How to Turn a Good Idea Into a World Class Brand | EP 6.3

Teams that know each other incredibly well can move at a speed that is not 2x, but 10x that of a team that's just been introduced to each other.

Okay, so today we are talking to my friend, co-founder of Ultra Mobile. This is Rizwan Kassim.

I'm amazed at how fast we went. We'd sit and whiteboard. I moved up to New York, so I was with the team that was there. Whiteboard, all right, here's the functionality. We strapped on the entire billing system onto our existing Calling card platform. We're like, well, we need to store customers and addresses and passwords, and do they do credit cards and all? And so let's reuse all this infrastructure. And we'd get together in a room and we'd fight over what the functionality should be and how it should be. And then when we were done, we went off to our corners and did something because we had done so many projects before. We knew what to expect from each other.

So when you guys are fighting in those meetings, I'm assuming you're debating over things like who makes— who gets to make the final call?

I have, in the history of this company, I cannot recall a moment where someone said, this is my decision and you're gonna have to accept it.

Got it.

Including our majority stakeholder and including someone who has every financial and respect to do so. Never have I heard it.

Especially if you're starting something or even the early days of entrepreneurship, start to raise your voice at each other, you start to yell at each other. I've seen people come close to blows with each other before. So It's, that doesn't really help that much. So I, you know, what I found recently was the most powerful book I've read this year is called Multipliers, where you are basically, you're debating, you're teasing the answers out of people and you're having conversations. And that's how you grow a business. And you're not always gonna be the right one. I think a Jeff Bezos quote is, you know, sometimes he disagrees with people, but he's gonna disagree, but he's gonna commit at the end of the day, which is what I hear that's going on at Ultra.

We've never, I cannot think of a time where a decision that I disagreed with that other people convinced me of was not pushed forward at full speed once we made the decision. We left the room, we're like, we're gonna do it. There's a brotherhood amongst that, right? And again, we've got shared values, we've got history together. We've decided to do this, let's go do it now. I may disagree with it, I don't know everything that may happen, nor does this person. What I do find, and it's hard to remember because We all come with the ideas that we think are right, and now we have to discuss them with someone. Not a single idea has not gotten substantially better by the process of that debate.

You mentioned you had a full-time job. When did you know was the right time to make the jump, pivot, let's go all the way on this?

First, you can only have so many irons in a fire, but I think if you've got a full-time job and you have the energy, finding dedicated time to do something else is key. And it's not easy. The gift that I've been given is insane curiosity, so I wanted to know. how to do this other thing. Optionality is key. Recognizing where potential comes, and that requires a really sober analysis of where opportunities— if you think an idea is going to be a billion-dollar idea and you want to dump everything into it, more power to you. But is it going to derive revenue? I'm very much a cash-focused guy. Is it going to— is it going to be able to pay the bills? Is it going to be able to sustain itself? That's— for me, that's the inflection point. If the new idea can meet basic business stuff and you've got an MVP out, this is why the beauty of the MVP is so great, that we've got this idea that just get a product out there to see if people want.

Right.

'Cause the second you've hit that, the rest is grinding. It's less luck once you've got the point that people are interested in your product.

You guys are doing really well right now. You have some accolades. I'm actually gonna bring this out right now too. Look at this. Look at this, Inc. magazine right here.

We were the number 1 fastest growing company in America in 2015.

And so what does that mean exactly?

So you submit to Inc. Magazine your numbers 3 years ago and current year, and they do a percentage. If we were a tech company, we'd have announcements. We do our Series A, we do our Series B, we do this. If we were a public company, we'd have announcements that we'd have to make quarterly.

Mm-hmm.

We were very quiet. We still are very quiet. For 5 years, I— we don't disclose how much revenue we do, how much profit we make. We don't have to. And there's no reason for us to do so except for ego. Doing this showed our employees, showed our partners, showed the rest of the marketplace, oh my goodness, these guys are serious. And it was a huge ego point that allowed us to attain credibility. We also got pricing discounts from companies because of that.

Because?

Because I could say, in a negotiation point, I was able to say, look, we've got this press that we're getting from Inc. You should do a press release saying the world's— the nation's fastest growing company chooses X service.

Interesting.

Yeah.

So there is a leverage point with that. Yeah.

And I know, and it's a list of 5,000. And you were number 1. And we were number 1. Yeah. About $100 grand to, I think, $114 million of revenue in 3 years.

Wow. $114 million in revenue in 3 years.

Impressive.

So there's a lot of purple around this company. You're wearing purple right now. I see a bunch of purple on the walls and things like that. What does purple mean?

There's 2 versions of this story. I've loved purple since I was in my early 20s.

So that's a debate that you won.

That's how I'd like to think about it. The exact shade of purple, I actually brought in a shirt and showed it to our head of marketing at the time saying, I would love it if this was our shade, and it turned out to be our shade.

Nice.

The real answer is that we did a look at the wireless companies. T-Mobile's got magenta, Sprint has got yellow. You look at the color spectrum, and you're like, what isn't taken up by a nationwide brand? And the purple-orange-blue combination we've got is both very appealing, felt good to some of us who really like purple.

Yeah.

And, um, and there's still a royalty aspect of it. And we're a brand that goes after first-generation immigrants, as well as people who are— need to pay $19 or $29 for cell phone service. This is the unbanked. These are people who are paying cash every month. A solid brand that looks good is a level of respect they don't usually get.

Right.

So they all kind of went into place, and so we showed up with a very strong brand that looked carrier quality, but was providing great value, versus other companies who were just like, eh, we'll throw it together, we don't need to spend any money on marketing.

Got it. So, you know, we're both in the same entrepreneurs group you've been in for a while. When you're in peer groups in general, what has that done for you? What has it done for your business?

Having educational experiences, being exposed to different forms of thinking make me better. Talking to people— you and I have spoken about online marketing for hours and hours and hours over the last 5 years. I bring those ideas back and help challenge the team. I don't run marketing here, but I help challenge the team. It gives me the sophistication to be able to talk to them and have some additional input. They take some of it, sometimes they don't. But it allows refinement of ideas, and the clearer of a vision we have and the more optionality we have, like, we're always pivoting in business. No, our strategy is never— like, every 6 months is a fundamental shift in either our financial or our product strategy because we're in a very fast-growing market. You can't do that on your own. No, no person can do that on their own.

Key takeaway: if you want to go far, if you want to go big, You gotta go with people. Alright, final question.

I have a piece of advice to share there. Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, brought through a group of 6th graders through our, um, through the restaurant that we were building, and he gave them our next 12-month strategy of product buildouts. And there was a reporter with them. I'm like, why would you do that? He's like, the ideas are not the hard part. The work is the hard part. The detail of the ideas is the hard part. But like telling them we're gonna launch 3 more restaurants and we're gonna add these features, that's— we think of that as incredibly dear and it isn't. So I find being really open with business details— we all were told NDAs and we should hold on to this.

Mm-hmm.

There's 2 ideas a year that are so precious that you need to hide them. The rest of them, It's the fact that you want to do them that's special. It's not the idea.

Totally. Good advice. So, I mean, on that note of advice, I mean, is there anything you'd like to add for, you know, current entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs? What would you like to add to, you know, help them out?

Always be learning. It's very easy to get into a place where we feel that we totally understand our business. We've got an excellent business intelligence team. It's asking questions. It's asking questions of our data. It's asking questions of what our customers want from us. And when you have initial success, it's very easy to think, look what we— look what I built. I must be great at this. Some of that's true. There's some luck. There's some everything else. But the difference between companies that go to here and kind of plateau and the other ones that continue, they continue to iterate. The only way to do that is with more information, and you get that by asking.

There you go. Rizwan, thanks so much for doing this.

Thank you.