A YouTube interview (Eric Partaker with Jeff Fenster) where Jeff, a serial entrepreneur based in San Diego, discusses his background (aspirations to be an athlete, law school), and gives practical business advice: don’t wait for a perfect product, habitually talk to customers to learn preferences, and iterate based on feedback (skate to where the puck's going).
Whatever business you're starting, whatever business you're running, don't wait for a perfect product to launch. Too many people are waiting for perfect. If you think about the digital world, which is I had a digital marketing agency before this, and in the digital world, it's data, data, data, data, data, user behavior. Why did you click this button? And conversion rate optimization and all of these, these acronyms in digital marketing space. But it's a completely disregarded in the physical real world, the non virtual. Right. When customers come in, why did you sit there instead of there? Why did you order this instead of that? Did you like that? Would you come back? What would you have changed? One person doesn't give you all the answers, but when you make a habit of talking to your customers, you're going to hear what they want. I don't have all the answers. So lose your ego when you're developing this product and skate to where the puck's going to be. Give the customers what they're looking for.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the 2%, where, as always, we're having conversations with peak performers from all walks of life to help decode excellence, to help give you the practical strategies, tips and tools that you can use to close the gap between your current and best self, not just in your work life, also in your personal life. And I'm super excited today to have our next guest. His name is Jeff Fenster, serial entrepreneur disruptor in the US this guy's got a crazy resume CV if you're on this side of the pond. And he's going to be taking us through all of that and hopefully weaving in through that some stories and some tips and tricks that you can learn to up your game. So welcome to the show, Jeff. Really great to have you here, man.
Thank you for having me. It's truly an honor. I'm a fan and excited to get the opportunity to speak to your audience today.
And you're hailing from. You're in California, right?
Yeah, Sunny San Diego. So literally I am on the other side of the pond and the other side of that country as well.
Yeah, very, very cool. And so let's, I mean, let's bring, I mean, you've done a huge amount of things. We were saying just before we hit record here that rather than like rattle off that long list in the intro, we'll just naturally get to conversation. Otherwise I'm going to use half the podcast just introducing you. So let's bring things back down to earth though, first, because one of the things that I try to stress on these shows is that we're all born clean slate. Right? Nobody's born with their success. It's created. It's created through hard work, perseverance, resilience, all that good stuff. But we're not even born that way either. We're just born completely clean slate. So can you bring us down to maybe, perhaps some humbler beginnings? How did life kind of start for you? What did that look like?
Sure. Yeah. You know, I grew up with parents that basically said I could be a doctor, a lawyer, or a doctor or a lawyer. So it was stressed in me early. My dad was a doctor, and so I grew up thinking I was going to. Well, my goal and dream was to be a professional athlete, but I wasn't fortunate to have the natural tools necessary to achieve that and so decided to go the legal route and went to law school to be a sports agent and, and stay connected to sports and have a career. And this was 2004, 5 and 6, back before even the word entrepreneur was even a word that we used. It was, you went, you had a job and a career. You were a business owner because you had a job and a career.
