Evan Carmichael sold his biotech software company and felt lost until he gave a free talk at a YMCA to just three people. That small audience showed him his real passion: helping entrepreneurs. He argues that following passion, not money, is what breaks through doubt.
Chapters
What inspires me? I believe it's important that you are inspired as an entrepreneur. You're starting the business around your passion. If you don't, you're not going to have success. If you're in it just for the money, it's not going to work out for you. I got a tweet from one of my followers, Bob Narinda, who is @BobNarinda, and he wrote in to say, so what inspires you? Was there a eureka moment that set you on your current path? And there was. So here's what happened with my business, okay? I had a software company and I built it up, I sold it. When I sold it, I was kind of struggling. I didn't know what I wanted to do next. You know, I put so much of myself into this business that I needed— I don't know, I needed something else to do, but I didn't know where to go. And I felt like just exploring, and I tried a whole bunch of different things, and one of the ones that came up was I talked to the YMCA, a local YMCA group, and we talked about doing a presentation where I come in and talk about entrepreneurship, young entrepreneurs, and how to make your dream of starting a business a reality. And they said, we have this group for entrepreneurs, we have a young entrepreneur program, we'd love to have you come and speak to them. So I said, great, no problem, like no cost, I'm just doing this to give back and to explore and to help and see where it leads. And I remember I got so excited about this. I was making a presentation and I spent about a month, I think, making this thing, what the slides were going to be, what I was going to talk about, and I was promoting it and the YMCA was promoting it, and about a month, and it was a free presentation. And I remember the day comes, like, today's the day, I'm going to go do my presentation at the Y, you know, we'll see what it leads to. And my heart's pounding and I'm nervous a little bit. I hadn't done a lot of speaking before this. And I remember getting to the door and going up the elevator and just getting all excited. And I go in, I open the door, walk into the room, and we set this huge room up full of chairs. And 3 people were in the room. And I felt like the air was just sucked out of my lungs. I spent so much time promoting this and the YMCA promoted it and working on the content and 3 people showed up for a free event? Like, what? And it was really heartbreaking. You know, I felt in that moment like maybe I made the wrong decision. Like this maybe was a stupid thing for me to do. Like I had wasted a lot of my time. I hate wasting time and I felt like this probably was a waste of time. So I continued on, you know, there's 3 people, still shut up, I did this work, I need to at least deliver the presentation. And it ended up being awesome. I went through my content and because it was such a small group, I got to know everybody really well and got to help them with their problems and the challenges they faced. And they left as different people than when they came in. And even though it was only 3 people, that made me feel really good. Like I knew that I had helped these people that day and I gave them advice that nobody else had given them before and I could help be the difference between them succeeding and them not making it with their company. And that made me feel really good. And from there I had to find a way to keep doing it. If it was presentations or websites or videos like this or on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or whatever, I didn't know where it would lead, only that I had to keep doing this work to help entrepreneurs. You know, before I was selling biotech software, had nothing to do with entrepreneurship. But I felt like after that experience, I had to help other entrepreneurs. That was my eureka moment. And everybody looking at that situation might have said, Evan, you're kind of crazy, right? Like, you could only get 3 people to come out to a free event that was you and the YMCA promoting it, and 3 people came out? Like, how is this ever going to be a business? And I didn't have the answer. Like, I didn't know how I would eventually make money from this. And entrepreneurs don't have money, so how do you turn that— like, logically, this didn't make any sense to get into. Like, Evan, what are you doing? This is stupid. Whereas with my biotech software company, I'm selling to huge companies like NASA and Johnson Johnson, guys with huge budgets. But there was just something about it that I love doing, and I don't know, I think I would have taken a job just to make money to, to do this, you know. I love doing it so much, and so I knew I had to continue. I had no idea what the forum would look like. I had no idea I would build this popular website and eventually be on YouTube. I had no idea any of that was gonna happen. I just knew that I had to continue it, and I think that's— when you have that moment, it's a very exciting but also dangerous time, because if you think too logically, if I thought just with my head, I wouldn't have continued, right? It wouldn't have made sense logically. It doesn't make sense to do this. If I talk to people about it and they looked at, you know, the stats and the market research, it wouldn't have made any sense. Like, what you're doing, you can't, you can't make money from this. Entrepreneurs don't have money, and even if they did, you only got 3 people to a free event. Like it didn't make any sense. And that's where for a lot of entrepreneurs their ideas die. And they side with everybody else and say, "Yeah, you know what, you're probably right. That was a stupid idea. I shouldn't have done that." Where there's still something like, "Mm, you know what, maybe there's a way to make it work." You know, you kind of, you feel like there's something that could have worked out. And so I didn't give up on my idea even though I had no idea how it would work out. And because you often don't have all the answers at the beginning, you start to doubt yourself. And I guess don't doubt yourself, right? And, and it's okay not having all the answers yet, and it's okay that you're going to struggle, and it's okay that nobody comes to your event, and it's okay that you're not making money yet. You don't have the answers yet. You're working on it, but you, you will figure it out if you keep going and you keep following your passion. You will figure it out. It's going to take longer than you want than you want it to take. It might cost more money than you want it to take. You know, we're impatient. We want things now. But it will work out if you keep following your passion. So that's my story. That's kind of my unique, I guess, eureka moment. And thank you for asking the question. So for those of you watching, you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. If you have a question for me or if you want to share your eureka moment, please leave it in the comment section below. I love seeing those come in. They really make my day every time they do. And if you want to see more videos like this, you can click on my face up there and subscribe to this channel. Thank you so much, and I'll see you soon.
