Should you risk your LIFE SAVINGS? - Evan & @SKellyCEO

Banerjee is asking, being a student, is it a good choice for me to risk all my savings on my startup plan when I'm totally unaware of the outcome?

Yeah, I think I'd say, is there a way you could maybe take 25% of your savings or 50% of your savings and test drive your plan? So obviously I don't know what your plan is. Um, but it sounds like you don't know what the outcome is. The way to find out what the outcome's likely to be is to start, you know, again, a great quote from Martin Luther King, one of my heroes, um, just changed the world. And he said, when you're going to go to the top of that giant staircase and touch the stars, you have to just take the first step. So for you, I think, why don't we say, how could, how could you— and we talk about it— what, what is the minimum viable product that you have to have to test drive your idea? How could you do it? I don't know, for 10% of your savings or 20%, whatever it takes. But the other thing I do, and actually, Evan, this is really cool, I'm changing the culture in this company. There's this thing, and it's what I learned way back in college, called future perfect tense, where if you've ever got a problem or you're looking at risk, if you imagine you've overcome the risk and you're living in the future, and then you look back, so you use different tense. So instead of, you know, in 2017, I'm gonna try to grow the business by, and use future tense, 100%. If you say, actually, I'm sitting here on a Blab with Evan Carmichael, we knocked the ball out of the park, what did we have to do to achieve our huge success? So if you actually change the tense of what you use, and ask you the question, how, you know, how did you achieve the outcome of test driving that you had a viable product for a market and you knew your audience, you knew the customer needs? What did you have to do to make that a success? And then say, how much investment did that take? You know, did it take your time? And again, in the spirit of Street Fighters, how can you get people to do something for you for nothing? How could you get your friends to mentor you? How can you get the social bars How can you really kind of really bootstrap stuff? So it doesn't always take big money to start businesses. And I think some of the best businesses, back to Evan's example, are really kind of ideas that have grounded, landed for customers. And then once you know what works, then scale it up.

I think I'm even more risk averse. I mean, for me, I hate spending money until I'm making money. I will invest my heart, my energy, my hustle, but I will not spend money until I'm finding a way to make money. Look at this YouTube channel. I already had a successful business while I was starting my YouTube channel. I didn't invest in anything. I used my camera that I had and borrowed a camera for other episodes from a friend of mine. I did the editing myself. I did all the research myself, and that led to one video a week max, because I think it's so easy to spend money on the stuff Right? Like, I could have bought the gear, and I could have hired an editor, and I could have had a white, you know, or green screen, and all of this stuff. I could have spent tons of money on this idea, and then I get into it, and like, ah, you know, I don't know if I'm feeling this YouTube thing. And then I'm stuck with a garage full of gear, right? And that happens to a lot of people. You put a lot of money into something, you're not putting enough time into it, and suddenly you're out of money because you spent everything on gear and inventory. So I'd much rather spend the resources that I had with my time to see if I love it, to figure out a way to make it work, to justify that this is an idea that is viable. And then as I start making money, reinvest it back into the growth. So if I was a student, I would not be investing my life savings into it. I'd be trying to hustle my way to figure out how I can make money by investing my time.

I like it. And, and if you, if you're ever out of an answer, go and talk to your customers, potential customers, potential prospective customers, and find out what their needs are. They'll tell you straight away whether you're going to knock the ball out of the park or you're just going to walk into a wall. And then, you know, if you're going to walk into a wall, what would work for them to close that gap in the market? So I think you're right. Yes, exactly as Evan called it out.