How to go from Idea to Unicorn: 10 Must-Have Mindsets You Need in the Early Stage

Go.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to our workshop today. Really excited for you to be here. So feel free to put in your name and where you are from in the chat and we'll get started as soon as we can. Now let's play some music while we wait.

You be. Let's go, let's go, let's go.

Sorry about that, everyone.

Let's go, let's go. You. Let's go. Let's go, let's go. You. Let's go, let's go, let's go.

All right. Thanks, Nelda. I guess that was looping there. That was kind of funny. We kept going to like this great part of the song and then loop back, but hey, welcome everybody. George Bandarian here. I see people are still starting to roll in, so. But it's three or four minutes past, so why don't we go ahead and get started. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen on this end and we have a really, really good training in store for you. I'm so excited that you're here. So let's see here. Sharing screen one. And let's do that. And all right, awesome. So you should see my screen now and we can get rolling. All right. So yeah, drop in your name and location in the chat box. This is our webinar format, so just some housekeeping and we're going to dive in. We have the Q and A enabled, so as questions come up, feel free to drop them in the Q and A and upload any questions you want to make sure we answer. If anything comes up and you have any questions, feel free to email us at hello at. I see a number of people are here. I see Joe and Nelson and Zarek and Mohammed from Egypt. Wow. Thanks for joining us, Mohammed. Peter from Palo Alto, Joe from Glendale, TK from San Jose, Mark from Monrovia. Awesome. So great to see you guys. Thank you so much for joining and really excited about presenting today's topic on the 10 must have mindsets for early stage founders. So let's go ahead and dive in. Let's talk about what's changed between the old world and the new world and why some of our old mindsets don't work anymore. And, you know, how is it that we build better products and ultimately what are these 10 mindsets and what can we take away and apply immediately? I'm going to be going in super speed and so I'm just going to throw a lot of stuff. This is one of those sessions that you just want to write down one or two or three Big nuggets that are aha. Moments that you realize like wow, I've been doing things the old way and I need to change. And that you know, you definitely are going to get your money's worth, if you will, for the hour. Although obviously it's a free session. The other thing I would say is we'll go deeper on some of the 10 than others but we're, we're gonna make all of them available for you and let you go deeper. So just stay in until the end and then I'll let you know how you can really kind of go deeper with the content and the philosophies if that's something you want to do. More people are coming in from Dubai and all over the world. Quite a global audience today, which is awesome. Welcome everybody. Camille and Alan and others. Cool. What slide are we on? We're on the slide about me. Most important on the slide, bottom right, my three boys, which is what I do everything for. But if you don't know me yet, my name is George Ban. I'm the founder and CEO of Untapped Ventures. I grew a company called AMI, sold it in 2018. Really wanted to be doing what I'm doing now which is being in venture and helping founders and launching untapped. So let me go to Untapped. We just celebrated our one year anniversary or one first birthday I should say a couple months ago. But basically we're a venture studio and a pre seed venture fund that builds and invests in game changing companies with badass founders, phenomenal founders, Untapped. Where that comes from is I'm a big personal growth guy and it's really about helping founders tap their untapped potentials and so and create new untapped markets. Right. So that's a little bit about us. We are you know, generally focused in B2B enterprise future work a little bit on the mental health side and we kind of do things in three main ways. One is just straight up VC investing into startups. One is we run like accelerator like programs and we have our next program coming up, the future of entrepreneurship program. And I can mention that. And then we also run, we're also a venture studio so we have our own ideas that we build and we're actively looking for co founders like you guys on the line to come in and become co founder and CEO or co founder and CTO of ventures that we value validated. So we'll talk about that as well. So anyway with that said let's, let's go ahead and Talk about the fact that we're living in a new world, right? There is near equal access to tools and knowledge. You guys have all this information available free online, great books on the topics. It's so much cheaper and faster to build products. You could really launch and grow business from anywhere. You could be in Dubai or some of these countries, Egypt, and grow a US startup. Right? So much has changed. You can, but on the flip side, there's a lot more competition for the same customers and those customers behavior has changed. And so really the speed of learning has become your new unfair advantage. How quickly can you learn? Sometimes you are successful and you learn by validating something, sometimes you learn by invalidating something. But especially in the beginning process, your speed of learning is your unfair advantage. And so how do you get that? How do you avoid a few years of this aimless wandering to something that lets you get through the labyrinth as quickly and efficiently as possible and do so without or before running out of resources, AKA funding. So how do you find the possible solution through the maze? And especially when this maze is definitely a labyrinth with so many twists and turns and dead ends and backtracking and pivots and pauses. Right. We all wish it was a straight line, but that's just not the way a, a unicorn, a journey to a unicorn works. And so really what separates the successful entrepreneurs today isn't. Isn't different skill sets or isn't the market they pick. It's really different mindsets. And so I'm so glad you guys are here to talk about that today. So what are mindsets? I think we all know mindsets is how we are set, how our mind is set, basically our worldview. And so if we're living in a new world, it requires new mindsets to go along with it. So as an example, in the old world, it was hard to build product. You had a big engineering team, there was not too many competitors, few choices for customers. We talked about that and now it's entirely different. And same way here we used to have to build this product and then we go demo it to the customer and then we sell it and. But now it's, you know, now you demo it, you can get something going in a low code, no code solution, quickly demo it to a bunch of people, sell it, see if they even want to buy it, and if they do, then go out and actually build the full, you know, v one of it. So these are some of the examples. But, and this is now kind of a good segue to jump into the ten mindsets so here they are. They're grouped into threes. You have three around modeling your business, you have four around prioritizing, and you have three around testing. And again, some we're going to go deeper on, some I'm just going to lightly touch on. There's only so much we could do in an hour and really it's like more like half an hour with some Q and A. You know, we usually do this over the course of a full day workshop. So if you're interested to learn more, don't worry. We'll, you know, we'll, we'll have an ability for you to get access to all that for free. But we wanted to just kind of make sure we get through the most important ones that people get stuck on. So as we're doing that, let's go ahead and we have a poll here. So I want to go ahead and enable that just because I can customize where I spend time depending on where today's audience is at. So I'm going to go ahead and launch the poll. Would love for you to respond. Where are you at in your entrepreneurial journey? Basically, I'm going to launch the poll and then I'll define it a little bit, so it should pop up on your screen. Are you in the early, early process where maybe you still have a job, but you're really early? You might, you're searching for an idea, you're searching for co founders, or are you committed and you're ideating? You know, you've decided you're going to be a founder, you're working on an idea. Have you passed that idea? And now you're in validation. You know, you're, you're actively talking to customers and validating that you're solving a problem that's big enough and worth the next five to 10 years of your life. Have you gotten past that? And now you're building the product? Have you, are you past that? And you have MVP 1.0. You have a handful of customers and you're fundraising, or are you one of our other stakeholders, ecosystem members? We have some of our VC friends or studio friends, different investors and stuff on the line as well. So where in your entrepreneurial journey are you? We usually like to try to get close to 100% participation on these. Right now we have about 63, so about 2/3 of you have participated. So if you're on the webinar and you're not asleep and you're not on your phone or your email, if you could just go ahead and take A second to engage with us. That'd be great. Would love to understand where you're at in your entrepreneurial journey. I'll hold that open for another 10 more seconds. All right, so we have about 70% participation. I guess that's. That's probably good enough. So let's go ahead and share the results and take a look. So it should be sharing on your screen right now. And what I see is about 20% are just super early working on. Sorry. 17% are searching, 21% ideating. Only 4% actively validating. 21% are raising right now and about 20% other. Okay, so pretty evenly distributed, except for validating. Everybody's about 20% in different categories, except for people that are actively validating right now, which is interesting. Okay, so we'll go ahead and help out. So if you're, if you're raising, definitely what we're going to talk about is going to make raising a lot easier. If you're building, then, you know, hopefully you've done all the validation and you're going to get some takeaway. And if you're in the early three stages, then you're really going to love it because this could change kind of the trajectory that you're on. So with that said, let me stop sharing. You should see my deck again. And I'm going to go ahead and go to the next slide. And so let's tackle the first two of the mindsets. Love the problem, not your solution. And your business model is the product. They really go together because they're around modeling. And so let's think about this question about how do we build a better product? And you guys have probably heard this by now, A lot of people, what happens is that they start with their solution, right? And they fall in love with their solution. And as entrepreneurs, that's what we're most passionate about, the idea, the solution. But that's really only 1/9. If we're just counting the number of boxes on a business model canvas, that's only 1/9 of your business. Your business model. You know, solution is only one small part of it, believe it or not. It's actually, it's not even the most important part, believe it or not. And it's hard for some people to wrap their minds around this because they think that the solution, the product, is the business. And that's not really the case. So let's, let's take a deeper look at that. So what we want to do is, you know, we'd rather want to fall in love with the outcomes of our solution. What is the uvp, right? What is the unique value proposition? What are you the only at? What are you the best in the world at? What is the big friction in the market that you're helping remove that nobody else can do, but it even goes broader than that. And what we want to do is get clear on the who we're serving and what are the obstacles, right? So in order to understand and create our uvp, we need to get clear on, on, on the customer segments and the problem. And so we use the Lean Business Model canvas. That's the one of the fundamental tools, not the other canvas because that's good for corporates, but the actual, the one that's good for startups is the Lean Business Model canvas. And if you look at that, we want to start with the outermost four boxes and we want to fill that in. And what we want to avoid is the innovator's bias where we start off with an idea, we think we found the next unicorn idea, and we first fill in the solution box and then everything else is filled in based on, on that. It's kind of like, you know, creating the, and we'll talk about this a little later, but it's kind of like creating the key and then going to try to find doors for it, right? So what you want to do is you want to try to embody the innovator's gift as opposed to innovators bias. And the gift comes from finding new problems to old solutions. So let's take a look at this one. We were playing one of my favorite songs. I got hooked on let's go from Date with Destiny with Tony Robbins in 2018. And so I have my Date With Destiny playlist on Spotify. And you know, I like music and. But let's look at the job to be done of music. So when you hire music, right, you have a job to be done. And that job to be done, the way that job is being done has changed. Some of you may not be old enough to remember the old tapes. I actually don't remember. I mean I remember records, I never played records, so that'll, that'll date me. I remember records, I just never played them. I kind of grew up with tapes. So this is where my job of music started. And then that moved to CDs, right? So you had your CDs and then you would have like these amps that we would put them in and the big CD players. Then Apple came out and innovated that with the ipod. And then you had the streaming services which even innovated that why store it on a device when I could stream it? And then that moved to, well, there's a speaker now and my IoT speaker is connected and I could have different speakers and I could easily play my stream music on different speakers. And then even that got simplified further to a voice enabled AI smart device that I could tell it. So it went from me having this physical tape, you know, in the analog world to that job of listening to music. Got innovated many times over by looking at what were the problems with the old way and finding a new way so people didn't go out and invent new music, right? Like that wasn't the innovation. It wasn't like trying to find new musical, musical devices or instruments. It was really how do we make it easier for the user to listen to what they want, when they want, where they want. And you know, I think like, if you look at that, the last one, that's currently the easiest and best thing at any time. My wife, you know, when she wants the kids to calm down and listen to, you know, do their homework, she puts on relaxing music, right? When we want to dance with my boys and stuff, we put on, you know, one of our dance songs and we just tell it and it just plays it no matter what room we're in. And very different. Different than going and picking up the mixtape or taking my ipod out and selecting which one I wanted, I needed to have downloaded it. So I think this is a really good example to illustrate how to think about how to think about that and how to think about your customer as your customer is on their hero's journey. And here they are. Remember, it's their hero's journey. Your startup is not about your hero's journey, it's about your customer's hero's journey. And you're just a guide in their hero's journey. We could do a whole session on that. But basically what you want to find is that triggering event, right? So like, what is what changed in their life that's going to make them want to get to this future reality, to want something better? What is the job to be done that they have? So I'll take another silly easy one. Like when I'm tired, I want to sleep. So I'm hiring my bed for eight hours to help me with the job of going to sleep. So that's the old way. But then all of a sudden something happens. I start getting back pains or I can't sleep at night. So something changes my Old way, and now it's not working for me anymore. Right? And so as you see, we're moving from the status quo to switching trigger to now I'm in consideration mode. And so what is the problem? Is it big enough? And so I'm now starting to consider switching. And so somebody needs to come up with something we call a Mafia offer to get me to consider your new way. Right? Your solution. And the Mafia offer is simply an offer your customers can't refuse. So that's all the Mafia offer means. It comes from the old Godfather movie when, you know, when he says, you know, I'm going to make you an offer you can't refuse. Right? And so we want, you know, some people call it an irresistible offer. Same thing is the offer is the packaging of your problem, your solution, and a price that a customer can buy. And it should be something that if you've targeted, it's a Mafia offer. It's so good. Now, not that the Mafia, usually when the Mafia gives you a Mafia offer, you can't refuse because there is a threat on your life. We don't want that. But this is that the offer is so good, your problem and your pain is so high, the solution is so targeted and the pricing is right. That you just can't refuse. Right? And so a lot of what we do is build Mafia offers and test them before we write a line of code. And so what you want to do is you want to create that Mafia offer to help show that you have a better way than the old way. If you were some new bed company or your new sleep company, you're gonna, your product innovation is something for my eyes or something for my back or whatever it was depending on problem was. Right? And so ultimately that's going to get me to select that which is, you know, your acquisition. And it's going to cause. It's going to cause me to cause a switch. So, so I've given a few examples. So I hope that the takeaway from this part is that your superpower is not your solution, but it's really anchoring against problems in the old way, right? So really, really get clear on what are the problems in the old way. And again, I know we all know, okay, it's all about problems, pains and needs, but really, really spend time and understand that bigger context, right? So like, don't just look at your product and the features and benefit, like what does the customer need, but look at what do they really want and what's going to emotionally make them feel better. So what's the bigger context they're searching for. So I like this example here. So Theodore Levitt talks about, people don't want a quarter inch drill bit, they want a quarter inch hole. But I think even he was missing the point a little bit because I don't think I know anybody that just wants a quarter inch hole in their wall, in their house. Right. So you want to search for the bigger context and what people really want. You have to ask why? Right. It's the five whys. So why do they want to drill bit? Well, they want to drill a hole. Well, why? Because they want to put a hook in. Well, why? Well, because they want to hang for art. They want to hang a painting. Well, why? Right. And you can go to the next level, which is, I want to feel good. I want to feel like my house is meeting a nice design. And 3M understood that. And so instead of trying to go to the bloody red ocean of drills and drill bits, they came up with this great innovation, which is, how can we make an adhesive that is strong enough that people can just put on their wall without drilling the hole? Right. So they looked at the problems of the old way and found a new way. So it's another good example of putting this into context. And so, like as Kathy Sierra says, don't build a better user, don't build a better X, build a better user of X. So we don't want to build a better drill bit, we want to build a better homeowner. In this case, case, the homeowner could just easily put up, like, I'm not a big handyman guy, right? And so I don't want to go get drills and drill bits and be putting holes all over my house. I would much rather do the 3M thing and be able to put the painting up and move it easily. That seems like a lot easier solution for me than the alternative and I think for a lot of homeowners as well. So, all right. And by the way, drop your questions in the Q and A. I don't see any questions so far. I see some messages in the chat, but I won't be monitoring that for questions. So feel free to chat amongst each other and if you have any questions, drop it in the Q and A. Like I said. So, okay, the takeaway from there was the bigger question.