Episode #767 - Lessons From Startup Flops with Christian Facey

Foreign welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell. A couple of observations there is that you, the benefit of being with a startup that flops, you know, what it does is it allows you to learn, learn things but you know, to do and then things not to do because a lot of times flops almost make it, you know, they almost usually, they run out of, they usually run out of time before the revenues kick in. You know, that's, that's usually what happens. You know, they just don't have enough in. They underestimated how long it was going to take and how much money it was going to take to get this airplane in the air, you know, and it became like the 737 Max where the door blows off, you know, and yeah, we didn't get a chance to do that testing and so but now I know next time, next time we're going to test that door and so or that plug, but the deal is coming out. I imagine that was a priceless experience for you because it kind of set the framework for you to learn going forward and to maximize your experience at Google in terms of kind of automatically noticing the missing links in what that other failed startup had and to really prepare you for, to move up. The other thing I want an observation, I would say, and so I'm saying that for people who've gone through failures or going through a failure right now is that could be exactly what you need, could be the most important thing you experience for you to go through in terms of the switches it's going to turn on in your head for things to look forward to and to watch out for because you're going to be in charge if you build your own company and you're going to have to notice it. And if you don't notice it, nobody else is. So, you know, that's part of your education. The other thing is, you know, people say, well, I don't know what I should do. Well, one thing is what do you want to do? And here you obviously wanted to do gaming because like you said, while I'm getting going at Google, as soon as I get catch my breath, I'm starting to create games again, you know, and apps. And that's kind of, you know, look at where your curiosity is. And if you want to be a writer, start writing now. Don't wait till you quit your job and say, okay, I've quit my job, now I'm going to write. No, right now, if you want to be a musician, play, you know, write songs, record and kind of evolve, give yourself a chance to evolve over to it. So you had your motor running in the game development and all. And so it came time to launch and what was the trigger to, to get you over the hump, because it's a big thing to, to actually pull, pull the lever and go out on your own, you know, to jump out of the nest and fly. So what was the trigger there?

So one of the main triggers was, and this was for a previous, I had a lot of ideas. I was rummaging around in terms of is it going to be a music streaming gaming studio or traditional gaming studio, whatever it was. And I basically invested all of my savings to go and learn about venture capital, how it works, how to pitch them. I was going to like venture capital summer camps, I was going to hackathons. I was doing everything under the sun. I was reading up on how Steve Jobs started Apple and how Heido Kojima, you know, built Metal Gear Solid, right. I looked at all of these different entrepreneurs, they especially the ones that couldn't code or couldn't code at the beginning. And one thing that kept ringing true was no matter how many nos that I got for all my previous ideas, the core of the idea was still getting into the room with investors, which was hard enough to do already. And I started thinking, okay, if I could spend just more time on this to really refine what I'm doing and get enough, at least enough meetings booked up over a longer, a long enough period of time, if I could get enough people that want to work for me part time as I try and raise money, and then I could take them out of their companies. If I could get all of those different things at least lined up somewhat so that I could leave and then formally start building the vision and building the product, the mvp, then that would be a good time to jump. And that's exactly what we did. And whilst we raised very quickly, the world then changed in there in March 2020, the pandemic. But for that initial part, yeah, that's what we did.

And the thing is you have had like rocket ship type growth. Talk about how the stages, this is 2020, what you're talking about now, right? And so you're, you're still just beginning your career and talk about the, the opening up of offices. I mean, it takes a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of energy, number one, to find them, to, you know, to write the checks, you know, to do the checking out. I mean, it just exhaust having done so much of this in my life, it just exhausts me. It's like looking for a new office, you know, looking for this, you know, if I staffing the thing up, it's just like, I'll let the young guys do it, you know. And so I know, I know it took a lot of energy. It's so easy to say, you know, but, but you know, to pick the locations, to pick the countries, to get the people in there. So how did that evolve? Like year, we're only talking about, you know, year 21 and 22 and 23. So how did that evolve in those, that three years? Because that's an explosion, you know.

Yeah, so, so two things. I mean outside of obviously building a great engineering team, that's literally building world class products that work very well. There's two key things for the global expansion. First thing is we actually have a lot of support from governments for trade missions. UK government has been great governments abroad as well. They help us evaluate countries for expansion. So we've been on trade missions around the US in India in the middle.

How did you get in on that? How did you get on in on that?

When we executed our first raise, a lot of startups like to raise in stealth, but US were like, we might as well test the press strategy to see if the industry thinks our idea is cool. And they did. And Business Insider announced our first $2 million raise. And then from that, that really put us on the map. We built up our press strategy from that. And the government of business trade in the UK reached out to US and London and partners as well. That's like an entrepreneurial kind of accelerator run by the mayor of London's office. They reached out as well. And then they helped us try and figure out, okay, if you want to expand to the US you might want to check out LA or check out New York or India, checking out Hyderabad, et cetera. And that massively sped up development. So that was the first part of the expansion strategy.

And they, and they have information things. They have what, what do they do to kind of educate you other than point you in the direction on the spin the globe and say, go here. What did they.

It's the blueprint, right, of what you need. So, so, so they give you different cities and they'll pick cities based on UK startups wanting to expand to those specific countries. They'll pick like the best cities for that, which was massively, massively helpful. Then I'll give you the blueprint in terms of banks and recruiters and clients as well, which is super important investors. So everyone that you would possibly want to build a network with, they will supercharge that and in space of a week, introduce you to everyone that you need to know and as well as fly you out there as well, depending on budgets on that given year. So yeah, very helpful.

And their advantage is the fact that they've got a British company in that, those countries. Right.

So it's actually, it's actually much, much more pronounced than that. So they have a, there's actually a government mandate to increase the amount of trade between these two, between, let's say, let's take the US and the uk right? If they enable a company to expand to the us, hire people, gain investment, cross country trade, et cetera, one of those companies blows up. I mean the amount of trade within the companies, within the cohort over the last couple of years is in the tens of billions of dollars. So they have a massively vested interest and they've made massive investments in order to facilitate company expansion to the UK and the US and vice versa.

Okay, so what was your first, your first location and did you do them one at a time? Did you do them in batches? We're opening up three, now we're opening five. How did you do that?

We do them one at a time and now per year we're trying to do multiple ones. So this year we want to do, want to expand in New York, do la, Chicago and then probably Singapore as well. That might stretch into 2025. But our first location obviously was UK and then we went to Abu Dhabi and then we got a trade mission to New York. And the reason that we wanted to save the, of the three main offices, we want to save like the biggest one for, for last because, you know, York's the advertising capital of the world is we wanted all the case studies that we can get from all the other countries. So we just walk into New York and be like, hey, I know we're new but we've got hundreds of data points as to why we're good.

Right.

So we expanded to New York last.

And so when you, from the time you show up, how long is it until you've got your office up and running in that location, in the, in a new location?

So we, well, thank. Thankfully we live in a, a digital world where we can get a lot of the key things set up without even, you know, meeting the people physically. So let's take the New York office. We had our first two hires, the office space, a trade deal, so an advertising deal and the game developer deals already before we, before we, before I moved out there. And the trade mission that I took for one week, about six months prior to that was the, was the key catalyst for that. The six months though it took to find the initial two people that we wanted to invest in to justify the move and then trigger, trigger, you know, the office opening via the WeWork and the bank accounts, all that kind of stuff. So it was really finding the people, which is the second part of the strategy. So we took a very stern stance on this in 2022 and we recapitalized on it again in 2023, which is that at Audio Mob, like last year, right, we had 9,000% growth in our game developer base, right? We have six of the top 10 that we.

9,000% growth.

Yeah, it's insane, right? And we are really capitalizing on a high performance culture. So the way that we think about audiomob, I mean again you Google us and we're like, you know, top startups, awards here and there and everywhere. And I'm not saying that flippant, it was very, very hard to get here. But this is like the NBA of startups or. And that. And those are the kinds of people that we want. Or it's like the football premier league of startups. And what you'll find is let's take a typical salesperson, right? We don't hire people that, you know, can spend the company card or nice, have the gift of the gab and then just get in those deals. They have extreme technical aptitude when things go wrong. They have good emotional temperament. And then of course they can sell as well. Like it's everything you possibly want in a salesperson. But rather than accepting 1 in 19, which is the industry stat right now, in our industry, we want, you know, all 15 of our sales staff to be of that quality. And we take a really, really hard stance as to the kind of people that we allow into the company. That's why it took six months to find two people because we take our time when it comes to hiring the best people that we can.

How long did it, you know, your one thing about developing your coding and develop your, your other system, how long did it did you spend and how long. How developed is your process now? At the end of, you know, three or four years in terms of finding those people, evaluating those people, training those people, launching them and you know, turning them loose but then keeping, you know, having their performance standards in there.

Put it this way, if I had the interview process that we've developed now in year one would probably be a billion dollar company right now. We're doing well now, probably be a billion dollar company now. So all these kinds of things that we've learned such as, and again, the millions of dollars I would pay from what we're about to say. Like if I just knew this earlier. All right, I'm assuming a lot of people here might have heard of the Myers Briggs test, right? Personality trait. Now there is a more advanced psychometric test called luminous spark. It's a 24 character trait test. And I won't go into too many details now, but basically is the most accurate psychometric test I've ever taken. I was shocked at the profile it generated for me in terms of how accurate it was. My co founder was, all my heads of directors were. And then we, we distributed across the whole of the company. And then what we did is we took all of the traits of the best closers, the most analytical people, the best engineers, etc. And then we use this in order to structure the interview for the typical, the types of profiles. And that was like the last puzzle piece that we needed because what we kept finding was like, you have people that were like really, really good at certain things, but then their emotional temperament wasn't, wasn't great when, you know, things went out of whack or vice versa. So once we added this, our interview process became very accurate in terms of who we're looking for.

For those of you who are sick and tired of fooling around and are dead serious about wanting to move up fast, I've got something especially for you. I've combined the best insights from over 40 years in business and making $70 million in income and compressed them into a free webinar. That's right. It's a free resource. If you want to find out exactly what the concepts are that I use in coaching million dollar earners, Register now@widelonwinning.com youm'll discover the 5 framework used by so many to reach their financial, personal and professional goals. You can find that link in this episode's show notes. Well, the thing is about that is that the ability to handle shocks is a skill that can be developed. It's basically in the first you learn an alternate way of reaction. Rather than going ah and run around yelling at people or quitting or making rash decision, you learn to like, take a breath, let the emotion fly over you and say, actually what happened, you know, how bad actually is it? You know, and you start getting the facts. And then, then you could start and then you usually find out that the, what you thought it was in the first flash is like a lightning flash. You know, it's like the lightning flash can be very dramatic in the sky, but you know, then it's gone, you know, and unless it killed somebody or knocked down a tree, it's over. And so it might have been the thunder and the lightning might have been very scary, but the impact was nil. And so a lot of that is what happens in life. But you know, if things happen, it's much more likely to be solved if you've got your wits. And that's a skill that can be developed. But when we're out there hiring, we, we don't have time to put people through these, these courses. And you might, for the right person, you might take them on knowing what I'm going to have to work with and train them some on this because they're so good in the other areas then at least you know, going in. But talk about that luminous, it's the luminous spark test. How'd you hear about that? And were you skeptical at the beginning about the, about that? Were you open minded? How did that, what was your reaction to that? How did it get incorporated into your program?

Yes. So one of my co founders, mentors is a, I guess, say it could be like a franchise owner, I guess of the model and she's an expert in training Fortune 500 CEOs, coaching them and coaching their staff members and identifying how to improve the cultures of businesses. So she introduced us to this model and I was really skeptical at first until I took the test. And the kinds of psychological traits that they were able to identify with me in this, you know, 25 page dossier was incredible. So yeah, it was one of our, one of our business coaches who ended up investing in the company as well.

Huh. And so was this a business coach that recommended it to you or someone who works with the company or.

Yes, yeah, both. So Wilfred's my co founder's personal mentor and coaches us and helps the company as well, distribute the models and also assist in our interview process as well.

And so are you putting all of your potential hiring through that test? Are you just evaluating them on the basis of the traits that you have distilled or the key ones that really are applicable to what you're looking for?

So it's, it's, it's not evaluating them on the traits. But it's using the, the feedback from, from the luminous spark test to help structure the interview in like the best possible way. So for instance, if someone is, and I'll give you an example how this works. So one of my traits is that I'm quite tough and I will kind of rise to the occasion when in adversity. And the pandemic has certainly taught me about that.

Right.

And there's for every strength there is an overextension. So if you are too tough and overextended strength, you can become aggressive. And there's measurements that are taking in terms of how much you overextend into that overextension. And really what you want to be is quite a rounded individual that doesn't overextend into the overextension like be aggressive, but remains tough. So there's all these different measurements, right. And what we do is we look at the, the mind map of a person and it will enable us to ask questions in a certain way based on traits that individual or it could be for instance that some individuals are, you know, highly analytical and highly, and highly tough or aggressive at sales or whatever it is. And we might want to ask him questions about traits that may not be as apparent, like maybe they're not as cooperative. And we want to like really find out why that is because we don't, you know, treat this model like a bible. We take it with a grain of salt. So we know like where we think the strengths are and you ask questions on where we think the weaknesses are and then that's how, that's how we use it to increase the quality of the candidates.

Now are you to start the pipeline prospects coming in, like we should go into Singapore. Will you do that by going online and somehow directly letting people know that you're interviewing or will you go through these online personnel apps or will you go to an agency, a personnel agency in Singapore?

So what we'll probably do is because we've got some deals that we could activate out there to make it a revenue generating office. We'll probably hit up our trade, our trade mission contacts. Now whether there's a trade mission there or not, there'll certainly be like a UK government entity out there and we'll get an idea of the mind map of the region in terms of, you know, specifically what part of Singapore do we need to, need to launch in terms of setting up the banks, all the legal stuff. And then we'll, we'll try and figure out, okay, what's the right recruitment framework. Do we need someone on site there? Can we use a recruitment agency that does everything digitally? Do I need to go over there? Like? We'll figure all of that out through basically an advisor, which in this case would be the trade mission, but in the uk.

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