I started a startup...as a unicorn | Update on Life after Lay Off

So being laid off, it seemed like it was one of the worst days of my life. I think everybody could see it in my first video, if you want to see. I just got laid off. I just got laid off. I'm a little bit more upbeat. I feel a lot healthier. I actually lost around £10. I've been going to the gym, which I never had time for before. I did gain like, I don't know, like 40, 30, 40 pounds in the past couple of years. So I need to kind of lose that weight and get back in shape and so I can kind of run around with my kid as he gets older and if he plays soccer or whatever, I don't want to be like the dad that's like runs for like 30 seconds, not even 30 seconds and is out of breath. So I'm trying to get healthy for myself, but I don't want to just say for him, it's for myself, but I want to be able to do the things with him as well. I mean, being laid off, it sucks. It's one of the worst feelings. Like it hurts you to your core. But I mean it. In every bad situation, you can try to find, you can be optimistic, you can be pessimistic, but you can try to find the good as much as you can and learn from those situations. And you learn more from your losses than your wins. Sure, you can learn from your wins, but a loss, and if you feel bad enough, I feel like you don't want to ever feel that way again. So you'll learn and you'll adapt and you'll try to make that feeling not happen again. And that's something that I'm really trying to focus my life on and my journey on now. Every startup sounds far fetched or it's like a pipe dream. In the beginning. It seems unreachable when it's just an idea. When those ideas become actual, tangible things like the leadflow community, it seems like it's tangible and getting closer and closer and it's growing and growing and almost growing towards you and it's like absorbing you. And I really want that for the Leadfield community. And I think I'll learn a lot more from Leadville community than any other startup experience I've had. I was laid off and I was scrambling. I was trying to find ways to support my family. I felt like, you know, as myself, if I'm not working, I don't have any worth in this like, world or whatever, you know, I wanted to keep working and I wanted to keep Grinding. And so I remember going back to my bootcamp that I went to and I knew that they were looking for an instructor and I got offered a position to. I didn't really see it fitting in my life very correctly at that time. So I've still been looking and I am scared. I was scared. But I mean I am kind of seeing the light of like this left field community rolling. I've been coding for like seven years now, right. You know, I can call up my old developer friends, my old senior developers, CEOs or whatever. I can ask, hey, are there any opportunities? Because like I always say it's like all about networking and trying to find opportunities and keep good relationships. So there's an old developer that started his own company, a chatbot company, making LLMs for smaller companies that so many companies in one sentence. But it's okay. So he's making these LLMs, these small like ChatGPTs for these smaller companies to use to help their admin panels or their customers. So they'll use their own database. It's called rag. So it's retrieval augmented generation. So it's using their own database to come up with answers. Like a human conversation format for things you can ask. Like the admin would need to know like oh, how many customers did we have today? What was the average age of those customers? And it could look, query their database and kind of give answers for that. So that is an opportunity. I'll go meet with him tomorrow. We've been talking. I could find a new job as a developer or with my skills as a senior developer. But it's really exciting for me to see people posting about their wins, people posting their projects in the discord and basically just like being able to see that and learn and get references. And it's really exciting for me because of this community. It doesn't really give me a chance to be bored anymore and really be like doom scrolling on my phone. I can always check into Discord or check my comments and there's always someone to talk to. Going on with the Leadville community really reminds me of startups that I used to start in the past. Like how I really got into programming. After I went to bootcamp, I actually was given some opportunities from the government, got some funding for reservation software. I also joined startup doing real estate AI, like real estate appraisal software. Those were very fun stories of my life. I was also taking outsourcing projects as well. And I remember making a website. He was having an exhibition event in Seoul. It was really good. The Communication was really good. We delivered the guy, the CEO came up to me and he was like, you're a programmer, I'm interested in startups. Is there anything that you want to start or you're interested in? And we could do it together. And I really looked up to this guy because he was a Stanford graduate. He really knew about business. He was very experienced and like it's another learning opportunity for me. I'll never reject or deny opportunity to learn. So I was just, you know, okay, let's go. And then so he was like, what are you interested in? And at that time at one of my companies when I was working, another person was always talking about making board games and coding board games specifically. So I thought I'd bring him in and we'd talk about making some kind of coding educational piece of games. So we got together and we actually created one. It was called Unicorn Ninjas. The three of us, you know, met a couple times a week, prototyped like cards on post its and how the game mechanics would work. We'd study about other games. We went to a designer. After we got all the mechanics down and how to win, we basically went to Fiverr, got some designs and ended up making a game. And there are a lot of obstacles, like you have to get a KC mark, you have to pay, like you have to bring the cards into the country. And there's a lot of things that you don't think about during logistics. So it ended up being this game right here. It's called Unicorn Ninjas. It was on Kickstarter. I thought it was pretty successful, but it ended because everybody moved away after a while. So the guy that I opened it with went back to Singapore and the other guy went back to America. So we stopped doing it. But I mean we're successful in launching a product and hitting our goals on Kickstarter. So that was really rewarding for me to know that if I put my time, you'd see the rewards. You learn so much while you're doing some kind of startup and trying to do something on your own because there's no actual instruction pamphlet. It's more like you are writing the instruction pamphlet for yourself and trying to figure it out on the way. I had the reservation software system, the real estate appraisal software, and then I was doing the Unicorn Ninjas on the side, which is the board game. And they're all very good learning experiences, every single one. I've learned a great life lesson at the real estate appraisal software. I learned more about programming, how to talk to programmers. At the reservation software, I learned about taxes and how to run a business. And at the Unicorn Ninjas, I learned how to. You know, there's a lot of obstacles in making a product, like getting the marks, getting the certifications. And I think these were all very important for me in my adventure as a entrepreneur. And I am still, you know, I was scared, not gonna lie. But I think I do have to count my blessings, because even though, like, I talk like I was scared, I have to support my family. I have a baby to feed. But those are also blessings because I can at least say that I have a wife. I have a baby to care for. And it's so fun for me to, like, watch my kid grow, take him to the gym, and it's really cool. And yesterday, actually, I signed him up for, like, a baby modeling agency. So I saw, like, an ad and I put my email in and they called me and they're like, okay. Like, she actually just texted me. Now, I'm not gonna show you any names, but it says, like, like, hello, Phil. Hope your day started with good stuff. I forgot to tell you about privileges. So, like, it's. They're trying to grab me, but I realized that, you know, we did the audition, he passed or whatever, right? Because he didn't cry in front of the camera. He's not such a shy baby. But I honestly think everyone passes the audition. But in the office, they're like, okay, to start, you have to give us $2,000. And then that's when I felt it was like, a little bit of a scam. I think it would be a great opportunity for my kid to be in, like, commercials and stuff. But having a family and having my kid is definitely a blessing in my life. So going back to the let fill community and seeing the comments, I can see that a lot of people are relating with my story. And you're sharing your stories and you're sharing the hardships that you're going through. And it makes me feel like I'm not alone. And I'm hoping that through my video, you don't feel alone. I feel like we can all help each other in the discord community, in the YouTube comments, and just show support for each other. You know, there's a movie called Rocky and Rocky 6. He says, it's not about the times you get knocked down. It's about the times you get knocked down and you keep moving forward. And I really feel that about, you know, life. So you can count your losses and learn, and then we can all win together. And that's something I truly believe. Like I said, I had the company Unicorn Ninjas. I have boxes and boxes of these from our Kickstarter. These boxes, not these boxes. Like cardboard boxes. So I want to give these away to anyone who wants one. Is I'll put the link of the Kickstarter and the rules video inside of the description. What? I'll choose like some random people and I'll send them out. But if you want one especially, maybe you could just leave it in the comments that you want one. And you know, we can figure something out. Shipping is very expensive. We can figure that out. Just want you to know, if I can do it, you can do it too. Coding saves lives.