Don't focus so much on growth that you forget why you started in the first place - Ep 115

Yo, so back on the YouTube for the first time in a very long time. I just blinded myself setting up these lights and I'm hoping this audio works correctly. Yeah, slightly different background. I feel like finally I've gone full YouTuber spec with this upstairs studio in the house. I've lived here nearly 5 months and I was just— I realized I wasn't really utilizing the space very well in this gaff. It's actually kind of funny looking back at the old pod. I used to use shitty microphones, iPhones, and the most ridiculously terrible lights. Everyone's face would look massively pink. Not saying this is miles better, but I just literally watched a YouTube video on how to make lighting look better. So hopefully this one actually does something. Slightly beside the point, I actually filmed loads of stuff the past few weeks and just haven't posted it because I probably need a new editor, which used to be me. Then I got an editor, then got rid of it. And honestly, just felt incredibly busy. It's also very sweaty filming in Dubai with a massive light on my face from two different angles, which you probably can't see. But yes, I tweeted the other day, as I tweet a lot of things. I often tweet bangers in my mind as they come to mind, but then never make a video about them. But I thought, given I've just been filming random shit for the past few weeks and people have been asking for the house tour, which I still haven't done, which I might do soon. Yeah, I think honestly, like, the past few months just been— kind of just realized, like, I'm probably forcing myself to work and operate in a certain way and spend my time and prioritize my time on certain things that isn't even necessarily good for the business. When I started out in entrepreneurship, for me, like, probably like a lot of founders, it might be relevant to people, but certainly for me, and I've probably been lying to myself to some extent, which I can get to, but I used to draw logos in books, right? That was like my first interest. I probably used to want to make movies when I was younger. I used to draw logos in books. That's kind of how it started. Then I discovered like Adobe Illustrator and started making random fictitious websites, and that went on to my first clothing brand, which was like fucking 9 years ago, something crazy, um, or even 10 years ago now, on Shopify. And I guess I was always a creative first, and I think there's kind of two types of founders typically, and obviously there's a lot of nuance and everything in between. But you often get the guys that, like, they're in banking, they're in a professional job, a lawyer, whatever, they saw a problem and then they go and start it when they've got more experience. For me, it was the other one, which is probably quite a typical archetype as well, of you are just a creative of some sort and you know you want to be a founder, largely because you don't want to work for someone else, and then you figure it out that way and you reverse engineer— well, not even reverse engineer, but you just, you want to get paid to do something that isn't worth someone else. And that was basically me, and I had all these ideas and so on. And gradually that got me into e-com and everything else. Um, anyway, the point is I was a creative first, operator business guy second. Not to say that I was never interested in business, I always was, but through the lens of I want to be able to monetize my creative interests, not just, you know, there's plenty of better ways to make money than building fucking e-com brands, let's be very honest. Um, I don't know, even just going into like property is probably more safe, right? And I've seen lots of the ups and downs and so on. But anyway, my point is I definitely created first, and the most, I guess, the most exciting parts of building brands for me has always been like the, the builder phase, like very much zero to one. I don't mean zero to like 1 million in revenue, literally, I just mean the early stage. And for me, that probably is like zero to, I don't know, 10 million in revenue, where you can largely do it yourself, lean on a small team, etc. Um, and also that's when you're in control of most things. And also by default of being smaller, you're spending more time, especially right at the start, on like day zero before you even launch, on creating the product and brand, the vision, all this. Like, I used to have this obsession with pink lights and my neon brand in the past, Neon Beach, which I've spoken about a million times in here, obviously. Like, I used to live in this London penthouse with my two mates, and I was obsessed with the pink lights. And the whole thing was like, I'd play like the 1975 and The Midnight and all synthy, like romantic nighttime tunes, look out at the London cityscape, 'cause we had a sick view, and have the pink lights. And that was my thing. And that was kind of why the pod became the Midnight Pod, because I had this kind of romanticized idea of like working late, creating your future, even though it was never even usually at midnight, it's really 8:00 PM or 9:00 PM, but you get the point. The midnight vibe was like pink lights, city view, working late. And that's why the pod became the Midnight Pod originally. I also had Midnight City jewelry brand. So there's a theme going on here. Citiescape, Midnight, Pink Lights, etc. It's kind of funny to think about that because I often forget about that business, even though it's quite a good business, much better than the neon one. That's a long story. And yeah, I think naturally as you grow a business and you become more of a CEO— and I fucking hate that term, obviously that is what you are naturally, leading the business— it feels more like that when you've got, you know, a board and investors and employees like me now, and there's pros and cons to all that side of stuff. And some of it, certainly the team side, is a natural progression of just growing. The investor path is obviously one, and some people go down that, some people don't, and that's the story for another time. But yeah, basically I've gone from doing what I really loved and was a passion project from day one, creating products, creating visions, turning into a business, to now just feeling like I basically just run a business. Um, and that in itself is not that enjoyable, but that's not because I have to, It's because I've probably felt that I had to incorrectly. And honestly, in the past few weeks in particular, I've been thinking about it for a long time, but, you know, I realized I wasn't spending time on— I guess two points I'm trying to make. I wasn't spending time on the thing that was actually most important in the start anyway, and even now, probably more important now ironically, which is the product and the brand. We have a product person, right? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying no one's working on that in the business. I just mean I had stopped applying my like vision and creativity and I guess like fucking autistic ideas to the brand. And we probably got a bit boring at some point. Not necessarily boring, but I stopped working on new stuff. So like Rainbow Dust, which 4 years ago was actually a very unique novel concept, at least in the UK, at least my take on it, you know, obviously mushroom coffee had been done before, but I was just like different and so on. But anyway, that thing, was the most valuable thing I did, was create the product and concept. Then you grow, you build the team, you get obsessed with the numbers, and that's all super important. And we have launched new products, but I was less, I spent less time on each of them, and I was less involved in more recent ones than just a member of the team or two. Because I was so focused on other things, mainly around performance marketing and improving retention, and ironically, all of those things would have been probably better, and the business had been better served, had I fully delegated the other stuff. Which typically for founders, in my experience, at least in my circle, tends to be just growth. And really by that they mean D2C growth. But we were growing in retail as well, and Amazon, and other channels, and whatever. But I'd gone too far away from the thing. And the thing is the product, the brand, the creative. Like, what is the thing you're marketing, right? And I think a lot of founders probably in the D2C space are guilty of this. And maybe guilty is the wrong word, but you spend all your fucking time focused on growth because once you've created the thing, at least that was for me, just maybe an honest reflection. Once you've created the thing, I got to the kind of mindset, 'Oh, we'll just keep doing this.' And don't get me wrong, I actually think we should have gone deeper on what we've done. That's another video for another time. But I feel like more of the growth could come from getting back to being scrappy and creative and actually doing unique shit. Rather than whether that's branding, and also rather than just going through the motions and growing the existing thing. But also, you shouldn't be a one-trick pony as a performance marketer, as a founder. And I don't think I am, and I've always kind of almost felt guilty that I'm not as good at that. I'm good at it, to be fair. I'm not as obsessively, elitely focused on that one thing as some founders I know who are doing much bigger numbers than me because they're just direct response performance marketing guys. By the way, that's probably one of the most important skills. I'm not knocking that, but I'm saying I'm more of a generalist with probably more of a product and brand general, like, vision. I fucking hate that word, it sounds like wanky, but that's probably more me. The zero-to-one creation, and don't just mean at the start of the business, I mean the new thing in any business. Um, but yeah, and I kind of got into this mindset of just need to focus on performance marketing when actually there's other people that can do that as well as me. Certainly, if not much better. And we have those people on the team now, but I've been spending too much time still being involved in that because I think that's where most of the gains come from. Or is actually, for me, most of the gains enjoyment-wise, importantly, which actually makes you want to stay in the game, and actually incremental and unique value to the business in terms of things that most other people, or less people in market, could do if I was to hire them, is focusing on the product and brand again. And like, if this was day one of something new 'Cause I've always said, oh, I'm someone that has loads of ideas and so on, and I do. But you're better off applying those ideas, and not that I'm starting a new business, but I do have loads of ideas, and I'm probably ADHD, well, I am ADHD, but you know, I'm that sort of type where you always want to start the next thing, but actually, that's not the productive route. The productive route is apply that newness thinking to the existing business. Anyway, I'm fucking rambling as always, but my point is, I've been forcing myself to be like an operator only, forgetting that originally it all started as, I got excited by creating ideas and the alchemy of bringing them to reality via e-commerce. I was never like, I want to be in e-commerce originally. It was, I want to create products and brands, and to do that, really, I need to A, be in e-commerce, and B, discover performance marketing. But then you forget that the essence of the whole thing starts with the fucking brand and the concept. And if I was to come up with like a genuinely world-changing product tomorrow— I'm not saying Rainbow Dust is that at all, by the way— but you know, if I was like genuinely innovative beyond anything that other competitors are doing, anything that we've done before, that would be far more incremental in terms of growth long term than just fucking getting CAC down by 5 quid because I'm spending all my time on, you know, building a performance marketing team. Um, and also I think someone tweeted about this, uh, some guy on X, but I do think most of the value you can create as a founder is probably more in product and brand differentiation and uniqueness and your story and so on, rather than just performance marketing. And I've kind of got to the point now where I don't fucking want to look at performance marketing. I'm not saying there's anything I do, I'm just using it as a relatable example because everyone building a brand has to do that to a large degree and will definitely be spending a lot of time on it. But I've been doing that shit for like 8 years and I've just got to the point now where I'm trying to consciously step back from that and actually accept that even if certain things, you know, I could have done something else in that, there's more incremental value in me going deep on what's the next thing. I mean, I've got a bunch of next things coming by the way. We've done obviously new things. I'm not saying we haven't done any of that. I'm just saying I've never gone deep enough on that since we launched to A, enjoy myself as much as I did in the first 6 months, which I'll probably never forget that feeling in some weird way. And B, yeah, I think that's where more value comes from, certainly for me. Somebody might watch this and say, oh fuck, I like to scale and you know, you just need to do performance marketing, you just need to scale the shit out of it. And I'm obviously doing that and trying to do that even more, but I do think more of the growth comes from the thing and also more of the enjoyment. Because at the end of the day, for me, it's not just about trying to hit the biggest number. Ironically, it is in another way, but like, it's not just about hitting that number now. It's about doing it in the long term and doing it with stuff I'm genuinely proud of and have enjoyed doing as well. Because fuck me, like, I'm guilty of this a lot, of just thinking, ah, you know, I don't have to enjoy any of it, I'll just enjoy it when I'm rich, sort of thing. I'll enjoy it when I've exited, when I've retired or whatever. But I don't think that's healthy. I mean, it's not healthy, and I've realised it's not healthy. It's also not sustainable, it's not healthy for the business. And actually, ironically, it's not good for trying to achieve that goal in the first place. So if you don't enjoy it enough— I'm not saying to enjoy all the time— if you don't net enjoy it to a really large degree, then I just don't think you're gonna make it to that next, next level. So yeah, anyway, that's a reflection for me in my fancy new upstairs. I mean, this was just the office, by the way. I say fancy, I've put a fucking few products behind me and a fake tree. But yeah, that's my reflection this week. As always, I say every video, I'm gonna make more YouTube videos. I'm just gonna say I'm gonna make them when they come, but I'm consistent. I think I've made 100 and I don't know what this is, like 114th episode of Doc the Journey or something, over like crazily nearly 4 years of this series alone, which is fucking mental, makes you feel very old. Crazy times in the world right now. I'm not gonna speak about it on this video or potentially any video for certain reasons, but yeah, it does put things in perspective. And maybe that's partly why I've started to think a bit more of like, fuck, just, lean into what you enjoy, because especially when you're good at that stuff, which I think I am, I want to get better at— life's fucking short, honestly. And I deep that so much, and I have a bit of regret. I mean, I have regret for sure, often of thinking I just wasted a certain time when I could have lent into what I was enjoying more and focused on enjoying the process more and actually probably got better results out of it. But I think everyone's got their own lessons from certain periods in their life. In the past 2 years, I think 2024 and 2025, and 2025 in particular, were those, were those, were very much lesson years for me in a lot of ways. And I probably didn't, well, I just didn't fucking enjoy them as much as I should or could have. And I actually probably didn't get as good of results as a result of that that I could have done. So anyway, yeah, subscribe to the pod. I hope you're all well if you're scaling, um, and if you're not And fuck, I haven't done a YouTube video in a while. Hope you're all well. Subscribe to the pod and I'll catch you in the next one. Peace.