We are All Making It Up as We Go & The True Price of Failure in This Game - Doc the Journey Ep 51

Yo. Welcome Back to episode 51 of Documenting the journey. And that felt like a very formal intro for once. I'm also not wearing a hat because I need to accept that I can't always wear a hat and have shit hair. So I bought some new fucking hair gel off Amazon, which is very exciting, and it seems to be a pretty good blend between hold and wetness and all that shit. But this is not a hair review channel. I also realized that I fucking hate my face when you can see both my ears, which is why you might notice I always choose to, like, focus on my good side when I'm recording the pod, which is pretty much always this side. So the room sounds really echoey as well today. I don't know if you can notice that. But anyway, diving into the episode, I'm in a bit of a rush. I need to go out soon. I'm actually going to my mate stag do, which is the first stag do I've ever been invited to. I guess we're getting towards that age, which is fucking scary. Tomorrow morning in Prague, so that'll be very good. I want to run through quickly some shit that's happening in the business and then I'll dive into more philosophical shit, which tends to always happen in these episodes, doesn't it? I suppose. Summer is a weird one, I think, entrepreneurially, because by nature of having your own business and shit, you can kind of go where you want when you want to some extent, because you can work from anywhere. And that's the beauty of freedom, which we often take for granted, or at least I certainly do. But then it leaves me thinking, oh, should I be going on holiday? Should I be taking time off work entirely while E commerce is in a lull, which generally July, August, it pretty much is. Although this month, I'm proud to say we'll have had our record month. Don't think we will next month, if I'm completely honest. We're going to spend less on ads and really kind of sit back and set the foundations for Q4 and Black Friday. Get a lot of. Got a lot of plans there. A lot of new SKUs coming, new flavors as well, and a few new different things coming. But yeah, summer's a weird one because. Do you, like. I know Gary Vee talks about this in, like, August, which we're three days away from. Do you knuckle down and get ahead, or do you take time and reset and, like, rest in many ways to get ready for Q4? And the answer is probably somewhere in between. Because having a month off is actually really fucking boring. But also working really, really, really hard in August, the whole month is probably also quite boring. So I've got a few little trips planned over the next few weeks which will be nice, always very last minute, including the stag do. But yeah, that's kind of one thing. A lot planning right now I'm trying to still figure out where I want to live and how I want to stretch my life and business and you know, the long story short, being based in London is still going to be the case because I think that's net beneficial for where I'm going. I've realized that having a team around me is better for my mental health and the business health. We had a. We got everyone in, a few people flew in from the team the other week and we just got together and there definitely is magic and synergies and little nuanced differences in conversation in person obviously compared to just everything online. So I think it's super valuable to do that. We do it now and then, but doing it all the time or certainly more of the time would be very helpful. So I think I will stay in London, might go to Dubai still in winter for a little bit. We'll see. But yeah, that's a big topic. I'm rambling again. Retail stuff. We have, we're launching our first retailer in a bunch of, well, a few hundred stores in September, which is way more hassle than I thought it would be, but it's been good. We're also speaking to other retailers and we've also been speaking to venture capital investors, which I've alluded to in the past because I've been kind of flirting with a lot of them because I didn't realize how this game worked. More to the point, I've been flirting with a lot of them for about, well since I launched the brand. And some of them I think could be really good for the business. Others I think probably wouldn't get the business. But I suppose it's a bit of a fork in the road and it's like, well, do you go and raise VC capital? Get on that VC train if you can raise the capital. Not saying we will or even could, but you know, signs look promising. Or do you raise angel money or stop raising money, Be profitable, bootstrap it a bit more, grow slower, no doubt, and I guess maintain more equity, more control and I don't know, like what's the end goal? I guess the end goal is for me to grow something really big and get an Exit and hopefully change the world for the better with like psychedelics long term like that. It's kind of two part goal, I guess there's the pragmatic financial goal which has to be there I think because it has to be there to for the business to exist, but also has to be there because I want an outcome which I felt like I missed out on in the past to some extent. But then I also want to change the world with Psilocybin and I genuinely believe our products are a good starting point to do that. So yeah, I think maybe like VC money does make sense, at least in terms of aligning with my longer term goals and positioning the business to be something much bigger than just a supplement brand, at least long term. And I think my ego has accepted that. I'm willing to have a much smaller piece of a bigger pie or a more impactful pie long term to achieve that, if that's what's necessary. If that's what comes with VC funding, which part of it is. So yeah, that's one thing I'm thinking about and I'll probably do a whole episode on that. It's funny, I tend to always think about what I should speak about when I'm mid random freestyle point in an episode of Dr. Journey, which is what's happening right now because I'm thinking VC versus bootstrap versus angel money. I've actually learned a fuckload about that in the past year. So that might be a quite interesting episode for me to do. And you know what, I'm gonna write that down right now on my list of YouTube ideas, which actually made the other day. Yeah, so I was just writing down a video idea. I think that'd be pretty interesting for me to dive into. I knew literally nothing about fundraising a year ago pretty much or a year and a bit ago, and I've learned a fuckload of angel money, VC money and you know, the process to do that and I guess how it looks and feels, I suppose. Coming on to a few thoughts for the week, which tends to be another consistent theme. I was thinking about this the other day. I don't know in what context I was thinking about it, but maybe it's a podcast. But like pretty much up until like age 18 or 21, you have a very clear path in life. You know, you go to school, you go to high school or sixth form, that's just a given. And you probably go to uni because that's what everyone else does and society needs that structure and it's beneficial. So it's net beneficial for most people to have that structure and to follow it. And then you get to 21. And if you're not an entrepreneur, you go and get a job and you probably climb the job ladder to some extent for the next 40 years. Not that that's a bad thing, bad thing by any means at all, but that's just what happens. And if you stick with that for a while and maybe drop out into entrepreneurship, you then enter a different pool. And if you, like me, never got a normal job, you dropped out of uni or you finished uni and went straight into entrepreneurship. Whichever way it was, you basically skip that entire ladder. And. And you also skip that entire set of like, societal and corporate guidance. And you just literally go into like, fuck, I could. Like, every day I have to earn and create for myself and no one's telling me what to do, which is very liberating. But it's actually very fucking weird and terrifying if you think about it, because when you have a job, I guess to some extent you were given a structure. Your life is kind of at least your work life. And as a result, most of your, like, actual social life and the rest of your life and where you live, etc. Is kind of told to you. You have to be here at this time, and this is what you do in entrepreneurship. And this is probably in hindsight, why I've struggled with deciding how to exist and where to exist is because I've never been told where to do it and I've had to make it up myself. And every day I'm making it up. And obviously you create structure for yourself as you get more experienced and have some momentum and get context on things and a network, hopefully, with which I've gradually done over the years. But you still are just making it up as you go along. It's kind of fucking mad because there is literally no playbook. Like, don't know where to take this video. I mean, I was just thinking about it. It's fucking crazy. If you are not an entrepreneur, you have so much structure given to you. And I don't think people can fathom how little structure there is when you literally start a fucking business or an entity or a thing or a product or a service, a creation from scratch. And especially when you're getting started. I think about when I was like 19, I knew literally nothing. Now I know some stuff, but still pretty much literally nothing compared to where I want to be in like 34 years. And yeah, it's. But you also pay the Price for mistakes you make even though you didn't know any better technically. Like ultimately I paid a big price for my previous business that failed. Everyone bangs on about how failure is okay and you know all this woo, woo. But I feel like none of the people that say that I've ever actually failed, I don't mean failed. I guess there's two types of failure and probably what they're referring to, and they said failure is okay, is that it never works, it never got off the ground, you never created any momentum or financial impact with what you're doing. They're not referring to the failure like me, where something's actually really big and there's a lot of responsibilities and a lot of risk every day and a lot of obligations to meet. And that breaks because of unforeseen circumstances. And I'm still dealing with that emotionally, mentally, financially, in many ways because I lost out on a lot of potential value in what I'd built from the previous years. Yeah, I don't know. Like, I look back now with so much more experience on that time period and kind of linking the two points here and yeah, it's like, how could I possibly have known how to deal with that or fix that? Whereas now I feel like I would have had a better chance of fixing it and maybe getting through with a better outcome. But yeah, it's crazy. I don't know. And I suppose that's the risk you take and your fault for being an entrepreneur. Right, and it was my fault being an entrepreneur. But yeah, it's just funny because that would be impossible to happen to you if you were just working a job and someone else is taking the risk and telling you what to do. I suppose so. Yeah. I've always found it kind of difficult to swallow when people say like, failure is okay, encourage failure, blah, blah, blah. But then I just feel like they've never actually experienced a genuinely large fuck up that impacts them financially and emotionally and all this stuff. And yeah, just, just whenever I hear that I kind of think, well, this comes back to the point I was making of like entrepreneurship is actually so mad, you literally, like statistically you should fail and you probably will like over the long, the long haul, maybe less so if your ambitions are smaller or you're playing it safer, which is nothing wrong with. Probably makes a lot of sense. But yeah, where's the game with that? I guess the first point was it's just mad how little of a path you are given as an entrepreneur. And it's actually crazy. And even now like Six years in full time or whatever. I've been doing this full time for like six years. My only source of income and I'm still fucking winging it so massively. I don't think people realize. But then as you become more experienced and you have more context and you become better, the irony is you realize that everyone else is winging it as well to some extent. Like even the guys that. Even fucking Elon Musk. Because when you are spearheading something and creating something, there are no rules. But there's laws. Sure, there's certain rules like don't do, you know, don't do immoral things, whatever, but that's obvious. But other than that, I guess just by. By default of creating something, you kind of have to just take the risk of figuring it out and. Yeah, chew glass and stare into the abyss as Elon Musk says or something. Yes, on that thought. Don't know if that's a positive or negative, but I think just acknowledging how fucking mad entrepreneurship actually is and just to be in the game and be surviving and swinging every day, it's pretty cool. And if you're drawn to that, you're probably got a screw loose like me. And anyone that I think is doing it is slightly mentally ill like me. I probably sound like a psychopath saying it in that tone of voice. But yeah, I'll leave you with those thoughts. This was a fairly rushed episode. I might return to. Actually like scripted episodes are not scripted, but structured episodes. Next week. Other than that, subscribe to the pod. Pleasure as always. Appreciate the support. Amazed by the map of the message. Me on a daily, weekly, monthly basis saying they actually love the shit that I put out, which is always amazing. So I'm really just doing it for me. But if people enjoy and it gives them context, then that's great as well. Subscribe to the pod. Thank you for watching. I will see you in the next episode.