Startup Q&A #19: Learning to Code, Mentorship, Encouraging Kids, and Intellectual Property

Hey everybody, Matthew Paulson here. Today we are going to discuss whether or not you should become a programmer, how to protect your intellectual property, how to encourage entrepreneurial children, and who my mentors are. Let's do this. This is officially episode 19 of Startup Q and A, the online video show that helps small business owners, startup founders and entrepreneurs grow their businesses faster and achieve their dreams of financial freedom. So whether you're just getting started or if you have 100 employees, this is the show that is going to give you actionable ideas and advice that you can implement in your business. Now, at Startup Q and A, we believe the best way to achieve financial freedom is to build a cash flow generating business and invest the profit into income generating investments. We don't believe you should build a high growth business and sell it to a big company some day for an exit. We just think that's too much work and it's too likely that that plan just is not going to work. We believe your business should actually make profit and that you should invest that profit into income generating investments like real estate, closed and municipal bond funds and dividend stocks. Eventually, as you take your money from your business, you put it into these investments. The income that you get from these investments will grow and then you'll have enough where eventually you'll have enough where those investments cover your living expenses. And at that point you're pretty set for life because you have income to cover your expenses forever and you just don't need to generate any more money from a job or a business after that. This isn't to say when you reach that kind of point of critical mass where all your expenses are covered by your investments, that you're going to stop working and sit on the beach and drink Mai tais. That is not my plan. What I am saying is that you will have the freedom to work on the projects and the things that you want to work on and, and whether or not they make money for you is more of a secondary concern because you just don't need that money. So you can work on passion projects, you can work on nonprofit stuff, you can just work on really anything you want to because your income will be separated from the work that you do on a day to day basis. So that is ultimately the goal that I'm trying to get to and I'm trying to teach you to get to through your entrepreneurial endeavors. So we recently finished a three part series on investing for entrepreneurs. So if you haven't watched those episodes yet, I think they're some of the best content we've done on the show so far. Go check those out. If you are running a business, you're starting to make a little bit of money and you want to start getting down that path of financial freedom by putting money into income generating investments, those three episodes are a great place to start for you. We've done theme shows for the last several episodes now, and because we've been doing theme shows, we've been answering questions that I've kind of made up and nobody actually asked. So we both have a little bit of a backlog of questions that people have sent in. So we're going to spend at least the next couple episodes answering your questions. So there's not really a theme for this episode, but there are some great questions. So for the next couple episodes we'll be answering listener questions and then maybe after that we'll pick out a new theme. If you have ideas for a theme, let me know. Mattattpulseon.com I'd love to hear from you if you have ideas for a theme for future episodes. So before we kind of dive into our questions this week, I want to move into a section that I call the Tip of the Week where I provide you a tip, trick or idea that will help you grow your business faster or achieve financial freedom. So this week's tip is to move your website over to HTTPs or or, which is just a secure way of connecting to your website. Now, by default, anybody going to your website, downloading content from your website, that connection is not secure. The traffic between you and the people that are coming to your website is not encrypted. It's not protected in any way. So that anybody that has a server in between you and your users, they can see what your users are doing on your website. They can see what pages you're accessing. If they type in a password, you, they can see that. And that's just probably not something you want in a world where privacy is increasingly scarce and people place an increasingly high value on that privacy. So I just think it's naturally a good idea that nobody else can monitor the conversation back and forth between you and your customers and you and your website visitors. The way to do that is to have a secure connection between your website and the web browsers of your users. The way to do that is to set up an SSL certificate on your website and then that SSL certificate will verify who you are and will allow that secure connection to happen back and forth. In the old days, you used to have to get a dedicated IP address for your web server or your website, and you had to go out and buy an SSL certificate from a company like RapidSSL. It was a little bit of a process to do this, and because it was some work, most people just didn't do it. You can still do it that way. There are plenty of ways to get a free SSL certificate now, but there's a really easy kind of shortcut way to do it. Maybe not quite as secure, but I think you get most of the benefits, and that is to use Cloudflare. Now, Cloudflare is a content delivery network and kind of a web firewall. So they kind of block a lot of that bad traffic from people trying to hack your website or people trying to hack any WordPress website. They stop that before it ever hits your web server. And, and one of the benefits of using Cloudflare, because they sit in between your web server and the Internet, is that they can do all the work to set up an SSL certificate for you. So if you point your website to Cloudflare, then Cloudflare points to, or you point your domain to Cloudflare and Cloudflare points to your server. They kind of act as kind of a firewall in between you and the rest of the Internet, so they can set up the SSL certificate for you and you don't really have to do anything besides toggle a switch and Cloudflare. So I really like Cloudflare as a way to get an SSL certificate for a really basic website. It's just a lot easier than trying to manage certificates yourself. So there are a few really good benefits of having SSL certificates on your website. First, Google uses whether or not your website has a secure connection, HTTPs or an SSL certificate, however you want to say it. They use that as a ranking factor now in your search results. So if you have two websites that are equal in all other metrics, but one has that SSL certificate set up and the other one doesn't, the one that has that secure connection is going to outrank the one that doesn't. So just even as a marketing play, it's a good thing to have in place. Second, some email service providers use whether or not you have an SSL certificate as a deliverability kind of metric. So you know they are going to assume that a website or domain is maybe a little bit more legitimate if it has an SSL certificate versus one that doesn't. So that's always a good thing to have. Also, having an SSL certificate is a prerequisite for E commerce functionality. So if you plan on taking orders from your website, you're going to need an SSL certificate. Anything where somebody types in a username and password or somebody types in a credit card, you are going to need an SSL certificate because you just, it's not safe to have people type that information, have it go to your web server without that secure connection in place. And of course, the largest benefit is that your customers will have a secure connection to your website. That way nobody can sniff what's going on in between you and your customers. It's always a good thing. So if you haven't done an SSL certificate on your website, we're now at the point where every website should have an SSL certificate. Go ahead and do that if you haven't done that for your website yet. So that is the tip of the week. Let's dive into the questions. So every week we take a few questions from Facebook or through our website. So if you have a question you would like to have answered on this show, go to the domain startup Q and A co that will take you to my website. And under the Startup Q and A show menu item there is a link to submit a question. Go ahead and do that. I also periodically ask on my personal Facebook page, my LinkedIn account, Twitter account, hey, does anybody have any questions for the show? So if you see one of those posts, you can just comment there too and then I'll try to incorporate your questions into a future episode. Please note, I record these probably about five weeks ahead of time. I'm actually recording this March 7th and I think it'll come out mid to late April. So if I haven't answered your question on a show yet, it's probably just in the backlog and I haven't gotten to it yet. So I try to answer every good question that comes in. So if you haven't seen a question yet, just wait a few more weeks and it'll probably show up. Okay, the first question comes from Keith Bates and Keith asks, Matt, I'm reading your fascinating book Online Business, Online Business from Scratch and I'm planning to start a social network. But I have one question. Do I need to learn how to write code so effectively? Keith is asking if you are going to build a startup that requires a significant platform software platform where you're going to have to have a website with a lot of functionality in it. Do you need to become a programmer in order to make that happen? Now, Keith, if you are just building a niche kind of social network so that you can connect with people over a common interest, a geography, people in your local town. Or if you want to take an existing offline set of social connections, maybe you're all part of the same club and move that online. There are plenty of tools that already exist that can help you create a niche community online where you don't need to reinvent the wheel and build a platform from the ground up. There are tools like Ning ning n I n g.com that will allow you to build your own social network on your own domain, with your own branding, and then you can just bring your audience there and it will facilitate all of the technical aspects, discussion forums, profiles, messaging, all that stuff. It will do that for you. There are also membership site plugins like Amember, Wishlist, there's a bunch of them for WordPress and other platforms that you can use to manage your community online. Any half decent WordPress developer can set that up for you. You don't necessarily need to become a very technical person to set these up and manage one of these things. You just don't need to do that. On the other hand, if you want to build the next Facebook, the next Snapchat, or whatever the next great big social network is going to be, somebody on the founding team is going to need to have a strong technical software development engineering background. You should really only start a business where you have expertise that other people don't have. Otherwise you're probably not going to be very successful. That would be like me trying to start an architecture firm with no knowledge or experience in architecture. It's probably just not going to work out that well because I don't know enough to know what I don't know. So if I did want to start an architecture firm, I should probably go find a couple of architects to partner with and maybe I provide some expertise they don't have and then they provide that architecture expertise and then I could go with them as partners, go start that architecture business. But me by myself, it would not be a good idea to start an architecture business. So if you really have your goal set to start a giant new social media platform, probably not going to work out. But if somebody made Snapchat work, it could be you too. You are going to need somebody that knows how to write software, knows how to do the technical stuff, because that person is probably going to be the person that writes the first iteration of your software. It would be a very strong uphill battle to do it yourself without a technical person, because then you'd have to work with Contractors that are programmers, which perfectly fine to do. But if you have never done programming work yourself or have worked on software projects, you're probably not going to get good work out of them because you don't know how to communicate what you want to them and what your story bars are and all that stuff. It's as much work to do programming yourself as it is to work with contractors that are doing programming for you. It's a whole other skill set to manage and talk to contract programmers that you probably don't have if you don't have a technical background. So you might be able to pull something off. But it's going to be really tough to work with contractors that are working on your project for you as developers. I haven't seen that work out in most cases. If you want to build that niche social network, there are plenty of tools that will do it for you. But if you want to build that next big great social network, either you need to learn how to program or you need to find a co founder that does. And they can be the technical end and you can be the business end of things for your business. Next question comes from Jeremy Brown. And Jeremy asks, who are your mentors in all areas of businesses? I actually don't like the term mentor because when you think of the idea of a mentor and a mentee, you think of kind of a very formal relationship where you're meeting at a coffee shop every couple of weeks, working on very specific things in a defined kind of formal relationship. And I just, you know, I don't think that model exists at the level that it used to. I think people are very busy, you know, more busy than we used to be. And that defined relationship, it's kind of awkward to set up. And I think it just doesn't really happen the way it used to. I've never had a formal mentor or formal mentee. But that's not to say there aren't a ton of people that I learn from or people that learn from me. I think it just happens differently now than it used to. You're watching this podcast, you're learning from my business experience. Am I your mentor? Maybe. But that formal mentee relationship, just. That doesn't happen as much as it used to. And I think they're. There are plenty of good ways to learn that doesn't involve monopolizing somebody's time in a coffee shop every other week. You can watch shows like this, you can read books, audiobooks, podcasts. There are plenty of great ways to learn from people at a Distance mastermind groups have probably supplanted a lot of the traditional mentor mentee relationships. I think that the model is just changing, and that's totally okay. I don't know. I probably am not communicating this all that well. But you know, that just the idea of a formal relationship, I've never done that, and I really, frankly haven't seen anyone done that. So I think it's more of a theoretical relationship that exists than something that people are actually doing. I would say there are probably two men in my life, though, that I would consider mentors. It didn't happen, like, never approached them and said, hey, would you be my mentor? It was just, we had lunch enough, we had coffee enough, we talked enough. You know, we've done enough life together where they have naturally become my mentors. And I really think that is the way to do it. You meet people, you might go out to a bunch of them once, and you just. You keep doing it as long as it continues to make sense doing it. The two men that I would consider mentors in my life, the first would be Nathan Helling. He is the vice president at Sioux Falls Seminary. Nate and I met maybe 11 years ago now. He ran a small group or a Christian ministry called Context for People that were Young Adults post college, and I became a part of that. He and I became friends. He was in my wedding. We talk regularly, and we have coffee or lunch every couple weeks. He's a couple years older than me. He has a very different perspective than I do on a lot of things. He has just spoken a lot of wisdom into my life over the last decade of my life. And I'm very thankful to have that relationship. It was through Nate that I went to Sioux Fall Seminary and got a Christian leadership degree. So he definitely has had a major impact on my life. And then the other person I would consider a personal mentor is Eric Unag. He recently ran a company called Dakota Security Systems, sold it to a company called Convergis Technologies. And he and I met maybe seven years ago now when we were both at church at Central Baptist Church in Sioux Falls. He asked me to serve on the trustee board there. And we did that for a few years, and we been friends since. And we recently were at his 40th birthday party, and it's like, wow, you must think of me as a pretty good friend here. For his wife to invite my wife and I to their 40th birthday party because there weren't a lot of people in that group. So it was interesting to see that we were part of the 20s people that got invited to his 40th birthday party. So he and I have had that really good kind of business mentorship kind of relationship. He has given me a ton of advice on just how to think about business and how to think about life. And, you know, he and I have had a very good back and forth conversation for several years now. And I definitely would consider him to be a mentor of mine. You know, beyond my kind of two people I would consider mentors. There are plenty of people that I've learned from at a distance. People whose books I read, I follow their podcasts, I follow their online video content, and I'll just name a few of them so that if these are things that you are dealing with as a listener, maybe you could follow these people too. I've got four of them written down. The first is Brian Preston. He is the host of a show called the Money Guy Podcast. He's like Dave Ramsey for smart people. Dave Ramsey has to dumb down everything he teaches because he teaches it to 3 million people of varying levels of intellect and skills and knowledge and financial position. Brian Preston is a guy that will really dive into the details that Dave Ramsey doesn't do sometimes and get into the nuances and will help really cover topics in depth. I really like his podcast for that reason. He's a financial advisor, but not every show is, hey, come buy my services. It's very detailed, in depth advice on specific topics. The next person is Steve Scott from the Authority Pub Academy. He is the guy that I've learned just about everything on book publishing from. He makes probably 30 grand a month selling nonfiction books on Amazon. I make like seven grand a month selling nonfiction books on Amazon. And you know, it's good revenue, but definitely not Steve Scott level. And I wouldn't have gotten to where I am today without what I learned from Steve. So I met Steve a couple times at conferences and stuff like that. He and I chat back and forth on Facebook. Never actually. You know, I wouldn't call him a close friend, but we definitely learned a ton from him and his, his online course and his membership platform and just his content that he produces. He is definitely a thought leader in the book publishing space and I've learned a ton from him. The next is Josh Peters. He used to be the publisher of Morningstar Dividend Investor. He's now a mutual fund manager at BlackRock. But I've learned a lot about investing from him and just how to think about companies. I've read his Dividend Investor newsletter for Years just looking at companies and saying, why is this a good dividend stock? Why is this not a good dividend stock? I've learned a ton from him. Sad that he's not at Morningstar anymore, but through his book and through his past newsletters, I've just learned a ton about investing in dividend stocks from him. The final person would be Rob Walling from Startups and the Rest of Us. It's a podcast. Rob is kind of the guy that was talking about self funded startup entrepreneurship before it was a cool thing to do. He was doing this 10 years ago, before anyone was talking about bootstrapped businesses and software as a service. He was very early on in the space. He had podcasts. He has conference. I'll be going to that in April. Maybe by the time you watch this, I've already went to it. But he is a guy I've learned a lot from. He lives in Minneapolis now, so I should really just drive up and go see him. He and I have met a few times and it's just I've learned a ton from him over the years. So those are some of the people that I'm learning from. Maybe at a distance. Maybe you can learn from them as well. Next question comes from Jeff Gilchrist and he asks, how do you encourage your children to be entrepreneurial? Jeff and his wife Sarah. I used to teach Financial Peace University with them at our church together, so I know him and his family pretty well. I know his son Caleb was looking for a summer job, didn't find one, so he decided to start a business instead. And that business was selling cards from games like Magic the Gathering. Not necessarily that one, but games like that on ebay and other sites like that. So he'd buy cards cheaply and then sell them at a profit. I know he's done it with a couple of cards already, so it's a great little business for somebody of that age range, I think. I hate to guess how old he is. Maybe he's 14 now, something like that. 15. 14. 15. Somewhere like there. Sorry, Jeff and Sarah, if I got that wrong, but that is definitely a great age to start a small business like that. So my kids are 4 and 10 months old, so I can't really offer you a ton of personal experience on what I've done to encourage my own children to be entrepreneurial. But I can tell you what my parents did for me, that whether they realize it or not, they've encouraged me to be entrepreneurial. When I was growing up. When I was 14, I had somewhat of a similar business as your son. I had a website about SimCity. I called it like SimWeb, I think it was hosted on GeoCities where I have screenshots and cheat codes and information about all my favorite games that were produced by a company called Maxis. They made SimCity the streets of SimCity. Sim Ant, SimTower, SimCopter, SimCopter, great game. I love SimCopter because you can import your SimCity 2000 games into it and then fly through your cities. A lot of fun during my middle school years in that game. But I built a website about that and I put ads on. I think I had maybe 25, 30 people a day, which it's funny to look at it back on now but then that was a lot of people going on my website. So it was kind of fun having a little hit counter showing how many people were on it. That was cool. But I would have ads on my website for like a free web hosting account from who knows where. This little company called SafeAudit that was kind of like an affiliate network at the time. It's now defunct but I'd get checks for $25, $50 a month from it and eventually I saved up enough to buy my own computer. So I had like a 400 MHz celeron computer with a 17 inch monitor, big old CRT 4x CD CD burner on it and integrated graphics and maybe I think it had 128 megs of RAM. It was just not a fast computer today but it was pretty hot stuff. I over collected 500 MHz, had a lot of fun messing with it, installing Linux on it, taking it apart. I learned a ton about computers because I had a computer in my own room. We were one of the first families in Mitchell, South Dakota to have high speed Internet access. We had cable Internet in the year 2000 which nobody did at that time. It might have been before that even. So there I was, I was 14, 15 year old kid, had my own computer, had high speed Internet access and a ton of free time. That could either get me in trouble, which it did, or it could also be a great learning opportunity. And it was that as well. So my parents, I was really set up for success by them whether they realized it or not. Because I had access to more information than really about anybody else my age at that point in history. I was a curious person, Just had a ton of time to explore the Internet, go on Yahoo and go through all the directories and pick stuff out to Check out. I learned they never really said no, that I couldn't do anything. I wanted to build a website, they didn't have a problem with that. I made a little website in Geocities called MadOnline and that turned into my SimCity website. Just had a lot of fun putting all that stuff together. Yeah, I mean, so it was really just giving me the space to learn and explore on the Internet and learn how to do things and be able to implement things. And just by giving me that free space and allowing my curiosity to reach its natural conclusion, I was able to build a nice little business for a 14 year old on the Internet. So I learned HTML, I learned how to do image manipulation with Paintshop Pro, I learned how to FTP, you know, files up to a website. I learned how web hosts work, how domains work. You know, I learned a lot of the very foundational things that I need to operate my business today. You know, when I was 14 years old, which not many 14 year olds can say that they, they did that, my parents also let me enjoy the food of my labor. So when I had money come in, they let me spend it. Maybe good thing, maybe not. They made me save like half of it and I spent the other half on candy and pop at school. Just blew it down toilet. But the fact that I was able to enjoy that, I could see that my work made money for me and I didn't get a lot of money in from anywhere else. So that money that came in, I could spend it on other stuff. And I realized that, hey, if I want to have some money to spend, I need to work on this. And that was a very good connection in my mind at that age that, you know, you work, you eat, you don't work, you don't eat or. Yeah, it was just a great opportunity to learn. Yeah. So give your kids the space to learn. Give them the tools they need, give them a computer, a laptop, whatever, an iPad. Now give them an Internet connection and give them some time and tell them to go make something and just see what happens. Last question I think comes from Adam Langbeen. And Adam asks if I have a great idea that might require a patent, what are the best ways to prove or guard my idea while I try to get investors? Let me start by saying the advice that I'm going to give you and the advice of a competent attorney are going to give you are going to be very different. An attorney that talks about intellectual property. They might talk about getting NDAs in place for people you talk to. Getting a Provisional patent, keeping your idea close to your rest. Your attorney is optimizing your business for protecting your idea, making sure that nobody copies it. That's what attorneys do and that's what they're supposed to do. But following that advice isn't actually going to get you any closer to actually making money and starting a business. Your secret idea, whatever it is, only becomes valuable when it becomes executed on, and then you will it into existence and make it happen. An idea that's not executed on has no value. The advice that I'm going to give you is going to push you in the direction of turning your idea, your secret idea, into reality and making it a real thing that people are paying money for. Because I understand that the only time value is created is when people are paying you money for that idea because you turned it into something that's real. My advice will probably be less protective of your idea because I think people are less likely to copy it than you think. Obviously you wouldn't go tell a competitor your secret idea, but people you're getting advice from, you know, I don't think you need to NDA people, just have a conversation about your idea with them. I just think that's a waste of time. And a lot of people won't sign NDAs because there's just no value for them to do that. So any advice that I give is going to push you in that direction of here's what you need to do to turn this idea, whether it's good or not, into reality so that people are paying money for it and you have actually a real business. So I guess my first piece of advice would be go spend $200, buy one hour of an attorney's time, of an intellectual property attorney's time, that might be closer to $300, and just get some advice from them. And how do I protect my idea? I'm going to be well worth the $300 investment and listen to everything they have to say. And just understand going in that a lot of the advice that they give you might not be practical. Some of it you'll probably want to do the most important things, but things like getting everybody to sign an NDA, maybe you don't need to do that. So just be mindful that they're coming from the perspective of protecting your idea and not necessarily getting your business off the ground. So go get that advice, but take it not with a grain of salt, but maybe just put it through a filter of how far do I need to go to protect my idea? And then what do I need to do to get my business off the ground? And is any of the advice that the attorney is giving me is that going to stop me from getting my business idea off the ground so you can go protect your idea? Just be mindful that might come at the expense of launching your business. The best example I can think of is just some entrepreneurs will want everyone to sign a non disclosure agreement that they talk to. I don't sign them. Most people don't. It's not a good idea to sign them. So if people aren't talking to you because they want you to sign NDAs and everything, that's going to stop your business from getting off the ground. So just be mindful of that. Just be careful about how far you go to protect your idea when it could be the thing that's protecting your great idea could be the thing that's preventing you from actually getting your business off the ground. Those are the questions. If you would like to subscribe to Startup Q and A and get next Monday's show delivered to you automatically, go to the domain startupqa Co and there are links to subscribe via email, Facebook, RSS, iTunes, YouTube and Stitcher. You can also follow me personally@facebook.com MatthewPaulsonpage if you want to add me as a friend on Facebook, it's facebook.com MatthewPaulsen I do only add people that I have mutual connections with, so if we don't have at least one mutual friend, I'm probably not going to add you. So be aware of that. If you want to follow me on Twitter, it's twitter.com MatthewDP D as in Dale my middle name. P as in Paulson my last name. Not hard to figure out there. We also have an email list so if you want to get every show delivered to you by email on Mondays, go to mattpulsen.com There's a big pop up there. Just type your email in there, click the button and you'll get every episode delivered to you automatically. If you enjoyed the show, go to itunes. Leave us a review. Log into itunes on your phone or on your computer. Find the Start search for Startup Q and A with Matthew Paulson or just Startup Q and A. The show will come up. Just click the five star button, write us a review. You don't even have to write us review. Just click the five star button. Then that will help us spread the message of financial freedom through the power of entrepreneurship and income investing to more people across the world. That will help us just get that message out further faster and whatever else. That is the show for today. I will see you guys next week.