Turgay Birand - CEO of Edition Guard

Today on Founder Journey, we've got another.

One of our startup visa success stories. Turgeberand is a serial international entrepreneur now calling Canada home. We're going to talk about the misconceptions, but also the advantages of bootstrapping your business. We're going to talk about the culture of hustle porn and how it contradicts the goal of breaking your shackles and being your own boss as a founder.

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Hey, everyone. Welcome back for another edition of Founder Journey. Today, I'm really excited to have Turgei Berend. He's an entrepreneur that I met probably about three years ago now. He originally came to us through our startup Visa program, but he's grown to become one of my favorite entrepreneurs. This guy's a hustler. He's bootstrapped numerous companies originally from Turkey. He's traveled around the world, he's lived around the world, he's built companies around the world. The most recent one is Edition Guard. In short, it's digital rights management for educational material, and it's a cybersecurity company. Very timely given everything that's happening with remote learning and the shifts and changes in education. Because of COVID he can do a better job than I can of explaining what Editions Guard is doing today. Turge, welcome to the show. Please let our audience know exactly what Edition Guard is, if I was accurate or not, and a little bit about yourself and who you are and the journey that you've taken to get to Canada and bring Edition Guard to the market and build it into the company that is today.

Yeah, totally. Thanks for having me. I think your description was great. It's the way I describe it usually. Just trying to make people not too confused. As, you know, it's like a fulfillment service for ebooks, and we just basically focus on getting ebooks delivered to people securely so, you know, people don't have to worry about piracy. And we work with a lot of publishing companies and educational companies to get content in the hands of students or users or, you know, any kind of end user really can use the platform. And yeah, that's a company that I've been running since 2012. And it's, you know, it is fully bootstrapped like my other ventures as well. And. And I set it up originally when I was in Turkey. I was living in Istanbul at the time and started growing it organically through SEO and doing content and doing tests here and there to validate it in the early days. The idea really came to me from the time when I was contracting so, you know, post validation was kind of like a slow, steady growth kind of thing. Little by little, you know, adding one customer there, three customers there, slowly trying to get the word out there while continually building new platform, platform versions and features into it. And then after a few years started hitting some growth plateaus which were kind of difficult to break through. Every single one of them kind of unique in their own way, I think. But the last one that was in 2016 or so was kind of like me as a founder maybe running out of ideas after five, six years of running it. So that's kind of what prompted it was one of the reasons that prompted that whole, you know, traveling the world and just getting out of Turkey and seeing different countries and, you know, just living on the road as a digital nomad while continually, continually trying to build the product and just kind of get out of my head, kind of get out the safe.

When, when people talk about bootstrapped now, seasoned entrepreneurs understand what that means. But from an outside looking in, you hear bootstrapped and you think a struggling company, a company that's facing lots of financial challenges. But that's definitely not the case. Especially in your case, Edition Guard was doing well and it was not like when you were sitting in Turkey as a bootstrap company. You were struggling to pay your bills, you were doing extremely well, you had big universities and large clients on board. Obviously that's grown now even more. And we've had a number of other entrepreneurs on Founder Journey talking about the difference between a venture backed business and a lifestyle based business and how a lot of them that are venture backed wish they were a lifestyle and they're not venture backed because they, they see hindsight like, okay, it would have been a very different journey and probably a lot more profitable journey if, if they were able to continue to bootstrap and build a successful business without third party investments. And so tell us about that aspect of your founder journey of bootstrapping and I guess the perceptions that people might have had about your business and what they ended up thinking once they got the whole digest of what you built.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of bootstrapping for sure, especially now that I've been through it for so many years. But I have very particular reasons for bootstrapping. When I started Edition Guard and that was to, you know, I was a contractor back then, my previous venture had actually gone bankrupt pretty much. You know, I burnt a lot of cash and I was in a little bit of debt and I had to do contract work as a Software developer to kind of get, get back on track financially. And you know, being a contractor, you're sometimes working for multiple bosses, which really sucks. And I wanted to escape that kind of, you know, reporting to anyone type of situation. So when I looked at raising money, it was just like, you know, I'm not going from one boss to another. Basically that was kind of the thought that I had when I looked at all the venture backed companies like you mentioned, or people with investors going through so much stress just because they, you know, they have to please those people. Right? They have to show roi. It's a numbers game for them. But for me it was very personal. It was about gaining freedom. And the nice thing about being in a place like Turkey for instance, or many different placed in the world is really the cost of living is so much lower, especially if you measure it in US dollars. I was probably living on like $500 a month or something and a dish.

Card was invoicing out in us so revenue coming in was in us but the expenses that you're paying are in Turkish dollars.

Exactly, exactly. So the exchange rate back then was like 2.5 or so. Now it's like 7. So it's about a ton to go and start something in Turkey, honestly. But you know, it was great. Every dollar you make it translates into two and a half. And so you're able to afford more and you're able to reinvest money. That's the big thing about bootstrapping I think, is that the ability that you have to bootstrap really depends on how much money you can reinvest into the business. Because that's how you snowball. It's kind of like the whole compounding thing in investing again. But this time you're investing into your own business and you put money into it and you put effort into it constantly and you're able to just do this basically, you know, you have like an unlimited Runway. Very quickly. If you can get to a certain revenue level where say you're living on $500, $1,000 and then you make another thousand dollars on top of that, which goes into the company, that kind of money goes a very long way. Again, because you can outsource to places a lot of the processes you need in place in the beginning to places like, you know, I worked with a lot of talented people in the Philippines, Ukraine. If not for those awesome people, honestly like the company wouldn't have gotten this far. But again, the US dollar goes very far there as well. When you're initially starting up, you know, you can, you can basically have a whole team for a very low cost. At least the beginning, you know, they're putting in five hours, 10 hours still, it helps you a lot in areas that you struggle. So bootstrapping, I'm still a big fan. After doing, doing it for almost 20 years now, all my companies have been bootstrapped. I've never raised a dollar. Throughout my entrepreneurial journey. I've been curious about it, but it's just kind of like a curiosity and hopefully it never comes to me. But I don't, I haven't met many people who say, oh, I've been, I've been raising money for 10 years and I'm still happy about it. But for bootstrappers, like whenever I meet a bootstrapper, they're glad that they did it and they have their freedom. So maybe that kind of helps things into perspective a little.

And there's obviously some instances where, where venture money does make a big difference because in scenarios where the upfront cost of development is very high, there's a lot of infrastructure or other things that need to be put in place, then yeah, that, that makes sense. You need to have that financial support because unless you're a self made millionaire that's going to just sink your own money into it. Bringing in that to hedge is essential, but I always say that the best investor is a paying customer. So the sooner you can get out in front of customers, the better. And the sooner you can start making positive cash flow into your business, the happier everybody's going to be. And so you alluded to 20 plus years of entrepreneurship and you said also that one of your companies crashed and burned. What does entrepreneurship mean to you? Why did you keep at it and keep building companies?

Yeah, that's a great question. Again, I started my first company when I was still in college circa 2000 or so. And the reason I started it was already very interested in business from a very young age. Like during the summers when I was a teenager, I tried to, you know, go sell Amway products and stuff, you know, just curious about like, oh, you know, you can put in hours and you can make more money, you know, depending on parents or whatever, you can make extra money to spend. I've always been really interested in getting into business, but the way I saw get a 9 to 5 job, work 9 to 5 for someone else and get paid. It seemed very stifling from the beginning. So I wanted to, when I had the opportunity, try out entrepreneurship while I still could, while I didn't have to get a job. So when I was in college, I kind of dove in. I was working on the side as a TA just to make a little money, but it was easy to kind of dive in and start some small ventures here and there. Even back then when the Internet was kind of, I call it kind of like the phase one of online business back then, where things were not as crazy as today, but still like, there were a lot of ways to make money, different ways. So I kind of. I kind of wanted to have my own thing from the beginning, but also my goal still is the same after 20 years. I want to have enough resources, most importantly, my own time is the most valuable resource to do the things that I really want to be to be doing, putting time into things that I really believe in that can actually make a difference in the world. I know that sounds a little cliche these days because everybody's trying to make the world a better place. But in reality, you know, the path to making the world a better place, I see it as, you know, you need to have your resources first. You need to have your experience, you need to have your time for yourself and you need to have money. You have to have your own money if you want to at least be calling the shunts as you know as well as you need to get to your vision.

I always say so. I always say that in terms of business, ideas are a dime a dozen. It's all about execution. And you have to be able to execute and make something happen. And ultimate goal is to get paying customers. And when you talk about wanting to change the, change the world again, ideology and sentiments are one thing, but it really goes back to execution. And you can start simple with volunteering and contributing in certain aspects. But when you do want to make a difference at a. At a broader, deeper level, there is a. A deeper commitment that's involved as well. And that does take some financing. Whether or not it's financing that initiative or financing your personal lifestyle so that it affords you the ability to allocate more time towards those things and less towards business. Awesome outcome is when you're able to mix the two and have your business be that catalyst for that impact in the world that you're looking at. And so where do you see. It's probably a tough, loaded question, but the state of the world where it is right now and everything that's happening, economies are kind of being imploded all around the world. Where do you see entrepreneurship playing a role in the 2021 and beyond?

Yeah, Honestly, I'm hoping that it is, it becomes more mainstream. A lot more people think about entrepreneurship because when you think about entrepreneurship, you automatically think about solving problems, or at least you have to be solving a real problem to make it far as an entrepreneur. So it means more people thinking about entrepreneurship. And people are hurting all over the world. Like you said, a lot of people out of work, a lot of people are feeling desperate maybe. But for Edition Guard, for example, we're seeing a lot of people, we're seeing a lot of growth after the pandemic. And when we kind of drill down into why that is, we see that a lot of people who've never considered entrepreneurship are actually diving in now because they're thinking, you know, I have no job security, you know, I don't know where the economy is going to go. I'm just going to do my own thing and see if it works. And we're seeing it work for some people, which is really good. And then I do think that entrepreneurship is going to be, you know, it's going to be good for a lot of people because they're going to have options, they're going to have their own freedom, they're going to be able to call their own shots, but also it's going to solve. This kind of situation creates so many opportunities that more problems are going to be there in plain sight that need to be solved. And again, there's going to be more entrepreneurs rising up for the challenge, solve those problems so that we really do have a better life and better world. So I have a positive outlook, honestly. And you know, when, when it's interesting, I was watching a YouTube video, I can't remember who was by, but they were looking at all the crises over the last 50 years or so and how it impacted, you know, entrepreneurship. And it looks like after every crisis we get a whole bunch of new innovations and great products and great ideas that solve a lot of problems. And then in between, when there's a full bull market type of thing, then innovation kind of takes a backseat to roi, I'd say. So I'm just hoping that this being such a big crisis that it will bring that much more positive change for entrepreneurship and through entrepreneurs.

Yeah, I think the solace that we can take from this is that it is global wide. It's not just one country suffering while others around it prosper. Everybody's in this challenging situation and so there is a broader opportunity for entrepreneurs and new ideas, new innovation. And given the state of the world in terms of technology, it's never been easier to start a company and it's never been more democratized, technology wise to start a company in Istanbul compared to Michigan, in Detroit. I think both of those are cities that you lived in. Right. So let's go back to you and the work life balance that you had as you traveled and how your balancing it now.

Yeah, it's so, because the business was pretty mature when I kind of set out on the road like three, four years ago. It was heavily automated and delegated. And those are two words I keep saying all the time. But Those are the two things that I've been focused on the last 10 years. Basically just delegating as much as I can, automating as much as I can. So then they have time to think and time to live. I see a lot of entrepreneurs just kind of burning themselves out in the process of putting in really long hours, not really seeing their family or friends or whatnot. I mean, there's the struggle porn culture out there right now, which I really strongly oppose.

And it's kind of just to take a step back. So for the audience, there's a couple different versions of that. That's hustle porn, struggle porn. And just for the audience's clarity, that that references how glorified it is that you are working hard and you're always busy and you're constantly with a full calendar of meetings and whatnot. Like at the end of the day, that, that is not necessarily healthy and it's not actually very productive. If you can't manage your time properly, are you really productive? And so hustle porn, struggle porn is this glorification of being busy when it's not actually productive.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And there are a lot of proponents of that culture just because it gets the more clicks and more traffic. And I understand that and some people like to live like that. That's fine too. But ultimately, when I think about entrepreneurship, it's supposed to be freeing you. It's not supposed to be putting more shackles and chains on you and the biggest chain you can have, you know, it's being tied to your business all the time. You know, if your business, if people can't run it when you're not around, you're never going to be able to take a vacation, never going to be able to kind of maybe not even sleep well at night because you're just, you're just always on. And that in the long run I think really hurts your innovative thinking and kind of like seeing the patterns out there to identify opportunities and just have the big picture thinking, you need to find new problems to tackle. Because I think we need to be constantly looking to the next idea, you know, like, what are we going to do next? You know, addition guards, like one part of my journey, for instance. But I'm already looking to a bunch of different ventures that I want to start at some point or invest in other people's ventures that look worthy. And to be able to do that, we got free ourselves from the current business. Not in terms of, like, emotional, but you need to divorce your time from your money, basically, kind of what I'm trying to say.

And when we go back to what we kind of talked about earlier, about making an impact in the world, again, it's great if it's your business that's tied to it and able to execute. But also being able to free yourself from your business does allow you to look at those type of opportunities and new challenges that might be more fulfilling emotionally and professionally rather than financially.

Yeah, totally. And, you know, that kind of ties into your question of, like, I have a daughter who's now five, and I'm really glad to have been there every day of her life. You know, it was. I'm very grateful for that opportunity. My business actually afforded me that opportunity. So, yeah, I could have had kids earlier when I was really having to hustle. But entrepreneurship can give you that too. Like, you don't have to be struggling all the time. Instead, you can be just thriving. And if you have kids, you can spend more time with them. If you have really great hobbies that you're passionate about, you can do more of those things. So my work life balance, honestly, has been mostly on the life side of the equation the last few years. I mean, just because we moved to a new country and moving to a new country is traveling is one thing, but settling down in a new country is. It is an endeavor in. In on of itself, which almost rivals, like, starting a new company in terms of the effort that goes into it.

And that gets compounded by the number of people. If you're by yourself, okay, moving to a new country is one thing, but having a spouse, having children, and if you have co founders, that all just gets compounded.

Yeah, exactly. I was again, very lucky that my business was running and I didn't have to worry about it too much while having to go through the process of settling down in the new country. And I mean, it's a great country, so it's probably easier to settle down here than others, but still, it's. There's so Many things you need to think about. There's so many challenges that you don't expect that come your way. Yeah, those challenges come from directions you never expect and. But ultimately, you know, I was able to do it. And now we're kind of proud to call Canada our home at this point. And now we have, you know, two countries that we can live in freely or we can keep traveling as well if we wanted to in the future. Those options are open. And I love that a bootstrap company especially can give you that kind of freedom. I can choose to really hustle on something that I'm passionate about tomorrow, or I can kind of decide to take a step back and take long walks and keep thinking about what's next. Having that kind of open field is more valuable to me than the dollars. Maybe if we spoke to like a Silicon Valley investor, they might look at our revenue and our churn or growth rate and they say, you guys are a failure. We could be a failure in their eyes because we haven't grown 200% month over month.

It's a failure in terms of the metrics that they need in order for them to be a success. But that doesn't mean you and your business are a failure. You're super successful and doing extremely well financially. Just not enough for them to get a piece of the pie.

Exactly. Yeah. The success is just such a subjective word that people who are actually successful think they are failures. It happens so often. I mean, I'm guilty of kind of beating myself up in the past about like, oh, I could have done more and I could have done this and I didn't take that opportunity and I didn't do this. But in reality, like, gotta step back and kind of look back a decade. Not like the last one year or three years or five years. Look back a decade and remember where you were 10 years. If you're happy with where you are now versus 10 years ago, you're doing well. I mean, just having more relaxed perspective on success, I think.

Yeah, that's something that does come with age and experience as well. But, yeah, some people are a little more fortunate than others. Part of it's a big part of it is entrepreneurship is luck. But the path that you set for yourself is going to be rocky. But to again, most often you do look back, it is positive. Even if your company or your ideas didn't work out, the experience and the journey, hopefully in the network that you make along the way is something that's positive. Net positive in your life.

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah.

The Experience, especially, like, if you have a few real failures of, like, bankruptcy. I mean, I guess a very easy definition for bankruptcy is, like, you look at your balance sheet and you see a negative number at the end of it. Say, okay, you know, you're not doing very well. And I've been in that situation a few times just shutting down a couple of my ventures in the past. But, yeah, I learned so much from those. I mean, you get to. You get to kind of learn what not to do, but also what to watch out for over time. And also, yeah, what you said is very true about luck as well. I wanted to kind of point, kind of go into that a little. Yes, luck is definitely a factor. I mean, you can call it, say, being in the right place, the right time, and just, you know, doing the right thing at the right time is super important. And again, I think what you can do is you can increase your luck. You can create more luck in your life just by hopefully staying awake and again, taking a step back from the day to day and look at the big picture and see if you're missing anything and hopefully identifying other opportunities that you have more chances of being lucky. So, yeah, it definitely plays a part, and I've been both unlucky and lucky, so it's good to experience both.

Awesome. All right, we're gonna kind of wrap this up here with two final questions for you. The first one is, as a founder, what are or what is one app or a tool that you can't live without? Something that's been instrumental in your founder journey?

I will kind of generalize instead of just mentioning one tool. Yeah, like a task manager. Totally. I use Trello. I've been using Trello for many, many years, so. But I've used a lot of different task managers as well, so I'm not kind of pointing at one. But without a task manager, you just get lost in the woods. And I've gotten lost so many times in the woods that I don't do that anymore. Yeah, always. You know, something that you can share with your team, with contractors you work with, you know, who's doing what, what's happening, what's going on, that kind of thing. Slack has become very essential. Yeah.

You know, I find that a lot of the entrepreneurs that I work with that are more technically inclined and developers themselves. Trello is definitely one that they gravitate towards. And then people that are more on the business side, they need something visual, just like Trello. Trello is awesome, but Monday.com has been one that's Been growing in popularity and we actually use that at launch as well as torello. But yeah, slack definitely is a key component to communication in our teams, especially now that everybody's gone more remote. All right, we're going to close it off with one last question or sorry, an opportunity for you to leave some parting advice for our entrepreneurs. What would you recommend for new and old entrepreneurs, seasoned entrepreneurs as well as brand new entrepreneurs about building a business? Being an entrepreneur in Today's world, not 10 years ago, not 20 years ago, when you started. Today, if you were to start, what's some pieces of advice that you'd give somebody?

Think about. I call it reverse fundraising, which is kind of just move to a super boring town that's super cheap instead of moving to a super expensive city that's super exciting and has all the investors in it. You extend your Runway by a really meaningful amount and see if you can do it. I know some business models don't allow for that, but even for those, try to become your own VC if you can, by creating some cash first. Like, I have some big visions too that really need a lot of capital to start, but I'm kind of trying to build up to that on my own without going for a lot of investors. So you don't have to go get investment. You can find creative ways to, I think at least build some of the parts of the businesses and maybe try to narrow down to a smaller aspect of your business that you're thinking about. Start small. Don't beat yourself up and try to try to enjoy it because it's wild, right? There's nothing like owning your own thing that pays the bills and gives you freedom. So I think it's just a great journey nowadays, especially because there's so many tools out there that help you get to your goals. You're building a software business. There are software tools that let you build stuff without cloud, things like that.

And no matter where you are in the world, whether it's Vancouver, Michigan or Istanbul.

Yeah, exactly.

Anywhere you go, Terge, I really appreciate you taking the time. You've been really generous with your time. One last thing is a chance for you to be the entrepreneur that you are. What's your call to action? What can our audience do for you? What can the entrepreneurs listening in right now do for you?

You know what they can do for me? Well, that's a specific question, but yeah, I guess definitely, you know, drop by my Twitter. I'm not very active there, but if somebody starts pinging me there, I might become active. That would be. That would be fun. And then yeah, it's just I'm always willing to talk to other entrepreneurs, always love to meet other entrepreneurs and chat with them and exchange ideas. So feel free to hit me up and you know, let's kind of help each other out on this journey. But yeah, beyond that.

And if you're an entrepreneur that is writing your own ebook, check out Edition Guard protect your ip. It's a great product, easy to use product and it's used by many, many people around the world. Turge, really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us and share your Founder Journey. Stay healthy and stay strong and look to see you again soon in person.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This has been fun.

Awesome.

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