How To Start A Business With ONE Idea | Nathan Chan (CEO of Foundr Magazine)

I think it's so easy to fantasize around an idea and then spend a whole ton of money to set up that idea and then actually create something that nobody wants.

Well, look, man, you've had an amazing career thus far. I know you didn't start out with like, the. The entrepreneurial dream, ambition and bug, so to speak, but you sure discovered it. Walk us through how you discovered the love for founders and entrepreneurs.

Yeah, so I started Founder almost a decade ago now, and it really started with this idea around. Honestly, how can I find work that I was passionate about? I didn't know that I would end up here. And so what happened was.

I never really achieved much beyond Founder, to be honest with you, Steven, I never really got good grades in school. My parents used to joke and laugh amongst family friends that if things don't work out for me, they can buy me a, you know, a lawn mowing franchise. So I didn't think that I, you know, I never really knew that I'd be doing what I'm doing today. And basically what happened was I. I started this magazine on the side while I was working my day job in IT support and literally as a passion project, like, as a passion project to try and get a job in marketing. And I was curious around entrepreneurship because I started to hear stories of friends of friends creating these online businesses and doing incredible things with no experiences whatsoever. And like, you know, we hear this all the time now, but like, back then, almost a decade ago, like, this was a little bit of a foreign thing. Like, you know, the four hour work week had been around for a few years, that book. But I was kind of like, all right, I want to find out how people are doing this in particular. Like, how are people starting online businesses with no experience whatsoever? And so I started to just kind of go out and try and interview people for this magazine. And at first it was really tough. No one would get back to me. But the people that I did interview, I was like, wow, this is incredible. I need to share these insights with the world. And that's what kind of happened. I launched Founder. It wasn't called Founder at the time, it was called something else. And we were sued for trademark infringement by one of the biggest business magazines in the States. In the first four months of starting, way to start best crash course in business ever for trademark infringement. And then I called it Founder. And yeah, like, it just kind of. I just fell in love with what we were building. And then as time went on, the vision for the brand and what we could Build became bigger and bigger and bigger. And now what we're trying to do is build one of the largest online business schools in the world, where the people that are teaching have actually done it. And that's kind of us well.

And I think that's amazing. In fact, it's actually one of the things I'm most excited about. You know, as someone who could have used that service 25 years ago, you know, I think you know a little bit about story, right? So homeless, built several businesses. Now.

Everything, grunt work, didn't graduate high school, don't have a college degree, dyslexic, adhd, didn't do well in school. Like, all the things that, you know, that should set the stack against me, right? But I was very fortunate, like you mentioned, just having a previous founder, a business owner, a mentor of sorts of, you know, help encourage me out of that, and began to speak life into me and say, hey, look, you can do this. There's nothing wrong with you. That's just, you just got to learn to think differently. And that's one of the things I love most about what you guys do, is you're changing the game as far as how people think differently because you're taking the practical and matching it with the grit, right? Everybody wants to make entrepreneurship sexy. The reality is entrepreneurship is not easy. That's the reality, right? I want to touch on the name change just for a second, because I think it goes into this, this concept of reiteration, right? Having to reiterate your business on a regular basis. And all the founders that you, you've. You've dealt with, including yourself, how important is reiteration to a business?

Well, I think it's critical because if you rest on your laurels, it ain't going to work out long term, unfortunately. Right? Like, and that's just part of business, right? Like, you know, things just don't work out or, you know, channels, you know, channels used to work. They don't work anymore. You know.

You always going to get hits, right? Like, it is tough. And that's why I think it's so important that the work that we do, you know, both of us really matters because people need help. Like, it's tough out there. Like, every single successful entrepreneur had helped, right? Like, you know, that's one of our taglines on our site. The greatest entrepreneurs had help. A lot of it. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's critical. Like, I think, you know, one thing one of my mentors taught me was.

Any problem that you face right now in your business, there's somebody else out there in the world that solved it. And it's your job to go out and find that person and find out how they've solved it. And it's not so much the what or the how, but it's the who.

Yeah.

And, yeah. You know, when you talk about kind of like innovation, you've got to keep innovating if you. If you want to build something, like, of true worth and significance. Right. You cannot rest on your laurels if you want to create a product or a service that helps a lot of people at scale. Unfortunately, the more people you hire, the more revenue you generate. It gets more complicated. And then, unfortunately, no matter how good you are, no matter how many times you've done it, just things don't always work out how you think they're going to work out. And oftentimes those are your best blessings. Right. Like, you talk about the lawsuit, right. Founder wasn't called Founder. The name was called Key to Success. And it wasn't a. To be honest, it wasn't that good of a name. And then I renamed it Founder. Yeah. And that was the best thing I could ever do because the reason we don't have the E was purely because I didn't want to get into trouble again. But we still own, like, you know, if someone says, like, do you listen? Do you read? Do you watch? Do you follow? Founder. People would know our brand. Like, we, like in the word founder is synonymous amongst entrepreneurship. So it was a real blessing. Right, Stephen? Like that. And that's the thing. And I think, yeah, you have to be, you know, willing to just be prepared that there are tough times.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I've been following the brand now for probably about three years and love the content. I've been in the Instagram stream for a long, long time. Several of our mutual friends are in there, obviously, and some of them featured in the magazine, which has been fantastic to kind of watch them, you know, have that moment, you know, kind of where they're being recognized for all the hard work that they put in for a decade or more, you know, which has been pretty incredible. I feel like I've come up with seven or eight things that I think.

Impede.

Most founders, entrepreneurs, at least the original idea. And I want to run them past you and get your feedback on each one of them.

Just to get your insight and kind of go from that straight. The first one we've actually kind of touched on a little bit, which is why you're doing what you're doing with Your new online products and your schools and your learning lessons that you're creating, which is a lack of knowledge, right? From what I've seen, uh, all the, you know, they're in the states. There's 670,000 businesses that start each year. Only 20% of them will be around after the first year, right after that. By the time you get to the fifth year, what I think we're talking like, 3% or something crazy. And I feel a lack of knowledge is at the core of that. What do you think?

Yeah, a hundred percent. I think part of the problem as well is.

I think people get so excited about their business idea that a lot of the time, unfortunately, people create things that other people don't want. I think that's an easy. Oh, so have I. We've all been there, right? But I think that's an easy trap to fall down, Steven. I think it's so easy to fantasize around an idea and then spend a whole ton of money to set up that idea and then actually create something that nobody wants. Yeah, I think that's a common one. But, yeah, look, I'm with you there. That, like, like, it's. It's our job to get what we do and the information out there to as many people as possible to help people on their journey.

Right?

Like, this is the thing. Like, every founder, no matter. No matter where they're at within their journey, they're listening to podcasts, they're reading articles. Not all are doing, you know, online courses, but they're doing some form of training. They're getting some form of mentorship eventually, right? Or coaching or consulting or something. Right? And so, so for us, it's like, how can we help somebody on their journey along the way, every step of the way? And, you know, the, the, the amount of. The amount of, like, lessons and things that we can share is just massive too. Like, if you think about, like, how much content we've produced and where are we getting started, right? And that's not to overwhelm. Like, that's not to overwhelm. Like, with the work that we're doing with Founder plus our All Access membership, we're working on software, eventually that will be able to be like, AI, that you can customize your learning journey, where we'll ask you a series of questions and we'll start to kind of work out, like a customized roadmap for you around where. Where you might want to focus on and where you might be kind of, hey, here's an area of development for you and we'll give you a customized path. But yeah, it is crazy if you think of all the things that you've learned, Stephen, from building successful businesses along the way, right? Like there is so much there. And even still, like, how do you cover it all?

Yeah, well, and I think there, I don't think there is a way to cover it all because, you know, because business is always changing, right? Business markets is always changing. Customers needs and wants and desires are always changing. But I believe there's fundamentals, right? And the fundamental that you know, of the lack of knowledge to me is my biggest mistake in business, bar none. You know, you take a homeless kid and you put him in an environment where he ends up growing a multi million dollar business, has never been taught how to use money, has never been taught about leadership, has never been taught about how to handle team members, how to hire, how to fire, how to read a P and L statement, how to read a balance sheet. Like that's all stuff that I had to learn. And unfortunately for me, I got, I always tend to learn by getting a four by four upside my head. Like it has to really hurt for me to finally click in my head. Actually, I take that back. I'm not speaking that into my life anymore. It hasn't been that way for a while, but. But it has definitely been there, you know, but you know, the greatest mistake I ever made in building a business is not building myself, right. I. So I was so focused on the product, so focused on the service, so focused on the stuff that I wasn't at at first. Getting into podcasts, looking at online courses, watching videos. I underestimated the power of that in the moment that I started doing courses. Like what you guys provided or provide is you start scaling very fast because you finally realize it's not about your product or service, your idea, it's about the quality of yourself. Right. You know, which I think takes me to the next one that I see a lot of entrepreneurs who mean well, great ideas.

But I think another lack that I've seen and curious to get your thoughts on it is a lack of focus.

Yeah, massive.

I think that's so key. And I like, once again I've been there like even with founder, right? Like there was a point where we got magazine, digital magazines, printed magazines, printed books. We were doing so many different things. We're trying to get into events, like we're trying to do 101 different things. You know, we're launching podcast after podcast, doing all these art, like all this crap, crazy stuff and like, even, even like in the past couple of years, to be honest, Stephen, we, we're kind of like, what do we want to be known for?

Yeah.

And that's like how we're just kind of like going, well, that's why we're creating this all access membership, because we just want to focus on the online education space for a very, very long time. And that's what we want to be known for. Yeah, we'll still put out a lot of content, we'll still have a media arm of our business. But like that, that focus is so key. Like, I remember we were looking at, I was looking at doing merch and posters and all. Like there's 101 things. And you know what, you know what the thing is with focus is? It's not sometimes it's, it's, it's the, it's the non fun, sexy stuff that gets you caught out. Right. Like it's fun to fantasize and create other ideas and do all these other things and launch these different products or services, but just because you can doesn't mean you should. Yeah. And I think so often it's easy to get caught out around getting, just wanting to have fun and not being clear on your vision, your mission, your purpose, your goals, around what it is you're actually trying to accomplish. And it actually becomes much more easier to focus when you have clear goals, when you have a clear mission and even a clear strategy.

Yeah, right.

Like we have a, you know, three year strategy now at founder, and it's like people say, oh, why don't you guys do like, you know, someone was saying to me the other day, or why don't you do like high ticket masterminds? You guys could do really well out of that. Like, yeah, we could, but like, it's not part of our vision or mission or who we want to be or what we want to do or even part of our strategy. Right. Like, if anything, I'd love to get into translating our courses into different languages. Right. Like, because that says where we're trying to go. So I think, I think focus is an easy early trap for early stage founders because it's easy to get caught up in the fun of it all.

It's not as sexy to not come up with 101 different business ideas and launch this, launch that, and do this app here. And it's fun, but the reality is to build anything of true worth and significance. And maybe that's not what you want to do. Maybe you want to build a lifestyle business that's okay too. But to build anything, right, it takes a certain level of consistency and focus and discipline.

Yeah. I mean it's borderline obsessive. Like I've, I mean, I mean I think about all the things that I've tried to bring into the marketplace of the world, right? The things that have worked and the things that didn't work. The things that didn't work so oftentimes were, they were either diluted on focus, like the focus itself. Like I, am I doing this? Am I doing this? Or am I doing this? Or it was a lack of commitment.

Right.

Or a lack of. I think the next one that I wanted to bring up to you and mention to you is this lack of leadership. Self leadership specifically.

Right.

I see. I work with a lot of high profile folks from entertaining to sports to entrepreneurship and beyond. And one of the things that I've seen consistently is when they're, when they're in a rut, it's because they're not leading themselves towards something else. How have you seen other founders, you know, with all the folks that you guys have interviewed yourself, how have you guys seen self leadership as part of the problem or part of the, part of problem and solution?

Yeah, leadership's a really, really interesting one.

To be honest. When you first, I found when you first start a business, you have the title of CEO, but you're not really the CEO. Like you laugh now because I know.

You'Ve been, you're really the janitor, the email marketer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You are not really the CEO and like.

When you, when you, when you do hopefully kind of get to a position where you can actually elevate to a CEO. It takes a certain different level of leadership amongst others, not, not even beyond yourself. You know, we talk about self leaders.

You know, you've got to be able to motivate, rally, inspire.

And actually like properly lead and hold people to account. Like we talk about self leadership, how can you talk about focus? How can you hold yourself to account? Like what kind of example are you setting once you build your business up and you have to hire people? If you are not focused, if you are not, if you are not living by your set of core values that you set for the team and the culture you want to build? Like so yes, self leadership is so critical. Leadership in general is so critical, especially as time goes on, when you need to be able to influence outcomes through others. Right? And that's not easy like that. Like no one teaches you that. And that's like, you know, these are non sexy topics. You talked about team building, you talked about hiring, firing, leadership. These are all things that we're going to like, you know, and we have programs and come and programs coming on these kinds of things. No one talks about this stuff. But it's the critical business building stuff. It's not sexy. Right? I know. TikTok ads is sexy, I get that. Right?

Yeah, I know.

It's all the music and everything. Yeah, yeah, I know. Like it's the hottest platform and everyone wants to understand and we'll, we'll give you that too. And you know, NFTs for business. I know that's sexy as well. Right. But like the real needle mover stuff is how to hold people to account is how to build a company culture where every single person in your business can recite your company core values like that, you know, every single person in your business knows what your strategy is like. So these are. Yeah, you know, I got a bit off tangent but like, yeah, leadership is critical self and leadership of others.

No, I think that's great and I don't think it's off tangent at all. I think it's what I wanted to. My goal today with today's show is I wanted to give aspiring entrepreneurs and early stage startups more than anything else a framework of reference. Right. You know, because in today's time, loves, love, love social media or hate social media. You know, I'm on my grind. You have, you're driving in a, you know, expensive sports car or you know, it just, it doesn't give the right frame of reference from my perspective as being someone who's created seven businesses and, and done so, you know, guerrilla style. Right. I want, I want aspiring entrepreneurs in early stages to understand that the important stuff is not the sexy stuff. You still have to, you still have to watch your cash flow. Right. You can't take ten grand out of the bank and then go party for a weekend to hang out with your friends like you're the dog, the top dog and whatever and not pay a consequence for it. Right. You know, so I kind of wanted to think through that. The other thing that this is something I struggle with early on that I think holds a lot of founders back and that is this concept of lack of coachability right here. Here we, here we have you and your team who have gone through the trouble and the heartache of developing a program that's designed to be a step by step process for any founder to kind of start at an entry point and end up getting the frameworks and the fundamentals that they need to build a successful business. We still have to cut through the head that says, oh, I actually need that.

How has coachability played a role in the founders that you've worked with and yourself?

Yeah. Wow, that's a really good question because that's where it all starts, right? That self awareness. If you don't even have the self awareness, Stephen, you're not even looking for help. You're just kind of just going with the flow. Right. And.

I think the most successful founders, they have this thirst for knowledge, thirst for improvement, thirst for self development.

At all facets, not just from a professional standpoint, but from a personal standpoint as well.

So I think that's where it all starts. I think you can start with inspiration too. Right. That's a good early place to start. I have friends that have businesses that, to be honest, they're not that into maybe learning from others. They don't have mentors, they don't network with others really that much. They don't really listen to podcasts or read books. But I think that's where it all starts. Like you said it before, the reflection of a company's growth is the reflection of the CEO, owner, founder or co founder's personal growth. Yeah. And I think. But you can't go anywhere unless you're open to it, right? Like, if you're listening or watching this show right now, you're already on that path. Thanks. But unfortunately, yeah, look, if you're not open to learning.

Yeah, it's, it's tough, you know, and I think for me, to be honest, Steven, I've always been a person like that's kind of the ethos of founder, right? Is like, find people that are doing it, learn from them and share their knowledge, share their experiences, share their lessons learned. But yeah, I don't know. I, I struggle to personally relate to that because I.

I'm not naturally a confident guy. Right. Like, you know, I told, I shared a little bit about my background. Like I've never really achieved much so before founder. So to be honest, I always kind of was just like, I don't know, I don't know these answers, but I'm not afraid to go out there and ask. I'm not afraid to go out there and put myself out there and say, hey, you know what? I don't have the answer to this, or hey, you know what? This, this part of my business or this isn't working for me. What do you think? What would you do if you were me? But I think that is absolutely critical, especially in the early stages. Right. Because.

It'S scary.

Yeah.

It's a lonely journey and you know, you need to kind of work out however you can to surround yourself with like minded people ideally at the same stage you're at, but then people that a couple of stages ahead and then even perhaps people that are a few stages behind you. Yeah. Because then you have varied, I guess you have a varied view on where you're at and people that are a few stages behind you, you can kind of share and that's a great way to learn yourself, is kind of share and teach and then you know, you've got people at the same stage you're at and you're on the come up together and there's something inspiring and motivating around that. And then you've got people that are a couple of steps ahead of you, which you're learning from ideally. Right. And so I think there's a level of self awareness that is that I think every successful founder has to have if they, if they want to build something. Yeah. Because otherwise if I've seen as well founders that or entrepreneurs that.

They don't want to learn from other people and.

Their businesses don't grow. Yeah, they really don't. Tough.

Yeah, it's tough. You have to be open to the fact that like I said, like every single person that you admire or entrepreneur that you admire or respect or even put up on a pedestal and these people are human beings, no different to you or I. Right. They're everyday people. Right. We all stand on the same rock solid hard ground. But every single one of those people, they have had help every stage of the journey. And not only have they had help from people steps ahead of them, they've also surrounded themselves with really, really great people. And that could be mentors, coaches and team members, like exceptional team members. Like that's something as well that people don't often talk about. But like, you know, us as CEOs and founders and going as, you know, the spokespeople for our business, like we wouldn't be where we are if we didn't have great people around us.

You know, ain't that the truth? Yeah, that is so true. You one of the things I was telling young entrepreneur recently.

You know, they were, they were leading from a place of insecurity. And having done that myself in my earlier days, I was like, you won't develop people that'll follow you and you won't attract the best talent. You know. And they were fearful that the team around them was somehow going to take their place. And I was like, no, no, no, no. You want them to take your place. You want, you want them to step into the thing to help you do the next thing. Because you're, if you're the entrepreneur and the CEO, you've got an idea about every five seconds, right? And in order to build one business, you have to develop the team of that one business. Now that, now the business is supported by the team and now you get to do the next thing. And I was kind of walking him through that and I told him, I said, look, your business will never outgrow your limiting beliefs. So it's time for you to believe something different, right? And that's one of the one things I love about founder and one of the things I love about the new programs you guys are developing is because I think we're starting to attack the root cause of most business failures, which is the way in which we act, right? And behaviors are driven by thoughts, right? So if we can change the way you think, we can change the way you behave. We change the way you behave, all of a sudden you build an empire rather than something that goes into the gutter, right?

One of the other lacks that I wanted to bring up to you.

Is the lack of community. We've been talking about this ironically a little bit. As an entrepreneur myself, one of my biggest mistakes along the way, as I thought I had to do it all by myself, I call it isolation, like isolation factor, right? Nobody understands me, nobody understands my dream, Nobody understands where I'm trying to go. And then I realized, well, first of all, I wasn't communicating where I was trying to go or whatever to anybody. Second of all is I at least had to surround myself with like minded entrepreneurs and to your point, people that are a little ahead of me to encourage me because they've already been where I'm currently at. You know, I've always said that the greatest purpose in life you ever have is serving the person you used to be. And essentially when I look at you and I look at what you, what you and your team have created, I see the very same thing. It's like I see Nathan created this entire program to go back and serve the Nathan that he that needed the program, you know, 10 years ago as he was building founder.

Yeah, 100% man, scratching our own itch. That's how, you know, like for all the aspiring entrepreneurs and early stage founders right now on this, like, that's how you know you're onto something. If you actually are scratching your own itch or creating a product or a service that you would use and you are actually using it yourself. Right. Like then you're onto something.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? And like, yeah, I would love that work what we're creating right now.

Yeah, no, I love it. So I'm curious. I'm going to dive into the three year vision just for fun. Right. So I know about the wonderful curriculums and the content you guys are putting together for everybody. Is there an element where you guys plan on merging the content learning also with communities of like minded entrepreneurs maybe in like spaces?

Yeah. So look, the key for us is a couple of things. So we talk about, you know, we want in three year strategy for us. The biggest thing this year is launching the founder plus all access pass merging because we've got I think 22, 23, 20, 23, 24 online programs and we've got like one new course coming out every month starting August. And that's what we've got to commit to for our members. And then basically we're going to merge all of our communities together and go on this.

Go on this path of basically building an incredible technology platform that you know, I talked to you about like a, you know, customized learning journey.

Yeah.

There's all sorts of other things that we will create off the back of that. So we'll build, we'll start building our own customized tech platform that pairs incredible learning with incredible experiences and incredible community. And so we're really going to start to kind of work out how we can link people up and bring that all together, get it actually away from Facebook groups and build our own internal platform around all of that. So that's how like the one, the one year is really about. That roadmap of launching the All Access Membership Pass Founder plus, focusing on building that out, building out our program and course machine, building up out our instructor pipeline so that we can really fulfill that one new course per month. And then once it comes to three years, we want to be producing one new course. Launching one new course a week. Yeah. Wow. We want to have hundreds of programs in our platform. We want our technology to be really on the cutting edge with a combination of not just on demand classes, but cohort based learning and classes. We want to have translations around all of our, all of our classes in different languages so we can go to the wider community, not just the English speaking market. We also want to reinvent the founder brand. I think that's going to be absolutely critical and we want to grow up with our audience, we want to produce much more sophisticated content. You know, we talked about some really exciting things that really excite me, but we don't speak about it enough, if I'm being honest with you, Stephen. Like, we need to speak more about team building. We need to speak more about hiring and leadership. Yeah. And all sorts of other really important things. Like, yeah, we have a couple of, like we have one course on, on finance. But like, how do we have many? Because that is so key. Right. On cash flow and managing your cash flow.

Cash flow could be one course by itself. Just reading a P and L statement can be one course by itself.

So, yeah, really the vision is how do we continue to scale out our online learning platform and then really go on this journey around not only our technology but also data. I think that's something that a lot of founders or CEOs don't talk about. But data is everything. Right. And the insights that you get from it to make better decisions or informed decisions to grow your company. Like, we're going on a big journey there and a big journey on the technology front and then, yeah, just a really big journey on leveling up the brand, on the sophistication of our content, but then also the credibility of the people that are teaching on our platform. You know, let's, let's be honest, we still don't have, you know, as many Richard Branson's.

Yeah.

That we would like teaching on our platform. We have many being interviewed, so how do we bridge that gap? That's just me being a little bit vulnerable, kind of sharing some of the challenges that we're facing. But more than anything, there are opportunities that we're working towards. Right. So we want, we want, well, like heaps more kind of founders on the front covers of our magazine and, and we interview for our podcast, teaching our platform. Now we want varied. Right. Like, yeah, you know, I don't think we're going to get Richard Branson to teach a TikTok ads course. We're going to get somebody that's in the training culture course. Yeah, exactly. There you go. Or a leadership course or. Yeah. Or you know, coming up with like.

Business ideas or something about island, you know, something like that.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So. So for us it's kind of like how do we continue to get more and more founders that we're interviewing? Like, there's a big bridge that we're going to work towards there. So yeah, that's. Those are some of the things in the, in the three year strategy.

One, three strategy yeah, no, I think just to throw a two cents in there, I think maybe a five or one to five strategy, right? So one to one to five meaning one, one. Well and then four silent soldiers, guys that have. Guys and gals that have built, you know, seven, eight figure, nine figure businesses.

Who are relatively unknown but have the experience. And I think you could tap on their shoulders and they'd probably jump right in and help out with that. I think that would be amazing. You know I am curious, the one question I didn't ask, right, this founder was becoming super successful as a media company, as a magazine brand and it was definitely serving the market and it was definitely becoming definitely leading the way that direction. Where did the heart for creating online courses and curriculum? Where did Founder plus even. Where did the desire to create that even come from?

Well once again just kind of, I saw a gap in the market so I. Because here's the thing with the media component of the business we could do anything, right? We could create software, we could create services, we could do agency, we could do vc, we could do all sorts of things, right. And.

I saw.

An opportunity to create something that didn't exist, right. Like I think and it paired up so nicely with what we were already doing. Like these courses and programs effectively are premium content, right? It's effectively premium content. And.

You know there's no well known go to place like you know, there's Masterclass, there's Udemy, there's Coursera, there's Skillshare but they're all, none of them are focused on just entrepreneurship. And yeah, I just saw this opportunity where.

It doesn't exist, right. Like where do you go? Like yeah, there's a digital marketer just for marketing, online marketing. But you know there's, there's platforms for upskilling, like you know, upskilling in the tech space or coding. But like yeah, it just didn't exist. And what we started to find when I created the first couple of courses is people were loving it. Right. And the unique view around how we create our courses with bite sized learning, it's no more than 10 minutes per lesson, it's drip fed like all these different things. And we were doing cohort before it was cool, right?

Yeah. But like the thing is we don't do it now. All of our stuff is on demand but we'll start to move into that again. But like.

Stephen, I just saw that there wasn't this go to place where you could go deeper, you could get the frameworks of how these people are doing. X Y and Z. And I just was like, what if we could get the people that we're interviewing to start giving back at a much deeper level? That's what it was. I was like, well, how can we get people to give back at a much deeper level and package up their experiences and lessons learned and kind of hold people by the hand? And. And it just kind of developed over time. And, like, to be honest, I didn't know that we would start looking into a subscription product. Right. But as time went on, it was like, I've been working on this for a long time now, like, well over 12 months. We've been testing it, we've been perfecting it, working all these things to give access to all of them, because that's just where it's got to go. Like, it's, it's our best product. It'll be our best product, and we're just going to focus on one product. So not only is it better for our community, it's a better service offering. It's a. It helps us build a better business.

Yeah.

So, yeah, that's kind of how we landed on the courses piece is like, I just saw that something out there like this should exist and that. That's kind of the focus.

Yeah. So a better business that helps build better businesses. I love it. I love it. You know, one of the things that. One of the highest compliments I've gotten in business was from one of my former CFOs. They started with my. One of my flagship businesses. And, you know, when you go to teach your team, it's a little different than when I'm on camera or speaking and doing a keynote or something like that. It's just. It's a different vibe, right? You're. It's more real, it's more authentic, right. You're. You're holding each other accountable, that kind of thing. But one of the things that he mentioned to me is he had just completed, while he was with us, he had just completed an MBA course. And he walks in one afternoon, he goes, I could have saved $50,000. I'm like, what do you mean? He goes, yeah, I could have saved $50,000. Everything that I learned there, you've been teaching us for six months, right. And I was like, dude, that's awesome. But it dawned on me that we will spend tens of thousands of dollars in, and this is no dig at any kind of school, but college courses and stuff like that with people largely who haven't built highly successful businesses. Right. It's all theory, right? So when, if and if theory can't meet application, there's no testing. And if you can't test, you can't invest. If you can't invest, you can't scale. If you can't scale, you can't sell.

Right.

It's all of that, like, all tied together. And you know, I think one of the things that I would encourage every entrepreneur, every aspiring entrepreneur, whether you have an idea, maybe, maybe you're like Nathan back in the day, and you're just like, I, I don't know what I'm good at. I just know I want to be good at something.

Right.

And you're doing that passion search. I encourage you to go ahead and check out Founder Plus. And one of the reasons I do that is because you can spend tens of thousands of dollars going to college and doing that stuff and you still can.

I choose to learn my information from people who have been there, done that, got the T shirt, and are willing to help me paint my own T shirt. Right. That's how I do it. Personally. Everybody that I've learned from have built seven plus eight, nine figure businesses. They've poured into me because that's what you'll find as you're a more and more successful entrepreneur, just as you're finding, Nathan, that the more successful you become in an entrepreneurial venture, the more you just want to give, like you want to help everybody else that doesn't know any better, you know, so they don't have to go bankrupt because they didn't watch your cash flow or, you know, all that kind of stuff. But I don't know, dude, I can't thank you enough for coming on. Is there anything on your heart for founders, entrepreneurs that we haven't talked about today that just, it's, it's right here and you got to get it off your chest?

Yeah. Thank you so much, Stephen.

Look, I think wherever you're at in your journey, I think one of the, one of the. If you're just trying to start something and you're just trying to get it off the ground, wherever out you're in your journey, I think the hardest part and the biggest struggle is wanting to get it right.

Wanting to not fail right. And I just can't stress enough. If you're listening, watching this right now.

It'S going to be okay. Honestly, at the end of the day, no one's going to remember, Right. People will only remember what you've done when it worked. Yeah, but nobody remembers. And I've talked about this like I created a Website before founder, this best smelling cologne dot net. And I was trying to do affiliate marketing because I wanted to just understand, like, you know, I wanted to mesh my passions with it and technology and marketing and online marketing. I was just, I just was hungry and I wanted to do something and luckily I found founder, but, but like, like, you know, I didn't know what I was doing. So just be okay and be comfortable that it might not work. And like, you know, for me, when I started founder, I didn't know it would work. I didn't have this grand vision that I had now. And I said to myself, I'm going to give this a good hard crack for 12 months and I'm going to spend 30 minutes a day every single day. Yeah, you know, you brush your teeth morning and night. I was doing 30 minutes every single day. I found 30 minutes for 12 months straight. And just make that commitment to yourself. Don't worry about making it successful or, you know, what other people will think and just, just see what happens. And I promise you, whether it works or it doesn't work, it doesn't really matter because you'll be far better off than you were 12 months ago.

Amen to that. Well, you know, it's in to piggyback off that just a little bit. It's. I've discovered that the thing always leads you to the thing. Right. So you have lots of things that you try. Lots of things, lots of iterations we talked about very early on in the show. It's like you just have to get out there and do it, like apply yourself and good things will happen, you know, that's kind of my belief as it relates to it. Dude, I can't thank you enough for spending some time with me today. I know it's super late there in Melbourne, Australia, super early here in Raleigh, North Carolina. But dude, I've had a sincere blast. I consider you a new friend in the business and happy to help you be successful any way we can.

Thanks so much, Stephen. And so look, if anybody's watching, listening, reading, they'd love to know more about our new platform, Founder plus you can get a free magazine subscription, free digital magazine subscription to all of our magazines and sign up to the wait list, you can go to founder.com membership. That's on us.

Awesome. And we'll also put that in the show notes on both the audio and the visual version. Dude, thank you again. Dude, I can't wait to have another conversation with you in the future.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time.

All right. Take care. See you. If you like that interview, I know you're going to love this one right here, so go ahead and check it out. In order to achieve the impossible, you have to be willing to imagine it and actually allow your brain to go there knowing you don't have all the information. You know every single thing I do. Which of these are bringing me happiness and bliss and which of them no longer do? And that'll change the quality of my life by changing that One question.