This content was created by Tim Draper. This content was uploaded by Tim Draper. This is a YouTube video titled "Rethink Your Problem | Favor & Sunroom CoFounder Ben Doherty" (posted 2019-01-21). The excerpt is a monologue by Ben Doherty, cofounder of Favor and Sunroom, answering a question about entrepreneurial doubt and persistence. He describes routinely questioning whether a startup will succeed, and explains that a strong belief in the core problem (on-demand delivery for Favor; empowering renters and improving the rental experience for Sunroom) kept him motivated to keep building.
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Yeah, so his question was, while you were starting a company, was there any points where you didn't think it was gonna work out? Yeah, like every week, all the time. That's standard. I mean, if you're— yeah, you're just all the time, you're not sure. And how do you get through that? I mean, I think this question is different for— this answer is different for every entrepreneur. For me personally, it was always coming back to thinking about whatever the core problem was that initially got me excited in the first place, right? So for Favor, it was like, you know, it was sort of this drive of like, there is going to exist some service that allows me to get anything delivered. I was just a firm believer in that, and I was also a firm believer that there was good be some service that let me as a delivery driver just work whenever I want. Which, again, that doesn't sound that exciting now because there's so many on-demand companies, but in 2011, that was like a bold statement, right? I was like, this is gonna happen, I wanna make sure I'm the one who makes that happen, right? So I think that can be, for me, that was a huge driver of like, I don't know why I can't make this work. Like, I'm gonna keep trying to make this work, but if it still doesn't exist in the world, and you have a firm belief it should, that's just how you just keep taking the next step forward for me. And then I'll say on the Sunroom side of things, I came from a perspective of, man, I like living in single-family homes as a renter, but I've had really bad experiences with my landlord. And I've also had really bad experiences just trying to actually go just to go shop around for rentals. I had really bad experiences on that where people were essentially, all of the other side that was involved kind of treated me like a second-class citizen as a renter. And so I sort of came in with like, I want to go change that whole, I want to flip that whole thing on its head. I want to make it so that now the powers are in the renter's hands, and as a renter, I actually have the power of a consumer, which is— the rental market is really odd where in every other market, if you don't like a product, you just don't go buy that product again. But in the rental market, you're like, you have no clue if a landlord's going to be good or not, but you're begging them and trying to make yourself look really good because you're afraid that they're not going to accept you. So anyways, that's That's what keeps driving me forward, is just sort of like a belief of the way that the world should be, and then wanting to be that, you know, wanting to build that team who's gonna go change the world the way that I feel like it should be changed. Yeah.
