Just Look Stuff Up

Just Look Stuff Up

Johnny Crowder

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey

Podcast for Entrepreneurs

7/31/2020

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The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated transcription

you don't know how many resources are available for free in your local community so you just look stuff up hey everyone this is devon miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i am your host evan miller the uh serial entrepreneur that's also a patent and trademark attorney um and founder of miller ip law and uh today we have another uh great uh guest on the inventive journey as we talk through uh his journey a bit his name is johnny and he'll do a much better intro but to give you a bit of a heads up he is um the founder of coke notes he's also a bit of i think he's a bit of a rocker but i can't remember exactly what type of music but rock and i always get rock and classic rock and hard rock and heavy metal all those good but he has he's part of a band and he and he has also has if you're watching the uh video version of it he has some really awesome tennis shoes in the background nike issues so he's kind of got a whole bunch of things going on but i'm excited to have him on he's going to be a great guest so welcome to the podcast johnny thank you for having me brother so i gave a really quick intro and it was uh i didn't i'm sure didn't do you enough justice but maybe uh give us a little bit of uh your background your journey and how you got it or how you got to where you're at today yeah that's this is always something that is a challenge to sum up quickly so i'll just give you some bullet points um classic entrepreneur story so i just wanted to create something that i've needed my whole life so grew up in an abusive environment drugs and alcohol around me i managed to stay sober fortunately i was in treatment for about 10 years for multiple mental health conditions school for psych i survived abuse and suicide and now i am dedicated to helping other folks who have faced some similar things and i also have been touring in a metal band for over a decade so there's there's that part i just say metal to keep things easy so so is there a difference because this is a complete side note has very little to do with the journey but is there a difference between rock metal heavy metal are they dissimilar or completely different how does that work um there are so many sub genres that i just encourage people to not get lost in that mix and just listen to what they like so i say metal to keep things easy i think anyone who um is into metal could probably technically alternative metal you're technically new metal but i just allow people to call it whatever they like all right fair enough that was a complete aside yeah as you can tell i i i'm not acquitted as metal as much i'm rock sure but kind of pop a little bit country a little bit so i have a genre but never got into battles but so sometimes i'll have to go and listen to some of your music but go for it with that um jumping back to your your journey and what you have going on go ahead oh so i mean that was pretty much as much context as i planned on giving i mean there's lots of information out there um you can watch my ted talk that tells a little bit more of my story you can find me on social media and read more but i really just try to use all of that personal experience as more of a backdrop so i try not to camp out too much on what i've been through i think there's enough of that stuff out there you know no and i agree so maybe maybe when i was heading there where we can go nags is when we talked a little bit before so you had a few different kind of startups that you started to get going some of them didn't work out quite as well or failed but you also learned a lot from them to get you to it today and i think you started kind of in i guess what eight nine years ago 2012-ish and you started to do some volunteering support work and advocacy and then that kind of snowballed into some of your first startups is that you call that right uh-oh i'm gonna let you edit this part out my microphone came unplugged for one second it's back in right you're all right or we'll still make it all the better with the ambiance of now everybody knows that there's technical difficulties that always have yeah anyway go ahead yeah so getting involved in advocacy was important for me because i always figured that the only way to help other people with mental health issues was basically just to become a clinician so i figured okay i have to spend a quarter million dollars on student loans and i have to be in school for the rest of my life in order to get my own little dinky office and then try to get teenagers to listen to me and i'm like you know what that sounds totally feasible but it's if it's my only way to contribute then i guess i'll do it so i was in school for psych at the time and i got involved um with the national alliance on mental illness or nami um and if you're listening to this in the us there's probably a chapter near you where you can get involved if you'd like and i basically just showed up and i was like what the heck can i do to help and it turned out that there's lots of opportunities and even if you don't have a doctorate or a master's degree or even if you didn't go to school for psych there's still a lot of ways to get involved so you started down that road and did you finish the degree did you put that on hold did you decide to go a different direction or how did you kind of you started down that road and then you decided maybe the student loans of 250 000 was a bit much to go down that road how did that play out well my it was weird because my band got signed while i was in college so that really threw a wrench and everything and i was like you know what i always wanted to do music anyway so i'll just finish my degree on tour like on the road and then um but i kind of figured i'll probably never work in psych again i i guess i'll be a rock star forever and as it turns out you can't be a rock star forever at a certain point you get too old and i'm fortunate that um i'm still 27 so i still get to tour now but i think a few years into touring i was like man i probably won't be able to do this when i'm 50. like i wanna i wanna also get involved in something else all right so you do that so you started to do it on the road i said and then you got busier with doing the the touring and that and then you moved on i think to 2015-ish you did the better people tampa b i think is that what you called it and that was kind of your first real entree into outside of doing the rock tour and the the into uh doing kind of a startup or small business yeah but i don't even know if i would credit that as like a genuine effort like when you look back at how janky it was it was like it was like better people tampabay at gmail.com like that's the level of intricacy but keep in mind let's see i was 20 how the heck old was i in 2015 i was like 23 or something and i just wanted to do something and it turns out it's actually pretty difficult to organize something all by yourself so i tried to get something off the ground it didn't really catch and then um i didn't want to give up i just knew that i couldn't keep pursuing and basically for people who don't know don't look it up you probably can't find anything about it but it was a it was maybe it's a challenge to everybody that now they have to go and see if they can fight the fifth page of google and find it i yeah basically for people who are listening and wondering what the heck was it it was uh an in-person peer support group for the metal and hardcore community so people with tattoos and dyed hair and um these are people who might not go to church you might who might not go to see a therapist or a counselor so i wanted there to be an option for people in my subculture and pretty much straight away i realized how difficult and impossible to scale that was going to be especially for a 23 year old with no budget that that's probably uh there's a few things working against you but i think it's cool i and even if you call a janky or you know it didn't work out i think there's a lot of things you can learn i think one of the things we talked a little bit about is some of the first few startups and we hit on another one um but they started you you figured out that if you centered them all around you and even if you could scale it you know you hit a critical mass right so if you center it all around one person one person driving it one idea that you know you can't expand it it limits the scope of it which is i think what we talked about they kind of limited some of your first startups when you tried to start getting into that yeah i think a lot of people depending on what they want to do like if you want to run your own cupcake shop and that's like your dream that is something that can revolve around you and your recipe and maybe a couple people um and there's nothing wrong with that i actually adore business models that are that simple like the less moving parts the better and but when you're trying to meet a greater need it becomes i don't mean greater as in this is more important than someone's cupcake shop i mean when you're trying to serve people not just in your local community when you're trying to serve people who live in other cities and other countries you quickly realize like okay let's do the math how many people will i eventually have to hire to manage how many different accounts and how and then you're like holy crap there needs to be some level of scale where if i lose internet for a day that the whole system doesn't explode you know no and i agree and i think that that's the i think true across a lot of industries and startups i mean usually most startups you'll have you know one or two people a founder a co-founder a couple of your very core people and yet you know i agree with you if you're in a mom-and-pop shop and i like those i live in a small town and i like those but it is a different you're saying hey i'm just going to serve my local area that's what i want to do i think it's very you know worthwhile but if you're saying hey we're going to have a bigger expansive reach we're going to hit more people we're going to have more channels or platforms or avenues building it all around one or two people makes it very hard to scale because no matter how awesome of a person you are you only have so you only have so many hours in the day only ability to do so many things and your time keeps getting more and more crunched so i think that that's a lesson depending on your business that the people need to learn is that you know you need to figure out how you can make this scalable or how you cannot have it centered or if you know and i always use i i'm a big advocate i love to watch you know shark taker that and they give the example if you're to walk out on the street get hit one day by a bus you know are you is a whole company centered around beauty where you know sink or swim it's that one person or you have you set it up to where it can move on or it can't go without you or you know there isn't just one critical person so i think that's you know a good lesson to learn early on so then we did i think your next business that we talked about before cope knows was was it not a therapist is that the next one yeah so maybe give a little bit of insight as to what that was how that went and how that led to where you're at yeah so that was version 2.0 so version 1.0 was peer support in person um i quickly realized how impossible that would be a scale so then i thought oh the the way that you scale something is you just make it digital and then it's magically scalable which is not true so um i thought it was i thought that was true you just wrecked my all my dreams dude i mean think about it like we i think everyone thinks they're they're different enough to sidestep the boundaries of what a human is capable of so like i remember when my band was signed my first band was signed and i started another band and there was label interest from that band and i told them i told that label like i can do two bands at once and they're like no you have to quit your old band if we're gonna sign the new one i said no you don't know me i'm different like i will put so much time into it i'm so driven and they're like yeah we don't care like we it doesn't matter who you are we know the limitations of an individual so like you're saying everyone has a ceiling and everyone thinks that they don't or that theirs is higher than everyone else's and so with not a therapist i thought oh the problem isn't that it's tied to my time the problem is that i just can't reach as many people at once because it's in person so i'll make it digital and it was digital peer support and um it was name your price surprise everyone picked zero dollars that was the most popular option um so i didn't make surprise nobody wants to pay for something he could get for free yeah and i worked i was working uh 50 hours a week at an ad agency i was touring full-time in a band and by full-time i mean six to eight months a year you're on the road so also working at the ad agency and then for around 40 hours a week i'm doing not a therapist not making a penny from it and you don't make a penny for music by the way so don't get that confused um not as an artist anyway so at this time i was getting so burnt out because i knew that i couldn't get people to work for me for free like i couldn't find people like hey do you want to break your back and volunteer full-time for this too so i knew that at a certain point you know not a therapist started smallish and then we started getting like around 40 to 60 different appointment requests a week and i'm like well if each one of these is an hour what have i done to myself so we were i think we realized by we i mean me i at that point because i kept trying to ask people to help me and they're like no so i think i realized if i can't get people to help if i can't get people to care about what i care about enough to help then i need to build a thing where i can rely on some level of automation so that i can care efficiently enough to to do this feasibly and make money right i mean that is for a lot of people who start businesses that's like not even on the table when you're thinking about the idea like the original idea for coke notes was for it to be free for everybody no cost and then um when you start doing the math on text credits and how to purchase yeah when you realize that here's what i didn't understand when i started cope notes i didn't understand that when you have an unlimited text plan it's not that your texts you can send however many you want for forty dollars or whatever it's that past forty dollars your cell carrier foots the rest of the bill so it's kind of like a buffet it's like if you eat a lot and someone else eats a little it evens out so eventually when i started working with sms wholesalers i'm like wait a second i have to pay every time i send 153 characters and they're like yeah hard cost no matter what and i'm like don't you have an unlimited plan they're like no you pay for what you used i'm like oh no if i get a lot of people using this is gonna be something that's gonna be super expensive and i'm gonna start losing money well i think that that's but i think it's an important point because i mean when i look at it and there's a little bit of you know especially if you get into whether it's therapy and i work with you know one of the businesses i work with is religious products right a little bit different but kind of the same bill and yet people are sometimes saying hey you're profiting off of religion and you're profiting off of people's pain or you know their life experiences and then you know almost that kind of that you shouldn't be able to make a profit you shouldn't be able to charge anything it should be free and yet you're not able to provide a service that's adequate if you can't run everything off of free for an amount of time as you there's a website cost there's this smn sm in or sorry if i can say texting costs there is you know the support costs and everything else and why you want to do it is you know reach as many people you have to figure out that's how i do it is i have to be able to support the business so that we can have the staff so we can have the system in place we can reach those people otherwise it just makes it uh too too untenable that you're never going to be able to accomplish a mission because you try and make it free i don't i'm not putting words in your mouth that's just kind of something i found as well yeah it's so i've always had a weird mentality around um working full-time in the mental health field but it's here's the way i look at it first of all i don't feel guilty about anything that i'm doing now because i spent 10 years volunteering in the mental health field without any compensation i'm traveling all over the place speaking at events leading classes like i have put in my time but beyond that even if i hadn't here's the way i look at employment either i mean you have to make money there is no version of life as an adult where your rent will be waived because you're a nice person and you don't have to pay for your groceries at the store or gas at the gas station because people are just so moved by the work that you're doing unfortunately that's not how it works so you need to make money somehow and the way i see it is you can either make money helping people or make money doing something that doesn't help anybody and those are your only two options because you have to make money somehow so anyone who is working in a field that you have to sow a bunch of compassion into i can almost guarantee that those people myself included can make much more money doing something that didn't help anybody so the sacrifice is still there if i make half as much doing a job that is helping people or i could make twice as much not helping people i will choose the helping people option every time it's it's weird i mean even look at teachers they don't get none that's garbage that's my exact i have my both my my uh mother-in-law and my sister are both teachers and i look and say you could go into and i'm i'm probably straight too much far to the other side i'm more of a capitalist and i like to make buddy it's not that i don't like helping people don't get me wrong oh yeah i found in miller-ip because i wanted to help startups and small businesses that i thought were kind of getting overlooked in the market and to your point i could go and if i just worked with the big companies and the big firms i would make more money but you say you know there is a point you're saying i make enough that i want to have the impact what's more valuable i have to have the groceries i have to be able to pay the rent but beyond that i'd rather have the impact i'd rather have that lifestyle and feel good about what i'm doing rather than just solely focus on money so i i think that that's an absolutely valid point and we have to remember that people who spend their their time and expertise and compassion doing something that's helping other people those people don't just deserve the bare minimum like teachers deserve to drive a car that they like and teachers deserve to go on vacation to another country if they want to like these people don't just deserve like oh if you're working in the nonprofit space or if you're working um serving underprivileged communities like you should be making twenty thousand dollars a year and you should be happy with it's like what the heck like i if the amount of compassion fatigue that goes along with with helping other people in your profession you need self-care built into that and sometimes self-care looks like getting yourself a massage or something and if you're on a shoestring budget you can't afford stuff like that yeah i know i i agree and i like the idea of you know and i don't know if it's your turn that's what i've heard of compassion fatigue and i think that there's a lot of truth to it so far to then recenter us because we we can go down that route for the whole rest of the podcast but taking it back to coke notes so now we did so you did that you started out with you know better people tampa bay that didn't quite work out um and then you got to an auto therapist you figured out that you can't texting isn't free it's not unlimited and so now you moved over to coke notes which kind of almost felt like kind of like said a version 1.0 2.0 and now you're a 3.0 learning everything along the way so maybe give a quick summary what is tote notes or how does it work or what is what is version 3.0 look like it is so much simpler than anything i've done before thank god so it doesn't have a lot of moving parts basically it's we provide daily mental health support via text message that's the simplest way i can put it so once a day we send you a text message that is filled with peer support and positive psychology and then you can text back saying whatever you want whenever you want and that thread instead of connecting you with a crisis counselor or having someone call you or being reported to your work or anything like that it's completely anonymous and it's for you to have a space to freely journal and speak so this improves the health of your thought patterns this changes your habit building patterns over time this helps you improve in your self-report and emotional iq so it's really ultimately a text thread in your phone just like you have with your family or your friends only it is specifically designed to make you mentally and emotionally healthier and i think one of the questions i when i first heard it i thought it's a great idea but i said well why can't you know if it's just really a text message would people actually just pay for you know text message you know and i always thought and not saying this what you do you know if i get a text message there he says don't forget to be happy if that's all i got i'd say well that's probably not enough value to warrant me paying so how did you kind of tail you know you talked about tailoring it making it so it is actually helpful and i think we talked a little about you actually base it off of you know proven principles and psychology and actually making it more helpful in that than just don't worry be happy kind of a message so how does that work or how did you kind of set that up yeah i think that's the most common misconception is people are like oh you're just gonna text me smile and i'm not paying anybody anything for that and that's like that is if coke notes looked anything like that i would not waste any time on it because personally for me stuff like that does nothing for me um so basically the way it works is we have a giant text library and it's hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of approved text messages that are written by peers with lived experience so we have that peer support base that empathy is baked into it and then they are not only are these texts based on proven psychological principles but then they're reviewed by a panel of mental health professionals to make sure that they're not just smile or be happy today to make sure that these will have a discernible positive effect over time so we even if the messages seem very simple to the reader that's actually by design we're not trying to send super complex jargon filled text messages to people we are trying to strategically interrupt negative thought patterns with something that's easy to digest where over time the way i view it is kind of like bumpers if you ever go bowling if you if your ball kind of bumps against one of the bumpers all it does is keep it going straight and that sort of what coke notes does we're not knocking your ball three lanes over or anything like that to me that's therapy is sitting down with someone and digging through all your past and that is some that is some really heavy lifting but coke notes is that maintenance tool that keeps you headed in the right direction no i think that's a that's a good point is you know you're not trying to be the full therapist that dives in deep and tries to give you know cycle analyte and you know go through deep and and figure out exactly what all the problems or rather you're saying hey this is to help you on a day-to-day basis i like the idea the idea of kind of guard rails or bumper you know bumper rails it just just keeps you moving straight keeps you on the right path so you don't get down into the gutter and you don't go off course so i think that's a great great analogy so that's cool so then as you did it you so you taking third iteration the company you're on coke notes has it been just to skyrocket to the top and no issues and no problems and trials or is it like 99.9 of other startups so you've had the bumps and the ups and downs along the way or how's it going for you i would love to sit down and interview on my podcast the founder who has not experienced speed bumps or roadblocks in the first two and a half years i want to meet that person that one person in all the world ask them yeah it's been really challenging actually um one of the main things that we run into is that people don't immediately understand the idea of preventative mental health care so here's what everyone says there's something called self-stigma which basically is the sentiment that everybody else needs this but i don't need it because my brain is perfect and i never struggle with anxiety or depression or negative thoughts about myself um which in in probably a hundred percent of cases is untrue all of us experience these negative emotions all of us experience things that we could improve on when it comes to our mental and emotional health and i think one of our main hurdles is trying to get people to overcome the idea that they're perfect and here's what i would say to those people um the idea you know if you see someone with super healthy teeth like super white super straight never had a cavity do you think that those people never brush their teeth because they don't need to because their teeth are so healthy or do you think those people brush their teeth and floss every day and use malfunction i'm married to one of those people that drive me nuts because she i'm the guy that has all the cavities or my wife's the one that has zero cavities she does and then she gives me a hard time when you were growing up you didn't brush your teeth as well you didn't floss as well you didn't use mouthwash so i i completely agree with that analogy that she's the one that's put in the work i i have since repented and take much better care of my teeth but there is an absolutely dude that that honestly has been probably our biggest roadblock is is helping educate people that if you have a brain the topic of mental health is pertinent to you it's not just people in straight jackets or people who live in mental hospitals or all of these terrible misconceptions that we have about mental health like you and your friends and your family everyone can afford to invest in their mental and emotional health whether it's simple techniques like taking breaths or taking a walk or stretching or speaking to someone about what we're going through and it's the biggest hurdle when people ask um who our biggest competitor is i always say pride that's what keeps people from engaging with coke notes is people thinking and asserting that their brain is somehow so different that they don't even need to focus on their mental and emotional health at all no but it's one that it's easy to tell yourself you're kind of like you know tell yourself the exception i'll work harder than everybody else and yet there's only so many hours of the day same thing as no matter how healthy you are and i think there are varying degrees of people that are able to naturally deal with things better and people that have need more assistance but everybody has their ups and their downs and their highs and lows and while those may vary everybody has them so i think that that's a fair point so so now for you're looking to say coke notes you you know trying to figure out that out how to position it how to you know get people to understand that how to you know market that or you know get that information out what do you see is the next six months to a year for coke notes so we are trying to focus more on partnerships and um connecting with community organizations so schools businesses health care providers insurance providers and just trying to meet these needs at scale because one thing that we're finding out is a lot of businesses are like we don't know what to do for workplace wellness because every time we try to do an initiative the employees don't engage and it's like well that's because they have to tell the hr person that they want to enroll they have to elect and that information becomes available or known to someone that they see on a daily basis and there's actually like social pressures that decentivize enrollment and engagement for student wellness for employee wellness so what we're trying to do is anonymize and automate that whole process so employees don't have to report to anybody that they're using it because we don't collect names and students don't have to alert their guidance counselor who might tell their parents or guardian or something or teachers honestly with stigma the way it is we are trying to make enrollment in mental health services as covert as possible to protect that person's relationships and and work in school environments so ultimately we're just trying to ramp up our partnerships with those organizations and say hey if you have students who are struggling with this or you have employees who are struggling with this we can step in as a third party to where no sensitive information is being shared anywhere and we can keep it anonymous enough to where folks will actually use the resource no that's a great great direction to take it great idea and i think it makes a lot of sense so well we're getting towards the end of podcast and i always almost every podcast i say i wish there was more time there's always more things that we could talk about and we'll have to have people back on and you're certainly no exception it's been a fun fun journey and a fun podcast to go through and talk about what you guys are doing but if um as we wrap up so people want to get i guess we'll jump to my two final questions and then we'll do that so far to ask i always ask two final questions at the end of each podcast um so ask those now and the first one is so if what is your worst business decision my worst business decision was initially declining help from who is now our cto so his name is matt cross he's amazing i love the guy he's a big reason why we're able to serve as many people as we are and when he initially reached out to me he was like um do you need help with security or with scale or with dev stuff and coding and i was like no i got it i'll watch youtube tutorials and i'm sure there's stuff online about it and i think that's an example of pride i was like no i can do it myself i don't need your help and i'm i'm lucky that he was so persistent and being willing to help me because here we are a year and a half later and he's he's my right-hand man so just i think my my biggest mistake was um declining help when it was offered because i was too determined to do it myself i think and i think that's universal along a lot of startups a lot of times you're the you know if you're a founder you're the person that came up the idea like oh i can do it myself and i can figure it out not a big deal and everything else and yet most of the time even if it you could you know and i have that attitude hey i can do this better than anybody else type of a thing and why even if that's true and i don't think it's true most the time you it still limits the ability as to what you can get done and how quickly you can grow it how quickly you can scale it how many people can help so i think that's a great lesson to learn okay so if now if i were to jump onto the second question somebody that's just getting into startups just getting into small businesses or wanting to get into them what would be the one piece of advice you'd give them um you don't know how many resources are available for free in your local community so you just look stuff up like call for for me it was a small business development center sbdc um but you can look around there's like i live in tampa and there's like a tampa bay economic center or something and there's all of these places oh like entrepreneurship collectives and stuff where you live google stuff try to find free resources because i got a consultant early on for free and i could meet with him i think it was once every two weeks and it was free free business consulting for a small business like especially when you don't have you don't have a ton of money laying around this is invaluable so i would encourage people to look in their local community for free resources specifically consulting services where they can just ask those dumb questions like i have dumb questions all the time and it's so crucial to have somebody to ask and if they don't know they will let you know but to not have to pay for that is incredible so please look in your local community i can guarantee you there are free resources that you can take advantage of right now so don't let money keep you from getting the advice and guidance that you need no i mean that's great advice and i think that too often people either don't think about or don't look out for them or don't take the time to research and yet there's a lot of resources out there because a lot of times well whether it's local government local communities people in the community are wanting to help and willing to provide their time or offer it up or there's those resources and that's a great piece of advice well as people want to reach out they want to get involved whether it's you know use coke notes they want to invest in it they want to partner up with it they want to incorporate it with their business or whatever what's the best way to reach out to you or to make those connections so if you go to copenhagen.com our website there is a contact button at the bottom you can fill out a form i personally read through all of those still so if you need to reach me if it's about business if it's about speaking or cope notes or advocacy whatever you need to reach out to me about i would strongly recommend the contact form and again the website is just copenhagen.com perfect well i've certainly encouraged people that are wanting to reach out connect or otherwise to get engaged to to contact you and to go to the go to the website so well i appreciate you coming on to the show today it's been a fun time great to talk about your journey wish we had another couple hours to go through although i don't think people would have the attention but there are plenty of fun things to dive into i appreciate you coming on it's been it's been great for those of you that are interested in coming on to uh the inventive journey on being a guest and telling your journey you can go to inventivejourney.com and apply to be on the show um if you want to uh subscribe or listen to get notifications to the episodes as they come out you can subscribe to any of our channels that we we have through whether it's on the audio or the video version and for those of you if you need help with any patents or trademarks feel free to reach out to us at miller ip law and we're happy to help there as well thanks again ken johnny for coming on it's been a fun time to have you on you've been a great guest and i wish you guys a great future journey of coke notes thank you brother you too English (auto-generated) All Podcasts From Miller IP Law Recently uploaded