Have Someone Who Is Real With You - Miller IP

Have Someone Who Is Real With You

Have Someone Who Is Real With You

Stephen Granger
Devin Miller
The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
7/16/2021

Have Someone Who Is Real With You

Maybe not have the dream crusher in your life. But someone that is going to be real with you and honest about your idea. Not in a negative way but a good sounding board. Looking for that person in your life. I have been incredibly blessed. Because I have a couple of founders that I reached out to on LinkedIn and said: hey, you are where I want to be in the auto space. Can we chat? And they have been great. It's interesting because they are very diametrically opposed founders of companies in their philosophies of growth. But to be honest with you and say that's not a good idea, or that's a great idea and hears why. There are holes that we all have even as multi-time founders, there are things you miss. You have someone else just throw back at you. That would be my advice.

 


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.

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you not have the the dream crusher in your life [Laughter] but someone that you can go to and say here like someone that's going to be real with you and honest about your idea not in a negative way but somebody a good sounding board looking for that person in your life whether that's another like i am incredibly blessed because i've got a couple founders that i just reached out to on linkedin and i said hey you're where i want to be in the auto space can we chat right and they've been great at and it's interesting because they're very diametrically opposed founders of companies in their philosophy of growth and that stuff so i've got two but to be honest with you and say that's not a good idea or that's a great idea and here's why because there are holes that we all have even as you know multi-time founders there are things you miss that if you have somebody else just like throw back at you that would be my advices [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups in the seven and eight figure businesses as well as a ceo and founder of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com we're always here to help now today we have another great guest i say that but all guests and i feel the same way about all guests are all great guests but we have steven uh grain geron and steven granger is the founder of recall rabbit and he'll type or talk a little bit about that throughout his journey but to give you a brief introduction went to college for about a year um didn't like school and wanted to be a professional cyclist i think married to and it was married to an olympian which sounds cool which i hopefully it is cool uh but got into sales after cycling that didn't work out became an entrepreneur um for a a long time and had that kind of entrepreneur spirit started a business with a friend in the 90s and built it for a period of time didn't work out in the long run moved over to being a recruiter until the dot-com bus started selling cars which it sounds like fun i love cars so i'm always a car guy but then i didn't like that moved over to car accessories i moved on over to carfax for a period of time went through life changes and left did another startup did an accelerator raised a bit of money uh learned what not to do and what hopefully to do a bit um shut it down after uh doing that for a period of time um went back to work worked as a manager at a dealership saw a problem which led now to where his business is at today so with that much is a brief introduction welcome on the podcast stephen thank you yeah that was very good just one small correction i didn't marry the olympic athlete i was engaged to one so oh i got it right if she ever saw the podcast she would be very clear about that so yeah yeah all right well i'm still interested to see what it was like to be engaged to an olympian yes we'll have to talk about that but uh it's uh as we dive into things you know i gave that brief introduction kind of went through everything but take us a bit back to what you know when things started when you started out in college and kind of how your journey got started there so yeah you touched on it um the uh college experience i realized was not for me i went to a very very small liberal arts school in missouri um i used to say it was kind of like high school with fraternities there were 786 total students at one point it was an all-male school there was another school in the town that was an all female school so there were more technically students in the vicinity but yeah it was not not a very exciting experience for me so um i had raced bicycles in high school loved it and i was like you know what i'm gonna live the dream go try and do it and so yeah after a year of school i moved packed up my things moved to the mountains in california near lake tahoe i had a friend from high school whose family owned a cabin and let me live there for no rent and that's when i met the olympic swimmer who she was the world champion she was a synchronized swimmer she was the world champion at what she did and then eventually won a gold medal in olympics and meeting somebody like that i realized whatever she had that made her the world champion at what she did i did not have it was kind of a soul-crushing experience but a life lesson and yeah and kind of got into sales after that and started my career just because that is interesting both on the so she did or she got a goal which is cool you know were you engaged dating at the time with yeah uh no right before the gold medal the olympics uh it's kind of a funny story so i broke off the engagement uh my mom ended up going to the olympics because it was a neat experience and she she always tells the story it was very funny to be there even though her son no longer dated the olympian but yeah yes we were dating during that whole time uh no just and i'm just curious on the olympian are they crazy focused and hyper you know and almost have to be honest and that's what so this will give you a good story of one of the moments where i was like wow okay uh so she would get up every morning at like five o'clock go to the pool swim from six a.m till six at night six days a week and then go to junior college at night and one day i asked her like you know how most of us we wake up and we're like i just don't have it today i'm gonna call in sick and then you kind of work through that and you power through and you're like all right i'm going to the office i asked her one day if she ever feels like that and she looked at me with a look on her face like i might have well asked her if she eats babies hole like she just and she said that thought has literally never entered my brain and i i remember so did sickly going well i guess that's why you're the world champion and i'm selling copiers right so yeah she definitely and it used to i used to think about it too like there's a reason michael jordan's michael jordan right he's different if he wasn't we'd all be like michael jordan but we're not right so yeah there is a different mentality to people who are high level achievers and and it was really funny because her coach was a very big negative reinforcement person and she would try that with me and i'd be like yeah i just hear i'm a loser you're not like really motivating me and she thought that like work was gonna be like that and i kept telling her like no one is ever gonna talk to you in a business environment the way your coach talks to you i remember she got like her first job and reached out to me and was like i have to apologize to you because you were right like work is so easy and i was like yes that's what i kept telling you your life's gonna be way easier after this so yeah well that's funny so now that that is a good story now one yeah so now you said in your in your own words or paraphrasing on words you know you dated the olympian or a friend were engaged for a period of time didn't work out but you also kind of had your soul crush so to speak in a sense i'm not going to be that olympian you know cyclist and so better to realize that now and do something else so you went into sales for a period of time and then how did your journey kind of progress after you did sales and then you got into some entrepreneur doing some startup doing things with the startup so how did that go yeah so i always in looking back and i'm sure this is a common theme against right like most startup founder entrepreneurial people like even as a little kid i always thought about starting my own business and doing stuff right and so i became a technical recruiter after the sales i just kind of fell into that it was the early early beginnings of the dot-com era and um i worked for a national company we had an office in texas i had originally grown up in texas but had moved to california in middle school and had family in texas and i came to visit and fell in love with austin specifically and i wanted to transfer and so i transferred offices and came here and met my uh became my best friend and we just like it was austin was really starting to grow technology while company-wise and we would call these companies and they had no idea the name of the company we worked for and we had this kind of aha moment over a beer or something like you know it just it's funny to think back young like how naive you are when you're young you're like we were like we're giving away 90 of the money to this company that basically provides a phone for us like the customer has they're buying because they like you and me like they trust us and that's why they're buying not because it says the name of the company on the phone right and so we're like we'll do it ourselves so we just in the spare bedroom of his house started um i used to joke later after i got married that i must have been a hell of a salesperson because he was married newly married really young they just got a house had a mortgage and i got him to convince his wife to quit his day job and start this technical recruiting company and we did that like you said through the dot com era and learned you know looking back a lot of just silly dumb lessons as a young person right in in a in an economy that was growing and you like almost despite ourselves we were making lots of money right and then the dot-com bubble burst and nobody needed recruiters anymore and it was kind of like a okay well now what but i still you know i'm salesy guy and i love cars right i and my ex-wife at the time she said well you love audi's why don't you go try and sell audis and so that's how i got into the automotive space in like 2001 and started selling cars and unlike what you said earlier uh it is the hardest thing i've ever done in my life like really i learned that i did it for about seven eight months that first stretch and yeah it's very a very difficult job and i give lots of credit to those people because you know it's what most people don't understand it's 100 commission like literally 100 percent get to the point where at that time we had what's called a mini where if you're a salesperson and you devon beat you up down to like the price is nothing and they don't make any money you get a minimal amount as a salesperson and it was fifty dollars and so like if i spent three days with you and you had beat me up and you finally bought the jetta i'd make fifty dollars right and it was just so it's hard it's a hard way to learn eliminate and so that that's how i got into the vendor side and like you mentioned i worked for carfax for 12 years and that was a great learning experience because it was a big brand but not a really very small company and they were just kind of pushing out into selling to dealers they had been a consumer-facing product and we're making this transition and so i was the first person in the role that i had and grew with them for uh like i worked there a little over almost 11 years and looking back now as a founder there's so many things that i just kind of didn't realize i was learning right from a company that was growing and doing well the things that you just see and looking back so no i think that definitely makes it no i wanted to touch back so you got into sales for a period of time and even new car sales now i've never done car sales i just like cars i mean yeah give you an idea the first thing that's what i did for joe i drove in high school was a 67 camaro that me and my dad restored so i missed it i love cars now i also have completely opposite side but i do have a vw it's the old vw bus that's uh has a bed that folds down in the background or the back that's for the fun with the wife and the kids so i'm just a car guy that loved that um but you know you so you do that for a period of time and say okay you know while i like cars car sales is not the most fun and it's also incredibly competitive that's why when they get on there they're not really on your side to give you the best deal because they want to get the most otherwise you know they make 50 after a while yes yeah but you did that and said okay you know tried the a few different sales job did the recruiting dot com bus that didn't work out you know then got over to car sales and said okay can't do car sales uh you know our car sales are not fun and they're they're a lot of hard work get into carfax for a period of time and then i think you said you went through some life changes and decided that you know you were going to leave carfax and go to another startup is that right yeah um i went through a divorce and if anybody is listening to the podcast you can relate like your brain isn't working probably 100 efficiently and made some decisions and left carfax and went to a smaller technology company in the space again a good life lesson uh really incredibly smart people learned a lot about product because they were launching a new product so i got to be involved in that where it was it was it was a great like almost like a boot camp for startups because they had lots of money and they had a core product that was revenue generator and then they were launching this new thing and they brought me in to help with that and so i got to learn on somebody else's nickels like what to do what not to do as you grow and and scale now the the not startup piece of it is they had lots of money right so they could make mistakes and go down a path where uh as a startup founder you can't normally do that right so yeah yeah did that for a while and like i said i mentioned you know you touched on it in my intros then i went from like i love the auto space like i'm like you i'm a car guy i'm passionate about it and what i'm passionate about is car dealers are actually they're very good people like when people bash on them i always try and kind of pull turn it down like you know when you look in a community typically they're the largest employer in a community because they have so many staff they give more to charity than anybody else in their community i mean how many of us have kids who's on a little league team that's sponsored by the local car dealer right like they do do a lot of good stuff and so my frustration has always been um kind of on how do we make how do we in the technology space figure out how to use technology to make that process better and better for the consumer um and so you know i i launched a startup to help do that and my startup was uh it was called sales dog and the idea was it was a an application for sales people inside the dealership that was a basically a game and the idea was by playing this game it would help them better understand engaging customers and their product because this is the the biggest problem one of the biggest problems i think in the space is that they're not there's not a lot of training for the salesperson right and so they're kind of thrown to the wolves you as a consumer come in and you typically know more about the car because you're super passionate about this car so you've spent eight like the average time a consumer spends it's like 80 hours online well that sales person he's maybe spent five he or she spent five minutes getting ready for you so you're super prepared and they're not and so the idea was to build an application to help that that was fun so they could do it and then our secret sauce we call that manage gaming and so the manager could actually change it right so if you and i worked at the store your game's questions would be different than mine because our skill sets were different right like you may need help in a different area and so went down that path and went into got into an accelerator and built out an app and did all the stuff you're supposed to do in a startup that you think yeah and it went sideways you know and and not pouring any wound but i think you're assaulting the wound but i'd love to talk about that for you in the sense you know there are things you know you can have a great and i think you know just sit there and explain that makes sense you know you want to as a consumer you want a sales person that has a good background they know the car they can tell you the benefits they can tell you why get this upgrade or why now don't just tell me i need an upgrade because it's better like tell me why i need it or why should i get this car you know this minivan over this minivan or this truck or this car over this car and half the time to your point the consumers spend so much time online especially it's all out there they've read the reviews they've read all this and you've got hundreds or you know hundreds of different cop cars and options on the line you're saying i don't know all these things and making it you know fun and interesting and incentivizing definitely makes sense and so i can see why he got into the accelerator raised a bit of money on it but tell us a little bit kind of what did you you know what made it go sideways or kind of what did you learn as it went sideways and this is something that i at first when i when it went sideways i thought oh this is going to be bad for future because i'm an entrepreneur like i was listening to one of your other podcasts and it was the guy from cox i can't remember what and he was like now that i'm doing this i can't imagine not right and that's kind of the thing like once you've been an entrepreneur it's hard to visualize going back to work for somebody like i've done it a couple times and it's it works for a little while but you get that bug right um the thing that i learned and this is advice i would give any potential founder is don't go spend a bunch of money building something that you think and the key word is you think people are going to spend money on because that's what i did you know i thought it made sense like you said makes total sense but when i went to my potential customers and said hey i have this thing and even they like we got lots of perks for like oh this is great like it looks cool the app's functional right at the end of the day nobody would write a check like when i would push and be like okay cool you want to it's 700 a month uh yeah i know or whatever the number right and this is the other thing that i would a learning lesson i took away from so one don't spend a bunch of money to build something that somebody's not gonna actually write a check for and two [Music] you know oh this is a ying inning yet right like don't be so focused on making money which i know sounds so crazy counterintuitive and if i heard myself say that i feel like you're bananas dude but like that's what i was so laser focused on that i couldn't just maybe take a step back and go okay let me have somebody try it for free right and then see how it works the minimum amount you know and what i always and i i agree with you on all that you know on the one sense you need to make sure people because there's a difference between a something that's cool or something that's useful and something people willing to pay for in the sense that they may think yeah that's a really good idea i'd use it and then you're like what would you pay for not necessarily people somebody else out there would pay for it like yeah and so i think but i think that that's a real thing that you talk yourself into hey it's a cool idea you start to almost drink your own kool-aid because you get so enamored with the idea that you don't necessarily think hey would somebody actually pay for this does this have a business case yeah not just a this is a cool product and let's be also on it like we're all bananas doing this right at some level because you're like we're doing what society tells us not to do so you have to fight like you have to have a little bit in that you anyways like about your idea like if you're not passionate about it it's startup is hard anyways but if you're not it is right and i always think there's a bit of naivety in the sense that you know if you're not passionate about it you're not gonna make and because you know startups are hard there's a heist or high failure rate and yet we're bucking a cranston yeah i know there's a lot of failures but i'm going to be the exception and sometimes you are the exception sometimes you have to you have to do that to have that broken risk meter and willing to accept the accept the um the risk and continue to move forward and do it anyway so and the other thing i think you touched on i liked as well is you know sometimes you get there you need to have money to make it or to keep a business going and i think that sometimes that gets pushed aside like i'll we'll you know we'll make money and we'll figure it out but on the other hand if you don't if you become so focused on money hey we have to make money now we have to do it right now that you sometimes don't give the product enough time to figure out what it's beginning and that that was the number one thing that like it was a ch like the idea was great like i got obviously we got into accelerator we beat out a bunch of other companies because the eye we do was good but there was a chicken in the egg effect that i needed to be able to say to a dealer and this is the not money part that this would if i was going to do that again is i needed people using the tool to prove its validity to then go to people and say hey it really works it's worth the spend because i didn't have that i was so focused on like i need to make some money to eat that i couldn't get initial users to then prove right that's what i mean like i was in a another startup was it was kind of a an eight-week program where you come in with a basic idea and by the end of the eight weeks you've got kind of something shelled out and each week you have an expert that tells you like finance marketing it was a great program here at a company in austin and one of the things the guy said to me in that like was so good like if you're not making any money it's a hobby like you can call it whatever you want you can have a web page but at the end of the day if you don't have paying customers it's a hobby so don't get me wrong when i say like oh super don't focus on money like money coming up with a revenue model is very important but i think that you've got to do it in the time frame that makes sense i think that's what you're hitting on if you you're so early on focused about and not that you shouldn't have a plan or you shouldn't say hey here's we go about doing it but if you're so focused on the money aspect that you never let the you never figure out what the product is going to be what is where does it fit in the marketplace where does it make sense where does it not make sense and if you never give it that a time to evolve you can kill it not because it's not a good idea but because you didn't figure out what are people willing to pay for what do i charge for this where are they going to use it how are they going to use it what is my pitch exactly and so i think that's you know good lessons to learn as to why you can have a good idea that as you said can go sideways not because it's not one that you know it's not a good idea but because there are other aspects that impact it and i think it's a good lesson to learn from yeah so now you did that you went back to the dealership for a period of time then now i can't remember are you still at the dealership or you're back yeah so yeah so the dealership experience is what gave birth to recall rabbit right and i've tried to take a lot of the lessons i learned from that first startup and push it into what we're doing today and it's it's worked right and so um i was at a seven star dealer group i was a manager overseeing their digital everything to do with digital and some used car stuff and i known about recalls from my time at carfax and all of a sudden i just started kind of looking at our inventory and we had about sixteen hundred cars on the used side between the seven different stores and when i started looking at it and diving in there were i want at the time i think it was about 27 percent of all the cars that we had had a recall that were not our own brand so like it was mazda and hyundai's so if we had a chevy 27 of them had recalls and i was like this is great i mean when you do the math that's a lot of cars right and it shows on the carfax the autocheck report so consumers see it online that's what was bubbling up to me i was like this is worrisome as a consumer and we need to figure this out so we can sell these cars right and so when i started asking how like what do we do there was no answer and it was this weird little moment of like holy cow this is a huge problem because one in four cars in the united states has a recall it's between 65 and 70 million cars every day there are new recalls announced um you know honda just announced 2.6 million cars so it's like every day and every manufacturer like even tesla has recalls like it doesn't matter what it is there's recalls and when i started digging i realized there was no good way to connect dealers to fix this because you can only fix your own brand by law right so if i'm a ford store i can only fix fords which makes sense right if you think about like i don't want the ford guy fixing the chevy airbag because he doesn't work on chevy's right um but there was no good way to connect them and this is partially because of the infrastructure inside a dealership and the way people are incentivized and their compensation structure a lot of people inside the dealership are paid commission this is a weird thing that falls kind of in the cracks of that because no one can get directly paid for fixing it or getting it fixed and it's their time like it takes time to take the car to the other dealership bring it back well who's going to pay for that person's time right those are the little weird things that we helped solve with our tool and so i was like okay i see something i'm not gonna go spend a bunch of money i learned the lesson so literally my first thing i went to a somebody i'd worked with in the past and i said here's my idea would you pay for it if i could come up with the idea and he's like yes makes sense and i said okay here's what i'm gonna do i literally did it manually i got an excel spreadsheet went out to auto trader cars carfax looked for volkswagens it was a volkswagen store looked for them manually around their dealership then i would take the vin and manually go to volkswagenrecalls.com usa and see if it has a recall and if it did i would then put the information in the spreadsheet send it to the guy and say okay here are all the volkswagens for sale around you that have recalls here's all the information you need on the car and the person to connect with right and so i did it manually for the first probably five or six customers because i was like if nobody's gonna pay for it there's no point in building it and if i'm not making enough money from it no point in building it and once i get to a point that i just can't do it anymore it's frustrating let's figure out automation and so that's one of the the lessons i learned from my first experience um and it worked right and so still and i like the kind of the lesson from the story is hey you don't have to always dump in a ton of money build it all let's see if we can do it manually see if people will pay for it even if i have to take 10 times the amount of effort time and money to do it let's see if you know theoretically if i were to get this to work and if people would pay for it then i can figure out okay now let's go up here figure out how to build it automate it make it nicer make it polish make it easier make it more streamlined yeah you know rather than just go out and build it all let's try the the the minimalist route to see if it makes it i never like minimally viable product in the sense that in my mind it always seems like that just is a code for we're going to put out a crappy product and see if people buy it anyway so i don't think that's the case but i think hey let's see if there's a way that we can do without having to do a major investment such so they can get that same experience see if it will work and also learn a lot i think a lot of times you put it out you do it manually say oh yes you really need to know this is what you really need to do yeah and it's funny too because i i know i've watched a couple of your podcasts and there are a lot of us who are not technologists right and you can go down the path of i think this is what i want to build and we don't know right like we think oh well you just go back in a little room you type a little stump then boom it comes up it's easy right no big deal and my cto always like it's not hard yeah i hate when you explain our product because you make it sound like it's super easy there's a lot of hard work but so you can go down a path and one little mistake takes hours and hours to fix that you don't understand and that's one of the the good things about being a technical recruiter is like quasi-understand the development life cycle but now as a founder i'm much i understand it much more deeply and again by doing it manually you avoid all that it's easy to change and manipulate and there are enough tools out there that you can figure out how to do stuff that you need to if you've got a niche that you want to try and attack so did the manual thing work doing it nights and weekends found somebody to help me build some automation but not full automation and i have a a good friend who i mentioned my best friend earlier that we were recruiters together had our own agency we both left that and went to work internally as recruiters for software companies and he he did that um he's still doing recruiting and one of the guys he worked for that was the vice president of development we all became friends um this is another piece of advice i like it so and he's gonna he'll hate it if he sees this but we lovingly call him the dream crusher because i'm an entrepreneur and you may know dev and you've probably talked to enough like i'm always coming up with great eye great ideas right and he's a great sounding board so i would always recommend like find somebody you know and really trust that can really kick in the teeth and you're like okay and he's one of those ones where he's like this is a dumb idea or he pokes the holes in it that's good you're like even if it's a bat a bad idea it might work if somebody's helping you figure that out um well this other gentleman is my he's he's now my cto but he's my technical version of that right so as a non-technologist when i think of an idea i go to him and i'm like how much would this take to really build if i'm talking to somebody who's going to be a developer what should i be looking for and he's always been a great sounding board for that and i came to him with this idea after i'd already built out some of it and i said look we're here i need to figure out how to get it to here to make it real and he was like i like this one man this one's actually a good one i want to come on board so he joined as my cto and he's helped his team has helped build out what we have now which is a fully automated tool we've got customers i think since the first time i talked to you you know i'm in an office space now when we first talked i was still out of the house and i started full time last january right before covet so on paper not the best time to start your startup but we've actually what we do for dealers actually helped them during covid make revenue so it was a it was kind of a good a good time for us to to start and grow no i think that that's funny you know interesting there's been a lot of startups during the time of colby just because people have you know they're at home either they're on lockdown they're on quarantine they have they got laid off they have other things for other motivations they're saying okay i've got some time on my hands i'd rather than go and look you know go and do work for someone else let's or see what we can do and so it's been interesting how that and i think it's one of those things right like you got this time on your hands you see things that are broken right you're like well this kind of stinks i don't want to do it i think there's a lot of that too that people have seen stuff that oh this could be done better yeah it's just been interesting so so now that kind of brings us up to where you're at today and there's always so many more things on the journey that i'd love to touch on but yeah given that we don't want to i'm sure the listeners don't want to hear about all of our side notes so maybe with that we'll jump to the two last or two questions i always ask in the end of each podcast so the first question i always ask and you may have already touched on it um along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what did you learn from it yeah um i would say yeah the the spending money before really having a good idea of what you're trying to accomplish i think um it's one of those best and worst because i learned from it right but it it could be a a killer you know depending on how big a project you're trying to do you know 70 80 000 to build an app is not unheard of right and if you that's a big chunk of change if you uh yeah i think that's the biggest lesson i've taken away is really before now you can you can spend money but like before you go down too far make sure what you're doing somebody's actually going to pay for it and that's a hard right because again every startup person thinks well when jeff bezos started amazon nobody was going to buy books and we all have to think that that's our thing but you know there is you got to have some sense of realism yeah absolutely no definitely makes sense and i like that because you know it is it's interesting and kind of a sign nobody touched on it is people think you know oh it's software it should only take a program or a few hours it's not that big of a deal and i've been on programs where i've seen companies literally spend millions of dollars on software i've done i've done several projects myself for at least in the hundreds of thousands and even just a simple product most of the time unless it's drop dead simple and it's like you know one web page or one little tiny thing you can get for cheaper but if you have one of those apps and the interesting thing is the simpler you make it is usually more expensive because it's almost counterintuitive because the more the easier of a user experience is simpler and more straightforward that it's fluid takes more time to make that user interface and that graphics and that flow all work together it's much easier to build a really complicated hard to use software that has tons of features but doesn't make any sense it's hard to use than it is to make that simple one so definitely think that that's something for everybody to keep in mind so as we um so now with that as the first question let's jump to the second question which is now if you're talking to someone that's just getting into a startup or a small business what would be the one piece of advice you'd give them yeah um maybe not have the the dream crusher in your life but someone that you can go to and say here like someone that's going to be real with you and honest about your idea not in a negative way but somebody a good sounding board looking for that person in your life whether that's another like i am incredibly blessed because i've got a couple founders that i just reached out to on linkedin and i said hey you're where i want to be in the auto space can we chat right and they've been great at like and it's interesting because they're very diametrically opposed founders of companies and their philosophy of growth and that stuff so i've got two but to be honest with you and say that's not a good idea or that's a great idea and here's why because there are holes that we all have even as you know multi-time founders there are things you miss that if you have somebody else just like throw back at you that would be my advices no and even it's a word of because sometimes it's hard to find those people but even what i found because along the lines is i'll write down because i i'm the kind of guy that i'll have 10 ideas before breakfast and then i'll have another 20 throughout the day and 90 of them or even more probably bad ideas but what i'll do is i'll write the ideas down that i think might be good i'll put it on the stick you know put it on my desk and i'll i'll leave it there circle back in about a week and see if i'm still excited a week after that i've had the idea that's a good one before because you know giving that time and that because every time you have an idea you'll say oh that's a great idea can't make lots of money we're all going to be millionaires and that's what everybody thinks and sometimes it's right other times you get so excited about the idea that you never really stop the thing doesn't make sense and doesn't work so i would also i think the other one for me too is juxtaposed like listen to yourself like it is really hard to do this and then you have to be committed not just passion is the right word but like you have to like sometimes even your friends and family i'm sure like there's lots of fair like i know you were talking with somebody about right raising and that whole like well if you can't even get your family to support you why should we i think that's the craziest thing like because your family's the first one that knows all your flaws right so they're gonna be the ones that are like not giving you a dollar right and you have to push through that and listen to yourself and like this is a good i i and that's a hard thing to do right when you're going through it sometimes so those are those are who i think you said so yeah awesome well as we now wrap up the the podcast that people want to find out more about your your business your software recall rabbit they want to be an employee they want to be a investor they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out contact you or find out more i would say linkedin always a good way it's stephen granger spell the ph and no i um and then our web page obviously recallrabbit.com all one word yep all right well i definitely encourage people to reach out connect up find out more so yeah thank you again for coming on the podcast now for all of you that are listeners if you have your uh your own journey to tell and you'd love to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to share it just go to inventedguest.com and apply to me on the show two more things as a listener one make sure to click subscribe and your podcast players you know what all of our awesome episodes come out and two leave us a review so other people can find out about all of our awesome episodes last but not least if you ever need help with patents trademarks or anything else just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat and we'd be happy to help well thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thank you you

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