Struggling and failing on my own

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription – I took our jobs I took programming projects I took like short contracts but I supplement advice myself just with my own work and I never asked somebody for money well I asked I tried to get money from an investor they said no but my experience trying to raise money from investors was very limited very short I mostly focused on growing my businesses that's what I really recommend for you I think the whole VC stuff you know investment before you know it's overrated in my feeling and all the time that you spend contacting investors and all the people is exactly not the time that you spend actually working in your business so I just preferred working in my business and getting that going now I worked on a b2b search software I mentioned it elsewhere in the course that totally failed because it had a really brutal difficult sales cycle which I had no idea how to sell it and not to mention it was really hard to know how to build and then I did something easier I built a group hiking website kind of like meetup for hiking but it was hard to promote because everybody was like well why don't we just use meetup and I was like well it's because it's cheaper and free and people are like well it's meetup is so free so cheap that your your site doesn't really offer a lot on top of it and so that never went particularly far it had some success like people some people were using it a Productivity events were getting scheduled I did get a lot of experience in event marketing around the hike hiking events I did get some experience and SEO scalability all those things so this was maybe the hiking website and it's still alive now it's come hike calm it I don't really update it much but it's it's a relic but and it kind of still makes me like fifty bucks a month or so but it's essentially dead it was my first lukewarm success I would say and at one point it had growth but at one point that growth stopped and it was I don't want to get too much into the the technicals of it I did get my footing under me in building that that was my feeling like feeling confident after a whole lot of other companies I started and all those things and I networked with a whole bunch of people and it's been years right since that philosophy project during college and working on my stuff during you know as I was working on in companies and after that the b2b search software in the hiking so it really it was years in the making and this was my first sort of lukewarm success and it was harder than I guess then now now things are easier but I don't want to use that as an excuse so that happened and then one thing that I really realized I had this epiphany that if only somebody had coached me if only I had a mentor then I could have avoided oh my god so many mistakes that the next thing I wanted to build was like something for me but an earlier version of me so I made a mobile app and at that time mobile apps were getting popular it was like 2011 2012 and I was thinking well make a mobile app for entrepreneurs and I'll help them kind of like a coaching app and that app actually succeeded that app did well and I started giving people advice and people use it for their business planning and I coach people through the apps I didn't coach them like you see a lot of people offering coaching packages but I would answer questions and I would communicate with people on somewhat of a regular basis and it gave me a lot of experience not just with my businesses but in addition to my businesses with other people's businesses and if you go back to that app I've helped over a thousand people I think now it's almost silly to say it and I don't say it anymore I just say like over a thousand people but really I've coached now over between two and three thousand people some in limited capacity obviously like some I just advised them through the app but many many of them definitely I think over a thousand has been over Skype coaching since then and but it's been years so but that those are the numbers and it's crazy how many people I've helped and some people have gone on to have amazing businesses many of them I'm still friends with and so that coaching aspect that stayed and that app actually because I was kind of like it wasn't just an app right for every other app is just an app my app was more of a more interactive I was I was a human behind it and because of that that app quickly really rose to the ranks of the App Store's and through my extra support and extra care and extra work became one of the top business apps on Android at one point and it's still if you search Android for the word business it's still one of the top apps that comes up even though I don't really maintain it anymore and it's I've sort of moved on but that was really the beginning of everything else that I did that was successful and then in the next video I'm gonna sort of talk to talk you through explain to you what happened after that how I grew and built my business on top of that app .