(upbeat music)
- [Interviewer] So, for entrepreneurs, let say,
watching this, where they have a limited decent business,
a couple million dollars.
They want to go to the next level,
what advice do you have?
- Well, the whole talk on the growth mindset
where I talk about how to build a philosophy
in your organization to focus on continual revenue growth.
That's day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month, right.
It's a grind, right, it's very easy to get distracted,
I can do this, I can do that, et cetera,
but you really need to focus on every dollar I spend,
how do I earn the dollar back.
Every month you are going to be growing eight percent.
Every month because if you grow every month at eight percent
and you focus on that, per year you are doubling
your revenue every year on year
and when you double your revenue year on year
it's very quick before you become
a very very large business.
So, so, you know, I've got a whole talk
called growth mindset.
I encourage people to watch it, but, look,
there is a lot of potential out there.
There's still a lot of industries that
are kind of just waiting for people to
come in and start businesses in.
You know, there is a lot of industries where
software hasn't reached yet,
a lot of industries where technology hasn't reached yet.
So, yeah.
- And then if they could grow,
do you recommend they kind of bootstrap?
I remember your story, even, for freelancer.
At first you were just changing the copy,
changing the learning page.
- [Matt] Yeah.
- Just that already produces more revenue.
- [Matt] Yeah.
- You weren't thinking about throwing money at,
you know, the page at all.
- Yeah, so I didn't raise any money to
run the business as a freelancer.
I bootstrapped it, other than I took
two and a half million dollars in to
buy a website.
- Correct
- That was doing a million under revenue
and then had a lot of problems with it,
it looked terrible, it looked like craigslist,
everyone told me the problems with it.
I said great tell me more problems, I'll fix them.
- (laughing) I'll fix them
- Every time I fixed a problem the revenue goes up.
- Yeah.
- So, I just fixed things one after the other
after the other and, you know,
from the day I bought the business,
which was 2008, 2009.
2008 and 2009 I raised two and a half million bucks .
- Right.
- Didn't raise any other money.
Just fix problems, fix problems,
asked customers what comes next.
- [Interviewer] Feedback.
- Then took it public in 2013 and it was a
one point one billion dollar US evaluation
- No other money raised.
- Right.
- So the initial seed of investors made about
fifteen thousand percent return.
- [Interviewer] They're happy.
- So they made good money, very good money,
they're very happy.
You want to be careful you're not
in a very very small niche
because if you're in a niche you can be phenomenal
but if the global market size is twenty million bucks
and you're a great executer, you know,
your marked share won't be more than
twenty percent of that.
- Correct, correct.
You're riding the wave too, right.
- Yeah, yeah.
- You're in a position.
- You'll be hemmed in by two small market,
so you want to make sure.
It's blue ocean.
- [Interviewer] It is.
- Right, you want to be in the blue ocean market
where you don't care about your competitors.
- [Interviewer] That's right.
- [Matt] They're all minos in a massive massive sea.
- [Interviewer] (laughing) That's right.
- [Matt] All you care about
is eating that little fish right.
- That's right, that's right.
- And, and you don't care about, you know,
other sharks in the ocean.
If you're in red ocean,
like you're a telephone company, that's terrible.
If you get one customer, they're going to loose a customer.
- Ugh, that's right, right, right.
- Right, it's brutal.
- Yes, it seems like it.
So, for someone like yourself
who do you look up to as an entrepreneur,
like is there any role model where people are like,
that's such a, like that person inspires you
or you learn from them.
- Look, I don't sit there and kind of
read through biographies and, you know,
of various people.
I mean some people have obviously done phenomenal jobs.
Like you know, Bezos for example that was a phenomenal job.
- Yeah, right.
- I read The Everything Store once but, you know,
I don't sit there and kind of read everything that
kind of, he writes et cetera.
You know. Elon has done some great things.
He's also done some fucking crazy things.
- (laughing) Hundred percent.
No one is perfect.
- No, everyone is human, I can tell you that much.
- (laughing) Yeah, hundred percent, yes.
- Elon just tweeted "I am now dating Jeff Bezos' ex wife,
funding secured."
So you know like, no ones perfect, sorry man.
- (laughing)
- But, you know, there's plenty of people out there
who have done great stuff.
I just try, what I try to do is I try and learn.
When I meet someone who has got a great business
I try and ask them what was the one thing that
you really remember that really
took the company to the next level.
What was the one thing you did in terms of
marketing or growth or whatever,
- [Interviewer] Structure, strategy.
- That really was the secret
and I really try and figure that out.
- Let me ask the question in a different way.
How do you gather and learn, how do you gather information,
how do you learn, how do you, you know,
stay on the cutting edge?
Like, do you read magazines or do you read blog posts?
Where do you gather the intelligence?
- Yeah, well, in some ways it's reading things.
I'm always on my phone reading everything.
Look, the great thing is now all
the wealth information is out there.
You know, back ten fifteen years ago
you could read a textbook, maybe, you know.
You get to read Jeffrey Morgan, Crossing the Chasm.
Right, like the bowling pin strategy.
There's a lot, I love the early business texts in hindsight.
But, if you read like a Harvard business review case study
they always figure out the strategy
but they do it looking back ten years.
Right, well now there is just so much stuff happening
in real time, you know.
You can go online, you can read hacker news,
you can read whatever and all the information is out there.
- Do you also learn a lot from the team
because I find that I learn a lot
from the team, tells me kind of what is going on, right.
- [Matt] Of course, there are people smarter than you.
You are constantly learning from them
and that's exciting you to go to work, people smiling.
- Yes, and then they all learn from each other too.
- Yes, they love coming to work
because everyone's smiling.
- Yeah, that's right, that's right.
- And enthusiastic