- How's it goin', everybody?
Dan Martell here, serial entrepreneur,
investor, and creator of SaaS Academy.
In this episode I'm gonna share with you
the biggest most expensive mistakes I made in my 30s
and if you wanna check out a previous episode
where I talked about the biggest
and most challenging situations,
frustrations I made in my 20s,
you can check that out.
But today I wanna talk about
really there's themes that I've seen previously
and when it's come to me is there's like
when I'm in my 20s there were like people
and this was very mind-set focused
and the reason why I bring that up
is because I believe that if you wanna grow in life
you have to focus on your growth game
and it's, a lot of it is gonna be mindset.
And I like to joke with people, you know,
if I haven't seen you in awhile
let me reintroduce myself, my name is Dan,
because my growth game is so strong
that I'm not really the same person
you may have known before.
Yes, it's me, my language,
my conversational style might be the same,
but the way I think and approach life is totally different.
So I wanna share that with you
and be sure to stay to the end
because I'm gonna tell you how to get access
to my "Dream 100 Training," an exclusive training
that I only delivered for coaching clients.
It's gonna help you really understand
how to build the peers around you
to attack any problem or outcome
you wanna achieve in your life.
Let's get into it.
(drums beating)
So giving you some context.
When I was, turned 30 years old,
I literally remember the night
it was when I was hanging out with my co-founder Ethan,
we built a company called Flowtown together,
my lawyer, Josh, who's an amazing dude,
amazing coffee guy and a world-class lawyer,
and it was, it was nutty.
It was full-on running around
the Mission District in San Francisco
we're kinda, I think we might have just closed
a round of funding so 1., or 750 K in seed-funding
from incredible investors
and that was the celebration, right,
my birthday is at the end of the year, December 26th.
So you know January 1st, new year, 30 years old,
kind of starting off on this first venture back to company,
I'd done a previous company prior to that.
And then going all the way to the end, 39, 40 years old,
you know, which I just recently celebrated,
and looking at not only building and exiting Flowtown,
but starting another company called Clarity.Fm
and scaling that raising 1.6 million in funding
from Mark Cuban and a bunch of other incredible dudes,
you know hundreds of thousands of calls,
exiting that, and then starting
one of the largest YouTube channels on the internet
for a B2B SaaS founders and there's a whole lot of other
businesses that occur it's so much crap,
like I'm gonna give you everything.
My commitment in this video is to give you everything
to let you understand how I made those mistakes
and got into it and the cost they had on my life
and kind of the new decision I made since going there.
Let's get into it.
Number one, dirty vision.
So I say this is because I think that
if you wanna get the most of life
you need to have a clear vision
for where you wanna end up.
And having just moved to San Francisco when I was 28,
starting Flowtown with Ethan, my co-founder,
I honestly was not committed to the business.
I was kind of half in originally when I started
I was an unemployed co-founder, so go figure,
I was really just an early investor
and over time I kind of led marketing,
I led business development,
and I say that because
one of the biggest regrets that I had was,
was making it hard on Ethan to have my commitment.
I was still travelling the world,
you know investing in other start-ups
and I mean even though my 40 hours a week
were definitely like incredibly valuable for Ethan
as a first time, you know, founder,
well he'd built some smaller companies earlier
but this was like the big one.
I realised that my vision
for my personal life wasn't clear
and because it wasn't clear I wasn't able
to make better decisions about where I focus
and invest in my time and that probably cost me
I would say 30 to 40% more upside for Flowtown
in regards to the exit number
because had I been more dedicated to that
we would've obviously created more value.
I probably would've missed, we made this big mistake
where we depended on a data source through Facebook,
Facebook changed our API and our whole product went to zero.
I've covered this many times in previous episodes
so you can go listen to, you search Flowtown story,
Dan Martell, you'll come across it,
and I think that had I been focused
we would've potentially gotten ahead of that,
I don't think we could've avoided it,
but it would have been less painful.
So just being half-ass, half-in,
and not having a clear vision for my life
made it hard to make decisions.
Number two, Steve Jobs' effect.
I'm admitting this to everybody on the internet,
my team knows this, in the past I was way worse
when I was in my 20s, and what happened
is I moved to San Francisco and I started listening
to all these like start-up podcasts, and interviews,
and Stanford key notes, and I was hearing all these stories
about driven founders and visionaries
and a lot of them kinda painted a picture
of kind of a dictator, and somebody that was
aggressively driven, et cetera, and I think I allowed
those narratives to play out in the way
I led and managed other people so much so
that I was definitely very aggressive
in my nature as a leader and it caused people,
it caused a lot of friction amongst the team
so much so that Ethan was like, hey dude,
like I'll run the team, you go work on these things
because it's really disruptive.
I remember about two years into the company
we were having a product meeting,
it was after we got shut down
and had to rebuild our whole business
and one of the lead engineers was saying you know like,
"we need to run tests, we need to measure,
we need to, lean start-up,"
like this is something you preach
and there was just something about
the way he said that to me, and he knows,
if you're watching this I apologise profusely,
I freaked out.
Like I literally,
I was very aggressive
and we had to like stop the meeting
and kinda diffuse things and deescalate,
and I just realised since then that for me going forward
I'm just not gonna be that person.
I think that there is a better way to communicate
that not only allows your top people
to feel like they have a voice,
make sure that they don't leave you
because people don't quit companies
they quit shitty bosses and it just is a better energy
for the overall team.
'Cause I'm the kind of guy, I wear my heart on my sleeve,
like if I'm having a great day people feel it,
if I'm having a bad day, trust me,
the, it's almost like the energy and the mood,
or the mood in the room just diminishes
and that is something that I did a lot
kind of into my mid 30s and then just decided one day
I wanna be a better leader,
I wanna show up in a more positive light
and I don't wanna use fear and anger to lead
I think there's a better way.
And I credit a lot of these incredible books,
from "Radical Candour, " to "Five Dysfunctions of a Team,"
to start "Start With Why," et cetera,
like literally any book on leadership from John Maxwell's,
et cetera, I read them, I digested them,
I implemented them into my life
so that I didn't bring that forward now
into my, you know, I'm 40 years old.
Number three, lost deals.
So here's the thing about being an investor, okay,
they call it the anti-portfolio.
These are the deals that you didn't do
that you should've done.
So for example, I was in the room with Travis,
Travis Kalanick from Uber was an investor in Flowtown,
we were in what he called the jam pad
working on product strategy for our company
while Uber Taxi was being created
and I had all these rules about investing
that I passed on and what I've discovered since then,
and so like lost money, that probably cost me
about 50 million dollars when I look at like, you know,
25K check, over time, 30 billion dollar valuation,
it works out to around that.
Other companies like Teachable,
I remember getting introduced to Ankur,
the CEO and Founder,
and because I was going through a lot of stuff at the time
with other portfolio companies,
I probably invested about 25 at that time,
and just like a few of them were like failing
and the thing that nobody tells you about angel investing
is you spend most of your time with the worst companies
and not that they're bad entrepreneurs
but the ones that are having a hard time
finding product-market fit,
or a scalable growth engine,
and I just, I just immediately I didn't even take the,
I make have tooken the meeting but a 10-minute meeting,
listened and passed on it
and Teachable went on to sale for 250 million
about five years later.
So, you know, when I think of
what's changed for me in my life
is I'm 100% people-focused on my investments.
I don't pass on deals anymore
because of what's going across my portfolio,
or even the market that's the other thing,
is I'm disconnected from the emotions and the market.
If I find great founders attacking a problem
that I feel I can be helpful with I invest
because I don't wanna make those same mistakes
I made in the past and that costs me probably, you know,
60, 70 million dollars in lost opportunities
that I just don't, I haven't made
in the last two or three years.
So, big, big lesson learned.
If you're using your previous biases
to not make decisions on investing in anything,
even business, people, marketing,
maybe you don't do Facebook
'cause you had a bad experience in the past,
you need to really reassess why that happened
and make sure that it was not a person problem,
or a situation problem, it was specific to that,
that decision or outcome or approach to making the decision
that was the issue.
Number four, party too much.
Yep, I'm admitting it.
Back when I said I turned 30
and I ran around, you know, the city of San Francisco
doing way too many shots and partying like it was 1999,
that went on for years.
And when I look back on the amount of time,
people always talk about the money,
I don't care about the money, I look at time.
When I look at the Sundays laying in bed hungover,
rolling into the Mondays, the mid-week, you know,
six or seven drinks at dinner,
causing you to be foggy in your work and irritable,
et cetera, and just like the impact on my life,
and the upside of those moments,
for me the straw that broke the camel's back
was when Renee, my wife, told me she was pregnant
with our first son, Max, and I made the decision
shortly after that to never touch alcohol ever again
for the rest of my life.
And you can ask her yourself,
honestly I don't think she believed it at the time
and even though I think I might've said,
"oh I gotta quit for 30 days, I gotta do sober October,
et cetera, in the past, I knew better.
You know I grew up in a household
where my mom was an alcoholic,
I ended up in rehab when I was 17 for hard drugs.
Like, you know, I didn't drink for awhile
into when I was 23, 24, I decided to start drinking socially
and it just, I knew that wasn't my style
and I didn't have the courage to make that decision
and when I look at the impact it had
definitely on my 20s, but in my 30s,
and then deciding to stop and the gift that it's been,
for me and my family.
I just didn't want my kids to grow up with a father
that was potentially an alcoholic.
I didn't want the, I didn't want them
to experience the things that I experienced in my household
because of alcohol.
And it is something that to me is fundamental to who I am.
Now everybody just accepts it 'cause they know
I'm like the best person to have around if you're drinking
'cause I'm the designated driver.
And I honestly have not, I'm just as fun,
have just, and guess what I wake up the next day
it's 5:00 a.m. and I'm fine.
Like it's so crazy the amount of more output and production
that I can invest in my family, in my health,
in my businesses, that because of,
if you think about personally, I mean,
I'd rather you do marijuana over alcohol
because alcohol poisons your body.
I mean it's just, it's a weird thing.
So anyways I'm not hear to preach
I'm just sharing with you my biggest mistakes,
that is definitely one I let go on way too long.
It has now been almost eight years
that I made that decision.
It was one of the best decisions I made
in the last decade.
Number five, no coaching.
Here's the crazy part.
I started two failed companies at 17 and at 20
and it wasn't until I was like 24 that I decided
to give it another shot with this company,
SPHERE Technologies, but what was different about that time
is right before I started the company
I actually hired an EMyth coach.
I read the book "The Entrepreneurial Myth,"
by Michael Gerber, I hired a business coach named, Bob,
amazing dude, and I had a coach in my life for awhile.
I've always believed that if you wanna move faster
have somebody that is supporting you to give you feedback
to give you ideas to hold you accountable.
And for awhile there while I built Flowtown
I didn't have a coach and what happened to me
is it allowed me to think too small, it didn't push me,
it didn't give me the perspective I needed
that I know when I coach my clients that I give them, right?
It's always about having somebody
that's gonna push you to think a little bit more,
stretch your belief system, share perspectives,
stories, et cetera, that's gonna get you to take action.
And I ended up hiring Marcy, an incredible coach,
her company's called, StartupHappiness,
if you reach out to her obviously say, "hello" for me,
and Marcy, 'cause what was crazy for me
is I built Clarity okay with no co-founder,
while my wife was pregnant,
and after she gave birth, right before she gave birth
I ended up closing 1.6 million in funding
and then she found out she was pregnant three months later.
Like if you're never met Irish twins, okay,
my kids are 11 months apart, if I didn't have a coach
I don't even know what my life would look like.
I probably would've gave up.
It was, and then on top of that,
my wife and I decided to move twice, don't ask,
literally it's almost like,
you know that quote that says,
if you want something done
give it to the busiest person you know.
I just figured that we're already in it
let's just keep doing stuff, let's just say, "yes,"
to every opportunity.
And we built a summer home,
eventually we moved back to where I grew up
and we built our longer-term home
and while my wife was pregnant.
I mean it went, it almost went sideways,
and I will tell you I didn't have a coach
in the first part of my 30s,
having a coach like Marcy, and then on since then
I now have three coaches in my life today.
I'm a big fan of, you know,
investing in the areas of your life
that you wanna move forward and I think
that's the biggest thing that I've realised
is if I wanna, you know, I'm training for a triathlon,
or an Iron Man, so hire an Iron Man coach.
I wanted to learn how to kiteboard,
hire a kiteboarding coach.
Somebody to hold you accountable, set the schedule,
teach the skills, et cetera,
you'll just get there way faster.
Business is a no-brainer.
The ROI on investing in yourself for your business,
if you can't justify that then you don't understand
what an investment is.
You think it's a cost, an expense,
and to me getting your mindset better
so that you can lean into your future,
and opportunities with a different perspective that,
that's invaluable.
So to me not having a coach
was probably the biggest mistake
of just continuing the momentum
I'd built in my life at that point
but not really making it.
It could've been a faster more aggressive slingshot
had I continued to have somebody to push me to think bigger.
So quick recap, the "Five Mistakes I Made in My 30s."
Number one, I had a dirty vision.
Number two, Steve Jobs' effect.
Number three, lost investment deals.
Number four, partied too much
and number five, no coach.
As I mentioned in the beginning of this episode
I wanna share with you an exclusive training called the,
"Dream 100," you can click the link below
to get your access.
Essentially it's the hundred people
that I believe you need to recruit in your life
to help you accomplish any outcome or dream,
specifically for your business success.
If you wanna create a world-class SaaS company
that's doing, you know 10. 20, 50 million a year
in annual reoccurring revenue,
you wanna have these three groups of people sorted out.
Number one is the peers, two is the advisors,
three are your mentors.
I have a very unique approach to each one of those,
how to recruit them, I cover all that in the training.
Click the link below to get access to that.
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And also leave a comment and let me know
what some of your mistakes or lessons learned you've had
along your journey.
I'd love to hear from them below in the comments
and as per usual I wanna challenge
you to live a bigger life,
and a bigger business and I'll see ya next Monday.
Always check the audio because you never know
when the mic's gonna drop, boom.