Dan Martell - Most Expensive Mistakes I Made in My 30s

00:00:00.000 How's it going, everybody?

00:00:00.780 Dan Martell here, serial entrepreneur, investor,

00:00:02.400 and creator of SaaS Academy.

00:00:03.960 In this episode, I'm gonna share with you

00:00:05.240 the biggest, most expensive mistakes I made in my 30s.

00:00:08.900 And if you wanna check out a previous episode

00:00:10.840 where I talked about the biggest

00:00:12.160 and most challenging situations, frustrations

00:00:14.980 I made in my 20s, you can check that out.

00:00:17.940 But today I wanna talk about,

00:00:19.460 really, there's themes that I've seen previously.

00:00:22.760 And what has come to me is there's like,

00:00:25.000 when my 20s, there were like people,

00:00:27.060 and this was very mindset-focused.

00:00:29.520 And the reason why I bring that up

00:00:30.740 is because I believe that if you wanna grow in life,

00:00:33.280 you have to focus on your growth game.

00:00:36.180 And a lot of it is gonna be mindsets.

00:00:37.980 And I like to joke with people,

00:00:39.320 you know, if I haven't seen you in a while,

00:00:40.760 let me reintroduce myself.

00:00:42.660 My name is Dan because my growth game is so strong

00:00:45.380 that I'm not really the same person

00:00:47.380 you may have known before.

00:00:48.620 Yes, it's me, my language,

00:00:50.960 my conversational style might be the same,

00:00:52.540 but the way I think and approach life is totally different.

00:00:55.620 So I wanna share that with you.

00:00:56.980 And be sure to stay at the end

00:00:57.760 because I'm gonna tell you how to get access

00:00:58.840 to my Dream 100 training, an exclusive training

00:01:02.100 that I only delivered for coaching clients.

00:01:05.280 It's gonna help you really understand

00:01:06.560 how to build the peers around you

00:01:09.220 to attack any problem or outcome

00:01:11.040 you wanna achieve in your life.

00:01:12.320 Let's get into it.

00:01:25.740 So giving you some context,

00:01:27.340 When I was turned 30 years old, I literally remember the night I was hanging out with my co-founder, Ethan.

00:01:33.540 We built a company called Flowtown together.

00:01:35.380 My lawyer, Josh, who's an amazing dude, amazing coffee guy, and a world-class lawyer.

00:01:41.740 And it was nutty.

00:01:44.100 It was full-on running around the Mission District in San Francisco.

00:01:48.100 We were kind of, I think we might have just closed a round of funding.

00:01:50.820 So $750,000 in seed funding from incredible investors.

00:01:56.020 and that was the celebration, right?

00:01:59.340 My birthday's at the end of the year, December 26th.

00:02:01.780 So, you know, January 1st, new year, 30 years old,

00:02:05.980 kind of starting off on this first venture-backed company.

00:02:08.740 I'd done a previous company prior to that.

00:02:10.640 And then going all the way to the end, 39, 40 years old,

00:02:14.860 you know, which I just recently celebrated

00:02:16.560 and looking at not only building and exiting Flowtown,

00:02:20.940 but starting another company called Clarity.fm

00:02:23.200 and scaling that, raising 1.6 million in funding

00:02:25.460 from Mark Cuban and a bunch of other incredible dudes,

00:02:28.420 you know, hundreds of thousands of calls, exiting that,

00:02:30.860 and then starting one of the largest YouTube channels

00:02:35.200 on the internet for B2B SaaS founders,

00:02:37.500 and there's a whole lot of other businesses that occurred

00:02:40.820 and so much crap, like, I'm gonna give you everything.

00:02:44.180 My commitment in this video is to give you everything 0.96

00:02:46.640 to let you understand how I made those mistakes

00:02:50.460 and got into it and the cost they had on my life

00:02:52.560 and kind of the new decisions I've made

00:02:54.800 since going there.

00:02:55.640 Let's get into it.

00:02:56.520 Number one, dirty vision.

00:02:58.800 So I say this is because I think that

00:03:00.960 if you wanna get the most out of life,

00:03:02.400 you need to have a clear vision

00:03:03.640 for where you wanna end up.

00:03:05.040 And having just moved to San Francisco when I was 28,

00:03:08.440 starting Flowtown with Ethan, my co-founder,

00:03:12.360 I honestly was not committed to the business.

00:03:15.480 I was kinda half in, originally when I started,

00:03:17.720 I was a non-employee co-founder, so go figure.

00:03:19.960 I was really just an early investor,

00:03:22.080 And over time, I kind of led marketing,

00:03:25.640 I led business development.

00:03:27.660 And I say that because one of the biggest regrets

00:03:30.860 that I had was making it hard on Ethan

00:03:34.200 to have my commitment.

00:03:35.720 I was still traveling the world,

00:03:37.900 you know, investing in other startups.

00:03:40.040 And, you know, I mean, even though my 40 hours a week

00:03:43.440 were definitely like incredibly valuable

00:03:45.940 for Ethan as a first time, you know, founder.

00:03:48.000 Well, he built some smaller companies earlier,

00:03:49.700 but this is like the big one.

00:03:51.580 I realized that my vision for my personal life

00:03:53.960 wasn't clear and because it wasn't clear,

00:03:55.920 I wasn't able to make better decisions

00:03:57.760 about where I focus and invested my time.

00:04:00.020 And that probably cost me,

00:04:03.460 I would say 30 to 40% more upside for Flowtown

00:04:07.560 in regards to the exit number

00:04:09.240 because had I been more dedicated to that,

00:04:11.620 we would obviously created more value.

00:04:13.500 I probably would have missed,

00:04:15.860 we made this big mistake where we depended on a data source

00:04:19.500 through Facebook, Facebook changed our API,

00:04:21.500 our whole product went to zero.

00:04:23.100 I've covered this many times in previous episodes,

00:04:25.700 so you can go listen to, you search Flowtown,

00:04:29.040 Story, Dan Martell, you'll come across it.

00:04:32.120 And I think that had I been focused,

00:04:34.060 we would have potentially gotten ahead of that.

00:04:36.020 I don't think we could have avoided it,

00:04:37.500 but it would have been less painful. 0.99

00:04:39.000 So just being half ass, half in, 0.98

00:04:42.280 and not having a clear vision for my life 0.98

00:04:45.660 made it hard to make decisions.

00:04:47.580 Number two, Steve Jobs effect.

00:04:50.400 I'm admitting this to everybody on the internet.

00:04:52.960 My team knows this.

00:04:54.860 In the past, I was way worse when I was in my 20s,

00:04:58.540 and what happened is I moved to San Francisco,

00:05:01.040 and I started listening to all these startup podcasts

00:05:04.600 and interviews and Stanford keynotes,

00:05:07.460 and I was hearing all these stories

00:05:11.100 about driven founders and visionaries,

00:05:14.280 And a lot of them kind of painted a picture

00:05:16.940 of kind of a dictator and somebody that was,

00:05:19.920 you know, aggressively driven, et cetera.

00:05:21.960 And I think I allowed those narratives to play out

00:05:25.740 in the way I lead and manage other people.

00:05:28.380 So much so that I was definitely, you know,

00:05:32.160 very aggressive in my nature as a leader.

00:05:34.500 And it caused people, it caused a lot of friction

00:05:36.840 amongst the team so much so that Ethan was like,

00:05:38.820 hey dude, like I'll run the team,

00:05:41.640 you go work on these things

00:05:43.100 because it's really disruptive.

00:05:44.640 I remember, you know, about two years into the company,

00:05:46.960 we were having a product meeting.

00:05:48.420 It was after we got shut down

00:05:49.900 and had to rebuild our whole business.

00:05:52.080 And one of the lead engineers was saying,

00:05:54.360 you know, like, we need to run tests,

00:05:56.780 we need to measure, we need to do lean startup.

00:05:59.020 Like, this is something you preach.

00:06:00.420 And there was just something about the way

00:06:02.380 he said that to me.

00:06:03.920 And he knows, if you're watching this,

00:06:05.740 I apologize profusely.

00:06:08.000 I freaked out.

00:06:08.980 Like, I literally,

00:06:10.720 I was very aggressive and we had to like,

00:06:15.120 can't like stop the meeting and kind of diffuse things

00:06:17.540 and deescalate.

00:06:19.000 And I just realized since then that for me going forward,

00:06:24.020 I'm just not going to be that person.

00:06:25.880 I think that there is a better way to communicate

00:06:28.400 that not only allows your top people

00:06:31.260 to feel like they have a voice,

00:06:33.380 make sure that they don't leave you

00:06:34.940 because people don't quit companies, 0.98

00:06:36.520 they quit shitty bosses. 0.77

00:06:37.480 and it just is a better energy for the overall team 0.98

00:06:41.960 because I'm the kind of guy, I wear my heart on my sleeve.

00:06:44.480 Like if I'm having a great day, people feel it.

00:06:47.080 If I'm having a bad day, trust me,

00:06:49.360 it's almost like the energy and the mood

00:06:51.320 or the mood in the room just diminishes

00:06:53.380 and that is something that I did a lot

00:06:56.540 kind of into my mid 30s and then just decided one day

00:07:00.160 I wanna be a better leader.

00:07:01.380 I wanna show up in a more positive light

00:07:02.980 and I don't wanna use fear and anger to lead.

00:07:07.020 I think there's a better way.

00:07:08.220 And I credit a lot of these incredible books

00:07:10.600 from Radical Candor to Five Dysfunctions of a Team

00:07:14.020 to, you know, Start With Why, et cetera.

00:07:18.540 Like literally any book on leadership

00:07:20.080 from John Maxwell's, et cetera, I read them,

00:07:22.180 I digested them, I implement them into my life

00:07:24.120 so that I didn't bring that forward now into my,

00:07:26.960 you know, I'm 40 years old.

00:07:28.360 Number three, lost deals.

00:07:30.280 So here's the thing about being an investor, okay?

00:07:33.040 They call it the anti-portfolio.

00:07:35.080 These are the deals that you didn't do

00:07:37.280 that you should have done.

00:07:38.700 So for example, I was in the room with Travis.

00:07:42.420 Travis Kalanick from Uber was an investor in Flowtown.

00:07:45.740 We were in what he called the jam pad

00:07:48.260 working on product strategy for our company

00:07:50.460 while Uber Taxi was being created.

00:07:53.360 And I had all these rules about investing that I passed on

00:07:57.580 and what I've discovered since then.

00:07:59.480 And so like lost money,

00:08:00.940 that probably cost me about $50 million

00:08:03.500 dollars. When I look at like, you know, a 25K check over time, $30 billion valuation,

00:08:09.640 it works out to around that. Other companies like Teachable, I remember getting introduced to

00:08:15.340 Ankur, the CEO and founder. And because I was going through a lot of stuff at the time with

00:08:21.320 other portfolio companies, I probably invested about 25 at that time. And just like a few of

00:08:26.340 them were like failing. And the thing that nobody tells you about angel investing is you spend most

00:08:30.180 of your time with the worst companies, and not that they're bad entrepreneurs, but the ones that

00:08:34.780 are having a hard time finding product market fit or a scalable growth engine. And I just, I just

00:08:39.560 immediately, I didn't even take the meeting. I may have taken the meeting, but made a 10 minute

00:08:42.920 meeting, listened and passed on it. And Teachable went on to sell for 250 million about five years

00:08:48.740 later. So, you know, when I think of what's changed for me in my life is I am a hundred percent

00:08:54.660 people focus on my investments. I don't pass on deals anymore because of what's going on across

00:09:01.080 my portfolio or even the market. That's the other thing is I'm disconnected from the emotions of

00:09:06.460 the market. If I find great founders attacking a problem that I feel I can be helpful with,

00:09:10.880 I invest because I don't want to make those same mistakes I made in the past. And that costs me

00:09:16.100 probably, you know, 60, $70 million in lost opportunities that I just don't, I'm not, I

00:09:22.680 haven't made, you know, in the last two or three years.

00:09:26.060 So big, big lesson learned.

00:09:28.180 If you're using your previous biases

00:09:30.360 to not make decisions on investing in anything,

00:09:33.020 even business, people, marketing,

00:09:35.280 maybe you don't do Facebook

00:09:36.360 because you had a bad experience in the past,

00:09:37.920 you need to really reassess why that happened

00:09:40.640 and make sure that it was not a person problem

00:09:43.620 or a situation problem.

00:09:45.260 It was specific to that decision or outcome

00:09:48.920 or approach to making that decision that was the issue.

00:09:52.100 Number four, party too much.

00:09:54.260 Yep, I'm admitting it.

00:09:55.920 Back when I said I turned 30 and I ran around,

00:09:59.800 you know, the city of San Francisco doing way too many shots

00:10:04.260 and partying like it was 1999, that went on for years.

00:10:09.960 And when I look back on the amount of time,

00:10:13.900 people always talk about the money.

00:10:15.740 I don't care about the money.

00:10:16.740 I look at time.

00:10:17.820 When I look at the Sundays laying in bed hungover,

00:10:21.140 rolling into the Mondays, the midweek,

00:10:24.380 you know, six or seven drinks at dinner,

00:10:26.840 causing you to be foggy in your work and irritable, et cetera.

00:10:31.560 And just like the impact on my life

00:10:33.460 and the upside of those moments, I, you know,

00:10:37.200 for me, the straw that broke the camel's back

00:10:39.460 was when Renee, my wife told me she was pregnant 0.65

00:10:43.600 with our first son, Max.

00:10:45.220 And I made the decision shortly after that

00:10:47.800 to never touch alcohol ever again for the rest of my life.

00:10:51.280 And you can ask her yourself.

00:10:53.220 Honestly, I don't think she believed it at the time.

00:10:56.480 And even though I think I might've said,

00:10:58.300 I gotta quit for 30 days,

00:10:59.640 I gotta do sober October, et cetera, in the past,

00:11:02.400 I knew better.

00:11:03.720 I grew up in a household where my mom was an alcoholic. 1.00

00:11:06.280 I ended up in rehab when I was 17 for hard drugs.

00:11:10.080 I didn't drink for a while,

00:11:12.120 into when I was 23, 24,

00:11:14.440 I decided to start drinking socially.

00:11:17.040 And it just, I knew that wasn't my style

00:11:19.880 and I didn't have the courage to make that decision.

00:11:22.820 And when I look at the impact it had definitely on my 20s

00:11:25.480 but in my 30s and then deciding to stop

00:11:27.840 in the gift that it's been for me and my family.

00:11:31.080 I just didn't want my kids to grow up with a father

00:11:35.400 that was potentially an alcoholic.

00:11:37.020 I didn't want them to experience the things

00:11:41.280 that I experienced in my household because of alcohol.

00:11:45.080 And it is something that to me is fundamental to who I am.

00:11:51.500 Now everybody just accepts this.

00:11:52.720 They know I'm like the best person to have around

00:11:54.280 if you're drinking because I'm the designated driver.

00:11:56.540 And I honestly have not, I'm just as fun,

00:11:59.980 I'm just, and I guess what?

00:12:01.520 I wake up the next day, it's 5 a.m. and I'm fine.

00:12:04.400 Like it's so crazy the amount of more output and production

00:12:08.560 that I can invest in my family and my health

00:12:11.140 and my businesses that because of,

00:12:15.300 if you think about personally,

00:12:16.940 I mean, I'd rather you do marijuana over alcohol

00:12:20.080 because alcohol poisons your body.

00:12:22.260 I mean, it's just, it's a weird thing.

00:12:24.400 So anyways, I'm not here to preach.

00:12:25.780 I'm just sharing with you my biggest mistakes.

00:12:27.620 That is definitely one I let go on way too long.

00:12:30.000 It has now been almost eight years

00:12:33.640 that I've made that decision.

00:12:35.320 It was one of the best decisions I made in the last decade.

00:12:38.600 Number five, no coaching.

00:12:40.740 Here's the crazy part.

00:12:42.080 I started two failed companies at 17 and at 20.

00:12:46.880 And it wasn't until I was like 24

00:12:49.100 that I decided to give it another shot

00:12:51.320 with this company Spheric Technologies.

00:12:52.940 But what was different about that time

00:12:54.820 is right before I started the company,

00:12:57.260 I actually hired an e-myth coach.

00:12:58.760 I read the book, The Entrepreneurial Myth by Michael Gerber.

00:13:01.420 I hired a business coach named Bob, amazing dude.

00:13:04.920 And I had a coach in my life for a while.

00:13:08.060 I've always believed that if you wanna move faster,

00:13:11.060 have somebody that is supporting you to give you feedback,

00:13:15.340 to give you ideas, to hold you accountable.

00:13:18.040 And for a while there, while I built Flowtown,

00:13:20.920 I didn't have a coach.

00:13:22.380 And what happened to me is it allowed me to think too small.

00:13:26.760 It didn't push me.

00:13:27.900 It didn't give me the perspective I needed

00:13:30.740 that I know when I coach my clients

00:13:32.680 that I give them, right?

00:13:34.040 It's always about having somebody

00:13:35.700 that's gonna push you to think

00:13:36.900 a little bit more, stretch your belief systems, share perspective, stories, et cetera, that's

00:13:42.020 going to get you to take action. And, you know, I ended up hiring Marcy, an incredible coach.

00:13:48.940 Her company's called Startup Happiness. If you reach out to her, obviously say hello for me.

00:13:55.340 And Marcy, because what was crazy for me is I built Clarity, okay, with no co-founder while

00:14:02.120 my wife was pregnant. And after she gave birth, right before she gave birth, I ended up closing

00:14:06.600 1.6 million in funding. And then, um, she found out she was pregnant three months later. Like

00:14:12.180 if you've never met Irish twins, okay. They're 11. My kids are 11 months apart. If I didn't have

00:14:18.340 a coach, I don't even know what my life would look like. I probably would have gave up. It was,

00:14:23.360 and then on top of that, my wife and I decided to move twice. Don't ask. I literally, it's almost

00:14:28.800 like, you know, that quote that says, uh, if you want something done, give it to the busiest person,

00:14:33.340 you know, I just figured, you know, we're already in it. Let's, let's just keep doing stuff. Let's

00:14:39.340 just say yes to every opportunity. And we, we, we built a summer home that eventually we moved back

00:14:43.700 to where I grew up and we built our, you know, our, our, our longer term home. And while my wife

00:14:50.060 was pregnant, I mean, it went, it almost went sideways. And I will tell you, I didn't have a

00:14:55.240 coach in the first part of my thirties, having a coach like Marcy. And then on since then, I now

00:15:01.320 have three coaches in my life today I'm a big fan of you know investing in the areas of your life

00:15:06.980 that you want to move forward and I think that's the biggest thing that I've realized is if I want

00:15:12.460 to you know I'm training for triathlon or an Ironman so hire an Ironman coach I wanted to

00:15:18.180 learn how to kiteboard hire a kiteboarding coach somebody to hold you accountable set the schedule

00:15:22.180 teach you the skills etc you'll just get there way faster business is a no-brainer the ROI on

00:15:27.920 investing in yourself for your business.

00:15:30.460 If you can't justify that,

00:15:32.300 then you don't understand what an investment is.

00:15:35.420 You think it's a cost, an expense.

00:15:37.940 And to me, getting your mindset better

00:15:40.760 so that you can lean into your future

00:15:43.640 and opportunities with a different perspective,

00:15:46.020 that's invaluable.

00:15:48.420 So to me, you know, not having a coach

00:15:51.760 was probably the biggest mistake

00:15:53.060 of just continuing the momentum I built in my life

00:15:55.920 at that point, but not really making it,

00:15:58.400 it could have been a faster, more aggressive slingshot

00:16:00.820 had I continued to have somebody

00:16:02.340 to push me to think bigger.

00:16:03.900 So quick recap, the five mistakes I made in my 30s.

00:16:07.760 Number one, I had a dirty vision.

00:16:09.760 Number two, Steve Jobs effect.

00:16:12.320 Number three, lost investment deals.

00:16:15.120 Number four, partied too much.

00:16:17.320 And number five, no coach.

00:16:19.900 As I mentioned in the beginning of this episode,

00:16:21.860 I wanna share with you an exclusive training

00:16:23.780 called the Dream 100.

00:16:25.360 You can click the link below to get your access.

00:16:27.960 Essentially, it's the 100 people

00:16:30.200 that I believe you need to recruit in your life

00:16:32.580 to help you accomplish any outcome or dream,

00:16:35.520 specifically for your business success.

00:16:37.500 If you wanna create a world-class SaaS company

00:16:39.560 that's doing 10, 20, 50 million a year

00:16:42.400 in annual reoccurring revenue,

00:16:43.880 you wanna have these three groups of people sorted out.

00:16:47.300 Number one is the peers, two is the advisors,

00:16:49.920 three are your mentors.

00:16:51.320 I have a very unique approach to each one of those,

00:16:53.540 how to recruit them.

00:16:54.460 I cover all that in the training.

00:16:56.060 Click the link below to get access to that.

00:16:58.800 If you like this video, be sure to subscribe to my channel.

00:17:01.280 Click the notification button

00:17:02.700 so you get notified when a new video goes live.

00:17:05.540 And also leave a comment.

00:17:06.660 Let me know what some of your mistakes

00:17:08.800 or lessons learned you've had along your journey.

00:17:11.180 I'd love to hear from them below in the comments.

00:17:13.800 And as per usual, I wanna challenge you

00:17:15.320 to live a bigger life and a bigger business,

00:17:17.420 and I'll see you next Monday.

00:17:20.100 Always check the audio

00:17:21.160 because you never know when the mic's gonna drop.

00:17:23.740 Boom! 0.99

00:17:24.460 Thank you.

Dan Martell - September 07, 2020

Most Expensive Mistakes I Made in My 30s

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