Dan Martell - July 20, 2015


Startup Advice： When To Shut It Down？ ｜ Dan Martell


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

224.94592

Word count

1,248

Sentence count

60


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about when to shut down a company or startup if it s just not going the way you think it should go and you want to shut it down. I talk through what to do if you ve been in a situation where your startup or project is just not working and you feel like it needs to go.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.560 When to shut it down.
00:00:01.880 I don't know if you've ever been in a position
00:00:03.400 where you have a company or startup or your project
00:00:06.280 and it's just not going the way you think it should go
00:00:09.520 and you want to shut it down.
00:00:10.840 Last week I was in New York
00:00:12.280 and I was talking to one of my good friends
00:00:13.600 and he'd been consulting,
00:00:15.720 that's kind of what he does full time,
00:00:16.840 and he had this other product that he'd been working on
00:00:19.320 as kind of some passion, an extension of his consulting.
00:00:22.360 And it wasn't going anywhere
00:00:23.640 and he really was wondering if he should shut it down.
00:00:27.040 The answer to him, because I was intimately aware
00:00:29.240 of kind of the progress and the energy he put into it.
00:00:32.240 I just said, hey man, just shut it down.
00:00:33.580 You know, like focus on the thing that you love doing
00:00:36.380 that you're really good at that you can get the value from
00:00:39.320 versus being distracted.
00:00:40.760 So that was an easy one, but I don't know
00:00:42.720 if you guys know this, but I've had many projects.
00:00:44.960 I probably own like 50 domains.
00:00:47.000 In earnest, probably started another dozen websites
00:00:50.260 or .coms, one of them was called Secret Sender App,
00:00:52.860 which was an easy way for you to send secret,
00:00:55.900 essentially secrets, to other people.
00:00:57.560 so like passwords and stuff.
00:00:58.760 I built that with my friend, Jeff,
00:01:00.460 and photovino.com, which was this really neat iPhone app.
00:01:04.000 You could take a photo of a wine bottle
00:01:05.600 and get two bottles shipped to your house in three days.
00:01:07.940 I know, sounds cool.
00:01:09.300 Turns out, totally illegal,
00:01:10.900 and probably not something you guys should try to replicate,
00:01:13.580 but I've started a lot of projects, I call them,
00:01:18.320 and at some point, I have to decide,
00:01:20.240 do I pursue it or do I shut it down?
00:01:21.880 So I want to kind of talk you through that thinking,
00:01:24.220 but the first area, the first question I ask myself
00:01:27.380 is am I passionate about this idea still?
00:01:29.880 And that is the first filter for really anything,
00:01:32.320 both starting and continuing,
00:01:33.780 but am I still passionate about this?
00:01:35.820 Do I still get excited about the idea?
00:01:38.120 Because a lot of times, when you get excited,
00:01:40.620 it's because you actually don't,
00:01:41.620 you're not aware of the effort it's gonna take
00:01:43.520 or how frustrating it's gonna be or the challenges.
00:01:46.240 So once you kind of know that,
00:01:48.040 where you've gone through a few iterations
00:01:49.740 in the product, it's out there,
00:01:50.840 there's people using it or not using it,
00:01:53.040 then you can ask yourself, you know,
00:01:54.140 am I truly passionate about solving this problem?
00:01:56.040 Or was it just something I had a good idea
00:01:58.980 or somebody said it was a good idea
00:02:00.620 and now you're like, you could care less.
00:02:03.440 So anyways, if you're not passionate about it,
00:02:05.680 shut it down.
00:02:06.960 The second thing I would say is,
00:02:08.320 have you come up with another idea
00:02:10.320 that seems better than that one?
00:02:11.820 So you can still be passionate about that one,
00:02:14.400 and that happens a lot for me,
00:02:16.000 but is the new idea even better, right?
00:02:19.760 Is the new idea, when you think about it,
00:02:21.340 you're like, man, the market's perfect,
00:02:23.000 the timing's great,
00:02:24.700 or the team that you got put together,
00:02:27.900 or maybe a potential co-founder, it's like,
00:02:29.400 oh, this idea is just perfect.
00:02:32.300 You know, and the other one is kind of like totally unrelated.
00:02:34.820 You know, if you come up with a better idea
00:02:37.120 and you feel like that's gonna have a further impact
00:02:39.980 if you have a strategy of where you want your business,
00:02:41.760 your life to go, and you feel like that is the one
00:02:44.120 that's gonna allow you to do that, shut it down.
00:02:46.660 You know, it's tough to do it because it's called sunk cost.
00:02:50.160 You know, it's all that time and energy invested
00:02:52.960 to really decide that you're not gonna do it anymore,
00:02:56.300 that's hard to do.
00:02:57.360 A lot of people aren't willing to take that sunk cost
00:02:59.600 and throw it away, but really great entrepreneurs can,
00:03:02.800 as long as they do it under the right context.
00:03:04.800 And what you don't wanna do is be somebody
00:03:06.540 who starts a lot of little things
00:03:08.080 and never actually gets anything done.
00:03:09.640 What I'm talking about, the passion or better ideas,
00:03:12.340 these are well vetted out.
00:03:13.840 And it actually brings me to the third strategy,
00:03:16.420 which is to give it three tries, three earnest tries,
00:03:20.920 like real shakes at the can.
00:03:23.360 Whenever I think about a new project I'm working on,
00:03:26.100 especially when it comes to marketing,
00:03:27.320 I feel like the first iteration,
00:03:29.100 the first time I do it and I put it out to the market,
00:03:31.300 that's like just kind of building the scaffolding.
00:03:34.340 Like everything's there, but it's probably not gonna work
00:03:36.940 because it's the first time.
00:03:37.900 I may not get the copy right,
00:03:39.140 I may not set up the ads right,
00:03:40.440 whatever the reason is,
00:03:41.800 I can't assume the first time it should just work.
00:03:43.680 So I always assume three tries.
00:03:44.940 Same thing for a product.
00:03:46.740 If you put it out in the market,
00:03:48.480 and then you're like, ooh, it didn't really work as well.
00:03:50.920 Let me get some feedback.
00:03:52.220 You get the feedback from the users.
00:03:53.820 You try it again.
00:03:55.160 And then it's like, a little bit better, but not really.
00:03:58.260 And you're like, okay, let me learn some more.
00:04:00.020 Let me look at the data.
00:04:01.160 And you give it another third try, truly earnest try,
00:04:05.360 and it doesn't work out?
00:04:07.400 Shut it down.
00:04:08.340 I mean, at the end of the day,
00:04:10.180 I feel like some people have this sense of like,
00:04:12.840 I've got to be tenacious and resilient and keep going,
00:04:15.780 but if it's not, if the dog doesn't hunt,
00:04:19.380 then stop hunting.
00:04:20.920 Like, just save yourself some time.
00:04:22.860 Go find a better idea.
00:04:23.880 Go find something you're passionate about.
00:04:25.080 Maybe there's, you have a friend
00:04:26.440 that's working on a startup
00:04:27.240 and starting to get traction.
00:04:28.340 Like, if you think about
00:04:29.580 where you want to end up in your life,
00:04:31.420 you don't want to be that guy.
00:04:32.640 And you see these folks on Dragon's Den
00:04:34.540 where they've invested 20 years of their life
00:04:37.180 in their whole life savings.
00:04:38.740 They've gone into the retirement savings.
00:04:40.880 And just because they feel that somehow
00:04:44.060 this has got to work, this is the idea.
00:04:47.260 And everybody in their life is telling them
00:04:48.800 that it's a bad idea, and they just don't do it.
00:04:51.700 I'm not, like, there's a fine line, but come on.
00:04:55.280 Like, if everybody's telling you it's not gonna work,
00:04:57.340 and you've given it three really good tries,
00:04:59.920 like, call it a day, shut it down.
00:05:02.140 Those are my suggestions for you.
00:05:03.980 I'd love if you liked this video
00:05:05.520 so that it could widen the impact and the views
00:05:08.080 that other people get to see.
00:05:09.260 Leave me a comment below if you've ever been in that position
00:05:12.060 or if you have any questions for me.
00:05:13.800 Again, I started 12 different projects
00:05:16.200 that never saw the light of day.
00:05:17.160 I've had to shut them down.
00:05:18.120 I know from personal experience, it's tough,
00:05:20.580 but over the years, when you finally figure ones
00:05:23.560 that work out and you have success,
00:05:24.820 it makes it so much easier because it allows you to focus.
00:05:27.980 I want to challenge you guys to live a bigger life
00:05:30.280 and a bigger business, and I'll see you guys next Monday.