Dan Martell - July 20, 2015


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

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Secret Sender App Jeff
Startup Balance With Kids： How To Be a Great Entrepreneur And Father How To Sell Your Company

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

224.95

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).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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.