00:00:00 · S0, S1, S2
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00:00:56 · S2, S3
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00:02:26 · Mick Johnson
[00:02:26] S4: Startups are a bad financial investment, but they're a great personal investment. You will learn more about what you are truly capable of founding a startup, than doing almost any other thing in the world, because you will put yourself out there into the world, and the only thing standing between you and your dream is yourself. And for folks who are into self development, or self learning or any form of inner learning, it's just one of the best things out there. My name's Mick Johnson and I've spent the last sixteen years sort of moving between large tech companies and doing a couple of small startups along the way. I was one of the first product managers on mobile for Facebook. I went to Google and spent some time working on maps for automotive, and then I went back to Meta to work on Facebook again. Australians have a little bit of wanderlust, right? We like to explore, we like to see the world. I've always liked travel, I've always liked exploring new things. I had a number of friends that had moved to the Bay Area. I was at a point in my life where I felt, okay, it's time for a change, time to try something new. Really, when I first came, just planned to be here for a couple of years. But I really grew to love The States. I really grew to love the Bay Area. I had a small startup called Gas Bag, which was a way to find cheap gas around you when the iPhone app store first came out, and then worked on location based apps. I would say the first startup that I did, my co founder and I, we were sort of new to Silicon Valley, we were sort of new to some of that culture. We ended up becoming Y Combinator batches. We were actually there when going through YC meant you got something like $6,000 per founder. We were paying ourselves $1,500 a month or something, right? Just trying to make ends meet, trying to make things work. We didn't really know how to raise money. We were just doing everything that we can without much of a map. We knew we had product market fit when our servers went down and people tried to call us. Because they wanted our service to work. That was when we knew we had it. You call it sort of searching in the wilderness a little. You're trying to get to product market fit, and you build thing A, and no one really responds, and build thing B, and no one really responds.
00:04:44 · Mick Johnson
And when you finally build thing X, and it takes off, you will know, and it's hard to describe that feeling until you've had it. I often coach people who've gone from a large tech company to being founder of a startup, and they always forget or deprioritize go to market. Because if you work for Google or Facebook, and you have a new feature or a new idea, you can get it in front of billions of people. That's not hard. Many early stage founders will say, well, we're planning to just build it, and we'll get referrals, and people will like it, and that's how we'll grow. But as an early stage founder, often your product can be pretty good, but if your go to market is amazing, you will get enough signal to truly make it great. And if you can't get people using your product, it doesn't matter. And so this can be any combination of calling people on the phone, creating search ads, doing content marketing, doing referrals, doing whatever it takes to actually get sales and marketing working for your business. We built some really interesting things, but ultimately it didn't scale, it didn't succeed. I went to Google and spent some time working on maps for automotive, and then I went back to Meta to work on Facebook again. And so the main thing I learned from both of my startup ventures, I'll say, startups are a bad financial investment, but they're a great personal investment. You will learn more about what you are truly capable of, founding a startup, than doing almost any other thing in the world, because you will put yourself out there into the world and the only thing standing between you and your dream is yourself. And for folks who are into self development or self learning or any form of inner
00:06:27 · S0, S1, S2
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00:07:20 · S2, S3
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