171: Our Ugly Startup Story – How we started our business (It is not glamorous – so be ready) [Podcast]

Company of One with Dale Callahan

Our ugly startup story is something I have told many times - usually when I am speaking at an event. But, since I recorded the 9 steps to generate $30,000 per year, I have been talking to many of you about how you can start something. A lot of misconceptions and overcomplicated ideas out there. I wanted to open up and show you what a startup looks like for real (not the idealized things you see in Facebook Ads). So today I share our ugly startup story which will include lessons learned and how we might do it differently today. Our Ugly Startup Story - The AskDrCallahan Startup Story First, we were led to homeschooling our two daughters. The story was a three-year path from "we have never heard of homeschooling" to starting up. Get more details here. About us. The PAIN. The path into the business came from learning about PAIN. Friends, who were homeschooling and finding their kids also going into high school, were afraid of math. They simply could not teach high school math (their words - not ours.) This was the pain - they needed solutions. Knowing Lea and I are both engineers - they wondered how we might handle this problem. Pain is an important word here - pain is what makes people seek solutions and spend money. I am not talking about physical pain - we are talking about frustration or desire for something one does not have. Marketing pain. We were almost talked into starting a business. It was worded as "Can our son join in with you teaching your daughter - we will pay you. So we started to help. Then it grew into our pain. I will skip the details here because some of them are in our published AskDrCallahan story, About Us, but after 3 years of this, we were teaching a massive amount of courses in our basement. We were at a crossroads. Lea wanted to move us to a new plan and put the courses on DVD and sell them to friends or open a school. Since I always like to have 3 options to make a decision - I came up with a third - do nothing. Quit. I liked the sound of that option. The Opportunity Analysis To determine if going for a real business model with homeschool math, we needed to do an opportunity analysis. This is a quick way to determine if there is enough money to be made. The details of this initial analysis can be found on Podcast 87: How to Do an Opportunity Analysis. The key was that the numbers looked interesting enough to move forward. This process took about 30-60 minutes! START NOW Once you know the idea is a go - you just have to start. We decided on the right product to start with - the one we already had done a few times - Algebra 2 with Trig. The notes were ready, we just needed to get started and put it on the market. Stupid Steps In Call it stupid, distracted, perfectionist, etc., does not matter. This is the place where we start to overcomplicate things. We always do - and so do you. I know, I coach startups and see it EVERY SINGLE TIME. My stupid showed up with me wanting to create a video studio, buy the best equipment, and - well I will not go into more details, but you get the idea. Stupid and distracted. My wife (who as it turns out represents the customer base - more on that in an upcoming podcast) told me "Homeschool moms do not want fancy, they want the problem solved. It does not have to be pretty or packaged well - it has to solve the problem!" This is a great time to heed the quote, "If You're Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late" - Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn (Billionaire) So I took a whiteboard, a camera, and started teaching the course just like we did at the university. (OK - I do not teach math at the university - but you get the idea.) With our daughter doing the video editing (something she had never done), we had a product in a few weeks. Tell the World This is the MOST IMPORTANT PART OF BUSINESS - MARKETING. If you have a great product and nobody knows it, then who cares.