Episode 14: Best Time Part 2

When something pisses you off in your life, pay attention! That something – maybe an inconvenience, a sloppy product, or a crusty English tutor with a tweed jacket and elbow patches – may just lead you to a business idea. Any emotion, even grief, as Glenn shares in this episode, can inspire any one of us to create something meaningful.

Transcript

Glenn Suart 0:00

Because you can always complain, Oh, I don’t have enough money, I’m too old, I’m too young. Now is a great time no matter what circumstances you have… is to look for an opportunity, do something better, and give it a shot without going crazy and spending a ton of money or… you’ll never wish you didn’t do it.

Doug Ross 0:28

Welcome to Conversations on Startups, a podcast brought to you by Douglas Ross, author of the book, Spark Click Go: How to Bring Your Creative Business Idea to Life, and Glenn Suart, of Today’s Great Idea, a radio series featuring over 300 origin stories of businesses, brands and inventions that have changed the culture. Welcome to today’s conversation.

Doug Ross 0:54

Welcome back to Conversations on Startups with Doug and Glenn. We are happy to be talking today… picking up on a topic we started last time, and it was, Why now is a great time to be an entrepreneur. And we thought that… we had some more to say about that. So, we decided to revisit it. Why not, right, Glenn?

Glenn Suart 1:18

Absolutely. And, you know, there’s so much to talk about. And let’s just jump right into it right away. One of the things that, you know, why is now a good time is, because as we sort of alluded to last time, there’s new tools available for you to do things that you may not have had before, and that allows you to take an idea and run with it. And so, Doug I’m going to tell you a story right now and you take a guess, you know, who I’m talking about. This is an example of somebody taking advantage of stuff. So, you know, Drew works at MIT, he’s an engineering student, he loves it, you know, he runs around the campus, does everything – he can log on anywhere. And, you know, he gets his desktop and has his files instantly. And then he graduates and he goes to work for some startups and it’s like going back to the Stone Age because, you know, he has to carry everything around on a thumb drive. And, he thought to himself, there’s got to be a better way than this and so he came up with something and he pitched it to venture capitalists with the idea… Tom Cruise [in] Minority Report never carried around a thumb drive! So that sort of got these venture capitalists to give him some money. And then what he did was he explained the idea with a video before he actually did it to get people interested in the idea. So he had a really exciting audience ready for this product, and he put it out there and it’s pretty big. And, you know, now what… 13/14 years later, he’s a multimillionaire, you know, 500 million people use this thing every day…or around the world. Any idea what I’m talking about?

Doug Ross 2:50

Well, it sounds like some sort of cloud storage. I think I use it for my…my own work and it’s not Google Drive, I’m thinking Dropbox.

Glenn Suart 3:00

Dropbox, it is. And the reason it’s so relevant to this is that, Is today a good time? Yeah! Like 14 years ago there was… there was a problem in front of Drew, and he solved it. There’s lots of problems today that didn’t exist… and before and there’s lots of new tools that weren’t existing 14 years ago, such as Dropbox, that you might be able to use to create your great idea and move it forward. [Absolutely] So that’s just an example of using tools. And what about you? You gotta have some examples…

Doug Ross 3:32

Well, I do. But can I riff off of your your Drew example?

Glenn Suart 3:36

For sure.

Bridget 3:38

You’re listening to Conversations on Startups with Doug and Glenn, thanks for joining us. Let’s get back to the show.

Doug Ross 3:47

A couple of things you said there… one of the best questions that a person can ask themselves… an aspiring or developing entrepreneur can ask themselves, There’s got to be a better way? If you ask that question, and many people do, and you go one step further, which is, Hey, I can build this thing in a better way, you’re probably in the 95th percentile of people that are on this sort of entrepreneurial journey. You’ve taken the big step and you’ve said, There’s got to be a better way, and I’m the guy or the gal – the person – to do it in a better way. So I love, love, love that question. It’s second only to my other favorite question, which is, What would happen if we did X? So I love that kind of question that Drew said… Drew asked himself in that example that you mentioned. One that I can think of as well, another young person is… I’m not sure how old Drew was but I think you said he was in college.

Glenn Suart 4:50

Yeah, he was at MIT. Yeah.

Doug Ross 4:52

Okay, so I’m going back a little bit earlier… and this gentleman was in what we would call middle school, maybe he was early on in his high school career, and he suffered from a condition. And this caused him to miss school so he was falling behind. And, what did his parents do? They found him a tutor. So in walks old, crusty guy with the patches on the elbows, okay [ready to learn] trigonometry, here we go, rubbing his hands. And this gentleman just thought that same thing, there’s got to be a better way. First of all, I don’t really relate all that well to middle aged men coming into my house, and it’s expensive for my parents, which kind of puts pressure on me. There’s got to be a better way. And just… he came up with the idea of finding tutors that would be… they themselves would be college students, but they’re looking for a little bit of extra money. They don’t charge much for the tutorial type of service and matching them up with students. So he essentially came up with a… with a marketplace online. He did this in his bedroom, didn’t need any capital, didn’t need anybody’s permission, you know, some of the classic hallmarks… hallmarks of an entrepreneur. You may not know his name, but I’ll ask you, just to put it back… put you on the spot for a second, Glenn.

Glenn Suart 6:19

I don’t know it, but it sounds like a hell of a great idea. Yeah.

Doug Ross 6:22

Guy’s name is Ed Beccle. He called this idea of his, Gust [correction, Grasp], – and that did work well – and then he went on and built that out even bigger and then merged this company. Now he was doing coaching within companies, and he had never worked in a company, but he just noticed that people, you know, training wasn’t happening and there was all this expertise within companies, we should just match people up through some sort of database program inside big companies and we can have this internal mentoring type of program. And that is a company that he just essentially sold to another firm… merged with. This guy is 22 now… and he’s got nowhere to go but up.

Doug Ross 6:24

Hey podcast listeners, we’re gonna take a short break now. If you’re enjoying the show, feel free to invite your friends, remember to subscribe, and if you want to help spread the word leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Each episode of Conversations on Startups focuses on a single topic. If you want to comment on something you’ve heard on the podcast, or suggest a topic for us to cover in a future episode, send an email to: go@todaysgreatidea.com or douglas@sparkclickgo.com. Glenn and I appreciate you and hope you find our uncut and unrehearsed stories, perspectives, and tips helpful. Speaking of helpful stuff-let’s pick up where we left off.

Doug Ross 7:52

He’s got other things up his sleeve. But again, tools are there at your disposal. In this case, it’s a little bit of programming skills, it’s internet access, and I would say a whole lot of gumption.

Glenn Suart 8:06

Yep, that’s a great summary. So, you got a problem, there’s got to be a better way. Sounds like a website domain we should investigate.

Doug Ross 8:16

… I’ll make a note.

Glenn Suart 8:19

And… and you go, as soon as you have the idea, do something with it, take some action. And all it takes is… such as this, There’s Got to be a Better Way, is a website domain, all right. I’m sure somebody’s already thought about it but you know, let’s go take a look. Costs us no time to look for it, and maybe that becomes a great new business for us because it summarizes everything we’re after. That’s what you do, you take action with whatever idea you have today. And today is a great day to take action… as you think about this website, you know, next month or, you know, two months from now, it might be gone.

Doug Ross 8:54

Yeah, absolutely! Do something to explore that. So you and I will have to do that so that our listeners can hold us accountable. But, the thing is about these problems, if you have a problem – you’re seeing a problem like these two in our examples today, chances are other people have a similar problem [Yes] or would really appreciate the solution that you’ve come up with if it’s using the best of what’s out there today, so matching technology in this case. In the case of Drew, cloud storage, you know, and Amazon services and all of that. Chances are people will like your solution and you can… you can test it out and see. Try it on a few friends, maybe post something, create that website, create a landing page and see if you can attract people to it, tweet about it; Hey, looking for tutorial services, hop on over here and we’ll see if we can line you up with someone.

Glenn Suart 9:47

Well, everything we’ve talked about has been I don’t mean to say, you know, a positive thing, identify a problem, solve it that type of thing. Other reasons to do something today – and it’s a great day to do something – is if you… you’ve, you’ve suffered for a reason. And, you know, one story, you know, you and I’ve talked about already, not necessarily on air here, but there previously is the story of Robert Munsch, the children’s book author. And the reason I mentioned it this way is that, you know, everyone knows his story… but his story is [The] Paper Bag Princess, etc. – if you’ve got young kids…his most popular one is one called Love You Forever, one of the most popular children’s books of all time. But what it came out of was grief, you know, he was born in Pittsburgh but was a daycare / preschool person in Guelph, Ontario and write… would write stories all the time – that’s how he got into the business of writing children’s books. But he and his wife had tried to have kids a couple of times and they had two stillborn children, and they were devastated by that. And he… he wrote Love You Forever as a love song to his two kids that he missed. So that power of grief was really instrumental in him sharing that grief with others, and you appreciate the kids you have if you know that story. So I guess the point is, even in bad circumstances, or you can… it’s still a good time to do something with that and channel it the right way – into something powerful.

Doug Ross 11:22

Yeah, who would think that in the midst of all of that you would… you would find something that strikes a chord with other… other individuals? That’s a… that’s a fantastic story. I hope that it was of help to him as an author, doing that as well.

Glenn Suart 11:37

It’s basically therapeutic at that point.

Doug Ross 12:03

Yeah, it’s kind of like you regret the things you didn’t do, as opposed to the things that you did try. Yeah, I agree with that. So we want people to NOT have regrets. That’s part of our mission.

Glenn Suart 12:15

That’s exactly right. All right. Well, I think we’ve beat this… this point to death. If you haven’t heard it already, go and do something – now is a great time to do it. We have to go now because we have to go, and – first, I gotta get this hammering to stop in the background – and then we have to go… we have to go check out some websites, don’t we now, Doug?

Doug Ross 12:40

Somebody is knocking on your door. I think Glenn.

Glenn Suart 12:43

Opportunity!

Doug Ross 12:44

Opportunity is knocking. Tell them to be quiet. No. Modern life, working out of homes. Great, Glenn, this has been a good extension to our conversation [we} touched on a lot of different things. Oh, by the way, you mentioned that Drew guy, you know, he was supported by Y Combinator. One of the best accelerators out there. Maybe in a future episode we can talk a little bit about what accelerators are and incubators, because these are… these are support groups, I guess I would say organizations that exist to help entrepreneurs form their… better define, form and launch their ventures. How ’bout we do that in a future episode?

Glenn Suart 13:29

Well, it sounds like the next episode we do. I think it’s a great one.

Doug Ross 13:33

Good. Let’s do that. Well, this has been Conversations on Startups with Doug and Glenn. We’ve enjoyed talking with you today. We’ll see you next time.

Glenn Suart 13:40

Sounds good. See you soon.

Doug Ross 13:54

Conversations on Startups is a production of Glenn Suart and Douglas Ross. We hope you’re having fun listening but mostly that you take action on your business idea. For more inspiration visit our websites: todaysgreatidea.com and sparkclickgo.com. Another episode of Conversations on Startups will drop soon, or is already available to binge. Thanks for joining us, and remember to subscribe and invite your friends. See ya next time!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai