How to Reach the Top after a Failed Business (Without a ton of cash!) with Ian Ippolito

Founder and CEO of vWorker as well as Exhedra – Ian Ippolito

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Ian had a few successes while he kept his day job, but the true success didn’t come til after one business failed. This interview is packed with nuggets on finding a need in business, marketing that need to the right people, and what makes the elite so successful.

I was excited to interview Ian because his company RentACoder.com was something that I used in college to start my first business (that never went anywhere because I gave up!) It was amazing to hear the back story of how it became such a huge success. He also discusses how to find a new trend.

I highly recommend this interview! 🙂

Resources Mentioned on this Podcast:

• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore
• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
• Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy

Check out Exhedra.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy, and today we have Ian Ippolito on the show. I was super excited when I met him because he actually owned a website called Rent a Coder, and I remember when I was in college, I thought Rent a Coder was the coolest website ever. We actually used it quite a bit. So now it was changed into V Worker, and he ended up selling it not too long ago. I'm really excited. He's got a lot of really cool advice. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Ian.

Ian: It's my pleasure, Jaime.

Jaime: Going back, when I think about when I was in college, I thought Rent a Coder was this huge, crazy thing that was started by a company or something like that, but you were in your house when you created this.

Ian: That's right.

Jaime: Tell us how you even created Rent a Coder. 

Ian: Well, I had another website called Planet Source Code which was for computer programmers. It was around, I think this was around 2001. That site did well for awhile, but around that time was the dot com crash. That site was run on advertising, and it was a great business because it was something I just basically had myself and an extra employee. We were bringing in advertising, and people were paying big bucks back then. For that.

Jaime: Let's talk about then too. So Rent a Coder wasn't even your first business. You had something else before. So how did you get into that then? 

Ian: It was the sort of thing where I always wanted to start my own business, and I always was kind of on the lookout for "hmm, maybe this is an opportunity." I saw at that time, this was before the whole open source movement. I'm sure you know what it is, but for your listeners, it's the idea that there's free software out there. This was a long time ago; this was 2001. I created this website called Planet Source Code. What it was was a place for people to share their source codes. It was basically the open source idea. It did really well. It was getting probably four or five million visitors every single month. I had that, and I was selling advertising. It was interesting because back then people really didn't understand how advertising worked. Actually a lot of times you look at the website, and you kind of zone out on the advertising. You don't necessarily really look at it, but they didn't understand that back then. They were paying ridiculous amounts of money for advertising, people like Microsoft and Oracle, big companies were paying for, people who know advertising. They were paying 50 to 60 cpm. CPM means cost per thousand. Just to show their ad fifty times. Back then, it was just a tiny little 468 by 60 banner, a little thing. A little thing was fifty bucks. And if you had a million people coming, or millions of people coming, it was a pretty good business. That was Planet Source Code. I had that business, and it did great until the dot com crash came. Then what happened, all these companies that were my customers folded. I was in the situation like "Oh my gosh, I'm going to have to figure something out here. All my customers are dying." While I was there, I had this resource, Plant Source Code, with all these programmers. What could I do with them that, you know, could still be useful and viable? That's where the idea for Rent a Coder came. These guys are always asking me for help on programming. Always. I'm like "I'm too busy. I'm sorry I can't do that."  I thought "No, what if I could create something that I could let all of them just talk to all of the people who want programming done with the people who could do it? And somehow make it safe, like with an escrowing system, and arbitration, and all of that. I think that it could be a really successful business." That's basically how it started.

Jaime: That's crazy. Number one, that you said all your customers were dying off, but what's funny that you have this site with all these people, and none of them were your customers. The customers were all over here saying "Hey I'll pay you for advertising, and that's it." They were dying off, but you still had this crazy entity that was worth something. 

Ian: Yeah, a lot. 

Jaime: So you just went "okay, I have this idea. I'm going to put these things together." But you'd never done anything like that before, I'm assuming? How did you take those steps in order to start creating that? Especially when your capital was running out because all your money was drying up.

Ian: Yeah, yeah. It's true. It was just a situation. Thankfully, I had a full time job; I was working as a computer programmer. What I would do, I would work my full-time job, you know, eight, nine hours. I would come home. I would work another eight or nine hours on this new idea that I had.

Jaime: Wait. You had Planet Source Code that was bringing in, how much money was it bringing in?

Ian: It was bringing pretty good money.

Jaime: You still had a day job.

Ian: I was very, I was very conservative about it. I never quite trusted it, and in the end it was a good thing. Just like, it was so crazy. Back then things were crazy. Actually it actually seemed like a bubble, and it seemed like it couldn't last forever. I wasn't going to put all my eggs in that basket. You know what I mean?

Jaime: So you still had a day job? Even though that was bringing in? Was it just you at that time?

Ian: It was just me, and I hired another employee. 

Jaime: Okay

Ian: Just two people, and maybe even a third person, just part-time. I liked that. I was just, yeah. It was so easy; Planet Source Code didn't take any work. Everything on Planet Source Code was supplied by the users. I didn't really have to do anything. 

Jaime: I'm really surprised though that you wouldn't go "Yes, I'm going to be an entrepreneur and quit my day job." Beforehand, you had had your day job until then. What made you not pull that plug? I know that seemed a little risky, but if you had tons of cash coming in? 

Ian: You know what it is? Even that was not my first business. I had...

Jaime: Oh really?

Ian: Even then I had another business before that. I guess it was from past experience. Before that business, I had a business it was called Help Maker Plus. It was a computer program that would create help files. Again, this was even longer before that, and this was before help files were very simple to make. You had this very special compiled thing to make help files for computer software. I made this program. This was really my first entrepreneurial experience. I was definitely working full-time, and on the side, I created this little program. It was awesome. I put it on, there actually was no internet back then, I put it on AOL and I put it on CompuServe. I put it on these places, and people would download it. They would download it, and it was shareware, at the time it was this crazy idea. But everyone knows what it is now. Basically it's not fully active until you pay for it. I created the software once, and put it out there, and people would pay me for it. It would activate the software for them. It was an awesome little business. It paid for, like I was able to buy a new car. It wasn't like huge, huge money, but it was making a decent amount of money. I was able to buy a new car, and everything was going great. It did take a lot of work because people were always asking for enhancements and stuff like that. Then what happened was, all of the sudden one day, Microsoft made an announcement. It had been running well for maybe a year and a half. I was thinking of quitting my job, and one day Microsoft made an announcement, and they said, "We're getting rid of that old help file format, and we're making something brand new." The new one was so easy to use; you don't even need a program for it. Instantly that business was gone. Just like that. It was gone that day. Basically. Everything that had built up over a couple years was gone. I knew that things could change very quickly. At that time, 2001, things were just crazy. You could tell they were crazy. You could tell they weren't going to last. I was kind of of the attitude "I'm going to get as much as I can and take advantage of it right now, but I don't think it's going to be permanent."

Jaime: Squeeze as much out, and then run away. That's crazy. In the past, you had gone through a really risky situation, and if you had quit your job, it wouldn't have been very good for you.

Ian: I would have been under big, big pressure. I mean, I was under big enough pressure as it was. To be honest, I was probably over-extended. I had six T1 lines. This is the bandwidth to bring in because at the time you couldn't get bandwidth. Each one was fifteen hundred dollars a month. These were yearly leases. I still owed on very single one of those six T1 lines fifteen hundred bucks a piece. With all the customers dying, it still was not a good situation. Thank goodness I had the job, or I would have been suicidal probably. 

Jaime: Oh my gosh. Are you risk-averse? As a person, do you feel like you're risk averse? All entrepreneurs need some risk, and to be able to take, yeah. Tell me about that.

Ian: I'm not risk-averse, but I take very calculated risks. I think about them a lot. I do everything I can to try to eliminate the risk as much as possible. In the end, there's going to be times when you just have to go for it. Hopefully, I've eliminated as much risk as possible. 

Jaime: Do you go through a process? Chatting with people, or finding out, you seem like a data driven kind of guy. What's your process for trying to figure out whether to make decisions or not? 

Ian: I do both. A lot of times, I would love to make it a data decision a lot of times. But a lot of times, there just isn't the data there. I mean, if you're creating something brand new, which a lot of times entrepreneurs are, you don't know. You don't even really know "does the market want this? How big is the market?" You've got no idea. So what I would do, I would talk to people. I would get their input. I would think about it a lot, and just mull it over in my head and try to think about how can this go wrong. I would think of a million different ways that this could go wrong. Well how could I create? Then if that happens, what am I going to do? What am I going to do to make sure that doesn't happen? I'd just work it over and over and over again. That's basically my process. 

Jaime: Okay. You can still make a decision to keep moving forward. A lot of people end up getting paralyzed. Right? Where they go "There's so many things that could go wrong. I'm just going to sit here and not do any of it." What makes you actually continue to take action for it anyway? 

Ian: That's true, and I think if you can create a plan that reduces the risk, it can make you feel more motivated to go forward. Because, yeah, if you look at it, and you're like "All these things could go wrong," and you have no way to deal with them, that's pretty paralyzing. But if you go "Let me look at the top three problems here," and you look at them, you're like if this happens you have legitimate plans for it, you can fell a lot more enabled. 

Jaime: That's awesome. Tell us about Rent a Coder. You're going through, like I have all these resources, the people. You didn't necessarily have the people that were looking to buy programming, were you?

Ian: No, none.

Jaime: You had tons of programmers. How did you figure out how to make it into a business? 

Ian: That's a good question. That was a tough problem. That was one of my biggest problems. How am I going? That's great that I have fifty percent, but that's only one side. The way I solved that problem, well, I figured I could get it eventually, if I had enough money, things I didn't have, right, to do marketing. I thought eventually I could bring them in, but what could I do now with very little, minus cash flow.

Jaime: Every entrepreneur's pretty much problem all the time, right?

Ian: Yeah, exactly. I was like "what I could do, I already have some of these programmers who are asking me for help." Even though that's not a very big market of programmers asking other programmers for help, I thought that's a start. So I'm going to start and not focus on the bigger market, which would be entrepreneurs looking for programmers, but I'm going to start with this little tiny thing which is programmers looking for other programmers. The site was catered to them. It was a very technical site, and it was how they could get other people to help them with their programming work. Once I got that base solid, I said "Okay, now we can move into a larger market." There's a great book called Crossing the Chasm, which is, I forget the name of the author. But Crossing the Chasm is the name, and he has this idea of the bowling alley. The idea of the bowling alley, because it's so difficult to break into a market, people are like "If I could get just five percent of this market, my company will be successful." A lot of times you're either at the top or you're pretty much not making any money, very difficult. The idea of the bowling alley is pick a small pin. Okay, the market is a bunch of little pins, ten pins like in a bowling alley. Pick a small pin, your head pin which you're going to knock down. By knocking it down, you're going to own that completely and totally; you're going to create the best product for that tiny little segment. Once you knock that down, it allows you to knock down other pins. It gives you the credibility to basically do that. That's what I did. I picked a very small market, that little programmer-to-programmer. I felt that we did a pretty good job of knocking it down. Within a couple, probably about a year or so, all of the sudden we started just naturally, different sort of people started coming to the site. Word started spreading and things like that. It worked very organically. We went from programmer-to-programmer, and then it went to an entrepreneur, actually an entrepreneur with no company typically, just starting off. Then it became the entrepreneur that had a company, but maybe had too much work to do, and they were hiring programmers. Then it became small businesses with less than a hundred employees. Then it became medium. It just grew and grew and grew from there. 

Jaime: Okay, so tell me about this. A lot of people don't like to niche small at first. They're like "But the market's so big, and if I put it down to only these people, then all these other people aren't going to go." So that's exactly what you did, which is really interesting. So you niched, but then how do you move away from that? If you're known as the guy, the programmer-to-programmer guy, why are other people coming to your site going "Hey help me too?" When that's not geared towards them, especially if the site looks like it's not made for them. 

Ian: Yes, that's definitely true. The advantage of not going with a niche is obviously you've got the big market like you said. The disadvantage is it's very difficult to market to a large market because there's so many different types of people in the audience. By going to the niche, you can pick a small audience to grab the people that you're looking for. If you decide to expand from your niche, in my case I had the programmer-to-programmer, so now I want to expand to the start-up entrepreneur, so I can target start-up entrepreneurs in ads and things like that. You're right. It did require a complete makeover of the entire site, a remake of all the marketing. That's the downside. I was perfectly willing to do that. Instead of here's this very technical thing, I had to make it a lot simpler to understand. What I ended up discovering was the way I was presenting things was just too complicated, just not being understood by people. It took a while to kind of redo that. Once I understood that, I was like now I got that. Then go to the new segment; learn how they communicate. Then just kind of repeat. 

Jaime: So it's a one step at a time process, which actually makes it a little bit easier on your side, instead of trying to solve every problem all the time. Okay, were you actually, so that first year when you were just doing programmer-to-programmer, were you actually making money? On that?

Ian: Fortunately yes, I mean, not a lot of money. Seriously the first month it was probably like a hundred bucks or something like that. It was cash flow positive from, it made a profit basically, not even just cash flow, from the very beginning. That was nice. Now I will say I did have the advantage of all the Plane Source Code programmers there. That was a nice advantage. If I hadn't had that, it would have taken longer. 

Jaime: Okay, so tell us about you've got that, and you started getting word coming in. How long did it take for you to grow bigger, especially with the redesign and all that stuff? 

Ian: Yeah, well, I would say probably the first big break, it was slow at the beginning, make a hundred bucks the first month, maybe like three hundred the second, and then maybe like nine hundred bucks the third. Which I graphed it, and it was like "look at that graph, it looks really great." What good does it do when you have maybe about seven thousand dollars a month in T1 bills? This is not going to cut it. I've got to figure something else out. I tried a bunch of things? I tried, actually at the time even Google AdWords wasn't there, so?

Jaime: Oh really? Wow.

Ian: It was the predecessor to Google AdWords which was called Overture, and it was really cheap back then. It was like five cents a click basically to advertise, so I tried that. 

Jaime: People now are like "What?!"

Ian: I know, exactly. It might be fifteen dollars for a click, in a lot of the places, some of the keywords. Yeah, it was crazy. Even at five cents, I couldn't make it work. I couldn't, at five cents, I wasn't getting enough conversions to make it work. Maybe long term it could have worked. If people did repeat business, it would have been, but I didn't have, I had short term problems, not, it wasn't a long term situation. I was like "okay, that's not going to work." 

Jaime: Huh? Okay.

Ian: I tried all sorts of things. The thing that ended up working the best was an affiliate program. I basically said, "Look, programmers, if you bring a new person into the site, it doesn't matter who they are, I'll give you fifty percent of all the profits that customer makes for the lifetime of that customer." 

Jaime: Wow.

Ian: That allowed, and I had good enough margins where I was able to do that. That allowed, so now these programmers were like "Oh, So-and-So, why don't you come over to Rent a Coder?" The word just kind of spread. 

Jaime: Really? You tried a whole bunch of stuff, and that was sort of the one that hit. You just sort of tried to expand that one the best you could, almost word of mouth. 

Ian: That was just word of mouth. After a certain time, there wasn't much I needed to do. It just kind of worked by itself. I never really stopped all the other stuff. I still did, you know, email marketing, inbound marketing, and all different types of things. That one was the one that worked the best. 

Jaime: So what year was that it started to pick up, and when did you quit your job finally?

Ian: I think I quit it in 2003.

Jaime: Okay.

Ian: This was about 2002 is where it's like, oh wow, it finally got to that point where it's paying Planet Source Code's bills basically. 

Jaime: Yay.

Ian: I'm like I'm in great shape now. I feel comfortable. I feel comfortable with hiring people and doing all that sort of thing. That's what I did. About 2002 is when it did that. 2003 is when I quit my, I feel comfortable. When you're an entrepreneur, you don't understand the monthly flows. One month it could be great, and another month horrible. It can be gut wrenching if you're not, if you're not comfortable with that. What I found, for example, was the first January, that happened. I'd been doing great, and all of the sudden, it went down by about half. I freaked out. I was like "Oh, is this the end of the site?" It ended up being, and I did all of these things to try to fix it and everything, but it ended up being just a seasonal problem. I had no idea. There's these things that just it makes you very nervous when things like that happen. After about a year, I was like "Okay, yeah, after a year of being positive and everything, I think we're in great shape," so that's when I did it.

Jaime: That's really interesting. Especially because the last two times, you had two businesses before, and you didn't quit your job. What was really different this time? Because it was going well those times.

Ian: True, you know what it was. I didn't see. The first one I never foresaw Microsoft doing that. In fact I was planning on quitting my job and never did. I was just lucky. 

Jaime: So your gut was like "ahh, let's postpone that."

Ian: Exactly, gut was like "Go for it." Thank goodness I didn't follow that. But the second time, my gut was telling me that this can't last. This third time I was again, I was kind of like I think this is the real deal. Barring any unforeseen tragedy, like the one that happened with the Microsoft thing, and that's probably why it took me a year to do it. I was like, I think I'm okay. 

Jaime: That's awesome. What's really cool is that eventually that was going to happen. You had so many businesses you start to figure I've done it three times. Even if I quit my job, something I can do it again, something, later. 

Ian: That's right.

Jaime: You start to build confidence. That's the thing too. Did you start to build confidence as you were going? As though I've done this quite a few times, now it seems like I've got a little bit more control in this situation. 

Ian: Oh, yeah, I got so much better every single time. To be honest, I really didn't know what I was doing the first time. I made so many mistakes, and things cost me much more than they should have. Each time I learned really important lessons about, especially about marketing and stuff like that. I'm a computer programmer; I'm a geek. I already knew the technical side, and while I learned a lot about that each time, it was all the other stuff that was the real challenge. 

Jaime: Give us some advice. Give us some of those lessons that you've learned that will help us out. It's one thing to go through them and learn them. It's really easy for us to hear your story, going I did this and I did this, and everything crashed. It sounds all nice and happy right now, but it must have been hellish for you to go through. So what are those things that you learned along the way?

Ian: Yes, yes. I think the biggest, the very first lesson that I learned I guess I keep going back, oh that's the first one. There was another first one. I created before that a program called the Power Launcher. This is before the Help Maker Plus even. I forget about these things. They're so long ago. I learned probably the most powerful lesson from that. Which was, so I created this cool program that I thought was a fun technology to experiment with, and it would run programs on people's desktops. I created it, threw it out there, and I was so proud of it. I threw it out there, and no one bought it. In fact it never sold even one copy, not even one. 

Jaime: That sucks. 

Ian: A complete flop. Over years that thing has never sold a single copy. 

Jaime: It makes me want someone in the audience to just go buy it to make you feel better. Yay, I sold one. Windows 3.1, yay! Let's buy that. 

Ian: We won't inflict it on that person. What I found was that was the really, really most important thing, the disconnect between what I thought was a brilliant idea and what the marketplace thought was a brilliant idea. I realized I learned so much from that. One, I'm going to do market research before I ever spend even an hour more. I spent months on that thing. I spent a whole bunch of time. I'm going to do a whole bunch of market research before I consider any project. I'm not going to waste a whole bunch of time. That was the first. And second, even after I've done that, I'm going to try to create something in a small way and test the marketplace first. Again, I don't want to spend all this time investing into something that is just a complete flop. I learned huge, huge, lessons. I've learned a lot of lessons since then, but was probably the biggest one that kind of put me on the path to being able to create companies that at least would have enough traction to kind of get going and be successful on their own. 

Jaime: So you're sort of talking, and I know Lean Start-up talks about this, about the minimum viable product which is awesome and really great, especially for software stuff. So how did, did you ever have stuff that you started doing the market research and was like this isn't good, I shouldn't do this? It sounds like you've had, okay. Okay.

Ian: A million times. A million times. I'd be like wow this is such a great idea, and I would get into it. Oh, you know what, there are six competitors here right now that are all very strong. They all look like they have great products. Okay, no, there's no way. Or wow, here's a great idea, but you know what, I think in three years, this other thing is going to come in and make it so you don't even need to do that anymore. Or okay, that's probably not a good idea. Actually the research stage of creating a new company is probably the most challenging. It's a lot of work.

Jaime: Tell us about your process. You've gone through this quite a few times. So what is that process of trying to get that market research?

Ian: Well I guess first of all, first it's kind of like a brainstorming process. I throw out what are the places I'm interested in, where I might want to create a business. I just throw it out there. When I'm brainstorming, I'm not too critical about myself because I'm going to come up with some pretty bad ideas, but hopefully some of them will be good. I write all the things I've been thinking about and all the things I think would be good. Then I will take each one, that's the brainstorm. Then I go into the individual one, and I go, "So, does this look like it's going to work?" I'll go, and I'll look at the marketplace, just basically, it's work. Just basically going and reading every single thing, going to every single website that I can find on it, learning about the industry, learning about the players, trying out the different products and things like that, seeing hopefully no one does the thing that I want to do. Or if they do, maybe it's not quite as good. Or if they do, maybe there still is some weakness or something that I can exploit to get in and do it. The ones that I prefer are the ones where there's nobody doing exactly what I'm doing.

Jaime: Really. Okay, it's funny because you hear this sometimes you don't want to be first to market because sometimes you have to educate your customers on going "yes this is really good." Why do you like being first?

Ian: Well, I guess there's two ways to be in that situation. You can be creating a whole brand new market that no one else has even heard of, and that is very challenging. Let's say that you're the first person to create the GPS. No one even knows what a GPS is. It's very difficult; in fact, they had a difficult time doing that. A bunch of companies tried it; they created it, and they failed. The company that ended up figuring it out was a company that didn't even market to the mass consumer. They marketed to taxi drivers. These taxi drivers would, they saw an obvious need. It was a small market. It was easy to get to. They did it, and people would go into the taxi and through word of mouth would be like "Wow! What's that cool thing? I would like that." So that's how they started. They went into cars, basically into mobile phones. That actually is hard. That's a really hard thing. An easier type of innovation is a market that does exist already, but something that's not in the market. There's something in that market that doesn't exist. Let's say with GPS again. Today they do exist, but maybe there's some feature that GPS's are missing that nobody else is doing. That's easier to do. It's also easier to copy by competitors, so you have to take a look at them and see what's their reaction going to be to me, if I'm successful.

Jaime: It sounds like you're, I hesitate to say, a born entrepreneur because there's a lot of people who are like brain always looking for new opportunities. It sounds like that's sort of one of your things, right? Ooh there's an opportunity here. I've actually had a lot of people on the show be "I have ADD because I'm like ?oooh, squirrel.'" You know what I mean? Good opportunity here, good opportunity here. How do you mitigate that? With going there's so many opportunities, and there's so many I could do? I heard from somebody that's a programmer, there are so many software solutions to so many problems.

Ian: It's true.

Jaime: How can you sort of narrow that focus, only choose one, then work on it until whatever the destination is?

Ian: That's a really good question because I think that the temptation is to just go all over the place. I don't think you can be successful if you do that. You only have limited resources. You have to focus, and you have to pick. I basically, the way I do it by going through that process, I narrow it down to the top three. Out of those three I'm going to end up picking only one. I'm going to focus on only just one because I'm just one person. I'm in a situation now where I could actually hire other people to do that. Maybe I would. This next phase that I'm in, maybe that's what I'll be doing. But up to this point, that's what I've always done. I've just picked one. I have to pick whatever is the best one. If you're the type of person, and you run into difficulties, there can be a temptation to "Oh, forget everything I've done."

Jaime: Just let me go back, yeah. 

Ian: It's difficult. It's a difficult balance between persistence, which is one of the most important things to getting anything done, but also flexibility. You can be persistent, and maybe you're banging your head against the wall. It is a delicate act and a delicate balance.

Jaime: Yeah. Do you have any advice for that? It seems like people run into that often. They're pushing forward especially if they don't get massive amounts of amazing positive feedback. A lot of the times you don't. A lot of times, it's little information instead of "Oh, we love this. We're going to make you rich." You know what I mean? It's not like that at all. How do we balance those two things?

Ian: I guess I'll start with the persistence side. First of all, I do think that persistence is the most important thing for an entrepreneur to have. If you don't have that, you're just not going to be able to succeed. They've done all these, there was this great study. They analyzed how different people succeeded in a whole bunch of different areas. It was West Point cadets; it was spelling bees for grade school children; it was professional athletes. They analyzed all these things, and they said. They figured out what was the thing that made people successful or not successful. Concert pianists and things like that. They were "Is it how smart the person was", and no. Is it "How much natural ability the person had?" Like an athlete and things like that. They found out no. Sometimes the best athlete was not the one who was most gifted at the beginning. They thought maybe in business it's your EQ or charisma or whatever. They tried all these different things. None of those was the common factor. The only common factor they found was what they called, they called it a funny name like moxie or something like that. Basically it was the idea of persistence. It was the idea that when things were difficult, the person would keep going. Not only that, but the person had the ability to work on the most difficult, painstaking things. They give the example of a good pianist versus one that never became, like one that became a world class pianist versus one that didn't. The one that didn't would practice, and they would do the things. There would be things that they could, and things that were hard. They would tend to practice, focus on the things they could do that were easy. That's what the typical person does. The world class pianist, it was crazy, but would focus on the things that they couldn't do. It was difficult, difficult practice. It's not easy. That's what made the world class pianists; that's what made the world class athletes. They had golfers; so the golfers would sit there, and they would practice on whatever it was that they were really, really horrible at until they got good at it. Over and over again, that's really what it was. I want to emphasize... You were going to say something?

Jaime: No, go ahead. That's interesting.

Ian: I want to emphasize persistence is really important and the ability to work on stuff that's not fun. You're going to have a business, and you're going to "Wow, I want to work on this part, the marketing, because it's so exciting." Meanwhile, your back end is really, really horrible, and customers are complaining. You're going to have to do that. You have to spend the time doing things that are not fun a lot of times. That's what it takes to be successful. That's the one side; that's the persistence. You have to, you can't expect it to be fun all the time. On the other side of it is knowing when it's so not fun that you need to stop. Try something else. 

Jaime: Where is that line, yeah? 

Ian: Exactly. That can be a difficult thing for a lot of people. I guess in that case I have a gut reaction, a gut feeling where I just check in with myself. I know. I have really, I'm very good at delaying my gratification. I will work on something, and I will work on it and work on it and work on it. There will be no results, and I'll keep going and keep going and keep going. I've been doing that for a long, long time. There's too many problems. There's too much this. I need to take a step back. So I'll take that step back. I'll just not work on it for maybe a day or something, and not even think about it. Just set it aside, and don't even think about it. I'm not going to ask anyone about it. I'm not going to do anything. Strangely enough, two things usually happen. So I come back a day later, after not thinking about it, I'm like "Oh my gosh, I have the answer to the problem." That happens a lot of times. But sometimes, it will just be "You know what? You can't do this right now, and you need to change course." Maybe it's a small change of course, or maybe it's a huge change of course. Maybe it's like this is down the whole wrong alley. That's what I do.

Jaime: It seems like you check in with your gut a lot too. Which is really interesting, and something that's intangible and hard, especially for someone who is so analytical to go "And then I check in with my gut." Which has no numbers associated with, no numbers, you know what I mean. No numbers associated at all. Is that something that you've learned, or is that something that you've always sort of checked in with yourself like that? 

Ian: I'd say I learned it. I think I'm like you. I think you've talked to me before about how analytical you are, and I'm the same way. I prefer to work with numbers. It's easier when you know the exact answer. It is something I had to teach myself. I taught it to myself on small things at first because I wasn't willing to trust myself on large things. 

Jaime: Isn't that funny? No, no, no, no. 

Ian: I'm talking really small things, like what do I eat for lunch or something like that. You know? Rather than really thinking about it, you know, being able to trust that gut process, and working it up to the point where I felt comfortable doing it on big things. 

Jaime: That's impressive. Okay, and that's what I think a lot of people need to learn. A lot of the time you will just assume people that are successful are just successful because they're smarter or better. As you're saying, it's persistence, it's checking in with your gut, and the stuff that people don't normally go" Yeah, that's success." You know what I mean? I think really makes a huge difference. I'm really glad you brought up the persistence stuff too. How do we know though? There's sort of two schools of thought with that, right? Some people are "you should only be working on your strengths. Let's find out what your strengths are. Ignore the weaknesses because you know we really care about the strengths." 

Ian: Yes, yes.

Jaime: But how do we mitigate that with the persistence? 

Ian: I don't know. That's a good...

Jaime: You might not have the answer to this, but I'm wondering your opinion on it. 

Ian: Well, my opinion is that actually what they're saying is valid. Going with your strengths is good. I think you start with your strengths. In other words, here are my strengths. I'm going to start out in something that focuses on that. But I think the mistake is to just stay within your strengths because there's going to be things that are within your strengths you're going to do. Even then there's going to be things that are outside of it. They say that being a perfectionist can be a real problem, and it's true. If you have to get everything perfect, you're not going to move outside of your comfort zone. You're not going to move outside of your strengths, and you have to, in order to round yourself out. I think that there's validity to that, but that there is a little bit more to the picture too. 

Jaime: I like that you say "I'm a recovering perfectionist." I like that you say that too because there's this thing. When I did video at first, I sucked at video. If I was like that's not my strength, definitely. As you do it more and more and more, you get better at it, so you don't actually know what all strengths are really when you're starting, especially if it's brand new to something. You don't know if you're good at it or not. 

Ian: That's a good point too. Exactly. At the beginning, pretty much you're not going to be very strong at a lot of things. You probably knew that you had strengths in things like communicating with people, and you had strengths in knowing a lot about entrepreneurship and things like that helped you out there. That makes sense. 

Jaime: Yeah. So it's interesting though, listening to you growing as a business owner too. As you do a new company, as you do this. You're like "Now I have confidence in this. Now I see the opportunities, and I see where I can take them based on my experience and everything like that too." You've really cultivated that by doing some of the crappy hard stuff that nobody wants to do. 

Ian: That's true. 

Jaime: Which is awesome. Do you have any other? I loved that you had so many really cool resources that you've talked about like the book and that study. Are there any other really cool resources that you could recommend to us by any chance?

Ian: It sounds like your readers are already familiar with The Lean Start-Up one. Yeah, that one is like gold. I definitely recommend that to anyone. 

Jaime: Really? So you read that, and you really liked it too. Did it seem really similar to what you've been through?

Ian: I liked it. Yes, it is very similar. It's the idea of, well, remember that first company that I had, the first product that I had where I was like "This is brilliant". I went and invested all this time in it, and it basically was, completely unwanted. The Lean Start Up is about the fact, in a way, I look at it as the fact that in your head everything is wonderful, but what is it like in real life? What is it going to take to get there? What is the way to do it in the least expensive and the least risky way? I like the way that they've done a lot of those things where they're like "Okay, you're going to push it out to market as quickly as possible to get some real feedback and get real market feedback on it, rather than just ?Well, I'm going to ask my friends what they think.'" They think it's wonderful because of course everything that I do is wonderful, and they're not going to tell me it's bad. I'm going to invest a year in it, and all of the sudden, you know, it's a disaster. I like a lot of the things in that book. 

Jaime: It's funny. As you're saying that, I remember when I first started I was told "You should ask people, and blah blah blah." I would ask my friends and family, and they're like "That's a great idea!" Then it's so funny because you're "Oh would you pay, would you give me money for this?" And they're like "Well...." 

Ian: That's a really good question to ask. 

Jaime: Yeah.

Ian: That's a whole different question. 

Jaime: Oh we're talking reality here. I wouldn't actually pay for it, but it's a great idea. 

Ian: I thought I was just supporting you. 

Jaime: There's a huge balance. I love The Lean Start-Up for that too. I think that's awesome. I know we have to get wrapped up, and I think, I know I love having you on the show, Ian. I'm sure we're going to have it again. I remember you saying you were working on some new projects coming up that you can't really talk about right now. I know hopefully we'll be talking about that later too. What's one action that listeners can take this week to help move them forward to their goal of a million?

Ian: Yeah, yeah. One action. Okay, this is what I would recommend. This is something that I do a lot of times when I'm stuck. I feel like things are just kind of building up, and I've kind of lost my momentum. Also I got it from another book. They call it "eating the frog." What it is, and this works. It sounds crazy, but I'll give an example. Let's say that I have a whole bunch of email coming in, and I look at the first email. I'm like I don't want to deal with that. That's going to take forever to do. I look at the second one, and I'm like "That's too much work." I go through all these, and pretty soon I've got a whole bunch of emails. I can't even process my new emails that are coming in because of all these old ones. The idea of "eating the frog" is every day you pick one task that you've been putting off for a long time, and you just do it. It's not easy advice because you've been putting it off for a reason. You don't want to do it. What I've found, the idea is that you could eat a frog every morning. Maybe you going will take three hours or whatever it is, and get rid of something off your list. The emotional payoff is so huge. It is such a relief I found that it's true. All of the sudden, I'm like, and I don't even realize it, but these things build up. They build up mentally. You think, you're not realizing, but subconsciously maybe you're realizing that "I've got a bunch of stuff that I need to get done." You eliminate one, and it's a very freeing feeling. All of the sudden, boom! Your motivation is back, and your momentum is back. That would be the thing I would recommend. Eat a frog. 

Jaime: I love that. I know. I wish I had a really ugly frog or something to show everybody. It's a great book by Brian Tracy. I highly recommend it too. Everybody should get it. It's ridiculously short to read.

Ian: Yes! So you read it too?

Jaime: Yeah. It's a great book, and it's so funny that I think it pertains to some of the stuff you were talking about before, with the persistence. There's those tasks that you really don't want to do. The emotional when you complete them. It really makes you feel so much better. Thank you for the reminder. I used to do that, and I haven't been doing it lately. I really need to. I highly recommend everyone to do that too. Where can we find out more from you, Ian? Are you on Facebook, or do you have a website? What would you like to promote? Anything you want?

Ian: I'm on Facebook, but I'll say go to my website because there's a link there. Exhedra is my parent company, so w-w-w dot Exhedra e-x-h-e-d-r-a dot com.

Jaime: Then I'll definitely link that up too. It's really cool, it's got. Yeah, I was checking it out with all your companies listed, and the amazing, you know Inc. 5000 listed and all that stuff. They can find out more there. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Ian. I really appreciate it

Ian: It was my pleasure.

Tags: business failure, Business Marketing, Failure, Ian Ippolito, millionaire interview, network, Profit/Loss, wealth creation

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Fear, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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