Ryan Hart of Hart Ventures – Multiple Projects means Mutiplied Opportunities

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Multiple Projects means Mutiplied Opportunities with Ryan Hart of Hart Venutres

Ryan Hart is CEO of Hart Ventures LLC. He has a team that develops projects like Globa.ly (Addressing the world via custom URL short codes specific to GPS) and Crown in Town (A Best Rating for Businesses). He gives his advice on trying new things and quitting others that aren’t working.

Check out Hartventures.net.

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Transcript:

Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you, the eventual millionaire.

Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast. I'm Jaime Tardy and today we have Ryan Hart on the show. Ryan is a partner at Hart Ventures, LLC and has recently launched a project called Million Dollar Earth. He also has many other projects that I'm hoping to get into today. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Ryan.

RYAN HART:	Thanks, Jaime.

JAIME TARDY:	Why don't we start out, usually I ask your background, but first I want to go into on your website it says Hart Ventures invents, builds, markets and sells sustainable automated service based on online businesses. Can you give me an overview of what you guys do because it seems like you have quite a few projects going on.

RYAN HART:	Right. Pretty much what I do is I leverage my web designer and my key marketer and between the three of us we come up with businesses that are service based which do not carry an inventory. The advantage of that is we don't have to invest a large amount of money or have carrying costs for products and we focus on services and there's three different revenue models either transaction based, advertising based or recurring revenue such as subscriptions. Every business we try to focus on subscription based revenue model because you can project future cash flows easier that way.

	Everything really comes down to cash flow. I feel that's the best way to build the businesses around subscription based. Then if you have to, some of our businesses like Million Dollar Earth are transaction based but in general we try to stay away from advertising base completely because it wouldn't make sense for a news outlet or a blog but that's pretty much our criteria for solving problems and we try to keep all of our business models fairly similar.

JAIME TARDY:	Nice. How did you even get started as an entrepreneur?

RYAN HART:	It was probably sophomore year of high school. I realized that my passion was to organize people and resources. I would paint house numbers on curbs and I would get a dozen friends together on a sunny Saturday and pay them $5 to go sell on each house and then I would come behind and paint house numbers and make $10 each myself. That was pretty lucrative to them. They'd make $30 an hour and then I'd make somewhere around $300 or $400 an hour. I started to realize that that was the mentality that wasn't just a passion, it wasn't just like a hobby, but it was a passion. 

	From there I realized that where I sort of stood out in knowledge and interest was online. That was what sort of captivated and I understood it and it was fun and interesting. It was sort of an easy fit to take organizing people and resources and knowledge of internet and technology and put them together and it sort of just fell into that's what I do for a living.

JAIME TARDY:	When did you start your first company besides doing house curb numbers? When did you actually really start something on your own?

RYAN HART:	My first project was a complete failure but I would consider it a wonderful learning experience. I learned a ton from it and I didn't make any of the same mistakes but I'd make future mistakes in business after that. It was Thunderbuy.com. What I was doing was getting people to unite their buying power to get a group deal. Consider exactly as Groupon except it was products. My goal was to help people with excess inventory liquidate their warehouse similar to Woot. So it would be Woots meets Groupon; I didn't want to touch their inventory or any of the products, I wanted to be a third party broker like Amazon brokers products. However, I didn't have experience, I had never been there before and I ended up pretty much losing $30,000 of my entire savings on the project.

JAIME TARDY:	When was this by the way, what year?

RYAN HART:	Middle of 2008 through the end of 2009. 

JAIME TARDY:	Isn't that right around when Groupon, I am trying to think of when Groupon came about.

RYAN HART:	Yes. I launched the site and then I discovered Groupon six months after they had launched.

JAIME TARDY:	Geez! Tell me what were some of the failures because like you said, we all need to sort of learn from each other's failures. If you learned so much, we can too, so tell us what failed.

RYAN HART:	I was so sold on my own idea that I dismissed people's suggestions. People were saying well why don't you sell services and I said ha-ha that's not scalable. I said I want to sell products because that's a business model that is nationwide; I just broker it and ship it. It's large enough to work and I figured that a little town like Tacoma there's not enough people in Tacoma to buy local goods in a way. I was trying to think too big and I didn't take people's suggestions. I probably had five or six people say why don't you do this in every city and do services instead of products.

	I would say when people tell you something, don't think you are smarter than them, listen to them and actually take time to actually ponder why people are saying something because there's typically something there.

JAIME TARDY:	From there, after your failure, you lost a ton of money, that sucks I am sure. Where did you go from there?

RYAN HART:	So that's why I came up with a website called Crown and Town and it was local business awards. What I would do is every week there would be a competition for a category in cities. Third week March, it would be who is the best plumber in your local town and people would vote and get friends to come vote for a business, businesses would promote themselves and at the end of the week, there would be a top five ranking in your city. I ended up winning the Pacific Lutheran University business plan competition and that was when I finished my MBA there. That was a really good experience. 

	I think at that point I had gotten to the stage where I could write a really good business plan and I could talk anyone into believing into my idea, but I still didn't have the discipline to execute. Also, I think I tried to launch it; I didn't launch it on a large enough scale. I should have put more resources into it. The main reason that Crown and Town didn't take off was that I built it around the chamber of commerce. I thought that the 3,500 chambers of commerce all operated the same, they had the same policies and that they would just come and sign up to participate because part of it was I would sell chamber of commerce memberships and the businesses who were chamber members got a 10 percent bonus on their vote because they were a more credible business.

	The issue there was my local chamber of commerce, it was a pilot chamber, and I had to go in there five times over the course of two months and re-explain to everyone how it worked. They didn't get it. They didn't understand the benefits even though they were getting memberships and that this was a way to leverage, promoting Crown and Town and my city, was promoting their chamber because every single person on every page saw their logo, you know, they were the title sponsor. I ended up signing up like five chambers and it got to the point where it was not going to scale. It would take a full sales force just to get the chambers involved. I decided that I needed to redesign from scratch how to operate Crown and Town, which I have the entire plan in place and that's actually my next project after Million Dollar Earth.

JAIME TARDY:	Nice. How long did you take to learn all that? From inception of Crown and Town to realizing this isn't scalable, how long was that?

RYAN HART:	From Spring 2009 to the end of 2010.

JAIME TARDY:	You learned a ton. Again, was that profitable?

RYAN HART:	Yes, actually the reason we won the business plan competition I think was because we already had $400 in revenue our first week, right before the business plan competition. We launched it on purpose then because most of the businesses didn't have revenue.

JAIME TARDY:	How did you do that? What was your business model for that? Who actually paid you? Was it the chamber of commerce?

RYAN HART:	No, it was free for the chambers to participate in and actually they profited off of it. How it worked was people could sign up for a silver or gold competition level. It would add certain things like people could download a coupon. They could have the link directly to their Yelp page and would encourage everyone to review them on Yelp after they voted. There was an article that said each Yelp review translate into I think it was $45 in revenue so it's a significant benefit to have a stronger Yelp page.

	People would also be able to collect votes three different ways. They could have a tab on their Facebook fan page. They could collect votes via text message and reply with a custom response. They could also collect votes on their page. By paying more, they could engage more customers. Our price points were $39 and $79. If they won, they got a free certificate.

JAIME TARDY:	That's nice. So you have the chambers helping you promote for free and it seems like a great idea but, of course, it's really interesting to know, as you get into it, that some things just don't work out the way you want it to. Where did you go from there?

RYAN HART:	From that point, I went and through my MBA program and traveling overseas, because there's a lot of international students who are brilliant and they helped me realize that there was a problem where people, like we have the unique ability to get anything sent to our doorstep. Our homes are addressed and the shipping carriers are willing to accept the package knowing they can get it anywhere in the United States and dotcom companies, you know, buying things through ecommerce, the shipping carriers will ship their products. But if you look around the world, 60 percent of the front doors in the planet are unaddressed.

	With that, I launched Globa.ly and what Globa.ly does is it helps you address your location via a GPS address. It gives you a short code similar to a Twitter profile and we ship to that address. In Jordan, even if you put their street address, every single person for Aramex which is the company that delivers there, they'll call you. They'll say where are you and they'll get directions to you over the phone and they'll drive there and maybe they'll deliver five or six packages a day. It does not enable them to actually have a route.

	The delivery system, this is a bottleneck for ecommerce worldwide. It also keeps people from the freedom of being able to order something online directly to their doorstep. Globa.ly technologies developed and people can basically create their address. At this point, we're working on shipping companies integrating it into both the ship to address on ecommerce websites and also being able to accept that address as a deliverable address.

JAIME TARDY:	This seems like it has a lot of logistics to it. How did you start with figuring that out? How do you get the GPS address of so and so? How does that person either get their address or translate it and that sort of thing?

RYAN HART:	That's called Geo Coding and it's a large industry. There are about 200 different providers. Google Maps is actually a leader in the aggregation of the technology. They buy all that data and they display it on Google Maps. They have a premier ATI license where you basically pay them to have access to all of their information. We've actually partnered and integrated with Google Maps to where, if you go to the Globa.ly website, you right click on the screen, it drops your pin and it takes me to GPS coordinates.

JAIME TARDY:	Nice. When was that launched and how long have you been doing that?

RYAN HART:	Globa.ly was launched last November. Right now what we're doing is we're working with shipping carriers, UPS and Fed Ex most specifically, to get them to encourage, really this whole thing is going to have to launch at the same time so we're going to have to get ecommerce companies to have a field to incorporate with us, like Amazon, and shipping companies to be able to deliver to the address and, at that point, we will have consumers begin using the technology.

JAIME TARDY:	There's like that tipping point. Nobody can really use it right now yet. 

RYAN HART:	Right. It's all in business development, at the moment.

JAIME TARDY:	Okay, so that one is still sort of in would you call it beta or what would you sort of call it?

RYAN HART:	Yes, beta. It can be used at the moment by consumers but it's not a commercial product yet.

JAIME TARDY:	What's your plan for that going forward then?

RYAN HART:	Basically it's a joint venture with, at the moment, it looks like Fed Ex. They'll invest in our technology and sort of rely on us like eBay bought out PayPal in a way. They are so crucial to their infrastructure.

JAIME TARDY:	That's what I was going to ask you too. How does Globa.ly actually bring in a profit because you figure the people that are having their address change, they're usually not going to pay. Is it Fed Ex specifically or those big carriers that are going to pay you?

RYAN HART:	Correct. The revenue model is licensing our technology to shipping carriers. It's free to ecommerce companies. They'll love it because now more people have a demand for their service to buy from them and their product is now global. There are no barriers. It removes the restriction of can we ship to you.

JAIME TARDY:	Is that funded? I know you said at the beginning that you sort of like having your own resources but is that something that's going to need to be funded, venture backed or something like that?

RYAN HART:	At the moment, it is self funded. The plan is that when we do a joint venture with a shipping carrier that they will buy a portion of our company and that will be our operational.

JAIME TARDY:	What gives you the mindset to go yeah I am going to joint venture with Fed Ex? Usually, especially if you've been burned before in business and had some issues, what makes you decide to just sort of go ahead and go that route?

RYAN HART:	The strategic angle on it is where can I get the most leverage because if I sell it to Amazon that's okay but it doesn't solve the problem of, really the link; my ideal power partner in this is a shipping carrier, because they are the ones who pay me. If they're the first ones to adopt my technology, sort of like CNN was one of the pioneers of Twitter. 

JAIME TARDY:	They can really take it off.

RYAN HART:	It just makes sense to go directly to a carrier.

JAIME TARDY:	Has that been difficult, if you don't mind me asking; has that been difficult trying to get a hold of people at Fed Ex and that sort of thing, larger companies like that?

RYAN HART:	You'd be surprised how a little bit of strategy through communicating online. You can show personality and get to know people and not have it just be black and white letters. If you combine that with a little bit of research between LinkedIn and Twitter, and they're across the nation from me, it just takes a little bit of creativity and persistence to form those relationships.

JAIME TARDY:	Nice. That's a really good point. Do you have any tips on that? If there is someone you really want to get a hold of whether it's a huge company or not, what is your process usually to form a relationship with them?

RYAN HART:	One example that paid off wonderfully; when I was in my MBA program, we were assigned a mentor and I joined the alumni association of the university because that sort of gave me the ability to pick my mentor. I picked a guy in the pacific northwest who was very knowledgeable. He would open a lot of doors and it was the type of guy I'd also want to be friends with. I sent him messages on Facebook, messages on LinkedIn, found his three different email addresses and was trying to get a hold of him. He was sort of blowing me off. He's important, he's got a lot of stuff to do, this isn't his passion like it is mine to want to get mentored.

	Finally I was like hey I know you're business, you probably don't check LinkedIn and stuff, this may be the first time you are hearing from me, I would lead in like that. I sort of let him save face on not getting back to me. Eventually he was like oh yeah cool thanks for contacting me. Later on, as we got to become better friends, he's like yeah I got all your messages but you can understand, you know, I was just blowing you off. A lot of it is persistence and it's letting them feel like, if someone tries to contact you and you drop the ball on getting back to them, it makes you feel bad in a way, so let them save face, especially if you're a small guy trying to contact a large guy.

JAIME TARDY:	That's huge, because nobody wants to be like yeah, I just never, yeah, okay. Even if it doesn't really matter; that's a great tip. Awesome. So you're still really in the depths of Globa.ly and working on that. What made you decide to start, I am assuming Million Dollar Earth is the next one or is that not the next one?

RYAN HART:	Million Dollar Earth was so much fun to start. It was an idea I came up with, I had time to do it and it was such a great idea that I cared about that I couldn't not do it. 

JAIME TARDY:	When was that? Considering you started Globa.ly last November, when did you actually start Million Dollar Earth? 

RYAN HART:	Million Dollar Earth was last February so a year ago. We launched in May. We had a lot of sales initially. The problem and I can talk about the successes and the things that worked but I'd say everything that I focused on with Million Dollar Earth was bloggers because, if I contacted someone directly, they were okay interesting but if someone promoted me and lent their name next to me and said, "Hey check out this website," that's where all of my revenue came from because I set up affiliate programs and shared 20 percent of my revenue with people who would endorse me.

JAIME TARDY:	Can you tell everybody what Million Dollar Earth is because I checked it out first and I was a bit confused at first. Tell us what it is first.

RYAN HART:	Million Dollar Earth it allows businesses to organize and unify their social media outlets and associate their brand with a unique city or iconic landmark. For example, Ashton Kutcher has Los Angeles and so he gets to take ten social media profiles such as his Twitter, his Facebook, You Tube video, Foursquare page, along with?

JAIME TARDY:	Yeah, huge tons of social media stuff, okay.

RYAN HART:	All the other auxiliary ones. Put them all in one location and be able to link directly to it. It comes up as a pop up on top of Google Maps on that city or landmark. We have the White House, we have the Eiffel Tower, Pyramids, Taj Mahal and people can also request a landmark to be added to the site. It's a fun way to browse the world and see locations, specific brands or people. Then you can interact with them. We were the first in the world to add a follow button to the Twitter widget. When you look at the Twitter feed on people's blogs or pages, you can actually follow directly from that.

JAIME TARDY:	Interesting. What made it so; you said it was successful because you sort of had the affiliate thing. Did you launch it? Was there this big launch process when you went out with it?

RYAN HART:	Yes. We had a big media push. We put it all behind a press release and we used an advertisement in HARO which is helpareporterout.net. Between that we got a big blog post on mrsix.cc which is a Chinese blog. It was in Taiwanese and so I had to use Google Translate to read it. Apparently games in China are really popular so if I could incorporate sort of a game element to it, which I ended up doing, they thought it would be really popular overseas.

	I ended up immediately selling Hong Kong for $2,000 and by the end of the week, I had $6,000 in sales and by the first 45 days I had like $24,000. Seventy percent of my revenue has come either from the Middle East or Asia pacific. The most return on my time or investment was creating relationships with bloggers to promote and write articles about me.

JAIME TARDY:	How did you do that? Did you just send them an email and tell them this is kind of cool, write about me?

RYAN HART:	Yes. I said I have an affiliate program. If you have any questions, let me know. I sent them a link to my press kit where I had a lot of really good photos to go with it and had, I think it was a 39 second animated video, which was fairly decent.

JAIME TARDY:	That's really cool. I remember when I was checking it out I saw that Charlie Sheen had bought one and I was going like how do you get Charlie Sheen, because his was crazy too, you know, Charlie Sheen. He has to do something different so he was kind of crazy.

RYAN HART:	I spoke with his publicist and he actually purchased Idiotville in Oregon. We put a play out that he was the chief idiot in Idiotville, Oregon. That went all right. It didn't get picked up by the news media but it added a lot of personality to the site.

JAIME TARDY:	That was the first thing I noticed. Oh, you actually have a big name person that I would know if, even if he's an idiot. That's really interesting. Was that scalable or is that scalable?

RYAN HART:	There is a defined limit to it. We feel that it can produce, there's a million dollars in advertising space on the site. Beirut, Lebanon was originally purchased for $500 and remember I told you that we added a game element to it; well it's somewhat similar to Monopoly in a way that if someone really wants your property you can sell it to them. It's completely automated through PayPal. He ended up reselling Beirut for $900.00.

JAIME TARDY:	So he made money.

RYAN HART:	That's a $400 profit.

JAIME TARDY:	Which is so funny because it's also very intangible, you know what I mean? It's an intangible kind of a thing. That's crazy.

RYAN HART:	I had a college professor who bough nine $100 cities and he's been looking, he hasn't put any time into yet but he was looking to sell those at a profit.

JAIME TARDY:	That's cool.

RYAN HART:	I didn't know it but Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is a very popular city. It's almost like what you'd consider Wall Street meets Las Vegas. It is actually in higher demand than Dubai which was surprising. A gentleman bought it for $500 and he actually had offers as high as $3,000 and he turned them down. 

JAIME TARDY:	Because he wanted it.

RYAN HART:	An interesting element in the Middle East was that, there's three holy cities, there's Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem and a blogger over there who actually was one of my top bloggers to promote me ended up spending the affiliate money I gave him on those three cities because he considered them holy cities and he didn't want any brands to defame them.

JAIME TARDY:	Wow, okay. Where is it now? Has it grown? What does it look like now?  I was reading a little bit on your website. Where is Million Dollar Earth right now?

RYAN HART:	It reached such popularity that we ended up; Google Maps wanted us to pay them for an annual license. We reached an agreement on a contract and we've basically been, we took the map down for the past two months. Google removed it. We're just waiting to sign the contract and move forward with Google. We negotiated a price and it looks like within probably 7 or 10 days we will have a site back up and be pushing it again.

JAIME TARDY:	Great. It's funny because you're using the Google Map API for that too. So can you use it for Globa.ly and this and use the same stuff?

RYAN HART:	It's per domain so they are separate. They're two separate contracts. As of right now, they are letting us use Globa.ly for free because we are under their API limit, but we had to get their permission to partner with them in the first place. Million Dollar Earth was so popular that they obviously want to be able to charge us and make money off it.

JAIME TARDY:	Darn!

RYAN HART:	They played hardball and we came to an agreement on a price.

JAIME TARDY:	Good. How do you see that growing?

RYAN HART:	Million Dollar Earth I think is fun. You get to associate your brand with something innovative, online. It's more like Web 3.0 in a way to where it's three dimensional and the fact that you get to, like if you put one message out on hoot suite, right, it's the same message on Facebook, Twitter, maybe even it was a You Tube video. So no matter where they go they get the exact same message and it doesn't really build upon itself. It's hard to have a marketing campaign around that. With Million Dollar Earth what it does is you can go post different things on each of your social media outlets and the bring them to Million Dollar Earth and expose them to all different aspects of your brand.

JAIME TARDY:	I would go to Million Dollar Earth, click on the location and it's actually fun to browse around and just see what cities who has, which is kind of cool and then get all of their profiles in one thing. Is it so I can actually see what their Twitter profile says or is it a link to their Twitter profile?

RYAN HART:	Yes.

JAIME TARDY:	Okay, so it's all in one spot.

RYAN HART:	It runs the widget right on top of the city.

JAIME TARDY:	Okay. It's funny; and last time I talked to you a little bit, because I know you were doing a thing for Valentine's Day for your other project that you have been working on. Tell me a little bit about that and how new that is. It sounded kind of new still from what you were doing.

RYAN HART:	One of the things that we're able to do is work on multiple projects at once and it sort of keeps everything fresh and exciting and we have small victories in each one almost every day. Your Star Forever, what we did is we got a database from an astronomer at UC Berkley with the million brightest stars in the sky and with that we used once again, there is a common theme here, we used Google Sky which is you go to Google.com/sky you can see their imagery like Google Maps of the night sky.

	With that we plotted all of the stars on there and then allowed people to dedicate them through PayPal and have the star be text messaged and emailed at a specific day and time to the recipient. It comes with a certificate. You can embed a You Tube video. A lot of the same functionality as Million Dollar Earth but for a different purpose. It's for an individual to show them that you care, they're special and that you feel it's a significant relationship and you want to associate it with something that's going to last forever in the sky.

JAIME TARDY:	When did that come about? When did you start that project?

RYAN HART:	November 2010 and that was five months before we started Million Dollar Earth. The plan was to partner with Groupon or Living Social and have them offer it as a nationwide deal. Last Valentine's Day of 2011, we ran it in Seattle and they actually had a record conversion rate for every 170 emails they sent out they had a sale. I was excited because I thought wow this is scalable. They will do this nationwide for Mother's Day, maybe for Christmas but definitely Valentine's Day. 

	Groupon for some reason they decided that, they changed their policy to where nationwide deals the only thing they do is sell products and those would be in Groupon goods but they had to be tangible. Your Star Forever didn't stay at the local level because it was a national product and it wasn't something locally that they could go down the street to get and it didn't fit in Groupon goods because it wasn't a tangible product even though it was digitally transferred. 

	I ended up this year I probably got as close as you could ever get to running a deal with Living Social nationally. They said that the catch for them was that they wanted a physical product. They want something mailed to them and so we got so close to Valentine's Day before I heard that that I couldn't even say hey I'll print and mail them a certificate and I'll also have it where they can download it and view it on an iPhone in the app store. It looks like we're going to work on that for Mother's Day or next Valentine's Day to be able to create more than just a digital product but actually have a tangible physical good that they could touch more than just seeing it as a link in their email.

JAIME TARDY:	That's so funny how they restrict that. What has been your experience with Living Social and Groupon in general?

RYAN HART:	They are really big. They don't have to take care of you. Groupon it's tough to get phone calls back. If you submit things on their online form, you don't hear back from them. At least I didn't, the type of business that I am. However, I knew the chief legal officer at Living Social and so I sent him an email and he connected me with the national sales director. The national sales director was the best customer service at Living Social at a company that I've ever received. He responded to every email within a day. He was courteous, he was professional and he worked his butt off to try to get a deal with me. Someone else squashed it but I was really impressed with Living Social.

JAIME TARDY:	That's really interesting. Do you have any advice I mean for someone who might not have a contact at Living Social? What's the best way to go around that?

RYAN HART:	It's really tough. 

JAIME TARDY:	Get a contact, right, that's your advice.

RYAN HART:	To get a hold of Groupon I ended up calling all the companies that were featured on Groupon goods. I went through I think like 17 companies because that's all they had and that didn't get me anywhere for Groupon. They wouldn't reveal their contact, they'd only forward my information on. What I ended up doing was luckily I knew someone high up at Living Social and he did me a favor. But really, if you don't have a product that fits them perfectly, like their typical product, it's really hard to get in.

JAIME TARDY:	That's really interesting that they won't even really talk to you about it and not just say yeah we don't usually do that. That figures. Tell me what resources have you turned to because it seems like you, well actually before I get into that, you have a team of people that's helping you with this. How did you find your team? You guys work on so many different projects I am surprised you're not working 90 hours a week trying to work on all of them at the same time. What do you guys do as a team to make it efficient and work okay?

RYAN HART:	Pretty much the key is to sell them on the idea and have them find their own passion for it and then whenever they are creative, never squash it and let them take ownership of it. We've got two other smaller projects we are working on right now, as far as the development side, because all our other sites are developed already, and it's just amazing to see Scott, my web developer, really like come up with his own solutions and just run with it without even having to talk to me. As far as the team goes, it's stay out of their way and find the right people because if you don't have the right people, it's not going to work. 

JAIME TARDY:	Are you working on selling the stuff all the time and you have developers, do you have a marketer? Tell me about the people that are on your team.

RYAN HART:	Pretty much it's Scott, Katie and myself. Katie is our strategic writer, our graphic designer and she brings a lot to the table as far as strategy and sort of an advisor to me and what direction I should be taking. Scott is one of the very few web developers that understands every single complexity of operations and database along with an amazing eye for graphic design. That is a unique skill because it's a lot of work to bring those two people together and manage them and when they are in the same person it's wonderful.

	I'm lucky to have Scott. Without Scott there wouldn't be Hart Ventures. It's just that simple. My job basically is to come up with the idea, set the plan, sort of cast a vision, stay on top of everything and coordinate my two team members. All of the sales and business development comes down to me.

JAIME TARDY:	It's funny because it sounds like all an entrepreneur's dream. Whenever I talk to someone especially someone who is just starting they are like I have seven different ideas and I want to do them all. I see you with all your projects and being able to actually do them, of course, it all takes time. I mean we went through five years almost, in a short period of time, but it's funny, how do you make that work? I tell a lot of people that they really need to focus on one thing for awhile but how does the project aspect really work for you?

RYAN HART:	There's sort of a life cycle and the part that I am most energized by is the first six months. Coming up with the idea, writing out every single detail to where I have a 15-page Word document that I can take to Scott and then he can basically run with it from there. Once I've designed it, sort of like an architectural stage, I go onto the marketing ideas. You know, how am I going to get traction for this? Who are my pressure points that I want to focus on contacting so that they will share it or that I'll get media coverage or I'll have a customer from it.

	Once I figure out my marketing and distribution, it comes down to the tedious part that requires discipline and that's just the general operations because that gets boring. Discipline is key to be able to stick to things and even the mundane tasks just tackling them.

JAIME TARDY:	Yes, that's awesome. Any entrepreneur that I know would be like yes I want to do the stuff that's not mundane, that's the really creative awesome stuff. That's really cool that you've had a way that that works for you.

RYAN HART:	That's unrealistic. You'll never succeed if you get to that point and then assume someone else will do your job for you.

JAIME TARDY:	I'm really glad you said that. That way we don't have a ton of people going oh yeah, I'll just do the creative stuff. It's a fine line. It's a very fine line. You can't just do creative stuff and keep going unfortunately. But I mean once you get one cranking then you can always move to another one and that's sort of a really cool thing too. 

	So what's one action that listeners can take this week to move them forward towards their goal of a million?

RYAN HART:	Be disciplined in everything because one area of being undisciplined can sink your ship. Let's say, like the area I have to discipline myself in is as an entrepreneur you set your own hours and I love to stay up late working to like 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning so I have to discipline myself to still be up at 8:00 and be at work at 9:00 regardless. The key is discipline. That's one area that I focus on. 

	The other is if you get just random customer service emails, you just have to get on them right away. Don't let them sit in your inbox for two days because you're the point of contact for your company and you really have to have an excellent customer service. You have to treat everyone with respect because you're taking their money. That's one area of discipline I have to focus on to make sure it's taken care of. For other people, it could be like someone may need to be disciplined in keeping track of all their expenses so at the end of the year they don't have to scramble and look through all their bank documents or someone returning phone calls properly. I know people who lack discipline in that. 

	In every area, have an honest assessment of where do I need to be disciplined because if you're lacking in a couple of areas, in the beginning, when you get close to making it, that discipline is going to keep you from turning a corner.

JAIME TARDY:	Great advice. So everyone that's listening, you know, as this podcast actually ends, start thinking about some of the places where you are not as disciplined as you really want to be and maybe think of one action or something like that you could do this week so that way it's really tuned to you and you could really start getting that discipline revved up. Awesome. Thank you so much, Ryan. I really appreciate it. Where can we find you online?

RYAN HART:	I would say check Hartventures.net. That's our company website that you can find all of our projects on and my contact is on there as well.

JAIME TARDY:	Beautiful. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

RYAN HART:	Thanks, Jaime!

Just to note, you can download the top ten tips from these millionaire interviews on the blog.

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Tags: business opportunity, business startup, millionaire interview, Ryan Hart, Startup

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Millionaire Interviews, Personal Finance/Wealth

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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