Hello Fastlane Forum! I am excited to finally start my own progress thread. I haven’t had an exit event and its far from over but I am going to share some background, a bit of my entrepreneurial journey, how my coffee chat with MJ (TMF ) changed my life and my current position in the Process. I hope to engage with those further in the Process, energize anyone new and most importantly inspire those in the desert of desertion as it is a desolate and extremely lonely place to be.
I have had a proclivity for entrepreneurial endeavors and expensive things since I was a child. I knew I needed the chedddahhh!!!
Like most, I was born into sidewalk poverty and more often than not, the response to my yearnings for high end toys or other consumer goods was “you better get a good job and make a lot of money to afford that kind of taste!” That motivated me to try entrepreneurial ideas to make my own money to buy the things I wanted. I ended up loving it. However, by high school I had gotten sucked into slow lane dogma. I successfully went through the motions at ASU with a small voice in the back of my head to lean into entrepreneurship which… I obviously ignored.
I gracefully graduated and landed my first cubicle with a salary - more money than both of my parents had ever made. I was a first-generation college grad and it had all been paid for; I walked away with zero debt. By all standards in my circle, I had succeeded with flying colors. Fast forward 5 years (2018), I had my FU moment. Mine was slightly different than MJ and his limo. As a high performer, I was blindsided when I was fired from a job I really enjoyed. I had been fired by a small minded boss who should have worked for me despite the 20+ years experience he had on me, my VP at the time. No warning. No reason. No severance. Nothing except the box I carried my shit out in. I knew it was time to answer the consistent entrepreneurial voice that had been ignored since I was a child.
The following Monday, I went to the Apple Store and bought a MacBook happy to fork over some of my slow lane savings for my very first “real” business expense! I opened my first LLC, Cardinal Flame which stood for the initial spark or flame that would ignite my entrepreneurial career and wealth (hence my handle). I would bet anyone $20 that MJ and the other veterans on here can guess what happened next. . . Yup, you guessed it, I got sucked into guru bullshit!!! Like all slow-laners I went through scenarios in my head calculating ideas with the limited capital I had. With limited options I started Amazon FBA and drop-shipping. I also began reading (a first for me even well into my 20s). I didn’t know at the time but it would be a HUGE factor in educating myself out of the poor habit loops I kept repeating, in ALL areas of my life. I cannot overstate the importance of reading and I wish someone had welded that into my childhood but I digress.
Another $20 says that no one will guess this one: one of the “gurus” I followed on YouTube is who recommended The Millionaire Fastlane !! I was floored when I finished the book. This guru had the audacity to recommend MJ’s groundbreaking school of thought; the purest juxtaposition I’ve heard from anyone’s mouth! LOL, what a dumb-dumb to put a kind, playful spin on it. This conversational “coffee chat with a multimillionaire,” as MJ’s puts it, changed my life. By the time I read TMF I had run out of savings (surprise, FBA and drop-shipping wasn’t immediately lucrative) and gotten another corporate job (2019). The week after completing the book, I literally felt like I was walking among zombies in my Fortune 500 company’s office. I had never felt so alone and empowered to get OUT! Consumerism also hit me like a ton of bricks. My world had been turned upside down and I loved it. I dropped toxic friendships. I dropped social media. I dropped several facets of my life to begin a new strategy. The coffee chat supplied the strategy - the formulas and logic were absolutely world shifting for me. I read it again almost immediately.
Fast forward through brainstorming and fumbles, I had the chance to attend the 2020 Fastlane Summit before Covid hit. I took PTO and tried to soak in as much as I could. I still felt like a wannabe but I sponged some great information and applied it to my strategy. I have to admit that I was one of the ones that openly “fan-girled” MJ; I bought the signed copy of TMF and got my picture, see below. There was so much great information but something that stuck out to me was @Envision’s advice to keep your job until you didn’t need it anymore (in my case, until my savings allowed) and to build wealth through hard assets, namely real estate. My Fastlane strategy was a fitness clothing line, so @Envision’s advice held a lot of weight. Soon after the summit my best friend who we will call Jasper, got heavy into real estate so this became my next aim. I wanted to build a real estate tree while in pursuit of the Fastlane. I converted Cardinal Flame to real estate. I bought another house and long term rented out my previous to get me started (December 2020). Surprise! I was notified rather bluntly from some upper management woman who I had spoken to all of about once that I was being laid off (Feb 2021). I wasn’t ready but I came to terms with this separation. I was ready for the push to quit comfort. To quit what could be keeping me in the slow lane subconsciously or otherwise. I was going to dive deeper into real estate, get my license and do sales on the side while affording me the flexibility I needed to pursue the Fastlane. The day that was scheduled to be my last day (about 30 days from the notice), they sent me a job offer for a similar position on a different team and the same pay. For better or worse (worse is the right answer), I took the comfortable pillow and blankie which pushed the Fastlane further away.
I kept working on Fastlane in the background but I was going nowhere fast. By this time, Jasper had added remodeling (flipping) and short-term rentals to his portfolio and skillset. Under his influence and I mean that lovingly, I had also converted my new house into an Airbnb and moved in with my girlfriend, who is now my wife. The Airbnb did well and it was easy money (back then anyway). I tried to connect Jasper to my mother who had been in property management her entire career; I thought they would make a great team for a short term rental property management company. At the intro meeting, it became clear my skillset was needed to make the company work. Although never my intention (because it wasn’t Fastlane) I became a partner and started investing my “spare” time into this business. I thought I could help start it up and then step out. That never happened as you may have guessed. The time it consumed was seemingly immeasurable, not to mention the stress. So here I am spending even less time on my Fastlane tree with excuses like my time was limited, I was tired, blah…blah…blah. I kept working on my Fastlane but again, progress was minimal.
Jasper was crushing my income numbers in record time with flipping homes in addition to his other real estate facets. I started real estate courses September 2021 and planned my corporate exit for March 2022 (after bonuses were paid out and with runway for some flips). Jasper was nice enough to split a flip with me, October 2021, to show me the ropes. As you may know, the Phoenix real estate market through and after Covid was on fire! It went well, I made $40K in 4 weeks all while working on my property management company, running my two rentals and showing up enough to my day job so they didn’t ask any questions. The timing couldn’t be better to strike and eliminate the shackles of the 8-hour day! I finished courses and tested for my real estate license December 2021.
By February 2022 I was remodeling my townhouse in Scottsdale (the one that was long term rented) and bought my first solo flip. The flips weren’t easy but I managed to juggle everything and profit about $300K on those two properties. Having a great team makes ALL the difference with those projects and I tapped into a great crew by the end of the projects. I was ready to run flips in just a few hours per week giving me ample time for Fastlane, they were that good! This of course was an anomaly, very rare that you find a team like that without years in the industry. I gave my two week notice the day after that bonus hit my account! The market shifted right after I sold the 2nd flip, around the April/May timeframe. I stepped back from flipping due to much higher risk and focused on the property management business but by July I couldn’t bear working that hard on a service business with limited Control and Scalability. Not to mention the ever-growing saturation of the short term rental market - prices were a race to the bottom and fuel prices certainly didn’t help the travel industry. My partner bought me out September 2022 and my new focus was to reduce all non-Fastlane activities. I did attempt a very calculated risk with another flip in August 2022 to help top off my savings fund- I made $324 and lost two months of my time. I had designed my life to be cheap. Sacrifices were definitely made and I now had several years worth of livable wages in the bank.
I pushed hard and closed out 2022 with more Fastlane progress than ever before. By January 2023, I was ready to launch product but I needed marketing help namely in Meta advertising. I began down that rabbit hole and searched for an agency or the right non-guru education. I found a down to earth, non-guru type who runs an agency but offers a small mastermind group for those who are ramping up at a sliver of the price of agency fees. I kept hitting the same wall with marketing - I couldn’t generate ad creative to punch consumers in the face with. I had my amazing and differentiating USPs from the beginning, years earlier, but now they weren’t that different from everyone else. I fumbled with this for about a month and it FINALLY hit me. @Envision had mentioned in subsequent conversations (at the summit) that he would not go the apparel route if he started over for several reasons but the doozy he mentioned and that finally slapped me in the face this year was culture. No matter how soft my fabric is, what performance properties the garments have, whether it was made in the USA, eco-friendly, designed from scratch, et al., the only thing that matters is culture. In this vertical, you MUST build a culture, first! It can become a productocracy IF and only WHEN a tribe and culture is built. A lunch conversion with @BizyDad in February 2023 really helped land this, helped it sink in deep. He is also the one who pushed me to write this post after that conversation - shout out to you sir!
I spun my wheels for the next few weeks rethinking everything I had done to this point. I was back in the desert of desertion, again. A place I had been for nearly 5 years. A painful truth to admit, 5 years and I was still there and had never really left. 5 years since my coffee chat with a multimillionaire. Had I wasted the gift of Fastlane knowledge? I had been handed answers on a silver platter and all my execution left me thirstier than ever in the Sonoran Desert. The desert came with its own hallucinations this time around, very real hallucinations. I felt like a wantrpreneur! I fantasized about going back to a simpler life, the slow lane and being “comfortable” again. I don’t want a Lamborghini any more anyway (I did in 2018 when I started). Did I need those kinds of things? Aren’t family and loving relationships more important? I turned back to the Fastlane Forum. I read threads for two days straight. There were a ton of great threads for this kind of mindset, I will name @Biophas’s “What's Your Motivation To Do Things If You Don't Need To Make Money” as one I greedily soaked up.
“Lucky” for me (JK, luck doesn’t exist, it was by design ), my beautiful wife also has a proclivity for entrepreneurship and has owned a handful of her own businesses. She read all 3 of MJ’s books over our courtship (shoutout to @Red for covering Fastlane couples at the summit). She has a corporate job and is a real estate agent on the side but this didn’t stop us from the aim of Fastlane! We went through the 1/5/10 planning process for our escape number once she finished the Rat Race. We set up Fastlane parameters that each idea had to meet and had many nights of brainstorming. We opened a shared note and added ideas and details whenever they came up. She had also become very interested in licensing and I had her reach out to @Rearden, who gave an awesome speech on inventions and licensing as a Fastlane (minus Control) at the 2020 summit. Time went by and we still have a huge list of ideas, some good and some terrible. There is one idea on the list that is a GREAT idea. The idea was hers and she had been spending some time on it without me early this year. I had only marginally helped and mostly listened to support her. I was determined to be solely focused on my brand and not get distracted (as I have SO many times before). However, at the time I was about ready to collapse in the desert of desertion it hit me like lightning. I was in public when I suddenly noticed that almost every person around me and on earth at least in a developed country needs her invention and would likely buy it. It has Control, Entry, Need, Time and Scale. We soon had some very memorable conversation about the direction of our life, the sacrifices we had made thus far and what should be next. We decided I would go all in on this invention; I have the seed money and the time.
We hired a retired and freelance US Patent Office Examiner to aid; we filed our Provisional Patent Application a few weeks ago. I know that without a doubt from my coffee chat with MJ that I need to get the market echo I am 99.9% sure will come before I dump serious money into this Fastlane highway. I am finally working on a Fastlane highway with potential, with light at the end of the tunnel! It feels amazing although I can hear MJ asking me to prove it before counting my chickens by people taking money out of their wallet and putting it into mine. I am working on several prototypes to finalize the design and I have a lot of the manufacturing contacts I need already from my other business ventures. Things are flowing and flowing well. Last week we had some time to kill during a drive so we tuned back into the final chapters of the licensing book @Rearden suggested. I seriously began to question my market echo approach. Of course, this book’s school of thought isn’t fully Fastlane and is centered around licensing but he brought up valid points that planted a seed of fear. My approach is to finalize the design using inexpensive prototypes and build an MVP. Source local and simple manufacturing for 100 units. Create a limited amount of digital content, build a website, post about 30 days of content on socials and then advertise. I have done most of this multiple times at this point from all of my “failed” businesses - I have the tools and skillset for all of it. My logic follows the coffee chat and if the product is in fact a productocracy I would see it with the first 100 and scale from there.
My dilemma lies herein for you veterans. This product is truly novel, there is nothing like it on the market (to my knowledge of course). It meets all the commandments. However, Entry is only going to be upheld with a non-provisional patent. That said, I am not dim enough to believe I have to have that before I hit the market but this novel product is simple to manufacture and uses existing technology. My aim is to hit the market FIRST and capture as much market share as possible. I know China will step in. I know the guru’s will likely be preaching it on their FBA courses once it catches a little bit of attention. In order capture market share, my strategy is shifting to licensing in parallel with my own controlled website launch. This is to ensure I can launch in a big way. The plan would be to take my MVP to a public place and just talk to people for a small market echo. The conversation would go something like this: thoughts, would you buy it and for how much? Simple but I wouldn’t be alerting anyone, odds are these people can’t execute against this idea since they are just a Joe off the street. In parallel, I would begin reaching out and setting up potential licensing meetings. If companies were interested, that would be a bit more market echo. I would gauge the market echo based on how they react and what terms they put forward. This is a market echo albeit not money in my pocket. However, if I could also get a fee upfront for licensing, have them agree to a synced launch and mandatory co-branding, I would:
The Future & Reflection:
I am pivoting to productocracy, where I should have started since the coffee chat. The last 5 years have been a ride, that’s for sure. Entrepreneurship is hard, just like anything else in life but there is nothing else I would rather do. I could never go back to corporate or just coast through life, it’s not who I am even if I kid myself with fantasies from time to time. My previous “failures” and missteps against Fastlane knowledge weren’t a waste of time. I learned a lot and all of that Process has put me in a position to use skills I now need and possess. If you are in the desert, don’t give up. Engage with others in any way you can and see it through. I can execute free from corporate chains because of the financial success I have achieved thus far from those ventures. Could I have been 4-5 years closer to my exit? Oh YEAH!
I would like to call out and thank:
@MJ DeMarco for his no bullshit approach in going against the grain and providing the groundwork for those born into sidewalk poverty to claw themselves out
@Envision for his inspiring and candid speech at the summit and sharing his process through social media (its one of the very few stories I actually watch and comment on)
@Eskil for his advice and friendship over the years
@BizyDad for his local PHX meet ups and willingness to help and listen
@Rearden for his expertise and (unknowingly) helping my wife and I get to this point
@biophase and all the commenters on his candid post that helped me through the desert of desertion
I have had a proclivity for entrepreneurial endeavors and expensive things since I was a child. I knew I needed the chedddahhh!!!
Like most, I was born into sidewalk poverty and more often than not, the response to my yearnings for high end toys or other consumer goods was “you better get a good job and make a lot of money to afford that kind of taste!” That motivated me to try entrepreneurial ideas to make my own money to buy the things I wanted. I ended up loving it. However, by high school I had gotten sucked into slow lane dogma. I successfully went through the motions at ASU with a small voice in the back of my head to lean into entrepreneurship which… I obviously ignored.I gracefully graduated and landed my first cubicle with a salary - more money than both of my parents had ever made. I was a first-generation college grad and it had all been paid for; I walked away with zero debt. By all standards in my circle, I had succeeded with flying colors. Fast forward 5 years (2018), I had my FU moment. Mine was slightly different than MJ and his limo. As a high performer, I was blindsided when I was fired from a job I really enjoyed. I had been fired by a small minded boss who should have worked for me despite the 20+ years experience he had on me, my VP at the time. No warning. No reason. No severance. Nothing except the box I carried my shit out in. I knew it was time to answer the consistent entrepreneurial voice that had been ignored since I was a child.
The following Monday, I went to the Apple Store and bought a MacBook happy to fork over some of my slow lane savings for my very first “real” business expense! I opened my first LLC, Cardinal Flame which stood for the initial spark or flame that would ignite my entrepreneurial career and wealth (hence my handle). I would bet anyone $20 that MJ and the other veterans on here can guess what happened next. . . Yup, you guessed it, I got sucked into guru bullshit!!! Like all slow-laners I went through scenarios in my head calculating ideas with the limited capital I had. With limited options I started Amazon FBA and drop-shipping. I also began reading (a first for me even well into my 20s). I didn’t know at the time but it would be a HUGE factor in educating myself out of the poor habit loops I kept repeating, in ALL areas of my life. I cannot overstate the importance of reading and I wish someone had welded that into my childhood but I digress.
Another $20 says that no one will guess this one: one of the “gurus” I followed on YouTube is who recommended The Millionaire Fastlane !! I was floored when I finished the book. This guru had the audacity to recommend MJ’s groundbreaking school of thought; the purest juxtaposition I’ve heard from anyone’s mouth! LOL, what a dumb-dumb to put a kind, playful spin on it. This conversational “coffee chat with a multimillionaire,” as MJ’s puts it, changed my life. By the time I read TMF I had run out of savings (surprise, FBA and drop-shipping wasn’t immediately lucrative) and gotten another corporate job (2019). The week after completing the book, I literally felt like I was walking among zombies in my Fortune 500 company’s office. I had never felt so alone and empowered to get OUT! Consumerism also hit me like a ton of bricks. My world had been turned upside down and I loved it. I dropped toxic friendships. I dropped social media. I dropped several facets of my life to begin a new strategy. The coffee chat supplied the strategy - the formulas and logic were absolutely world shifting for me. I read it again almost immediately.
Fast forward through brainstorming and fumbles, I had the chance to attend the 2020 Fastlane Summit before Covid hit. I took PTO and tried to soak in as much as I could. I still felt like a wannabe but I sponged some great information and applied it to my strategy. I have to admit that I was one of the ones that openly “fan-girled” MJ; I bought the signed copy of TMF and got my picture, see below. There was so much great information but something that stuck out to me was @Envision’s advice to keep your job until you didn’t need it anymore (in my case, until my savings allowed) and to build wealth through hard assets, namely real estate. My Fastlane strategy was a fitness clothing line, so @Envision’s advice held a lot of weight. Soon after the summit my best friend who we will call Jasper, got heavy into real estate so this became my next aim. I wanted to build a real estate tree while in pursuit of the Fastlane. I converted Cardinal Flame to real estate. I bought another house and long term rented out my previous to get me started (December 2020). Surprise! I was notified rather bluntly from some upper management woman who I had spoken to all of about once that I was being laid off (Feb 2021). I wasn’t ready but I came to terms with this separation. I was ready for the push to quit comfort. To quit what could be keeping me in the slow lane subconsciously or otherwise. I was going to dive deeper into real estate, get my license and do sales on the side while affording me the flexibility I needed to pursue the Fastlane. The day that was scheduled to be my last day (about 30 days from the notice), they sent me a job offer for a similar position on a different team and the same pay. For better or worse (worse is the right answer), I took the comfortable pillow and blankie which pushed the Fastlane further away.
I kept working on Fastlane in the background but I was going nowhere fast. By this time, Jasper had added remodeling (flipping) and short-term rentals to his portfolio and skillset. Under his influence and I mean that lovingly, I had also converted my new house into an Airbnb and moved in with my girlfriend, who is now my wife. The Airbnb did well and it was easy money (back then anyway). I tried to connect Jasper to my mother who had been in property management her entire career; I thought they would make a great team for a short term rental property management company. At the intro meeting, it became clear my skillset was needed to make the company work. Although never my intention (because it wasn’t Fastlane) I became a partner and started investing my “spare” time into this business. I thought I could help start it up and then step out. That never happened as you may have guessed. The time it consumed was seemingly immeasurable, not to mention the stress. So here I am spending even less time on my Fastlane tree with excuses like my time was limited, I was tired, blah…blah…blah. I kept working on my Fastlane but again, progress was minimal.
Jasper was crushing my income numbers in record time with flipping homes in addition to his other real estate facets. I started real estate courses September 2021 and planned my corporate exit for March 2022 (after bonuses were paid out and with runway for some flips). Jasper was nice enough to split a flip with me, October 2021, to show me the ropes. As you may know, the Phoenix real estate market through and after Covid was on fire! It went well, I made $40K in 4 weeks all while working on my property management company, running my two rentals and showing up enough to my day job so they didn’t ask any questions. The timing couldn’t be better to strike and eliminate the shackles of the 8-hour day! I finished courses and tested for my real estate license December 2021.
By February 2022 I was remodeling my townhouse in Scottsdale (the one that was long term rented) and bought my first solo flip. The flips weren’t easy but I managed to juggle everything and profit about $300K on those two properties. Having a great team makes ALL the difference with those projects and I tapped into a great crew by the end of the projects. I was ready to run flips in just a few hours per week giving me ample time for Fastlane, they were that good! This of course was an anomaly, very rare that you find a team like that without years in the industry. I gave my two week notice the day after that bonus hit my account! The market shifted right after I sold the 2nd flip, around the April/May timeframe. I stepped back from flipping due to much higher risk and focused on the property management business but by July I couldn’t bear working that hard on a service business with limited Control and Scalability. Not to mention the ever-growing saturation of the short term rental market - prices were a race to the bottom and fuel prices certainly didn’t help the travel industry. My partner bought me out September 2022 and my new focus was to reduce all non-Fastlane activities. I did attempt a very calculated risk with another flip in August 2022 to help top off my savings fund- I made $324 and lost two months of my time. I had designed my life to be cheap. Sacrifices were definitely made and I now had several years worth of livable wages in the bank.
I pushed hard and closed out 2022 with more Fastlane progress than ever before. By January 2023, I was ready to launch product but I needed marketing help namely in Meta advertising. I began down that rabbit hole and searched for an agency or the right non-guru education. I found a down to earth, non-guru type who runs an agency but offers a small mastermind group for those who are ramping up at a sliver of the price of agency fees. I kept hitting the same wall with marketing - I couldn’t generate ad creative to punch consumers in the face with. I had my amazing and differentiating USPs from the beginning, years earlier, but now they weren’t that different from everyone else. I fumbled with this for about a month and it FINALLY hit me. @Envision had mentioned in subsequent conversations (at the summit) that he would not go the apparel route if he started over for several reasons but the doozy he mentioned and that finally slapped me in the face this year was culture. No matter how soft my fabric is, what performance properties the garments have, whether it was made in the USA, eco-friendly, designed from scratch, et al., the only thing that matters is culture. In this vertical, you MUST build a culture, first! It can become a productocracy IF and only WHEN a tribe and culture is built. A lunch conversion with @BizyDad in February 2023 really helped land this, helped it sink in deep. He is also the one who pushed me to write this post after that conversation - shout out to you sir!
I spun my wheels for the next few weeks rethinking everything I had done to this point. I was back in the desert of desertion, again. A place I had been for nearly 5 years. A painful truth to admit, 5 years and I was still there and had never really left. 5 years since my coffee chat with a multimillionaire. Had I wasted the gift of Fastlane knowledge? I had been handed answers on a silver platter and all my execution left me thirstier than ever in the Sonoran Desert. The desert came with its own hallucinations this time around, very real hallucinations. I felt like a wantrpreneur! I fantasized about going back to a simpler life, the slow lane and being “comfortable” again. I don’t want a Lamborghini any more anyway (I did in 2018 when I started). Did I need those kinds of things? Aren’t family and loving relationships more important? I turned back to the Fastlane Forum. I read threads for two days straight. There were a ton of great threads for this kind of mindset, I will name @Biophas’s “What's Your Motivation To Do Things If You Don't Need To Make Money” as one I greedily soaked up.
“Lucky” for me (JK, luck doesn’t exist, it was by design ), my beautiful wife also has a proclivity for entrepreneurship and has owned a handful of her own businesses. She read all 3 of MJ’s books over our courtship (shoutout to @Red for covering Fastlane couples at the summit). She has a corporate job and is a real estate agent on the side but this didn’t stop us from the aim of Fastlane! We went through the 1/5/10 planning process for our escape number once she finished the Rat Race. We set up Fastlane parameters that each idea had to meet and had many nights of brainstorming. We opened a shared note and added ideas and details whenever they came up. She had also become very interested in licensing and I had her reach out to @Rearden, who gave an awesome speech on inventions and licensing as a Fastlane (minus Control) at the 2020 summit. Time went by and we still have a huge list of ideas, some good and some terrible. There is one idea on the list that is a GREAT idea. The idea was hers and she had been spending some time on it without me early this year. I had only marginally helped and mostly listened to support her. I was determined to be solely focused on my brand and not get distracted (as I have SO many times before). However, at the time I was about ready to collapse in the desert of desertion it hit me like lightning. I was in public when I suddenly noticed that almost every person around me and on earth at least in a developed country needs her invention and would likely buy it. It has Control, Entry, Need, Time and Scale. We soon had some very memorable conversation about the direction of our life, the sacrifices we had made thus far and what should be next. We decided I would go all in on this invention; I have the seed money and the time.
We hired a retired and freelance US Patent Office Examiner to aid; we filed our Provisional Patent Application a few weeks ago. I know that without a doubt from my coffee chat with MJ that I need to get the market echo I am 99.9% sure will come before I dump serious money into this Fastlane highway. I am finally working on a Fastlane highway with potential, with light at the end of the tunnel! It feels amazing although I can hear MJ asking me to prove it before counting my chickens by people taking money out of their wallet and putting it into mine. I am working on several prototypes to finalize the design and I have a lot of the manufacturing contacts I need already from my other business ventures. Things are flowing and flowing well. Last week we had some time to kill during a drive so we tuned back into the final chapters of the licensing book @Rearden suggested. I seriously began to question my market echo approach. Of course, this book’s school of thought isn’t fully Fastlane and is centered around licensing but he brought up valid points that planted a seed of fear. My approach is to finalize the design using inexpensive prototypes and build an MVP. Source local and simple manufacturing for 100 units. Create a limited amount of digital content, build a website, post about 30 days of content on socials and then advertise. I have done most of this multiple times at this point from all of my “failed” businesses - I have the tools and skillset for all of it. My logic follows the coffee chat and if the product is in fact a productocracy I would see it with the first 100 and scale from there.
My dilemma lies herein for you veterans. This product is truly novel, there is nothing like it on the market (to my knowledge of course). It meets all the commandments. However, Entry is only going to be upheld with a non-provisional patent. That said, I am not dim enough to believe I have to have that before I hit the market but this novel product is simple to manufacture and uses existing technology. My aim is to hit the market FIRST and capture as much market share as possible. I know China will step in. I know the guru’s will likely be preaching it on their FBA courses once it catches a little bit of attention. In order capture market share, my strategy is shifting to licensing in parallel with my own controlled website launch. This is to ensure I can launch in a big way. The plan would be to take my MVP to a public place and just talk to people for a small market echo. The conversation would go something like this: thoughts, would you buy it and for how much? Simple but I wouldn’t be alerting anyone, odds are these people can’t execute against this idea since they are just a Joe off the street. In parallel, I would begin reaching out and setting up potential licensing meetings. If companies were interested, that would be a bit more market echo. I would gauge the market echo based on how they react and what terms they put forward. This is a market echo albeit not money in my pocket. However, if I could also get a fee upfront for licensing, have them agree to a synced launch and mandatory co-branding, I would:
- Have the seed money from an outside source to further the market echo, this is money in my wallet from a large consumer
- Have instant credibility with my own consumers from being able to state, “also sold at Nordstrom” for example
- Have access to the large organization’s supply chain resources, think suppliers, quality control and buying power (potentially)
- Be able to more easily capture a MUCH larger market share before anyone could beat me to it as they would be investing their own money in manufacturing and those units sold will have our name attached
The Future & Reflection:
I am pivoting to productocracy, where I should have started since the coffee chat. The last 5 years have been a ride, that’s for sure. Entrepreneurship is hard, just like anything else in life but there is nothing else I would rather do. I could never go back to corporate or just coast through life, it’s not who I am even if I kid myself with fantasies from time to time. My previous “failures” and missteps against Fastlane knowledge weren’t a waste of time. I learned a lot and all of that Process has put me in a position to use skills I now need and possess. If you are in the desert, don’t give up. Engage with others in any way you can and see it through. I can execute free from corporate chains because of the financial success I have achieved thus far from those ventures. Could I have been 4-5 years closer to my exit? Oh YEAH!
I would like to call out and thank:
@MJ DeMarco for his no bullshit approach in going against the grain and providing the groundwork for those born into sidewalk poverty to claw themselves out
@Envision for his inspiring and candid speech at the summit and sharing his process through social media (its one of the very few stories I actually watch and comment on)
@Eskil for his advice and friendship over the years
@BizyDad for his local PHX meet ups and willingness to help and listen
@Rearden for his expertise and (unknowingly) helping my wife and I get to this point
@biophase and all the commenters on his candid post that helped me through the desert of desertion
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