Embark on a journey through the entrepreneurial maze as I pull back the curtain on the sometimes thrilling, often challenging world of starting your own business. Discover the highs, lows, and side-splitting anecdotes—like the infamous 'doodoo with a love heart' that somehow became a symbol of our brand's quirky image. In the trenches of LLC formation, taxes, and vendor hunts, you'll learn that a little humor and a lot of flexibility are your best friends. James Khan drops by to share strategic insights, ensuring that our candid chat is not only informative but also sprinkled with laughter as we tackle the rollercoaster of entrepreneurship.
The path to a successful startup is littered with potential missteps, but fear not, for this episode is your compass. From the overlooked power of network leveraging—think university communities brimming with feedback—to the harsh reality of bootstrapping, we dissect the delicate balance between dream-chasing and pragmatic decision-making. I'll reveal how the wisdom from campus life and the necessity of adaptability informed the strategic pivots that kept our entrepreneurial ship afloat, proving that sometimes, the best lessons come from the school of hard knocks.
Wrapping up, we zoom in on the importance of prioritizing and setting clear goals, sharing tales of our own misplaced focus—like the saga of picking the perfect project name. If you’ve ever wondered whether your strategic planning is more like throwing darts blindfolded, this chat will help sharpen your aim. So, grab your headphones and a notepad, because this episode is chock-full of insights that promise to steer your project towards triumph, with plenty of chuckles along the way.
Embark on a journey through the entrepreneurial maze as I pull back the curtain on the sometimes thrilling, often challenging world of starting your own business. Discover the highs, lows, and side-splitting anecdotes—like the infamous 'doodoo with a love heart' that somehow became a symbol of our brand's quirky image. In the trenches of LLC formation, taxes, and vendor hunts, you'll learn that a little humor and a lot of flexibility are your best friends. James Khan drops by to share strategic insights, ensuring that our candid chat is not only informative but also sprinkled with laughter as we tackle the rollercoaster of entrepreneurship.
The path to a successful startup is littered with potential missteps, but fear not, for this episode is your compass. From the overlooked power of network leveraging—think university communities brimming with feedback—to the harsh reality of bootstrapping, we dissect the delicate balance between dream-chasing and pragmatic decision-making. I'll reveal how the wisdom from campus life and the necessity of adaptability informed the strategic pivots that kept our entrepreneurial ship afloat, proving that sometimes, the best lessons come from the school of hard knocks.
Wrapping up, we zoom in on the importance of prioritizing and setting clear goals, sharing tales of our own misplaced focus—like the saga of picking the perfect project name. If you’ve ever wondered whether your strategic planning is more like throwing darts blindfolded, this chat will help sharpen your aim. So, grab your headphones and a notepad, because this episode is chock-full of insights that promise to steer your project towards triumph, with plenty of chuckles along the way.
Check us out and send us a message on our instagram, Tik Tok and Youtube platforms @the.needle.movers www.theneedlemovers.xyz
Speaker 1:
The whole reason I play PlayStation isn't because it's called PlayStation One's, called Xbox Nintendo. What does Nintendo? I don't give a half shit right.
Speaker 2:
Hello everyone and welcome back to a new episode of the NeedleMover's podcast, our podcast that brings you the lessons learned from our past adventures, as well as knowledge from things that we've read along the journey, as always with you, valerio Tomasso, and my co-host, mark Jasons.
Speaker 1:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the journey of CY Charles fucking Yaxes.
Speaker 2:
So let's read off from Reddit. How do you, how do people even know how to start a business? And this is the question To clarify I am a CS student, which I've got no idea what it means, but anyway, it's not important Eventually interested in creating a business model, I see people like Gates, musk, etc. Who created businesses. Well, the background has nothing to do with business. So for anyone in general who starts a business, like, how do you figure things out? Specifically, how do you go about understanding LSC, licensing, expenses, tax implications, fine vendors learn how to conduct employee payroll and all of these sort of things? This is the one answer I wish I got 15 years ago. A universal truth is every single entrepreneur didn't know shit at some point. Thanks, absolutely Thanks. They took the risk and found a way to use the skills to make money Hands on.
Speaker 1:
Super duper fat. It's a shame, but it's so fucking true, especially the ones who just blindly did it. Some people actually like making the mistakes to figure it out for themselves, and it took me a while to be like why, why, when there could be a template? Honestly, the payoff is better than nothing.
Speaker 2:
The payoff is better than Every single entrepreneur didn't know shit at some point.
Speaker 1:
Even the ones who believe they did or do. That's why they make books after a while. That's why they do things after like things I wish I'd learned they never had. Which entrepreneur None of them are like. Well, I don't know any of that. I've been like yeah, I knew exactly how and I got exactly where, just didn't look. One call. What is that in the background? By the way, it looks like a piece of shit with glasses on. Hang on, it's because it's blurred out.
Speaker 2:
It's exactly what it is.
Speaker 1:
Why do you have a piece of shit with glasses on the background? I cannot do it why?
Speaker 2:
How do I?
Speaker 1:
employ this thing. Oh my God, oh my God.
Speaker 2:
You thought you could just have that, and I wouldn't ask questions.
Speaker 1:
Why do you have a he's Valentine's Day? Is this what Valentine's looks like? Oh my God, did you get that? You boy? Of course you did, I got that.
Speaker 2:
It's because of Debbie. No, I recieved it.
Speaker 1:
You received it, she gave it to you, I think. Someone said guys and girls don't have Valentine's Day the same, and this is even proof of something. Oh my God, doodoo with a love heart. That's Wow.
Speaker 2:
Let's address the elephant in the room, charles Young. Oh, good Lord.
Speaker 1:
Oh, he's the. He's like the third wheel right.
Speaker 2:
But should we explain the crazy meaning behind the name?
Speaker 1:
Oh, this is another loved brainchild of you, right? But, yeah, it's a brainchild because you explained it to me what was?
Speaker 2:
it before Charles Young there was science behind it. No, I don't think we had anything before that.
Speaker 1:
Oh, I remember the science. There was an app once upon a time on iPhone called Khan Academy. Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 2:
Okay, okay, okay, there was some logic behind it, right? So I think just around that time we had just gotten into reading self-development books Correct me if I'm wrong and we read the Gold by Laia Goldrat. We read something else and somehow I came across the book written by James Khan. If you don't know who James Khan is, he's one of the former dragons in the BBC TV show Dragon's Den that airs on the BBC, clearly, and he has done really well from a recruitment perspective. But it wasn't just recruitment, it was headhunting, I think, in a specific industry, and I was reading his book. I was really impressed with the guy. He booked some sort of an office in the middle of Mayfair for Image, which was practically a broom closet. But just having that Mayfair address on his business card was something that really stood out. He then called his company under somebody else's name because he didn't want to make it look like he was a one-man band. I don't know what the name of his company is, but it's clearly not his name. And on top of that as well, in his business card he didn't write that he was the managing director or the partner or anything. He just wrote like recruitment advisor or something along those lines and you know what the logic made sense. You don't want to make yourself look like you're a one-man band. You don't want to make yourself look like a startup, because you know those all-key signals that you're not successful. They give away signals that you've not made it, that you've got no idea what you're talking about. And of course you know we were just out of university. We had plenty of imposter syndrome, not thinking that we knew what we were doing, and we probably didn't. However, we thought let's come up with a name that kind of hides, all of that. And here and the Charles Young.
Speaker 1:
It's funny to hear you say this, because a lot of what you said is like the template for things we did, like, oh, we need an office, oh, we need business cards, oh, we need to make sure the name and I remember the maps behind the name. Correct me if I'm wrong here, charles. So what was it? A strong first name and then your demographic? Was that it? Yeah, yeah, that was it, that was it Like a royal name.
Speaker 2:
I think we went with Charles.
Speaker 1:
Shout out the current king. He wasn't in, but he said Charles. And then what are we going for? Oh, young, the youngest age, that needs to be targeted. And there was birthed Charles Young, spoilers ahead. That name did eventually change, but we will get to that somewhere down the line. But we kicked off with CY and I remember from you explaining it and I'll speak, and it wasn't like you just came up with Charles Young. I'm pretty sure we spoke through it and we was like, oh, this one, yeah, yeah, charles. And then we all agreed that works perfectly, and I so shark, sorry, dragons Den is practically the UK equivalent of sharks tank, right, in case anyone's one, yeah, yeah, but it's a very popular show. By the same consideration, you've got Donald Trump and sharks tank, yet James Khan and others in them. Dragons Den, steve Bartlett now, but Sorry, I've watched a lot of that and I knew James Parno. Like I said, I had the app for him. So I was just like okay, if he said and the app I was speaking about earlier is actually like one to make your own business, it doesn't. I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist anymore. This was back in the old iPhone days, but it was like it provided a roadmap. Let's say so. Once you had that logic, we said, okay, fine, charles Young. Okay, what do you think is one problem? I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but one thing that always came up was who is who is Charles Young? You've met Mark. You've met Valeria. Who the fuck is Charles? Who the fuck is Charles? Who the fuck is Charles.
Speaker 2:
And because like I like that there wasn't that many people that asked the questions besides our friends. I think a lot of people were very polite.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, of course, oh and, but it does. But then you think, like with that same premise, if our business cards say we have recruiters, we're X for it, and then the company's called Charles Young Limited, it just still is a flowy circle. But I liked it because I was like any chat is good chat. Oh yeah, that's a mystery. You could meet him one day if you join up. It's the whole thing. But I think in this case, do you think we acted fast or slow when it came to naming it? Would you say?
Speaker 2:
It's probably one of the faster things, or probably it's still too slow. And I think the thing is right. Like when you're trying to do things from scratch, you always want things to be perfect. Like you know, you want to choose the perfect name. You want to choose I don't know I have the perfect website. You want to have all the ducks in the road because you think that all of those really kind of contribute to the end goal. Yeah, maybe they do right, because you know, if you had a website that says, I don't know shit, young Recruitment, I don't know, making it up now Cool, yeah, probably wouldn't work as well as Charles, but you just feel like you have to do something that works well. But the thing is that you know you can pivot, you can change, you can. I mean changing the name of a company. I think it's like 30 pound fee that's how quick it is and you can practically do it overnight.
Speaker 1:
And I agree, and I think this is one of those decisions in this journey of what we're talking about for this company, which was so fast and I've seen my musician friends or other friends, perfectionists they get lost at this point. Just choose a name. I can't do it. It needs to be perfect, it needs to take time, it needs to do whatever. This is one of the decisions I'd say that we made, which was super speedy, and I think it was like ah, charles Young, thanks, move on and let's focus on other things, which I think is a good measure, like, and we were part of the people who pivoted from it later on, but it didn't. It wasn't like. I remember the story of Philip Knight and Nike, the Greek God or something that, and it was pitched to him in a meeting and he was like I don't feel, like, I like this, and then it blew up. But I always had that in mind, because I'm pretty sure I must have read his book by then, but I always had it in mind where it's like it doesn't matter what the name is man, because either your audience will end up loving it and you'll be like I didn't even care, or you liked it and it mattered. But for me, I think getting to the name was one of the, I'd say, positive sides of this, where we just was like yes, okay, demographic, strong, like monarchy type of name and it works, and then we just moved on. And the reason I bring this up is because I feel like there's some other decisions down the line. We wish we'd done that. Hey, hey, hey. This is one that just happened to work out and just move away.
Speaker 2:
But it's just one of those things, right, that the details that you pay attention to that don't really matter. I think that that's what I like to bring the attention to, because you know that name was one let's go like one pillar of it, one element, but then everything else that goes around in, like the website, the product having, because we wanted to create this experience for graduate students or, you know, graduates we should say going into the industry we want to create an experience whereby they could simulate what it felt like going into one of those assessments, and we wanted the whole product to be up and ready. No, but actually we could have that conversation without having that product up and ready. And it's that the element of where do you spend your 20% of the time to get 80% of the results. We really missed that element. I think Pareto right, I think that is the I thought you said corrector.
Speaker 1:
I said Pareto. Pareto, for example. But yeah, corrector too, it's a but again. This is all learning and educational and for the benefit of us learning down the line. And it's true, we did spend so much wasted energy, so much expenditure. You don't get it back. Well, energy is not destroyed or created, it just exists. So fuck it. It just moved on to something else. But it was one of those. And if we stay on the topic of names, do you recall what made us change it down the line? I know it's further down the story, but I'm just curious, like how did we?
Speaker 2:
I can't honestly remember, but I think that's probably for another day. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:
That's when more people get involved. But for now there was three of us and see why I took the threshold and, like Thausses, I think it was a super Well, not super. There was time waste, unnecessary focus on certain things, and it's not that it's not key, it's not that it's not important, but in my mind it was like we didn't test it with an audience. We came up with it ourselves, talked through it, said yeah, that sounds about right, chose this motherfucker and then moved on. So I think that's why I asked, because I was like, maybe, once we got some external inputs, we were like, maybe it doesn't External inputs whatsoever, that's gonna be a trend. By the way, the lack of external inputs is all the learnings, but, yeah, the namesake. So that's why I was curious the key takeaways from like how would you know about different?
Speaker 2:
And I think, sorry, sorry, Drabba, I think part of it is the issue that when you think about market research because we all watch the apprentice and we watch the different various TV shows they always say, oh, do market research. And when you go look at the apprentice, you have got these interviews that are sitting there. These interviews that are sitting there pick off 15, 20 people that come to this market research. You've got people going on the street asking random questions around. You know what you think about this product, what you think about this, and the first thing you think of is okay, to get the right audience, to get the right people, to get a room, to get everything. All this and it costs money and the last thing that you have when you're starting up a company is money. Yeah, so you've, got those contrasting advice between things that you should be doing and the resources that you need to have in place to actually get those things done, and it never really works out because unless you are back or unless you've got some sort of savings, you don't have the means of completing the task. But I think part of the issue of me pointing that out is that perhaps the group of people that we had were too much of a detailed engineer kind of people. Like you know, I was an engineer, you were an engineer, the other guy was an engineer, and we looked for perfection as opposed to looking at how do I get the objective done in less than a deal way, but I still get to the same goal. We could have gone, for example, into universities and spoken to random students after lectures. That would have cost nothing. We could have gone to university societies and had I don't know a 15 minutes slot of how you get the next company and then ask for feedback. That would have cost us nothing and you know our time was probably worth nothing at the time. But we always were thinking of how do we do this in the ideal way, and by thinking on how you do it in the ideal way. You missed out. I think we missed out on the ability of thinking scrappy, getting that 20% to 20% effort in getting 80% of the results and because of that we missed out on the opportunity of having that data so that when we went to speak to a university or when we went to speak to customers, we were lacking that element of conviction saying, actually that's what we found out from the market research, actually that's what the students told us, and we missed that. We didn't have that element.
Speaker 1:
I'd like to add to that by saying there's so much advice out there, right, and there's so much like ways you can go about things, like even when we will get to the point where we're looking at business cases and different formats, templates, all of that. There's so many to take in. And then there's, I think thing we fell into was the trap of we've chosen this route. Let's just stick to that format, like very rigid, like no flexibility, like, oh, no, the name has to be like this. Why don't we choose no, no, no, we're going to do it the James Conway? Fine, fuck it, okay, oh, but we need money for this. What if we want it? Like you say, why don't we just go to campus as a last? Nope, listen to the fixed format way that we've got in mind and just go into the details on focus like this and like because of the like there's so much, like the hordes of information that is you have to fill with through, and then our choice to just stick within the barrier of the one that we've selected, both of those things like worked against us, and so that's where that difference of a actually maybe, just maybe, we could like adapt according to your circumstances, like you're right, it does take costs and resource to start up. You don't have the money, so then what do you have where? This is where these new books and this is where this podcast comes in right. Unfair advantage oh wait, we have the ability to go to the universities at low to no costs and we have the ability to just talk and engage, like I could already hear when you were saying about asking people on the streets, like the way we think of that, and be like that's just a lot of noise, we don't need people on the streets. So then, yeah, just take us the why we, why we're discussing this, just go there. Yeah, but we only want to graduate. We need the top year. What the fuck are we doing? We're talking more than we're acting.
Speaker 2:
That's a lot of how. There was a lot of theory, wasn't that? And I think that's the problem with a with a technical degree right? Do a lot of theory, not a lot of practicals? Yeah and you get stuck in the world of theory, and because you're stuck in theory, you don't end up doing a crap that you need to do. I mean, I never forget. There is this, this thing that I think I talked about like maybe once or twice already, coming out of my university hall seeing this advertisement of we will help you move your crap from your university room into storage and back into university for a charge, I think, with like 60 pounds, and remember me thinking, huh, this is students advertising to students. It's great, but I, you know I shouldn't do that. That's the whole mentality, right. Like we could have done that, like really that across we could have advertised on our, on a street ball or on the notice board, whatever it is, as long as it was within the campus. We could have taken that the level of engagement and we could have done something with it. A little bit like gorilla marketing, right, figured out every single avenue which you can advertise to someone and just get it done.
Speaker 1:
The many ways we weren't wrong. It's also the I think the big limiter was always us basing it on us, like you'd see something it makes sense, you like, but would I care? I might not necessarily be my demographic clearly I'm not because I'm offering the service but I'm still in the mindset of me and me and the niche that I'm trying to appeal to might not be the exact same, like the reason I'm me is because I have something to appeal to that niche, but it doesn't necessarily make me and that's the case with many people. But it's just hard to get you out of that mindset. So you always think of what I do, what I want, what I think, and like you are an anomaly. It's not that what you're creating or what you're doing is not useful or an important, it's just your target in the wrong. That's not, that's not who you need. And so that's where a lot of the actions or inactions came from, where it's like, okay, for the example of why don't we just put an ad up on a notice board? Well, would I care, but the fuck do you care? It clearly works. It's something that people do all the time. They pull tabs and yet, and I'd still be like, yeah, but I've only ever taken forward, I only called one. Someone took the rest someone. Someone didn't care about the name and still took the rest. Someone didn't care about the design and that's it. Would have given a lot more backing because, trust me, going to specific people afterwards down the line when you need something and they're like what have you done so far? And you're like we got a name. We got a cool name and it would you like to know about the name. No, thank you. Well, that's all the conversation we have for today.
Speaker 2:
I think I think part of the issue really is that we never really had the ability of thinking about the end goal and then working back from it. Because if we had identified that, you know our angle is to do business with X, x people, how do you reach X people? What do those X people hang out? For us it was students, right. What do students hang out? University holds, where do the hangout? Sports facilities, at the pub, in societies, in lecture centers, those are where the people congregate. And then you work back from that and you start thinking, ok, how can I reach those places? Well, you can do it. So by being guests in some of the lectures. You can do so by putting together leaflets you put into, get a posters, putting together I don't know. I've already said leaflets, but you can even push leaflets inside of apartments and flat blocks, because we had access to all of this thing. That that's what really bothered me, I guess, but as me retrospectively, that we didn't think of I'm getting agro dear.
Speaker 1:
I want to say that it's not. I don't think we didn't think of them. I think we discounted them because of ourselves, because I once you said brochures and I recall us having conversations that would like mention stuff. Would we do it? Know we'd be able to discount them because, like I say, it wasn't that we didn't have a lot of information, we had it. We just find ways to say that's not necessary and it's not like we didn't see this stuff. We just come out of university we'd seen so much of this stuff and just fully decided, oh, it's business time, let's ignore all the business you see in your day to day, all the entrepreneurship you see, and just do your own thing. Now that you've got like, oh, we've done a course in it, we've read some books, these are the ones we'll follow. Everything else we've literally seen in life doesn't matter anymore. And that was and funny because we read and we did so much. And then, when it comes to the name and I'd love to hope you can correct me here that we were like oh, the as part of our strategy, we need a name for it. Or was it that we just felt like what we felt was important and we were like, oh, we have to get a name and wasn't in like a sequence, because that's how I feel. It wasn't like a sequence of you need this, this, this. It was more like what's the name? Yeah, and if we can't continue until we have a name, just jump, jump into that boat like yeah.
Speaker 2:
Before I get back to that for a second, I just want to point out something that you said it was interesting, right, because we thought we got a business, we have to get to business, but we ignored all the kind of business that we see until now. You know, leaflets, business cards, things done in university halls, all great ways to advertise. People do it because they work. But we thought hang on a second, we are a professional business, let's ignore all this random stuff that businesses do and let's try to concentrate. And I remember us talking about going to career fairs. I remember that too. What would you want to go to a career fair? Come on Like what's the cheapest and easiest way to access students? It's definitely not going to be a career fair, because that happens once or twice a year.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, why do they even happen if not to access students? I think, when you say it back to me, it just feels like we had insecurities in our business, of course, in ourselves, in our inadequacy for growth. That's why we chose a name that would alleviate that. Okay, we don't seem like we're professional enough to have a business, so we want to do it as right as possible. We don't feel like we're professional enough with. Our names mean nothing to anyone, so let's choose one that just feels much more strong and dominant. We try to make up for something which doesn't matter. I think I've heard somewhere that yeah, that's the word I'm looking for overcompensating. If you make it big enough, they will learn your name. So many names are difficult, right, and it doesn't really matter. It might, but it doesn't. The whole reason I play PlayStation isn't because it's called PlayStation, one's called Xbox, nintendo. What does Nintendo matter? I don't give a half shit. Right, nintendo paves the way. Now, yeah, and as much as this episode focuses on the name, so did we Just think about it? We focus so much in? But the product, that's what you're here for. Right, and it was just an interesting retrospective. Look back and think, yeah, and I don't say this to say that at this point now, if we did anything, we might not have imposter syndrome, like fill, inadequate, any of this, but the difference in letting it drive, the way you manage and move forwards in things, is super key and the sign I wouldn't let happen again, because it's like even as much as back then I thought things don't matter, now I'm pretty convinced I think it doesn't matter. Get it out there. Don't hinder yourself or others by holding up because of your inadequacies or incompatencies or things that you think are, because they might just not be true.
Speaker 2:
And I think, in some way, we probably hid behind some of those tasks, hide behind the name selection, hide behind making the perfect product, hide behind the fact that we didn't really go out and spoke to the market. Let's be right, honest, right. I've actually met now one or two businesses that have got a niche, that offer what we were thinking of offering, and they're doing really, really well. So the product was clearly good. But I think we hid behind the fear of potential rejection or the fact that maybe we didn't have the right niche, or maybe we didn't, we weren't writing or thinking and we just didn't move things forward or we didn't move the needle in the direction that would have made an impact.
Speaker 1:
It's active procrastination, it's being busy for business' sake and it feels good because you feel like you're getting somewhere, you're moving, but, like you said, we didn't have the end milestone and work backwards. Now, if you did that, then you could see when you're falling behind. And we still, at some point in our journey, we started putting milestones in, but we kept moving forwards rather than trying to work backwards. Even then, and that was a it's a huge thing to like reconsider and say actually, yeah, we were being very actively procrastinating and just not doing things. So let's do the name. It's a big hurdle. We've done this. That's this week's work, that's a whole seven days. We can write that off. We figured it out Like, okay, don't need to do shit. It's like, in all honesty, you can feel like you're making a lot of momentum and you wish you're on a treadmill, even say you're making some gains, but really you're sleeping like a dog at night and it's that difference where it's not really making that impact of a difference that much. And so I think, yeah, we've insight that looking forward to where we want to be, what we need to get, and then you can prioritize and do weight prioritization would have been a huge difference maker. Even to be fair, when I say huge difference maker, I do worry or concern that we would have distilled just based on how we were like taking time and things that don't matter, but at least then we'd have hit milestones and been like, oh, this project's in red, whereas every time we'd hit red we wouldn't notice because we never had anything to track to and just keep amending dates. For that is true. So yeah, this week we've been talking about all our regrets, with just the time spent on a name. It's funny. We make a whole episode based on the name, but the name Charles Young and Young was on niche, and that gives you a hint to next week's episode, which we will be focusing more in. What was the niche you were targeting in the first place and what are niches as a whole? With that I bring you to the end of our episode. I hope you've enjoyed so far, as always I've been your host, mark Jason's and co-host for Lerit Muscle and, as always, till next time adios.