The video explores the entrepreneurial mindset, detailing how one's passion to solve problems can drive a successful business journey. It highlights the need to find people willing to pay for solutions and emphasizes that entrepreneurship isn't about taking risks blindly but understanding the risk-reward dynamic. This approach distinguishes scaling a business from merely running a small one.

Also discussed is the importance of customer referrals and adapting marketing strategies as critical growth strategies. The speaker shares personal experiences of overcoming self-imposed limitations and misconceptions about market saturation, emphasizing the need for innovation in marketing methods and responsiveness to customer feedback to sustain business growth.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. entrepreneurship [ˌɒntrəprəˈnɜːrʃɪp] - (noun) - The process of starting a business or other organization, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit. - Synonyms: (business venture, enterprise, startup)

What I think people misunderstand about entrepreneurship is we aren't inherently risky or people that like to take risks.

2. saturated [ˈsætʃəˌreɪtɪd] - (adjective) - Thoroughly soaked or filled to capacity, often used to describe markets that are filled with firms offering similar products. - Synonyms: (full, crowded, overflowing)

We plateaued. And we sat there as an executive team and said, you know what? We saturated the market.

3. plateaued [plæˈtoʊd] - (verb) - To reach a stable level or period after a growth period; no longer growing. - Synonyms: (stabilized, leveled, stagnated)

We plateaued. And we sat there as an executive team and said, you know what? We saturated the market.

4. narrative [ˈnærətɪv] - (noun) - A spoken or written account of connected events; a story, often used to convey a certain point of view or a set of beliefs. - Synonyms: (story, account, tale)

We told ourselves this story and this narrative to make it feel comfortable.

5. metric [ˈmɛtrɪk] - (noun) - A standard for measuring or evaluating something, especially in quantitative terms. - Synonyms: (measure, standard, criterion)

For me, that was always the most important metric and factor.

6. reframe [riːˈfreɪm] - (verb) - To change the way something is viewed or considered, usually to bring a new or different perspective. - Synonyms: (reinterpret, reshape, rethink)

But until we reframed it, we would have just sat there and said, no, no, no.

7. dopamine [ˈdoʊpəˌmiːn] - (noun) - A neurotransmitter in the brain responsible for transmitting signals related to feelings of reward or pleasure. - Synonyms: (neurotransmitter, hormone, brain chemical)

The quick fix, right? The scrolling on the phone, the quick hit of dopamine, all of those pieces.

8. iterating [ˈɪtəˌreɪtɪŋ] - (verb) - To repeat a process or set of steps to improve a design or product gradually. - Synonyms: (repeating, revising, refining)

But over time, the software got better. We understood how to package it, how to market it, how to make it look nice, all those pieces.

9. executive [ɪɡˈzɛkjətɪv] - (noun) - A person with senior managerial responsibility in a business organization. - Synonyms: (manager, director, administrator)

And we sat there as an executive team and said, you know what?

10. core values [kɔːr ˈvæljuːz] - (noun) - Fundamental beliefs or guiding principles of an organization that dictate behavior and can help people understand the difference between right and wrong. - Synonyms: (principles, ethics, standards)

I think that the first ten or 15 people we hired had our core values inherently because we did all the hiring and interviews and such

GRIND MENTALITY - Brutally Honest Business Advice from David Hauser

If you didn't have the track record, if you didn't have the capital you have, you were just at your stage of life still passionate about entrepreneurship. Like, what would you do tomorrow? I'd find anyone to pay me for whatever I believed I was solving a problem for. Right? Like, I don't even care what the problem is. Like, most likely, I'm gonna find the wrong problem to start out with, but very quickly in the path of finding people to pay me for that, not say, I will pay you in the future, but, like, pay me today to solve that problem. I'll figure out if that's right or wrong.

What I think people misunderstand about entrepreneurship is we aren't inherently risky or people that like to take risks. We like to take risks when we understand the reward. And the reward is larger than the risk. And that's something that you can't really teach. It's just inside of you or it's not. And people that don't understand that, you know, maybe they can run a small business over time. Right? But to be an entrepreneur and scale something up, I think that's the difference between just running a small company, which I think a lot of people can do, and being an entrepreneur, and scaling a business, you have to love and live in that risk reward scenario compared to what people think, which is all risk, I think the most important thing is to figure out how do I get my customers to refer other people.

For me, that was always the most important metric and factor. Like, I knew I could spend more money on marketing. I knew I could do more activities. But the most important piece was, will my customers tell their peers about what we're doing? And each time that we tweaked and we kind of built around that, that's when we discovered the kind of next steps of growth.

So many times in our journey, we plateaued, right? Like, if it was at a million dollars, at 5 million, 10 million, like, those are kind of the typical tiers. We plateaued. And we sat there as an executive team and said, you know what? We saturated the market. We can't. We. We can't grow anymore. And we told ourselves this story and this narrative to make it feel comfortable, when in reality, what we should have been pushing and saying is, no, no, no. Like, what are the things that our customers are asking for us to do next? How do we get them to tell their peers about us?

We started to change our mind and think about that. We grew again and again. Ultimately, before we sold, we were at $30 million a year revenue. Now, the company today does about $100 million. So all of those stories we told ourselves were false until we started asking those questions.

It's just go out and do something like, take that next step. There's so many people I talk to that get stuck. Right? And where do they get stuck? It's like, okay, I need a business plan. I need to do this. I need a first customer. Yeah, okay. But, like, how about just call someone and ask them, do you want this service? Right? Like, after that, will you pay me for this? Like, little, little steps along that journey? That's the advice that I think is most powerful. Compared to worrying about all the other stuff. It will all come in time. Just do any little step to move forward.

Otherwise, a year from now, we're gonna have the same conversation. I don't know what to do next. That was my sophomore year. Ultimately, I ran the company junior and senior year full time while also going to school. So consolidated my schedule to two to three days a week in school and the rest of the time in the office, and, you know, really spent that time focused on building the company while studying, too.

And we experienced success very quickly. Went from zero to a million dollars of revenue very, very fast, and had to start hiring and learning all sorts of things that we didn't know. But it was just because we were building something for a genuine need. Like, we built this for ourselves.

We were entrepreneurs, me and my business partner, that wanted a phone system, press one for sales, two for support, all that stuff. Super easy. So we weren't on our cell phones, didn't exist, and we just built it. We went out to the market and said, pay us for this. The way we priced it was wrong. The software was terrible. Everything about it was wrong. But we said, we're going to solve this problem.

Are you willing to pay me? And people said, yes. So over time, the software got better. We understood how to package it, how to market it, how to make it look nice, all those pieces. But, like, the first software, just for reference, we didn't even have a web interface. You could sign up online, and then you had to set it up over the phone, right?

Like, we started at the base level and said, like, how do we just deliver what we say we're going to solve for, which is a better phone experience for small businesses to make them look professional? That's what we did, and people paid us. We then said, hey, will you pay me $10 more a month so you can do this online? People said, yes, and we built the online part.

We always said, hey, we've saturated the market. And it's easy to tell ourselves that when it becomes hard, when it's hard to market, when it's hard to find the next customer. And that just means that we need to find new marketing methods, new channels, channels, new ways, because there's no way that at our size, we saturated anything, right?

There are hundreds of thousands of new companies every month being formed. Like, we're talking to one 100th of that, if that, right? But we told ourselves this narrative. I remember sitting in the room when we started the company. We had a very different name. It was terrible. It wasn't grasshopper.

And we said to ourselves, we can't change the name. We spent so much money on marketing. There's no way. Why would we change the name now? And when we reframed it and said, okay, how much are we gonna spend on marketing in the next ten years?

Compared to the last five years, the number was astronomically larger. We're like, okay, well, now we understand that that number before was holding us back. It's not meaningful. What we're really gonna spend is to the future. How do we run radio ads? How do we do things when our company name is.

Got vmail. Like, terrible. Like, I spent half my life spelling it out to people because it sounded like Gov and whatever else, right? 50% of a 32nd radio ad was spelling out the domain name. So, like, those were the things that were holding us back. But until we reframed it, we would have just sat there and said, no, no, no. We spent too much. We can. There's no way you can change it.

But we did change it. So when we started, we just. We're just doing whatever right now. I think that the first ten or 15 people we hired had our core values inherently because we did all the hiring and interviews and such. But we never talked about them.

They were not written down. They were nothing, you know, talked about in the interview process where if you fast forward ten years into the company, we asked people before they even got to an interview. Here are our core values. Give me at least three stories about how you've lived these in your life. Like, that was before you showed up for an interview.

Like, that was the pre screening, right? So, like, that was a maturing process over time. One, writing them down, two, integrating them, and then three, actual. I think it's hard in our culture that we're always chasing the easy thing, right? The quick fix, right? The scrolling on the phone, the quick hit of dopamine, all of those pieces where what we really want is to feel good, be happy and have joy.

Those are hard and take time and are difficult. Right. It really matters to slow down. Sometimes I go fast as anyone else, but sometimes we have to slow down if we want those pieces of life, right? And I find, you know, how do I slow down in my life if it's an hour a day?

I don't meditate. I do yoga for an hour. And that's my brain. Quiet time. And I try to do that every single day. But again, like, that's slowing down and it's getting back to how do I feel, what's going on right now? And that takes a long time to get comfortable with. Like, at first, it's really uncomfortable. Over time, it feels better and better. I see a problem, I want to fix it. And the first reaction after understanding, identifying the problem is, okay, what does it take to get there? What's the risk? And how big is the reward? Like, that's the next step.

Entrepreneurship, Business, Innovation, Customer Growth, Risk Management, Problem Solving, Business Motiversity