705: (Solo) How Success Made Me Neglect the Thing That Built Everything

Nathan Chan (0:01)

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All right, I'm gonna tell you about the dumbest thing I've done in 12 years of building Foundr. It's not a bad hire, it's not a failed launch. It's something way more dangerous than that because I didn't even realize I was doing it.

SPEAKER_2 (1:15)

Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan.

Nathan Chan (1:29)

So for four years, from 2019 to about 2023, I took my eye off the thing that built this entire business and by the time I noticed, I'd left years and years of growth on the table. So if you're running an e-commerce brand right now and things are going fine, and keyword, I want to say that word fine, pay attention because fine can be the most dangerous word in business. This is what happens when you stop focusing on your core product. So let me give you a backstory.

Foundr started as a digital magazine in 2013, and within a couple of years, we launched the podcast and the podcast became our engine. It's how we built relationships with incredible founders, it's how we built trust with our audience, it's how people found us and over time, people started asking, hey, how can I learn more from these guests? And so we built an education platform. We took some of our most popular guests and we got them to teach. We created courses and coaching and now Foundr plus membership and the education business started doing really well, like really, really well. We're talking significant revenue and the machine was working and here's where it gets dangerous. When your monetization engine is printing money, you start to tell yourself a story. The story goes, for me, it was the podcast is doing fine, it's running, we've got a team on it, let me focus on the thing that's actually making money. So I shifted my attention and I was focused on the education platform and I was focused on building the team and I was focused on product development, new initiatives, all these things that felt like they were moving the business forward. And the podcast pretty much went on autopilot, not intentionally. I didn't sit down and say, let's stop caring about the show. It was gradual and I stopped being as involved in the creative. I stopped obsessing over the guest strategy and I lost passion for innovating and pushing the team on how to innovate, how we were distributing it, all that kind of stuff. And before I know it, four years, the show just kind of existed. Now, it came out every week. We still put out amazing episodes, but nobody's really pushing it to be exceptional. And one thing that really hurt me, and I'll be honest about this, is we lost our way for quite a few years and the show never grew as big as it could have because it wasn't the focus. And here's the part that will mess with your head, is the success of our education platform, the thing that was making us money, is actually what hurt the podcast growth. So the monetization was so good that it gave us permission to be complacent about the thing that was driving all of it.

So I want you to think about that for a second. The better the downstream business performed, the less attention we gave to the upstream asset that was feeding it. And this is exactly what happens with many e-commerce brands. You launch a product, it finds product market fit, revenue starts growing, and what happens? You get excited. You start thinking about the next skew. You've got a hero product. Now let's build a whole new product line. Maybe a new channel. You hire more people. You start spreading your attention across all these initiatives. And the core product, the one thing that built everything, starts to drift. And nobody notices it at first because sales are still coming in. The numbers look okay, but the growth flattens and you tell yourself, well, that's just the market changing or we've hit a ceiling. We need to diversify. No, what you need to do is look at the thing that got you here and ask, when's the last time I personally touched this? When's the last time I became obsessed over making it better? So then the question becomes, how do you know when your core product is drifting? How do you know when it's time to start creating other products? Because it's not always obvious. And here's what I've learned. These apply whether you're running a media company, an econ brand or any kind of business. Number one is growth flattens and you have a rationalization for it. You say the algorithm change or the market saturated or we've captured our share or maybe you've stopped innovating.