Giving founders brutally honest feedback

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
And so it's like, damn, you have written off the most obvious growth channel with this internal narrative of, we tried that, it didn't work. It didn't work is a sentence I'm very skeptical of now.
Here's what I got for you today, this podcast. I have a story about two kind of like blue collar founders who just got their business off the ground, and I met up with them, and they asked me these questions, and it was like, it was a set of mistakes that I think everybody makes. And so I think it's worth talking about. So I want to talk about what the three things these guys said. And I want to tell you about this business that's really fascinating. So that's a small business. Then there's a huge business that's fascinating me right now. It's so new and interesting that like I just kind of want to talk about it with you. And the last is I have like a marketing principle, a little framework that I saw, a great example that I saw and I want to share that as well. So I got three things for you.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:04)
All right. I have a couple things for you as well. Maybe we'll go back and forth. You want to start with your favorite one?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:10)
Yeah. All right. So I went to Utah last week to do a podcast with this guy, Ryan Smith. He owns the Utah Jazz and he started Qualtrics. So anyways, that's going to come out. It's a good episode. He's a crazy dude. While I was there, and one of the reasons that happened was, Ryan plays pick up basketball at six in the morning. And there's a guy who's in his regular run. He's been doing that for like 16 years with the same group of guys in Utah. Very like, honestly, aspirational thing. I was like, oh man, I kind of want that. That sounds kind of great to have. One of the guys in the run had DM me like two years ago. And he was like, hey, I play basketball with this guy, Ryan Smith. I told him the podcast is great and he should come on. And he's like, if you guys come to morning basketball, I'll do the podcast. And we're like, done. We'll be there. We play basketball, we do the podcast, all the good stuff. He tours us around the stadium and all this crazy stuff. We're just hanging out. We're just getting like a meal before we head to the airport. And so I invite those guys, the guy who put in the good word, I was like, hey, you know, we should come hang out. You know, you kind of made this whole thing happen in a way. Like he probably wouldn't have done it had you not, you know, told him, hey, this is something worth doing. Come hang out. And so he comes and he starts telling me about his business.
He's got this business called Mobile Emissions. So the idea is like, you know how you have to get like your smog check, you have to get like an emissions check for your car every year.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:32)
They do it at your house.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:34)
They'll come to you. That's the idea. Okay, great. So normally you go to some like dump of a mechanic place and you wait in line or whatever your book appointment, you go, these guys will come to you for like 50 or 60 bucks. Okay, cool. And so I'm like, how's the business going? He tells me how it's going. It's going great, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then he basically says three things that like, I just thought were such typical traps that every founder falls into, myself included. That's, you know, if you spot it, you got it. That's how I even noticed, oh, that's that trap. I've been in there before. I got some scars on my ankles from stepping into that one. So the first one is, you know, he's asking about growth. And naturally, Sam, when somebody asks you like, you know, what do you think we should do to grow this thing? What's your first question? I'm just curious if you have the same first question I do.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:19)
What have you tried? What's worked? What's like the one thing that's actually going well? And what's like the 10 other things that you've tried that aren't going well? And stop doing them and start doing the one thing.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:28)
Exactly. So basically, it's like, where are the customers coming from today? Let's start with that. Okay, so how do you get customers today? And then they said, oh, you know, Google search results. And I was like, oh, so Google Ads. And he goes, no, no, no, like just Google search results. I go, oh, like, why aren't you doing Google Ads for when somebody searches like smog check near me or whatever, right? Emissions testing near me. And he's like, oh, we tried that. It didn't work. So we're really thinking about, we're thinking about this and this and this and this, like fancy new cool things.