Snack: Lucy Guo

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Do you know what it takes to set up a business selling crickets to be ground into flour in the state of Utah? Or one that sells cat litter made from tofu in Hawaii?

Yeah, me either. But someone does, and that someone is today's sponsor, Northwest Registered Agent. They can answer all your questions from what licenses you need to turn bugs into food, or how to set up an LLC for your yarn-dying business. Whatever weird, wonderful, slightly unhinged thing you're trying to sell, these are your people. Northwest Registered Agent has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They are the largest registered agent and LLC service in the United States, with over 1,500 corporate guides, real people who know your local laws and can help you and your business every step of the way. Don't pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get from Northwest for free. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/happensfree and start using free resources to build something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at northwestregisteredagent.com/happensfree.

Do you remember the first time someone said pitch deck and you thought, wait, isn't that just a PowerPoint? And then one day you need one for your next big project, and suddenly your PowerPoints look dorky and not good. Well, the good news is there are people who live for making pitch decks, and you can find them on Upwork because nobody, trust me, nobody wants to sit through our corny animated slideshows. Upwork lets you build a team of highly skilled specialists for every function your business needs, so you can focus on what you do best and let the experts handle the rest. And with Business Plus, you can access the top 1% of talent on Upwork. AI-powered shortlisting delivers a curated shortlist of top freelancers matched to your goals in under 6 hours. No endless searching required. Visit upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upwork.com.

upwork.com. Welcome Lucy.

Lucy Guo (2:42)

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to chat.

SPEAKER_1 (2:44)

Great, great. So my first question, did Taylor Swift send you a note when you unseated her as the world's youngest self-made female billionaire?

Lucy Guo (2:56)

I'm a huge Taylor fan. She's probably the only person I've ever met in my life that I've fan girled over. I was shaking.

So no, she didn't send a note, and it was really sad because I would have loved a note.

SPEAKER_1 (3:11)

You're obviously a very driven person. Were you always this way? Were you like this as a kid?

Lucy Guo (3:18)

Weirdly enough, I think so, but not necessarily for the motivation of wanting to change the world. There was something to being, I was always competitive. So I think this started off when I was even selling Pokemon cards on the playground or building bots to make money on Neopets. I wasn't really using that money to invest in stocks, for example, at that age. I was specifically building bots to get items on Neopets to sell and make money, so I could buy better pets on Neopets and buy other things I wanted, like skateboards, et cetera. Because I always wanted to be the best at everything. And that included owning the rarest pets on Neopets. Yeah.

And I think that competitive nature drove me to really where I am today. I also think I just really love building products. I think, I don't know if it's just competitiveness. Like, oh, cool, I built like the best arcade website. I built the best internet marketing tool. But it's really cool for me to see like people use my, like the apps I build, right? Like I would build random apps on weekends for fun.

And then just launch them on Product Hunt. And then they would go viral and get millions of users. And just like seeing people out in the wild use it was just very cool.

SPEAKER_1 (4:35)

What's your approach when you are talking, when you're pitching to investors? I mean, you seem pretty convincing. What's your advice to people who got their first idea or they're going into their first pitch meeting?

Lucy Guo (4:50)

My advice is actually very different for raising money. So I think when you're raising money, you should always only be raising when you don't need to raise, or at least act like you don't need the money, because that's when investors want to come to you, right? So my piece of advice there is, if you're starting out, you have no metrics whatsoever, go approach investors, but from an advanced by standpoint. Don't ask for money, just say like, hey, I really admire you because X, Y, and Z, you seem domain knowledgeable in what I'm building.