Transcript
Cody Sanchez (0:00)
When you are starting a business, you gotta be kind of unpicked. And today on this podcast, I want to talk about how do we move fast but make sure that we give ourselves enough time? And then two, I want to nail the number one thing that most people get wrong when they're building a business. I think most people actually kill their business by caring too much about what other people think. Hi, and welcome back to the Big Deal podcast. I'm Cody Sanchez and today we're going to learn some things that you will never learn in business school. But you need to know if you want to make a lot of money. And I want to start, start out with this line from Warren Buffet, like one of the best investors and business builders of all time. He says, you can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. And this applies to almost every part of investing and building. Most people though, don't realize it, so they want, you know, six pack after one month at the gym. And I get it, speed is essential, but you gotta have time. You need a long enough Runway for the really interesting stuff to happen. So first let's talk about Runway and thinking about reasonableness when it comes to making money. So if you look at my resume, by the way, if you see me on social media, you might be like, she's always had a lot of money, she's always built businesses. But that's not actually how it was. You know, in the beginning, it started out, I was a Walmart model. Shocking. Not a Runway model. I was a reporter in Latin America, I was on Wall Street, I did private equity. I owned Laundromats. Now I'm a YouTuber, I'm a fund manager. When you zoom out, there's a common thread of ownership and actually investing throughout all of this. Even though it looks completely disjointed, that thread actually becomes a moat. My point here isn't for me to tell you my entire background. The point here is to say it's going to take a minute. So set that expectation. But here is how to make it way faster. When you are starting a business, you gotta be kind of unhinged. So let me tell you just a few of the absolutely unhinged things I did to grow my business. And hopefully you can steal some of these ideas. So to start, I didn't have a five year plan. I didn't have a five month plan. I didn't have a business plan. So one of the first things we did, we actually printed out these. There's about 5,000 stickers I think I spent like, I don't know, maybe a thousand bucks on that. And then I went to a newsletter conference that I was not invited to because this business, Contrarian thinking started as a newsletter. We covered the walls, bathrooms, hallway mirrors. We spent about $10,000 on hats because my plan was to put those everywhere. Small problem, it was a stolen logo because I did it on Fiverr. So that didn't work out great. I still have those hats to this day actually. Throw me that pink one over there, will you? Don't sue me. I think this company is called like Brain, Brain Dead or something like that. I ended up giving away those hats to a bunch of people in order to get newsletter subscribers. It worked out. We also taped like Contrarian thinking logos to every wall in my house. So in every zoom meeting me, even though it was just like me a ring light my dog. These billboards are kind of cool. So I did a little tradesies to get billboards that said shortstocks, buy laundromats. And I put them all over Miami. Like some of this stuff is not that scalable, right? But it worked because it was cheap and it was free. So if it was free, it was me. You can afford to look a little crazy right now. It is okay in the beginning for you to do crazy things to get started. Like Gates said, if everything you do needs to work on a three year time horizon, you're competing against a lot of people. But if you're willing to invest on a seven year time horizon, you're competing against a fraction. So like have long term plans but allow yourself to be scrappy in the beginning. Because I think most people actually kill their business by caring too much about what other people think. By the way, nobody ahead of you is going to care when you're young and dumb. You can be young and dumb. A perfect example of this is a company called Cluli, for example, that they did this video, which is the most ludicrous video I've ever seen and now it is all over. Twitter profile says you worked at bananazon.
