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The Business That Finally Worked · The Expert Method

• speaker-0: A lot of founders get stuck because they confuse a clever idea with a real business. I know I've been there before. My friends have heard about it. They see something that feels interesting, maybe even useful, but they have not earned a deep enough understanding of the people, incentives, and trade-offs inside the market that they want to serve. And usually that gap does not show up in the idea. It shows up later when nobody wants to pay or when the things you were proud of turns out not to matter nearly as much as you thought. So with that, I'm excited to be joined by Lindsay Friedman. Lindsay is a founder in the long-term care space who has spent years close enough to the actual problem to see what families need, what providers respond to, and where a business can quietly lose its way if the incentives are wrong. In our conversation, we discussed what it really takes to build from lived experience instead of abstraction, how to tell the difference between a feature and a business, and why the way you monetize something can shape the moral center of the company that you're building. If you get value from this conversation, be sure to subscribe and share it with a friend. And now here's my conversation with Lindsay Friedman. Lindsay, thank you so much for being here. speaker-1: Thank you so much for having me, Ian. speaker-0: So Lindsay, you've built multiple companies and it sounds like your earlier businesses, your earlier attempts taught you the difference between having a great idea and really understanding a market that you're operating within. So when you think about your move into long-term care, what helped you recognize that this was a problem, this was an industry, this was a market that you understood deeply enough to build something really valuable and to build around? speaker-1: I think it really started because that was actually the industry I was going to go into. I graduated high school and I went right into memory care hospice taking care of people. And it was what my calling was. That's what I thought I was going to be. I thought I was going to be a nurse and just focus on long-term care. Well, it turns out when you actually want to be a nurse, you have to like not be grossed out by like everything and it's everything grosses me out. So I had gotten a business degree while I was being a nursing assistant, started into nursing school. As soon as we got to anything bloody, I was like out. And it was super disappointing moment for me. I was like very discouraged. I was really trying hard to like get over that squeamishness, but I couldn't. So I loved long-term care. I loved elders. That was my passion. But had to regroup because my parents were basically like... we put you through school now twice and you're not gonna be a nursing assistant. Although I think it's an amazing job, but that was my parents like, you're wanna like help from us and we don't wanna do that. So I ended up starting to write, I ended up creating a tech company, which I learned how to code and created a company that was actually called writingroom.com. It was a site for writers and that was like my intake into technology and it failed. and then started another tech company after that, which had like minor success. Like I had an asset sale, but then I, after that became my grandma's caregiver. And I was back to caring and that was what felt real. And I was able to see the issues families faced. And that reminded me of where my true passion was lied. And that was what helped create my company, which was back to tech company. So I had the knowledge to do it. but it really fit in with that long-term care and caring for seniors, which is what I was really truly about. speaker-0: What do you think you took from those first few companies that you've now taken into this journey? speaker-1: Having a cool idea without understanding your market deeply and not just saying, like, I was a writer. I love to write. I thought I understood writers, right? But you have to understand the stakeholders because you have to understand who's going to pay for this, what the value is, what the ROI. And if you are not integrated deeply into that market, you're not going to understand it fully and you'll most likely create a product that doesn't have a great product market fit, which means it'll never be a business. speaker-0: So take us through your understanding of your market now and then how that understanding has translated into the product that you've developed. speaker-1: So we kind of have to divide it. I have two companies. One is called Carebloom. It's a caregiver support tool for families. The other one's called LT CareNav, and it helps families plan for long-term care. Carebloom came out of the issues that I saw from my six or seven years of being and working through long-term care as a professional. I saw the lack of compliance. I saw the issues. And then it was compounded with my grandma. and what I did. It was the problems I saw and as working in caregiving and with families. It was such an obvious problem. wasn't a people might need this. was people need this because there's A, B, E, and F of all these issues. And anyone who's cared for somebody will be able to explain those to you. So that was really kind of like I knew it. I was living it. I watched it from both sides. LT Care Nav grew out of the fact that as a founder, you wear 100 hats, right? That's just sort of how you roll. And one of the hats I wore was Installer. And I would go into families and they'd be like, this is great, but I don't know when my mom's gonna need more care. I don't know how much it's gonna cost. I don't know who's gonna help me. Are you gonna help me? And the answer was always like, well, I'm giving a care bloom, but there's a lot to it. Long-term care is hard and it is expensive. And it's not covered by insurance. So anyone who thinks that they're not looking at that not coming ahead. But I learned that the same questions came from families over and over and over. And there was no one consolidated place to understand every single option. And so that's kind of what I set out to build. speaker-0: Nice. So the LT-CARE-NAV is kind of an aggregator of the options of the services available. And then CARE-BLOOM, to make sure that I have this correct, CARE-BLOOM might be one of those options that would be listed in that aggregator. speaker-1: It is. speaker-0: Nice, love it. Love it, amazing. I think that story really demonstrates and underlines something that a lot of people on the podcast have brought up. So listeners will remember if you listen to the Jay Samet, the Bob Berg episodes, those are the two that are coming to mind, right? The real way that you start a business is you start by identifying a problem. It can't just be a problem that you think might be used. It's like a problem that you experience in your personal life, right? Like Jay Samet, he talked about the idea, right? If you... want to start a business, just start by writing down the problems that you're experiencing in your everyday life. Just write down three problems that you're experiencing in your day to day life every day. Do that for a month. By the end of the month, you got 90 problems. Pick one of those that you want to solve and then you can just kind of productize that, turn it into a business. So it sounds like that was really your journey where you had the entrepreneurial spirit, the spark, right? You took a few stabs at creating some things that you thought would be cool that maybe you wanted to have exist in the world. It maybe didn't start by... problem that you were experiencing? I'm not sure. Like, where do you think the disconnect was with those first couple of experiences? speaker-1: You're right, there wasn't a problem. I love to write and it's funny because when you tell people, ⁓ I'm a writer, they're like, ⁓ I'm doing a book too. would be like, everybody has a book in them. I totally believe that. And so I wasn't having a problem. I just thought, wouldn't it be cool if like all of these writers who were trying to get together to write things had a space? Now, I should preface this. I built this before there was a Facebook. So because people are going, there's so many things out there like that. Yes, there are today. There were nothing like that. MySpace hadn't even sold yet when I created this. So this will date me and this idea. So it was an original idea. But when you talk to investors about like, so people can socialize and do things, they were like, and why do they want to do that? Like, we don't understand. And then the next company was, you know, the fancy background removals we all use now? speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: I had the patents on those. Yeah. No. The patents still. Yeah. So I never was able to get the company working or off the ground. I had tons of patents on background removal. speaker-0: So. Wow. Like just for like, like, are you talking like the background removal? Like I load an image into Canva and I can just click the button that's like background removal. ⁓ speaker-1: or just... Yeah, or Zoom where they just take the background out. Yeah. Right. Yeah, it's a random thing, right? So when I started that, it was actually because I had created this site called Writing Room, which was the first company that failed. But I was going around doing author interviews, which I loved. I love reading. It's like one of my favorite things in the whole world. So I was going to these author conferences and interviewing them. And I was really lucky to be invited to Thriller Fest to interview some of the top authors ever. speaker-0: That's so cool. speaker-1: And I was like in a little room and we'd have the like mics like we're doing now except there's no virtual thing and actually I had a real camera. Every author came in and was like, it'd be really great if you could put my book behind me. Like green screen. That was all there was back then. I don't think they even use them now. They're like, can we green screen it in? And I'm like. Well, buddy, green screen's like 10 grand to create the video. Like, there was a whole process with green screen back then. And anyone who's younger listening to this has no idea what I'm talking about. But I promise you, that's what it was like. I was like, ⁓ it'd be really cool if I could find an economical way to remove the background so I could put books behind us while we do author interviews. So was this some kind of problem I had? No. It was something that authors were asking that I was like, ⁓ let's try to do this. And so I set out to do background removal and I remember updating my patent because my patents were prior to an iPhone. I remember doing like another patent to cover the phone because it was the first time I touched an iPhone. Cause I'm like, look, there's a camera on the front. speaker-0: Yeah, smart. You were thinking ahead. That's amazing. Sounds like honestly, like those two businesses, right? There was a real problem that you were experiencing. Maybe it wasn't a, like, yeah, the author thing, the background removal thing was something that the authors were asking you, but you did identify a problem and you did create a solution to that problem. But I feel like maybe there are some missing links then to kind of what Jay and what Bob have taught us where, like, why did this problem that you're solving now, why is this the one that worked? And I guess maybe you would kind of talked about the fact that you have a deeper understanding of this market, that you are more embedded in it. Is that the full extent of why you think that this one worked? Or do you think there might be something along the lines of like, you really care about this one, right? This is your passion. This is something that you're always leaning towards. Or do think it's kind of like the combination of those two things? speaker-1: It's a combination because just because, yes, there might have been a problem, it wasn't a problem that was large enough that anyone was going to pay for. And even background removal, we don't pay for background removal, right? Like if everyone told you on Zoom that it was $5 for you to remove the background each time, you'd be like, I'll go without, right? There has to be a value of the service you're providing. I never was able to fit it in to monetize it. And I think that's really important when you're creating something. Is it a feature? Is it something people are willing to pay for? Whereas the long-term care space, you know, the alternative to putting a Care Bloom on someone for $199 a month is $35 an hour for a caregiver. You're paying for something and the value's there. you can watch someone for 24 hours a day versus have five hours of care. There was a really tangible value to it. And I think that made a lot of the difference. speaker-0: I love it. This is kind of a little side quest that we've started now on the podcast, trying to put together kind of the pieces of the puzzle that go into starting a business that will work, right? So the first thing is obviously identifying the problem, but then you need to validate that, hey, is solving this problem something that will deliver tangible ROI to the customers? Like, is this something that people are actually willing to pay for to solve, to fix? And then also that critical piece, which is... Well, obviously like, okay, this is a problem that I've personally experienced. I would be a customer of this product. So I'm going to fully understand what the ideal solution would look like. And then, you know, I'd be willing to pay for it. People will be willing to pay for it. And then there's also that third critical piece, which is I really care about it, right? Like I care. Like I, yeah, so I'm in it. speaker-1: I am hoping that the founders really care. We're working with a very vulnerable population. They're overwhelmed. They're facing a really hard time in their life. I get a little discouraged when I talk to founders who don't lead with the passion. And that could just be me, because this is going to be one of the largest economies up and coming. I mean, it's massive, the longevity economy. I really hope people who are entering the space, because there is a lot of money to be made with good ideas, are coming from the right point of view. They're servicing this clientele. speaker-0: And what does that right point of view look like to you? Like is it just like really caring about the customer? speaker-1: Yeah, you really have to have an understanding. You should design with the senior in mind, have them involved in the process, because you don't ever want to put it where an adult child's like, this is a great idea, now I'm going to make my mom and dad do it. Keep that in mind of what provides dignity, what provides autonomy. Some of these things where you're putting cameras in their room to make sure they're safe, like, I think we're losing some of it. So making sure what you build is still very respectful to the demographic. speaker-0: So can you take us through how you've taken those considerations and applied them into what you've built with both Care Bloom? How have you taken those considerations into what you've built with Care Bloom? speaker-1: So we spent years in R &D. And what was really important to me is that we did still had privacy for the care recipient. So in the mind of like no cameras, no recording devices, what could be really discreet? That was a big part of it. So we actually used multiple sensors in a room and care recipient wears a smartwatch. It looks just like a Fitbit. And I will tell you, that was the biggest lift in adventure of a lifetime, trying to manufacture your own watch. We could not use an Apple Watch because we're about precise indoor human location tracking, and it's very, we're very sensitive. So we needed our own device. And at first our devices came out and it looked like a medical device. They don't like that either. Like a brick on your arm or hanging from your wrist, that calls out like, need help. And nobody really wants it. So we have a really sleek looking watch that has a watch face on it that functions like a Fitbit, that's still our proprietary watch. So we're still transmitting the data that we need to get. And it was also really important that the senior never has to touch the device other than to look at the watch. There is, if you do a help request, because they also forget. I want to be able to alert to everything that's happening without them having to ever feel that to remember it. So we have some really nice things in place to make it about them while still making the family member feeling comfortable. speaker-0: They have the sensors and then they have the wearable. What else is involved as a part of the Care Bloom service or product? speaker-1: So there's an app, right? Everything comes down to an app. There's also like a dashboard where we deliver the data. We do analysis. So early on, we were not doing AI analysis of the data because it wasn't available, but now it is. tech changes and we're evolving with it. And that's kind of the ecosystem. The family member never has to have a smartphone. So the senior can just wear the watch, no phone needed, which is also part of a build when you think about who you're building for. speaker-0: So you get all this data, like are you building out some kind of like long-term care plan for them, like a personalized long-term care plan that then this is monitored and tracked and kind of reminded throughout the process or how does that work? speaker-1: So on this, it's actually not a plan. It's just really to alert you to changes. So we do some analysis of, hey, it looks like mom is sleeping in a little more, or she's not going to bed, or she's going to the bathroom more. And all of these behaviors can trigger different health indicators. So we use the behavioral data to trigger health indicators and let families know what to look out for. The long-term care plan, that comes in with LT Care Now. I think for me, the one thing that people are, I get pushed back on all the time is that it's totally free for families. And I did that because I totally understand that this is a market that is already under duress financially. Caregiving is expensive, long-term care. When we talk about expensive, you could be looking at like 15 grand a month out of pocket. If you're starting to look at full-time home care or nursing homes. It's very expensive. So for me, it was really important to not have a handout because there's a lot of people who need to get paid in your planning process. So I wanted to be an easy solution to start the journey and point you in the right direction of who could help you. We do introductions. We are not lead generation, but we make introductions based off of analysis, like AI analysis of who and what you need. And then we make those introductions for you. And through that, I was able to find a way to monetize the site. speaker-0: Nice. And I would imagine the monetization comes from like when you bring a client to the person that's listed on the platform. Is that how it's done or no? speaker-1: So I actually have done it in a different way because I do not want families to feel like commodities. Nice. And I think when you start to pay per lead or when you take commission from the provider, that lead becomes a commodity. And families to me aren't commodities. So my model is the provider actually just pays for access to the software as a service. and it's a flat fee, it's completely not biased. And I vet every single one of my providers. And when I say I'm doing it versus other places, it's like you can go to our podcast and actually see me interviewing providers so families know that I'm really doing this. again, for me, it's protecting that population. speaker-0: Amazing. Yeah. And just setting the right incentive, right? Because the incentive that you set with how you design the monetization of the platform is going to be like, that can tell you how it's going to play out, right? If you pay per lead, then it's just going to be like, all right, these, these providers who have the most money are just going to be the ones that dominate the site and dominate the service. Right? So I think that's a Brilliant long term move, right? I'm sure you got a lot of criticism for that in the short term. You're like, what are you doing? What are you talking about? But in the long term, you're thinking long term, which I think is the right way to go. speaker-1: And it is, I think sometimes when you're starting a business, you have to understand what is most important to you. I have talked to investors who've been interested in the site and they're like, you're leaving a lot of money on the table. And the answer is, are you right? Probably. I mean, some of these other lead gen sites, it's like mass lead generation. One family gets sold to a hundred people and they're paying for the X amount of leads per month. And then they get 45 % of whatever that provider gets on top of it. That monetization model is far greater. But as the founder, you have to decide what's important to you and what you're laying your head down on the pillow at night and being proud of what you do or knowing you're taking advantage of people. So that's where I'm falling on it. speaker-0: So what do you put first? you put maximizing profit or maximizing the impact and doing the greater good for people? And I think that the maximizing of profit has definitely been the way that a lot of businesses have gone. But I do think that there's a shift happening in culture, in society for kind of recognizing that and then looking for solutions that kind of put them as the consumer above everything else and really just caring about solving the problem. I know, I haven't really articulated that just yet, but I feel like there's some kind of evolution that's happening there. And you you read other biographies of some of the great founders, right? It's making the decisions that benefit in the long run, where it's like, if you play out that scenario where it's, if you design this site, this service to maximize profit, you're not providing as good of a solution or service to the people in the long run. But if you optimize for the customer and just focus on providing them with the best service possible, that in the long run, I believe is gonna, gonna win out. speaker-1: I agree with you completely. And that's why I think we're seeing all these like social good companies coming out is that there has been so much about profit and maximizing that that that's where we're falling. And I think we're falling apart because of that kind of structure. Not not not the people who running those big businesses. But yeah. speaker-0: No, for sure. Yeah. And this reminds me a lot of what Bob Berg had shared in our podcast ⁓ last week, where he's the author of this book called The Go Giver, where he just talks about approaching every interaction that you have with a person with just finding how can you deliver the most value to this person? Just leading with how can I deliver value now? How can I get something from this person? Leading with that approach, I think, is the long-term strategy for sure. Where oddly enough, it's the paradox, right? If you just focus on giving value. you're probably going to succeed more in the long run, right, if you just focus on that. speaker-1: I've kind of approached all of interactions, even like to say like LinkedIn, and I love that go-giver term. That is really what it is, is if you come from every one of your interactions is what can I get from you, what is this benefiting me? You're leaving out a whole opportunity. Your communication is going to be different. People are going to want to help you in a different way, or not at all. Whereas that is kind of an approach that I have that has been really helpful for moving this company along. is that when I do outreach, it's like all about collaboration. It's all about what does a partnership look like? And I think those kind of relationships and really understanding that in like any relationship, a give and take, and if you're giving as much as you're getting, it's gonna work out a lot better for you. But I feel like some people don't love that. They really approach it of like, what's in this for me for this moment? speaker-0: It's so funny how there are these principles that are applicable to business, then also like there's just these universal principles that can be applied to business, can be applied to personal relationships. Because like, as you're saying that it's making me think about like these relationship books that I've read where it's you hear anybody answer the question of what makes your marriage successful or things like that. Right. And it's about, you know, not keeping score, right? It's just doing things for the other person without expecting anything in return. Just like don't keep score. And then you can take that kind of idea. and apply it to how you approach business as well. speaker-1: Absolutely. speaker-0: How are you approaching growing Care Bloom and how are you approaching growing LT Care Nav? speaker-1: KeraBloom has a B2B and a B2C end, so we sell to both. Actually, so does KeraNav, right? So we target our B2C, our free users on the front end, and the B2B backend. Everything, the B2B on the backend of KeraNav is the one that is scaling faster. I've never had to be like, no, no, not yet. We can't do this yet. It's because the system is so broken. So I've just hit on a place where it is such a broken market. Lead generation in this field is crumbling. I mean, they're looking at like $500 a lead at this point in some areas. That has been surprisingly easier to scale than anything I've ever done. I guess if you find a problem that's really like weighing on people profoundly, maybe it is easier. Hardware is hard when we circle back to Carebloom. People are nervous about it and they don't know what they're gonna get, especially when you're a newer product. And that's been an interesting go-to-market. And it took us a long time to really gain a lot of traction. It takes a lot of touch. So I think when you have a product, a physical product, understanding what your sales cycle looks like, we understand we have a many touch sales cycle for Kerobloom. I guess when it comes to that, when founders are listening, That's going to be really crucial to understanding your success because if it takes you four or five times to talk to someone to close a deal, you need to prepare for that moment of what that looks like. speaker-0: What is the insights and like really being clear and understanding, having a detailed understanding of what your sales cycle looks like? How does that play into the product? speaker-1: The actual hardware is hard and out, like that saying is so true because even your friends could probably tell you like, you don't understand your sales cycle until you have something to sell. So talk about a catch-22 because you can hypothesize until you're like blue in the face and you might not ever get it right. And when we do like assisted living B2B, there could be even more touches than that. And I was thinking we would go in, you'd have a first meeting, you'd have a second meeting, you'd go back and install. It'd be like a nice simple thing. And then it turns out this stakeholder wants in and this stakeholder. But you can't find that out until you have a product. So if somebody else has an idea of how to test this without having the product, I would have wished I could have heard that. So if you get that person on your podcast, like who figured that out, that would be amazingly resourceful for people because I wish I would have known before, because when we finally got our product, I was like, we're going to sell this. And we're going sell out in like two weeks. It did not go like that. speaker-0: Now, okay, now you have this first draft of the product available to go and sell. How did the insights from understanding what the sales cycle looks like now influence, like what changes were made to your product once you actually had something to go out and sell? speaker-1: Luckily, we have not had to make any changes to the product, but we definitely understand better what value chain looks like, what delivery. We understand now what that whole process along looks like from ordering. most of our stuff comes from China, and then it lands here in the States. And I thought, ⁓ we're never going to be able to get it in fast enough. And it turns out when your sales cycle's longer, you can understand that. At first I was telling the manufacturer, I'm like, no, that'll never do. We're going to sell out of these so quickly. And I guess there's just so much that goes into understanding with your sales cycle plays into your value chain. And when you make, when you order, because you don't need to necessarily have stuff sitting here, there is definitely a juggling act to understanding that. It is not like one or two rounds. It'll take like several iterations of bringing product in to understand what your timing looks like. speaker-0: So it's more of just kind of like a supply chain kind of question and figuring and nailing that out which is you know, there's whole supply chain specialists for a reason because that's a very complicated system to build out. something that I've been bringing up in a lot of these conversations is something that I learned at the end of last year which has kind of changed my whole paradigm as it relates to marketing or growing a business. And I know you mentioned that you didn't have to make many changes to your product but it sounds like your philosophy right is build the best version of our product that we possibly can. And this rhymes with, so I went to this workshop where this guy was doing a marketing workshop and he asked two questions at the start of the conversation. Number one was, what is the objective of marketing? Right, we all raised our hands, like, generate leads, improve branding, da da da da, whatever it was. And then he heard all of our questions and he came back and he said, the number one objective of marketing is to grow the business. everything else that falls under marketing, whether it's ads, content, boom, boom, serves that purpose of growing the business. Okay, so we agreed on that. And then he went to the next question, which is, okay, so if the number one objective of marketing is to grow the business, what is the most impactful or most powerful lever in marketing? And he said, the number one most powerful lever to growing your business, AKA marketing, is having a better product. All right, so I'd love to just kind of hear how you think about that, right? Improving product, because if you improve the product, you're going to create more satisfied, more happy customers, and more happy customers leave better testimonials. They refer others, they buy more of your stuff in the future, they stay in your program for longer. So how do you think about that idea of improving product and you as the founder, do you spend a significant amount of time kind of thinking about product and how you can improve and enhance and make the product better? speaker-1: For me, the product is what I love. I love to touch the product. I like to iterate on it. And so I agree with that because I was one who probably didn't put the product out when it could have because I'm like, it's not good enough yet, right? That is really great advice for an established business. Like if you want your product to do better, just make a better product, right? And that's great when you're already established. I think for startup founders, and I am guilty of this, is that I wanted a perfect product and I didn't want to release anything until there was a perfect product. So there has to be a balance. And what that looks like is, you know, you might never think it's perfect and then you're never going to get it out there at all. And what you think is perfect may not be perfect anyway. So for example, one of the really big things that how I began Care Bloom was actually as caregiver compliance, meaning paid caregiver compliance. So on top of what I needed to monitor like was my grandma or a family member, I saw how broken home health care, a lot of aides, they're very underpaid, they are exhausted. It's a hard job to care for somebody when you're not treated or paid properly. And because of that, in a lot of cases, care is not the quality it should be. for 100 reasons. So I don't want to ever blame the home health aide or the aide. But there's a lot of infrastructure that goes into that. So I thought, I'm going to build this compliance tool. And it was fantastic. And so the caregiver actually wore a tag as well. And we still offer this service. But it turned out, I thought we were going to go into assisted living. And we had done testing. And I was like, I can bring compliance up 70%. I can verify that tasks are done. If I do all of this, it'll be great because now you're gonna know about how much better a resident is doing or a family member, all of these things. And I was so proud of this. And it was the thing I spent the most amount of time on, because quality of care equals quality of outcomes. And I would go into assisted livings and nursing homes and they were like, yeah, we don't care. I was so proud of this thing that I built. It was this great, like, I was so proud of everything this thing could do. It was amazing the compliance in our testing, what we were able to do. They were like, nope, we don't care. We still have that offered, but I will tell you, very few people take up on this piece that I am like. It was like a moment for me. I was like, look at me, I did this. And no, everyone was like, we don't care. speaker-0: Right. Yeah, you got to get it out there, right? You can't let perfecting the product get in the way of actually getting it in the hands of the people that will use it because that is the most important thing is that people actually want it, right? Right. So you need to validate that with the, you know, there's the idea of the MVP, right? The minimum viable product. People listening might think, ⁓ you're only talking about physical hardware products. I disagree. Like I think that the idea of a product can still be applied to service businesses. Like for you, for LT Care and Av, it's a software, right? So that software is your product. But I think for more like done for you services or kind of coaching programs or information products, I think the product is not so much like the content or the modules or the curriculum or the methodology that you've developed, but I think the product is the transformation that you deliver. Don't let perfecting the product get in the way of you going out and getting your first customers, right? Just go get your first customers with the MVP, minimum viable product version so that you can validate that people actually want it. speaker-1: Emphasis on the ⁓ like really try to get something that is super simple out there because you could do what I did and I like built out all these products and you put a lot of money into a company and you even raise money and there's a lot of money into it. And if it's not successful, you'd rather know sooner rather than later because not succeeding doesn't necessarily mean failure. That's why we do an MVP. So it doesn't hurt a lot if you don't succeed, but what can you learn from that moment? speaker-0: You know, you only fail if you quit every failure. It's just a lesson that you can take and apply to the next thing. It's just feedback, right? Failure is feedback. There's so many sayings about it. Yeah. And I think some of that I heard yesterday too is the fastest way to stall in business is to make every result mean something about you. Yeah. You don't have to take like any thing not working. It doesn't mean that you're bad or you're dumb or you're not going to succeed, right? It's just, that's the feedback that you needed to now go iterate and work on the next thing. speaker-1: And it's hard not to take it to heart, I think. I've had a lot of people who've interviewed me ask me what I could go back and tell my younger self that I know today that I didn't know then. But if I could do that, I was like, if I told myself something, one, I probably wouldn't have listened, and two, I wouldn't have learned it. If you don't experience it truly and you really haven't learned it, it's not going to resonate with you in the same way. and you're not going to really be able to bring it forward without having that moment. speaker-0: If information was all it took to create change, right, everybody would be a millionaire with six packs, right? You got to go live it. You got to learn it, right? You got to get the bumps and bruises. Go through that experience yourself. And yeah, like everything that we've talked about today, it's easier said than done. But, know, we're going through a really big shift right now, and there's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of disruption, as Jay Samit mentioned. The optimist in me. thinks that this is a really cool opportunity for people to kind of be forced, for lack of a better word, into a situation where they have to figure out how to create their own value in the world. Right? No matter what technology comes around, we're never going to run out of problems. I think every individual, like you said, every, every person has a book in them. think every individual has a problem that they're uniquely qualified to solve for others, whether that's, you know, helping coach people through XYZ transition in their life, help them deliver some transformation in their life or develop some kind of product, but I think that everyone is uniquely qualified to solve some problem. And I think that this transition is going to get put a lot of people into a situation where they have to figure out how to create their own value in the world, AKA solve a problem or build a business, start a business. I'm excited about that because in order to be successful, you really have to care about the problem that you're solving. And I think that people are going to be find themselves in a situation where they really enjoy what they do. And I think people that enjoy what they're working on care about the work that they're doing are the happiest people in the world. So how do you think about the idea of more entrepreneurs in the world. speaker-1: So I do agree with you. I think there's a lot that's left to unfold that like, what are we gonna need? What does that look like? Let's face it, AI is gonna start changing a lot of things. And there's a lot of things it's gonna do that are fantastic. Like if you want to start creating marketing tools, there's like, the ability to do this is like no other time before. If you are gonna start a business, it's probably a good time to do it because... things are at your fingertips now. When I started, let's go back to like writing room. There wasn't even anything really to Google. Like there was not a lot of help in what that looked like. My last book I just wrote came out at beginning of this year. And I remember getting ready to call my editor. And it took my daughter, my daughter was like, why are you calling an editor? And I'm like, well, what else are you supposed to do? Somebody has to like look at it. And she's like, speaker-0: Yeah, yes. speaker-1: chat-sheepy-tee can look at it and just check the grammar for you. I was like, ⁓ look at that. So like that, it's giving people the opportunity to write books. It's giving people the opportunity to start businesses who might not know where to start. So I think embrace it. And if you have a passion to start a business, like jump in. You'll learn a lot. speaker-0: If you had a billboard that everyone in the world could see for 10 seconds, what would it say and why? speaker-1: Plan for your long-term care because you need it. speaker-0: Very on brand, very on brand. love it. Lindsay, thank you so much for the time. Thank you for listening. My main takeaway from this conversation is that being close to a problem is not the same thing as understanding the whole system around it. Lindsay had ideas early on and some of them were genuinely ahead of their time. Having the patent for background removal, so cool. But what changed with this business was not just the product. It was her depth of contact with the actual stakes, the people involved and the incentives shaping every decision. speaker-1: Thank you. speaker-0: That is the part a lot of founders miss. You can build something impressive and still be solving the wrong problem or solving it in a way that bends the business in the wrong direction. Strong founders eventually learn that product, market, and incentives all have to line up. If they do, the business gets clearer. If they do not, no amount of polish really saves it. If you want to get connected with Lindsay Friedman, you can find her links in the description of this episode, including links to Care Bloom and LT Care Nav. If you run a coaching program course or mastermind and your clients aren't completing the work, download the free Program Execution System Toolkit in the description. It shows you how to install execution infrastructure so clients actually follow through and get results. Thank you for listening and I'll see you in the next one.