Latest / Founder Unfiltered - What Founders Think But Never Say / The Original Idea for Mylance Was a Fool’s Errand

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The Original Idea for Mylance Was a Fool’s Errand · Founder Unfiltered - What Founders Think But Never Say

• 0:00
  Welcome to another episode of Founder Unfiltered.
• 0:03
  My name is Bradley Jacobs. I'm your host, the founder and
• 0:06
  CEO of Mylance. Before we jump in, Mylance is
• 0:10
  Content Producer helps you show up on LinkedIn, attract clients,
• 0:14
  build trust overtime, and actually makes those both
• 0:18
  responses at a much higher rate from the DMS that you send and
• 0:23
  people will DM you because you are showing up.
• 0:25
  Our tool helps you get there in under 5 minutes per post and we
• 0:29
  do all of your positioning for you.
• 0:31
  If you don't know which, most people don't, so you'd be in
• 0:34
  good company. All right, with that, let's jump
• 0:36
  right in. Today's episode is a story about
• 0:41
  Mylance and what I've learned building this company along the
• 0:45
  way and why the first idea for Mylance was frankly a terrible
• 0:50
  one. And I've learned through the
• 0:53
  trials and tribulations, the years of experience of what's
• 0:58
  working and what's not working. And so much is not working and
• 1:01
  has not been over the years. And that's how I've learned all
• 1:05
  of this. And so I can help you skip some
• 1:07
  of those learnings and see what's not working and what's
• 1:09
  working in your business. So I'm just going to tell you
• 1:13
  the initial pitch for my land, this is back in January of 2020.
• 1:17
  It was right before COVID and the whole pitch was that as a
• 1:23
  independent consultant, as a high end freelancer, if you
• 1:25
  will, that you have to take care of everything that your employee
• 1:31
  normally would take care of for you.
• 1:33
  That's your legal entity. Financial accounts, legal
• 1:36
  advice, bookkeeping, taxes, insurance, and getting all of
• 1:42
  that was taken care of by your employer.
• 1:45
  But on your own, none of that is taken care of.
• 1:48
  So the idea was that we're going to wrap all of that in one
• 1:51
  monthly subscription and save you a ton of time and money and
• 1:55
  headache because you just as a, as an independent consultant,
• 1:58
  you just want that taken care of, right?
• 2:01
  And I did all the math on how many consultants there were.
• 2:04
  And then this is my favorite part is I talked about
• 2:07
  additional revenue opportunities.
• 2:09
  So the pitch was literally, and this is a quote on a slide that
• 2:13
  I had as part of a deck. Once we acquire users through
• 2:17
  our bookkeeping and tax offering, we'll expand the
• 2:20
  offering to the other challenges freelancers face.
• 2:23
  I needed the HR for freelance, which includes legal coverage
• 2:27
  and advice, bookkeeping, expense tracking, taxes, proposals and
• 2:31
  contracts, insurance. And then the V2 was business
• 2:36
  demand generation, which means helping you get clients.
• 2:40
  So we are going to also do coaching to help freelancers
• 2:42
  find contracts, affiliate fees for freelancer recommendations.
• 2:46
  I could keep going. This list of things that we were
• 2:50
  going to build, I was going to build as part of his company was
• 2:53
  enormous. And I'm wondering as you listen
• 2:56
  to me talk, can you start to pinpoint the problem?
• 3:01
  So what's fascinating is that in my first year of doing business,
• 3:06
  the main product we were selling was essentially a coaching
• 3:10
  business that helped you launch and grow your consulting
• 3:13
  business. And then what ended up happening
• 3:16
  is our coaching customers who would then have success
• 3:20
  launching their consulting business, they'd be doing great.
• 3:23
  They came back to us and said, well, I'm really struggling now
• 3:25
  with my books. I'm really struggling with
• 3:26
  invoicing, I'm really struggling with taxes.
• 3:29
  And so I said, oh, no problem, I got you, let me build a
• 3:33
  bookkeeping offering. So we built a bookkeeping
• 3:36
  offering while we were continuing to run the coaching
• 3:39
  program. And then I had come from Uber
• 3:43
  and I had understood the value of technology, the scale that
• 3:47
  technology allows, affords. And I said, wait, hold on, these
• 3:53
  are fun and all, but these don't really scale with technology.
• 3:55
  Coaching doesn't scale with technology.
• 3:57
  Bookkeeping maybe, but you know, still need a lot of humans in
• 4:01
  the arena, at least that time. This is pretty big AI stuff.
• 4:05
  And so let me go raise money and let me go hire Acto and A and a
• 4:09
  dev team and we're going to go build software.
• 4:13
  So if you take the first three years of myelance, we had the
• 4:17
  coaching program, we had the bookkeeping business line.
• 4:19
  I was also building a community as lead Gen. for all of this
• 4:23
  just to attract customers. And now I was raising money.
• 4:26
  We raised a few 100 grand, we hired ACTO and we did all this
• 4:30
  product research to figure out what software product we are
• 4:33
  going to build that was going to solve our customers problems.
• 4:37
  Because what we found at the end of the day is that the coaching
• 4:41
  program helped get you clients and getting clients sustainably
• 4:46
  over time was the most challenging thing.
• 4:48
  Now I can keep going on the journey that my lands took, but
• 4:52
  I'm wondering if you can nail down the massive mistake I was
• 4:57
  making and continued to make. And it's not that the business
• 5:01
  wasn't bringing in money, it was right.
• 5:03
  We were finding a way, whether through the coaching program,
• 5:06
  through Bookie, through bookkeeping, we were making
• 5:09
  money and we are profitable for a lot of this.
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  But what we were doing is we were solving 1,000,000 problems
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  at a, you know, medium depth level at best versus going super
• 5:21
  deep into one. And what's also fascinating
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  about this is I hired a team of advisors.
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  I went back to people in my career that I knew, that I
• 5:33
  respected, that I thought were incredibly talented.
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  And I asked them if they would sit on a bit of a board with me,
• 5:40
  like an unofficial board I would get.
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  I gave them some equity in the company.
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  And I said, I want you to meet with me once a month and I want
• 5:48
  you to give me feedback. And I'm going to pitch to you
• 5:51
  how the month went. I'm going to check in on our
• 5:53
  metrics and I'm going to tell you what I'm going to accomplish
• 5:55
  next month. Given here's the big vision for
• 5:57
  the company. And not a single one of them at
• 6:01
  any point said, hold the phone. You are doing way too much.
• 6:05
  You are solving so many problems for the it's, it is one
• 6:09
  customer, but you're solving so many problems.
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  This doesn't work. My learning from that is none of
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  them had been founders. All of them were amazing at what
• 6:21
  they do. They're amazing operations and
• 6:23
  marketing, product engineering. Like I had people across the
• 6:26
  board, but they were all big company kind of executives, or
• 6:30
  even if they'd worked in startups, they were working in
• 6:33
  startups that were post product market fit.
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  They didn't have the lens of what does this need to look like
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  in the early days. So I wasn't getting the advice
• 6:47
  that I really needed. I wasn't getting the gut check.
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  And frankly, maybe I had to just learn this lesson on my own.
• 6:51
  Maybe that's just how it goes. But the reality is as customers
• 6:56
  were asking for more things and customers are going to ask for
• 7:00
  more things, I was adding to what we had already built.
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  I was building on top instead of cutting addition.
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  In my situation, it felt like progress.
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  I didn't want to get rid of the things that I had built and I
• 7:14
  wanted to solve customer problems.
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  Like that's why I got into being a founder in the 1st place, is
• 7:18
  that I love solving problems. I love adding value.
• 7:22
  And actually what I was doing is I was really frankly going
• 7:25
  backwards because I think in a perfect world, what I would be,
• 7:29
  what I would have been doing is pick a problem to solve one
• 7:33
  problem for one specific customer built in MVP, right?
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  And then continue to see where there was traction within the
• 7:43
  solution I built and kind of addition by subtraction, like
• 7:47
  get rid of the things that are not contributing to that and
• 7:50
  only build what is contributing to that.
• 7:54
  But as simple as a concept as that is in practice, and this is
• 7:59
  where you get to kind of look at your own business if you're
• 8:01
  listening to this, where it's easier said than done because
• 8:06
  there's an emotional attachment that I had to these great things
• 8:10
  that I built and I might have had customers on them.
• 8:13
  So I don't want to get rid of something where I have customers
• 8:15
  on. I don't want to change something
• 8:17
  existing where I have customers on, right?
• 8:19
  You end up in this whole emotional roller coaster of what
• 8:23
  do I do when the real answer is you have to cut things that are
• 8:28
  not directly contributing to the solution of your business.
• 8:33
  And that's what I fail to do over and over and over again.
• 8:37
  Because even once we eventually shut down the coaching program
• 8:41
  because it was such a big, I don't want to say distraction,
• 8:43
  but it, it's like running a coaching, a high end coaching
• 8:47
  business. It's all about sales and
• 8:49
  marketing. I can't do that and fulfill the
• 8:51
  coaching business and pretend to run a software business.
• 8:54
  Like those are different things. So I shut down the coaching
• 8:58
  business and we focused on lead generation for, for consultants.
• 9:02
  And what I did is I basically built a custom Zoom info style
• 9:06
  software solution that identified the best users, the
• 9:11
  best customers for those consultants.
• 9:14
  So we'd say like, OK, these are the 20 companies for you to
• 9:17
  target. These are the 50 people at those
• 9:19
  companies. And we can give you your names,
• 9:20
  Linkedins and emails, which I think is a great product.
• 9:24
  It was really, really powerful software, but our customer
• 9:28
  didn't really know how to use it because they weren't B to B
• 9:30
  sales reps. So what we did then is we built
• 9:33
  an agency on top of it and we said, you know what, we'll do it
• 9:35
  for you. So you can see where I'm again
• 9:38
  repeating the mistake. I'm building software now, I'm
• 9:41
  building an agency. I'm maintaining the community
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  still. There's so much going on here.
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  And we weren't just doing outbound.
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  We were then moved into content creation as well because our
• 9:53
  customers, we were learning that the best outbound has both
• 9:57
  content and sorry, the best overall client acquisition has
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  outbound and content creation, one without the other doesn't
• 10:05
  work. We could have said you need to
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  go do this, but we did it. We said we'll do it for you.
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  So now we're doing content creation, we're doing outbound,
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  We have this agency layer where we're doing it for you.
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  We have the software and we have a community.
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  Like I continue to repeat the mistake because it's so easy to
• 10:22
  make when you get obsessed with solving the problem for your
• 10:25
  customer. And so finally, honestly, when
• 10:28
  all of this AI stuff came out, I was like, you know what?
• 10:32
  This isn't working. Our solution is good, not great.
• 10:35
  Our customers are happy, but not ecstatic.
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  And I'm not building a business where our customers aren't
• 10:41
  ecstatic. And so I basically cut
• 10:44
  everything and I started over from scratch.
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  I'm like, what is the Super, super simple solution that I'm
• 10:51
  going to build that solves one problem for one customer?
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  And I went back to the drawing board.
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  We went back to use your interviews and instead of saying
• 11:01
  like, oh, your biggest problem is client acquisition, cool.
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  Let's break that down. What part, What part is most
• 11:07
  challenging for you? Let's really talk about what are
• 11:11
  the hypotheses that we have as a company as far as what we
• 11:15
  already know and let's pressure test those deeply among our
• 11:19
  customers set. And that's where I really
• 11:21
  learned that our customers see the value in LinkedIn, but they
• 11:26
  don't know how to use it. And what that really means is
• 11:28
  they don't know what to post. They don't know what to post
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  that's going to resonate with their ideal audience, that's
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  going to feel authentic and genuine.
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  And the first thing I did was build a no code MVP in Notion
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  and Google Sheets with Zapier. And that's it.
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  That's a, you know what? I'm going to solve this problem.
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  I'm going to charge you for it and I'm going to give you the
• 11:50
  solution in Ocean Doc. And people are like, OK, great.
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  I don't care as long as you solve my problem.
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  And so we would create prompts for them and say, like, all
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  right, this is what you're going to post on LinkedIn this week.
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  And they paid $134.50 per month for it because we were solving
• 12:05
  their problem. It didn't need to be this like
• 12:07
  big glorious thing. And So what I found was the
• 12:11
  simpler something is, as long as it's solving the problem, people
• 12:15
  are still willing to pay for it and happy to pay for it as long
• 12:18
  as it's again, solving that problem.
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  So it's really this big lesson that I've learned in looking
• 12:25
  back at my Lance. I, I laugh at myself.
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  I'm like, I can't believe I thought I was going to go build
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  from scratch with at that time, no funding the HR for
• 12:37
  freelancers, like the entire package, right?
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  Truly legal, bookkeeping, expenses, taxes, proposals,
• 12:43
  every single one of these pillars that I labeled is a full
• 12:48
  company. And it's not just a full
• 12:50
  company. There are dozens of companies
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  for every one of those across different customer segments,
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  right? Enterprise has dozens of
• 12:57
  companies, S and BS have dozens of companies. start-ups has
• 13:00
  dozens of companies. They all have dozens of
• 13:02
  companies which shows you if you don't pick your niche, you are
• 13:07
  going, you have no chance at competing because the enterprise
• 13:11
  company is not going to go to the general bookkeeping
• 13:15
  solution. The SMB is not going to go to
• 13:17
  the general bookkeeping solution.
• 13:18
  They're going to go to bookkeeping for SMBs, They're
• 13:20
  going to go to bookkeeping for enterprises.
• 13:23
  So when you get narrowly focused, that's when you win.
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  And it's easy to say, we all say it all the time.
• 13:30
  Everyone knows it. Putting into practice is so, so,
• 13:34
  so challenging. And that's where I really argue
• 13:36
  that you need coaches, you need support, you need people that
• 13:41
  can challenge you and point out the blind spots, and you need
• 13:44
  people who actually have been there and done that and know
• 13:46
  what they're talking about. Because I did get support.
• 13:49
  And frankly, it still wasn't nailing where I where I really
• 13:53
  needed to be challenged. So I'm going to say, if you
• 13:56
  can't say what your business does and who you do it for in
• 14:00
  one sentence, then you have a research project dressed as a
• 14:04
  startup. Because at the time, frankly, I
• 14:07
  didn't have a start up. I had a big vision and wanting
• 14:11
  to like a lot of ambition, but I did not have a core problem.
• 14:16
  And so I was frankly like floundering around in product
• 14:19
  market fit world without even a real North Star.
• 14:21
  That was reasonable. It was completely unreasonable
• 14:25
  to think that I could build HR for freelance.
• 14:27
  It is for anyone truly. So you're going to wrap this
• 14:31
  episode up. I hope you learn something from
• 14:34
  my journey and really can think about this for your own business
• 14:37
  of taking the emotions out of it and being very clear on the
• 14:41
  problem you're solving, the customer you're solving it for.
• 14:44
  I learned this lesson the hard way and it's something that I
• 14:47
  continue to to need to remind myself of literally every day.
• 14:51
  With that, come check us out at mylancemylance.co.
• 14:54
  We have a free tier of the product now, so you can just
• 14:58
  enter in your LinkedIn. We'll pull your information.
• 15:00
  We'll create positioning based on what your LinkedIn currently
• 15:03
  says today. We'll give you your first
• 15:04
  calendar for free. So come check it out.
• 15:07
  Shoot me note on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear from you means
• 15:09
  the world to me. And with that, have an amazing
• 15:11
  rest of your day.