A Week of Discovery 🙌

Hello and welcome beautiful humans…

This is week 1 of The Unicorn Founder, and what a week it has been 😤

There has been so much progress, new developments, feedback, and, and, and… let’s just dive in already →

This Week’s Update Overview:

• 😖 Existential Crisis: Figuring out passion & purpose and how it relates to business building.

• 💡 Y-Combinator Clarity: The accelerator question and what that inspired.

• 🤠 Founder Interviews: Business owners and startup founder insights.

• 📋 The Research: The stories of how the good went to great and how the nothings became somethings.

• 🎯 The Next Steps: New information, validation, and plans going forward to generate $50k in one week.

😖 The Existential Crisis

Quick story time: On Monday I had a follow-up meeting with an executive/founder coach and we were discussing how passion → purpose (ikigai) and purpose → a business.

I spent a lot of time reflecting and wondering how to channel my many passions into a specific purpose (still a work in progress).

This got me feeling quite stuck and unsure if proptech really was the industry I wanted to build a billion dollar company in… prompting many questions about myself and about the industry.

The way forward from here led me to do a deep dive into three things:

1. The proptech industry

2. The early stories of the founders of current billion dollar companies

3. How other founders got to where they are currently

In addition, I was prompted by an executive/founder coach to look into applying to a startup accelerator, with two recommendations being the Founder Institute and the Irish Tech Challenge.

The only problem: I don’t have a startup to apply with, I have been in pre-startup territory (ideation and customer discovery).

Which is where things are starting to change on that front - more on that later…

 💡 Y-Combinator Clarity

After receiving the recommendations to apply to those two accelerators I decided to go through the application process for Y-Combinator (YC), which was founded by Paul Graham and is one of the most prestigious startup incubators/accelerators to be accepted into - they have a 3% acceptance rate.

After briefly going through their application process I gained clarity that if there’s one accelerator I’ll attend it’ll be from YC.

The Clarity: To have a startup generating enough traction, impact, and growth to be good enough to be accepted into YC Winter 2025, applications starting in September 2024.

That was a crucial turning point for me because it gave me a clear milestone that I needed to go after, with peace of mind that the only thing I needed to be concerned was the startup portion of the equation.

This is just how my brain works haha.

 🤠 Founder Interviews

Tuesday - Friday was then filled with 50 interviews with founders who were either:

a. Running a successful startup/business

b. On the way to a “successful” startup/business

There were three main questions I would ask every single founder:

1. Why are you building this sort of startup/business?

2. How did you know that this was the problem you wanted to solve?

3. What is the main obstacle you are experiencing that is stopping you from making the progress you want to be making?

The results were fascinating.

I’d love to see where your thoughts lie, the answer is coming up in a bit.

📋 The Research

This is where I not only interviewed people but did research on the stories of how companies like Uber, Airbnb, WeWork, etc. were founded, including the current proptech industry.

I also researched people like Elon Musk to learn a bit more about how he really got started.

🙋‍♂️ Interesting Fact: There was only one founding pair that had previously built successful startups before making it “big” - which was the Uber founders (out of the five I researched).

🥸 Powerful Realisation: All the other founders just tried, over and over and over again, constantly refining and experimenting.

What was even more powerful than learning about that fact was the following common answer from nearly all the founders I interviewed.

🗣 The Most Common Answer: I decided to solve this problem because I had experienced it myself/had second-hand experience with the problem.

This means that in order for me to get my odds stacked in my favour as much as possible, I need to solve a problem I myself am experiencing or have close association to someone experiencing it.

That changed everything for me.

I realised that I needed to get inside the industry and look from inwards out > outwards in → which explains why I struggled so much when doing the proptech research (it was extremely difficult to understand the real issues going on inside real estate from simple research/customer interviews)

I created a complete breakdown which is available for free as the first referral reward.

 🎯 The Next Steps

That change came at the perfect time for me to start my pivot and follow Steve Blank’s advice, the author of The Startup Owner’s Manual, which is to:

On Saturday I connected in-person with a very interesting individual who not only filled me with inspiration but also ideas of how to get out of the building asap.

So, let’s break down how this next week is going to look 🦄

🎯 The Goal: $50,000 of pre-sales revenue generated before Sunday.

Today: Learn Glide

Monday: Complete learning of Glide and get certification level 1

Tuesday: Attain Glide certification level 2 and run test programs

Wednesday: Gather leads for the custom software service

Thursday: Present the offer to leads

Friday: Present the offer to leads

Saturday: Build custom software

Sunday: Build custom software

Next Monday: Ship software to leads and earn first pay-check.

All I am doing is getting inside industries, building software solutions for them, and once I am in, I will be able to more accurately look around and find the problem/opportunities that I will build the billion dollar startup on.

There is a lot more details under each day, but more on that next Sunday 😉

😍 I know you loved this… right?

🔋 Community is Power

Life is not easy, but having good people around you helps a ton!

• 1 Referral = Thinking of starting a startup/business? Get the Billion Dollar Case Study to get some points on where to start from the ones who have done it already.

• 2 Referral + = Are you interested in knowing more about other billion dollar companies? There is a lot of exciting research conclusions I’ll be releasing shortly as rewards.

• 5 Referrals = Exclusive access to a private slack channel of founders/entrepreneurs and even some investors from all over the world.

Did I miss anything? Smack that Reply button and let me know what you’d like to see.

Did someone forward this to you? You can follow the billion dollar company journey here.

Want to connect? Here is my LinkedIn.

Ciao!

Ethan