Oh. My. Goodness.

Chaos is an understatement of how it’s been in my mind over the last few weeks → And it just got slightly less chaotic.

But it also didn’t. AHHHH 🤠

This is Week 5 of The Unicorn Founder and finally do I feel like I am gaining ground on the clarity battle for where the heck I am going 🕺

I have updates on the unicorn startup, the agency, some very philosophical i.e. life changing reflections, and realistic ideas to bring in some revenue (at long last) → Let’s GOOOOOOOOOOO!

This Week’s Update Overview:

• ✍️ The Life-Changing Reflections: Oh my, these are going to either really make you think or never come back to this newsletter.

• 🏢 What’s Happening with The Agency: How I am figuring this whole thing out - of which I started having zero idea about (which I definitely still do not have yet).

• 🤩 The Beautifully Simple (yet lucrative) Revenue Stream: Yes, can you believe it, I am trying to be more realistic (trimming down my ambition) which is actually helping me find ways to make $$$.

• 🦄 The Rainbow-Haired Unicorn I am growing: I never even knew I had this fella hiding in all the work I was doing, but he’s starting to rear his head in exciting ways and possibilities.

✍️ The Life-Changing Reflections

As you know, a lot happens every week.

One average meeting. One really great event. And one meeting where I just listened for 85% of the time.

These three things inspired so much, so much! But I’ll replay some of the most meaningful plus some other juicy extras - as per usual.

The Average Meeting:

• Just because you scheduled for an hour, doesn’t mean you need to stay in the meeting for the full hour if you covered all that was relevant more quickly than expected → i.e. don’t waste time just because you’ve got it.

• Sometimes you just don’t need to meet with one more person, you just need to build → i.e. just because you are “meeting” with people doesn’t mean you are being productive.

• As much as I wish I could meet with every single person on the face of the earth and hear their story, I can’t. Be extremely selective about who you meet with → i.e. know the purpose of your meet-up so that you’re time is used as effectively as possible. (Be Intentional)

This is all on a purely productive standpoint because that’s the chapter I am in right now - if that’s not you, and you just want to meet with people for the sake of it, GO FOR IT, that’s totally okay! (my little disclaimer)

The Really Great Event:

On Thursday StartupClub ZA hosted their CPT City Connect, which was phenomenal → and I’ll tell you my introspective reasons why.

But, if you want to know why it was phenomenal on a purely generic level (i.e. being based on the speakers, food, venue etc.), here is my LinkedIn post about it and the topics discussed.

Quick Context: Two founders of two different payment providers were interviewed on-stage, there was amazing food by ChefnGuests (Philippe the founder is an amazing guy, check him out on LinkedIn), and just an awesome opportunity to connect with other founders, both local and visiting internationals - of which I did much of!

Some Highlighted Points:

• Payfast represents the traditional model of building a billion dollar (rand in this case) company whereas Stitch very much represents the modern way of building through leverage (of funding).

• Both founders were extremely honest in sharing their stories, the very low lows and the very high highs.

• Silicon Valley people are no different from people all over the world, access to resources is just slightly different, and the conversations are 9/10 times more nuanced towards tech, innovation, and startups.

Okay, the introspection now:

• I got to see the calibre of people founding these companies, whilst also hearing their stories, including the honest ups and downs → They are no different from you and I.

• You have two ways in which to continually push yourself and your thinking:

  1. Put yourself in a place (eg. SF) where people are leading the change right next door and in the local café’s

  2. Fill your days with intentional behaviour that keeps you up-to-date with what’s new in the world whilst connecting with people who are implementing some sort of change somehow

     → Both options require a proactive inclination towards discomfort as you face ideas, thinking, and execution that intimidates you.

• These founders had no clear idea where things would end up, yet they continued plodding on → but if you have some sort of idea, no matter how vague it is, of where you are heading, just imagine how much further/faster you could go? (a question I asked myself)

• Stitch had literally no traction before getting funding - the investors backed the founding team → how well could you do with traction and an exceptional founding team when looking for investment? (Capital is freely available and flowing around the world)

Alright, that’s quite a bit to think about. Anything else that comes to mind will undoubtedly be thrown onto my LinkedIn feed this coming week - stay tuned ;)

The Meeting of just Listening:

I haven’t spoken to this guy in ages, we connected almost a year ago through X and finally we touched base again.

He’s based in Los Angeles and doing some amazing things there, and after sharing everything that has happened in my life since we last connected on a call, he got the chance to open the floodgates from his end.

Oh my goodness - prior to our call I had been thinking about a few things:

• Should I go work for a startup?

• Should I go intern in the private equity sector?

• Maybe I need to go over to SF? (answered above with the event)

And the first two questions were completely put to bed after my call with this guy from LA.

Disclaimer of what comes next: Of course there are always exceptions to things, but this was valuable insight confirmed in-person and an important perspective I needed to consider - because him and I are extremely similar in life philosophies and personalities.

He has been working for a startup which is growing fast & getting a LOT of funding BUT:

• He’s doing/learning everything he could use for his own startup except that it’s serving someone else’s vision.

  → i.e. he sees (almost) no difference working for a startup/versus building your own. (with our particular personality)

• He worked for a VC firm as an intern (free experience for free labour is the common setup) and he hated it.

  • It’s the same as above, except there’s no pay and he found a lot of flaws in early VC firms.

    → i.e. VC firms take a lot of time to actually become profitable and he wants to invest time into things he believes in. (which right now doesn’t include VCs)

This was all suchhh good insight into my two questions → leading me to conclude that yep, I am pretty happy to continue working on dedicating my time to building things that I want to build. (which involves its own set of challenges, learnings, and opportunities.)

🏢 What’s Happening with The Agency

Alrighty, this is what recently happened:

• Completed 3 software applications this week.

• Built two websites.

• And learnt a lot of new stuff.

At the start, I just wanted to get straight into software building, but I am starting to see some insane value of researching and learning from resources available all over the internet.

I have joined around 5 low-code communities which have been tremendously valuable - providing me access to people, ideas, and solutions I never before had access to.

This week has been a 50/50 split between building and researching (learning).

I’m feeling peace with going all-in with the agency as a stepping stone into the startup world and in using it as an incredibly powerful startup incubator machine by allowing me to get inside of companies and test out MVPs over and over - with immediate feedback.

Next week there’ll be some more updates on the agency side of things, for now I am networking a lot, learning a lot, and just building, building, building.

And in addition to that, I have been superrr quiet on LinkedIn, but now I have a bit more direction of what to share with you all on a day-to-day basis.

🤩 The Beautifully Simple (yet lucrative) Revenue Stream

I seem to have missed a massively large market of potential software clients by being so ambitious. SMBs. (Small-Medium Businesses)

Of which, there are MANY. (Reported to be just under 100,000 formal SMBs in South Africa, out of 2.6 million)

I’m going to tap into that, at least initially, and then I’m going straight to dollar/euro/pound territory → after the initial test runs are executed well.

As you may know, with my software module business model, I only need to build the base foundation of the software and then the additional work is only in the customization.

I seem to have missed out on a lot of really simple use-cases for the software, that cost between $500 - $2,500 a build, which I will tap into.

Here’s how:

1. Over the next two weeks I’ll be investigating the fundamental problems SMBs are facing and and build out these base models to solve these issues.

2. From there, I’ll do deep dives into an array of businesses fitting my specific criteria of employee count, annual revenue, etc. and build out research papers into the problems they are facing.

3. To get into the door, I’ll be offering a tailored software solution, at no charge to them, just so that I can refine my “research project”.

4. At the end of the refined research project and a test-run of my free software, I’ll be in a very warm position to upsell the lead to a paid software package.

So, let’s see how this all plays out. I’m excited, hope you are too.

🦄 The Rainbow-Haired Unicorn I am growing

Ah yes, the last, most juiciest piece of all of this.

I did not expect this to happen - which makes it all the better.

But as I have been building out a bunch of random software things for random people, I have found some ideas start to grow in my mind.

It starts with the real estate agents.

• My guiding question is: What are agents fundamentally needed to do?

  → I am then looking into all of their current operations and finding ways to automate nearly everything up to the physical, human part of what they do.

I am so, soooo excited about it all → in my mind it’s all forming into something really large and powerful.

I would tell you more, but I don’t have much built yet, and so in a few weeks more will be shared…

But just know, it’s revolutionary, full of clarity, and sooo damn cool.

Anyway, the agency will serve as the funder for the startup in the meantime → a really nifty setup if you ask me.

😌 Want to give honest feedback?

All you need to do is reply to this email to tell me your experience versus expectations.

I’ll see what I can do to improve either a) the experience or b) the expectations I am promoting.

Or just thank you for the really helpful feedback :))))

Did I miss anything? Hit 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, see you next week!

Ethan