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Tackling the Myths of Entrepreneurship: Luc Bohunicky
49 Plays4 years ago
Entrepreneurship is sexy and compelling.
You call your own shots. You're the master/mistress of your own domain.
It's an ideal way to make a living.
Well, that's the perception.
The reality is that entrepreneurship is stressful. It's a 24/7 activity that takes blood, sweat, and tears.
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Luc Bohunicky and I explore the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, and what entrepreneurs must do to develop products and attract an audience.
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Transcript
Introduction to Marketing Spark and Guest
00:00:02
Speaker
My name is Mark Evans, and I'd like to welcome you to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers small doses of insight, tools, and tips from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in 20 minutes or less. On today's show, I'm talking with Luke Bahanaki, a podcaster, LinkedIn aficionado, and senior growth manager at Deep Dive Technology Group. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Luke. Thanks a lot for having me. It's nice to get one on the books here.
00:00:27
Speaker
We've gone back and forth a lot on LinkedIn like I have with a lot of people over the last six months and really enjoyed our conversation. So it's really excited to have you on the podcast today.
The Myths and Realities of Entrepreneurship
00:00:36
Speaker
One of the things that you talk about a lot is entrepreneurship. And I think what we've both seen so far this year is a lot of people unfortunately have lost their jobs and are exploring the idea of doing their own thing, of being the master or mistress of their own domain. But there's a lot of myths around entrepreneurship. From the outside looking in,
00:00:57
Speaker
It appears to be a very sexy very glamorous very exciting activity but you can provide some insight into what it's really like to be an entrepreneur and what it takes to. To enjoy that that lifestyle.
00:01:13
Speaker
Yeah, that's a juicy one right there, Mark. And I know that you and I have had these conversations on LinkedIn, and that's one of the beauties that I love about LinkedIn. It gives you a chance to vet your own thoughts and understand if you're crazy or if other people are crazy just like you. So yeah, I definitely think there's a lot of misconceptions about entrepreneurship. Maybe we'll get into a couple of those today. I definitely got into entrepreneurship for the wrong reasons.
Luke's Entrepreneurial Journey
00:01:40
Speaker
So I think I would have gone into it anyways. I'm 30 years old now. I got in, I guess right out of university technically before that happened. But yeah, I got sucked into the glamour side, man. I have to say, you know, like I said, I think I'm a born entrepreneur and I would have done it anyways, but you get this idea that it's a good way to make money. You get this idea that it's a good way to have this lifestyle, but you know, I guess you get caught up in that and you start,
00:02:09
Speaker
uh you know believing that that's it you start you stop thinking that you know you actually need to work hard to do it you stop thinking about what lifestyle you need to have you stop thinking about do i even like this business do i even like working nine to nine do i even like sacrificing my weekend so i think a lot of people get into it for the wrong reasons and that's probably why lots of people get out
00:02:33
Speaker
I think that a true entrepreneur is somebody that's tried multiple times and is still sticking to it. I don't think we should have an ego about what is defined as an entrepreneur. I think it's a verb and not a noun.
00:02:47
Speaker
And yeah, I just think that we need to break some of these social stigmas because it's a lot of work. It's not for everybody. It's not sexy. It can be. Um, but holy smokes, you learn a lot by doing it. Yeah, you do learn a lot and it is very exciting. I mean, while you kind of got into entrepreneurship for all, maybe the wrong reasons, I consider myself to be an accidental entrepreneur because in 2008 I got laid
Mark's Path to Entrepreneurship
00:03:11
Speaker
off by a startup. There was this thing called the global credit crunch and they didn't need marketers anymore.
00:03:15
Speaker
And i didn't know what i was gonna do i had three kids and a mortgage and i was gonna get a full time job and i fell into consulting i got a consulting gig and then i got another consulting gig and also i was an entrepreneur so i think one of the things that people need to keep in mind is that entrepreneurship happens for lots of different reasons sometimes.
00:03:35
Speaker
It's by design. Sometimes you're hit with a brainstorm that you just, you can't ignore on itch. You can't stop from scratching. And sometimes it's just, you know, right place, right time. So I think that's one of the things about entrepreneurship we need to, we need to think about maybe pinpoint one or two entrepreneurial myths that you wanted to dispel.
00:03:55
Speaker
To highlight your point there's no one way shape or form of entrepreneurship and i think that's the beauty of it and that's why we need to kind of get rid of these stigmas i personally think that one of the biggest myths is that you need to know something. So of course you know something but the idea that you need to be the master of a particular domain in order to go into a business and start a startup.
00:04:19
Speaker
I think it definitely helps to have domain knowledge. It definitely helps to know the customers that you want to sell to before you even start selling to them. But I think there is also a disadvantage if you think that you know
00:04:36
Speaker
too much if you think that you already know the problem that you're solving if you think that you already know who your ideal customer profile is what keeps them up at night if you think you already know everything that has to do with your business your product and your customer.
00:04:53
Speaker
I think it kind of puts you at a disadvantage, and I've worked with a lot of really smart technical co-founders, so of course I'm biased in that direction, which is good to just be self-aware. But when you have people, whether they're technology people or business people that think that they know too much, you lose the whole site of experimentation, which is what I think entrepreneurship is really all about.
Creativity and Expertise in Entrepreneurship
00:05:20
Speaker
But I would also argue that creativity and the ability to do things out of the box are also important. Recently, I read an article about Ben and Jerry, who, as we all know, created this amazing iconic ice cream brand. And the story was really about their 30 year relationship and how they remain good friends even to this day. But when you think about Ben and Jerry, they didn't know ice cream inside out. I mean, all they knew was they liked the idea of selling ice cream and they liked the idea of doing it in a place like Vermont. So it was more of a,
00:05:50
Speaker
Feel kind of feel good kind of enterprise for them but were they ice cream experts going in absolutely not so i think you make a good point about. The fact that maybe some of the most successful entrepreneurs are people who are simply passionate about idea or realize that they gotta do something because something's gotta be done yeah that's the magic of entrepreneurship sometimes.
00:06:10
Speaker
Yeah, and if I can play off the word creativity that you used, Mark, I think that in many cases you do know something from somewhere in your life, but you apply it in a unique way. So that's what I love to see is when you have a person that does something in their career, whether it's a job, a startup, whatever.
00:06:32
Speaker
And then they quit that thing and they feel like they don't have anything. They feel like they didn't take anything away because their career path isn't linear anymore. Well, guess what? Entrepreneurship definitely isn't linear. So I think it's beautiful when you do something really random in life that might not be related to something you do next, but you can apply the skills, the knowledge, the unique vantage point
00:06:57
Speaker
from what you did and apply it to what you do next. And I think that's where a lot of entrepreneurial disruption actually originates from.
Product Development and Customer Understanding
00:07:05
Speaker
So let's shift gears a little bit. So you decided to become an entrepreneur and you've got a target market that you're focused on and you've got an ideal customer who you think would be amazing to serve. How do you go about building your product? It can be both from either building a technology product or you're building maybe a piece of hardware. So what are some of the things that you need to think about? Because obviously it looks as though, well, it's not, it looks as though you, obviously you spend a lot of time focused on this particular aspect.
00:07:35
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think, uh, I think if you get this aspect wrong, this first customers first product kind of dilemma, if you get this wrong, you almost a hundred percent of the time fail. And if you get it right, you have at least a platform to attempt to succeed. So I think it's extremely important. And I feel that you, you can't build
00:08:02
Speaker
everything and then go and find your customers you absolutely can't do that you also can't on the other hand just go to a potential customer and say hey i have an idea. So i think that's where it's an iterative process of don't spend a month to build something but produce something if it's a physical product produce a three d rendering.
00:08:25
Speaker
if it's a digital product produce some wire frames produce some type of prototype or really really rough and dirty proof of concept just to help the people that you're talking to wrap their head around your idea and it will provide more feedback during that customer discovery customer development process anyways so i think that there was early stages really really don't build a lot
00:08:54
Speaker
or build nothing and then go and talk to lots of the right people lots of people meaning don't just talk to one two or three talk to a statistically significant number of people and relevant i mean you don't need to talk to everybody that's an exact customer talk to relevant stakeholders but don't talk to your mom on expect to get good.
00:09:18
Speaker
Product feedback right so those are a few things that i would think about when i go out i personally like to think about three particular types of customer profiles because if you choose one and you're wrong like it's got nothing to compare it to if you choose ten you're spreading yourself too thin so i like imagining there three different types of people that might like this i'm gonna go talk to a few of all three and then i'll refine my search later.
00:09:46
Speaker
So a couple of things to bounce off you in terms of that show them something concept. So there's a couple of, a couple of things people talk about. One is minimal viable product. And the other one is the lean startup, which was popularized by Eric Reese. What are your takes on both of those approaches and how does it align with your idea of showing potential customers something?
Lean Startup Methodology
00:10:10
Speaker
I read the books, loved them, embraced them, everything Eric Reese has put out, everything Steve Blank has put out. I think it's phenomenal and I know there's a bunch of other names out there that deserve a lot of credit too. I think the idea of a minimum viable product, the idea of a lean startup, from my vantage point, go very hand in hand. I feel like it's up the same tree and I feel the whole idea is
00:10:38
Speaker
you know, don't build something and expect somebody to come at you. It's this idea of you're working with very limited resources. It's this idea that you need to be in a place where you're willing to rapidly experiment and really produce, really find a way to test your riskiest assumption before you move on. So at any particular point,
00:11:05
Speaker
where you're an early stage start up you're doing some kind of activity that's both building a product and building a customer base some combination of the two and there's always some kind of
00:11:18
Speaker
Assumption that you should be testing and you shouldn't look at it as how quickly can I finish building my product? How quickly can I raise venture capital? But how do you get to that next point of learning that next point of experimenting? What's that biggest assumption that you're making that if it's true you have a business but if it's false you don't and you go out and you test that and sometimes that's by talking to people and
00:11:43
Speaker
sometimes that's by building something and showing it off sometime that's by a be testing something but i think it's the idea of this philosophy is to go step by step and figure out how to break your start up into bite size pieces that are digestible let's say within a week's period of time as opposed to a month or a year so you can ultimately learn as fast as you can and eat up the least amount of resources while doing it is that in line with what you think.
00:12:13
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with you that minimal viable product. Makes sense. One of the things I do worry about, or one of the things that that concerns me when the middle of a viral product is if you come out with a product and it's buggy and it's far from perfect and it doesn't delight in a certain way, then.
00:12:31
Speaker
In many cases you don't get a second chance the brand perception has been established your one shot at impressing that person or impressing the market overall has disappeared and so i do have some misgivings about the lean start up and approach. Do you worry about that at all is that you think that's a legitimate concern.
Visionary Marketing for Startups
00:12:52
Speaker
I don't want to play devil's advocate, but I will because I hear a lot of people talking about this and I totally agree. It's possible that you can burn a bridge if you release a shitty product and your first customer champion or champions realize it, but I think it's a greater risk if you don't just get something out there ASAP. I think if you find the right customer champion Mark,
00:13:18
Speaker
They want to be with you because you're casting a vision, you're casting an idea that you're out there to solve a particular problem. And it's more than just a feature or two features, but it's a vision of doing something that's going to redefine and reshape your customer's experience, your customer's day to day, whether it's B2B or B2C.
00:13:42
Speaker
So I think if you're doing something cool enough and valuable enough and you cast a really big vision and you're building a relationship with your customer champion, I think you're going into it saying, hey, this might not work perfect. This might have a few bugs. That's why we're discounting it. That's why blah, blah, blah. But you make sure that you over service the heck out of that customer. When it goes wrong, you rectify it. And I think in many situations, if you find the right
00:14:12
Speaker
Persona of customer champion they're in it because they want to be the first ones there in it because they know that they're getting a competitive advantage that they're there innovating so i think if they if you burn a bridge with your customer champion because your product wasn't good enough day one i think it was the wrong expectation or the wrong customer.
00:14:34
Speaker
That's great advice. And I think I remember someone talking at about a conferences about how to love your first one of her customers is that those are the people that really matter to you because if you can delight them, if you can educate them and get their feedback, then your product is going to evolve. It's going to improve.
00:14:52
Speaker
And then you'll be able to track more customers so let's let's shift gears a little bit you've built your product you've identified your customers and now you gotta do what many entrepreneurs. Consider to be a necessary evil you gotta focus on marketing how do you start with marketing as a start up.
00:15:10
Speaker
Particularly when you may not have a budget for marketing. That's a loaded question, but you talk to entrepreneurs all the time and a lot of them have good products, but you gotta do marketing to attract the audience to actually make the product work.
00:15:25
Speaker
Yeah, you know, honestly, I've never really thought about it as marketing. That's just my personal thought as an entrepreneur when I've had to go out there and build a strategy around which traction channels I want to prioritize, what tactics I'm going to leverage within those channels. It's never been like, oh, this is a marketing activity.
00:15:50
Speaker
it's always been centered around the idea of how do you how do you get your first few like it starts with how do you get one and then after you get one you build it up into a juicy case study and you get you know when you do your p r whatever traction channel you want which is a whole separate chat.
00:16:09
Speaker
And then you find customers two through 10 and kind of, I don't think you're in this mass market, like it's a full blown marketing strategy until you perhaps have dozens of customers. So in those really early stages, I really like the book called Traction by Gabriel Weinberg.
00:16:28
Speaker
who is the founder of dot dot go and he kind of says i can't remember but he says like there is nineteen different traction channels nineteen different ways you can find or nineteen different places you can find your customers and he provides a framework and again it's very much like okay well i think that these three channels out of the nineteen might work so i'm gonna run some tests some experiments
00:16:55
Speaker
hopefully one of them will work out for me. So I've just looked at it as where can you, you know, don't look at it as such a big audacious task. Where can you find your first customer? Where can you find your next customer after that? And then once you get into a groove and it's like holy smokes, we took a guess that
00:17:15
Speaker
LinkedIn would be a good traction channel and it's working, then you can figure out about doubling down and defining a clear strategy. But yeah, I think it's a daunting thing when you think about marketing, but when I need to find my next customer in the early stages, it seems more palatable for me.
00:17:34
Speaker
That's great advice and I think it's particularly good advice for entrepreneurs who are intimidated by marketing because it's usually something they don't know. Most entrepreneurs have a particular domain expertise or they've got their engineers in our world so I can see how that might be something that's a little more digestible and a little more approachable. Final question for you and I think it's a bit of a loaded question and I'm surprising you in some respects.
Customer Engagement Strategies
00:18:01
Speaker
What's the biggest mistake made by market or something that you find hard to believe these days.
00:18:08
Speaker
I would say that the thing I find hardest to believe, this is with marketers, and I think it also applies to almost every single other department inside of a business, perhaps except for sales. And it's that some marketers believe that they don't need to be directly talking to customers all the time. And I think that's wrong. I feel that the closer a marketer is with the customer,
00:18:36
Speaker
Actually, the more value they can add, and maybe some people would argue against this, but like in 2020, I would much rather be a marketer than a salesperson, like with the way the world's shifting, with COVID, all these crazy things. I think there's so much opportunity for marketing, and I think a lot of sales people will shift their role to become marketers, or they'll at least start thinking more
00:19:00
Speaker
as marketers than just pure, I'm going to call the next phone number on this list and try to sell something. So I think that.
00:19:08
Speaker
In light of the opportunity in the broad world of marketing in this digital era, I think these marketers need to get close and front and center with customers. Because if they can carry the voice of the customer, it's going to help with everything like content, like website copy, like, you know, what, what is that, uh, what is that thumbnail going to look like? How are you going to write your headline? How are you going to write that Google ad?
00:19:37
Speaker
I think it all spills out from just taking the easy approach, which is just figure out what the customers are saying, figure out what they're wanting and do it. And too many marketers, I think, play the telephone game expecting sales to relay this info. They should do it themselves.
00:19:54
Speaker
That's great advice, Luke.
Connect with Luke Bahanaki
00:19:55
Speaker
So if people are looking to connect with you or to consume your content, where do they find you? Well, apparently I'm hanging out with a lot with Mark Evans. So if you hang out with Mark, you might get close to Luke, but just in case that falls through, uh, search for me, Luke behind a key on LinkedIn. I love talking about early stage startups, marketing challenges and early stage startups and sort of how to build a personal brand in light of being an entrepreneur in 2020.
00:20:24
Speaker
I have a podcast called First Customer Club, www.firstcustomerclub.com, where I chat with people like Mark Evans, entrepreneurs, founders, marketing leaders, on these same kind of topics. So really grateful that you had me on today, Mark.
00:20:40
Speaker
Well, thanks for listening for another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you like what you heard, please rate it. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Luke, visit marketingspark.co.blog. If you have questions, feedback, would like to suggest a guest or want to learn about how I help B2B companies as a fractional CMO consultant and advisor, send an email to mark at marketingspark.co. Talk to you next time.