Episode #13 - You Can Suck at Business and Still Make Money
The best and worst business advice Dale and Coby have ever received — from being told to make hard sells on the first call (terrible) to learning that it's never what you say but how you say it (game-changing). A practical episode on filtering good advice from bad, and building the confidence to trust your own judgment.
Hello and welcome to the Sequoia Project podcast. Episode 13 today, and we are going to talk about something a different — we're going to talk about some examples and some theory behind, like, you don't even really have to be good to make money in business. Like it helps if you are, but you don't have to be.
Dale: I'm starting to hear a lot of stuff of like, oh, if you want to be successful business, you have to do this or this is what you can expect. And I'm just going, oh, I didn't experience that at all. And like, it might be what most people experience, but I didn't. So yeah, I think today I just want to kind of go through some of the stuff that I've heard and make some stuff that you've heard or that we think that the audience have heard and just go, was that actually happened to us at all?
Coby: When I first started the business, I had no fucking idea what I was doing when it came to starting the business and still within the first week of actually knowing where we're going to go with the project, the actual business side of things, we started making money. Once we actually had an offer, and just literally put it out to the world and decided how we're going to sell it. It was as simple as literally just saying, I'm going to do this. Is anybody interested? Here's how much I charge. And then they went, yep, we'll do it.
Dale: Ford Motor Company. They had one year where they had to recall three million vehicles for an airbag fault, which is a major safety issue. These guys have been making cars for 200 years and now they bring out a new model, they thought everything was good, they tried to do it the best they could, they released it. It wasn't. Three million vehicles had to come off the road and get fixed. And you're talking these guys have billions of dollars for research and development. Even they make mistakes.
Dale: Facebook, something we all use, has been done for selling data, personal data, putting — infringing with politics, pushing political views. They're literally affecting — they have affected elections before. Facebook have come out and been like, yeah, no, yeah, like we're responsible for doing that. But everyone moves on. Anyway, if you are sitting around and you want to start a business, you've got everything you need. What we're going to tell you is it's better out there because there are companies that spend hundreds of millions, billions of dollars on marketing who are still fucking it up. You may as well be in the market. You're not expected to get it right first time every time.