The #1 Mistake Founders Make (And How to Avoid It) | Colin C. Campbell

The #1 Mistake Founders Make (And How to Avoid It) | Colin C. Campbell Speaker 2: Most startups, they don't fail because the product sucks. They fail because the foundation does. It's not the idea that breaks a business. It's the lack of structure. No clarity on equity, no alignment on values, and no one knows who's really in charge. And here's the part no one tells you. If you don't build with brutal clarity from day one, you're already on the path to failure. In this episode, Colin C. Campbell reveals what actually kills a startup and how to build a moat to protect your business from day one. Unknown Speaker: Lunch With Norm. Speaker 2: Our guest has co-founded several Internet companies and technology companies, including Internet Direct 2000 Hostopia. He's the author of the number one bestseller, Start Scale, Exit Repeat. It is currently the number one bestseller in 15 categories on Amazon and won 29 global awards, including the prestigious Axioms Gold Medal for Entrepreneurship in 2025. He continues to launch new companies, including Startup Club, paw.com and meowingtons.com. So we're going to get to my buddy Colin Campbell in just a second. Now let's have a word from our sponsor. Unknown Speaker: Tired of negative reviews dragging down your star rating in sales? TraceFuse has your back. Tracee specializes in removing non-compliant Amazon reviews the right way. I'm talking 100% compliant with Amazon terms of service. And with over 11,000 reviews removed for 400 plus brands, they know what it takes to protect your reputation and boost conversions. And here's the best part. Speaker 2: You only pay for performance. That means you only pay for reviews they successfully remove. No contracts, no monthly fees, just results. Plus, as a Lunch With Norm listener, you get two reviews removed for free. Ready to clean up your reviews? Visit TraceFuse.ai. That's TraceFuse, T-R-A-C-E-F-U-S-E dot A-I. All right. So if you have any questions or comments, throw them over into the comment section and sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee. I'm just grabbing it. And welcome Colin C. Campbell. Speaker 1: Thank you for having me on again, Norm. I really enjoy your show. I've learned a lot from you and your experts and the eCommerce companies that we run today, and I've seen you talk at conferences. It's really been a key asset for our eCommerce companies is just listening to your show. Speaker 2: Oh, well, thanks. Did Kelsey give you that 20 bucks? Speaker 1: Exactly. Speaker 2: All right, buddy, you know, and we've been friends for almost 30 years, which is crazy. I can't believe it. But along the way, I've seen the growth in, we have a forum and it's called, it was YEO, now it's EO, but just in everybody's companies. And you're one that stands out where, you know, we talk a lot. We kind of collaborate on a couple of things. But anyways, the way that you've gone from company to company to company, And mostly successful. There's been some failures and that's what we're going to concentrate our efforts on today. Some of those failures because I'm not sure and probably the listeners are, you know, how did you keep going? How did you build that resistance to go after a failure? And I know one in particular that hopefully we touch on that you just came back. And did it and you had the guts to do it. So let's talk about these. Well, first, let's talk about your journey as an entrepreneur. Unknown Speaker: Where did it start? Speaker 2: And how is it proceeding? Speaker 1: All right, Norm, if you want to go with this, we'll jump right into it. The early career, the 90s, started a company right out of college. It was a bulletin board service, a way that we'd connect to the internet before the internet. Within a year or two of running that service, the internet launched and it was a massive change. So we basically had to shut down that company. And then we launched a company called Internet Direct, and it became the largest ISP in Canada, went public. And we launched a number of services around that, like hosting services, those kind of things as well. But unfortunately, you know, we're pretty young, didn't quite know what we were doing. 20s. Yeah, we were one of the fastest growing companies in Canada, I would think number seven one year, number three the next year. And we decided to sell the company to a cable company. And it was a stock for stock swap. We were public, they were private. It was stock for stock exchange. And we were locked up for 18 months following the transaction. Unfortunately, something happened in 2000. It was the dot-com crash. I don't know if you remember that. Speaker 2: Oh yeah. Speaker 1: It was a very, very difficult time. I mean, the NASDAQ went from 5,000 down to 1,100. See, can you imagine it today if the Nasdaq were to fall by almost five times, like to go down to 20% of its current value? I mean, that's hard to even fathom that kind of drop. And unfortunately, our stock was locked up. And this company, which at one time was worth $19 a share and well over a billion dollars, and then I had 14% of this company, and we just couldn't sell the shares. We couldn't trade them. We were locked in. We had exited very poorly. We spent 10 years building a company and we spent 10 weeks blowing it on exit. And so the company that had $19 a share ended up falling to $0.06 a share. By the time it was $0.06 a share. I lost 98% of my wealth at the age of 29 years old. But fortunately, we had another company called Tukaz. We sold that company as well. And fast forward six years later, we took another company public, a company called Hostopia. And two years after that, we sold that company to a Fortune 500 company. And that time we sold for all cash. So we had learned a key lesson there, right? And I talk about this in the book. Liquidity or control has been one of the things I truly believe that most entrepreneurs need to think about on exit. There's a lot of shysters who come around. You spend your whole life building a company or 10 years, and then there's a lot of people who come around and say, well, why don't you merge with us? Why don't you do this? Why don't you do that? I'll tell you what, give me cash or I'm gonna keep control of this company. You can merge with us, but we're in control. And that concept, that mentality, that learning was really the basis for the book Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat. We continue to launch companies. We sold them, like for instance, that Hostopia, we sold that a month before the Lehman crisis. We sold .club domains to GoDaddy a few months before the tech record 2022. And we've been very good at setting timing. In fact, we actually have what's called a time to sell index in our newsletter. And by the way, Kelsey is the gentleman who helped us put together the newsletter for Startup Club. And it's packed. We only do one a month. We only do one a month, but it is packed full of great stuff. It includes a time to sell index where we track based on empirical data, you know, what is the best time to sell your company. And I'm telling you right now, it's very low. It's like 6.8 out of 100 right now. And we use basically the last 25 years of IPO data from trough to peak and to try to figure out where we are currently in the market. It's a nice metric to use. I mean, obviously every industry is different. You know, AI is a little hot right now. There's different, you know, there could be some companies you could sell out of right now, but the reality is in general, the market is pretty low right now. Speaker 2: Don't forget to subscribe and leave me a comment saying I subscribe and I'll personally reply to your comment. Speaker 1: Failure's been a part of a lot of my businesses and the fact is I learned, and here's the key, Norm, I learned how to begin to fail fast. I have another one. I'll give an example. There's a company called Shareholder Blockchain and you put private shares on a blockchain and I love the concept. I still love the concept today. What I said in MVP is stage gate, specific point in time where we're going to achieve an MVP. It's like 120 days after the investment, hired the programmers, hired a lawyer. We're building this product and 120 days comes by and the programmers went rogue. They started doing some other stuff. They didn't have anything to show for it. And I realized I was in a quagmire. And instead of throwing good money after bad, I killed it right there. So you either pivot or kill it. Set that stage gate that gives you the room to get to a certain point in time or either pivot or kill it. So I killed it really fast. Then we talk about this in the terms of eCommerce companies too and products and I know we'll go into that as well. Speaker 2: Okay. And that's, I guess, one of the biggest advantages of being an entrepreneur. You can turn on a dime where a lot of these bigger companies take time. So like you said, some of the, well, you can fail fast. So what are some of the things that you're looking for in a company when It may not be performing because and Colin, I want to just tell you something. I was just on a podcast yesterday with Kevin King and we were talking about this and it's about maybe quit just your success might be just around the corner and Now you're saying, you know fail quick. What's the difference between the two? What's the one that says? All right, I got a I've got to not quit and try to push us through another month or so or Fail quick. Speaker 1: I mean there's two different messages So I think what we want to do is we want to remove the emotion and ego from it Because that's the reality that is clouding our judgment as entrepreneurs. And we can do that by setting a stage gate in advance. And again, we break this down in the book, but you set a stage gate for your business, whether it's an MVP, whether it's 10 distributors, whether it's 100,000 in sales, by a certain date. And each stage gate is smart, specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound. Okay, so there's smart goals. And when we do that, we also lay out the funding that we need to get to achieve that stage gate, the people, the talent we need to have to get to that stage gate, and the right systems or KPIs early on, I talk about KPIs, to track to get us to that stage gate. When we put all of that together and we say, okay, this is what's going to happen in advance, We give ourselves actually a lot more room. It reduces a lot of stress. It reduces a lot of the naysayers that are around us all the time in startups. But it does come to a point when we say, okay, if we don't hit that stage gate, why did we not hit it? And of course, if we're very, very close, that's a different story. But if we don't hit that stage gate, we either pivot, or kill it. That's it. You know, one of the biggest challenges I've had with running an incubator and working with entrepreneurs is their ego. You know, I have an idea for this product. Let me tell you what the ego cost us here. You know, in one of our eCommerce companies, I will remain nameless. It's right there. Let me tell you, we had a hundred year supply of shampoo in our warehouses, a hundred year supply. We had 5,000 velvet blankets that went to Canada. I mean, this is the first time I saw it, I'm like, what is this for? Are these for sex shops or something like that? I mean, they looked like they were, you know, we've had a number of failures at Pod.com and so we had to sort of re We reorganize our strategy around that. And one of the things we do now is we really do test and fail more. Think about this for a second. We test and fail more. So failure is actually okay, as long as you're testing and you're cutting it right away. We need to succeed at only two or three out of 10 products. But those ones we can scale to infinity. We can put patents on them and we can advertise them on Facebook and Google and everywhere else and we can scale those to infinity. But had we not tested out those other seven or eight products, we wouldn't have got to the two or three that were successful. Now, of course, every time we design a new product, a number of us get together and we We talk about it and we ideate about it and we put our best foot forward on it. But the reality is we're going to fail a lot. And the key is to not lean into the losers. Like what was done in some of my eCommerce companies in the past, the founders would lean into the losers because they made a big call. They made a big investment. And then they didn't scale the winners because they didn't have enough funding to scale the winners. They had to clear out their inventory of all their losers. And ego It's probably the number one reason why they couldn't get over that. If you can let that ego go, if you can recognize, okay, I made a mistake, okay? I made a mistake on this company. I'm gonna pivot or kill it. Or I made a mistake on this product. I'm gonna pivot or kill it. Or if you can do that, it's like it unleashes your ability to test and fail more. To actually get out there and make these products. And the one thing that we did learn at our eCommerce companies, and I think this is something important for your listeners. Is that whenever we tried to copy, we failed. I'm not saying there isn't a strategy for copying, but if you can copy and make it a little bit different, put some unique features on it, at least some advantages, different check mark here or there, that can make a difference. When we created unique and different products, we succeeded. We did very well at that. And that's how it became such a successful eCommerce company as well. So, and now a number of them. And then we were in the glasses business with a company called Hip Optical. As well, and that company had to come up with its x-factor, something unique and different that no one else has, even Warby Parker. And what that was, was basically putting a factory inside Florida and now we're dominating the distribution in Florida for eyeglasses. And they're at very low cost, but we can produce them within 24 hours. They don't come in from China. So, you know, when you're thinking about your business, when you're thinking about your products, when you're thinking about whatever it is, set that stage gate. You can set a stage gate up for your products. You can set a stage gate up for, you know, okay, we're gonna spend $20,000. We're gonna do this and that, but then kill it or pivot. We've got a product that we've been working on here for two, three years. We're patenting it. It's got very unique features and no one's ever designed a dog bed like this one. It's an outdoor dog bed and we're doing a Kickstarter campaign. So that's another way of testing. You know, you can find different ways to test. But if you can do it, do it really well or don't do it at all. Yesterday, I've been in filming with the crew for two days now over at one of our Airbnbs filming this particular dog bed and some other products. But we're going to get out there and we're going to test it and if it succeeds, we'll get patents filed on it and we'll scale that through our distribution channel. That's the next piece. Once you do have something that's successful, how do you lean into it? How do you lean into the success and manufacture enough product and distribute fast enough and build a moat around it through trademarks and patents for that product so that you can take people down? We've taken a number of our companies down on Amazon. And we've taken companies that have copied us and put us in huge, huge companies have copied some of our products and put them in Costco. And we've taken them out of Costco. So we've had some very good success at defending our IP. It's part of the equation. So you've got to think about scaling it and defending it. Speaker 2: Also, something probably a lot of our listeners wouldn't know is that your product is sometimes double or triple the price on Amazon. And people will flock over to you because of the perception, because of the perceived value, the quality. I know that these other dog bed companies that are either trying to knock you off for $30 or $40 or $50, and you're up there at $160 to $200, and you're getting the sales. I think it probably comes down to the testing, the quality, and just the reassurance that it's a good quality company. Now, I want to go back to the testing for a second. So we talked about it. This is what you do, you fail quick, but how can, not so much startups, but how can Amazon sellers really put this into action? Speaker 1: Well, I think that there's an opportunity here to test your products or your concepts without even launching them. Okay, so I'm going to go a little bit into, I'm not saying to do this through Amazon. I think, so what we do with our Amazon strategy is we have our own website. We test on our website. We, and this isn't just PAW, this is Meowingtons, this is The Hip Optical, this is all eCommerce companies we have in our portfolio. But what we do is we test these products first with our existing customer base. Okay, sold well, check, right? We hit that and send out an email, lots of demand, great. And then we'll test it with Facebook. And if it does well and we can make a profit selling it, then we can scale to infinity and then check and we'll test it with Google and check and then we'll launch it into Amazon, Wayfair and all the other, you know, Chewy and all the other distribution channels out there as well. We have a formula for scaling, but I wouldn't recommend walking into Amazon and using Amazon as a test. I think that's going to really affect you if you have some way of testing it through Facebook marketing. If it's a very small quantity, and here's where we used to do this. We don't do this now. You know, you can technically advertise a product on Facebook and then even if you don't have it, you can say, oh, sorry, we sold out or we cancel it and just see what your ROAS is on that product before even designing it. Or you haven't even designed it probably, obviously, you have nice videos of it and everything, but before even manufacturing or putting a big order in, you could technically test that out. We're also doing Kickstarter, right? We're using that as a test. If we don't, you know, this is live. So this is going to happen, this Kickstarter campaign. I'll send it over to you when it comes out. But when we go live with this, it's either going to succeed and probably they say in the first 24 hours or it doesn't. We're going to know right away. And how much have we spent on this? Yeah, we spent a lot on R&D on this particular product. And it's taken about two years to come to market. Unfortunately, we had some hiccups along the way and some Chinese tariffs and all this craziness, blah, blah, blah. But the reality is we're getting closer to launching it. But we haven't really spent a lot of money on it. And we did do a very small order of 500 units. I mean, for that, for some, that would be a lot. But you know, you could probably do an order of 10, 20 units. You could fly those in. Don't worry about making money on the 10, 20. What we want to do is just start proving the formula. Once the formula is proven, it's time to scale it. Speaker 2: So you brought up a point and I want to go down a different rabbit hole here about tariffs. Have you been able to manufacture any of your product or bring it back into the States or are you, and tariffs are going to fluctuate over the year, over the next forever, but have you been able to look for any American manufacturers or everything over in China right now? Speaker 1: We're a glasses company. We have a factory here in Fort Lauderdale. Speaker 2: I'm talking more about your product. Speaker 1: Here's a reality for a lot of eCommerce merchants who are in the textile space. The reality is 90% of all textiles come from China in the United States. We have been talking with, I know another method to move cloth from China to India and then have it made in India, but you're still getting the cloth from China. They have a pretty close to a monopoly. On the cloth market, especially the faux cloth, I mean, you get silk, you get other cloths. You know, others from other countries, but China really does control that market. And so it's very difficult to try to acquire faux furs and the kind of stuff that we do. Our cooling products too, we have some very cool cooling products. It's just very difficult to get those materials in the United States. And a lot of our costs are material heavy. So even if you move the material to Mexico or India, we're not certain we'd even still qualify to get around the tariffs. We're 140% tariff. We had inventory caught in transit, $600,000 worth. We're moving a portion of that now into the United States at the 54% tariff, but it's still pretty hefty. It's pretty hard, but our products are in high demand, and so we're pretty confident that we'll be able to move that inventory at a slightly higher price. Speaker 2: What's your best market? Is it, and again, I'm going to say for eCommerce, primarily for the pet side of your business. Is it Facebook? Is it Amazon, Walmart, retail? Where are you selling most of your product? Speaker 1: Cloud.com. Speaker 2: I mean, right on the site. Speaker 1: Yeah. And that's a, you know, we talk about eCommerce building the moats. You know, one of the best moats you can build is your own brand. And when we have products on our website that you can only buy on the website, especially newer products, because again, we're testing them through the website, especially a lot of our luxury products, luxury blankets, those kinds of things. You can only buy them through, when it does hit like a bestseller, then we'll move it over to Amazon and we'll do a much higher volume purchase and drive the cost down and price down for the consumer as well. We do a lot of, traditionally, we've done a lot of Facebook, Google, and we've done fairly well at other distribution channels like Wayfair. Our products, you know, we really do, you know, for people who love their home and love their dogs and their dog comfort and design. And so we bring that together and people do see the value in making an investment in those products and they're all machine washable. As well, so in the long run, you'll probably spend less on some of our products, whether it's the car seat or the waterproof blanket or whatever it is. Speaker 2: So as an entrepreneur, I've seen you hop from different businesses, like not even, nothing in common. The Hostopia, PAW, HIP. There was the weighted blankets at one point. There was a whole bunch of different clubs. Like how do you start up that club now, right? Yeah. Speaker 1: Even the book. Yeah. Speaker 2: So how do you jump from business to business to business without being an expert in that business? Speaker 1: I believe entrepreneurship is a trade like any other trade. And what we need to do is learn how to master that trade, right? And so I started out doing that and failing in my first decade in my career because we failed to scale, we failed to exit. You know, there were paradigm shifts that occurred, just that and the other. And it wasn't until that first 10 years of going through that, recognizing the patterns, that there's these patterns that exist between all of these companies that we were doing. And if we could replicate that, then I could put this like literally on a piece of paper. And I did that. I put the entire thing on one piece of paper when I was asked to speak at MIT to a group of 60 very successful entrepreneurs at MIT. And you know, those theories did apply throughout all the companies. Now, I want to be clear. There's a couple other ingredients. You do need to play in here. One of them is having a passion for your product, your idea makes all the difference. Cause when you're down on, you know, when you're in the roller coaster and pretty low, you know, even with paw.com and 145% tariffs, we love our dogs. We love designing products for our dogs. It's sort of fun. I'll be quite, it's really fun. When a business is fun, you can get through those hard times a little bit more, but then also skills. And I also think generally you can stay in your own lane. In our last newsletter, we talked about a gentleman who started a fish and chip shops up in Toronto, and he had the best fish and chips I've ever had in my life. He had a great formula for making them, but that wasn't his business. His business was launching new fish and chip shops and selling those off. So he started, scaled, exited, and repeated over and over again with these fish and chip shops. And I did an analysis of a five-year analysis of a model of buy to start, scale, keep versus start, scale, exit, repeat. And one model came out at $2 million of wealth creation. And the start, scale, keep model came in at $500,000 of wealth creation. So it's really it really is about a formula. I do think an expertise helps in a particular industry whether it's real estate, And you're seeing my companies, I'm sort of more of a conglomerate now because I no longer run any of my companies. I'm the investor of the companies and I hire the CEOs who do have a passion or skill in that particular area. So we hired Michelle Van Tilburg. She was CEO of Meowingtons. She'd been doing that for five years and we brought her over to run paw.com. Geeks4Less is a good example. There's a gentleman who used to live in Ukraine. He moved to Canada. We've run that company now for 20 years. There's about 600, 700 programmers in Ukraine. That's his life. He's made that his life, that company. You know Pencilla, another company I've invested in with my nephew there who's a bit of a character. He's just so passionate about that particular product. So much knowledge about how to design platforms. He's the right person to do it. So I don't want to underestimate the importance of having skill sets and passion for a particular industry. I think that's important. But what I will say is amongst all these industries, there are certain consistent patterns that you can follow. Unknown Speaker: Hello, how are you doing? Speaker 1: Donnie, nice to see you. Speaker 2: She's bringing down my coffee. So I had to Give her a cameo. Speaker 1: There you go. Very good. I like that. But so I mean, I do think the patterns exist and that's what the book Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat does is it really shows you the patterns. And then we created this workbook, the Start Workbook, where it is probably the most comprehensive Start Workbook you'll ever see in your life. It includes an AI deep dive of every chapter. So you can read one chapter, listen to the deep dive, read another chapter, listen to the deep dive. It's really truly a masterclass. It also has over 60 or 70 items on a checklist that you can do in order to launch your startup successfully. It's called the Ultimate Startup Checklist. This is actually not in the book, the Startup Checklist, but it is in the workbook that you can get on Amazon as well under the name of Start. The name of the workbook is just called Start. Of course, it's that section and it's got about eight GPTs, custom GPTs in it as well. And I know we're giving that away. I know we have the digital copy that we're giving away to your listeners. And all you do is just send an email to helloatstartup.club with the heading, there you go, with the heading workbook, and we'll send you this book for free. See, our goal at Startup Club, and I know it's your goal too here, Norm, And my goal is really to help as many entrepreneurs as possible. Entrepreneurship really is a trade and you can learn it. And when you begin to do that, you'll start thinking about, hey, maybe the market is hot right now. Remember how hot eCommerce was three years ago, four years ago? You know, shouldn't we all have exited the company back then? And we heard of some stories of people who did exit and were very successful. Now you're looking at one-tenth the value for some of these companies based on what it was three years ago. So, you know, timing is, you know, we talk a lot about that in the book and exit and, you know, we're jumping around a lot here, but the reality is, you know, if you can develop skills and learn how to start scale and exit a company, then that can increase your wealth dramatically. Speaker 2: All right. So we are at the bottom of the hour. And if you have any questions for Colin or myself, just throw them into the comments section. We'd love to hear from you. And now we do something a little bit different here on the Lunch With Norm podcast. And that's the Wheel of Kelsey. That happens at the top of the hour. We've done things a little bit differently recently. We are taking like today's prize. We're going to put it into the newsletter and then you can Hit us up on the newsletter and then you'll be entered for the prize and we'll show that prize next week. So this week's is actually from last week and that way we just get a bigger audience that might like to join the prize. So if you want that prize, which will be next week, it's hashtag wheel of Kelsey or tag two people. You get a second entry. Now we've got a real special prize today. First of all, like Colin said, If you write an email, hello at startup.club and put, what is it? Workbook into the subject, you'll get a free workbook for, and you don't have to have the book. You don't have to have Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat. I would always recommend it, but you will get that free for any listener. Now the other giveaway today, Colin, why don't you tell us about that? This is pretty cool too. Speaker 1: Yeah, first of all, on the workbook, you can actually buy it on Amazon as well if you want a physical copy. I personally love the physical copy because you can just put a pen and just- That's what I have. QR code so you can scan the QR code to do the custom GPT. It's a lot of fun. And by the way, the Amazon, we have the book is on sale now for $1.99 for a few days more. Wow. Yeah, so you only got about two or three days left to get it, but it's on sale right now for $1.99. Speaker 2: I paid full price. Speaker 1: But again, I like the physical copy. I mean, I love it. I love the way that Forbes, the publisher, did it and the way they put it together and the color coding of each chapter, the illustrations, 180 callouts. You know, we wrote this book for the ADHD entrepreneur. We really try to make it, simplify it. And it really is an interesting book because there's a lot of stories, stories about failure, stories about success. It's not just stories about myself, it's stories from other billionaires, authors, experts in the book. And it all came together after 200 interviews in 10 years of this project, putting this book together. Speaker 2: So it's not just an AI prompt that you did. I mean, this is 10 years of work. Speaker 1: We talked about AI in the book, actually, and how to catch an AI wave, but there was no AI used in the book at all. Speaker 2: Very good. So that's hashtag WheelOfKelsey. I see Marina already has. Oh, and it'll be signed, right? So this is, yeah. Speaker 1: So originally we've sold about 30 or 40,000 copies since it launched last year. And this particular copy here is one of the original prints. We printed 1,500. This is another version. This is number 11, but I'm actually numbered each one. So whoever wins it will get their name and they'll get one of the original prints. Speaker 2: All right, fantastic. Let's go to a sponsor and we'll be right back. Are you spending more on Amazon ads and getting less return? There's a smarter way to grow and without increasing your budget. LaVonta's Affiliate Shift Calculator shows what you could do if you reallocate just a portion of your ad spend into affiliate marketing. If you're an Amazon seller doing over $5 million a year, This is for you. And guess what? It's free. All you have to do is click on the link in the description to go to your custom forecast today. All right, let's talk about, in the book, you talk about minors and majors and in the early stages of startups. You want to break that down for us? Speaker 1: That's another area where failure is okay. What is a minor major growth hack? It's sort of the same thing, but it's something that takes a minor amount of effort and could have a major impact. So one of the examples I use are signs on businesses. My wife and I own a school here in Fort Lauderdale, and we came up with these lawn signs that said, basically, open house on this day, blah, blah, blah. We did this like 10 years ago. We gave it to the parents. It cost us maybe $1,000, $1,500 to do the whole program. And the parents would put it on all in a booth throughout the neighborhood. People would drive by and see this and this one particular promotion was sold at the school. The school completely sold out. We had a lineup and we've never run it ever again because the school's always been pretty much sold out in Fort Lauderdale. I've done that multiple times. I'm always wearing the merch, wearing the shirt or the car. My car's branded paw.com. On my boat in Fort Lauderdale, on the outside of the boat, I don't get to see it all the time, but a million people go by my house every year. On the outside, I've got a paw.com little logo and a picture of my dog. on the on the side of the boat. And these things don't cost a lot. But they have a major impact. And that's an example of that. And there might be some things that you do that you say, like, you know, for instance, once we did a logo for one of the companies was a gtld.club. And there were other gtlds or domain extensions launching. So we put .club and other domain extensions in there. We did an article and we posted on a blog or something and Google picked it up as an image so that whenever you searched for GTLDs, this image would pop right up. And it didn't take us much work, but then all of a sudden we'd see this image being used by dozens of bloggers in the industry. And it cost us hardly anything, but let's say we failed at that. Let's say it didn't happen. Okay, well, who cares? We spent 30 minutes working on it. Right now, we've got, if you type on Google right now, how to write a best-selling business book, we have an article on the first page of Google right now that I wrote three weeks ago, right? How long did it take me to write that article? And by the way, we open up Startup Club. We're opening Startup Club to the contributors. Those who want to contribute, now the articles can't be AI written and they have to be really valuable for startups, but sometimes you can, you can, my son, he just did one called Toronto Pre-Construction. He runs a company called Toronto Pre-Construction. He did one on how he got to the front page of Google, six or seven secrets to getting on the front page of Google. And so, you know, there's ways of using SEO and articles and real articles too, because, you know, AI is interesting. Eventually you're going to have AIs pulling from AIs. What I'm discovering with AIs is that they're pulling more and more from real original sources. And Startup Club is an original source, so it's very well recognized by the AIs. And why this is important is as an eCommerce vendor or companies, we have to begin to think differently. We have to go back in time a little bit and think about how we want to position or how do we get our products featured on sort of more traditional content companies like Wirecutter or like some of these other, like Consumers Digest or whatever these companies. We need to start thinking like that because that original content That's where the AI is pulling from. See, all the quick hacks we learned from Google, you know, they got us to this point. But now there's a whole new world of AI, and I don't know what you call it, search engine optimization for AI, or whatever the name is, but the reality is we've got to begin, as eCommerce companies, we've got to think differently with how people are looking at products and how they're going to find products in the future. And I think AI is going to drive that, which means you've got to go to original content sources, but you can create those content sources yourself. And there's something on blogs, becoming the expert in your industry. Speaker 2: And one of the other new things that we have to think about, the new trends, are searching specifically in AI. You know, Kevin King wrote an article about searching or AI searches and what you have to do. Similar to the robot.txt file that you would insert into a WordPress site, there's similar things that you have to do so AI could pick you up. So that's kind of interesting. And as you said, with original content, Colin, you know, way back, I started a press release company. That's gone full circle. People cut down for a few years. Now they're back up because it's original content and Google is picking up on it again, which is really cool. It's just full circle. So yeah, I couldn't agree more with what you're talking about. I want to go, we talked about this very briefly. We skipped over it and I think this is probably one of the most important things like with this podcast. We created an X Factor. We created a USP. Let's talk about that X Factor, what it is and what you need to put something in place. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, think Domino's Pizza, 30 minutes are free, right? Think National Car Rental, you just show up, get in the car and go. You know, these are companies identified their X factor. A friend of mine, Joe Foster, founder of Reebok, we just had his 90th birthday party over here in Fort Lauderdale that I hosted for him. But he's in the book. I've interviewed him a number of times, spent weekends with him, had a lot of fun getting to know him. He got his business to $9 million in 1979. You know, he'd gone to distributors for 10 years in the United States and by the way, failed every time, couldn't get a distributor. But you know, the 11th time he finally got one, but it wasn't until he changed his strategy. He first, he applied for five-star awards, three five-star awards from Runners World Magazine. This is 1979. How important are reviews, Norm? He applies for these awards and he wins three five-star awards on his running shoes. Then he picks up a distributor. Then he goes into a space where no one else was playing at that time and that was women's aerobics. And somebody wears his shoes on television. Her name was Jane Fonda. And then I asked him, by the way, did you pay her to wear the shoes on? And he goes, no, she paid for her own shoes. So the company went from $9 million to $900 million. It actually became the largest shoe company in the world, even larger than Nike in the mid-80s, 84, 85, whatnot. Since then, Nike's eclipsed them. You know, but you can see there are the stories there, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: It's failure. They're just getting distribution that once they need distribution, that reviews matter, that influencers matter. Does this sound familiar? This is 1979, right? Yep. Speaker 2: History repeats itself. Speaker 1: It really does. And so when you hear these stories or listen to these stories about how others have created their X factor, it can be a huge difference. And it really is a bottleneck in the industry or something that you solve that no one else has solved before. Speaker 2: So I just got to tell you this. I was on doing a Marketing Misfits podcast last week and we're talking and all of a sudden one of my investors or the head of the board or something, we went to his 90th birthday party. This is Joe Foster and we went to Colin Campbell's house and I went, what? This is out of the blue. So I heard about, thanks for the invite, by the way, but I heard about it. Speaker 1: It's the parties, you know that. You've come to a number of them, but yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's just, it's such a small world. This X-factor is so important. These USPs are so important and everything that you do, you do the X-factor. You try to find the X-factor. Speaker 1: Hard. It took us like seven years at Hostopia to find the X-factor. But when we found, I mean, our x-factor was identifying who was the real buyer, and it was a mid-market executive, and then guaranteeing 100% in a migration that they wouldn't lose any customers. And if they did, we'd pay full fair market value for that customer, which meant we had to become the best in the world at migrations. See, the number one thing this manager feared was being fired. And when we dealt with that, That bottleneck in the industry, man, did we ever start winning. We won AT&T, Vodafone, British Telecom, all the South American telecoms. It became a global, basically a global standard at the time for small business email and hosting. Speaker 2: So, heading back to this X factor, for an Amazon seller, one of the things that you have to know is your audience. You have to know your competition. You should probably rip through the reviews and pull out the positive and negatives. See how your product, I would never suggest anybody go with a Me Too product or a generic factory product. You want to do something a little bit different and that could be something incredibly simple but it's got to stand out and this x-factor might take a bit of time. You might want to dump as much information as you can We're going to go into ChatGPT, create a prompt, talk about some of the things that Colin just talked about and ask it about your X factor. Maybe you'll get a couple of ideas. I don't know, but you know, I'm using ChatGPT for not just ChatGPT, but a variety of these LLMs now for a lot of the work. And I want to talk to you about that. Maybe this will be the final because everybody's talking about AI. How are you using AI and where do you see it going? Speaker 1: I use it probably about three hours a day, four hours a day. I go back and forth with it. I interact with it. A couple of areas that some of your users may not have played with right now is the deep research, right? So I'm working on a project for one of my companies. In this particular company, I asked a I created a prompt that said, you know, I want you to act and behave like the largest law firm in the United States that interacts with the federal government and I want you to come up with a full memorandum for me and I created this criteria for this memorandum and I clicked on deep research and man, did it ever deliver. An incredible report. Something that would have cost me $150,000. You did that in about 20 minutes, 20, 30 minutes. But you got to be a little bit patient with the deep research. That's one of them. Another one I've been using is VO3. And I think this is going to be important for eCommerce as well, is learning how to play with these AI videos. I know you got Sora over here with ChatGPT, then you got VO3 now with Google. And by the way, they're very hard, very buggy right now. They took the voice off, they took the voice on, you know, the reality is We're getting the product out there. We're starting to play with it. And I think it's really important for eCommerce vendors to play with AI in a lot of different ways. Understand though, consumers know it's AI. They can smell it a mile away sometimes. But there might be some scenarios where you combine real shots with AI shots. And I know we do a lot. We're experimenting a lot with that right now. Another one that I just recently found, it was a company called Merica, M-U-R-E-C-A. And it creates songs. So if you, you know, you're doing a, I mean, it was just phenomenal, the music that it's creating. And we're working on an ad, I don't know if it's an ad or a promotional video. And we've now have the main soundtrack for the promotional video. And it is freaking amazing. It is. Speaker 2: I know, that love song you sent over to me, I was pretty damn impressed, Col. Speaker 1: Exactly. Speaker 2: No, but you sent me over a song yesterday for something you're working on, and that was damn impressive. Speaker 1: Yeah, it stuck in my head too. So you know when a song gets stuck in your head, that it's good. And we're talking about doing this kind of stuff, a fraction of what it would cost to hire a band to create the music and it went a lot faster as well. So you see the idea, the concept of a solopreneur being successful in the eCommerce space or in any space entrepreneurship by applying and using these AIs. So we really encourage every one of our employees to use AI in as many ways as possible. Embrace it. Don't hide from it. It is a paradigm shift. It will mint more millionaires than any other technological shift in history. And if you're behind it, you could be one of those millionaires as well. Speaker 2: Right. And we had Nate Kennedy on a podcast yesterday. I don't know if you know him. And he said the single biggest AI advantage that he's going to see come out. I don't know if you've heard of this. This is a Google product. It's called Alpha Evolve. Have you heard of this? Speaker 1: No, I have not heard of that. Speaker 2: Check it. Check it out. He thinks it's going to be the future. Speaker 1: What's it do? Speaker 2: It's coding for AI agents. Speaker 1: Okay, so yeah, so we're seeing coding being implemented with Claude with OpenAI. Google has another one too. I think it's called I can't remember the name of it right now, but it was a different name that Google was running it under, Compass or something like that. But the reality is your coding's gonna change and we're gonna see a scenario where 90%, this was in the Wall Street Journal today about the Claude AI CEO talking about 90% of coding will be done in six months, 100% of coding will be done in one year with AI. So this is something that's gonna unleash the power of every entrepreneur out there. And this is one of the most coolest concepts that I love about AI is that entrepreneurs in many ways are more artists than operators. There are some that are operators, but the most are artists. And we have this creativity, we have this knowledge, but we don't have the technical know-how how to create it. And so we have to hire a lot of people to do that. Well, what if we live in a world where someone like myself can write a book, but then also I can now write a screenplay of streaming series for Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat, which by the way, we're actually thinking about the real story behind the stories. And yeah, it'd be educational, but there'd be awfully humorous and very entertaining. And one of the challenges you have is like, well, I don't know. I've never written it before. But you're no longer stuck on the technical requirements of doing a screen, you know, how to lay it out and do all that kind of stuff as long as you can put it in there. As long as you, you know, the song that I sent you yesterday, I wrote the lyrics and then it cleaned up the lyrics and then turned it into a song, you know, so that does require a little bit of your creativity and your knowledge and how to apply that knowledge and how to apply that technology or that whatever you created and monetize it. But you're only limited to your imagination with AI. I liken it to Tony Stark who straps on that suit, Iron Man suit, and he's a superhero now. Every one of your listeners can be superheroes. They can accomplish 10 times, maybe 100 times, maybe 1,000 times more what they could have done two years ago. And every day it's getting more and more and more and more. So you've got to wrap yourself around it and all this stuff and pay for the memberships. It's not a tiny cheapo. It's not a tiny cheapo. $20. I think I paid $80 for Marika for the year. But here now I have an engine that can help me create music for anything I want to attach it to. Speaker 2: Yeah, I always talk about I have talked about back in the day, the carriages, there's hundreds of different carriage building construction companies out there. And there was this thing, you know, all of a sudden, these automobiles were starting to come out, but it was going to be a fad. And two brothers who were in the carriage business decided that they were going to go the automobile way. They saw the trend and they went with it. And that was the Dodge brothers. Hundreds of carriage companies went under because they felt that the old way, nothing could change. Dodge saw it and they said, yeah, that's the next trend. And I think for entrepreneurs or anybody who's looking to be an Amazon seller, you've got to follow that trend. And if you're not, you're going to be like my parents trying to get onto Skype. You know, they're lost. So, yeah, I think that's about it, Colin. Thank you for coming on the podcast today. Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think what's old again is new again, and learning, whether it's the e-myth, lean startup, start, scale, exit, repeat, whatever book it is, I mean, learning and listening to these podcasts, understanding entrepreneurship and how to start a business, scale a business, and then use AI all the way along the way. It's okay to use AI. This is a different world we're living in today. Now maybe it's not so okay to use it when it comes to writing articles and SEO and stuff like that because Google can sniff a lot of that out. The reality is you can use it for research, even for your articles. There are ways you can use it to help clean up your text a little bit or identify errors you may have made. So that being said, it's a whole new world. It's time to be an entrepreneur and take your idea, dust it off, and start it, scale it, and exit it. Speaker 2: Perfect. Now, if you want to get Colin's Start Workbook, it's the ultimate workbook guide for entrepreneurs, Kelsey's going to be putting the link in the comment section. It's free. All you need to do is email Colin at hello at startup club and just put workbook in the subject line. There's no link required. All right, Kels, let's go over, and I think this might even be Colin, over to the sponsor. Speaker 1: Start, scale, exit, repeat. I'm Colin C. Campbell, and I've started over a dozen multi-million dollar companies in the last 30 years. I spent the last 10 years writing the book, Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat, to figure out what it is that these serial entrepreneurs do over and over again. We interviewed over 200 people. We created fifty eight chapters over thirty illustrations a hundred and eighty call outs and we quite frankly made this book. For the ADHD entrepreneur it's been number one on amazon in fifteen categories and has won twelve awards globally. Get your book today either on eBook, paperback, hardcover, or Audible on Amazon or your favorite bookstore. Well, that's a little out of date. Speaker 2: I think I was just going to say that we need to re-redo that one. Unknown Speaker: All right. Speaker 2: So, Kels, let's go over to the wheel and we'll see last week's winner. Unknown Speaker: All right. So just to make this clear, this is for last week's episode. So this is Max's eContents giveaway. We will be spinning the wheel for the original copy of Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat next week on the next podcast. So we just move it over a week. So let's see who the winner is today. And it looks like it will be. Speaker 2: Steve, all right, Steve, you're going to love that. So that's it for today. Colin, thank you so much. If anybody wants to check out more information about Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat or you in general, where do they do that? Speaker 1: I mean, you could obviously Amazon is the place where you can get it, the book, but also go to Startup.Club and we have this This is a really phenomenal newsletter. Sign up to our email list. Click on it there or you can go to hello at startup.club and they'll connect you to the email list. We have so much great information and we have so many great authors who are contributing. Here's one of the authors. You may know him. He's Kelsey. He wrote a phenomenal article for Startup Club of how to create A great newsletter to all of your genius, Norm, which we use, by the way, at Startup Club to do our newsletter. He took all your genius and he wrote like the 10 tips and tricks or secrets to launching your own newsletter. And he wrote that article and it's been posted on Startup Club. It's a great resource and it's absolutely free. You don't have to spend thousands of dollars to really become, to master entrepreneurship, to get an MBA and starting scaling and exiting. You can do it just by joining our free club. Speaker 2: Very good. All right, buddy. So thank you for coming on. I'm sure I'll be talking to you shortly and we will see you later. So that's it for today, everybody. We'll see you next Wednesday.