The Mentors

How To Capitalize On Your Failures

vrevzin — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 05:43:07 +0000

Rebroadcast: Publish date – January 1st, 2020

Original broadcast: Publish date – December 12th, 2018

Failure has long been embraced by entrepreneurial minds, and some of the most successful inventors, businessmen, and creators credit their ultimate triumphs with their ability to endure repeated failure. As startup founders, musicians, podcast hosts, and self proclaimed “jacks of all trades” we’re no strangers to failure.

In this episode, we take a stroll back to our very first attempts at venture creation, starting with our college days of trying to launch an affiliate marketing platform called AdLobby. We discuss the massive mistakes we made as first time entrepreneurs, including selling our car to pay for engineers that we couldn’t even speak to. We also talk about the next two business we tried to start, and how we almost got into the top accelerator in the world after recruiting an MIT technical co-founder.

With each of our failures, however, we were able to leverage the experience to not only avoid making the same mistakes again, but even turned them into lucrative job opportunities with other tech startups in both Boston and New York City. Tune in to learn how you can start looking at failure differently, and what you can do to position it as a positive experience to others.

We leave you with this quote:

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” -Thomas Edison

Show Notes

0:37 Vadim: Today we’re going to be talking about some of the failures we’ve had in our lives, of which there are plenty.

0:51 We talk about this a lot on our show – that you can’t succeed unless you try, try, and try again. And some of the biggest learning experiences that we’ve had were from our failures. Most ideas we tried failed completely.

1:05 In last week’s episode, Praful talked about how Thomas Edison was only able to succeed because he was willing to fail. There are countless examples of this.

1:33 Sergei: We definitely wouldn’t be able to make money in business if we didn’t try a bunch of other ideas that didn’t work.

2:00 Vadim: You do also need wins in order to move forward, and we certainly had some of those along the way. But we’re going to tell you stories about 3 businesses we tried to start earlier on in our careers when we knew nothing about startups, and what we learned and how we were able to apply that to future businesses and to get good jobs.

2:40 Sergei: The first business we’re going to talk about is AdLobby.com. You won’t find it online unless you search on web archives in 2006.

3:00 The idea for this website came from a guy we heard about in the UK who started a website called The Million Dollar Home Page where he would sell 1 pixel for $1 on a website with 1 million pixels to make $1 million dollars.

3:23 The website went viral and he did end up making $1M

3:51 We decided to start something around advertising too and the insight we had is that everyone has some sort of real estate/personal space online, like profiles even if they don’t have a website, and why not let them make money by putting links of brands on their profiles.

4:50 Not knowing any engineers and not being able to code, we went around our university, Bentley, to find someone who could build it for us. We ended up meeting a guy who knew some engineers who decided to take the project on.

6:20 We sold our car for $5K to pay for this project even though the guy offered to build the app for free or a much lower cost in exchange for equity. We didn’t want to give up a piece of the company and so we said no.

6:50 In hindsight, we should have taken the deal. We would have saved a bunch of money and had a cofounder who was equally as invested in the business. In the end of the day, if the business was going to fail, which ultimately it did, we would have 100% of 0, which is 0.

7:10 We also learned how not to manage engineering talent. We weren’t hands on enough. The 3 month project ended up turning into a 10 month project. We didn’t manage the engineers because the consultant that we paid managed them, and we didn’t talk to him enough to keep control of the specifications of the project.

7:50 We should have also been actively testing with beta users while the product was being built.

8:30 In the end the product didn’t work well enough and we had to shut it down.

8:45 We also didn’t do nearly enough sales. We were building a marketplace with users and brands, and all the while we should have been cold calling every day signing up brands and also getting a growing list of users so that when we launched the product we would have traction right away.

9:00 We did get some brands interested and got a bunch of friends to sign up once the product was finished. But it wasn’t enough.

9:30 Because of this it was easy to run out of steam and give up because we didn’t have enough customers.

10:00 Sergei: There is a silver lining. I did get my first sales job at a startup shortly after graduating only because of that experience doing some sales for my own startup.

10:30 Vadim: This is why we always say, when you build something out of nothing, even if it’s not ultimately successful, other people see that as a valuable skill.

10:45 We actually talked about this topic on an episode of Mind Love, that if you want to change careers, try doing so by building something of your own. Then you can say you can do the same for another company.

11:15 Sergei: The next business idea that we had a few years later was a coffee subscription service where you could sign up online and automatically get coffee delivered to your door every month.

12:10 Vadim: The name of this company was TastyRoast, and the first thing that we did was to build a website, even though we didn’t know how to at that time. What we should have done is validate the concept first with customers.

13:20 Sergei: We ended up spending 3 months building this website.

13:46 Again though there is a bit of a silver lining. By forcing ourselves to learn WordPress we now could build a website for any idea we had. As an example, Vadim built the website for The Mentors in 1 to 2 days.

14:05 We also learned about drop shipping which allows you to not hold inventory by having your supplier ship directly to your customer. The mistake there is that by doing drop-shipping we increased our costs, which made the coffee more expensive than what you could get at the store. This made it more difficult to get customers.

15:30 We also made the big mistake of thinking if we build it the customers will come. We should have been figuring out our marketing funnel that whole time.

16:00 Vadim: We also should have partnered with or gotten advisors with experience in ecommerce.

16:30 The good thing about this experience is it made me much more technical where I learned some HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and I was able to leverage this to get product roles at different companies.

17:00 It also helped us launch future companies, and made us better at working with other engineers.

17:38 Sergei: The final business that didn’t work out but that we learned a lot from is Meetlie. We tried launching this business while still at our finance jobs after participating in a Startup Weekend Hackathon.

18:15 At that competition we met an MIT engineer who ended up being interested enough in the project to continue working with us after the program.

18:28 The product would help people host office hours to offer their advice to people on topics like accounting, finance, law etc. At first for free but then they could charge for it.

18:50 Because we had some interested users we decided to apply to the competitive accelerator, TechStars and we got chosen as the top 25 applicants for a final selection of 10 teams.

19:30 Unfortunately we ended up pivoting a bit and subsequently not getting into the program, which taught us an important lesson.

19:49 The day we didn’t get in, that technical cofounder decided to quit. So we learned that he was primarily motivated on working on it because we were getting traction on getting into this program, and not because he wanted to work on the business.

20:25 Our biggest takeaways here were about how to vet a potential cofounder. Even though he’s a great guy and has gone on to work on some fantastic things, we realized after the fact that we just didn’t have mutual trust with this person.

20:39 Trust is one of the most important components of a cofounder relationship.

20:45 One red flag is that when we were applying to this program he scrutinized every word on the application, which was really our job to fill out. That should have showed us a lack of trust.

21:00 Also, because he was a strong hardware engineer and not as strong as a software engineer, we didn’t trust him to do his work effectively.

21:30 Vadim: we also learned that it’s important to create an appropriate decision making structure in a company. During one of our meetings with him he mentioned that he wants us to make every decision together, which just slows things down too much.

21:33 We should have clarified that we would make the final decisions on important aspects of the business. This is something that we made very clear with future co-founders.

22:05 A democratic process doesn’t work well in a business because sometimes you have to make difficult decisions that not everyone agrees with and you don’t want decision paralysis.

22:30 Sergei: part of the decision making process outline should include times you would confer on certain decisions, that you won’t just go and make them in a vacuum, but you do need to have one ultimate decision maker.

22:49 Vadim: There were some benefits of starting this business. This was the first time we really worked directly with an engineer, which taught us how to work with engineers more effectively. We also learned how to pitch investors.

23:25 We also were able to leverage this experience in our resumes to get future jobs.

23:41 Sergei: This also reinforced to us that we need to focus more on customer acquisition because we got further with this idea only because we talked to more customers, and we should have done even more of that.

23:51 We encourage you to try any business idea, whether it’s simple or revolutionary, because you’ll learn from every experience and since most first time businesses don’t work out, the sooner you start the sooner you’ll get to that ultimate success.

24:30 Vadim: the other nice thing, the more you try and fail, the more you get a thick skin and get desensitized to failure where it doesn’t bother you quite as much anymore.

24:40 What’s consistent with everyone we’ve interviewed, is that they keep on pushing.

The Secret to Finding Big Opportunities, with Carey Smith of Big Ass Fans

vrevzin — Sun, 19 Aug 2018 10:08:49 +0000

How do you mint 15 new millionaires over night? Carey Smith of Big Ass Fans knows how. He committed to growing his industrial fan company for as long as it took, until he was certain that his most hardworking employees could also become rich from the sale of his company. That meant waiting until he could sell it for $500 million, giving away 10% of that to his team.

Carey doesn’t like to call himself an entrepreneur. He’s been creating businesses since he was a teenager, and it’s simply part of who he is – it was never going to be any other way. Still, when you listen to his story you start to understand how his background shaped his thinking, and how someone with no experience managing a team was able to successfully lead a company of over 1,000 employees.

In this episode we discuss how he came up with his business idea, uncovering a massive opportunity that would lead to owning more than 75% of the entire market he worked in. We also dig into the day to day of his work as CEO, and his relentless attention to detail when it came to his tribe of employees and his customers.

Carey has done many interviews over the years, including a feature on PBS, but the stories you’ll hear on this show will not be found anywhere else.

Show Notes

1:09 What do you think contributed most to your success, and what makes a successful entrepreneur?

1:23 What i used to tell my people is that we had to make money to be in business but we’re not in business to make money

4:40 Why you should speak to people in the field after they make a purchase

4:50 We’re not interested in hearing the nice things, we want to know what we did wrong – takes digging

5:50 Sold directly to customer and this was important because they talked directly to the customers, which affected the product development

6:25 Sergei: 2 things to stood out to me from your advice – don’t just chase money, and provide value to the customer

7:37 Most people wouldn’t start a fan company, and going back to your first business, if not for the money then why did you start it?

7:37 Main reason Carey started a business was that he thought he could do it better than people he was working for. Needed more freedom

8:24 Story about what Carey did in highschool to teach kids for 3 days and takeover the school

9:30 Asked students what they were interested in and asked what their parents did, and made enough offerings to teach 1000 kids over 21 classes

10:30 That was his first experience in realizing that he can take his own idea and make it a reality

10:45 Started his first business at 28 – good to do it while you’re young because you have a lot of energy and your lack of experience helps you take more risks

11:20 When they were kids they moved 12 times, so they were very independent

11:50 What was the fist business opportunity you recognized?

12:48 Learned how to convince people it was a good idea even though it wasn’t the best one

14:40 Even the business that he got to $1.5mm in revenue, it wasn’t enough to even hire people. He had to do all the sales, marketing, installation etc.

15:13 Even at this point he was paying attention to other opportunities because it was obvious that this wasn’t going to grow

15:57 Don’t need to start a business around a product you like. it’s business, it can be about anything

16:00 When looking for an idea, Should look for something that is out of the ordinary. For example, their fans weren’t ordinary size fans. At least that stands out

16:40 He found out that large industrial buildings weren’t air conditioned and were very uncomfortable to work in. Big fans would make them more comfortable and productive.

17:53 As a business person you want a monopoly so you can control the market, by having first entry

18:50 Vadim: A unique value proposition is definitely important

19:30 Threading a story here – grew up independent – realized in HS he can do things himself if he wants to, and later on did the business he knew the most about, and evolved from there.

19:55 Where did the idea for big fans come from?

20:20 Did a lot of writing for trade magazines to get in front of his customers

20:51 In one of them Carey saw an advertisement from a small machine shop with a huge fan

21:19 Lesson – you should always leap on every opportunity. Don’t think you’ll get it again.

22:00 Had to have exclusivity because he knew it was a good idea

22:53 Also included in the contract that if they sold a certain amount of fans, they could buy the Intellectual Property for $400,000.

24:00 Ended up buying the IP after they messed up by using a cheaper gearbox forcing them to send back 600 fans

24:42 The name of your company should explain what it is that you’re doing

25:00 How did you fulfill the orders right away when you started manufacturing yourself

25:20 Purchased 1,000 fans from the original manufacturer to buy them time. Put themselves into business within 6 months

26:10 These guys see you selling thousands of fans when you executed your IP purchase agreement. Did they try to prevent the sale?

26:30 Originally they offered to buy the company for $5 Million, but they weren’t really interested.

26:56 They went on to hire all his employees and stole his database, so they ended up suing them. And after several years they won.

27:40 They got an injunction on them right away so they couldn’t use any of the information that they stole

27:47 They lost them as a distributor, lost their customers and were forced to lawyer up

28:18 The supplier’s company only ever got to $15-20 million, while they did $250 million+

29:19 When you think about starting businesses, what’s the first thing that you do when you start it?

29:47 When he wanted to start his business, he told his wife he could no longer work at the company he was at, and he needed to sell his house. Started with $30,000.

30:34 To sell the roof cooling business, they had to explain the product and how the science works to be able to explain it.

31:24 He spent a lot of time writing because they didn’t have money to spend on advertising and this was his customer acquisition strategy

31:37 They also used direct mail

31:41 Before they did the writing they already developed a product on the weekends

33:17 Even with online advertising, you need to use the tools in a different way than someone else. You have to attract attention

33:37 Even in trade shows, people just walk by so you have to catch their eyes

34:45 The name had to have helped you scale this business

35:00 That’s definitely a big part of it

35:50 The name was a representation of their brand and their culture.

36:05 A lot of the way he approaches business was the way he was taught to do things in kinder garden. Watch out for everyone, be nice and do your best.

36:50 He would always be out of his office talking to his employees, even when they had 1000 of them.

37:17 That way you get to know the problems in the company, and everyone in the company knows who you are. And often it’s a communication problem which is critical to solve.

37:40 They were focused on the customer but the employees as well, because if you don’t treat them well they won’t treat the customer well

38:00 They paid bonuses, even people in production got much bigger bonuses than people in the C-Suite

38:22 When Carey executed the sale of the company he wrote checks for $50 Million. 15 people were made millionaires.

39:20 Part of the reason they sold for $500 Million was because he felt that the value was enough to get a good amount of money for his employees

40:15 There’s a lot of takeaways here. You listened to a lot of the things you learned as a kid

40:25 Another big takeaway is don’t get hung up on the perfect idea. Find something you have some insight into or like or are good at and just start solving problems for people. It will lead to something else.

41:14 You would have never had the insight of the big fans if you didn’t run the cooling businesses

41:28 You also knew to take the time and talk to your employees and customers so you knew how to solve their problems

42:32 If money is your focus you won’t get it

43:44 Do it, do it right, keep doing it.

44:00 How long did you work on the original business for that didn’t work out?

44:25 For 12 years

44:27 I ask because it’s important to see that sometimes the good business idea doesn’t come over night. You have to “do it and keep doing it” until you figure it out. That’s a big message for us in this episode.

45:20 A lot of people dream and talk about things but they never start.

47:26 When you’re older you’ll want to look back and say, I did the things I wanted to do.

How To Make It In America

vrevzin — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 04:43:22 +0000

ated=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true”>

This is the final part of our series about our father, Samuel Revzin, who built one of the most successful schools in Soviet Belarus, only to have to start all over in a new career at the age of 54. Listen to Part I, and Part II if you’d like to hear the whole story.

In this episode we tell the story of how our mother and father made the difficult decision to pack their bags and move halfway around the world to make a better life for their children here in the United States. With few employment prospects for recent immigrants, they had to do menial work for years to support the family.

Listen to find out how our father was able to use the same entrepreneurial instincts he developed in Belarus to start a business in a shopping mall that he grew to three locations and multiple employees. This small business was effectively our real world MBA, where at the age of 12 we were thrust into the day to day of the business to learn what it takes to run a company.

How to Do What You Love in a Communist Country – Part II

vrevzin — Wed, 04 Jul 2018 07:11:49 +0000

This is a continuation of How To Do What You Love In a Communist Country Part I – a story of our father, a man who didn’t finish high school until he was 29 years old, and ended up building an education empire in one of the most oppressive areas of the world, only to have to start his career all over again in the United States in his early 50s.

We walk you through his rise in Soviet Belarus, from the workaholic nature that compelled him to take on triple the work load of any other educator, to the opportunities he was given as a notorious community organizer. By the time he was 42 years old, he had established deep ties in the Department of Education, and was presented with a rare opportunity (especially for a jew) – build a new school in one of the worst areas of the city.

He quickly developed a massive vision – he wasn’t simply going to build a school. He was going to create an organization that brought resources, aide and opportunities for the whole community. We discuss how he negotiated additional funding to completely change the way an academic institution operated, attracting families from from the entire city, and what lead him to become a prominent innovator in education across the entire Soviet Union.

Music by: www.purple-planet.com

How Julie Smolyansky of Lifeway Became CEO of a Public Company at 27

vrevzin — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 18:04:14 +0000

At 27 years old, Julie Smolyansky found herself leading a 12 million dollar public company. Her father had died suddenly of a heart attack, and just 24 hours later she was addressing all of her employees as their new CEO. Over the next decade, Julie would go on to grow the company to one of the most recognizable food brands in the world, earning a spot on Fortune Magazine’s ’40 Under 40′. Since then she has launched a non-profit, produced several documentaries, and authored The Kefir Cookbook, sharing her entrepreneurial story and over 100 globally-inspired sweet and savory recipes using Kefir.

On June 11th you can meet the Lifeway team at the Consumer Discovery Show, an incredible event for anyone interested in building powerful connections with some of the world’s most innovative consumer brands. Listeners of our show can get a 20% discount on all tickets to the event by using the code TheMentors20 before June 10th.

Many doubted Julie’s ability to run a public company at such a young age, but her confidence came from having incredible role models in both of her parents.

After emigrating to America, her mother opened a small Russian Deli to support the family. This eventually grew into a larger food distribution business working with Russian stores all over the United States, securing exclusive contracts like the right to distribute a then little known brand called Nutella in America.

Her parents got the idea to bring Kefir to America after visiting a trade show in Germany to source food for their delis. The Russian population in Chicago was growing, and they knew that their would be growing demand for this staple Russian drink.

In our conversation with Julie, we uncover how her parents created their own recipe for the drink, and the steps that they took to turn Lifeway Foods into a public company within only 2 years of inception. We also discuss the importance of having the right mentors in your life, and why a strong network of support contributes more to success than experience.

How to Do What You Love in a Communist Country – Part I

vrevzin — Wed, 23 May 2018 17:00:15 +0000

The Soviet Union was not a very supportive place for entrepreneurs – especially in the 1960s, on the heels of Stalin’s dictatorial regime. In fact in the decades leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, many were jailed for circumventing the law by starting their own businesses. Free thinkers, creators, and innovators had to find other ways to apply their minds.

Our father, Samuel Zakharovich Revzin, was one such thinker that was simply born in the wrong era and in an inconvenient part of the world. Despite all of this, he was able to rise to prominence and create one of the most innovative education institutions of his time. Decades later, his work can still be found in the Russian State Library in Moscow, and his legacy lives on in the students whose lives he touched.

This is the first episode in a series that will chronicle our father’s life, and the stories he began to document in his unfinished autobiography before his death. His entrepreneurial drive and instinct had a profound impact on our lives, and the stories throughout provide incredible lessons for any creator that must overcome obstacles on their journey.

The story starts with two major themes – how to create experiences for yourself to find your passion, and the importance of having relentless focus on building value versus an obscure goal. You’ll hear stories of how our father was able to create opportunities for himself to do what he loved at a very young age in a communist country where many were forced to follow a predetermined path.

These lessons will help you rethink your own path, and hopefully provide some guidance on how to find purpose in everything you do.

Episode 13: How to Start a Successful Coffee Shop in One of The Biggest Cities in The World

vrevzin — Wed, 21 Mar 2018 15:53:51 +0000

Coffee Project New York has been voted the best coffee shop in New York City by Time Out Magazine, gaining world wide attention within just a few years of opening – but it wasn’t an overnight success.

Chi-Sum Ngai and her partner Kaleena Teoh had no entrepreneurial experience when they decided to start a coffee shop, so when they first opened their doors in September 2015 they had no customers except for a few neighborhood regulars. However, the decisions the couple made in the early days, even before brewing a single cup of coffee, were instrumental in their eventual success.

Hear how they got their start by deciding to go to a coffee conference in Seattle on a whim, building a massive network of coffee experts and influencers that pushed them to open their own shop. We also uncover how they created a differentiated business in a city with thousands of coffee shops, and even dive into the financial details of building a business like this.

Episode 11: How to Network Like a Pickup Artist

vrevzin — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 17:52:40 +0000

Rebroadcast: Published September 11th, 2019

Original: Published March 7th, 2018

The 3 Second Rule (of not giving a sh*t) Song – The Mentors Original

Approaching and talking to strangers is not natural for everyone. But some people seem to always make new friends and connections everywhere they go. What are they doing and saying that makes them stand out?

In this episode we learn from some of the same techniques and principles in psychology that pickup artists use to meet people anywhere, and apply them to a business setting.

The biggest similarities between dating and professional networking are in the critical first moments where people often times end up getting in their own way. The outcomes of these moments depend on whether you condition your mind to frame a new relationship as doomed before it even begins, or instead as an opportunity that can change your life in ways you could never predict.

Hear our stories of how ordinary people have used some of these approaches to get life changing jobs and opportunities for their own businesses.

Listen to this episode to learn how to:

Overcome the initial fear of approaching someone new
Strike up an organic conversation with anyone
Talk about yourself in a way that gets people interested

Episode 8: Building a 90 Million Dollar Business After 50, with Larry Petretti

vrevzin — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 16:44:23 +0000

Is it possible to spend your whole career working for someone else, only to start your first business at 55 years old?

Immediately after high school, Larry Petretti began a career as a carpenter eventually moving out of the field and into the business side, working his way to the top of a massive construction enterprise.

At each level he took the time to meticulously learn his craft to know what it takes to run every part of a construction business, from sales to management and operations.

The soft skills he acquired in his 20s brought him tremendous opportunities in his 30s and a job offer for a COO job that allowed him to travel all over the world. By the time he decided to start his own business, he was certain of his success.

Learn how you can apply some of the same principles to massively reduce the risk of entrepreneurship by starting when the time is right for you.

You’ll also hear how Larry’s decision not to go to college was ultimately better for his career and business, and how he found the time to continuously educate himself to surpass his peers.

Becoming Unstuck – How To Finally Get Started

vrevzin — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 06:10:01 +0000

Rebroadcast: Published July 17th, 2019

Original: Published February 7th, 2018

A lot of people want to start something, but most never actually do. Why? They simply don’t want it or need it enough, and find happiness in other ways.

But, some of us never get started for a handful of simple reasons.

We don’t know what we want to do.
We don’t know our own strengths.
We doubt ourselves.
We worry about what others think.

Fortunately, all of these obstacles can be overcome. In this episode, we discuss how to reframe your thinking to finally start acting towards your goals and dreams. We share our exact framework for getting out of the “funk” when you get to a point in your life when you’re constantly feeling unfulfilled.

We also give you specific examples of how we identified and improved on our respective strengths to gain the confidence to create.

Hear Sergei talk about how he got into acting, eventually landing a paid speaking role at an ABC pilot, and how Vadim became a lecturer at a University having never before taught in an academic setting.

The feeling of being stuck in your life can have a major impact on your overall happiness – follow these steps to quickly get out of that state of mind to continue to progress.

|Music by: www.purple-planet.com