A Venture Wisely reader asked me something a few days ago that made me chuckle to myself.
They’re a great contact who has become one of the biggest supporters of this newsletter, and they’d been kindly setting up a meeting for me.
Before it was finalised, they asked me straight.
Had I blown the doors off to get the meeting?
And I thought to myself, of course I have.
I laughed because it’s a phrase my friends and I have used for as long as I can remember.
There’s no origin story. Nobody coined it. It’s always just been there in our group, wheeled out whenever we need to get our A-game on.
It gets used for work. Closing something, pitching something, getting a thing over the line that has been dragging for weeks.
And it gets used for the rare night when we all decide it’s going to be an out out evening.
You know the one. It’s been in the diary for a while, everyone’s committed, and the whole thing only works because nobody turns up half hearted.
Hearing it come back to me from a reader made me realise it’s a pretty good description of how I’ve tried to build everything I’ve worked on.
So this one is about that. What it means to blow the doors off, where I’ve got it wrong, and where it changed my life.
You can’t build anything half in
I’ll start with where I got it wrong, because it’s a good one.
I spent ten years in social media. Marketing roles, technology, then running my own agency. My entire working life up to that point was about helping brands show up online and build an audience.
And I never really posted for myself.
I dabbled. A post here, a burst of activity there, then nothing for months. I’ve only properly semi-committed to it in the last few years.
Think about that for a second.
Someone who knew exactly how audiences get built, who did it for other people every single day, and who left his own sitting there untouched for the best part of a decade.
Half in costs you quietly. You only see the bill years later, when you look back at what you could have built and didn’t.
The bigger example is ContentCal.
In my mid twenties I was running two businesses at the same time. The agency was doing £2m in sales, it was profitable, and it had a proper team. ContentCal was doing somewhere around $300k to $500k in annual recurring revenue, maybe less. Promising, but small.
For two years I hedged between them, on the wrong advice.
Two years. That’s a long time to keep a foot in each camp.
When I finally made the call, I went all in on ContentCal. Over time I wound down the agency, the brand, the business and the clients, and put everything into the software company.
To a lot of people that looked mad. I was walking away from something that was already working, a profitable business with a team behind it, to bet everything on a smaller one that hadn’t proven itself yet.
It was the best decision I’ve ever made.
Before I knew it we’d raised from Fuel Ventures. Before I knew it we’d sold to Adobe.
If you’re running two things right now and telling yourself it’s sensible risk management, be honest about it. Is it a strategy, or is it a decision you haven’t made yet?
Because there’s no way of doing a business when you’re only half way in.
Go big or go home.
Nobody pays you for being modest
After we’d raised some money for ContentCal, my COO told me I needed to raise my profile.
I’d always wanted to. I just never knew how. Which, for someone who’d spent a decade in social media, is a slightly embarrassing thing to admit.
I was introduced to a now great friend called Ash Jones. Ash had built the personal brands of a lot of well known founders, Steven Bartlett among them, and he was the first person who coached me through the cringe.
His instruction was simple. Post every single day. About yourself, about what you think, about what you’re doing.
Every day.
“The top one percent of opportunities come to the top 1% of people.” he told me. And he was and still is right.
Visibility is a huge competitive advantage.
If you’ve never done it, the first few weeks feel horrendous. Every post feels like you’re standing on a chair in a busy restaurant shouting about yourself.
Then it passes. It did for me, and I’ve never looked back.
Over the last five years I’ve grown to over 150,000 followers across social media. And here’s the bit that still gets me. I’ve never dedicated a huge amount of time to it. I’ve never gone all in on it. So that still feels small to me.
That’s 150,000 people from a half-in effort.
So what does all in look like?
Honestly, I’m finding out. This newsletter is part of that.
The wider point is about business. There’s no benefit in being modest. Your customers, your investors and the people you want to hire all need to know who you are and what you’re building. If you won’t tell them, nobody else is going to do it for you.
The founders I’ve seen do this well are rarely the most naturally confident people in the room. They’ve just accepted that feeling awkward for a few weeks is the price of being known, and they paid it.
Learn how to sell yourself. Get over the cringe.
Getting things done beats being the smartest person in the room
For a long time I wanted to be the smartest person in the room.
That changed when I was quite young. One of the founding team at ContentCal gave me a book called How to Be a Leader. I read it, and the biggest lesson in it was about dropping your ego.
It hit hard enough that I wrote a letter to myself, to my ego, and said goodbye to it. I’ve written about that before, and I still think it was one of the most useful things I’ve ever done.
I’m so grateful for that book, and for the person who gave it to me. They’d clearly seen something in me that needed to change, and that was their way of saying it. Handing someone a book about ego is a lot kinder than telling them they have one.
What I took from it is that the way to build something great is to surround yourself with people smarter than you, set the vision, and get out of their way.
You don’t need to be the brightest person at the table. You need to be the one who makes things happen.
I’ve never achieved more than I have since.
Thinking still matters, and I’ll come back to planning at the end. Over a long enough run though, action outperforms thinking. The person who ships something every week will beat the person with the cleverest idea in the room almost every time, because the shipper is learning and the thinker is still deciding.
The biggest value I bring now is knowing how to get things done.
Some people just won’t get it
If I tried to count the number of times people told me ContentCal wouldn’t work, I couldn’t. It’s probably in the hundreds.
Most of it came during fundraising. By the end of 2019 I’d met something like 30 funds in London.
Fuel Ventures was the last one. They invested.
That’s where a phrase stuck with me.
You’re looking for a market of one.
One yes is all a round needs. Forty-nine nos and one yes is a funded company.
Everyone has an opinion, and that’s absolutely fine. It took me a while to understand why so many of those opinions were negative, though. Two things helped.
Most people don’t start businesses. They’ve never been anywhere near the risk of starting a company, so of course yours looks scary from where they’re standing.
Most people, investors especially, are looking for reasons not to do something. That is their job. Saying no protects their fund. I don’t take it personally anymore.
The number of people who said no to ContentCal and then missed out on some very big investment returns still makes me laugh.
I get the same now about the ventures I’m building today.
What most people don’t realise is that every business adapts and changes over time. The company someone passes on in year one rarely looks like the company it becomes. And most people don’t have the time to research your space anywhere near as deeply as you have. That’s okay too.
Get on with it, and go and find the people who do get it.
So when someone tells you it won’t work, thank them for the feedback and move on.
And even if they turn out to be right, at least you fucking went for it.
You’re looking for a market of one.
Plan it all out. Then blow the doors off.
I want to be clear about something, because this phrase can sound reckless.
Blowing the doors off is the last step. It comes after the thinking.
The out out night with my friends works because it’s been planned. Everyone knows the date, everyone has cleared the diary, and when it arrives nobody is checking their phone wondering if they should head home.
Business works the same way.
When I finally committed to ContentCal, I’d had two years of hedging to understand exactly what I was choosing between. Once I decided, I went all in, hardcore. No back door to the agency, no plan B sitting in a drawer.
And when we sold to Adobe, we blew the fucking doors off.
And inside Adobe, we did too. We were the fastest product integration ever completed in their history of acquisitions.
So here’s what I’d say to you.
If you’re going to do something, and it’s something serious that means something to your life, a business, a hobby, a job, a passion:
Plan it all out.
Think it all through.
And then go fourth, and blow the fucking doors off.