Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Today's episode is part two of the interview with Trevor Owens.
Trevor is an author and entrepreneur.
He's the co founder and CEO of Javelin.com, the makers of Quick MVP and Lean Startup Machine.
Quick MVP is a service that lets you quickly and easily test business ideas.
And the Lean Startup machine is a workshop that teaches you how to build something customers want and run the right experiments to steer your business in the right direction.
Trevor is also the author of the Lean Enterprise book, which details how corporations can apply more innovation and Lean Startup to launching new products.
In episode 61, we shared the story of Javelin.com and how Trevor took an idea and turned it into a business that generates well over $2 million a year.
We talked about how he considers himself an introvert, yet he's managed to build amazing connections with people like Dave McClure, Eric Ries, and Seth Godin.
In this episode, we get t and talk about what Trevor teaches at the Lean Startup Machine workshops.
We'll talk about the step by step process that Trevor and his team use to help entrepreneurs test their ideas and get their business moving in the right direction.
And we'll cover how you can systematically validate your idea and move ahead with confidence.
Trevor shares a ton of really valuable insights in this episode.
Let's get tactical and talk about how people listening can go about testing a new business idea.
And obviously this is an area that you have a ton of experience and expertise with, both from having run so many LSM events and having built Quick mvp.
But, you know, can you kind of walk us through?
You know, let's say I have an idea, right?
And I think this is it and this is going to be a great startup and a great business.
Where do I go from there?
Trevor Owens (02:30.660)
Yeah, so it's, I think you just described perfectly like almost every entrepreneur right there who just gets started, you know, they have an idea and they think this is it, right?
And inherently there's a problem with that thought in of itself because when you're testing ideas, you have to really kind of first of all recognize the unpredictability and just recognize how bad all of us are at predicting that something's a good idea versus a bad idea.
And also you have to be willing to test a lot of things because every single, you know, I've Seen thousands of ideas go through lsm, and it's very rare that one is validated right off the bat.
And most of them change a lot.
They change, you know, and they change dramatically.
I mean, they change customers, they change problems, they completely change the solution.
So you kind of have to just be willing to pivot.
And I think that's a.
That's.
That's a struggle for most entrepreneurs from the beginning because they just love their idea.
And as human beings, we're biased to love our ideas and just say, like, oh, this is the idea.
And like everything that the media tells us, the media crafts, like, every entrepreneur's story as if they had this idea.
And it's something unique about their background that led them to this idea.
And it's like their destiny, right?
And that's usually not ever the real story.
You know, almost every.
Actually, almost every successful startup has pivoted.
You know, Google, sorry, YouTube started as a dating website.
Originally.
The founders were building, like, this dating website.
Didn't work.
And then they created YouTube.
Twitter started as a podcasting site called Odeo.
And they changed Twitter.
Groupon was like an online petitioning or voting website.
Almost every successful startup has changed dramatically.
And the founders were successful not because they loved their idea and just persevered against all the data.
Like, they just figured out something that was working and doubled down on it.
One of the inherent problems that we have with Quick MVP is that people put a landing page up and then drive traffic to it, and no one signs up.
And they're like, this tool sucks.
They're like, no one signed up for my idea, and it's the best idea ever.
That's going to happen.
That's guaranteed to happen to you as an entrepreneur.
So you kind of just got to be ready to pivot.
And then, um, once you can get over that, I think there's a lot of.
I have a lot.
I have a whole bag of tactics to share with you guys.
So.
Omer (05:23.400)
So I was going to say, I think that's a really great point about being willing to pivot.
And, you know, I think not falling in love with that idea, because the one thing that I've seen, and probably I've been guilty of as well, is you come up with an idea and you fall in love with it, and then you spend all your energy trying to convince everybody else that it's a great idea, rather than almost, you know, doing the inverse of that and looking for people to sort of convince you that it's a bad idea.
You know what I mean?
If it can almost withstand that, you know you're onto something.
Trevor Owens (05:59.720)
Yeah.
Or even just like people to convince you it's a good idea, not you to convince them it's a good idea.
Right, right.
Usually the common pattern, I mean, another thing people to take into consideration is like, as an entrepreneur, you're very resource constrained.
So you're not going to, you want to start a product that is filling a gap in the market where no one is targeting it and that people love it to death because that's the only way you're really going to grow.
If you're just making a knockoff of something and people kind of like it.
I mean, in theory you can make money from something people kind of like.
But you don't have many resources to like have a big marketing campaign as an entrepreneur.
So you have to like kind of be very selective about your ideas and pick these things that, like, are we like to say an addictive drug for your customers?
Because if you find something that customers really want, like an addictive drug, then you don't need to have all the resources, you don't need to have the experience, you can make a lot of mistakes and you'll still be successful at the end of the day.
So that's kind of the second perspective.
Omer (07:07.860)
Okay, cool.
So, you know, just a good sort of warning in terms of don't kind of fall in love with the idea.
But what's the next step?
Should we go out and start finding customers and talking to them?
Do you guys sort of advocate building the landing page?
What's the next thing to do?
Trevor Owens (07:28.260)
Yeah, so there's three main methods that we teach.
The first one is doing customer interviews.
The second is pre selling a product that could be through a landing page.
And the third is a technique called concierge, which is where you deliver the product as a service after you've got some pre orders, they increase in opportunity cost and they narrow in scope.
So interviews, you can do them really quickly and you can learn a lot really fast.
And you can pivot pretty broadly at that point.
Right.
You're kind of exploring things on the customer and problem level, not the solution level.
So a big mistake in doing customer interviews is pitching your solution.
When you do customer interviews, you want to understand who you're talking to, what are their motivations, their goals, and what problems do they have?
And which problems do they have that are like really strong pain points?
And from there you can come up with a solution.
Every entrepreneur, as we mentioned, has a solution as their idea.
And so one of the first steps is just to try to forget about the solution, figure out what the problem is that you want to solve, and then see if that problem actually exists.
Because every customer has a problem and every problem has a solution, but not every solution solves a problem.
This is why so many startups fail.
And not every problem solves has a customer either.
There's a lot of problems out there in the world that exist because nobody is motivated to solve them.
Right.
They don't affect anybody directly.
They may affect society, but they're not a specific problem that a specific person has.
Omer (09:04.920)
Yeah, I've experienced that where you sort of identify somebody and you perceive them to have a problem and you can already sort of figure out, you know, how this product is going to solve that problem for them.
And then when you really talk to some of these people, they're like, you know, it's not that much of a problem.
You know, I can live with it.
Right.
And that's also a good warning sign.
Right.
In terms of, you know, these people are not going to be motivated to spend money with you.
Trevor Owens (09:36.670)
Yeah.
And we have some other.
Some other tricks as well.
Like the basic interview format we call the three point interview, which is where you ask someone if they what, you know, what problems they have.
And then you.
The second part is to ask them to tell you a story about the problem.
Because we never want to get.
We're not trying to get feedback from customers.
We're really trying to get data on them.
Like, that's kind of the goal your customer interviews is not to say like, oh, do you like this, like, red car or something like that.
It's like you're trying to ask them, hey, tell me about the last month of your life.
Like, when you had this problem, where were you?
What did you do?
Because the data on what they've actually done you can make predictions off of.
People are very bad when it comes to predicting the future.
Every year I make a goal that I'm gonna get in better shape and go to the gym all the time, and then I never do it, unfortunately.
And then the third part of that is asking people if they had a magic wand, what the solution would be.
And a lot of people, when you ask the magic wand question, they're just like, I don't know.
And if they say I don't know, then that's a really negative sign because they haven't even thought of what the solution should be.
It's probably not a big problem.
The practice of doing customer interviews is almost like being a Private investigator in the sense that you're connecting the dots.
Nothing is like, you know, explicit in terms of this.
It's in art.
I mean, there's techniques to it, but you still have to read between the lines and kind of, you know, almost like tell if people are bluffing or not.
Because, you know, people aren't people.
It's not an exact science.
People aren't going to tell you, oh, yeah, this is a great business idea, you know, and then you just take that and you're going to be successful.
Omer (11:24.620)
Yeah, again, I think that's a really good point.
It's just because you do customer interviews doesn't necessarily mean you're going to end up with a successful product.
Trevor Owens (11:35.610)
Yeah, but a little bit of data is a lot better than no data.
Omer (11:42.170)
So let's talk about pre selling.
What's the idea there and what do you teach?
Trevor Owens (11:47.690)
Yeah.
So after you validate the problem that people have, you want to validate the solution by collecting some form of payment.
And that form of payment doesn't necessarily have to be money.
It can be in the form of people's email address or personal information or, or even just their time.
In fact, you want to collect something from people that's of value to them.
So for example, if you get, if you talk to the CEO of a corporation and you charge him $100, that's probably not really validation that he needs your solution.
Because the CEO of a corporation has a lot of money, so $100 is nothing to him.
If you go to a teenager and you get $100 from them, that's a lot of value because they don't have any money at all.
Versus time from a CEO is really valuable.
Time from a teenager is not very valuable because they have a lot of time.
So you want to collect something of value.
And when it comes to Quick MVP and when it comes to this stage, there's a lot of interesting things that you can do that are not obvious.
And these are some of the things that we're trying to innovate on with Quick MVP is that with a landing page, you can actually kind of validate the price of your product.
You can kind of validate the customer acquisition cost through Google AdWords.
And you can also validate a little bit of the, of the market size because Google has search volumes that are public, that are public information.
And by taking the conversion rate on your page and the search volume, you can figure out how many potential customers I could get in the foreseeable future for this.
So in the pre selling Phase you're looking to just get as many people to sign up, give you some form of commitment that's of value.
So that if you go and invest a lot of your time and money in building the solution, even though that's not the next step, but let's just pretend for a second that's what we're going to do, that you know, they're going to be there as your customers and it's not just, you know, them signing up to kind of get you to leave them alone or something like that.
So in this phase, you're trying to validate the solution.
And I also really recommend people try to validate some of the, some distribution channels really early on because you know, getting to product market fit is the hardest part of the battle, of course, but then distribution becomes the next battle immediately after that.
Omer (14:19.140)
So what do you mean by the distribution channel in addition to AdWords, looking at other ways to reach potential customers?
Trevor Owens (14:25.700)
Yeah, well, you know, I think of it like if you can find a way to like AdWords is like a scalable channel for acquiring customers.
So if you can, I would rather have something that has like a lower margin or maybe like something that people want a little bit less.
If I knew there was like a scalable acquisition channel that I could target immediately, then you know, a little better product.
But I don't know how I'm going to get it out there.
So if you can like on day one, not only figure out something's valuable but also figure out how you're going to acquire those customers, it's like you just won the lottery basically.
Omer (15:05.160)
You know, most founders, I've talked to, startups, generally the main distribution channel for most of them seems to be around content marketing.
What are your thoughts on that?
Trevor Owens (15:20.510)
Yeah, so I think content marketing is great, but I also think that everything you do is going to be context specific.
For some people, content might not work at all.
And it also depends on if you're good at it or not.
I mean, I have, I have friends that are really good at writing blog posts and really good at creating content.
And even though there's a lot of content already out there on that subject, because their content is better, they're able to use content marketing as a good channel.
But I do think that over the last year that content has become a very crowded channel.
And there's kind of this rule of like the law of shitty click throughs, I think it's called.
I don't know if that's the, the exact law, but it's like Every marketing channel degrades over time.
So, you know, nobody was blogging, you know, 10 years ago, but.
And so if you had a blog 10 years ago, at the beginning of it, you were getting, like, a lot of subscribers and your conversion rate was really high.
But now, over time, there's so much content out there that it's harder to stick out and people have more demands in their time.
So that that distribution channel actually has degraded.
And.
But that doesn't mean it's degraded for you.
So you should always test every channel before you decide to go into it.
Write a few blog posts, see what the return is, and then do the math out, extrapolate it, and compare that to other potential channels.
Omer (16:48.370)
Okay, cool.
And then the third part of the puzzle was the concierge product.
So what do you teach there?
Trevor Owens (16:59.730)
So concierge is after you validate the solution, actually delivering that solution as a service or as a prototype or basically the most ghetto version of the value that your customers need in order to become your customer.
So there was one app at the Lean Startup Machine several years ago who wanted to make a service that would basically, as a business owner, if you're hiring people, you have a lot of resumes, and it takes you a lot of time to filter those and find who the best candidates are.
So they want to make an online site where you upload your resumes, and their algorithm would determine who the best candidates are for you really quickly so you don't have to sort through all of them.
And in the pre sell phase, they got, I think, $1,000 in pre orders immediately.
Because some business owners, they have a lot of purchasing power.
What they did was they actually skipped the concierge.
This is why it's a good example, because they forgot to do the concierge and started doing the wireframes, and they went back to the business owner to show them the wireframes, what the product would look like.
The business owners were like, I don't really get this.
I thought I was signing up for something else.
This doesn't really work for me.
And they couldn't figure out how the wireframes weren't right when this is what people were telling them they wanted.
So then they took us back and said, let's do the concierge, the five of us as a team, let's just get their resumes, sit down with them in their office, and then talk to them and figure out how to get the five best out of these stacks of resumes.
So when they did that, it was a very different experience because they sat down with the business owner and they said, okay, so we have all your resumes.
What qualities are you looking for in these people you're trying to hire for this role?
And then the business owner goes, I don't really know, like, what do you think?
What do you think I should look for?
And so part of the problem they were solving was not just get the top five resumes out of the stack of 100, but also educate the business owner on, add some expertise in here in terms of who they recommend as the best person to hire.
So they never would have learned how important that was to the product if they just skipped ahead and built it out after getting people to sign up for it.
So, you know, the concierge method is delivering whatever your product is going to do as a service, you know, just as like labor, you know, and charging them what you would charge for your product and then doing it by hand.
And a lot of successful startups have used this approach.
And, you know, I think Eric wrote about a company called Aardvark, which sold to Google, which is like a Q and A service.
There's also a company that came out recently called Magic, which has been kind of, I guess, blowing up on TechCrunch, where you can send them a text message for anything you want.
And it's like Magic.
And it's a concierge because there's no technology, it's just people, you know, it's just the co founders behind the phone, like typing, going on Google or whatever and arranging things for you and then charging you for it.
And over time they're going to build algorithms and systemize that because a lot of times you just can't.
There's a couple things you can't predict that the concierge phase does for you.
It helps you figure out people think they want it, but are they actually happy with the service afterwards or is it feasible for me to deliver the service for them at the amount they're willing to pay?
So you figure out a lot of the delivery issues in terms of the product and the business in that phase of it that you would completely miss if you just skip to building the product.
Omer (20:49.110)
Yeah, I love that.
Okay, so I think the landing page piece of this and running, let's say, an AdWords campaign to test some initial demand.
How much do you recommend that someone initially spends to.
On.
On.
On their AdWord campaign before they can get to a point where they feel they have enough information?
Trevor Owens (21:18.020)
Yeah, this is, this is a highly, a highly, highly personal question.
And it's also a context specific question.
So, you know, first of all, there's no way to know ahead of time like what a good keyword is for your product.
One of the ways you can tell is by just typing in the keywords into Google and seeing what shows up and seeing if the thing that shows up is kind of relevant to what you're trying to sell.
So if you're doing a resume sorting app, searching for something about resumes and seeing some advice or some blog posts on how to sort, those would be a good sign versus if a site showed up saying where to submit your resume, that would not be a good sign.
So I think just playing around with that and then Google also shows you what the suggested bid is for the keyword.
And the bid doesn't really tell you if it's a good keyword or not because it could be an undiscovered keyword because you're doing a really original idea that no one's ever done before.
And so the bid, the bid is low or there's other businesses or it's really high because other businesses are targeting that keyword and making a lot of money, right?
So at the end of the day, it comes down to like, what keywords you choose comes down to just testing it and trying different things and learning as you go, you know, running several iterations of tests to figure out which direction to go into.
And then, you know, you don't want to.
It also depends because, like, you know, some more serial entrepreneurs, they'll say like, oh, I, you know, who do this?
Like, who are doing this before Quick MVP existed.
I talked to a lot of people, you know, who did that.
And one entrepreneur who is really successful and has made a lot of money said, I'd do $5,000 on an idea, you know, $5,000, like to vet it out.
Most entrepreneurs don't have $5,000, you know, if you're, if you're a first timer or you're not willing to just spend that just to test if you should take the next step or not, right?
So I think that you probably, it's probably up to you to decide how much you want to spend per idea.
But it's probably going to run you 100 bucks to 500 bucks probably to really get enough traffic to vet it.
Now we're not really going for statistical significance here.
And in Lean Startup, with the exception of AB testing, if you're an existing business with customers, of course you want to be statistically significant in that.
But all the stuff that we do in lean is not in like the pre product market fit phase is not statistically significant.
The reason is because the cost of getting something statistically significant is way too high.
And you're not really trying to figure out like where the market is today.
You're really kind of trying to predict the future.
So you're really just looking for patterns.
And you know, if you get, let's say you just pay for 10 clicks on Google, that might be enough to see if you get one person to sign up or not.
If you get 20 clicks to your site from Google and nobody signs up, that might be pretty convincing that either your page is really bad and you need to reword it and you don't really understand the problem you're solving or nobody wants it.
So all of these success, we call it success criteria in our lingo where it's like, what is the minimum validation that you need to continue working on this product?
And it depends on your opportunity cost.
But it's a really like a judgment based decision because you're operating in a unique context.
If you're building an app that's never been built before, there's no industry benchmarks for that app.
Right.
There's no like way to tell like oh like five is like the right number.
You kind of have to do the math out yourself and use your judgment.
And the good part is that this exercise of figuring this out and kind of developing your own judgment, you get better at over time.
But there's no kind of, you know, Easy answer like 42 or something.
Omer (25:32.560)
All right, so looking at, you know, I think people might listen to this and say, okay, I can build a landing page maybe I'm already doing that today.
I know how to get an AdWords account and start running, you know, a basic campaign.
How does Quick MVP make that easier or, or better?
Trevor Owens (25:57.290)
Yeah, I think the, our first value proposition just being easy to use and fast.
The average like new Google AdWords user, their first campaign takes 45 minutes to set up.
And if you've used AdWords, it's an interface built for marketers.
It's not built for this type of thing.
So it gives you like a bajillion options like AdWords, you know, being, I don't know, it's like $150 billion a year.
Business has the worst UI of any product probably on the Internet.
So we've simplified that UI where it takes like, you know, I was watching our.
We use a really great app called fullstory by the way, which is pretty new where it takes your mixpanel events, or, you know, your.
Whatever your events that track what your user does in the app, and it turns it into a movie where you can watch your customers as they simulates their mouse moving and clicking on the different buttons and how they use your app.
And I was.
The AdWords part of Quick MVP is the most complex part of our technology.
And I'm watching people, how they're using the app, and people will spend several days just tweaking the copy on their landing page obsessively, and then when they go to place their ad, it's like literally like, I don't know, like 30 seconds.
It's like less than a minute where.
Oh, sorry, there's a.
Can you hear that in the background?
The truck?
Omer (27:28.280)
Yeah, I can.
Trevor Owens (27:29.640)
Sorry about that.
Okay, I think we're good.
So, you know, it literally takes people less than a minute to launch an ad using Quick mvp, which to me was really sad because we put so much time into that feature.
But.
But if you were going to use AdWords, it's a really complicated process.
And then what we help you do after that is manage every iteration of the idea.
So we give you all the data, we do the math for you in terms of the market size based on the search volume, the customer acquisition costs, how much profit you're going to make per customer, and then we track each iteration of your landing page and campaign to show you how if your numbers are getting better or not.
Because one of the things is that when you run your first test, it's really not the end all, be all.
Really, what you want to know is the rate of improvement.
Because your first test is just a baseline.
You want to know, if I'm talking to customers and I'm learning and improving, how quickly are the numbers getting better?
You know, sometimes your baseline could be the best numbers you ever get.
That's a really bad sign.
Whereas, on the other hand, you could double or triple the performance after the baseline.
And that would be a really good sign that there's more potential in here to work with.
Omer (29:01.140)
So let's talk about the sort of the current javelin business today.
Do you guys disclose revenue?
Trevor Owens (29:09.770)
We don't disclose our current revenue, but we disclose that after the first three months of quick MVP, we were doing about 240,000 a year in recurring revenue.
Omer (29:24.570)
And I read somewhere that the LSM workshops were doing about over a million dollars a year.
Trevor Owens (29:31.370)
Yeah, almost 2 million.
Omer (29:33.130)
Wow.
Okay, cool.
Is there one thing in your business that you're most excited about right now?
As you sort of look towards the rest of 2015.
Trevor Owens (29:43.160)
Yeah.
So I'm excited about quick MVP.
You know, I never thought it would be this successful, actually, because going from a project management tool that nobody used and didn't understand to people launching lots of landing pages and campaigns was really amazing.
And we're also adding interview functionality to the tool.
So, like, interview tracking, because most of our.
Most of the people who cancel a piece subscription and we track this, like, really religiously is like one of two things.
It's like 10% of people, they validated their idea and they don't need a tool anymore because now they're going to, like, start the business.
And, like, for that 10% of people, you know, I'm really happy that they're, like, leaving the tool.
It doesn't bother me because they're like a successful outcome.
And maybe we're going to try and target that later, but it's still just like 10%.
90% of our cancellations are people who say, I invalidated my idea and I don't know what to do next.
So I'm just going to take a break and maybe interview some people before coming back and doing another landing page.
So that's one of the reasons why we're introducing customer interviews to the app.
And we're also going to be adding customer interview scoring methodology.
So one of my friends is Ben Jaskovitz, who wrote Lean analytics, and he had.
Whenever I see a Lean blog post, I immediately.
I've read everything on it.
So I know when something's really different and unique and innovative.
And he wrote a really innovative post on scoring customer interviews and giving the quantitative measure.
And so we're going to implement something very similar for the interview feature, where you, like, answer a couple questions about the interview and it'll give you a score of how big the problem is for that customer.
And then for lsm, we have some big things we're doing.
Part of the reason for me moving to the Bay Area is to help expand our network here in terms of the resources that we're providing to entrepreneurs.
We do also have a really great community as well, called Lean Enterprise, which I run with another business partner, Michael Gold, who is really prolific event organizer.
And this is a really young community where we have a lot of innovation managers who come and we run conferences.
And I'm really excited about that community as well, because I think there's a tremendous amount of potential still in the startup world in terms of that.
I just don't see enough people using the data Driven lean techniques that are out there.
But I also think that in the next 10 years, we're going to see a major renaissance in corporate innovation.
Because when you look at, first of all, you look at the data, corporations are really, really in trouble.
Because over time, the amount of time that a corporation has spent on The S&P 500, the most valuable companies, largest companies, it's been decreasing from 60 years.
Around 1960, a company would be on the S&P 500 as most valuable company in the world.
Today, it's about 17 years and it keeps going down to where companies that are the most valuable companies we know are falling off the S&P 500 list.
And so they see what the startup world is doing, they're like, wow, we really need to figure out how to learn some things from that.
And corporate America has an order of magnitude more capital than all of Sandhill Road.
If you look at the top five corporations from how much cash they have, it's 10 times more than all the dollars that Silicon Valley invests in a single year globally in venture capital.
So they have all this money lying around.
They don't know how to do a lot of things that startups know how to do.
And these companies have tremendous influence in the quality of life in global affairs.
The reason that we know what the future should be, we've had the Jetsons for a long time and yet our daily lives are very far from that.
I think that as corporations begin to use their potential, it's a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs and for people that work in large companies to really make a big difference in the world.
Omer (34:22.050)
And then on top of all of that, you wrote a book as well in your spare time?
Trevor Owens (34:27.170)
Yeah, yeah.
So that it's about.
Actually been out about a year now, which is just based on my frustration working with enterprises and kind of covering some of the basic knowledge that people in the startup world know and understand.
That's but that corporations and innovation people consider really hard to accept or doesn't really make sense to them because the two worlds are really different.
But, you know, the corporations are trying much more to become like, you know, the startups then than the other way around.
Omer (35:03.620)
So the book is called the Lean How Corporations Can Innovate Like Startups.
And I'll include a link to that in the show notes.
Okay, Trevor, it's now time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I'd like you to answer them as quickly as you can.
Are you ready?
Trevor Owens (35:21.540)
Yes, ready.
Omer (35:22.500)
All right.
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received.
Trevor Owens (35:26.560)
There was two, so two important moments for me.
One was an advisor me told me focus on one thing.
This was about 6 months before I decided to do LSM full time.
Doing a bunch of different ventures.
Said focus on one thing.
Focus all your efforts on the thing that you think is going to get you to where you want to go.
Be the biggest potential.
And I think the other piece of advice that someone told me is that the only this is kind of a contradictory one because it's right in some right ways and wrong other ways.
But someone once told me the only wrong reason to do something is for the money.
So this is an advisor of mine who created a product that he really regrets because he thought it was going to make him a lot of money.
Now I believe that you should focus on things that you believe are going to add value to the world and then after that figure out how to make money from it.
Because I'm a big believer in making money.
But the first consideration should be adding value and having an impact.
Omer (36:29.980)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Trevor Owens (36:34.060)
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
It's a very classic book.
And as an entrepreneur, your social skills and working with people is the most important thing.
So that book has really helped me a lot.
It's helped a lot of people I know and I try to read it almost every year just to get a refresher.
Omer (36:53.190)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Trevor Owens (36:58.150)
Hard work.
I mean, it just comes down to really hard work ethic.
And you know, in America, I think we're in the U.S. we're lucky because we have this really aggressive work culture.
And when I travel around the world in some cultures, they don't have that kind of like that drive.
And a lot of the entrepreneurs, they just need to push themselves a little bit harder and really grit their teeth and sink in.
Omer (37:29.600)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Trevor Owens (37:34.560)
Yeah, my favorite productivity tool is just the philosophy of managing my energy and not my time.
I try to be every meeting I take and every interaction or everything I try to do, I try to be at peak energy when I'm doing it.
And it doesn't matter for me as much about doing something at a specific time of day.
It's much more about doing something when I feel my most productive.
Omer (38:02.540)
If you had to start over tomorrow, what type of business or market or opportunity interest you the most?
Trevor Owens (38:10.750)
Yeah.
So I don't know if this would be starting over.
But I think I'm looking forward to getting into investing in the future because I think being an investor is a lot easier than being an entrepreneur at times.
You don't have to do all the hard day to day work and you can really have a big impact in a different way.
Omer (38:35.000)
What's one interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Trevor Owens (38:40.600)
So I was, I originally went to college to wrestle for Division 1 and I got injured and wasn't able to do that.
But wrestling is a big, a big part of my shapes, a lot of my philosophies.
And I actually have cauliflower ear, which is like.
Basically when you're a wrestler or a fighter, you tend to get like a bruise in your ear from like, you know, head, but not headbutting, but like, you know, people hitting you in the head and stuff.
And when your ear gets a bruise, it damages your cartilage and you get like this deformed ear.
And so I have that in my right ear and it's actually a badge of honor.
It looks pretty ugly.
But anybody who's been in wrestling, it's like, oh, you got a cauliflower ear, you must be really good.
Omer (39:26.530)
Wow.
And I think rugby players in England also end up getting those cauliflower eras as well.
Trevor Owens (39:32.130)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Omer (39:34.050)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Trevor Owens (39:38.930)
Yeah, so everything that I do, including lean, is oriented around education and personal transformation.
And the things that I'm most passionate about are like the skills that can open your opportunity, you know, sphere like magnitudes.
So like learning languages is something that I'm passionate about.
Economic development, you know, like, I really think that they say that talent is evenly distributed throughout the world, but opportunity is not.
You know, I think there's, I'm really passionate about how can we take really hardworking people who don't have opportunities and give them opportunities and kind of arbitrage the labor market.
So anything around personal transformation is really a passion of mine.
Omer (40:34.879)
Awesome.
Those great answers.
Trevor, I want to thank you for joining me today and sharing your experiences and insights with our audience.
And thank you for letting us get to know you a little better personally as well.
Now, if folks want to check out Quick MVP or you want to attend a Lean Machine, a Lean Startup machine workshop, you can go to javelin.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Trevor Owens (41:02.860)
The best way is definitely on Twitter.
So I'm.
And yeah, just tweet at me.
I do try to answer emails.
My email is just trevorablin, but I get a, you know, ever since I raised money, I get like, all these people trying to sell me real estate and trying to sell me, you know, all these, like, HR services, stuff like that.
So I get a lot of spam.
And if anyone knows how to, how to get rid of that, let me know.
Omer (41:27.780)
There you go.
Maybe there's another business opportunity there for somebody.
All right, thanks again, Trevor, and I wish you continued success.
Trevor Owens (41:34.820)
Thank you so much, Omer.
Omer (41:36.740)
Cheers.
