In a recent episode of The App Guy Podcast, I sat down with Aaron Ross, author of Predictable Revenue which many call the sales bible of Silicon Valley; a book that covered the outbound process that helped Salesforce add another hundred million dollars in revenue. He joined our podcast to talk about his new title, called “From Impossible to Inevitable”.
Here are some highlights from our talk:
Aaron: Well, the new book is really written between myself and my co-author, Jason Lemkin — a guy who started a company called EchoSign, and he grew it from zero to more than $100 million dollars, as well as selling it to Adobe — so all these lessons learned around what does it take for companies to speed up how fast they grow, but even more importantly, what are all those mistakes that everybody makes time and time and time again, and how to avoid those.
Paul: Do you have any thoughts on why it is that people run businesses, try to sell them on — is it about the money or is it about something bigger?
Aaron: Well, it’s both. It’s partly about the money, and then if you don’t need money then it’s probably about status. If you’re a natural entrepreneur, you can’t sit on a beach for long… Jason and I have been around long enough to see the new generation of younger entrepreneurs who are making the same mistakes we’d made once or twice. Part of the reason I wrote this book is for our own convenience — we get the same questions over and over again, and we’re like “let’s put these into a book so people can just read the book”.
The new book is really for anyone if you already have something — you may not be making money with it, but if you’ve got something and you’re trying to figure how to make money, or how to make more money. It’s a growth book and I guarantee this will be a million-dollar book for many people because it will save them so much money, time and heartache.
Paul: There’s so much misinformation out there for entrepreneurs — it’s nice to hear you talk about a two to three-year time period at the very minimum for something to perhaps work.
Aaron: Yes, especially if you’re a first-time app person or selling something in the consumer space.With first-time entrepreneurs, they have the dream like “Wow, I’ve built this app, people are gonna love it” and a year later they quit, because “Oh my god, I didn’t have enough savings.” They’ve lost faith in themselves because they’ve gone through so many iterations and it’s still not clicking the way they think it should, or people still aren’t paying more than a dollar, or paying anything. They don’t realize that sometimes you just have to do the time. Actually that’s a whole other chapter, how it takes years longer than you want, it’s the painful truth number five.
Paul: Is it worth being an entrepreneur, in your mind? Is it a lifestyle that is for everyone?
Aaron: It’s for sure not for everybody, just like being a parent is not for everybody. I associate these two a lot. Over the last few years I grew my business and my income by 11x, but I also grew my family. I was single without kids five years ago and now we have 12 kids, but in both cases… having a business is worth the work, but hard to deal with the uncertainty; financial uncertainty or self-confidence — you’re putting your heart out there in a product or in a post or in an idea, and people reject it time and time again. But if you can get through that, and you get to the other side, when it starts to click the rewards can be way worth it. So it’s not for everybody, not everyone should be an entrepreneur; some people should work for entrepreneurs. Not everyone should be a parent, some people should have friends who are parents, they can visit, but for me both having lots of kids and a growing business have been the best parts of my life, really.
You have to find a source of motivation that will keep you going. It’s okay to take a break, but you have to push through. For me, having a big family has been that motivation. Having a growing family forced me to make more money. I didn’t have any other option.
Paul: So what I’m learning from you is that having a motivation, something that really drives you to push through those times where you feel like you want to quit.
Aaron: Yeah, one thing I’ve learned is that energy and passion and luxuries. And time. Energy, passion, and time are luxuries. I rarely have time for extra things like writing a book, going from zero to twelve… But I’ve written like three books in the last few years, grew a business 10–11 times… I don’t have a lot of time, I rarely have energy. Frankly, I used to have a passion for writing, but because I’m always tired — emotionally, physically, mentally — I only write by deadline. So I think that what we think of, like you have to find your passion — that’s all true, but you also can’t wait. Sometimes you find your passion by doing something that you know is important even when you don’t want to do it.
Actually, one thing I struggled with at work is that the more I worked to support the family, feeling guilty about not being with the family, but I think what really helped me was accepting the fact that when I’m working to make money for the family, that is family time. It’s something that’s important, that has to happen to support the family.
Paul: One more thing we need to do before we say goodbye. Since this is a show about apps, what’s on your phone?
Aaron: You know, when I was younger I loved technology and now I feel like all these apps are distracting. However, if I had a favorite… it’s called Letter. You have to spot a letter in a bunch of other letters. My daughter showed it to me, I was like “Wow, that’s cool.” With the kids I got Circle, MyCircle might be the site, but it’s a neat way to integrate with your Wi-Fi to give you a little bit more control over kids with what time their Wi-Fi can turn on and off, what they can see, and try to put some boundaries around electronics use at home. That was neat.
Click here to listen to the full podcast.
Grab a free sample of Aaron’s new book at FromImpossible.com.
