Making Something From Nothing: Cody Harvey On How To Go From Idea To Launch

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Have good counsel around you. These are people who have a track record of taking ideas and creating successful businesses. Gather their opinions. This doesn’t mean if they say it’s a bad idea to not pursue it. It’s just a way to gauge a small sample of people who have your best interests in mind that may see issues or problems that you don’t see. Sometimes these people will even want to get involved and help you bring your idea to fruition, so now you have even more resources than you did before.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Cody Harvey.

Cody Harvey is an American entrepreneur and visionary behind a plethora of market-disrupting technologies, most recently, Breakout Audio. Cody has revolutionized the way industries such as finance, entertainment, blockchain, SaaS and non-profits operate in order to maximize impact and increase the bottom line. Cody has proudly shown the business world more efficient ways to accomplish its goals. Cody’s latest startup, Breakout, is a new free social audio app that will let users not only connect and share without censorship, but also own and sell their own data.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

Absolutely. I grew up in a small midwestern town in Indiana. My school was literally surrounded by cornfields. I was pretty active in sports and enjoyed anything that had to do with outdoors. Growing up, I saw most people around me struggle financially and sweat over bills and unexpected life expenses. I was really close with my family and knew when I got older that I wanted to figure out a way to make sure my family was NEVER in that position again. I think that experience shaped me as an entrepreneur and gave me the drive I still have today.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can GET hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. — That’s how winning is done!”

Watching movies growing up was one of my favorite pastimes with my father. This quote is from one of the Rocky movies. Everybody, at some point, has circumstances in their life when they either figure out how to overcome or succumb to the struggle. My life has been a series of struggles I’ve had to figure out how to overcome each one. Every day is a gift. And if you still have air in your lungs, you still have an opportunity to win.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

Braveheart is probably that movie for me. William Wallace, after losing everything he loved, continued fighting for his freedom up until his execution. There was no quit in him. He was sold out for his convictions and sacrificed his life for what he believed in. I admire that.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?

Great question. Good ideas are still only ideas if they aren’t executed and put into action. Sometimes even putting them into action leads to failure. I see this happen all the time. Here’s a list of things to do in order to go from idea to reality.

1. Have good counsel around you. These are people who have a track record of taking ideas and creating successful businesses. Gather their opinions. This doesn’t mean if they say it’s a bad idea to not pursue it. It’s just a way to gauge a small sample of people who have your best interests in mind that may see issues or problems that you don’t see. Sometimes these people will even want to get involved and help you bring your idea to fruition, so now you have even more resources than you did before.
2. Start small, but just start. You’ll never know how something is going to be received in the marketplace if you don’t put it out there. Sometimes you just have to roll the dice and see what happens. However, you can reduce your financial and time risk by starting small and seeing how well people gravitate towards your idea. Maybe you have a clothing line idea. Don’t go and buy 1,000 hoodies and 1,000 hats. Instead, buy 10 of each and determine the market response.
3. Write everything about your idea down. Typically one idea leads to a million ideas. Ways to market, who to partner with, price points, ways to innovate and so on. No idea is perfect at first, but over time you can refine your idea so it has the highest probability of success. This takes discipline and writing everything down. What gets measured gets improved and writing things down helps you go back and measure everything. It also keeps momentum going so you don’t get distracted and allows you to see it all the way through.
4. Understand if you’re a creator or maintainer. Maybe you’re great at coming up with ideas, but not so much on the execution side. Most people are not good at both — and that’s okay. Find someone who is great at executing and bring them into your idea. A small piece of a large pie is better than a large piece of a small pie.

Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?

I actually get excited when someone else has already thought of it. It’s validation that it’s a good idea. Even if they’ve executed the idea I still get excited. The market is huge, so even if an idea is already in existence I can still grow a business from it. In fact, it makes it easier to find my would-be customers. Today it’s pretty easy to find out if an idea has been created by searching for it online. You can even leverage Google and other search engines and see just how many people are searching the search term around your idea, which will help you gauge the market demand.

For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.

Sure.

1. Write your idea down. Everything about it.
2. Build an MVP (minimum viable product).
3. Build an online presence and community for your idea.
4. Test your idea and gather feedback from your community. Try to make your idea their idea as much as possible. They’ll be your biggest champions and ultimately decide whether or not your idea is successful or not.
5. Fund your idea with either your own money or investors’ money and take it to the next level.
6. Use your funding to hire great legal advisers who can assist with trademarks and patents. Unless you’re an expert in this field, it’s best to outsource it to someone who does it on a daily basis.
7. Interview multiple manufacturers. Look for these things: Quality, communication and price. I put price last because although you want the best deal you NEVER want to sacrifice quality. I also included communication because you want to work with someone who is going to be able to adjust to the demand of your product. This requires good ongoing communication.
8. Build up demand through your community for the product and create strategic alliances that will add value to your idea.
9. Start small. It’s easier to get small shops and influencers to push your product at first unless you have certain connections. However, once there’s demand, the larger players will come. They want to make money so if you can prove they will — they’ll jump on board.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)

1. Nobody is going to care more about your idea than you do in the beginning. I was putting in 16+ hour days for the first year of my first tech start up. Many people dismissed the idea and I really had to continue to believe in myself.
2. Be willing to travel to meet people face to face. You’ll get things done much faster this way and develop authentic relationships that will pay off. I’ve traveled as far as China, Japan, India, Guyana for some of my one-on-one meetings — and I’m thankful that I chose to do so.
3. Hire slow and fire fast. Be careful who you bring on board. They are a direct reflection of you and your idea. I made the mistake early on of just bringing anyone on that wanted to help. This was a mistake and now I have certain standards and values I look for when bringing someone into any of my company ecosystems.
4. Marketing is crucial. You can have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, you won’t get very far. I was always afraid of spending marketing dollars as I feared losing money. Now we spend millions of dollars on ads just to be seen. As long as you have a good product and decent marketing you’ll be fine.
5. Reinvest back into your business. I see a lot of young entrepreneurs make money and then spend that money on themselves. If you’re trying to grow a business you have to treat it like a child. It needs to be nourished. We are constantly reinvesting back into product development, masterminds, our employees — and so much more.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

1. Write it down.
2. Research to determine market demand for it.
3. Find the right people to help you bring it to fruition.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

You have to be careful hiring consultants. They aren’t all created equal. Personally, I like seeing how far I can get with something with just myself and my core team. However, I do think there are times when you need to hire the right person or team to help you get it to the next level. If you get far enough in the process sometimes you can incentivize someone with the right skill set to join your team. This comes down to having something tangible and being able to properly cast the vision of the company or idea.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

It depends on where you’re personally at in life. Someone with less financial responsibilities can bootstrap an idea with little risk. Someone that has a family and a mortgage might not be in that position — and should seek out venture capital. I think it comes down to a person’s appetite for risk and their particular season of life.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

I believe that people are the greatest asset for investment. People, if given the right resources, will come up with new creative ideas that can greatly impact the world. I’ve tried to reinvest into those around me and even some people I barely know in order that may might have a chance at bring their ideas to life and make the world a better place.

You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

Great question. I believe people should be free. Truly free. Free to express themselves how they choose, free to say what they want to say, free from poverty, persecution, dictatorship the list goes on. There’s so much division in our world today that rises from one persons world view being that others should not have the same freedom as them. I despise that. Everyone is valuable, deserves to be free and deserves to be heard. That is why I started Breakout.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

Wow, there’s a lot of people I admire and respect. I would say either Richard Branson, Gary Vaynerchuk, or Robert Herjavec.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

Thank you for allowing me the opportunity.

Instagram: @Codyharvey_

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Twitter: https://twitter.com/breakoutsocial

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.