The Mistakes I Made When Building Selfmastered

Summary

Even if I come from a VC background, I've made a lot of mistakes when building Selfmastered. This video is about sharing in total openness the things I didn’t get right at the beginning, and what I do to solve them. I’m sure it will be helpful if you’re building your online business.

Transcript

I've made a lot of mistakes when building self master and I come from a VC background. So I'm supposedly the kind of person that invest in businesses and then tell intrapreneurs what to do. So I should have known better. So this video is about telling you in all openness, what I believe I screwed up when first starting the business, and then giving you four or five solid tips that you can implement today, so you maximize your chances for success. Let's get to it.

[INTRO] Hey, I'm Leon Castillo founder of Selfmastered. A high performance training company that helps entrepreneurs scale their businesses by solving their solid bottleneck, their own performance, which transformed the unproductive, overwhelming and focus entrepreneurs into laser focused business athletes that can achieve in one day, what they previously achieved in one week.

So today, I want to do something fun, because I was asked the other day by one of the persons in our community like, Dude, what are the main mistakes you've done when building this business? Especially coming from a VC background? You've invested in 37 companies, you've seen all sorts of business models, you give advice to entrepreneurs? So you're probably got it right in the first tried, didn't you? Of course, I did not. We all mess up. And this video is about sharing honestly, what has not worked as well as it should have worked. So you avoid this. So here we go.

Mistake number one. And this one has been huge for me is over investing in product and under investing in marketing. And what I mean by this is that because I understood that nobody knew me in America, right? Because a market is mostly in America, I had an aim in Spain, but not in America. And the way of counteracting this fact is by building the absolute best product I could build, and I devoted one year to build the best product I could, I released three versions of the product before I started taking marketing. Seriously, I was fortunate that leads were coming our way inbound.

So we had the business open, and I didn't need to do as much marketing to stay alive. And the result is a fantastic product that everybody loves. But the marketing side of things has not been well developed. Yet, we are lucky that we found product market fit. So what we do is useful to folks, because oftentimes though that over invest in product and are building something no one cares about, we had been lucky, I knew how to fix execution and performance problem based on my background.

So I knew that what I had to offer was valuable. But if you don't have a specific experience on the business you're trying to build, do not over invest in product, talk to people first and build what they need. Which leads me to mistake number two, I did not take marketing seriously, at least not in the beginning. Why? Because I'm not a marketing guy. I come from the finance world. Before that I was an architect and I was mostly devoted to product so I didn't really care about product or sales. I'm naturally good at sales. So marketing just was not on my mind. Huge mistake because now I understand that marketing truly is the lifeblood of any digital business. And when I mean taking marketing seriously, I do not only mean just doing marketing, I mean truly understanding marketing, because marketing is super broad. The official definition is communication that gets you sales, but it goes way deeper than that marketing is how you relate to the world with your business is how the business perceives you is how do the customers understand you're helping them it is even files are fickle in nature, which is why I've come to realize that most folks do not truly understand marketing in its depths, they will focus on creating outrageous claims let's just 100x your business in two days without working on stuff like that they will work on the micro marketing on the claims on the messages, but not on the positioning not on Word does the business than within the company of landscape and not focus on answering the number one question

Dan Kennedy says we need to answer when building our business which is why should your customer buy from you and not from someone else? Right so this has been huge for me understanding the depth of the marketing craft and willing to become a master at it three over investing in knowledge acquisition but under investing in skill acquisition, what does that mean? It means that I had been learning the wrong things to build my business.

As you know, I'm a huge proponent on just in time learning which means that I learned about the stuff that I need at the moment in order to take the business to the next level. If I do not know copywriting well then I will study copywriting and start doing copy. If I do not know how to position a company then I will learn positioning and start working on positioning your company because I'm truly committed to self mastery. I want to be One that is able to drive demand and marketing generation services for the company, right? I don't want to source that.

The problem is that once you get enamored with something you're learning, it is very easy to get swayed away and start learning things that are not immediately applicable to the things that you are needing in the business. Right? Let's say you start with positioning, then you go with message marketing match, and then you go into the history of branding. And whatever it is, it is very easy to get swayed away of the things you truly need. And that's what I mean, over investing in knowledge acquisition knowledge, understood as things that are useful, but not in the moment that skill acquisition stop that builds me based on the bottlenecks that I have discovered in my business.

This one is huge, huge, and for hiring wrong, just as you can be learning useful stuff that is not immediately applicable. So it's more knowledge and skill acquisition, you can also hire good people at the wrong time. And that has happened to me in the past the people that were fantastic for the company, but I just fell enamored with the position they had. But they were not really useful to the company at that time. I wanted to work with them. But they were not qualified to do the things that we truly needed. And that was totally my fault, because the business was not ready to have that position. And I had to let them go. And this is a massive mistake from my part, right.

So hiring wrong, not solely hiring bad doesn't mean that I hired the wrong people. In fact, I hired the right people for the wrong thing at the wrong moment. And this is a lesson that all entrepreneurs learn at some point in their entrepreneurial careers. And now, what I would do differently, what are the four or five tips that I would give a newly minted entrepreneur so they can fast track the success, here we go.

But before we get into that, remember to like, subscribe and hit the bell. So you never miss out on any of the juicy content that we release every week. And also because it is the right thing to do you love this channel, and you know you have a friend who will most likely benefit from our content. So please share it. So the idea here is that by doing the opposite of what I just described, you will give yourself a chance to become better intrapreneur. So the first thing is, of course, Master marketing, but understand marketing as two different sides of the same coin. One is the macro marketing, and one is to meet from marketing. Macro is the positioning, who are you? Who are the competitors? How do you relate to them? What do you provide to your customers? How do you make their life better? Why they need to buy from you not someone else? What are you truly ideological positioning and marketing positioning that makes you indispensable in their lives? This is what I call macro marketing.

And then micro marketing is how do you translate this positioning to messages that actually work? What's the message Market Match? What are the social media channels, what is a paid out strategy, all that stuff stems from positioning, but positioning is not something people like to devote time to because it is too theoretical, it sounds not applicable, but truly is the core of a sound marketing strategy. Everything flows from a strong position to you guessed this one, build a 10x product after you have an MVP minimum viable product before so even if you know you're building the absolute best product, try to do that when you have traction when you already know it is useful. When you have a viable product that is already helping your clients achieve what they want. Not before, don't make my mistake, don't be the kind of person that just wants to be perfect when delivering a product or service and ends up Joe parallelizing its own business growth, a 10x product is absolutely the right goal to have but has to come after you figured your marketing out.

Three, don't get clients build relationship. This one is massive. So if you're truly doing a good job at selecting your clients, you are probably working with very cool, folks. At least we are right folks that I would happily go and get a beer with folks that I want to be in business relationship for a lifetime, let's say right? So if you change the scope from being transactional, let's just sell this product to this person. And that's it. Let's actually build relationships. How can I provide value to this person throughout our life cycle and don't think about it in purely economic terms. It's through products and services, you can also build friendships, you can build relationships that are not predicated on a transaction of money because the best relationships are those that are based on trust and the more you work on becoming a friend and essentially helping those that have paid you the more they will purchase from you in the future, the better referrals that we provide, and overall the better experience they will have with your program, which will give you a boost in reputation and results and finally for sharpen the axe daily but do so mindfully so what I mean, I mean that you need to be learning, reading, consuming good content, building yourself up developing your skills becoming dangerous at your craft, but don't make my mistake of over investing in knowledge and under investing in skill acquisition, because you'll pay the price. Only learn what you truly need at that moment and nothing else. Why? Because that's going to make your learning way more fun.

If you can immediately apply what you just learned, that will get encoded in your brain in a much better fashion. If you decide I don't know how to start reading about history of medieval India and you're building a marketing agency. I'm sure it is super interesting what happened in the 600 years ago, but it's not immediately applicable.

So there's an opportunity cost that you're incurring by learning things that are not immediately applicable one because you're not learning things that could be working for you, but also because you're learning stuff that you will inevitably forget. Because the things that you do not use, you forget them.

So don't make my mistake. Don't try to become a knowledge buff. Be a fantastic businessman, by investing in the things you need to learn and execute on them. And now tell me What mistakes have you done in your career when building your business? Do you have like a very clear idea of the things you fucked up in the past? And do you believe others should know in order to get better results? If so, please share them in the comments. Let's create an awesome thread. Let's start helping others. Avoid the mistake that we painfully made in the past.