If You Got Fired During Big Tech Layoffs, Do This...

0:00back in 2008 and 2009 is one of the biggest recessions and generations rolled in on us I was right on the edge of still working for Consulting clients but also having enough product income that I could essentially quit the day job so to speak and I think there's a lot of fear and uncertainty going around today and if you've been fired in recent Tech layoffs or you think you might be fired in a future round make it really behooves each of us to think about how can we become more self-sustaining and not reliant on big companies to pay our salaries but rather build side income and to launch side projects that could

0:35grow much bigger than that and could potentially provide for you and your family for the rest of your life in this video I'm going to dive into all the options you should be thinking about if you find yourself in this situation I'm Rob Walling I'm a Serial entrepreneur I've written four books on building startups and I've invested in more than 125 companies a friend of mine got laid off a few months ago and we sat down and were talking about what his options are I brought up the idea of starting a side project whether that side hustle is software like this channel focuses on or whether it's ebooks or courses doesn't

1:06really matter but my big thought was what do you have to lose you have a lot of time right now you're applying to jobs you're going to interviews but building something out that isn't just a skill set but that actually generates revenue for you is never a bad thing because if you have some luck and it turns into a product that supports you full-time then you don't need a full-time job but if it doesn't and it completely fails you're going to learn something if it makes you 500 or a thousand dollars a month that's nice little side income that you can keep around even once you find that full-time

1:35job so there's really not much of a downside risk to it other than your time and that's why I'm recording this video is if you've been laid off or you think you might it might be a good time to start your own business entrepreneurship is a great equalizer especially startups that solve problems for businesses because businesses don't care who you are where you came from or what you look like they care if you solve their problem problem and if they go to your landing page and you solve a burning pain point for them and you're charging them twenty dollars fifty dollars a hundred dollars a month and that pain

2:08point is worth that much for them to solve they will sign up and they will stick around and that's the beauty of bootstrapping especially is that you don't need anyone's permission to start your company or to launch a product even if it's just a little side hustle you don't need anyone's permission to go out and write that ebook to build the course or to build that no code or that SAS app that you want to launch you can already tell I don't mean start the glitzy startup that maybe you worked for if you worked for a Facebook or a Google or some massive company that took in a

2:39bunch of venture funding or maybe you worked for a venture fund a company that recently imploded that's not the kind of company I'm talking about starting I'm talking about building a real product for real customers who pay you real money this is not monetizing on ads it's not a two-sided Marketplace it's not something that's only going to pay off when you have 10 million users this is more akin to a brick and mortar when I go to my dry cleaner I paid the money and they clean my clothes and they iron them and they look really nice when I go to Squad cast and I pay them money they

3:07give me back amazing podcast recordings squadcast is studio quality podcast recording software when I go to savvycal and I pay them twelve dollars per seat per month they give me back a scheduling link that is super versatile and that people love to use again they have built real businesses for real customers like me who pay them real money and that's the kind of business that I'm talking about in this video so there are some reasons to start a business or a side hustle I think I gave those at the top of the video what are some reasons not to do it or maybe when this is not a

3:37good idea for you I think that if you are really risk averse or the risk of spending 10 20 hours a week launching something if it doesn't work it will destroy you it will crush you that you lost all that time then maybe starting a business isn't for you A lot of people think that being an entrepreneur is risky and frankly it's probably not as risky as you think because you don't need to mortgage your house you don't need to put money on your credit cards you can dip your toe into the water using the stair step method that I'm going to talk about in just a second and

4:05you can take very small bets and as those bets pay off you build one on top of the other on top of the other until you can cover your full-time income another reason not to start a business is it's going to take longer than TechCrunch would have you believe all the tech sites glorify these overnight successes what they don't talk about is how most of the overnight successes took 10 years for someone to get there that they actually had a prior startup that was in the same space and so they have this great Network and still had some funding and over the 10-year Journey they eventually got here but it looks

4:35like they got successful overnight so if you do think you're going to get results in weeks or in a few months I would caution you to think in terms of many months if not years don't think in terms of I'm going to be successful in the next month or two and lastly right now given the economic climate I wouldn't be starting a business where I needed to raise funding it's not a great time to raise funding and as you know from this channel if you've watched it before I talk all about pragmatic practice vehicle companies and products it's things that you can bootstrap or mostly bootstrap you may not know this but many

5:05many amazing businesses have been started in the midst of recessions companies like Microsoft and Pinterest and Uber were all started in the middle of recessions and SAS companies like MailChimp and slack and Cloudera were also started in the last couple recessions starting during recession is not a terrible time especially if you don't need funding and you are one of these cockroach companies which is a good thing a cockroach never dies when you're a bootstrap company you don't run out of funding you just run out of motivation see when you raise a kajillion dollars your company tanks when you run out of funding but as a bootstrapper you close down when you run

5:38out of motivation and so the key is don't run out of motivation but if you think you want to dip your toe into this water I'm going to give you four tips to increase your chance of success so the first one is something I've already mentioned and it's to forget Moon shots it's to build a real product for real customers who pay you real money and this means starting with a problem so whether you build software or whether you write an ebook start with a problem someone's trying to solve and then craft that product around solving that problem really well you want a problem that is a

6:07pain Point people are willing to pay to solve so stay away from consumer stuff you want to solve a problem for businesses or potentially Freelancers which I consider vsbs very small businesses Freelancers people who are making money from something it's not selling to Gamers or people who like to knit not that those are bad markets but they are consumers and they're very price sensitive so I would stick to solving problems for businesses and the good news is you've had a job at a tech company you probably have some expertise and have seen some problems that you could craft a solution around again whether it's written content video

6:41content or you build some software to solve it that's where I would start my second tip is to use the stair step method of Entrepreneurship this is where you start small on step one and a step one business is relatively quick to build you should be able to get it to Market in a month maybe two tops and the step when business has marketing built in so usually you're going to build into a Marketplace so if you're going to build software even if you're going to do no code whether you code or not you can build add-ons to marketplaces like Heroku and Shopify and Salesforce and

7:15these have built-in traffic and if you rank for them you can pretty easily build up hundreds if not thousands of dollars in mrr now I say pretty easily I don't mean it's a shoe-in and I don't mean you're going to just throw it out there and it's going to happen no matter what the idea you choose is what I mean is that compared to trying to build a full-blown SAS app or trying to go out and launch and market a course on your own being in a Marketplace is going to help you so for courses it might be something like Coursera or udemy or Udacity and for software a fan of this

7:45channel put together a list of 69 different software marketplaces it's over at rocketjams.com and we will link that up in the video description and the beauty of the stair step method is you can start small you can do it on the side and you can build up confidence you build up skills and you build up revenue is perfect to do while you're looking for a job and if that step one business turns into something bigger it can become a step two business which is where you buy out all your time and then eventually if you want to get to the point of step three that's a standalone

8:15product that you Market directly to your audience or build a standalone SAS app it's a more complicated thing to do but it's something you can eventually climb to if you decide you want to do it tip number three is if you have cash let's say maybe you have some money you've saved in the bank maybe you got a nice Severance you can skip the initial and painful 12 to 18 months of building and you can find product Market fit by acquiring a business that already has it and I'm going to give you four places where I would be looking for these types of companies the first is Quiet Light

8:46brokerage quiet light has actually been a supporter and a partner of microconf for the past couple years if you head to quietlight.com you can get on their list of buyers and see new businesses that are coming to Market these are things like content sites e-commerce sites SAS apps they have a really great pool of buyers and sellers and if I were interested in acquiring a business I would absolutely head to quietlife.com there are other options as well of course Fe International Empire flippers and acquire.com are three other places that I would be looking if I was interested in acquiring a business in this fashion in order to skip past the

9:23early and often painful stages of building and finding product Market fit and my tip number four is to find a community to be around like-minded people who are also trying to do this there are tons of them out there there's Indie hackers which is for early stage folks building software products on the side there's the dynamite Circle which is for digital Nomads and there's microcof which is for bootstrapped and mostly bootstrap SAS Founders it's the channel you've stumbled upon here and at microconf.com you can find out about all the things we do for our community including Mastermind matching our amazing slack Community called microcomp connect with more than 5 000 founders

9:59and aspiring Founders and the idea of being part of a community is to surround yourself with people who have done what you want to do or are trying to do what you want to do because it's a huge leg up to get advice from people who have been there and to build community with people who are headed in the same direction that you are I'll be honest years ago when people would tell me to go find Community or go find a mentor or go find a mastermind group I would kind of scoff at it because I figured you know I can do this myself and I know

10:25better than other people and I was wrong I was so wrong that I went and built my own Community that's what microcomp is it's the community that I wanted to exist when I was first getting started and there are tens of thousands of entrepreneurs that are part of Indie hackers the dynamite Circle microconf and many other communities depending on your goals so you can't underscore enough the idea of being around people who are headed in the same direction as you or who have already been there and can lend guidance along the way in a second I'm going to give you a bonus option of what to do if you don't think

10:53starting your own side project is the right thing to do right now but before I do that I want to call out startups for the rest of us it's the sister podcast to this YouTube channel and on that podcast I talk for about 30 or 40 minutes every week about building launching and growing SAS products I do interviews with amazing Founders amazing authors it's a podcast that's been running for 13 years we have 650 episodes and you should check it out wherever greater podcasts are served startups for the rest of us so if you don't think starting a side hustle is the right option you may want to

11:24consider going and getting experience at an early stage startup and I don't mean an early stage Facebook or Google I mean the type of startup that I've mentioned in this video and the type of startup that would be in the microcomp community and I have a couple thoughts on how you might want to do that the first is if you can move somewhere cheaper than the Bay Area if that's where you live right now move somewhere cheaper if you can lower your cost of living it means you can stand to take the best job that's going to teach you the most and be a little less worried about salary I'm not

11:51saying you have to move to the middle of nowhere and accept the twenty thousand dollar a year salary but if you move to a b tier or a c tier City in your country tree you can dramatically lower your cost of living and it opens up your options to maximize on learning the other thing I would do is I would go where startups are looking these are job sites like dynamite jobs remote okay authentic jobs and we work remotely these are probably the four most popular job sites for people in the microcomp community these bootstrapped mostly bootstrapped software companies that are solving problems and just because

12:23they're bootstrapped are mostly bootstrap doesn't mean they're small we have companies doing Millions if not tens of millions in revenue and so it can be as stable a job or even frankly more stable than some venture-backed companies because they don't have these swings of trying to find funding 18 months and needing to do layoffs and working at a small company whether it's a five person a 20 person team you can learn incredible amounts about how the business works and you can have a huge contribution not only to the bottom line for the company but a huge contribution to the product and you can make a difference while learning a lot so

12:55whether you decide to start a side project or not I still think it's a really good idea to consider if you enjoyed this video I'd love it if you'd hit the like And subscribe to the channel putting out videos like this every week [Music]