# Never Too Late for a Startup – Brett Palmer – MicroConf Growth 2019 Channel: Rob Walling Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhbC4nima7E Duration: 12 min Language: English Words: 2028 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/qhbC4nima7E --- [0:00] [Music] [Music] good afternoon everyone hey it's great to be here my name is Brett Palmer I'm a software developer like many of you and I just turned 52 this year so many would probably when you did your votes go Wow 52 that guy's that guy's pretty old hope he makes it to the presentation so so I made it I've got my Fitbit on and heart rates good and I'm doing all right but my motivation in giving this talk was to help others of my generation and younger generations realize it's never too late to do a start-up now is a great time in the world today to do these startups [0:50] technology is great and I've always been an entrepreneur at heart so there's our so that's my main motivation I'll quickly go through this describe kind of my entrepreneur path give it a little bit history because just somebody younger people understanding where we came from it's much easier today to do a start-up than it was early in my career then present my MVP and why experienced professionals like myself should self fund instead of go a traditional route and then my conclusions like I mentioned entrepreneurship has been in my blood I have to give a story about my grandfather who grew up in the in the Great Depression raised six kids with [1:39] his wife during world war ii worked volunteer in the city council in his church and managed Wonderbread for 30 years but his whole life his goal was to someday work for himself that's what he wanted to do and when he retired from Wonderbread at 60 years old he took all his life savings and built a new motel in Salt Lake City now probably for someone coming from the great depression that seems really high risk but that's what he wanted to do and he built that motel he and his wife the kids were all gone at that point he and his wife lived in that hotel for the first few years because he [2:18] couldn't afford a house but he worked at that hotel and remember as a boy going there and helping him clean the Swim and pull out he loved that work and that inspired me all my life and it worked out in the 80s investors came in and they build a big convention center and bought his property and everyone was pretty happy so in that case it worked out pretty well but why wait till 61 to do that and why risk all your already retirement to do that so some of my background to give you a little history of startups in the 90s at least from from my perspective the way he did a [2:57] start-up is you went to a good university you got into the best MBA school you go to you'd work 20 years in the industry watchers start up with VC funding and hope for the best so that's why I started my journey came back want to study Electrical Engineering work seven years at Novell if you remember that software company great company for me got a master's in computer science finished my MBA I was all set to do a startup this is right when the dot-com boom was just going in the 2000s so we did a startup had I was you know what the chief architect had lots of money [3:38] like a lot of startups but this is before lean startup principles were really understood and the founders had an idea in this app and this app was going to be a personal finance app everyone's gonna love it but as we got building the app you realized this app was really for the founders no one else really wanted it and it just I was found myself building an app no one wanted which is really discouraging for a developer so after six years I finally left and one tip you know you don't have product market fit if your own employees won't use your app so round 2 I did a [4:19] partnership partnerships are good I wanted to do I wanted equity because options the previous one didn't seem to work out that so I did an online app with some partners is a technical partnership we built this app for online testing we put it in the cloud and did assessment testings ninth through 12th grade equity partner to this day really pretty good but a minor partner not at not a majority partner and there are some problems with partnerships and some of you that might might be looking at doing a start-up and having some co-founders here's something here's some tips to think about first of all every partner [4:56] considers their own contribution the highest so I've heard a few talks about you know some that are working full-time it's somewhere working part time what are you gonna do you need to write make sure everything is in writing and you know exactly how that's going to work out because everyone's gonna have a different idea of and what's what's most important and the problem with is if you don't do that determine how that equity partnership is gonna work out that can be roots and really bad feelings and breakups can be really difficult so my third round software consultant I've been doing this for the last ten years [5:31] really like working for myself as a service provider doing government work and small business work in open source software enjoyed that a lot working on a cloud and mobile platforms and but really the problem with with with service-oriented business and consulting is your trading your time for money and I really wanted to have my own product build my own SAS company that I could grow and support my family way into the future so my final my fourth round where I'm at today the last few years I've been working on this software product and really like many of you it's a problem that I wanted to solve myself so I have [6:21] four children three daughters and one son and all of my children do do sports and all very unique and they do things different than I did so none of them play football basketball Caillou did they ski ride horses all kinds of things and I found myself trying to coach them and being a good father and not knowing really what to do and also really wanting to work with their coaches and help them better communicate with parents especially like I have a daughter and son that are ski racers and getting to events and knowing what practices and not knowing how those eventually work is really frustrating and you'll love the coaches because [7:00] they're great coaches but maybe they don't communicate very well so I built this app to do that very thing and I used here some of the technology they usually the ionic framework which is built to is a web technology framework a hybrid framework to build Android and iOS apps cloud computing with firebase and Google and AWS Storage s3 and then I used WordPress and docker containers so I have some screenshots but I'll just more talk about some of the ideas because I'm still trying to refined where I want to go with this platform but the idea is that teachers or mentors or coaches need to be a better way to [7:46] communicate with their with their athletes or or students so create a website with mobile access that can push those push that information to the to the students and one of the easy things with this is as as one of the users maybe it's a fitness coach and you're you're studying you know you improving your fitness and then you move or you want a different coach well you take that data with you and it creates this kind of viral marketing of hey I had this app it's worked really well with this coach would you like to use this other would you like to use this coaching app and then introduce some [8:29] friendly competition all of us that have fitbit's or such you find that you know you're you're working on your steps you're working on your heart rate to compete with other people in the office and just a little bit of gamification makes the application so much more enjoyable and the other other nice thing with the mobile platform is you have this great platform that you can share so you have access to the social media the users that they can say hey you know students can report their successes and of course parents love that teachers love that it's a great way to create this kind of viral market in the app so [9:05] those are some of my ideas so some of the challenges when you're self funding your application of course you got to maintain your cash flow as many of the speakers have already spoken about today and you need to quickly meet product market fit and one of the things that I'm still struggling with his narrowing my product niche to really focus on what the application should be doing it so I have this and this as a technologist I I tend to like satire and Monty Python's with my favorites and as I talk about my app and this is my fourth attempt one my swamp castle right and the King's [9:49] talking to his son he talks about you know everyone said it was daft to build a castle in a swamp but he built a teeny builder's first first castle it's sinking to the swamp so he build a second castle and that also sinking to the swamp and then he built a third castle and it burned down fell down and then sank it to the swamp but the fourth castle stood up so that's my goal is my my fourth run at a startup I'm finally going to succeed so in closing and I just wanted to talk about some of the benefits for I call myself a generation Xer why self-funding is a [10:24] good idea for us some funding is good because traditional VC funding can be difficult accelerators are fantastic and I wish they'd had those early in my career but they're often looking for young young people that don't have families don't have mortgages and and they're gonna work them to death so funny is also as many speakers have talked about it's a low capital risk you have these constraints so you're you're you're earning money as you go you don't have to have a lot of investors and you're proving it out as it goes along and it's a great way to prepare for retirement so if you have parents or [11:05] others that have great ideas but they're not really sure if they're ready for retirement a self-funding application was a good way to go and one of the benefits of people my generation is we have a wealth of experience to share and we know there's different problems that maybe younger people aren't faced with but you know I'm a parent I have parents that are growing older so coming up with new ideas and lastly don't fear the technology you don't need formal training in these days you can 10 local meetups and masterminds learn what you can and outsource the rest and there's lots of new opportunities out there for retirees I [11:49] know I'm kind of running out of time follow Lean Startup principles which a lot of people talked about today and then one of my favorite books that came out a few years ago the world is flat but the Internet and Technology there's so many opportunities for people today and now it's the time to do it so I hope everyone I visit my first year at micro cop I've really enjoyed the talk so far if you want to talk to me after [12:25] you --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com). 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