A Startup A Day: The High-Income Skills You Need To Start A Startup With Greg Tanner

Imagine starting a startup a day. That sounds crazy and impossible to handle. But, apparently, for Greg Tanner, this wasn’t all too crazy. Greg did 31 startups in 31 days. Having spent the majority of his career in Information Technology, Greg has mastered how to run a business from an IT sense. He is the founder of several companies, including Aspen Capital Fund. Join Greg as he sits down with your host Stephen Jaye to discuss how to successfully start a startup. Learn what are the best high-income skills you need so that you can be more flexible. Discover ways on how to spark your creativity. Learn how to be observant of your surroundings. And remember to take care of yourself. Startups can be stressful. Make sure you don’t overwork yourself and ruin your health. Learn all this and more today.

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A Startup A Day: The High-Income Skills You Need To Start A Startup With Greg Tanner

There are a lot of people out there who start-up businesses and companies and I have a lot of admiration for that whole process. My guest here is Greg Tanner of Aspen Capital Fund spent his July starting up 31 companies in 31 days. Here to talk about that experience, Greg, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate being here.

The first thing I need to ask you is how busy did that make your July?

It was very busy. It took a lot of discipline and what I call high-income skills to get these all going. I had some of these ideas before. I watched someone do 31 startups in August 2020, a guy named Mark Grimes. I also watched another guy named Doc Williams do 100 startups in 100 days in 2020. He’s a phenomenal inspiration. He builds a business every Thursday on a YouTube show and he shows you how to do it. It’s cool.

Anyone reading that’s wanting to learn more about the process and how to start up a business can check out this Doc Williams’ YouTube channel.

He shows you how to do no-code, app-building, all sorts of types of businesses. It’s crazy. There are a lot of how-to and good ideas there so that was the inspiration. I was going to do it in 2020 with Mark. However, my August was too busy. I wasn’t able to do it. In 2021, I decided to do it and had a lot of ideas since I started Aspen Capital Fund. My nephew and I have this thing called the Tanner Idea Factory. We have all these ideas. Some of them we never got to or that’s a good idea but then it was just an idea. I took some of those out of there. I’ve taken some things that I’ve been wanting to do for my business at Aspen Capital Fund and some of the other things that I thought were good ideas.

It was a good experiment. I’ve done startups before but now in this age of creators, it’s interesting to try to figure out how do you monetize your idea and how you scale it. That’s the biggest takeaway I’ve learned from it and some of these ideas, I stood it up and I was like, “No one’s going to ever give me a dime for this thing.” It was a failure the day that it was opened or started. You got to know when to walk away from some of these ideas. You can’t be so in love with it. It does take grit but you don’t want to be wasting months on a startup that’s not going to make any money.

That’s a very good point because there is a fine line between whether it be starting off a business or taking on any endeavor, between giving up on something before you even give it a chance and sticking with something that’s not going to go anywhere when you’ve put a lot of energy into it. How would you say or what would you recommend someone who’s reading this starting up their own business or any other thing in life? How would someone go about knowing when it is time to walk away versus when they’re giving up too soon?

It’s about cashflow and people want those ideas. If you can get someone to part with their hard-earned dollars, you probably have something going there. I tell everyone, “Go on the internet and see if you can get a dollar from anyone and if you can, you’ve got some skills there. If you can’t then it’s either your idea or you need to learn some skills on how to get your own following.” That’s the best way to test it is to get your friends, family and potential customers to be like, “That’s an interesting idea. I would like to see, watch and read it.”

People can say something interesting but people aren’t going to put money somewhere unless they believe in it. Someone can say, “That’s a good idea,” whether they’re being nice or something but to know that it has traction is when someone’s willing to throw up some money.

You need to give 90 days of consistent cashflow before you give up. If you make a dollar on day ten then I would say stick with it for 90 days. After 90 days, evaluate whether you can put more time, effort and money into that business.

Ninety days is a good general guideline for how long you’re waiting for this cashflow to emerge from an idea. With all these 31 ideas and you’ve pursued other ideas both before and afterward, what percent of your ideas end up being the ones that you stick with for multiple years and develop an actual cashflow business from?

90% of the startups fail and 10% of the other ones keep going. The first year is the toughest when you see the most dropout and then if they have some grit after that first year, you’re going to probably stick with you going forward. That first year is the telltale sign because you’ve got to get strong momentum and you’ve got to start to scale towards the end of that year.

One of the things that come to my mind when I hear about starting up a business every day for 31 days in a row is that what a lot of people feel when they think about the idea of starting up a business, podcast or anything else is the amount of time, effort and energy that goes into it. It’s a pretty sizable investment to do any business. Is there something that someone who has a full-time job and wants to pursue something on the side or has a lot of other responsibilities can do to minimize the amount of extra exertion to make it seem a bit more manageable to pursue what they want to be pursuing?

Yes. First of all, you’ve got to have some good high-income skills. You’ve got to be able to build a website, use Zoom, learn how to do video or sound editing and you’ve got to have some graphic design skills and some wherewithal. All of those things are going to be important tools in your quiver as you’re building a startup because you can either hire people or you can do it yourself. Hiring people is very difficult because the people that you’re going to hire have their own time commitments to their own job. That’s where people are going to trip up in terms of time.

I would definitely learn those skills like how to build a website with a low-code or no-code. It’s important. Learn how to grow a following is important as well. Building your own community is the pathway so you want to get a thousand true followers. If you can get a thousand true followers, those thousand true followers will buy anything that you sell them if they like and love you. That’s the gist of it.

I had a technical background. I exited out of my tech company but I’ve had these skills for twenty-plus years so I’ve been building on them. It’s daunting but it’s not that daunting. You can start a business in a day. Create the graphics and logo, get it stood up and set up a paywall. I got good at understanding paywalls in this process. On a scale of 1 to 10, I had a 2 skill level and at the end of it, I had a 10. I could set up a paywall almost in my sleep.

That’s an important thing I’d like to point out to the readers too because sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it and getting that practice. With this talk of high-income skills, if someone were to attain some of these higher-income skills so that they could eventually start building and say, someone’s starting right from scratch, what would you say are the three most important high-income skills someone could try to obtain? What will be the best method for them to try to do it whether it be a Coursera course, trying something or going to YouTube?

The number one would be understanding WordPress, website building and knowing how to customize that piece of it. The second one would be to understand Search Engine Marketing, which means SEO. That’s going to be very important for you. The third skill is understanding graphic design and being able to create marketing pieces, editing pieces and that stuff. The next one, which is four, which I’d say is content writing. Learning how to build and create content whether that’s sound, video or writing, you’re going to need those skills and have that piece of it.

I really like Udemy. I use Divi theme builder extensively and Elegant themes have amazing resources there for learning how to build a website and using Divi. It’s amazing what you can do with that piece of it. When you google it, they come up and they have great videos and you could learn Divi probably in a day by watching videos.

Divi is a theme that you purchase and it loads on top of WordPress and it gives you some low-code. I wouldn’t say no-code but you can do no-code as well.

That’s interesting because the traditional path as far as the history of the internet has always been to either learn some basic HTML and CSS. When I think about that, I think about those websites from the ‘90s that would always have these weird highlighted tags. There’s always that yellow highlight because they type in that one command that everybody knows and you could see it in anything now. Those low and no-code solutions are pretty interesting.

What I’m wondering is do you think that these low and no-code solutions have opened up more possibilities to people now than what people would have had in the 1990s and early 2000s when it was all about putting together that basic CSS package? Has our standards increased accordingly with all these new tools?

The no-code is going to change the way everybody can build things. Anyone can build things now. You can do Bubble IO, you can write an app. If got a spreadsheet, you can upload it to Glide. It builds the app automatically for you. That’s the wave of the future and 2020 accelerated that creator mentality. People figured it out and are doing a lot of low-code, no-code pieces now. I read somewhere that there was somebody was running a $10 million business from his phone in Thailand. There’s that. You can manage an entire business and he’s doing it from his phone in Thailand. You don’t even need a computer or a laptop.

That is crazy especially if someone wants a little bit less computer time and my life personally. I’m sure there’s a lot of other people that want that, too. It’s amazing to see all these possibilities. With these possibilities being generated, do you feel like we’re living in some transformative era? Is this more the natural progression of technology?

It’s a natural progression of technology. We’re going to see a lot more people creating what I’d call their lifestyle businesses or creating businesses that will help creators in general. That’s a cool thing. There’s a lot of businesses that can be created to help people do podcasts so to speak or creating online marketing courses.

When I think of what’s happening now, a lot of people are talking about a lot of jobs being automated especially a lot of jobs that just involve following a procedure. I believe that if your job primarily involves following a procedure, it’ll probably be automated in the next 15 to 20 years. What that’s going to be replaced by, it seems like things that involve some form of creativity because you can’t automate creating content, for example, or it doesn’t seem like it to me now. Maybe there’s something in the pipes that I don’t know about.

There is AI that you can write content. They say it’s good but quite awful. It looks like a dog wrote the article or it’s the same article that was already spread out. It’s weird but there’s interesting stuff out there like the voiceover stuff from AWS. You can type up what you want to be said and AI reads it. You can make it sound like someone with a French accent or whatever. It’s interesting to play with.

There is going to be that in the next decade or so but in the near future, no. Automation is cool but the big transformation is going to be around electricity and electric vehicles. I also think Apple AirTags is going to be just as big as the Buds. I’m not an Apple guy so you can tag like, “Here are my car keys. Where are they?” If you lose something, you can put a tag on your cat and dog and it’ll track it. It’s interesting.

One of the things that I always think about whenever I hear about technological advances and what things do is what secondary impacts could come from it. I imagine people being able to tag their dogs. The first thing that popped into my head is a lot more dogs being left off-leash because one of the main reasons people are worried like, “I will never find my dog,” especially in places with less busy roads, in smaller towns and suburbs as opposed to in the middle of the city. I’m not going to comment about whether that’s good or bad. It is a trend that I imagine happening from these Apple AirPods.

It’s good we have all these sub-industries. Think of the sub-industry that the AirPods created, all the people building them and customizing them and Beats by Dre and on and on. That’s going to be interesting because it’s going to be a multi-billion dollar segment of the market and it’s just created and coming on. There are some cool things around that entrepreneurs will get creative about something around that industry and start creating around that as well.

A few episodes back where we discuss the trends especially trends amongst the younger generation, I had observed some surveys showing that Gen Z or iGen, whatever you want to call the people born 1996 roughly after, I have no idea when they’re going to cut that off but have a higher interest than the last couple of previous generations in entrepreneurship. More are interested in starting their own businesses and it seemed to be somewhat related to all these new tools that are out there. I haven’t joined TikTok yet because I heard it was addicting but I heard that it’s easier to start developing a following and start making money on something on TikTok than it has been on YouTube. YouTube seemed way easier than anything before that. Do you see this as a trend going forward? Do you see more people retreating back to standard jobs?

For me, I see a lot of people getting involved from my generation in what we call boring businesses like laundromats, mailbox rentals and anything like that. There’s a lot of money in these. Those entrepreneurs are building their own tiny empires. I see a lot of my generation going back to what I call boring businesses and the next-generation is going to see TikTok is fun and YouTube is great. Creating content every day and making sure your community is happy is extremely difficult and taxing physically and emotionally.

We’ve seen that with some influencers in 2020 where influencers have nervous breakdowns and they stop or run out of creative ideas and they’re done. You’ll start to see some of that generation go into lucrative trades like owning a plumbing company, becoming an electrician or a barber. Those trades are generating six-plus figures for a lot of people. After they realize how hard it is to build a community, I’d rather go work 42 hours a week versus 24/7 because they’re always on. It’s crazy.

Especially when you’re a brand. One of the things I thought of in the last few years is HVAC. It’s tough to find an HVAC person possibly because we live through this recent era of everyone following their dreams or desires and wanting to have an impact. I wouldn’t say HVAC people don’t have an impact but part of it may have been that we had a very narrow view like, “If you’re not working for environmental justice, healthcare or something, it’s not impactful.” People weren’t wanting to go into these, as you put it, more boring businesses or jobs.

The market corrected in the other way and that’s one of the main reasons why we see teachers making less money than plumbers now. Part of it is because the teacher, you feel the impact or whatever but a plumber is something that we had previously. This is one of the things I was wanting to comment on is our previous attitudes we’ve had about some of these jobs being, in some cases, not the best attitudes, these boring businesses and jobs.

What’s happening is that there’s a lot of smart young people out there now and want to have a life-work balance. They want to be somewhat financially independent. They don’t necessarily say, “I want to be a multimillionaire,” but they also say like, “I don’t want to be making $25,000 a year.” They’re looking at those opportunities a lot differently like, “I could learn the trade, become a plumber, own the business, have people working for me and be as successful or as not successful as I want to be.” That’s the attitude of people now.

Also, young people that are coming out of college now are realizing that everybody’s got a college degree. There’s not a high demand for, “You got out of school. Congratulations,” unless you’re like an engineer or something. I’ve met some young people getting out of high school that went into a trade. I have a friend’s son. He went into restoration right out of high school. He’s nineteen years old and he’s making six figures working restoration, doing bids on fire and water restoration. That’s pretty amazing. The other great thing is that he’s got no college debt and now he’s got a skill that is in demand. That’s probably not going to go away anytime soon.

One of the traps that a lot of people fall into is thinking that the meaning that they want to get out of their lives has to come from their jobs. That’s a natural reaction to some of the things that I observed growing up as an older Millennial. My parents were Boomers. I observed my dad and some other people working long hours. When you work so many hours that you don’t have any energy for anything else if you want a meaningful life, you have to get that meaning out of your job. Now though if people can only work 40 or 42 hours instead, that gives you the capacity to find meaning through some other endeavor.

In 2020, the pandemic magnified that piece because people realized, “I’ve been in my car for 90 minutes this morning and then I’d go home for 90 minutes. I’ve spent three hours into my car yelling at everybody else and honking.” People realize like, “I’m wasting my life going to work.” Here, I can wake up at 5:30, walk down the hall and work until 10:00, have lunch and be done at 1:00, maybe 2:00 and have the rest of the day or vice versa. Do it upside down. Don’t go into work until 10:00 and do all these things before 10:00 and then work until 6:00 or something and be done with the day.

That’s another interesting discussion I’ve had with tons of people. I’m sure people closest to me are tired of hearing about it but the idea behind Daniel Pink’s book, When, people being able to orient their days because for a while, we were all trying to be the same person. We all get in at 8:00. We all leave at 5:00 but people have different circadian rhythms. People have different preferences and ways of making themselves happy.

I struggle with getting into work at 8:00 and sitting in front of a computer pretty much all day until 5:00. I need to get up and move around a little bit. Having that flexibility to orient things in a way that makes sense for everybody because we’re all different people, we all have different bodies, personalities, circadian rhythms and preferences.

I agree. What I also learned is working eight hours is just not productive. You only work three hours. I was working hard on these startups for about four hours in the morning or late at night. I could get it stood up and barring any technical problems or anything bad happening. You’re not going to work a solid eight hours. I learned that the less I worked, the more creative I was. I was able to go, “This is good. This is how it worked.” I learned that working through the day isn’t as productive as, “I’m going to take some time and think about what I’m going to do and then do it.” You’re more productive doing that. It’s what I’ve seen and learned.

That was cool because I’m good at the end of getting the stuff stood up and knowing what to do and in the middle of all this, I had a malware jump on my server. Not these companies but other businesses that I have going on. It was a nightmare. It took me four days to get over it. I had to scorch the Earth over the weekend and stayed up late on a Friday.

I got everything backed up and cleaned. I got up on Saturday, realized that wasn’t going to work and so Sunday I  scorched everything and then went to a backup and finally overcame it. That was a turn in itself. Bad timing but good lessons learned. Make sure you have a backup and you do have some protection if you value whatever your hosting is. Sometimes your website could still work and you have malware and if you don’t care, you don’t care about it.

You touched a little bit on creativity and even though there’s every morning you woke up and you created a new idea, you had 31 ideas at some point in time. What would you say is a good creativity hack, a good thing someone could start doing to improve their creativity on a day-to-day basis?

Sleep more. It’s dreaming and important. It is and put a notepad next to your bed so that when you have the idea, you write it down. Sometimes I’ve had a great idea and then I’m like, “I forgot what it was. What was that idea?” That’s important there but I do believe if you don’t sleep enough, your brain needs that to generate ideas. Consume a lot and write down the things that you think are cool ideas or variations on those cool ideas. That’s important too and then practice creating ideas. Not all ideas are great. Trust me. I had 7 or 8 dumb ideas during the process. Some of them were cool.

We have this pet ID, cat ID card thing and it’s a boring business. You’re printing out an ID card for a cat. You can do a dog too because we have cats and I know how cat people are like my wife. She’s not averse to buying these ideas for two cats for $20 each. She thinks it’s cool as a conversation piece. That was a cool idea.

It seems like that idea likely came from being observant. I think of a lot of people who have the idea are people who figure out how to build a business or how to build something. How to serve a need essentially, which is what nearly all businesses do, they serve some part of a need, is to be observant and to see what people around them are doing or willing to do. I would have never noticed that people are willing to pay money for cat IDs.

It’s interesting and the reason why that came up is that my wife’s on Nextdoor and there’s a cat missing.

That’s every other day. I’m on Nextdoor, too. Every other day cat missing, dog missing or someone stole my package.

They have a picture of the cat. We think we see the cat and it’s not the cat because the cat was 3 miles away. We’ve been trying to catch this cat. I said, “Amy, how are we going to know that this is this person’s cat?” She’s got a cat pet ID. She’s like, “Here it is. I can tell you. I can prove that I own this cat or dog.” I thought that was a cool idea and looked to how do you do it. It’s easy to find an old HR printer because you can print an ID. Instead of a person, you put a cat’s face on it. You create a template, fill it out and away you go. That’s a great little business for somebody out there. I didn’t go crazy with it but I thought it was a good idea.

One of the things I want to make sure I clarify from my audience as well is when you said consume things. I want to make sure that they understand that we’re not talking about consuming a lot of food and alcoholic drinks.

By consume I mean read, listen and watch.

YouTube, podcasts, blogs, books and magazines.

Take courses. One of my favorite things I do is Masterclass. It’s not cheap but it’s cool. I took Steve Martin’s comedy writing class. I thought it was good. It was different. I did the Diane von Fürstenberg fashion class too. That was cool. Get out of your box and comfort zone. Try something new.

That can take almost any form. You can go to a museum and check out whatever topic that museum is about. It seems to me it’s about more than entertaining yourself.

There’s a lot of great content on Netflix, Hulu and Prime Video. By that, I mean documentaries. There are a lot of cool documentaries. There’s also a lot of well-written things that are cool as well. It can come from anywhere. If you want to be creative, you can’t do alcohol, hallucinogenics or whatever. You think you’re being creative but in reality, you’re not helping yourself at all.

The term is self-medicating, which I always say that there’s a time and a place sometimes you need to medicate the same way in medicine. Sometimes you need that Advil or a Tylenol but oftentimes it’s better to build up resilience. I’d rather use Advil as a last resort if I’m in pain as opposed to taking it preemptively, “I’m going skiing now and I think I’m going to get cold or a headache.”

That’s important. Diet is important also. I’ve been on a diet since February, trying to lose some weight. I’ve lost a significant amount of weight. The diet I’m doing is a keto diet so I haven’t had any sugar. That’s been instrumental in also not the way I function and feel but also, I’m thinking. Being able to think through things. There’s a clarity that comes about. In the beginning, you feel crappy because you’re not used to consuming so much sugar but after you get over that hump, you’re like, “I feel different.” Now if I have any sugar, it’s like drinking a can of caffeine or something. It’s weird.

It’s interesting how your body and your taste buds adjust to whatever you’re consuming because it’s hard to imagine a twelve-year-old that enjoys the taste of coffee or beer but nearly everybody by the time they’re 25-ish learns to like both of those things. I never became that partial to coffee but chai tea. How different is that if you think about it?

We all have these ways of adjusting to whatever we ask our body to start doing and consuming. I noticed that when I started getting a lot more active after moving to Colorado and wanting to do a lot of bicycling around, three days of sitting would suddenly make me feel nuts, even start dragging, to be honest.

I ride my bike a ton too and I used to. It’s awesome. Everyone’s like, “Why do you like riding for 5 or 6 hours?” I’m like, “One, it’s pretty awesome to be out outdoors in Colorado. Two, there’s no distraction.” Sometimes you get lost and you’re looking at the road but you’re thinking about a lot of other things because your mind eventually wants to catch up to what your body’s doing. That’s cool as well.

I love bike riding and one thing I think of in this current era is that we are inputting so much information into our brains whether it be our normal sensory stuff that we’re evolutionarily used to but also scrolling through Twitter or anything we’re looking at or any of the constant. You turn on the news on TV and 50 years ago, it would be one person reporting on the news and maybe they’ll move over to the sportscaster or weathercaster. Now you put on CNN or something like that and there are the banners scrolling things across. You’re inputting a lot more information and our brain sometimes does need time to catch up.

I have some of my best ideas when I’m on long bike rides because your hands are on the handlebars. You can’t pull out your phone, camera and can’t start looking at all these other things. Your hands on your handlebars and what you’re intaking is how the air and trees smell, how much your body is in pain depending on how often you bike and how much you’re going uphill and nothing else. I would definitely put a plugin for that because it is an awesome way to let your brain catch up and process information and ideas.

The other thing is you’ve got to work hard. It’s hard work doing a startup. People think it’s glamorous or whatever and they don’t see the unsuccessful ones because they don’t talk about the unsuccessful ones. No one has talked about the guy that created the alarm clock around your neck because he didn’t make it. People ask me all the time like, “How come you’re so successful?” I’m like, “You should see how much unsuccessful I’ve been too,” but you don’t hear about that because I’m not running around going, “That one failed.”

I often say that finding success in life is a lot like rolling the dice and you got to get boxcars of two sixes. The only way you guarantee that you eventually get that successful roll, which is a 1 in 36 chance, is that you roll the dice 36 times or however many times. It’s going to vary because there is a luck element to it. There are some things that you’re going to try and then not going to work because of factors that are beyond your control so maybe it takes 1 person 21 rolls to get that pair of 6s and another person that takes them 50. It’s oftentimes a matter of you have to continue rolling it until you get that result.

People say, “I want to make a lot of money and a startup.” I’m like, “Don’t do a startup. Go learn a skill, go work for Google and you can make a million dollars a year.” In your startup, you’re taking a chance. You may not make any money and might lose money. That’s the key. When I find a founder, I’m like, “Do you like to work hard? If you don’t, this isn’t going to work out for you.”

I want to ask before we wrap up about that working hard because 31 startups in 31 days especially with this malware issue, sounds like working hard and what do you about say periods? We all have limited capacities and sometimes it’s not about working eight hours and you said that usually we only do three hours or I like to do 2 or 3 what I call 90-minute power sessions. That’s how I work best if I can have 90 minutes to crank out a lot of stuff and then take a break and also, the needing the sleep for creativity. How do you balance the need for sleep, space and understanding our limitations with sometimes some periods in life needing to put in a lot and crank out a lot of hard work when we’re pursuing something?

The interesting part about this experiment too because I knew there was an end. In a startup, you don’t know there is an end. You do have to have that discipline like, “I’ve got to walk away and I got to go sleep. I’m going to go away for the weekend or turn my phone off for a couple of days or whatever.” You’ve got to recognize that. My first startup was with an IT company and we were trying to get all the procedures done. I literally worked almost straight every day for 12 to 15 hours, maybe more for four months. It was absolutely crazy. It was great to do for the business. It was bad for everything else in my life. Everything else suffered greatly.

If you don’t recognize that, you’ll lose people in your life, relationships, piss people off in your startup and do a lot of stuff because it’s hard to keep up with that momentum and that speed of execution. A lot of founders get caught up in that and then they realize two years later like, “My health is bad and I lost my wife. My kids hate me.”

It consumes so much of your energy and I’ve heard so many people say that you can’t become that ultimate level of success in that area by working 9:00 to 5:00 or doing the 40 hours a week. You have to throw something else in there especially people who are holding down some form of work whether it be a full-time job or even a part-time job, driving for Uber or something while they start that thing out. That’s a large time-consuming endeavor.

It is. In this experiment, I made sure that I got good sleep and I had to execute every day. That was get up and make sure I got it up and running and then the ones that were like, “This isn’t going to work,” I didn’t waste more than three hours on it. I was like, “This is a placeholder in my life and that’s it.”

Of these 31 businesses you started up in July if you were to talk to the audience here about one specific business that you think my readers should check out, which one would you pick?

I wanted to do a paid podcast for Aspen Capital Fund. I liked it. I’ve been talking about it. It’s been an idea but to actually get it off the ground and do it was cool. It takes a lot of work to do a podcast. People think, “I had to write a script, record it, get a tailer and a trailer for an intro or an outro.” Luckily, I had the equipment already so I didn’t have to buy anything new but I learned a lot about podcasting in a twelve-hour period. Those are cool.

I also liked the newsletter stuff. It’s like passé but not really. If it’s pertinent to you because you can create a paid newsletter, courses or anything like that, anything around that community stuff is cool. For me, I liked to be able to build a community. I’ve been working on this keto-Mexican thing on my own and then I’m like, “I’m going to create these recipes and put it behind a paywall.” No one wants to pay for recipes that you could probably find on the internet. It was cool because I had people that were a part of another group called The Mexican Food Group. It’s got I don’t know how many people are in it.

I put the idea out there and a lot of people were asking me about it. They wanted to follow along and learn more about the recipes and all that stuff because Mexican food typically is fattening. It was cool because keto diets are pretty bland. Building that community and doing that stuff applied to recipe, podcast and newsletter ideas. There’s a common theme that I started to see. It takes time to build a community and once you build that community, it’s a goldmine.

It seems like the summation of all this is that first of all, get your rest, take care of your body, take care of yourself but also or consuming the right things, be observant, open-minded and out there in front of people and eventually, you’re going to be inspired by something. Something’s going to stick and going produce a good lifestyle, community and living.

That’s the cool thing about business is being able to reap the successes. I don’t think anybody wants it on their tombstone like, “I wish it will work more.” That’s the cool thing about having a startup is it’s hard work in the beginning but once you get it going then you can dictate what’s your life’s going to be all about. Some people do want to work all the time. Elon Musk does a startup every day in his workday. Some of them fail and some of them don’t.

I didn’t know that but he loves working. I don’t know how he has time in the day to do all the things that he does. If you follow him through a day, it’s like, “What does he do?” He only has smoothies because it’s fuel for his body. That’s the only reason he eats.

It’s not for enjoyment, just to keep them moving forward.

He cut everything else out of his life besides working, which is whatever someone wants. I could never handle that much working.

Everyone’s built differently.

Sometimes it’s about knowing what you want and going out there and living according to that truth. Greg, thank you so much for joining us on the show and telling everyone the story about starting 31 companies up in 31 days. It seems like a daunting task. I don’t know how many of my readers will be able to do something like that but get out there and get your creative juices going because it seems like even though there’s that hard work period, the creative period has to come before it. You have to figure out how to be creative.

I’ve proven that you can do it. You can do a startup. By the way, none of these startups took tens of thousands of dollars. We’re talking that the most expensive one was the pet ID because you have to buy a printer and materials. You can definitely start your own startup. Don’t let anything or anyone hold you back. Dive in and figure it out. That’s what a lot of entrepreneurs do.

When you’re thinking, “How do I do this, whether it’s how do I produce a cat ID?” you had to say, “Now I’m going to figure it out. I figured it out. I take this template. I use this printer and stuff like that.” Whatever your idea is, it’s a matter of setting aside time and saying, “I’m going to sit here and I’m going to figure it out,” or maybe you figure it out while you’re on your bicycle because your hands are not tempted to browse random websites or something like that.

Choose your time wisely. Build something. That’s the cool thing. It’s building. Even if you’re building a doghouse, it’s cool.

That’s what it seems to come down to eventually is how you spend your time. Hopefully, you all got something out of this and learning on your path to figuring out how to better spend your time and your path towards aligning your life behind what you want to do because, in the end, that’s what we all need. Greg, thank you again very much. I hope everyone else tunes in again for more episodes of Action’s Antidotes, where I will interview more people with interesting stories and success that they had achieved around their true passions.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Important Links:

• Aspen Capital Fund
• YouTube – Doc Williams
• Divi
• Udemy
• Elegant themes
• When
• Nextdoor

About Greg Tanner

Since 1991, Greg has had first-hand experience in building businesses from the ground up as an entrepreneur. His roles have been Founder, CEO, Sales and Business Development. Having spent much of his career in Information Technology, he has accumulated expertise in IT networking, storage and compute. As the founder of Jupiternetwork, Greg created the brand, team and network of people to create one of the most recognized businesses in the Rocky Mountain Region. He led the business to a merger with 3t Systems.