Chris (00:00.886)
What's up founders. Welcome back to next round. I'm your host Chris. And one of our solo episodes today, I really want to get into the founder identity shift. And just to be clear guys, this is content. These are concepts, playbooks, methods, systems, processes, all of these things. When I do my solo content like this are me explaining what I've learned from other founders who've gotten funding, who have built massive, massive companies.

successful exits and definitely my investor conversations. Like none of this is me making it up out of thin air. If you continue to follow the show throughout season two and season three, everything we got coming up, I promise you will continue to learn a lot of this stuff, get more in-depth insight. But today we're starting off with the founder identity shift. Now, what does that mean? What does that actually look like? First of all, that is you versus the vision, right? Great founders build a system that can grow out, that outgrow them, right?

It's not just about what you yourself can do. There's a limited ceiling on what you can do in terms of your productivity, your efficiency. And I think even if you take a step back as a founder, there's only so much time that you have in a day. Like in the beginning stages, you know what it's like. You have to do all of marketing, all of sales. Even if you have a co-founder, it's still like a lot of responsibility is shared. So both of you are doing everything. It's just, it's exhausting.

But you got to have that vision, right? When I interviewed Kelly Perdue, he said the number one trait of an extraordinary founder is leadership. It's not hustle. Leadership. And I think leadership in that sense is about delegating, giving other people tasks, getting the right people to do said task. Right. It's not just about going to Fiverr Upwork and finding somebody or going on LinkedIn, finding some random agency. It's about finding the right person who can be a part of your system.

to improve the efficiency. Leadership is making decisions with incomplete data, taking ownership when it's uncomfortable and communicating relentlessly. Even when you're tired, even when you don't feel like it, even when you're frustrated, you being the leader, part of that is being able to kind of call, like calm the storm, bring everybody else down, calm things down and keep a level head and balance out the workflows and really get things aligned. If you are the leader, that is one of the most important things

Chris (02:27.532)
you are going to have to do. You have to be able to communicate your vision, your idea, your concept that's in here in your heart and in your head and put that out there to the people you work with first. Because if they don't get it, if the people you work with don't get it, the customers definitely aren't going to understand. And I've learned that you don't want to be the founder that is talking in circles and preaching to your crowd, but you don't really have

that connection because the vision is lacking. Right? So there's one thing I want you to take from this. It's you have to articulate the vision. You have to. And I think that starts with you having a clear mind, taking care of yourself. A lot of those kind of things, getting that rest and all of that stuff. It's not about hustling nonstop. That's something I'm learning even from David Cerner's podcast. Like the idea of you hustling nonstop, like the 9916 we see in the

why Combinator culture right now? It's not real. It's not a real thing. It sounds good online when people post pictures from the office at three o'clock in the morning or when you see a picture on Twitter of somebody who has their computer out at a bar. It's like, yeah, it looks cool. Okay. But are you really being efficient? Are you really getting any work done? No, it's better if you take that time that you're not working to actually relax.

to actually calm yourself. So when you do start working again, you can actually be productive. But if you just work all the time, nonstop every day, you're probably not gonna be efficient. Now do think this works for those people that are super high up who have been like, I interviewed Ron Weiner and this guy has been an investor for 30 plus years. At that point, you have so much skillset, so much knowledge and leverage and...

You working every single day is going to be different from somebody else, right? You're working at that age of 60 plus is way different from when you're 20 years old. And I know there's this idea that you have to do that and it's just, it's not going to help you. It's not going to tie into your vision or make you a better leader. That's very important to understand, man. So the second concept here is the influence phase. It's you versus the market. The modern founder isn't just running a company. You got to run a platform.

Chris (04:49.748)
I preach about this all the time. I always will. Right. Your ability to influence through storytelling, content, visibility, create to leverage that product alone cannot. How many products do we see all the time that are good products, but you don't even know about them. You don't hear about them. Never because we don't hear about them. There are probably so many founders right now who are building something, who are making something and we don't even know. I think about this a lot because like

When I actually do get to talk to founders, now that I do so many interviews with founders, now that I'm connected with investors a lot more, founders reach out to me on Twitter, on LinkedIn, at events. I get more interaction and engagement because of the influence I personally have, right? Because of this show, I have more influence, so I get more founder connections. And it's making me realize, like, damn, there are a lot of founders out there who are probably doing something amazing, but...

They're just not in the right space. They're not around the right people. They're not putting out content. They don't have a way to distribute their thoughts, ideas, their vision to the world. That's why you have to be out in the market. You got to be active in the market. You have to put it all out there. It's not just about making product and coding your life away. That's really the smallest part at this point. To be honest, I know it sounds crazy, but what I've summarized from these first

from like the first, but the last 10 interviews I did in the last two or three weeks, the product part is kind of the easiest part now because with like vibe coding, people not saying vibe coding is like a perfect. I'm not saying that I know it's security issues, payment issues, authentication. I get it. But somebody can go on vibe code and MVP and make a profitable company like that could be your MVP like there. So you being amazing at coding is great.

Yeah, but is it enough? No, not nearly enough anymore. Nobody cares. Nobody cares that you're a great coder. Nobody cares that your idea is good. Can you put that out into the world? Now, I'm not going to get too deep into this, into the strategies on how, because I want to do a whole different distribution episode. But listen, you have to be able to be out in the market and be active. And this is one thing that I learned from Ron when I interviewed him. A hundred customer interviews. A hundred.

Chris (07:14.68)
Do 100 customer interviews with your prospects, sit down and have conversations with them. That is gonna expose everything, whether your idea is good, whether your pricing needs to change, if you added the wrong features, whatever the problems are, after you talk to 100 of your ideal customers, you'll learn everything you need to learn. Now you continue to do this, but in the beginning stages, it is extremely important. You can't skip that step. That's part of being active in the market.

And this is going to be a lot easier if you have five years, 10 years experience in one specific market, because then you can always lean on that. But if you don't have a decade plus in one specific market industry, you have to do a hundred plus interviews with customers. And that'll tell you everything about the market.

Now let's get to this last section. Now the builder phase, you versus the work. And I wanted to save this for last because I think that this part has become really overrated. Like not saying it's easy to build a product. I'm not saying that, but I just think the other parts of distribution of your leadership, all of that stuff matters more because if you're not even good at building or any of those things, you can still put together an incredible team that's great at all of those things and build something special. Right. So

In the beginning, everything depends on you, right? You're the marketer, product manager, salesperson, operator. We talked about that. You don't want to get stuck in this trap because the only way that you get out of it is you cannot get to product market fit in that phase, right? That identity you have of I have to do everything by myself is not going to be the thing that gets you to product market fit. Now I'm saying product markets fit specifically because I don't want this to be tied to like

I made a certain amount of money or I have X amount of users because that differs if you're a consumer product or if you have a SaaS product, it's a lot of different ways in the startup world. You can get to product market fit, but that's the thing you got to be shooting for is product market fit. And until you get to that phase, you got to put in the work, right? You're doing it by yourself. But I think, again, this is just what I've learned.

Chris (09:29.996)
I think now it's like to get to that phase from, okay, I got this thing and it's working to actual product market fit that transition phase. That's when you have to build that team. That's going to help you do the work. That's where the work becomes much more important, much more intense, because once you figured out it works, you interviewed a hundred customers and people love it. It's great. Now it's like, okay, we got people loving a product. We got people paying for it and all of that stuff. We're building that foundation out.

Next phase is next milestone is like product market fit, not scaling. Not, I had this confused desire. thought of companies years ago. I thought you get that and you get people to love it and then you can scale. No, no, no, no, no, no. You got to get people to love it. Get some people to pay for it. Get product market fit. And then you think about scaling. So that team part is very important in there and you have to do the work.

Like the first identity shift you're going to go from is like doing everything to trust in other people to do that and building that solid team. And when I say team, did another interview of becoming on the show very soon. You got to make sure you subscribe. So many people I got coming on, man. just, we got Sam Sterling. raised a ton. Stuart Webb, our interview was great. He actually talked about like when you're building a team, you want to hire people in the right order.

Right now I'm not going to get into it because I want you to list the full episode, but we talked about hiring somebody for sales, getting somebody for that HR department. Like it's so many things you have to hire for that you don't even think about as a founder. But you have to put that into perspective because that's going to be the gap between where you are in product market fit. That's the gap is building that team, putting the squad together is going to help you get there. So.

Those are kind of like three identity shifts I think you need to have mentally as a founder. If you're going to take that leap, if you're going to take that next step to be in that product market fit stage to be more profitable, that's what it's going to take.