Founder at Menlo IQ
Lucas, a 2x founder with one exit, built Twiz and now leads Menlo IQ, offering a Free Gamified AI Sales Trainer to engage sales and entrepreneurship.
The previous company that I had was called Twizz. It was a marketing agency. We were focused on helping small businesses grow. We did work with some larger companies too, but mostly small businesses. Did that for about six years and then ended up doing a partner exit, where I ended up selling for about the same amount as I would have if I did a full exit of the company. From there, started this new business called MenloIQ, we built a way for people to supercharge specifically small businesses, supercharge their referral programs, using the newest and coolest AI tools and bring all those people who are part of their ecosystem into one place to collaborate on selling and generating leads with them.
The most obvious is being able to complete more tasks easier. If you have someone else who's a co founder, there are definitely days where I'm looking at the list of development tasks that we have and just thinking this is a lot of stuff to do today. Maybe if I was still working at my previous company, it would have been harder because I would probably need somebody to help with some of the extra tasks, but luckily I am able to do this every day and that helps. It's more important to find the right co founder than to jump into it. If you're going to bring on a co founder, the question always has to be, what can you do for me that I would not be able to do myself? So just completing development activities is something I can do. I'm willing to wait for the right moment to have a co founder.
It's very important that you actually are friends with this person first. What's most important is that you find the right person who fits the culture and everything. You have to be able to talk to this person every day for probably the next 10 years. And if you're not friends with them, it's going to be very difficult.
ChatGPT, it's kind of my mentor. I could do a lot of stuff with ChatGPT and it can tell me to do a lot of things that are going to improve my business. And because it's aggregating the entire internet's information into knowledge, it's a pretty good mentor. I'll give you an example. Let's say I would normally go to a mentor to get their thoughts on how my startup is valued, looking at comps from different companies that are in my same industry. And also to see what they raised, what they raised at their pre money valuation, post money valuation, all these different factors. I would have probably gone to Google, search for that, put that together in a document, and then went to a mentor to do that qualitative assessment for me. And that mentor would have a lot of intuition. They probably would have a lot of facts they could back up that intuition with. Because of that, they would help me grow my understanding of that particular problem or solve that particular problem. My default mode now though, is ChatGPT. So I go to them for everything and I train specific bots on specific issues. As opposed to ChatGPT, those mentors that you go to, they are not guaranteed to always put the time in to understand the problem. Whereas with ChatGPT, it can look through a hundred thousand pages or an extremely large context window to answer a question. And it's guaranteed to at least have taken that all in to consideration.
The first thing anybody who's growing a business should do is to ask themselves if they're attaching their self worth to their net worth. Definitely something that I did at the beginning and for the first four years of my company. However good my company is doing, that's how good I feel that day, right? The first thing is to definitely try to decouple that from your business. You don't want to be tied to your business in that way. You need to make sure that you're separated from the highs and lows in your business. And that you don't base your self worth on how other people think about you in terms of success or failure in your business. No matter what happens to the business, whether it goes up or down, you're still fine. You're still good. Right? I had to work through that and journaling helps. Taking time to physically disconnect yourself from the business also helps, getting a life outside of business, starting your hobbies again.
In the first company, we compartmentalized the roles of me and my co founder. He was responsible for operations and I was responsible for sales. That pipeline of feedback to execution, it never stopped. It kept going no matter what the situation was, no matter what the revenue was, there was that pipeline of me going out there, getting feedback. He would go and execute. And that's actually how a lot of software companies operate as well. This may not be the situation for you. You might be more of in my situation now, which is that I am both the developer and also the salesperson. So what my cycle has been for this new product, because I don't have a co founder, I have had to first go through that period of getting feedback, building the product, and not pushing it hard to launch. And I know if you have investors that might be kind of tough, they might be trying to get you to launch it faster and faster. I went through a process of a few months where I just focused solely on building the product to be as good as possible.
I would use what the internet thinks are good sales tactics to try to close people. The issue is that if you're trying to close people, people can tell that you're trying, right? Those people are intelligent buyers and they're also usually pretty nice. So when they're being nice, they don't always want to tell you that they're starting to tune you out, that they're not interested, that they're probably not going to follow up with you at all about buying the product. They'll listen to you, pitch and talk and talk and talk, and they actually don't want it at all because you're trying to push it on them. Everyone should go read a book called spin selling. What they essentially found was that the best salespeople were just honest. They didn't do any sales pitches. They just told him about the product. They helped break down the pricing. They were persistent when it came to trying to close. They would say, are you ready to buy? But they wouldn't use any of these objection handling skills or anything like that. If you're someone who's really deep into the product, the last thing you should be doing is reading a sales book. Just focus on your craft and people will resonate. The smart buyers will resonate with what you're selling and they'll buy from you just because they know you're being honest and that you have a good product.
Podcasting helped a lot with different things we did in the business. What I'm planning to do with Menlo is by hosting a podcast and then inviting people to the show. It's a great interview and they share it, which just gives you more eyeballs on your exact customer demographic. And even if it's not a direct sale, it doesn't have to be like driving traffic to an ecommerce page that you're trying to get people to buy from. You have to think about it as a conversion metric. If you can get up to 30 percent of people taking the demos, that's incredible. Right? It's a crazy good growth strategy for any business, software, ecommerce or service business.
We did just start the fundraising process. Luckily, I've got a pretty good network of people who are investors now, probably going to them to start the fundraise. What I'm actually thinking of is getting some institutional investors on board first, and then going to my network after that so they can do follow on capital. If you're just trying to build a product to generate a lot of income, and that's your main goal, then you don't need to raise money. The only reason why I am fundraising right now is because I am done playing for things that have like a one X multiple. I want to build something big and I want to help a lot of people and software is a lot more valuable. So it can help people in a lot of different ways.
Let's say you have this goal or this ambition, which for me was to have a successful exit in my last company. But the mainstream business media, a lot of people that I knew would tell me this is going to be a hard process that takes a lot of time. You're not going to be able to run your company while you're exiting. It's going to be very difficult and you're not going to be able to pull it off. Ultimately the whole process from due diligence to actually money in my bank account was one month. Obviously we weren't selling for like a hundred million dollars, but it was a good exit, right? That was a lot easier to do than I thought. I would just say that biggest piece of advice is don't believe the internal or external monologues always about the achievability of a goal.
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