2 failed startups, 1 purchase & turnaround, 1 b2b startup rocket 0-1 🚀 +, AMA

@catlady92 YES, my favourite topic. What do you want to know? You give me the business and predicament, I'll try to make free money for you, deal?

Generally, a theme I do in my businesses is create what's called an upside down or negative working capital cycle. Say you own a store that sells shoes, well as you scale you could be in financial difficulty b/c you need inventory and then have a time it takes to sell them. This is working capital intense...with the companies I own I control the capital and have a big head start before I pay out my cost of sales. This company that'll do > $20MM next 12-18 months I started with $0....$0. I did do canvassing, chatting w/ people, advisory work, farted a round for a bit drawing stuff in my man cave. But then when I decided on my business model I just explained it to people, we tried it, and wow it worked. My first SaaS saw 30X cash on their $ and we broke even in 7 months, and it's rolling now and will have created about $9MM in cash flow off $180K or so invested. Plus they got approved for my royalty financing so never need to raise debt or equity again it looks like.

When I started this biz, I sold retainers and then turned around and hired after. I have a 45-day period where we collect before paying out the cost of goods sold. Then when I go finance companies...we keep the $ in my account and disburse to incremental salespeople, who go sell and then the $ from sales goes into our account and we disburse net $ out to partners immediately as it comes in. But we eliminate collections, cycles, and we keep generating more float which in turn funds a capital pool that we use to manage growth (infinity return capital since this is just float we're making big returns on).
 
@coolguy123 You just start. When I was 15 I did eaves, shovelling snow, you name it. You learn by doing and when you 'do' you're already taking steps fwd.

Actually even my company has a 90/10 action rule and it really makes a difference.
 
@subcdedenoc1980 Working on emailemu.com and have been building it for about 8 months. I launched it with the intention of going down the path of only emails and removing the need for people to subscribe to lists.

In conversations with marketers, I heard many of them mention wanting to be able to see the other parts of the marketing pie of their competitors' content, so I created www.dingodive.com to fit that need, but I am at a crossroads.

I'm wondering if I should pivot and build the dingodive or keep going down the email path and try to generate revenue asap as everything is being bootstrapped.

Would love just your general thoughts from someone with your level of experience.
 
@soag Hey man, as a backend marketer, I use Milled.com, but I do like the use case for dingo dive, especially when you can extrapolate sending frequency data as well as the actual email copy/designs.

I think it’s a great way to conduct research, fast.
 

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