Ep.142: Overcoming Business Growing Pains

Can you share with us problems you encountered in starting and handling Leadership Stack? Starting the podcast? I actually started it in a very crude way. If you watch the very first podcast episode recording that I did, it was with my wife, Apple, and my brother, Kevin. And it was just in my office and we had a lot of reverberations, we had a lot of noise. May mga kotseng dumadaan. We started it very crudely like how you would pretty much start a startup. You know, when you start a company it's never going to be perfect. I started SEO Hacker from the attic of my parents' house. Maalikabok. Madalas hindi ako pwedeng magbukas ng aircon kasi saying kuryente so pawis pawis ako doon. It’s nothing glorious. I didn't have carpeted office. I didn't have like toys in my background. I didn't have any of these things. I had an eight year old ASUS laptop. That's what I had. An eight year old ASUS laptop and I had to make do with that. I had to, that's what I used. And by God's grace, it has grown and grown and grown all the way to what it is now. When you start it up, ganoon talaga eh. So I wouldn't say it's a problem. I would say it's starting pains or growing pains, right? It's part of the process. It's not really a problem. It's part of the process and you learn from that. So I learned how to reduce reverberations, like right now, if you think that the audio output is pretty good, it's because I use a mixer. I use Focusrite 2i2. I'm not getting anything from this. So just a disclaimer, I'm not a promoter. Buy at your own risk. Yeah. I had the chip from Amazon and all the way here. And then I make sure that the gain is low so that it doesn't get any feedback or white noise.And then nilalapit ko yung bibig ko doon sa mic to make sure that my voice is clear. So if you're happy with the audio output, that's what I do. So I'll only learn these things because of the many mistakes, growing pains, startup pains that I went through. I think those are the only things because by God's grace, the Leadership Stack team, my editor for the podcast, my editor for the video, you guys do a fantastic job. I don't have problems doing that. These guys do a fantastic job. All I do is create content. That's it. I record this. I answer your questions here. I record podcasts with guests. I don't edit, I don't do the transcriptions. I don't animate. They do everything. And why are we doing it for free? Well, they're funded by SEO Hacker. I pay them their salaries through SEO Hacker. But I'm doing it for free. So actually this, I'm not doing this really for free, I pay a lot to produce the Leadership Stack, but it's my way of paying it forward to you guys. All right. So you guys learn a lot as well from what I went through.