Turning Your Idea into a Startup

Excellent, expected. The inspirational Business Advice Podcast. Hey, hey guys, welcome to another episode of Excellence Expected with me, Matt Asquith. Now, you've had a fantastic idea.

You've spotted a pain point, you've figured out a problem, or you've actually got something that you believe people will desire. But the problem with that is, it's just an idea. And especially if you are working another job, if you're a bit of a side perinar, if this is something that you're running alongside something else. How do you know how to turn that idea into a startup?

More importantly, how do you know when to quit your job? How do you know what to do first? What to expect? How do you go about fundraising and bootstrapping this thing?

And that is the issue that we're going to define, challenge and conquer today. Out turn your idea into a startup. And joining me today is someone that has done just this. Someone who's spotted a huge problem with the way that people were able to research, stocks and shares and actually make investment choices.

So what did he do? He created something to help himself and help everyone else. So it gives me great, great pleasure to welcome to the show, the founder of Simply Wall Street. Al Bentley, how you doing today?

Yeah, very good, great to have you. Great to be here, mate. Excellent stuff, it was a pleasure to have you. Just tell us a little bit about Simply Wall Street because you genuinely did find a problem with something and you actually solved it, didn't you?

Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, I can give you the abridged story of your life. Yeah, go for it. So I used to be a naval architect, I used to work offshore and design boats and stuff like that.

And as I said, I taught myself to invest and I found it extremely frustrating, basically how I earned this experience. And I was just like, that must be a better way. And it's crazy because a lot of people in the people in the people who are all street, they think it just kind of happened and just started. But in reality, I was working on it for two years, exactly as you mentioned in your intro as a side thing.

And it was one of the best things to actually have one of those side projects actually become what you always hoped it would. And I can talk about that for ages if you want. Well, just a little bit about actually what Simply Wall Street does because it's a very intriguing idea. Just give people a bit of a rundown on that one.

Yeah, so what we do is we believe that self-directed investing doesn't actually need to be that difficult. Especially when you're talking for the long term, which is what we're all about. And so what we do is we make investing easy and we do that through the use of visualization and infographics. So if you don't know what an infographic is, it's basically a way of representing something that's usually complex in a kind of visual, easy to understand way.

So what our website does is it produces infographics on 10,000 stocks every day. You can choose any company you want and you can go and find a really kind of holistic report on that company and really get an understanding of should you consider it as an investment. We don't tell you what to do. It's still on the user to make the decision.

But the idea being that we just give you a really easy way to digest that information. And then what we also do is if you like that stock, you can then add it to your portfolio and we then also visualize your portfolio for you. So trying to help you understand what's going on with your portfolio, how can you improve it. And I guess at a high level, what we aim to do is to turn people into better investors into the kind of investors that they know they should be but they often end up not being.

That's a really interesting problem that you solve in there because you're taking something that is very, very complex and you're making it easily represented on screen and you're making it digestible for people that otherwise may be a little scared off by that. So when you think back to right back in the early days when you had the idea, what was that journey like? How did you go about figuring out actually is this a valuable thing that we can do? What were the first steps that you took?

Yeah, well, so I guess the important thing to realize is that initially I probably didn't really understand, well, I didn't understand the problem as I do now. The initial problem I started trying to solve was really focused around helping people research investments whereas in reality, that's only part of the problem. The problem is actually the whole general experience of investing is basically terrible. So it took me a while of playing around in that space to realize I was playing in the wrong part.

Actually, a big part of what helped me make that realization was doing what school is a startup weekend and these are kind of weekend events where you kind of, they say you start up in a weekend, you don't really start up as a weekend, but you essentially go through the process of it and you get challenged heavily on your ideas. So that was actually a pretty key kind of learning step for me. That's very interesting. So did that help you validate the entire idea?

And what did it feel like to actually make that shift to make that pivot into something new with them? What was the kind of struggle that you went through with that internally? I wouldn't say it helped me validate it. It probably helped me realize that it wasn't validated and I need to do more work on it.

So it was a bit of, it was a certain realization that kind of, oh my God, there's this massive problem out here and you really start to get a handle on what's going on. But the main learning from that weekend was how important validation is. A lot of people get a bit, they think, oh, you know, investors want to see validation, oh, I got to go validate it. They think of it as sort of this kind of like chore that, oh, you know, it's a bit annoying.

I've got my idea to have validated yet. Validation is the single most important thing you need to do. And the reason for that is until you validated it, you're potentially wasting your own time and you need to find a way to validate it that makes you comfortable. Don't kid yourself, just because your friend said, oh, yeah, that's a great idea.

You should do it. That is not validation. That's one of the biggest problems I think so many of us faced in the early days. And as far as people with the best intentions will tell you, it's a great idea.

And you do need to step out of that comfort zone. Don't you're moving to somewhere where you've got to be challenged on these start at weekends, accelerator programs, whatever that might be. They're there to push you out. They're there to really challenge the ideas.

And when you were faced with that decision, all right, okay, so I need to pivot. I need to shift and change. How did you go about that? What were some of the actions that you took to reaffirm this new direction?

I guess it was really what I wanted to do personally is I wanted, I was kind of looking for a sign or looking for some kind of clear proof that this is worth me spending my time on. And I kind of broke that down into a bunch of different bits. I think often the validation doesn't have to be in your ideas a whole. You can actually do bad day parts of it.

Yeah. So one example was I really wanted to be convinced about the hypothesis I had, which was that visualization of financial data would make it easier for people to invest. And so just to test that alone, I actually ended up building this, actually it was super weird. I've still got it somewhere.

This kind of weird system where it showed a mock up about, I thought the data could be presented and then next to it, how it's presented at the moment. And I think I sent that out to like two or three hundred people and it was a form they had to fill out. It actually took them like half an hour. It's quite surprising anyone to do it.

And then so I used that as a way of a bit of learning, but most importantly, trying to make sure I was clear that visualizing stocks as infographics was actually something that people wanted. So that's that part. The other part is more around the problems a whole like do people actually want to invest is actually a problem around investment being difficult, why is it difficult and that kind of thing. And so I decided that was quite a few investment conferences and I think events like that you can go to and they're a great way to meet like genuine people who most importantly you have no connection with and you can really get an understanding of what's going on in their head.

Why are they at this conference? Like what do they want to get out of investing, those kind of things. I like the idea of just putting yourself out there. I mean, so many people talk about going to conferences and so on, but I don't think many people, I think many of us really looked at it from that perspective to go away and actually not have any connections to get some really objective feedback on that.

So let's just move that a little step further forward then. So you'd realize that this was a great idea. You'd realize that actually you could move it forward. You mentioned that you were doing this kind of on the side at this point.

How did you manage that? What was the time and like what were some of the struggles that you faced doing that? I think I've always been someone that's done those kind of projects. So it might not be a business or it might not be, it might be, it might be, it's always been someone that's been very proactive in my spare time.

I think if you're not someone that's that naturally, I think you really, really get a struggle to do, to try and do like a business side project. I think a lot of people have so many time commitments in their life that they just don't see how it's supposed to do these things. If you're really serious about getting into the space and testing a business idea or learning about doing this part, you're probably going to have to sacrifice some parts of your time. You probably need at least three evenings a week and probably a day on the weekend to probably otherwise you're not going to get anything done.

I think you just got to be practical about it. The other area that I'll be honest with you is really powerful and a lot of people wouldn't want to talk about this. If you're working a job that is probably too easy, if you do your job really fast, you can probably do a lot of work at work. I think we've all been there and done that.

I was back to my time doing the kind of web working and you're almost out of the agency. It was, well, wait a minute, this is only going to take me two hours, but I'm here for eight. So this is kind of nice. It was, yeah, it's interesting because you find yourself becoming, what's the word?

You kind of become pretty ruthless with your time. You find the best way of doing the job that is really easy to the best of your ability very, very quickly. So you actually learn quite a lot of time management techniques as well, which is a really weird by-product of doing it. Exactly, exactly.

You're probably fine before doing this. You'd be surprised how you can feel your day with essentially nothing else, if you're not being challenged to work. But as soon as you start challenging yourself, you'll find that exactly like you said, Mark, you can just smash out the work that you need to do in the first two hours and then you kind of free. It obviously depends on your job, but it gives you a much bigger drive and you improve your time management.

And most importantly, you have incredibly far more motivated. Absolutely. You just find yourself wanting to do the right kind of work, which is quite interesting. So how did you, when you were working the three, four nights a week, how did you define exactly what to do?

What was your process for figuring out what was important to the new business? Yeah, so that's really, that's actually the tough part because, and that's something you're going to have to get used to doing because most people are so used to having their goals set by their bosses or someone else and they don't realize that the goal setting is the hardest part. Now, I think one of the best things you can do in this instance, especially when you're starting out, is to find someone to share the experience with. It doesn't necessarily mean they have to be a partner or a co-founder or any of that stuff.

They could maybe be doing a completely separate project or maybe they could be a mentor, but I think having someone else to bounce ideas off and say, okay, I want to do this next, and they're like, well, why are you doing that? It's really good. It also creates a level of accountability as well. Say, I'm going to do this by next week, and then you catch up and they'll be like, have you done it?

No. So I think that's probably one of the best solutions. Again, it's all about drive and being motivated. If you're fundamentally having a problem with that, you're going to have much bigger problems.

Yeah, the accountability is something that I think we all struggle with. When we think about goal setting, you're right, because if you get into your own business, you can very easily fritter away the day doing absolutely nothing and just feeling like you're being productive because you're replying to emails and you're doing whatever. And that's not the right thing to do. So I think that's a very interesting comment that you make, because probably all of us can identify that in somewhere.

So let's just shift the gear into actually getting this out there then. So let's talk about the launch. When you got to a point where you felt you could actually get this into the public eye. What did the product look like?

What were some of your reservations and how did you go about actually getting it out there? So I guess, in a weird way, obviously there was a formal launch, but that launch actually only happened four months after we started doing an accelerator program, we had some investment, we actually built a proper version while I guess you could call it. But in a way, there was actually a bunch of relevant launches before that of different MVP or minimal viable product. So I actually built an app before that that I launched, again, more around testing, more around trying to prove up certain things I really wanted to be sure the problem existed and all this kind of stuff.

I think in terms of actually going out and building, which I think is a question you're asking Mark, I think the most important thing is probably to work out what you're going to build, why and why are you building it. I think a lot of people get obsessed with building apps and building websites and I think that's often not the right thing to do. If you are going to go and build it, you need to be really smart about how you do it. If you're someone who's proactive, good at maths, technical background, I'd highly recommend trying to do it yourself.

I don't think I have people that attempt to do that. If you definitely don't think you can do that, then you'd better go find a good friend who can. I certainly would never recommend paying an expensive agency or something. I wouldn't even entertain that thought.

That's very interesting then. How do you make sure that it's at the standards that it needs to be at to get that first impression buying them because that's quite a balance and that's all you want to know. How did you guys manage that? Well, that's an interesting thing.

I think a lot of people will, they will use that, what you just mentioned Mark about, oh my God, you know, it's got to have a great first impression. I mean, I've heard people say to me, now this app really needs to have a great UX because that's what's going to make people use it. No one uses an app just because of the UX or they might use it for a day but they're not stop using it. So, I think you'd be surprised that you need to focus on the problem in solving and are you actually providing solutions that problem rather than having a super polished app.

But even saying that nowadays, it's not that difficult to create an app or website or whatever you're doing, maybe it's not even online, it can be polished to a level that's acceptable because you've got to remember the first people that are going to be using your product are going to be people that are desperately in need of it and so they're probably not going to be too bothered about that kind of stuff. I believe that's the importance of the MVP. You've got to, when you're getting through startup affairs and when you're getting to the launch, even if you're launching a beta and you're getting to a version 0.5 or 0.6 and you're putting that out there, you've got to focus directly on the problem that you solve it because people do really get hung up on, like you said, a solid UX. As long as the UX is passable and it's good enough that someone intuitively can navigate to the solution to their problem, that's surely good enough, isn't it?

Yeah, I completely agree and I think the other thing you've got to be very, very careful of is building things and paying someone else to build things. It comes back to that bit we mentioned earlier. It feels like you're doing something. It feels like you're, oh yeah, we're building something.

It's happening, it's happening. It doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing to do. So I think, yeah, that's probably the biggest pitfall that a lot of people start to fall into but saying that sometimes that's the mistake that people need to make to learn, learn it the hard way. Well, that's right.

I mean, you don't necessarily know what you don't know until you've experienced doing it wrong. So I see that point completely. So let's just shift again into the actionable takeaways section of the episode because there's so many people that have these ideas or so many people that are just, they leave the shower to go and register a domain name because they've had what they believe is the next world-breaking idea. We've all done that.

So let's talk about action. So people that have ideas, let's talk about your first actionable tip for actually taking that idea and making that into a startup. Okay. So it's not necessarily just I'll go into the tip in a second, but first of all, I believe it's extremely important to not be scared about sharing your ideas.

So don't go around trying to keep it shrouded in secrecy. It's the biggest waste of time. No one wants to copy your idea. Just deal with it.

And you'll get far further by telling people about it than trying to hide it. But yeah, so my first actionable take would be all around validation. You need to be extremely confident that you have found, first of all, a genuine problem, a genuine problem with a big market. And that's the first thing.

Don't necessarily worry about the solution yet. If you're jumping to the solution, you probably already probably haven't understood the problem. And I believe that you could spend a year, years just trying to get into this. There's so much online about how to validate, how to test, how to fake things, how to do tests.

And that's the kind of area that you're really into focusing on. And the cool thing about this area is that it's fun, doesn't cost anything, and you can break it down into short projects. So you can say, okay, I'm going to spend the next two weeks doing this, the obvious validation. So that would be my first actionable tip.

Super stuff, yeah. I like the idea. I like your core there about not necessarily understanding the problem enough if you've already thought of the solution. That's a very interesting point.

Okay, super stuff. So let's move to actionable tip number two, sir. Okay, so we didn't touch on this too much earlier, but my actual tip number two is so you've got an idea, you think you've validated it, or at least you're comfortable enough to validate it that you now think, okay, I think this is actually a good idea. It's actually seriously something that I want to commit some of my life to doing.

Okay, I think there's an important step that a lot of people miss out on, and maybe they don't quite understand, which I call preparing your life. If you think that you found a great idea and you want to run with it, I think it's worth making changes in your life or preparation to life to make that move easier. And I think a lot of people don't do that. They actually, when people hear about startups failing, often the startups don't fail because of business or because of a mistake that the founders made.

Often they fail purely because the founders' lives just can't handle it, either from a purely financial reason or maybe it's a commitment reason, all those kind of things. So when I say prepare your life, I say these are my actual tips. So first of all, start saving money. Start getting a cushion in your bank account.

You need to be good at saving money to be an entrepreneur, especially if you're going to be bootstrapping. There's tons of stuff out there about how to save money. And be aggressive, like moving with your parents, stop paying for expensive memberships and stuff. The next thing I'd probably do is also thinking from a job perspective, you're probably ready in full-time work.

And if you really want to start up, my opinion is you better to try and put your job on hold and give a startup a solid six months of your life and give it a proper chance rather than trying to do half and half, three days a week and two days a week. That means you'll be bad at your job and you'll be bad at your startup. So start to entertain this idea that you're probably going to quit your job and try and think about trying to do it in a way where it's low risk. Maybe it's a way that you could agree with your employer that you could take a spectacle, all those kind of things.

So for example, some people street, I was actually working part-time and I had that all kind of lined up and actually worked that time and worked out really well for when I actually quit and did simple, all-street full-time. So all this stuff is kind of crazy for people to think about doing but if you're serious about it, then that's the way to do it. That's really good advice. Really good advice.

I mean, that tip breaks down in so many different ways. The point that you made there about the startups failing much of the time because the founders' lives can't necessarily deal with it. That's a very interesting perspective. And is that something that you, when you've been on the accelerator programs and so on, have you seen that happen in real life?

Have you seen that go on actually around you? Oh, yes. Definitely. So often a startup might fail also.

So those are the reasons I've seen first-hand and it's one of the embarrassing things, frankly, that a lot of people don't like to talk about in the startup space but kind of one of the key things for a successful startup is probably founders that are in that position that I just mentioned. An ideal founder is someone that has a bit of a cash reserve, probably single, probably no major financial commitments. Those kind of things. It's not something people like to talk about but the fact is it's just true.

And so if you can get your life as close to that as possible, you'll be in a great place. The other area that will start up to fail, that people don't talk about much is founder disagreements. It's very, very common. You start off with this person that you probably maybe don't even know that well or maybe their friend of yours and then you're going to be thrown into working with them 24-7 and everything changes.

That's a great point. Fantastic point. Super stuff. So let's move into the third and final actual tip please, sir.

So my actual tip number three is do you need to actually build it? And I guess it comes back to this piece of I think people often get too excited too early on and I think, oh my god, I must build this app or I must build this website. There's a reality that you could probably be actually far better if they didn't build it, focused on doing something either and it's a book called Lean Startup, which I'm sure a lot of you read as well to heard of, but very much all about trying to replicate the solution but without actually building it. Yeah.

So an example would be there's a really famous website called Product Hunt which is a way of people to find out of new apps and products. That just does a simple email list. And you could build it in a day. The fundamental solution is the same people are discovering your products.

They didn't need to go off and build a whole app. So yeah, really consider, well, so my actual tip to really clear is you probably don't need to build it. Yeah, I think that's really important. We've run beta ourselves where you literally just build the email list up and you kind of validate the idea like that, you know, we've gone through ones ourselves where we actually get paying customers just on the back of an email list.

And if those guys would pay for it, then of course there is. And that's a great way to actually fund it as well to yes, validate your idea. But it gets you some cash flow of rolling as well. So you can reinvest it.

So I completely, completely agree with that. I think that's a fantastic point. So that's been such a good chat. So thank you so much for that.

30 minutes of just flown pass. It's amazing how time just disappears when you chat about something so interesting. So thanks for doing that. And just before we wrap it, where is the best place for people to connect with you online, please, sir?

The best place where you can email me, Alex and people street com. And I'm pretty, I'm pretty prevalent online. So you have a problem finding me, but yeah, the emails on the website just people simply will stream. Super stuff.

That is amazing. Well, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. Excellent.

Thanks a lot. Always good. And guys, listen, if you've missed anything that I'll mention, if you want a recap of anything at all from this chat, head over to excellence-expected.com. Where as ever, there's a world of small business resources.

There's more chats with startup founders. So if you are wanting to kick something off on your own, dig in, listen to ours interview back and check out some of the other episodes as well because there's some really, really fantastic content there. And whilst you're over there, don't forget, you can grab your free copy of the essential 14-day guide to cutting your work in hours and increasing your impact. Thanks once again for listening, guys.

And don't forget, the more you expect from yourself, the more you will accept. Adios.