Joe Fairless

I was 29 years old and what I gave up was a base salary of, I know how you love the numbers, by the way.

Yeah.

So base salary of $150,000, not including bonus, which probably would have been, I don't know, 10 to 20,000.

And I mean, but more important than that, I mean, as you know, and any entrepreneur knows, it's the certainty and the security of a W2 job is what I left and got into the entrepreneurial world.

And what year was that?

That was in January of 2013.

Well, I left for a business that flopped, which is a learning.

And I know we have a lot of maybe college students or aspiring entrepreneurs listening.

And this is a good lesson that I learned the hard way.

It is a lesson I should have learned or should have known already, but perhaps it will be new to someone as it was me.

And that is

that I did not have clients before I had a product.

And instead, I decided to launch a product without clients and the business flopped.

And what happened is, you know, I had risen through the ranks as a marketing advertising professional in New York City relatively quickly.

So I thought it would be good to consult college students, young professionals,

and teaching them basically the same thing, how to do what I did.

But what I failed to realize is that college students and young professionals don't have the money to invest in a consultant to help them along the path.

And so I created, before I realized that, I created a website, had a developer, paid him about $3,000.

And then very quickly in January of 2013, so it took me 30 days to realize that it was just crickets whenever I launched.

I don't know.