Very Short Interview No. 1

To complete my short interview with an entrepreneur I reached out to a friend and mentor, Tyler Parker.  Tyler is the President and CTO of Spin Chill Corp., a company he co-founded that specializes in a small device that can warm a can of beer (or soft drink) in under a minute. Since the creation of the company, Spin Chill continues to grow and Tyler finds himself working on other entrepreneurial projects, such as ToutLoud. ToutLoud focuses on delivering targeted marketing campaigns on Instagram that leverage the marketing power of popular social media pages. Even when progress is being made with one business, Tyler continually looks for ways to improve and branch out into other business ventures, befitting of a true entrepreneur.  Links to Tyler's projects can be found at the bottom of this post.

SpinChill Demo 

Below you will find the questions and answers from my interview with Tyler:

SH - In your opinion, what are the most important skills to take from an entrepreneurship class?

TP-  I’m not sure how a class would teach these two things without direct hands on experience but here are two:

1.           The ability to deal with absolute uncertainty – Most people have had a lot of structure in their lives since birth.  Everybody goes to school for 12 years and then goes to college for a certain amount of time and takes certain classes for a certain major and gets certain grades on certain tests on certain dates.  Most people then get a job or join the military where the structure is basically exactly the same: someone tells you what and when to do something and if you do it well enough and on time you get a raise or promotion or good review. With entrepreneurship, however, nobody tells you what to do or when to do it.  This sounds great, and it can be, but there are literally millions of different decisions you could make that could completely change the outcome of a business.  Or are you even starting the right business?  Or should you hire people or get investment or sell or franchise?  Obviously one metric for success is making a profit but what constitutes a successful profit and when should you expect to see it?  How long should you keep pushing forward with a certain idea before you decide to try something else?  Entrepreneurship can be very fun and rewarding but it’s definitely not stable or structured so beginning entrepreneurs have to be able to handle complete uncertainty and be able to maintain a clear vision of where they want to go and how to get there.

2.           Salesmanship – Many engineers, myself included, want to make cool products and have someone else handle all the “dirty work” of sales, marketing, and management.  This works really well in a large corporation where someone else is specifically hired to handle all those things.  As an entrepreneur, though, you are the salesperson and you have to be able to sell your product directly to clients, especially in the beginning when you’re trying to tweak the product to fit the needs of a user.  You also have to be able to sell your idea and vision to employees, potential founders, and investors.  There’s really no way to learn salesmanship without getting out there and doing it.



SH-  What are some common mistakes that you or other entrepreneurs you know have made when creating a personal businesses?

TY- I think a big mistake is getting excited in the beginning and not building a strong foundation for the business to be built on.  Similarly, a mistake is thinking that a business will be something that you do for the next few months or so.  This can include bringing on co-founders prematurely, not defining goals and plans, taking investment from the wrong person or for the wrong amounts, and a bunch of other issues that can arise.  Thinking short term can cause you to do things like work with the wrong people because “who cares, it will only be for a few months”.  The reality is that the whole idea is to build a successful long lasting business so that means whatever you do in the beginning carries on forever or the business has to restructure or fails.  Peter Thiel’s law says that “A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.”


Another, much smaller problem, is that many people with a college degree want to focus on something that pertains to that degree because they spent the time to get it.  That’s not necessarily bad if you are an expert in your field but don’t discredit businesses that have nothing to do with your degree. You may be a mechanical or electrical engineer but if you find out that you can buy and sell products online and make huge profits, who cares if there’s any engineering involved?


SH- What helps you stay on track with your business goals and identify good potential business ideas?

TP- I think a constant sense of running out of time or money keeps entrepreneurs motivated.  Also, most businesses are seasonal in some way so there’s always something that needs to get done before a certain date to be successful.  I personally find business ideas by solving problems in my own business.  When I have a problem I look for a solution and if I can’t find one I usually build a way to solve it for myself.  If it looks like something that many other businesses would pay to use, it’s probably a decent business idea.  Most of the best business ideas come from someone using cross disciplined skills (human resources + software development or almost any other combination) to solve a real problem.  This is because most problems that can be solved with a single discipline have probably already been solved.  For instance, the practice of law doesn't change much when looking at it from a laywer's perspective and most computer programmers don't know of the inefficiencies in the legal practice.  However, a lawyer who also happens to know how to write software might be able to totally change parts of the industry. 


Reflection:

My interview with Tyler went well and definitely opened my eyes as to how a successful entrepreneur handles themselves. The most important point that I took from my interview was that successful entrepreneurs are jacks of all trades. As Tyler stated, an entrepreneur needs to know how to sell themselves and their product, all while coming from a background that may not necessarily include marketing/salesmanship. I also found myself pleased with the point that Tyler made in that entrepreneurs need to know how to plan ahead and make decisions in the context of the long-term future, even amidst uncertainty. A business based off of short-term thinking will be a short-term business (with no chance of long-term success)! I thank Tyler for providing his time for this interview and I'm excited to get back to him later on in the semester (hopefully I'll have some more entrepreneurial skills by then). 

Links:
Spin Chill
ToutLoud
Tyler Parker