One moderately successful exit and I am now somehow Elon Musk... Please
That is what I told my self today after failing miserably at reaching my daily goals.
I was fortunate to have been a part of building Door of Clubs. An online community for collegiate clubs and organizations to raise sponsorship and get jobs. At the time of my exit from the company we had 80,000+ students from 2500 clubs and companies like Disney, Mastercard, Amazon, and the White House leveraging our platform to reach our one of a kind community.
It took us a year of numerous pivots to unlock the growth we experienced but when it came it flowed like water. After exiting that business a tad bit earlier then I wanted to but that is a story for another day... I felt like I had seen the path and could easily do it again. Hahahahaha... I laugh at my hubris.
Last month I launched Scribbl.co. I launched expecting an over night success since you know I am a “successful entrepreneur”. I dreamt of hundreds if not thousands of signs ups handed down from the gods in the first month. Can you tell the little taste of success got me all messed up.
What I completely neglected to internalize was the fact that the past has past. Every thing about my new business is completely different then my last. Not one thing is the same.... not even me.
The lesson here is a change in circumstances requires a new set of knowledge and a new set of skills. Unfortunately I don’t posses the knowledge or skills yet but fortunately I am waking up from my dream that I know what I am doing.
Feel free to have a little laugh at my pain in the comment section!!!
Co-Founder @ scribbl.co
This is something I've been super mindful and conscious of. Though for me, I've not exited Ministry of Testing, I ended up opting to find someone to run it.
I felt totally unsure about what to do next and whether or not 'working for someone else' was a wise thing to do. I doubted myself massively, but went ahead regardless (working for IH). I just didn't think anyone would accept or allow me to work the way I work. Turns out I was wrong and/or I got lucky :D
For now I'm happy, though am slowly exploring side project ideas, but I'm in no rush to get anything off the ground. Mostly I want to focus on (re)learning and writing.
Thanks for sharing this. Congrats on the success of Ministry of Testing. It's also awesome to hear you have found a place that accepts you for who you are.
I stumbled upon your post about 30k linkedin followers. Will definitely be taking your philosophy to heart.
When you first started Ministry of Testing, what did you focus on for the first 6 months?
I will cheer you :) You are already a lot further in this game than many of us :)
I agree 100%
Can you describe how you landed those large sponsorships from Amazon, disney, etc?
What was the moment, or what pivotal accomplishment unleashed that growth @ door of clubs?
Amazon was a referral. We got connected to Disney at a conference for campus recruiting. The White House came from a cold call. Most of our sales were initiated by cold outreach via email. The reason they became customers was that all of these organizations had initiatives to hire students from diverse backgrounds. The challenge they faced was targeting the students with those backgrounds through conventional methods like campus career fairs. We offered them direct access to the targeted students they were looking for.
It was when we figured out how to get student club leaders to sign up their members to our community. What we learned was that student club leaders had two challenges that we could help them with. The first was raising sponsorships (this was the real draw) and the second was helping to connect their members to unique jobs and internships. We started hosting competitions where student clubs could earn sponsorships by signing up their members to our community. The insight was that each of these clubs had an email list of hundreds of members. We built a simple tool for them to upload that email list to our platform and automatically send invites on their behalf to their members. The more sign ups the larger the sponsorship. It just so happened that clubs are pretty viral. Students are usually in one or more clubs so once they learned about us they would tell all the clubs they were members of that this awesome company was making it easy for clubs to raise money and get jobs.
Brilliant play.
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True insight. Thank you for sharing. 🙏