Japman Bajaj

I’m a big fan of suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neurs who visit schools and play a big role in the entre­pre­neur­ship classes. I recently watched this video of Josh James going back to Brigham Young and shar­ing some insights. Here are some of the tid­bits I took out of it:

Josh dropped out of school, but took the most out of his classes. The only rea­son he dropped out was that he had learnt so much from his eco­nom­ics, sta­tis­tics, and entre­pre­neur­ship classes, and applied them so well, that it didn’t make sense for him to stay in class when he was bring­ing in $125 an hour build­ing web­sites for companies.

As a 4^th year stu­dent, him and his buddy turned a $12,000 invest­ment in a CGI script busi­ness into a $200,000 sale of the com­pany, which he describes as being “really cool. Like really cool. It beat sell­ing out bill­able hours by a long­shot, even at $125 per hour.”

In their next busi­ness, they had 50 employ­ees, and in Feb­ru­ary 2000, they were sure they were going to fail. They moved to a paid model, and con­verted 0.05% (that’s not a typo) of cus­tomers. They were los­ing 800 cus­tomers a month, mainly small busi­nesses. Of the 50 employ­ees they had, 48 were work­ing on retain­ing small busi­ness users, and just two were work­ing on build­ing the enter­prise side. Then, they got calls from eBay and CNet encour­ag­ing them to keep doing what they were doing, at which point they took 46 peo­ple off of the small busi­ness side and put them on the enter­prise side. That’s when it really took off, almost expo­nen­tially, ulti­mately lead­ing to the $1.8 bil­lion dol­lar sale of Omni­ture to Adobe last October.

Things he did per­son­ally that helped make it work:

1)      Reads a ton. Was read­ing books and mag­a­zines by the truck­load. He used to read between 30–40 mag­a­zines a month, cover to cover.

1. Books and Mag­a­zines helped him shape his men­tor­ship. He would read 15 books on a topic, and find the 5 best ones and just really absorb them. He did it on all the stuff he wasn’t famil­iar with, and when he was done, he would have 5 dif­fer­ent opin­ions by experts, help­ing him for­mu­late very strong opin­ions, and gave him more con­fi­dence as a young entrepreneur.

2)      Take alot of vaca­tion time. Never work Sat­ur­day and Sun­days, but work like a dog dur­ing the week. And when he vaca­tions, he makes sure he vaca­tions really, REALLY well, not just for him­self, but for his kids and his fam­ily too.

3)      Puts the same pas­sion at home as he does at the office. There are respon­si­bil­i­ties at home that need to be paid atten­tion to (i.e kids, fam­ily) that will help fuel you even more at the office.

4)      Get an Assis­tant as soon as you can afford one.

On where he got his ideas for business:

“They say neces­sity is the father of inven­tion. Things that annoy me end up fuelling my ideas. Then I heard some­one in an entre­pre­neur­ial lec­ture series tell us to make ide­abooks. The idea is you write an idea down, you write the mar­ket­ing plan, the sales plan, the employ­ees you’re gonna get, the pro­file you want, your com­pet­i­tive advan­tages, and you just keep writ­ing and writ­ing and writ­ing, and the next day, you move on to the next idea, unless you’re still so drawn to the last idea, in which case keep writ­ing. And when you find one that you just can’t stop think­ing about, that’s prob­a­bly a good one to pursue.”

On start­ing a business:

“First of all, you have to make sure you have the right pro­file. If you’re too averse to risk, just don’t start a busi­ness. The num­ber one prob­lem peo­ple have is that they have ideas and they talk about it, talk about it, talk about it, but never do any­thing about it. And then they go to some pro­fes­sors, and the pro­fes­sors tell them “well you have to think about this this and that”… NO YOU DON’T.  Just start it, and I promise you, when you’re spend­ing your own money on it, you’re going to pay a lot of atten­tion on it!”

On get­ting your first sale:

“Do any­thing .. ANYTHING.. you can to win your first cus­tomers. As long as it’s not … (long awk­ward pause)… immoral… it might be bor­der­line not legal, but as long as it’s not immoral, then what­ever it takes. You gotta win those first cus­tomers. We had a cus­tomer come visit us, and i had all my friends come visit us wear­ing suits like they’re work­ing on who-knows-what, pre­tend­ing like they were work­ing on stuff! Do what­ever it takes to get those sales”

More on the first customers:

“Never give any­thing away for noth­ing. You may find you need to dis­count your price, but never give stuff away for noth­ing. If some­one wants to pay less, you have to come back and ask them what they’re going to do to make up that dif­fer­ence. What kind of press release are you going to get? What kind of events are you going to speak and tout us at? What else are you going to do to make up the price dif­fer­ence? Never give away stuff for nothing”

On First-Time Entrepreneurs:

“It bog­gles my mind that peo­ple aren’t focussing more on rev­enue, rev­enue, rev­enue. Who cares if the desk isn’t put together, or some guy sent you an email you haven’t replied to, or some other guy wants you to attend some cham­ber of com­merce meet­ing? Go after rev­enues. Sales is all that mat­ters in the begin­ning. And if you can’t get a sale, THEN you go back and fix the prod­uct. But as soon as it is barely good enough to sell it, you sell it!”

On Busi­ness Ideas:

“For the most part, I don’t want a unique ideas There’s maybe a cou­ple unique ideas that have turned into big busi­nesses. But if there’s alot of peo­ple in the space, it’s vin­di­ca­tion that peo­ple are will­ing to pay for it, it means there’s a mar­ket, it means you can make some money, it means you can com­pete, and it means you can be bet­ter faster stronger, espe­cially if there’s only small play­ers in the field.”

There’s a ton of good stuff in this video, and this is already a way longer blog post than I like to write, so I strongly sug­gest you check it out.