Welcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs, the podcast where we speak with business owners and entrepreneurs from all around the world and from all walks of life, in the hopes that something you hear will leave your business a little richer.
We’re your co-hosts, Vicki and Laura from Two Four One Branding, supporting new entrepreneurs as they launch their business, and offering you the tools that you need to succeed. It's why we invite experienced, successful entrepreneurs to share their wisdom with you on this podcast. If you love hearing their stories, please subscribe on whichever platform you're listening or watching on right now. You will be notified of the next great episode.
Today, we have invited Faisal Abid for a conversation. He’s a trailblazing entrepreneur - and he’s a disruptor - he brings innovation to industries where you wouldn't traditionally find it, such as the crematorium he co-founded in Canada. Faisal, welcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah, we're really looking forward to this conversation. It's so different from any other entrepreneurs we've talked to so far. So before we get too deep into what you're doing now, I'd love to go back in time and learn a little bit about you and how you grew up. And what your childhood was like, were you entrepreneurial as a kid?
Yeah I guess so. I mean, I was entrepreneurial in school trying to figure out the best way to get a lot of good marks without doing a lot of work. I ran for student council elections, all that stuff but I was by no means an A + student. I was always A minus, B+, but trying to just figure out my way there. So I don't know if that's entrepreneurial, but I was always... I don't like the word “hustler” but I just got stuff done.
I like the word hustler!
There we go, there we go.
And so we understand that you did formal education a little differently to the mainstream.
Yeah, so I did Elementary obviously. I went to high school and in high school, actually, at the end of elementary, I got into computers a lot. And I think that is all because of The Matrix! I watched the movie, I wanted to be Neo and I just got into computers a lot. And I started something, I was pirating a lot of apps. I was pirating Visual Studio, which is what you typically use to build apps and just figuring out how to build stuff. And then I went into high school, I got this opportunity to end up writing a book on a programming language that I got really into. So I did that in Grade 10, Grade 11, I co-authored that. And then what happened was University started and when that started, that was a moment of “Do I really want to do four years of this? Or do I want to, again, short circuit the system and do something of my own?” And I've always been inspired by Bill Gates so I said, “You know what, I'm gonna think about dropping out”, but I didn't drop out for the sake of “Alright, I'm dropping out”, it was more so, “Let's start a business.” And I got into this.. Android had just come out and the idea was, I had this idea of let's build something; I started building something called AndSpot which was supposed to be like a social marketplace where it was a better version of Android Market and App Store. So I started that in first year university, in second year university, I started to go you know what, maybe this has legs. And so I told my parents “Give me a year, I'll be back in school.” In my mind, I knew I was never going back. But I did that and then that's when I just never went back. So even when the business ultimately shut down, I just went and got a job. Because I said there's no point in going back when I've done more than what most students my age have done, so I might as well just apply for a job.
Sounds incredibly entrepreneurial to me. It was in your blood.
I guess so.
What do you love most about being an entrepreneur now?
I think what I love the most is just being able to do a lot of interesting, fun stuff. It never feels like work. There's a lot of effort put in but it's not like I have to wake up and go to my job and do all that. It's always fun. And even, I've been lucky, the companies that I have worked for, I've had the opportunity to choose the companies I worked for so I got to learn a lot from them and I got paid to learn, which was always great. And then when I decided I wanted to learn something else, I said, Okay, peace out. Because ultimately, the whole idea was, I had run a business before, when I dropped out, then I had run a couple of businesses that did work out pretty well but then the idea was, I want to do something big again where I'm full time, full time on it. And so I was just waiting for the right moment.
And as you mentioned, Eirene was that moment where I said, Okay, I'm going to do that. But looking back, there was never like okay, you know what, I'm done with business, I'm never gonna do it again. It was just, I'm just waiting for that right moment. But I was always building something and that's what I really like about being an entrepreneur, you just get to build a lot of fun stuff.
So tell us about Eirene. So for those listening and watching, most people probably have not heard of it, unless you're Canadian, maybe Canadians have heard of it.
Yeah.
Tell us a little bit about the business and what it does and how you got into doing this.
So the pitch that captures everyone's attention is, Eirene is an online Funeral Home. And you say that, and everyone goes, what does that mean? And it's actually really interesting and I'll tell you the backstory of it. The whole Eirene experience, the online Funeral Home parts comes from, it's very serendipity. So I co founded with my co-founder, Mallory, and the way we met was also very just by chance, and the way the business happened is by chance as well, where I was in Japan, and I had met, it's very interesting how the whole story adds up and if you look back, you're like, oh, it looks like it was scripted, but it's not - really it's just pure luck.
Where with the first company, I dropped out, I joined this company called KOBO and KOBO had sold to another big organisation in Rakuten and Rakuten put in a new CEO. And when the new CEO joined, a really sharp man named Taka, I being employee number 400 of that company, just reached out to Taka and I said, “Hey, cool, you’ve joined. I'm a software engineer working on the Android team, I'd love to go out for coffee.” Taka did not go out for coffee with me, but Taka instead said, “Great to meet you!”, and I was super happy. Imagine a 23 year old kid, just very happy that the boss responded to you and then Taka ran a business competition, I won that business competition and it's funny I already had signed a job offer for another company. So I won it, I was presented it, and I just left. But I stayed in touch with Taka.
So flash forward, many, many years going to Japan, I see that Taka’s in Japan and I'm like, Oh, I didn't realise he had left KOBO. And so I reached out to him and he invited me to what he's doing, and he was running a business called KamaKoreshinso which was essentially a Buddhist cremation service but in expedia format, where you can go on and you can search for the Buddhist cremation that you want. If you want a service, if you want a prayer, etc, etc. And so I got very excited when I said, Wow, I've never thought about death in terms of a business, that is something that can be technology enabled. And so I started thinking about that constantly, and this was March of 2018. So I come back to Toronto, and I'm thinking about, well, how do I do this business? Because I didn't know anyone in the funeral industry, I identified that there's clearly an issue where all the funeral homes are so physical, but I didn't know how to get break into the funeral world or anything. So by chance, I'm introduced through a mutual friend to my now business partner, and she and I are speaking at this coffee shop about just random ideas because she wanted to leave her work and start a business as well. And so we're talking and 25 minutes go by and no real idea sticks. And then as we're paying the bill, I asked her, “Okay, what's your big idea?” In my mind, she's very smart, but both she and I haven't been able to come up with an interesting idea. And then she says, “Oh, what's weird is my dad is a Funeral Director.” And I go, hold on. And she goes, “I've always thought about building something in death” and Taka had given me this pitch deck. So I reach into my backpack and pull out this pitch deck all crumpled up, I'm very disorganised in my backpack, and I pull it out. And it's this entire map that he gave me about how Buddhist cremations work in Japan and all the services he's doing. Now, what's interesting is, none of that is what we're doing in Canada but it's this idea of doing something in death. And so her and I started talking, because no one else talks about this. Imagine going somewhere and saying, “Hey, I want to build something in death”, they’d say, “What the hell?” And so it was purely fate and coincidence that we met.
And so we started talking in 2018. About, okay, let's build something inside of death, and what can we build.? So we did market research, we started talking to a lot of people and did the whole Business 101 thing. And we eventually came to this idea of Eirene, the online funeral home, and the idea essentially is let's replace physical funeral homes, offer the exact same experience at an affordable price, at a high quality, affordable price, but it's the exact same experience, where you still will get your loved one cremated. But the Eirene experience of you interacting with the funeral home is fundamentally different now. Typically, when you interact with a funeral home, you would drive there, you would sit down with the Funeral Director, the Funeral Director will tell you all your options, and there's a lot of hidden charges, we've all heard the stories about the funeral industry. So we said, well, how can we make it extremely transparent, and basically change that part of the experience and basically lower our overheads by not having a physical space where that way we can serve families wherever they are in Canada in a regulated environment, and so that's Eirene.
And so we first started in Ontario, so for the listeners, it's a province in Canada. And we said, Okay, we're gonna start in Ontario, and the reason we did that is, A) we’re in Ontario and each province, each state has a different licensing regulatory body. And so we launched, we started there, and the regulatory body was very confused at first because they didn't know if this was even something that should be allowed. Because if you think about it, the funeral industry, the regulations aren't as updated as you would think about like television or technology, right? That's like every two months, there's a new technology, you have to update this. In a lot of ways, like Uber, we had to talk to the regulatory body and push them to understand what our business model is, and how we're good for the consumer. It took us a year and a half almost, from the time where we said, hey, we're gonna launch this, and we finally got it in November of 2020. Since then, we've been able to expand across all provinces, we're now expanding internationally as well, and that's just been each province, we’d go to - and the provinces we decide, it's families reaching out to us and saying, “I heard about you, you took care of my friend's dad” or etc, etc. “We want the Eirene experience.”
And so fundamentally, if you think about how the funeral home process is, the way Eirene is different is, you can be anywhere in your safe space. If you just lost your mom, the last thing you want to do is get in a car and drive around, you're grieving, you want to spend time with your family. So with Eirene, you can go online or you can call us, you can call us at 2:15 am in the morning, a licensed Funeral Director will pick up, talk to you, and we will send the transfer service to pick up your loved one, take them to the crematorium, they get cremated, and we hand deliver the remains back. This entire process, you technically never have to leave your home. If you want to stay with your family you can, you will get a docusign, you will sign it. Everything's online or via phone so you never have to leave your safe space and deal with all these things that you shouldn't really be having to be dealing with.
That's so compassionate, and I really enjoy how you describe how you've set up this business really with the end user, the client, in mind and at heart. That you can't fail when you have those values.
That is just learning from all these years of trying businesses, some succeeding, some failing - is ultimately, what matters is the consumer and in a business like ours, what matters is the family, it's not just a singular person we're dealing with. Uber, you're just dealing with one passenger going from point A to point B. Eirene is just not dealing with the direct person, we're dealing with the entire family, they just lost someone very close to them, that is extremely important. And so we have to focus on the user. And then when we talk about technology, that technology is completely seamless to the user, from the user's point of view, they're talking to our Funeral Director, they're signing the documents. All the automation, the innovation, the AI that we've introduced, it's all on the back end operation side, for the Funeral Director side, so they can be - it’s ironic - a lot of people go, “It's online so it's not human.” What we've done is by leveraging technology and AI, we've made the business more human because we let the Funeral Director get most of their time back, so they can spend time with the family.
The average arrangement that a Funeral Director might make with all the paperwork, documents, regulatory things that they have to do, might take six, seven hours - on our system, we built something called Funeral OS, it takes 10 minutes. So now the Funeral Director can serve more families, and also spend meaningful time with the family talking to them, versus saying, “Okay, thanks ABC, I need to fill out these documents and get back to you.”
And so Funeral OS, I love the name by the way, is that also available to other funeral homes or Funeral Directors as a software?
No. That is right now a proprietary Eirene thing. Only Eirene Funeral Directors, it's our secret sauce. It's what helps us scale. Because if you think about it, this is a very interesting business
where, Funeral OS, and we can talk about this when it comes to business 101, we didn't build the business, which is Funeral OS. On day one, Funeral OS didn't exist because how would we know what needs to be automated? We have Funeral Directors on staff, but instead of wasting years building this technology, we built the technology as the needs came up, as we saw families interact. So after having been in this business for three years, we've seen every different permutation of problem and Funeral OS addresses them. So Funeral OS is the secret sauce that just works at Eirene.
Was that something you created with your tech background?
Yes, and that's what I've always strived to do, which is, not just a theory, I'm an engineer. It's been more so how do we identify problems and apply technology to solve these problems, and there are some problems that just can't be solved by technology. And I recognise that and that's the non-engineer part of me and so how can we build processes to solve these problems? And then how can we sometimes automate those processes using the technology? So it's this accumulation of a lot of different businesses that I've been part of and help scale up where I'm like, “We can take this AI, we can take this NLP, Natural Language Parsing from this company that I worked at before, the ideas that we built”, so applying all that to this is just a culmination of all that.
Yeah, it makes so much sense. It's interesting, because death is something we don't like to talk about, especially in the Western culture. So how do you get around that and get the word out about what you do? How do you market your services?
Well, death is something that no one likes to talk about, while it’s something that everyone needs. And so to market those services, there's no secret sauce to it, it's just offering a great service and being there when the customer needs it, right. So if the family goes on Google, the family can go “Okay, cremation in Ottawa” and Eirene will pop up, and that's because we are fundamentally, from our core we're a technology company. We're offering a very compassionate service that is five stars for each family, but we understand how the technology works. Because if you look at the funeral industry, it hasn't evolved in all these years. And what I was going to say earlier was, it hasn't evolved and it has also stayed static, so when a funeral home is created, it can only serve a radius of x kilometres, but Eirene serves everywhere. And so Funeral OS is built with that in mind, where, how do you take all this volume of families coming in? We do most likely, and I don't have the numbers on me, but we do most likely more funeral cremation than most funeral homes can ever do. That's because most funeral homes don't operate across Canada, and if they do, they're an amalgamation of multiple funeral homes bought out by a bigger player and with multiple employees at location. We have an Ontario team that serves Ontario, but we have licensed Funeral Directors who are licensed across provinces, and so they can serve multiple provinces. And so when we advertise, it's really because we understand technology, we are able to build great SEO and build great brand content, and so families are able to find exactly what they need, whether they need us now, or whether they need us six months from now, they can discover us online.
So how does it work? Because you can serve so many different areas at once, is it that you have partnerships built with different crematoriums. Is that what you had to build?
Exactly, and so the crematoriums, because we're a licensed funeral home, we can work with crematoriums because we actually have a licence that says Eirene is a funeral home, and there's all these designations, right. And so, if a loved one passes away let’s say in Hamilton, we have a crematorium there. Once we send out the transfer service, we know exactly, Funeral OS knows exactly where the family, which crematorium the family will, with the loved one, will go to. And so the family is notified of all of this, there's transparency throughout the whole process, which is really interesting, because the family can see - we've built what we call an arrangement tracker - where you can see where your loved one is at every step of the process. This gives the family a lot of visibility and transparency, because the Funeral OS, this was built into the funeral OS as a need, where families would call us, six months into the business, families would say, “Well, has my loved one been cremated yet?” Or “What's the status of my loved one?” And I thought, well, that's the most, in a lot of ways, that's a very anxiety-inducing state of sitting there and going, I don't know where my loved one is right now. So I'm gonna have to call them, and then you have to pick up your phone and call. Well, why not just, if you're in bed or whatever, just click on the link and see what the status of your loved one is; if they got cremated, you're gonna get a phone call, you're gonna get documents, and so families love that they use it all the time. And so Funeral OS can figure out where that's happening, the human intervention is the Funeral Director always looks at everything and says, “Yes, this is correct.” And when that is correct, the Funeral Director signs off on it. There's a checklist and audit trail that happens. Internally, I make fun of it, it's like a blockchain because it's all immutable, but it's an audit trail. It's a digital trail of every action the funeral director’s taken on our system, so that if there's ever a mistake, the regulatory body. if the regulatory body says, “Hey, we would like to see what happened in case 121. You can see from start to finish, all the actions taken by everyone involved in this, the payments, the IP logs, everything, that’s Funeral OS, that offering more transparency than any funeral home could ever give you.
And Faisal, again, this transparency is what brings peace of mind. We've heard stories about people not even being sure that what was brought back to them in an urn, related to the body of the person that left the house.You hear these stories, people just not even sure that, there's too much mystery around it from the time they say their final farewell to the time they have an urn back on their mantle, it's just the unknown, it's an abyss. And as you said, it's very much an anxiety-inducing time for someone who's mourning and grieving. So I really honour that process that you've used technology to bring so much heart to such a sensitive topic for people. And if we can just stay on the marketing thing for a second longer, you say there's no secret sauce, but when I look at your website, I reckon there is, because it's a very light-hearted website, there's no photos of you headshots all serious as you might expect, there's icons, what do we call them?
Illustrations.
Yeah, illustrations of each of you and a little bit about each of you, and it's a very accessible, friendly, soft, and a little bit fun brand, I would say.
Absolutely, the secret sauce is the experience that the founders - myself and my co-founder have, because we've been in the tech industry for so long, we understand what customers want. If you look at the funeral industry, it hasn't changed, but customers have changed. If you got to 1900-1901 there's a funeral home there. The way you interact with that funeral home in 1901, is still fundamentally the same way you interact with it in 2023-2024, but everything else in your life, you interact with it in different ways. So why have we suddenly forgotten about how we interact with a funeral home? You interact with something as simple as buying groceries in a different way. So what about death? And so customer's have evolved, consumers have evolved, and so that's how our secret sauce is, we've also seen transformation in different industries.
I used to work at a company that was basically building Chat GPT, before Chat GPT and we were trying to break into the enterprise. And so I was able to understand how do we build products that can be simplified to just a text bot. Another company I worked for was a health insurance company and there I learned a lot about health, safety, security, building better branding, all that stuff. And because whenever I join a company, I start off as an engineer, but I quickly move into different roles because just writing code is like hammering a nail, but I need to understand what we're building. And so I would talk to the product, I would get into the design of it, I'm a terrible designer, but just the UX of it. And so to get into all these things, you get to understand the whole picture. And so the same way when we started building Eirene, we needed to build this as something that consumers know. It has evolved with them and it's not something that you're going to struggle with, because the interfaces are so different now.
I am curious, why did you call it Eirene? Is there something behind that?
No, a lot of people think it's either my grandma or my co-founder's grandma's name. But Eirene means Eirene is a goddess of peace and serenity. It's a state of peace. And so Eirene, the one meaning is that. The other reason is Eirene is a woman's name and if you look at how death is handled in North America, and I would probably guess around the world, probably even more in Asia, is that the woman is primarily the first point of contact. When a death occurs, the woman is typically making these arrangements, and is tasked with the responsibility. So while the brand isn't feminine, in the sense that it's not Barbie, but when you go on to Eirene, there's this clear division of, this is a state of peace, like you said, you felt peaceful when you were looking at Eirene and so that's why we call it Eirene.
Yeah, I like it a lot.
One thing to add is we also did not want to call it, “Faisal’s” Cremation, or “John's Cremation 123”, as typical funeral homes are, and that's again, because funeral homes were named that way in 1901. There wasn't Google Maps, so if someone had to go somewhere, you said, “Go to John's funeral home down the street.” So everyone knew where John's funeral home was, but why hasn’t the naming scheme evolved? And so hence, Eirene, it's a brand, a scalable brand is designed, it's not just cremation, it's your one stop shop for everything death-related to get that content and understanding.
I totally get it. I think it's a beautiful name, and I love the meaning of it so much. But I'm curious when you first launched because this is so different, were there struggles? What was it like when you first launched the business?
So every time I launch a business, it's always like, “Well, it was fun building it. I guess no one's gonna use it. So might as well whatever, my mind goes. I learned a lot building it.” So we'll see what happens, but I remember finally getting this licence and the co-founder and I, we meet up and we have to get one person to use this. That's it, that goes back to not building Funeral OS yet - that it wasn't designed yet. The first version of Eirene in December of 2020 was designed to handle probably just a couple cremations a month. There was no automation, everything was done manually in the back end. And so we said, we have to get one. So we had limited capital, there were probably four people, myself, my co-founder, a licensed Funeral Director, and, I think there's only three, I'm sure I'm missing somebody. And so the idea was, okay, let's figure out how to get customers, oh right, we had a marketing person, and so all we did was her and I just got onto Google ads, and figured out what to do. None of us knew how to advertise a funeral home. None of us, we were just starting from scratch, and I eventually took over most of digital marketing from a paid marketing aspect of just understanding how Google Ads works, understanding SEO, and just built that month by month figuring it out, we had our first creation that month, we were all very excited. But then we were very sad to realise that it was a referral, and I was like, no we can’t have a referral, I want somebody who's never heard of us, that is the true mark of success. And then we actually did. Someone and God bless this person because from their point of view, I would say we did an excellent job of communicating, because we had no reviews, no one had heard about us, but this person trusted us, trusted the brand, and called us and said, “How do you work, XYZ?”, and then they converted, and they used Eirene.
And for us, that was such an excellent moment that we are doing something right. It may not be product market fit, but people have a use for this and that person left us five stars. Then the next month, we had two cremations and we got more excited, and now we have so many that, I don't know if that number is public, but we do so many cremations now. And that's why Funeral OS is needed, all that stuff is needed. And I look back and I go, there was for a time an internal goal that we wanted, every day, a family to use us, and I said we need to have 30 families use us, and that was the benchmark to hit - we've blown past that benchmark. And I look back and say, wow, I used to think when we got that first one, how in the world are we going to get 30. And now we're across Canada and everywhere. So each time a family went through, we learned from the family what we could do better, why they used us, how they discovered us, and we just doubled down on it. It was the most, I figured out the secret formula, the formula is a tried and true business fundamentals, talk to your customer, ask them what they liked about your product, what we could improve on, fix it, then a second customer comes in, do the same. I still listen to almost all phone calls that happen on our system, where we've built a lot of AI, AI can do a lot of very interesting things but one of them is, it assists me to quickly understand what's happening on the phone calls. And so every time a phone call comes in, I am guaranteed to read it, and I will see what the family is asking and if there's ever something like the family says. “I was on your site and a pop up kept showing up and it was really annoying”, I will figure out what they're talking about, and we will fix that. Because people are going through a very emotionally vulnerable state. We're not running Snapchat or something where if it's a bug it's okay. You're already grieving, the last thing you want is some annoying something happening on the website. And ultimately, it's technology, things can go wrong, browsers and phones and Samsung browsers are weird all the time. So something can always happen, and it's our job to quickly fix, figure that, address that, apologise to the family if we need to, but then fix it so the next family doesn't have to go through this technological issue.
Yeah, that sounds really like that's the key to your success - it’s that attention to detail and the willingness to resolve matters quickly.
We help new businesses to launch their business so that they do reach success, and we like to ask this question of our podcast guests. What is that secret ingredient? What is that one thing, if you had to pinpoint one thing that really tipped you from startup to success? Would you be able to name that?
Yeah, just perseverance, doing the boring things. I think a lot of entrepreneurs, and I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, and they all like the fun stuff, and the fun stuff is maybe speaking on a podcast like this, but the fun stuff is going out to an event or winning some award or whatever, and obviously making money. But I would say business is probably 98%, boring, hard stuff, and 2% fun stuff, but the 2% fun stuff makes up for all the 98% boring, hard stuff, but the 98% boring hard stuff is the most critical, important things, like just fixing issues or building new features that can help. They might sometimes might not be the most revolutionary new feature you're working on or talking to families if something went wrong, these are the hard stuff, boring stuff that you have to do.
And a lot of entrepreneurs hire right away. And one of the things we did not do, mainly because we couldn't afford it, but also something I've learned through businesses that I have been part of and have failed, and even those that I've done that I failed is, if you hire for something that you don't understand fully, you will probably have a bad hire, and in an early stage company that bad hire will probably take you off the route. And unless you have a lot of funds to bring you back to course correct, your business will probably die. And what I mean by that is, I’ll give you an example of a B2B sales company I was part of, and the founder, excellent founder, but we could not understand how to sell the product. So what we did was the founder hired a salesperson, and that to a 25-year-old me thought that was a great solution. Yeah, this guy came in, great suit and this guy's gonna sell, he knows how to sell, but he could not sell. And why? Because the founder himself could not figure out how to sell the product, and so when it comes to marketing, or engineering or product, only now after raising a seed have we hired head of marketing, digital marketing manager, content, all these things, because both my co-founder and I have done all the jobs that are possible in this company, and figured out what we need to do. Other than being a Funeral Director, which you have to be licensed for, my co-founder deals with finance operations, now we're finally hiring in finance and operations. I deal with digital marketing, whether it's our engineering, now we’re hiring more engineers, so unless you know what you're hiring for or why you hire this person, you're gonna have a bad hire, and it's gonna cost. And the number one reason why businesses fail is because you waste too much money. I think if everyone had a cheat code, and everyone had a trillion dollars, every single business would be a success.
Yeah, it's not about the money, it's about the people and the impact they can have on culture too, because culture is really important as well, what's your thoughts on that?
I have seen this at every company I've worked for, including Eirene, there's people that you can hire, that could be A players at another company, but they can be your B players, and you don't want B players when you're just starting off. When you have three or four people and sometimes there's a sunk cost fallacy and I've seen this in another organisation where they hire a top, top talent from another company, and you saw this person's resume on LinkedIn and you're like, wow, this is going to be amazing. But that person was A + player for that company, but that person just did not fit culturally at this company, and unfortunately the founder decided, “No, we have to keep this person”, and the culture really went bad; people I remember I didn't want to go to work because I'm like, oh my god, I gotta deal with this dude again. Or on the flip side sometimes, other companies’ B players can be your A +++ players and I've seen that happen too, where you hire somebody and this was another organisation as well, we hired somebody and nothing exciting resume, they said their skill sets are great, but they didn't work for Microsoft or some sexy company, but they join and you're like, “Wow, I don't know how this business would have succeeded if this person didn't join.” That energy, they bring that positivity, but at that company, they probably got, I think this person that I'm talking about, probably have gotten laid off from this company just because they didn't fit, and so culture, it's like relationships. Sometimes you're in a bad relationship. It's not your fault, not the other person's fault, then you both meet someone else and wow it’s an amazing relationship you both have.
So true. And Faisal, you talked a little earlier about a number of businesses that you've been a part of, that have failed. So let's explore that a bit. We don't need the details necessarily, but what is your mindset around failure? How do you manage it?
The first time it sucks. The first business you will ever run, and it fails will always suck. And so when my first business failed, it was absolutely awful. For a lot of parts, there's this feeling of Damn, I dropped out of university and my friends were saying, Oh, that's amazing, Faisal the next Bill Gates, blah, blah, blah, then I dropped out. And you're paying yourself $200 a month, and ultimately the business fails, and you're like, Wow, how am I gonna ever talk to these people? Reality is none of these people care but you internalise that. Then you start thinking about the parents. I told my parents, just give me a year, give me another year, and now you go damn, they were right all along, I should have stayed in school. And as a kid, you never want to be “my parents were right!” And then the other thing is, then you start to think, if only I stayed in school, or if I had to go back to school now, I'm going to be two years behind, the whole world is going to move forward, so it sucks. But then you fail a second time, what I did wrong this time around, then you fail a third time. And you're like, Okay, whatever. Now, my thing is sure, it happened, why did it fail, I see it in a more operational view, rather than emotional view, where I'm like, this fails, this is why it failed, this is how we address it, this is how we move on. And so, I think it's very important to, I've said this to a friend of mine, she had a great business, it didn't work out. I think it didn't work out primarily because it wasn't a founder market fit. The product definitely has a fit, but she wasn't the right person to run the business. And so I told her that instead of jumping into another business right away, get a job and get a job because the most important thing right now is you recoup those savings, and that money, because when you have the money and you have the savings, then you can start another business, and if that fails, you're not destitute, sleeping on the roads or something, right? I think a lot of this is romanticised like, yeah, you're a starving entrepreneur and stuff, but when you go down that path of being a starving entrepreneur, you start making decisions solely based on “How do I live my life for another week?” Versus decisions that are good for the business overall, and that's why it's very important when you start a business that it's most likely gonna fail but you have to know, you have to have that runway, a personal runway, not just a business runway to handle that failure and retry again. And that's what I did. When I got a job, the whole purpose of getting that job was so I could pay myself some money. I wasn't thinking well, I'm gonna save this money to buy a house, no. I am saving this money, so I could run another business, and that was purely, that's exactly why he did that. In fact, what I did was, I got a job, and then that evening, I went home and I incorporated a new business. I called it Diagrammatic and it was for consulting. And I said, I'm gonna do consulting, and I'm going to talk to entrepreneurs I had met in Toronto that had already built businesses, and if they need consulting, because mobile development was really hot back then. I'll build your mobile app for free, you don't have to worry about anything. But I want a seat at the table, I will stay quiet but I want you to talk to your co-founders, your business people, I want to see what you're doing. It's kind of like forced mentorship, and so I used to go to their offices at like 6 or 7 pm and just watch them talk because it was a startup, they were working late, and sometimes I would just skip work, I would tell KOBO, “Oh, I feel sick today, I’m not coming in” and then I’d just go to their office, and they were happy. I was getting some equity, some small options, but they were happy because instead of paying me 50k, they were getting the app done for free. And so, they just brought me in, they thought, wow, look at this guy, he's just getting it done for free. But you know what, I learned so much more than $50,000 worth and I did this multiple times. And so all of this, everything that I've done was designed so I could start another business and then even when I did start another business, I didn't go alright, I'm leaving my job. After 6pm, I came home, started working on that business, up to a certain point where I said, now I can go full time. And for some businesses, I just let them run because I'm like, cool, it's making me some money on the side, no problem, and I'll just look at another business now. And some businesses that failed, I said “Well it failed but it’s not like I have to look for another job or anything, it just didn't work out.”
I don't know how to explain it but it's about not being afraid to take the risk, but yet still kept yourself a safety net.
It's being pragmatic. I think when you're dealing with risk, there is smart risk, and there's stupid risk. Stupid risk is I'm going to leave my job, go massively into debt for this business and that's like going to Las Vegas and playing the casino. Technically, there's a one in a trillion chance I could take out all my savings, put it on red, win it, and I'm a multimillionaire with $50 million in my bank. There's a 99.999% chance that's not going to happen. And so, I tell entrepreneurs, it’s like you're playing a game. Business is a game, and it's an arcade machine, and you have a bunch of quarters, and the more quarters you have, the better you'll get at the game, and the higher chance you have to win. That win could be anything, that win is defined differently for everyone. Maybe for someone that win is, “I want $10,000 in salary every month and I've won the game “ , for someone else maybe that win is,”I want to take my company to IPO”. But the main fundamentals are you need to have enough quarters to keep playing the game. And so I've always thought of it as this is an arcade machine, and you lose all the time on an arcade machine, most of the time, but every time you play the game you get better, and so that's how I have operated and I continue to operate, where cool, I'm getting better at this. Okay, no this didn’t work out. And sometimes it doesn't mean the whole business fails, it's like, just learning Google ads, I don't come from a marketing background but I learned about Google ads and I did an excellent job to grow Eirene this far, to a point where we now can hire a digital marketing manager that can run our Google ads. And most months I did not know what the hell I was doing, and we wasted a lot of money. But every time we wasted money I learned why it was a waste, and we kept playing. So it's about playing that arcade machine.
I liked that, I like the idea of businesses being a game too, because I think it takes away some of the fear of starting it and it's really smart when you have quarters in your back pocket. Don't put all the quarters on the table right away, keep some in the back pocket. Some great advice there. I really think hopefully anybody out there who is thinking about starting a business, doing a side hustle right now, this is really good advice before you really kick it into high gear and see if the thing you're trying to do is going to be a success to test it. You can use that time to test it out.
Yeah, the reason why I didn't like the word hustle before was there's this idea of hustle porn where it's like, you got to roll the dice and you have to win and you're like, that's gambling, and you're not playing a game, you're literally gambling. And if you're gambling, most of the time you're gonna lose, all the time you're gonna lose other than one chance. And so what's the point of gambling, you might as well play the game in a very methodical, a good method, you could play it in a very algorithmic way. And you can learn how to win it versus the hustle culture of, leave your job, you gotta just go full on focus, you have to focus, but you can focus after six o'clock till your business has some momentum, then you leave your job, then you can pay yourself and sure you might not be paying yourself your full salary, but you de-risk yourself at every single point of the way. Because if you look at what an investor does, if you're investing in a business, even if you're working with customers, and a startup and a customer comes to you, and says, I want to build an idea. You're helping them start a business, and what you're doing internally is de-risking your time and commitment. You're saying does this person have money? Yes. But does this person seem like someone that wants to run a business? Does this person have a good insight into the market? Or are they just like, if I wanted to start a satellite company, I don't know the first thing about satellites, right? But I can have all the money, I could say $10,000 to help me start this business. So you're de-risking, so you should be de-risking yourself as well at every step of the way you de-risk yourself slightly until you can fully pay yourself and hire people, etc, etc.
Yeah, not only are you a very wise entrepreneur, you're also quite a resilient one. So of course, we're Resilient Entrepreneurs, we always like to ask the question, what does it take to become resilient? What, in your opinion, is the most important part?
Not being afraid to mess up and, and when I say not being afraid, it's, you're gonna feel bad, and you have to feel afraid. No one is fearless, I think that's a lie. I think it's stepping outside of that comfort zone and going, Yes, I'm afraid, but I'm still going to do this, and we're going to figure it out. Because most of these decisions are quickly course corrected. You make a bad hire, quickly fire them, you start a business that doesn't work, shut it down, start another one, change ideas, etc, etc. I guess, conquering your fears but you just have to step out of your comfort zone. That's it. I don't think there's any, waking up at 4am and drinking coffee, and all those crazy YouTube videos you see, all this nonsense, you just need to be very resilient, and know that whatever happens, here's what I'm trying to do. And I'm going to be afraid, it's gonna suck, you're probably gonna cry, you're probably going to feel all this is useless. But despite all of that, you still have to keep going. You will feel those emotions. A lot of people go, I'm feeling like I'm not going to do this, maybe I'm not cut out for this. No, I am sure, guaranteed, even someone as successful as Bill Gates, when they were starting with all the safety nets, they still felt that, everyone does, it's a human emotion, to feel afraid, to feel self doubt, everything. I was reading something very recently on Lady Gaga and it was something like tons of music producers said no to her, and etc, etc. She had lots of self doubt, and all that stuff, but she kept going. And I sometimes think about all these businesses, entrepreneurs, because there can be a lot of shitty ideas, but all these entrepreneurs who are very smart give up because of that first No, or because of that 10th No or hundredth No. So many investors did not want to invest in Eirene, and now we just closed the seed round, we have a really good VC that's amazing, helping us scale up, but equally, there's been so many investors who were like, No, I don't think death needs to be disruptive or why can't just the big guy do this, or x this or x that?
My first business when I was 16 years old and doing something like this, maybe I would have been like,” oh crap, he's right. Why would I do this?”, but after going through so much, I’m “What the hell do you know?” We'll figure it out, and then no one knows anything. A lot of people forget that everyone is sort of cosplaying—--
Say that again.
No one knows anything. Everyone is cosplaying the best version of themselves. If someone tells you that, ‘No, this idea doesn't work.’ Okay, sure. Are you a fortune teller? Sure, thanks. Great, I will move on to someone else. And you keep doing that you will find somebody, you keep iterating, you understand, take criticism, constructive criticism, maybe nine things that person said are bulls**t, but one thing that person said, maybe it's true, right? Maybe the idea doesn't work because you're charging too much money. So think back, and then maybe tweak and experiment. So it's about doing those cycles.
Take the feedback, but don't stop at the No.
I think that is the key. I think a lot of people don't talk enough about the J curve in business, but it's very, very real when you start out you are so along this path, and you're work and not work and work and not work and you’re trailing along, then nothing happens and then one day, that tipping point, and you get that ‘Yes’, and you get that investment, and you find that person that believes in you and you find those customers that start referring you and everything's all the pieces fit together. Because you've done the work, you've taken the feedback, you've understood the market, you do all the business 101 stuff, like you've just suggested, and the pieces come together, and it's about holding on for that. That's hard. I know for a lot of people and I know a lot of people want to quit along the journey, because it's really hard. I think when you find a great team, like you suggested, staying with a great partner makes a huge difference. When you have an investor that fully believes in you and supports you and says “You guys got something go for it. I'm behind you. Here's the money.”
Yeah, it changes everything right? So it's about finding that I think that's such a great, hopefully summation of what we've just talked about. I appreciate you so much, this has been a great conversation and a very interesting one because we don't talk about topics like this enough and it's amazing to know and I think this is a note - that you can apply technology to any business and change it in a fundamental way.
Absolutely.
Like come on, everybody. Let's go, let's understand tech, let's accept tech. There's people who are still on the fence about AI and afraid of what's got. Absolutely, there's amazing usage, and we've just shared one here today. So thank you, thank you, thank you. This was awesome. I'm sure our listeners are gonna take a lot from this conversation.
Welcome. Thanks for having me.
