FOCUS ON YOU: Why Competition Is For Losers

I'm Frank, founder of Ballers (http://realballers.com), an ai-powered basketball community that uses computer vision to give you edited highlights and stats of your basketball games using only your phone. If this is interesting to you, lets chat here.

On day 2 of living in San Francisco, I attended a Founders In Arms podcast taping hosted by Mercury featuring Max Mullen (Founder of Instacart), and the hosts Immad Akhund (Founder of Mercury) and Rajat Suri (Founder of Lyft / Tribe / Lima).

My question to them was: what did you waste time on early in your companies that, with the gift of hindsight, was a waste of time?

Immad said competition was a big one, that “There was always a boogeyman going to crush us.” His advice is that your own execution is likely the thing to kill your business, so you need to ignore the noise.

The things you read in the press aren’t always true.

You have no idea what’s really going on inside other companies, and ruminating on it only serves to distract you from what you know you should be working on.

THE ENEMY IS ACTUALLY YOUR BEST FRIEND

This is a lesson I learned while building my last startup INK’A. You can see my old pitch from 2017 here:

I did some part-time dev evangelism work for Twilio when they had 25 employees and saw how a box of 200 t-shirts would be devoured in 2 minutes at events. Lugging boxes around was not the future, so I knew there could be a better way to handle this kind of marketing.

We built an API/dashboard for shipping t-shirts, used by Mixpanel, Greg Brockman at Stripe, and 300+ other startups to engage users (mostly developers) with promotional product marketing. I got to a few hundred thousand in revenue and tried to raise funding, unsuccessfully.

Many pitches fell flat. When PandoDaily did an article about us, it was met with ridicule on twitter and my beloved safe space Hacker News. "A startup for startup tshirts? This is whats wrong with silicon valley" I remember one investor saying.

One particular pitch meeting ended with the investor saying, “You’re not growing as fast as Teespring (YCW13), so you’ll never get funded.”

I went to visit Alexis Ohanian (who I’d worked with on merch with before) to see if he would invest. He said he couldn’t because he already invested in Teespring and it was too close.

So I started to get annoyed.

Who are these Teespring guys?

What are they doing, how can I crush them?

All the wrong things.

I ended up meeting Evan and Walker, the cofounders of Teespring, going to their office back in 2015 when things were exploding.

Turns out there are very few people in the world that could understand the ideas I had, my vision for the world, and the journey I was on. These weren’t my competitors, these were my friends.

My people.

My Founders In Arms, if you will (we should put that on a tshirt).

Walker and I built a close relationship and he was the first guest on my podcast explaining the Teespring story and the transition to Fourthwall. Now I’m an advisor to Fourthwall and, since I’ve done merch for a decade helping 50 Cent, Mark Normand, and hundreds of companies, I build out Fourthwall stores for free for people (you do yoga, I design merch).

Evan, I got to hoop with and hung out with in Puerto Rico at New Years. I'm now an investor in HF0, the accelerator that Evan helps to run.

If I had kept this competitive mindset, I would have never built these friendships that are worth way more than any startup could be.

WHAT REALLY KILLED IT

The company kept growing each year, bootstrapped and getting to 7 figures in overall revenue. It was a slog with no recurring revenue, and just myself and a few contractors making it run.

I was living in Puerto Rico at the time and we had just finished demo day. I finally rebranded from Startup Threads (I cringe knowing I sent decks out to people with that brand name, the original name was even worse, can tell you over a protein shake). Demo day went well and I lined up a few investors on the island who understood what we were doing and had some ad agencies prepped to use us as their backend for clients. We were raising $750K and we could build out a swag management platform with integrations. This was August 2017.

You may already know the next part.

In September 2017, Puerto Rico was hit with a once in 100-year hurricane by the name of Maria that decimated the island, with long-standing impact to this day. I was able to leave the island the day before it hit as I had a scheduled trip to NY to shoot a commercial for Land Rover x The New Yorker Festival, but I felt the damage not only to my apartment, but in fundraising. The investors I had lined up hadn’t finished the paperwork and disappeared to the Hamptons. They ghosted me and to this day I don’t know what they are up to (Founders, get the deal done as soon as possible).

We never raised the $750K we were looking for.

In the end it was shipping costs and breakage that killed the business (you ever have to eat a $50K order because the client thinks the print is too small? We are not the same /LaRussell). We didnt have enough money to ship things. I started selling my possessions to stay afloat but nothing worked. A famous founder called me a fraud since we couldn't ship things on time and I lost the will to continue.

Eventually companies like Swagup ended up building it the right way (we are mentioned in the article) years later, and others like Swag.com were acquired by CustomInk to do similar things. If I held on a bit longer, I might have had a different outcome.

Looking back, I certainly spent too much time thinking about all the other merch companies that existed and trying to compete with them instead of just getting to the next stage.

Focus on you. The narratives you hear rarely tell the full story.