In this conversation, Adam Callinan and Andrew Startups delve into the intricacies of marketing and growth strategies for startups. Andrew shares his journey from founding a startup in college to establishing Growth Experts, a company dedicated to helping businesses optimize their marketing efforts. They discuss the common pitfalls startups face, particularly the tendency to jump into advertising without a solid marketing foundation. The conversation also touches on the importance of organic growth, the challenges of paid media, and the personal resilience required to navigate the startup landscape. Andrew emphasizes the need for founders to maintain a healthy work-life balance and invest in their personal development to achieve long-term success.
Takeaways
- Marketing is not just advertising; it's about building a foundation.
- Many startups waste money on ads without proper marketing strategies.
- Organic growth is crucial before investing in paid media.
- Social media often provides low ROI for early-stage startups.
- Founders should focus on their health and well-being.
- Batch content creation can streamline marketing efforts.
- Investing in personal development is key for founders.
- Imposter syndrome can be mitigated through personal achievements.
- Building a supportive personal life can enhance professional success.
- Understanding your audience is essential for effective marketing.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
04:30 The Evolution of Marketing Strategies
07:37 Understanding Marketing Foundations
10:27 Identifying Ideal Clients
13:09 Current Trends in B2C Marketing
15:55 The Importance of Organic Growth
18:48 Reflections on Paid Media and Business Growth
20:59 The Shift in Social Media Marketing
26:02 Building Resilience as a Founder
30:10 The Importance of Supportive Relationships
32:38 Mental and Physical Health Strategies for Founders
37:12 Parting Words and Resources for Founders
39:00 PodClose.mp4
Keywords
growth experts, marketing strategies, startup success, organic growth, advertising pitfalls, B2C marketing, founder resilience, personal development, health optimization, business insights
Adam Callinan (02:06)
What's up, Andrew? Thanks for coming, man. Are you still in Mexico?
AndrewStartups (02:09)
I'm still in Mexico for two, three more weeks, but super excited to be here, Adam. I haven't done a podcast in a while. I did a lot back in the day and it didn't really drive a ton of resolve. And then I met you and I was like, I'll do anything with this guy. So I'm here.
Adam Callinan (02:23)
Nah, why I will
always take flattery. I appreciate that. Yeah, I could go. I can go so fast. We'll leave that one alone.
AndrewStartups (02:27)
Maybe not anything that that that sound clip could have gone.
Anything professional I
Adam Callinan (02:36)
Yeah, I appreciate that. The clarification is important. So why don't we just start with talking about growth experts and what you do there and how you got there as a starting point.
AndrewStartups (02:49)
Yeah, so I started my career almost 20 years ago. I started by founding a startup in college. We did virtual resumes for graduating college kids. And without trying to make this a 10 minute response, we did pretty well. I realized.
stuff.
But we raised some money and I didn't like anything that was going on. was in my 20s and putting in 18 hour days and I was like, I'm only having fun with the marketing part. So I was like, I'm going to go do this for other startups that have already handled all the other parts. And that's kind of what led me to leaving America. And I first went to Mexico. I know it sounds like I'm still there, but I came back only during COVID. But then I went to Dubai and had a big startup success there by that, by that exact thesis, just joining a
company that was amazing product screwing up at marketing. And I'll talk about that later, but it's a really common problem for engineering and product focused founders. So fast forward 10 years after that huge success and I was in San Francisco and joined a company in the B2B space, which was totally different, had never done it.
Lo and behold, same problems. Founders are building amazing products, don't understand marketing. Joined them two and a half years later, had another exit that was almost wholly driven by the marketing that I had done.
Decided to start growth experts because I saw this as a service being a dopamine hit for me every day like, know two years with one company sometimes there's downs there's times when you don't need to do marketing because the product and ops teams are overloaded but if you work with a bunch of companies that all need marketing I'll get to do this amazing thing that I love all the time and Most people don't love it that I work with so I found a sweet spot and obviously I was very early in remote work
That was really important to me also at the time. So it got me to be my own boss, write my own ticket, work with brilliant people, not put all my eggs in one basket, and continuously get addicting wins. so fast forward now, it's like what, our ninth or 10th year, we're specifically focused on helping companies with more than just marketing now. The last couple of years has been also helped bringing in other people with similar level of experiences myself in sales.
HR, business development, tech and product, legal and compliance, we have fractionally applied those people to companies, which is really hot right now as well.
Adam Callinan (05:08)
Amazing. is marketing is a big umbrella term. It means a lot. What is marketing to you? Like what do you, when you went into those, those couple of companies, whether it was in Dubai or New York or in Mexico or in San Francisco, and they were, they were struggling at like air quote marketing. What did that mean to you?
AndrewStartups (05:26)
Yeah,
yeah, so I bucketed everything you do before you start advertising. Marketing is not advertising. Advertising is just throwing money when
figuring it out as you go. When I don't work with companies, that's what they do. They skip the marketing step, which I'll get into. There's three main steps that we work on inside of marketing to get them ready for growth and advertising. But if they skip all those and they go to advertising, it's almost 100 % of the time a mistake. They waste a lot of time. If you have an exorbitant amount of money, you can use that money to accelerate the learning with advertising, but it's often better. And so what we do,
marketing-wise is we finalized the marketing foundation for a company. So there's often some kind of data, some kind of strategy, some things the founders have tested that have worked. That's one part of it. There's also niche industry-specific channels that we want to test that are different for every company. And then there's often the battle-tested things that we know as a company with 20-plus years experience I have that it will work. And so we put together a strategy that we want to test, but we first finalize the messaging and the marketing foundation. What that means to me
I mean I made up the term a long time ago, but what it means is You know your messaging your analytics your search optimization your social media strategy
conversion rate optimization of your website or app listing page. These are things that are going to 10x any other campaign we do after it. So we want to handle that first. Then we go to market with organic strategies. Oftentimes early stage companies, even if they've raised millions of dollars, are pretty confident that they shouldn't blow tons of money on marketing. And that's where my sweet spot is. I'm like a, as one client calls me, a cheap ass, but a very scarcity focused marketer because I want to prove things out for free.
Adam Callinan (07:08)
Yes.
AndrewStartups (07:13)
So we save the money for once things are proved out. Things like the landing pages that work, the features that people care about, the type of content that resonates, the platform that works the most to drive conversions. If we figure those things out organically, excuse me, I had something in my eye, then we can layer over that with much less spend and get much more conversions from it. And that reduces a startup's failure rate quite a bit.
Adam Callinan (07:37)
So in looking at the companies that you went into that had those problems, were they guilty of advertising without having done the marketing?
AndrewStartups (07:49)
Almost every time. Yeah, like and oftentimes when I speak at an event or even reach out to a company I love, you know, I also have a podcast. I won't plug it here, but Adam was on it episode episode funded now what coming out next week if you're so but so a lot of founders I reach out to to be on the podcast or we chat after the podcast like, you should come and work with us. They're like, we got like a hundred K we're going to spend it on ads instead. And then a month later,
Adam Callinan (08:00)
I know you can plug it. I was just on it. Yeah, it's great.
AndrewStartups (08:17)
come back like yeah that was a total waste. It happens almost on a weekly basis. I have a call on Friday with a founder that just came back after he's like we're gonna run some ads on Facebook and then I was like cool and then he sent me afterwards the ad creative and it's just like terrible and you know they don't think I think the money like yeah he spent more money than we would have charged in the first month working together on just the ads and now he realized it was a waste and it is what it is and it's not their fault these ads
Adam Callinan (08:32)
Yeah.
AndrewStartups (08:47)
platforms as personal end users, we're getting inundated with ads. So we're like, that must be what we should do also as business owners. in tech and with that, especially if you have a SaaS product or even a high ticket item like that, you would sell B2B. It's not always the best case scenario. so, but yeah, there's always some form of founder led traction that they've got and, and
some of it's good and some of it's bad. So that's why I said at the beginning, that is part of a successful marketing strategy is over looking over that data and figuring out what's worked and what hasn't and then growing that. so, you one of the best things we do is kind of take the founder out of marketing. You just need to come to meetings with us so we can tell you what's working and then you need to review things to make sure that it's on brand and got the right voice. And that's about it.
Adam Callinan (09:33)
You know, it's interesting. I've I've looked at startups. I mean any businesses like this, but I think it's more flagrantly apparent in the earliest stages, you know, until you, know, until you hit 10 or 15, maybe 20 million in revenue or like you're literally dumping fuel on a fire at that point. Not in every case, but certainly in a lot of cases that the startup world is like a thousand piece puzzle, but all the pieces are not equally weighted. They're not all the same size.
And so what you're talking about, I look at that from the context of like the website you talk about that, mean, there's your conversion rate, there's all these data and KPIs and all this stuff, and I don't really matters without context, it all can be manipulated and misled without context. And they're all important, but they're not all equally important. And so the idea that going and spending the ad dollars, even if you have the most epic campaign and ad set structures on the planet and the coolest headlines ever, it doesn't matter if you're missing all these other pieces of the puzzle.
destined to burn it down in a very expensive, painful way. So when you work with a, what's your process? Like if you take on an XYZ company, they're doing four million, what's your ICP? Like what's your ideal company?
AndrewStartups (10:46)
So industry agnostic, the ICP is that they suck at marketing and don't want to waste time on it anymore. No, mean like really we work with companies that aren't even startups anymore. so I'm trying, my team has me like stop saying startups all the time because we also work with tech companies that have grown through going to market through partnerships and they're at seven mil, 10 mil ARR, but they're just now starting marketing. So, but the thing that holds them all common is they don't have an optimized website or even this company that I was thinking of didn't even have a website yet.
Adam Callinan (10:52)
Okay.
Yeah.
AndrewStartups (11:15)
They were just going to market through partnerships, prove the product out and they're like, all right, now we can have enough revenue to stand on our own two feet, self-funded. They didn't raise any money. we are, you know, a lot of companies we work with are in B2B SaaS, but I'm ex Tinder and love B2C companies, but there's a lot more. I mean, you talk about the thousand piece puzzle. That's like a 10,000 piece puzzle. If you're B2C, whereas B2B is like really replicable and really easy for us to win. B2C,
Adam Callinan (11:40)
Yeah.
AndrewStartups (11:45)
on if you're targeting Gen Z. I mean I'm a 40 year old dude. I do have some early 20 people on the team but like those are harder projects to win and they and we have to really love the
to work with a company. So it's, you know, we like to work on only things that are helping advance the world, helping people in some way. And that we see us being able to be really successful in. Like, I mean, we're just addicted to wins. And so if I meet with founders and I'm like, these people are really smart, but they suck at marketing. We're like, I'm like super excited about it because I know within 30 days, we're going to have an incredible result. And that's what I love doing the most. That's what gets me out of bed.
and gets me able to work 18 hours on a day because the winds are addicting. So I try not to be like super specific because if there's someone out there that applies to what I just said but is out of the wheelhouse of, know, PropTech, we help companies in telecom.
Obviously lots of AI companies now because those are really smart engineers that are really bad at marketing and it's such a competitive space that the time availability for them to win is very, the window is short. So they have to go pretty hard on marketing right from the beginning. So we have a lot of companies in AI but they're in everything from microbiology to...
Adam Callinan (12:47)
Yeah.
AndrewStartups (13:10)
meetings and HR. So really, really the gamut and you know I just try to be as wide as possible because again these problems are so replicable. I wrote a book that goes through every single channel and how we approach it from a growth hacking, no spend point of view and the amount of people that reach out to me from different parts of world with different startups and say it's still relevant to them even almost four years old, it surprises me every day.
Adam Callinan (13:19)
Yeah.
What is working? I mean, let's back up. It's not surprising that you can create something like that that can be evergreen, right? I mean, if you're getting into, again, going back to like campaign ad set structure, specific things within a given channel, I mean, that's gonna probably be moved on by the time the book publishes, but general marketing thesis, cross channel marketing thesis, I think that's not surprising that that has remained evergreen.
AndrewStartups (13:53)
True.
Adam Callinan (14:00)
What is, from a B2C standpoint right now, what do you see that's working really well, like surprisingly well? Is there a standout channel or two?
AndrewStartups (14:01)
True.
Yeah, a couple things. I everybody's obsessed with newsletters and everyone's talking about building community, but they don't realize how hard that is and how much spend it takes. so one thing I definitely love saying is social media is a waste of time. It is not going to provide a high ROI.
If you are early stage business that has no customers and no downloads and no installs and no traffic to your site, we're going to Andrew. We have this amazing social media strategy. Are you going to spend money to promote your social media content? No, but we think it's going to go viral. I get up. I don't want to cuss. Can I cuss on this podcast? I don't know. No, no. I mean, and I'm an old man, but I just I I interviewed two early 20s founders that are raising money the other day for behavioral health
Adam Callinan (14:46)
Yeah, totally.
AndrewStartups (14:58)
Science thing and they were like, yeah, we have this amazing social media strategy. I'm like, it's not gonna it's the platforms are designed Yeah, the platforms are designed to make money. They're not giving you free shit period So what doesn't work is putting all your eggs in one basket? But if you look at social media following as maybe one tenth in value as an email subscriber base and you look at an email subscriber base and one tenth is value as just partnering with someone who already has a huge fault
Adam Callinan (15:05)
You missed the you missed the bus. Yeah, you're too late.
AndrewStartups (15:28)
And I think like you know so the easiest thing B2C to do is to give some micro equity to some badass influencers in your space. You know this this could be all the way up to like celebrity or athlete. Difficult but if you go and you see a news article of Kevin Durant investing in a startup, he is not a super savvy investor. Obviously he's got a genius team with him. I was at a company that he invested in. So you know I'm okay to say this publicly. The company's exited it's gone.
Adam Callinan (15:50)
Yeah.
AndrewStartups (15:55)
but he is putting his likeness and his 5 million social media followers and saying he's a founder. It's like a huge stamp of validation to people. So I think that's definitely something that really works. know, going with the old-school influencer engagements of like giving them a hundred bucks to make a post. You might get a boost in vanity metrics but like actually getting someone who is like let's say you have a tech solution for autistic children.
going and getting the top autistic mommy blogger to...
work with you and say she's a founder and like she becomes the face of the company instead of you. Hugely valuable and very successful because she's already got the baked in audience that would cost you 500k to acquire and you still have to convert them whereas they'll just do anything that that lady says. So I think that that really is big but yeah people think yeah the community we're going to build a community it takes money and it takes a lot of time. Just like starting a podcast I mean you're only on your
I'm on like 20 something episodes and still only had a couple thousand organic listeners But we're gonna start spending money now Which is what it takes to really expand past that because Spotify like anywhere else is a pay-to-play environment So you got to have money if you're trying to grow organically like an audience to use that but over time community is an amazing B2C marketing tool You just got to grow it and it costs money
Adam Callinan (17:08)
Yeah.
Yeah. I, mean, further to that, we talked about this in our conversation recently, going and spending the money before you have a functional system in place is so dangerous. And that's why, I mean, we talked about it in the context of Penn and like, I will not spend paid dollar on paid media. I will not spend a dollar on paid media for a significant amount of time. If ever it's just today, you know, in 2015, you totally could. We build a whole company on it. It was epic. We could not spend money on Facebook fast enough.
AndrewStartups (17:39)
Right, right.
Yeah.
Adam Callinan (17:47)
It
was literally we invested every nickel we had on inventory and paid ads. And our ROAS was like 15X. It was printing money. But those are the good old days and they're gone, long gone. So today, building a business model purely on paid media, you just have to know going into that, it's the easiest it's ever going to be as today. And it's hard. I mean, it's almost impossible. And you're gonna be on a slippery slope and it's gonna suck forever.
AndrewStartups (17:52)
That's all you needed.
Yep. Yeah.
Yeah.
users are fickle. Everyone is inundated with thousands of ads. know, funny thing, 2015, I was still saying focus on organic marketing. Everyone was like, you're an idiot, dude. We're making so much money on this paid stuff. And I still see, I mean, I don't do any social media as an end user anymore at all. I don't even post once a year, nothing. But.
Adam Callinan (18:35)
Yeah, me neither.
AndrewStartups (18:36)
But I check on desktop maybe like 10 minutes a week, like Instagram messages from people who read the book and whatever. And I'll still see obviously startup ads and I'm just like, I should reach out to them and offer marketing help
because the organic stuff is you can't skip over it. You have to get it done at some point. It's also like for instance, just with PR, what you said with the paid stuff, it'll work a lot better now. I mean, let's just say Google ads for instance, there's this thing called a quality score.
Adam Callinan (18:48)
Yeah.
AndrewStartups (19:02)
which I'm sure you know about. The better your SEO is and the better your keyword relevance is to the ad that you're advertising.
advertising for it on a Google search ad for instance or keyword targeting on a display ad, the lower your cost per click will be. And I have many times outperformed a billion dollar company on an ad because they're just like throwing $12 a click at it, but our quality score is like a hundred. And so our cost per click is like 10 cents or whatever. One dollar, probably not 10 cents, but, and it's the same thing for PR campaigns. If you get really solid PR campaign and someone sees your Instagram ad and then goes to Google and searches your name and see
Adam Callinan (19:27)
Yeah, sure.
AndrewStartups (19:38)
a bunch of validating articles come up, that conversion's gonna be much higher and probably not even tracked back to Facebook, the attribution, but, yeah, exactly, yeah, it's bad. Yeah.
Adam Callinan (19:46)
Yeah, that's a whole nother deal attribution. Yeah, it's not existent. It was
bad in 2017. Now it's not existent. But, you know, it's funny. It's like that has completely inverted in that 2015 example, we were literally just like spending as fast as we could spend. We weren't focusing on the organic and we paid the price for it. Like, let's be real clear. We paid the price for it. We, you know, we scaled up, we got into tens of millions and our cost of acquisition
AndrewStartups (19:56)
Exactly.
Good to hear it.
Adam Callinan (20:16)
I mean, it's slid every year starting in probably 2017. It's lit every single year. And at that point, you know, it's not that we were too late, but I, in hindsight, I feel like we were a little bit too late or the business was so dependent on paid media that then trying to convert that revenue model into an organic revenue model. Honestly, it's not something we figured out. It was, you it was a big part of like, well, we got lucky with timing because
AndrewStartups (20:41)
You got very lucky. Exactly,
Adam Callinan (20:44)
because we had somebody come
AndrewStartups (20:45)
because now...
Adam Callinan (20:46)
and want to buy it and then we had another one come and we got to compete them off each other in 21. Like today it would be a totally different, it be in very different situation.
AndrewStartups (20:49)
Amazing. And no one buys companies,
at least as far as I know, no one likes to buy companies that are wholly built on paid advertising anymore because you never know. The algorithm can change, the cost per click can change, and then your business goes away. But to your defense, all of the spend on ads probably made people, at least back then with less knowledge of it, like, I see these guys everywhere, we gotta buy this company. You know, like...
Adam Callinan (20:59)
No.
Totally. There's too much risk.
Yeah, it was the timing was lucky
and that drove like all of our follower base. You know, it's not like because we were producing this like insane epic community focused content like our follower base was growing because we were spending an incredible amount of money on ads and we were having fun in the comments and you know, beefing on people because that's just what the brand was. But today it's completely inverted. I mean, you just you have to stop. Yeah, you have to start on.
AndrewStartups (21:28)
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, you'd get cancelled.
Adam Callinan (21:40)
the organic and the community and the quality content, particularly as we massively launch into this AI focused everything where robots are basically now creating all the content everywhere. Authentic is critically important. And then if you're using paid ads on top of that, think once it's moving and running as fuel to the fire, sure. But your point is really important.
AndrewStartups (21:50)
our brains.
Adam Callinan (22:44)
What's not working other than just doing paid ads? Like what are you seeing companies do that is sort of maybe an outlier?
AndrewStartups (22:50)
So like I said, mean, social
media is, you know.
So I actually in my book I break down social media marketing into two things It's what you do on your own pages which to steal from SEO I call it on page social media marketing and what you do off of your own pages Which I call off page social media marketing on page social media marketing like carrying every day what we're going to post on our own pages Unless you have obviously again if you're BTC don't kill me You do need to even be to be you do need to create content But you can batch it and do one days of work create 30 days worth of content
not using AI to write at all, but there's promo.com, there's stock imagery, there's all kinds of stuff, but I'll teach companies to create a strategy that makes it really easy for you to create a batch of content. 10 % of that should be talking about what your product is, 10 % more about what your problem is, 10 % more about testimonials from users and UGC or whatever it is. That's important, you need to do, but it's not gonna work to really grow your brand in less response.
money and I will scream that from the rooftops. Yes there are outliers. My wife is a former social media influencer and she still argues, no social media I want to do it. I'm like but you have a business that makes real money and you've never made a single dollar from it from social media. Growth experts obviously it's very niche. Our clients are startups that have recently raised money and tech companies that are already doing a certain number of money to be able to pay for us. So social media
never really worked for us. Even when I post stuff on LinkedIn, it's mostly just like book sales and people are like, thanks for helping and giving me free advice. And like, that's cool for karma, but social media is not, I'm not a huge fan of it. I think the detriment, like you said, like 10 years ago, you could get so much value out of it. Now you get a neck pain and and FOMO and that's it. And so you have to...
Adam Callinan (24:41)
Yeah. Yeah. And an emotional
complex.
AndrewStartups (24:46)
Emotional complex, but if you spend an hour a week going off of your own page and going on to the subreddits the Facebook groups the LinkedIn groups the Quora questions the YouTube Videos that are related and you create content and you post like reshare comment follow and Actively engage with that stuff. That's really targeted that does have a high return on time investment So if you're an early stage startups, that's dead broke. That's what I try to get people to focus
on for social media. You're like, especially if you have access to a fresh graduate or student that's like native into this stuff, like they're busting out memes and commenting on all kinds of stuff that would take old dudes like us, no offense, long time, least you got all your hair. the, so, you know, I think that's what the way social media can be valuable, at least at the early stage. And then later, once you have data on this type of content works, this channel is the best for us
Adam Callinan (25:29)
I'm not taking.
Ha
AndrewStartups (25:42)
to focus on these hashtags, drive in a lot of people, then you can have, hopefully, revenue, also hire a full-time social media manager, and then they can create a badass content strategy with really scaling it up and then build your community over the course of three years. So I'm not saying it will never work, but for early stage startups, their ROI's low.
Adam Callinan (26:02)
Yeah. So changing gears. One of the things that I think is really important to talk about and continue to talk about is what are, what are the things that we as operators do or that, you know, you get to work with a lot of them. I'm sort of working in a vacuum here, outside of companies that we had invested in or whatever people that I know personally, what are the things that, that business operators, founders,
you know, executives, directors do in their personal lives to build resiliency and build sort of an anti fragile, mental framework to be able to withstand these like massive swings and ups and downs that go with startups.
AndrewStartups (26:45)
love this question. Nobody has ever asked me and as a health optimizer myself, I'm really excited to answer this. mean, and I've got a really recent scenario to back this. So I think that work-life balance doesn't mean like all in one day. Sometimes as a founder, you have to put your health to the side to get that new feature out at two in the morning. And especially if you're younger, I mean, I just saw founder posts like San Francisco's back and it's like eight guys on mattresses in a
like coding at like three in the morning and the rooms like dark and it's just like laptop glow and if you're in your early 20s and you're in AI like and now is I mean like it's the gold rush like by all means do that but overall
Work-life balance can be, you know, like six months of restorative, like I'm chill, I got hired this new person to take this off of my plate, and then they quit in six months where they get fired, and then I had to back into the fire. But overall, I think that alcohol is terrible. I quit drinking seven years ago, and I see a correlation between founders that party and drink too much. Even if you think that networking is a huge part of what you need to do, put the booze down. It does not help.
is so I think founders there's a shout out to founders run running club I run every Saturday at 10k with a bunch of really badass founders and the percentage of those dudes and chicks that are raising money compared to another founder I was working with that was like at every networking party I would ever go to didn't raise money and he's a genius you know I think that
there's a clear correlation between like a healthy get to bed as early as you can get up early and get your your your you know there again that founder that was always networking was like oh I built this last night at two in the morning I'd get those emails as opposed to so like try and have a health as healthy as possible of a lifestyle another thing I realized way too late was like settling down with one partner I I'm okay to shame myself I was definitely as an early digital nomad
traveling around the world like an ex Tinder worker. You know, like the culture at Tinder in West Hollywood was very interested in the data around dating. So you want to go and get data. It's not like being a relationship. Well, it turned me into like a, you know, late thirties man child before I actually settled down. And then you realize, all this energy towards like, this date I got to go on and like getting to know someone over and over again.
Adam Callinan (28:52)
Yeah
AndrewStartups (29:14)
And then I started looking at all the entrepreneurs. I know they're successful. They're all settled down, male or female, across the board almost, you know? And so maybe not all. Some people divorce whenever serial entrepreneurs, you know, men are toxic in general. I'll admit to that. But I think that at least for me and now the people I discuss with, like the sooner you settle down with someone, the more energy you have and support you have from your life circle. I mean, you're married, dude, aren't you?
Adam Callinan (29:42)
I am.
AndrewStartups (29:43)
been married? Okay. And look at what you've done. How many companies have... You're on your third company after two exits, right?
Adam Callinan (29:46)
14 years, I mean, I my wife in college. We met, yeah, we've been together since college.
Well, I'm on like my seventh company, I have had two exits.
AndrewStartups (29:56)
Okay. But either way, mean,
you are a data point in that direction, I think. So, healthy, well-balanced life, and if you can, a supportive partner, think those are two awesome things.
Adam Callinan (30:10)
Yeah, the supportive partner thing is I don't honestly know how I would have like mentally made it through, you know, the those two exit companies. Like you know, it's so easy to look at the amazing ups and those are the things that you hear about publicly. And those are the things that are in people's LinkedIn profile headers and whatnot. And that's good and great and grand, but it's not helpful. One, it's not reality, right? I mean, those are little sound blips in something that takes years or decades to build.
AndrewStartups (30:20)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Adam Callinan (30:38)
But I don't think it's particularly helpful for other operators to only hear the good stuff.
AndrewStartups (30:42)
Totally. What's your partner's name? Katie. Shout out to Katie for being there through the ups and downs. 14 years. 14 years. What does she do?
Adam Callinan (30:44)
Katie.
Yeah, no, dude, she's the rock. Yeah.
She was in medical device for, we were in Southern California. We met at University of Arizona in college and then.
AndrewStartups (30:58)
Wow, wow,
relationships come out of that school? Isn't that like the party school where everyone just like drinks through? Nice.
Adam Callinan (31:02)
Yeah, well, we had it was a fun school. Yeah. But
we did we did meet at this magical place called dirt bags. Shout out to dirt bags. She was working. I was not at least then she was literally a waitress at dirt bags. Put herself through school and yeah.
AndrewStartups (31:10)
Ha ha ha!
Wait, like she was a bartender?
Wow, you made... That is the hardest
pull. Okay, again like going back to Tinder days. I mean like I actually have half written a book about dating and comparing it to online marketing called hacking the online dating funnel. You never hit on a bartender. It's like rule number one. Because like also it's like being creepy to a chick that's constantly hit on all the time. So you know, you're a pretty good marketer then. I you said something that worked.
Adam Callinan (31:33)
Hahaha, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, we had we had a unique it
was like my best friend was the manager at the restaurant. I was in there having lunch one day. So it wasn't like your typical drunk dude in a college bar hitting on the hitting on the waitress move. So it was a little it was slightly less less creepy than that. But no, but to your point, like, I'm going to do an episode with her talking about what it's like to be the partner. I mean, it's it's not any easier on.
AndrewStartups (31:48)
Okay, her guard was down. Nice. Cool. She's going to love to hear this episode.
Adam Callinan (32:08)
them than it is on me. In a lot of cases, it's a lot harder. mean, in bottle keeper, we didn't have kids. Now we have kids. Now we have a three and a six year old. And granted, we're in a totally different place, but there's a the partnership part is important. What do you do or do you hear of founders like the physical thing is clearly that's massive being trying to maintain some physical fitness. I have a big belief in going and doing at least a couple of times a year, something that's just like outrageously difficult that you don't actually think you can do because you can.
AndrewStartups (32:14)
Yeah. Wow. Congrats.
Adam Callinan (32:38)
You just have to prove to yourself that you can. And I discovered a lot of that in back under kind of hunting stuff. But on the mental side, that's something that I overlooked for a really long time. And I, I massively paid the price for that. So how do you deal? mean, now like, you know, meditation is a part of my life. Journaling is a part of my life. I have to pay attention to that or I will go off the rails.
AndrewStartups (32:59)
Yeah, I found that stuff way too late. I literally saw the founder of Headspace speak at a conference in 2014 and I was like, that's crazy for that would never work for my ADHD brain. And now I'm like, I cannot survive a day without a morning meditation and like stopping to breathe intentionally like three or four times. So yeah, I think like I said, work-life balance does not mean you have to do all this at the beginning. A lot of founders that are like,
haven't even raised money yet are going to push all this shit to the side to just survive. If you're just in like make it or break it mode, don't worry about this stuff. Like do whatever you got to do to get there. And then once you get, but just notice that once you get a semblance of success, you can start to invest in this. Like you going back country hunting, you're in a different level than the dude who's building his first thing or the chick that's building their first thing. and just trying to make it and you know, you'll get there eventually and then you can do what Adam does and going back.
country hunt mooses and stuff.
Adam Callinan (33:59)
Yeah, I the
I guess everybody's baseline is different, right? Like I didn't go from couch potato to like running 50 K trail races. I mean, there was a massive years long progression to identifying that. But I did have kind of a red pill moment that did revolve around a hunting situation. But but I do think that. You know, you as.
AndrewStartups (34:18)
Yeah. Nice.
Adam Callinan (34:25)
you as the listener, whoever that's paying attention to this, finding that thing that for you seems a bit out of reach from a physical standpoint, don't go into it willy nilly, prepare for it, but going in and doing it and accomplishing it creates this interesting mental space, in that the next time you go and have that hard mental thing, generally in and around business.
it will feel significantly less difficult and less daunting. It sort of resets that perspective and baseline, but.
AndrewStartups (34:50)
Yeah.
Totally, I mean the...
Left America with $300 life savings and a phone number of a place I could stay for free and Then I realized that was easy and these people are amazing And I just kept taking more risk and more risk and more risk and more risk and now I have like no fear of anything and I'm thinking about going backpacking in Pakistan with a with an ex-military friend to just go hiking in the mountains and maybe even Afghanistan because 20 years later I've done crazy shit up to Mount Everest and all kinds of stuff. So it's the same thing with
Adam Callinan (35:07)
Exactly.
AndrewStartups (35:24)
proving to you. And I also... mean, I haven't done a 50k but I run 10k every weekend and sometimes by myself 20k. I'm like, that was a half marathon. And I'm going to go out for brunch right after it. Because like you proved yourself that you're capable of doing anything and then that imposter syndrome goes away and you're just like I can just dominate anything. Some of that comes with being you know having some narcissistic personality disorder or something. There's a specific type of person. I've never had imposter syndrome but I also had to dial back
a lot of thinking I can do anything on my own and now...
team and you know okay I can't do everything. But just the last piece on that the two things that if you're a founder listening to this if you're going out and you know like still spending a lot of time on like dating or drinking then those are two easy things to just get out of the way. Like I honestly it's a huge red flag for me when I invest in companies if the founder is super social and like it's you know I've never really said that publicly but Chamath
Facebook guy he said like the yeah yeah the reason why not San Francisco Silicon Valley like Menlo Park founders really crush it is there's no social things to do there at all like I don't even I've never even been there and I've lived in SF for like 10 years I don't even go to talk there when people like come and talk at this thing I'm like I'm not driving 30 minutes down there's nothing there's not even there's just good food that's it but so the founders there have no social distraction whereas San Francisco there's three cities on a train
Adam Callinan (36:28)
Yeah, probably happen to you.
AndrewStartups (36:56)
that you can get to, lot of social distraction. know, New York tends to be a lot of like fintech finance bros that I won't slander in any kind of way, but like, you know, they're like party people and they win less because there's stuff, there's other stuff to do.
Adam Callinan (36:57)
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, that's amazing, man. Where if you have any parting words or otherwise, where can people find you? Where do you want? Where do you want us to send them?
AndrewStartups (37:20)
Yeah, so
parting words, if you're an early stage founder listening to this and you have absolutely no money, then definitely go to startupgrowthbook.com. I got a book that's like what five bucks on Kindle that will teach you everything that I do for companies that pay 20K a month. So I think that's the best thing. My podcast is called funded now what it's everywhere you listen to podcasts, even YouTube. Adam's the next episode. So if you like this, then you'll like that because it's
about him than me and he's way cooler and then I'm Andrew Startups on everything.com, Instagram, LinkedIn and yeah if you are closing some funding or already you know making some money then reach out we'd love to hear what you're working on if marketing is the missing piece but I also do have fractional sales people, fractional HR and recruitment people so we can pretty much finish fix any gap in your startup for like under 5k a month.
Adam Callinan (38:17)
Amazing man. I have a challenge for you. not this coming summer, but the following summer, you have to look at coming out and running the rut, Google run the rut, run the rut.com. There's a bunch of different, distances there from like 10 to 21, 28 and 50. There's also a vertical. Okay. But it's on, it's on an Epic mountain range. It's on an Epic mountain range in big sky, Montana across Lone Peak.
AndrewStartups (38:25)
the rut. It's 50k.
All right.
Oh wow, oh a vertical could be fun.
Nice. Well, I am, I'm so down and I am planning on doing van lifeing for a couple months this year and road tripping around. So I'm going to pull up on you either way. I want to hunt in back country. That's what I really want. So Adam, thanks so much.
Adam Callinan (38:43)
has some pretty epic climbs, it's beautiful.
Awesome. You can do that.
Yeah. Thanks for coming in here. Appreciate it.