So You Want to Be an Entrepreneur? (Part 1)

Being successful often means learning from those who have already achieved their goals. Sam Furr, Founder of Tappable answers questions on starting a business and gives advice for young or aspiring entrepreneurs looking to get started.

What inspired you to start your business?

Freedom. I wanted freedom, but not necessarily financial or time freedom, but more freedom to steer a business the way I wanted. I just hoped financial and time freedoms came with that, but it wasn't the driver. I wanted to do hard work for myself to reap the benefits. My brain moves too fast I felt to be in a constant job role just doing one thing; I needed to have oversight of a lot more, so I could impact more.

What challenges did you find at the beginning of your journey, and how did you overcome them?

Managing cash flow, lack of spend oversight, I don’t think we focused enough on where the money was going and just looking at where it was coming from.

People. Finding the right people...Very difficult early in business. You need the right people to push you forwards, and the right experiences around you to learn from. I think we lacked that for the first few years & the rewards were instantly felt when we brought the right experience to the table.

Deciding what not to do is more important than deciding what to do, it's also much harder.

How did you get the idea for your business, and why did you think it would work?

Mobiles were booming at the time; touch screens in everyone's pocket just made me feel like it was the future, and we had a deep, deep passion for mobile phones & mobile gaming.

Doing something that you love never feels like a day’s work. So if I could work doing things I love, I just had to follow that.

What kind of research did you do before you started?

Not a lot. It was apparent to us that we were early in the industry, and the world was moving toward mobile, so actually, we did very little research; we thought we knew how to run a business; what we learned was that we didn’t, but that’s fine. 

What advice would you give to someone trying to become an entrepreneur?

Do something you love! And do it with every piece of energy that you’ve got. Find a way to market and sell early because if you can’t market your product or service and actually sell it and onboard customers, you have no business, and focus on the customers before anything else. Do not overthink things; get advice, get a mentor, accept failure, and accept that you’ll have bad days.

What daily habits do you use to help you succeed?

I’ve had to find a flow state or a way to get into my flow state, and that is one or two hours of solid, uninterrupted deep-diving into a specific 'large' thing, so I generally try and pick two or three things that need an hour or two solid attention a day, and get into the flow state for those things.

Break things into small tasks. Big goals and significant milestones are daunting and scary, but everything can be broken down into tiny steps and make sure you do at least one of them a day towards your overall goal.

What are the qualities of a successful entrepreneur?

Energy and passion. There are bad businesses doing very well because the founders are awesome, and there are great businesses that struggle because they don’t have the right people driving them.

The ability to pivot onto something new and have the awareness to not listen to ego over what’s really right for your business is essential, every opinion is valid, certainly in a start-up, and you need to find the balance of creative VS analytical, people need to come up with the ideas and someone also needs to break that idea down and validate it, so it is super important to find those two creative and analytical minds and thoughts. 

What are your tips for employing a team?

Be very careful of affinity bias, people like people like themselves. Try to phone interview first…yep, in 2022, try a phone interview first because you don’t want any preconceptions; you want to judge the skill without the affinity bias, which is a very difficult thing. Culture first, skill second.

It’s better to have somebody slightly less skilled but the right fit culturally than to have a brilliant person who doesn’t fit into the business’s energy. Go with your gut! You just know, if you’re second-guessing whether someone is suitable, they’re not the right person, the right person you just know instantly. 

How did you raise money to start your business?

By selling everything that we had, including clothes on eBay, cutting sky packages down just to be able to fund it. Do not dive in with big overheads, do not go and rent offices, do not buy the best equipment in the world, bootstrap as best you can and raise money only when you need to or when you’ve proven something, and you now need to accelerate that growth. We started with no investment and raised probably 9-12 months in a small amount of money to help the balance sheet.

What makes your business unique?

The people & our diverse set of skills. The people, the honesty, and the transparency. Technology is filled with false promises, cheap, quick solutions and people who can do everything quicker, better, faster and cheaper than everyone else when the reality is rarely true.

All our clients and partners use us because we are honest and that includes when things are bad. Things go wrong in software, so the people make the day-to-day good, the chemistry with the people, the chemistry with the clients I think is different, and our ability to be very honest with clients through the good and the bad is what makes for a successful partnership, and builds trust. Our clients trust us, and don't second guess what we're telling them.