Why I'm Doing This.

When I started my first business, everyone always asked me the same question.?

“Why are you doing this?”?

Here’s the honest answer.

I just wanted to be an entrepreneur.

I didn’t have a real problem that needed to be solved.?

I didn’t have any experience.

And I had zero confidence.?

But I knew that’s the lifestyle I wanted to live.?

I spent nearly three years working to grow Sensus (the name of my first business).?

We built mission-obsessed teams for small businesses.?

It was really tough, and honestly sometimes not very enjoyable, but that’s what you sign up for as the founder.?

Over the course of our first two and a half years, we grew that company to be a seven person, six figure business—and within the last eight months, we lost it all.?

I was gutted—as any founder would be.?

Every day that I woke up, that business was my identity.?

And I didn’t know how to move on when it wasn’t anymore.?

There were ten lessons I took from that experience:

Lesson One: Bootstrapper’s are different—and you should be proud to be one.?

Lesson Two: Your company has to solve a problem.

Lesson Three: If you’re the founder—you have to be the head of sales.

Lesson Four: When it comes to customers—broken promises are irreversible.

Lesson Five: C players will seriously set you back.

Lesson Six: Delay your first full time hire until you’ve achieved product market-fit.

Lesson Seven: Never let your team see you lose faith in your business.?

Lesson Eight: You have to be willing to make sacrifices—sometimes extreme.

Lesson Nine: Remember why you started in the first place.

Lesson Ten: Experience matters—surround yourself with people who know what you’re going through.

Surprisingly, the journey didn’t change my attitude about wanting to be an entrepreneur, but I knew I wasn’t ready.

I went and worked for a startup for the next two and a half years.

That experience taught me everything I fell short of understanding in my first business.?

How to hire great people and let low performers go.?

How to sell to prospects.?

How to bring new products to market—and find a fit.

How to be resilient.?

How to work through tough problems.?

How to manage cash.?

How to win.?

But most importantly, it taught me that I was ready to be an entrepreneur.

I had some serious wins—and setbacks—with that team, and I’m grateful for both.?

I’ll be a better business owner because of that experience.?

But today, I’m excited to have a fresh start on my own journey.?

Earlier this year I founded Thrive: the only community built for bootstrappers.?

It’s the community of founders that I would have given anything to find when I was struggling to build my first business.?

But all it was at the beginning was a significant amount of insightful, rewarding conversations.

From February through April of this year, I interviewed 63 startup founders.

Every one of them were bootstrapped.?

Every one of them built their entire company off of revenue—which to me, was pretty badass.?

We talked about everything in these conversations from why they started the company to what almost put them out of business.?

It didn’t take long for me to realize that these people were exactly like me.?

Each of them were humble enough to admit that more often than not, they had no idea what they were doing.?

Most of them were never sales professionals or product experts.?

They just wanted to be in control of their life—and bootstrapping their own company was the best way to guarantee that.?

Those conversations were great because of how raw they were.?

There was no transaction, just good people sharing their story who expected nothing in return.?

After I completed the final interview I had scheduled, I sat down to do some self reflection on what I’d learned.?

First, I started with my findings from the founders themselves.

It became clear to me through those conversations that these folks struggled with the same things I did—product, revenue, hiring, you name it.?

We made nearly all the same mistakes.?

The next thing I did was open a notebook and write down all the reasons I wanted to start a company in the first place.?

After every answer, I kept asking myself a simple question: “Why?”

It forced me to dig deeper with every answer, until I finally landed on something meaningful, and discovered why this path was important to me:

To be in complete control of the life I want to live.?

That statement became my motivation. It took me a long time to land there, but I had never had more clarity in my entire life than I did in that moment.?

I knew from my conversations that a similar feeling was driving many bootstrappers.?

People who would give anything and everything to see their company be successful, but are in a category where the odds are continually stacked against them.?

So I started a community with 50 of them.?

Then slowly but surely, it grew.?

And grew.

And it’s kept growing every day since.?

We started hosting webinars, masterminds, and other events to engage the entrepreneurs within it.?

Not long after, we started being asked to coach founders—and that’s when I knew that this is what I wanted to dedicate my time to doing everyday.

For me, that's when it started becoming fun.

I've always subscribed to the idea that if you believe in something, you have to be all in.?

And I'm excited to share that as of this morning, I’m all in on Thrive.?

To be honest, I’m nervous, but I think that’s okay.?

It’s a healthy amount of nervousness, and it’s because I know what’s on the line.?

But I'm more motivated than I ever have been.?

I have an amazing team, advisory board, friends, and family in my corner.?

Beyond growing our community, I’ll be working directly with seven founders to help them beat the odds this month.?

All bootstrapped businesses, and all founders who I'm genuinely inspired to coach.?

People I’m passionate about helping because they remind me of me.?

There’s no playbook for building a business on your own, and most founders that try never succeed.

But I think it’s time to change that.

So when people ask me why I’m doing this, I’ll tell them the truth.?

This community—and the people in it—could have saved my first business.

And the thought of that makes me want to do this more than anything.

Because building your business from scratch doesn’t mean you have to do it alone.

So as I write this message on the morning of day one:

I’m a little nervous.

I’m for sure excited.

But I know that I’m ready.?

I’ll keep you in the loop along the way.

We're just getting started.