We ve got a great guest with us today. Gabriel Weinberg is an entrepreneur

Transcription

1 Starting from Nothing The Foundation Podcast Guest Name Interview Gabriel Weinberg Introduction: Welcome to Starting from Nothing The Foundation Podcast, the place where incredible entrepreneur show you how they built their businesses entirely from scratch before they knew what the heck they were doing. Welcome to another edition of Starting from Nothing, the podcast that helps entrepreneurs understand what are those first few steps to taking action. I m your host today, Frank Mocerino. We ve got a great guest with us today. Gabriel Weinberg is an entrepreneur and investor. He s the CEO and founder of DuckDuckGo, which is a really unique search engine that we re going to talk about. He s also the author of a book, Traction. We re going to spend a lot of today helping you all understand what are the four overall steps to getting traction for your startup. Gabriel, welcome to the show. My pleasure. Well, before we get in to Traction and the excitement about this book, and before we get into anything about DuckDuckGo which is a search engine that focuses on the privacy of the users, I wanted to get a little bit of your background. I had actually have been doing some research and I saw that in 2006 you successfully exited a company. And this is before DuckDuckGo and, of course, before the book. I want the listeners to get into a little bit of your background. What was that like in 2006 to exit that company? Could you give the listeners a little bit of a story around that? Yeah. It was actually my second company, my first one failed pretty miserably, right out of school. I really started doing startups right out of college and learned a lot from that first failure, made so many different mistakes. You still made a lot of mistakes on the second one but you always make mistakes and was able to hit up on something that was pretty successful. It was an early social networking company that was mainly how to find your old friends and classmates for non-us people which is pretty anachronistic now given Facebook exists. But at the time in 2006, it was still a

2 pretty useful service and we actually sold that to classmates.com itself of that year. Wow! If you had to just give one lesson learned from successful company exit to people who are building companies right now, what would that one lesson be about something that you learned from that experience? I mean ultimately what I learned was it relates to everything that went after in the book which is that traction trumps everything. We were a weird company, in the sense for normal tech startups. We didn t have investors, we didn t have employees. We re just really two guys. I did all the programming and most of the customers support all that kind of stuff. Looking at it from an exit perspective, most companies would be like, We re definitely not acquiring this thing. because it brings up a lot of red flags there. But the answer is that traction trumps everything and if you have enough traction, it really doesn t matter who you are, where you came from, it speaks for itself. Cool. Okay, the seeds were laid many years ago in the pre-facebook age almost. Yes. Alright, cool. Then, essentially, two years later, right, in about 2008, you founded DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo, for those who don t know, is a search engine who focuses on keeping the privacy of the users. For people who still haven t heard of it even though now the traffic is just plowing through it in the millions, what s the reason why the world needs DuckDuckGo? You re right. DuckDuckGo is a search engine like Google except that we don t track you. What that means is when you search on DuckDuckGo, you re completely anonymous. In addition we focus on an overall better search experience with instant answers. These are those things that appear above the links in results. Those answers are powered by open source community across the world, or really any developer, and even non-developers can suggest instant answers for us as we have about 500 of those. Our basic pitch is you can get both great results and great privacy so why not switch? Wow! Okay. I want to dig in a little bit to the mindset behind DuckDuckGo and the reason is that many entrepreneurs out there right now are wanting to start a business and they re not sure of what to get into. One of the blocks that comes up for many entrepreneurs is they look in an industry and they see a big competitor and they just think, Well, that pretty much is already taking up all the space that would be available so there s going to be no

3 consumers for me. I better not enter that space. I better just enter another space. I m curious how looking down the barrel of all these massive search engines and people potentially would have told you, Don t build a search engine, it s too crowded. What gave you the permission? How did you feel that this was going to be something that was going to be successful even though you could look at the market and see it s pretty much already handled? In hindsight, I wish I can say something like I had some kind of premonition or something, but to be honest the answer is I wasn t thinking about that way at all. Yes, bad things I learned from the last business. One of the other things I learned was I wasn t terribly excited about my last business, like product-wise, I wasn t a user. I didn t even find my own friends and classmates on the US aside because I m from the US. When I said I d do something now, I really set out to do something I was really interested in, and see myself investing like a decade of my life doing which I think really is good advice for prerequisite getting started on something and I really backed my way into a search engine. I started a bunch of projects [unclear 00:06:11] over those two years you mentioned, of things I was interested in. It just kind of came together that search engine came out of that and I launched it just to see what would happen. I didn t set out with this big business plan. With that said, you are faced down with competitor. If you re in a space with huge competitors, you actually have an interesting advantage which is those competitors don t want to go after small markets [unclear 00:06:36]. You can often find niches that are profitable and kind of lead gens and you can build from those lead gens. Interesting. What I m wondering about now is the future of DuckDuckGo. In my mind, I now associate major search engines as massive companies where search engine is like 1, 1000 th of what they actually do in the world. What do you see as the five to ten-year vision of DuckDuckGo? Are you going to be inventing driverless cars, you know making the internet available to every single human on the planet? No. Our focus is really on searching. We think that is a big enough problem in and of itself for us. [unclear 00:07:24] other companies focus on all these different areas and not on search engines. Us just focusing on search [unclear 00:07:35] better user experience on search engine. Now search itself may change in five to ten years. We see the future of search being more answered just because searching, you really want to [unclear 00:07:44]. We still see ourselves just focused on search engines.

4 Okay. Focusing on the reason that you built the company, you re serving the existing customers, you re not going crazy. I like that. Yeah. Yeah. Back to your point earlier about really wanting to do the company or something, that was my initial vision. That s what I was interested in. I really want to see [unclear 00:08:14]. Awesome. That s great. Okay, in 2008 or so, that was when you founded DuckDuckGo, could you just maybe share with the audience a little bit about the progression of that? How did you go from being a search engine, in the space where most people only know one or two big names, how did you go from being a brand new search engine to now millions and millions of searches? How did people find you? How did you kind of grow this thing? There are a bunch of phases and really the book [unclear 00:08:49] counts. The framework we do it and what happens is we started out we have 10,000 searches a month just from our initial launch. Then over time, from 2008 to 2015 we ve grown from 10,000 to 100 million a month. Each one of those [unclear 00:09:13 00:09:28] and by doing that we ended up using channels. We started out on SEO and then I did a lot of contact marketing, blog [unclear 00:09:37 00:10:00]. Amazing. Okay. Traction now is the book that you ve written and it s being released by Penguin. Actually right now, this week, is that right? That s right. It s coming out this week. It s an improved second edition. The original came out last year [unclear 00:10:21 00:10:25]. This one is even better than the last one. That is really cool. We ve got a refreshed version and as promised, what we want to take the listeners through today is those four overall steps to what a startup can do to get traction in order to explosively grow. Is that right? That s right. It s sounds simple. It sounds so simple, right? There s just four key steps and then all of a sudden, you re a millionaire. Of course that s not the case. What I would love to do Gabriel, if we could, is first give the listeners an overview of overall what are those four steps, and then I d like to get into each step individually. That way we can give the listeners the best lesson that we can in 20 minutes or so on what they can do to just start thinking about in terms of the traction for their company or their startup. First, what are the overall four steps that you see as getting traction for new startup or a new company?

5 Right. The metaphor we use is a bull s eye [unclear 00:11:31] and then the outer ring is all of the marketing channels you can possibly use like trade shows, PR, and SEO, and then there s 19 that we actually identified in the book. You re trying to hit the bull s eye which is that one channel that would really rocket ship your state of growth where you initially have taken off. That s usually just one channel that is dominating. The framework is designed to take that 19 and find the one. The four steps are really before you can get into the 19, you just set a traction goal which is a hard number goal that you re really trying to achieve that will move needle for you. Step one is really brainstorming all those 19 channels. Think about the tests you can run on them. Step two is a little more circle. The next circle is the bull s eye. You pick three of those and really run those tests that you brainstorm. The final step is really focusing on the one at the middle that really looks like it s going to be able to get you traction. Okay, great. Let s begin at the beginning. When you say you got a traction goal, like when you first started DuckDuckGo for example, how do you start out with a goal? What kind of things did you look at? Meaning, did you look at what you considered would be a realistic goal or did you just place a traction goal on it in terms of what you wanted to achieve, doesn t matter where you currently are? When achieving the traction goal, I mean it s very specific [unclear 00:13:07] but what I like to advice is you find something that really make an inflection point in your company. When starting out, it s usually one of three things. It s the amount of traction you need to get the profitability which could mean you need a sustainable income or just literally profitability, like I need to take home $5000 a month or something. It could be that you need a certain amount of traction price money because your business really needs investors. You can figure out what that is because you look at other companies getting funded, or like your type of company and see what kind of traction they had when they got funded. Or the third one which was unique is you're really looking for amount of traction that shows you have some product market fit. The reason that s more unique is because you usually do need money at some time in your business but I was lucky enough that I had that previous exit and so I could self-fund the company for a few years. What I was really looking for was more like 100,000 searches a month of repeated visits, of repeated visitors that was showing that there was really a product here that people were engaging with and sticking with. Okay, cool. I like that last one, the unique one that says you ve got a product or a market fit. I want to tie that back to you growing DuckDuckGo. What was

6 your initial traction goal when you started out growing it? Was it actually the 100,000? I came to that. The honest answer is I totally messed up the step. They sound so easy but they re not and I didn t have one and I set out The reason why this is so important is you use that goal to then work backwards to see if your efforts and traction are actually going to move needle for that goal. In retrospect, what I really needed to prove that I had something was more like 100,000 searches a month. But when I said I ll forget traction, I focused on SEO because my last company grew through SEO. Only to realize after the fact it s been probably months working on this that even though I successfully got traction through SEO, I only really got up to 10,000 searches a month through that channel. If I realized that from the goal, I would have never set out on that channel [unclear 00:15:28] this is a waste of time. Okay. I m curious, as you were growing DuckDuckGo for those first three ones, and not to detract from the fact that we re going through the four steps but I think it s interesting to follow along with the way that DuckDuckGo grew as a parallel. What were some of the biggest challenges that you had in growing it to the first 100,000 or so visits? I mean the real challenge early on is you don t have this product market fit and so people are turning out. This is a counterintuitive traction piece that s kind of easy way to mess up this early step and I like to think of a leaky bucket metaphor. Consider your product is a bucket and holding water, in this case will be holding customers in, and that would be like you really have a product market fit. When you first start out, the bucket s pretty leaky, your product kind of stinks, and so did mine, customers are just leaking out all over the place like. DuckDuckGo, I can t find this. I can t find that. The counterintuitive pieces people say, Well, I really shouldn t try to get traction because I know people are just going to leave. Instead, I ll get some beta customers and I ll ask them what I needed to change then I ll kind of relaunch. The problem is those beta customers kind of already knew what you did before and they re prime to that and they re usually too close to you, you become friends with them. They end up not telling you where all the leaks are in your bucket. The only way to get it consistently is to really have a study stream of cold customers coming in that really can tell you They re coming in fresh. The first time they ever see your product they can tell you if there s really still holes in it or not. When I set out an initial stage for DuckDuckGo, I just really had my ear to the ground and try to get people in through all different channels. I was testing all sorts of different 19 channels and try to figure out what was resonating,

7 what was really messing. I d follow up with everyone who kind of left publicly and ask them what was wrong. Really just trying to get to that product market fit stage, as well as try to figure what marketing message was resonating and what channel I would use and really try to scale once I hit that product market fit point. Okay, cool. Now I actually really like that. What you re saying and the takeaway that I pulled out for the audience is that customers actually have to use your product a lot before it s perfect, otherwise you don t know exactly which ways to grow it. Yes. In particular, you need to keep getting new customers in the door during that period or else you re really not sure whether the first whether you just spent 100 hours selling that beta customer or your product is actually good enough to attract new customer. Gotcha. Okay. The new customers are important because the beta customers essentially become like family or like the home team. Exactly. Okay. New customers have to be continually coming through the door on a regular basis to make sure that that bucket s not leaking, or really as the bucket s leaking this is when you re testing out that product. Yes, exactly. Okay, great. Cool. Overall now we ve started with a traction goal. What s going to move the needle forward? Then there are the four main steps. The first step is basically looking at all these 19 different channels and seeing which ones you re going to focus on. Is that right kind of an overview of the first step? Yeah. In this step you really brainstorming test that you can run. You re taking each of the 19 and say you re taking trade shows and you re asking yourself, What is the best test I could possibly run in this channel? Tests are designed to be about no longer than a month, no more than a $1000. You really want to answer three questions: How many customers do I think I can get through this channel at scale? How much would it cost to acquire a customer? And are they the right type of customers? The way people really mess this step up is they don t look at all the channels and they focus on the ones either they re familiar with or they think their industry is associated with so they should use. But the non-intuitive thing is that often the underutilized channels in an industry are often the best ones to use because, exactly because no one s using them.

8 Wow! That s really interesting. Could you say again those three core things that are important? Yes. The questions you re really looking to answer on any kind of traction test when you re thinking about these channels are how many customers can I acquire through this channel? That s the mistake we talk about earlier I made with the SEO. There just weren t enough customers coming through that for this search engine. The second is how much would it cost to acquire the customer? Because if it s too expensive, even if there s a lot there, you still can t really scale it, you won t have enough money. The third is, are these the right type of customers? Because customers coming through different channels end up being different. You can target them somewhat through channels but customers you might get through offline meet-ups maybe different than the ones you re getting through PR. Interesting. I can definitely as this book comes out I can go and I can see the overall 19 channels that are out there. I m curious because as the listeners are hearing what you re saying, I find myself even wondering what are some of the underutilized channels that I might not be thinking about. Yes. There s one we actually had to name because it didn t feel like anyone had a name for it. We call it Engineering as Marketing. What that is is developing another site, not your main site but another site that s a free tool for customers that they can use that it s just widely available tool for people that is somehow complementary to your site. A good example is HubSpot which runs marketing automation software. I appealed last year, one of their main traction channels is this site called Marketing Grader that they put up for anyone to go to, to grade their online marketing and just kind of put in your domain name and you get a grade. Millions of people have gone through that even though they only have a few tens of thousands of customers. But everyone who have gone through that is a good lead for their main site. That s a good example of underutilized one. Another good underutilized one is just offline ads. Other good story from the book, this other online site called WP engine which does WordPress hosting. A lot of people have WordPress sites and WP engine is the lead holster. They actually grew consistently through magazine ads. Wow! People don t usually think about, You re an online business. I m going to go advertise offline in magazines, but they actually grew significantly through that. Those are kind of just two examples. That s really interesting. Actually, I think that this is going to peak a lot of the interest of the entrepreneurs that are listening to this. That offline ads thing is something that I actually have been hearing about only from a copywriter friend of mine who is very into marketing funnels and opportunities for doing

9 things differently. But I like that you mentioned the fact that offline ads can be a benefit to an online business. Yeah, absolutely. Another one that people often ever look is anything that involves public speaking for obvious reasons. There s a couple like either hosting your own conference is a very underutilized strategy, as well as going and trying to be a speaker at a conference which is scary for most people. But in a lot of businesses, there are a few places a year where a lot of your customers attend some event. If you can get in front of them as a speaker, you can often just basically change your business overnight. Amazing. Get in front of your customers and do the thing that is probably scariest to many entrepreneurs which is speaking as an authority figure in front of a group of your peers. Right. The unfortunate answer is it s hard to know which channel is going to be the best, but it might be one that you re unfamiliar with or that you re scared of. That is part of the what makes this difficult even though it s a simple three-step process, that makes it very difficult. I m really interested in this whole 19 channels, and as we seem to keep pulling away it s like every different layer is interesting and an opportunity for me to look at what I m doing in my own businesses and evaluate. Am I just missing certain things by not even considering them? I think that s going to be a benefit to a lot of the listeners. I want to continue down our path of the overall four steps of traction. We ve got first overall now we have in mind a traction goal, What s going to move the needle? Then the first one is realizing actually that there s 19 different channels and you re figuring out, brainstorming how you contest in every single channel. You gave us some really unique examples of some channels like offline ads or getting out and speaking that a lot of founders might not be thinking about. What s the next step? What s step number two in the overall traction strategy? The next step, assuming the first one right which is you actually considered all 19, then you go back and you really look and say which are the three kind of most promising tests that you can run. And, again, these tests should be pretty cheap and quick, maybe $1000 max, a month max of your time. Hopefully you might be quantitative with it. You answer those three questions in a spreadsheet and you try to rate them. You take your top three and then you actually go run the tests in the real world. If trade shows is one of them, you may go to attend a trade show. Speaking engagements is one, you make test, try to speak at a local event. If

10 it s Facebook ads, you re going to run some Facebook ads. You re actually going out and testing. The way that people really mess this step up is they try to do too much optimization at the step. They go over the month and over the $1000. They might run 40 Facebook ads instead of four. You re really just trying to validate your assumptions here. What s the line between validation and over-validation? Well, I try to draw a max there but it is a moving target, right? I think you can basically tell yourself, if you re spending more than a month or more than a thousand dollars, you re probably doing something wrong. And there s extenuating circumstances varying cases but that s a good rule of thumb. The kind of the more mathematical answer might be you wrote down the answers to those three questions like how many customers you thought you could acquire? How much you think it would cost? And are they the right customers? Your test should really validate those. And when you feel you have a decent answer to those questions, then you can move on. If you try some Facebook ads and you figure out how much they cost, they cost too much, or you realize the volume just isn t there, or the customers that are coming through just aren t converting very well compared to other channels, then you can move on. Interesting. When I m out there testing these different ideas, am I doing multiple at once or am I picking one channel doing it for a month no less than $1000, only that channel and then moving on? Or do I have things going on at that same time? We suggest you do it in parallel and the reason is because you can. Because often times these tests have waiting periods. You put up ads, you got to wait for them, or you schedule your time to speak and then you got to wait three weeks to actually speak. Yeah. In that interim time, you can be doing more than one thing. The three is not a hard and fast rule but it s generally been the case in our experience. If you try to do more than three, it s just too much too handle and too little, you can definitely do more. We generally think in parallel though. Run the tests in parallel and a rough number s about three in parallel. Yes. Okay. Alright.

11 Now we ve got a traction goal, we have run. We have asked ourselves the three questions on the 19 channels, those three are: how much does it cost? Or how many customers are you in front of? Cost to acquire them, are they the right customers? Then the second step is you re actually going out and doing these tests, and the short-hand is it should be about a month or less and about $1000 or less, and you should be doing about three at a time. What s the next step? What s step three? The step three, we re in a success case here so we re doing very well. Awesome. Yes! One of these tests you ran, you had great answers for it. You liked it. Now, you re doubling down. You got good answers for one of these tests and you found a channel that really could, in your estimation, get you to that traction goal. You re really trying now to do that and scale it. Counterintuitively here, there s two things going on. One is, you re still running a lot of tests. You re just running tests within this channel because what often just like underutilized channels are often the best things to use, underutilized tactics and strategies within a channel are often the best thing to do within that channel. If you re doing Facebook ads, again, right now Facebook video, a portion of their ad platform is hot, getting good conversions. You want to be at that cutting edge. The only way to really do that is to focus. The other counterintuitive piece is you really need to ditch the other tests you are running. People really mess this up because they may have run three tests. Maybe one was pretty successful, say it s Facebook ads again, the second one they ran say they went and spoke. They did get some traction from speaking. They did get a PR head and they got some traction. They still spend time speaking and getting PR, they really shouldn t do that. Because one channel, the Facebook one, was way better and if they spend time on that, they re more likely to uncover those underutilized strategies. Got it. Okay. Step three is really based around the 80/20 principle. Now you re picking the channel that is performing the best and you re really focusing on it. I think that it s key to point out that you don t just keep running other tests in the background but you find the one that is going to perform the best and you really focus energy on it. I also want to mention, you focused energy on it, right? You re using the 80/20 principle so that you re leveraging what s going to give you the most results. But then you also said, and I want to make sure I point this out, that you re still testing within that channel.

12 Yes, very important that you do that. Because what you re essentially doing is you re committing to being like a worldwide expert at this channel. You want to be at the cutting edge of it. You want to be on the forums, coming up with your own creative strategies in this channel. You re not just the regular following the best practices user. You re going out there really trying to be creative with it. Cool. Okay. What s the last step? Just collecting checks now that I ve built this amazing thing? What s step four? Yeah. The traction goal was really step one. You re pretty much done here. The unfortunate part is at least with DuckDuckGo. Some companies, they literally are done here. They figure the one channel and it gets them like all the way to exit. With some companies like DuckDuckGo, you eventually reach diminishing returns. When you start diminishing returns, you have to cycle back to the beginning. You re recognizing that because your focus on that channel and you could see when you re starting to reach diminishing returns even with all your testing. And then you have to acknowledge that and then start the process over again. We ve really done this six times at DuckDuckGo. Wow! Okay. That is one heck of a process and that s a lot of value to listeners. I ll recap it for everyone. Actually, I ll ask that you recap it. First thing is we start with a goal in mind, what s going to move the needle forward. And then if you could just recap for us those kind of four core steps because I think that they were fantastic. Right. Step zero is really you re starting with that goal and that goal should be an inflection point in your business. The first step of the three-step bull s eye process is your brainstorming all the 19 channels to really think about tests, to test that channel in relation to your goal. Then the next step is you go and pick the top three and you test them. If the top three don t work out you may need to test a bit more. But you do actual testing of your brainstorming. You implement it in the real world. The last one is once you find a test that really validates assumptions that could reach your goal, you really double down on and you focus on it. When you reach diminishing returns on that channel, hopefully never but possible, you got to start over. Wow! Okay. That is an awesome, awesome framework. The cool thing is that you have actually practice this. And the result of everything that you ve done in building companies today now is this book Traction. People can actually follow along with the process that you spent years and years refining and building in operating in your own companies. Yeah. I should say also that I did bunch of angel investing and also draws in that experience, and then I co-authored Justin Mares and I we went out and interviewed over 40 other successful startup founders and drew out their

13 experience in the book as well as read countless things online. It s really a culmination of all that, and then it boiled down into this framework. Great. Okay. I m going to move a little bit beyond Traction and I want to focus on just you as your mindset and the man. We had a really interesting conversation last week where you talked about the lens with which people should view entering entrepreneurship. I was hoping you could tell the audience a little bit about what advice would you give to someone who is an entrepreneur who is just starting out? Yeah. We started out this conversation talking about or I mentioned how I totally failed at my first business. Yup. That, unfortunately, is the common story, right? Most businesses fail and then most first time entrepreneurs even fail more because they don t really know what they re doing yet. If you start out with the mentality that I m going to give this thing a shot, I ve got this one idea, I m going to do one and done that s kind of what I call the one and done mentality. I m going to do one, if it doesn t work, I m going to back to my job. You re kind of setting yourself up for failure right then because you are likely to fail. If you have a different mentality which is I m going to do this for the next decade, I m going to start setting this up as a career path, and even if I fail the first time, I m going to keep going. Just with having that attitude, you made yourself way more likely to succeed. Wow! Okay. I think that that s really addressing an attitude that s pervasive in the entrepreneurial space which is Oh my gosh! I need this one thing to work so that I don t have to go back to my job. I really like the way that you addressed it that entrepreneurship, like anything, is a lifestyle choice and a career choice, and you re short changing yourself if you re telling yourself things like, If this one doesn t work, I ll go back and get a job. Because, as you can see right now with someone who has built and sold a company and has built a massive software engine and has written a book, if he failed, which he did after his first company, he wouldn t be here. I think that s an important lesson to communicate to everyone is that this is a longterm vision of a career path just like anything else. I m curious because this is also something that I found interesting that we chatted about last week. What do you think is the timing for building a successful company? What s that really take? The average exit time for kind of angel VC companies and kind of raise money is seven to ten years, and that s been my experience as well viewing other

14 people s companies and now DuckDuckGo on my own. I think if you re setting out to do something, you need to be thinking, do I really want to do this for the next decade. That really means this is something that is really driving you, like you want this to exist in the world, you re passionate about this area of the world. If you re not, I would really, really question whether it s the right company. Awesome. Basically be sure that your purpose is aligned with your business because it s going to be a long-term thing if that s really what you re going to pursue. Right. Cool. I m interested in your mindset because there s got to be a lot of downs that happen. In the past, if you ve ever felt stuck or just felt like you couldn t get beyond something, what was your practice for getting out of that? It could be anything. I know we talked about how important mentors were but it could be going to a mentor, walking around the block, meditating. I m curious about your process for getting unstuck. Yeah. There s a few things that s really kind of stabilize me although, again, it s probably very personal to personal. But for me personally, I m married and had a family and so that kind of grounds me straight up. On a day-to-day basis I try to really stick to routine, that really also orients me on a day-to-day basis. And then within that routine I often try I do, like you said, take a walk. I do that pretty much once a day all the time. There are definitely are downs and I m not saying all this is like the complete antidote, but it basically prevents us downs from being too down. Cool. Okay, that s something that will operate on as the last question. If you get stuck you really anchor into your family and your routine. I think that that s really interesting particularly because a lot of entrepreneurs tend to be running structuralist now that they left their job and they don t have a lot of structure. It resonated with me that you rely on routine and anchor into your family in order to get unstuck. Going into that routine, I m curious do you have a routine for the way that you start your day off every day to be productive? What s the first two hours of your day look like? I really do, and partly it s driven by having young kids which if anyone has young kids will know what I m talking about. But even before I had kids, I always take a shower in the morning regardless if I like exercise last night and took a shower. It s just something that wakes me up. Generally, my routine now is my kids are up, I make them breakfast, and then I take my youngest to school, and then I come into the office. That s really my morning. Alright. I like that.

15 If as an entrepreneur, you ve heard from Gabriel, you re feeling stuck, you re feeling like something s not right, you can anchor that in some structure which is actually the way that I interpreted it with the structure of routine and the structure of family. As Gabriel mentioned it s going to be unique to everyone, but I think it s interesting to see what you specifically were using for that. Gabriel, I want to say thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. I think that the four overall steps to traction are something that every entrepreneur is going to be helped by if they just take a look at that. And in particular, I m really excited to actually get my hands on the book and get myself through those 19 different channels to see what I m not considering in my businesses. The books going to be out this week, where can our listeners go to get the book and where can the listeners go to connect with you after they ve gotten the book? Yeah. First, thanks. It s really been my pleasure. They can connect with me on Twitter@yegg and the book is at tractionbook.com. Amazing. Tractionbook.com is where you guys are going to want to go, I know that the book is going to be very valuable. You ve seen a peek of what the overall process is going to look like. Gabriel, thank you so much for coming on. Closing: Thank you. Alright, take care. Thank you for joining us. We ve taken this interview and created a custom action guide so you know exactly what action steps to take to grow your business. Just head over to thefoundationpodcast.com to download it for free. Thanks for listening and we ll see you next week.