Talking Entrepreneurship with Chris Saave

Chris Saave is an entrepreneur I’ve been fortunate to see in action the past few years. We cover his thoughts on starting a business, the importance of learning, finding hidden knowledge, and how to take risks.

Many of these lessons have helped me along my entrepreneurial journey. Chris has certainly stepped his game up with his latest venture, Meet Me Card.

If you enjoy the episode, you'd love my weekly newsletter with updates on new episodes and blog posts, as well as a summary of the coolest things I learn each week.

Referenced works:
"Why books don't work" by Andy Matuschak 

Timestamps:

(1:03) How we crossed paths

(3:12) How do you get the right idea to start a business?

(9:05) Dealing with the sunk cost fallacy

(12:16) Importance of reading

(18:12) Focus

(22:49) Sight beyond sight

(24:32) Finding hidden knowledge

(28:27) Process of learning new skills

(32:09) Judging by quantity vs quality and the quest for perfection

(35:18) Just do it, avoid regrets of omission, take calculated risks

(41:31) The history behind Meet Me Card and how Chris applied all these lessons

(50:43) Chris’ ideal 25th hour

Transcript

Mike: Chris, thank you for joining me today, I've been looking forward to this.

Chris: I'm really excited to be on thank you so much for having me.

Mike: Perfect, well I've got a lot I want to ask you about today and before we get into that maybe you can give a quick refresher on how we crossed paths.

Chris: It was a long time ago we actually worked together. We worked at a gym, and you were, I guess, you were the lead man so I was just following your lead and we both became Chester.

Mike: Right, and to give context to people who have no clue what Chester is, Chester is currently the Viking mascot for Westchester Community College, and so we both know, we’re in that mascot Brotherhood. That was my first time in any real supervisory role and working with someone like you made it a piece of cake so I always appreciated that.

Chris: Thank you. It was easy because you're very, how do you say, you were very open-minded, you were very welcoming and you are always open to new ideas, but at the same time you explained what we need to get done a lot of times and we moved on that, and we worked as a team. I liked your leadership because you had a follow-my-example kind of essence to you, you know. So that really helped me push along when I saw you I was like okay this will is what we got to do now. I'm fully supporting this guy, let's go for it. I'm going to help him no matter what and that's what I want.

Mike: I am speechless, thank you for that, and conversely I feel like I've learned a ton from you watching you while we were working together, and I want to ask personally about all these things. The overarching topic of discussion I had in mind is entrepreneurship, and I've seen you build multiple businesses, learn many skill sets, and do all these crazy things that are not interconnected. I think you've built a very diverse skill-set that I want to tackle here piece-by-piece. So I guess first what I'm interested in is how do you go about germinating an idea for a business and then, once you get that idea, what is the overall process for building it from the ground up?

Chris: That’s a good question. Where I come can jump in and give a real quick answer to this, and really help people understand, because a lot of people give generic answers. If I was ever asked that question I want to give them “how do I literally start?” The biggest thing was if you see a problem and it co-aligns with what you like doing you're on the right path. For example, when we were in college I really tried to solve the problem of a lot of people having horrible teachers. They were just reading the book like a bedtime story to the students who paid a lot of money. Instead I created something which was called Pass Your Notes at the time. It was to help students studying at the time to get a jump-start looking ahead and seeing what they had to study so they had more time. Instead of crunching all this information within three months they can have literally a year to crunch it all, and then guarantee themselves a better chance of passing, and because we have work we have school we have family issues we have rent to pay all these things, so it really just crushes us in three months. That coincides with the answer I gave where it says “you see a problem, you help the many.” Like the thing with Steve Jobs when he said “if you help the many, the many will help you back” and that's why I really try to do a lot of times, really try to help people, but along the sense with something I love to do, you know? Because I love interacting with people, I love talking with people, I love using technology and being active, and literally I’ll be hands-on with things to help develop things.

Mike: Going off what you said about helping the many, I was going to ask you about this a little later but we'll get into it now. How do you decide which problems to solve? I guess that better ties into coming up with an idea for a business. In my mind I would think you could come up with a problem that has a lucrative opportunity, but on a smaller scale. Or maybe on the other end of the spectrum something that is an incremental Improvement but could help nearly everyone, and here's a huge variety of opportunities here. What do you look for?

Chris: The way I'm going about it, and how to decide which problem to solve, a lot of times you can be faced with many problems around us, and what it comes down to is: what can I tackle once? What can I focus on first and, at the same time, what is going to financially be not a big burden to take on but flow with me? Let’s imagine there are three problems in front of us, one two and three. If you go for problem two right away you may you know financially get a burden. if you go for problem three right away you may be not literally or mentally ready for that, but if you go for problem one it will teach you along the way many things that can build you up financially or build you up mentally for whatever is coming with problems two and three. Those are things where you have to ask yourself how would I know which one to go for, because those are great things Chris. What is it you take the idea, you look at it, you sit down literally and you write it down. I did it on paper, and you literally have yourself critique yourself. Then you have close friends that you know are supportive critique you. Then you go to people who are not supportive and you then ask them for critique, but don't take it so personally. You just have to understand is this idea going to really work well. You have to believe in it from the beginning and see how far you believe in it to the end of the person that tells you the last critique. If you’re still believing it and you still see a possibility for it to produce and succeed, go for it. You have to be understanding that if it doesn't rock, like for me for example, I knew I tried to help out students with that idea for Pass Your Notes but then there came a point where it was too much financially and I wasn’t ready for that. Down the road it’ll come down, but I learned a lot trying it. Don't get me wrong, trying is good, but you have to understand when you have to take a pause on it. Not quit, but just pause, put it aside, and try to rebuild yourself because at the time I was not able financially. I had to pay people to help get notes and things like that, find different ways, take time to get notes and syllabuses and really it took a toll and so then I backed off and I kept on pushing forward with always investing knowledge into myself. That's really, a lot of people don’t understand, they say “I'm just going to go for it, I’ve seen people do it overnight.” That's their overnight, because they just got you overnight, but they've been doing it for a while, investing in themselves, investing in courses to learn, reading books, watching YouTube videos. Just really practicing it. Or even asking competition “what do you guys do,” and then it's really taking away the ego and really pushing yourself forward, and not thinking it's just your ego. You got to push back your ego and push forward what the business needs. It’s kind of like a baby, you know, what does it need versus what don't you want to do?

Mike: Two things you said there: investing in yourself and you didn't say those words exactly, but you perfectly described dealing with the sunk cost fallacy. That is such a hard thing to deal with, how you were far along down the road with Pass Your Notes and then decided to pivot away from it where many people, that's where the sunk cost comes in. People say I've invested this much time, this much effort, this much money into it, and they factor all that stuff into their decision whether to keep going or not, and when you factor those things in it seems like the right decision to keep going, because you don't want to throw away everything you've done in the past. You've had that mindset of not factoring those things into the decision and you're looking at the unit economics of what's my customer acquisition cost, what is my cost of good here, how would I make money going forward or how would I lose as little money as possible in the near-term? You were taking those factors into account more so than time spent in the past. Very tough for people to do. 

Chris: A lot of times people make a mistake and they’re like I’ve done so much I shouldn’t give up. That's fine, but you have to understand that because you've been doing a mistake for a long time doesn't mean you have to continue. Literally that mistake can be teaching you to go towards a different direction and that other direction can actually lead you back to your path, but with a different you. Every level you progressed forward needs a different you. You're going to have to let go of a lot of things that you used to do. Like I used to get angry or something didn't work. Now I look at it like “alright, lesson learned. Let’s move on. How can I do it better?”

Mike: Before I forget, the other thing you mentioned, investing in yourself, and you mentioned books. What's fascinating to me is that the amount of return you get from reading a book. When you're reading a book it takes, depending on the size of the book, a couple of hours or a couple of days. It takes that person who wrote the book months, maybe years, and thousands more times the investment that you put into reading the book. So just the act of reading is maybe  the greatest return on investment for your time and money that you can have, and I think that's something that not a lot of people are doing nowadays. There are many impracticalities with physical books. In the grand scheme of things, I was reading somewhere on Twitter where someone was saying if we take a big step back and look at history, if books start to be phased out now, if everyone's using a Kindle or everyone's reading electronically, there’s only a tiny period in human history where we ever would’ve learned from books or written word.

Chris: I agree with you a hundred percent. Even right now like I have books I read but I took a pause because it's such a huge book. For example I have a Sherlock Holmes book, I love reading it, it’s a good fiction. You know what's funny? I invested in that book for the adventure but also it teaches me a lot of how Sherlock Holmes himself looks at things. If you can see through the eyes of other people you will see a whole new world each time, and with that you can look at your entrepreneur adventure with different eyes and maybe have the eyes of Albert Einstein, Sherlock Holmes, Elon Musk, anybody those types to be able to look through your business. Imagine you asked them to look through your business. If you read their stuff you’d be able to look through your business the same kind of way, you know, with that kind of mentality. All the information they give, it's not that you have to take all of it, you can buffet pick at it. I learned a lot from Sherlock Holmes just be honest and I learned a lot from Elon Musk. I learned a lot from reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Reading books helps you, and you don’t have to read straight through three days like I got to get it done. No, it's really have enjoyment like when I went to each chapter and I read the title of the next chapter I was like “aw man, that’s gonna be a good read tomorrow.” Pause, put it on the side. With that investment for like $13 for a book, it came in better and for me personally I highlight my books and write in it it's like interactive reading. On the Kindle and things I love it too, but the thing is I can't like I can highlight in the book by I like the pen-to-paper feel cuz it like lets me write notes on the side and I get to remind myself. So when I flip through the pages I’m like yes I remember that and I was thinking this. This is going to help me for my business.

Mike: I’ll have to include the link to this in the episode notes here, but a huge component of what you just said, and I want to give more focus to reading and annotating and taking notes in books, because something I learned it was just a few months ago maybe a year ago was about the transmission process of information between you and what you're interacting with. There's an economist Andy, it's going to be in the episode notes, where he was making the case against books and it was interesting because his case wasn’t really against books or lectures or these other methods of learning, but it was against how the person on the receiving end interacts or fails to interact with them. To put it another way, when you're reading a book and you don't make any marks in it at all if you're not writing maybe separately about what you think about it. If you're reading a book cuz you said that we cover to cover your not getting tested on it or anything like that, in a few weeks you'll forget most of what you read. If you’re underlining, putting notes in the margins, highlighting, doing all this stuff, and then you come back to it maybe infrequently you'll remember so much more about what you read, and it's something I found firsthand. If I go back through a book now that I read maybe two or three years ago I'll flip through it and forget maybe all but the key point or two but if I'm going back to something I started reading months ago where I have maybe I put asterisks, like a different number of asterisks based on how important the information was, or if I'm underlining writing notes to myself, I could go back in time to when I was reading and what I was thinking. It's a very interesting experience. I don't know if you've had if you had something like that yourself?

Chris: Exactly. For your book, you saw me. I sent you a picture, I highlighted, I circled, it was so intense, so great, it’s an eye-opener when I started reading it. To know you and to see you have written this, I was just blown away impressed, and it was because I learned so much like: how the players have to think, how the how the coaches have come into the locker room and just really set the ambiance, and how you were able to sneak past you know certain people, but you are taking in so much investment for doing that. Sometimes like you were taking a risk which you were like I really want to take the risk cuz it's a good investment for me. If I got into the locker room and heard what they were talking about I could get a much better idea.  Because you wrote that, and I was interacting with you writing and highlighting,  I felt like I was there. It was incredible, love your book. Definitely recommend it.

Mike: You had sent me the picture. Thank you so much. I’ve sold dozens of copies, maybe dozen singular. To see that picture of you highlighting and sending that to me, it hit me differently, because it's the same kind of process of maybe if you're publishing a blog, an article, video, book, whatever it is, it's always a one-way communication. But when you sent that, it made it two-way communication back at me, and it just, I can't describe it. It was just an incredible feeling. I want to pivot off this, I want to pivot into something that was underlying what we've been talking about is focus, and not only what to focus on, but I think you were saying something along these lines before of what to eliminate from your focus is almost just as important as finding something to focus on.

Chris: Right, yeah. This can go many different ways, but to give you the strong point of this what to focus on. For example I was focused on Pass Your Notes but I had to take a pause and pivot and really kind of push forward for a different angle. Nowadays that I have a business I even had to eliminate some people, some people's attitudes, some of my own things I was doing that I had to eliminate, so I can really give a hold on focus for this business. If it's not investing into your company, if it's not bring you joy to your company, if it's not growing your company or even growing you to help grow the company, it's really all influences and you really got to push those away and what it comes down to is I have people around me that are investing mentally into the company, investing emotionally into the company, and financially, and those things are really helpful. It doesn’t mean to cut-off people like say goodbye, forget you, never talk to you, I hate you, nothing like that. It's just that you bring it back and you’re like I need to focus here I'm sorry I can’t spend time with you, and there’s a saying that there's people that bring you 20% energy, and you got to push them aside and focus on the people that provide 80%. So the people 20% you don't kick him out your life, you know, you just have them there cuz you know we're all human and we need emotion, connections, and the 80% will help you grow. Kind of like how Bill Gates, when he went through many other people, he went through many people for his businesses, but 11 people decided to invest in him and he then honed down and those people are now billionaires and he himself is a billionaire. It’s that kind of concept if you focus on the right thing, you focus on the right person, those focuses will actually help you skyrocket higher. And you can't lose the fact that you can't be like “I have to focus on this, this, this, and blame them for whatever is happening to you.” You have to focus on you and realize that the biggest focus you have to have is you and who you are. Your philosophy will influence your business, your culture, your money, your bank statement. Those things, that's the kind. If you’re the kind where your philosophy is “I got it and now I’m gonna spend it.” Then you're going to be having a cup that’s empty soon. But if your philosophy is like “I got money from the company, I'm going to reinvest into the company,” it's like a baby again. I'm going to buy milk, I'm going to buy whatever food it needs, things like that it's going to grow stronger, and that strength of that business is going to feed you back. That’s the different focuses you can focus on.

Mike (20:58): If you took in finance, I think most people know, if you're a regular investor. If you're not in the finance world at all, everyone knows you have to do something with your money other than keeping it under your mattress. What most people try to teach young investors is the importance of compound interest and it's not just that if you put your money at an early age, if you save at an early age you’re going to be making compound interest that snowballs over time, it doesn't just apply to money. It applies to other things as well. If you start reading books earlier, or if you start practicing skills and deliberate practice earlier. If you do any of these things and you take advantage of positive compounding if you're learning a new language, all these things can pay huge dividends down the road. The difficult part though is seeing the future benefits. Today, if I want to start learning Spanish, and say I knew nothing about Spanish. I have to picture myself being fluent in Spanish maybe way down the road, but know that with every stumble and every failed quiz and every obstacle in the present that it's getting me closer to the end goal, because everyone's a beginner in everything they start with. There was a day when LeBron James was terrible at basketball, but nobody likes being bad at something. So you have to have that mindset to pull those future benefits forward and keep making that decision day after day to keep at something.

Chris: Right, have you ever watched the show ThunderCats by any chance? It's an old show and they've rebooted it, but have you ever seen that show? The reason why I bring it up is because there’s a part where it applies to me a lot and it hit me as a kid the first time I saw it. There is a saying, the leader of the pack grabs his sword and says “give me sight beyond sight.” This is kind of interesting, I grew up as a kid, it resonated and grew in me where all the sudden I have to have sight beyond my own sight. The sight that I see around me and the people I see, the things I see around me, my business and how I see it, I have to look past that further. I look into the future and kind of see “where do I want to be.” If that’s where I want to be, alright then re-engineer it, work it backwards each step. I want a successful business that's helping many of the people, well then okay bring it back. How am I helping him? How am I creating it? What am I doing to learn how to create it, you know? It kind of like you work yourself backwards and that helps me out so much, like incredibly, and reading books attaching the looking forward and re-engineering things backwards and understanding a lot of things have details in them. It blew me away and that's why I'm able to do a lot of things that many of people cannot do, that people find hard. People find “oh that's too much to do.” I'm like I have fun doing it, really, and I’m zooming through it. Give me two minutes and I’m done. Because I re-engineered it and I started studying on the side how to do it. For example like websites I didn't know before, I knew about websites and I had some influences, but really what it was it was me taking time to watch YouTube videos that were an hour-long and grabbing the small nugget of five minutes in there. See, knowledge that we want and knowledge to help our businesses grow are sometimes hidden within a hundred pages, and those five pages in there are what we're looking for. That will shift our lives forever. Or the hour long YouTube video, those 5 minutes is what we're looking for and that's where shifts need to be different than any other competitors or people are doing them. So it's a lot to understand but again it comes down to your philosophy of how much you want it.

Mike (25:19) I’m very much in line with what you’re saying, it's finding the signal in the noise, and it just reminds me of something I read recently about Charlie Munger who most people are against...I know Nassim Taleb advocates for not reading any daily newspapers or any or if you're staying up to the minute with all this minutiae of news in the finance world, you're not seeing the big picture. But Charlie Munger, him and Warren Buffett are fountains of information. He had said that he would read all the stuff and keep up-to-date with all the news and what's going on on a micro-level and he only ever acted on maybe one or two small pieces of information and ignored 99.9% of what he was reading but the one little opportunity he found, he wound up making hundreds of millions of dollars off. It's exactly what you were saying about finding the nugget of information within an hour-long YouTube video.

Chris (26:33) Oh my gosh you don't even understand. Like to create a website you’re like what do I do, I have to code and stuff like this, and I sat there and I was like whatever it is this hour, if it's depending on 25 years more of doing the same thing versus taking this hour that seems long to me and just doing this hour of study. Having it change the rest of 25 years coming forward, it's worth it. I'll take this hour instead of not taking this hour and jumping on to, nothing against Netflix, just like whatever I'm tired, I'm good for today. It’s more like I know I'm tired, but I'd rather sacrifice this hour for many hours of pleasure in the future to have it translate to be a successful thing for me you know. Shift my life a bit. I have to bring your book back, your book has done that, like reading it shifts part of you and just like imagine yourself as a as a jigsaw puzzle or a Rubik’s cube, each time you take that sacrifice to read or to learn and be able to apply it. That is another shift to your jigsaw being solved in your life, the one that you wanted the most.

Mike (27:53) Every time I don't want to go to the gym and I dragged myself there and do to 20 minutes on the StairMaster just to say that I worked out, little things like that add up to a huge difference.

Chris (28:02) It does help, and you’re in shape dude. We were walking the other day and honestly you kept up, and you know I'm sure we could have ran the same thing.

Mike (28:24) Something that had come up during a walk, I want to ask you about the process of learning new skills. You mentioned building a website, and I know there's a lot of other things that you've been learning to do from scratch pretty much, and how do you go about taking all the things into consideration what we’ve said, like starting from the end, working backwards, designing from there. How is that process been and what have you learned with each thing that you start from the beginning? What have you learned about the process of learning?

Chris (29:00) Yeah. To jump into the answer, I do cyber-security so I learned a lot of things I have to learn. The biggest thing about learning here was that I first of all created influences around me. I have a great friend named Joseph and he's a cyber-security major and he does a lot of things cyber-security for New York City and things like that, but having his influence around help me learn better. So understand that I could do it on my own, but if you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far you go with a tribe, and it's having that good influence. I've learned that helping you learn things, helping you learn something for your business or to grow even more personally is to have the right influences as well, and having him there to help me study or having me have a question or if I have a question he can answer it, it’s easier than me going Google and getting frustrated and searching all through the internet. But along with that there's also like I learned cyber-security, I learned website design, I learned graphic designing, I learned how to talk to people. One of the biggest things is talking to people, and that's the hardest thing for a lot of people, because they have great ideas but they can't talk to people. And for me, for example, I had to get out of that barrier. I used to have a church meeting where I would talk to people then. I went to Toastmasters and even flexed like, it's really whatever you're learning, try to train it a bit, and even if it's out of your comfort zone. I was invited to Toastmasters one time and I was like, I know how to speak, but then I was like “wait I have some time, I haven't practiced speaking for a while. You know what, let’s flex it a bit and I'll see where we're at, and if I'm bad I'm bad and I know I have to get better, but at least I will have a measurement.” Again, measuring what you do is important, because those things that are measured are then watched over and improved. So I went to Toastmasters and they gave me a random topic. I did it, everyone was amazed and blown away, and I was amazed myself and those things kind of like it encouraged me, I then rewarded myself because then they gave me like a ribbon to say thanks you and everyone was amazed and they wanted to talk to me. Those things, because I challenge myself, because I went out of my comfort zone to just sometimes you have to flex yourself to really see where you're at. Those things really help you for progress forward, and the biggest thing we all want is progression to really go forward, but a lot of times that progression is because we have to then train ourselves and test ourselves. So the way I learned a lot of things was having good friends that are around the same subject and if you don't have them try to go out of your balance to reach out to some people and say “hey, just a quick question, I  want to know this and that.” Find what they like and embrace that. For example Joseph likes cybersecurity, but he also like food too so we got a lot of times lunch and we talked a lot of things. So it’s always investing in the people that will invest back in you. Taking that time to learn and thinking outside the box at the learning.

Mike (32:10) I just want to throw something in here, and it's something that we brought up on walk, the with the story about the two pots and the people being graded. I’ll give a bit of context, for the people listening, there's an art class, this class was split up, and they had to create the best clay pot, and half the class was judged on the quantity of pots that was created, and the other half was judged on the quality that was created. As you would expect, half the class of that was judged on quantity made whatever was, dozens or hundreds of clay pots, and the people that were judged on the quality made just a handful, and to put the extra time and effort to try to make it perfect, and wouldn't you know, the people that were judged on quantity wound up making not only more so clay pots, but better clay pots.

Chris (33:06) Right, and we talked about it and the reason why is because when the quantity just ignore the facts of trying to be perfect and just really just started just creating, along the way you found imperfections. I can do that better and then next one, next one, next one, and that's how you get better, by just doing it, and then the perfect people were so focused on trying to be perfect that they created only like one pot and it looks okay. To bring it back to the fact of how I tried so many different businesses, and really just created them, go for it, created them, go for it, ok pause this one, move onto the next one, and then you find one and you’re like wow. That's where even right now, I have the business right now which is you know Meet Me Card, and that's one of the up-to-date pots that I’m working on that is like, wow, you know you've done all these other businesses that really taught you a lot but it didn't bring what you wanted to come to this one, you know I'm saying? And it was really amazing, that's a great story, and if anyone else is feeling that way, a hundred percent just do it. Because just do your idea, stop trying to perfect and have every move be calculated, but just go for it. Also just to add in, I do hiking and everything I do in hiking is just to go for it and do it and never look back and be like man I wish I had done that because you will never get that time back, so I go ahead and I make a calculated risk and make a calculated kind of like decision looking at it and I'm like, I can do it, just do it now you know.

Mike (35:01) I'm pretty sure you just posted a picture this morning of you on Instagram on a hike and you were doing like a handstand on the edge of a cliff and I can't help but picture that as you're talking about just doing it.

Chris (35:14) Right, right, I’m not saying you have to go forward to all the way to jump on a cliff, but me for example yes I was jumping on the cliff, I calculated the risk, I looked at the perspectives of how where I would lose balance and where I wouldn't. Those things came into play. I went hiking with my friend and there's this gap between two rocks. I personally love adventure and thrills and some adrenaline rush so I saw the gap and my friend was like don't do it, but I’m like I know I can make it. Them saying not to do it put a little bit of fear in my head cuz I was like what do they know that I don’t know, but I was like pause, hold that back, let's buffet it, they’re telling me take a calculated risk. Okay let me look at it again, I looked at it and I was like I can do it, I can see. I know what I have to do, where to stand, where I have to push my foot towards from, and I was like just do it. If I had left that day, honestly, without jumping that little thing. I know it sounds silly, but without me having to jump a little like gap, for me I would have looked back today feeling like I can't believe I let that stop me, and I would have been so kind of sad later in life like it sounds so silly something so small, but that small thing, like we said. Small things add up to bigger things, like later in life someone says to me “no, don't go for that business. Don't do that,” then I'm like okay, cuz then I remember back to this moment and it builds up from that. It’s just snowballing, and I was like screw it, forget that. I’m gonna hear them out, but I know that I’m calculating the risk and I'm like, do it. I jumped, their heart was leaping out of their chest, I landed perfectly where I wanted to, exactly where I did it, or I wanted it, and I had a plan B if it didn't work out for me, so I had to a plan B where if I'd landed wrong I’d roll and so forth and so forth, there were many exit plans. But the thing is doing it, I landed and boom, I did it. I was so happy. They were happy. Their heart was jumping, my heart was jumping, and you just made a memorable moment that you’ll never forget because you took that leap of faith. You’ll never know honestly if you're ready or not until you just take that leap of faith and you really just go for it and I was so happy and that's how you see all the pictures there.

Mike (37:51) I’m picturing myself taking a tumble if I tried any of those things. 

Chris (37:55) In business if you're looking at something, and you're an entrepreneur and you’re not sure about it. Take a calculated risk, and if it's gonna mess up it's going to mess up. Like one thing I learned from The Magic School Bus as a kid again like I watch these shows but I think they're influential. Magic School Bus, Miss Frizzle is always like get messy, make mistakes, and they've always had a plan to keep on going, and it was true. We're always scared of being not perfect, we’re always scared of messing up, but that's the part of it you can't get perfection without messing up, and it's not saying you have to look for those mistakes and make them. You have to just try your best and if you make a mistake it's okay. A lot of times I’ve fallen and felt like not getting back up. I've been in depression, I've done these I felt like not continuing, and honestly I think what kept me going was to say that if I ever look back and said I stopped, I would be ashamed of myself you know. Like I’d feel I feel so bad for myself, but again we learn as we go on and we really just we progress, and it could be for me, I'm in this for the long haul. I'm not here for the short-term just to get rich quick. Like Buffett said, everyone wants to get rich quick, but that's the trick though that I think life sometimes puts in our way. There sometimes a trick where it’s like “hey, I'll give you richness real quick if you go this way.” Or I give you richness in a decent time if you go this way. You never know what life gives you or how fast you can get rich, or how fast you can get wealthy. I like to be wealthy. Wealthy in health, wealthy in finances, and wealthy in relationships, but how much time are you going to invest in that. Once you get it are you going to quit it? That's the difference, where it comes into play. I look at the long haul. I say I'm here, win or lose, I always love this, always keep pushing for it. Let me do my best and I’ll always try to get better. Myself: physically, financially, emotionally, and mentally. All those things. 

Mike (40:01) I want to tie this together, all the things we’ve been talking abou,t with your latest venture. This business you started, Meet Me Card. I've got mine in front of me here with my logo and name on it. I knew nothing about NFC, and now I know it stands for Near Field Communication. Or dealing with NFC chips and what's the difference between that and bluetooth, all this stuff. I'll give you my quick understanding, that you've designed what I believe the tagline is “the last business card you'll ever need.” It's the shape of a business card, but it's an electronic card so it's obviously not made of paper. I scan this, you don’t even scan it, that’s the problem it’s solving. All you have to do, I just hold the thing up near the top of my phone. It’'s got to be the NFC technology, it's got to be something like point six centimeters or whatever it is within that field of the chip in my phone and it pops up in my internet browser with pretty much my virtual business card where I’ve curated all my links and all this stuff. I know you told me an interesting story about how you started with this and where you've gone from the beginning to now. Tell me about this card.

Chris (41:33) Thank you for bringing it up. So the card is actually yes exactly as you said the last business card you'll ever need. This business venture I'm working on, I've created like you said, if you have ever had a business card you know that 98% of the time people usually throw it out or lose the business card. So with this business card you only need to have one business card, and tap someone’s phone and all your information can show up on their phone. Now instead of carrying a bunch of business cards, I know people have questions automatically. I’m going to break it down easily. Instead of carrying a bunch of business cards in your pocket whenever you go to a get together, meet up, or anything business-wise, you actually can carry this one card, tap someone’s phone, have them unlock their phone. Just tap the top of the screen, usually the chip is next to the camera, and boom. Any info you want to share you can share. For example, Mike, you put the info for your phone email and website. No personal info shared, just what you want to share. Now instead of losing the business card, now the person can have it on their phone and save it on their phone. You’re not wasting anything, you’re not wasting money and on top of that you're helping the environment, you’re not hurting trees by cutting them just to create these business cards to have them be thrown out. And are they biodegradable? No. A lot of times for business-wise we look for the better innovation, and I created this so that I can help out businesses, help out the environment, help out even just many other people with the need to have their business expand quicker and stronger. So hope I answered every question.

Mike (43:28) Just throw in before I forget, the initial prototype you started with.

Chris (43:35) Oh my gosh, the initial prototype. So I had it ship, all I did was have it shipped and I put it between two note cards, and oh my gosh these note cards looked so basic. I had a couple of my friends take them and I said “here, run around with these and try them out, and see how you feel about it.” They loved it, they were just like the card doesn’t look that great. I said don't worry I just want to make sure it worked. Bringing it back to the thing before, I could have worked on the design, I got to make the perfect, I got to make the card look good, oh no I can’t give it to anyone just yet. Screw that, I made it even with two paper cards wrapping a chip in it, let's do it, here you go, here you go, here you go, and they came back a lot faster with results than I could have done on my own. So they came back with feedback and all I did was take it, fix it, and create perfection just doing it. Just like the pottery story where I made a bunch, I learned from it and I just made the perfect one. Now it's a card and has a specific design to the card where it's actually nicely handled for the hand as well as easy tap and it's waterproof and is well it is able to be traveled anywhere with ease and I can be running, I can be in a business meeting, I could be in the kitchen, I could be with friends at college, I could be anywhere I am and tap anyone's phone: Android, iPhone, Samsung, any phone, it can literally share this information and it's not attached to an app. So the reason why is because the apps now carry a lot of weight in your phone, so to be much more savvy for your space on your phone I didn't want to make a heavy app for it. So I had it link with your web provider so it can easily be found, saved, without storing any gigabytes or weight to your phone. So you wouldn’t lose memory. We make it so much easier in all aspects for the environment, for the person, for the phone and it really is able to share your information a lot quicker and especially with this pandemic happening we don't really want to take things from people in our hands and have it stored in our pocket and forget it and all the sudden it’s passed on spreading. Instead you just tap the phone with your card and boom. It’s very easy, very simple, and on top of that the card right now is only a one-time payment for $29.99 on the website MeetMeCard.com. You literally can design your logo on it and have any logo you want on it, your business logo you like, and on the back of it for example if your phone is not working and you have an older model phone we instead also have on the back a QR code so people can scan it. So there's many different ways to have the information be transferred and there's just a way to make it easy for people and just easy for the user to share the information. Like I went to recently, I went to go out to eat with a couple of friends and somebody saw one of my friends and was “hey,” they caught up, but they don't have either of our phone numbers. I said that's no problem, I just pulled out my card, told them to pull out their phone, and I just tapped their phone. You should see the face they had, their eyes widened, their minds were blown, they were impressed, and they were like “what is that?” because it's new technology and it’s really solving an issue here. We just solved the problem that she didn't have my phone or my friend's phone number. So easily she was able to have my phone number, my email, my website, just by a touch. It ended up that she worked for Allstate and now they're ordering from us as well.

Mike (47:46)  I could imagine that I was meeting someone, professional contact or personally, and you know I'm out there. I'm up putting stuff out on LinkedIn, my website, Instagram, all that stuff, but it's all different handles, different names, instead of just bothering someone for a long time to add me here at this, add me here at this, it's all in one unique place that makes it easy to transfer and access. Unrelated to the card, I know there’s a story that Steve Jobs cared so much about what the inside of the Mac computers look like and I got my card you sent it in the mail, inside the package is an envelope and there was an old-fashioned wax seal that I thought was just such an incredible touch that I can't say I've ever received anything in a sealed envelope like that before.

Chris (48:54) We wanted to design it so that when you receive it, the card, it's not just boom you got your card. Not at all. It's from reading books and learning from different people, learning from the great ones, the goats of our generations and past, that you can understand where you have to take some value in. So just throwing you a card wasn’t an idea and just saying hey let me have your money. No, that's never the focus for me. It was always: how is your experience when you receive it? How is your experience when you use it, and how is the experience forever towards the environment around you? So when you receive it you definitely get a card with wax seal on it because who doesn't love that? You get a wedding invitation and you're always freaked out. We really try to aim for that kind of perspective where it’s designed to really made you feel not just on the outside also the inside so when you open it you have a design you have a design that’s customized for you, specifically for you, and we also attach a video along with it so that we can welcome you with it. So if you’re not hit by the first gate you’re hit by the second one and we hope to make it always pleasurable but also efficient for the person, whoever is able to join us on this journey. 

Mike (50:20) The user experience was incredibly well thought-out and designed. I want to wrap up here with the question synonymous with the podcast. It could be related to this business, it could be related to anything you're up to personally. If you had a 25th hour in a day to use for some for personal development...maybe you do want to watch Netflix with an extra hour, maybe the benefits of that outweigh the costs. What would be your ideal use of an extra hour?

Chris (50:55) I always wish for that extra hour. I make it sometimes, but I would say I’d divvy it up. There’s the saying not to put all your eggs in one basket. So for me I would divvy it up to be partial continue learning or partial application, and also pleasure. Literally I can tell you that with all the studying and all the reading it's not all about that only. You have to remember that you have to reward yourself when you're done doing the hard work. Whenever I finish a section of my business and I finished, like for example, something with the chip I needed to fix. Boom, after I fixed it I was so happy, I had to reward myself. So I then either enjoyed a good movie, I either played a great video game that I love, or I danced. I love dancing, and that's one of the things you have to reward yourself. So I got to say that with all this stuff and it's not to really burden people to feel like you got to do better. It's also the fact that yes, do better, but also remember that the reason why you’re doing better is to reward yourself. So if you don't reward yourself, you won't understand why you're doing it and you start feeding away with that feeling like I'm just doing this, and it's like whatever. I don't care about it anymore. I don't want to do this anymore. That is one of the biggest things. The reward is there to set the tone to say you're going for it you're doing great keep on going, because I learned from the rich people who I used to live with. I used to live with really wealthy people in North Carolina with one of my mentors and they taught me that whenever we did a deal they bought themselves for them when the pleasures on their rewards was to buy themselves a Range Rover or to buy a new horse. And your level goes up as you keep on going, to have an evening out for yourself. So to add it back to what I would do for an extra hour: I would split it between two things. I’d actually split that hour in half and say half an hour to just try something for fun and apply for my business and then the other half to reward myself for doing all these great things. You got to remember that we're in this because we want something in the future. But if you don't ever taste that future, little by little, we're going to forget the taste, and we're not going to remember what we're doing it for, and we're just creating a regular day job for us, and we need to remember that that hour, that extra hour, is very important for us to choose what we want in life. 

Mike (53:33) I knew you’d come up with a very very interesting answer and I have no clue where you were going to go with that. I'm going to thoroughly enjoyed going back through all the things you were talking about it and I'll have to add if there are applicable articles and stuff to the notes where people can find them. I just want to thank you again for the card, find it at MeetMeCard.com, and all the incredible insights you share today, and for me having the opportunity to learn from you and seeing you take on all these new interesting things. It's been a great experience.

Chris (54:12) I really appreciate this time thank you so much I really had a great time talking to you and I and whoever comes on next is going to keep on enjoying your podcast.