What tips do you have for early entrepreneurs?
For early entrepreneurs, I mean, we're all still learning.
No one's a master entrepreneur.
It's a journey of a lifetime.
But I'd say things if I look back would just be to embrace curiosity.
Don't be afraid of change.
Don't be afraid to try something new,
even if you don't think you're an expert at it.
Learn as much as you can,
listen to as much as you can,
put yourself in front of content and people that create content in your area of expertise.
Just really just soak up things like a sponge.
It's a game of trial and error and you learn constantly as you go.
It's like flying the airplane as you're in the air.
You know, you can't know everything.
But have a bit of strategy at the same time.
Don't just jump all around the place.
Have a little bit of a strategy and follow it before you start changing too much.
Along those lines, Darren, what has worked for you from the tips that you just gave us?
What has worked for you and what hasn't worked for you?
I'd say everything, everything that I've just said.
I mean, that's kind of my motto is I try and do all that.
I try to, if I think there's something in an idea,
I'll keep working that idea for a long time before I really change
because I know that my gut tells me that there's something in it.
If the market tells me there's something in it,
if there's a bit of market data,
and then I just keep on learning and I keep on listening to podcasts and audio books
and reading material just to learn and then try and learn from the people that have done it before me.
And then you really just get an idea of what can be done and then you put your spin on it.
Like there's a great saying in the creative world, it was a book, actually.
I think it was a book called Steal Like an Artist.
And you have to borrow ideas and steal ideas from other people and then you make them your own.
You know, you put your spin on it.
So it's really just a combination of all those things and just keeping on positive and keeping on the journey.
That is awesome. Thank you for sharing that.
I want to go and add on to this a little bit more and ask you a different question.
It takes a lot of humility and leadership skills to express what hasn't worked for you,
what failures have occurred while you're trying to do.
Would you share some of the things that you tried or some of the things or perspectives or skills
that you thought you had that did not pan out in the way you thought it would and what lessons you learned from it?
Yeah, wow. I mean, it's hard for me to kind of pick one huge thing because I'm always doing so many things at the same time.
But I can honestly say that along the way, I'm constantly changing and tweaking ideas that aren't working.
Like, for example, a lot of digital marketing ads for me, Facebook ads haven't really been an amazing experience.
I haven't really got a lot of traction. So I'm working out with different things.
I'm playing around with Eventbrite ads, which work really well for me.
I just stumbled onto that and it works way better than Facebook ads.
So I'm always testing new ideas.
And if I'm not getting the response and the results that I'm getting, I'm coming up with another one.
But I'm staying on my general track, my general strategy.
I'm always chopping and changing in terms of small ideas along the way.
So I'm always changing and testing out new things. Some of them work, some of them don't work.
And even just in terms of digital marketing, for example, I might test a campaign that is exactly the same campaign with a few different pictures.
And all of a sudden, the one combination of a picture and content or copy hits and all the rest of them don't work.
So you just don't know.
So it's really just a constant game of testing.
But it's also about staying in your lane and not changing your whole strategy every time, not throwing away.
What's that saying? Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
You know, you can't go from being a digital marketer to a copywriter to an AI expert to a...
You've got to stay in your lane if you think there's something in there.
But just keep testing new ideas until you find the one that works for you.
And you're going to have lots of failing along the way.
Eventually, you'll find the one that cracks and you just keep on running with it until it doesn't work.
And you're going to find another one.