Joy Powers Innovation

Are you an entrepreneur struggling to validate your business idea? In this enlightening episode, Kevin Surace, holder of 94 patents and pioneering inventor, reveals why many startups fail by creating solutions without real market demand. Drawing from his experience developing billion-pound product lines like Quiet Rock soundproof drywall, Surace shares invaluable insights on identifying genuine customer pain points and ensuring your target market has the means to pay.
Beyond practical business strategies, Surace introduces his transformative "one complaint per day" philosophy from his upcoming book "Joy Equals Success". He explains how limiting negative thoughts creates mental space for innovation and growth. The conversation explores essential marketing metrics, the five-step Dale Carnegie sales process, and why successful companies often pivot through five business models before finding their winning formula.
Whether you're launching a startup or scaling an existing venture, this episode delivers actionable wisdom for building sustainable success.

Recommended Read: Reid Hoffman's book on AI (featuring conversations with ChatGPT) Copy

Everyday AI: Your daily guide to grown with Generative AI
Can't keep up with AI? We've got you. Everyday AI helps you keep up and get ahead.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Free - Quizzes, Calculators And Forms
OutGrow - Quizzes, Calculators And Forms - over 21 industry vertical templates.

Designrr.io Creates eBooks & Leadmagnets
Transform content into eBooks, Show Notes, Dynamic Flipbooks, Transcripts, PDFs and Web pages.

Kajabi Course Platform Kickstarter!
Get the foundations you need to start your online business On Kajabi For $69/mo.

Turn text to video, in minutes.
Create studio-quality videos with AI avatars and voiceovers in 130+ languages.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Chapters

• 10:32 [Ad] Everyday AI: Your daily guide to grown with Generative AI
• 11:19 (Cont.) Joy Powers Innovation

Transcript

Jim James (00:00)
Do you know that there is joy in everything? It's not always joy from success, but there is joy in everything. And my guest today is going to tell us about how you can find joy in everything, but not before he's told us about an amazing career as an entrepreneur, as a keynote speaker, and as the father of the virtual assistant. My guest today is Kevin Surace who's joining us from Rochester, New York. Kevin, walk to the show.

Kevin Surace (00:29)
Thanks for having me, Jim.

Jim James (00:30)
It's my pleasure and I'm fascinated because you have one of those careers that seems kind of written in the stars. I mean, you've got a picture of Ink Magazine behind you, you've got trophies, you've got 94 patents. Kevin, I'm delighted to have you on the show and we've got a little while for you to share with us a little bit about what you're doing now in terms of business. And then we're going to talk about some of the strategies that you know about how entrepreneurs can get noticed on a lean budget.

And we're going talk about Your Joy is Success, your new book. So introduce yourself first, please, better than I've done, I'm sure. And then we'll dive into some questions for you.

Kevin Surace (01:10)
Well, sure, sure. I'd to look. I'm an inventor. And when I say that, I hope that my inventions bring joy to people and change people's lives. And what I have tried to do, not always successfully, but I've tried to do is probably the core to any good startup, any good business, any good small business that wants to grow is go solve a pain point that people actually have that they're willing to pay money to solve. Because I have seen,

we have seen so many entrepreneurs that have an unbelievable solution. There's no pain point for it. They're looking for a pain point, right? But it's a really cool thing. I've created a hat that's blue. Did someone have a pain point saying I can't live without blue hats, right? For example, so I think I'm currently involved in a company in the software quality assurance space that's using AI to find all of our software bugs for us with

Jim James (01:48)
You

Kevin Surace (02:09)
basically no human intervention. I'm involved in a startup that is solving the ransomware problem by creating a ring that you wear and that ring is tied to your finger and it's a biometric ring. And so you will not be able to gain access to any important applications or networks without that ring on your finger with your fingerprint tapping it when it's time to log in. And it turns out the reason that's important is cyber

criminals with ransomware nine times out of ten get in using your credentials including stealing your MFA stealing your codes on your phone and things like that people don't want to hear that but that's the truth right?

Jim James (02:52)
Yeah, MFA is multi-factor authentication, isn't it?

Kevin Surace (02:55)
That's right. That's right. So that's very easy to steal. We could spend an hour. I could teach everyone here how to steal Jim James's MFA codes to get into his Riverside. You know, so, so those are the things I'm involved with right now. I do, you know, 40, 50 keynotes a year around the world on joy equals success and artificial intelligence and disruptive innovation, starting companies. So, and I'm working on a book called joy equals success. So I've been

busy and I'm still inventing. I've got another patent that we're working on right now. So very exciting.

Jim James (03:29)
It was amazing. Just to be clear, Kevin will also share his contact details at the end, it's Appvance is one of the companies and Token Ring is the other company that he's talking about. Because this show really tries to focus on how to get noticed and the challenges of that for entrepreneurs, you've identified the old problem, is entrepreneurs invent something, then look for a problem that it can solve. Why do you think that is, Kevin?

I mean, let's just deal with that first. Why do people invent things without having the customer in place first?

Kevin Surace (04:06)
Yeah, it's a very good question because they think it's really cool. It's that simple, right? I think this is so cool and I shared it with my friend and he thinks it's cool or she thinks it's cool. And so we're going to go out and build a company around this cool thing. Okay, interesting. Did you ask any of the potential customers, one, is it something that solves a real pain point for them? A real pain point? Two, would they be willing to pay for it? So the other mistake I see is people

creating interesting technologies or interesting offerings or interesting service offerings to a group of individuals that have no money. So, you know, one of the tricks in a successful business is create a product or service that solves a real pain point for people with millions of dollars. I'm being a little facetious, but you get my point because people who have a lot of money or companies who have a lot of money can spend some of it on your solution.

Jim James (04:51)
Yeah.

Kevin Surace (04:59)
But if you solve world hunger, which I do want to solve, it's very important. That's a great thing for governments or churches or whatever, or nonprofits. But there's a reason nonprofits do that because there's no profit and there's no one to pay you. don't have any food because they have no money and they don't have any money because of infrastructure and all those things. So, you know, try to solve problems for people who can pay you because you're going to need that money

Jim James (05:12)
Yeah.

Kevin Surace (05:28)
in marketing and sales to grow your business.

Jim James (05:31)
So first of all, then we need to be listening to the market. So at what stage then does one decide to go and find out if there's a market? Because we've all invented things. I mean, I've started businesses in different parts of the world as well, some of which have been successful and some less so. At what stage do you take an idea, Kevin, and validate it? Or do you wait? Okay, right.

Kevin Surace (05:56)
0.1. Not even one. I mean, it's the first thing you want to do is find potential customers and listen to their feedback. Do they have a real pain point? Now, I will tell you this though. Customers don't design products or services. They don't. So you will go to them and sometimes they'll go, that won't work. That's impossible. Why would you do that? Hang on. Do you have a pain point? I really do. And I'm going to give you a direct example. So

when I started a company called Sirius Materials, now 20 plus years ago, we worked on at first a soundproof drywall that today is the standard way to build hotels and condominiums and townhomes and theaters and everything else, right? And it's called Quiet Rock and it became the standard. It's a billion dollar product line. Well, I invented that literally with a mixer and reading all kinds of background on things like viscoelastic polymer,

and learning how constrained layer damping could work and all these techniques. The reason I did it is customers were calling, we had a coding that went on cars and customers were calling potential customers and saying, can I put that on my walls? Well, no, but why are you asking that? Well, we just got sued from this homeowners association because of everyone can hear each other next door. We got sued from a hotel because everyone can hear it. I go, well, when you hear that five or six or seven or ten times, you go,

this is interesting. You're getting sued for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. And I go, well, how do you feel about that? Well, insurance covers it sometimes. It doesn't cover it other times. I never want to go to court for six weeks again and have to defend the way I built it that I thought was right. I didn't know better. So I said, what would happen if I, if we had a soundproof drywall? And, of course everybody said they would want it. Now the cost of soundproof drywall,

at the time was about 10x that of regular drywall. 10 times. But it kept you from getting sued. So you had to get that into the cost of the project or do it the old way that actually doesn't work. Right? So, so that did take some time for people to, to, get to it. And I did hire a couple of contract consultants, sorry, in the drywall business, which I wasn't a complete expert in at that time.

And both of those consultants said, this is $50 a panel instead of, you know, five or 10 for a regular piece of drywall. No one's going to buy it. Those were the consultants. But when I talked to the actual customers and you actually did an analysis on what they were spending on labor anyway, labor was the big cost. The material wasn't much cost anyway. So in the end, it's a billion dollar product line. It's huge. It's used everywhere. And there was a real pain point, which is we get sued and people hate noise, you know, next door.

Jim James (08:46)
And Kevin, I think what you've also, what you have said there is, think, a very key point that you go and listen for the pain point, not for the product definition. And, you know, think often we think, I've got to build a product so customers can understand what I'm building. And we're sort of trying to sell them what we've built as opposed to listening to the problem. And they may not have the solution in their own mind.

Kevin Surace (08:46)
So early on.

That's for sure.

Jim James (09:14)
And that's not actually what we're trying to find from them, right? I think as opposed to.

Kevin Surace (09:17)
Right. You cannot ask the customer to build a solution for you because if you could, then they'd be working for you. Steve Jobs never went out and asked the customer, they want an iPhone? What he did do is recognize that when people were driving or doing other things, they wish they wouldn't. It'd be nice if you had access to your email right now, just standing up. That'd be great. Well, how about your voicemail? Well, you know, and just how about could you look up something on the web? Well, that'd be

it's 1997, right? That'd be very interesting. So, or 2007 at that point. You know, finding the actual pain points was what was interesting. He never said to anyone, how about a phone that does all these things? Cause nobody could imagine what it would have looked like, how it would have worked. He needed to take his product people and envision that and himself, right? But there was a real pain point that he saw and Steve was phenomenal at seeing there is a pain point.

And we're going to have, we're hired to solve that, right? We're hired to solve that pain point. And if we solve it, people will come,

Jim James (10:21)
which point is it fair to say that one of the key attributes of a successful entrepreneur is that they're observant, curious, but also observant, right, as much as being innovators.

Kevin Surace (10:28)
Ears.

Yeah, sure. There's a great book just on the curiosity factor of entrepreneurs and the more curious you are, the more interested you are in solving real problems, the more interested you are in what people have to say about solving those problems. You know, you're using your ears a lot. And I think that a lot of entrepreneurs, sometimes myself, certainly in this interview, we tend to use our mouth, but when we use our mouth, we're not learning anything other than what we already know. So we have to listen and we have to not

argue with them. They're telling you, this isn't quite right about this product. This isn't, I really don't have that pain point. You and I talked about this at an earlier time, which is in Silicon Valley, we still say that when you start a company, it'll be your fifth business model within that company that is probably the one that's successful. And the unsuccessful companies are usually the entrepreneurs who hang onto their first model and they insist they're right and they simply run out of money.

And companies only die for one reason. People know it's marketing and sales. No, they just run out of money. There's only one reason. Cause if you still had money, you'd try something else. So don't run out of money.

Jim James (11:41)
Yeah, and I think it's Annie Duke, isn't it, who's written that book, Quit, which is great. And reading that and this whole idea of if you don't get to the summit of Himalayas by 11 o'clock, you need to turn back. And it's always very hard as an entrepreneur to know how close to 11 o'clock do you push it, right? And when you, as you say, you really need to follow some guidelines. But Kevin, then let's assume that you have done some listening.

Kevin Surace (11:46)
Yeah.

Jim James (12:09)
And in any of these companies like advance, example, or token ring, which sounds very interesting and also very innovative. Also would I think have some, some sort of user anxiety, maybe, you know, because if I lose my ring, I'm even more in trouble. What, what do you recommend to entrepreneurs then in terms of the marketing? Because it's, it's a fine line, isn't it? Between engaging the audience

and finding what they're saying and going back and going, well, I need to rebuild and saying, actually I've listened and this is right, but I need to convince people or educate people on how to use it, which is this kind of crux of crossing the chasm, isn't it?

Kevin Surace (12:53)
I mean, look, you were in the marketing business for many years. It's changed in some good ways because we can, any of us, can reach a billion people on the web if that's what we want to do. You need money and you need to be on the right platform and et cetera, et cetera. The Tik-Tok-ification of advertising is happening right before our eyes. There's no question. It's changing the way we reach people. It's changing how we use influencers to reach people.

But in the end, you have to get your message in front of people and that becomes a marketing qualified lead, which just says that marketing brought it in. And we're not sure if it's qualified to move to sales, but we're sure that someone brought you some lead came in. We don't know if they have money yet. We don't know anything. We just know lead showed up. Of course you use every social media network. You use Google. You use everything you can to reach as much audience as you can.

And the smart people are measuring that on a daily basis. You know, lot of mistakes made in marketing, which I have also made. The biggest mistake is you're not measuring every 24 hours, which means you can go weeks of spending crazy amounts of money that generated no sales qualified leads, no truly qualified leads that you can take through the sales cycle, right? They're just junk. They want things for free or they don't understand the business or whatever it is or your service or your product.

So it is critical that you measure the results all the way through at least sales qualified lead and ideally in time all the way through contract one, whatever that is, right? Someone bought something for you, whether it's a dollar, whether it's a million dollars, someone bought something. And so where did those leads come from? Did they come from conferences? Did they come from Google? Did they come from TikTok? Did they come from Facebook? Did they come from LinkedIn? LinkedIn is a great source of leads if you target right and use it correctly.

So, so you want to look at all of those. I'm not here to tell you which ones of those work for you. It depends on your product or service. Just measure every day. And the people who don't measure every day, and I've had so much pushback. I was on the board of a company once and the CEO said, we're not going to measure every day, but we'll take a look at it in a month. I said, you're not, this isn't good. They're probably not the right person to run this company, right. Because we got to measure every day so that we can put more money into the things that are working and less money into the things that aren't.

And by the way, that shifts over time. You know, this particular ad may be working better over here. And so I'm going to boost that on Facebook and this particular thing is working better on LinkedIn, whatever it is, right? Please do it. Measure it daily. All the tools are there to do that today. And you will drive a successful campaign if indeed you have product market fit, meaning that there's people who have a pain point. They happen to have money. They saw your ad or social or video or whatever it was

and they're willing to spend the money with you, right? That's given.

Jim James (15:47)
Kevin, what would you recommend for measurement? Obviously we've got some tools like Google Analytics. Are you suggesting those or I've had the founder of a company called Funalytics, which is tracking all of your different channels to market. What do you recommend?

Kevin Surace (16:02)
Right, right, Like a Fun Analytics, there's several of these companies that will track all of them. Obviously Google Analytics is excellent, but can't tell you things about LinkedIn or can't tell you things about Facebook, right? So you're going to want to track all of those. It may be different tools and maybe they're built-in tools or you may get one overall tool that gives you a dashboard. And if you had that dashboard every morning, you'd say, I spent $1,500 on LinkedIn yesterday. I got,

you know, X number of marketing qualified leads. Some of those moved to sales qualified. You can start to follow that down the funnel. Right. And then I spent, you know, $300 over here and I got far more. So what's the return on that investment? And you want to calculate your ROI. Right. So what is the cost per lead? As you know, it's, you know, lifetime value of customer over cost of acquisition. So LTV over CAC, right? So what's my lifetime value of the customer?

Are they going to buy once? Are they going to buy forever? Is it a monthly subscription? What is it? So I've got a lifetime value in profit, and then I've got a cost of acquisition. And I'd like to see those ratios at 10x because I've got a real business there. I talked to a lot of people, one, they don't know what the ratio is, two, they have no idea what the cost of acquisition is. You know, your real cost of acquisition isn't just the marketing dollars you spent. It's the marketing person who's managing that. It might be the salespeople that the calls are going to come into.

So it's all of sales and marketing budget, including salaries and overhead. That's your cost of acquiring customers. So if you spend a million dollars and you acquire 10 customers this year, that's $100,000 CAC. And if you're charging $3,000 for your service, you're dead, right? It costs you $100,000 to get a customer and you only get $3,000 from them and they never buy again. That's a disaster, right?

So if you're spending $100,000 to get a customer, that's fine as long as you're charging a couple hundred thousand a year and you're going to keep them for three to five years. That's how you got to start thinking about LTV over CAC. And how many people I run into, have no idea what these terms have been around for 20 years, but they don't have any concept of this is how I measure and I measure daily.

Jim James (18:11)
I think as you say, Kevin, that most people, including me, we're so busy thinking about engaging in social media, thinking about maybe cashflow product development, that the hard part, I suppose, a bit like accounting gets left to month end, end of quarter, end of year. The ship is sailing without really checking on the navigation, as you say, every day or every hour. It's possible now, isn't it?

With a company like Token Ring, what is your marketing strategy to get across the chasm? I'd love to hear from you how you're going to introduce this new security device.

Kevin Surace (18:53)
So token ring only sells to enterprises. They have to be large enterprises that can buy more than 10,000 rings, rough number, right? And some can buy a hundred thousand rings. So, so our cost of acquisition is immaterial because they're going to buy millions of dollars product. And, and, and, and so the target is, CISOs. Those are the heads of security in companies and, and, or CIOs and,

and the cost of ransomware to them on an annual basis is in the sometimes tens of millions of dollars, if not more, let alone brand equity and all of those other things. And so this is a very inexpensive way to protect the access to their networks where Russia, China, anyone else cannot get in if they didn't have your ring and they don't have your ring. They don't have your ring. It only works with your ring and you can't, you know, so they can't get in.

So it literally comes up on the screen and says, you know, tap your ring, put your thing at I'm done. And it's compatible with everything from Microsoft products, the Oracle products to SAP, to all of the major platforms already. So, so very targeted marketing, right? I only want to talk to CISOs or the director or VP of security below them. That's it.

Jim James (20:08)
I think what you've also hit on, which is fantastic to illustrate that is that a sales strategy doesn't have to be social media and broad. For example, in B2B, you've identified like the gateway, which is a relatively small number of people who make a decision on behalf of a large organization. So your acquisition cost is relatively small because they can be profiled on LinkedIn, for example. And I think we often get into the mindset at the moment of

Kevin Surace (20:33)
That's right. That's right.

Jim James (20:38)
the need to do social media almost for B2B and B2C. But what was great is you just highlighted that the sales channel, if you think about it carefully, can be much more efficient than that as well.

Kevin Surace (20:53)
It depends on your product, right? If you can sell to a C-level exec and they have the authority to buy millions of dollars of product, that's where you should focus. You you notice I never said consumers on Token Ring. It's not that it wouldn't offer tremendous benefit to consumers. It's just my cost of acquisition probably outweighs what I'm going to get from them. That is not a really good channel. They do have the problem, but you know, ransomware people don't really hold consumers

Jim James (20:56)
Yeah.

Kevin Surace (21:23)
much for ransom because they can't pay much, maybe $100. So go to companies, banks, healthcare, insurance, sometimes retail, that have tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to lose every year if they don't close this door that is wide open. Two years ago, they rolled out MFA, either with an app or a code that comes to your phone. 100% of those are hacked today, quite easy to hack. You actually hire a

an access broker to hack it for you and then they turn it over. And so what they rolled out and said, this will protect us doesn't protect them at all. And so they've got a real problem.

Jim James (22:01)
scary isn't it? Yeah, I used to have a client F5, F5 networks that does security, you probably know them as well and introduced them to the media in Singapore and listening to the volume and the violence of these attacks was pretty alarming. But in the context of our conversation, I think also what's really key for me and anyone listening is identify a real pain point that has effective demand, right? Not just something that you think other people need

Kevin Surace (22:26)
Mm-hmm.

Jim James (22:31)
that you might like yourself and solve that. That isn't necessarily a great business, right? In terms of rolling out for you this business, you've got multiple businesses. How do you decide the different strategy per business or do you try and find the same kind of company with the same kind of problem? And if you like, bring in B2B, high tech.

Kevin Surace (22:38)
That's right.

Jim James (23:00)
solutions just in different markets.

Kevin Surace (23:03)
Yeah, look, look, look, I've worked in consumer, I've worked in, in B2B and, you know, you have to bring in experts who have done that. You want to hire the best people you can that have already done that before. Right. If you're a retail organization, you don't want to, you want to bring in people who've done retail successfully before and advertise retail successfully before and built retail ads because they've just got 20 or 30 years experience doing so. And even though the

avenues of change that we're going to advertise across the concepts are similar. When it comes to the sales cycle, the sales process, I have a process I followed for since I, early in my career, I taught a version of the Dale Carnegie sales course, which is five steps, open qualification, conviction, objection, close. And you can map those a bit to your own business, but people make this mistake all the time and skip some of these steps.

They talk to someone and try to go for a close, for example. And that's because they're not trained in the sales process. And you will go through this sales process if you want to close accounts that are of any value. You just will. You're going to open, hi, how are you? Qualify. So that's the discovery process, right? We have this thing, you have some needs, do they match? Right? And I need to understand your needs and your pain points.

Because you came to me because I'm the doctor in this particular case, right? And so if I was a doctor and you came to me and I said, Hey, I'm not going to ask you any questions, but I'm going to treat your headache. And you go, but it's my knee that hurts. Well, I'm going to treat your headache. So the point is you have to have this discovery call in this discovery period where we're just asking you questions about your pain points. What's working. Salespeople hate this. They don't want to ask this. What's working for you? What are you using today?

And finally, why did you even call us? Like, why did you even show up at our doorstep? Is there some reason just to kick the tires or you just, they go, no, you know, we it's velocity can't go fast enough. Okay. So you're in trouble because you can't go fast enough, can't find the bugs fast enough, for example, maybe, or you can't. Okay. Now we can talk about what the next steps are. And the next step might be a demo that's targeted to that just to show them how we do that.

The step after that is going to be make sure that we understand what their budget is. Does it fit what we have? In all of these businesses, you're going to get people who come in and say, I really want what you have. I don't have any budget right now, but if I can use it for free for a while, hang up. There's no business there, right? I got to be nice to them. No, they have no money. Move on. You're in business to make money. Don't be rude, but time to move on, right? So do they have a budget? Finally, you

can do proof of concepts, proof of values, things like that. And then finally you win the contract. And when you follow this cycle, you will follow a process that gets you to win more than 90% of the time. So it's amazing when you don't follow the process, the close ratios are terrible. You know, almost never close anything. It's really fascinating.

Jim James (26:11)
I must put that five-stage methodology into the show notes. Kevin, you've had a lot of success with developing new products yourself, building companies now as an investor as well, but also as an author. I know you've got a new book, Joy Equals Success. Let's just talk about the book and how that maps onto, if you like, the entrepreneur and how they run their business because it's great we've gone through the tactical and practical steps.

We also need nourishing, don't we, as individuals, right?

Kevin Surace (26:44)
Well, it's everything about how you run your business. And this book and this talk came out of people asking me, how do you have 94 global patents? How did you do that? How do you solve all these different problems in different industries? And by the way, why are you so seemingly joyful all the time? And I started to put that together and I said, actually they're related because when you look at your day, most humans,

bias towards the negativity. And what I mean by that is you get up first thing in the morning, go, my knees hurt. It's raining, the milk is spoiled. I'm just, you know, and then they get to their business and they go, this didn't work. We lost that. Okay. I'm going to ask your listeners to do one thing. Start counting the number of either negative thoughts, internal or external complaints

that you have throughout a day. I guarantee you when you start counting it, it's going to be over a hundred. You've had a hundred complaints, internal or external, some of them you shared to people, probably half. By the end of the day, you passed a hundred. Some people, maybe it's 200, some people maybe it's 85, but it's in that range. And now I want to challenge you and say, your new goal is one. You get one complaint a day. One, you can still have one.

It's the only one. So if you get out of bed and go, my knee hurts. You're all done for the day. And it puts you in a mindset that says, now, every single thing I do, I have to find joy in doing it. So I like to make lists. And when I make my lists, there's hard things on that list. There's terrible things to do on that list. But I always just look at it as it's a huge joy to check something off the list. It's no matter how bad the task was, including firing someone, it is more joyful

to check it off the list because it has to be done to move my business forward. So you got to talk to a customer that's angry. Don't look at that as, I don't want to do this. Yes, you do. Because this is the pathway to success. This is the pathway to perhaps saving that client, perhaps deciding that they are not a fit for your business, whatever the case is. But you got to go through that step and there's great joy in getting through the step. And now when everything you do, you look at, you look at

as something that brings me joy. Now you have all of this open head space to invent and listen and be curious where if you were negative all day, you've eaten it all away. You're in a downward spiral.

Jim James (29:19)
Kevin, that's a wonderful mindset. I don't know whether we're allowed, because I'm in Britain, we're allowed two negative thoughts because in Britain, we're quite good at being pessimists. Let's also just think about, that's a wonderful book. I'm looking forward to reading that. And let's just also just think about one tip that you'd give us, or would that be related to the book? One tip for all of us.

Kevin Surace (29:44)
You know, I mean, we talked about a lot of things, but one tip as an entrepreneur, well, there, there are many, right? But, but clearly job one is to make sure that your business is solving a real pain point for someone who has money to spend. Listen to all those words, not someone who doesn't have money, not, not just yourself. You're to buy your own product and not going to, that's not a business, right? And if it doesn't

match, if that doesn't have that kind of product market fit, it's okay. Cause you have four more shots at this before you're just at the average of five business models before you hit your successful one. And if you stop at the first one, I, unless you get very, very, very, very lucky, you're probably going to fail. And so get that out of your head, be curious about what the next model is. A Slack, many people know what Slack is. It's a

you know, messaging platform for work basically. And, their business model was a gaming platform. They had games. Nobody was playing their games, but they had this little chat thing on the side that people were interacting with. And so before closing the company, they said, well, maybe we'll just improve that and try to sell that. And the thing took off, right? It was, it was their fifth or sixth or seventh business model, right? It's not even a business model. They understood.

But the customers were saying, we like this, we hate your games, right? This is important, important to listen to and important to hear. So it's okay to have five different business models, even if it's in one year.

Jim James (31:20)
Wonderful. As long as you manage to keep cash throughout the year. That's your other moral of the story, isn't it? Kevin Surace, if I was to ask you for a book or podcast that you'd recommend, what would that be?

Kevin Surace (31:33)
My goodness. there are so many, you know, if you haven't spent a lot of time in the AI space and I spend a lot of the time, a lot of my time in AI continuing to invent, think that Reid Hoffman's more recent book, the title escapes me for the second, but Reid Hoffman's more recent book on AI where he used chat GPT back and forth to write a lot of the book is just inspiring and it's interesting and it's interesting to see

where this technology is going to go over the next five to 10 years. So I think that's kind of mind opening to people who may not spend all their time in AI.

Jim James (32:11)
that Reid Hoffman from the LinkedIn founder, I think is that right? Yeah, okay, perfect. Just for anyone that wasn't sure. And finally, Kevin, Kevin Surace, if you want to find you to listen more maybe about soundproofing their walls or about AI or about joy or any of these topics, how can they do that?

Kevin Surace (32:14)
Yes, yes.

Or the energy retrofit of the Empire State Building, which I did, and the New York Stock Exchange. We can go on. It's just kevinsurace.com. And that's my speaking website, a lot of data there, and has my LinkedIn. And I do answer my LinkedIn messages. So one can get to me. And there's a form on there you can fill out and request me and all of those things.

Jim James (32:47)
Kevin Surace I'm glad that we've been able to get to you and get you to come on the show. Thanks so much for joining us. We could have, as we said before we started recording, have a whole day, but I know how busy you are. So thank you for sharing your time and your thoughts with us.

Kevin Surace (33:00)
Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Jim James (33:02)
So we listened to Kevin Surace, multiple patent holder, inventor, investor, and author too. So, so much to take away from that, but I think one of the really key points for me is to find a business that people want to pay you to run, find a problem that actually is real and that there are companies or individuals that will pay you to fix for them. Because without that, you've just got an idea. So I think that the idea of making sure you're building something someone else is going to pay for,

kind of elementary, but so many of us don't build our businesses that way. So thank you to Kevin and thank you to you for joining me, Jim James, as always on this episode of the UnNoticed Entrepreneur. If you've enjoyed it, do please review it and share it with a fellow UnNoticed Entrepreneur because we don't want anyone to go unnoticed. Until we meet again, just keep on communicating.