Ryan Waier is the Founder and CEO of OBCIDIO. He is on a mission to disrupt how professionals solve problems, share content, and forge stronger relationships through social communities.
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Resource Mentioned:
- Your Big Idea: Successful Entrepreneurs have One Big Idea. Follow JLD’s FREE training & you’ll discover Your Big Idea in less than an hour!
Success Quote
- “Champions are made when no one is looking.” – Apolo Anton Ohno.
Business Failure
- Ryan is creating something very special with OBCIDIO, but with greatness comes great failures. Ryan opens up and shares some great stories on this topic.
Entrepreneurial AHA Moment
- Ryan is so generous with his openness and honesty. This moment does so much to define the type of Entrepreneur Ryan is now and forever will be.
Current Business
- OBCIDIO is taking the best aspects of multiple social media platforms and putting them all in one place. The wave of the future.
Small Business Resource
- HootSuite: Social Media Management Dashboard.
Best Business Book
- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.
Interview Links
Killer Resources!
1) The Common Path to Uncommon Success: JLD’s 1st traditionally published book! Over 3000 interviews with the world’s most successful Entrepreneurs compiled into a 17-step roadmap to financial freedom and fulfillment!
2) Free Podcast Course: Learn from JLD how to create and launch your podcast!
3) Podcasters’ Paradise: The #1 podcasting community in the world!
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Full Transcript
John Lee Dumas: Hire Fire Nation and thank you for joining me for another episode of EntrepreneurOnFire.com, your daily dose of inspiration. If you enjoy this free podcast, please show your support by leaving a rating and review here at iTunes. I will make sure to give you a shout out on an upcoming showing to thank you!
John Lee Dumas: Okay. Let’s get started. I am simply ecstatic to introduce my guest today, Ryan Waier. Ryan, are you prepared to ignite?
Ryan Waier: Fire the cannons, John!
John Lee Dumas: [Laughs] Alright, man! Ryan is the founder and CEO of OBCIDIO. He is on a mission to disrupt how professionals solve problems, share content and forge stronger relationships through social communities.
I’ve given Fire Nation a little overview, Ryan, but why don’t you take it from here? Tell us a little bit about you personally, and then tell us about your business.
Ryan Waier: Yes. Well thanks, John. First of all, I just want to thank you for the opportunity, and to get into myself a little bit, I’ve been basically an entrepreneur for the last 15 years throughout different industries. I kind of started in the construction field. I currently still run or consult for construction companies throughout the United States. I got into basically this enterprise social software about 3 or 4 years ago, and it really came about with the need for the companies that I was running at the time. We were running multiple companies, we had multiple employees across multiple divisions, and at that time, I think it was actually MySpace was kind of the hot social network.
John Lee Dumas: Right.
Ryan Waier: Facebook came along later. But looking at the efficiencies of how it connects people, how people can communicate and how people can share, I kind of inked the first designs for OBCIDIO. So really, what I wanted to do at that time was create a platform that we could take the efficiencies of what some of these consumer sites like MySpace or Facebook were creating and add in a content management feature. So not only can you store files, do tasks and manage projects, but really use the thread of the communication and the content-sharing can benefit people across these divisions, pull out experts, allow people to solve problems and things like that.
Slowly, as we developed, we evolved in OBCIDIO into basically a mash-up of technologies. So best described, probably a mash-up of Facebook – it has a Facebook interface – and LinkedIn, which is a business network. Like I said, we actually add in content management features and project management features and things like that that makes us different, but OBCIDIO as a whole, how it starts in layman’s terms is different than a LinkedIn for business network in we really focus around communities and social communities, allowing people to create or plug in to these social communities that are on the site. And on the networking side, we try to get it to a regional or a local level. The power of somebody’s network is more in a regional area. If you’re on LinkedIn you might be making a lot of connections, but what are you doing? It’s kind of a static placeholder. You’re putting people in there and you’re coming back to them at some point, but you’re not actively networking with them.
So we wanted to create an active network on one side, but we also wanted to use these social collaboration tools, allowing people to create basically their own little private social networks. Anything from people on a regional level creating a social network for passing off referrals to. We have companies with hundreds of employees that use this as a communication content management and project management tool remotely for their work [games].
John Lee Dumas: Well, I love OBCIDIO. I use it every single day, and what really just got me from the very beginning was the types of level of engagement interaction that you have on this platform. It’s very Facebook-like, you’re right, but at the same time, it’s very businesslike. So I’m on there, I’m posting things that are relevant to entrepreneurs or relevant to my business in general, one or the other, and I’m getting real good engagement I’m just not finding on the other social networks. So that’s one reason that I keep coming back for more. I know you know, Ryan, how active I am on it. I’m really just a fan of OBCIDIO and I really look forward to delving more into that later on in this interview, but before we do, let’s move into the success quote. At EntrepreneurOnFire, we really like to start every show off with our guest’s favorite success quote to get that motivational ball rolling and to get people really pumped up for the content that you have for us today, Ryan. So what do you have for us today?
Ryan Waier: Sure. One of my favorite quotes is “Champions are made when nobody is watching.” This quote really revolves around – it’s kind of used a lot in athletics, but I think it applies to entrepreneurs because at the end of the day, it’s what you’re doing and what you’re putting in. As an entrepreneur, sometimes you feel isolated. Your friends, your family, most of my friends have 9 to 5s. They come home and they’re looking for something to do outside of work. Their weekends aren’t dedicated to work. I think it’s the discipline of putting in the time and putting in the effort. That’s kind of the motto that I live by. I think that what you do behind-the-scenes and what you put in is really what you’re going to get out, and if you want to be an entrepreneur, you better clear your schedule because there’s a lot of people that might be in love with being an entrepreneur or the idea of being an entrepreneur, but if you don’t love the work and you can’t put in the time behind-the-scenes, you’re never going to be successful at it.
John Lee Dumas: That is so true, Ryan. To correlate that with EntrepreneurOnFire, when I first launched my venture and was going out there and getting my mentors and coaches and people who had been in the podcasting or broadcasting world, I really got the same general feedback of, “John, you are really crazy! There’s no way you are going to be able to keep up a daily show, five days a week,” and I’ve now actually even turned it into a seven day a week show with my Question & Answer session on the weekends. I continue to get that feedback, but for me, it always came back to that word that you used, which was “discipline.” I learned discipline in the Army. I know what it means to just wake up early, to work hard, to maintain focus and to do it until the job is done, and then you reap the benefits of that work and of that work ethic later.
So I completely am on the same page to you, Ryan. I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. Take it down to the ground level now. Let us really see inside your life at OBCIDIO. How do you really apply this quote and this mentality to your everyday life?
Ryan Waier: Well, I think that’s what it’s all about. I think you hit the nail on the head. It’s consistency and discipline. I talk to people all the time and everybody has an idea, everybody wants to start a business. Really, what I do on a daily basis is I’m a creature of habit. I do the same things every day. Now unfortunately, I don’t only have OBCIDIO. I have some other companies. As a startup, you’re putting on a lot of different hats and you’re doing a lot of different things, but I think at the end of the week, you have to be consistent with what you do during the day, and consistency and discipline are the two biggest things of being an entrepreneur.
If you want to be your own boss, you have to learn early that hey, yes, I could go take a two hour lunch right now or hey, I could blow off at three o’clock, but that’s not it. I mean some people I think go into trying to be an entrepreneur and they think, hey, this is going to be a flexible schedule. Well, like I always tell people, the only flexible schedule you have is what 18 hours you’re going to work during the day.
John Lee Dumas: [Laughs]
Ryan Waier: And that’s really it. So how it applies is I guess it gives me focus that when I’m sitting here and other people in my network might be doing a fun event or doing something and I have to get something done, it keeps me focused and I remember that quote. So I think it’s powerful and I think it kind of keeps you on point as far as what you’re looking at because you give up a lot. You really do. Not only financially are you going to struggle for most people going into this. I mean when you look at it, most successful businesspeople have been broke or bankrupt or on the edge several times. So if you’re doing it for the money and you’re not doing it for the love of it or if you’re just in love, like I said, with the concept of being an entrepreneur, then you’re probably in it for the wrong reasons. So having some discipline, focus and consistency I think is what you need.
John Lee Dumas: I could not agree more, Ryan. You are obviously showing that with what you’re doing at OBCIDIO, which is why it’s where it is today. That’s one of themain driving reasons that I wanted to create EntrepreneurOnFire, is being I knew there’s people like you out there that would be honest and would share their journey, and EntrepreneurOnFire is about sharing the journey. Being an entrepreneur is not all fun and games. There’s a lot of rewards, but it’s a lot of hard work.
Ryan Waier: Right.
John Lee Dumas: For me, like I was willing to put that hard work in and do an every single day show and really just get it out there and really fill a niche that I saw, and because of that, now I’m ranked number one for iTunes New & Noteworthy, getting over 100,000 downloads a month. If I had just listened to the coaches and the mentors, I probably would be just having an average show, once a week, doing what have you. You are really doing the same kind of mentality over at OBCIDIO and you’re seeing those same kind of results. So if you put the work in and you put the effort in and if you keep your nose down and you stay disciplined, the results are there waiting for you. Again, it’s no straight path. It’s a rollercoaster as always. We’re going to touch on that right now when we go to the next topic, which is failure.
Ryan Waier: Right.
John Lee Dumas: Ryan, this is about your journey as an entrepreneur. Take us back and share with Fire Nation a time that you failed or a time that you came across a challenge that you just had to really struggle to overcome, and then share with us how you overcame that.
Ryan Waier: Well, I mean the failures and probably what you hear from a lot of entrepreneurs, I mean there’s probably too many to count. I can tell you firsthand that coming in to a technology startup, me and the team that I had were nascent. I mean we really didn’t know what we were getting into. It’s different than starting other businesses that I’ve started over the years, so there’s been a ton of failures. I think one of the biggest challenges with OBCIDIO was we were crazy enough to try to build this massive platform that did a lot of different things. It combines business networking, it combines content and project management, and then it combines all these social collaboration tools, and developing an identity early is something that I think we failed at miserably.
Probably over the last couple of months after launching did we only realize that hey, we could be building the largest platform or the best platform in the world, but if we don’t create an identity, then we’re going to have problems. I think we always knew what the purpose of it was going to be. I think we always had a vision for it. Our vision has always remained steadfast as far as creating this open network where people can share knowledge, pool resources, change the paradigm of how small businesses reach out and locate experts as an overall vision, but not having an identity I think set us back, and the way that we kind of worked through that was finally getting the members of the site to provide us with feedback in where they wanted to go, and once we started allowing them to drive some of the development and kind of their perceptions on what this was and how they were using it, we’re starting to form a pretty good identity. So that was definitely a failure. There are hundreds of others, but I don’t think we could probably fit them in a 30 minute segment [Laughs]. I could go on and on, but there have been a lot of mistakes.
John Lee Dumas: Well, Ryan, thank you for sharing that failure/mistake that you made, and also, thank you for sharing the lesson that you took away from it. A book that I actually talk a lot about on EntrepreneurOnFire, which is a book that I like. I don’t love the book. I think at some points it’s long and drawn out, but I think its message at the core is great, and that’s Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup.
Ryan Waier: Right.
John Lee Dumas: He talks so much about the minimally viable product, getting it out and getting feedback from your customers as soon as possible and adjusting on that. So once you started doing that, what were one or two major changes or adjustments that you made that you really saw results on?
Ryan Waier: Well that’s a great question. Actually, that is my recommended book. I think at some point, it was probably about I would say 13, 14 months ago, I read Eric Ries’s book, and that changed the entire way we did development. I mean it really fundamentally shifted our focus on back to – his system, like you said, it’s about building a minimum viable product, it’s about a build, measure, learn, or pivot if it’s not working. Like I said, I think what that did is it allowed us to focus and drive home the fact that we couldn’t be this platform of everything to everyone, but we had to be something to someone, and building specific tools and applications as we went along, we just weren’t getting the customer-generated feedback. I mean Eric Ries’s principles are pretty simple. He wants you to launch early. He doesn’t necessarily care that there’s bugs, that the system doesn’t work. I was never a big fan of that.
Like I said, this kind of comes back to me being a little bit nascent to this industry, but in other businesses, if you launched an inferior product, you are going to die quickly. I think he’s really changed the paradigm on how it’s launched, but specifically for us, that was really it. I mean we searched for an identity for a long time. Like I said, we had a purpose, but to get down to where we took each application and applied that theory of building a minimum viable product so we could get it to a customer base, and then taking that customer base and allowing them to expand on it. So before we were building products, and then taking them to our customer base or our members and saying, give us feedback. Well, we were missing critical pieces along the way and the products weren’t as successful as they would have been if we would have just listened to the customers. So specifically, that’s where things started to change for us. Now, like I said, we’re consistent. Every product that we do is either based on a customer demanding it or what we’ll do is we’ll get to a minimum viable product of something that’s been on a roadmap or something that other people have said they wanted and we’ll get it out to the base as soon as possible to beta test it and work through the problems.
John Lee Dumas: That’s really good stuff and a really good application of Eric Ries and his principles. Let’s use that, Ryan, to transition now to the other end of the spectrum. You shared with us some challenges, mistakes, failures that you’ve had, which we all have as entrepreneurs, but there’s also those aha moments, and you and I both get our aha moments from our customers, from our listeners, from our audience that we interact with. That’s such an important part of our businesses and they inspire us and they move us forward in different directions. Maybe having us pivot or maybe having us just really overcome that obstacle in front of us because we know we have to. Share with Fire Nation an aha moment that you had, a real light bulb that came on in your mind.
Ryan Waier: Well, for me – and I thought about this question for a little bit – I think what it comes back to is yes, I think we all have these aha moments, but where I get my enjoyment is seeing the different ways people use an application that you thought could never be used in that way because what it does is it gets the creative juices flowing again and it gets you back reengaged. It gives you hope of the potential or just the possibilities, building what we’ve built and how powerful it could be. I mean fundamentally, I think this can change. Like I said, I think this can change the way small businesses leverage knowledge and resources and share this type of things together. So just on a daily basis, I’ll see somebody use this thing in a different way or for a different application, and I think it’s a series of these little aha moments, but I don’t think it’s safe to say, “Hey, we’ve made it” or “We’re at the end of the road.” I think really, we just take these little ways or if we get feedback from somebody or if we see somebody connected in a way we never thought possible. It kind of puts that light bulb on and it gives you that motivation and hope of what you’re doing and going broke doing it and getting gray hair and no sleep is going to be worth it at the end of the road.
John Lee Dumas: Well, Ryan, you just touched on this, so let’s go into this next question. Have you had an I’ve made it moment?
Ryan Waier: No. John, I don’t necessarily believe. I’m pretty grounded in the fact of setting unrealistic goals.
John Lee Dumas: [Laughs]
Ryan Waier: I think if you do set unrealistic goals, I think what you’d have to do is have a series of milestones that you can celebrate in between to keep yourself motivated and get there. But in technology – and you probably know it just as well – you might be hot one day and on top of the world, but the next day, not only are you irrelevant, but you’re gone.
John Lee Dumas: Oh yes.
Ryan Waier: And even financially wiped out. So with our team, we really focus on not being that next person that’s going to be extinct. Our journey has been a lot longer than some of these people that are having success, but I think what we’re doing is we’re really laying a long term foundation to have a viable product over the next couple of decades. We’re not looking at this thing as short term. So will we ever say that we’ve made it? Sure. Maybe if we look at this thing a couple of years down the road and there’s 50 million to 100 million people using it and it’s super successful, but I think when you start saying that you’ve made it, you’re pretty quickly going to be extinct in this industry.
John Lee Dumas: That is a great way of looking at it, and that’s one reason why I love this question, is because every entrepreneur looks at this question differently. Some people got stumped, some people dive right into it, some people say, “I have an I’ve made it moment every day I wake up,” some people say, “I will never have an I’ve made it moment.” For me, I think you hit on it perfectly. You need to set these “BHAGs,” these Big Hairy Audacious Goals, but then really have these true milestones along the way that when you reach them, you are celebrating, you’re appreciating the achievements and the accomplishment that you have come to at that point because life is about the journey and you work way too hard, Ryan, to just look up one day and realize that you haven’t been enjoying the journey that you’re on.
Ryan Waier: That’s correct.
John Lee Dumas: So Ryan, we’re going to move now into your current business because you have so many exciting things going on with OBCIDIO. I’m a big part of going on there every day and seeing what is happening. I truly like that. I’m enjoying every aspect of it and seeing the growth that’s happening as we speak, but what’s one thing, just one thing, that’s really exciting you about OBCIDIO right now?
Ryan Waier: Yes. Well first of all, to touch on that, from our feedback, I think everybody loves you guys posting these podcasts. I think it’s been a real cool thing, more than probably you know. I mean I’m getting feedback from all kinds of people. I even got somebody shot me a message the other day and just said, “Hey, this stuff is great!” So we really do appreciate you coming out and posting that and giving us some more diversified content, but yes.
One of the things that we’re working on right now that I think is really cool is, like I said, this whole community concept. These communities, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to build tools to have an active networking. So like I said earlier, if you’re on like a LinkedIn or a Google+, you kind of feel like you’re out in the Wild West. What we’re trying to do is not only connect people on a local or regional level first, but we want to give them the tools to actively solve problems within a community and share knowledge. Things that you’re not doing on other sites because they don’t have the features of managing the content or the tools to do that. Networking isn’t static as far as going on to LinkedIn and saying, “Hey, I met you at a network about last night. Let’s connect on LinkedIn.”
What we want to do is build these active communities, get people engaged in these communities and have them help other people solve problems. If somebody is an expert, everybody on our platform is an expert at something. When they engage in these communities, they add value. The tools that we’re building now are going to make it more easy for people to plug in to these communities and easier for people to pull in other experts and find ways to solve these problems through these social collaboration tools. So that’s been really exciting for us, and as we do that, we continue to build out on the tools themselves that help people connect or whatnot, but I think at this point, that’s really what’s driven us and that’s really where we’re starting to get some good feedback from people because they understand that hey, there are all these networks, but what are you doing on these networks? I mean I was on Twitter this morning and I was laughing. I had seen a guy on there with – I think he had like 307 followers and he was following like 400,000 people and he must send out a tweet every 15 to 20 minutes. It’s almost like the equivalent of – I think he’s from New York, but I wanted to send him one back. I mean you might as well open your window and just yell it on to the street.
John Lee Dumas: [Laughs]
Ryan Waier: Because who are you broadcasting to? So we really have some cool things planned as far as we want to get more students engaged in the platform. I think this is a great platform for students to get on when they’re getting close to graduating where they can get some real world experience working with people to solve a problem, unlike trying to create a network or trying to create 500 contacts on another social network, be it whatever it is. The power is in the network, but really actively engaging with these networks to do something. To expand an opportunity, to share knowledge or resources is what I think will help these not only students, but it helps the businesses on the other side where they don’t have to invest in all this overhead to go try to find somebody where they can connect and people just have this natural forum and this ecosystem to just share. It is pretty cool and it’s pretty exciting.
John Lee Dumas: Well I’m excited personally to see where you take OBCIDIO. I just see you’re taking big steps every single day so I can’t even imagine where it’s going to be a year or two years or five years from now. So I look forward to being part of that process. We’ll use that to move into my favorite part of the show, Ryan, which is the Lightning Round, because this is where I get to ask you a series of questions and you come back at us, Fire Nation, with amazing and mind-blowing answers. Does that sound like a plan?
Ryan Waier: Yes, that’s great! Let’s go for it.
John Lee Dumas: What was holding you back from becoming an entrepreneur?
Ryan Waier: I look at it the other way around. I think it was always for me a case of what was holding me back from working in Corporate America. As soon as I graduated college, I think I went to a couple of job interviews. The economy was bad. That was around 2002. I ended up probably at an insurance place like John Hancock or something and I think I accepted a job. I walked in there and after the first day, I knew I couldn’t do it. So I reverted to a guy that I worked with in development. Basically, I showed up at his door the next day. I said, “Listen, let’s start a company.” He went along with it and ever since then I’ve been there. I know most people’s typical path would probably be to go to work in Corporate America and learn a trade or learn a process or learn how that works, but I think it was the opposite for me. I think I’ve just always had it. I’ve always had it in my blood. I’ve always been a little bit of a riverboat gambler to take risks and it’s always been there. So I started early.
John Lee Dumas: What is the best business advice you ever received?
Ryan Waier: I had a chance to work with some great motivational speakers and business consultants about 5 years ago, and one of them was Dan Clark. I remember talking to Dan and getting him off to the side and he kind off talked to me about – you can look it up today. I mean you can YouTube it. Dan is coauthor of Chicken Soup for the Soul, but some of his good stuff is on Law of Attraction. That’s when he told me. At the time I had several different businesses and things going on. That’s kind of when he told me. He says, “Look, you can be in love with the concept, but you better love the work you’re doing or you’re never going to be successful in it.” And then he gets on to more of what really the Law of Attraction is, and really what he stressed was the power of your network. He goes back in some of his videos and he says you’re going to be an average of the 5 people that you hang around with most. Right? So if you don’t like something that you’re attracting, you need to change that.
One of the things that I took from it as far as business advice is I guess first, trying to get into something that as painful as it is to be successful, you better love what you’re doing and understand that all this work that you’re putting in for is going to be for a purpose. And the second thing is, which kind of even falls into OBCIDIO, is the power of your network. I think a lot of people go as far as the network that they’re with. I mean if you hang around with negative people, you’re probably going to get a negative output. If you hang around with positive people and then you expand your network, you’re going to get a positive output. I think he famously said that you can’t soar with the eagles if you’re scratching with the chickens.
John Lee Dumas: [Laughs]
Ryan Waier: I think I’ve kind of taken that advice, and at that time I made a shift into trying to build a stronger network and really make sure what I was doing had value and that I love doing it.
John Lee Dumas: Well those are some great insights. Thank you for that, Ryan. What’s something that’s working for you or your business right now?
Ryan Waier: Well one of the cool things as far as what’s working for us is first of all, I kind of like to do these customer – we have a specific roadmap and we’re always building out features, but what we do sometimes if we have a customer or a large member base that wants something, we’ll step that in front. Recently, Keller Williams’s office here in Tampa, they have about 200 people, and a couple of the agents, after I showed them the system, came to me, and they said, “Look, we’ve got this problem with everybody in the company on a daily basis sends around this long chain email saying, ‘Hey, who’s the best plumber in town? Who’s the best guy for air conditioning? What [title] company can we use?’” And they were on basically an old prehistoric system that nobody ever used. They had a proprietary system there at Keller Williams. It wasn’t social. It was a static system where people could go in there and enter information, but nobody used it.
So what we did is we came in and we built them basically a social CRM system where not only can they add contacts to their company page, but all the contacts that they add are social. So there’s a way of threaded communications around all these contacts, there’s a way to vote these people up and down. So it really gives somebody that’s looking for a central database to come back and go into an area to find a vendor or find a customer, find a person that they need. Quickly look at it, see if he’s voted up or down. People, like I said, also have an avenue to follow that person. There’s always something changing. Maybe a guy went out of business, maybe he’s not doing as good at his work anymore. There’s a comments section where people can have real time discussions on that.
So that’s where I find the most fun in this thing, when I get it to go and work hand-in-hand with these people and really develop something for them like that.
John Lee Dumas: What a great example. Do you have an Internet resource, Ryan, like an Evernote that you’re just in love with right now that you can share with Fire Nation?
Ryan Waier: HootSuite is where I’ve had the most fun lately. I tend to play around with some different toys, but HootSuite – and I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but basically it allows you to connect all your social profiles. So I’ll take my LinkedIn account, my Twitter account and our Facebook account and you can kind of manage all your status updates from one platform. It’s a pretty cool tool. It allows you to cover a lot of ground.
John Lee Dumas: That’s exactly what I use with EntrepreneurOnFire, and man! It’s such a timesaver and it just makes things so much more efficient. I love it!
Ryan Waier: Yes! [Laughs] It’s a great tool for sure.
John Lee Dumas: What’s your favorite business book, Ryan?
Ryan Waier: Like I said, that would probably be The Lean Startup with Eric Ries. I think as far as I would recommend it to anybody probably creating a startup in any industry. I had to read the book twice. When I first read it, I thought, “Wow! There is nothing that I’ve done right in this process!” [Laughs]
John Lee Dumas: [Laughs]
Ryan Waier: But I think as anything, I think you have to take some things out of context. I don’t think any one startup is alike. I think there’s a fine line, especially what he talks about in his book between launching a little bit too early or selling the message that you can’t back up too early, and I think for anybody that reads that, they need to take warning and this is your own decision. I mean what he’s trying to do is push you over the edge in one way because naturally, we just don’t think we’re ready, and he’s trying to push you over. But really, on the backside, I think everybody needs to look at their product and say, “Hey, it’s great that we can launch early and try to build a customer base, but you get one shot at doing it.”
As far as educational though, that’s probably one of the best books out there, and like I said, there’s no doubt in my mind, especially in the technology side and the tech startups, that probably 90% of the kids, I don’t care if they’re coming out of Silicon Valley or New York, if you’re building an app or whatever you’re building, they’re using his principles and there’s a reason for it. So I would recommend that book highly.
John Lee Dumas: So Ryan, this last question is my favorite. Take your time, digest it. It’s kind of a tricky one, but come back at us with as good an answer as you can. If you woke up tomorrow morning in a brand new world, identical to earth, but you knew nobody. You still have all the experience and knowledge that you currently have right now, $500, a laptop with Internet connection, and your food and shelter is taken care of. What do you do in the next seven days?
Ryan Waier: Well, I think this one is easy for me. I’ll tell you the story basically how we first started developing OBCIDIO. I didn’t have a team at the time. I had contracted with a development house to start building early designs of OBCIDIO. At that time when I went there, I think they quoted me like $100,000 to build the site that I wanted to build. This was 3, 4 years ago and this was just the initial phase of it. I think I talked them down somewhere to about half, and before we got going, they wanted maybe a $15,000 down payment. At the time, like I said, the economy was bad. I didn’t want to really pull money out of the other businesses. So I didn’t know if it was the right thing to do to try to come up with $15,000, so I said, “You know what?” I knew there was a good trade and I used to be active in trading stocks, mostly options. So I took about $3,000 to $4,000 and basically just bet on black [Laughs]. The next morning, I woke up and I had about $23,000 in my bank account. So I called them the next day. I said, “Well let’s get it started.” I kind of felt it was a sign.
John Lee Dumas: Wow!
Ryan Waier: Looking at this question, if I had $500, as soon as I woke up, if I had it at 9 o’clock, by [9:10] I would probably be in a trading account and I would try to figure out how to make a living off of it or at least get it to a point where I could expand on it from there. So that would definitely be what I would do. If I had a computer and Internet, I would probably be trading on it.
John Lee Dumas: Good, good! That’s what I’m looking for, is the honest answer to what you would do. It’s unique, it’s not for everybody, but it’s a different way of looking at it. So thank you for sharing that with us. It’s very actionable. You’ve given us actionable advice this entire interview, Ryan, and we are all better for it. Give Fire Nation one parting piece of guidance, then give yourself a plug, and then we’ll say goodbye.
Ryan Waier: Well, I think as we’ve talked about through the interview, I mean just the trials and tribulations, a lot of people that are listening to you are maybe aspiring entrepreneurs or maybe they’re on the fence. Maybe they don’t know if it’s what’s right for them. I mean it usually starts with somebody having another job and saying you’re scared to death. I mean, you’re focused on one income and you got to take that leap. But I think really what you have to do is you have to look back and say, “Look, you’ll always find a way,” and especially through good work. If you don’t take the leap, you’re going to regret it, but I think going into it, you have to know. Some people can take chances, take risks, and some people aren’t comfortable with it. If you’re simply not comfortable with it, this isn’t a business for you to be in as far as trying to be an entrepreneur. If not, take the leap, and you’ll find a way to get through it. You can’t worry about the money and the things like that. You do something that you love and it’ll find a way. So that would be my advice.
On the backside, everybody, for any business professional, go check out OBCIDIO. We have a new Facebook log in feature so you don’t even have to spend time creating another account. You can log in with your Facebook credentials. Get on the site, get active. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking to jump into a community that helps somebody solve a problem, if you want to create a social community for your own company or if you need a remote project management solution or if you’re using it like John himself where you’re on there building an active network. It’s got something for everybody. It’s got a lot of content management features where you have your own personal cloud to store files and create tasks and do cool stuff like that. So check it out.
John Lee Dumas: That, it does, Ryan. EntrepreneurOnFire, we thank you for being so generous with your time. You can find the show notes at EntrepreneurOnFire.com/83. Ryan, we salute you, and we’ll catch you on the flipside.
