YouSaid · the spoken record

Tope Awotona

lines on the record: 107
first: 2024-01-08
most recent: 2024-01-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yes. And so I spent two, three months signing up for every single product that existed on the market and really deconstructing them, tearing them apart. I must assign up for what felt like probably 20 to 30 different products. I use the products religiously to really understand how they worked. I spent a lot of time in their community forums to really figure out what their customers were saying. I would submit support tickets to really understand their customer service. I would pose as a buyer of their software to understand how they're selling it, how they're pitching it.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You needed to make it a great experience for every users of the product, whether they were your own registered users or the people who were receiving invitations from your registered users. Those are some of the things that I noticed.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so a few things I thought I needed at the time. So one, there were a lot of products on the market that were really tailored to brick and mortar businesses that do a lot of appointments. So if you're a salon and you do 100 appointments a day, there's a lot of great software for you. But if you are an enterprise software sales rep, that really does maybe five external meetings a day or three or four. There were no really good options for you. The other thing I noticed was that as a salesperson, one of the things I knew very well was that just because you want to meet with somebody doesn't mean they want to meet with you, right? And so I thought a lot of the products that exist in the market really spent a lot of time designing for the users of the software and not so much the recipients of the invitation. And so I thought that if this would gain mass adoption, you'd really needed to build for both all participants.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just knew that as a consumer, as a potential consumer, I didn't feel like any of the product on the market at the time really checked all the boxes of what I would need.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a common problem, and I'm thinking it's 2012 because at this time it's 2012. Surely this is a solved problem. I'm going to do an internet search and see what I can come up with. I can really make it easy for 20 people across three different companies to compare their availability. I do a search and I find a number of different products in the market that are solving bits and pieces of it, but none that really that I thought did it really, really well.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's so painful when you've got like five people on a pseudo conference call and there's multiple emails, and I can do Wednesday. Yep, I'm gonna do Wednesday, I can't do Wednesday, how about Tuesday? It drives me up the wall.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so that was a national account manager. And so I managed a number of Fortune 500 accounts in the Southeast. So companies doing over a billion dollars in revenue and also selling complex enterprise software to them. So what that meant was the kind of companies you're selling to are like the Coca-Colas of the world. They need to bring 10 15 people to a meeting, and then a lot of times for the deals that we sold, we needed to also involve systems integrators. So these are the firms that would actually go in and deploy the software. And so they would bring another three people. Very often you are trying to arrange meetings with 20 people across three different companies and it can be very painful.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so this entire time I never quit my day job. So, what I end up doing is I'm still working my, you know, my day job at that time traveling all over the country. But what I realized was that I started all these different businesses, not because I was passionate about solving a problem and not because a problem necessarily existed. I was doing all these things because I wanted to start a business. And so I thought that I wanted to take a break. And rather than forcing a business idea, I thought that I needed to pick a problem that truly existed and I needed to pick something that I was really excited and committed to being a student of it. And I decided that I would basically take a break from starting businesses until I found that idea that check all those boxes.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Yeah, I never saw one. It's just order in and order out. And so I think what I found was I did much better than the first business, right? So, you know, probably netted, sold more grills, one. But I think I found that the same problem kind of repeated itself. When people come to buy any kind of product, they're not looking just to do the transaction. They're also looking to be educated. And so I thought to build a real successful business around this, you have to invest time and effort into building a brand, into educating people and creating content and doing all these different things. I just wasn't excited about that work. I didn't feel like home and garden. I just didn't feel like that was my calling.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They start coming in and the margins are better this time, so instead of making $5 for $500 purchase, you're making a few hundred dollars on a $700 purchase or something like that. So much better margins.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, ceramic grill, and people were fanatic about it. People who love it just love it, they rave about it. But what I spotted was that as fanatical as people were about the big green egg, it was actually really difficult to get it if you didn't live in a major city. So if you lived in a city like Atlanta, it was easy for you to get. If you lived in a city like Athens, which is, you know, let's call it 70 miles from Atlanta, you had to drive to a major city to get it. And so I thought that there was an opportunity there. And I started calling the different manufacturers of these grills. I thought I could build a better e-commerce business than they could. And my larger vision was I would do a better job of driving traffic and driving demand to YardStills.com. And eventually, I would go start my own, I would build my own, you know,”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And so the idea was you can get good deals on home and garden equipment. That was the category that I was. Going after What I wanted to do was a few of my coworkers at work were crazy about the big green egg. I'm not sure if you've heard of it before.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew exactly what I wanted to do next. So I wanted to go back to e-commerce, but I thought that this time around I would pick a higher margin product. And so I turned around and created another e-commerce website. And this time around, rather than paying the guy $20,000, I built it all myself.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Toothens. One, I realized that I didn't really care about projectors, right? So a few things happened, right? So whenever people would place orders, so some people would place orders without really asking any questions, but then a lot of people really came to projectorspot.com, not just looking to buy a projector, but they wanted to be educated about projectors. And so I realized that for me to be successful in this business, one, the business model was just really, really tough. And two, I needed to become passionate and knowledgeable about projectors. And I just didn't really want to spend my life doing that.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did, I did. But I wasn't, it didn't face me. I mean, it was disappointing in some ways. Yeah. Because I had, you know, because he put a lot of time and effort into getting it up and running, you sacrifice many late nights, many weekends in, and you do all that. And it doesn't really materialize.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One, because electronics in general is just very commoditized, and there are many, many other merchants out there. And so most of the competitors were actually not making their money on the projectors. It was a loss leader for them. What they were really doing was they were creating their own, they were making money from the accessories or the light bulbs, maybe the lens. I forget what all the supplies and parts are, which explains why I had no business doing this in the first place. But that's really where the bulk of their profits came from.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They do, they do But then I saw it very, very quickly that the margins were razor, razor thin, right? So you end up selling a $500 projector and maybe you make $5, right?”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They asked me all the smart questions they should have asked me. What do you know about projectors? If it's this easy to start a business, why would this guy just not run the business himself? Why are you so confident that you're going to rank highly for these keywords? Yeah, so there's a lot of laughter when I share the idea for sure.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. I put in probably something like, I would say about 20,000 dollars or so. I don't remember all the details, but I would say most of it probably went to the website development.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. I'd never used a projector in my life, right? Maybe Cena FU in a different meeting, right? But never really bought one before set it one up before. But the analysis seemed compelling to me. And so we started a project our business and we called it ProjectorSpot.com. And after something like two, three months of work, we set up the website and we were ready to take orders. And I should add that we didn't actually go out and buy projectors and sell them on the website. We established dropship and relationships with different wholesalers. And in the space of two to three months or so, we launched the business.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Movie projectors There were actually six specific keywords. It was HD projectors, it was movie projectors. I forget what the other four were now. So there's a ton of search traffic looking for movie projectors. And then you analyze the sites that are currently ranked and high for that keyword. And then you look at how displaceable they are basically. And his instincts were that they were easily replaceable, that you could, with three, six months of work, you could be at the highest ranking site for that keyword.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I thought that was fascinating, and he showed me some of the businesses that he'd helped start. And in hindsight, I should have probably interviewed some of those other entrepreneurs. But the idea sounded fascinating. And so I paid him to do an analysis for me to find out what are some keywords.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so he told me that he'd actually helped a number of different entrepreneurs start a number of different e-commerce businesses. He said, most people start e commerce businesses because they want to sell something in particular. They want to sell hand sanitizers. They want to sell masks, whatever it may be. Like, well, that's one way to start a business, but he said an interesting, a really interesting way to start a high growth e commerce business is to instead start a business around keywords that have a lot of traffic that you can optimize for. So instead of starting a business to sell hand sanitizers because you want to sell hand sanitizers, what if you started a business selling light bulbs because it turns out that there's a lot of traffic for light bulbs and no one's really satisfied in that need very well.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it was another software company doing a very similar thing, but for a, you know, as in selling enterprise software, but selling it to a different industry.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My mom was really sick and she ended up being in the ICU for about a month, month and a half or so. And she was recovering from the complicated case of malaria. And so, because she was recovering from that, I think at the time, she Looking back on it now, she had cancer at the time as she was recovering from that. And she was just in a tough place. And I wanted to be closer to her. I was thinking about going back to Atlanta and then at the same time I got recruited by a company in Atlanta that one of my best friends was working at. And so that kind of accelerated the decision to come back to Atlanta.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So from that point on, I think it made me realize that entrepreneurship was way more attainable than I thought it was before that. So I thought I had to be, you know, I just, yeah, just the story made me realize that I didn't have to have all the answers. But if I saw something that I thought needed to be changed, I just needed to take action and learn and persevere. And so because of that, I started, it kind of rekindle this very, you know, this latent idea that I had of becoming a tech entrepreneur. That from that point on, I start dabbling in a bunch of small businesses.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and so I really enjoyed working for the company. But while I was at the company, part of the onboarding process is you get a chance to meet with the founders. And they tell the story, the company's founding story. And that story just really opened up my eyes. It was the first time I heard about the founding story of a company of a successful company. Because before then, I thought that most people who started. Customers receive it accept it, they break their backs to pay them money. But what I learned from this founder was it took them eight years to really get to product market fit, as we call it today. And the idea pivoted many, many, many different times. And the reason that that business became successful was had more to do with their ability to learn from their customers, their own resilience.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Went to Kansas City to work for a company called Perceptive Software. It made enterprise content management software, so I think of it as software to manage paper files, right? So digitalis files and manage the approval workflows around it.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I enjoy the work I did, but I've always been a very, very impatient person. And so at the time I looked at the CEO of IBM and he was in his 60s and it took him all 40 years to get there. And I didn't know that I had that much time to wait. So I wanted to be in an accelerated path. And so I started looking for a much smaller software company that was growing at a much faster rate. So at the time, IBM was probably growing double digits every single year. And some of the businesses that I was looking at were probably growing double digits every month. And so I really wanted to Work for a smaller company with more growth opportunity.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It took me a while to, you know, there was a little bit of an adjustment. I spent a lot of time selling to consumers in the last few years. And so now I was selling to IT managers, right? So IT people and also selling in some cases to CIOs. So I got exposed to a much more complicated and much more sophisticated sales process. But I loved it. I found myself not really”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, far from it One of the things I've learned myself many, many years after, is I think being the child of immigrants, I think maybe hurt my understanding aloud to how to be successful in the business world in America. And so I didn't do some of the things that my peers were doing, like internships. I didn't do those things. In hindsight, I should have done those things. And my parents would have known to, I mean, they would have probably pushed me to do that if they were from here, but they didn't, my mom didn't know that herself, not to put the blame on her, but I think there's, I am probably more savvy about how those things work today.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Guess you could say so. I did feel like it was stretching me new ways that I had never been stretched before. So keep in mind at that time I'm still a computer science major, right? So I was used to a different form of any electrostimulation. I'm coding. You write code and you instruct the computer to do these things for you and you see what you create that was fulfilling. But then this was a whole different form of fulfillment and satisfaction you could Are influencing people's decisions, right? That was what filled in a way.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think it ultimately gave me the understanding that there's a hit rate, right? So if you knock on X amount of doors, you will ultimately make X amount of dollars. So to me, it was a very predictable thing. And in between, there's a lot of rejection. People were unhappy that I interrupted their dinner. That part was tough, but the rejection of people not really wanting to buy, that didn't really faze me. The other thing I really liked was it was the first time I could really influence how much money I made. I could work harder. I could improve my skill and not wait six months, 12 months to make more money. I could make more money the next day, the next week.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The best money I ever made in a day, and interestingly, the rest of the week, I did not sell anything. And so the very fact that I sold two alarm systems the first day, I think if that sequence would have been reversed, if I would have gone the first four days without selling any alarm systems, who knows what I would, you know, how my career would have changed. But that's what happened.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did I. So, what happened was my very, very first day, I sold two alarm systems. Which allowed me to make $500 Which at age, you know, 19. That was a lot of money to me.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in Athens Georgia, so we would go knock on doors for three, four hours and try to make a sale. And what would happen was the job was strictly commissioned, right? So which is, you know, you could potentially work. All week, all month.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yes, it was a summer job. Talk about the most difficult job ever. I would knock on people's doors right before dinner time. And so, I'm pretty sure half the people who bought from me bought from me just so they could get back to their dinner.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He has a cashier, but then I, uh, you know, like most college kids, I wanted more money. And somehow, I think through a classmate or a friend, I learned about door-to-door sales.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I picked computer science for two reasons. So back in 95, Windows 95 was launched and that really opened my eyes. I just saw all these grown adults tripping over themselves to buy software. I thought that was really fascinating. I also noticed at the time that the world's richest man was Bill Gates. And so my little teenage mind, I started to connect the dots around maybe this is where the world is going.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not really. And that's not to say they weren't issues, but I think I was probably blind to them. And I think part of the reason why is in a lot of ways I've always kind of been the odd man out in everything I've ever done, right? So even in high school in Nigeria, I was two years younger than most of the kids. And so I've been kind of used to being the odd man out and just really being able to connect with all kinds of different people and not really thinking much about the differences. I probably was blind to some of those things.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, do you remember? I mean, coming from Legos, where everybody around you was black, right? I mean, the leaders, business leaders and people were powerful and also the poorest people, everybody around you was black and coming to America where racial issues are front and center. Was that sort of jarring or something that you didn't expect when you arrived?”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, absolutely Everything from the way classes worked to uniforms, right? So the very fact that you didn't have to wear uniforms was very, very different from what I was used to. One other thing that was very different from me was in high school in Nigeria, I was a very popular kid. Was very different here New country, very different culture. You know, most of the people in the high school, they've known each other for many, many years because they went to middle school together, they went to maybe went to elementary school together, and that was, I guess it was tougher socially than academically for sure.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the plan. So I took the SAT, but then my mom was like, You can't go to college at 15. You're too young. So I ended up going to high school. I went to Wheeler High School in Marietta. I went there for two years.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. So my older siblings were here. Two of my older siblings were here, as well as my aunt and her husband and her kids. And as a matter of fact, when we first came to the States, we lived with them.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, there was always a given that I was going to go to college in the States. But then what happened was because my mom also retired at the same time, the whole family ended up moving to the States in'96.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I think that's one of the things I really miss actually is when you're 12 years old, there are a lot of things you want to ask your parents that you don't get to. So I don't really know what his dreams were. I do feel, as I think about it as an adult now, is I think he knew that he was incredibly, he was incredibly gifted in so many different ways. And I think he felt like he hadn't done his best work yet.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did, I did. You know, I think. Some of that is the Nigerian way, to be honest with you, but I also think within them, my mom had a very, my mom was a very strong and resilient person. And one of the things I really appreciate about the Nigerian culture is really everybody's your family, right? Even your family, friends are essentially think of themselves as your family. So I think she was able to, you know, a lot of people rallied around her and supported her, but she definitely, it was very, very difficult time for her. But I think she also really wanted us to I don't want to say move on with our lives, but I think she wanted us to, you know, she thought the best thing that we could do is proceed with our lives. That's what would make our dad proud.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember that it changed everything I thought I knew. So as a kid, I, you know, my dad was my hero, right? You know, because when you're 12 and your dad lets you get away with everything, he's your favorite parent. I would stay up late at night till my dad came home no matter how late that was. So after he died, I went through a period of time in which I lost a lot of weight. I didn't really have an appetite for many, many months after that. I became an insomniac at the age of 12. These are things I now recognize that are signs of trauma, but at the time I didn't really recognize it.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know if people did. I think the first time it occurred to me was, so I ended up skipping a few grades, you know, like in primary school. And I think that's when I knew. And I think my mom was a little worried about what that might mean and how that might play out. So I think that was really the first time I became conscious of it.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They did, but not, you know, I don't remember having a lot of conversations with my parents about my grades. There was just an expectation that you performed well in school because they did. I remember as a kid, you know, probably eight or seven, my mom would argue with my dad about. She really thought it was important for us to go to Harvard. And I didn't know what Harvard was, but I know that my mom thought it was important.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT