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EP119: How to invest in a technological revolution without being an experienced tech investor with Jared Yellin

Released Sunday, 6th November 2022

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EP119: How to invest in a technological revolution without being an experienced tech investor with Jared Yellin

Sunday, 6th November 2022

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Today, Sachin speaks with Jared Yellin, a serial entrepreneur who is highly passionate about making the world a better place, and who follows his dreams, no matter where they take him. Jared is bold and speaks his truth. He inspires Sachin and thousands of other people. Jared has been of service to Sachin’s community for many years.

Learn about a totally disruptive way to make the world a better place through technology with Jared and Sachin. If you've ever had a great idea but lacked the technical skills to make it a reality, this interview is for you!

Key Takeaways:

[1:02] Sachin welcomes listeners to Perfect Practice. Today, Sachin is speaking with Jared Yellen. Sachin introduces Jared and thanks him for joining the podcast.

[3:00] Jared realized at an early age he was “perpetually and utterly unemployable” so he went all in on entrepreneurship. He’s a non-technical tech founder. He is not an engineer. He knows how to write direct-response marketing copy and he knows how to sell. Doing everything he could possibly do wrong, he built a B2B SaaS platform and it’s a pretty successful company.

[3:53] Jared outsourced his software development to a Boston, MA firm for $750K over 10 months. Jared self-funded it. It ended up taking over two years and over $2 million before he could launch. Then he learned about technical debt, from engineers cutting corners and making bad decisions, or debt. With enough debt, the project will implode. His project imploded.

[4:45] Jared still felt there was a need in the market for his solution, but he learned not to outsource early-stage software development. He started building a team. He hired a CTO with national and international experience who lived in Jared’s town. They built a software development team in the U.S., Canada, and India. The CTO was originally from India.

[5:24] The India team was made up of contract workers, which put the workers at a disadvantage in India for being able to bank, so they kept leaving the team for full-time work. So Jared opened a company in India in 2017 to hire the team. He used the company as a magnet for good talent.

[5:49] That company is SYNDUIT, a marketing software company for small business owners, now with tens of thousands of paying users, across 30 industries.

[6:14] Around two years ago, Jared realized he was obsolete at SYNDUIT. He was proud of the milestone but he wondered what to do next, at age 35 with a young family. He decided this next chapter had to be his moonshot. He had to do something that would shake up the world or go down trying.

[6:50] Jared then had a “calling” moment. The calling was to do what he had just done at SYNDUIT, 10 thousand more times over the next 10 years. He didn’t know what it meant but he knew not to negotiate against a calling, but just go with it. He didn’t ask questions.

[7:13] Jared called up his CTO from SYNDUIT, and his Director of Operations, Katie, and talked the idea over with them, to build, scale, and sell 10 thousand tech companies over the next 10 years. They said they were in, because it was Jared, but they had no idea what he was talking about, so he explained it to them.

[7:41] Jared planned to launch a tech ecosystem, where entrepreneurs from around the world can pitch their tech ideas in the “napkin sketch” concept phase. Everything that exists today started as an idea. Jared wanted to hear ideas from around the world pitched in a safe environment.

[8:22] What Jared was looking for was the right person with the right idea, in the right market, and with the right business model. When those four things are present, he would co-found a company with that entrepreneur. They would both have equity in the company so their values would be aligned. They would build the company, everything included, at cost.

[8:53] About 97% of the initial costs for the minimum viable company would be provided at cost in India by SYNDUIT. Jared launched Project10K committed to building, scaling, and selling 10 thousand tech companies over the next ten years, while ensuring that every entrepreneur he says yes to has the support and infrastructure to achieve product-market fit.

[9:26] Product-market fit is defined as having $10,000 a month in recurring revenue. If you achieve that milestone, you can raise capital, make strategic alliances, and find other opportunities. In their first two weeks, Project10K founded seven companies. It gave them the opportunity to tune the processes. The team scaled from 12 people to over 100 people.

[9:58] About 15 months ago, they stepped on the gas and have not looked back. Thousands of entrepreneurs have gone through this process from a variety of nations. Project10K co-founded around 150 companies in the first year. Project10K does a lot of testing on the front end, so by the time they say yes, there’s a high probability of the outcome of build, scale, and sell.

[11:01] The goal is to sell viable businesses within 18 to 24 months of founding. It’s working, and Jared’s certainty about their ability to execute is 11/10. They have a very strong leadership team, a profound ecosystem of co-founders, investors, and overall strategic people, and a ton of attention from athletes, celebrities, politicians, family offices, tech incubators, and foundations.

[11:42] The reason Project10K has so much attention is the impact they have had. They’re democratizing and decentralizing the tech industry. Their portfolio is diverse. There are more women ad founders than men. Most ethnicities are represented. The youngest founder is 11 and the oldest is 77. There are high-school dropouts and Ivy League graduates.

[12:13] Project10K is actualizing dreams. People have dream tech ideas but they don’t know where to go with them. Project1K provides a working home for them.

[12:49] Jared stands for leveling the playing field. Project10K enables people at the idea stage to have a business home. The process starts with them pitching their idea. Founders whose ideas have the most viability are invited to due diligence. If Project10X sees enough potential, it will co-found a company with the entrepreneur.

[13:27] Jared invites Sachin to be an ambassador for Project10K for his large audience of entrepreneurs. Jared invites any listener with a B2B or B2C SaaS idea to go to Project10K.com/Sachin/ and schedule your complimentary pitch. This is a free offer to Sachin’s listeners only to pitch their idea to Project10K. It’s a five-minute pitch to the team.

[14:39] A video, a manual, and a presentation template where you plug in your idea prepare you to make the pitch. There’s no app idea that’s too early. Don’t do market research, just pitch it. If the team sees a viable idea, they will invite you to due diligence where research is done.

[15:24] Project10K also democratizes investing. You don’t have to be accredited to invest in these private opportunities, thanks to an arrangement with Wefunder.com. Find out how to invest $1,000 or more by going to Wefunder.com/Project10K/. Watch the video and read about what Project10K does.

[17:30] Sachin loves this opportunity for investors, whether or not they are accredited, and that Project10K is inclusive of every entrepreneur’s ideas.

[19:18] Jared shares the story of Crystal Morrison, Ph.D., now a non-technical tech founder. When her child was born on the spectrum, she put her career on pause. She wanted to be a full-time mother to her child with needs. She found that being a liaison between all his therapists was exhausting though. That led to the idea of Meerkat Village, launching very soon.

[20:48] Meerkat Village is a platform where a family that has a child with special needs can set up a village to support that child. OT, speech behaviorists, grandparents, and others collaborate in the app to share resources, documentation, food trackers, and more to support that child in one location. It’s a new category of software, village-driven care. There are a lot of use cases.

[21:37] Jared shares another story. Dr. Stephanie, a dentist, wanted to know what was draining time and money in her office. She talked it over with her staff. They told her it was missed appointments that don’t reschedule. She discussed it with other dentists. Between 7 and 12 percent of revenue is lost by appointments that are missed and not rescheduled.

[22:46] The new app goes to the waitlist and starts sending out text messages to the waitlist any time an appointment is canceled. In the first month of Dr. Stephanie testing this software, she recouped $7,000 of revenue she would have lost.

[23:31] What Project10K focuses on is not building exponential change, it’s making an incremental difference. They make practical solutions to everyday challenges in people’s personal or professional lives. There are tens of thousands of these challenges across every industry. Jared mentions some of the industries using Project10K, including wellness.

[24:59] Project10K’s portfolio is very diverse. They look for ideas that have a financial model attached. The whole thesis is subscriptions. If you start up and get 10 users to pay you $100 a month, you’re going to make it. If it’s a free solution, you have to sell to investors, and that’s a hard sell. With a business model, you can build it quickly in the market.

[26:22] This is a new standard of entrepreneurship. Jared realizes this project is bigger than he is. All industries, to date, have been disrupted. Innovation comes in and creates a new level of efficiency. Entrepreneurship has had a one to two percent success rate for thousands of years. Project10K is disrupting the model of entrepreneurship by providing an ecosystem of support.

[28:48] Every company in the Project10K ecosystem is there in service of each other. This allows them to bring entrepreneurship from a one to two percent success rate to a 40 to 60 percent success rate and a 100% transformation rate. Even if the startup is not sold, the individual will transform. Jared wants entrepreneurs to have it all, including family life success.

[30:00] Project10K does not attract the 21-year-old graduate living in a house with 14 friends and working around the clock. They attract mature professionals who have found inefficiency in their industry that they want to solve. They have families. Their children are seeing their mom go after her moonshot. In three years, she will sell the company for, say, $11 million.

[30:34] Selling the company will radically change the economics of the household, but it will also show the children that anything is possible. They just saw their mom prove it. This is a new standard for entrepreneurship and it reduces the severe pain that entrepreneurship is cousin for so many people.

[31:25] Sebastian, the 11-year-old entrepreneur, is a student of personal development. He’s reading Think and Grow Rich. He’s home-schooled. His passion is Legos. But once he takes apart the model, pieces disappear. His app is a phone app that scans the Lego pieces, inventories them, and tells you what you can build. Phase 2 will be a marketplace of rare pieces.

[32:28] Sebastian has an unfair advantage; Jared knows the Chairman of Lego. He knows about this app that Sebastian is co-founding! Besides working with Project10K, Sebastian has built a successful YouTube channel. You can invest in Sebastian’s app at Wefunder.com/birdi/.

[33:01] The team is everything. The alternative to the right team is a dream that does not get realized. Jared says most ideas either are never pursued or are pursued too far without due diligence, and they fail. Project10K brings discipline to the space of early-stage tech. When they say yes, within 90 days, they launch a minimum viable company to generate cash flow.

[34:09] Then they put a fanatical focus on it to hit a recurring monthly income of $10,000 within the first 90 days. That’s market fit. That allows them to fundraise, build strategic alliances, and provide a predictable path for the entrepreneur to follow with the support of Project10K.

[34:57] At 5:00 p.m. for Jared the business goes away and he is with his children until they go to sleep. Then he is with his wife until she goes to bed. Then he puts in 90 minutes to prepare for the next day and is up early to go to the gym the next day. Everything is scheduled. That discipline helps him get everything done.

[39:25] Jared shares links for people who want to pitch their ideas or invest: Project10K.com/Sachin/. Invest for as low as $1,000 at Wefunder.com/Project10K/.

[40:37] Sachin thanks his friend Jared Yellen for joining the podcast today.

Mentioned in this episode

Perfect Practice Live

Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill

Lego

Wefunder.com/Birdi/

Jared Yellin Bio:
Jared Yellin is a parallel entrepreneur who focuses on launching companies that even the playing field. From marketing solutions to educational platforms, simple sales training, and so much more, Jared has supported over 100,000 small business owners over the past 10+ years. He brings a depth of knowledge on marketing and scaling a business (while “having it all”) that is not only diverse but is also extremely practical and proven. In fact, his no-nonsense style of growth allows people of all levels to thrive when it comes to meeting and exceeding their goals. Jared has a number of life-altering companies including SYNDUIT, the first marketing platform with content for your industry that is currently supporting over 40,000 small businesses from

around the world. In June of 2020, Jared declared a new moonshot… Build, scale, and sell 10,000 tech companies in 10 years which led to the birth of Project 10K, the first tech ecosystem that co-founds tech companies with entrepreneurs from around the world. Jared is most proud of being a father of two beautiful children, Taylee and Ryker, and he has committed his life to do whatever possible to create more freedom with his kids and beautiful wife, Lindsay.

On Jared’s tombstone, it will read… "The man who helped other people accomplish more than they ever deemed possible while he, himself, accomplished the impossible that no one ever knew."