E665 | Trash, Product Market Fit and Diwali

In this episode of the podcast, Doc Danny shares the inspiring story of his son Jack and his journey to find a successful business idea. Jack tried various ideas like a yard sale and selling water, but they didn't go as planned. However, he didn't give up and eventually came up with the brilliant concept of "Trash Tacklers."

"Trash Tacklers" is a business where Jack takes his neighbors' trash cans to and from the street so they don't forget. Jack put in the effort to create a logo, flyers, and even a guarantee for his business. He then decided to pitch his idea at a neighborhood party, but unfortunately, his first pitch was rejected. This initial setback didn't deter Jack, and he kept pushing forward.

His next pitch was to a busy doctor couple with kids. They loved the idea and immediately signed up for Jack's service. This success gave Jack a boost of confidence and he ended up with four customers, each paying $10 per month. This meant that he was earning around $40 per month or almost $500 for the year 

Doc Danny is incredibly proud of Jack for having the courage to pitch his business idea to adults at the party. He emphasizes that failure is a normal part of entrepreneurship, but it's crucial to learn from mistakes and keep iterating ideas. Danny also advises starting with minimal ideas and continuously improving based on feedback.

The key takeaway from Jack's story is that failing is normal, but persistence is the key to success. By remaining open to learning from failures, coming up with new ideas, and continuously improving his pitch based on feedback, Jack was able to find a business model that worked for him through trial and error. The first customer signing on gave him the momentum to keep pitching successfully.

Overall, this episode serves as a great reminder that success often comes after multiple failures. It's important to embrace failure as an opportunity for growth and to never give up on our dreams.

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: You can't compare the two without understanding what the other one is. You don't know how awesome it feels to, to have a win if you don't know how shitty it feels to have a loss. So you got to use that as perspective as well. You can't just use it as a negative, fuel that, that completely cripples you and pushes you back to whatever, state you're in prior to that, or maybe in a worse one.

Hey, are you a physical therapist looking to leverage your skill set in a way that helps you create time and financial freedom for yourself and your family? If so, you're in the right spot. My name is Danny Matei, and over the last 15 years, I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession. I've been a staff PT, I've been an active duty military officer physical therapist, I've started my own cash practice, I've sold that cash practice, and to date, my company, Physical Therapy Biz, has helped over a thousand clinicians start, grow, and scale their own cash practices.

If this sounds like something you want to do, listen up, because I'm here to help you.

Hey, what's going on? Dr. Danny here back again with a short Thursday podcast and it's story time again. Just go ahead, sit back and enjoy another entrepreneurial story coming your way. And this one is personal. It's about my son. So my son recently in particular has been very interested in making.

I think he wants to buy his own stuff. I think he wants to buy shoes and video games. I think that's like what he seems to be interested in and spend his money on. And we will get him, a pair of shoes that he needs. But that's about it. And yeah, I'm not getting into video games unless it's like his birthday or Christmas, and maybe he'll get something like that.

He's got to buy that stuff himself. He helps with us stuff. He helps us with stuff around the house as his chores go and whatnot. But he's, he has been interested in wanting to make more money, especially recently, but honestly for a while, and I want to talk about. Product market fit and sometimes how that can take a little while to figure out, where you align now, this can relate to your business.

For many of you, you may think to yourself, man, this is the niche that I want to work in. This is it. This is like ideal. For me, I started in the CrossFit world, that was my. That was my bread and butter for the first year in particular of our practice. And so I was able to get up and running and to build really, to build my own kind of book of business off of that niche.

But as, as I started to work with them more and more, and I realized man, it's a tough group of people to work with. Like all they want to do is have me. Dry needle their shoulder so they can continue to clean and jerk with terrible technique over and over again, and they don't really care to solve a long term problem.

They're all pretty young. They're somewhat not as compliant. And as I started to work with more and more people adjacent to that, like outside of it their friends and family, they were still like people that were, I would say. Active adults, they were trying to get back to something that they really enjoyed.

They were trying to really be able to enjoy activities with their friends and family. For me, somebody hitting a PR on a cleaning jerk is not important to me in comparison to somebody being able to throw their kid in the pool when they ask them to, because their shoulder is limiting them.

And I started to gravitate far more towards that as someone that could relate to that at the age that I was, and I had some underlying, previous injuries from from sports and the military and things that. That I had to work through myself, that, that were limiting me. And I know what it feels like to feel limited and have to say, to not say yes to your kids asking you to do something.

And it sucks, so for me, I ended up going a lot more in the direction of these sort of active adults. And that was a far better product market fit for me. Once I figured that out my son, he's tried a lot of things, a lot of things uh, Yard sale in our driveway terrible signage didn't work out.

No one wanted to buy his old Legos. That was a failure and it sucks. It sucks to sit there and watch them like just sit there and not sell anything and they look like so sad. It's like they feel so defeated. But I think it's important as well, right? Like you, you gotta, I think you have to appreciate that because he eventually had a win, but he's had a lot of failures.

One thing that he did that was actually okay, but turned out to be somewhat I don't know the best way to put it. Not necessarily the most ethical way of trying to make money was Selling, selling water, like a sparkling water, like LaCroix's or whatever, to we live across the street from a school that's selling LaCroix's to teachers when they were there for a teacher's training day.

And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that, but they realized that if they said that it was for a fundraiser. Which, raising money for something that people would pay them money easier. This was actually my daughter that figured that out, I think. And so yeah, they actually made a decent amount of money, but they did so by telling people that this was going to go to some charity, but that didn't exist.

So we shut that down. That's not cool. You can't do that. We had to give the money back. So that was, one that didn't go so well. And then he has all these ideas that he, what he wanted to do, but it never really pulled the trigger on it. And finally You know we come to the conclusion that, all right, Jack, what's, what's the minimum effective dose we can do, right?

Like what's something that people don't want to do that is not that hard to do, but it's a bit of a nuisance that you maybe you can help them with and our neighbors in particular. He has some friends that are doing something similar where they're basically taking trash cans. Out to the street for people so that they don't forget and the trash gets missed and then you end up with a bunch of trash and whatever.

And you forget like Sunday night to take it out and whatever else, or it's raining, maybe you don't want to do it. So this is the business idea that he has. So we create. A logo for this. We have copy. He has a guarantee. So if I don't show up to bring your trash cans to and from the street, you don't pay me anything guaranteed.

So he has all this copy he's put on a flyer with his logo. And last weekend we went to a Dwali party, or I don't know if I pronounced that but. It is a Indian holiday that my neighbors celebrate and it's honestly, it's a ton of fun. They do an awesome job. We get great Indian food and they have some games.

They play the fireworks and all kinds of stuff. And, but all our neighbors are going to be there. There's probably 50 people in this house. And my son with flyers goes walking around and starts going up to people directly with his flyer, pitching them on his idea for his business called trash tacklers, where he's going to take their trash can.

To and from the street, first person he goes up to is the guy whose house it is. And I'm watching this and he goes, Jack, this is a great idea, but to be honest with you, like it's two people, they don't have any other kids. Like he's we barely take our trash out because they compost the hell out of everything.

And they may take their trash out once a month because it's only the two of them. So he's I don't think this is something we'll need, but I appreciate the offer. Devastated. Like just, he's damn it. It's another loss, right? Another failure. Didn't work out.

Goes up to the next person. And he says, Hey, here's a new business I'm starting. I think I can help you out. I'd love to take the burden of taking your trash cans down to, down to the street off of you. So you never have to forget this guy, him and his wife. They're both physicians.

They're busy people. They have two young kids. And this guy goes. I'm a hundred percent in this is genius. I hate doing this. He's I hate it. And I, he's I forget all the time you got me for life. And to the look on his face, whenever he got his first sale was. Amazing, right? Just so excited, so much energy from this first client that he acquired.

And that just was it all the momentum that he needed the rest of the evening, he ended up getting a total of four clients. So he's charging 10 bucks a month. And so now he's making 40 a month and he's like doing all the math in his head. He's I'm willing to make almost 500 this year off of bringing trash cans out that honestly doesn't take him that long, but he's just taking the burden off of somebody else.

This idea of product market fit of failing of something not working out that there's a couple of things with that. So first of all, everybody fails. It just matters whether you're failing and you're. Regressing and you're quitting and you're going backwards and you're saying I give up.

This is too hard I'm not gonna do this or you're failing forward and you're realizing okay, that didn't work. What's next that didn't work What's next and the people that I see that do the best in their own businesses they test things They try things and then if it doesn't work, they don't let it Ruin their outlook on their creativity what they're trying to do.

They just say to themselves. Okay, that didn't work What can I learn from that? What's next? And that's what he did. And it's really cool to, see him have success with this, not necessarily so he'll make some more money. It's the lessons that he's learning about it. Imagine having the balls to go up to all these adults out of.

A fricking party with your flyers and pitch them on taking their trash out while they're sitting there trying to enjoy some, some food and a drink and talking to other people. And that's what he did. That's scary. That's hard to do for a kid, and he did. And it's it's scary for anybody.

It's scary for you to go to your first workshop, and teach it and to pitch yourself and put yourself out there. And say, Hey, this is what I do. I'd love to help you with whatever your injury is. I'll stay after. I'd love to talk to you individually if that works.

And no one comes, everyone leaves. That sucks. I've been there. It doesn't feel good. It feels bad. It feels sitting in your driveway trying to sell used toys and nobody shows up like. It's the same feeling, it's the same thing, you're going to go through it no matter what. But you've got to realize it's all part of it.

And the other thing that's important is it's whole, it's this whole concept of duality, right? It's you don't know what cold feels like if you don't know what hot feels you can't compare the two without understanding what the other one is. You don't know how awesome it feels to, to have a win.

If you don't know how shitty it feels to have a loss. So you've got to use that as perspective as well. You can't just use it as a negative, fuel that, that completely cripples you and pushes you back to whatever, state you're in prior to that, or maybe in a worse one, because it's all part of it.

And it's going to make that win that much sweeter. It's going to make it feel like you hit a home run when that first person says, yes, when that, whatever it is on a bigger scale, like that business relationship goes through that when when you have, when you sell your business, when you X, Y, Z, it doesn't matter, whatever this big things are that you're going to get a lot of rejection from.

If you can compound those losses to fail forward and to learn from those, man, the wins are way. They're so much sweeter. The people that have had to work for things are the ones that can appreciate it the most. So if you're struggling with something, dude, take a lesson from, my 11 year old, don't stop.

Iterate, find your product market fit, find the right verbiage, find the right offer, find the right context in which, to bring it up. Maybe bringing it up to everybody while they were, they're already a drink or two in was a genius move. They were like way more likely to say yes, it's like a baby.

That's it. But like all these things, you've got to keep iterating it on. You got to keep moving forward. And the only reason that you fail, the only reason it won't work out, this is the truth, like the only reason it won't work out is if you just stop, like if you stop because the pain is too bad, you can't take the rejection anymore, game's over.

This is going to be there and it's going to be there at different stages, different levels, whatever, but you got to build that tolerance. You got to build that ability to keep moving forward. And if you can. You can honestly, you can do whatever you want and you're going to have such a great perspective when it actually ends up happening for you.

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