🌱Founding startups

Dillon Zhang Forrest, founder of Steady Capital, spent the first 3 years of his startup career working nights and weekends.

"Not a lot of people [around me] were entrepreneurs at the time. But I would see these Paul Graham and Chris Dixon essays online and that's what made me feel connected to everything."

Seeing his then startup CEO succeed, he took the plunge.

"I just thought if he could succeed, there's no reason why I can't succeed."

That was in 2011, a decade before he launched Steady.

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💡 Getting started without an idea

At the beginning, Dillon didn't have an idea.

"I was pretty sure I could generate a good startup without an idea. I knew people could find ideas by working on them."

Dillon's thinking that the idea is not the most important thing tracks. In 2015, founder, fund manager and investor Bill Gross found that the single biggest reason why startups succeed is timing.

Of course, pinions differ widely amongst investors, and there's more diversity of perspective with the new generation of emerging managers.

Ashley Flucas, GP of Flucas Ventures with over 2,000 investors and 200 deals in her syndicate focus on product last. In speaking with Stanford University's eCorner, she shared that she approaches evaluating deals from the outside in with emphasis on go to market and distribution. Showing that you have strong channels is #1. Flucas says, "you could have a consumer product worth billions of dollars not because you have an idea that will change humanity, but because they have brilliant returns. If you don't figure out how to distribute and scale it, nobody will ever see it."

Elizabeth Yin, co-founder and GP at Hustle Fund shares another perspective; where you should focus (eg on product or distribution) depends on your strengths.

🚀 Steady Capital's go to market strategy: storytelling

Dillon is lucky in that has the advantage of being a hacker and a hustler with time on his side. We connected just after his private launch to recap his go to market strategy: tell 50 stories in 50 days.

"Twitter became my job. My bio was the sales pitch on why I deserve a follow. I treated it more like a newsletter than my personal Twitter."

For startup founders struggling to find time for everything, the strategy does not have to be complex to work. Dillon's threads received a combined X likes, Y tweets and Z conversions. He's know in our ecosystem as the guy who signed off his earliest customer emails with "let's make you some f*cking money!"

Dillon balanced the initial distribution effort with a focus on responsiveness, delivering at or above expectations for his earliest customers. As soon as his twitter influencer moment was over, he went heads down building his private beta.

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While Dillon says he built his company out of envy, the stories he shared during his 50 in 50 push leave you feeling more hustler humans of new york-y than green.

"I was envious of all these rich people, just getting all these opportunities to invest their money and get richer. On the flip side of that, we like to see an underdog succeed. The people who I'm trying to track for my business resonate with these rags to riches stories. If they're interested in these stories, they should be interested in my company."

Of all the threads he shared in spring 2021, Gary Tan's humble beginnings as the child of immigrants now running Initialized and Ryan Hoover's story of the solo, non-technical founder of ProductHunt (sold to AngelList for $20m) stand out as underdog favorites. But his #1 favorite took him back to the original incarnation of Steady, when he planned to have people invest $100 into a McDonald's franchise.

"Those two blew up. What I'm proudest of honestly was my first one [on Patricia Williams]. It was about a black single mother and her two daughters. They built this like McDonald's empire in Compton."

Dillon's initial idea didn't work out because of McDonald's franchising laws but a friend sent him an Instagram post that led to the tweet thread (and acknowledgement of Patricia's success from McDonald's corporate).

💼 Idea + business model + go to market = traction

Trying out a bunch of different ideas over the last decade has helped Dillon figure out how to separate good ideas from the not so good.

"I think one bad idea is basically anything that doesn't make sense in a sentence. Another is something where you have to build the whole thing out. That's for an entrepreneur who is like Elon Musk and certain entrepreneurs that already have a few successes under their belt and they're able to raise money off of nothing."

With time, Dillon has learned that the importance if the idea is really depends on the business model.

"[Agencies] are a proven business model. You have competitors but you guys can all win and succeed together because it's impossible to monopolize your market. Work hard at that business model and you will succeed. In venture backed stuff, there are usually a small number of winners and to win, you need to create a new product or business model."

🙅🏽‍♀️Lack of access to capital in exclusive networks

The factor Bill Gross ranks as least important was a stumbling point for Dillon in his early days. He spent a ton of time fundraising with limited success.

"Everything becomes easier with capital. I know so many talented operators who don't have fundraising talent, and there's only so much you can do with limited capital. My struggle to learn how to fundraise, that's held me back."

The struggle Dillon experienced was about more than just learning though. It was about networks. VC capital has reached an all time high in 2021. Crunchbase reports that more than $288B was raised in the first half of of the year, a 95% increase from the $148B raised in the first half of 2020.

Jason Yeh, an entrepreneur, investor and founder of Adamant Ventures is trying to address this problem with the courses and content he creates, included Funded podcast.

Dillon acknowledges that while people on Twitter might say that this is the best time to be a founder or to fundraise, it's still really hard.

"There's just certain types of people more likely to succeed at fundraising. If you're product manager at [a well known company] you're much more likely to be able to raise money. There's a bias against women. There's a bias against Black people. There's a bias against Latin people. There's a bias against people who don't come from good colleges and stuff like that."

Dillon's previous struggle to get capital as an "unproven" founder helps him understand his target customer better. Beyond the idea, with Steady Capital, the mission felt stronger. And the mission is important to Dillon at this stage in his career: with a successful startup on his resume (RankScience), he wants to work on startups that he would only work on for free. After spending so much time building web apps in b2b SaaS, creating a product that helps people create passive income feels different.

"It's very exciting to help people struggling to make money build wealth."

🏃🏻‍♂️Building a track record through 10 years of experience growing startups

In many ways, Dillon is back to where he started, pursuing gold standard execution to meet or exceed early customer expectations on service and performance by automating and delegating as much as he can to stay laser focused.

He probably wishes he'd been able to give his 10 year ago self the same advice.

"I was obsessed with becoming a successful startup CEO. I moved to SF, did a few companies, RankScience being one of them, and I made a lot of mistakes. But I also continued to get a lot better at what I did."

How to be a successful CEO started to crystallize for Dillon as he was leaving RankScience.

"I'm not gonna say I could see the matrix, but I no longer felt like I was walking into the dark...I just woke up one morning and got it. There was the tactical stuff, product, sales, managing money, but the last thing that made me feel like I got it was interpersonal. It's important when you're a team that everyone can hold each other accountable. Everyone should be afraid of disappointing one another."

Now, Dillon has led Steady on a consistent path of MoM growth in assets managed and growth of those assets. Since launch Y months ago, he's attracted over Z customers and $ in investments. The first passive income checks are on the way.

 💡 "You feel disenfranchised. I feel disenfranchised. Let's try to build something together for us."

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