230: Mark Grimes — Launch a Startup Every Day for 31 Days
Do you have ideas all day long and just don’t know when you’ll find the time to start all your cool “startup ideas”? Well, today’s guest actually made it a reality. After collecting 350+ ideas over the years, he decided to just take a leap and see what business idea would stick… within a 31-day period.
Mark Grimes is a Philanthropist, Angel Investor, and Startup Founder, where every one of his businesses since 1989 has been cash flow-positive within 90 days. He is the recent Founder of 31 Startups, an experiment to launch a startup every day for 31 days during the month of August 2020 and help them get cash flow positive within a 90-day period. Was he successful? Tune in to find out!
Mark is currently on his journey to turn his 31 startups cash flow-positive. The deadline for this is the 30th of November. Mark has a formula for his success that he discovered over 15 years ago. The secret (which might not be that surprising) is Mark is hypersensitive to squeezing costs as far down as he can at the start and making sure there are paying customers first, before trying to scale further.
Why did Mark decide to start this crazy challenge? Well, the pandemic changed two of his businesses drastically, one of them being a co-working space, and he also found himself to be an empty nester with a lot more time than before. So why just start one thing, when you could start 31 things? He wanted to show people how to do it strategically and smartly.
How does Mark define a launch? He sees it as an idea he’s put to life and will be interviewing potential customers for it. He hasn’t registered all 31 business ideas as corporate entities yet because that would mean he’d be $100–200K in the hole! And Mark defines cash flow-positive as a business generating more money than what he’s spending on it. There are easy ways to game this system, but Mark has every intention to make it legitimate. He details every expenditure on his blog for full transparency.
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