Pivot, Pivot, Pivot - Builder’s Console Log (ep 1)
My Builder’s Console Log📅 2025-06-09
Transcript
[00:00] Pivot, pivot, and pivot. Welcome to builder's console log. This is going to be an ongoing series I just have for this community here, giving background of different stories I've had in business, different things I've learned up to this point for entrepreneurship and just everything with a board. So today's topic is pivoting and the importance of pivoting. One of the most important things I've learned when running different types of businesses is knowing when to pivot and knowing when to stay. To best describe this, let me give you a real world example of a business I ran that I exited within three months. Let's take some time back.
[00:31] Let's go back a couple years. It was like 2021 where I exited my first business, which was a vape oriented business, which I'll probably have to do a whole another video on. Long story short, in this business, I started it in 2018. This is when the vape regulations and everything around vaping in general, the regulations were very laxed. But around 2020, 2021 when COVID kind of hit, basically the government went full force against vapes. Anything that was inhalation was inherently deemed to be a cigarette. This put me in a position
[01:02] where I had a successful business, but the issue was the actual cost associated to run that business when it came to legal situations was just way too high. In order for me to operate in every single state, we were talking like $40 to $50,000 in just California alone to sell vapes. So, this wasn't necessarily a pivot. This was just me realizing when you just got to bite the bullet and exit a company when the positioning in the market is just not right. Which then led me to the next business I ran, which was cardboard cat homes. Cardboard cat homes
[01:32] was a product based business. The idea here, and if you own cats, you already know what I'm talking about, but cats love cardboard. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you just buy like an Amazon box. A cat will think that's the best gift you ever gave it. It'd be like Christmas. So, I ran this company. I bought this company and I ran it for only 3 months. So why was it only 3 months I ran this company? Well, up to that point, I had 3 years of Shopify e-commerce knowledge. So I really understood stuff when it came to logistics when you're shipping products throughout the country, the sizing of the box being important, the weight of
[02:02] the box being important, and the overarching thing that I learned through running a product based business is the end consumer could be very much, how do I say this, more demanding than they are in a software niche. That's because when you run a product based business, the individual will buy the product, it will take a couple days for shipping and then the individual will finally receive the product. That period between conversion, shipping, and receiving product can leave a lot of window for customer support tickets to be open. Where's my box? My box didn't come with the right
[02:34] stuff. My box was damaged. How do I assemble the box? How do I use the box? Like, there is a lot of overhead when it comes to customer support when you just sell a $40 ticket item. At that time, we were selling these boxes for around $35 at the low end, $55 for the high end, which on the surface is like Corbin, you were selling cardboard c you were selling cardboard that shaped into cool things like pirate ships and little castles for 55 bucks. I was there's a lot more entailed with that. And three major pitfalls of that was the first one is obviously supply and demand. When it
[03:04] comes to the supply chain, if you needed more boxes, you got to get them manufactured. And at that time, I was getting them manufactured in Shenzhen, China. And when they were getting shipped over, that would take two to three weeks. That was already latency. And then on top of that, the actual cost associated with shipping a box of that size was outrageous for me to ship the box because of the sizing of the actual box and the weights of the box. We're looking at like 20 to $25. So, my margins were already getting hit there. So, by the time I wanted to make $200 of
[03:35] just profit post transactions, post shipping, post everything, I was looking at to acquire around 8 to 10 customers to make $200 of profit. Issue with that is that that's 8 to 10 customers that could potentially be unsatisfied with the product or alternatively open up a bunch of customer support tickets for me to handle, which is fine if you have a team, but if you're a individual or a small team, we need to think scalable here. And that put me in a position where I realized I need a pivot. I had run a product based business for three
[04:05] years, which was that vape business. Then I ran this for three months. And within three months of me realizing the pitfalls, I went ahead and exited that business, dissolved this LLC, and just moved on to the next thing. If I would have stuck there and put myself in a corner like, "No, no, I'm going to make this work." it would not have worked in the long term in theory if I were to scale up to the point of getting a thousand customers and dealing with all the headache that's associated with that. So then the question is Corbin, how did you know to pivot? And what I like to do now if I'm starting a new
[04:35] business is I like to draw it out. So what I mean by that, I want to envision what this business looks like when it's super successful from my context. So, assuming I was like, "Okay, for me to hit $10,000 a month in profit every single month, what does that look like? How many customers is that? How much inventory is that?" And what you'll quickly realize when you do this kind of experiment is that some businesses when they're extremely successful operationally, the overhead is just too
[05:07] high for one person. you'd find yourself kind of handcuffed to higher upper limits for the business due to the fact of having so many customers that need the inventory and all of the costs associated with that. So that put me in a position where I pivoted out of a product based business and wanted to lean more towards service and software as software and service is easier when it comes to providing value and getting customer responses faster. For example, the software I'm currently running bumpups, someone pays $20 for a plan, they'll instantly get the plan. they'll
[05:37] instantly know whether they like it or not and they can proceed on paying me $20 the next month or not. So, another thought experiment is that if you're running a service-based business, what is success in your terms? If success is, I want to reach $10,000 a month, but that requires me to handle 20 clients a month on retainer, can you actually handle 20 clients a month on retainer? Does that sound like a comfortable life? Do you want to proceed? If the answer is yes, then go ahead, aim for the 20 and keep going. But if the answer is, okay,
[06:08] well, I can barely handle three clients a month. Then that's when you have to take a step back, reapproach, pivot, pivot, pivot the whole structuring of the business itself. Lean towards more scalable things that require less of your input. If you get more successful, the worst binding you don't want to find yourself in is that the business becomes more successful. Like that's a good thing. We want that. But when the business becomes more successful, your time becomes less. Eg. It requires more
[06:39] overhead from you as an individual. The best kind of businesses to run are the businesses that whether or not you get 500 new clients or 10,000 new clients, the amount of time associated from yourself doesn't go up exponentially and doesn't require you to work 18our days. And that's why the big play here is artificial intelligence. Building software, building apps, building services this way that are easier for you to grow at scale. But I want to identify one pitfall and one thing you
[07:10] should know before entering in a industry that is oriented this way. Software on a short time frame is very cheap. The most of the labor associated with building out software is just your time, right? Like the input of time. Once you get a working vehicle, the vehicle is just running, right? If I'm going to sleep and someone processes a video on bumpups, I don't have to be there to check whether or not the timestamps are accurate because I know the time stamps are accurate based off the pipeline I built. The one thing I'm learning from this experience of building out bumpups is acquiring
[07:40] customers for a product based business is a lot easier because it's easier to communicate in the sense of, hey, do you have a cat? You have a cat. Here's a cardboard cat home. Hey, do you like vaping? Do you want to vape? Here's a vape. It's easier to sell products this way. The margins aren't as good, but acquiring customers is easier. When it comes to software, building is hard. Of course, it's hard. I mean, there's a huge learning curve when building out apps, web apps, or just services in this nature. The issue then becomes how do you source clients? That really becomes
[08:11] the pitfall of any software. You could have the most amazing software in the world. It could be the best one, okay? It could be better than Google, but if no one knows it exists, no one's going to buy it because they quite literally can't buy it. They they don't even know it's there. So, my last piece of advice when it comes to pivoting is don't get your ego too tied to your business. My first business, I probably ran that a little longer than I should have just due to the fact that it was to be honest with you, it was my first really major business. We went all the way to the point of being a CC Corp. We were pushing some really good revenue. We were on Amazon. It was a lot of fun. But
[08:42] the issue was I saw the writing on the wall. I clearly saw the government was cracking down on that industry, but I wanted to stay. I wanted to grit my teeth and keep going. But at a certain point, you got to know when to pack up the bags and pivot. Now, pivoting doesn't necessarily mean you have to always exit the company like my two past examples. Pivoting could be, hey, I noticed this one feature in the app working really well. Let's just lean in harder there. But the idea is don't be too loyal to a concept or an idea. Stay open-minded. And as I said earlier in
[09:12] this video, pivot, pivot, pivot. This is builder's console log. If you want to know what the name's about, I think building is pretty self-evident. that's in any industry, whether you're building a real estate business or you're building a software business. Evident console log is something that's very useful that every software engineer uses to debug when there's issues in code. So, I was like, you know what? What's a cool name for this? Let's do builder's console log where you're going to get my console logs of bugs that happen in my life and I can give you some insight. I see you next