Disruptive Innovation Part 4

0:00 This is the 21st episode of the Create Podcast. A friend sent me this video to encourage me. To be a top 1% podcaster, you have to upload 21 podcasts. 21. Top 1%. 90% of people don't get past 1. 9% don't get past 20. And then 1% of podcasters, of all of them, make it to 21+. The world belongs to those who can keep doing without seeing the result of what they're doing.

1:01 The reality is, being a Disruptor isn't easy. When you set out to change the game, you will face challenges that can test your resolve technically, emotionally, and even ethically. In this episode, we'll get real about the risks and resistance Disruptors encounter. So, established competitors might push back hard. Regulators might not know what to do with your new approach. And not everyone will cheer for you. In fact, some may openly criticize or undermine you.

2:04 Technically and emotionally. And I can say that about being a creative in general. Owning a small business, building a brand, heck, doing a podcast can be emotionally difficult in training. In fact, I still believe that being a creator and creating content, even with the advent of AI and the simplicity of being able to use phones and have access to cheaper mics that sound great and all this technology that's out there to help make things easier, it's still difficult.

3:07 An emotional toll and mindset challenges. So let's first acknowledge the emotional rollercoaster. Okay. Embarking on something new means uncertainty. And humans generally aren't fond of uncertainty. You'll likely experience moments of doubt, anxiety, and stress. You might ask yourself, am I crazy to think this could work or feel isolated when others don't immediately understand your vision? This, my friends, is normal. Being a Disruptor often requires belief in yourself when few others share that belief initially.

4:11 In other words, expect some friction. People in your industry might dismiss you. Friends or family might not get it. Even your own team might have moments of losing faith. Part of your job as a Disruptor is to be the chief believer. A chief enthusiasm officer. Not in an arrogant way, but in a way that keeps the vision alive through rough patches. This is why having a why is essential for your business, for anything and everything you do.

5:14 Not only that, but to give you the keys you need. That's not going to frustrate you. That's not going to cause you issues. In fact, it's frustrated me building this, but I want to go through that pain so you don't have to. And being a creator, an entrepreneur, a disruptor is always going to have these rough patches. But if you have that why, if that why is burned into your bones, into your spirit, it becomes the essential compass leading you and pushing you through.

6:16 if you have that why, it'll push you and push you and push you and push you and drive you. You know, people who struggle through depression, you can interview a lot of them, and you'll find that many of them have yet to find that purpose, that click, that internal, yes, drive. And sometimes they get set into that depression. Now, of course, there are different types of depression, PTSD, blah, blah, blah.

7:18 And sometimes there's no one else around to pick you up. And it's up to you to pick yourself up. And maybe surround yourself with people who are voting for you, who are speaking truth into you. So how do you handle this, these internal challenges? Well, one key is to stay grounded in your mission. Remind yourself why you started this journey. What problem are you passionate about solving?

8:22 But if you want to become a 1%er to maybe grow the kingdom of God or to grow your family or to leave a legacy. You know, you don't need to surround yourself with things and spend hundreds and thousands of millions of dollars to become the 1%. What you need is perseverance. And sometimes it takes a, you know, little cheap remote and a prompter system that's cheap to accomplish the goal, to reach those 21 episodes.

9:27 As Bouncino of Silva Health advises, entrepreneurs create a community and find allies to help you navigate the uncertainty. Connecting with others who have walked the same road you have or are walking it alongside you can provide encouragement, advice, and sometimes just a sympathetic ear. Even disruptors need to vent and recharge. Your mental health is important. You're going to be working long hours, long days. Okay, I'm breaking from my script a little bit.

10:28 It takes a lot of endurance and patience to walk that road. And sometimes things would hit you. And if I let them sit in my spirit, if I let them weigh me down, then those long hours would actually get longer. I found that if I gave my burden to lay it at the feet of Jesus Christ, lay it at the feet of the Lord, let the Holy Spirit work it out.

11:30 Look, Jesus Christ's burden is light. His yoke is easy, and his burden is light. And even if you don't believe in Jesus Christ, if you surround yourself with family and with friends that support you, and a family doesn't support you, surround yourself with friends that support you. Friends don't support you. Find mentors that support you. Find communities, become active, and allow yourself to vent to people you trust, okay, two or three people, but also listen to their advice.

12:38 There would be healing in that conversation, as opposed to making, like, a gossip session that some people make it. If I brought the Lord in, or if we focused more on solving the problem. So bring the Lord in, and solve that problem, and give advice, if I can give advice, or just be a ear, a sympathetic ear, that just repeats scripture and focuses their heart into that why.

13:44 And then, you know, give it to the powers that be, or get audience feedback, and find that it's just a complete, total flaw. It happens, and it hurts. And it's okay to feel that. The resilience doesn't mean never feeling upset, or frustrated, or hurt. It means not letting it break you. I like to think of a horse, right? So these horses are majestic creatures, very powerful. Don't get them angry.

14:45 and, to be honest, the seven steps leads to demonic possession. But that's a whole other topic. But if you don't let it break you, you can let it hone you and focus you and supply wisdom and understanding. And that next time that you keep going and going and going, you're not going to have the same mistake. In fact, I don't believe in having the same mistake more than once.

15:48 Oh, it didn't work. Go to sleep. Okay, this is the feedback I got. This is how I can fix it. Oh, I can shift here. I can refilm these scenes here. I can change the code here. I can adapt that. And I can fix this. And I moved from, oh, this hurts, broke me, to this hurt is guiding me and focusing me and focusing the project. Many famous entrepreneurs faced repeated failures.

16:51 Learning grit from these stories is essential. So you might hear that word grit a lot, and I use it sometimes. And I'm always referring to the point where you're accomplishing something and it fails or it hurts or something is happening. And you're hitting that mental roadblock of this sucks. It hurts. Yesterday, I went to record a bunch of stuff for a fellow friends podcast, and I went to do some editing and, you know, get all their social channels and get their website and all that launch.

17:54 And I'm going in. I'm like, okay, I can wake up in the morning. I didn't have a day of rest. Day of rest is very important. I'm like, okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. And I'm struggling and the lights aren't working and the interface was rented. So I had to go pick it up. And then this happened and that happened. And it's just list, list, list, list.

18:59 failures. They learned that they were good at one thing as opposed to another. And they had long gyms and things and, and, and they were going, okay, at their own gyms. And they found out that they could launch other gyms and they tried that and they tried this and they, they tried some things and a lot of failure. But now, according to what he says, multimillionaire, uh, is growing and expanding business opportunities and going above and beyond.

20:02 that's called being crazy. So I don't recommend you do that. I recommend if you're hitting a brick wall and you're, you're getting that grit and you learn, you get audience feedback. You ask people around you, what can I do better? You, you, you look at the numbers, you look at things and you start seeking. I would seek God's wisdom, but you can also seek the logical wisdom.

21:06 So feedback and failure is not final unless you stop trying. There's also an image aspect, right? Sometimes disruptors are perceived as troublemakers and occur in a corporate setting. A person pushing for disruptive change might even be seen as a threat or risk. I've been there being sidelined in your own venture. You might worry that speaking boldly about changing the industry could attract criticism or envy. Part of the disruptor's resilience is developing a bit of a thick skin.

22:09 I know someone else who's got podcasts that people are attacking them with. Please don't do that. And whether it's personal, I'm not going to say either way, but I know. And are people perfect? Are you perfect? Am I perfect? No. In fact, I would say I'm very imperfect. But my trust is not in myself. My trust is in God. And he can shape me. And the people around me, I'll find the right people and keep them around me.

23:10 You're challenging someone's company. You're challenging someone's power and authority. I mean, it's a very extreme example, but the same thing applies. Resistance from incumbents. Let's talk about that. When you enter an industry with a disruptive approach, expect incumbent, pre-built companies, the established players, to not take it lying down. You're potentially threatening their market share or the way they do business. Often incumbents will initially dismiss you. This upstart can't possibly affect us.

24:13 And eventually, they're going to have to cut off that line of business. I've seen it all the time. Sometimes a big company will try to quickly imitate the features of your product or service. They have seemed to have more resources so they can be intimidating. However, they often lack your agility or the true understanding of the innovation. That reason why. So their copycat attempts might be half-hearted.

25:18 to customer sales until you build a stronger brand. So it's you build an online presence or you do a pop-up shop. I know a clothing brand that you might know, that'd be called Supreme, that started that way. You know, they got rejected. Okay, no problem. It started doing pop-up shops. And now think about it. Millions and millions later. They also might do this. They might spread F-U-D, FUD, right?

26:21 Traditional software vendors cautioned that it wasn't secure or reliable. Over time, the benefits spoke for themselves. And most of those benefits, to be honest, are as a software provider. Because instead of you buying $45 for the software, you buy it for $7.99 a month. And at the end of the year, my bottom line is increasing. Because instead of it just $45, now we'll say $10 a month to make it easy.

27:25 And that's every year. And so within five years, they're already making more than they could before. Because people would be stuck on older versions. Because their companies are like, I'm not going to invest in it. It works. We're not changing. Now, of course, the problem I have with Adobe is they keep making changes. And sometimes those changes and updates remove things that I have need of. I mean, one of them, delete the undo button for a brief time.

28:27 I have a bunch of those waiting in the wings. I also have some failures. Some that I wouldn't consider personal failures because if I look at the account and I look at things, I see there are other mitigating factors. But it doesn't mean I'm not learning and improving the software, improving the service, and constantly thinking, okay, how can I solve this big problem? If I can solve that big problem, then perhaps I can change that portion of the industry.

29:33 In many cities, Uber faced bans or had to fight cost of legal battles. London revoked Uber's license at one point. In some places, taxi unions sued for operating illegally. This can be a huge challenge. It's hard for a small company to navigate legal fights. The approach, Uber's and others took, was usually to mobilize public support. There are users that love the service and banded around it and often petitioned or pressured city officials to allow it and to negotiate, regulate after establishing a foothold.

30:36 As Ave Pardo noted, disruption often triggers resistance from established players who may lobby for stricter regulations or slow adoption through fear. These challenges can be mitigated by aligning innovation with compliance, treating regulators as partners, and building trust with stakeholders, cities, states, etc. In short, be proactive so that you care about safety, you care about fairness, or whatever the concerns are, and find ways to meet those concerns.

31:40 Loyal customers can become your advocates. If an incumbent tries to squash you, when seeing this, when communities rally behind their favorite disruptive startups, like locals supporting Airbnb in city council meetings or petitioning for their food trucks when regulators try to ban them, this helps. Now let's talk about risk management. Disruptors take on more risk than those who play it safe. And risk management is a key essential for scaling your business.

32:40 You want to disrupt, you want to change the industry. Okay, great, you have to try something new, and it could be risky. But not all risk is equal. And smart disruptors learn to manage and mitigate risks. So here are some strategies. Trust or test assumptions early. We talked about minimum viable products, and point, those reduced markets risk by validating demand cheaply. If they're quicker, you can verify key assumptions.

33:46 And it may sound like this is something you should already be doing, but not a lot of people take track of their cash flow. Sometimes it kind of depresses you when you're starting, and you're like, oh, this is my cash flow. And then later your cash flow can just start skyrocketing. If you haven't started putting processes in place to watch it, you might find out that in a year or two, you've lost lots of money, and then you get to come back and make changes.

34:47 It's like protecting you and giving you an extra layer to ensure compliance where possible. For example, if you disrupt in healthcare or finance, regulatory compliance isn't optional. You need a strategy to innovate and obey critical rules or work to change those rules. So I'm releasing a part of the universe platform, you know, payments system, you know, so people can, you know, easily do subscriptions, easily manage, you know, customer credit cards, all those kinds of things without that information being accessible to me as the universe.

35:47 Not just passing the buck, someone like, I hear you take care of it, but more investing into seamlessly integrate to make it easier for you as the customer, me as the service provider, and the payment processors to make it just easier for everyone to work together to provide that, you know, experience that you're expecting from the universe. We'll also kind of, you know, mitigating my risk. So being disruptive doesn't mean being reckless.

36:51 Personal resilience. This is risk of burnout or stress overload. This is important. If you're a creator, if you're building a brand, building a business, building a nonprofit, if you're running a nonprofit, you're running a for-profit, if you're running a community, if you're building a clothing brand, stress overload is a real, real thing. And handling it is very, very important. Your mental health, it's part of your triune being, right?

37:53 A day of rest is very important. Meditation again, spending time in God's presence, reading the word, allowing your mind to wander and then focus back in and explore the city around you and allow yourself to take a different route home and just change things in your atmosphere to keep your mind from getting into a rut and from getting into depression. And then, of course, you have a spirit and many people ignore the spirit, you know, because it's like, oh, it's my heart.

39:00 I make sure I have friends that I can call up and pray with and I am ministering to them. They're ministering to me and I'm making sure that my spirit is always kept in check. Like, it's not always great, I will admit. It's one of the areas I can really use some help in and there are some, you know, concerns there. But as long as you're taking care of your physical body, taking care of your mental body, taking care of your spiritual body, doing the right things, do small things first.

40:07 People who are just doing sprints, okay, they're going to be running and they're going to go off to another sport. No, no, no. You have to build this lifestyle. This is often overlooked. But maintaining your mental, spiritual, and physical health is key to being able to handle external challenges. As the saying goes, you can't pour from an empty cup. You need to fill that cup daily as you pour it out.

41:10 That kind of backfired on them with their customers being outraged by that. Their stock plummeted and many predicted doom. Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, publicly apologized, scrapped the idea, and won back trust of her time by riding the ship. Netflix learned from their misstep and they moved too fast and confused their value proposition. So they adjusted course resilience, right? They're adjusting. And kept going. Meanwhile, cable companies and networks started fighting back.

42:17 And using the technology to help fund the entertainment division down the line is that producing shows is expensive. We're talking about millions and billions. And it's completely new for tech companies, right? Amazon's doing it now. Netflix was the forerunner. Apple's doing it a lot. And they're pouring millions and millions of dollars into this stuff. But it was such a huge risk to make it the bigger risk of not having content.

43:20 They found new ways to deliver value. Originals. Better algorithms. International expansion. That's a big one. You know, they start [inaudible] animes. And they started going into different markets and expanding. Maintaining your integrity. Now, here's another one. One more aspect to discuss. As a disruptor, you may find yourself in great areas ethically or legally. As you push boundaries, it's important to maintain your integrity and values. Doing the right thing builds long-term trust.

44:21 A bad reputation can sink even in a disruptive company. We've seen some high-flying disruptors falter due to internal culture issues, ethical missteps, intentional or not. For instance, WeWork's implosion was partly due to leadership issues, not for lack of good ideas. You know, if you ever watch WeWork, they started buying all these properties and they had no capital. And when they went public, WeWork is like, here, that's what we do.

45:22 As we wrap up today's podcast, the tough love portion of the series, remember this resilience, the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties is perhaps a defining quality of successful disruptive and disruptors. It's more important than your intellectual quotient, more important than how much money you start with, arguably even more important than the initial idea of persistence, endurance, adaptability, will often beat a brilliant but inflexible team. So cultivate that resilience in yourself and your organization.

46:23 And over time, you start believing in your own resilience, and those obstacles don't become hurdles or potholes or just part of the road. You've proven to yourself that you can bend without breaking. Finally, keep the disruptive spirit alive. Recall that first company piece we mentioned. Warning how many disruptors can become complacent. Shopify and others grew fast. Later, admitted they got too comfortable and lost agility. Don't let success breed hubris.

47:27 It does not matter how slow do you go, as long as you do not stop. The journey of disruption can be arduous. Persistence is undefeated. In fact, it's a fruit of the spirit. You only truly fail if you stop. So rest when you must. Learn the hallways and keep going. Do not stop. Lord, I pray right now for my audience. Lord God, and everyone turning in, that you give them peace, that you give them supernatural endurance and stamina to continue to run that race, to pursue that vision and the calling and the creative purpose that you place in their heart.