I recently had the opportunity to do an interview with Jun Loayza, a fellow entrepreneur and chief marketing officer of his startup, Future Delivery. In the interview, Jun answers the tough questions: his misconceptions on entrepreneurship, how he copes with being broke, and how he plans to take over the world with career-advancing video games.
The entrepreneur’s life sounds exciting to many people, but having made the transition from corporate life to a startup myself, I must say that being an entrepreneur is a tough life! What do you think are the most common misconceptions about entrepreneurship, and what are the corresponding realities?
Before I embarked on my journey as a young entrepreneur, I really had no idea what it took to start a company. I thought one had to go through some formal process or that there were some set rules and guidelines that you had to follow in order to start a company. Many of my friends still ask me, “Jun, how did you start your own company?” The truth is, you become an entrepreneur once you find that mentality and mindset. Your company is born the moment you decide that it is born. You have the idea in your head, all that is left is for you to refine the idea and execute.
The biggest misconception I had is that as an entrepreneur, all you will be doing is high-level work. People become entrepreneurs because they want to be their own boss and don’t want to do grunt work. The truth is, you will wear every single hat in your company, so you will be doing the high-level work and all of the grunt work. You will also have to do a tremendous amount of research and validation before you actually get started on executing your startup dream. I have met a lot of investors who say that the biggest mistake that most startup companies make is that they don’t do enough primary research that validates their idea and concept.
Money is a huge issue for aspiring entrepreneurs. How do you handle the personal financial crunch of starting a company?
It’s all about the cash flow when it comes to running a startup. That’s why a majority of startups fail – they just run out of money to operate. So how do I personally deal with it? I cut costs in every possible way that I can and I make short-term cash in every possible way that I can.
Before stepping aside from my corporate life, I saved up enough money to last me 6 months without making an income. I moved back home with the family so that I don’t have to pay rent. It was actually great moving back home: dinner is also ready at 6:30pm, my clothes are washed every Sunday, and there is always food in the fridge (hahaha, I just noticed 2 out of the 3 perks have to deal with food). I cut costs on gas by carpooling with my girlfriend as much as possible when I have to drive to LA (it also helps save the environment).
I don’t feel that moving back home is a HUGE sacrifice. My family and I are very close, so it’s so fun being able to hang out with my brother at home again. The biggest sacrifices that I’ve had to make are “time” sacrifices. I just don’t have enough time to allocate to everyone that I want to. I rarely see my friends from high school or UCLA, and I’m only able to take out my girlfriend one night out of the week. My night life has been put on hold because I pretty much work until 3am every night.
So how do I handle the financial crunch? The answer is pretty much summed up in these three steps:
- Move back home (check)
- Don’t spend money on movies, expensive dinners, and alcohol (check, minus the alcohol) (Jun grins)
- Don’t have a girlfriend/boyfriend (failed… hahaha)
I definitely failed on the relationship front too. So what advice would you give to someone who wants to start a company but can’t afford to quit his/her job?
If you want to start a company but you can’t afford to quit your job, then become a part-time entrepreneur. Work on your startup when you get home from work and on the weekends. This can at times be even more stressful than being a full-time entrepreneur because now you’re even more tired, more stressed, and since you’re not full-time on your startup, it won’t really pick up and start growing.
The best thing for you to do is build your team before you iron out your idea. Once your team is built, work together to create your company vision. If your team of part-time entrepreneurs works hard enough, then you may be able to reach a point where you have bootstrapped enough funding to quit your job, or you start making some revenue which will allow you to step aside from your full-time job.
You work at a company that you’ve basically started with your friends. How does the team cope when the company puts strain on those friendships, and how do you eventually moved past it all?
I love our company culture because we have a “genius/garbage” model. Every time someone offers an idea or input, we all feel comfortable enough to say that it is a “garbage” idea or it is a “genius” idea. This saves us A LOT of time because we don’t have to beat around the bush when there is a bad idea. We can immediately say it’s “trash” and move on.
We love bashing each other in the company because it only makes us stronger. This is why our company culture is so strong and why I believe our company has a great chance for success.
Give me a brief overview of your newest product, FDCareer. Who is the target audience? What is the main goal behind the site?
FD Career is career development with a gaming touch; we make personal and professional development actually fun! Our core principle is unique, yet simple: Live your life as if it were a video game.
Every time you gain an internship, get a high GPA, or become a leader of an organization, you gain experience points and level-up. As you level-up, you gain prestige, access to new areas of the site, new features, and eventually the ability to recruit with more prestigious firms.
Our target audience are students and young professionals. If you have been productive in your life, then FD Career is a great way for you to show off your accomplishments and get recognized. If you have an expertise, then you’re able to create a Quest about your expertise. For example, an SEO expert can create an SEO Quest that other users can take.
If you don’t know what you want to do with your career, FD Career can help you find out what you want to do career-wise. If you want to learn more about Management Consulting, you can choose the path of business and take on business analysis quests that will test your quantitative and strategic thinking abilities. For example, the Rock Harder Quest will challenge you to solve why a company is losing profits and give you the opportunity to provide your solutions.
Monster helps people by giving them a platform to apply for jobs.
Vault helps people by providing company information.
FD Career helps people by helping them find out what they want to do career-wise and how to get there.
You already have an impressive number of users on FDCareer. What online and offline outlets are you using to market FDCareer? How are you recruiting users to your venture?
This is my area of expertise and what I absolutely love doing. We have been using every single form of online social media possible. We’re on Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, Digg, Stumble, and everything else. I do want to highlight three unique strategies that I feel we are using:
- Living the Startup Life – For the longest time, I was thinking about what kind of YouTube video we can make that will brand the company. We thought about making commercials, video tutorials about how to interview, and interviews with career coaches. It finally hit me when I saw Startup.com (a movie about the rise and fall of a startup company). I decided to make a video documentary of Future Delivery, documenting our successes, struggles, and hardships as young entrepreneurs. It’s entitled Living the Startup Life and you can watch it on YouTube right now.
- Google Alert and Twitter Track – I am using Google Alert to track certain keywords that are very relevant to Future Delivery: career development, self development, “Future Delivery”, “FD Career”, and many others. Every time someone writes anything with my target keywords in it, I will be immediately be notified. If you have a company, you should at least be following your company name on Google Alert. If you’re a blogger, you should definitely be following your name so that you know when someone is talking about you.
I am also using Twitter Track to follow the same keywords as the ones I am following on Google. Whenever someone tweets one of my keywords, I can immediately respond to them and hopefully make a new connection that I can introduce to FD Career.
- Connect with my friends on Brazen Careerist – Although this may not be unique to you Monica, I feel there are a lot of people in our generation who have still not tapped into the Brazen Careerist community. I feel that we are definitely a strong, influential community that is growing everyday. Because of BC, I was able to meet you Monica.
Yes, and you’re a great connection to have. The Brazen Careerist team will be ecstatic to hear our network is a key part of your marketing strategy to young professionals.
Entrepreneurs can definitely tap into this network to promote their startups. Of course, they have to do it the right way. If they start spamming us, we’ll know about it and warn everyone else.
You once described FDCareer as a mashup of Second Life and Facebook for young professionals, yet the product as it stands today looks quite different from both SL and FB. At Brazen, idea transformation happens all the time as we get nearer to launch. How would you describe FDCareer now?
FD Career is the first product for Future Delivery. The product that you’re referring to as the fusion between Second Life and LinkedIn is FD World. FD Career is the first step to toward FD World.
Ahh, that makes sense now. What does the future of FDCareer look like?
Our goal with FD Career is to establish Future Delivery as the leader in career and personal development. When users reach a certain Social Level, they will be rewarded an avatar on the FD Career website. When FD World launches during the Summer of 2009, users will be able to transfer their accounts and avatars from FD Career to FD World.
In the next few months, we’re going to release Competitions for FD Career. Teams of 3-5 people will be able to participate in online business, engineering, or social media case competitions where they compete against other teams from across the nation. Our goal is to create more user participation and support on the site through the competitions.
Many people don’t understand what the business model for Web 2.0 companies are. What is your general business model for FDCareer, and how do you get funding for a Web 2.0 product such as FDCareer?
Our funding has come from bootstrapping from our personal network. It is very difficult to raise money from professional investors without having a launched product that has proven traction. We have spent a lot of time earlier this year building relationships with investors, but not necessarily looking for money. Now that our product has launched, we are speaking with the investors we have built relationships with and are now formally setting up pitches. We hope to raise a round of seed funding this Fall.
Our business model consists of company sponsorships and advertisement. If we can establish the FD Career system as a great tool to find the best talents in the nation, then companies will use our site to better hire these talents. Instead of sifting through the hundreds of thousands of resumes that companies receive every year, they can use our leveling system as a measure of a person’s experience, motivation, and potential value that he or she can bring to the company. Companies will pay to use a platform that helps them find talents more efficiently than the tools that they use now.
As a young, twentysomething professional, what can I get out of using FDCareer that I can’t get from other social media such as Second Life, Facebook, Linked In, Brazen Careerist, or blogging?
We do not want people to stop using other social networks or social media. FD Career is created to be the platform that gives you prestige for everything productive that you are doing in your life.
One of our future quests will be to become a blogger on Brazen Careerist. Why would we create a quest that leads people away from our site? BC is an amazing community that helps Gen Y meet others with similar goals and interests. Being a member of BC is both productive and extremely fun.
That’s awesome. We’re always looking for new faces in the community.
We also have quests that encourage people to use Digg or Twitter: a series of quests that we currently have challenge the user to get more followers on Twitter.
Within 2 months, we will launch our Blogging Community where we rank users’ blogs. We will rank them in terms of visitors, subscribers, and comments. All blogs in our community must be a personal blog and cannot be a company blog. We’re building this so that people who have had great success in promoting their blog and who have amazing content gain prestige and get rewarded. More importantly, users who have no idea how to get people to come to their blog have the opportunity to learn from those who have been very successful with their blog.
As far as battling it out with Second Life, it will be a fierce battle. Second Life is not scalable because it is a community based around fantasy personas. In contrast, FD World will be a community of people representing their true identities. Our hope is that people will use FD World to further expand their network and develop their personal and professional lives.
Sounds like FD Career is going to be a great addition to the social media world.
Thank you so much for interview!
If you’d like to get in touch with Jun, here’s how:
Over 70% of people get a job from networking. As a entrepreneur, you technically already have a job; but you will inevitably go to informational/networking meetings to sell an idea, convince clients to hire you, or secure funding. Here’s how to get started:
Monica O'Brien is the Director of Digital at Fizz and author of the book Social Pollination, which helps businesses leverage social media for crazy growth!
