The Transcript

Uncover an Idea, Find a Co-Founder, Build a Business

Jonny Nastor: Hack the Entrepreneur is part of Rainmaker.FM, the digital business podcast network. Find more great shows and education at Rainmaker.FM.

Launching a new business? 99designs is your number one choice for quality design at an affordable price. Start your next design project at 99designs.com/Hack, and get a $99 upgrade for free.

Voiceover: Welcome to Hack the Entrepreneur, the show which reveals the fears, habits, and inner battle behind big name entrepreneurs and those on the way to joining them. Now, here is your host, Jon Nastor.

Jonny Nastor: Welcome back to another episode of Hack the Entrepreneur. I’m so glad you decided to join me again today. I’m your host Jon Nastor, but you can call me Jonny.

My guest today helps startups and companies attract new clients online. He’s the co-founder of Hubstaff.com, which allows businesses to manage their remote staff by tracking time and activity levels, providing screen shots, and calculating employee payments. Hubstaff allows us to see exactly what virtual teams are working on, so we can track expenses to specific projects.

My guest is also a self-published author, a consultant, and a father of two.

Now, let’s hack Dave Nevogt.

Before we get started, I want to thank today’s sponsor, 99designs. If you’re like many listeners, you’re in the early stages of getting your business off the ground. Your to-do list may seem like it’s a mile long, but there’s one task you should tackle sooner than later: your branding.

Businesses can get maximum creativity with 99designs, the online marketplace where dozens of designers compete to deliver the best design. You get to choose from ideas created just for you from awesome designers around the world. When you’re just starting out, of course, you’ll want to get your logo designed, but 99designs also makes it easy to round out your visual identity with other designs, too — like stationery, a great website, or whatever else your business needs.

Your brand could very well be the best business investment you’ll make. Get the help you need at 99designs. When you’re ready to bring your brand to life, visit 99designs.com/Hack. As a Hack the Entrepreneur listener, you’ll get a free $99 upgrade to use on your first design.

Welcome back to another episode of Hack the Entrepreneur. Today, we have another very, very special guest. Dave, welcome to the show.

Dave Nevogt: Thank you, sir, appreciate it.

Jonny Nastor: Absolutely. My pleasure. This is going to be fun. Dave, can you tell me, as an entrepreneur, what is the one thing that you do that you feel has been the biggest contributor to your successes so far?

Taking Risks and Not Being Afraid to Go After Your Dream

Dave Nevogt: Taking risks.

Jonny Nastor: Fair enough.

Dave Nevogt: What I mean by that is not being afraid to go after it and go after several things, so it’s a numbers game. If you’re willing to try several things and the more you cast, the more chances you’re going to get a bite, right?

Jonny Nastor: Yeah.

Dave Nevogt: I’m not afraid to go after an idea. I know it’s going to take time. I know it’s going to be hard, but until you can start talking to customers and not be afraid to put yourself out there, the chance of success is pretty low.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah, totally. Is this something you had to learn the hard way, or have you never been the person who goes after the shiny object? The fact that where you say that you know it’s going to be work. You know it’s going to be hard. It’s not just going to be an easy win with any of it. Is this something you had to adapt to and you learned a hard way?

Dave Nevogt: No, I just think that’s in my nature. I think it’s in my blood. I’m the guy that was mowing lawns at 12. That’s just the way it’s always been. I’ve always enjoyed going out and trying to discover new ways of doing things and potentially better ways of doing things. Just always enjoyed the feeling of making a buck for myself. I think that’s what pushed me towards being an entrepreneur in the first place.

Jonny Nastor: All right, I want to figure out where this happened for you. There seems to be this time in every entrepreneur’s life when, we typically don’t realize it at the time I don’t think, but looking back where something happened and we either have this calling to make something big in the world or we find we simply can’t work for somebody else anymore. Can you tell me which side of the fence you fall on there, Dave, and then when that was? Between mowing laws to now, where did this happen when you look back?

Dave Nevogt: I went to college like I think the vast majority of entrepreneurs probably do, at least online entrepreneurs. In high school, no one really understands what they’re going to do, for the most part. At least the vast majority don’t. You go to college as a typical path. Then, no one understands even what they want to do when they’re in college. I think what generally happens is that they go out and get a job because you’ve got to make money. You’ve got to pay the bills.

There’s a big realization that now you’ve got to evolve into the workforce. I think that’s when a lot of stuff happens. Mine happened when I went to go work for a very large company. I realized that I wasn’t challenged at all in that company. It was totally different than what I thought. I couldn’t make any moves.

I could not change the game in that large corporation. The only thing I could do is perform to the best of my abilities, and potentially, 15-20 years down the road, I could be in a position where I wanted to be financially. I just couldn’t change the game. I needed to be the person that changed the game. That’s the way I felt.

Jonny Nastor: When you decided that, how’d you make the transition from working for this giant company straight out of college, which is a very common path in North America, right?

Dave Nevogt: Right.

Jonny Nastor: You’re right. It totally is. Did you sort of like side hustle it and try and figure stuff out?

Why You Need to Be Putting Yourself Out There

Dave Nevogt: Yeah, totally. I built a golf business on the side. I woke up at 5:30 in the morning. I made a commute, an hour-long commute north of Chicago. I worked eight hours a day. During that eight hours, for the most part, I was thinking about my side business. On the way home during the hour commute, if I took the train, I was working on my business. If I took my car, I was thinking about it. Then I got home, had some dinner, worked for another three hours, and then I did it all over again. It was a period of just putting everything I had towards this new venture.

Jonny Nastor: How long did you do that for?

Dave Nevogt: Six months.

Jonny Nastor: Wow. Why golf?

Dave Nevogt: I got an online course. Well, back in the day, back in 2004, it wasn’t even online. It was physical. It was mailed to my address in this big bulky container.

Jonny Nastor: Are you going to tell us which one?

Dave Nevogt: Yeah, I don’t even remember the name of it even. Terry Dean is the guy who wrote it. I don’t even remember the name of it.

Jonny Nastor: I know that name.

Dave Nevogt: It was how to make money online or something like that.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah, I totally know. I know that name. I’m from that era, too, so I was wondering.

Dave Nevogt: I don’t remember the exact name of the course, but it was good, man. It taught me a lot about advertising and copywriting. It told me where to get my start. Now, today, you could learn all the information just in blog posts for sure. But back then, that information just wasn’t readily available. It was a brand new market, brand new kind of thing.

Jonny Nastor: Nobody gave that stuff out. Now, it s content marketing. Everyone just gives it out, doles it out for free.

Dave Nevogt: Totally, totally changed. Totally changed. To answer your question, why golf? In that course, he taught me that you have to find a hungry market, somebody that has a pain point that is ready to make an impulse purchase. I guess the main part is that pain. Golf was something that I was into at the time. It was between golf and poker were the two that I were looking at.

Jonny Nastor: Two things you were into at the time.

Dave Nevogt: Yeah, so those were the two things. Golf just happened to be it. It’s one of those things where it was luck, man. I was in the right place at the right time, but again, if I had been afraid to do that at the time, if I wouldn’t be willing to actually just create the website, even though I had no idea how to create websites, if I didn’t have the ability or the inner strength to try to write headlines, although headlines was something that was totally new to me, never would have happened. I never probably would have been where I am today.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah, that’s cool. Are you still in the golf game?

Dave Nevogt: I am. I sold half the company. The company now is kind of dead. I’ve moved on twice over now. Things die out pretty quick if you don’t pay attention to them.

Jonny Nastor: They do, yeah. Totally. All right, so you are excellent at taking risks and knowing that success is a game of numbers, so you’ve got to keep casting. Every blog post now, every expert talks about 80/20. Do 20 percent. Get 80 percent of the results. Do what you’re good at. Delegate the rest. Dave, can you tell me something in business that you absolutely are not good at?

Dave Nevogt: Yeah, that whole process is something that I’m still totally learning, and still, it’s very hard to do that. Something that I’m not good at would be paid advertising.

Jonny Nastor: Oh wow. I thought that was what you did?

Dave Nevogt: Well, it’s what I did back then. It was easy back then. Back then, you make a headline. Then you go into your AdWords account, just throw them in one ad group, and then you go from there. Now, you’ve got to have your YouTube ads set up. You’ve got to have so many different ad groups set up in AdWords. You’ve got to know Facebook advertising. There’s a whole big world out there now that didn’t exist back then when I did it.

Jonny Nastor: I know it’s insane actually. I fully don’t understand it, either. Do you guys use paid advertising at Hubstaff?

Dave Nevogt: We have not found a way to really scale paid advertising yet.

Jonny Nastor: Really.

Dave Nevogt: We do it. Right now, we’ve got some Facebook ads running. We’ve got some Google ads running. We do not have YouTube yet. We’ve started experimenting a little bit with sending traffic to blog posts that are more like content, like Outbrain or Taboola, or whatever the name of it is. We’ve started with that stuff, but we have not found a profitable campaign really yet, if that makes sense?

We kind of break even, but it’s not something that we’ve been able to scale our business with. Part of that is just because of the size of the market. Coming from golf, golf is a very big market for B2C market online, so you’re dealing with the individuals. You’re dealing with individuals that have a pain, and they need something now — and there’s a lot of them. You’re dealing with people with personal budgets.

Then, Hubstaff, what I do now, is B2B, and it’s a lot different. You’re dealing with entrepreneurs, very time-starved people. This is not their habit. It’s not what they want to be doing at that point in time, so the market is very different from B2B.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah, that makes sense. All right, Dave, we’re going to move onto ideas and projects. ‘Projects’ — obviously, a very, very loose term — can be a whole new business venture or something within an existing business, but just for ideas, before you even get to projects, to coming up with these ideas, would you consider yourself a serial idea starting person?

Why Communication with Your Partners and Co-Founder Is So Important

Dave Nevogt: Yeah. I have a lot of ideas. I think it’s hard. You can only do so much for sure. I have to continually tell myself, “No, you know we don’t want to go and distract ourselves,” but there’s a lot of ideas that I have that we could do if we could do multiple things. Right now, actually, what I’m trying to do is focus in and focus on the core business.

Jonny Nastor: Which is Hubstaff?

Dave Nevogt: Yeah.

Jonny Nastor: Will there be a point, or do you get that weird entrepreneurial itch, where Hubstaff is going well, and it’s like, “Oh, I’d love to start something else maybe too on the side”?

Dave Nevogt: For me, I love what I do. I love Hubstaff. I love it. It’s my baby. I’ve got a great partner. We have a very solid foundation, and the software is awesome. That goes a long, long way to helping us focus on the core business that we have. That being said, what it is more than anything is a feeling of missed potential. It’s opportunity costs. Where is the highest ROI going to be? Is the ROI going to come from doubling down and putting all our energy into one product that’s doing really well right now? Do you go deep into that product?

Or would it be smarter to invest somewhere else, for example, like development resources? Right now, for example, we have eight, maybe seven programmers. You take that team, or at least a subset of that team, and build out another product that you can monetize in other ways where we can take a lot of the knowledge that we’ve gained from starting this first product and build another one three times faster.

Then, that brings in a whole new demographic of people that may cross-fit into what you’re currently selling. There’s a lot of things to consider there. That’s the main thing for us. What’s the smart thing to do?

Jonny Nastor: You’ve decided, though, to double down on what it is you do?

Dave Nevogt: For the present time, yes.

Jonny Nastor: It could change tomorrow, who knows.

Dave Nevogt: That could change tomorrow, yeah. Right now, we’re focused on building other things out, but those other things are all going to feed into Hubstaff.

Jonny Nastor: Excellent. Well, first of all, where did you guys even come up with even the idea of Hubstaff?

Why Pain Points Can Lead to Opportunity

Dave Nevogt: I have been doing online business now for a long time, 10 plus years. Back in 2008, I was searching for a product that did this. My main pain point in my life was dealing with all the moving parts in a business — just all the admin, why projects weren’t moving forward. I had a physical office out in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I had about eight people in that office.

When I came home at night, man, all I could think about was this feeling of stress because,