4min chapter

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#285: Michael Mignano – Building Anchor Into The Biggest Podcasting Platform In The World

The Danny Miranda Podcast

CHAPTER

Do You Have a Challenge for People?

Mike McDonald: My challenge to anyone who's got an idea is don't sit on it. Get it out there into the world. You will learn far much more about that idea and yourself in a real world scenario than in a controlled environment, be that in your head or a small closed beta group. He says he has been most successful when he acts on his ideas even if they're incomplete.

00:00
Speaker 2
Very cool. I'm curious. The hour has flown by. Yeah, seriously. And this is crazy, but I'm, I'm, I have so much more. I want to talk to you about in terms of technology, the future where we're going, but I like to end these podcasts with a challenge for people because you take and you listen to the audio or video and you watch it and consume it, but what action are you taking after doing that? And so the challenge leaves people to take an action after consuming the podcast. So do you have a challenge you can leave people with?
Speaker 1
I think if you have an idea for something in your head, whether it's a startup, like we just spent a lot of time talking about or a podcast or a film or a book or a piece of writing, a trap that I have fallen into many times throughout my career, especially earlier in my career was to not act on it. To think about it, analyze it, even get feedback from people on it, which I do think is helpful to get feedback, but, but maybe most critically and most importantly for this challenge is to not act on it. And what I have found in my career thus far is that I have been most successful when I've just acted on my ideas, even if they're incomplete, even if they're bad, even if they don't end up resonating with anyone. You know, a thing that I've been doing recently is I've been writing really for the first time in my career. Over the summer, I had some downtime in between my Spotify role and my role at Lightspeed. And I was like, this feels like a good opportunity to start writing. And so I started writing and quite honestly, a lot of the stuff that I've published, I did not put a lot of time into some of it I have, I will say, but there are also certain pieces where I just put them out there. I write them and literally publish them an hour later. And sometimes it leads to, you know, maybe some critical feedback. Somebody says to me, Hey, I think you got this wrong or I don't think this idea was fully fleshed out. And I love feedback like that. And I take it and I take it with me to either change what I wrote or, you know, take an into consideration for the next thing or for the podcast, you know, a podcast when we talk about it, my perspective has changed. But what I like about putting things out there that are incomplete is they enable me to learn a lot faster, right? And this is how anchor was built, right? We had this idea, we obsessed a lot over whether or not it was the right thing to put the idea out and out there into the world. But eventually one day we said, we've got to just get this thing out there. Let's just put it out there. And in fact, you know, bringing it all the way back to the beginning of the conversation, you asked about the time when we had investors flying all over and all this attention and this media, we had been in a period of building anchor in closed beta for a year and we had set all these goals for what would have to be true for us to launch it. And we didn't reach any of those goals, but we got to a point where near and I looked at each other in the face, we're like, what are we waiting for? Like what are we really going to know about this product unless we get it out there in the world? And we learned a ton, right? We learned that, you know, if you get a lot of attention after you launch a product, you probably ignore it. We learned that the product we were building didn't work, but we also learned about the things that did work. And so, you know, my challenge to anyone who's got an idea is don't sit on it. Get it out there into the world. You will learn far much more about that idea and yourself in a real world scenario than in a controlled environment, be that in your head or a small closed beta group, get it out there into real world conditions as quickly as possible. That's my advice.
Speaker 2
Mike, that's an incredible place to come to a close. Thank you so much. Follow this man at McDonald on Twitter.
Speaker 1
Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

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