The Pursuit of Scrappiness #19 - Jekabs Endzins (Roibox) on serial entrepreneurship, the potential of geo data in AdTech, principles of building multiple profitable companies & helping millions of people to delete embarrassing tweets
Jekabs Endzins is a serial entrepreneur, currently developing Roibox, a digital marketing tool that revolutionizes the potential of geolocation data. He has co-founded several profitable businesses, including Mogo Finance (now Eleving group), Tapbox, TweetDeleter, Finitera. He has also failed close to 10 other ventures over the past 10 years and has some ‘war stories' to share.
As a true serial entrepreneur, Jekabs is always working on several projects at the same time, and in this episode, he shares his secrets on how to manage that. We talk about the latest in AdTech, building and failing companies, choosing the right co-founders, the value of business incubators, challenges in monetizing businesses with great user metrics as well as fails and learnings from building companies for 10 years.
The topics covered in this episode with Timestamps
[06:15] - Roibox and making digital ads more geo-targeted and efficient
- In most online businesses analyzing data is a must
- The place where consumers work, live, and spend their time has an influence on their commercial decisions
- Digital ad spending is bigger than TV, print, outdoor and others
- Deliver product updates as fast as possible to get real market feedback
- Be decisive - a bad decision is better than no decision
- Finding product-market fit by trying to help as many and as different customers as possible
[26:18] - Serial entrepreneurship and managing multiple ventures at the same time
- The key for time management is to have the right partners in multiple projects, to be able to run many companies in parallel
- The more you do, the more you can get done
- The ability to multitask between projects is key
- Finding co-founders based on gut feeling
- Doing background checks and references on cofounders you don't know well
- It’s important that you want to spend time together with your co-founder
[38:15] - Tapbox and the value of business incubators
- Government support for startups in Latvia is extensive enough
- Business incubator as big financial support in early stages
- You can get 50k and more financial support without putting in too much work
[45:15] TweetDeleter and challenges in monetizing a great and highly demanded product
- Tweetdeleter is a new type of company - fail it till you make it
- Challenges in monetizing a convenient consumer product
[59:28] - Business fails and challenges
- Dealing with modern financial system regular practice of freezing funds
- Learnings from hiring over 10 years
- You can always build things faster
Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/
Support for this episode comes from Nexpay > https://paynexpay.com/
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