We Wasted $150,000 on This Startup Mistake

It's the mistake that sinks countless startups. We Wasted $150,000 on This Startup Mistake. Before Bryan Clayton built Green Pal into a bootstrapped marketplace processing over $30 million a year, he and his co-founders made a critical error that almost ended the company before it began. In this interview, Bryan shares the unfiltered story of that failure and the hard-won lessons that followed. You'll learn the psychological toll of selling a $10M company to start over and beg for $27 sales, why bootstrapping forces you to focus on what truly matters, and how they fixed their customer retention by finding and destroying a critical bottleneck in their business. Check out the company: https://yourgreenpal.com

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Inquiries: welivetobuild@gmail.com

🕒 CHAPTERS

00:00 - I Sold a $10M Company. Then I Begged for a $27 Sale

03:08 - Why a Tech Business is Like Gardening, Not Construction

06:24 - The Myth of the "Hacker & Hustler" Founding Team

09:30 - The $150,000 Mistake That Almost Ruined Our Company

12:40 - Why Early-Stage Founders Need to Be "Mario"

15:52 - Knowing When It's Time to Sell Your Business

25:24 - How to Find and Destroy Business Bottlenecks

28:22 - The "Reliability Score" That Fixed Our Customer Retention

35:00 - A Founder's #1 Job Shifts From Hustling to This...

45:00 - Why Raising Capital is a "Bad Bet" for Most Founders

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