In September 2015, I founded an on-demand fuel delivery company in Miami and inked its multimillion-dollar acquisition within two years. Throughout the entire journey, my co-founder Barret Hammond and I didn’t really spend much time in Miami. We actually never even opened an office. Instead, we traveled throughout Asia, Europe, Central America and the U.S. -- all while running our startup remotely.
Now that I’m out of the trenches -- no longer flying economy -- I can look back and extrapolate what meaningful insights and lessons came from the experience and what it took to be successful while working from the road.
Learn As You Go
I had a 10-year entrepreneurial career leading up to GasNinjas -- I started my first online business at 15. The one thing that hasn’t changed is my ruthless focus on self-education and learning by experience. Blogs, books and YouTube videos are just a few of the resources I’ve invested an alarming portion of my waking hours into. The unlimited supply of useful information on the internet is available to everyone, but just as available are the unlimited distractions. To succeed as an entrepreneur, you must choose to dig into the resources that will guide your vision forward, which can be done anywhere at any time.
In my mid-teens, I found two books to be extremely influential: The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss and Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad. Early on, these books taught me the importance of passive income, which motivated me to create multiple side businesses that, together, would eventually cover my living expenses and travel budget and allow me to put away savings to later fund our company.
Outsource What You Can
A few of my side businesses were e-commerce sites that drop-shipped various niche products directly from manufacturers to customers. Experience with influencer marketing was my real enabler for this, letting me drive significant traffic on a meager marketing budget. Everything else was outsourced -- technical tasks, marketing, order fulfillment and customer service were all handled using third-party services. Once set up, I’d spend an hour a week managing each site. The income I generated from these ventures gave me the freedom to pursue GasNinjas.
When selecting partners to outsource your work, make sure to provide a clearly defined project scope or description of responsibilities. Typically, I closely monitor new team members for a week or two before providing them full access to a codebase or assigning more responsibility. Establishing trust is paramount with remote workers.
Analyze Infrastructure Versus Effectiveness
It took us three months to release a bare-bones minimum viable product (MVP) and fill our first tank. Past experience had taught us to be frugal. No amount of polish can hide a crappy idea, while a good idea doesn’t need much to shine. Things like app development, dispatching and customer service were all handled by remote freelancers who became full-time once the demand justified it.
We utilized third-party services to quickly and inexpensively automate most of GasNinjas’ moving parts, giving us more time to focus on what we believed to be most important: generating revenue. We focused on things that were substantive rather than aesthetic. Doing so kept us on a fast track while maintaining nearly no overhead.
Needless to say, infrastructure doesn’t make you legit. Good systems and cash flows do. As a younger startup, you may want to automate inexpensively as you’ll still be searching for product-market fit. As your business matures and processes become more defined, you can allocate additional time and resources to each part of your operation. Building a well-oiled machine that generates revenue while you’re away doesn’t happen overnight. It will take a number of iterations and adjustments before going “auto-pilot.”
Validate Your Assumptions And Be Open To The Results
We pivoted a few times before figuring it out. Prioritizing the push to cash-flow positive while still a small venture gave us some breathing room to think about what we aimed to accomplish at a macro level.
While cold calling customers for feedback, we happened upon one who owned a company that had its employees garage work vehicles at home. He suggested that having GasNinjas fuel these vehicles overnight could prevent time wasted at the pump during working hours. This idea led us to work with massive fleets, where the value of time savings reached thousands of employees. Had we not taken the time to ask our customers what they thought, that pivot may have never happened.
Don’t waste too much time perfecting your product before putting it in front of customers. Their feedback will teach you about the market and potentially help you discover a more profitable business model.
Don’t Forget To Get Paid
We weren’t the first to tackle on-demand fueling but we sure weren’t going to be the last. While we were laser-focused on building a large business, we always kept a keen eye out for exit opportunities.
Our payday came from the most unlikely of relationships. As regulation changes threatened our industry, we kept an open line of communication with our competitors. From maintaining that dialogue came the opportunity to exit to our main competitor in Silicon Valley, who had raised tens of millions of dollars in funding.
Keep in mind, if you’re working remotely and outsourcing most of your business, your intellectual property (IP) may be limited. Our valuation came from high-value contracts with partners and customers.
Financial freedom is not retirement. It’s a solid base that can afford you the opportunity to work on bigger and bolder projects. A wealth of experience can be gained by starting side businesses that get you there. In order to create such a base, it’s crucial that you learn to replace yourself through automation and outsourcing. When done right, you will have the time and income that allows for exploring other revenue-generating activities. All of which, I’ve learned and lived, can be done from anywhere while leading an extraordinarily adventurous and fun life.
