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Welcome to another value packed episode of Investing Yourself, the Digital Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm of course sure restart that. Sorry about that. Welcome to another value packed episode of Invest in Yourself, the Digital Entrepreneur Podcast. Every entrepreneur knows that the turning an idea into a real product can be one of the toughest and most expensive parts of the journey. But what if there was a way to build smarter, faster and leaner without compromising on the quality of momentum? Today's guest has cracked the code. They are also the co founder and CEO of Vertigo. He is leading an MVP studio that helps early stage founders transform their ideas into fully functional, minimum viable products, quickly affordable and with razor sharp focus on what truly matters.

With hands on experience launching startups in both the UK and the US he knows the pains of technical barriers all too well. That's exactly why he teamed up with his co founder to create a more accessible tech driven path for founders. Since 2020, sorry, 2022, he's helped over 80 founders validate ideas, launch products and secure founding, with many going on to top accelerator programs. If you're the, if you're a founder ready to launch smarter and scale faster, you won't want to miss this episode because today we're, we're joined by Tom Green. Tom, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me on. Looking forward to it.

Tom, we're going to start with the first question. Why? Why did you become an entrepreneur? What made you decide like hey, I want to quit the corporate world and become a grueling aspect of the entrepreneurial world?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think there's a moment that everyone has a realization when they kind of move into entrepreneurs. And I think it's even when you start in like your first kind of idea of a venture is the paces you realize you can move out. And I think for me kind of rewinding a little bit, I was working in a role where I was working at a big corporation. I was involved in product Strategy and product launches. And that was seen to be quite a cutting edge aspect of the business that I worked in. But still, you know, we were talking about years to launch products. I remember so often, you know, I always have my interest in startups, reading magazines, publications about businesses who had done incredible things, launched, scaled to 100 million, exited in the space of three years.

And I would sometimes look back over what I'd done in that three years and usually it would be sort of launched three quarters of a product or, you know, got half the way into doing something. And I think after a while that just really started eating away at me and, you know, alongside the other pieces of, you know, I think often people associate kind of being in a corporate world with ambition, but I think for me, ambition was a huge part of the reasons that I became an entrepreneur as well. I think I saw the path to, you know, being someone who manages teams and starting to get leisure on screen is easy. For me, entrepreneurship is a part of that as well. And so there's two things. Wanting to be in a situation where I was moving quickly, launching stuff, changing people, thinking people's lives, both kind of internally and externally, but also, you know, grabbing the bull by the horns from a personal perspective and diving into management and leadership in ways I kind of hadn't before. So those were my two big things.

I love that. I love how you came from two different aspects of it. It's not just like I got forced out of it, I had to jump into it. You're like, no, I saw a trouble point in big cor operations. They were taking their time, sweet ass. And you're like, no, I need more control on that. And I want to go faster, faster, better, stronger. You know, I want to talk about this MVP mindset because in your work with 80+ founders, what's the most common misconception seasoned entrepreneurs have about MVPs and how do you guide them towards building something that truly validates the idea without, you know, overbuilding?

Yeah, I think it's a huge sort of like learning process, both from a mental but also a business aspect that we've learned how to go through. And usually what happens is people launch their products and they had too much time to think about what this product should be, you know, to be, to be kind of frank about it. And that results in the product which is hugely diluted across lots of different features. And the probes people shouldn't go down, but they generally do is you build something that was in your head and then you find out that Only one of those four things was actually what people wanted, and you get rid of the others, and then you start building around that core value proposition. And that's something which we try and sort of nip in the bud, especially when founders come to us with their ideas and needs to have these four revenue streams, and it needs to be available to do these 10 things. We like looking at things from a conceptual level, not what features does this have, but what problem does this solve and who does it solve it for. And then once you've boiled down to that, you quite quickly realize that you're looking at one or two workflows to get you started with user flows to be able to kind of to be able to solve those problems. And I think for us, we see it with entrepreneurs who are successful entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs who are kind of at it for the first time.

You always get that that trap door is always. There's always a guy going on your. Your own guts who martial entity, especially for those who are experts in their own space. You know, we speak to a lot of, you know, real estate agents who are launching a product in the real estate industry. We speak to a lot of financiers who wants a lot of launch products in the finance space. And they always presume that they represent 100% of the market they're going after. And what they presume find is that they're actually, you know, the guy who works a few cubicles along from them at work doesn't operate the same way. They need Nadia and I think so for us, it's basically those assumptions around what you need to build just need to be clocked out from the minute you get going.

And I know I sit here and say this so easily or that make it sound so simple, but the reality is that most people, by the time they're launching ideas, they probably had them for a year or two. And that means that that's however many hundreds of nights spend lying in bed before they go to sleep thinking about all these different ways and features and stuff like that that it can perform for their clients. And so for us, it's all about, I guess, bringing back the basics. Okay, what are we solving here and what can we do to solve that? And yeah, I think once you've got that mindset of purely looking to help the people who give your customers, you can be in a really kind of organic place to actually kind of make those decisions.

I love it, because what you're saying is exactly what I tell people who are starting podcasts. They're they're like, I want it for everybody. I'm like, then it's for nobody. You know, like it's solving nothing for anybody. And I love how you saying it's now I can just clip that and say, look, if Tom is saying this for founders of SaaS products, then it works for podcasts also.

Like, yeah, just as you say. Another thing as well is that I thought that's what you want, isn't it merchandiser to know that you know exactly who you're targeting as a founder. I know some people kind of love the idea that their products could be for everyone. For me, that's a nightmare. Imagine having to kind of create multiple strategies to try and target everyone. If you know you're going for mid level, mid sized builders in Southern Florida to begin with, you know who you're marketing to as easier you can go from there.

Yeah. And, and what's really great, and this is what I usually say, like there are Approximately, let's say 8 billion people right now on earth. We'll just say rounding errors and all that. If you have eight people in a room, they represent a billion people each. So you have this like, okay, I can just choose one person. And I'm like, okay, that's going to be about a billion people because there's 8 billion people in the world. You know, it's the way I think of it, big and small at the same time. And even if you don't get that billion people, you'll.

A fraction of a billion is still great to have coming in and knowing who you are. You know, what was the first product that. Well, let's, let's go into your, your first mvp, like your first thing as a founder. You've. Are you still working a 9 to 5 or have you decided, hey, no, I quit that and went straight into this.

So I had a bit of a transition stage. So I've kind of been involved in the starting of three technology startups or technology kind of businesses and then kind of, it was a real stepping stone experience. So while I was in my initial nine to five, I started an ad tech company and that was where I learned my lesson around building the right kind of traction. So we built a lot of traction with investors and we built a lot of traction with potential clients. So we both start with a big waiting list and we put loads of work into lining up our investors, lining up our potential customers and we thought, cool. What we'll do is we'll raise loads of money, then we'll build the product and then we'll have all these customers here, we'll just jump on board. We're looking at a huge company out of the bat. Then what we realized was the bottom edge got into the process or started to build the products and kind of put together our upgrade.

There was legal issues, there was compliance problems, all kinds of stuff that we hadn't stress tested because we've been looking the wrong direction. We've been looking at who was going to fund this, not at the market. Understanding the real kind of ebbs and flows of what was going to happen once we were in that market. And so that was a crash course in how to have a business which feels unsuccessful and then suddenly is zero in the space of not very long. And so I think my main takeaway from that is sort of wow, I need to go learn a bit more about this sort of zero to one phase which you know, I've been doing a corporate level but at a startup level it was completely different where you were on the hook for everyone. There was, there was no kind of compliance team on the end of a phone who I can get onto and ask the business is going to be okay. And so then that's when I went out of the US and I went to California. While I was in California I started a, my second company which was very tech heavy focused API business around content creation and, and that business I know and different experience again I teamed up with a co founder who I just met.

We then got that into market really quickly. We eventually started building that up. So that was a sort of early stages of growth, sort of five to $10,000 MRO. And now I experienced another sort of growing or company growing pain which I think a lot of founders experience. Eventually that I fell out of my career. It became quite clear that we were completely unaligned on or misaligned on how we were going to approach growth, how we were going to approach the values of our business, what our roles were going to be. You know, I very much saw us as being down in the weeds, being scrappy the next couple of years. He was very much interested in growing.

This was at the level and basically being a sort of CTO on vacation kind of situation. And so we kind of, you know, as the crack started to show, business fell apart effectively and then we moved on and then I started to kind of to move on from there. And then I took kind of the learnings from those lessons into starting vertical which you know, again with a co founder and a lot, a lot better. I went through A much bigger betting process with this co founder, as you can imagine. And we kind of really did start scrappy and. And you know, for us, the early stages of what we did for our business in terms of validating our company and getting things out there, was really about asking people, what if? And that was, you know, I spoke with hundreds of founders before we had any clients and that heard and said, well, what if there was a solution to getting something launched in two days? You know, we started going by really pushing the boundaries of what we thought was going to be possible in the long run. We say, well, these are founders who are looking to launch an MVP argument. We were saying, okay, well what if we could launch this for you in a day? And they would say, well, you must be scamming me.

Okay. We thought, okay, that doesn't land too well. It was the next one two days and we end up with pushing towards our current model. But effectively it was just by me selling it. And our sort of engine, which we lean on a lot more now at the time, is very rudimentary, with effectively my PO bounder throwing it all together and not sleeping that Mossberg for a night or two. And now we are at a stage where we've got really robust processes, where we are kind of our tooling that we've developed. We build the vast majority of the products that we're building and the customization comes from our accountant team. But really it's our technology which builds out.

And at the early stages, that technology just wasn't there. But we believed that we would be able to build it to make it happen if the demand was there.

I love it. There's a lot I want to touch on in what you just said, especially about what you learned from co founder one to co founder two, going from the previous to Vertico, which seems to be like, you guys have a great relationship. What is one? Obviously you learned your lesson. You need to vet better to make sure you guys are all aligned or at least you can align enough that it can. It won't cause issues in the long run. What is one? What is one question you would want founders who are potentially taking on a co founder to ask to make sure they're aligned at least well enough that it should avoid any problems.

I think the main thing I would ask is about where do we see this being in 18 months. I think the something which I found it was a big difference between my first co founder and second co founder. My first co founder told me an amazing cv so he'd already taken his startup through Y Combinator. His kind of exact words would have been, I've already taken a startup through Y Combinator, I want to take another one through Y Combinator and I want to be there in a month and a half. Super exciting thing to hear that someone who's done it before wants to do it again. But the reality of startups is that you don't know what's going to happen. And I think what we wasn't taken into account there was that he was coming out from a boom or bust situation. If we weren't getting there, we probably weren't getting anywhere and it wasn't really worth it.

He wasn't going to be interested. There were questions I didn't think beneath the surface of what if that doesn't happen? Where are we at 18 months if we're still in the stage of being scrappy, that we haven't grown? And so take into account where my, the approach with my current founder was that we very much approached the business with, well, let's identify a problem, let's then identify the solution to that problem and let's see if we can scale that and we're willing to go in whichever direction that leads us to be able to do so. And I think that idea that, you know, okay, we're going to be here as a pair in a year doing this, whether it's just us still, whether it's us and team of 10 people, we're going to be here and we're going to be working that out. Not if we don't get into this accelerated program. If we don't get this funding around, if these, I guess, quite aspirational checkpoints aren't here, then we're going to call it off. And I think that aligning on that kind of level of resilience and I guess the ability to really get into the treasures with Zone, yeah, that's the most important thing. After all, things like skills, skills matches and personality alignment are very important things. But at the end of the day, you need to know mostly that someone's got your back and you've got their back when the going gets tough.

Because it will.

No, it will. Especially because I see a lot of similarities. It's like when you're getting a co host for your podcast, you want to make sure that everything's aligned with them with the podcast and you same with a co founder because you will be in the weeds. You will be, you know, you'll, you'll have dragons to slay. If you will to take some story storytelling metaphors you have. What I love about asking questions to my guests are or be. The preform is that they give me great questions. And one of yours is like, you love answering this question, and I want to know why you love answering this question.

The question was, how do you know when your MVP is ready to launch? Now, obviously, I want you to answer that question, but why do you love answering that question?

I think I love answering that question because the person who's asking it, I feel like I'm about to liberate them, basically. I feel like that's a question which comes with so much baggage. It comes with so much fear in that question. You know, am I ready? Generally, when people ask you about are they ready for something, they come from a place of presuming that they're not. And I think that's the thing. The reason I love answering it is because I love talking people through what the realities are of getting to running this brand new here. And I'm not going to sit here and say that I turn around to everyone and say, yeah, just do it and launch. Because there is something you need to do beforehand.

Of course there is, but the stuff you do beforehand is very achievable. It's going out and having conversations. It's going out there, pushing the boundaries of your network and going to events and finding your target market and having conversations and letting them guide you. I think that's something which a lot of founders get into the mindset of is having to produce all the answers themselves. The reality is you go and ask the people you're building it for, and they will tell you those answers. I think that's why I love answering that question. Because it's very easy as good founders, a very tangible way to get the point of it being ran.

Oh, I love it. Oh, that's. That's a great answer. It's one of the reasons I love asking that specific question. Because you get such a robust answer like you did tomorrow, I want to know, since you are currently on this Vertical, you. You're moving along. Where do you see yourself in 10 years? Are you still with Vertigo or have you moved on to, you know, founding multiple Y accelerators? You're now a, you know, angel or investor. You know, what are you?

Yeah, it's amazing. And I don't know, but I know that whatever it will be will be multiples. You know, I think the thing I love about this role is that while I'm the CEO of Vertical and we're an MVP Studio. And while we don't take shareholdings in our companies, we work with the fact that I get to be kind of overseeing very well machine which is working with like you said, over the last two and a bit years we realized aga startups being able to kind of be there for that, beginning that journey for somebody startups I absolutely love. And so where I see myself in 10 years and I think, you know, I think it's quite feasible that this could be a branch of verse code if, if it didn't end up being a different venture would be some sort of venture studio model. And I think I've got some, some directions personally on, on where venture studios are good and bad. And I think for me I love being involved in the tech build itself. So I love, even though I love technical, I love being involved with assisting the developers as they go to that early stage ideation in terms of building out the MVP and beyond.

And I also love those early sales. I think that's something that we see our founders are going through which is so exciting. When we launch an mvp, get an email from them two weeks later saying we've gone too hard to find our onboarding or if they're launching something in consumer space, they're saying we've got our first 100 early adopters giving us feedback. I can see how much, how exciting that is for them. And I get, I obviously are looking from a bit further and further reveal but in terms of being proud of our, of our clients, our customers, I love seeing that. I think in the longer run it's something which I want to do ourselves. You know, I want us to have our own kind of internal lab where we can scale out, scale, you know, launch these products and scale out kind of to the early stages ourselves while also then essentially bringing on those clothes to push them further. So I think to kind of go around the houses a little bit and come back to your question.

It's going to be hopefully a lot of things but under, under an umbrella.

I love it. No, I love how you're, you're linking, trying to make everything link together. You know, the venture capitalist school, I'm not sure what you, you called it, but you got that, you know, and then you're like maybe starting little products, pushing them out and seeing where they go. It's similar to what a company app Sumo does where they make their own products, you know, in house is as cheap as, not as cheap but as streamlined as possible without all the bloat. And it's, I, I Love that idea and I love to see it with Vertico as well. I would love to have you back on in like five years, see where you are. You're probably halfway done. Everything that you just listed out.

What is one thing you want to accomplish?

I think something which I feel like I'm probably not ready for at the moment, but it's something which I want to accomplish. I think this is probably even looking maybe further in 10 years, but. But out there is something more scale. So I don't necessarily think that means kind of scaling one single business. But I think one thing that I currently love is being at the stage where we are, where we're growing and we're kind of, we're scaling from both small to medium and from there. But I think one thing that I do believe that most entrepreneurs shouldn't have dreams of is building a movement which makes a difference. And I think, you know, I don't have any. I don't think, yeah, every entrepreneur is a hero and every entrepreneur is brave.

But I think launching businesses which go for kind of gets sort of early stage exits is super impressive. But I think if as an entrepreneur and whether this is your kind of third or fourth venture, whatever kind of makes sense of you financially, but also from maybe your kind fulfillment standpoint, that whether it's your third or fourth venture, I think you want to be in a position where you have done something which leaves its mark. And I think whether that be a mark within the industry or a mark within ecosystems or country or region, I think to be able to say that you did something which really kind of created and made a difference and I guess within that, rather than a company which owns this, owns a market, rather than kind of having market share, I think that's an ultimate goal for me. I think for me there's a lot of things to do to get there. I think at the moment I'm specializing very much in this early stage space. I see myself there for quite a long time. But the skills that come with it, around leadership, around understanding general kind of economies of scale and team building, I think those are things that I want to flesh out on. And I think like I said, I'm probably looking at a bigger than 10 year horizon here.

But it's something which is in the back of my mind at all times.

I love it. I love talking with founders of companies because they go big and they go small and they're everywhere. Like you said, you have this 10 plus year dream going on and I know you're probably Gonna achieve it before the 10 years even because you are someone who has that dedication. I can see it in you and you're just your willingness to help so many people in the early stages. We are coming to the end of the episode which I hate because I'm missing out on a great conversation with Tom. But I wanna know, Tom, what is the advice you would love to give back to 10 year old you? You're sitting right beside me. You have the opportunity to hand back a piece of wisdom if you want, or a piece of advice.

Yeah, I think this sounds like a very boring piece of advice and I think people maybe will judge me for this. But it will be easy to start selling stuff. Honestly, I think that's the, the one thing when you're, you're young. Firstly, when you're young you have a great advantage of selling stuff. It's much easier to sell stuff when you're 10 years old. But I think mainly, you know, all the great founders that I speak to, not all of them, a lot of the great founders that I speak to, other people who were clearing out their neighbors driveways were selling secondhand clothes when their mum wasn't looking and all this kind of stuff, doing anything but hustle for a bar. And it's such an incredible trait. And I think I left school thinking that sales was a bit of a sleazy job.

And I was probably, I thought I was a bit better than that. Maybe I thought I was a bit smarter than that. And then as soon as I started companies, I complete. The first thing I wish was I've done sales my entire life. And the thing that sales gives you, aside from, you know, when you're younger, having a bit of a cash in your hand, I think the main thing that gives you is an understanding of people. If you can understand people, what they want, what you need to do to be able to give them value for them to kind of, you know, sacrifice something else in your favor. Be able to understand that from an early stage of your life and take that through professional care. Whether you're working sales or not is going to be a huge benefactor for you.

And there's nothing that really is kind of A lot of people I know who are great at sales get themselves out of all kinds of situations. And I think that's an advice which can be, can be great for anyone who's going down that route.

Yeah, you learn to speak to people and you can learn to read them as well. Tom, it's been an absolute pleasure. I'm going to Jump off stage here. I want you to let my audience know where they can find you, how they connect with you, and then I'll be back to close up the show.

Great. Well, yes, be great to chat today. If anyone would like to follow me on LinkedIn, you'll find me. Tom Green. I work for the company Versicode, as you would have heard us mention a couple of times throughout the show. I share pretty regularly on LinkedIn about starting art here, kind of the MVP's realities, so feel free to listen in on that. In terms of us as a company, you can find us at. Buzzcode.co.uk is our website.

Feel free. If you're someone who's looking to launch a business or want to talk about launching an mvp, we've got a team of experts who always want to have a chat with you, whether you're ready to build or not. We have that conversation and yeah, I think from there, feel free to reach out. This is what we love doing and, and the people who do it are the most exciting people in the world, in my opinion.

I love it. Tom, I want to thank you so much for being here. It was an amazing opportunity to chat with you and I'm looking forward to having you back on. Thanks to my audience. Make sure you check out the show notes down below to connect with Tom, especially over on LinkedIn. And if you're a founder looking ready to launch or thinking about launching an MVP, make sure you go over to vertigo.co.uk. i want to thank you so much for listening. I am Phil Better, the Podcast Mogul, and remember to always invest in yourself.

Thanks for joining us on Invest in Yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. The Podcast Mogul reminds you that your journey to freedom and success starts with one powerful move investing in yourself. If today's episode sparked your fire, hit that follow button on Spotify and drop us a comment. Share your wins, your challenges and what drives you to break free from the corporate grind. Remember, you're your best investment. Always invest in yourself because your potential is limitless. Until next time, keep hustling and take control of your destiny.