Entrepreneur, founder and coach Henry Latham shares the low down on how to start a business. From deciding if you really want to, to evaluating ideas, to building it in a way that fits in with your lifestyle (rather than replacing it). We cover a lot of ground here while discussing the founding game, and explore what might be in it for you and your family.
About the show:
Problem Busters is a show that explores solutions to the biggest and the smallest of problems. Hosts Jonathan Goodwin and Oliver Happy discuss making the world a better place with guests from far and wide.
About our guest:
Henry Latham is a London-based Entrepreneur and founder of Prod MBA. First attracted to starting his own business while backpacking in South America, Henry has founded, grown, funded and wound up his own business and is now enjoying helping others evaluate and pursue their own business ideas via the Prod MBA course. Henry now lives in sunnny Middle England.
Show mentions:
- 01:00 It started when backpacking in Brazil by myself, floating down a boat in the Amazon.
- Backtracker - my first idea and first business. An app for tracking travel. As a Politics and Spanish major I had to learn it as I went along.
- Fast forward a year or so, we'd been through an accelerator program and raising investment, the business failed due to making every mistake in the book.
- Book - Product Leadership starts with you
- My second business: Prod MBA and helping people succeed.
- 04:00 What lessons did you learn from the initial business failure? I could dig into many things, but many are well trodden. The surprising thing for both Product leader and entrepreneur is the disillusionment with the business you are building.
- Looking back, I never believed in raising investment and shaping a pitch deck to show scaling 10x per year. I started the first business because I liked travelling.
- In the end I became stuck in London in the funding cycle.
- But I was really wanting to build something that was more aligned with my beliefs and the lifestyle I wanted to life.
- 06:00 Does starting a business have to mean building an app? We have a misconception that a product equals a solution. What what we need to be successful in business is to understand where value lies in a market and how best to deliver that value. Take coaching: There could be many way to achieve this. It could be an app, but you could deliver more value in say a high level coaching program.
- It is a big mindset shift for many.
- Obviously technology enables delivery of value, but it isn't the only way to get them to their desired outcome
- How do we get customers to their desired outcome the fastest way possible? This is what we need to be doing.
- 10:00 What is the Prod MBA? The market need is that there are Product Managers to master core competencies of Product Management. As a Product person, I was seeing so many courses and books that were so far removed from reality, that it wasn't helpful.
- The real world of product is messy, it's uncertain and you come up against challenges of your own ego, pressure of people pulling in different directions.
- There is a psychological aspect to product
- We teach these competencies by building a real product from scratch - because that is the best way you are going to learn.
- 13:00 Some examples of ideas people have tackled in the gym?
- Akash: Gym towels and prototyping bamboo towels.
- Nittin: Healthcare and how to choose healthcare options in the U.S.
- What we teach is that it is all about understanding where the biggest problems are in the market
- Is it an addressable problem? Is it an acute problem? Is it worth addressing?
- We don't talk about solutions until 8 weeks into the program. It's a massive mindset shift for...
