From Side Hustle to Startup

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Chuck Temple: Everybody has ideas, right? The people that actually get out there and talk about it and get feedback on it, then those are the people that are going to at least get to failure quicker, if not success quicker. The risk isn't talking about it and getting feedback. The bigger risk is not talking about it and getting no feedback, and then wasting your time and your money or other people's. That's the bigger risk.

Jill Finlayson: Welcome to the Future of Work podcast with Berkeley Extension and the EDGE in Tech at the University of California focused on expanding diversity and gender equity in tech. EDGE in Tech is part of CITRIS, the Center for IT Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute. UC Berkeley Extension is the continuing education arm of UC Berkeley.

In this episode, we're asking the question of, are side hustles the new normal? In recent surveys, nearly 50% of the population has a side hustle in addition to their full-time job. What starts out as a side hustle often begins as a spark from a passion or a desire to explore an idea outside the confines of a regular job. It's a space for creativity, a chance to build something meaningful on your own terms.

But as this small venture grows, it presents a unique opportunity, the chance to transform that side hustle into a full-fledged startup. To explore this growing trend, we're delighted to talk with Chuck Temple and see if a startup might be part of your future of work.

Chuck Temple is a highly successful entrepreneur, having founded three million-dollar industry-leading companies. The first of these companies, DVD Your Memories, was started on a shoestring and with no outside funding, yet went on to become one of the largest, most successful personal media transfer companies in the United States.

With no formal business education, Chuck decided to go back to school and receive his MBA from UC Davis with a focus on entrepreneurship in 2016, the same year he won the first place in the prestigious Big Bang! Business Competition.

Chuck, along with his business competition partner, went on to found the Electric Scooter Guide. And within one year, that company became the world's leading resource for the personal electric scooter market. He's also a former Extension Instructor. And currently, Chuck resides in San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two young sons. His latest endeavor is a pickleball event management platform. Welcome, Chuck.

Chuck Temple: Hi. Thank you for having me.

Jill Finlayson: Great to have you. You know, for many people, turning their side hustle into a career is the dream. It's a dream of autonomy. It's a dream of getting paid to do things you've loved. And you even documented your first startup in the book Startup to Sold, How I Built My Side Hustle into a Multimillion-Dollar Business. It sounds really glamorous. It actually sounds almost fictional, so I was wondering, what is the reality of starting that first company?

Chuck Temple: Everybody, I think, has a different path to their first business. And for me, it was simply a necessity. I was kind of a broke and starving college student. One thing led to another, and all of a sudden I realized that there was a lot of personal media out there. This is 2006. And personal media being slides, photos, videotapes, old movie films, stuff like that.

And there was a demand for it. I could feel that there was a demand, but also I just found that I had a passion for the business. It was my first real business, and I had never had a business class before.

And so for me, the different pieces of that business became this really, really interesting puzzle where you have marketing and operations and equipment, and just all these different levers and switches and dials. And each one, you can kind of twist and turn and become better at. And I thought it was this kind of ultimate game to play.

For me, that's how I got going. But the basics were, is there a demand? And at that time and in San Diego, there was. And I could feel it. I didn't have any stats to back that up, but I could feel it because I knew a lot of seniors at the time. And they were always saying, I have all this stuff. What do I do with it? And then the passion was there for me to do this work because it's something that I could do, and I enjoyed solving problems for these people, which is what I think businesses are.

Jill Finlayson: That's amazing. So you basically found there were all these people who had pictures, but didn't have a good way to store them or view them. And you're like, I can solve that.

Chuck Temple: Yeah. And it wasn't something that you need a lot of high tech for, right? It was kind of-- except for movie film, it's all somewhat prosumer-grade stuff that we would buy. And so it was something that I could do without a lot of money because I had no money. I started on a credit card, and a college student doesn't have a very high limit credit card, and mine wasn't. My current roommate at the time and I bought a slide scanner, and that's how we started.

Jill Finlayson: You could see that there were some people who needed this. But in a broader sense, where do you think good ideas come from? And how do you know it's a good idea? How do you define a good idea?

Chuck Temple: I would say maybe three things. So demand, personal passion, and the fact that you have the skills and capability. And then maybe there's a fourth one, which is, do I have this problem personally, so that you can empathize with your customer.

And I think, though, if there was a Venn diagram of those four things, if you were centered in the middle where all of them meet, then you probably have a good idea. However, as you go forward, passion, OK. That's like, you either have it or you don't. And do you have-- these are pretty binary things.

But demand is probably the most tricky one. And the way that I always kind of look at demand is kind of through these tests, right? And so you could, say, start with the $0 test and figure out whether or not there is a demand at $0. And $0 could just be asking people, right? It doesn't cost you any money.

And then if it's proven correct, then you can go to, say, a $50 test where you maybe make a really simple website and put a form on there to collect emails, and just put your pitch out there, and then try to send people to it. Maybe attend a farmers market, or somehow get your idea out there. And if that works, then you can keep building up to a $500 test, and then a $5,000 test, and work your way up.

But the mistake I think a lot of people make, and what I made-- every entrepreneur probably has at least one unsuccessful business. And the one where I failed, I failed because I didn't follow that advice. I did a-- let's just say a $80,000 give or take test before doing a $200 test. We did it backwards, and we ran out of money for the $80,000, and my co-founders quit. And then I did the $200 test, realized that there was no demand for that particular product, and then moved on.

Jill Finlayson: Yeah, I think that is an area where people-- they do fall in love with the problem. Maybe they have the problem, but they don't talk to enough people to see if there's customers who are willing to pay to solve that problem.

Chuck Temple: Yes. You fall in love with it. Like, maybe your passion becomes too high. Or for me, I had just finished business school, so I thought, oh, OK, I know what I'm doing now. But then the idea I thought was good. And so my two co-founders and I just ran with it and developed it and spent $50,000, $60,000 on development costs to make an app. We ran out of money before it was even done.

But then what I ended up doing right is I hacked together the software to do this particular thing-- I'll just tell you what it was. It was called Vira. So basically, the idea for this thing was a virtual assistant that was web-based where you just push one button. It automatically connects you to a live virtual assistant that's, like, face to face with you, right? And we thought that would be awesome.

And I had assistants ready, and the app and the technology. I mean, you could imagine. This is 2016. It was a lot of money to develop this. We even made it-- literally we made-- it's so funny. We made a commercial. We went to Los Angeles, got a producer, and literally made a commercial with actors.

Yeah, looking back, it was silly. But the commercial's awesome. And my girlfriend, who's now my wife, was actually-- she was in it on a nonspeaking role, which is kind of fun. So it's cool to have this commercial.

But anyway, fast forward-- I don't know. We spent five, six months building this thing. I got investors. I mean, it was the whole deal. And then once we ran out of money and it kind of failed and the co-founders, we all kind of split up, I hacked together something to do this with. I think it was some voice recording program that dropped a voice note into Dropbox, which then texted the assistants or something. Basically, it was like almost free software, just to see if anybody would use it.

And I don't know. I gave it away for free. And even for free, almost nobody used this tool. And so basically, the idea of having this on-demand virtual assistant for the majority of people, it just wasn't viable at that time, at least not for us, or for me the way that I was doing it.

And this was something that was built using almost free tools and doing it myself, doing the assistant work myself. It still didn't work. It's still-- people would use it once, and they just didn't-- for whatever reason with their life and the psychology of people, it just didn't work.

Jill Finlayson: So this is your first red flag. If you give it away for free and no one uses it or no one comes back, that's not a good sign. [LAUGHS]

Chuck Temple: Yes. And that's after you already even built. I think for this idea, it passes the $0 test. Like, you talk to people and they say, it's a good idea. You try to raise some money. Friends and family, they give you money. That's a $0 test.

It's when actually-- wanted to build the $200 test website plus a little bit of really cheap software, if that doesn't work, then I'm done. And that could have been one month and almost no money invested, and I would have figured out how to basically move on quickly because where you get stuck in business is when you have an idea, you think it's really good, but you spend way too long trying to figure that out.

And it's all about, how fast can you disprove your hypothesis, I would say. Your hypothesis being like, this is going to work because of this reason, whatever it is. However fast you can get to that answer, that's part of what makes, I think, people successful as an entrepreneur.

Jill Finlayson: And how do you get them to tell you the truth? Because as you said, people want to support you. They want to be encouraging. How do you get them to tell you the truth, as if they would actually use it?

Chuck Temple: Yeah, well, if they don't use it for free, well, that's a good answer. And then if they use it for free, but then you need to charge some money or you need to put some ad on something, or whatever it is, and that doesn't work or there's not a way for that to happen, then it would be hard to say that there's value there. So there's certain things that you could do that maybe people want, but if they're not willing to pay anything for it or go on a website at a regular basis, or whatever it is that makes-- that potentially can earn revenue, then that's also kind of a red flag.

Jill Finlayson: So listen to people. Ask a lot of questions early on, and move on quickly. Even if you love the idea, you've got to be willing to move on quickly.

Chuck Temple: Yeah. And you've got to be OK talking about it. I think that's the one thing that so many entrepreneurs get really afraid of, and I can kind of see why, right? It's easy. Well, nowadays it's easier and easier to build ideas. But if they're afraid to talk about their idea for fear that someone's going to take it, the real enemy here is that you don't talk about it. You don't learn about the breadth of your idea. You don't get the feedback.

Because it's really all about business ideas, being an entrepreneur, coming s with new things. It's really about, how well do people understand your idea? How well do they take to it? All that stuff. You don't get any of that feedback unless you actually talk to people.

An idea-- everybody has ideas, right? The people that actually get out there and talk about it and get feedback on it, then those are the people that are going to at least get to failure quicker, if not success quicker.

Jill Finlayson: Yeah, I love that, because you don't want to spend a huge amount of time only to find out later that you can't do anything. You want to get that feedback early and frequently so that you're developing the thing that people actually want.

Chuck Temple: Yes. And I think that when people say, it's not really about taking a risk in that you are taking a risk by not talking about it, right? It's not-- the risk isn't talking about it and getting feedback. The bigger risk is not talking about it and getting no feedback, and then wasting your time and your money or other people's. That's the bigger risk.

Jill Finlayson: So let's talk about one of your next big risks. You actually started a juice company, which seems very different from DVDing people's memories. How did you end up tackling this? What was similar and what was different?

Chuck Temple: Just to clarify, I was hired as a co-founder, but the company had already started before me. So juicing and stuff like that was-- I love that industry. And it was really my only job since college. I had just moved to San Francisco, had just failed at the virtual assistant thing, and I wanted to meet other co-founders and just get into the vibe of San Francisco. I'd never lived there before.

And so my wife kind of encouraged me to get a job where you get paid-- my only time I've ever had a salary paid by someone else. And so I was hired as the COO for a juice company called Happy Moose Juice, which is a wonderful company based in San Francisco.

And we did in-house juice making, and it was delivered to a lot of the big tech companies in San Francisco, which was awesome. But then there was kind of a mass-- call it HPP, High-Pressure Pasteurization, I believe, kind side of the company that was trying to get into grocery stores and bigger stuff like that.

Jill Finlayson: So what was the same, and what did you have to learn? Because this was a more perishable product. Did that change how you approached?

Chuck Temple: Oh, yeah. So what I love about just life in general is that there's so many things to learn. And there's business, right? There's just so many different types of businesses. So every business I've either worked in or been in has been really completely 100% different. So media transfer. Obviously, s is perishable in the nature of decades, whereas juice is perishable in the-- sometimes a few days, a certain ingredient will go bad.

And so the first thing that I did was analyze their process. And then after analyzing it, basically kind of created an ERP system in Google Sheets to basically figure out their whole operation. So from the stock that came in, how many days it lasts, what juices we're going to make, how much of this kale we needed in this juice, blah, blah, blah.

It was really fun to get super deep into the weeds. And that's a good way to learn the business also. But consumer packaged goods and juice in general is just really different because it's about scale and it's about big partnerships, and it's really interesting.

Jill Finlayson: You've done all these startups. Let's see. We've got a successful startup that you sold. We've got a startup that failed, and we've got hired to co-lead, co-found a startup that was already going. What made you decide to stop and go back to school at this point?

Chuck Temple: After I sold the DVD Your Memories company, when I started I was a psychology student really wanting to get into neuroscience. I was going to take a year off and go to Thailand and just teach English, and then go and try to get my PhD in neurobiology.

And what happened was that business started. I grew it to the point where I thought maybe someone else could grow it more, and that's the reason why it sold. At that time, I had four stores in two states and 27 employees, and it was running pretty well, actually. Like, I could-- if I'm not growing it, it was really only about 10 hours a week to just maintain all of that because the systems were really tight.

But I always assume I'm just not sure. I'm just not sure until I'm 100% sure. And so for me, I wanted to-- since I had no formal education in business, I felt like, OK, I had this awesome experience with DVD Your Memories. It grew. But I personally wasn't, like, personally passionate about the media transfer industry myself. Just, I don't have this type of media. I was working with mostly seniors at the time that had that type of media.

And so I wanted to go to school to see what I didn't know so that way, I could-- the next business that I had or whatever I did next, I could be that much more effective at it. And so that is why I wanted to go get an MBA, was because I had a business. I had no business background.

I wanted to see where my holes were in my own game because that's how I was successful at DVD Your Memories was by recognizing my own weaknesses and then trying to fill them. I was like, OK, on a larger level, why don't I go get an MBA to figure out where my holes are in business so that I could fill them, so that I could be a better business owner or entrepreneur?

Jill Finlayson: All right, so share. What were the holes that you found? And what did you pick up that you wish you'd known?

Chuck Temple: So my biggest holes were, I would say, in understanding finance. That's probably the biggest one. And then also partnerships. I guess it would be like all my favorite classes. I had this class. Hemant Bhargava is the professor there, and he taught a platform-- it's called Tech Competition and Strategy, but I call it, like, Platforms 101. And understanding the value of a platform, that was maybe my biggest lesson.

Also, there are some great entrepreneurship classes that I had, without naming all the professors that were there. But just how I had mentioned the $0 test to the $50 test, that whole concept I learned at the business school. I would say those would be the biggest.

My strategy for business school, I'll just say this right now. I don't really remember things all that well. And so what I did is I just basically took notes and didn't care about remembering anything. And so then when I started a new business or I had an idea or I'm consulting with somebody with an idea, whatever it is, I would just go to that class, and I would just go through my list-- my note list.

And so I've done that to great effect in every business that I've done or consulted with since. That is my MO for helping them is I just-- I go through that and I make sure that I'm covering things, and then all the good ideas flow back in.

Jill Finlayson: Yeah. One of the things I like are finding the golden nuggets. So you have this whole long class, but there's two or three things that you walk away with from that class that sort of changed how you thought about things. For example, one instructor that I heard was saying how oftentimes, people working on their side hustle or doing a startup underprice the value of their goods because they look at the cost of goods, they look at their time, but they don't look at the value of the product to the consumer.

And so being able to ask them, what would be a cheap price? What would be an expensive price? What would be prohibitively expensive? And really collecting information about, what are people's willingness to pay? And that really stuck with me. Did you have any other favorite things that stuck with you?

Chuck Temple: Oh my gosh. I would say because I've been involved in platforms ever since, once I understood that the top, I don't know, eight out of 10 biggest companies in the world are all platforms now, and two dec-- or three-- well, now three decades ago, they probably weren't, they were probably oil and gas companies and whatnot, understanding that was how I got super interested in platforms.

Then understanding which side to subsidize, how to solve the chicken and the egg problem, all of those things are what helped the Electric Scooter Guide company take off in the beginning. And we followed basically the best practices from that professor. And then I still keep in touch with him to this day, and he'll give me little tips and ideas, and things like that. So staying in touch, and then also just having those notes.

But understanding one-sided-- or two-sided platforms, and which side to subsidize, and why you want to have an exclusive partner, and just how to take a leadership role. And gosh, there's so much to it. And so many people are making platforms now that it's very interesting.

Jill Finlayson: Yeah, I was very lucky. I was actually one of the early employees at eBay, which is very much a two-sided platform for buying and selling. How would you define a platform? And what might people think about platforms in terms of their own ideas or expertise? How might they use a platform?

Chuck Temple: Well, I think the easiest way to think of a platform-- I mean, they've been around forever, right? So a newspaper would be an idea of a platform that everyone-- well, maybe not everyone can understand because I don't know if the younger folks have seen them. But basically, it's like you have readers, and you have advertisers, and you have the journalists. So I guess you could say that. Again, I'm not coming up with this on the spot.

But in the middle is the newspaper, and the newspaper has journalists. They write the articles that then the readers see, so that's two sides. And then if the readers are reading it, then you have a third side, which would be advertisers.

And so then you could start thinking of, do you have same-side or cross-side network effects? And when you do, then things can explode. And that's where a lot of these huge apps like eBay have become so successful.

Jill Finlayson: So tell us about this startup that you did while you were at UC Davis or heading out. What was this publishing Electric Scooter Guide idea?

Chuck Temple: So the scooter thing had all the criteria that I had mentioned in the beginning. So electric scooter demand wasn't quite there. And this is for personal electric scooters, not the shared ones that you see on the street. But there's a whole, of course, personal market for scooters.

So demand was starting, but we had gotten in early. I had a huge passion for this because I had just moved to San Francisco. I was going to get an e-bike, but my wife was like, think I'm going to get a scooter.

That actually made a lot more sense to get a scooter because you could then just take it into restaurants. I could still ride to downtown, or wherever I wanted to go. I personally used it, and then I was in love with scooters. I wouldn't stop talking about it to everybody, and that's how I knew that I wanted to do something in the industry.

I had met Justin, who was my co-founder in that company, because he was doing business classes as part of a joint program at UC Davis. He was a biomedical engineering PhD candidate, or PhD student his last year. So we graduated at the same time. We won this Big Bang! Business Competition for an invention that he came up with. Went through a few different ideas, a smoothie shop.

And then I talked about scooters. And we realized that this technology, it was just coming to fruition because basically the hub motor, along with lithium ion battery prices and the size of it, made it such that personal market electric scooters was like-- it was just this time in history where it was just going to happen.

So what we did is we found the first problem. So we wanted to do something. We're like, OK, well, what can we do with electric scooters? But also, I had randomly started the subreddit called r/ElectricScooters on Reddit. And I was managing that community.

And I purely just pinned a post saying, what do you guys need? Like, what is needed in the industry? They call it community management, which is just asking questions and people give you answers.

And they said, we want to just understand what these scooters are. There's so much misinformation. There's these brands that are coming out of China. What's the real range? What's the price? Is this reliable? What's the battery size? Like, half the time you go on their websites and you either can't read it or there's an extra zero in there because it's just so unregulated, and it's just such a new industry.

And so what we did is we just put it all together into what is really just a spreadsheet. Took a few weeks, but we cataloged every scooter in the world, or that could buy in the US. We put a spreadsheet together with actually the correct information.

And then of course, there's this industry called affiliate marketing, which becomes the scooter companies that had affiliate links where we could make 4%, or whatever it is. So we just put the links on there. We put the data in a sortable, filterable way. That's Justin. He's, like, the internet guru. And that was the first product. And that's how Electric Scooter Guide started, I would say.

Jill Finlayson: That's great. And the whole idea that you were trying to solve a problem that people couldn't get accurate information. You were doing the work to actually find the real information. Well, I kind of want to go up a level and talk about how you actually think about starting a startup. But before I do that, can I ask, what are the pros and cons of working on a startup?

Chuck Temple: I think there's two big pros. Number 1, you have autonomy over your time and what you do. You now get to be the-- create your own destiny. You get to really test yourself and see, how far can I go? Like, what are my limits? Can I make something that's this big or this big or this big? And you can just put these numbers in your head.

And as far as you believe in yourself, you probably can get there. So that's one pro is being able to work on what you want, when you want, as long as you want, or not at all.

And number 2, I think there can be a really nice payoff in the end. Without getting to specific numbers, I got lucky from my first company because I was the 100% owner, and it was doing pretty well.

And so when it sold, I was 30, and I had no debt. And so when that sold, I got all the revenue for it. And that kind of set me up for basically, well, decades to where I still need to work, but at least I can work on something that I want to work on rather than the pressure of life and having to make ends meet and living paycheck to paycheck.

That is the pro is that in the end, potentially you can not have financial issues. And for me, it wasn't, like, a massive sale or anything to where my kids are set up for life. It's not that much, but it is enough for myself. It was basically just stress avoidance. I think it's those two things. It's its autonomy and eventual payoff.

Jill Finlayson: And the big cons?

Chuck Temple: Oh my gosh. Well, people have asked when DVD Your Memories was five years in or something, they said, hey, is it really worth it to have a company? Because I see how hard you work. And I would have said probably no for the first four or five years until it got to the point where I was making a lot of money every year, and my workload was going down a little bit because I started understanding a little bit more.

But I would say the big con is that if you're the kind of person that wants to take things on yourself, and probably the kind of person that's going to work really hard too-- and when you work really hard and you spend a lot of time, it can take over. It can eat you up. Like, take over your brain a little bit. And so you become obsessed.

And when you have good days, you feel great. And when you have bad days, you don't feel so great, and you stress about everything. At least that was my way, right? I had one employee out of 27 that wasn't happy, it would really eat me up.

And so maybe that's a mark of a good manager, but it's not a good mark for sleeping well at night. I would say the stress. The stress can be really high. Even when things are going bad, because times were lean at the beginning of the DVD Your Memories company where I was basically almost broke and everyone was saying I needed to quit, that was a hard, hard time, and the stress is really high.

But then when we started growing really fast, there was a switch that was flipped. And that was from-- I had discovered Google AdWords, and I discovered split testing, and then I discovered unique selling proposition. And then within two weeks, we went from basically almost being broke to making 4x, 5x the next month. And then that doubled again that year, and it doubled again later that year.

But when you're growing really fast, it's also really stressful, just not quite as stressful as when you're almost broke. So I think that's the biggest con, is that it can be really stressful. And when you're not making money, you think you're a failure. And you have to have really good mental health to be able to, I think, get through that.

Jill Finlayson: If people are willing to go on this ride, let's go through the how-tos. So what would be step 1 of starting your own startup?

Chuck Temple: Of course, some people are thinking of maybe a service business. Some people might be thinking of a software company. Some people might be thinking of a website. So there's so many different things, right?

But the first step, see if you have the, I would say, four criteria, number 1 being demand. Because if you don't have that one, the other ones don't matter, OK? Passion, passion for it, the skill set needed to be successful, or the ability to get to what I would say 80% perfect-- or it's like, if there was the best marketing person that you know, how quickly can you get between know nothing and 80% of that person? So that's the third one. That's, like, the skills to do this business.

And the last one is, do you experience the problem yourself? That's the fourth one. If demand isn't there, then none of the other three really matter at all.

Jill Finlayson: So you've found demand. What's step 2?

Chuck Temple: The next step is building the smallest and cheapest and quickest thing you can to see if you are fulfilling that demand. You could also say solving that problem. So in the case of Electric Scooter Guide, it was making basically a spreadsheet that was web-based that people could go to.

And then basically, we put it out there, and people-- they commented on it, right? We didn't hide it. We said, hey, this is the idea. Here's a little sample. And you get this feedback, because people want to help. They want to-- people will help you solve their own problem if you just let them.

And then you have-- what do they call it? There's probably a term for this, but it's basically having the customers help flesh out your product. And that's what I've done in all the companies that I've been successful in. And that's a key factor, is getting those early customers or those people you're helping early on, being really high touch with them. Talk to them. Talk on the phone, whatever you can do.

With my current startup, I have a WhatsApp group that's full of the users of this platform that I made. And they basically tell me everything that they like, everything they don't like. They come up with so many ideas that I can't even implement them all at once. And it's amazing because you're talking to the people that are actually your customers, and they're literally just telling you what to build. So there's nothing better than that.

Jill Finlayson: And that's really, I think, key is not only having those customers-- I think having raving fans, right? People who are actually actively engaging with you and giving you feedback is another good sign.

Chuck Temple: Yes. Absolutely, yeah. If people are enthusiastic about your product, that's a really good green flag.

Jill Finlayson: And with that feedback loop, you said, build the smallest thing that can solve the problem. Do they help you prioritize?

Chuck Temple: Yeah. So every business is going to be different. What you don't want to do, instead of spending two weeks, you don't want to spend two months to get something that's gone way too far, which might overcomplicate things, and then you get feedback based upon maybe something that's not actually solving the problem. It's just this tangential feature, or whatnot. You build the simplest thing that's just going to solve that one immediate problem.

I think there's a really good video by Y Combinator that I was watching. And I remember the-- I think he's the old CEO. He said something about, find the person with their hair on fire, and you can basically just sell them a brick. And that's what you're looking for in the beginning, is you're looking for this huge, massive problem that you can basically build almost anything to solve.

Then you start connecting with your users. You are personable. You get feedback from them. And you're thankful when they tell you-- this is a big thing, right? If they tell you something and they can tell you don't like hearing it, they're not going to keep telling you stuff. And that's the most valuable thing that you can get, is having them tell you stuff. Anything.

Every time they tell you anything, especially something that's wrong-- even now, they even-- people, they say, hey, I noticed that this doesn't work when I do this, and I'm sorry to tell you. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, thank you. This is the most valuable thing that anybody could give me.

Jill Finlayson: So we got step 1, which is need finding, finding that person with their hair on fire, finding demand. We got the second step, which is basically prototyping, right? Building something that will be minimally solving the problem.

So then I guess my next question would be step 3. How do you actually build a real product? And maybe you can use the example of this pickleball that you're working on. How do you build something if you're not necessarily an engineer?

Chuck Temple: One thing that even-- it's weird. Even engineers don't realize is that there's this world of no code, low code, or you can-- maybe it's going to be called visual programming now. And it's akin to when, for those people that remember coding out HTML, and then you got, like-- I think early on Dreamweaver and FrontPage, which is called the WYSIWYG, or What You See Is What You Get editors. And you could then just drag your image, drag your text onto the screen, and go from there.

The same thing is happening with platform building at this point, or just kind of certain types of software. It's what I use. I don't have any background in coding, and built a platform as I was learning this technology that is now used by hundreds of people a day, tens of thousands of people a month. It rivals the most complex software in the industry. It's cool because I built it myself, and it's, like, the coolest thing ever.

The other cool thing about this type of software is that you are not waiting for a development team overseas for you to explain something 100% perfect and then still not get it 100% right because it's lost in translation. You or someone on your team can implement changes in sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes. And yeah, for big stuff, it could still take a day or two.

And so what's awesome is that the feedback group that I have, they can tell me, hey, what about when we cancel a pickleball session, can it just automatically email everybody that was signed up? And I'm like, oh, that's a great idea. And so now there's just a checkbox that says, and email everybody that signed up. And then if you check it, it just does it. And that took me 10 minutes to build.

And so this is something people should look into. I'm familiar with one called Bubble. It's just bubble.io. It's probably the most well known for web apps. It works on web and mobile, but it can function like an app, a single-page app.

Jill Finlayson: How do you go to market?

Chuck Temple: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is the class [LAUGHS] that I taught that did take me months and months and months of research to really put it into a class because there is so much to that. And happy to share my notion with your listeners.

Everything's going to be different for go-to-market. There's different strategies for everything. For me in this case, this is a pickleball website. And if you're in the Bay Area, especially in the East Bay, you can look at it. It's dailypb.com.

And the way that this launched was I built it. It took me a couple weeks to build it. But again, still a newbie, but I was a super newbie at the time. That's why it took me two weeks.

But I launched it on the one local Facebook group, people that are in my area, because it basically gives you the open play schedule for the area, which is-- there's no central place for that. I had the problem myself. I was passionate about pickleball, right? But I didn't know if the demand was there, that first one.

And so two weeks was, OK, the max I was going to spend on this, and I launched it. And hey, if one or two people came to the site, OK, cool. I probably won't pursue it. But 1,000 people came to the site. And I think that group at the time was only around 1,000 people. And just in a couple days, 1,000 people went. And so that told me that there was a problem that I was meeting.

And then when I went to the pickleball courts and I mentioned that I built the platform, people are so excited about it. They're so happy to meet me. They're like, can I buy you a beer? Can I buy you a coffee? This is that signal of the raving fan signal that you really want to get, because for many reasons, but for purely selfish reasons, you can activate those people if it's time.

So you want to expand, you can put a message out, saying, hey, we want to expand to South Bay, or we're looking for investment. And all of a sudden, you have thousands of people that are championing this product for you because they help you with it. They recommend it to all their friends. So that's how I launched.

Jill Finlayson: That brings me to my final question about building your startup, which is, how do you scale? So say you start to get interest from these other communities and neighborhoods. When do you decide to do your first hire? And how do you scale operations? Like, are you suddenly getting so many emails you can't respond to them? What does this next step look like?

Chuck Temple: So every company's different. And for my current company, I would like to be there, but I understand-- for a service business, I'll just say for DVD Your Memories, I hired because I was working, I think, 80 or 100 hours myself. And business was growing, and it was the holiday season, so I was able to hire because I already had money for that.

So for Electric Scooter Guide, I was doing videos on my cell phone. Of course, we got into review videos and everything else along with the website. And I was doing videos myself. We were making, again, enough money to hire somebody to help with the video stuff because that's what I wasn't as good at and that sort of thing, right?

But for software, all the companies I've been in are so different that the software one, I understand why people do need to raise money. And I'll give you the reason for me, why I'm-- process of raising money is because consumer software, it's really about gaining users. And of course, you want them to pay money. But it takes a lot of time to figure out all the different revenue sources, and that can-- for a single person like myself to do marketing and try to grow, but then also fix every bug and do every customer service.

And if you have kids-- that's the big thing in my life that's changed that has the biggest impact on me as an entrepreneur, is I used to be able to work till 2:00 in the morning for weeks on end to get something done. And now I've got to stop at 4 o'clock to pick up kids. And then I want to be present for them and not putting them in front of the TV and then going back to work.

And so now having to hire people a little bit earlier means that if I were to generate revenue in one area, it's not going to be enough for an income. But if I were to scale myself right now without generating revenue, of course, that just increases expenses and doesn't generate revenue. And I think this is why, even though technology scales really well, there is so much to it, that, I believe, is why companies need to raise money.

Jill Finlayson: So this is a lot of juggling. We talked a little bit about work-life balance. How do you work on a startup or a side hustle while you have a full-time job?

Chuck Temple: So one is find partners. And you can do-- everybody does a bit of the work, right? If you don't have kids or something else that needs to get done, you could do it after work. If you have enough passion, you've got from maybe 5:00 or 6:00 PM till whenever you want to go to bed, and all the weekends, and you can work on it then. That's what I kind of did for my first one.

And maybe it's helpful if you're younger, in your 20s. But even now, I probably could stay up to 10:00 or 11:00, but maybe not 2:00 in the morning like maybe when I was 25 years old. But I would say, just work on it in your off time, but work on it smart. Check for demand first.

Then I think another big one is talk to somebody that has had a few businesses before. Especially if it's your first time trying to be an entrepreneur, talking to somebody like myself or somebody like you that has experience talking to entrepreneurs, or someone that's had a few companies that's started them up before, that will be invaluable to you at the beginning because when you're trying to plan out, how do I even get this going, the ideas they're going to give you are going to save you months or-- you can't measure the value that a mentor can give you.

So finding a mentor to help you if it's your first time-- and even if it's not-- to bounce ideas off of and say, hey, this is my strategy. What do you think? And you still make the final decision, right? One of my mentors was Noah Alper, who's the Founder of Noah's Bagels. And he told me some things that I absolutely went with. He told me some things that I agreed with, but I didn't follow, and turns out he was, of course, right.

But these mentors, they've been through it before. And even though there's so many kinds of businesses, business in itself, being an entrepreneur, is a journey that actually does have a lot of similarities, no matter what company it is. And so finding the mentor that's been through any kind that you trust, I would highly, highly recommend that.

Jill Finlayson: To close out our conversation, I'm going to ask you for three tips for two different audiences. I'd like to know, what are your three tips about innovation that could apply to somebody who has a corporate job or an academic job and they want to innovate within a larger company space?

Chuck Temple: Number 1, if you're in a company and you're trying to innovate, getting buy-in is going to be one, but don't think it's the first one. I am of the predisposition that it's better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.

And so unless you're dealing with some crazy sensitive information like the UFOs at Area 51 and you want to not leak that to the public or something, if you do the research and say, hey, there's a problem, here's my plan or proposal, right? So you show that. Here's the people I would need. Here's how much time I would need for them. And you show that you've done research first.

Then create some prototype that gets to-- in software, they call it-- I don't know what they call it. Do they call it the aha moment? Or they call it the first success maybe. It's like, every software program has this internal metric. How quickly does the person host their first pickleball session? Whatever it is.

If you can make the most-- again, this comes back to this prototyping and getting that first problem solved, but nothing more, and super simple. So if you're innovating in a company, they're probably not going to want you to spend a bunch of resources if they're not sure that there's going to be a payoff.

But if you can be like, hey, by the way, I used this no-code tool, or I used make.com, or Zapier plus Bubble, and I did this in two nights that does this crazy cool thing, check it out, then you can show that, that you've already done it, that it already works, and that there's actually a demand or a need that you're solving.

Then presenting that to your boss-- or hopefully, you look politically at your company and actually talk to the people that have the political power. That may not actually be your boss. Like, the people that sit closest to the elevator or the water cooler, or whatever it is. You rally the troops, I guess, and then you talk to your boss.

So now you have your simple prototype that works. You have your problem statement. Then you say, Cathy and Jim and these other people that everybody respects, thinks this is an amazing idea. Then you go for step 3, which is get buy-in to keep working on it.

Jill Finlayson: It's sort of the free, $5, $50, $500 that you talked about as well. Like, starting with no cost as minimal, and piloting. Because I think oftentimes, companies are risk averse. So the idea of, it's just a small pilot, it's just a test, we'll learn from it. And if that's compelling, let the data speak for it.

Excellent. All right. So now we've got the people who are all inspired by your stories, and they want to go do their side hustle. What are your final words of advice for them?

Chuck Temple: Number 1, if you are afraid to talk about it, don't be afraid to talk about it. That's advice number 1. I would say also, there's a spectrum, I think, of personalities. From the one hand, people are all kind of action, not worriers. They just go and do things. And then there's other people that are worried, and planning, and all that stuff.

If you are on the super planning side, give yourself a deadline. Because in my experience, my friends that have great ideas that are some of the smartest, most brilliant people, they're also a lot of times really planners. And they overthink everything, and they want to plan to the nth degree before they even start. 100% of those people never start.

I think it's a shame because I think they have a lot to give. And I think that's what creates opportunity, creates value for our economy. So this is a good thing.

And so I would say if you are on the spectrum from worry and planning to just never think about anything and just action, if you know yourself and you're around, like, 0% to 30%, try to give yourself a goal of getting quick as you can to a number that you're OK with.

You have to then switch your brain into execution mode and stop worrying about the plan because you've done it already. I just know so many people that are like that, and you've got to get over that. You've got to say, it's good enough now. Let's run with it.

Jill Finlayson: So I hear, find demand early. Start, because if you don't start, you're not going to get anywhere. Learn. Listen to what your customers are saying. And move on quickly if they don't agree with you.

Chuck Temple:Yeah. Yeah. If you're not finding anything, try a couple more times if you think you've got something, another angle to get in there. But if it's not there, it's not there. And it's better to move on so your brain can stop kind of thinking about this thing. And that creates room in your brain, or it creates this empty space where new ideas can then come into you.

Jill Finlayson: I love that, the power of new ideas and creating space for new ideas rather than just getting stuck in one little corner.

Chuck Temple: Yeah, don't get stuck. Don't get stuck.

Jill Finlayson: Thank you so much for joining us, Chuck. I've really enjoyed our conversation.

Chuck Temple: Thank you for having me.

Jill Finlayson: And with that, I hope you enjoyed this latest in a long series of podcasts that we'll be sending your way every month. Please share with friends and colleagues who may be interested in taking this Future of Work journey with us.

And make sure to check out extension.berkeley.edu to find a variety of courses to help you thrive in this new working landscape. And to see what's coming up at EDGE in Tech, go ahead and visit edge.berkeley.edu.

Thanks so much for listening, and we'll be back next month to discuss the impact of performance improvement plans on mental health and using the opportunity to reassess your own future of work. The Future of Work podcast is hosted by Jill Finlayson, produced by Sarah Benzuly, edited by Matt Dipietro and Natalie Newman. Thanks for joining us.

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