Liam Martin is a serial entrepreneur who runs Time Doctor and Staff.com — one of the most popular time tracking and productivity software platforms in use by top brands today. He is also a co-organizer of the world’s largest remote work conference — Running Remote. He just wrote a book by the same name about why everyone got remote work wrong during the pandemic and he’s here today to help us figure out how to run a successful remote company
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
When business started difficulties overcame:
“My parents were really against entrepreneurship, they wanted me to become a doctor, they wanted me to get my PhD. I remember I had to actually show my mother million dollars in my bank account before she stopped telling me I could go back to grad school or I could get a really good ‘government job’. She just didn’t get it. And your parents are always generally trying to look out for you but if they are not entrepreneurs, I will generally not take their advice on entrepreneurship I will generally not take their advice ”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
- Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future Book by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
- The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses Book by Eric Ries
Favourite Quote:
“The secret to life is being comfortable having uncomfortable conversations” Liam Martin
Recommended Online Resources:
GitLab – The One DevOps Platform- From planning to production, bring teams together in one application Ship secure code faster, deploy to any cloud, and drive business results
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“Identify whether you are an entrepreneur or not… We talked about that before. What that means is you are someone who can’t work someone else because you don’t want to get dominated by someone else’s rules – you want to make your own. If you are in that state you are an entrepreneur. And then make failure as quick and as easy as humanly possible. That’s what I would do, whatever the idea is. The ideas may be bad, you are actually probably going to have to go through three or four ideas before you come up with one that actually gets you some traction but that is the journey. And to get very tactical actually ,I would do this for about three years. If you can’t make any money within three years, stop, something is either wrong with your ideas, your execution or yourself. You may not be an entrepreneur ”…[Listen for More]
More About Liam Martin:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“Money can’t buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you’re being miserable.” Clare Boothe Luce
Other Quotes From the Chat with Liam Martin:
- “As you grow an organisation you are going to hire people that are smarter than you. Hopefully everyone that you hire is smarter than you. However, they are smarter than you in a particular tenant of the business. So maybe you are going to hire someone who is really good at growth or maybe you are going to hire somebody who is really good at customer support. What they are not good at is entrepreneurship. And you need to be able to take that into consideration and recognise that at the end of the day these people have opinions and those opinions definitely matter but you are the run that runs the business ”
- “Making failure as cheap and as fast as humanly possible allows you to be able to figure out what doesn’t work so you can get to what does work. And you just really need to be able to make sure that you don’t run out of money before you figure out something that does work. It’s relatively simple. And that’s what I would recommend to anyone who is looking to pursue entrepreneurship at scale is at the beginning of an organisation is the most innovative time because you are really starting to identify your product market fit – meaning does your product actually fit the market that you are trying to approach. And the needs to be a lot of experimentation to get to that point. But once you actually get to something that works that people are getting traction in and people are using and paying for… And paying is a really important part of it… And not leaving then you can build off of that. But it is just the process of getting there. – It’s very, very difficult and… ”
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