Against all odds: Steven’s journey to entrepreneurship

This podcast will unlock the secrets of successful SaaS businesses. INSIDEA’s Founder and CEO – Pratik Thakker, will talk to Steven – building Protecht with his co-host Chris.

We’ll hover through the strategies and tactics that made their success possible. So join us as we explore the world of SaaS and learn how to unlock the potential of your own business.

You can watch the full episode on INSIDEA’s YouTube Channel and on Spotify. But if you are more into reading than watching, HERE YOU GO!

Pratik

Hello everyone. This is Pratik, founder at INSIDEA. Good evening, good afternoon, good morning, wherever you guys are joining from. I’m here with my co-host Chris Cownden and wonderful guest, which we will introduce in a moment. This podcast is about like bringing your ideas into reality. We are bringing you inspiring stories from founders who are successful in their journey. And we’ll find out like you know how what they did in their journey, which will help you actually learn and bring your ideas into reality. So Chris, over to you man, take it forward.

Chris

OK. Thank you Pratik. It’s been, it’s been since I think it was like in July I met this person in a in a well I have been working remotely for Appsumo since November time and then when I went to Austin I did meet.

Chris

This guest and it it’s been fascinating to see you Steven joining the podcast session today. Talk about your fitness, technology and thank you for joining us on unlocking your ideas. Steven Bell.

Steven

Yeah. Well, it’s super great to be here. Thanks for the invite and even the consideration and hopefully something I shared today is helpful for your listeners.

Pratik

Awesome. And tell us your back story. Like, you know, before we even begin, we want to know.

Pratik

Who you are, where are you from, what do you do? And bit more in details. The audience can actually understand your background and then we can make more about like your professional life and why you created this platform.

Steven

Yeah, definitely. So happy to take the microphone for a second and introduce myself. So my name is Steven Bell. I originally grew up in southern Orange County in the city called Laguna Beach and really enjoyed my time there. And I think because of my upbringing, I was able to meet a lot of people that were successful in business.

Steven

I went to high school with the founder of Quicksilver, the founder of Sanak, the sandals, all their kids and more, and just being in that business atmosphere was always really enticing to me. So ever since high school, I went on to pursue a degree in philosophy at the University of Utah. And the way that I tried to look at that degree was not so much to study philosophy for the sake of philosophy and to not only increase and have a more meaningful life, but also to look at.

Steven

Business from uh, kind of outside the box angle. So since then I came out of college, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I had a few different things along the way that were entrepreneurial endeavors. But I then ended up getting into software sales. And after being at large organizations, I continue to whittle away my whittle myself down to small organizations. And my most recent experience was at a company called Appsumo. And that’s where I met Chris. And the best thing about appsumo is they’re huge. Side hustles. And so that’s kind of what brings us here today.

Pratik

Incredible. So if you see like you know the listeners, any entrepreneurs we bring you here, they have tried multiple things in their career before they find something which is meaningful and they they want to pursue for a long time. So again, thanks for sharing your journey. What inspired you to become an entrepreneur or a founder?

Steven

Yeah, I think what tried to what I’m trying to do to take me from, I guess, what the industry. Also, wantrepreneur to an entrepreneur is just finding something that I’ve monitored a problem for a long duration of time. I’ve tried to do the market research, and it’s in an area that I’m passionate about. And so I think with that trifecta, it finally kind of pushed the scale because one of the biggest hiccups into being an entrepreneur was, hey, what am I going to work on next? And I think that’s because I was chasing dollars or chasing ideas that I didn’t actually care about, and so I didn’t know how to motivate myself to do the next step. And so I think because I had monitored the fitness space for a number of years, that’s what made me finally take the jump and give a crack at trying to build my own successful business.

Pratik

So bringing like you know you, you chose this industry, you chose this entrepreneurship, how did you decide to bring this idea into reality? What actions did you take and maybe that will help people who are in the same journey to get inspired and, uh, learn from it.

Steven

Yeah, so I can share a little bit of a back story to help connect the pieces so that everyone’s all on the same page. So during my time in college, I had a friend that was pretty successful in the Amazon FBA space. We see it on Tiktok, we see all over social media. Oh my goodness, go to Alibaba, buy this product, slap a logo on it, and you’re going to be a millionaire. well-being young and naive, I thought, OK, well my buddies doing really well. Why? Might as well have him help me out.

Steven

Well, that fell flat on its face. Ended up spending $10,000 at a loss, which when you’re in college, that’s a lot of money. And so going forward, I knew that I wanted to be a lot more tactical and a lot more smart about it. I tried to just slap a high sticker price. And obviously as I’ve evolved as a business professional, you realize that you don’t really do that on Amazon. And so kind of what got me to where I’m at today is I have been monitoring Apple forums for about a year because.

Steven

Even though I loved fitness, ever since I was in high school I played high school basketball, club basketball, high school volleyball, the whole 9 yards I was really active. But then there’s a period in my late teens, early 20s that I wasn’t so active, and so I then used an Apple Watch to get back into better shape. Well within the weightlifting sphere, people use common things like wrist wraps for wrist support and wrist straps for grip support, amongst other accessories to complement. Their workouts. And so I always realized that I had to take off my Apple Watch one putting on a risk support. And that kind of drove me nuts. And so I always just wanted to wait around, hope that somebody would build out the product and I can buy it as a consumer for 3050 bucks and call it a day. But I think what really took me from monitoring into action was just opening, opening my mouth at my local gym. I am pretty. I go the same time.

Steven

Every morning to the same gym and after a period of about a year or two, you get to know a lot of people. And so I started interviewing other people and realizing that not only these people on the Internet, but these people in real life have this problem. And so to try to get the ball going, I ended up taking a traditional risk draft, cutting two holes in it and calling that my prototype. And so that’s how I kind of tried to bring it into action. But then I realized in December that I had to enlist the help of a product development firm to kind of really.

Steven

Combat some of the downsides of just cutting two holes in a traditional restrup to really creating the product that is about to release here in January.

Chris

And and where and where do you see that product going next is a massive advancement in the technology.

Steven

Yeah. So I think as far as where I see everything shaking out when it’s all said and done is I’m looking at my first product as even though it’s a finished sellable product that it’s also. Going to be a prototype into other disciplines. And so when I think of sports like mountain biking or bowling or some of these other sports or even just medical risk races, people want to wear their watch. It’s something that we become accustomed to. And why would an injury set that back? And so I definitely see there’s potential and that there’s market research to complement these findings. However, I think that there’s going to take a lot of work to get from.

Steven

Day to see, but I think that’s what I’m excited for.

Chris

Ahead and you and you said before that you were bootstrapped. Is that a route that you’re gonna continue to go on or were you looking for investors to support that research and development and get the product off the ground and into just get some more exposure?

Steven

Yeah, I definitely have thought about the investor route. However, I don’t believe the business is at a point there to tip the scale. I went out on my own. Because I had been working years and years and years of sales, anything from door to door to retail to Sass, you name it. And while I enjoyed that, I realized that I try to be a pocket knife. I look up to people like Leonardo da Vinci and some of these other people that I consider polymaths. Of course Elon is in the news for for this today and so I joined or I created protect as a way to build new hard skills to just kind of have more fun in life when trying to make money. And so while I think that there is.

Steven

Idea or while there is a valor to this idea, I do think that I need to lay a stronger foundation so that I don’t grow too quick and make that common mistake of a lot of entrepreneurs of you grow something that you don’t even have your feet set and then it just ends up crumbling.

Pratik