WEBVTT
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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, Brian Lofermento, and for the first time in, it feels like a while.
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I'm not the only Brian in today's episode, because we are joined by an incredible entrepreneur who has such an interesting background.
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And, of course, there's a million reasons why I love entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, but one of those reasons is that, gosh, entrepreneurs just think of cool things and they have the ability and they have the willpower and discipline and work ethic to go build those cool things.
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And you're going to hear in today's episode how cool of a solution that today's guest and entrepreneur it has brought into the world.
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It's something that I'm personally very excited to use his service and tool and software and I know that a lot of you are going to be interested in what this guy's building.
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So let me tell you all about him.
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His name is Brian Burns.
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Brian is an attorney, a self-taught developer and a news junkie.
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He graduated law school in 2016.
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He's worked for the FEC, the Federal Election Commission.
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He's worked for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, as well as a large international consulting firm in Washington DC.
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After moving home to Chicago, he began working in-house at a fintech startup, where he caught the startup bug and became fascinated with coding.
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In 2020, he was a candidate for US Congress in Illinois and he was the campaign manager for a successful candidate for the Illinois State House in 2022.
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He then started building TurboTabs, which is a website that empowers users to design the perfect daily report for themselves.
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Yes, this is not a newsletter that you sign up, that somebody else writes what they're thinking and they force feed you things.
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This is something that is built specifically for you.
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Turbotabs has just recently launched to the public.
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You can sign up, which is super excited.
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It's going to help users get more from the internet without getting sucked into a doom scroll.
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Holy cow, that hits home for so many of us.
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I'm so excited to hear from Brian himself so I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Brian Burns.
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All right, Brian, I'm so very excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first.
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Welcome to the show.
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Thank you so much.
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I'm really excited to be here.
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I listen to your podcast all the time.
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Thank you so much, brian.
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That's something you and I didn't talk about off the air, but I'm so appreciative of that because I am fascinated by your background.
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You seem like a bit of an anomaly because you are a lawyer, you've worked in consulting, you've worked in the startup space.
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You also can just build things with your very own hands.
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So, brian, you've got to take us beyond the bio.
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Who the heck is Brian?
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How'd you start doing all these cool things?
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Yeah, so I've just always been a curious person.
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I can remember way back in grade school the constant feedback I always got from my teachers was Brian asks really good questions, and that's what the teachers would tell my mom and that was good for me to hear, but there was a little bit of frustration.
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I just always want to learn new things.
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I always want to go deeper, I want to understand exactly how things work, and that kind of curiosity has really driven me throughout my career.
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Yeah, so my main motivating thing is that I always want to learn more.
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I always want to do more and I'm always focused on improving myself and gaining more skills.
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So I think that that's something that's definitely helped me at every job that I've been in.
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Certainly it helped me in law school, helped me in undergrad and building turbo tabs.
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The infinite curiosity has really been essential, because a lot of the things that we're building have not been built before or we have to find new solutions to problems.
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So it's been a lot of fun building.
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Yeah, I love the fact that you talk about solutions and problems.
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This is at the very core of what it means to be an entrepreneur, and I love the fact I didn't tell you this before we hit record.
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But I love that news junkie makes its way into your bio, because that's totally how I feel, brian.
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I love seeing what's going on in the world.
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I love expanding outside of my own little corner of this planet and my own little corner of what I'm working on and what I'm consuming to see what else is out there, and so I want you to talk to us about that news junkie aspect for yourself personally and how that played into you envisioning TurboTabs and bringing that into the world.
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Yeah.
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So, like I mentioned, and like you said for yourself, I'm curious about the world.
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I want to know what's going on.
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Probably my main source of news is podcasts.
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I have a list about four or five daily podcasts that I listen to every single day.
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I like to get perspectives from multiple sides.
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And then you know, like everyone nowadays, I actually do a lot of my news gathering, scrolling through social media.
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It's not necessarily the best way to get my news, but it is.
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You know, when I wake up, I roll over and I check my feeds.
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A lot of times it's almost an anxiety driven thing where I just want to see, like, make sure everything's still okay, make sure you know the world's still spinning that sort of a thing.
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But then it's very easy to get sucked into a doom scroll and I just want to.
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I looked up a few figures before the podcast that I'd like to share with you and your audience.
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One is that Americans now are spending, on average, four hours and 37 minutes on their phone each day.
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That's even more for Gen Z and this adds up to about one full day per week, six full days per month, 70 full days per year and if we assume a 77 year life expectancy, which is what we have in the United States, and even accounting for, let's say, you don't look at your phone for the first 10 years and the last 10 years of your life.
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That still gives you 57 years of phone using, and I calculated it that means 11 years of our life are spent looking at our phones, and so screen time addiction is a huge problem.
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Forty five percent of Americans think that they're addicted to their phones, and that's really essentially what TurboTabs is trying to help break that cycle.
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So if you're checking in in the morning, you might just want to know, you know what's the headline news story, but then all of a sudden you're scrolling and you're into the weeds on some random subject that you had no idea about, or you're getting you know whatever.
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You're getting sold stuff constantly, and it's no secret that the entire business model of a lot of these social media companies is to draw you in, give you that dopamine hit and keep you coming back.
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They take a lot of their playbooks from casinos and how they design their applications, and so TurboTabs is all about empowering people to get back in control of how they experience the internet Instead of passively consuming a feed that is being given to you based on some algorithm that you have no idea what it is and it's not for your benefit.
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Again, the point of these algorithms is to keep you engaged, keep you there so that they can push ads to you.
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So with TurboTabs, we're trying to kind of turn it around and put you back in control.
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So how it works is you sign up on our website and you're going to be able to create a new report, and each section of the report is something that you design.
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So, for example, a lot of users like having their calendar, their agenda for the day, at the top of the page.
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So you'll get the weather report for the day, you'll get an inspirational quote and then, right below that, you can link your Google calendar or your Outlook calendar and we're going to print you a nicely formatted preview of your day ahead or of your week ahead.
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You might want to be following some of the stocks that you follow, so you can add in several different stock tickers, and each morning we're going to hit some APIs.
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We're going to get the data.
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Where did it close?
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Where did it end?
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What's the change year over year, month over month?
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And we're going to give that to you in a nicely formatted table, and that way you've got kind of the most important things that you want every day, whether it's sports news, whether it's regular news, whether it's your horoscope.
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And even we have a function for a chapter a day for reading novels.
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So the idea is all of this each morning, our computers are going to go out to the Internet.
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We're going to do all the work for you, so you're not logging into several different websites, you're not logging into several different feeds.
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We're going to get the information for you, we're going to put it into a beautifully formatted PDF and we're going to send it to you in your email.
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And that's basically how TurboTabs works and how the idea is that you can read that and you can be confident that you've got all the news that you need for the day.
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You don't need to log into all your apps and you can just move on.
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Yeah, I love that.
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And, Brian, I will say, one of the things that caught my eye as soon as we came across TurboTabs is the fact that it is that PDF, because my morning habits is I open up Twitter and I open up Reddit and I open up sports score apps and I open up my Gmail, I open up so many different things and the fact that this is one PDF which, to me, feels like okay, this is a document and I'm going to consume what I need in the document and I'm not leaving that document.
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I'm not going to open up 30 different apps, and so that's not lost on me the fact that you've so intentionally created it into a PDF.
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But I want to ask you this question, because a lot of people will say, yeah, this is a great idea, and I'm sure you've gotten this feedback in real life all the time of holy cow, why didn't this come out sooner?
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Like this is an amazing solution to a real life human problem.
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Those stats that you listed for us are terrifyingly accurate and so scary for us to confront societally.
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But, brian, what I want to ask you is where, along the way, did you go from seeing this idea and thinking of this idea to actually developing it, because I can only imagine the amount of work that goes into building something like this.
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You were not a coder or developer by trade in the early parts of your career.
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You are an attorney.
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I want to keep reminding people of that fact because I think it's such a cool story.
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Where, along the way, did you say I'm going to build this thing?
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Yeah, so the origins of the idea?
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I'd actually have to go back to one of my first jobs out of law school at a consulting firm.
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We were working on a mass tort litigation and part of my job was getting information from several different spreadsheets and databases, combining it into a nice daily report that I would then email up the chain to the higher ups so that they could have this nice, neat report that they just consumed every morning and they like that.
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They knew what was going on.
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Even when I was making that report, I remember thinking it would be really nice to be on the other end of this report just receiving that information.
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Fast forward, you know, a few years and during the pandemic actually I didn't mention this in my bio, but I actually did also have a brief stint as a middle school teacher A local school had a position.
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They needed someone on an emergency basis.
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It was actually a friend of mine so I started teaching fifth grade math, believe it or not and in that role, same thing Each morning, me and a few of the teachers would have to email each other a worksheet that we would then print out for our class.
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Each day, and again same thing.
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I was spending all this time going out getting the information and getting it to a PDF so I could print it and hand it out to the kids.
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And so the idea for the PDF is really about, like you said, kind of limiting the amount of information that you have to consume, limiting that universe, and by doing that you actually give yourself, you're kind of more empowered in that way.
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There's a phrase and I think it's a marketing phrase, but it's the medium, is the message, and so by making the medium a PDF, we're sending a couple of messages.
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One is that, like you said, read this and you're done.
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It's a finite document, it doesn't scroll on infinitely, it's done.
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Another message that we send is it's archivable automatically by nature.
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What does this mean?
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Well, if you, you know, anyone who's familiar with the Internet knows that it is constantly changing, and something as simple as finding out what was the news three weeks ago can actually be a really difficult thing to do.
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So with TurboTabs, you're going to have in your inbox, just, you know, search for from TurboTabs and you're going to have a daily report going back as far as since you've joined us, and you'll be able to look at that and see kind of a snapshot in time what was going on at that time.
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And this is another thing again where the medium is the message.
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Pdfs are kind of automatically archivable.
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Most people in the business world realize that the PDF is sort of like the end product of a lot of different work processes.
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So by giving information to our consumers, to our clients, in a medium that they're used to receiving, it just makes it a whole lot easier.
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You know, a lot of our customers print their documents and then they don't even have to log in, you know, and be looking at a screen for that time that they're consuming the news or their information.
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So it's sort of a mix of an old school business model of a newspaper blended with, you know, all the tools that the internet has.
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And then I just realized I didn't actually answer your question.
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So as I was learning to code, you know, I kind of had this idea about these PDFs I used to create for the higher ups and I decided just, you know, I wonder if I could make this happen automatically.
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And so I started experimenting with different languages, different modules, different ways to create this.
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I had to have tried probably 20 different kind of tech stacks before I found one that was flexible enough that resulted in a nice PDF.
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And really, you know, once I made that first PDF happen, that's when kind of the spark went off, when I was like, okay, I can do this, and I've already.
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You know, in my previous coding, teaching myself to code, I learned how to get information from APIs.
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I learned how to scrape websites to get information.
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That way, if I just put these two together and then you know, one more module on the end to send it off in an email like that's a really cool product that I myself would love to have.
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And once I kind of made that realization, that's when I nose to the grindstone mapped out exactly how I want to create this, what the steps are to do it, and then just started executing.
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Yeah gosh, I love that.
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I also love hearing the way that you articulate the strategy and the intentionality behind even that decision to make it a PDF, and it's really cool how it's inspired by your own professional career.
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A lot of people think that all these things are separate and they all live inside of their own individual boxes, but I think that, Brian, you are such a shiny example as an entrepreneur about how all things bleed into one another, and so I actually do want to pick on that part of your journey together here right now, because I love how nonlinear your path is, Even hearing about the way that you came about these skills of oh hey, I know how to access APIs.
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Oh hey, I know how to access APIs.
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Oh hey, I know how to feed this information into a document, and then you just throw us a little bit of a curveball and say I also taught math to middle schoolers.
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Brian, there's something about your journey that I think is so incredible about how comfortable you've been with the nonlinear nature of it.
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I would imagine this is just total speculation, for my end is that I would imagine, when people go to law school and become an attorney, there are high expectations of them, for this is what you're going to do for the rest of your life.
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You seem to be perfectly okay saying yeah, that's one part of my story and I picked up a lot along the way, but I'm also making all these turns and pivots and gaining things along the way.
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Talk to me about that attitude behind that nonlinear journey.
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Yeah, I think a lot of it comes from, like I mentioned in the beginning, just this natural curiosity that I have, also with respect to law school specifically.
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I didn't necessarily go to law school because I wanted to become a lawyer.
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I know that might sound weird to a lot of people, but actually what drove me to go to law school was an intense interest in politics and how the world works and you know you kind of trace back all of the power links and different relationships going on and a lot of things all trace back to you know how the laws are written and how they are created, and I knew that if I really wanted to understand how the world works, I would need to have a pretty good understanding about how laws are made, how they're enacted and that.
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So I never really felt tied or compelled to actually be practicing law as a career choice.
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It was always for me just another tool to have in the tool belt and a way to understand the world.
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Now it has been good.
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I actually found that I do enjoy practicing law.
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I have a family law practice here in Chicago that I have clients for and that I really enjoy representing them and being in court and doing all of that, but I never felt the need to box myself in and to become just for lack of a better term a one-trick pony.
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There's a Shakespeare quote that gets quoted out of context constantly, and your listeners have probably all heard the first part of the quote, which is Jack of all trades, master of none.
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That's, you know, the quote that everybody hears and they think, oh, I got to just focus on one thing and do that one thing really well.
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But the actual full quote is Jack of all trades, master of none, often better than a master of one.
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And so just the fact that that quote has been pulling out of context and used to, you know, encourage people to just do one thing, I think is kind of emblematic of you know kind of how the world works right now.
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And that's not to say that there's anything wrong with specialization.
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It's obviously incredibly important to have some specialized skills, but for me I have always seen the value in being able to connect these disparate disciplines and find the commonality between them, and so that's kind of where I think my superpower is.
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Yeah, gosh.
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Actually, brian, I'll confess here publicly I never have heard that quote in full.
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It always has stopped at master of none, and that's incredible.
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And I think that that's going to resonate with so many listeners in our audience because I feel like that's at the very nature of entrepreneurship.
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You've talked a few times about curiosity today and the importance to yourself.
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I think that that's a common theme across all entrepreneurs is we love learning and, to a detriment, sometimes we love consuming more than we love creating, but it is because of that curiosity that goes into it.
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So I love that.
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Because you brought up a quote.
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I'm a big sucker for quotes and it immediately caught my eye when I was doing my research ahead of our conversation today about a piece of advice you got from a high school teacher that has influenced you heavily and that is anything worth doing, is worth doing wrong, because you're shattering so many of our commonly held beliefs here, brian, with that Shakespeare quote.
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Talk to us about that, because a lot of people do get paralyzed.
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I'll pick on some entrepreneurial generalities again here.
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A lot of times people get paralyzed by perfection or waiting until they're ready, which I think is a total BS notion.
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So talk to us about why anything worth doing is worth doing wrong.
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Yeah, exactly.
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And again this kind of turns a conventional wisdom on the head where most people think if I'm going to do it, I got to do it right, I got to do it perfectly, I got to make sure that everything's just right.
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But really the exact opposite is true In 90% of things in life.
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If you get it 80% done, that's usually good enough for most things, and especially when you're building a product and you're building something new, being comfortable with it, not being perfect, is almost a prerequisite to getting it off the ground.
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With TurboTabs specifically, the first versions of it were horrible.
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The first PDFs I created looked really ugly.
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The first emails that I sent were getting blocked by spam filters.
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The first landing page that I had nobody clicked on anything, but it was out there and it was out in the world.
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And as I incrementally improved it, I was able to start to see that this is something that people are interested in, kind of.
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More broadly speaking, in life, if something is important to you, if you want something, it doesn't matter what it is.
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It doesn't matter if you want to be a good family man, or you want to be a good friend to someone, or you want to be a good artist.
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Whatever it is that you want, if it's important to you, you have to be okay with it not being perfect.
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You have to be okay with just going out there and doing it, because unless you take that first step, unless you get out there and do something, then it's always just going to be an idea in your head, it's going to keep you up at night, it's going to be rolling around there and nothing's going to improve.
00:20:21.105 --> 00:20:23.996
You absolutely have to be comfortable with failure.
00:20:23.996 --> 00:20:25.200
That's something that I believe.
00:20:25.200 --> 00:20:35.837
110% is that if you're not comfortable failing, you're never going to do anything significant, because all the easy things have already been done and there's not a whole lot of reward behind them.
00:20:35.837 --> 00:20:42.473
So if something's important to you, you have to be willing to do it imperfectly or you're never going to get it to where you want it to be.
00:20:43.155 --> 00:20:48.884
Yeah, I really appreciate how much you call out the fact that early iterations of TurboTabs was not great.
00:20:48.884 --> 00:20:53.096
It's something that I constantly say here on the air is go back and listen to episode zero.
00:20:53.096 --> 00:20:55.078
This podcast was terrible.
00:20:55.078 --> 00:21:01.800
I'm so grateful for anyone who found it way back then and still subscribe to it and still tuned in because it really wasn't good, brian.
00:21:01.800 --> 00:21:07.290
But that's why I'm a big subscriber to that belief of first you need to make it exist, then you can make it better.
00:21:07.290 --> 00:21:14.236
Talk to us about that development roadmap or that timeline, because we've all heard that term of MVP, a minimum viable product.
00:21:14.236 --> 00:21:16.881
You've launched something into the world, brian.
00:21:16.881 --> 00:21:21.018
That is such a huge achievement and accomplishment and it's a huge risk.
00:21:21.018 --> 00:21:23.063
It's something that very few people do.
00:21:23.063 --> 00:21:29.231
More dreams die from not even launching something than what happens after people actually launch it into the world.
00:21:29.231 --> 00:21:31.298
So talk to us about that development roadmap.
00:21:31.298 --> 00:21:34.413
When, along the way, did you say, okay, this is good enough.
00:21:34.492 --> 00:21:41.404
That 80% that you mentioned, yeah, so I guess there's a couple of different stages, right?
00:21:41.404 --> 00:22:02.657
The first thing with a digital product like I have, is you want to build something that can at least test the business model, and so, for me, what that meant was basically building a landing page that was hey, this is what TurboTabs is, this is what it's going to do, sign up here for a free trial.
00:22:02.657 --> 00:22:05.683
And that was more or less it.
00:22:05.683 --> 00:22:08.623
Right, the TurboTabs idea, you know, we've explained it.
00:22:08.623 --> 00:22:12.355
Now it's a personalized report that you design, that we email you in a PDF.
00:22:12.355 --> 00:22:14.439
It's pretty simple, right.
00:22:14.439 --> 00:22:35.241
And so the idea, you know, I could have very easily got bogged down and, you know, building this perfect product and making it and all these bells and whistles, and then I could have gotten to the end and figured out that nobody wants this right, and so that would have been a huge waste of time, a huge problem, and so what I did instead was I built, like I said, a very simple landing page.
00:22:35.241 --> 00:22:39.460
I made sure that it explained clearly what the idea was.
00:22:39.460 --> 00:22:45.159
I made sure that it was clean and professional looking, but the functionality behind it wasn't there.
00:22:45.159 --> 00:22:47.897
Still, it was launched there.
00:22:48.069 --> 00:22:57.279
I asked some family and friends to look at it, and that's important to have family and friends look at it, but what's also important is to get an idea of again the business.
00:22:57.279 --> 00:23:03.442
And how does this feel to somebody new, who doesn't know me, who doesn't have any sort of trust to me?
00:23:03.442 --> 00:23:04.392
How does it feel to them?
00:23:04.392 --> 00:23:26.647
So, in addition to getting the landing page set up, I set up a Google Ads account and I started spending a few hundred dollars a month running ads and I experimented with a couple of keywords and I finally got to a keyword where not only was I getting people to click into the website at a reasonable cost, but I was also getting conversions at a reasonable cost.
00:23:26.669 --> 00:23:30.924
And at that point once I realized that, okay, this is one funnel that could work.
00:23:30.924 --> 00:23:37.272
This isn't necessarily the only, only funnel, but this shows that there are at least people out there searching for something like this.
00:23:37.272 --> 00:23:45.839
My search terms were something like customized report or automatic newsletter, those kinds of things, but I was.
00:23:45.839 --> 00:24:01.839
I got this signal in it and it wasn't a large signal, it wasn't a loud signal, but but going back to this, you know, being comfortable with it being 80% done and being able to get what you need from that with just this landing page, with just those, you know, very small budget and Google ads.
00:24:01.839 --> 00:24:06.965
I was able to see that, yes, people do want this, and so let's keep building from there.
00:24:06.965 --> 00:24:15.654
And then it was just a matter of building out small functionalities, one step at a time, until I got to the point where, yeah, this is something that people will pay for.
00:24:16.336 --> 00:24:28.497
Yeah, brian, I want to ask you this question with your CEO hat on, because you mentioned asking friends and family to be beta testers for you, which is very cool, and it's super great that you've got that support network to plug that gap for you.
00:24:28.959 --> 00:24:35.920
But what I always find is that when you ask for criticism or feedback, you'll get it, and if you ask 50 people for it, you're going to get 50 different pieces of it.
00:24:35.920 --> 00:24:47.153
You, as the CEO and founder of TurboTabs, you also are the one filter that says, okay, I hear this feedback and I want to make this actionable, or I'm going to develop something that solves that problem.
00:24:47.153 --> 00:24:49.700
What's that filter look like on your end?
00:24:49.700 --> 00:25:07.790
Because I'm sure that you've been told 500 things that you could do to change or to improve TurboTabs, but somewhere along the way, as the CEO of the company as well and the developer of the tool itself, you're the one who says, okay, this one I'm going to take on board, I'm going to prioritize this one, this one is completely irrelevant.
00:25:07.790 --> 00:25:14.284
Sorry, mom, but all of those things, how do you serve as that filter and how do you view that feedback?
00:25:16.508 --> 00:25:18.852
I think the you know the.
00:25:18.852 --> 00:25:33.634
You know it's simple and you know difficult to explain, but, you know, at the end of the day, the buck stops with me and ultimately, kind of my judgment is is what's going to decide whether or not a feature gets built or not.
00:25:33.634 --> 00:25:50.617
When I'm making that decision, one of the first things I consider because, again, this is a product that I developed originally because it's something that I wanted, so that's kind of the first thing is is this something that I would like, that I would enjoy, that I would find value in?
00:25:50.617 --> 00:25:56.098
And so I've found that there's really not a substitute for that.
00:25:56.098 --> 00:25:57.303
You know there's.
00:25:57.303 --> 00:26:02.054
Obviously you want to find people that you trust, and this product isn't just for me.
00:26:02.054 --> 00:26:11.404
So I'm going to build things that aren't necessarily something that I would want, but having that as the North Star right, is this useful, does this give value?
00:26:11.404 --> 00:26:21.480
Is really the number one question that I'm asking myself when I'm figuring out whether or not I want to commit resources, time, money to developing a specific feature.
00:26:24.290 --> 00:26:45.013
It's hard right, you don't know what people want, you don't know how difficult things are going to be to build, but at the end of the day, you know, that's one of the I say it's both a perk and a downfall of being the CEO is that, yeah, I get to make the decisions, but if I make a decision that wastes 20 hours of developer time, you know that's also on me.
00:26:45.013 --> 00:26:47.179
So it's a balance.
00:26:47.179 --> 00:26:50.419
And, again, you have to be comfortable with the fact that you're going to be wrong.
00:26:50.419 --> 00:26:52.306
You are going to be wrong.
00:26:52.306 --> 00:26:55.212
If you're not wrong, you're not trying hard enough, right?
00:26:55.212 --> 00:27:16.236
If you're not, you know, if you're not aiming, one sure sign that you're not aiming high enough is that you hit all of your targets, and so that that's something that, again, being comfortable with failure, being comfortable with the fact that it's not going to be perfect, that you're going to make some mistakes, that you're going to waste some time, but you're always moving forward and you never stop, that's the most important thing.
