Josh Little: [00:00] If we had enough capital to last long enough, we would have figured it out, and a lot of people feel like we did figure it out right at the end with the consulting piece allowing asynchronous microconsulting. There’s nothing that does that. And there are things like Intro that lets you book time with an expert but, that’s another synchronous meeting. What expert wants another meeting on their calendar, right? Wouldn’t you just love a message from somebody that had a question for you that you could get to on your walk? And that’s exactly what we offered. But we only had three months to run after that. And we saw that inflection point at the end, and then we’re like, “We got to shut it down,” because it was only 5K in monthly revenue that we’re getting. 

Joe Grover: [00:35] Even more painful.

Joe Grover: [00:36] You’re listening to The Real F Word, a podcast that dives deep into the realities of entrepreneurial failure, and each episode features raw, unfiltered stories from founders who’ve navigated both the highs and lows of startup life. We’ll discover the lessons learned and the strength found in facing setbacks head on. Welcome to The Real F Word. 

Joe Grover: [00:57] Welcome to The Real F Word. I’m so delighted to have Josh Little here. He’s a five-times founder. He’s had plenty of success, but today, we’re not going to talk about any of it. 

Josh Little: [01:08] Dang. 

Joe Grover: [01:09] We’ll talk all about the experience of building a company that didn’t realize its potential, that you had to pivot. You had to change. We’re going to talk about failure today, and hopefully you’ll be open about what other entrepreneurs can learn from your experience so that they can derisk the journey as they build a product and launch a company. Thanks for being here, Josh. 

Josh Little: [01:27] Of course, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. 

Joe Grover: [01:30] Tell me a little bit. First of all, you’ve started a lot of different businesses, and you’ve raised capital in two different companies. I want to talk specifically about your experience building Volley. Tell me a little bit about the journey. What was the origin of the idea, and what was the product?

Josh Little: [01:46] Yeah. So, when the pandemic hit, I was looking for my next company, looking for opportunities. And the global pandemic or any major change in society is always a good opportunity to reflect on what’s going to change, what’s going to stay the same, what’s going to stay changed. So I started thinking deeply about what effects the pandemic would have. Of course, in the early days, we didn’t know how long it would last or how big this problem was. But companies were starting to go remote, and I just knew communication was going to—the way we communicate at work was going to change fundamentally, or it needed to change because people were already, “What are your options?” You go remote, you’re either on Slack Crack or Zoom Doom, either one. It doesn’t quite fit the bill. 

[02:32] And I at the time happened to be having some pretty deep, meaningful conversations with friends on an app called Marco Polo, which is a video messaging app, and these conversations were every day, carrying on a conversation that was meaningful. We could get to it when we wanted to. And we wouldn’t have had these conversations in real life. We would never have scheduled time to meet to have this conversation, and you would never have texted or Slacked somebody the depth there. So I felt like async video was a solution to the problems that were plaguing remote work: lack of communication, loneliness, meeting fatigue—those were the top three. And so I had the idea of “What if Marco Polo had a baby with Slack? What would that be like?” and started communicating that idea, created some prototypes, and started sharing them with people, put out a survey. I’ve never had a survey actually go viral. People started sharing this survey, and it just had a little video of a prototype and a pitch, and people at different companies, government agencies, started filling it out. Hundreds of people. And I was like, “What?” And I just shared it on LinkedIn, and I was like, “Oh.” So I shut it down immediately, and I was like, “We’ve got something.”

[03:45] So, pulled a team together, started building Volley May of 2020. And within a few months, we had an MVP on iOS, and we realized pretty quickly a single platform wasn’t going to be what we needed. We needed an Android app, we needed a desktop app or a web app. So we started building those, and by the fall, we had those in place and started doing a private beta. We had about 700 companies that were interested in being early adopters of Volley. So we just brought them in in cohorts and started testing with them and, yeah, just trying to get the groundswell going with Volley.

Joe Grover: [04:25] Yeah, I remember the first time I was introduced to the product. I was an executive at a local tech business, and our CEO said, “Hey, this is how we’re going to communicate from now on.” And he would send us Volleys at night with updates from the day. And so I used the product, and I know a lot of people that continue to use it. You went out and raised some capital. How much did you raise, and what was the vision for the company as you were pitching these VCs in Silicon Valley or some here in Silicon Slopes? What was that vision that you had pitched to the investors?

Josh Little: [04:54] Yeah. So it was Marco Polo for work: the ultimate team communication platform. That was the idea, and people who knew Marco Polo all wondered, “Yeah, why isn’t there a Marco Polo for work? That makes sense.” Because Marco Polo’s user base was largely families and lots of females, actually, moms that were communicating. But it really wasn’t widely adopted at work. So we were going to build a platform. And it was missing a number of the features you would really need to have a robust messaging app with your team. So that was the original vision, and we really didn’t even need to pitch it. People who are hearing about what we’re doing wanted to stuff money in our pockets, and this was, 2020, 2021. This was the time when venture money was flowing like water. And so we raised 1.4 initially, even before we launched a product, and then, once we launched, the product had enough interest, we raised another 4.9 or 4.8.

Joe Grover: [05:48] In your Series A?

Josh Little: [05:49] No, that was a seed round. 

Joe Grover: [05:50] Ah, your seed round. What was the expectation in terms of the financial outcomes that this company could drive for both you and the management team and the investors?

Josh Little: [05:59] Yeah, well, I mean, we were running the messaging app playbook. And if you look at successful messaging apps—Slack, Telegram, Signal, Discord—that playbook doesn’t say, “Hey, build a really great monetization strategy, and then launch a product.” It says, “Build a really great free product that people adopt and grows like wildfire. Once you do, you’re going to figure out how to monetize this thing.” So we were really running that playbook, and because venture money was so readily available then, we saw no end to our ability to fundraise and continue to fundraise if things went well. So we didn’t monetize out of the gate. We just ran with a free product. Because we also know from building several products before how much extra effort and overhead it takes to build the whole system of monetization and help and support and all the things that go along with that as well as the product that needs to support that. So we want to just focus all on the customer experience, free product, and yeah. So, March or April, we raised the rest of the 6.3 that we raised for Volley.

Joe Grover: [07:06] So you had a good team. You guys have done it before. You had venture backing, some Silicon Valley investors, some investors here locally, probably some family offices and angels. You had a playbook. There’s other companies that have done it before. A lot was going right for you. So when were the first signals that things might not be playing out exactly how you expected?

Josh Little: [07:27] Yeah. So we got some signals pretty early, but they weren’t like, “Beware! Turn around!” They were just like, “Ooh, this is going to be harder than we thought.” And there were three what I would call blind sides. The first was how reticent people were to recording videos of themselves. We knew that was going to be a problem because we know not everyone’s comfortable—

Joe Grover: [07:48] I kind of feel that right now.

Josh Little: [07:50] Do you?

Joe Grover: [07:50] Yeah.

Josh Little: [07:51] See, it doesn’t bother. I grew up with a video camera stitched to my hand, made tons of videos when I was a kid, have a YouTube channel. It doesn’t even register for me. But I know people are sensitive to that. But we started seeing a lot of that, and they wouldn’t come out and say, “I’m vain,” or, “I don’t like seeing myself.” They would say, “Oh, you guys need filters,” or, “Can I look at something else while I record,” or things like that, and we’re like, “What, really?” And yeah, what we found out is about 90 percent of people feel that recording a video is akin to running naked through Times Square for them psychologically. I mean, we’ve all taken lots of videos of other people on vacations and whatnot. Very few people have flipped their selfie camera around and spoke. And that freaks them out. “That’s not something I do. That’s what YouTubers do.” So we had that psychology. That was a blind side—not that it existed, but just how prevalent that feeling was.

[08:55] Second was the trust risk factor. When you think about Marco Polo’s user base, if you think about those conversations like families, that’s really high trust, really low risk, where that video messaging has taken root. But if you think about a workplace, it’s just the opposite. It’s typically low trust, unfortunately, pretty high risk to put yourself out there, say something that’s stupid, that can be shared, that other people you know can forward to others. And so that risk, especially as the team size grew bigger, the risk felt even higher.

[09:28] And then the third blind side was we didn’t realize how much communication apps are like religion. People really, “Hey, you want to use this app to communicate?” That’s like, “Hey, do you want to come to my church?” It’s that big of a deal to people. And we didn’t realize how big of a deal communication app fatigue was. 

[09:51] So those three things showed up pretty early, but none of them were deal breakers. None of them were like, “Okay, this is not going to work. These are signals of, “This is going to be harder to get to work than we thought.” And like any early tech product, we just had an MVP. And at this point, we didn’t have channels, we didn’t have spaces, we didn’t have a lot of the features that are table stakes for a messaging app, especially a workplace communication app. So we couldn’t turn around or go somewhere else until we built channels, until we had transcripts. We need transcripts. We’re not going to know until we build transcripts, right? So we had to build those things. And so the rest of 2021, it was really like throwing features at the problem, which is never a good idea, but in this case, it’s not a bad idea, because we knew even ourselves we had to have pretty high motivation to not have some of the things that we were used to in Slack.

Joe Grover: [10:54] And how big was the team at this point?

Josh Little: [10:56] Team at that point was eight, and so it was six engineers, a designer, and me. And yeah, so, we were just trying to get adoption, trying to get teams. And then I would say the next signal we started seeing—this is probably a few months in—is we started to see shark fins. And for those of you who don’t know, a shark fin is a graph that looks like it’s going well, and then it doesn’t, and so it creates this like shark fin. And we just saw this at—I have thousands of these—we had thousands of teams adopt Volley. Every FAANG company had multiple teams on Volley, and it was very much the same: Someone would believe in it. Somebody would say, “This is it. This is the future of communication,” like you had, “We’re communicating on this.” They’d invite everyone, and it’d go well until the weakest link breaks the chain.

[11:48] And that’s another thing that we really didn’t understand is it’s not the CEO that decides what communication tool you use. It’s really the weakest member. So, typically, you would run into zeds. So if you had a team of 20, a third of the people would say, “Hell yes,” a third of the people would be like, “Whatever,” and then there’d be another, maybe not third, but a couple of people who were just like, “Hell, no.” 

Joe Grover: [12:13] “I’m never going to use it.” 

Josh Little: [12:14] “I’m not going to record videos of myself. This thing is evil.” And they would protest. And there goes Volley, right? Over and over again. 

Joe Grover: [12:23] Every team that adopted it, you had this pattern?

Josh Little: [12:25] Not every. And that’s the thing: There was never—and this is true about most startups—it’s never just like, “It won’t work. No one will use it.” We had thousands of teams that were using it in various levels of success, right?

Joe Grover: [12:40] But then this is the challenge, right? Is to look at the signal through the noise. And it’s tough because there’s so many. As an entrepreneur, you want to see all the positive examples of adoption and market penetration, and then you may ignore some of those other signals that, “Wait a second.” There’s 50 percent of the time, even 40 percent of the time, they’re just not maintaining usage.

Josh Little: [13:02] Right. And yeah. So those were intimidating, but we still had functionality and features to build. So, by the end of the first year, we realized we’re not going to build our way out of this. It’s probably a different use case, different market, different workflow. We’re going to have to start hunting. And so we were tracking everything: dozens of signals of different use cases from heavy equipment sales in the field to real estate to support to whatever.

[13:30] But the most promising signal that we had at that time was actually creators: YouTubers that were using it to teach a class to engage artists. So a lot of these educational YouTube channels will then have a series of courses. And then to go along with the courses, you have this community where you’re talking about the work and whatnot. And so we had all of the top five YouTube strategists in the world using Volley for the community side of their courses, and we’re like, “Interesting.” And you want to talk about a demographic that’s comfortable recording videos of themselves? YouTubers, right?

[14:07] So we started leaning into that small signal and started building features for them. And it started working. 2022, great growth inflection. And we thought we had it. And we were starting to think about monetization at the time. And that’s when Sequoia and YC issued letters to all their portfolio companies. Venture winter set in. Stock market crashed, and VC basically froze. And we didn’t realize it at the time how lasting of an effect that would have. We thought this was a hiccup. So we did what everyone else was doing: try to raise a little bit more money. Try to reduce some of our workforce. We went from 12 to 10 people—we weren’t big ever—just to try to extend our runway, which we did.

[14:56] We got to over a year, because we had six months of runway in May of 2022 when that happened. So we extended the runway, and we thought we could weather it out. And we worked with this audience. We tried to monetize. We created a pro version of Volley where you could pay for extra features. That wasn’t it. And we knew that wasn’t it, but it only took us three weeks to build. So we shipped that, and then we started building what we eventually knew would probably be more successful would be allowing for people to charge for experiences they created on Volley. So think microconsulting or paid group programs. It’s what our creators and coaches and consultants on Volley were using it for. And so we were just paving the cow paths, doing what they were doing, and making it a lot easier for them to monetize, whether, instead of putting a stack of Stripe and Substack together with Volley, and we just built those features to allow you to put in a number, create your offer, send out your link, and it’s all automatic. So we made a hasty attempt, nearer the end, to monetize in that way. That was also successful, great growth inflection. But the revenue was just not enough to save the day. 

[16:09] And by that point, all of our investors, they had already invested enough in Volley. Nobody wanted another bite of the apple. I pitched 30 or so more investors that were in the creator monetization space. Nothing. And at this point, end of 2022, nobody’s investing. Almost zero investments were happening at the time, no matter what anyone wants to say. So we tried to sell it. Couldn’t get a deal done. We got close with Discord and Vimeo and a couple others but couldn’t get a deal done. So, May of 2023, I had to announce a shutdown because we needed at least 60 days for everyone to fulfill what they just sold on Volley to be able to do the consulting offer or whatever. Otherwise, we’d have to refund all of that money. So we did it and got it shut down cleanly.

Joe Grover: [17:01] Tell me about that decision to shut it down. What are the conversations you’re having with your investors, with your management team. Tell me about that.

Josh Little: [17:09] Yeah, I mean, everyone is eyes wide open. I’ve been told I’m quite good at investor updates and team updates. I share openly. Everyone can see the P&L, everyone can see what everyone’s making. I’m very transparent when running a company. So I do weekly updates with the team. Everyone knows what’s going on, where we’re at. So they’re getting the play-by-play. Investors get monthly updates, but they’re very in-depth.

[17:34] So all the investors that were paying attention to my monthly updates knew exactly what was going on, felt like we were making all the right moves. It was either monetize, sell it, or raise money. Those are the three options. And nope, nope, and nope, unfortunately. So everyone was eyes wide open in the know when we got to that place. And I would say we had dozens of contemporaries. A lot of people were smelling that same signal that I was when the pandemic hit that communication is going to change and async video is a solution, so that we had dozens of other companies that were competitors or copycats or whatever you want to say. And we did better than any of them, which I’m proud to say, but just not good enough—not escape velocity. We never reached escape velocity. And given the trajectory, I just couldn’t see it happening if we had six more months or 12 more months. We needed years, not months more.

Joe Grover: [18:37] What’s up, fail fans? You know, as we’ve listened to so many guests on this podcast, that the road to success is often paved with failure, with a lot of challenges, and even full-on face-plants. But there’s a thing that you could do to help skip some of those bumps and bruises, and that’s really where the consultants at Amplēo come in. See, Amplēo offers fractional executives in finance, marketing, and HR. And these are people who’ve experienced a lot. They’ve been in the trenches. They’ve built businesses. They’ve failed. But here’s the kicker: They’ve learned from those failures, and now they’re applying all that wisdom to your business to support you so you don’t have to learn the hard way. I mean, think about it: Instead of stumbling around in the dark and hoping you don’t hit the wall, you could bring someone in who’s already mapped out that room, right? Amplēo consultants and experts have worked with and for numerous companies of all sizes, and they’ve gathered insights on what works and where to focus and how to actually grow your business efficiently.

[19:36] So while we embrace failure on this podcast, there is no rule that says you have to fail at everything yourself. So check out Amplēo and see how their fractional executives can help your business move forward and avoid those painful learning curves. Sometimes the smartest move is learning from someone else’s failure. Visit Amplēo.com to learn more.

Joe Grover: [18:37] What was the toughest conversation you had as you shut down something you had been building and were excited about and had an interesting product, great investor group trajectory at one point.

Josh Little: [20:08] Well, I mean, that’s why I say investors who were paying attention, because there were a couple of investors that just weren’t paying attention, and they didn’t know all of the things that we did, didn’t care to understand the full story, and they felt like we just gave up, right? And so those conversations were hard. I had one investor try to rip me up on LinkedIn, and if you only knew. If you only knew. But you know, 98 percent of investors said things like, “You guys ran a flawless performance, your execution was near flawless.” And I really feel like I did the best work of my life. I built the best product I’ve ever built in my life. And I hang my head pretty high based on the work that we did. Didn’t see the score on the scoreboard like we’d like to see, but looking back, it’s hard to find obvious gaps or holes or bad decisions. I’m not saying there weren’t. Hindsight’s easy. 

Joe Grover: [21:06] Well, that’s what I want to talk about, because it’s easy to attribute our failures to circumstances or economy or capital constraints, competitive dynamics that are outside of our control. But for entrepreneurs that are listening, what are the things inside of your control that you would have done differently? What are some of the key learnings? Some things you won’t do again?

Josh Little: [21:31] Yeah, I think I probably—this is easy in hindsight. Unfortunately, I do feel like, given the data I had, I’d probably do the exact stinking same thing if I had the same data moving forward. But we should have pivoted a little earlier from the team thing, but that’s what everyone invested in, that’s what everyone thought, “This is the time for this product.” We just had to get it right. So we didn’t want to move away from that too fast.

[22:01] And another thing in this—I can argue both sides of this—another thing we probably should have done was monetize from day one. But that’s not the messaging playbook. And while that would have helped us orient on a willingness to pay, like a user that’s willing to pay and build around them, it may not have helped us find, ultimately, what I think would have been successful, which is that consulting, coaching, monetizing experiences you’re creating on Volley, that product. Because I think if we monetized from day one, we would have monetized something very similar to what Slack and other team communications products are doing, and we would have found a handful of people that were willing to pay. Like I said, it wasn’t a zero, and we would have just oriented around them and never looked further. So we probably should have monetized earlier, but I could also see where that would have got us stuck in the mud earlier.

Joe Grover: [22:58] For sure. Tell me about the—we sometimes ignore the personal cost of building something and it failing.

Josh Little: [23:05] Yeah.

Joe Grover: [23:06] How did you deal with this emotionally? What was your reaction in the quiet moments where you’re sitting playing guitar or singing? I know you’re a musician. How were you feeling?

Josh Little: [23:17] Oh yeah, just demoralized, humbled, all the words. Confused. Because it’s not like I wasn’t doing something that I knew I should be doing. I was doing everything that I could possibly think of, and so was the rest of the team. And when you’re in a situation like that and you’re just not seeing it work, it’s really frustrating. And how did I deal with it? Food. It’s a good medicine. It’s effective. It works. So I gained 50 pounds. 

Joe Grover: [23:55] 50 pounds?

Josh Little: [23:55] Yeah, I put on 50 pounds. Yeah?

Joe Grover: [23:57] What was your food of choice? 

Josh Little: [23:59] Oh, nachos. It’s the most delicious thing you can put together on the earth. No, I don’t know. 

Joe Grover: [24:07] How were your sleeping patterns? 

Josh Little: [24:08] Sleep is good. Yeah, I’ve always slept good. So not a problem.

Joe Grover: [24:14] Talk to me about your family relationships, some of your maybe cofounder relationships. What was tax on any type of personal relationship that you had?

Josh Little: [24:23] Yeah, other than the couple of investors that weren’t quite paying attention, I feel like they’re stronger. I think most investors that were in Volley would probably bet on me again, as crazy as that sounds, that if I had a new idea this month and was going to pull the team together, just based on how we executed. We played a really good game. I’m proud of that. But it’s always hard to not return somebody’s money. At a minimum, I want to be able to return their money. But I can’t imagine a situation where we hadn’t.

[25:05] And family, my wife and kids, they know the game we’re playing, and if you’re going to ride a horse, you’re going to fall off. There’s no way around it. And if you ride a horse as long as I have, you’re going to get some bumps and bruises, and I’ve had them before. So this is just another one of them. Unfortunately.

Joe Grover: [25:25] Yeah, that was my experience too when I drove once from St. George to Ogden in one day, and I started early in the morning, and I just met with a bunch of the local investors that I had raised money from some family offices, some of the angels that you probably know well. And I remember sitting at a coffee shop up in Ogden, right, and I was actually pretty distraught.

Josh Little: [25:44] Yeah.

Joe Grover: [25:44] I’d lost more than 6 million bucks. But this particular investor had supported me in a couple of different ventures. And I sat there, and I was a little emotional, and I just apologized. I said, “It’s gone. There’s no way to recoup the equity. I’ve lost all of your investment.” And it was extraordinary to see his response to that. He asked, “How are you doing? How’s your family?” And he looked at me and said, essentially what some of your investors said, which was, “If you came to me today asking me to invest in you again, I would do it. I was prepared for either outcome here.” And that, to me, was maybe the most profound conversation I’ve ever had with an investor, more than investors applauding you when you’re succeeding. To have an investor support you when you’ve failed is really heartwarming and uplifting and encouraging. It may be the single most confidence-building comment anyone has ever told me, because it’s in the face of me losing—I probably lost a million dollars of his money. He wasn’t our largest investor, but he was someone I had a personal relationship with. And that was incredibly painful, and it sounds like you had some of those experiences as well.

Josh Little: [26:55] I had a lot of those conversations. Yeah. One in particular, Jacob Mullins of Shasta Ventures, which is a VC firm in the Bay Area, they put a million, and he was probably more ready to shut Volley down. Not probably. He was more ready to shut Volley down than I was, period, just because he had saw how hard we had worked. And if you work that hard at something it’ll go. And if it’s not going, you just don’t have product market fit, it’s not the right time, or it’s not the right time or not the right product or whatever. And in a lot of the conversations, he would ask about me. And every time, he’d be like, “Okay, what are you guys doing next? We’ll back it. Let’s build something else.” And I was like, “Oh man, that’s awesome for you to say, but I’m pretty tired, and I’m going to take a nap, so I want to take a couple of weeks or months of naps. So not sure that I’m ready to take another bite yet or another swing.”

Joe Grover: [27:50] Yeah, that’s certainly how I felt after my last venture as I started playing guitar again after 20 years and skied a lot and just had to breathe because of that intensity. I mean, when you’re trying to solve a puzzle, it feels impossible. You’re trying everything, right? You’re modifying the product. You’re throwing features at the product. You’re talking to customers. You’re working on partnerships, right? You’re looking for an acquisition, a strategic investor, and you’re just trying everything and anything to get this to go, and it’s not going. It’s emotionally exhausting. It’s mentally taxing.

Josh Little: [28:24] It’s humbling. Yeah, for sure, for sure. 

Joe Grover: [28:27] Do you think the outcome would have been different if you would have had more capital? Because it’s easy to blame—I’ve always thought, “Oh, well, if I had more capital, I could have pushed through and figured out the right product, market fit, figured out the right customer, built the feature set my customers wanted.” But talk to me about that piece of it. Was capital the primary contributor?

Josh Little: [28:48] Yes. If we had more—let me try to unpack that. I see no future that we want—a flexible, dynamic, connected future—that doesn’t have a heck of a lot more of async video involved in it. I don’t see us Zooming more or Slacking more. There’s something in the middle that gives us the benefit of time and space, that lets you say what you need to say, move on with your day, have a meaningful conversation when you come back to it and listen to others on 2X, and you can speak seven times faster than—all of the things about async video, I can’t believe that a global pandemic didn’t change people’s sentiment there. I can’t believe it. But at the same time, I don’t know what’s coming down the road that’s going to change people’s sentiment. It could be Elon tweets something. It could be some global—I don’t know—some other product. But I do know the TikTok and Snapchat generation are a lot more comfortable with async video than existing generations that are in charge in the workforce, right? 

Joe Grover: [29:55] My kids are all about it all day, every day.

Josh Little: [29:57] All day, every day. My kids don’t even type anything in Google. They just talk to Google and Siri, right? So I see a future generation that would—so, if we had enough capital to last long enough, we would have figured it out, and a lot of people feel like we did figure it out right at the end with the consulting piece allowing asynchronous microconsulting. There’s nothing that does that. And there are things like Intro that lets you book time with an expert but, that’s another synchronous meeting. What expert wants another meeting on their calendar, right? Wouldn’t you just love a message from somebody that had a question for you that you could get to on your walk? And that’s exactly what we offered. But we only had three months to run after that. And we saw that inflection point at the end, and then we’re like, “We got to shut it down,” because it was only 5K in monthly revenue that we’re getting. 

Joe Grover: [30:44] Even more painful. Right? It’s because you’re like, “Ah, we had it! We had it right there.”

[30:50] So tell me about the word failure. We don’t use it. I mean, we probably have only said it a few times in this whole conversation. I understand, as entrepreneurs, we try to frame failure in ways that maybe protect ourselves from acknowledging our own deficiencies or decision-making. Do you feel like Volley was a failure?

Josh Little: [31:06] It depends on what question you’re asking. I failed to return capital to my investors. So, yes, I failed at doing that. I didn’t fail at building a great product, building a killer team, engaging our users, building a product that some people loved. I didn’t fail at executing as well as anyone could at that venture. So I didn’t fail at those things. We just failed getting the product to reach the measure of its creation. You kind of—like you said—it’s true potential. We failed at figuring out the exact right mix for the right people at the right time to get it there. And ultimately—

Joe Grover: [31:48] How does this failure change your perspective of entrepreneurship, or has it? I mean, is it going to change the way you build your next business? I know that you’re still working on Volley, right? It sounds like there’s still a future. So the Volley story hasn’t been—

Josh Little: [32:02] It’s not fully over. I’ve acquired it. We’ve rebuilt it and relaunched it. It’s just a product that needs to exist. It’s too dang good to see it just go in the trash. So I don’t know if it’s a great financial move, but it’s a labor of love, and it also—the story’s not over, so I get to save that right? We’ll just see what happens. And our plan is just let Volley grow organically over time. And it grows 5 to 10 percent a week, and those gains stack up over time organically. People invite other people in. Some stick, some don’t. We’ll keep bugs fixed, build some new features, and we’ll see where it goes. But it’s not a full-time effort for anyone on the team at this point. Labor of love.

[32:45] But how has it changed me? I think you’d have to be a psychopath just to not be phased at all by an experience like this. Because a lot of the people I raised money from were my friends, close friends, and many have become friends now, right? And so I raised a bunch of money for my friends that I wasn’t able to return. And that hurts. And it makes me a little gun shy. It makes me worried about potentially doing that again. And do I really have it? And ask some of those foundational questions.

[33:24] But, I came from rural Michigan where I worked in restaurants, and I was a high school teacher. And I’ve made my way through all the twists and changes to be an entrepreneur, and I’ve made my way through all the twists and changes to be an entrepreneur, to be a tech entrepreneur, I do something where people will give me millions of dollars to build my dream—willingly! And you can’t—you can’t—think that that’s not a privilege. So it’s an absolute privilege to do what I do. It is confidence-shaking to have a failure. But I’m honored to do what I do, and I feel like if I don’t do it, it’s not filling the measure of my creation: doing what I potentially could do. Being a tech entrepreneur is the highest-paid potential career in the world if you get it right. The richest folks on earth did what I do. And I’m good enough to think that I could do that if I got the right product in the right time, the right team. Just got to find that. 

Joe Grover: [34:22] So you’re gonna get back on the horse? 

Josh Little: [34:23] Get back on the horse. Maybe not this week, but maybe this year. We’ll see. I’ve got seven ideas that I’m playing around with.

Joe Grover: [34:29] Yeah. Thank you for your candor about just the personal costs, the emotional toll it takes. Certainly the pain of raising money from people that we care about, our friends and investors, and not being able to return that money. That’s, I think, the story that we often overlook when we glorify the successes, right? And we see the entrepreneurs that take companies public and sell for hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s easy to focus on that. And really, the outcome that you experienced happens most of the time, but we rarely talk about those outcomes, and then that’s where I think the richest lessons and learning are in those. And so you’ve shared your insight in a way that I just really appreciate, Josh. And if you came to me and you were raising money, I would bet on you too, because I feel that the accumulation of those experiences actually derisks the journey for you and for your investors moving forward.

Josh Little: [35:24] I really think so. I really feel like my best work is ahead. I feel like Volley was the best work of my life. Didn’t show on the scoreboard, but all of those lessons and learnings are paid forward to the next thing, right? And so I’m excited about it. Not sure what that is, but I’m excited about whatever that is.

Joe Grover: [35:41] Yeah, I always have this vision in my mind of if I ever hit the grand slam, right, I’m going back and driving from St. George to Ogden again and just handing checks out and just saying, “Thank you so much for believing in me. That one didn’t turn out, but this one did.” And it was really on the back of those investors and those experiences and that capital that they entrusted me with that I was able to get to an outcome, a really positive financial outcome. So, anyway, now that’s public, so I guess all my investors will be like, “I’ll be waiting at the cafe for the check.”

Josh Little: [36:15] “Here we go, Joe. Yeah, where is it at, man?” 

Joe Grover: [36:17] That’s right. Thank you so much, Josh.

Josh Little: [36:18] Of course. Yeah, thanks for having me. 

Josh Little: [36:21] I’m Josh Little, and I failed while daring greatly.

Joe Grover: [36:24] Thanks for tuning in to The Real F Word. The real F word is failure, and remember that failure is a stepping stone; it’s not just a stumbling block. Join us next time as we continue to explore the journey of resilience and growth, without ignoring the true costs personally, professionally, and financially that comes with failure. Keep learning, keep growing, and keep embracing the real stories of entrepreneurship. See you next time.