David speaks with Colin Landforce, a serial entrepreneur who started his business journey as a teenager and went on to build successful ventures across multiple industries, from tech to cannabis. Colin is the founder of LTRMN, a multi-million dollar consumer cannabis product company, and creator of Cut30, a 30-day bootcamp that has helped over 1,000 creators and brands improve their short-form video skills for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
They talked about:
💰 Having a positive relationship with money
🔥 His early entrepreneurial start with CD burning and eBay
🎉 Building a party promotion business in high school
🌱 Getting into the cannabis industry and overcoming challenges
👥 Leadership lessons from building teams in fast-growing sectors
🧠 Developing the right mindset to handle business risks
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📄 Show notes:
[00:00] Introduction
[02:32] Colin's early entrepreneurial start with CD burning and eBay
[05:46] Developing a positive relationship with money
[08:35] Post-College Ventures: Media Agency and SMS SaaS
[12:14] Challenges of getting in to the cannabis industry
[18:32] Biggest lessons from building teams that win
[23:35] Balancing Personal Life and Entrepreneurship
[25:57] Accepting high risk as an entrepreneur
[30:34] Colin’s Partner Running an eCommerce Business
🗣 Mentioned in the show:
David Belle | https://theknowledge.io/dbelle/
E-bay | https://www.ebay.co.uk/
Twilio | https://www.twilio.com/en-us
Yale | https://www.yale.edu/
Harvard | https://www.harvard.edu/
Deloitte | https://www.deloitte.com/uk/en.html
LEGO | https://www.lego.com/
Nike | https://www.nike.com/gb/
TikTok | https://tiktok.com/
👤 Connect with Colin:
Twitter: https://x.com/landforce
Website: https://landforce.com/
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
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📜 Full transcript:
Builder's Build - Colin’s early entrepreneurial start with CD burning and eBay
David Elikwu: Obviously, you've gone viral a few times and you talk a lot about the businesses that you guys run now, but I'd love to go way, way, way back and figure out, okay. Where does this all come from? So have you always felt like you've been an entrepreneur, have you always had that kind of self-starting spirit?
And I know that you have this phrase that says like 'Builders Build'. Has that always been you from like a very young age or is that something you've cultivated as you've gotten older?
Colin Landforce: Yeah, I'd say something I've [00:03:00] refined, right. So I think, you know, early on, initially it expresses itself as entrepreneurship, but I've done a lot of, a lot of introspection on the topic really centered around insecurity of being a Jack of all trades, right. Cause I am a Jack of all trades and I've certainly had plenty of moments of like, what am I actually doing? What am I actually going to like specialize in? And for me it all circled back to just creating and like, I think of building as like creating something where there, where there once was not, right. And so in terms of that, like, yeah, it started with LEGO's, right. And then as it manifested itself into business, which is the place where I'm lucky enough to like make a living and, and have a career building you know, early on, I think for a lot of entrepreneurs found themselves, you know, promoting parties in this kind of thing.
That was definitely probably I guess five figure businesses I was doing was throwing parties and that kind of thing. But yeah, again, for me, it's like, it's building is the core tissue there at the end of the day. And the usual CD burning in middle school and all those [00:04:00] little hustles, I think are common amongst people of our age, and we ended up here. I wasn't concise. It never is for me, but
David Elikwu: no, no, no. I love not being I mean, yeah. Let's dig into that, so. Okay. So you're doing CD burning in middle school, what's the first hustle that you remember having?
Colin Landforce: There's a couple like that. The first actual one was E-bay drop shipping sneakers. I think it was like the first, the first thing. So that was, I'm sure we're all aware of like the fake sneaker world and I was transparently. So like, I was not, not getting one over on anybody. Drop shipping from China. Jordans and Nike's, that were not actually Jordans and Nike's. That along with the, the party, the party stuff. So one of the origins, again, going from just like random things into like, oh, this is a business was when I was in high school. Our school canceled all of our dances because they'd gotten, gotten a little bit out of hand.
And so all of a sudden there's all this pent up demand for a dance. A party, right. Amongst, you know, 15, 16, 17 [00:05:00] year olds. And so we threw a party and that was you know, that kind of like kicked into a, I guess a four or five-year thing, starting in the middle of high school bleeding into college and not quite beyond of just like promoter, DJ and event stuff.
Which got pretty big, you know, we through like some of the biggest new year's Eve parties in Portland a couple of years. It was always just like that business is a slippery slope in more ways than one. And I feel like, especially at that scale, doesn't ever really pan out like nightlife. You can hustle, you can make some money to a nightlife, but it kind of gets into a totally different ball game in terms of actually building a business there. And it was very transitory for me. It's like I'm in college you know, I was making better money than anybody I knew in college, but it never was going to, I never was going to be a whole lot more than that, I think in retrospect. Those were definitely the early, early things.
Developing a positive relationship with money
David Elikwu: And how were you thinking about money at that time as well? Was it a thing where you were making money and saving it, or were you looking for ways to spend it, or were you thinking about maybe like reinvesting in other things. Was that something you already having in mind?
Colin Landforce: I have a very fluid [00:06:00] relationship with money is probably a good way to put it. So yeah, like everything I've ever done is, I'm not a saver. Right at this point in my life. Sure. I save, but I have a very, very fluid relationship with money. It is something that comes and something that goes, and I generally feel like at any given moment, you could probably stripp me naked and throw me in the middle of a desert and I'd be in decent. I'd be in a decent place 30 days later, right. So all of these things, whether it's just like continue, keep the beast rolling, keep growing and keep it moving.
David Elikwu: And so when you went to college, were you, was the plan that you wanted to get some kind of job out of that? Or were you thinking, I mean, you're already making a lot of money probably more than some people were in their first graduate jobs. What were you thinking at that time?
Colin Landforce: I think I unfortunately went to college just cause it was the next thing to do. And I ultimately didn't end up graduating. I think I was a term short, I don't know how many credits exactly. But I went to business school just, just cause it was the next thing to do.
And so the reason I ended up leaving is because I just had this moment of like, I'm not actually doing this. I [00:07:00] can come back and do this at any point, if it's what I want to do. But I'm going to, to go actually do things. And so I was reflecting the other week on college and I think that the professional development class that I took that was really about writing and speaking, it was probably the most valuable college class that I took.
And that class is, you know, not, not business specific or any degree specific, right. All these things boil down to communication is like the most important skill set any of us can have you know, regardless of education.
David Elikwu: Yeah. I was just talking to someone about that. His name's David Belle he was a guest on this podcast, actually. And we were talking about how realistically, I think sales or communication, and being able communicate clearly and being able to sell people on ideas is probably one biggest, highest leverage skills that you can develop wherever you get that, whether you're getting it doing door to door sales, whether you're getting in school or selling things, or however you get and however you can build those skills, they unlock so many other things, even writing as an example. So I run this course on like career building [00:08:00] and stuff. And I just talk about how learning to write and learning to write well and communicate ideas clearly, even if you're not in a position, it doesn't matter. You don't have to want to become a writer. You don't have to want to use that for the specific purpose, but you can many other contexts. Yeah.
Colin Landforce: And communicating and sales are obviously very closely related and I, I totally agree.
David Elikwu: Yeah. So what did you end up doing, coming out of college? Like how did you find that? Because I can imagine maybe you don't already know exactly what you're going into. I can assume you maybe spent some time experimenting.
Post-College Ventures: Media Websites and SMS SaaS
Colin Landforce: Yeah. So immediately after that I was building media websites. And this was a very, I mean, I learned so much through that time. It was such a, a brutal grind, but I was building music based blogs, basically. There are two of them in particular. And it was a hell of a grind.
I feel like looking back, knowing what I know now, it could have gone very differently. But I, I obviously didn't and I generally feel like the obstacle is the way, so I learned a ton during that period, but honestly, [00:09:00] coming out of, it I was dead broke and ended up just like kind of washing my hands of it. But the, the next thing I did from there was a text SaaS. So really like before text marketing was what it is today. I did a, a SaaS around that. That was a grind, but learned a lot there as well.
David Elikwu: So were you doing the coding of that business as well.
Colin Landforce: No, not at all. We had, we had developers, but I mean, do you know much about the SMS space today?
David Elikwu: Yeah. I know, know a bit, but I'm sure you could probably educate me a bit more
Colin Landforce: You from, are you familiar with Twilio?
David Elikwu: Yes. Yeah.
Colin Landforce: Okay. This was before Twilio. So we had, we had burner phones connected to our servers and we had literal phones sending the text and running, running our entire platform off of burners plugged into the, into the servers in this tiny little office.
So we were like, literally ahead of our time, not necessarily in a good way on it. But it was great. We learned a lot and it's really interesting looking back on like, how prolific SMS is in, like in the marketing landscape and just like the, I guess not only marketing, right. Things like one-time [00:10:00] passcodes and the operation of products and especially digital products and websites, these days is, is pretty interesting, but we were, we were way ahead of our time and that ended up bleeding into like an agency, right. Cause we, it was very hard to make money doing that. And so very quickly, all the people that we were, you know, selling on text marketing also needed all these other things and so very quickly morphed into an agency. [00:11:00]
David Elikwu: Okay. Sweet. So you built an agency like a media agency out of the back of that.
Colin Landforce: Yeah, just all the usual suspects, right? Websites, social media, you know, software development, like really just like for better, for worse, the everything agency and those are different kind of grind and did that for a while and ended up just, just stepping away from it to go pursue other things, but all experiences are good experience.
David Elikwu: It's so interesting because I think a lot of the kind of entrepreneurial scrappy types or people that, like you say, Jack of all trades, people that pick things up as they go along, you actually are picking up all the skills that you can leverage later on. So sometimes even though you might not see in the moment how applicable this thing is, or you might have something that fails or doesn't pan out the way you expect it to the lessons that you learn and the skills that you build ultimately pay off when you find something that you can apply them to.
Colin Landforce: Yeah, I totally agree. I [00:12:00] genuinely do not ever look at any time I spent on anything as wasted time, even if it didn't pan out for that, for that exact reason. If you're picking up game, if you're getting experience you know, to a certain degree, that's always going to be adding value, even if it doesn't seem like it in the moment.
Challenges of getting in to the cannabis industry
David Elikwu: So tell me how, how does the cannabis thing pan out? Like how do you get into that?
Colin Landforce: Yeah. So, gosh. Leading up to that, I was actually at like my only job, I think, as a young man at that point. And that was kind of coming to an end in a lot of ways. And I had a couple of friends that were, as the story goes selling bulk flower to dispensers. It was kinda like looking for what's next. And it was that.
So I left that and jumped in. And the rest is history. You know, I can't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, but I think that the year following me leaving, we did like, three and a half or 4 million. It was largely bulk, just moving weight to dispensaries.
But the, the end goal was always product, right. So the early days were [00:13:00] just building the distribution network. Without distribution, nothing really matters, right. So building out that network so that we could ultimately sell whatever we landed on into that same network. And so the early days were just, just building that out and then figuring out what was next.
And then we started developing brands and developing products and so on and so forth. And then I think three or four rounds of M&A later here we are publicly traded through a merger and doing that at a bigger scale than four or five years ago, when it all started.
David Elikwu: That's awesome. Give me an idea of how easy or difficult was it scaling in those early days? Because I think there's two things, right? So people obviously see your journey and see everything that you've done. And there are people that will want to replicate that whether it's in the same industry or in others, and people will see that as a, as an example.
You know, was it, was it easy being able to scale the distribution? Also maybe give me an idea of like how this fits in from a legislation perspective. Was this like soon after it was starting to become legalized in a lot of places, was it super early or was it, you can already see [00:14:00] some examples of what this was going to look like in some other areas.
Colin Landforce: Yeah, well, I think there are a couple angles on it. One is especially early days, we're basically talking about a low margin distribution business, and those are really hard from a cashflow standpoint. As you grow, you need exponentially more cash um, and it's low margin. So cash is hard to come by and that's, if collections are perfect and business is good, right. And then you add onto it the cannabis dynamic. And so outside of regulation and licenses and the hoops that have to be jumped through there, which vary a lot market to market.
Cannabis in open markets, which is what the west coast, all the, all the west coast states are open licensed states, which means that more or less, if you want a license and you want to be in business, you can be. Which means it's an absolute blood bath. Like, I don't think there are very many industries that are more competitive than west coast cannabis.
And so you add that onto that and it's absolutely been a blood bath. It's very, very difficult. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
The advice I do give is, is that cannabis is exciting. There's going to be there is, and there will continue [00:15:00] to be a huge growth curve in cannabis and my favorite lane. And if I was like stepping back, stepping away now, but then wanted to get into cannabis, I would be getting into ancillary businesses that service cannabis. Like a marketing agency, an electrician, all this boring stuff that basically has like the same growth, potential as cannabis, but it's just the nuts and bolts, right. And it's like, the electrician gets paid whether or not the price of the flower being grown there plummets and kills the business that's running it. The electrician who ran the wires gets the check every single time, right. Because you don't, you don't get to grow the weed without that. I think there's huge opportunities to just niche into cannabis with all these boring businesses isn't the word, but like run of the mill businesses, right.
That's my pitch on the cannabis industry. Stay away.
David Elikwu: Yeah, no, no. I completely get that. It's not always the big, sexy thing, right? Like there's so many small niches and so many small opportunities that people often miss, just because they are literally looking to replicate whatever it is that they've seen.
So, one other question that I had [00:16:00] is going off the back of what you were saying, which is really about, when you're there in those very early days, you haven't necessarily done something exactly like this before. How much did you need to learn in order to be competent? Because I think you see the story a lot of, a lot of people get onto something good and they don't even know how to cope with it. And there's too much demand, there's too much going on and they can burn out very quickly. But obviously you guys were able to keep going for the long haul and actually make it work. And you were able to learn whatever it is that you needed to learn at the exact right time to be able to keep things going.
Colin Landforce: Right. So I think to a certain degree, that's the nature of any startup cause even in an established industry you don't really know what to expect until that first punch, right. And then all hell breaks loose. So I think startup life in general is kind of built that way.
For cannabis it gets extra special because, you know, I think in the case of us, so like, especially early days but also now a big part of our businesses is the distribution businesses and distribution is an afterthought to regulators, right. When the regulators sit down at the state [00:17:00] level to go, okay, so we need to figure out rules and licensing for stores, and then the people that grow it, and then the people that make the products, right? Like generally speaking, all the regulation around, moving it and getting it from A to B was like a total afterthought. So in addition to, okay, you're, you're learning about the compliance, the hoops, you have to jump through and then you're learning the software that runs that, which is also like pretty half-baked, there's also just like gaps in this stuff where there is no way to do it, right. It's pretty daunting when you're talking about like compliance and regulation to go like, okay, so we don't have a way to do this. So just like, do it the same way every time. So once we figure it out, at least we'll know that you we're being intentional about it, right? It's like you have a lot of moments like that. Even in the sectors that are more sorted out like a retail, but then even there, right? So you don't get to just use a normal POS solution for a retail store, right? You need to, you're using things that are, are addressing, you know, both the compliance side of the industry, as well as just the nuance of cannabis, which there is plenty. That means all these softwares are new. There's not a single [00:18:00] player in the cannabis space that's like a big player in software that has been around very long because it hasn't been around very long from a recreational market standpoint. Which means that all of these things, all of the utilities that any other industry takes for granted are like being rapidly developed by teams that are generally fighting the same fires as you. And like, grappling with the ever-changing legislation, just like you are and so on and so forth. So it's like startup vibes on like 5,000 honestly.
David Elikwu: Yeah, I can imagine, particularly within that kind of industry.
Biggest lessons from building teams that win
David Elikwu: Did you find any trouble with, in terms of hiring look, finding the right people, people that were not just there, because it was an interesting industry to be in, but people that could actually do what you needed and to help you scale in the right way.
Colin Landforce: There's a really interesting dichotomy of people getting into cannabis between like people that just want to do cannabis but don't particularly have any experience outside of it. And then people that have a ton of experience in a thing and want to get into cannabis and apply that, right. So [00:19:00] early on for us, our whole thing was not hiring from within cannabis. Our thinking was that you can teach somebody about cannabis, you can't teach them to like show up on time, right. Those are inherent traits. And so, especially from a sales perspective, right? Like we want to do bring in people that were great at boots on the ground, B2B sales and then teach them cannabis.
Now, fast forward a few years. Now, it's like, I'd much rather hire a sales rep that has a book of business and has existing relationships, so that that's kind of flipped on its head.
And then in a totally different light, you know, we had, we had somebody applying for a job, like on our manufacturing line who had like two master's degrees from like, Yale and Harvard in like theoretical something or other. And again, this is just somebody that they just want to be around weed. They just want to do weed, which is just a bizarre thing to deal with, right. It's not your run of the mill manufacturing team member. So it's really all over the board, I think not to give like a cliche answer, but it's kind of boiled down to just like, it just has to be right. You know, [00:20:00] a super seasoned manufacturing leader is not going to be able to come in and figure out a main cannabis supply chain overnight. Cause there's nothing like it in the world. And so all these things where like, you have to find people that they kind of like have some of the structure and core competencies from the spaces that they work in, but are flexible and crazy enough to go figure out how that applies to cannabis and how it doesn't cause nothing, nothing is cookie cutter in it.
David Elikwu: Yeah. How have you found adapting to the leadership side of things in terms of actually having to help run this company as you're growing. Cause I think it's very different. You get two kinds, maybe like two types in my mind, there's a lot of people that, okay, don't necessarily have any corporate experience or startup experience, but they're able to maybe build something small and it stays relatively lean, like, in the tens of people.
And then I think on the flip side, you also have some founders that maybe they've worked in some other startups before, and they've seen things scale and they've [00:21:00] maybe worked in corporates or in consulting or something else. And they have some of that experience.
How did you find that if you didn't necessarily, it's not like you had to spent years and years within previous startups to be able to see examples of, you know, like how to lead effectively and how to help the business to scale well.
Colin Landforce: Yeah, I think that's another place where, I think there's a lot of like management skills that can be taught. From a leadership and communication standpoint, I think a lot of that is you have it, or you don't. I guess, technically what might be considered middle-management, but I'd like a lot of the leaders in our business have just been brought up through the ranks. Because a lot of the intangibles, like you need so much, so much leadership on the ground with how fast things change in this. And the reality is that's not going to come from someone who's like, led a large team at Deloitte. It's going to come from someone who knows this stuff, who understands the struggles of the people on their team and the people around them, but then happens to have the communication skills and just these intrinsic leadership [00:22:00] skills to piece that together.
I don't know, again, this feels like cliche answers, right. But it's so true and I've seen so many people coming to cannabis with traditional experience in X. They just get burned by the nuance. And without being able to you know, not literally speak the language, but like understand the language the rest doesn't, doesn't matter a lot of the time at the end of the day.
David Elikwu: And so do you think things have changed a lot, obviously, like you mentioned, you've had the merger, you're now publicly traded, how different is that to where you'd been before and obviously like having gone through that whole process.
Colin Landforce: Yeah, I think there's definitely just additional layers, right? All the, all the other nuance and complexity still exists every day. And then you have new layers, you have the public market layer, like as you're fighting through the, the daily firefights and, and operating the business and growing the business. There's also this layer of like, where's the share price, right. And these kinds of things. And I think we're fortunate enough where, you know, we have people who like, that's how they spend most of their lives. That's not how I spend most of my life. I've learned a ton about [00:23:00] it, but I think that a lot of value that I in general bring is being able to bridge that gap, right? Like I've been the drug dealer and I can also play the suit. And I'm really like, not either one of them at the end of the day. So, connecting the dots between two of those and, and like facilitating both of those operating, right. Because, you know, we have salespeople that like, they were selling to their customers when this was totally illegal, right. And then we have you know, the board of directors in the public markets to think about. And all of this is just a matrix of connecting dots and making sure that those things can play well together and communicate with each other and understand each other.
Balancing Personal Life and Entrepreneurship
David Elikwu: How have you found building this with also managing your personal life as well? I know that you're crazy about being a dad and having your family and How do you find balancing that side of your life as well? Cause I know there's loads of people. When you think of a CTO of a public traded company, you know, there are people that their whole lives get sucked into work and whatever it is that they're doing and, you know, they have to pick up their phone whenever [00:24:00] it rings at all times of the night and do all of those things.
So how do you find that balance?
Colin Landforce: I mean, it's tricky. I'm I'm fortunate enough that like, nothing else actually matters outside of, of that little being that I am so fortunate to have in my life, right. So there are moments where it's an all hours thing, right. And there, there are moments of like conflict in my personal life because of how much it is.
For me, the hardest part is just being able to block out the rest of that when I have that time and get present and how hard that is, kind of varies with what's going on with the business just what dynamics I'm dealing with during the day. But I think like, the content of, you know, said phone call or getting those emails, the content of those aside. It's not that different from just like balancing entrepreneurship where you, you take ownership of everything, you care about everything. And you want to be available, whether it's a partner or somebody on your team, or one of your colleagues or one of your peers like that want or need to be available. And not actually shut off is like an [00:25:00] entrepreneurship thing as much as it is anything else. And at the end of the day, when we talk personal life, I think like I have like building things and then I have my kid and my family and there's, I don't need anything besides those things, which I think makes it simpler. Like I'm not like trying to hang out with the boys and watch the game and all these things. Like I do that with my, you know, with my sidekick.
And so I think in a lot of ways, it's a lot easier to balance it when it's just two pieces, then when it is you know, a social life and all these other things, like I got my kid and I got building, right. And that simplifies it a little bit.
David Elikwu: I saw quite recently, you did a thread on, I think you were talking about how your barber could make like an extra 40k by starting a small business on the side. And it's funny because you see some of the responses, and okay, I think you get two sides. There's one group of people that are like, oh my gosh, I need to run out and do this. I'm going to start my own pomade company. I'm going to do exactly what you just said. And then you also get people that like nitpick, and they're like, oh my gosh, but what about this? What about that?
Accepting high risk as an entrepreneur
David Elikwu: And what do you think it is that people [00:26:00] just don't get about entrepreneurship? Because it's not for everyone, right? There are people that were in your situation, however many years ago that were in college that would've been too scared to drop out like you did. And they would have been too worried about what the future would look like, they would have been too focused on all these other things. And then they ended up just going into whatever job that they think is right, and whatever they think is the next step. What do you think it is about maybe your experience or the way you think that makes you able to like, take that step.
Colin Landforce: It's a very existential question. I spent a lot of time thinking about it because it's something that I want to make sure I can instill in my daughter and not like entrepreneurship, but really just like exactly what it is that you want to do and bring to the world. I want to make sure that my daughter is in a position to do that and doesn't feel blocked by technicalities or whatever it is.
And I think that the biggest thing again, and kind of trying to dissect this so that I can apply it to my parenting is just, I was so fortunate to have parents [00:27:00] that never told me I had to do anything except for remember who I am and who I represent and follow through on commitments you make to other people, right. It was never like, oh, you need to do sports. You need to take music lessons. It was none of that. It was like, do exactly what you want to do every single day and just like be responsible and meet your commitments.
I think that that's kind of at the core of how I ended up here that along with some crazy tick where I love making things and building things. I think that there's, I feel super, super blessed to have, have that kind of at the in the deepest of depths in terms of like the core of my psyche and personality. And I think it's something that my parents gave me without particularly realizing it. But that's something that I try and like push onto my daughter, which if you kind of like backtrack on what I just said is like push nothing. Like my kid will be exactly what she wants to be and nothing, nothing else.
And so when I see that kind of stuff, like, I think it's fear if I had to diagnose it, I used to have this really like flip it and like kind of asshole reaction to it. But I [00:28:00] think at the end of the day, it's people that are like, over-complicating those things, or are just like figuring out why, all the reasons why that wouldn't actually work. Which is a huge bummer, I think, at the end of the day. It's also, like you said, like making things isn't for everybody. Like there has to be accountants too and that's fine.
David Elikwu: I think that's really powerful. And I'm glad that you are taking that approach with your daughter, because I think not everyone gets that. Just like you say, so many people are driven by fear. I think it's a real societal thing that we are taught that there's pretty much one way to go through life. And I think it's the scarcity of like how much time you have, right? So you don't want to make a mistake. You want to get everything right. You want to pick the options that you think will give you the least possibility of failure, And so with entrepreneurship with building things, there is a big opportunity for failure, but I mean, I guess it's about, there's a big opportunity for success, but there's also a big opportunity to fail and you might have to restart. You [00:29:00] might even like you shared, like there's a few different things that you've tried, some of them haven't panned out exactly the way you want them to, but eventually you can strike gold and you can find something that works and you can, you can scale it. You can apply all of those lessons that you've been building up.
But I think unless you are willing to make that bet and to at least try then, you're not, you won't have either. You can't have the big success if you're not willing to risk the big failure. And it's the same, even with investing, right? Like if there's a lot of people that want to make big money, let's say on crypto or in whatever area, but they are not comfortable with big losses. People lose, like they want to have 20-50 percent margin in terms of like their investment going up. But if their investment down like 10%.
Colin Landforce: Selling. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think you know, on one hand it's risk profile, right? Like I have a very, very different risk profile in terms of like what I'm comfortable with than anybody else, then to go a little bit deeper than that. It's like, what is risk?
[00:30:00] I don't care if I try something and fail. Like it, it is not an, not an important part of my life, right. And I think that guides that risk tolerance that like, what is failing? The investment example is like, obviously very, very different. But for me in trying something it's like, I don't have my self-confidence wrapped up in whether or not idea X works. So in a lot of cases, there's like very little, if any risk at all. And then you add on, on top of that, that I have a very high tolerance for risk. And it's like, yeah, why not? Why not go to the moon, right.
David Elikwu: So, is there anything else you're interested in building?
Colin’s Partner Running an eCommerce Business
David Elikwu: I know you mentioned, that you're helping with your wife's ecomm, e-comm business.
Colin Landforce: Yeah, for better or for worse, there's almost nothing I'm not interested in building. My wife's business is crushing it. I'm very thankful that that has you know, me weighing in or having opinions and helping here and there has not created strain on our relationship because it certainly could. But she's taking it at her speed. It's going well. I tell her at least once a week that there's a million-dollar a year business and we need to pour some gas on the fire and make it [00:31:00] happen. She's like learning stuff every day and figured it out and taking her own approach to it. And it's awesome. She's having a lot of luck with Tiktok is driving all of our growth right now and it's cool to watch.
David Elikwu: What's she selling?
Colin Landforce: So my wife is half Chinese and we got totally lucky and finding this thing, but it is a lot of people of Eastern Asian descent have like a missing enzyme or something where, when they drink alcohol they turn red and they also, in addition to turning red, it's like a bunch of other bad things happen, right? Like it's like a immediate hangover and X and Y and Z, she could tell you all about it. And so she has this, this patch product, a topical patch product that basically is packed with vitamins to counteract that.
And so it varies drastically on people that try it. And actually there are a lot of Caucasian folks that are for that also deal with this, it's just predominantly Eastern Asian. But basically you put that sucker on before you drink. And for some people it's night and day for some people, it helps a little bit. We totally randomly stumbled into buying it from a kid who had created [00:32:00] it. And the issue has been dealing with this since she was in college and first started drinking and were not drinkers by any means, but it's like for a lot of people, it's like, literally like you take a sip of wine. And like, you start glowing and you get a headache immediately. And so it's a pretty incredible product for the people that works for, and it lines right up with something she knows very well. So it's really a perfect, perfect e-comm business for her.
David Elikwu: Thank you so much for tuning in. Please do stay tuned for more. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps the podcast and follow me on Twitter feel free to shoot me any thoughts. See you next time.
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