The Fintech Startup Getting Creators Paid: Tony Tran of Lumanu

Ethan: Hey everyone, and welcome to The Startup Savant Podcast. The show where we talk to real founders of real startups. The folks who are working to pull the levers, press the buttons, and grease the wheels of progress. I'm your host, Ethan. Our guest on the show today is Tony Tran, founder of Lumanu. Tony, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

Tony Tran: Thanks, Ethan. I'm doing well. Weather's good. It's not raining. Can't ask for anything better.

Ethan: That is pretty much all we should ask for and I'm stoked you've got it. All right. So let's start off real easy. Tell us what is Lumanu?

Tony Tran: Lumanu is a payments and financing company in a creator economy. The way I tell everyone is we are building the financial infrastructure for the future of creative work. You think about the millions and tens of millions of people out there who are not W2 employees, who are either creators, independent freelancers, or even small business owners that are doing the work that used to be done by entire full-time teams. And they have a lot of needs around getting paid on time, managing their financial health, dealing with taxes, paperwork, et cetera. And Lumanu helps all of that. We also help the businesses that pay them.

Ethan: How did you know, and how did you identify, and then how did you validate that this was a problem that needed to be solved within that creator economy?

Tony Tran: That's a great question, Ethan. I have a flowchart that I go through every time I have a crazy startup idea. And it usually starts with who really matters to me and then what problems do they have. So just to give you some context, when I started Lumanu, I wasn't actually keen on the problem to be solved, but I knew the demographic I wanted to solve for. My family immigrated from Vietnam in 1994 to South Carolina. We had a very atypical group of workers. I was the only one that went to college, got a W2 job. Both my siblings dropped out of community college, started their own business. My dad was a freelancer. And one of the things that I think we as full-time employees sometimes take for granted is it's really nice to have a paycheck every couple of weeks. You don't have to invoice your CFO. But I knew that there was a big generation and it's only getting larger every single day that does what I would call non-traditional work models. They don't check in, check out, get a paycheck, have automatic social security and all those deductions. They're essentially their own boss. And I knew I wanted to build a company for them.

The question of what is the biggest problem to solve took a while to iterate through, but eventually I just had a eureka moment when I realized, gosh, it would really suck if I finish my work as a salaried employee and don't get my paycheck. And reality is that's what a lot of non-W2 employees have to deal with. Imagine finishing work for a client or selling something on YouTube but not getting the money that you've earned 30, 60, 90 days later. And that was the catalyst for everything that became Lumanu.

Ethan: Where were you hearing about this issue? Because I've worked with freelancers and contractors and the like on the side of the client for many years and I'm happy to say that I always pay the people that are helping me out. And so I guess I don't sit in the circles of the freelancers themselves, but where were you hearing that this was an issue and is this something that happens a high percentage of the time or is it just something that happens a high raw numbers amount?

Tony Tran: It actually happens quite a lot. I can share with you actually how I first discovered the problem, which then actually had a lot of influence around how I started the business and the initial sequencing of features that we built. Before Lumanu, I was at another startup and we dealt with a lot of enterprise clients. Think Hertz, Starwood, Marriott. When you are working at those companies ... And we were a marketing startup, so we actually saw the type of what I would call vendors they work with. And vendors could be anything from a freelance photographer that comes into a hotel to take photos, to copywriters, to basically any type of creative talent that is not on salary. And it was just mind boggling to me the amount of paperwork and processes that one of those vendors have to jump through. If you're a photographer earning $5,000, you have to go through the exact same number of hoops as a software company selling $300,000 software to Marriott.

And you can almost imagine, if you're the finance team at one of these big enterprises and you have a stack of bills to pay and it's always growing, that one freelancer, that one independent is going to be pretty far down the list. It's not necessarily that they had bad intent, it's just the reality of the situation. They can't do faster than net 30, sometimes net 60, net 90 day terms.

So my joke all the time when I talk to employees, when I talk to investors is getting paid is so much more than moving money from point A to point B. There's so much anxiety around am I filling out this form correctly? Did I put in the right bank account information? What if I move? What if I get married? What if I turn my sole proprietor into an LLC or an S Corp? Did I update all the right documents?

All of those things go into what I would call the human element of getting paid. And that problem is an unsolved problem and that's why there's a lot of friction with getting paid today. Even if you always get paid on time, which is actually very rare, there is still a lot of work you have to do. And then of course remembering to pay your quarterly taxes, keep track of your own stubs if you will. Which W2 employees get that taken care of for them. But if you're your own worker, your own solopreneur, your own business owner, you have to deal with that yourself.

Ethan: Right. So what's the form factor that this product takes or this service takes? I'm assuming it's an app. Is this something that if I'm a freelancer and I'm going to work for one of these large organizations, am I coming to them and saying, "Hey, you need to use this service because this is the service I use," or does the large company already use the service and then that's what they choose to pay me through, or how does the relationship work and who brings Lumanu to the table?

Tony Tran: That's a great question. We actually have a distribution channel that's broken into two. You actually hit them both. Our primary distribution is we actually go out and sell to businesses. So our customers are big enterprises like Walmart, we work with Revolve. We also work with smaller businesses. Anywhere from five employees all the way up to tens of thousands of employees. And the best way to think about our software for those folks is it's almost like a payroll software, but it's meant for your non W2 employees. So anyone that you work with anywhere in the world, whether it's an influencer, a digital creator, freelance copywriter, even a small agency that's helping you with your out-of-home advertising, any of those folks, you can essentially pay with one stop shop through Lumanu. And the nice thing is, as your partners, as your creators are getting their work done throughout the month, they can get paid instantly.

Then our customers, the Walmarts of the world, just pays Lumanu back in one big invoice at the end of the month and they can actually pay that on their own terms. So the whole pitch to a Walmart is, your talent gets paid when they get their work done, but then you can pay us back whenever your finance processes dictate. Now, as more and more people get exposed to Lumanu, the people that have to sign up for Lumanu to get paid, then they realize, "Wow. I can actually download the Lumanu app on the Android and App Store and actually start using Lumanu to invoice even businesses that are not Lumanu users." So if you are a freelancer, you can actually download Lumanu today and start using Lumanu to invoice anyone in the world and get paid. And the nice thing there is Lumanu actually handles all of your taxes, paperwork W9s, W8s so you don't have to deal with any of that. And we have something called early pay. So let's say you're working with BMW, which is not a Lumanu customer, and BMW tells you, "Hey, great work. You'll get your paycheck in 90 days because that's our default payment terms." You can actually log into the Lumanu app and get your money immediately.

Ethan: As the freelancer, you can log in.

Tony Tran: As the freelancer. Yeah. We have an app for freelancers.

Ethan: Okay. This really brings up a big question. You're probably floating quite a bit of cash. How are you operating ... This is maybe a silly question. Where are you getting the money to pay if you haven't been paid yet? Is there just a huge pile of Bitcoin sitting behind this or are you taking loans to pay for this before you get paid? How does this work?

Tony Tran: That is actually the beauty of being a startup. A lot of people realize early on that you can raise capital in the form of venture equity. That's where you give up portions of your company to venture capitalists, angel investors, et cetera. There's actually another type of fundraising called debt financing or building out a credit facility. Because of Lumanu's business model and our very strong math models and underwriting, it's essentially zero risk for us. We're not giving and lending money for work that's not done. We only do it once work is already complete. So we're really just floating cash to cover the traditional slow time that it takes a finance team to process these bills. Because of that, our default rates are infinitesimally small, and we can actually make a pretty good return by charging a fee that's actually cheaper than PayPal.

If you're a freelancer getting paid via PayPal, you pay 2.9%. Lumanu's fee is 2.9%. But unlike PayPal, you actually get paid instantly rather than having to wait 30, 60 days. Because of that, we actually have a pretty big credit facility that we use to fund all of this. And then that facility is growing all the time, especially as we get more and more what I call data tape. So as more transactions happen and as we show that we give money out to the freelancers, then we get paid by Walmart on time every time, that facility grows.

Ethan: Yeah. And I would assume that you look pretty darn creditworthy since your default rate is so low. I would assume that you've got contracts and stuff to back it up if there was ever a case where whomever large company was like we can't pay this or we don't want to pay this or whatever.

Tony Tran: Exactly. And for us, the way that we distributed our software, because we have a great relationship with all of the, what I call payers in our network, it becomes incredibly ... There's a lot of economies of scale. So as soon as any user in our network, for instance, works with a Walmart or works with a Toyota, gets paid a few times, anyone else, even new users that invoice Toyota for the first time, we can leverage that historical learning to make sure that we are being safe with our underwriting.

Ethan: All right. I want to jump into how you initially got creators to begin joining your platform. What was the method you took to get out in front of those people and get them to sign up?

Tony Tran: This is where it was a little bit of trial and error. And I would encourage any founder that's listening, there's no one right way to do everything. You have to think about what is the strength of your business and your founder team. For us, our strength has always been more of a B2B to C motion. So the first batch of creators that learned about Lumanu ... And we have everyone from small photographers all the way up to Snoop Dogg and Jessica Alba, although I doubt they log into the app. It's probably their managers logging in. They all learned about Lumanu because they got told, "Hey, it's great working with you. The way that we're going to pay you is through Lumanu. And the reason we use Lumanu is because it makes life easier for you, makes life easier for us, handles all the tax compliance paperwork and you can get your money early if you want to."

That's usually, I would say for 95% of our users, their very first experience of Lumanu is someone told them, sign up for Lumanu, get paid. And then after that our customer team, our marketing team engages with them to try and show them the rest of the platform and all these other benefits. We do have some users that learned about us just through word of mouth. We don't run any advertising on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok so we have a pretty lean acquisition motion. But yeah, the first few customers all learn about us through the brands and agencies that paid them.

Ethan: Gotcha. And that's where your focus has been. Not necessarily marketing to the creators, to the freelancers, but going towards those brands. And it sounds like your marketing is pretty lean. Does that mean that you make up for that with your inside sales?

Tony Tran: A little bit. We actually generally, for a startup at our size and our revenue, have a very lean go-to market team of both sales and marketing. We have a very nice, what I would call, flywheel motion. A lot of companies learn about Lumanu because they get an invoice from a Lumanu user. And then from that invoice we give it to our inside sales team who then talks to them and go, "Hey, Conde Nast, you saw how easy it was to pay that one or two invoice. Imagine if paying all of your freelance talent and creators was as easy." So once that flywheel motion has started, it actually is quite lucrative. Now, early on, you're right. It's a lot of cold emailing. It's a lot of creating content to draw attention. It's a lot of word of mouth referrals and so forth.

Ethan: Gotcha. So in that beginning phase when you were rocking more sales, we heard that you had an interesting approach to sales and how you think about sales. Can you tell us a little bit more about that approach?

Tony Tran: Yeah. For sure. As a founder ... And I tell this to all my friends and anyone that wants to run their own business. Everyone has to sell. Now, I know sales has this connotation. Sometimes it can be sleazy. It's like, hey, am I selling things that don't exist? Am I comfortable selling vaporware? I'm trying to get people to pay. And I know it's not that intuitive to a lot of folks. And me, I'm not a natural salesperson. I was a comm-sci major to start my career. The way that I framed it, which is really helpful, especially if you're just starting out, is to think about sales conversations as essentially real life feedback. But there's no better way to get candid answers than when you frame it as a conversation where either people put down money at the end of the call or they tell you why they're not.

And both outcomes are incredibly valuable early on. And what's funny is ... This is true, no matter if you're making a couple thousand dollars a month, making zero or making millions of dollars a month. Every time you launch a new feature, every time you talk to someone new, a yes is obviously more valuable than a no, but a no is still very valuable if you understand why.

And that's what I really encourage. And I personally really love sales motions because it gives you such quick feedback. Whereas if you, for instance, spend a lot of money on a Facebook ad, you might get some results around click-through rates, conversion rates, et cetera but it's hard to get that deeper why. Why did someone look at an ad but not convert? Or why did they put in their contact information, book a demo but didn't show up? It ends up being a lot of guesswork. Whereas if you just get on a phone, meet someone in person, hop on a Zoom call, you have a captive audience and you can very much dig into the why. And that's ultimately what makes a company succeed early on is understanding the why more than getting a yes or no.

Ethan: So you were jumping on these calls, they were being framed as sales calls. Obviously you were probably looking to make a sale at the end of the call, but you were really looking for more of the feedback. The, “tell me what you really think.” And I love the idea of at the end of this call, they know it's a sales call, so it's like a forced honesty kind of thing that they can't just be like, "Yeah, this sounds great. I love this product." And then you're like, "Great, that's awesome. I'll get you signed up." And they're like, "Wait. I actually didn't mean any of the stuff that I just said. I wanted to make you feel better."

Tony Tran: Exactly. Or they just ghost you.

Ethan: Yeah, exactly. Who were you calling when you needed to start making these calls and getting people on the other side of the phone?

Tony Tran: You have a hypothesis to start. You have a general idea of what problem you're solving and who's going to feel that problem the most. Then you have a general sense of what are they using today to solve that problem, if not you? And then that basically allows you to go out and reach out to a few folks. For us, we knew early on that brands and agencies were target customers. We weren't sure how large the companies were. So a good trick that I like to use has nothing to do with ... Obviously everyone's an internet company now, so geography is not as important.

But I just pulled up 20 to 100 contacts in New York City. I was living in San Francisco at the time. And just reached out to them. And actually just said, "Hey, I'm Tony Tran, founder based in San Francisco. Just happen to be in New York next week meeting some folks. Would love to see if you're up for an in-person." And then you give them an out too. "Hey, but also I know you're busy, so happy to hop on a 15 minute call. Here's my number. Feel free to text me." Even if you only get a few responses, that's all it takes. And I still remember vividly when we first started, I sent that email out to about 10 New York companies. Five of them got back to us and we converted three.

Ethan: Sweet.

Tony Tran: Those three became customers to this day. Three, four years later. And they were with us from the day where I was basically selling a deck more than a product all the way to multiple pivots into what we are now. And we wouldn't have gotten there ... Literally, I emailed a guy who was working at a 2,000 person company and he responded almost immediately.

Ethan: This is probably more of a technical question, but if there is a 2,000 person company, that means you have 2,000 different options of people to call within that company. I'm assuming that you're looking for a very specific job title within that company to call. Are you finding those via LinkedIn or do you have some super sleuths who are getting this contact info for you? How do you make sure that you're connecting with the right person to make these decisions?

Tony Tran: LinkedIn is definitely my go-to. DM them. Some people put their contact information on LinkedIn. A good college friend of mine actually started a company called Apollo. A-P-O-L-L-O.io. Pretty much everyone uses a tool either like Apollo or Apollo itself, and that makes it really easy to find work email addresses, for instance, based on job titles, location, company. But between those two, it's pretty quick to get the right folks. My main thing is I would encourage to send DMs on LinkedIn. Tweet at them if needed. But the important thing is just to follow up. People are busy. Just because someone didn't respond to you or didn't even open your email doesn't mean anything. People are busy. So just keep sending follow-ups. Remind yourself every few days to follow up.

Ethan: Good advice. So it sounds like you've got quite a bit of experience with sales and making things happen, but what were a couple of the things that you wish that you knew at the beginning that you know now?

Tony Tran: I would say this is something that I tell my wife this all the time in her business, and I wish I knew this before. There's this old advice. When you win a customer and they're happy with your product, you wait a while and you ask them for referrals and introductions to anyone else. I actually find that as soon as you make that initial connection, you're in what I would call the honeymoon phase. You're talking. Obviously they care enough about your email or your initial outreach to take time out of their day, which is a very finite resource. No matter what happens in that call, just put your leg out there and ask them, "Hey, do you know anyone else?" Make your ask very pointed. "Do you know two or three other people who also work in New York who have a similar problem?" And I find that even if you strike out most of the time, all it takes is one person to get you to two more meetings. And those two meetings might become four additional meetings.

And don't wait for them to sign or buy your product. Just do it right in that moment in that very first call and I find that that's really helpful. I think right now, the way the world is, there is a human psychology of just people want to help other people and they know how hard it is to be a business founder and owner. Ask them to be honest with you. If you're completely off track, if the problem that you think was so burning actually doesn't matter, what is a problem that matters and then who else has those problems? But I think just leveraging the natural connected tissue of professional networks to get that next meeting on your first meeting, not just with that same person but with other people in your network, is really helpful. And I've seen that work whether you're selling enterprise software or you're selling life coaching advice to employees.

Ethan: I think that's really excellent advice. They always told us that in insurance. It was like, who else do you know that needs my product? But I feel like in your case, insurance is just so boring. It's like, who else do you know that needs insurance? Well everyone I know. But yeah, in your case, it's a lot more personal. And I think that that question comes across as more genuine. And so yeah, I love that. I love that question.

Tony Tran: And I'll give you just one example. This is where I think the art is about just understanding your space really well. I remember early on during the pandemic, I was talking to this one creator and she was a Broadway person who obviously had no work and she started freelance writing and we were talking and she wanted to use Lumanu. She actually ended up doing some freelance writing for us. And all I said was, "Hey, your website looks amazing. Did you do this yourself?" 

And she's like, "No, I got someone to help me." And I was like, "Oh, interesting. Well, tell me more about this person." And she's like, "Oh." She blah, blah, blah sets up these websites. She actually works with a lot of us copywriters and freelancers because we're not exactly the most artistic folks. Then she introduced me to that person who then I found out belonged to a collective of other freelance web designers who used this one software called Flowpad. And then I got an intro to a team at Flowpad, their community team, who then was connected with thousands of other people. And it's that continuous hops. And sometimes you hit a dead end and that's okay. You backtrack and you try a different path. But you just never know what conversation could unlock another conversation that could unlock thousands of conversations unless-

Ethan: Yeah, absolutely. You actually led me into something I wanted to ask. You've got a bunch of users now on the creator side. Let's talk about that. How many users are you up to right now?

Tony Tran: We're about 40,000.

Ethan: That's awesome. You mentioned these hops that got you to a situation where you were talking to a person that basically had access to thousands of these people who are your target user. Was there ever any time or any action that you took that created a huge influx of users in one go?

Tony Tran: Funny, there's two answers to that. One is yes, there was. Ended up getting a lot of scammers actually.

Ethan: Oh, geez.

Tony Tran: There was a period of time where we were like, this is our first time trying to run some Instagram ads. The downside to running an Instagram ad for any type of business that has to do with money is you're going to get some scammers. So that didn't work very well, but we did get a bunch of app downloads.

Ethan: Sweet.

Tony Tran: Yeah. One thing I would encourage folks, if you're just starting out, don't rely on paid media if your business has anything to do with helping people get paid. That's number one. One of the things that we did recently that have really helped, and I actually have a person on my team that runs this program, is our ambassador program. We have this notion that it's better to go deep with a user rather than broad. The traditional school of thought is you go online, you pay for some type of affiliate software, you generate these referral links and you just hand it out to every single user and hope some of them share on their LinkedIn or TikTok or what have you. We did it a different approach. We wanted to give our ambassadors a sense that they truly were an extension of our team.

We invited them into our Slack. I personally hopped on calls with a lot of them. Understand what they loved about the product, what they didn't like. Really understood who they worked with, how they found their clients, what else they needed help with way beyond our software. And because of that goodwill, we had people that ... Ambassadors are not only some of our most active users, they use all of our features, they give great feedback, but they also generate a lot of referrals for us both on the creator side but also on a business side. To your point, when an ambassador for instance works with a ... I'm going to use BMW because it's top of mind and BMW's not a customer. That ambassador can use Lumanu just fine, but they can also say, "Hey BMW, you really should start using Lumanu for all your ... You're one of many companies that are still sending me physical checks and I hate it and I bet you a lot of other creators hate it too."

Not to rag on BMW, but you'd be surprised at how many companies still send physical checks. 

But yeah, that's one of my encouragement is especially early on, every single relationship is so valuable and you can nurture it and go deep. Don't think about scale out of the gate. A lot of people are like, "How can I launch an affiliate program and spend all this time building a perfect code referral, whatever, gamification?" Just hop on a call and talk to them and understand them and then get them to become an actual advocate for your business. And then they'll just share it naturally with their friends, their clients, and their network.

Ethan: So embrace the power user is basically the idea.

Tony Tran: Embrace the power user and there really is no shortcut for human connection, is what I would say. You can try to gamify it as much as you want, but when someone actually talks to you or hop on a phone or has a text thread with you, you automatically enter their inner circle relative to all these other tools that bombard them with refer a friend and get 10 bucks off.

Ethan: This is going to sound like an odd question and maybe we can just back into it. But do you think that you will always be a person that sets time to get in there and talk with the users every once in a while or do you feel as though you can bring someone on? And I know you said you have a person kind of in that position already. You're obviously not managing those relationships, but you play a part in those. Do you feel as though it can work as well if you are not playing any part in those relationships? I know that was a very long and confusing question.

Tony Tran: Absolutely. I'll give my answer in two parts. Absolutely. My joke is always you've got to build a bridge to somewhere. Always have to keep in mind what works today, how does it lead to version two that's going to work at 10 times the scale. So you always have to have an eye for a person that can actually run a program and then how can they build a team that can run a program. So even today, I don't talk to every single ambassador anymore, but every ambassador talks to someone. And it doesn't have to be a live phone call. Gen Z sometimes hate hopping on a phone, they just want to text. And that's perfectly fine as well. So absolutely, I always keep an eye towards that. And the cool thing is, early on when you force yourself to do these manual conversations, to read all the support tickets, you start to see what is really important.

For instance, I've found that texting is actually really awesome. People like that asynchronous text, get a response. They like that over email, they like that over Zoom. And the cool thing is you can even FaceTime them if needed. So that was something that we really only learned because we forced ourselves to do those conversations. The second part, to your point, and maybe this is not a belief that's shared by a lot of folks, but for me just being a product founder, I think it is critical to talk to customers all the time. And you have to do it as much as you can in whatever form factor you have. If you were to look at my phone right now, I have an iPhone, all top nine of my favorites, it goes my wife, my parents, six users. And then group chats as well for users in New York. And by the way, full disclosure, I have ADHD, so sometimes I just need to have a quick feedback through an idea, I just text into that little group and I get an immediate response.

Now I'm not saying that it's going to replace more thorough user research, but having that type of relationship is really critical early on because speed is everything and the ability to pick and choose what feedback to extrapolate and make decisions on is really important. But you need those connections to begin with. It's funny, we have a user called Chris and he checked in on me from time to time, he's a photographer. He learned about us because one of our customers paid him and he would just hit me up on Slack because he's on our Slack. He was like, "Yo boss, what's up? What's new? I just came back from Hawaii." And just a little chit chat like that I learned, wow, he actually just got a full-time job but he didn't stop his freelance job. "Why did you want to get a full-time job Chris?" And then through that conversation he explained to me, "Well, part-time work is great but I realized that I can do both so why not have health insurance?" I was like, "Whoa. Interesting. So you got a full-time job just for health insurance?" He was like, "Yeah. I had to give up some flexibility." That one conversation led to more.

Ethan: Right.

Tony Tran: So it's just about as long as you what I would call ... It's almost like cooking. As long as you just have all these ingredients around, you just never know when inspiration strikes. But the important thing is you've just got to surround yourself by good ingredients.

Ethan: What wording. Look at this guy. Well, I think we all need a Chris every once in a while. And I think the message here is don't push your Chris away. Use your Chris.

Tony Tran: Yeah, exactly.

Ethan: Are those six users generally the same people? I mean are you talking to the same users over and over or do you branch out? Or have you made your relationships and that's where you want to hang out?

Tony Tran: It's a little bit of both. I do have my go-to and I try to have them be very diverse in terms of demographics, where they live, what they work on. But then the cool thing is all of them bring on additional folks. So I'll give another example. One of our very early users ... Gosh, I'm not going to name any names, but she makes seven digits. So definitely very successful. Was a great source of feedback and everything. She even invested in Lumanu early on in our series A. 

Found out her husband was a business manager who runs his own business. Talking to him, he was actually a really big catalyst for some of the international features we were building. Actually he was the one that told us how, excuse my French, shitty PayPal is when it comes to paying international talent with all of their hidden fees. But all it takes is one person introducing to another person and now that other person is a really big part of my ... He's not quite on my favorite list on my text message, but he is on my favorite on my Slack.

Ethan: I'm going to jump and this is maybe a smaller jump than even I had imagined since we're already talking about people who you're reaching out and helping or are able to and willing to help you. Let's talk a little bit about mentorship and coaches. And I know that both of these types of folks out there, these relationships are something that you've got experience with. Can you first tell us the difference between what a mentor does and what a coach does?

Tony Tran: For sure. I'll start with one thing that's very simple for me. You pay coaches, you don't pay mentors. So for me, a mentorship, you have to really treat about it as a two directional street. You're giving the mentor something as a mentee and they're giving you something and it's really win-win. I'm a mentor now to a lot of folks, and I've been a mentee to a lot of folks and one thing I've learned is great people find ways to help other great people through shared collaboration, networking feedback. For me, mentorship is one step above a friend. And this is where it doesn't have to be as structured or rigid. It is not time bound as much. But you're traditionally going to be working with a mentor on what I would call swim lanes. Swim lanes could be, hey, I want to be a better salesperson.

Cool. Let's work on multiple ways we can work together and pick mentors that are great salespeople that you can emulate. So that is my approach to mentorship. And you can find mentors usually through referrals. It's funny, one of my very first mentors, I found someone on LinkedIn who had my last name, who was a co-founder. There weren't many Vietnamese entrepreneur back then, but this guy named Ben Tran who started Clout, if you remember in the early days. Just hit him up, was like, "Hey, we have the same last name and I'm starting a company. I would love your advice as a fellow immigrant, Vietnamese founder." Unpaid relationship. And he loved helping me and he ended up actually investing in Lumanu as well so it's win-win. Gave him a lot of great returns.

Coaches in my mind, first of all, coaches are more similar to therapists than they are to mentors. You should be very comfortable with a coaching relationship being very one way. I think that's the first thing. Don't expect to give anything back to your coaches. You're paying them for a reason. You're paying them to get better at something or to work on a very specific project. 

Every coaching relationship I've been in, I try to really treat it ... If you were to sit down and write a project, what do I want to accomplish? What is the timeframe for this? You should be able to write it down and you should be able to have an objective mutual agreement with your coaches that this is something they can help you with. How much is it going to cost? And then go about doing it.

And I think this is true for executive coaching, it's true for if you want to double your bench press or whatever and you get a fitness coach. It's the same thing. It's a paid relationship. Now, I think that's the most important thing is, treating it with that lens allows you to really pick out the best coach. So for me, I remember early on I had a very specific project. I'm a first time founder. I was able to raise a seed round. It was a bit more painful than I thought just because I just hate talking to that many people. 

And I knew with the series A it was going to happen again so I actually got a coach, not even to help me get intros or anything, but to help me approach the fundraising problem like a product problem. And that was just really helpful. It was a very well-defined project. They had a very definitive end date, which was when I raised the series A, that coaching relationship was over. Fortunately it actually translated from that coaching relationship to another coaching project, which was around building out the executive team, hiring, org chart and stuff like that. But I think that for me is the big difference. So to recap, mentorship, I really do think is a two-way street. You should give as much as you can take and you grow together. And then you can blossom from a mentorship into friendships and so forth.

Coaching, you can be friends with your coach, but I think you should go in with the mindset of this is no different than a physical trainer, no different than a therapist. You're paying for their time and their expertise and you should know exactly what you want to get out of it. And if you don't know what you want to get out of it yet, take time for yourself to figure that out before you even hire a coach. And sometimes you can actually talk to coaches as part of the discovery process of figuring out what is it that you want to work on.

Ethan: I struggle to ask this question of which one is more valuable than the other one, but I feel as though they're for different use cases. I feel as though you can always have a mentor. You can always have someone that you can talk to. And since it's not costing you dollars, it's costing you time and it's costing them time and that sort of thing. But coaches can be pretty darn expensive.

Tony Tran: Can be. Yep.

Ethan: And so my guess is that you should always strive to have at least one mentor or someone you can talk to. But when do I know that it's time? I guess, yeah, I'm not going to ask which one is more valuable than the other. When do you know it's time that you need a coach specifically?

Tony Tran: It's a great question. There really is no one size fits all answer. I would say there's probably ... At least for me, so my personal experience, you're right, coaches cost money. You have to make sure that you're in a financial state where you're not going to be worse off investing in a coach. So if you're living paycheck to paycheck and your coach takes a whole paycheck, it's probably not the best time until you figure out some other stuff first. So I think that's number one is do you have the financial resources? By the way, it's the same thing as therapy. Therapists cost money. 

Even if you really need it, you gotta ask yourself, can I afford it right now. To your point, I think everyone should have at least one mentor. And then the coach, you should really figure out when a project happens, when you have a very definitive project. For me, it was very much a return on investment. I could sit down and say, I want to raise a series A. This is the outcome of doing successfully and here's the consequence of not doing successfully. And there's a big gap between success and failure, which justified an investment. And that's what made me jump through that hurdle. Fortunately, [inaudible] executive coach as a business expense, so I was a little bit in a privileged position there.

But even in personal matters, my wife is a life coach. There's a lot of different price points, different coaching mediums, whether it's group coaching, one-on-one coaching, live coaching, asynchronous coaching. There's always different price points and I think that's something that people just have to figure out. But at the end of the day, I would just encourage you to think about what is the very well-defined project or outcome you want? How much time are you willing to invest into it and how valuable is it to you? And don't underestimate the value of your time. How much money do we spend on food and working out and stuff like that? Coaches are the same thing. It's self care. It's helping you get better. It's a gym membership.

Ethan: All right, thank you. Okay, so that's an awesome answer on the when of getting a coach, but let's talk a little bit about more your personal experience. What's the biggest benefit that you've ever gotten from a coaching relationship?

Tony Tran: This is a really great question. I think everyone is a little bit different. For me personally, just to give you a lens into how I was raised, my dad always taught me, you're basically by yourself. That's how he grew up. Didn't get help from anybody. And that stuck with me through college and through the early years of my career. One thing I would say is being a founder or a business owner or blazing your own path can be incredibly lonely sometimes. And the mental health side of it is really insane. And if you're like me, you care about your friends, you don't want to be the person that keeps bothering them and asking for hours and dinners just to complain and to put stuff on their plate. And I think for me, having a coach ... And every coach knows this, and again, it goes back to my whole one way street thing.

Just having someone that you can text to in a safe environment to complain. An employee said something that you felt like was really offensive to you, maybe your character, but you couldn't say anything in the moment and you just wanted someone to vent to process. In a work setting. So a little bit different than a therapist, although there's nothing wrong with having a therapist and a coach. But I just love having that type of relationship. Both coaches that I have, I have a text thread with them where something random happens or I'm just like, "Hey, I have this huge migraine and I had to bounce on an investor call. I'm feeling pretty guilty right now." And they'll just tell you like, "Hey, it's not going to be the first time. It's not going to be the last time. And a lot of other people do the exact same thing."

Or I say like, "Hey, I've never felt like there were so many fires I have to put out and I can only put out a couple fires." Or I would say things like, "Hey, it's Sunday, I'm watching football and I'm feeling guilty about not working." Just having another person tell you it's okay to not do X or it's okay to feel some way, just makes it feel like you're not alone. And I think that is so incredibly important. There's a metaphor that I always say, starting a business is like being a cockroach. You're just going to have to get stepped on and tackled and a lot of things have to go wrong before just enough goes right. And it's just a matter of how persistent you are. And it definitely helps to have someone in your corner. I'm lucky that literally my partner is a coach, so I get it from both the partnership side and the coach side and I have an actual executive coach as well. But if you're single or you don't have many friends, or maybe you just moved to a new city, just having someone, even someone that you have to pay, it's really helpful and it makes you feel like you're not alone on your journey.

Ethan: So you said two coaches. Is one of those coaches your wife?

Tony Tran: Yeah. Luckily I don't have to pay for it.

Ethan: All right, cool. The coaching is such an important piece, and everyone always talks about sports. Even the people that are the best in the world at a sport still have a coach. And so there are people out there that think that asking for help is weakness and that could not be further than the truth. I think that asking for help and asking for help could look like getting a coach, and I think that's actually a signal of strength.

Tony Tran: Agreed 100%.

Ethan: So let's begin to wrap here. This has been a lot of fun, but I know you've got plenty more things to do in your day. So you're currently solving the issue of payments for creators, but what's next? What's the next problem that y'all are going to solve? And you mentioned healthcare in there, and I really hope that that's the answer, but I'm just projecting. And if you say yes, that that is, then I'm coming to work for you. Let's do it.

Tony Tran: Well the answer is yes. Next year, we have a whole slate of things we want to work on from healthcare to business banking. For me, I think the value is, is there a way that we can leverage the combination of a few things so that the sum of the parts is bigger than the parts itself? Imagine a world where if you're a creator, being able to receive money through Lumanu can automatically help subsidize your health insurance. Because, very similar to an employer, we have a pretty good understanding of your income, your expenses, and we can set you up with the right plan versus you trying to navigate the government websites on your own. So there's a couple things there that definitely we want to work on. And the second thing that I'm very excited about, and we're actually piloting this right now, is our creator directory.

We realize that over time, just having a way for the people that are looking for talent to be able to find the talent is really helpful. Whether the talent is independent, a small agency owner. I think the world is heading towards a state now where even Lumanu, we leverage a lot of freelance marketers, freelance copywriters. There's a lot of other companies out there just like us. Especially as we go through, unfortunately a lot of tech layoffs right now, there's just a lot of great talent out there that are going to be professional, independent workers. But that's something I'm really excited about as well. Not only can we help you get paid fast, we can help you get paid more by connecting you with your future customers and clients.

Ethan: Heck yeah. That's awesome. I'm stoked for this, and you might get a message from me later saying that we're going to team up and solve healthcare for the world.

Tony Tran: Yeah. For sure. For all of those that don't have a W2, nine to five job, right?

Ethan: Yep. My heart goes out to every one of you out there. All right. What is your number one piece of advice for early stage entrepreneurs?

Tony Tran: I would say go out there and have as many conversations as you can. Call them sales conversations, call them research conversations, call them networking, whatever it takes, but just pitch. Pitch your business. Don't be shy. And don't let perfection be the enemy of good. Every response is a productive response. You might not like it. If you're like me and you have severe rejection sensitivity, it takes a while getting used to. You say something and people don't immediately respond with the most enthusiasm, but that's okay. And then just ask why and then ask why again. Keep asking why until you figure out how to move forward.

Ethan: Excellent. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. One last question. Where can people connect with you online and how can our listeners support Lumanu?

Tony Tran: You can find me on LinkedIn. It's funny. My Vietnamese name is Hieu. So just LinkedIn, Hieumanity, H-I-E-U-M-A-N-I-T-Y. So humanity spelled with my first name. I'm also on Instagram, so @2onys. And yeah, the way to find Lumanu, like I said, we're in the app store. If you're an independent freelancer creator, you can actually just go on the app store and download the app, and that's all it takes. It's completely free. You can start invoicing, getting paid, and like I mentioned, as we roll out all these other features around health insurance, taxes, helping you find work, that's all going to be loaded into the app.

Ethan: Awesome. Well, we're going to put all of those notes to the LinkedIn, to the Instagram, to Lumanu, we're going to put everything in the show notes. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here today. This has been a ton of fun.

Tony Tran: Likewise. A lot of fun. Thanks for having me, Ethan.

Ethan: All right, everybody. That's another episode of the Startup Savant podcast in the can. I hope you enjoyed the ride. Hey, listener. Yeah, you. The one listening to the show right now. It's really good to see you again. Wait. Have you been working out? I can totally tell. That's so awesome. Get this. We've been working out too. Pumping that audio iron. Getting in reps, putting in work. 

Because we want our podcast to get swole. But since sound waves can't be visually represented in the mirror at the gym, we need you to let us know if we look cut. I really don't know how to take this gym metaphor any further. I tried really hard. Basically, we just need you to let us hear your thoughts in an Apple Podcasts review. That's it. That's it. And if you do leave a review, it helps us out a ton and we appreciate you whether you do or not. Thank you for being a listener. For tools, guides, startup stories, and so much more, head over to truic.com. That's truic.com, T-R-U-I-C.com. See you folks.