Ep40—Steve Subar—Business Model First, Product Second: Thirty Years of Building Smarter
Episode Summary
Steve Subar, serial entrepreneur and inventor of the Mat Fresher automated yoga mat cleaning machine, discusses his business-model-first approach to company building. He shares lessons from 30+ years of entrepreneurship, including founding Open Kernel Labs (acquired by General Dynamics) and emphasizes validating product-market fit cheaply before building products, the importance of experience over information, and innovating business models alongside technology.
Key Quotes
"I started with what if I could create a business model for whatever that business would be. I thought about building a business model first and a company second, with three constraints: recurring revenue, high gross margins, and essentially zero B2B sales friction."
"Information is not the same as wisdom. Learning from making mistakes is not the same as good decision making. If you take information and you add experience, then that equals wisdom."
"It turns out that you can actually get a lot of market sounding, a lot of validation, early validation of product-market fit without investing very much in the product at all. I got a folding table, some rubber gloves, antiseptic spray, a Square reader, and asked yoga studios if I could hang out and see if people wanted to spend two bucks to get their mat clean."
Transcript
Hi, welcome to Tales from the Sky Lounge. It's a podcast about business, consulting, and venture investing. We get out there in the world and we talk to people who are making it happen and we get their stories. If you can like and subscribe, our producer, James, gets really happy about that. So, today's guest in the Sky Lounge, Steve Subar. Hi, Steve.
Hello, Todd. How are you?
Hey, doing well. So, Steve, who are you and what are you working on?
At present, this doesn't make great cocktail conversation. I'm the inventor and patent holder of the world's first fully automated yoga mat cleaning machine.
That's awesome. And you're an entrepreneur and you can't get away from it, right? It's truly a disease where you kind of have to go back to the well and start companies. But tell us about Matt Fresher.
Want to go deeper?
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