Juggling Entrepreneur Podcast
Get ready to dive into a treasure trove of inspiring interviews with parentpreneurs! Join us as we chat with parents who are juggling business ventures and family life. They’ll share their highs, lows, and golden nuggets of wisdom to help you thrive on your own entrepreneurial adventure. Tune in for some serious motivation and practical tips from those who truly get it!
Juggling Entrepreneur Podcast
From MVP to Market Fit: Curt Moore on Startup Strategy That Works
Hi everyone, welcome to the Juggling Entrepreneur podcast, where we explore the art of balancing ambition, innovation and everyday life. Today, we are joined by Kurt Moore, a seasoned product executive and a startup strategist who knows what it takes to build and scale a high-impact businesses. With decades of experience leading product innovation at companies like Cisco, advising early-stage startups and driving growth across complex markets, kurt brings a unique blend of his corporate savvy and entrepreneur grit. Whether you're launching your new venture or navigating into the next big pivot, kurt insights on leadership, product vision and sustainable growth are the ones you won't want to miss. Let's dive in. Hi Kurt Moore, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Hi, nice, to meet you, nice, to be on your show, and I really appreciate having me on today, nice, I gave a little bit of a preview.
Speaker 1:Meet you, nice, to be on your show and I really appreciate having me on today. Great, I gave a little bit preview on you. Do you want to add anything more?
Speaker 2:No, I think you did a great job. You know I am an entrepreneur in a pretty early stage startup. I'm retired from a 30-year career in corporate business, so I look forward to the interview and hopefully can share some things for your listeners that will help them.
Speaker 1:Sounds great. Let's dig into the first question. You have worked at the intersection of corporate innovation and startup agility. What are some key lessons you have learned about building scalable products in both environments?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. Like I said earlier, I retired after 30 years in a corporate position. I was in the oil and gas industry in Colorado, pretty progressive, kind of started at the bottom, got all the way up to a senior vice president role. So during that part of my career you certainly learn how to collaborate, how to work individually and be a contributor as an individual. But you also learn quickly how to be a contributor on a team. And as you grow in those types of careers and you go from being an employee that's managed by someone and suddenly you're a manager that's managing multiple people I think I had up to 45 people underneath me in my career you quickly learn that you know you can't do everything yourself. You've got to delegate, you've got to make sure you've got the right people at the right desk doing the right things with with the right tools and the right leadership and then kind of get out of their way and let them work. And you quickly learn or hopefully you quickly learn there are people that work well on teams and there are people that are just more quiet and shy and they need to do things kind of off on their own and you try to blend all those pieces together to get a collaborative team that works together on your individual department goals and then spreads out into the bigger corporations so that your department is contributing professionally.
Speaker 2:So that's a brief, very brief overview of what my corporate life was like. Again, I retired from that in September of 21. My wife and I moved from Colorado to Oklahoma to be closer to her elderly mother, to keep a better, closer eye on her, and I thought you know, I'm too young to just quit totally. So I decided to dive into an entrepreneurship opportunity, something I have been thinking about for a long time. I've got a good story about what that is all about and I can tell you, as we go along, the difference between working in a corporate position everything from parking in a parking garage and going into a big, tall building and sitting in your office and having meetings and calls and all the interactions with other companies versus what you do with an entrepreneurship as a startup.
Speaker 2:It's totally different, totally different, largely at least, in my experience. You're mostly alone. You've got some key legal resources and accounting resources and business development resources that you have access to, but you just don't have all of the administrative support and suddenly you find yourself, being everything from the janitor to the secretary, to the office manager, to the president and CEO. It's just a different role, but I do enjoy it. It is exciting. When you have your accomplishments, you know that's mostly driven by you, and when you have your setbacks, you also know that you did that and there's no one else on the team or in the company that can be pointed at for success and failure. So I would say entrepreneurship is very exciting for people that have passion to do it and I would encourage it for sure.
Speaker 1:Sounds good and, as you have said, corporate has its own challenges. So does the startups, and it's a completely different ballgame. You have mentioned you sometimes need to be the lower level to the higher level executor. You are your own um leader and operations lead and finance lead and the tech lead and playing all those roles co, co, cfo, ceo and and playing multiple roles by the same person. Uh, sometimes it's good because you get that holistic perspective of the vision for the company, but sometimes it's overwhelming and overbearing. You have to handle the failures and successes by yourself. You have to handle the challenges by yourself. So I've been there, so I know the pain. But most of the people think that entrepreneurship journey is like a movie. It is fast-tracked. You work hard for a little time, all of a sudden you will get a great success. From your experience being in corporate work for 30 years and now being in a startup and looking at the real world, do you want to share with the audience the harsh truth of entrepreneurship?
Speaker 2:Sure, I absolutely will do that. You know, when I think of this journey I I'm on being an entrepreneur for the first time, compared to my career coming out of college and running out for 30 years the first thing I would say is be passionate about what it is you're doing. You know, if you have a lot of passion for the business that you're building, it's important to you, it's important to you, you believe in it. It's a product or a service or whatever it is that you have high passion, that this is important to be done. I think that's critical and I think there's a certain measure of you know, be aware, go into these ventures with your eyes wide open.
Speaker 2:There is a lot going on and you know you don't. One of the things that shocks me the most is you just don't know what you don't know until it comes up and knocks on your door, whether it's a legal challenge or just you know the financing, you know startup capital, you know product development. You know how fast are we going to do this and I've got you know examples, but we're currently in eight states. We want to be in all 50 states. It's costing, you know, several thousand dollars in five digits to get ourself calibrated to be in each state growing out. Well that's, you know that's a lot of money and but we want to be in all the States. But you know you have to pace, you know your availability of capital to do that type of development. But again, you know if, if, if it gets in, my opinion, it gets in your blood and it gets in in under your skin to where this is important and I want to do this. That's that's. That's very important.
Speaker 2:And then be aware that it's not easy, and I'm sure there's any number of success stories out there that seem like, you know, someone had an idea, they talked to two or three people, they got on a couple calls, they talked to a bank, they started doing something, and it was just one win after another. I think that's probably a small percentage of how that really works. There's a lot of long days. There's a lot of days when you drive home from the office and you think, wow, you know, that was a long day and I'm not sure I moved forward today. I think I might move back, and so you have to have pretty thick skin and be resilient and be resolved. But when you have your wins and you see the growth and you see how it starts and where it goes over some period of time. It is very satisfying. So I would certainly encourage it, but again, I would temper that with be passionate about it. You know and be aware of all of the ups and downs you're going to face on the journey.
Speaker 1:That's a really great, wise advice hitting the reality of it. Thank you again. How do you personally juggle the demands of executive leadership, your startup mentorship and staying current with the evolving technologies in market?
Speaker 2:Well, that's a great question and there's no simple answer to that. I think it's, at least in my circumstances. We've got a very detailed business plan. We work very hard to prioritize critical steps and sequence those steps and order our development and for the most part we stay pretty attached to that, leaning back into my prior career.
Speaker 2:I was not and I'm not I'm just not wired to just let the day happen. I want to plan out what needs to be done, what's, what's the next most important thing to do right now and then, after that's done, or, if that can only be, if we can only get half done with that, when can we finish the second half? And I say we, it's a pretty small team. We really work hard to keep ourselves focused on the big goals and the big plan, knowing that if we can make that 75% of an average workday or workweek, the other 25% comes at us and you just have to manage that. And it's anything from switching phone carriers or there's an outage on the website or you know.
Speaker 2:There's just any number of things that happen that you can't just ignore them. You have to rally to it and deal with it and get it restored and back on track. But it does take time. So when you're balancing that, at some point you need to go home. You're going to harm your work-life balance if you're getting in at five in the morning and leaving at eight at night. For week after week after week You're going to wear yourself out and burn yourself up. So I think that's important for entrepreneurs and I think it's important whatever your role is, to make sure you're giving it your all for some period of time, whether you're a 40-hour or 50-hour week or whatever your work week is designed to be. But then you've got to let it go and go home and live the other side of your life with your family and your friends and kind of reset yourself just to make sure you don't burn out.
Speaker 1:Which comes to a very great point about. Most of the founders are very passionate about making a product or a service perfect. A product or a service perfect, and in the quest of making it perfect, sometimes they lose a lot of great opportunities, right, or they are losing a market opportunity. What your suggestions would be for balancing or juggling the need versus perfection?
Speaker 2:Well, that's another great question. You know, in our circumstances our products are legal documents that we prepare for clients and record them in the public records to protect our clients from fraud. You know those documents were. They need to be perfect I don't know, perfect is the right word but they need to be right and they need to be. They need to say what they need to say and they don't need to say what they don't need to say, and they need to be a recordable document.
Speaker 2:In each state where we operate there's a process to go through. We've copyrighted those documents to protect ourselves and protect our enterprise, but at the same time, these are documents that have never been recorded in any state before until we started recording. So we want to take those documents to each state and say, hey, look, here's our business, we're live for our license, get herself up and running in those businesses, and then share those documents with the state and share them with professionals, legal professionals, title professionals in each state and make sure if we need to add something to that document to make it not ambiguous or confusing when it's recorded in a certain state. We don't learn that after we've recorded a dozen or a couple hundred of them. So I think it's critical that your product or your service or whatever it is that you're centering your business around is correct. But I would hesitate to go for perfect because, you're correct, perfect is a pretty high bar and I think you get it right, as right as you need it to be and you know it to be, and then go and if it needs to be adjusted after the fact, because you learn something more later on then amend it, change it, improve it.
Speaker 2:I think that works if you're making Coca Cola or if you're making Chevy pickups or if you're coffee, whatever you're doing, I think we're all in some level of continuous improvement and that's a function of getting feedback from the market and feedback from your clients. So we think we've got our products right. We believe they're fully functional. We believe we will get them calibrated to each specific state statutes as it relates to recording documents title. But in the meantime, you know we're certainly aware that we don't know what we don't know and we may learn something in the future that makes us adjust or amend or improve our documents going forward and that carries on out into our relationship with our clients, whether it's a business to consumer model or the business to business model. We have those pretty well pinned down. But just in the short year that we've been really out and about in the markets we've certainly learned that there are ways to improve those models markets.
Speaker 1:we've certainly learned that there are ways to improve those models. That is a very elaborated but very complete answer and I really hope the audience understand what you're trying to say, because it's extremely, extremely important, especially around the perfection. Most of the founders are stuck at that point of making the product so perfect that they lose a lot of opportunities to grow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I don't want to be too wordy on all these things, but I have seen in my prior career and I don't want to extrapolate that forward into this opportunity and journey I'm on now People do get wrapped up and you know, and almost hesitant to take the next step because they're still designing, design, design, design. And in my prior world, you know, we would design extremely complex facilities and you'd have, you know, different groups from different disciplines on teams. And there is a design stage, but there's also an implementation stage.
Speaker 2:Otherwise it's just a bunch of people talking and it never stops. And you know, you see people at tables and you're like, well, I want to go back and rerun this. Or, you know, talk to another vendor about that, and at some point you know someone at the table myself oftentimes would say you know, we've been through this, you've exhausted that, we're going to go.
Speaker 2:You keep looking at improvement, but that's going to be post-construction improvements. We've got to go. We've made a commitment to have an installation and a facility on the ground on some time frame and we can't go back to telemanagement that we're just never going to stop designing. So there's a point to put your pencil down and go and be open to improvements later on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for making that very clear. What are the biggest, some of the biggest operational challenges property owners face today, and how can your tech startup, or any other recent technologies that are in the market, able to help with this quest?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. You know I'm a property owner. I've been a property owner since my mid-20s. I've certainly witnessed siblings and my parents own property and sell and buy and invest in property. I think it's important to note. As property owners today, you certainly have a fair palette of risk to consider, whether it's insurance from fire and hail and storms and whatnot, or you've got to be sure you're being mindful of your finance strategy, so your mortgage rates and what type of mortgage you have.
Speaker 2:One of the things that makes our product a bit unique is when you think about owning property. You know when you're buying or selling property at some point you're going to have closing and you're going to do that at a title company and that title company is going to do all the things that are necessary to make sure that the title exchange from the grantor to the grantee is clear and if there are some lingering easements that are going to carry forward along the property from one owner to the next, it's all scheduled, it's all shown. There's no surprises. They do a very, very valuable job. But my personal take is I think I've been closed on six properties in my adult life and probably refinanced another dozen times. I've probably gone to somewhere around 20 closings.
Speaker 2:Most people go to those closings and they're not really sure what on earth is going on there other than I'm going to sign a lot of paper and I'm either going to get a check or I'm going to get keys and garage door openers. And you know, when they start shuffling the paper to you, you know you look at the first one a little more closely. You know and you sign that, and here it comes, it's just a wave of paper. You know and you sign that, and here it comes, it's just a wave of paper. And by the time you know you get to the second half of the paper. You're not, you're just listening to them and signing.
Speaker 2:Listen, sign, oh you want the initials here too and I'm sorry I turned that off, I'm sorry it's our company phone. So what we try to do is help people understand. You know what is being accomplished in that closing and what are you coming away with. You're coming away with the title policy that protects you up to that closing and it's back. So if the title company missed something or if there was some unrecorded document and there was some claim against the property, you're going to be protected against time in time, from the time you close to what's behind you. But going forward you know it's up to you to protect your risk. So that's where you know again, you put insurance on and you maintain your property and you be in compliance with. You know HOAs and you know codes at cities and whatnot.
Speaker 2:But here in the last few years a new problem has erupted and it's called title fraud and you know the whole basis of that is. You know people with bad intent will peruse through the public records and look for generally they'll look for more elderly property owners with high value properties and they'll attempt or they just will record a deed, a fraudulent deed, in the public records and try to catalyze that by adding a mortgage or even reselling the property. So that actually tried to happen to my mother back in 2014 and that I'll tie that back to passion. Why would you do this? People say, well, kurt, you know this kind of relates to what you were doing as a 30-year career in oil and gas, but why this? And then I'll tell them the story about. You know, this tried to happen to my mom and she was in pretty tough shape. She had had some surgery. She had been in the hospital for a long time. She was very, very anxious to get home. She's elderly, she's getting a little mixed up and some clown tries to record a fraudulent deed and essentially swoop the title to her home away from her. So I do have a lot of passion about that. I think preying on elderly property owners is about one of the more despicable things you can do. So how do you protect yourself from that? You can do nothing and just hope it doesn't happen to you. I think that's probably most of property owners are in that boat. Some property owners are in the monitoring your title and being alerted If something's been recorded. Give you a heads up that if something got recorded and it wasn't you recording a second mortgage or you selling your home. It's something foreign to you, you at least have an opportunity to rally around that, catch up and try to fix it.
Speaker 2:Our view is to simply record what we call a notice, a title freeze, in the public records. It puts the public on notice that in my mother's situation she would have just said hey look, I'm worried about title fraud. I'm worried about that for myself and my property. I'm freezing my title. There should be nothing else recorded without my express recorded consent in the form of a release of title freeze. We've built that to work similar to a credit freeze. If you're familiar with that and your audience is familiar with that, such that you know if someone is considering, you know, attacking Kurt Moore's property, they're going to see that they're going to look in the public records to get what they need to get and understand what they need to understand to make that attack. But they're going to come face to face with that notice of title freeze and our belief is it's a more proactive defense. They're going to see that and more than likely it's going to deter them and veer them off, which is a win for our client. But if they don't see it or aren't otherwise bothered by it and they still make that attack, our clients will be in a better position to repair the attack for having recorded that freeze.
Speaker 2:Because, again, if I didn't consent to this recording, how did it happen? And so, again, built much like a credit freeze. If you froze your credit and you go apply for a loan, it's going nowhere. It's going to stop dead in its tracks. And sometimes people do that. You know, I froze my credit because I was worried about that and then I, you know, two or three years went by and I decided I wanted to apply for this credit card at the checkout stand at some home improvement store because they were offering deal and boom, just stopped it. Then they can't go, it won't work. So we try to make our products similar to that.
Speaker 1:So hopefully that answers your question you know that answers the question and it's it's a complete reality check that how much the property that you own or you pay mortgage to for most of your lifetime need to be protected against the fraud situations like this, and it's important not only to pay the mortgage but also protect the property against the fraud. So I think it's an amazing, great service and product that you're doing, kurt, and thank you for coming up with the idea and providing services to the community. We will wrap up this podcast with one last key takeaway from you, kurt, as an entrepreneur and as an executive leadership person what your suggestion would be for people who want to step in from the corporate world to the startup world and build a product or the service of their passion? What are the three things that they need to remember in reality check?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. It's a great question, you know. Again, I think it first and foremost would be make sure you have passion around what you're doing. You know, and some people are passionately motivated by making money and if that's enough, I guess that's enough. But making money is, it's nice.
Speaker 2:But I think if you're really going to have a journey through being an entrepreneur whether you're a clothing manufacturer or you know, whether you're a clothing manufacturer or you know consumer products or you know really anything innovative, I think passion for why am I doing this? When you build a business plan and you take that out to potential counterparties, they may consider investing. You know that's one of the first things they'll ask is well, what are you doing? Why are you solving this problem? Is this a problem? Why is your product going to solve this problem that you're describing and how passionate are you about that? And that really resonates with me.
Speaker 2:I think it's important that you have some high level of understanding about the mechanics of what it is you're designing.
Speaker 2:In my circumstances, for my career and for Moat, I spent 30 years designing legal documents and negotiating legal documents and recording documents and researching public records, and so it's not a radical leap from what I used to do to what I'm doing now.
Speaker 2:So I think you need a good bedrock foundation of prior knowledge and then something you want to introduce to the markets that is potentially needed and you're passionate about. And the third thing I think is critical for an entrepreneur is just make sure you understand the capital required to do your venture. I'm sure you know a lot more about it than I, but from what I have read and over the years, some high 90% of business ventures that don't make it generally just run out of capital and they could have been a month away or six months away from you know the next Google for all we know. But if you don't, if you aren't properly capitalized to, you know fully walk the journey, there's a lot of danger and risk there. So make sure that you've got a capital plan and contingencies around that plan so when unexpected costs pop up it's not overburdening you and preventing you from executing your business plan. So those would be the three things I would throw out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and those are really great points. And again it's the real world points that you're saying Passion, having passion, making sure you have capital to continue to make the product and become the next big company that you've worked so hard for. So again, thank you a lot, kurt, for your wise nuggets. And to the audience, kurt Moore, once again. He was an executive leader and now he's an entrepreneur chasing the dream and protecting the people from the title fraud. Thank you, kurt, once again to be on our podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you, I really appreciate it, really appreciate your time.
Speaker 1:Bye.