This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hey there, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Welcome as well to a new exciting segment we are doing every Friday. I believe we can learn as much from failure as we can from success, if not more, in fact.
And it's with this principle in mind, we're starting Failure Friday. Conveniently, as mentioned, it runs every Friday. It's a collection of short stories all about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. So just like our Throwback Thursday segment, you get to hear directly from side hustlers who have struggled to get something off the ground. I'm gonna tell you a short story of something that went very wrong.
Now these stories will vary, but often it starts with an idea, an assumption perhaps, a pre-sumption, something that they thought would happen, and then of course, what really happened and what they learned along the way. This has been so fun to work on in just a few short weeks here. I applaud their courage and I will share some of my failure stories along the way as well. But without further ado, today's short story features Joel Runyon from Austin, Texas. Now he, like Sean Ogle from last week, he's no stranger to side hustle school listeners, as well as anybody who's been following my work for a long time.
I've been friends with Joel for more than a decade. At the very first World Domination Summit that I hosted, Joel decided to take a group skydiving. If he put this whole thing together himself, he arranged everything with the company that does the skydiving. He recruited people to sign up, got their deposits, just did the whole thing himself. And I realized then I was like, this is a guy who is not afraid to take bold action.
He's not afraid to take risks also, skydiving. But as you'll hear in this story, there's one risk he shouldn't have taken. Or perhaps you could say he should have taken a small risk to pay a small amount of money. So I'll let him tell the story. It's called the $300 mistake that cost me nearly $100,000.
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Hey, my name is Joel Runyon and I run a site called Impossible. It's a blog and lifestyle performance company focused on helping people push their limits and doing something impossible. This is the story of how a $300 mistake cost me nearly $100,000 two years of my life and resulted in an epic story about getting sued by a billionaire. Sounds cool, right? Not so much.
Anyways, I started this company about 10 years ago and I quickly settled on the name and logo, an all caps version of Impossible with a distinctive line through it. I trademarked the logo, but I didn't bother trademarking the company name. I didn't want to spend tons of money on the trademarks or other legal work early on. And I knew that you get a common law trademark when you start using it. So I thought I would be fine.
Keyword thought. Fast forward a couple of years and I wake up one morning to a phone call telling me I'm getting sued. Apparently some other company had picked my company name, trademarked it and then sued me for infringement despite the fact I'd been using it for years and I had it first. They not only wanted me to change my company name, but drop all uses of the word Impossible any and everywhere I was using it. My first mistake was thinking that obviously I did nothing wrong and it wouldn't have to do anything since I was obviously in the right.
It turns out that's not how courts work even if the facts are on your side. The second mistake that I made was to not want to get too much involved personally. So I hired a recommendation from a friend who was a lawyer that was nice, relatively cheap, but not at all an expert in the field. Trying to save money here actually costed me a lot more as six months and $12,000 later, they just came back to me and said, doesn't look like there's much we can do. Not exactly helpful.
I still didn't learn my lesson though and a lawyer friend offered to help me out. They offered to work on trade if I helped them with marketing and so we went ahead and did that. But again, trying to save money cost me more money and time. Because we were working on trade, he never made it a priority. And we actually kept getting put in a worse and worse place legally with late responses to filings and other missed deadlines.
Eventually we were getting back against the wall on timing and I decided to take things into my own hands. I pulled the files myself and I started to realize that there were a lot of things going on that my lawyer wasn't updating me about. So I fired him and I started interviewing a ton of elite IP legal teams. I found one of the best in the country and I hired them quickly. Unlike the others, they were very expensive, but they were going to fix things.
Once I had this team on board, the opposition realized that we had an elite team and that I wasn't a fan of bullies and we weren't gonna back down as easily as they had hoped. This actually started to deescalate things immediately and they became much more reasonable to a place where I eventually settled on a much, much more favorable terms for everybody involved in just a few months. What took me over two years and over six figures to figure out could have been solved in less than six months with the right lawyer if I had hired them the first time. Even more so, if I would have just registered the mark when I first started, it would have only cost me $300 and I would never have any of these problems to begin with. I'm not a lawyer, but I often tell people, once you cross the threshold from a hobby to a real business, maybe you're making about $5,000 a month, you should look at filing a trademark.
It's $300 in fees, maybe $1,000 if you have a lawyer do it for you, but it can save you a massive headache in the future. It sounds expensive, but compared to the time and money of a lawsuit, it's a pretty good deal. So yeah, that's the time. One mistake about trying to save $300 cost me almost $100,000 in two years of my life. But it turned out to be a good story though, right?
I hope that you guys have more luck than I did and that this story is a reminder that trying to save money can actually cost you a lot more than you ever thought. But hopefully this is an encouragement to keep pushing your limits and do something impossible no matter what that is for you and your business. Good luck out there and keep pushing. [Music]
The thing I have known about Joel for a long time, thank you so much Joel for sharing that story. The thing I've known about him for a long time is he can come back from stuff.
And even though this is a pretty crazy story and like you said, felt like a defeat for a long time and really frustrating, it would be nice that that had never happened, but it did happen and he's still going strong now. Like he didn't let it take him out. And I think that's such an admirable quality. I think it's something that all of us can cultivate. In some ways it's resilience, it's like the ability to bounce back.
But I think to go even further than that, it's the ability to be anti-fragile, but it's not just bouncing back from something, it's whatever that thing was, you're actually better off in the end because of it. You have somehow channeled that as fuel for greater motivation. So I also wanted to mention when he talks about the trademark registration and such, notice that nowhere in that story does Joel say, if you haven't started at all, then you need to spend a lot of time thinking about this. What he says is when you go from hobby to serious business, like once you realize, oh, this thing's actually working, then that's when you need to get more serious about this. So if you're making, I think he mentioned $5,000 a month or so, you're like, oh wow, this is actually gonna go somewhere.
That's when you're like, okay, how can I lock down more of those trademarks? Maybe I should think about getting an LLC or an S Corp or something like that. But I mentioned that because sometimes people get really, really hung up on those issues before they've actually started anything, before they have a product or a service or even a fully developed idea. So there's a creative tension there. There's a balance there.
You don't wanna avoid spending $300 that could end up costing you $100,000, but you also don't wanna be held back from starting. So I'll leave you with that today. Check out impossiblehq.com, Joel Runyon's site, or his new e-commerce site, actually, impossible.co. We're gonna link all this up on the show notes page, but if you just remember, impossible. If you just Google impossible, you're gonna find Joel Runyon.
If you've got a question or a comment for us, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Those notes today are at sidehustleschool.com/1525. Thank you so much for joining me today. Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
You're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
from The Onward Project.
