This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
This week I'm hosting Neurodiversion, an event in Austin, Texas, featuring people from all over the world. In fact, hundreds of people who have come into town. Check it out at neurodiversion.org or neurodiversionevent on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube as well. That's what I'm doing in my non-sidal school life, but naturally the podcast continues as well. So today we've got a Failure Friday segment.
Failure Friday, it is basically a story of a mistake, a misstep, a disaster, something that goes wrong. What does the side hustler or the entrepreneur, the business owner, what did they learn through this experience? How are they able to regroup? How are they able to hopefully come back stronger? But also it's not just about the after.
I wanna take people through the actual experience of what did it feel like in that situation? 'Cause it's not always pleasant. You don't always feel like, yeah, it's all gonna be okay. Often in that moment, you can feel pretty discouraged. So in this segment, we're gonna hear from a friend of mine.
This is Joel Runyon. I've known him for, I don't know, 15 years now or so. I knew him before he started this business and he's gone on to grow this business, run an ultra marathon on every continent, raise lots of money for charity, do all kinds of other cool stuff as well. He is just an inspirational dude. We've featured him in some other episodes over the years, but today, again, Failure Friday, we're gonna talk about something that did not go well, a $300 mistake that cost him $100,000.
You heard that right, a $300 mistake that cost him $100,000. Joel is also from Austin, or at least he's been living in Texas for a while. I'm gonna pass the mic to him, let him tell the story. I'll come back at the end with a few words of wrap up. [Music]
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 wanna 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 had 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 I 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 is 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]
All right, so I get a lot of questions about legal formation and such and my number one advice is don't let those things hold you back from starting. Notice that even in this story of a pretty significant disaster, notice that nowhere does Joel say, oh, I wish I hadn't started, right? I think the thing is just when you go from hobby to serious business, you need to get more serious about it. So when you're making $5,000 a month as Joel was at the time, that's when you start thinking about getting an LLC or S-Corp registering for those trademarks and so on.
All those things do matter. I don't wanna suggest they're not important. I just think they're not the first steps to figuring out your new side hustle or your new way of making money. Check out JoelRunyon.com. He's also on all social channels, Impossible.
Do not be fooled by other impossible imposters. Joel is the original creator of the brand, Impossible, and he's done a lot to fight for that. So I have a lot of respect for him, as I said. Listeners, thanks for being out there. If you have a question and update about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com.
We've got notes pages for every single episode, 3,366 and counting. Those are all on the website. New episodes drop every day, seven days a week. My name's Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
