After studying economics at UC Berkeley, Alex Goldberg spent the first seven years of his career scaling early-stage tech startups, typically as marketing hire #1. He loves running experiments, building teams, and helping innovative brands blossom into household names.
Leveraging his entrepreneurial background in marketing, Alex started a product review site called Fin vs Fin as a side hustle and grew it aggressively during the pandemic. Today the site promotes over 200 direct-to-consumer brands as an affiliate, and the company had grown to manage a portfolio of sites beyond just finvsfin.com. On weekends Alex enjoys golfing, cooking, listening to podcasts, and spending time with family.
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Table of Contents
Thank you for joining us today. Please introduce yourself to our readers. They want to know you, some of the background story to bring some context to your interview.
Alex Goldberg: My name is Alex, and I’m based in Los Angeles. I moved to the bay area for college, studied economics, and landed early internships at tech startups. I learned scrappy growth marketing skills and was able to scale several companies from just a handful of employees to several hundred strong. Three years ago my former boss left the startup where we were working and asked if I wanted to start a blog together. We both liked working with each other and wanted to stay in touch, so I agreed. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could generate some extra bucks for a beer each month?”, we joked. We started writing about fintech, since that’s the industry we both had worked in, but soon pivoted to consumer wellness as we saw boatloads of venture capital start to pour into the space.
Soon we saw a trickle of organic traffic from Google and found ways to monetize through affiliate relationships. Fast forward a year and the revenue from our site was hard to ignore. It was making it almost impossible to focus on work at my actual day job. Two years after launch, I quit my 9-5 to focus full time on the business, which now hovers ~$1m in annual revenue. It’s been an incredibly fun ride to build something from scratch. We’ve since expanded our business to include 5 sites, diversified our revenue streams, and have built out a solid team that can help us streamline operations. I can’t wait to see how much more we can grow in 2022.
You are a successful entrepreneur, so we’d like your viewpoint, do you believe entrepreneurs are born or made? Explain.
Alex Goldberg: Like all things in life, successful entrepreneurship requires a particular balance of both nature and nurture. Both of my parents ran their businesses, so it’s tempting to think I was born to do the same. The reality is more complicated. Business leaders have skills that anyone can learn through trial and error, but I now recognize at least two notable exceptions that are nearly impossible to pick up: persistence and drive.
You cannot teach someone to be insatiably hungry for business outcomes. Put differently, many of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met will forever remain employees, not because they lack talent or ability, but for insufficient hunger to compete in a market. Everyone wants “success”, but few are willing to drop what they are doing today to start validating ideas that will get them there. Fewer still are driven to work late into the evening for months on end without any sign of traction. Businesses don’t typically fail via bankruptcy, they go under when an entrepreneur decides to give up. The upshot is, if you refuse to throw in the towel, you’ll always be one step away from hockey-stick growth. Thus, an unwavering, almost-fanatical drive is the secret sauce of entrepreneurs. And for better or worse, it’s not something that’s easily learned. I feel lucky that my entrepreneurial drive kept me tinkering long enough to achieve early success with Fin vs Fin, which was by no means my first attempt at starting a business. Regardless of how much we grow, I’ll bring the same hunger as I had on day one.
If you were asked to describe yourself as an entrepreneur in a few words, what would you say?
Alex Goldberg: Opportunistic by design. I am attracted to relatively unsexy problems where competition is low. I consider my ability to sense opportunity in such spaces to be a core competitive advantage. Lacking a clear long-term vision, I don’t claim to be able to predict the future, especially not beyond one or two years. Rather than working to unseat legacy incumbents with better tech or more robust features, I get excited when I discover clear signs of demand today that are not being met by any solution whatsoever. Given my background in marketing, my natural bias is to find an effective distribution strategy first, rather than developing product innovations or killer end-user experiences that I have to later figure out how to sell. Thus I’ll never be an Elon Musk or Steve Jobs — both of who have repeatedly made science fiction into reality — but I’m confident that my style is scalable and repeatable all the same.
Tell us about what your company does and how did it change over the years?
Alex Goldberg: Fin vs Fin has evolved from a side hustle into a thriving business. We publish product review content across a portfolio of sites that rank well in organic search. Our focus is mostly on comparing wellness brands, although we define this broadly to include other niches such as pets, fitness, telemedicine, personal finance, and more. When a visitor discovers our content and clicks through to a brand to make a purchase, we take a small commission. We also work with brands to promote their offerings via paid ads on our sites, in our newsletters, and across social media.
In the early days, 90%+ of revenue came from just a handful of partners, but today we are proud to work with over 200 D2C brands. My business partner/ co-founder and I wrote the first 60 articles on finvsfin.com ourselves before outsourcing any of the work. Today we have a team of contractors several dozen deep that handles various aspects of our content publishing operations.
Thank you for all that. Now for the main focus of this interview. With close to 11.000 new businesses registered daily in the US, what must an entrepreneur assume when starting a business?
Alex Goldberg: If entrepreneurs knew how challenging it is to build a profitable business, they likely wouldn’t start. I only felt comfortable leaving my full-time job when profit (not just revenue, but total income net of expenses) exceeded my annual salary. Not only is it challenging to find product-market fit and scale to a level that can consistently replace your full-time w2 income, but it also typically takes a lot longer than anyone expects. Know this, and plan accordingly, even if that means keeping your business as a side hustle for much longer than you’d like to continue to hedge your bets and pay your bills.
Did you make any wrong assumptions before starting a business that you ended up paying dearly for?
Alex Goldberg: We made two errors in our early days that we continue to pay for today. The first is our company’s name. “Fin vs Fin” potentially made sense for a fintech comparison site, but given how our focus has expanded, it’s more difficult to understand today. Ultimately we’d be much better off had we decided to build on a broader domain that we could build a recognizable brand upon. Today our options are to buy a better domain and redirect our entire site, which is both risky and time-consuming, or continue building on a property that’s hard to pronounce, spell, and recall.
The second big mistake we made is also somewhat technical. In the early days, we opted to build our sites on WordPress using a super simple and widely adopted page builder called Elementor. While this part of our tech stack has made it easy to build our site out quickly, it’s somewhat clunky and leads to slower page load speeds. Given how much Google cares about mobile page experience, this technical choice has hurt us and proven extremely costly to fix. As they say, you live and you learn but were I to build this same business again, I’d think more critically about the extensibility of our brand, and the longevity of our underlying technology.
If you could go back in time to when you first started your business, what advice would you give yourself and why? Explain.
Alex Goldberg: One of the best pieces of advice that took me too long to internalize is to work ON the business rather than IN the business. The key difference is defining processes that can then be delegated, instead of focusing on individual tasks that need to be completed repeatedly. The latter is important to keeping the lights on, but the former is what scales, Admittedly I spent too many months without empowering others to complete the work, which requires trusting other people. This can be tough in the early stages of building a business. It feels counterintuitive to stop focusing on things that keep the lights when you’ve experienced early success doing so. Overall, this is a growing pain that’s critical to recognize early.
What is the worst advice you received regarding running a business and what lesson would you like others to learn from your experience?
Alex Goldberg: “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.” This common refrain throughout Silicon Valley insinuates that joining a well-funded startup is a sure path to career success and wealth, regardless of your initial position, While there are examples of employees getting fabulously rich after short stints at high-flying startups, it’s easy to forget that such cases are the exception, not the norm. My own experience at three promising early-stage startups serves as a testament to the fact that 1) rocket ships are hard to spot, and 2) even among those passengers clever enough to hitch a ride to the moon, life-changing windfalls are far from guaranteed.
Starting my own business has only further solidified my belief that valuations are an over-emphasized vanity metric. Don’t make them your north star. I realize now that owning a huge percentage of a small venture — i.e. bootstrapping — is more likely to yield wealth than holding an infinitesimally small slice of a Unicorn. Valuations aren’t categorically unimportant, just remember that your equity stake matters just as much. With so many alternatives to VC funding available for entrepreneurs looking to fan the flames without giving up ownership, it’s worth forgetting Silicon Valley’s rocket ship fable, and perhaps building your hot air balloon instead.
In your opinion, how has COVID-19 changed what entrepreneurs should assume before starting a business? What hasn’t changed?
Alex Goldberg: COVID-19 was particularly devastating for brick and mortar businesses with mostly in-person service, forcing many business owners to digitally transform operations overnight. Entrepreneurs should assume that consumers’ expectations of fast delivery and customer service have been elevated, whether the threat of a deadly virus exists or not. Just as Amazon Prime forced other eCommerce retailers to compete with free 2-day shipping, COVID-19 has reshaped what consumers expect around responsiveness and virtual comms. In many ways, this shift was already afoot long before the pandemic, and industries that were slow to adopt technology have simply been forced to catch up. While supply chain shocks raddled markets long before the pandemic as well, smart entrepreneurs who suddenly realize how much of a liability shipping physical goods presents are hedging revenue by establishing redundancies at each node of their supply, as well as exploring alternative revenue streams.
What is a common myth about entrepreneurship that aspiring entrepreneurs and would-be business owners believe in? What advice would you give them?
Alex Goldberg: Running a business sounds sexy, but in reality, there’s an endless barrage of thankless work. When you’re an employee, it’s easy to think “what does the CEO even do? Why do they get paid so much?” Well, the correct answers are “everything” and “because they took on a ton of risk.” Entrepreneurship promises freedom that a 9-5 doesn’t, but ironically, most founders become slaves to their business in a way that few employees ever are. It’s important to remember why you started the business in the first place and make sure your startup serves as a vehicle toward that aim. Perhaps that’s becoming a billionaire at all costs like Bezos, but if not, be sure to take some advantage of the flexibility that being your boss uniquely affords.
What traits, qualities, and assumptions do you believe are most important to have before starting a business?
Alex Goldberg: Focus, persistence, and hard work are the cornerstones. If you apply all three for an extended period, it’s hard for me to see why your business won’t find success. About maintaining focus, an old boss used to tell me: “you can’t pop a balloon by poking it with three fingers at once, but the task is easily accomplished if you try with a single sharp needle.” Going at problems with your mental version of a single needle is critical. This often (counterintuitively) means saying no to many promising things so that you can maintain focus and consistency.
Persistence is important because you never know how close you are to succeeding. It could be just around the corner or a million miles away, but the only way to find out is to keep going. I’m often reminded of a cartoon drawing I saw a long time ago that illustrates this concept incredibly well. It shows a miner who turns back after tunneling deep into a mountain and getting within one pickax heave away from discovering gold. If only he’d kept going!
Working hard is a prerequisite to success. It’s true, many hard-working entrepreneurs fail to ever get a profitable business off the ground because the timing or external circumstances weren’t right, but I’m not sure there’s a single successful entrepreneur who didn’t work hard. This advice is so trite, it hardly bears mentioning, but just remember that time is your most precious resource.
How can aspiring leaders prepare themselves for the future challenges of entrepreneurship? Are there any books, websites, or even movies to learn from?
Alex Goldberg: I’ve been very inspired watching other entrepreneurs bootstrap, build, and launch projects in public. There’s a whole “build in public” movement happening that gives aspiring entrepreneurs front-row access to learn from others. I love indiehackers.com for this reason, as well as failory.com, a site dedicated to the stories of startup failures that are just as instructive. That said, I believe the best way to learn entrepreneurship is by doing, not reading, or watching. With so many low-code tools, free online courses/communities, and access to global networks of freelancers, there’s no excuse for diving in and building. I recommend finding a co-founder to build with as well, which will help you stay motivated. Overall, there’s never been an easier time to be an entrepreneur, which at least partially explains the ‘Great Resignation’ we’re witnessing among American workers.
You have shared quite a bit of your wisdom and our readers thank you for your generosity but would also love to know: If you could choose any job other than being an entrepreneur, what would it be?
Alex Goldberg: As a kid, I often dreamed of being a sports agent and representing top athletes. Perhaps I’m attracted to the profession because it’s extremely entrepreneurial, but the idea of courting high-end clientele and brokering their deals sounds like a fun rollercoaster. I enjoy relationship building, so I could do sow with world-class talent and score court-side tickets to top events, that sounds like a fun career.
Thank you so much for your time, I believe I speak for all of our readers when I say that this has been incredibly insightful. We do have one more question: If you could add anyone to Mount Rushmore, but not a politician, who would it be; why?
Alex Goldberg: Mark Zuckerberg.
(Just kidding. He sucks.)
I’d choose Martin Luther King Jr. for his leadership during the civil right movement in America, but if he’s too close to a politician, perhaps Kobe Bryant. He’s a childhood hero of mine whose infamous “Mamba Mentality” resonates with and motivates me to this day.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Alex Goldberg for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Alex Goldberg or his company, you can do it through his – Facebook
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