"But that's the beauty of entrepreneurship – making those kinds of mistakes is exactly how you learn and continue to improve as you work toward your goals"
Meet Jonathan Gans, the Co-Founder & CEO of Kahana, a content management platform for creators. Kahana’s goal is to make life easier for creators; the platform encourages creators to write consistently, build portfolios, and create content.
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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.
Jonathan Gans: First of all, thanks so much to ValiantCEO for the opportunity to speak with you and share my story. My name is Jonathan Gans, and I’m the CEO of Kahana. I originally co-founded Kahana with my freshman year roommate from Duke in 2019. We met our third co-founder through cofounderslab.com (a.k.a. the Hinge for finding a co-founder) in early 2020, and we’ve been working together to build Kahana ever since.
You are a successful entrepreneur, so we’d like your view point, do you believe entrepreneurs are born or made? Explain.
Jonathan Gans: That’s a great question. I appreciate the compliment, but definitely wouldn’t classify myself as a ‘successful’ entrepreneur – we are always striving to improve and get 1% better every day! To answer the question, I think it’s a bit of both. There’s certainly a lot of luck involved, from being in the right place at the right time to meeting people who can help and provide support. Your experiences and the people around you definitely help shape you into what you ultimately pursue.
If you were asked to describe yourself as an entrepreneur in a few words, what would you say?
Jonathan Gans: Satisfied but never satisfied – I try my best to appreciate where I am at in my journey at any given point in time, but am always striving to improve and continue to work toward accomplishing my goals.
Tell us about what your company does and how did it change over the years?
Jonathan Gans: Our company has certainly changed over the years, but our mission has stayed the same – we are all about serving creators. We build solutions that make life easier for creators, enhance creative flow, and streamline the process of creating content. After our founding team joined forces in 2020, we got to work right away on building out a prototype. We first released it in the summer of 2020, and received some great feedback, and were able to generate some initial sales. Once we felt confident in what we had to do in the next iteration, we closed off access to the prototype to focus on developing the beta, which we released earlier this year. Now, we’re in the process of continuing to grow the user base, build out the platform, and listen to our customers’ feedback.
In 2020, a large part of my day-to-day was focused on simply getting the product off the ground and getting it to our first users. Now that our marketing is in a more mature position and the platform has evolved, my day-to-day is more consumed with speaking to customers to hear feedback and speaking with thought leaders in the industry to continue to find individuals and teams who the platform can help.
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?
Jonathan Gans: I think there are a few factors to consider. One assumption, which I think is really important, is to assume that you’re going to succeed. Entrepreneurship can be a challenging and often lonely road to take, and having a positive outlook throughout your experience really helps. Another big assumption is that, no matter what your level of experience, you can start a business.
I’ve heard people say too many times that they can’t start a business because they’re too risk-averse or that they don’t have the “entrepreneurial spirit”, but in reality, that is simply a mental hurdle that needs to be overcome. The best way to gain experience is by pursuing this kind of goal. Another assumption – which ties into this last one – is that you can assume people who were previously in your shoes will be extremely generous and willing to help you. None of what we’ve accomplished thus far would be possible without our advisors, friends, and support systems, and that’s ok – you SHOULD ask others for help because it will go a long way and they’ll be more than willing to give it.
Did you make any wrong assumptions before starting a business that you ended up paying dearly for?
Jonathan Gans: There are definitely mistakes that we’ve made, and so many things that we could have done better in retrospect. But that’s the beauty of entrepreneurship – making those kinds of mistakes is exactly how you learn and continue to improve as you work toward your goals. Part of your job as an entrepreneur is to make assumptions, test them, learn, and iterate quickly. And that’s why I actually don’t think you can really have a “wrong” assumption: your job is to test many different assumptions and find the right one. So any “wrong” assumption that you make is really just a step closer toward the “right” one.
If you could go back in time to when you first started your business, what advice would you give yourself and why? Explain.
Jonathan Gans: Start as soon as possible. When I look at my journey over the past few years, one thing I could’ve done differently is to simply start sooner. There was a window of time where I had to convince myself that I could do it, and I’d tell myself to let go of any doubts and just get started.
The sooner you start to set aside time to work on your business outside of school or your day job, the more of an advantage your business will have – you’ll be able to go to market faster, learn what doesn’t work quicker, and ultimately be in a better position to succeed.
What is the worst advice you received regarding running a business and what lesson would you like others to learn from your experience?
Jonathan Gans: The worst piece of advice I’ve received is that you can’t start a business with your best friend – I would in fact argue that it’s BETTER to start a business with your best friend. I actually wrote an article on LinkedIn about this topic. When you’re starting a business with your best friend, you already have an extremely strong foundation of trust, know that you can handle heated discussions, have a buddy to lift you up and get through tougher times – all of which are extremely important to finding success as an entrepreneur.
The lesson to take from this is to ultimately trust your gut. It’s definitely great to get as much input and advice as possible to help you make decisions, but at the end of the day, nobody knows what is best for you and your business more than you do. For example, you certainly shouldn’t just start a business with someone BECAUSE they are your best friend, but it shouldn’t deter you from doing so.
In your opinion, how has COVID-19 changed what entrepreneurs should assume before starting a business? What hasn’t changed?
Jonathan Gans: In my opinion, at the core, very little has changed – the same challenges still exist.
A couple of main things have changed, however. First, of course, remote work is now completely normalized, which can change the dynamic of how people collaborate. Another factor to consider is that it could become more difficult to start a business that relies on physical interactions.
What is a common myth about entrepreneurship that aspiring entrepreneurs and would-be business owners believe in? What advice would you give them?
Jonathan Gans: A common myth about entrepreneurship that I’ve seen some aspiring entrepreneurs and would-be-business owners is that there is a right place or time to start a business, and in my opinion, that’s simply not true. As I’ve mentioned earlier, the sooner you start, the better, so the best time to start a business was yesterday. It can be tempting to wait for a specific point in your life when you think that you’ll feel more comfortable, but the truth is, that point doesn’t really exist. As an entrepreneur, you do not wait for opportunities to come to you – you have to have the mindset that you create opportunities.
What traits, qualities, and assumptions do you believe are most important to have before starting a business?
Jonathan Gans: There are a few key traits and qualities to have before starting a business:
- Willpower
Ultimately, as an entrepreneur, your ability to succeed is completely contingent on willpower. This is something that we learned from our advisor, Hugh Molotsi, and has been instrumental in everything we’ve done thus far.
- Fail fast
As an entrepreneur, you need to have the ability to iterate and pivot very quickly – spending too much time on something that isn’t working can set you back and hinder your ability to find success. You’re undoubtedly going to make mistakes because that’s how you learn, but the key is to learn quickly and make the right adjustments.
- Access to capital.
The reality of starting a business is that you need capital to stay afloat, and it is important to find ways to get pre-seed capital to enable you to cover your costs.
How can aspiring leaders prepare themselves for the future challenges of entrepreneurship? Are there any books, websites, or even movies to learn from?
Jonathan Gans: One of our partners, Carl Nordgren, always says that the future is uncertain and that the only real way to prepare for that uncertainty is to improve your creative and entrepreneurial skills so that you are better equipped to face the uncertainty and find success. I highly recommend checking out his latest book, Becoming a Creative Genius {again}.
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?
Jonathan Gans: I truly can’t imagine not pursuing entrepreneurship, but I would be lying if I told you I wasn’t crazy about fantasy football. I could definitely be convinced to join ESPN”s fantasy football podcast and talk fantasy nonstop.
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?
Jonathan Gans: Thank you so much for having me! This has been an absolute blast, and I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you. I think I’ve gotta go with Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. by a landslide (a little politics jargon). He lived his entire life to make the world a better place, and his teachings have changed lives around the world.
Larry Yatch, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Jonathan Gans 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 Jonathan Gans or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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