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LinkedIn Posts

Here are some posts I've written.

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Davis Clute

CEO + Co-Founder at Hiccapop | Teacher | Author | Forbes 30 Under 30

People have asked if I’m scared of Amazon stealing Hiccapop’s products. I’ve never lost even a minute of sleep over it. If the customer can get a better value somewhere else, they should. We only win when our customers win. Whenever I hear people blaming competition, all I can think is: “OK, sounds like you’re going to be the first person on the chopping block.” They say most businesses die from suicide, not homicide.

Let’s say the government wants to protect me and my employees, and so bans Amazon from undercutting us with their own bed rails. Instead of buying a bed rail at $20 from Amazon, the customer now has to buy it at $30 from us. But the customer would have simply spent the extra $10 buying a book for his daughter. You helped one business (Hiccapop) at the expense of another (Bookstore) -- no new wealth was created. Just a rearrangement.

In fact, there was actually a net loss: $10 was diverted away from its highest and best use. Society lost a turn, so to speak. It was good for those on the inside looking out (Hiccapop), but bad for those on the outside looking in (Bookstore + Parent). You see that my business was protected, but you don’t see the bookstore owner who never made a sale. The author who never received a royalty. The daughter who never read a book.

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Davis Clute

CEO + Co-Founder at Hiccapop | Teacher | Author | Forbes 30 Under 30

I just got a haircut, and my hairdresser said it took her 1 year and ~$10k to get her cosmetology license. A cosmetology license allows her to do haircuts, manicures/pedicures, and facials. She needed 1,600 hours of schooling in order to be approved to cut hair. She also had to take a written test which was extremely hard because it was only her 2nd year in the country, and her English was not good. Cosmetology licenses are awarded by the California Board of Barbering and Cosmetology, which is a subdivision of the California Department of Consumer Affairs.

Everything has a cost — including the quixotic quest to protect consumers. We’re protecting consumers from dangerous haircuts at the cost of crippling debt, lost earnings, and “crowding out” new income opportunities. These costs end up falling hardest on new entrants who are typically immigrants or low-income groups.

If I were a mayor/governor, de-regulating this industry would be an easy social welfare program. These regulations are horribly “discriminatory” against groups at the bottom of the economic ladder. There is no way the benefits of this regulation are worth its costs.

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Davis Clute

CEO + Co-Founder at Hiccapop | Teacher | Author | Forbes 30 Under 30

I think hard work is massively overrated in Entrepreneurship - there’s nothing sexy about swimming hard in the wrong pool. You want a think-ethic, not a work-ethic. If I worked a 16 hour day, I wouldn’t brag about it - I’d be embarrassed. I also don’t think you can do both: either you’re chopping the tree, or you’re sharpening the axe. Take pride in preventing fires, not fighting them.

6+ months ago a distributor from Israel asked if we wanted to expand Hiccapop into his country, and my answer was almost immediately ‘No.’ You might say it’s easy profit -- what’s the downside? But costs can be non-obvious: you increase revenue by 10%, but increase operational complexity by 25% (see below). In any case, the option won't disappear soon - Israel isn’t going anywhere. Once you’ve caught a wave, don’t worry about doing backflips. Just keep both feet solidly planted on the surfboard. Put differently: To finish first, first you have to finish.

If your car started getting 5 miles per gallon, you wouldn’t build a larger fuel tank...you’d fix the engine. But I constantly see this dynamic with Entrepreneurs. If you’re ever throwing man-hours at a problem, you need to take a break and reflect on what’s going on. Motion isn’t always progress.

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Davis Clute

CEO + Co-Founder at Hiccapop | Teacher | Author | Forbes 30 Under 30

“Davis, how did you make 30 Under 30?” — Practically, a friend nominated me out of the blue. He’s a few years younger than me, and we always talk about business, finance, etc. I think he was the only person who nominated me. From there, they reached out & sent me a questionnaire. Then we had a 20 minute phone call interview. I figured I had a decent chance at that point because Hiccapop has good revenue/profit figures, and we haven’t raised any outside venture capital. I thought my story was unique.

Broadly, I made the list because I focused more on the process (learning business fundamentals) than the accolades (Forbes). I can’t directly control whether or not I make 30u30 - but I can directly control how I run my business on a day-to-day basis. Don’t spend time trying to hack your way onto the list...spend your time focusing on the things that will make your selection inevitable.

Forbes 30u30 actually has 20 categories...I was in the Retail/Ecommerce category. So it’s more like 600u30. But still not bad :) — Finally, thank you to Forbes & the many wonderful people in my life.

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Davis Clute

CEO + Co-Founder at Hiccapop | Teacher | Author | Forbes 30 Under 30

We don’t manufacture in the USA because customers don’t want us to. I haven’t seen evidence that customers want to pay 50%+ more for basic consumer goods produced in the USA. Some people think the quality in USA is much better than China's, but customers are smart and know a bad deal when they see one. A 5% increase in “quality” is not worth a 50% increase in cost on a simple product. If the increase in quality actually compensated for the increase in cost, the market would have corrected itself already. Businesses pay attention to what customers actually do, not what they say they’ll do.

Manufacturing didn’t move to Asia simply because of their cheap labor. It’s just as accurate to say manufacturing moved because American wages were pushed up by American businesses competing against each other for workers. Put differently, American business itself pushed manufacturing out because it had a higher and better use for those labor hours. The opportunity cost of those man-hours got higher.

At its core, people who advocate for manufacturing to remain in the USA predict that those workers are incapable of adapting & reinventing themselves. This patronizing prediction won’t age well, and neither will all predictions betting on the inflexibility & helplessness of human beings.

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Davis Clute

CEO + Co-Founder at Hiccapop | Teacher | Author | Forbes 30 Under 30

People complain musicians get ripped off by Spotify, but Spotify itself doesn’t make money. It’s unprofitable. More subtly, artists aren't paid well because the 1,000,000th musician doesn't create much value. In a very real sense, there is no money to give them. You’d pay $1,000 / hour for great legal advice, but you wouldn’t pay $10 for a ditch you don’t need. You have the right to weave baskets all day, but you can’t force people to pay their hard-earned money for it.

Say a garbageman gets paid $100k / year, and a musician earns $20k. You & I (“society”) have collectively decided we need a new trash collector 5x more than we need a new musician. Prices are a veil over the real economy. When you & I drive to LA, we are telling the steel industry to divert steel from 747s to Priuses. We are causing layoffs at Boeing, and hiring at Toyota.

Spotify can’t pay artists money it doesn’t have. There are many musicians who should give up & collect trash. Musicians only get paid $500 per 100,000 streams. But if they truly created more than $500 in value, then a competing music entrepreneur would hire them away by paying slightly more…and still make tons of money. If there’s anybody “screwing” the artists, it’s you & me. Prices are merely the messenger.

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Davis Clute

CEO + Co-Founder at Hiccapop | Teacher | Author | Forbes 30 Under 30

I was recently humbled while waiting for a delayed flight in the Austin airport. I was thinking about a particular biz idea for the thousandth time: my idea was to create a plug-in that tracks and visualizes the articles I read on Wikipedia. I love reading Wikipedia, clicking on links, and going down the rabbit hole — and I wanted to see the pattern of my meandering learning. I was planning to hire a developer, build a mobile and desktop version, etc. Because the idea would take me a couple months to finish, it was safely far away enough to fall in love with. 

Then I thought: Why not release it today? I could manually track the articles I read in my notes app. It’s a workaround, but it allows me to test-drive my idea today - not in 2 months. It was a B+ product with an A+ time frame. 

Predictably, I immediately realized my idea was lame. Once it was real, I realized I didn’t care about tracking my reading history. It struck me as something I would check twice and never look at again. 

It was deflating to my ego, but it's an important lesson for all entrepreneurs…especially new ones. There is always a faster, cheaper, and simpler way to test your idea.

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