406: Why I Threw Away 300K And A Successful Engineering Career With Steve Chou

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You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. And today I’m doing a solo episode to tell you the story about why I finally decided to quit my 300k per year job and close the book on my 21 year engineering career. Now, ultimately it wasn’t about the money and I’ll share with you some important lessons that I learned along the way. By the way, if you like my solo episodes, I actually publish these types of episodes weekly.

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on my other podcast with my partner, Tony. Unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now, before we begin, I also want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I use for my e-commerce store.

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and it depend on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and this full revenue tracking on every email sent.

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Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list, which is why I focus a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS, or text message marketing, is already a top five revenue source for my e-commerce store.

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and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce, and e-commerce is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too, and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free.

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That’s P O S T S C R I P T dot I O slash Steve. Now on to the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. It’s story time today. Now I just got back from the Seller Summit, which is my annual e-commerce conference. And while I was there, I was surprised to find several people who were still working full-time or about to take on a full-time job when they were killing it online. And by killing it, I mean making at least a million dollars per year in e-commerce. And in some cases, I talked to a couple of people that were making several million dollars yet still working a full-time job.

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And in fact, I met this one girl who paid $200,000 for law school, got a prestigious offer to a top law firm, and was debating whether or not to take the job. Now, looking back at my own life, I actually continued working my day job for a long time before I quit. Now, if we rewind back to 2016, I was working full-time. I was running two seven-figure businesses, a podcast, a conference, which is the Seller Summit.

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and raising two young kids at the same time. And I remember being asked why I even bothered working when my businesses generated so much money. And at the time, I was making about $300,000 per year, and my businesses were generating 8X that number. And the truth is, is that I really love my job. I was a director of engineering, and I had the opportunity to work in a field that I loved with people who were way smarter than

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All my coworkers had PhDs from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, and Princeton, and it was literally a dream job for any engineer. But after working at the same company for 17 years, I finally decided to quit in 2016. Now the exact story of why and how I left was actually kind of funny. Technically I didn’t quit, but let me just set the scenario here. So my businesses were making all this money and

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I remember going up to my boss and I was like, hey, I’d like to drop down to four days. Is that okay? And she said, sure, let’s try four days, see if it works. And then I think we had that arrangement for several months and I was like, you know what? I kind of want to go down to three days. And so I talked to her and she was fine with it. And at the time I was getting full health insurance and everything. And so three days it was, I worked three days a week for, I don’t know, maybe another quarter. And then finally I was like, you know,

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I kinda wanna just go down to two days a week, is that okay? And she said that was fine. Oh, by the way, I just wanna let you know. So the reason I had so much flexibility was because I was one of three primary designers on the product that was making the majority of the sales for that company. Anyway, so three months pass and I go up to my boss and I say, hey, you is it cool if I just go down to one day a week? Like at two days, I can’t really do that much, but I know that if anything breaks,

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I can be here immediately to be called into a meeting. So, you know, just if you need me for a meeting, I’m happy to attend. I’ll be in the office during this time. If anything breaks, is that cool? And she said, great, go for it. Now I would have done this one day a week arrangement forever because it was awesome. I get, get to go in the office one day a week. Usually I think it was like on a Thursday, I get to see all my friends and coworkers that I’d worked with for 17 years. And at the same time I get a nice office and I can

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pretty much do whatever I want at work. Now fast forward, I think we had this arrangement for maybe six months or a year. And I think at that point, you know, our company had already gotten acquired and the big boss decided to leave to start a new company. And so this new guy comes in and he’s just kind of going down all the employees and, and, know, figuring out what everyone works on. Finally, he came up to me and he was like, would you mind just stopping by my office real quick? And I was like, sure. And so he sat me down.

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And he said, Hey Steve, I noticed you’re only here one day a week. What exactly do you do for this company? And at that point I, I really didn’t have anything to say. So I said, you know what? I’m going just be upfront with you. I don’t really do anything. However, if anything breaks, I’m here to fix it. Cause I know the product intimately, but the big guy wasn’t, you know, he wasn’t going to have all that. And so he basically said, Hey, either work at least four days a week or go and

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That’s actually when I finally decided to quit. So technically, I mean, I quit, it was my decision because I refused to work longer hours, but technically I could have stayed. Anyway, I count that as quitting. Okay, now here’s why, here’s some other reasons why I left. These were the main reasons why I left and some of the lessons that I learned in the process. Now, the funny thing is that most people don’t like their jobs, but I can honestly say that I love mine. All my colleagues and peers were all Stanford.

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or MIT PhDs and I was actually consistently challenged every single day. In fact, I’ve actually written at length in the past on why I never considered quitting. But a couple of epiphanies finally pushed me over the edge, aside from the fact that the big boss knew I wasn’t doing anything. Now for one thing, I’ve come to realize that my kids are getting older at an insanely fast pace and I don’t wanna miss any of it. Now right now, they’re at a golden age where they actually wanna hang out with me, this is back in 2016, and…

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I didn’t know how long that was gonna last. And in fact, my kids are teenagers now and it’s still lasting, but at the time I had no idea. And as they’ve gotten older, their activities have grown exponentially. And I found that I just wanted to be more involved. I coached some of their sports teams. I’m at every one of their practices. They’re taking private volleyball lessons. I’m there setting the ball for them at these practices. So bottom line, I started all my businesses, spend more time with family, and I didn’t want to lose track of that vision.

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but I must say that it’s been tough. Even though my businesses don’t require more than 20 hours per week to maintain, I am constantly bombarded with new opportunities that are difficult to turn down. So for example, I started my conference at Seller Summit the same year that I quit with my friend Tony on a whim because it was something that I’ve always wanted to do. Now I want to take a quick moment to reflect on some of the major lessons that I’ve learned leading up to this point. So if you’re listening still up until this point,

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Here are some words of wisdom from a random Chinese guy on the internet. Alright, so lesson number one, always have a backup plan. Even if you’re happy with your job and the current status quo, you should always have a backup plan because you never know when your priorities are going to change. Now, for those 17 years that I worked, I was very happy in my day job. And I could have realistically worked there for another 17 years, but my kids completely changed the picture. Now, if you want to be in control of your own destiny, if you want flexibility in your life, then you need

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to have an alternative income on the side. No excuses. There are 168 hours in a week. You spend roughly 56 hours sleeping, 40 hours working, 36 hours eating and showering and taking care of yourself, which still leaves 36 hours to do whatever you want. So you got to take advantage of this time to plant your seeds of wealth before you need the money. Now I started mywifequitterjob.com six years before I needed the income.

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My wife and I started BumbleBLinens.com a full year before my wife knew she was going to quit. Lesson number two, anything that is easy will not lead to long-term success. Now, after running my blog for the past seven years, I’ve encountered so many people who just want to get rich quick. And their first question to me is always, hey Steve, what’s the fastest way to make money? What’s the easiest way to start? Now, unfortunately, this is the absolute wrong way to approach a business. In fact,

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I would go as far as to say that the easier your path, the less sustainable your business model. So let’s take blogging as an example. There are hundreds of thousands of people who started blogs and search for great riches because it’s so easy to do and launch. All you need is three bucks a month and you can launch your own WordPress site. But because the barriers to entry are so low, there is a ridiculous amount of competition and you have to do something extraordinary to stand out in the crowd. Now, the people who succeed at blogging today,

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are those who either started when it was much less saturated or those who are doing something pretty interesting that makes them stand out. And the world of e-commerce is no different. Right now, Amazon is still hot, but I give it a couple more years until the platform becomes completely saturated with random sellers. Now you can either hop on right now or you can wait until it gets much more difficult. When my wife and I started Bumblebee Linens, we made a commitment to sell products that were a pain in the butt to fulfill.

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Doing custom embroidery sucks. Not only are our embroidery machines expensive, but it also requires some expertise to stitch out embroidery designs in volume. But custom embroidery on demand is a value add that allows our little shop to stand out because no one wants to go through the trouble of stitching custom designs. The next lesson is that design matters. Now the design of your website matters. And I was actually just reminded of this important lesson when my mastermind colleagues ripped my site to shreds. Now if you have your own brand,

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and web property, you cannot neglect the aesthetics and the usability of your site or the packaging of your product. Customers who shop in your store evaluate whether they’re going to buy from you within the first five seconds. So you have to make those seconds count. By having an attractive and usable design, you can drastically increase the likelihood of a purchase. Now, if you haven’t read my post on this, I wrote a really long article about how my last site redesign resulted in a 42 % increase in conversions.

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And I have similar case studies where I just made some slight tweaks to a few things and drastically increased sales. So check it out. Next piece of advice is never call yourself an expert. Now, when I first launched my e-commerce course back in 2011, everyone started calling me an e-commerce guru and I kind of fell into the trap of playing that role. But here’s the thing, as soon as you start believing that you’re an expert in your field, your mind instantly shuts off.

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All of a sudden, you find yourself less willing to learn new things because you feel like you know everything already. And what’s worse, being an expert makes it difficult to openly admit that you don’t know something because everybody expects you to be master in your field. So here’s my advice, even if you are awesome at what you do, tell yourself that you don’t know everything that there is to know about a subject. You can learn from everyone regardless of skill level. You’re just a student, just like everyone else.

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and you must keep up with the latest trends in order to stay relevant. Now, if you tell yourself these things every day, you will keep an open mind and constantly learn. I will never call myself an expert or a guru.

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If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

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Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

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And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a $100 discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. Now back to the show.

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Next piece of advice, do something different and better, but do not follow. Now, while I love the opportunities that Amazon has presented to us in the e-commerce space, I’ve actually found that there are way too many people out there just throwing up me two products online. Go on Alibaba, find a product that has a decent profit margin, import the product, you know, as is with no changes, list the product on Amazon and make short term money. Now, while this formula does in fact work sometimes, it’s definitely not a good longterm strategy.

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If you sell stuff and don’t make it your own, it’s just a matter of time until someone will find the exact same supplier and copy you. So instead of throwing up a bunch of easy to source products, take some time to design a better mousetrap. Take some time to create your own design or provide a value add that no one else is providing. Do something different and don’t follow everyone else. Now the same principle holds true with all the how-to advice on selling online that is circulating around the web. If you follow

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the same rules for niche research and sourcing as everyone else, you’ll end up selling the exact same products as everyone else. So take all the guidelines and strategies that you learned online with a grain of salt and find your own path. Next lesson is the best way to succeed is to care about others. Now, I want to emphasize that it’s impossible to run a successful business in a vacuum. Your ability to achieve your goals will be largely dependent on your network and your ability to work with others.

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And this is why I’m such a huge believer in attending conferences. Now, even though I have two kids and run four businesses, I still find the time to travel to four to five events every single year. Now, none of my business would have taken off had I not put myself out there to meet other like-minded entrepreneurs. But establishing new contacts at networking events is only half the battle. If you truly want to foster lifelong relationships with your peers, you have to care. Now, what does it mean to care? It means being willing to help

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without expecting anything in return. It means trying to get to know someone personally instead of treating them as a resource. It means delving deeply beneath the surface of small talk. If you want to grow your business, start by helping others first and let reciprocity take its course. Incidentally, if you haven’t listened to my episode with Robert Cialdini, make sure you catch that episode on the podcast. Next lesson, be bold and amazing and people will seek you out.

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Now I spent the first half of my blogging career as a complete unknown and no one gave me the time of day. And why is that? It’s because my content was pretty bad and I focused on quantity over quality. I wrote middle of the road pieces that regurgitated what other entrepreneurial blogs were already talking about. In fact, it wasn’t until I started writing more personal posts that people started taking notice. I started expressing my opinions more and incorporating my personality into my writing. And in short,

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I basically stopped caring about pleasing everybody and just let the words flow. So today I just try to be different and write whatever comes to my mind instead of the watered down fluff that a lot of blogs put out. And whenever I reach out to influencers with larger audiences than my own, I usually go out and take a couple risks. So for example, here’s an email that I wrote to Tony Horton of P90X to make myself more memorable. By the way, if you aren’t familiar with Tony,

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He actually created P90X, which is one of the best selling workout videos of all time. So here’s what I wrote. said, hey, awesome interview today. Unfortunately, as a podcaster, I am forced to perform extensive due diligence on all my guests. And here’s what I uncovered after just a tiny bit of Googling. Shawna and Tony, you were incredible in helping to arrange the interview, but I’m not sure that I can air the episode in light of the following scandal. And then I wrote this press release. Tony Horton caught in junk food scandal, fitness career over.

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And I had these Photoshop images of Tony like eating French fries and just eating really poorly. So Tony was photographed chopping down a McDonald’s French fries in a room littered with dirty junk food wrappers, judging by the amount of trash in the room. Experts estimate that he’d been consuming filth for approximately four weeks. First, I gave up carbs and I stopped eating sugar and enough was enough. Tony was quoted as saying as he shoved a handful of fries into his mouth. His fitness career over.

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Tony was last spotted trying out for the Chippendales Senior Citizen Tour and then I photoshopped him with a bunch of Chippendales with gray hair. Maintaining an impeccable body and being a role model for men’s health was too much for Tony, which just goes to show that even well-known fitness stars don’t always have their act together. Now, I wrote all this and fortunately the two of them had a really good sense of humor, but the moral of the story is to be bold, stand out, and don’t fear the consequences. Let your personality shine and stop.

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playing it safe. By the way, I just want to tell a quick story. When I was at my job, I rarely got promoted because I never really spoke up on my mind. I was really just focused on being a good employee. But once my businesses made all this money, I basically stopped caring about the job. And so I started being really bold in meetings at work. So for example, like the big boss will be presenting something. I would say something like, I don’t like that idea. I don’t think it’s going to work.

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I think we should do something different. And I remember people going to me and say, Hey, you realize that’s a big boss up there, right? And at that point, I didn’t care about the job anymore. So I just spoke my mind. And the funniest thing happened. Once I started speaking my mind, I started getting promoted. Okay. So it’s counterintuitive, but by just speaking your mind and being bold, good things are going to happen. Okay. Next lesson, the difference between success and failure is just a decision to keep trying.

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Now, this last lesson is definitely cliche, but it’s probably the most important lesson of them all. When I first started my blog, I had zero readers for over a year. In fact, it took me well over three years to generate any sort of meaningful income. If I had given up early, I would have missed out on making a million dollars every year in profit. When I first launched my online store, I had very little sales for the first month, and my wife and I wanted to give up and call it a day. But we kept with it.

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and managed to replace my wife’s salary in a single year. Now the key to success in business is not to give up at the first roadblock or the second or the third. You want to give yourself a three to five year time horizon and understand that it’s a marathon and not a sprint. Hope you enjoy that episode. Now if you’re still working full time, if you have kids and your job is not that flexible, you should start some sort of side hustle now.

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Time is precious and the time that you spend with your kids is infinitely more valuable than time spent with limited upside. For more information about this episode, go to mywebcoderjob.com slash episode 406. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash d.

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That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-I-P-T.I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for eCommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog.

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And if you are interested in starting your own side hustle or e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.