An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Hire people better than you: I know my strengths and weaknesses. If I have a weakness I am not interested in improving, I’ll hire someone for this task. For example, I am terrible at creating graphics and have little interest in this topic, so I hired an excellent designer to help with this.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Christopher Liew.

Christopher Liew is the Founder of Wealthawesome.com, where he shares tips on money, travel, career, and business. Chris quit a lucrative 9–5 career in 2019 to start a web publishing business and travel the world. He also consults on Fintech product releases.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit, even from a young age. I started my first “business” at the age of eight, by selling candy and chocolates to my classmates in the third grade. I was fortunate to have parents who taught me the importance of money at a very young age. I had a successful career in finance, but I wasn’t satisfied with a desk job. I decided to start an online web publishing and consulting business so I could work from anywhere.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago” — Warren Buffett.

I love this quote because it has a lot of layers to it. The someone who plants the tree could have been your mentor, your parents, or yourself. You can plant a tree for someone else, whether it’s a friend, child, or loved one. Whenever I need to motivate myself, I think that by working hard and planting a tree, I’ll be sitting in the shade in the future.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

The Four-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss had a profound effect on me. I read it during a period of my life when I wasn’t happy about my career. It showed me that there were options other than working a 9–5 desk job.

It opened my eyes to the possibilities of the types of things I could do, without having to be pigeonholed into a specific career path. He speaks about launching online businesses, and traveling around the world and working. I have realized this dream about six years after I first read the book, and now have a thriving online business with unlimited traveling freedom.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?

I’ve done consulting for Fintech companies in the past, so my experience is mostly in software products. I find people really struggle with understanding the tech side if they come from mostly a business background. They also underestimate the cost and complexity of bringing a product to market successfully.

For software products, to overcome the problem I would recommend planning out and budgeting every stage of your operations very carefully, and to get tech consulting help if you are weak in that area. Consider joining an accelerator program also, that can really kick start your project and put you in contact with people that can help build your product.

Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?

It is extremely difficult to come up with an entirely original idea. The good thing is, you don’t have to! Whenever I’m doing research on a new project or product, I see if there are any competitors in the space I’m targeting, usually from an initial internet search.

There always are competitors, so I guess I’ve never come up with an entirely unique idea before. I then see if I can improve on the execution, or target a different niche then the competitors, or come up with a better product. You don’t have to invent a new mousetrap, just make a better one.

For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.

For software products, here are the steps:

1. Come up with the idea
2. Plan out how you will build the product
3. Source a “manufacturer,” or in this case a product team such as an app or web developer, and graphic designer.
4. Build the product
5. File a patent or trademark the product
6. Setup your distribution channel — for a web app, setup a webpage, for a phone app it would be the Apple App store or Google Play store.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)

1. Planning becomes procrastination after awhile: I took a long time to land my first few clients, because I wanted to craft the perfect emails and responses. It’s good to know when to stop planning, and start doing.
2. Saying no: When you start to see success, you’ll get approached a lot with ideas on how to improve your business. Learn what to say no to.
3. Avoid the shiny object syndrome: I like to chase new ideas, which is ok, but sometimes I would let it interfere with my main business operations. Make sure your biggest money-makers are running smoothly before pursuing the next hot thing.
4. Hire people better than you: I know my strengths and weaknesses. If I have a weakness I am not interested in improving, I’ll hire someone for this task. For example, I am terrible at creating graphics and have little interest in this topic, so I hired an excellent designer to help with this.
5. Just start: I tend to overanalyze. I build detailed spreadsheets, come up with complex scenarios, and talk myself out of a lot of good ideas this way. These days, I like to just start which gives me data points that I can use to improve for the future.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

1. Market research: See if there is a demand for your product. You can run surveys, ask your own personal audience, or buy some research reports.
2. Test the concept on a small-scale: If there’s a cheap and easy way you can test out the business before pushing all your chips into the middle, then try it out. It gives you more data points to work with.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

If you’re starting out, I would say to try other ways to network first before hiring a consultant. Keep costs low and always remember that cash is king. Reach out to people in the industry that you’re trying to invent a product for. There are all sorts of ways to do this without being in person. LinkedIn outreach or even cold emailing can yield a lot of success.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

I think both are valid approaches and there are countless examples of success with both approaches. It’s unique to each situation. I would say if you can make your product come to fruition by only bootstrapping, then go that route. You get to maintain control and all of the equity. If it’s a larger project and you need more expertise and capital, then you’ll need to go the VC route.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

I’ve hired over 20 people and they are my first and foremost priority. It’s a humbling experience when people depend on you and the success of your business for their livelihood. After a few more years of operating my business, I’d like to focus on more charity work in the future.

You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

So many people are miserable at their jobs. I feel that I’ve inspired many through my writing and content to pursue a career path that provides them with more satisfaction. Whether it’s just earning more money, or wanting to travel and work around the world, I’ve helped many people learn about that path.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

Seth Godin is one of my favorite writers. He has a fascinating almost Zen-like approach to business. I’ve read most of his books and would love to be able to chat with him about his insights.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

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Making Something From Nothing: Christopher Liew of Wealth Awesome On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.