An interview with Cody Min, Founder of Astronaut Monestary

"I am not anti-venture, but I am anti-thinking that it is the only way to build a business"

“All our classmates at Penn were starting startups, and they were all able to raise an absurd amount of money, because that was the hot thing to do. And so people would ask me, oh, you're starting this business, are you raising venture?”

This is a quote from Cody Min, a dear friend of mine and founder of Astronaut Monastery, a creative brand agency in New York City.

From the ripe age of 22 years old, Cody decided he wanted to build his own company, and most importantly, to do it on his own terms without outside capital.

Below Cody and I share a candid discussion about the his journey from closing contracts in his tiny apartment to building the pre-eminent creative shop in New York City today.

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Why did you decide to bootstrap your business?

C: Beliefs are a big part of it and the reason I have continued to do it this way. I think the real reason why I started it that way was just, that was all I knew.

All our classmates at Penn were starting startups, and they were all able to raise an absurd amounts of money, because that was the hot thing to do. And so people would ask me, oh, you're starting this business, are you raising venture? And I didn't know what that meant. So I was just like, no, but I’m not sure I even knew what “raising venture” meant.

To take a step back, ultimately if you want to raise a venture that means you are risking that you’ll never make money because it's hard to get to a billion dollar outcome. I am not anti-venture, but I am anti-thinking that it is the only way to build a business.

A lot of founders also do it because they want to have this globalized impact. They need massive amounts of capital in order to hit every single customer in the world. At the end of the day, I don't care if people know who I am. I want to have an impact in the sense that I can affect other people, but I don't need to bring every single person in the world to use my product.

You probably will have a huge impact over the course of your lifetime, but I find it kind of crazy that people demand that within such a short time frame of five to seven years.

C: And also, how much money do you really want? Most people are starting these businesses, they're leaving a cushy corporate job to start this business. A lot of founders don’t hit the same paycheck for years, if ever.

When I’m advising new bootstrapped founders and they’re trying to figure out early revenue targets, I like to keep it pretty simple. It’s really driven by – what are you getting paid right now at your corporate job you’re about to leave?

And then, how many customers do you need to get and how much you have to charge those customers in order to get your current salary? If you're making 200 grand right now, you only need 20 customers profiting $10k each. You do the math pretty quickly. It's pretty easy to hit that.

When you talk about it that way, it does sound easy. But for a lot of people, myself included, it does still feel much less clear than if you just raise money.

What kind of trade-offs did you face in the beginning doing it this way?

C: I don't think I had any directions. I literally did not know how to use excel. I didn’t go to Wharton and I’d never taken a management class. Literally all I did was just like look at my peers. This guy graduated from Yale. He seems smart. He's working at Bain. I looked up how much people from Bain made.

I was like, OK, if I can target that, first year, I should be okay. I'm not saying this is how I should run a business for the rest of my life, but in my first year, maybe I should just do that. And then I hit it. And then I thought, maybe I should just up the threshold.

For people who are starting their own companies, who have come out of these cushy jobs, how should they think about time to get to that position?

C: It's hard. I mean, I think…

Or how did you think about it? Were you ever like, if I don't get it by this point, then I'm going to do something else?

C: It's kind of funny. I never really thought of anything else. I'm just going to keep doing this. I will say, because my business income was tied to my personal income, I was not as willing to reinvest as much money back into the business as I probably should have.

If it's literally your own money, you think, I can either use this and buy a bottle of wine or I can put this money in the business. It's a circle. You ultimately have to buy things for yourself. And you also have to enjoy the fruits of your labor. And that's really hard to separate.

How did you deal with being a solo founder?

C: My room was tiny because I couldn't afford a lot. I could touch my desk from my bed. I'd wake up, immediately go to my computer, check email, spread out work, and make coffee. And I would just sit in this tiny cube, literally for 12 hours straight, just grinding.

Definitely my mental health suffered.

I think that’s one thing I’d probably recommend if you’re going to run a business on your own. I wish I'd gotten a separate workspace. I really wasn't even willing to spend the money for a cheap WeWork.

That's also why I operated as a solo entrepreneur. I was like, I can do all this on my own. I think if I had met a creative partner from day one, I would have considered partnering with them. I'm really glad that I did it solo, but it was really lonely. And until I had a really solid full-time team, It was extremely lonely and extremely stressful.

I come from this world of building venture capital businesses where there's a bunch of investors trying to support founders. Who do you go to about big picture stuff?

C: I'm part of a faith-based coaching group. So there's an executive coach I work with. There's 10 or 11 other guys in the group. I’m the youngest in the group, and I am also probably one of the smaller businesses.

It's really helpful to see seasoned people who are in their 40s and 50s who are running great businesses that also did not raise any money.

What's the light at the end of the tunnel of all of this?

C: I think most people should get into the cash flow business for lifestyle reasons. And then you do hit an inflection point. And you basically have to make a decision. Am I going to continue to run this as a lifestyle business? Or do I really want to scale this enterprise?

The light at the end of the tunnel is that you can hit this inflection point and then just stop. You can just continue chugging this business along and not care about scaling it further. Or you can try to go big.

We did make the decision to go full force and scale this business, rather than to sit back. In our case, we want to be the best creative shop in New York, maybe the United States, maybe the entire world.

How do you think about scaling and removing yourself from the business?

C: It's funny because I think when you scale your business, in theory you have more time but actually you can lose a lot of your time. Service based businesses are very hard. Because you're a salesperson, you're the brand, right?

I'm out of the majority of daily client conversations, which is good, but I'm still in too many, that's why I'm making those hires, taking myself fully out of it. But, I always think about legendary entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, who were deciding the most asinine details and seemingly in the weeds, and they ran really phenomenal businesses.

Maybe the beauty of building this way, is that it’s all your choice.

C: If you think about venture capital, they are often just looking at a standard model. Here's the playbook, we apply the playbook, and we hope that one of them makes it. As a founder, it can be difficult to decide your own way, because venture pattern recognition will push against deviations.

If you own your business, it's your personal decision. It’s your life. You can have a lot more control over those decisions. I’ve had a kid this year, so I'm probably not going to be able to do certain things that I wanted to do last year. I do think it is the ideal way to run a business as a solo owner.

Yeah, it’s like you get to decide how to run your business. It’s based off your needs and desires. You get to say, instead of trying to grow 10x, maybe we're not going do that.

It feels freeing in a way.

C: 100%. Its amazing.