The Roller Coaster of Entrepreneurship: Overcoming Burnout with Austin Armstrong

Jim Burgoon: 00:00:01

Welcome to Grace and the Grind, the podcast where we dive deep into the journeys of heart centered and purpose driven leaders and entrepreneurs.

We'll pull back the curtain to explore the stories behind success, how people have navigated the toughest challenges, overcome their obstacles, and found their way through the grind to build something truly impactful. Whether you're a Christian leader looking for guidance or an entrepreneur seeking inspiration, we're here to equip and encourage you on your journey.

So let's get started and find the grace within the grind. This is Grace in the Grind. And now your host, Jim Burgoon.

Host: 00:00:42

Welcome to Grace in the Grind where we're here to empower, to equip, and to encourage Christians in business and Christian entrepreneurs to do all that God has called them to. And today, a new friend of mine is on the show, Austin Armstrong from Syllabi IO. Austin, welcome to the show.

Austin Armstrong: 00:00:56

Jim, thank you so much for having me on. It's truly an honor and a privilege and I'm excited for a fun conversation.

Host: 00:01:02

Same here. So why don't we do this? Let's take the next minute to really introduce the audience who you are and what you do.

Austin Armstrong: 00:01:08

Yeah.

So I have been doing social media marketing for 20 years now, which is crazy to think about and say, but I was fortunate enough to find what my calling in life is very early.

So When I was 14 years old, I got started on MySpace and I very quickly learned how to grow a large following and build little businesses around that and turn it into multiple streams of income. And I really just got addicted to that process and I've been more or less doing it ever since.

Now fast forward to about 11 years ago is where I really started my professional journey in this space in video marketing for social media.

I had moved out to California and I started as an unpaid intern at a video marketing company that specialized in addiction treatment marketing and behavioral health marketing. And I worked my way up from being an unpaid intern to a paid intern to a part time employee to a full time employee.

That led me to working at several drug and alcohol treatment centers and different mental health nonprofits. And then six years ago I started my first company with my boss, which was really cool.

At that same company that I worked my way up in, he was my mentor. I was also fortunate enough to find a mentor in life in my early 20s. So I really went from unpaid intern to business partner.

That was a company called Socialty Pro where we helped service based businesses grow on social media with a specialty in short form, video. Within that six years, that's where I really started to grow my personal brand online.

I had a lot of early success with TikTok and I leveraged that to grow across every other major social media platform. I today have about 3 million followers on social media.

Talking about AI and how you can grow on social media, generate leads and sales for your business, and develop different streams of income.

Two years ago, I took all of that knowledge and I wanted to solve a lot of the problems that business owners had and content creators and entrepreneurs had that caused them to hire a marketing agency in the first place. But a problem with that is that agencies are quite expensive.

And so as a solo founder or a new entrepreneur or a small business, you need to create content, you need to be consistent, but it's. You might not have the budget to hire a marketing agency. And I just wanted to solve like all of these problems, which led to syllabi.

So Syllabi is really a culmination of my 20 years of experience on social media, 11 years of video marketing experience, and I created a tool that lets you find ideas, create, schedule and publish videos on social media on any topic, in any niche in a matter of minutes for a very low affordable price. And it's been truly a blessing to see it grow over the last two years.

Host: 00:04:09

Man, what an incredible journey from intern to business partner. Like just skip the whole thing, let's.

Austin Armstrong: 00:04:14

Just go right for it.

Host: 00:04:15

I absolutely love it, man. So with that being said, what were some of your challenges?

That's a huge like obviously 20 years and you're probably personal friends with Tom from MySpace. I remember MySpace.

Austin Armstrong: 00:04:26

Yeah, it was my first friend.

Host: 00:04:28

Yeah, yeah, my. Thank you, I remember that.

But going from the unpaid intern to the business partner to the all that you're doing and the massive influencer that you are. Like, what were some of those challenges? Like imposter syndrome, fear? Like what were some of the things you were going through?

Austin Armstrong: 00:04:43

Yeah, ton, tons of that.

This I saw the long term vision and I was quite poor for a long time as you grow up and hustle, but I knew that it would eventually pay off into expertise and it did. I stuck to that journey because I love what I do and I loved it along the way. I especially being an unpaid intern.

But even just being a part time employee, finding the balance of actually needing to pay bills and feed yourself, there were quite a few weeks where the grocery shopping was, the Walmart across the street and. And eating dry packaged noodles and ramen and that's what I ate. To get by with a lot of roommates that were not ideal situations, but I kept.

Keep improving, keep learning failures along the way. I would say the most recent struggle that I had was I got quite burnout in the agency space.

It was very difficult for me to juggle because I'm very attached to the work that I do, and I take a lot of pride in the work that I do. And so there were. Being an entrepreneur as a roller coaster, there are so many amazing highs, and the lows can just challenge you to your core.

And so there would be times where, you know, everything's, it's a great month, we're profitable, every, everything's good, and then all of a sudden, for whatever reason, you lose a key client or two clients, and then all of a sudden it's, oh, my gosh, am I going to be able to make payroll this week? I can't pay myself because I need to pay my employees.

You have an employee quit on the spot because they're going through their own struggles and stuff. And that's happened at core moments. And so it just. That roller coaster really burned me out.

After running that business for six years, I ended up hiring people to just basically run it so that I could focus on syllabi full time. And that wound down the business until we ultimately shut it down. But there were multiple times where I just felt like giving up entirely.

Just completely demoralizing. To go from crazy highs to crazy lows immediately, very taxing. But I'm in a very good position right now. I'm very happy.

I love that I can hyper focus on just one thing, on syllabi growth.

The other thing about being an agency owner is we worked with a lot of different businesses, and so it's really just mind shifting to what are the core needs of this client and their ICP and their specific use case, and then pivot to another business that has an entirely different user base and needs and all of this stuff and just constant mental shifting with the brutal.

Host: 00:07:32

But yeah, oh, I. Yeah, the highs and lows can be brutal and especially at your level. So that brings two questions. The first and foremost is how did you not quit?

Austin Armstrong: 00:07:40

Yeah. Meditation, reflection, time off, finding those little things of balance and moments of enjoyment and life. My wife, my dog, we love traveling.

I love training, Muay Thai, just doing stuff like that. I think our staff was also a big reason that I carried the business longer than it should have been. Should have shut it down way earlier than I.

I finally did. But I really cared about our employees and I didn't want to hurt them. In any way. We had an amazing trip to Disneyland.

I took all of our staff to Disneyland and I was really burned out at that time, but I still wanted to do that trip. So just little things like that, just chugging along, just like grinding through it, to be honest. Just grinding through.

Host: 00:08:26

So then with that being said, and you've mentioned burnout several times, how did you recover from burnout? Like I know just start when you're burnt out. Just starting another company does not cure burnout.

So how did you go through the recovery process to come back from burnout?

Austin Armstrong: 00:08:39

There's a great book I read last year called or the beginning of this year called Buy Back youk Time by Dan Martell, which is concepts that have also been talked about in four hour work week and just outsourcing your time. And so really what worked for me is not being so hands on in the job, just letting go of certain tasks. It's okay to not do everything yourself.

Hiring account managers to escalate situations with clients and have other people actually posting the content. Like when I started the company, it was me doing everything.

I was doing sales, I was doing the, the idea outlines and the content, I was shooting the videos, I was editing the videos, I was publishing the videos myself. And eventually you bring on some team members to do a lot more of those things.

And that I think really helped me is to just move away from the business itself to have more time. And then eventually that worked as a transition to being full time with syllabi, which is a much more enjoyable experience for me personally.

Host: 00:09:45

Yeah, it sounds it and it's an incredible thing as I'm scoping it out like I'm joining syllabi because it's syllabi. It's really cool. So thank you. And that's a place of getting in flow for you. I'm like, this is awesome and I'm very inspired by this.

So one of the things like I'm sitting here thinking like with burnout and what you're saying, how did you come to the place?

I don't know of whether it be a question of how did you become mature enough or emotionally secure enough to let go of control to start giving away stuff, what was that process like? Because I know a lot of my listeners want to do it all, try to do it all and struggle with giving away stuff. So walk me through some of that.

Austin Armstrong: 00:10:28

Yeah, that's such a good question. I don't know if there's a clear answer for that because everybody is going to go down that path. In their own way.

I love learning and growing in this industry and so I go to a lot of conferences, I have hired a lot of coaches, I listen to a lot of podcasts, I listen to a lot of audiobooks, I watch a lot of videos.

And I think just being in that mindset and switching from because I definitely grew up in a scarcity mindset family and it's hard for a lot of people that grow up that way to switch to an abundance mindset where when you put a time value and you can outsource that task for more money than you value your time at, you can actually free up your time and make more money. I definitely associate that early I read Four Hour Work Week in my early 20s and I love that idea.

And I think just continuing to focus on that because it does seem like a lot. There's a concept that I really loved in buyback your time of time inventory.

And so if you just take, take a week or two weeks and every task that you do, just write down a start time and an end time for the entire day, the moment you wake up, what's the first thing that you do? What are the.

And how long does it take you, how long does it take you to get out of bed, put your clothes on, brush your teeth, get a cup of coffee, let your dog out or your kids or whatever you got going on and then what? Every single thing. How much time are you spending on reading emails? How much time are you spending on social media?

How much time are you spending on creating content? How much time are you spending in meetings? How much time are you doing X, Y and Z? Right?

And when you do that time inventory, you can also outline importance of those tasks and how valuable those tasks are as well as how much you enjoy those tasks and having that, that collective like average of this is a task that I like to do and is worth my time versus a task that I hate doing and is not worth my time and figuring out, okay, I don't need to like I love being on social media and I love posting and I love responding to comments and being in the know, but I don't need to spend the time editing the videos. That was a big realization for me. I still edited all of my videos up until last six months, maybe even maybe nine months.

I forget exactly when I wrote that book. And so I am still at the beginning phase and the end phase and the in the touch.

But I saved about 45 minutes every single day because I'm not editing my videos. It's just Micro improvements over time that get you into a headspace of where you want to be. Just consistently working towards where you want to go.

You want a four hour work week.

You know what, how start by taking inventory of every single hour of your day and then doing a practice like that and just slowly working towards whatever that goal is. Maybe four hours is impossible for you. I don't do four hours a week. That's impossible for me.

But just little stuff like that, it's just progress over time.

Host: 00:13:57

I love that micro infant and over time, I love that. That's boom. We're going to throw that up there on a quote somewhere.

Austin Armstrong: 00:14:03

I will also say real quick, I don't have kids. That makes a lot of the decisions and things that I do a lot easier. Fully transparent. I don't have kids. I'm. I'm married. That makes it.

That frees up a lot more time too.

Host: 00:14:18

It really does. I have two children, they're both teens now, so one's about to be on the way out the door to college.

But yeah, that, that does create a lot of space and time. Yeah.

So with that being said, so when you're, when you're, you mentioned you had shifted like several pivots in your career and now you're in syllabi. What were some of the challenges with building syllabi and how'd you overcome it?

Austin Armstrong: 00:14:42

Yeah, so I'm a non technical founder and so finding the right people and the right team is a struggle. It's becoming easier and easier with AI now. But we started developing syllabi 3 years ago.

This was pre chat GPT initially tried to be the product project manager of it and I tried to hire a team overseas to develop it and ended up wasting about $15,000.

But it got to a point where there was a visible like MVP type thing and I used that as leverage to approach a really good friend of mine that happened to be a brilliant software engineer and developer. And he also came from like a marketing background. So he, and he's just a close friend, just awesome dude.

So he understands my marketing language and the big goal and idea of what we want to do with syllabi and he was able to help develop it and he became our cto. And so what took, it's just a crazy story.

What took that development firm and my terrible project management six months to build for $15,000 he grinds out in 48 hours over a weekend. And it was better. He just built it, rebuilt it from scratch better.

th of: 2023

We were a rocket ship at first. We went from 0 to 1 million ARR in six months, which is incredibly quick and amazing traction. And then the market got saturated.

We realized that we were not targeting the right people, the right audience and the right business. And so for 10 months straight, we were going down consistently downward slope. Tensions among business partners get tough when money's on the line.

We have to start taking less salaries so that we don't have to put that burden on, on employees. We weren't able to raise as much money as we wanted to, even though we're constantly pitching investors.

And so it took 10 months of just talking to our users every single day, constantly making tweaks and improvements to make the system better, learning that we really needed to pivot from what our core technology offer was, which was avatars. We were focusing on the AI avatars at first and we really switched our messaging and our target key features from avatars to faceless videos.

And we stopped talking to business owners and we started talking to content creators and new content creators. And when we did that, which was now six months ago, we started skyrocketing back up. And so now we're growing very quick, up 20% month over month.

I think last month we grew about 30, which is amazing. We're now at the highest we've ever been the most users, we've ever been the biggest margin, everything.

But it took 10 months of slow descent into nothing, which is stressful, but in retrospect, far less, less stressful than the agency space. For me, I would deal with this struggle again over the agency space.

I will probably never start an agency again or it would be a very different model and everything.

Host: 00:18:11

Right.

Austin Armstrong: 00:18:11

But yeah, I went from being an agency owner to a startup founder, which is an entirely different industry, entirely different wheelhouse, entirely different skill sets involved. I love it. I love what I'm, I love what I'm doing right now. But yeah, it's not all sunshine and rainbows.

Host: 00:18:28

Yeah. So then how do you deal with failure? Like when you come across those massive failures, how do you personally deal with those?

Austin Armstrong: 00:18:34

I try and look forward, I try and take lessons away from the failures. I think every failure is just a lesson that's, that's there on the table for you to figure out how you could have done things differently or better.

And then you just, you have to take action on that. You have to try and test that theory and see if you can actually improve on that. And, and that that works.

We, we Deep cohort analysis, overcoming churn talking to users. They the reason that they left a negative review was because of this. All right, let's fix it. It's a clear thing.

Let's eliminate all of the reasons why people are not enjoying the tool or the service, whatever it is that you're doing. I try to always look forward and I just try to see the big picture. I'm a big self cheerleader.

I think you have to do that because you can't rely on other people being your source of motivation. You have to be the motivator yourself, at least for me. So I try to celebrate every little win that I have and be my own biggest cheerleader.

And that has gotten me through so far.

Host: 00:19:37

Amazing. And that's something that I'm right with you.

I have two things that I do is I learn to laugh at myself and I learned to encourage myself because if I don't laugh, I'm gonna cry sometimes. So I've gotta laugh. So I asked the previous guest, Jonathan Mast, who you're very into, very quick.

Austin Armstrong: 00:19:52

Jonathan, great guy.

Host: 00:19:53

Yeah, great dude. And I asked him this question and since you're in the same space, being an AI type space, give us some future like three to five years from now.

What does AI look like?

Austin Armstrong: 00:20:03

Geez, it's almost hard to predict that far out because of how fast everything's growing. Start even starting today. On this recording, Sam Altman announced 12 days of OpenAI and I haven't had time to go check out what the first days yet.

And so they're making 12 days of insane announcements.

Some of my thoughts are we've seen a lot of movement towards agents and agentic which if you're not familiar with that terminology, it's basically taking the knowledge from the LLM or the information that's given and then doing the action on your behalf. Until recently. Just a quick example. You want a blog article for your website.

Maybe you go to an AI content writing tool and it gen you prompted however you want. It generates the text, even gives you SEO headlines, titles and everything.

You have to still copy and paste that into the website and optimize everything and click submit to search console to send that article to be indexed. Agents do all of it for you.

They'll do the research, it'll write the article for you, it'll publish and Optimize it on your website for you and it'll. They'll submit it to your into search console and search platforms. Posted on social media, whole 9 yards actually does the actions for you.

I think Claude just rolled out two months ago. The ability to do actions on your computer. So it will do mouse clicks and copy and paste information into spreadsheets.

Really basic functionality right now, but that's taking it from cloud to actual in device and doing actions on your behalf.

So we're going to see, I think, a huge push in agents and I think agents are going to disrupt everything that we've seen even faster than some of these AI tools have evolved. The other thing on the horizon is robots. We're already seeing Optimus Bot.

I think last month or two months ago, Elon Musk did that big demo of the Optimus bots and there's a couple other companies that are getting into machinery. Very simple to imagine just putting a software chip with Grok or OpenAI or Claude or any of these LLM models right into the robot.

I saw a demo yesterday. Somebody built this little walking robot thing is like from Interstellar, basically the robot thing. And it just has a full conversation with it.

We're going to see, I think in less than five years, robots in a lot of people's homes that are cooking meals for them, doing laundry, sitting next to you, watching sports, just being a companion. Those are, I think that's going to be. Those are. Those are two areas that I really see coming very soon.

Host: 00:22:49

It reminds me of the movie Bicentennial man with Robin Williams the companion.

Austin Armstrong: 00:22:53

And that's what's coming next.

We get enough of these robots in society walking amongst us and they not only you could already argue that AI is passing the Turing test because it's able to confuse. But once they have advanced reasoning and logic, then it gets into those questions that Bicentennial man asks and do robots that.

That feel and can logic. Do we give them rights? That's a really interesting question.

Host: 00:23:19

That is an interesting question. But I'd rather buy Centennial man than the I robot. Yeah, but that's a whole other conversation.

Austin Armstrong: 00:23:29

I'm. I'm with you there. I'm. I side with Robin Williams. Yes.

Host: 00:23:33

Yeah, we always want Robin Williams.

So with that coming down as we land the plane on the show for today, I usually do a segment that's called if you guys have listened for a while to the show, it's hashtag wisdombomb. And if you haven't, then just let you know.

This is where the Guest gives a quick shot of wisdom like a portable truth that you can take imply into your life. I do this on my Facebook every day just about hashtag wisdom bomb, hashtag wisdom of the day.

If you want to show us those up or just follow me on my Facebook at. Lead with Jim. With that being said, Austin, will you give us a wisdom bomb that people can just take with them today?

Austin Armstrong: 00:24:10

Yeah. Perfectionism is procrastination. Just execute, improve along the way and stay consistent.

Host: 00:24:18

Perfect. I like that. That's. I'm going to take that one for me because I deal with perfectionism so I'm going to take that personally.

And with that being said, how can we find you?

Austin Armstrong: 00:24:28

Yeah, if you wanted to check out syllabi, it's S Y L A B Y IO I am very available online and accessible. My name is Austin Armstrong. You can find me basically on any social media platform. Very active. I am the nerdy AI with glasses Austin Armstrong.

I am not the defensive lineman coach of the Florida Gators Austin Armstrong. Nor am I the relationship vlogger out of Austin Armstrong. Yeah, I. I am right there in the middle.

I've tried to set up a collaboration between the three most most famous Austin Armstrongs, but they keep leaving me on red. So here we are.

Host: 00:25:05

Well, with that being said to you, the listener, we will make sure that all of that is in the show notes. Unless you need like football or need relationship advice.

We want you to go to the the real Austin Armstrong and everything that we mentioned today will be in the notes for you. Everything will be clickable for you for easy access. And with that being said, thank you for an incredible conversation today, Austin.

It's been an honor to have you and I appreciate you very much.

Austin Armstrong: 00:25:29

Thank you so much, Jim. It was a really fun conversation. I really love the deep questions.

Host: 00:25:33

I appreciate that. And to you, the listener, thanks for listening this far. And just guess what? We're here just to empower, encourage and equip you.

We want you to take action and all that God's called you to. So make sure you do that every single day. Take action.

And then also, if you feel so inclined, leave a review, some likes and things on that to to really boast through this podcast. With that being said, we will see you on an episode, whether it be a future one or a previous one.

But make sure you're just tuning back in for some incredible conversations with incredible people.

Jim Burgoon: 00:26:04

This has been grace in the grind. Whether you're a Christian leader looking for guidance or an entrepreneur seeking inspiration, it's Jim's passion to equip and encourage you.

Make sure to check out Jim's solo episodes where he shares practical leadership insights grounded in a biblical perspective. We hope you've enjoyed the show. If you did, make sure to like, rate and review and we'll be back soon. But in the meantime, find us on social media.

Lead with Jim and you can also hit the website at www.leadwithjim.com. take care of yourself and we'll see you next time on Grace in the Grind.