When Dr. Travis Webb got in touch with me some time ago to introduce his new business management platform, Yo-Do Software, I was interested in the platform, but even more interested in his personal story of going from a Religion PhD to a business founder. I am always urging academics to go the entrepreneurship route. For me, launching my own business has been transformative and gratifying. The Professor Is In is a small business, and so I am one of the “entrepreneurs” that he mentions – the kind who could launch a business by hustling and working long hours, but who did not seek (or need) large capital funding. I often say the only thing I purchased to launch TPII was a box of manila folders and then I never even used the manila folders. (I did eventually have to purchase many, many kinds of online services, apps, and programs to run the business, and actually I think that expense and hassle is exactly what Yo-Do is meant to help with). Running a small business is optimal for me, because I genuinely don’t play very well with others, and never wanted to be beholden to anybody financially, or have anyone else monitoring my business decisions. I cherish the independence. Being the “founder” of a much larger and more complicated enterprise that requires capital investment to start entails persuading other people of the value of your idea. But done successfully, it generates far more money than a small business ever could.
Many of you reading this are entirely qualified to pursue either route–entrepreneur/small business owner or founder. You have skills and knowledge that the world needs. I think you’ll find Travis’s story illuminating. KK
C. Travis Webb, PhD, has over 30 years of experience owning, operating, and selling personal service businesses across a range of disciplines, including tutoring centers, martial arts studios, yoga, and music schools. That firsthand experience as a multi-vertical business owner shapes everything about the software he builds today.
Webb has taught at the university level and is a published author, with works appearing through Routledge, Oxford University Press, and most recently Intellect, Ltd. He is former assistant editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. He holds a PhD in Religion from Claremont Graduate University, and his academic background gives him an unusual vantage point in the software industry, one grounded in how people actually learn, move, create, and grow within community-based organizations.
He is the founder and CEO of Yo-Do Software, a business management platform purpose-built for personal service businesses and Xenia, a digital front door for small towns with big tourism. Yo-Do serves studios, wellness practices, and arts organizations with tools designed around the real operational complexity those businesses face.
Before we talk about how to transition from academic frustration to entrepreneurial frustration, we should probably talk about the why. Why would you want to sign up for long days, endless to-do lists, the indignity of pitching, the indignity of sales, and the likelihood that whatever you’re working on is also being worked on by scores of other people who have more money and a larger network than you do?
Fortunately for you, the answer to that is right in Karen’s blog. Using Rage to Stay Motivated, Part Two from 2011 lays out exactly what you need to understand to answer that question. And what you need to understand is this: the hero’s journey isn’t just an anachronistic tool for deciphering Star Wars plots or soothing your bruised ego after another brutal round of dissertation revisions. It is the reason you do anything really hard. You have something to say or do that no one else can say or do but you. And that’s that.
I read Karen’s blog back in 2012 right after I’d decided to go back to grad school and take my PhD. I’d spent a couple of years poking away at a Master’s Degree in English Lit, and decided that I really, really wanted to figure out what was going on with religious abjurations of the body in the sacred canons that are sometimes called the “World Religions.” And it was inspirational.
No one else was working on my problem. I mean, no one. Which, as you all know, isn’t a great thing in the academy. Newish is great. New-new for a young scholar, not so much. But that didn’t matter to me. I forged ahead. My project changed, of course. I “pivoted,” in founder speak, but it was a closely related problem, and still way outside the bounds of the current academic job market. So three-and-a-half years later, PhD in hand, I had a dilemma. Do I enter the scrum for tenure track jobs and take whatever I can get to keep my dim hopes of landing a 2/2 with regular sabbaticals and R1 resources alive, or do I do something else?
By the title you already know the answer.
What Does It Mean to be a Founder?
Being a founder is a little different than just being an entrepreneur. All founders are entrepreneurs, but not all entrepreneurs are founders. If you want to be a founder you need other people along for the ride. You can’t do it alone. You’re establishing something beyond your sole capacity to manage. This informal schema isn’t static, however; sometimes entrepreneurs morph into founders. Their labor grows into something semi-autonomous. It takes on “a life of its own,” if you don’t mind the cliché. And they need others to keep it going.
Being a founder means that you have to convince other people your vision is worth struggling for. Of course, if you have enough money that they don’t have to struggle, you can skip this part, and people will tell you what you want to hear so you keep signing the paychecks. But the point stands. Being a founder means that you need to manage people. It’s not a free solo kind of thing, no matter what Steve Jobs said.
Step One: Have an Idea
That’s it. That’s the step. Nothing else to add. If you don’t have an idea, you don’t have anything. Go get one.
Step Two: Is There a Market?
This one is pretty straightforward for someone who is sufficiently professionalized. There are a variety of ways to understand professionalization, but one of them certainly has to be market savvy. Where do I fit in, and how can I show others that I do? It’s the process by which you learn the social skills necessary to identify niches within the academic marketplace and fill them.
Probably sixty or seventy years ago this was easier. The postwar college boom meant there were enough jobs for people who really liked Matthew Arnold and didn’t want to spend too much time publishing to survive. But those days are long gone. You’ve got to know your market, or you’re not going anywhere. That’s true of founding too.
You can have the best idea in the world, and if there isn’t a market for it, it’s not going to land. There are any number of books, online references, and AI tools to help you identify if there’s a market. And you’ve got to spend some time researching it. Something that you’re probably going to be very comfortable with.
I can’t stress that enough. You need to figure out your market. Sincerely. It’s far more important than step one, even though I put it first. In fact, you can use your market research to back into an idea. Let me illustrate.
Hotels aren’t new. They’ve been around a long, long time. If you Google it, you’re going to find that Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan in Japan is the oldest hotel (or inn) in the world, established in 705 AD. But that’s wrong. The Egyptians had inns, and so did the Sumerians too. They’ve got Nishiyama beat by about 3,500 years give or take. My point is, as a business, this isn’t a new idea. But that doesn’t matter. The question is, is there a market for it?
If you find a community with sufficient density or industry, and there aren’t enough places for people to stay when they’re visiting, that’s going to be a great business. Literally, if you build it, they will come. It doesn’t get any better than that—from a marketing perspective.
Step Three: Does Your Product or Service Fit Your Market?
This one is a little more nuanced, and probably the hardest to be objective about. You’re going to be a believer in your service or product, or you wouldn’t be hawking your service or product. So how do you evaluate whether your belief is going to be validated by experience?
Unfortunately, there’s only one tried and true way to figure this out. You have to build it. That’s the only real way to figure it out. You can do market research, of course.
“Would you use a hair conditioner that also exfoliated your hands and prevented wrinkles?”
“How much would you pay for this conditioner? 10% more than your current conditioner? 20?”
But market research is a mixed bag. It can only show you what you think to ask. The marketplace is much larger than even the most sophisticated model can predict. And balance sheets the world over are littered with the red ink of products that were successfully researched before they failed epically. Think Coca-cola’s release of “New Coke” in 1985. A complete disaster for the company that led them to restore the original formula in less than three months.
And this leads us to our final step, money.
Step Four: You’re Going to Need Some Money
This is again a difference between a solo entrepreneur and a founder. If you’re solo, you can sweat out the early stages of a new venture. Put your head down, watch less TV, go to fewer social gatherings, and hustle until you have something that can sustain itself.
But when you found something, like a software company, you’re going to need some capital to get things going. If you have access to larger financial networks, or you have family with resources, you’ll want to try tap into them. You can also go the route of pitching to VCs. I haven’t had a lot of success with this, personally—mostly because I hate it—but I know people who have.
You might not need a lot of money to figure out if your idea has legs. Different businesses have different needs. But you’ll at least need enough to take care of yourself while you get going, unless you’re going to hold down a job while you’re hustling to get your idea off the ground. But that’s just for starters. In my case I needed money for software infrastructure, and attorneys, and contractors to do the work I didn’t have the time or skillset for.
We raised the capital we needed from a variety of sources. One, prior to founding Yo-Do, my wife and I were entrepreneur-entrepreneurs. We’d built a music teaching school in Orange County, CA from a handful of students to over 300 and employed about 25 part-time teachers. We sold that business in 2023 to a national chain and used that capital to take care of us while we built Yo-Do.
The development came from the professional network I’d established while building our music school. We partnered with a tremendously talented team in Poland called ARP Ideas, and traded equity in the new corporation for their expertise and labor. We got an additional infusion of capital from an old friend who’d followed his own path to entrepreneurial success, enough to hire a (very) small team and begin to build and support our client base.
We’re considered a boot-strapped start-up. We don’t have a lot of runway, but I believe in our software, and our company, and I have a fantastic team, and great partners. I don’t know if we’re going to make it. The competition for service business management software is plentiful, well-funded, fierce, and experienced. But there’s only one person who can do what I’m doing. Small businesses need our help. Big businesses need our guidance. We must save the day.
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