Ironically, Dan Martell is one of the most genuine friends I’ve made in the startup world. I say ironically because he is a caricature – the guy literally uses hashtags when he speaks :-). But none of that can take away from how legitimately passionate he is about helping others, in particular other entrepreneurs.
Dan doesn’t talk about it much, but his path to the #leanstartup celebrity all his Twitter followers know today was a pretty long and unglamorous road compared to a lot of today’s entrepreneurs (including myself). Though he doesn’t remember it, Dan and I first met on the Internet back in 2009 when I was trying to do some early content marketing for awe.sm and he was, as always, building his personal brand by explaining how he got to 595 Twitter followers (how quaint! 😉 ). At the time, I believe Dan was still living in Canada having sold the professional services business he had built over years of unglamorously quotidian hard work, and, like me, was trying to break into the Silicon Valley in-crowd. I wrote him off as YASMDB (yet-another-social-media-douchebag), albeit one with amazing hair and actually pretty good advice, and forgot about @danmartell.
About a year later, awe.sm got its first “office” in San Francisco courtesy of some desks Klout was subletting in their space, where Flowtown was already subletting a conference room. Over the following 2.5 years I got to know Dan as we worked side-by-side there and later at the new office we moved to with Flowtown and Plancast. In such close quarters for such an extended period of time in such often-times stressful circumstances, you learn a lot about anyone. And what I learned about Dan is that his enthusiasm and passion and child-like love of startups are unimpugnably genuine. But in Dan’s case, I found myself learning a lot not just about him but from him as well. I learned from his example as well as his mentorship, with which he was always generous to everyone – those of us in the office just were fortunate enough to have access to the firehose. He has one of the best product senses I’ve ever seen because he has the rare ability to assume the veil of ignorance of a real user. And his belief that creativity and hard-work (aka #hustle) can solve any problem enables him to turn whatever challenge you bring him into an opportunity.
Even though we’ve talked about it several times over the last few months, what Dan is doing with Clarity.fm wasn’t truly clear to me until today when I started reading the (impressive) press coverage of their launch. Until this morning, I saw it as Dan building a product to solve a pain point Dan had and thought enough other people have to make it a viable business. Then I read the following quote Dan gave in the TechCrunch post:
For the first years of my working career, I was still living in my native Canada and I was desperate for advice. I emailed the minister of my province there, he respected that I was a young entrepreneur, and he introduced me to three guys that had built hundred million dollar companies. That was the reason that I moved to San Francisco in the first place,” Martell said. “I know that getting the right advice at the right time can dramatically change an entrepreneur’s life.
Only then did I realize this isn’t purely a convenience product for Dan, it’s a passion product. And when an entrepreneur and product person as talented as Dan is passionate about something, you know it is going to be great. So that is why I’m excited Clarity is being built by Dan.
As for why I am (and I think you should be) excited about Clarity in general, my friend Hunter says it better (and more concisely) than I can:
Excited by @getmoreclarity bec expert networks are another example of individuals unbundling from corporations to be their own business
— Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) May 3, 2012
So if you’re an entrepreneur seeking advice, check out Clarity and don’t bother with Mark Cuban, go straight for this guy.