Did you know that 89.6% of people are more willing to believe a statistic if there's a decimal point in it? So I just made that statistic, I don't know what that number is. But the thing is, the science behind it is true. If you add a decimal point to a number more people are willing to believe it. 

Now as a marketer, if I know something like this, I'm going to use it to my advantage. Right? Of course I'm going to be truthful, but I'm also going to use this to my advantage because I know that using a decimal point, getting a more finer tuned number is going to help me make my point and get my message across. 

Now, one of the reasons I'm making this episode is because I recently created a trailer for a third podcast that I'm coming out with, its called started millions. It's going to share the stories from a lot of early stage founders that are still precede and we're going to learn a little bit more about their grind and how they're making it work without having to go seek investor funding because this is where they still are. In the podcast trailer and not only just in the podcast trailer, but also my linkedin bio I recently put out a stat. In the stat, it is very true. However, whenever marketers put out statistics, the thing is, even if it's true a lot of times, the number itself could be slightly massaged, right? Because whenever you have a statistic, there's a lot of nuances that go into this, this statistic. And if you wanted to have an honest conversation, you would have to understand all the nuances. And I'm so glad I didn't stutter with the word nuance the second time and I don't know if you caught it, but I started at the first time and my brain was clinching, but there are these so many nuances with the way numbers work. 

If you want it to be honest, You know, you would explain exactly the pros and cons of the staff. But the thing is if you're doing some marketing materials or if you're giving a speech or if you're giving a lecture, going into this nuances is going to take away from the point you're trying to make, right?. So there's this balance where you want to make this very strong point and you want to do it in a way where you have some kind of statistics to back it up. But at the same time you actually also know that people can misinterpreted, people can misunderstand it and really that they would have to do a little bit of more legwork to understand all the pros and cons behind the statistics. 

So the statistic that I actually published in my podcast trailer and in my Linkedin bio is that 93% of startups that go through Y Combinator is program fail to exit and basically I'm calling them a failure and when I call them a failure and they say they failed to exit, well I'm actually using white Combinator own definition of success. So in a traditional solidarity program or in a business school program, their definition of success is the exit. The exit is the holy grail, That's what entrepreneurs are looking for. They want the exit. Well if you take a look at the Y Combinator companies, only 7% have actually exited and even when they exited you don't even know what that really means because we don't know if that was a profitable exit or not, they could have been bankrupt and they just liquidated and that liquidation is an exit or the exit could be an I. P. O. But only 7% of these Y Combinator startups have actually exited. 

The other 93% they did fail to exit. But if you wanted to dig a little bit deeper into these numbers then the harder truth is that 20% of these companies actually did fail all the way. Like these companies are dead, they're gone, no one is working on them. They are not going to be revived, they are done with. Right? But the remaining 73% of these companies, well these companies are still active but even though they're active we don't know the trajectory of these companies. Right? What's likely is that most of these companies will eventually fail if they haven't failed already because a lot of these companies are probably dusty, they're not profitable, they're just sitting there and they're just waiting until their time comes. 

So when you're looking at these Y Combinator companies, the truth is, yeah, 93% fail. But if you wanted to dig a little bit deeper into this number, it's a little bit more nuanced than that. There are companies out there that are still active. But if I had to be a betting man and take a bet, I would say that these companies are pretty much, you know, on the way down, right? You might have a very small percentage in the very single digits that make it. But that's about it. So there's 93% number is interesting because on average startups that don't don't go through these programs, they are failing around 96%. Right? So it's only a very incremental benefit that you might get from a Y Combinator program. 

So I'm using this this statistic to my advantage because I think I've identified or I know that I've identified what the what these programs are doing wrong in terms of focusing on the product and how Vertical Lift Off is different because we're focusing on the customer and we actually get product market fit before spending any money on development and losing all this money that I'm going to use this statistic to my advantage. 

So I just wanted to make that clear anytime someone says some numbers or presents a model, there's always nuances to it. It's really difficult for the person presenting it to go through all this, you know, all the different nuances because you might need like a master master degree to go through every single step for every single one, right? But you just want to be as honest as possible, put your best foot forward, put out that stat. And if people do question you want it, you want to be able to defend it and it's okay to be honest about it and it's okay to defend it and say, yeah, you're absolutely right that 73% of these companies are actually active, they have not exited. So we're not using the definition that Y Combinator is using if they were using the definition of success that I use for VLO founders, we use profitability. Those are some numbers that I would definitely like to see. And I actually hope the entire startup industry changes to where we're starting to tout profitability instead of how much funding we have raised or all these other vanity metrics. 

So I just wanted to be clear. And of course, I think this also gives me a chance to plug in my third podcast. Go check it out. If you like this podcast, you're gonna like the next podcast too. It's called Start up millions and we just have the trailer episode out right now, but we're going to share nothing but early stage startup founder stories. If this sounds like you, If you are an early stage startup founder and you want to be one of the first to get on this podcast, let me know some of the benefits of being on a podcast, especially on a podcast is just launching. I can tell you that straight up for my podcast Growth Act secrets and for this podcast, the 6% entrepreneur, it's the 1st 10 episodes that gets the most hits. So if you can be on a growing podcasts and be as one of the 1st 10 episodes, you will get a lot of traffic. Not only do you get a lot of traffic from getting onto one of these 1st 10 episodes, but you also get a lot of traffic if the podcast host puts your website or your information on their website because then you get all these back links, especially if it's on the podcast sites because then you start getting back lines from Itunes and Spotify and all these different places. 

So it just makes sense if you are an early stage startup founder, that is still precede and you want to come to Start up millions and share your stories so other founders can learn from them because we all have something to learn from. I would like to invite you to be my guest, hit me up and go to booking.startupmillions.com. That will take you to the booking calendar, but better yet send me a DM on instagram or on linkedin. I think that would be a way better way to connect to make sure that you actually do qualify. And yeah, I will see you on the show. See us at Startup millions. All right. This is Robin, Copernicus boom bam. I'm out. 
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