#5 - Brian Hamor

Brian Hamor - Highlights

One of the cooler founders I’ve had the chance to talk to. Brian is the type of guy that comes off very relaxed and easy going, but I get the sense the man is an absolute competitive monster when it comes to business. And I mean that in a positive sense. I’d love to get a beer with him, but not sure I wanna compete against him in any business setting. Some highlights ⬇

I’ll open by saying that Brian is a quiet assassin in the startup world. The type of guy that you might not think of when you think of kick-ass startups, but they’re quietly crushing.

Quiet assassin?
“Jordan, whatchu mean?”

Here’s why: most founders you meet fall into one of two buckets

Brian is neither… and both. He’s got the builder’s discipline and the operator’s market awareness, but he’s not super into the loud LinkedIn shit. More of a quiet, build from my apartment type of grinder.

Right now, he’s building BuyerExperience, a bootstrapped, lean-as-hell company doing an undisclosed amount of revenue (but it’s healthy, believe me without a single VC dollar. The entire business is engineered around high-ticket customers, minimal noise, and competitive stamina, outlasting and prob out-hustling, competitors.

It’s his cleanest biz yet, sharpened by lessons from previous roles at Marpipe and PlayEasy, and a deliberate choice to avoid every shiny-object distraction.

This company isn’t loud. It’s just kind of… crushing.

So here are my 5 takeaways from my conversation with Neil on how buyerexperience.io came to be, the mindset and learnings from previous company failures, and you can win in business without being a prick

1️⃣ 1. Competitive stamina > competitive advantage.

Brian believes most founders lose because they burn out, not because their idea was worse. The willingness to keep going - and not run out of money - is a bigger moat than a flashy differentiator.

It’s why he’s such a big proponent of bootstrapping vs raising VC money. Most VC backed companies fail because they run out of money. Well, it turns out that it’s hard to run out of money if you’re building a profitable company.

It’s even harder to run out money when you secure 2-3 clients before even going live with an MVP… but more on that later

2️⃣ Simplicity

This is a common theme amongst every founder I’ve talked to. No matter the level of complexity, every founder I’ve met with preaches one thing: simplicity.

BuyerExperience is fixing a very simple problem: bring back lost revenue. And they’re doing it in a really cool way, but moral of the story is if you can’t describe your startup in one sentence, then you’re cooked. it’s one of the first questions I ask founders when we meet: describe your business in one sentence. Most all of them can do so - but if you can’t? Not a good look.

3⃣ Quality of customers = quality of your life

Long story short - the quality of your customers is going to determine how amazing or how shitty your life is. If your customer is going to haggle over $100 or even $1,000, the odds are that they’re going to be a shitty customer.

When Brian was building BuyerExperience, he started with the question of: “who’s my ideal client?” and then worked backwards from there.

A lot of founders have an idea, and then think about what problem they can solve from there. Brian looked at a group of people, found a problem he’d personally experienced being in the sales world, and then built. Definitely a difference there.

4⃣ Build for real customers, not hypothetical ones.

My absolute favorite story talking to Brian was the story of the first dollars they made at BuyerExperience.

Brian and his team had identified a big, urgent pain point for a potential customer - the kind of problem that, if solved, would save them a crap ton of money.

So naturally, they pitched the concept before the MVP was even finished. The customer was sold on the vision and the outcome, not the features or even of a product that had been built, and agreed to move forward.

They locked in revenue before a single “real” product screen was in production.

Then a few weeks later they had a meeting set, and had no real product. It wasn’t ready yet - honestly not even close lol. He had to go back to the customer and say something like “yeah we’ve had some technical issues and it’ll be a few more weeks”. and the customer was chill about it - and the coolest part, is that that customer is still a customer today.

So, safe to say it worked out

It became a proof point for Brian’s GTM philosophy: if you can sell the outcome before the product exists, you know you’ve nailed the positioning - and you’ve validated the problem is worth solving.

Pretty dope stuff

Brian, you’re the man. Super fun chatting and if you don’t follow him, check him out on LinkedIn

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. From the bottom of my heart. Hope to see ya next week

Cheers

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Till next time,