Daniel Flynn is co-founder of Thankyou, a social enterprise that was founded in 2008 and sells consumer products to help end extreme poverty. In 2015 Daniel’s book, Chapter One, became a bestseller and generated $1.4 million in sales in its first month using an unorthodox “pay-what-you-want” model. In his conversation with Adam, Daniel discusses his belief that “leaders are learners”, and how working with a psychologist to come to terms with some of his personal challenges helped him grow into the leader he is today.
Thankyou: https://thankyou.co/Daniel on Twitter: https://twitter.com/danielmflynn
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Adam Spencer: Let me tell you about our partner, Teamified. If you need to build a top-notch team quickly, Teamified is your go-to solution. They not only provide fractional CTOs, they can also do contractors and even remote team members tailored exactly to your needs. And whether you're looking for expertise in the Philippines, India, or Sri Lanka, Teamified has you covered. What's amazing is that Teamified uses a blend of AI and human expertise to cut hiring times by 50%, cent. Their platform handles everything from automated onboarding to day-to-day management and even performance tracking. You can also handle rewards and recognition, buy equipment, and order training all through their platform. Simplify your hiring process and get the best talent fast with Teamified. Check them out now and transform your team. Go to dayone.fm/teamified. That's dayone.fm/teamified. Thank you. T-E-A-M-I-F-I-E-D, and get started today. Hi, I'm Adam Spencer, founder of the Day One Network, which is bringing the history of the Australian startup ecosystem to you. I believe in founders. It's why I do everything I do at Day One and our media company, W2D1 Media. And that's why the Day One Network exists, to create helpful content for founders. We've got some great shows in development. But a large part of what we do couldn't be done without support from our partners and sponsors. And I couldn't be happier than to be working with NTP, who get community better than any other technology recruitment company out there. A Newcastle company like mine, NTP are invested in seeing the growth of the local tech community in Newcastle, Sydney, and more broadly Australia. So thank you NTP for helping us bring— Thank you. Helpful content to founders and the startup community in Australia. Back to the interview. Hi, I'm Adam Spencer, founder of the Day One Network, which is bringing the history of the Australian startup ecosystem to you. I believe in founders. It's why I do everything I do at Day One and our media company, W2D1 Media. And that's why the Day One Network exists, to create helpful content for founders. We've got some great shows in development. But a large part of what we do couldn't be done without support from our partners and sponsors. And I couldn't be happier than to be working with NTP, who get community better than any other technology recruitment company out there. A Newcastle company like mine, NTP are invested in seeing the growth of the local tech community in Newcastle, Sydney, and more broadly Australia. So thank you NTP for helping us bring helpful content to founders and the startup community in Australia. Back to the interview.
Daniel Flynn: Hi, I'm Adam Spencer and welcome to Day One, the podcast that spotlights Australian startups, founders, and the organizations that empower Australian entrepreneurship. We go back to the beginning to tell a story of Australia's most inspiring founders and how they built their companies. You're listening to a special interview series as part of a documentary W2D1 is producing about the history of the Australian startup ecosystem. On the episode today, we have—
Speaker C: My name's Daniel Flynn. I'm one of the co-founders of Thankyou, a social enterprise that sells consumer products to help end extreme poverty.
Daniel Flynn: When did you first become aware of— would you say you were involved in the startup community, or do you see entrepreneurship outside of the startup community, or do you feel like you're very much in the startup community?
Speaker C: Yeah, look, I would say when we began years ago back in 2008, we were just in our own bubble. You know, we saw a problem, a solution, potentially, you know, using business to, you know, help solve a social issue, and we just started running after it. And so I would say we didn't really get too involved with different communities, startup community, even the social kind of enterprise community, which turns out at times kind of sits a bit separate. They're getting closer and kind of more interwoven, which is cool. But it wasn't until years later, once Thankyou started getting some momentum, that I kind of put my head up and started catching up with, you know, different people in different communities and thinking, ah, should have done this earlier. You know, that would have been helpful.
Adam Spencer: Yeah.
Speaker C: So that's our journey, but you know, I think it's a, yeah, it's a growing local and global ecosystem.
Daniel Flynn: When you say years later, when you started to kind of put your head up and look around Ballpark, what year are we talking?
Speaker C: Yeah, look, I think I would say like probably year 3, in year 3 of our journey and maybe, yeah, mid-year 3. I remember one event in particular standing there thinking, huh, we should have done this 3 years ago. And so that was just a memorable moment for me. But we had spoken at events before and sort of kind of fly in, fly out, but not really gone much deeper than that.
Daniel Flynn: You're based in Melbourne, Victoria, right?
Speaker C: Originally, yeah, originally. We've actually now moved up to Queensland.
Daniel Flynn: So 2000, what are we talking about? Around 2011 would be when you started to see what's happening around you in the business kind of scene and landscape. And that was Melbourne at the time, right?
Speaker C: Yeah.
Daniel Flynn: Correct. Can you give me a bit of an, from your perspective, what did the ecosystem or landscape look like in terms of community size? What organizations or people kind of were very visible to you as kind of maybe leaders or in the space?
Speaker C: Mm, yeah, look, I think back in 2011, from my recollection, we found ourselves spending more time and maybe fitting better in the social enterprise type environment. At the time, a group called Social Traders were gathering a lot of people in this space, both interested or, you know, really well developed, or, you know, like some businesses much further developed than we were. And it did feel quite separate to the traditional startup rounds of funding get investors, let's go. Like it did feel different, you know, and some maybe good, maybe some not good in that. Yeah, that was the feeling I had. Yeah, we kind of felt, I would say we felt probably a little out of place at Thankyou in a traditional kind of startup community because simple things like we didn't, as founders, have any equity in what we did. And that was, yeah, it's a different concept.
Daniel Flynn: Yeah, I love how, you know, you've got a value or a philosophy of lifelong learning back then in the early days, and even now. Who do you lean on? Who are some people or organizations that you lean on to help either learn from or just help keep going, help in any way?
Speaker C: Yeah, look, I remember, and I'm sure we've all heard, like, leaders are readers.
Daniel Flynn: Yeah.
Speaker C: And so then we hear about Bill Gates or so-and-so and this CEO and 50 books a year or a month or, and always like I'd sort of nod along like, yeah, leaders are readers. And I'm kind of thinking to myself, readers are readers? Some readers are leaders? Like I wrestled with it. And I think a better phrasing for me that I resonate with, 'cause I don't do 50 books a year, I change like 50 nappies a week at home, but like not books a year. I would say like leaders are learners and sometimes that's a book, other times it's a podcast. I would say for me, I have this weird kind of balance between I listen more than people know and I don't listen and that speaks to the disruption, let's go do things differently, but genuinely in a conversation or if I catch up with a mentor, I'll take away a lot from that. Or even not even catching up with a mentor that knows they're a mentor, but listening to podcasts, reading books. I think Seth Godin, as an example, he's been very formative in my thinking. And I was lucky enough years later to meet him because he bought our book Chapter One, and that was a moment I'll never forget. But even before meeting, yeah, it really shaped me. And so, Yeah, for me, learning is a pursuit of listening and of research. And sometimes it's as basic as a good desktop Google research session. And other times it is diving deep into a book or into research to, you know, formal research to understand an industry or a market or a problem.
Daniel Flynn: You've been, what is it, 12 or 13 years now at Thankyou? During that time, what are some of the biggest gaps you've observed in the, just I suppose, business landscape in Australia, if we speak that broadly?
Speaker C: Okay, so broadly, two things come to mind and there's probably many more, but the two that jump out, one is this idea of celebration, true celebration of people and ideas. And I think we say we celebrate, but I think that there's a weird undertone in Australian culture where we do tear down. Tall poppy syndrome is like some of the loose terms thrown to it. I found it very polarizing or just different going to America and getting just a little bit of a window into their startup and business culture. And I was like, wow, like you are celebrating. You're like wanting everyone to get there. Whereas in Australia, people may say that, but you get the sense of like, if I succeed, maybe that takes away from you succeeding. And that's not true. I mean, I think we rise, and there's a great quote that Justine used to share all the time actually, and I loved it. You know, we rise by lifting others. So I wouldn't necessarily say Australian culture's a real, let's lift others, let's rise together. We're happy with a level of success, but once you pop above it, we'll critique, we'll pull it down almost at all costs.
Daniel Flynn: Mm.
Speaker C: So that is a, that's a thought. And then the other one is, I think, this idea of social business. It was described early on to us that Australia was 10, 15 years behind the UK and their thinking in social enterprise and their kind of prevalence of it in society and tax law. And, you know, a whole bunch of other areas that sort of just opened up more and more people getting into the space. Yeah, that was the feeling we had. Although actually one of the, the CEO said, the CEO of Social Enterprise UK, I was telling him how we're so behind. He's like, Well, I love the thank you model and that's not behind. So just keep doing what you're doing. And so I would say that there've been a few moments where, yeah, I wonder if we're as far along as a, society in Australia as we should be. And then rather than tackling that problem heads down, get results, and hopefully in time, you know, we rise just by nature of the tide rises when we all, or a few of us, or a lot of us put in the hard yards.
Daniel Flynn: Switching gears now to a more positive side, what do you think we're doing as a community really well?
Speaker C: I think the tide has shifted from some of that heaviness I just spoke of, I think we are starting to realize the world is very global. And so we need to win on global stages as Australian startups and enterprises. We need to win locally, but we really need to win globally. We have such a small market here. I've been probably the most impressed by the New Zealand startup and social enterprise communities. I think they are just—
Adam Spencer: Yeah.
Speaker C: Truly caught that idea of to win globally. They are such a small country, but I think that's starting to work here in Australia. And so we are getting some pretty big high-profile examples in Australia that are stacking up on the world stage. And I think it is inspiring more and more people to dream bigger from here.
Daniel Flynn: What's been the biggest change in you internally, you know, between the time of starting this journey 12, 13 years ago to today? Just either philosophically or business-wise.
Speaker C: Yeah, so the biggest change for me in this whole leadership journey in 12 or 13 years, and there's been a few, like there was a mindset shift from like, make money for me and give a bit, right? That was, if I summed up me at 18, it's like, make a lot of money, bunch of success, and then do good. And then 19, kicks in an inverse of that, and thank you is like, it is just very different. It is like, we will spend our time and our effort to see this social mission and idea realized. So that's a shift, and that happened early on, and it's been 12, 13 years of that solidified, so that's cool. I think personally, in addition to that, my biggest journey has been a self, discovery of some of the deep stuff that matters. I would have described my greatest fear as the fear of failure. I didn't want to fail. I didn't want to mess up as a leader, as an organization of what is a mission that has like this infinite potential. But that's incongruent with our story because we take risk all the time and— Yeah. You know, how does that work? And so risk is inherently built into our history. And some pretty deep work with an amazing counselor, psychologist, who I reckon session 1, he knew I wasn't coming back. Between us, I wasn't. I was just doing one thing. No one was ever going to know about this session. It's just a once-off. And he said, Daniel, I don't think you have a fear of failure. And I don't usually jump to it this quick, but I think you have a fear of rejection. You're afraid that people might reject you. And man, he unpacked it and I started crying. I didn't stop crying the whole way back to the office. My next meeting, my assistant who knew about the meeting, she's like, "Your eyes, Daniel." Mm-hmm. And we learned not to book that session during business hours. And it took years to kind of unpack this subtle, quiet thing on the inside of me. But turns out the stuff on the inside as a leader, well, that can either play out beautifully into the ideas that you make or the teams you lead, or it can play out super ugly. I had a mix of both. I would say that for me though, the discovery of that and working through of, oh man, imagine the freedom of not caring, with respect, but not caring what others actually think about you. Yeah. My name Daniel, Daniel, the actual meaning, I always thought it was really heavy. I don't know if anyone's ever Googled their name meaning, but my name meaning was like, God is your judge. I was like, dang, that's so heavy. And then this whole journey of like going deep, I realized, wow, like here's another way to say that. You're not my judge. That audience is not my judge. No one is. Like it's— That whole idea of like living your life to an audience of one versus everyone else, to me, it became great freedom and now we innovate better, our ideas are bolder and fate is, yeah, just doesn't keep me up at night like it used to or certainly the fear of it.
Daniel Flynn: Thank you for sharing that. So my mission or my goal is probably not, it's definitely not solve you know, the problem of extreme poverty, and it's not as large as that. That kind of mission is both inspiring and a great reason to get up in the morning to do the work you do. But on the flip side of that, like, does it ever get you down how big the problem is? And can you solve it? Can you fix it?
Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, this is a Any good big problem, big vision, this is the tension. There are many and extreme poverty is one of them. It's actually one that most people, there is a little bit of an eye roll because it's like, ah, hasn't there always been poverty? And there has, but extreme poverty was, I mean, 3 decades ago, it was over 2 billion people and then it's come down, down, down. Now it's at 736 million and so the world is progressing. To a literal zero number. Like, it is more than most realize there's progress. It's going to take more and more ideas, more and more contributors. We're one of them. We're not the only one. And then the pandemic hit, and actually those numbers for the first time in decades went backwards. There are estimates of upwards of 150 million or more people going back into extreme poverty. And so we're going backwards on the idea that really we should be going forwards on.
Daniel Flynn: Yeah.
Speaker C: I don't know, like some days it's super intense hearing the stories and the hard reality, and it is so much easier to switch off. But for me, in that sort of intensity, they are hard moments, but they're also the moments that breed innovation and ideas and this sort of fire. One of the most confronting things to experience is spending time in communities who are living in extreme poverty. And then going back through an airport that has the like super bright light, luxury goods, luxury perfumes, like the fragrance, like that extreme hot water, cold water. One's the world I kind of grew up in, I suppose, and the other isn't. And to find that they are often so close to each other, super confronting. And I have walked away from some of those moments being like, "Yeah, it's all too much." And others being like, Yeah. Man, let's blow this whole industry up. Like, how do we take over the airports? How do we rethink this? This has gotta serve that. And so that's, it's tension. And some days it's hard to hold tension and other days it's a remarkable thing and it's where ideas and innovation come from.
Daniel Flynn: Do you have an unpopular opinion about the startup ecosystem, the Australian startup ecosystem, you just firmly believe to be true, either a direction we should go or a direction we're going and we shouldn't be, that no one else seems to be on the same page with you about?
Speaker C: Oh, look, I don't think I'm that good to have an opinion that no one else is on the same page about. I'm not that smart, but I have some probably unpopular views that I've heard shared by others around the world. I had this great opportunity to speak in America Gary Vee was speaking at the same, like, day and room and stage, and he got up and ripped into the startup community as this sort of overinflated chasing of valuations and a false fake economy. He just like, he riffed like he does, and I sat there going, I have been, I've been thinking this for so long, 'cause at Thankyou, we never talk about revenue publicly. You gotta understand that in our world, We talk about profit and profit distributed because a consumer buys into Thankyou because they're like, but the money goes, right? And it makes a difference. So think about this. We run a startup that's grown big and scaled. It's been profitable every year. It's given every year, which means cash, like stability going out of the business, off to projects. But our focus on profitability versus celebrating revenue has led to a very, very profitable business that has grown. And last year, I mean, this was a crazy year, but we were able to give over $10 million in our profits away to our projects around the world. But we never talk revenue. And I hear so many startups, they like revenue bragging. And I'm thinking, yeah, I'm sitting on a panel and talking profit and they're talking revenue. I'm thinking like, yeah, we could talk revenue too, and it would be a bigger number, but we're focusing on a very important number. And I'm not saying revenue is not important, it is a measure of success, but I wonder if some of the old school measures of success in a business actually stay true, ring true, and should have more focus. I would say a profitable business early on is critical.
Daniel Flynn: I like to ask everybody this question. It's the advice question. You've probably been asked this a million times, but if a brand new founder or entrepreneur came to you tomorrow, you could just tell them one thing that would help them, what would you tell them?
Speaker C: It's funny because I don't know if I'd even listen to this if I was telling me, but like play the long game.
Daniel Flynn: Yeah.
Speaker C: This takes longer than you want it to, but that's okay. Like, play the long game. And that means the decisions you make have to be long game decisions, not short. And I think we've got a society rigged, a social media machine rigged around like instant. And yeah, I think few and far between are the organizations that are being built to last. But they're there and some have always been there, but it comes from a different way of thinking and it's play the long game.
Daniel Flynn: I love that. There's a quote comes to my mind when you talk about that and that's people underestimate what they can achieve in a year, but underestimate what they can achieve in a lifetime.
Speaker C: Yeah, I love that. I got a book sitting on my desk from a partner of ours, great creative digital agency, And they sent me this notebook saying like, 10 seconds, 10 minutes, 10 hours, 10 days, 10 weeks, 10 months, 10 years. What would you do in 10? And it's a really interesting way to break down like, yeah, that quote even further and start to plan, plan in 10s.
Daniel Flynn: I love that. This is the big question and it's not really a question, but just keeping in mind that this interview is to serve a larger documentary. This documentary is gonna be the history of this Australian startup ecosystem, and I think that's an important story to tell so we can better understand where we came from to help inform where we're going. I want, you know, founders, investors, policymakers, academics, everyone from all over the Australian startup ecosystem to hear this story, keeping in mind that they're going to be listening to this. What's top of mind? What do you, what do you think that they need to hear? What do we need to— Yeah, what needs to be in the conversation?
Speaker C: I think the conversation needs to be about the long game. And I think that so much of what I've heard in startup land and communities at times is about exit, building to exit. Someone asked me once, "What's your exit at Thankyou?" I was like, "Oh, well, we'll finish up the job. We don't get paid a dollar more or less. We have no equity in Thankyou." organization we founded, and that's our model, this all for purpose and mission. It's helped us make really interesting decisions, decisions that if we had a short game in mind, we would never have made. And the truth is they won't pay off for years or decades. Some have started to, others I believe will. But I think we should be having a conversation around the long game, and yes, there are some examples. Yeah. Of really incredible and successful examples of visionary leaders who had a long game and told investors and told people, hey, forget short-term profit, you know, forget early exits and just, we're gonna play a long game and we're gonna change how the world works. And, you know, I think for the better, that's the goal. So maybe it's popular, maybe it's unpopular. I think it's visionary, I think it's aspirational, and I think it's really hard. Because it means at times you put the mission or the idea before self and you make decisions that are based on like the world or our society changing versus you quickly benefiting.
Daniel Flynn: Let's say you solve global extreme poverty. You finished, you achieved, that mission is done. What would you do next?
Speaker C: You know, we, We really believe in Thankyou as a bridge between, you know, our world's two extremes, extreme consumerism and extreme poverty. And many have asked, what happens when extreme poverty doesn't exist? And hopefully Thankyou's been a huge contributor in that. Well, I think that for us, Thankyou is an idea that should live on well beyond its founders and its team that run it now. And my hope is that it would always chase the gap, probably the impossible gaps and hard to close gaps, but the gaps between, you know, those that have and those that don't. And that's a simple way to sum up a very, very complex reality. But yeah, I think Thankyou will have its work cut out for it for as long as, you know, people are buying and consuming and the world has problems that need solving.
Daniel Flynn: I hope you enjoyed that interview. More interviews are on the way. Follow the podcast wherever you're listening right now. Stay tuned for more interviews with many, many more amazing people from the Australian startup ecosystem. Thanks for listening and see you next time.
