Ethan Whitson: Building The Guide Network

In this episode of the Entrepreneurship@DU Podcast, host Joshua Ross welcomes DU alum Ethan Whitson, founder of The Guide Network, a platform built to help outdoor guides streamline operations and grow their businesses. What started as a marketplace to connect customers with guides quickly evolved—through trial, error, and customer feedback—into a full-service software solution now used by guides from solo operators to high-end lodges. 

Ethan shares the winding path of launching a startup while still a student, the unique challenges of building tech for a traditionally offline industry, and how the outdoors shaped both his business and his mindset. From scaling a platform with a small team to training for the Leadville 100 ultra marathon, Ethan opens up about the grit, resilience, and purpose behind his entrepreneurial journey. 

He also dives into the deeper issues affecting the outdoor industry today—from shrinking local knowledge due to retail consolidation to the need for conservation and inclusivity. 

Transcript:

Joshua Ross:

My name is Joshua Ross and welcome to the Entrepreneurship at DU Podcast. On this episode, I sit down with Ethan Whitson, entrepreneur, du alum and founder of The Guide Network to discuss his journey to create a platform to help outdoor guides become more efficient and grow their business.

Ethan Whitson:

We make it a point to give a really great experience to anyone all the way from someone guiding out of the back of their truck, which we call an independent guide, a solo operator, all the way to a destination lodge in Alaska that you pay a ton of money for.

Joshua Ross:

Ethan shares his experiences as an entrepreneur focused on the outdoor industry, an industry that has experienced rapid growth with over 175 million participants in 2024.

Ethan Whitson:

I feel like the biggest thing is you have to consistently take risks and you got to be okay with that, and you got to be really okay with struggling because I think that iteration process takes time. I think the biggest thing in doing a startup that I’ve learned is you have to iterate fast.

Joshua Ross:

Just because you start a business and something you love doesn’t mean you get to spend your time doing it. Many entrepreneurs quickly realize that running a business often pulls you away from the passion that inspired it in the first place.

Ethan Whitson:

I kind of started this business to go outside more, and I think the irony with tech startups is they’re so intense and so involved that I think that’s actually limited my time outside, which has been very frustrating.

Joshua Ross:

Here’s my conversation with Ethan Whitson. Ethan Whitson, welcome to the podcast. You have a very interesting distinction. You are our first guest in the new studio in the Daniels College of Business, so welcome.

Ethan Whitson:

Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be here. Yeah, this place is awesome.

Joshua Ross:

So you’re from Golden Colorado. I’m from Golden Colorado. I believe it’s one of the hearts of the outdoor industry coming from Golden Colorado. How has the environment that you grew up in that you live in kind of shaped your approach to building the Guide network?

Ethan Whitson:

Yeah, I’ve always been around the outdoors and it’s been a massive thorough line in my life. I’ve had some crazy family experiences in the outdoors. I lost a family member very early on in my life in the outdoors, so it is something that you’d think would kind of push me away from it, but I’ve always been really involved in it. I’ve always loved to go outside. I would say it’s been a big part of my identity and it’s also been a big part of how I relax or find peace. So it does a lot of things and serves a lot of purposes, and I’ve been very lucky to be that close to some incredible resources and just ways to get outside.

Joshua Ross:

So what made you start this company? Give us a little insight on what the Guide Network is and then what was the reason you decided to start it? What problem are you solving?

Ethan Whitson:

Yeah, so the origin story kind of interesting. It goes back to I guess Golden High School. So I graduated Golden High School and I moved to California to go play college baseball and kind of like you were talking about Golden being this incredible hub for the outdoors. I went to California in a place where there wasn’t a lot of outdoor activity and I couldn’t find any outdoor guides. So I was 18 fresh out of high school and thought, wow, there should really be a marketplace for outdoor guides, and I couldn’t find anything. So I was living with my uncle who’s a software developer at Apple at the time, and I was like, I really want to make this platform. And that was kind of the genesis of it. I bounced around before I came to to a couple different colleges. I was playing baseball out at there and then I transferred to DU and the idea kind of resurfaced, and then in the idea to first dollar class with UI kind of really dove into it to see what was possible. And then once we started getting going on the marketplace, we realized that wasn’t the business model people wanted. They were actually really excited about the software we built that powered the marketplace, and that’s where we’re at today. We solve a lot of operational problems for guides, everything from waivers, payments, client interaction, guide, scheduling. We pretty much fully run their business. So that’s kind of how it started. There’s been a lot of iteration, a lot of pivoting kind of involved to get where we’re at today.

Joshua Ross:

So what type of guides do you support? And you’ve said a lot of things that you offer, but what was the problem you initially were trying to solve and has that changed?

Ethan Whitson:

Yeah, it’s definitely changed. The problem we were first trying to solve was just trying to locate outdoor guides or trying to buy

Joshua Ross:

What’s an outdoor guide?

Ethan Whitson:

An outdoor guide is someone that you pay money to take you on an experience outdoors, whether that is fly fishing or climbing, skiing, and there’s definitely, I was thinking a little bit about this last night, there’s different sects of outdoor guides. There’s some that are trying to maybe teach you an experience or an introduction to an activity and then all the way up to someone taking you to do something extremely dangerous that your life would be in jeopardy of otherwise. We kind of work with everyone across the board. The marketplace idea was trying to make it easier for people to find guides, whether it would be one of those intro level people or someone more complex, and there’s a lot of different ways that business model didn’t work out and why we kind of pivoted and I’m kind of happy to go into that. But yeah, think it was kind of a happy accident that we landed in the business model we have now, and it was really driven by customer feedback. I think we’ve always been really, really direct with following what our customers want and iterating off of it, and I think that’s also kind of how we’ve landed on our business model today.

Joshua Ross:

So before you started Guide Network, how were the guides booking business, finding customers, and how has that changed?

Ethan Whitson:

So there’s kind of two different ways and it’s still split up this way. I would say the first one is pen and paper. They’re really operating off legacy systems. I would say 30 to 50% of it. That number year by year goes down quite substantially, but very archaic ways of just running a business. The second one is there’s a lot of legacy booking tools out there and something that’s been really nice for us is a lot of those companies have been around a long time and have either been acquired by public companies or private equity, and this software has just pretty much been left to die. So it’s definitely opened up the door for where we’re at right now.

Joshua Ross:

So you said you’ve pivoted, has that customer changed? Walk me through a little bit about who’s your typical type of user customer guide on your platform.

Ethan Whitson:

Yeah, we make it a point to give a really great experience to anyone all the way from someone guiding out of the back of their truck, which we call an independent guide, a solo operator all the way to a destination lodge in Alaska that you pay a ton of money for. That is pretty much the most high-end luxury travel experience you can get. So our software kind of is modularized and does a myriad of things in terms of what those clients specifically need, and we tune up or tune down the complexity based on how complex their operation is.

Joshua Ross:

Well, so there’s a little bit of customization to what you offer based on the size type of the customer,

Ethan Whitson:

A lot of different complexity I guess. And the reason for that is is the people that are operating these really big operations, whether it’s higher volume or higher ticket size in terms of prices, they just need so much more and the customer’s really expecting a lot more and they typically have more employees, more legal restrictions, that kind of thing. And then for some guy that’s just operating out of the back of his truck or a solo operator, they need to be as simple as humanly possible to operate their business. So we’ve really had to separate out the software. So we’re still solving the problem that they need, which is streamlining their business. And I think that’s the big value prop we’re solving for how do we eliminate admin tasks? How do we make the customer experience for them better so that their customers feel like they’re getting a really solid booking experience and they’re not booking through some sketchy website or third party plugin kind of thing.

Joshua Ross:

So how do you handle the request from larger potential customers or customers that want certain features and functionality, which a lot of times are custom, but you’re realizing you want to keep that customer happy but also don’t want to just start creating a lot of one-off custom software tools and features for customers.

Ethan Whitson:

Yeah, I think that’s been the vein of my existence for the last five years. It’s a really, really difficult thing and I don’t know if there’s an answer that fits, but I will say kind of going back a little bit, when I was in idea first dollar, I teamed up with my business partner Brandon, who was my best friend from home, and he at the time was at CSU and he was doing development. And when we were an idea to first dollar, we were coding this whole thing on a no-code to on WordPress. And we realized very quickly, oh, this is not going to cut it. So I’ve been extremely lucky. A couple months later we brought on his cousin Bailey, and that’s our founding team. So it’s two devs and me on the operational side. And they’ve been just incredible I guess, of iterating on customer feedback.

And what ended up happening is the first couple customers we had, we got to sit down in their shop or office and I would go in there probably almost every day to a different customer and we’d sit down for hours and we’d look at almost every single one of them had this three ring binder. And the three ringing binder was like a gold mine because I quickly realized that a lot of these employees are semit transient and they’re going from business to business. And pretty much this three ringing binder had been copied and pasted at every shop across Colorado. So we pretty much took this binder, the information in it and the process they used and digitized it. And then what you’re asking about the features is we would start, once we had the basic meat and potatoes of the three-ring binder system, we’d go around and say, okay, what do you guys need outside of this?

That might be an issue, and then we’d dive into those features. But when someone asks us, I guess to build a feature, there’s definitely a lot of factors that go in. The first one being potential revenue. Obviously if it’s a massive client, there’s times that we have put everything on hold to try and onboard them, which has been really risky. And other times we look at the landscape of all of our clients, kind of see what percentage it’ll fit. And then I think when you’re building a big tool like this in complex software, you just have to end up modularizing it to an incredible point where everything you can turn on and off, you have different account types, and then that’s where the complexity really ramps up. And it can be a big trap that can make the customer experience really bad. And that’s something we’ve kind of had to deal with through the years is making sure the software fits the needs of every single client.

Joshua Ross:

It’s a great lesson to be learned. Right. Well done on that. So as you are building out the platform, can you walk me through some of the valuable lessons you’ve learned from either the development part, the people you work with, the guides, the outfitters starting with WordPress? What are some things that were some takeaways?

Ethan Whitson:

Yeah, I think the biggest thing in doing a startup that I’ve learned is you have to iterate fast. And I mean, I feel like I’m beating a dead horse saying that, but typically customers, I mean you can’t always listen to customers. Sometimes they’ll lead you astray, but most of the times they’re going to have really good feedback and especially if they’re using your product on a daily basis, if you have the opportunity to talk to them every day or on a consistent basis and get feedback and iterate, it’s the best way of building a business. And I don’t think there’s really anything close to that. That’s been probably the biggest learning experience for me. But I mean, it’s been a really interesting journey. I would say whenever you’re building something new and you’re disrupting a market, it’s kind of terrifying. I have some crazy stories of, I’ve been driving in the middle of Montana and people have threatened to slash my tires and I’ve been threatened to get beat up in shops because they thought what we were doing was so disruptive that they had a massive problem with it.

And it’s kind of funny because we’ve come so far away from that and we’re back to something that is a lot less disruptive and we’re beneficial. But I don’t know, I feel like the biggest thing is you have to consistently take risks and you got to be okay with that, and you got to be really okay with struggling because I think that iteration process takes time. And the longer time horizon, the longer you can expand that out, the higher your chances of success continually to grow. So that’s I think something really difficult and easier said than done, but it’s kind of the key I think to building a software product.

Joshua Ross:

So you’re a technology platform, right, in the outdoor industry. And so I love the outdoors. I love to go getaway. Last weekend I went and climbed a couple fourteeners and the best part about it where we were camping, cell service did not work. So we are completely disconnected. And so you have outdoor enthusiasts that often seek to disconnect. How do you bounce the need for this operational technology, which is so important as you talked about, to really help your customers become more efficient, but also preserving this authentic outdoor experience?

Ethan Whitson:

Yeah, that’s a really difficult one, and it’s something I quite frankly struggle with myself. I was telling you last week I got off a five day or seven day rafting trip in the middle of nowhere and didn’t have cell service, and I kind of started this business to go outside more. And I think the irony with tech startups is they’re so intense and so involved that I think it’s actually limited my time outside, which has been very frustrating. And I think technology is a piece that these guides a lot of times don’t want or don’t think they need, but it’s something that increases their time outside. Something I always tell our clients is what we’re building is going to help you spend more time doing what you love and less time on stuff you hate, which is the admin work, which is answering the phone.

Something that’s really difficult about being a guide that I don’t think people understand is you are out of cell service from typically seven, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM and then in that latter half of the day, and most of these people have families, you’re calling your client for the next day, you’re doing your taxes, you’re doing all this administrative work, and it’s, it’s a brutal lifestyle, especially because it’s a seasonal business. So oftentimes these guys could be working a hundred days in a row doing that day in and day out, and our goal is to kind of take that pressure off of them. And although it is a tech adverse market, which we’ve definitely had some problems and struggles with, I think that’s kind of the goal is even though they don’t love technology is to give them time back to do what they love and spend it with people they love.

Joshua Ross:

I love that. That’s a great way to look at it. And I think that’s probably what most of your customers realize is that you’re making them more efficient, they can do more with less and at the end of the day still enjoy the outdoors and come home to their families and be present, which I think is important. Kind of hanging out on this whole idea of technology, where do you think technology improves the outdoor experience?

Ethan Whitson:

Yeah, I think this is kind of a weird statement, but I’m going to answer that something very far away from what we do. I think the mapping technology is incredible right now, and I’ve been a massive Garmin fan for a really long time. I’m a really avid back country skier and runner, and I think Garmin and Onyx, what those companies are doing right now is keeping people really safe. And I also think it’s giving us incredible data on whether it’s heart rate metrics or anything like that. And I think those tools are incredible and I’m really excited about pretty much everything they’re doing.

Joshua Ross:

I love it. I’m a huge Garmin fan as well, and we both ski in the back country and I go on a lot of new routes and I won’t do it unless I have the GPX file downloaded my watch, so then that route is on my watch so I can make sure I know where I’m going, which I think is incredibly important. So you crisscross the state, you actually crisscross more than one state in what you’re doing. You interact with a lot of people and you’re also very into the outdoors. What part of the outdoor industry do you feel is growing the fastest and why?

Ethan Whitson:

I think with outdoor industry, there’s a bunch of different limiting factors that hurt growth. I would say the biggest ones are the barriers to entry are knowledge and money. I think hiking is really one of the easiest things to get into just because the barrier to entry is extremely low. And I think skiing will always be one of those things that is growing pretty consistently and it’s easier to get into. But yeah, the outdoor industry right now as a whole, there’s a lot of stuff going on that has made it difficult, I guess to get involved in some of these activities. And there’s a lot of, I guess things going on and people trying to be proactive about that. But I would say probably the lower barrier to entry things are the easiest to get into. But I think COVID was a really interesting time in the outdoor industry and I don’t think we really have a full grasp of what happened yet. Pretty much we saw an insane boom in every single aspect of the outdoor industry, and we’re kind of seeing a mean reversion where all of that stuff’s coming back down right now and has been over the last two years and kind of continuing on a normal growth pattern. But that’s been a very kind of interesting factor that I feel like a lot of small business owners are really having to negotiate with right now.

Joshua Ross:

What do you mean by knowledge in terms of a barrier to access?

Ethan Whitson:

Yeah, so there’s this funny thing that happened three or four months ago. There’s this big industry organization, I’m a part of trade organization, and I don’t necessarily fit the prototype. I think they have this yearly meeting, and I think I’m 25 right now. And I think the youngest person besides me was probably like 35 or 40. And for some reason I always get the need, feel the need to say something during those, which I probably shouldn’t probably keep my mouth shut. But in this conversation, pretty much there’s this interesting ecosystem, and I think this is kind of important to talk about it, where you have kind of these independent retailers and for all use fly fishing as an example. I think you have these fly shops that they sell gear, but what they also sell is knowledge. And in fly fishing, there’s a lot of information you need to know to be able to go out and execute it.

As back country skiing, you have to know how to read terrain or a river, you have to know what gear you need. It’s extremely weather dependent, so there’s a lot of knowledge you need before you can actually execute the activity. And I think in this trade organization thing, I spoke up at the end and they were like, we’re just seeing not as much traffic because, and this is another issue I think with the internet and the outdoors is a lot of these big brands are selling direct to consumer, which kind of cuts out the fly shop. And what that really does is I think cuts out a passing along of knowledge that is extremely critical, and those guys specifically have knowledge about where they’re located. So we’re seeing a lot of these smaller retailers kind of die off and then the knowledge kind of dies off with it, which is in my opinion, really sad. And going back to that trade meeting, I spoke up and I said, I think there’s way too high of a barrier for entry right now because we have people that are kind of gatekeeping the outdoors. Speaking on the growth, it’s grown so fast that you look at a place like Colorado, there’s a lot of people outside and a lot of people that are from here don’t necessarily love that. And then it’s expensive to get into and it’s hard to learn all that information.

Joshua Ross:

Yeah, you’re spot on with that. When I think about skiing in the back country and being able to go out and do that, you have to take an area course, right, and that’s 600 to a thousand dollars and you’re still not completely knowledgeable and comfortable back there. And then a setup with the skis, the skins, the boots, the backpack, the probe, the shovel, the beacon, all of that. You’re another $3,500. We haven’t even talked about the gear you’re putting on your body. And then what about transportation into these places? Because a lot of ’em, you need a four wheel drive or all wheel drive type vehicle. So I’m not going to use the word gatekeeping, but there is a barrier to get through to that. I would not go try new terrain without somebody that had already been there before. And so you got to find that as well. So it does make it very difficult and that moves over to backpacking, that moves over to fly fishing, that moves over to mountain biking. There’s a lot of these other things that require a large outlay of capital and knowledge to be able to go do. So we’re going to just jump into a little bit about you.

So you’re running the Leadville 100 in August. It’s a hundred miles, about 16,000 feet of elevation gain all above 10,000 feet. Why?

Ethan Whitson:

Yeah, that’s a question. I don’t know the answer to I, the story is interesting. I got in off the wait list. I’m actually doing the race as a fundraiser. Something I mentioned at the very beginning of this podcast is I lost a family member in the outdoors, and it’s a very long story, but pretty much she was lost in, my aunt was lost in 2005 in Vail on a fourteener. They never found her and Vail Mountain Rescue recently found her body and it’s this incredible story about this kind of all woman search team and it’s a very big Colorado mystery that’s had a lot of conspiracy theories and stuff tied to it. I’m just very grateful, I guess for the search team and the woman that went up and found her. And they took a very different approach to typical search and rescue and it’s really cool. So I guess I’m really excited about raising money for Vail Mountain Rescue and hopefully helping get them some new gear.

Something I think that’s overlooked is search and rescue is the backbone of the outdoor ecosystem, whether it’s with guided outdoor adventures or people going out by themselves, quite frankly, the mountains are dangerous and it’s not something to be overlooked and they save a lot of lives and they help a lot of families out. So that’s something I’m excited about in terms of why I’m doing it. I don’t really know. I loved Ultra on and I think it was just too good of an opportunity to pass up. I was registered for another a hundred and yeah, I’m very scared for it.

Joshua Ross:

So walk me through how you’re training for it also building and running this business.

Ethan Whitson:

Yeah, it’s not been a very smooth process, I’ll tell you that. They’re both very involved and I think what’s really drawn me to ultra running is I think a startup is really the business form of ultra running and it’s probably the best mental preparation you can ever have. You’re going to over a really long race like that, you’re going to have incredible moments. You’re a hundred percent going to have some really bad moments and you have to work through them mentally. And I think that’s something that has drawn me to ultra running. I pretty much my daily, my day right now kind of consists of waking up working all day or working out in the morning, then either working out at night, running, eating dinner, going to sleep, repeating. And I don’t necessarily think that’s a very healthy, I guess, process to be in for a long period of time.

But I do think if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re doing a startup and it’s really stressful, I think registering for a race, whether it’s anything from a half marathon to a marathon is really important because it gives you a healthy way to kind of exercise your stress way kind of. Because I think these businesses are really intense and especially when you get into it for a long period of time and you do see a lot of ups and downs, it’s really easy to take that stress and have unhealthy ways of getting it out. And I think when you’re doing something that intense, there’s no room for unhealthiness. But again, you could argue that that lifestyle is unhealthy within itself. There there’s a little bit of back and forth. I think that’s difficult

Joshua Ross:

Throughout my life and starting running companies, it was the one thing that I would never give up was the exercise. I thought it was so important for my wellbeing, my mental health, the way I dealt with stress. And to your point, my buddies and I all loved a mountain bike, so we’d always put a race or two on the calendar and that got you out of bed early in the morning or got you on the train late at night. And that just so incredibly important. So if you could solve a major challenge facing the outdoor industry right now, maybe we’ve talked about this already, but what would it be?

Ethan Whitson:

I really think that the smaller retailers, the smaller guide shops, the smaller you name it, the people that provide knowledge in the industry, we can’t let those people go away. And I think we’re in a really difficult point where pretty much what’s happened during COVID is everyone went outside, all these manufacturers made a lot more gear, they sold it to the retailers, and they’re pretty much, they’ve been sitting on this gear that they can’t sell because the growth went down a substantial amount. And now we’re in this really odd phase of trying to get out of this growth period that’s been really difficult and we just cannot let those brands die. I think trade organizations play a really important part and making sure that a lot of those manufacturers aren’t just going direct to consumer because it is such a high barrier of entry that you do want to give consumers the option of buying cheaper gear or buying used gear or being able to get into these activities at an affordable price.

But we can’t let the knowledge die because the knowledge is what keeps our ecosystem running, both from a conservation standpoint, teaching, I think that’s also a thing that’s completely overlooked in the outdoor industry often, and I would say quite frankly, used as something to make companies look better and not something we often take super seriously is that these resources provide a living for us and if we don’t take care of them, they’re going to be gone and the next generation won’t be able to do that. So I think it’s kind of this two-pronged approach of like we can’t let these smaller businesses die, and we also have to be conserving these resources pretty aggressively because we have seen such an uptick in usage that it is very easy for us to just let these places go and let them get destroyed, and we just can’t let that happen.

Joshua Ross:

No, that’s a great perspective. I was climbing Mount Albert in Mount Massive a few days ago, and we did Albert on a Thursday, got to the parking lot about eight o’clock, and it was completely full, about 40, 50 cars. And then the next day we climbed Mount Massive, and then we left on the Saturday morning. That parking lot in Albert when we left was completely full cars up and down the road, probably another 250 cars. And it just shows that the number of people that are going to the outdoors, and this is one of what, 58 Fourteeners in the state of Colorado, and this is one that’s a little harder to get to, but just shows you the number of people that are actually getting out using these trails, beating up on these trails as well.

Ethan Whitson:

And something I want to tag along to that, and this is something I have wanted to say publicly for a long time,

Joshua Ross:

Here it goes,

Ethan Whitson:

Being from Golden and being from Colorado, I used to get so mad at that and it’s really easy to get mad at that, but everything I just talked about does not work, and those businesses don’t work without tourism. And we have to find ways to make that sustainable and to accept that and be like, okay, it’s okay if I pull up to a parking lot of a place I love to go recreate, and there’s 20 out of state plates. It might make you very angry. And I’m not going to lie, it’s made me very angry a lot of times. But without that, we don’t have those small retailers, we don’t have guides that are educating people. We don’t have money to fund search and rescue. It’s a very intertangled web of quite frankly. Also, something that’s important to say is the outdoor industry is not operating off crazy margin. So for these businesses to operate, there does need to be significant volume. And that volume and tourist traffic is just so, so important to honestly, a lot of economies all across the United States. We operate globally and we see in some of these small countries, that’s that whole town’s income. So it’s easy to get angry about, but it’s also providing a living for so many people and keeping these resources and people that power them kind of in business, which is important.

Joshua Ross:

Yeah, I can see how people might get angry. I look at it a little differently and I’m like, people are getting outdoors. People are embracing the outdoor lifestyle. People are getting fit, taking care of themselves, thinking about their mind, their body, and that’s what I think is incredibly important. So I got a couple rapid fire questions right before we close. Worst outdoor gear purchase you’ve ever made?

Ethan Whitson:

Oh, I’ve made some bad sleeping pad purchases and those you do not forget

Joshua Ross:

Best outdoor experience you’ve had through the Guide Network.

Ethan Whitson:

I got a day of cat skiing through one of our clients in Crested Butte, and that was very fun and really cool, pretty unforgettable.

Joshua Ross:

Okay, you have three days off. Where are you going in Colorado and what are you doing?

Ethan Whitson:

Yeah, well, right now if I have three days off, I’m going to Leadville and I’m running the Leadville Trails. I just did that this weekend. So yeah, I think I really love recreating just kind of all over the place. I love the San Juan, so probably going to the San Juan to go ski.

Joshua Ross:

One piece of advice for students or aspiring entrepreneurs who want to build something in the outdoor industry,

Ethan Whitson:

Something that’s been really interesting looking at the Guide Network is we’ve kind of been on a four to five year grind of extremely linear growth that’s taken a very long time for us to get to what you would define as product market fit and see very exponential growth out of it. And I really think people look at the time horizon too short, and I think there’s a saying in entrepreneurship that I really believe in. It’s people they don’t, companies don’t just fail. People oftentimes just get tired, and I think it’s totally okay if you’re tired or not passionate about something to stop and go a different direction. But if you do really believe in what you’re doing, I think the time to product market fit is a lot longer than people actually think. And you’re going to have a lot of ups and downs, and you have to be really good at writing the ups and downs.

I think that’s probably the biggest thing I’ve learned in entrepreneurship is it takes a lot of time to understand of you can’t get too high and you can’t get too low no matter what happens. I mean, obviously you can enjoy success, but if you learn how to ride the roller coaster and you look at your timeframe as a lot longer than it typically is, and that gives you a lot more time to iterate and kind of improve or pivot on your product or what you’re trying to solve. I think that’s how great companies are made. And you look at most companies and you see an overnight success where that person probably grinded in a basement for 10 years before they ever saw product market fit. And I think if I was starting from scratch tomorrow, that’s what I would tell myself or if I was giving advice to someone is you ought be in it for the long run. And if you’re not passionate about it, switch it up. But if you are, you’ll end up finding something that works. It might just take you a little bit to get there.

Joshua Ross:

Well, that’s great advice. Well, Ethan, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for making me a little bit smarter.

Ethan Whitson:

Thank you for having me. Yeah, this was awesome. I love the new studio and always great to be back in DCB. I have a lot of thank yous to kind of give to DU as a whole and a lot of connections, A lot of things I learned here and I’m just extremely grateful for this place.

Joshua Ross:

The entrepreneurship at DU podcast was recorded in the media studio in the Daniels College of Business on the University of Denver campus. You can find us on Instagram at du Entrepreneur on LinkedIn, at DU Entrepreneur, and on Facebook at entrepreneurship at du. This episode was engineered and produced by DU Student Eka Wosu and hosted by Joshua Ross.