ARYZE spoke with Andrew Batey about risk-taking, entrepreneurship, and his company Beatdapp
Andrew Batey, also known as “Fidel Cashflow”, is an entrepreneur who enjoys the adrenaline rush of taking risks in his free time and also in his work.
Andrew has taught advanced marketing and entrepreneurship courses at FIDM, and currently teaches Advertising and Marketing at Trinity Western University and mentors and advises a number of startups in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Vancouver. On top of teaching and mentoring, he brings in interns to work at Beatdapp, giving them hands-on and practical experience.
His current project called Beatdapp leverages a proprietary Blockchain protocol to track and verify music usage across streaming services for royalty payouts. Andrew’s entrepreneurial spirit led him to become co-founder of Beatdapp and he promotes entrepreneurship through teaching, coaching, and mentoring.
Taking Risks and Having Drive
Entrepreneurship and enabling companies to take off from the ground comes with a certain degree of risk. As Andrew points out,
It’s a lot of work, and risk, but very rewarding to pull off. At its core, I believe entrepreneurship is about having the drive, passion, and a skill set to solve a specific problem for a group of customers. The first part is recognizing the problem and your level of passion to solve it. The second part is really about having the developed skills to execute on the business idea.
A few notes that Andrew suggests is that it’s important, and challenging, having the discipline to discover which ideas are worth pursuing. He also notes that it’s important to know which tools to use for whichever problems might arise, and figuring out what you are passionate about that you “haven’t talked yourself into doing”. Subsequently you need to be ready to take the risk to make it happen.
Working with Start-ups
Having a go-for-it attitude and looking at startups like a puzzle to solve encompasses Andrew’s approach to working with startups. He starts his process by going to the drawing board and detailing out a battle plan for the company to see how their business might scale. Once he’s involved Andrew feels like he almost has to help to see the company through. That’s when he knows he’s “taken bait hook, line, and sinker.”
Working with start-ups is particularity interesting to Andrew as the challenges that come along with solving unique problems for each company combine his love for risk-taking and challenge. He mentions that no two companies are the same, and each have their own “unique path, set of success drivers, and a certain amount of luck and resources”. As Andrew notes,
To me, startups are like one giant puzzle with challenging and complex solutions required for success. Once you have PM Fit, it’s about strategically and efficiently scaling your business to maximize positive outcomes while minimizing potential risks. I love both parts of that journey – the start and the scaling. I find it absolutely boring and unchallenging to maintain or manage a mature business!
Over the course of his career Andrew has transitioned from focusing heavily on companies needing customer acquisition strategies and growth hacking to later working on network effects and virility to currently finding himself more drawn to companies that have product retention issues, scaling sales teams, and B2C companies where grown tests can yield quick results. Andrew is a risk-taking entrepreneur who likes challenges and avoiding stagnation. Who knows where he’ll end up next.
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