Transcription
Lose every game but win the party, or win every game but miss the party? No, no, lose the game, dude. I'm the wrong person to ask, very much the wrong person to ask. Lose the game, win the party, have the jaw. Absolutely, yeah, especially in a setting like Tens.
Yeah, 'cause you can always win at other things, but you know, you can probably make the same argument about the party. But I'm there for the jaw, dude, and there's no jaw like it. So like, screw it, take the jaw.
Exactly. Um, get tackled by Bucky SP, yeah, or chug a beer against Jack Par? You mean flatlined by Bucky Ber? Yes, okay, yeah. Get sent home by Bucky Ber, or get sent home by Jack Par in a different way?
No, I'll definitely take on Zander. I'll take on Jack Par 100% in chugging. Oh, definitely. Are you solid at a chug? Dude, I can throw a stedo down faster than you've ever seen in your life. At K T, you make a video. I can literally do it in like a second. I can do it that in a second, I guess.
Okay, so we, because story time will be at 10, you and I can get together and we can go for... Okay, go for... Okay, D.
Um, oh, dodgeball versus Jon Alomu, yeah, one-on-one, or paddle one-on-one against C.A. Kisi? No paddle, 100%. Let me in, bro.
I'm going. We get straight into it.
What's up, everyone? Welcome back to Story Time. Thank you so much for tuning in today. We're here with someone that we wanted on for a really, really, really long time. We've been able to make it happen. It is JP Funpay. JP, thank you so much for being here, dude. I appreciate your time.
Thank you so much. It's just so for me, Le man. It's also a huge thank you to TENS for making this happen. If you use the code STORYTIME, all capitals, so it's like STORYTIME, if you put that in, you get 20% off all tickets to TENS. You'll be there, I'll be there. Story Time itself will be at 10 as well. We have some exciting stuff coming, so thank you, TENS. Looking forward to it, dude.
To talk about, I have so many questions for you. So, when you came in, you were saying how, firstly, you grew up in Malbos, Malb Strand. Yeah, I had no idea on that, firstly.
So, to look into your life, the JP that we know now, the successful entrepreneur, business runner, business seller, business owner from Malbos, what was that journey? Why business and Malbos? How did you make that journey?
Well, I don't think Malbos has as much of a relevance to it, although it was an incredible town to grow up in. I didn't seem to get out of it for like 30 years. I think I stayed there for 29 years. But it's more to do with my dad, I think. He was a very entrepreneurial kind of guy, and he taught us from a very young age how to be entrepreneurial.
He had all these little challenges and things. He's very unique in his way of doing things, which, if I look back, a lot of the things that he did pulled through later years and gave us a lot of drive. So, I don't think Malbos was necessarily so much in relation to it, but having an entrepreneurial upbringing was very much a part of it.
Always kept us hungry. And sport as well, like sports was a big thing for us. Me and my brother both competed in rugby. We both played for Western Province. We both had South African records in athletics and in shot put and discus, and mine was javelin.
So, yeah, I think sport and entrepreneurial kind of merge well in the later years. A lot of people think I'm from Joburg for some other reason. I don't...
Oh, is that the general consensus? The Joburg consensus? Like, "Oh, I thought you were from Joburg." Like, "No, dude, grew up in Mal." I used to surf and bribe over weekends. It's pretty much how it's been.
Well, I grew up... The reason I know Malbos specifically is 'cause I grew up in Durbanville, and Malbos was where we used to go. We'd pack the car, drive out, go kneeboarding, boogie boarding, surfing, whatever, in Malbos and Big Bay, which is now like Big Bay. Back then, it was like a lifeguard little house and that was it, just like sand dunes.
Yeah, the pride that I have for Durbanville, which sounds insane when you're in Cape Town and you're like, "Durbanville? It's like a little town." Like, cool, but doing international film and then being interviewed and people are like, "So, where are you from?" And you're like, "Dude, I'm from the little Afrikaans town."
Exactly. Like, I'm from there, and everyone's like, "But on TV, you're American." And like, so I have so much pride in that. And in a weird way, the more success I ever faced in my life, the more proud I became of where I was from.
Correct. You know, that it, like, once you get to a certain level, you stop trying to pretend, you know, to be... So you're like, "No, dude, I'm from there, and I'm proudly from there." And that's for me the reason of that question.
It's also, it's also has to do with a little bit of, um, almost like underdog vibe. You know, you shouldn't be achieving the stuff that you do or crossing the T's and dotting the I's from where you are from.
And um, so I definitely relate to that 100%. Malbos was an incredible place to grow up, and it still is. The place has expanded quite a lot, but the wind's still the same.
So, yes, yeah, kite surfers dream, dude.
All pulling in there.
Yeah, going from that then into business, you were saying earlier your first business. How did that start, and what was the first business?
So, I mean, I had a lot of small kind of hustles growing up. Anything from like picking the flowers in one street and selling it to the street next door and repeating that process.
Also, in school, I mean, everything that anybody wanted, like we were selling it. Whether it be marbles or like if it's marble season, me and my brother, whether we're selling marbles. Marble season, I remember marble season was slammer season. We were selling slammers.
And then if it wasn't that, we'd just sell like knickknacks. So, um, really, so you've always had that?
Like always, always. It very much comes from my dad always trying to push us. My dad had a very weird way of growing up, and I kind of like every time I tell this to explain this to someone, it seems like a lot of people can relate to it.
And I think it's good for me to maybe mention this because I think it's a good mind shift for people when they raise kids and how they have to deal with raising them to be entrepreneurial.
But my dad had this way of, uh, he was in an accident, and he came back from the hospital. My mom, she basically gave us chores, and we were like, "Okay, we have to do the dishes." And so we, us fight, you know, like every kid does, doesn't want to do the dishes, doesn't want to clean up.
And so my dad said, "No, no, no, no, this is not going to work. You guys are going to fight forever." So he said he doesn't want any more chores, doesn't want us to do chores, and he came up with a price list.
So me and my brother used to went from like, you know, we'd get 20 Rand for doing dishes and so much Rand for doing this and so much for... So we basically had throughout my young life, I remember I used to have just this ability to make money.
Like that was always the vibe, you know, if whenever you wanted money, it was cool. There's a prices of things you can do. So me and my brother went from fighting about who's going to do the dishes to fighting about who's going to do the dishes.
And then every now and then, my dad would go and he'd make like clean the pool. He'll make it like 60 Rand or 40 Rand. I can't remember what the price was, but he'll lift it quite high, and then he'd leave us to start negotiating who's going to do that because that's the easy job for the most money.
No way. So we learned how to work together. And, you know, looking back, me and my brother built companies together eventually and knew how to work together as a team.
And that only stems from us trying to negotiate and navigate our way around making money as kids in this hustle. So, but we basically, they got everything they wanted from us, and we could make money whenever we wanted on the fly. Genius.
I mean, it's quite evolved. So, um, yeah, if I look back on it, I mean, I would not raise my kids any other way.
And that's such a clever way of doing it. I'm looking at all the years that I did the dishes, and I'm like, I did that [ __ ] for free.
Yeah, correct. I could have made 50 bucks out of that or something, you know? Like my dad also had this opinion that like if you force someone to do something that they don't want to do, you're kind of like, you know, you're setting them up for doing things they don't want to do in life, like being in a job that you don't want to be in.
So putting down this price list and having us kind of work for our own money and feeling like we earned it, like, you know, he didn't mind paying. We could do the dishes three times a day. He didn't have an issue with that.
But, um, it worked brilliantly, and it gave us an ability to always have money, spend it on something, go, "Oh [ __ ], we need money now to go watch a movie." Cool, jump in, do the house.
So it worked all the way around, and I think it like those little things and finding entrepreneurial little challenges is something that I'm... It's very dear to my heart.
I have an opinion in South Africa that we're doing it wrong. We're doing it wrong in schools. I don't feel like entrepreneurship should even be a curriculum. I think it should be a national sport, you know, something that, wow, people aspire to and compete within their ages from a very young age.
I think, you know, um, yeah, I left school when I was 15 years old.
No ways. Did you decide, "Sweet, cheers, I'm out?"
I was homeschooled from the age of 13 because of sport, and then, uh, just, um, at like 15, I was like, "Well, you know, stand seven, what's like grade nine?"
Yeah.
Um, want to become a magician, wanted to do business, and none of that I felt like school's never going to help me in. So I made the call and decided to finish up school.
And you started your first business when you were about 16?
That same working with your brother?
Yeah. Did your brother also decide, "KET, dude, I'm out too?" Or was it...?
Well, he was fortunate enough that he did. He studied from a very young age. He was able to go into uni. I think he finished school when he was 16 years old, so he was a completely different kettle.
Yeah. So, um, when he was 16, turning 17, he finished school, and he eventually did B.Com accounting and did LLB law. He got two degrees, essentially.
So I was like the creative one coming up with ideas. He was the smart one knowing how to build structures and everything, and we learned a lot from each other.
So I think I've left him with some creativity, and he left me with, you know, knowing how to manage companies. And, um, you know, that's... He's now retired in Malbos.
Beautiful. Well, you say that. You know, if you can play golf on a Tuesday while all your friends are working, I guess.
I mean, yeah, depends what you want to do with your time.
Got to be into that.
Yeah, yeah. What was the first business that you were like, "This is our go at life?"
First business?
Um, well, I was a magician for about two years, so I did a lot of magic. Um, did magic shows for corporates like at 17. But, um, I started like hacking and stuff on computers from a very young age, like from 14, 15.
You know, I was through the dial-up years. I was learning how to do like white and black hat hacking and stuff, and that got me into web development and things like that.
So, um, one of my best friends at the time, he just finished his degree. He was a software developer. So I said to him, "Okay, cool, I've got this idea. I'm going to go out, go to places who need websites, restaurants and businesses. I'll sell it to them, and you develop the website."
And that's kind of how we got started. So it's... It was about, I think, back 22 years ago. So I've been in business for about 22 years, but building websites from day one was my thing.
So, you know, online tech and building platforms and running dev teams, yeah, that's always been my strong point. And now I've got a bit of a marketing mixture too.
So, J, well, the first time I ever recall hearing of JP Funderspay was through articles and different people commenting and mentioning online at the end of one of your businesses. That was a massive...
Two questions towards that that lead us from first company. Was that massive sell your first company, and why the sell?
Yeah, so not actually, not at all. I mean, there's so much grace space in between where I started to where you first see me kind of appear.
In fact, a lot of people have asked me advice over time. They'll be like, "You know, what is your secret? What's the secret to success? And what's the secret to running good businesses?"
And like the sad reality is that the actual best way to grow in life is to actually fail. Like fail and fail hard and pick yourself up from there.
And I don't feel that I would have ever been as good as I am in the stuff that I do now if I didn't fail at it so many times. You know, eventually, you do such a lot of good things in your projects, and then you go like... and you're unable to calculate the 2 or 3% that's going to break the camel's back, that break your business down.
And learning what that 2-3% is, identifying it, and finding ways how to, you know, finding the things that don't work and learning how to mitigate that, that has been insanely helpful.
You know, I kind of... I'm at this stage of my life now where I think any project that I touch will be successful. I just... because I know all the elements that make up the biggest scope of the project.
And that's why I also limit my time in how much time I spend on things outside of my projects. You know, I kind of feel like my focus is always best spent in my own projects.
But, um, but yeah, I think learning, there's a lot of failures in between that. Like, you know, we failed, uh, you know, and, uh, there's a lot of projects that started out two years later, we had to close it down, ended up with no money.
I mean, I can tell you cliché stories of I used to smoke cigarettes, Peter Stuyvesant Blue, and I walked to the shop, and then, you know, we didn't have a banking app. So I'd like, you know, swipe my card, and it's like, "Oh, declined."
[ __ ] Then I go outside, I log into my app, and you know, I'd see, "Okay, cool, I got 14 Rand. Cool, I can buy a packet of 10." And you know, that happened so many times.
So, um, but I always had a