E117: How an MMA Fighter Built a Multi-Million Dollar Company Selling Digital Products

“Even when you find business models that are pretty well fleshed-out, there’s gonna be a million ways to connect the dots that you just kind of have to take your best swings and learn as hard as you can and work as hard as you can. That’s going to be everybody’s experience in entrepreneurship. There’s really no way around that.” - Dan Faggella

Our guest for today's episode is a Class A badass guy. Those who have been listening to the podcast for a while now know that I vet every single guest to make sure that they don't pitch a product or service that's not useful to our listeners. Hence I have a rule to never interview anyone I haven't met personally.

This guy just broke that rule.

Our guest, Dan Faggella, is an awesome, I-wish-I-had-more-time-to-talk-to-him impressive guy. I've been in ecommerce for over 15 years and it's hard to impress me with anything these days. But Dan just blew me away. I talked to him for about 40 minutes and had me thinking about implementing his ideas on my business after the interview.

Dan Faggella is the founder of Tech Emergence, a company focusing on artificial intelligence. But before he founded Tech Emergence, he built and ran Science of Skill, an eLearning ecommerce company geared towards self-defense. What started as a way to fund his dream of building an AI company became a multi-million dollar venture, achieved by selling digital products.

In this episode Dan and I talk about his early days in ecommerce, how he came about the idea of creating Science of Skill, tips on selling digital products, and tons more tips on ecommerce and entrepreneurship in general.

As a sneak peek, here are some conversation points:

• How Dan and I virtually met
• Why and how he started Science of Skill
• How he found ecommerce as a way to fund his lifelong dream of creating an AI company
• The two approaches to selling digital products
• Leveraging digital products to increase margin on physical products
• Why he doesn't sell on Amazon
• Where he finds his customers and his sales channels
• Tips on selling digital products
• How he finds experts for his instructional videos
• His badass Jiu Jitsu skills and how he can beat guys twice his size (link to video below)

This is an unusually long episode and I apologize for that. I just loved talking to Dan and wish I could have more time with him. It was such an insightful and information-packed conversation and I hope you find it extremely useful as well!

Resources mentioned:

MyEcomCrew Epic video of Dan beating big guys Coloring Club

If you want to know more about Dan or reach out to him, you can go to his website, or shoot him an email at dan@techemergence.com. You can also find him on Twitter (@danfaggella).

Thanks for listening, as always. Until next week, happy selling!