The McMethod Email Marketing Podcast

By John McIntyre, The Autoresponder Guy

Episodes

Mentioned books

Jun 23, 2015 • 34min

Episode #115 – Gaurav Duggal on How To Land Recurring-Revenue High Paying Clients

Jun 16, 2015 • 41min

Episode #114 – Taylor Pearson on Evolving Worldwide Economic and Business Trends (and its impact on you)

Are you in for a big picture episode? Because this is the one. It’s far less about email marketing and sales funnels, And far more about how the world is shifting at this very moment. And how these shifts will directly impact you and your future. From business trends to current economic movements world wide, These things have drastic implications on your life, So it’s best to know them. So you can be prepared or know what you’re up against. Listen in to this insightful conversation and see how these things we talk about will affect you in your business and very much so in your current job as well. Whether considering embarking on a new business, Or expanding a current one, ..this conversation will be useful for you to listen in on. Learn what’s possible. Learn about all the new exciting opportunities. Because the world is changing and it always presents opportunities for those who are looking. Adapt or get left behind. Because NOW is the ideal time for YOU to get into business… ..it’s cheaper, easier and more possible than ever. Get informed and as a result, ..be one of the excited about this world trend (not one of the scared). Also, learn actionable steps to kickstart your opportinty-search and personal growth. In this episode, you’ll discover: how we currently are in the midst of a transition from a knowledge economy to an entrepreneurial economy (and the reasons behind slow economic growth in US and Europe tied to this transition) the disappearance of the middle class in America (the ideal white picket fence middle class family is becoming a distant memory, fast) why and how there is more opportunity now than ever before (and far less security than any time in recent history too..) that if you are not currently building skills and positioning yourself… you are treading on thin ice how a growing number of jobs are being replaced by software or are being outsourced abroad (and how this can be a great thing for you and your career) why it has never been a better time for you to get into business (exciting possible opportunities are abound at this very moment) how evolving technologies and the fact that we can track everything now are separating the real and the fakes in service-based businesses there is absolutely no shortcut for hardwork, ever (yes there’s more opportunities than ever, but only if you’re willing to work for them) the apprenticeship pattern that is becoming a necessary step in this coming age of entrepreneurialism the magic power attained from starting a business even if it fails (why the attempt is all that matters when you’re growing as an entrepreneur) time-proven skillsets and career types that will always be around for you to support yourself and family Mentioned: The Fourth Economy Ben Horowitz So Good They Can’t Ignore You – Cal Newport TaylorPearson.Me (enter chance to win Taylor’s 67 best business books) The End of Jobs – Taylor’s new book about to be released on Amazon Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. It is John McIntyre here, the autoresponder guy. I am here with Taylor Pearson. Taylor is a good friend of mine. We met a couple of years ago. Not sure where we met, Thailand, maybe Phillipines. Do you remember? Taylor Pearson: I think it was Bangkok two and half years ago, end of 2012-2013 John McIntyre: We have been working a lot on building businesses over the last years. Taylor isn’t a copywriter or a marketer. I think he is a philosopher. He is a thinker. What is interesting in conversions we had about businesses, even changes that happened in last few years and some of the patterns that were seen. It is less about email marketing and how to build sales funnel. If you zoom out and look on the overall trend of last 50 or 500 years – interesting patterns are going on now, how global economic scale is shifting and what it means for individuals right now. Episode is quite different to usual episode. You might be starting business or you might have well-established business and looking for more ways to expand or start a new business. We will have this stuff in few moments. Taylor, how are you? Taylor Pearson: I am doing good. Thanks for introduction, John. John McIntyre: Thanks for coming on the show. Before we get into the needy-greedy stuff, can you give background on who you are and what you do? Taylor Pearson: In Bangkok I was working at digital marketing agency for a year and a half before that and I hooked up with guys from Tropical NBA. I came to work with them. I was managing online ecommerce stores. I worked with them for couple years. Then continue work with ecommerce clients. I do online marketing and conversion. What I have been working on for the last 6 months – I have been writing a book John McIntyre: Tell me about the book. What is the book about? Taylor Pearson: The title of the book is “The end of jobs”. It is very easy to get caught up in criminal games. I was talking to someone last weekend. She is an accountant, she was talking about this guy who is ahead of her in this company, he is struggling, he is really a nice guy. If things work out, maybe she could jump up and take his job as an accountant manager. I thought: “Oh my God, you are missing the whole point. No. The opportunity is not this guy’s management job. Internet and technology and all these things are going on. The book is as you said a big picture look at what’s going on in terms of getting some perspective. Why is it happening like it is. John McIntyre: One really good point that you brought up there. The [?] Arcada is missing the opportunity. Everything changes fast. We have brains of prehistoric times, we think nothing really happened. But now the way we communicate totally shifted, for example like we talk with the other side of the world via scype. In this situation good question is: “what am I missing? What do I dont know?” Taylor Pearson: If I think back to things I was working on three years ago and what stressed me out and what I was focusing on – it is so trivial now, that I have a broader perspective. As things change faster and faster at least for me John McIntyre: Let’s talk about that and fourth economy. There is a lot of books that approach this topic from different angles. “Fourth economy” is an interesting book on changes we are talking about here Taylor Pearson: Everything he was talking about theoretically I saw was going on. He lays on the book the case for economy moving through different stages. Move from agricultural to industrial, to knowledge, to entrepreneurial. The reason we have this economic problems right now. We have successfully made this transition, we havent shifted from knowledge to entrepreneurial. He looks in a big macro prespective. And I saw it from micro prospective. People in entrepreneurial economy, like you, are getting dramatic outcomes. I think she works 50-60 hours a week on that accountant job. You are getting much better outcomes than she is. Why is that? Are you than much smarter or harder working? Or are there other things at play? John McIntyre: I was thinking VC, venture capitalism, people who were here ten years ago. I think even they dont grasp eternal opportunity, change. Even when you say from the inside, from your own experience, like you are doing right now, it is too hard to understand how fast these changes are happening. Taylor Pearson: I had this conversation with someone in late 20s, and he talked “when I retire at 65”. I was like: “Oh, God!”You cant even imagine how the world is gonna look like ten years from now, much less 40 years from now. If you look at these things and where trends have come you get the notion of what’s possible and what the opportunities you are not taking advantage of. John McIntyre: Absolutely. What are some of the risks you are seeing? We have economical issues, wealth gape. That is macroeffect. Some people experience it, some people don’t. There are also risks on micro level Taylor Pearson: Middle class is at risk. Globalization and software are replacing middle management. We see occupy Wallstreet. Glass ceiling has disappeared, there is more upward mobility than ever. If you are not positioning yourself well – you will fall through the floor John McIntyre: There are a lot of advertizing agencies out there that have no accountables. They create fancy, wonderful looking campaigne, won awards, but they have no way of tracking whether they made a difference in sales. Companies would keep paying for the work. This stuff does happen today. Technology improves. It is easier to deal with inefficiencies within the system. When you want to take something out of the system – something has to go back in. Global economy consists of small economies. We try to take value out of that, build families and stuff, if we don’t put the same amount of value back in, the economy will contract. Today it is easier to find out who is doing the work and who isn’t. People who look for work – they are at a long way, who already work – they are at luck. Taylor Pearson: Absolutely. Middle layer disappears. John McIntyre: In some way it is scary. Softwear comes out, machines come out. More and more jobs are gonna get replaced. Someone think it is a bad thing. Jobs will be replaced offshore. But that is just the nature of economics – we can do it cheaper and faster. Those people who will be there, will need to create value Taylor Pearson: It is valuable to talk about this stuff. The punchline in macroeconomics is if people are operating these positions, they are told what to do, they are not growing in their career. If someone can do your job for 4 dollars in Sri Lanka, that job is gonna disappear. The flipside is for the people who are ambitious it is their time right now. I can log into my Odesk account and I have access to a better labour pool than anyone on the history has had before. I have access to technology that was 10 times more expensive. I remember listening to interview with Ben Horowitz. He founded first cloud computing services. He was doing what Amazon web service does now. They were charging a thousand times as much. That were early 2000s John McIntyre: There has not been a better time for people to get into business, it is cheaper and easier and less risky than ever. Because of technology you have to create value Taylor Pearson: Sure. Barriers are basically you need access to the Internet, laptop. Once you crossed that barrier, everything is on you. I consulted companies on online marketing and technology. Everything I learned either from free resources. People complain about $500-1000 online courses. You drop $20000 for a semester of college where you take four classes on like English Grammar. You take $150000 loan to get this Liberal Arts/Humanities degree or Marketing degree. Why would you pay $100000 for Marketing degree? It is absurd. All barriers are right there. You just need your willingness to use them John McIntyre: I think that is an interesting side there with education. Everything is online. Even if you take courses online, you dont have to pay for he whole semester. Universities face pressure. You dont need a degree anymore if you can get a result. Today is easier to measure what is making impact and what isn’t Taylor Pearson: Yes. Before you didnt have access to these resources. In the early days of printing press there were only 8 copies of each book. Today every 3 days there is more data added to the Internet than there was in existence before 2000 John McIntyre: That is a challenge. It is easier to become overwhelmed. Taylor Pearson: Our generation is defined not by what we say ‘yes’ to but what we say ‘no’ to. In 1980 US Department of Labour had 2000 possible career options. It is big number. You needed to take 49 questions test. And based on your test results it tells you what is your ideal career. And now we are 40 year later there is a million possible careers. What you do – conversion expert – would not be listed under half million possible careers. There is even more than that. It is increasingly important to say ‘no’ more often to figure out what the things are worth focusing your attention on. You, the individual out there is the cash resource. It is no longer capital or banks or governments, these are the things that are holding back economic growth. It’s individuals. John McIntyre: Uhm. Our generation grew up in affluence, there were no major wars, well, except the Iraq. We had some recession in 2008. Many people cultivated slight attitude of abundance. We need to follow our passion, enjoy our life. We talked about this book about Steve Jobs, people we really look up to. But if you look at the path these people took to be where they are right now, pretty much no one followed their passion. At the end of the day it was about becoming good at something. It wasn’t about fun. The foundation of this has to be skill and value. Taylor Pearson: Word ‘passion’ lost its meaning. There is no short cut for doing the work. For the people who are willing to do the work, we living in the greatest time of human history. The tools of production are are your fingertips, they are on the keyboard John McIntyre: You have to do the work and you have to change. In 1900s change was more static. My grandpa finished school, went to university, worked in bank for next 45 years. The goal is not think “I will do this for the rest of my life” when you found something yours, but to embrace the ongoing opportunity Taylor Pearson: A guy was working in post office on Germany. He wrote this article when he retired, saying, he was doing nothing for the last 20 years, just put papers across the table. Over the next 20 years that’s not gonna be feasible. If you push papers over the desk, they gonna get someone do that for cheaper, the papers will be digital John McIntyre: Humans if to look from evolution point, dont wanna spend energy, thats why some like routine and dont like learning. That’s not enough anymore Taylor Pearson: If you compare people who are obsessed with the idea of passive income. It is always rewarding to get up and work on something fun John McIntyre: Another thing is hussling. When people put pictures evryday on facebook, twitter, it is a bit like culture, it is when you think you are an entrepreneur and you are cool. There are few minutes left. What can we give to listener as a piece of advice? Taylor Pearson: I am kind of interested to walk listeners through your story. Over the past years there is a notion – you go to college you get a good job. It wasnt the case before, people who went to college were wealthy aristocrats. I look at you, you kind of started with apprenticeship type of position. And this is a trend now: you go to someone who has successful business and you use it for building your skill. John McIntyre: I grew up in Sydney, in 2011 I was in Nepal for several months, had a slight cultural shock. I didnt want to follow boring way of university- job. When this opportunity came to work on Phillippinnes, I bought a one way ticket. The worst case I saw then that I would borrow the money of my mom to come home. When I arrived, my website that earned $400 a mo was smacked by Google. I stared a dating site. That failed, I didnt do one sign up. I learned how to ‘Sell’, I thought it was a greatest skill on earth. I was doing the best I can, grabbing every opportunity, hussling. Taylor Pearson: So you found a community of people who were doing marketing and sales. Another interesting side is – in the past entrepreneurship was all or nothing affair, you had to mortgage your house, you had to open retail store on Mainstreet. Now it is cheaper to learn lessons like you learned from your smacked $400 website than 20 years ago John McIntyre: The amount of people online is growing. All those people are gonna need products, servises. I listed the interview with Mr. Mask and he says there is no big risk on starting a business, if you have to wife, or husband, kids. Even if you fail, you can go and get a job at Mc Donalds. You can still find food, the threat to our survival is very little Taylor Pearson: I have a friend, I went to college with him. He saw what I was doing. He quit a job half a year ago to start a company. He said worst case scenario was to loose skills. He was inhouse accountant at this big oil company Alabama. Now he understands online marketing, how to manage relationships with vendours. I am reading the House of Morgan right now, a biography of J.P. Morgan. 2001 Borders turned over online book stores to Amazon John McIntyre: It is better to be bad player in the right game, than good player on the wrong game. Taylor Pearson: Get in the right game! John McIntyre: So if people want to connect with you, where is the best place for the m to do it? Taylor Pearson: taylorpearson.me. I will give away 67 of my favourite books on business. It is $1300 for the book. The book is called “The End of Jobs”. It will be on Amazon John McIntyre: Thank you for coming on the show. The post Episode #114 – Taylor Pearson on Evolving Worldwide Economic and Business Trends (and its impact on you) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Jun 9, 2015 • 31min

Episode #113 – Dan Ferrari on Being A Struggling Freelance Copywriter & His Rise To Total Success In A Very Short Time

When Dan Ferrari quit his corporate job to declare his new life as a freelance copywriter, ..he took a big chance. A necessary risk to break through to the next level in life of course… But he didn’t know what would happen, He went all in anyways, freelancing his way up the ranks. Starting at small-time and severely underpaid jobs (we all have to start somewhere right?), To busting out email autoresponders, long form sales letters and tripwire funnels for an established internet marketing company, The Motley Fool. Dan Ferrari made it through the Copywriter’s Gauntlet, Proved his worth, And now works for arguably the best marketing company out there that’s been accumulating loads of useful data from their clients since 93′. What this means for Dan is that he gets to be a part of this all, A part of something that many would pay to learn from. Yet Dan is the one getting paid now. Learn the best high-level strategies that top marketers are implementing today from Dan in this episode. We get into some very fun email marketing and sales funnel related conversations. You are bound to come away with some big “Ah ha” moments. And will be wanting to get these implemented in your business sooner than later. In this episode, you’ll discover: how everyday can be new and exciting in the right job, even it if is a job (with the freelancing-freedom-craze going on.. know that a job can be a dream come true too) Dan’s recency versus familiarity formula that creates way higher conversions on sales funnels when to come in with higher priced product offers for all your warm leads (learn the art of pitching within autoresponders) why getting a click on the very first email is a strong indicator of this person’s commitment down the line (and how to make sure you get more of those first email clicks) how to handle people that don’t buy after going through your trip-wires within your sales funnel (and easy trick to pick up conversions from these non-buyers) the perfect time to drop in that SOS Andre Chaperon style email series in your sequence why you really ought to have more than just one or two or even four products (the real money comes in the back-end products that you’re not even promoting up front.. a recipe to explode your customer LTV) the simple technique that will get you to outbid all your competitors with PPC Mentioned: FerrariMedia.com The Motley Fool Andre Chaperon Perry Marshall Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. It’s john McIntyre here, the auto responder guy. I’m here with Dan Ferrari. Dan has a really interesting story and it is funny, coz we started chatting. It was in Feb 2014, he replied to one of my emails about Phillipines, he was living in Hawaii at that time, surfing, he was just getting into copy-writing. He is working for one of the biggest publishing companies online. He has exhilarated his carrier really quickly. Now I do my own thing. Dan took a copywriting skill and took it in a different direction…less than 18 months which is really impressive. Today we get him on, listen to his story, find out lessons he is learning in his day job as a copywriter. So we are getting to that in a minute. Dan, how are you? Dan Ferrari: I am good, how about you? John McIntyre: It is good to have you on the show Dan Ferrari: Yeah, man. Thanks for having me. John McIntyre: Before we get in to the email stuff, can you give a background on who you are, what you do and how you got started? Dan Ferrari: Sure, I mean you pretty much nailed it. I was living in Hawaii, surfing, getting into water as much as possible. Than it kind of floated by me that copywriting is a way to have a flexible schedule from wherever you wanted to in the world. So I left corporate job and declared myself a freelance copywriter, started climbing my way up from the bottom. I have been doing it for several months since you and I first connected. At that point I got to writing some freelance stuff for Multliful, that went well enough. Several months later they offered me the fulltimed job. That’s where I am now, writing copy for Multliful which is an investing, publishing company, finance, it is a great place to be John McIntyre: This is a big company, it is not just five guys selling an ebook online, is it? Dan Ferrari: No, this is about 300 person company. Pioneers at taking marketing to the Internet. The company has been around since 1993. It has seen different stages of expansion of ecommerce online, selling information online. Really a lot of history here. John McIntyre: It’s cool. How does it feel to work in a company like that? Dan Ferrari: It is exciting, there is just so much going on here every day. There are so many really talented and brilliant people. I was telling a buddy of mine, this is the best mastermind in the world. People would pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to be a part of the group that’s here, experts in traffic, design, analytycs, to product strategy, copywriters and everything. John McIntyre: It is interesting too. Right now that complain about cubicle generation, everyone want to quit their job, follow their passion and try be entrepreneur. What I see going on here. As far as jobs go, this sounds like a great job. Before we started recording it, you sounded like you are enjoying it, right? Dan Ferrari: Yeah, especially coming form the freelance world, I was very hesitant to take the job, I might not be able to work anywhere. To be honest, I still might not be able to work anywhere. It is interesting, you brought up that our generation wants to be entrepreneurs. This is the most entrepreneurial, corporate environment I can imagine. I can go with any idea and say: “we need to be doing tripple funnels, testing on our email funnel, we can just go and test that.” This is one of the most amazing things about companies like this – we can just test everything. We test and we learn and we test again. Entrepreneurial spirit of failing forward is always there. If something doesn’t work – we errate, if works – we scale. It is awsome John McIntyre: …What is is like to work at a company like that? Dan Ferrari: Day to day it is pretty wide open. I am pretty flexible with my hours, so. The way that I try to structure my days is I come in, .. three four hours on the project I am working. Right now it is some email stuff, some autoresponder I am writing, a week from now it can be sales letter or tripple funnel. The second half of thee day is the mastermind type of thing; we meet, we talk, we throw ideas against the wall. Everyday it is something new and exciting. Who knows what tomorrow will bring, I am sure it will be the same thing John McIntyre: Cool, man. This has been traditionally the email marketing podcast I know there are things you can’t share, but what have you discovered in working with especially the email marketing type of things. What’s working in the industry? Dan Ferrari: The big concept that I have been digging into is recency versus familiarity. So if you think of someone who has opted in your email…, right at that moment you got a lot of recency with that person. They gave you their email address, they gave you your microcommitment and they are ready to go. On a flipside they have very little familiarity with you, even if they went through a fairly wrong conversion process, they get that email, they still don’t know you that well. The thing that I’ve noticed in a lot of data, people who are early in the … there is a lot more of them, right? Hundred thousand people might come in, because of that recency effect, you are gonna convert a lot of them in the first few days. You should be making a lot of offers to capture that. Unfortunately, conversion points at that moment are not going to be that high. Just because the pool of people was so big, it is gonna have a lot of impact on your business. Now the challenge comes, after you worn through that recency window, which might be 3 days, might be seven days, it is kind of the first few days that they are with you. After you worn through that – you are gonna start loosing a lot of people. People come in, they are excited, and than they start falling off. But the people who do survive, who go through, say, your 14 days – they are gonna start converting at much higher rates as they are gonna be familiar with you; they are gonna start to know you; they are gonna start to like you, start to trust you; so they come in with the second wave of offers, maybe higher price offers. They are gonna start converting at a fairly higher rate; and then you know tying those two ends of spectrum together, the extend to which your email funnel and email copying and the experience that you bring them through can keep people engaged, keep them from falling off – you can have even more people going through piece of the funnel. That’s were a lot of things like story telling,… soap opera sequences and things like that can be really big; coz you open up a story in the beginning, when you have this recency effect. You make some offers, but the story is not complete, right? So people will stay with you… and than you can make some serious offers down the line, get them there. John McIntyre: So how long we talking, making offer one email every day for three days when they first sign up? Dan Ferrari: Yeah, and realistically, the first email is the most important. Interesting thing that I’ve seen is getting a click on your first email can be a very good predictor of the person’s likelyhood of buying down the line John McIntyre: Hm Dan Ferrari: Honestly, I cannot answer you what that window is. My suspicion is it is anywhere from 0 to 7 days. That’s kind of some of the stuff I a working on right now, testing few of those hypothesis and seeing if we have any data that supports any of that John McIntyre: Interesting. Funnel. Someone signs up, for the first 7 days, in first email you hit them with an offer and then they fall off that offer for the first week. After that we switch into content or stories, what happens next? Dan Ferrari: First set of offers, there is gonna ideally be some sort of urgency, device there; you might get a one-time offer on a bundle: “If you buy this today, you also gonna get this for free of the next 72 hours.” So then you close sort of that sales period. And your next email, exactly what you said, you are gonna open up basically a new story line that ultimately gonna lead to a different offer. Or at least a different positioning of the same offer. Coz you want the people who went through that first offer series and didn’t see it, you don’t wanna alienate them once they get the second offer and have them feel like you just pull the wall over their eyes. You want them to feel like that is also a good offer, maybe it is reposition, maybe different bonus bundle, maybe it is an entirely different product altogether or a different price. This is not something we are doing, this is conjecture on my part. You have somebody come in, you will have some low priced offers in that first few days; your next “storyline” is a webinar registration; and then the next group of emails is basically a product [?] launch or webinar preparation; you get to that webinar and you sell at a higher price than in the initial series of emails. Because people just didn’t want that entry level product, they are looking for something more advanced, that’s when the second level comes in, that’s when you can make a higher price offer. That’s when they are more likely to convert, they know you much better, it is easier to move up the scale. John McIntyre: Right, right. Traditionally the advice that I’ve seen someone [?] juncs in the funnel, …they only move to the next step if they buy tripple …offer. So if they didn’t buy tripple… offer in, say, two weeks of emails, they are “dead”, what do you do with them? What you are saying, we keep rotating people through these offers. You start with that one offer, with tripple…, move them to another one – put them on a next sequence Dan Ferrari: You can have even some self selection. Maybe they havent bought tripple…and in the end of that series you have another email that puts options to segmenting them into three more series, right? So that they can self select into whatever they wanna hear about, you can have offer to that. A lot of this assumes that you have a robust product line to appeal to a lot of different people. But I think this is where it becomes difficult, you have to have a product strategy to support a lot of different people that come into your funnel. If you have one product, you can only reposition it and repackage it and sell it in so many different ways. Just by definition you are gonna be missing out on the people who are in the market but are interested in the different offers of that market. John McIntyre: Yeah, right. One thing, I was with the client recently, we were working on a funnel. He had 5 products in the funnel. The idea was: “they come in, they get a webinar and they buy the first product. After that they go into a sequence where 1) we send them content email to build the value, we send then another email, which we call “trigger” email; and if you click on the link in the email it is like voting and saying: “I am interested in trading options.”…They get moved to another list, sort of a mini-adventure for 5 emails, they get 4 emails sequence there that builds up and it sells a product. At the end of these 4 emails, we move them back to the main sequence, when they get another content email, then another ‘trigger’, that puts him in a different funnel, different product, and constantly rotating, is that sort of what you suggesting? Or do you mean everyone gets the same offers? Dan Ferrari: No I think what you are driving is perfect. You know, tailoring the offer to the people who want to see it. Making sure that people who have certain motivations, that they are willing to share their motivations, the way of collecting those that you can put them into proper funnel – that is absolutely brilliant. John McIntyre: The other thong too, we were talking before this call. I was on the phone with someone yesterday, they might listen to this episode; they were looking for autoresponders, John, I need those ten emails. We are on the phone looking at his structure. And it is not like he has one product, he had several different products; he had a lot of stuff going on, he wasn’t sure how to fit it into overall picture. My advise to him was: he doesn’t need autoresponder, he doesnt need more emails. He needs to work on product strategy, set a business model, business plan. The business exists to solve a problem. You can do it with one product, you can do it with hundred products. How many products do you have? Dan Ferrari: On a front end we have 5 different products, we have a portfolio backend products that take someone from that initial low price point from hundred dollars a year to bring them up to hundred thousand dollars a year John McIntyre: … with this idea: “the person who spends more money to acquire a customer wins” hands down. If you spend more money than your competitors to require a customer you can outbid them on everything, whether we are talking online marketing or by lists. When that comes in, the person who spends most money – sells most expensive products, making the most profit. Dan Ferrari: Yeah, and largest lifetime customer value, for sure. John McIntyre: So it is almost like. To make this sales funnel and all these different things work, to have a campaigne, you need to have five products, six products, seven products, you need to be always creating more products to meet the demand, because that’s where the money is. Advertising is when you buy customers is straight forward Dan Ferrari: Absolutely. If you think of this on the level of external PPC ads, once you can start to do that – you can be the only ads that people see when you start bit your competitors out of market place. It just creates a self fulfilling cycle. The higher price you pay, the more impressions you gonna get, the more customers you are gonna acquire, the more profits you gonna have, the more you can reinvest back in the advertising John McIntyre: .it is pretty magical, like that positive feedback that’s gonna explode things. What’s with the emails your company (Moltliful) is sending out? What is their structure? For example, Gorus have emails, they have a header at the top, grey background, white in the middle, it is newsletter style. What is Moltiful doing? Why is it doing it that way? Dan Ferrari: You know we do have templates on our emails, I don’t know the history where they came from, just knowing the people who work on them, I am assuming we’ve tested those I know they can convert better at a different format. But in terms of the actual copy in there. It kind of depends on the use of emails. Our emails are what we call “carriers”, a single email that leads to a long sales page. That email is bidding a click, you are bidding an intrigue for what is on he next page. Not really revealing too much, just getting the person to get exciting to see what’s next. And then selling that click for everything it’s worth. A lot of these email funnels like we’ve been talking about. Here, like I said, you need to be selling a click, especially on that first email. It is a little more bouncing, you are trying to get them to stay in that funnel. You don’t want to be too hard. You don’t wanna be too upfront. So you need to get them to the story and next email. John McIntyre: How hard is too hard? Dan Ferrari: Ideally, you can be tailoring every message, also the frequence you are emailing based on who is getting that email. Somebody who has opened an x number of emails is going be more likely to respond to sort of more aggressive and harder copy than somebody who has opened one email. The more engaged this person is with you – the more you can email them every day. People who open our offers a lot, the more offers we make them, the more they buy. Somebody who isn’t engaged – you start making them more offers, they get fatigued easier, they drop off the list John McIntyre: Uhm, so it is almost like we need here. Maybe it already exists. Let’s say, you got three main funnels, three main lists that you have. One of them is let’s say the coolest. Maybe they open one email a month, one every two weeks, something like that. Than there is another one when people are opening at least one email a week, and another one when people are opening every day. What we do is we assign scores based on what people have, lets say the cold ones are 10-25, the warm ones 25-75, and hot ones 75-100. Based on what the score is, we use algorythm to move them from list to list. They start cooling down, they start getting less emails, they start heating up, they start getting more emails. Something like that could be pretty amazing. Dan Ferrari: Yeah, I mean that is awsome, that is hard to do from my experience and our experience here. It is the holy grale. If somebody goes to autoresponder and they stop reading email three, for example. If you could just keep sending the email three with different subject line, in stead of moving to email four, you probably are getting a better response out of that person than they finally opened and then you send them to email four as opposed to maybe they are gonna open email four, and it is somewhat of connected sequence, but they missed email three and now they are confused on what’s going on. John McIntyre: Uhm, maybe that is the other thing, making the system so that they don’t get email four till they open email three Dan Ferrari: Absolutely John McIntyre: And then you get three attempts, that would be pretty easy to do, right? You write one email, create three subject lines. Imagine system do this, you send an email copy, then for the subject line you write three subject lines. It’ll send the first one- they open it, they go to the next email, if they don’t – they get second subject line, and the third. Say, up to 5 subject lines per email. I don’t think that would be too difficult to do. You need a system that is programmed differently. Basically, if someone doesn’t open this – send them this. Or you triggered. Once they open email three, send them email four Dan Ferrari: Yeah John McIntyre: Instead of being automatic or autoresponder, it will just queue up to happen automatically. They don’t move forward in the funnel till they take a specific action. Dan Ferrari: Yeah, I think that’s the key and that’s where I see a lot of funnels going, dynamically on the behaviour they exhibited John McIntyre: You can do it just right now, I just realized. The reason I am mentioning this right now – anyone listening can implement this, who has software like [?] Drift, which is email software I am using. You create a single campaigne for each single email. Say email one – that’s gonna be a campaigne. And in email one campagne you have five emails. The five emails are the same, the only thing different between them is the subject line. This is gonna be a nightmare to set up. Ten campaigns. Some people are gonna drop off. So this is why it might be ten campaignes, it might take them three month to get through. So then what we do, you have ten campains, each campaigne has five emails. One email has five different subject lines. So they sign up and they go with campaigne one, they get email one with subject line one. They dont’ open it – they go to email two or campaigne one with same email but with second subject line Dan Ferrari: As soon as they open it, they get dropped off campaigne and … John McIntyre: Exactly Dan Ferrari: Absolutely John McIntyre: That would be “pain is the ass” to set up Dan Ferrari: Ideally you can start retargeting, drawing further channels to make sure you are not missing them at all. That’s kind of the other piece of all this. We’ve been talking about email. With things like Twitter and Facebook, you start to see a lot of people curate their content and their information through social media or through the web. So maybe they are not even email person. But they are still interested in what you have to say. So then you can start segmenting based on their consumption behaviour too. So you are more aggressive with people who exhibited email behaviour with emails, or you get more aggressive about retargeting and spending your money on them if you notice they are not taking emails. Maybe they are more active on your website or some of your other properties. John McIntyre: I guess this isn’t your business, not your software application we are coming at right now Dan Ferrari: It’s cool, man John McIntyre: The way Agra [?] works, you plug in your emails, you plug in your retargeting information and it figures out where people are. Even with retargeting information. If someone is on email… you can retarget them with the page on your side, the goal is to move people through a very specific sequence of content process, which it really is. We can enforce the fact that they don’t get to the next step until they completed the current step and so you do that with retargeting. You can do that with emails. You can say stuff like: “If someone visits sales page but doesn’t buy – send them this campaigne. If they visit the check out page but dont buy – send them this email, and show this retargeting campaigne.” Dan Ferrari: What you just said there about controlling their experience. If you think about VSL, this is the reason VSL outperforms a text based sales page. You are controlling the flow of the information, so that you can put your logical selling argument in order and they are gonna consume it in order. When they reading it on the page – they can skip around, they miss on something, you have to repeat things, make sure they got everything. So you are taking that VSL concept of controlling the information and you are just expanding it to every channel someone can possibly be experiencing your stuff online John McIntyre: Exactly. I am not a coder, otherwise I would set something like this up. This sounds like a sweet piece of software. I hope someone who listens to it – builds it Dan Ferrari: Sends us some royalties John McIntyre: This is where technology is amazing, right? As it gets more efficient, everything gets more cost effective, gets more competitive, say, on adwords. People are getting better at using retargeting, emails to plug the conversion wholes in their funnel. It is higher than it has been ten years ago, twenty yeas ago coz of this behavioral stuff. This makes advertizing and marketing so much more effective, because we are getting the right message to the right person Dan Ferrari: Yep John McIntyre: People who dont need that message at this time, dont even hear about it. It makes the whole thing more efficient. And this is where the software, which in stead of having simple autoresponder, which most of us are doing right now, straight broadcasts, we customize the entire experinece. The same way the video sales…applying the same virial, the same idea of controlling the experience and doing it entire way through the funnel, not just sales page. Dan Ferrari: Yeah, it is really powerful stuff John McIntyre: It is exciting, man. You should talk to the guys on… and see if they can put it together. Dan Ferrari: We are working on it. John McIntyre: Cool, man. It was good to have a chat with you. Casual and relaxed, my favourite kind. Before we go, if someone wants to get in touch with you, send you an email, send you a twit, what should they do? Dan Ferrari: Probably the best way to get in contact with me, I have a website at ferrarimedia.com. Ferrari like the car F_E_R_R_A_R_Imedia.com. Opt into the list, shoot me an email, say I heard from you on John’s podcast. I’ll reply. Not a lot of … John McIntyre: If you get a million out of this, will you reply to all of them? Dan Ferrari: Alright, I’ll keep that in mind. John McIntyre: Do you have anything that people can buy it? Dan Ferrari: No, nothing for sale. Just working on Mulliful stuff at the time. I don’t have a lot of time for anything else John McIntyre: That’s fair. Cool, man. I will have the link to ferrarimedia.com at mcmethod.com, hopefully you get at least a million. Dan Ferrari: That would be nice John McIntyre: I hope population in China listens to this podcast. They might not speak English, some of them. You have to polish your Chinese Dan Ferrari: I can hire a junior copywriter for Mandarin and Cantonese John McIntyre: Mulliful in China, that would be interesting. Alright, man. Great to have you on the show. The post Episode #113 – Dan Ferrari on Being A Struggling Freelance Copywriter & His Rise To Total Success In A Very Short Time appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Jun 2, 2015 • 40min

Episode #112 – Shane Melaugh on High Level Strategic Conversion Optimization and His New Software Thrive Leads

Get ready for an insightful episode. What started as a conversation about Shane’s stellar new list building and split testing tool, Theme Leads software, …turned into a deep conversation about entrepreneurship, … Life, And beneficial high-level business mindsets. Shane Melaugh and I cover a lot of implementable topics on this one: lead gen, optimization, copywriting, wordpress softwares, and much more. Like many hard working entrepreneurs out there, Shane has survived with hard work (he even has a formula for getting greuling work finished easier). So with his hardworking strategy, ..plus his smart intuition, Shane and Thrive Leads, are proof that hard work pays off. From finding true passion along his journey, To dealing with big money and pricing services correctly, Shane is an experienced entrepreneur that talks as much about mindset and life philosophy, As he does practical actions you can take right now in your business. Listen in for some great insights taken from the guy whose just released one of the better email list generating and optimizing softwares out there today, Thrive Themes. In this episode, you’ll discover: how to get so good at something, people can’t ignore you (even if you have a tough time learning that skill) why the best things in life involve pain and struggle why a mailing list is the most valuable asset you have if you’re an online business (and how to best test and optimize it) why exit intent is a commonly used tool that marketers are employing in their campaigns to present offers (and how it’s not actually necessary) that as entrepreneurs going at it solo… we undervalue our work all the time (look into the real value you provide when assessing your prices) how to validate enticing offer ideas before crafting them (and build a list of buyers at the same time to benefit your launch) the exciting fact there is always a market for however high you price your stuff why your perception on money and will change when you start to make more money, and the advantages it gives you to snagging high value clients how to create tailored offers to different segments of your audience (learn what’s more important when optimizing your separate segment funnels how optimizing and split testing goes only as far as the relevant incentive offered (nail down a targeted offer before you start to optimize) the trick to getting a 5x increase in your conversion rate and its massive payoff potential (you’ll never get this from tweaking a headline) Mentioned: Thrive Leads Andre Chaperon So Good They Can’t Ignore You Bounce Exchange Buffer App Optimize Press Shane’s Blog Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. It’s John McIntyre here, the autoresponder guy. I am here with Shane Millah. He recently released a product called ‘Thrive leads’. He is doing cool stuff with email plug ins, also with WordPress and conversion. Shane, how are you doing? Shane Millah: Hey, John! I am great. Thank you for having me on a broadcast. John McIntyre: Can you tell me a bit about yourself? Shane Millah: The short story is that after school I didnt know what to do with my life. I was unemployable. I went to university at some point to start studying Psychology. I didnt like it. Entrepreneurship was the only option I had. It was process of try and error. I was selling stuff on ebay, computer hardwear. For the last few years I am developing softwear, WordPress tools John McIntyre: I read this book by Count Newport “So Good They Cant Ignore You”. There is this traditional path that people take university-job. This book is about the new generation of people who follow their passion. Shane Millah: I have a blog where I talk about marketing and business. The most important principle for me is ‘grind’. Pick a skill and grind it out, it will be difficult. I have workaholic tendencies, where I have no life and I am just working, so it is challenging to find the balance there John McIntyre: I think there needs to be a mission, like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook or Elon Mask. Tell me what trive leads is Shane Millah: It is our newest WordPress plug in. It is everything you need to generate leads on your website inside one single plug in. It is conversion focused. It is about testing, running A-B tests of all kinds, figure out what brings most leads onto your list. It is about conversion optimization. In my business email lists have been extremely powerful John McIntyre: I’ve been doing some code email to a couple of different lists, one guy replied and told about trive leads. Speaking about email opt-ins, what is working and what is not? Shane Millah: You show a light box with an opt-in offer, at the moment you suspect your visitor is about to leave your website. The way it is usually done is you wait for his mouse cursor to leave the viewport. You go to the back button or ‘close’ icon on browser tab – that’s the moment you would be showing this offer. You are recovering the lost visitors. With trive leads you can test different form triggers. You can test showing a form on exit against showing it after 10 seconds, or when someone scrolls down half a page. What you find often is the accident tent trigger does not perform well at all. If you compare it to triggering a light box after 3 or 10 seconds, my bets would always be, trigger light box will get more leads John McIntyre: There is company called Bounce Exchange, they sell well because of amazing behavioral technology. They set accident tent pop up form, creating a design for it and split testing. And they charge you $4000 a month. There is ask form, when you pick your budget there is four options 1) less than one million 2) 1-10 3) 10-100 4) 100-million, so they work with big companies to do this Shane Millah: I remember first time I cam across Bounce Exchange, I was in disbelieve. At that time they were charging only $800 a month. Congratulation for them to make a business like this. Cashing thousands per customer per month is amazing. To me as to business owner it would be cheaper to hire someone to write that code and put custom design even just from scratch John McIntyre: A lesson I learned here is we undervalue what we actually do. If you put pop up or trive leads on amazon, they get millions of traffic a day. You can show Amazon they will do millinos dollars a month just by implementing this pop up strategy. I know someone has podcast editing service. I heard a guy boasting to his friend that he got for 10 episodes $20 000 Shane Millah: Say, Lamborgini car is so more expensive than other cars and there are some people who will not just nut Lamborgini they also have it gold plated. That is how rich they are. When you offer a product like lead generation service, or copywriting and you say your price for that is couple thousand dollars, you should know that there are some companies or people that would pay 50-100 thousand dollars for that. John McIntyre: There is this guy who is selling tickets online. He is offering #1 ranking in Google for any keyword. And it is guaranteed, if they dont give you #1 ranking, they will give you money back. They charge $100 000, because clients know if they have #1 ranking, they will make millions a day Shane Millah: As I’ve gone from making thousand dollars per month to tens of thousand, sometimes hundred. My own perception of money has changed. The idea for hiring people for, say, design, paying them $500 or avoid it. Whereas now paying ten thousand for someone pro for two days of their time seems a good deal now John McIntyre: Tell me some interesting things about email opt-ins? Shane Millah: One of the most underutilized things is making tailored offers to different segments of your audience. Creating a form with a different header color or button color is very easy to do, but the maximum pay off of twicking your button colour is very low. Change your entire value proposition or offer. Most blogs have just subscribe to my newsletter opt-in. By now everyone knows it is better to have opt-in insentive of some sort, ‘get my free report’, ‘get my free course’ in return for opting-in. The next thing people will realize you can be more effective by making different offers to different segments of your audience. To give an example from my own blog, if someone is looking at a post at video marketing category, they are probably interested in something else than someone looking at a post in product creation. If I show them both the same offer, and I am testing different lights, buttons. That’s never gonna be as effective as saying: “Here is an offer that is specific to your interest in video marketing to the video marketing people,” and saying: “Here is an offer that is specific to your interest product creation to the product creation people.” John McIntyre: When I was learning to write a copy, I read from Gary Halbet, best copywriter out there. Just change the way you word the offer – but that doesnt always work. This weekend I will brainstorm offers, not just twick existing ones Shane Millah: We spend a lot of time building a testing engine onto our plug in, the technical side we can do for you, we cant give you the understanding of who your market is, or how they think. The buffer app was launched in that kind of way, they had a fake offer that looked like you can purchase it, but when you clicked there was a message “sorry, this product doesnt exist yet”, but you can sign up for th waiting list here. You can use this to validate your different offers. Plus the one that gets most attention, most leads, you are building the audience that you will then be able to sell your offer to John McIntyre: Lets talk about trive leads Shane Millah: It is basically the only plugin you need to generate leads from your website. So install this plug in, get rid of the junk installed to generate leads, you connect it to your mailing list and you can set up every type of opt-in form that you want, test different forms, different designs. It is a part of trive themes product line. We have conversion optimized WordPress themes. We have an awsome visual content builder, that fastens building sales and landing pages and a couple of other interesting plug ins John McIntyre: How are you different from Optimize Press 2? Shane Millah: Optimize Press 2 has some marketing features that we dont have yet. But the biggest issue with them is it takes so much time to build and edit your content. Everything you change is like a 5-step process. If you look at Optimize Press landing builder and you compare it to our landing page builder, what you can do with ours, you can do with theirs. But in practice you are not going to do it with theirs, it will take you 3-5 times longer. We have a similar visual editor, when you looking at your landing page and you dragging dropping elements, you look at it as front end editor. The difference is we built it as fast as possible to use. You never have to refresh the page or wait for something to load. If you wanna create to pages to run a test John McIntyre: What about customization? Shane Millah: Our themes are less custimizeable. The main reason for that is the speed factor. It is something we want to address in next months. I dont know exactly how it is with Thesis. I tests a very simple page with one text paragraph in it. I looked it in one of our themes, and in source code it was 240 lines of code. I looked at it is different theme, best selling theme in Theme Forest, the exact same page had 2600 lines of code. The reason is because all of these options, customization, extra features they have is loading tons of code, scripts and stuff in that page. Even though as a user you dont see that. The only way they can be customizable is by having really bloated code. That is something we wanna avoid. Right now our themes are less customizable than some of our competing themes. We dont have themes where you can pixel by pixel change the length. The reason is that we have this performance focus John McIntyre: I will have a link to thrive leads. Thanks for coming at the show. The post Episode #112 – Shane Melaugh on High Level Strategic Conversion Optimization and His New Software Thrive Leads appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

May 27, 2015 • 30min

Episode #111 – Neil Patel on How Spending 162K on Clothes Made Him $692,000

May 19, 2015 • 36min

Episode #110 – Jon Ferrara on The Importance of Relationships and Social Media In Business Today (turn contacts into gold)

Jon Ferrara is like the Thomas Edison of online marketing. He loves relationships, he loves to teach, and he’s invented some killer softwares. In this world that is becoming more and more over-communicative, Where we all struggle with nurturing relationships and scaling our careers at the same time, Jon has taken this convoluted communication, and is making it all make sense. How else are we supposed to scale, maintain, and grow our relationships (let alone profit from them)? Jon has created an answer to this problem, Because where we are limited, Technology can provide solutions.. Leave it to the guy who invented the CRM (he built the very first CRM called Goldmine). Jon is taking the charge in relationships/business with Nimble, his social sales and marketing platform that helps entire companies scale with use of their relationships. On this episode, we get into the nature of relationships, And how to use them to grow your business, Through strategic social media management, That let’s you scale BIG, While controlling each and every social platform with ease. Jon also goes into detail about his exciting new platform that I just had to sign up for during the show. Couldn’t hold off. Get ready to be exciting too, when you learn how to nurture your most valuable relationships in various ways, with software or not. In this episode, you’ll discover: why social media is more than just a social networking platform Jon’s daily routine that sheds light on how he keeps up with his social networking and keeps all his relationships strong at the same time (not an easy thing to do) a super-networking-technique that creates very positive responses to anyone you do it to (from friends to acquaintances, this trick works) The Dunbar Limit – the limit on number of connections humans can realistically maintain (his software helps you maintain thousands) the best way to grow in today’s over connective and over communicative world (something very hard to do today) how the world is a small place, and how that is changing the way business is conducted (relationships are growing more and more important than ever) that vital importance of “top-of-mind” and how to stay there (no one cares about how awesome your product is.. they care about themselves) why you need to pay attention to the Relationship Big Three: contacts, calendar, communication (and why you need to use all your social platforms and communication outlets together) Mentioned: Zig Ziglar Goldmine Salesforce Nimble Jon’s Twitter Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. It’s John McIntyre here the autorespoder guy. I’m here with John Ferrara. Now John is the founder of Nimble, which is as far as I understand, it’s a social CRM .it brings in all the data from every platform, like LinkedIn, twitter, email, all the different sites out there. Someone might have a social profile on apparently, I think, even blogs, because I just jumped on the family out there and I was like oh I know a bit about you. You’ve actually been in the Philippines and building a resort and how do you even know that, that’s kind of hard to find. So, it sounds like a very interesting platform. And I want to get… actually, the story of how I found john. I was doing some emailing to people who were doing infusionsoft , so then they cancelled infusionsoft and then got a Nimble, and they I say well, can I talk about Nimble? And they say no, you can’t interview me, you’ve got to interview the guy who got the company, so that makes a lot more sense. And that’s why I hit up John and say let’s talk, let’s have a chat, so now we are here. And I want to find out about what Nimble does, a bit about the relationship side of it and why, John as far as I understand really believes in, this is all about real relationships and exploring who someone is. A little bit different from the ordinary. The old school marketers approach. So it’s going to be an interest episode. John, how are you? John Ferrara: I’m great John, It’s a pleasure to connect with you and your community. I love to teach. I believe that the more people you can help grow, the more you grow. So I love every opportunity to get in my self-box and talk about the power of relationships. And its ability to help you reach your dreams by helping other people achieve theirs. John McIntyre: yeah, fantastic, man it’s a pleasure to have you on the show. So, before we get into some of the relationships on the needy greedy of what’s actually going on the world today with the stuff, can you give me a list of a little bit of the background on who you are and what do you do? John Ferrara: Sure. so, some people call me the Don Quixote of relationships and some people call me the Godfather of CRM but I’m just the guy that struggles like every other business person to identify people that matters to reach out and build connections that enable me to stay on top of mind, so when they bind decisions, they consider my products or services. I started out as a sales guy when I was a kid, and I struggle with managing relationships , and I looked around and I couldn’t find a tool that helped me out to do that well. So I quit my job when I was 29 years old and I started a company called Goldmine. Have you heard of Goldmine John? John McIntyre: I have not no John Ferrara: So if you google John Ferrara Goldmine what you’ll see is that before there was outlook, before there was outlook before salesforce existed , Goldmine was that contact tool that people use to manage relationships and to turn contacts into Gold. So, basically in 1989 I was the first company that integrated contacts, calendar, communication, sales market animation and collaboration into a business team tool that we sold to over 5 million companies around the world. John McIntyre: nice, so I just found the website here. Is still going? John Ferrara: Yeah, we sold the company in 1999. So we started in 1989. Started the company on 5,000 no bank loans, no venture capital , so when we sold it we were doing around 7 million of dollars a year , about 5 million customers and after ran in a business for about 10 years I didn’t really have that much time for connecting to people that were important to me like my family and my friends, so I sold the business and the guy that I sold it to sold it for the double of what he paid me for and then some Venture firm bought it and they started putting some management people that they had no idea of what they were doing, so the company started to sort of floated for a while John McIntyre: ok, ok that’s a cool story John Ferrara: So the thing is, that having an inventive SFA CRM contact management and market animation before they existed. I know a thing or two about the market and I took time out to raise 3 babies , because I truly believe we are all this planet to grow our souls and help people grow theirs , and I think you can’t do that unless you are present with other human beings and I think the most important people to be present with are your family and friends, so I took some time in my life to do that, but in the process I started to use social media and I started to use the power and its ability to help me connect other human beings effectively and I saw how it was going to change the way our customers make bind decisions and companies engage with them, and I started looking for a tool that enabled me to integrate social media with relationships . I saw that contact tools didn’t do that where we all live outlook, address book and google contacts and then I started to just look CRM systems and saw they weren’t even about relationships, they were really management reporting t tools. So CMR stands for more costumers reporting management than relationship management. There are 225.000 global businesses, less than 3% use any CMR. Most of use spreadsheets. so I got back into business to fix what I think is broken what I think is relationship management market , because if you weren’t force to use see around you wouldn’t use it, that’s why they call it salesforce , because you have to force people to use it. John McIntyre: mm ok, I haven’t heard that one before, it’s good. So, mean one think I’m going… the directions I’m going to take this conversation. I think, one interesting part is this philosophy you’ve got with helping people, like believing we are really here to grow and to help other people grow is the best way to grow, so what motivates that philosophy? Where does it come from? John Ferrara: well, if you think about, if you go back before the madmen marketing that occurred from mass manufacturing, if you go back to the small town of any country, people knew each other and business people built their reputation and the promises they made and the experiences they delivered and the people they served and how they grew. And so today I think that social media is increasing that transparency and expectations of costumers to company, of employees to employers, and is creating a world of small towns. So I believe that as Six Ziegler said, the more people you help to grow the more you’ll grow and the best way to do that is being someone who is trusted advisor, so when they make bind decisions they think of you. It’s just hard to do in todays over connected and over communicated world. so what I’ve done is create a platform to help people to more effectively connect and stay connected to people that matters in their lives, and is not prospects and costumers, they are going to help you grow your business. For instance John, you connected with me. I’m not a prospect or costumer to your lead conversion strategy, marketing animation consulting practice s, no. I’m a person that can help teach other people about the promise of building a marketing and their lead conversion strategy, because I’m someone who knows a thing about that, so you are building relationship with me and see that relationship, you are then connecting with other people and setting yourself up as a trusted advisor and people that you can help grow. So ultimately John I think what you’ve done in your whole life is identify people you can help grow. and whether you are helping them with leads or whether you are helping them with education or whether you are helping build bridges in some place, I really believe that we are here in the planet to help other people grow and ultimately is about growing on your soul, because I believe that like I said, we are on this planet to grow our souls and we do that by being present with other human beings by sharing our passions and dreams and through vibration we help each other succeed and ultimately that’s all we lead this planet with. Through those vibrations or connections. And I think that from a business perspective, that’s a very powerful thing. If you are connecting with other people not to tag them, but to serve them, because I believe that sales is a service John McIntyre: mm I like that, I think it’s the world changing in some way with technology in the sense that , like you said , because it’s all connected and we have all these software applications that allow us to build this relationships across the world. So you are in a different state and you thought I was in Thailand or Australia. Here I am in you know, Vancouver , but I think you are right, with this idea that the world is getting smaller or flatter as one guy said and that’s changing the way business is done .this is all taken from oh I’m going to market and sell stuff to how can I help you? How can I serve you? John Ferrara: and ultimately it’s not about business, it’s about relationships , because hopefully you are doing business with people that you like , and you are connecting beyond the, you know, how much money can I make from you , or how many things did you order from me . it’s about shared passions and dreams and you are sharing that with that person , whether is a photograph of some mountains with a client or your baby or the sunset or some food that you ate, all the different tools we have for sharing in social media and connections are increasing the top of my bonding you have with other people, and ultimately that’s great for business , because what Mike West said is that tout of sight, out of mind ,and out of mind you are out of money honey and if you are not on top of mind with your costumers when you are binding decisions, you are threw, and how do you stay on top of mind? You don’t do that by sending a quarterly newsletter letter , you don’t do that by sending them an email or saying how great your businesses are , because who cares about how great you are or how your products are . They cared about themselves. People buy better versions of themselves, they don’t buy great products. So if you can be seen as a trusted advisor, someone who can help them grow, when they do need your products or services or they contact you, they will bring their friends John McIntyre: mm, ok, so I’m curious, with this philosophy, how did you apply this philosophy in your life? John Ferrara: well, I believe that the heart of relationships are our contacts, our calendar and our communication. And ultimately, our contacts and communications are not only in our outlooks and google contacts they are across six different tabs or browsers and three different laps or desktops, so twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, foursquare, google plus, angelus, crunchbase, quora, etc. I think in today’s world we are over connected or over communicated and it’s hard to identify people that matter. So imagine me John five years ago when I envision social and that’s the what it has changed and the way costumers make bind decisions and companies engage with them . And I wanted to build a platform that would empowered people to do that as at scale how do I build my own brand and the Nimble brand, because look Goldmine was a grandpa’s platform back in the days, so they are not going to remember what Goldmine was, even who John Ferrara was because base guy had been a dad for eight years, right? and so I have to grow and build my brand and build the Nimble brand from scratch and I did that without any marketing dollars , so the way I did it was so I reached out and connected with influences and the core of constituency in around the area of the promises of my products , so what that means is I found the people who influenced my perspective customers in around the areas of promise of Nimble which is sales, marketing , startups , entrepreneurship social media , social business, etc. and I reached out and built and authentic relationships and relevant relationship with these people where I then I established a human connection , and then overtime we became friends and , they supported each other, they started to give each other feedback in the Nimble idea and we started talking about Nimble, and then eventually that scaled the brand of the company to their networks and their networks of networks and now we are generating 70,000 visitors per month in our website . We are converting at 10% a trial and 20% paid-with no advertising, no salespeople, so basically the stuff I’m talking about is powerful and they work, and is not different from the way I built Goldmine. So think about this John. Imagine having a network application before people knew they needed networks, so back in the day in 1999 businesses were adopting computers in the early days and they bought novel networks to tie up printers and hard drives together, but there were no business applications that enable people to share data, so there was no outlook, there was no combination of email calendar and contact. I created the first platform and then I integrated market animation, so I built if this and that for businesses people and people in companies , so then you can essentially say , if you put an email in the Goldmine data base and it looks like this , then do that, day one do this, then do that , so I built the first relationship platform for a company, how do you sell that?, so I was a kid in an apartment with 5,000 dollars, so the way I did it was, I identify the influences of my prospects, novel network resellers . I called them up one by one around the glove and I got them to use Goldmine, cause people use what they know and they know what they use, so they started using it, they started to recommend it and that’s what bootstrap Goldmine and I never took a dime of money from anyone and essentially, today we are doing the same thing, but in a digital social way, so the idea of influence marketing, influential engagement is very powerful. And it’s just hard to do with the tool we had to do when you are living with outlook, address book and google contacts and twitter, Facebook , limekiln ,etc., and try to manage all those connections and conversations . John McIntyre: mm ok, one thing that that is hard to manage, one objection I’m seeing myself and I reckon anyone who is listening is that, it’s going to be like wow, you now I can just go to Facebook or google and buy some ads and do it that way , but it’s a going connection , this real, this actual relationships , that’s going to take time and you know it’s going to take time and too much effort John Ferrara: yes, but you know people overestimate what they can do in a few years and they underestimate what they can do in ten , and you know, how long you have been doing what you are doing? You are basically managing a resort how long ago? John: I think I sent my first invoice when I was in the copywriting stuff in about two years. It was in 2012, so almost 3 years ago John Ferrara: yeah, and look where you are now, you know, you are a global marketing strategist and consultant right? John McIntyre : yeah. John Ferrara: so imagine where you are going to be in 5 years or 10 years, so you know, you can be downed at how long is going to take to build your brand and grow your network, but if you don’t start today, you won’t get anywhere tomorrow, so I believe that your network is your net worth, that your personal brand plus your professional network equals your professional net worth and that goes for individual or goes for company and look what we have done with Nimble. Nimble is a global brand. All done without any advertisement spam. All done by in relationships with influential and building community through conversation by inspiring other people with content and that’s the future of business. John McIntyre: content or relationships John Ferrara: Yeah, so basically think about this. You are in a digital boat in the social river, and what you need to do is to be able to drop large into the river and be able to get binds in those legs and bring them in, so today if you are smart, you are sharing content and inspire educate other people . We call that the five E’s of social business: educate, exchange, engage, embrace and empower your costumers and you do that by giving knowledge. So in a daily basis you share content and you inspire educate people about how can they be more affective at lead conversion and marketing and costumers life cycle. People see you as a leader John? John McIntyre: absolutely John Ferrara: and if you then bring in the people that matter by whatever you identify what matters to you and your business and you build a connection and start a conversation, would you then start building a network around your business? And how many people will then convert into costumers? John McIntyre: a lot of them John Ferrara: so you and I are reading from the same book, and this is the future of business because Facebook ads get ignore .So what you need to do is become a trusted advisor to your prospects and costumers and you do that by not just going after prospects costumers, but you do that by going after people that influence them, because your recommendation from other people are more powerful than you telling them how great you are. So I tell people, if you teach people to fish they will figure out how to fish in pools John McIntyre: and actually, in this experience, during this podcast by the time this goes live. We are in the episode 100 and eight- ish . so one thing that blows me away when I started I didn’t know how long I was going to do this for or what responses I was going to have , but after doing for almost 2 years now it’s been incredible to see . Friends of mine that I’ve spoken to and they say the same thing. it’s been incredible to see the response in terms o you know, what’s done for the business in terms of the money I make , but also for the description John Ferrara: Well, you know, I tell people stories to teach them these ideas, cause ultimately if you tell them something exactly they are not going to remember, but if you tell them a story they remember. So the story I tell people on the lines exactly what we are talking about, is that social media is like a cocktail party. You don’t walk into a business function and say “hey I’m john McIntyre , you guys want to buy some marketing consulting?” right? You walk into the room and you look around and you identify people you might want to connect to , you walk up in a stage and you begin to listen to conversations and eventually you start valuing the conversation , so they might be talking about gosh I have this business and you know I used to do advertisement and yellow pages and that’s not working and we had this in the newspaper and that’s not working and you know, I hear about this social media stuff, but I just , you know, Facebook is a place for my wife and I just don’t understand the social stuff and they might start saying: well, you know I’ve read about how -it’s not really social media , but basically that business is social, life is social people are binding, people are liking , they like people and you know them and then you start teaching them a bit and you know john it seems like you know a lot about those stuff and what do you do? And you know, I just happen to consult that stuff, so what happens is when you are going after people telling how great you are and you then teach them how to be great. and not only that, but if you go into a room and there are these other thought leaders and you begin to have conversations with them, when new people enter into the room they go “wow john is talking to this other thought leaders and you must be a thought leader and all of the sudden you are a thought leader , and it’s just like and it’s just because you are having conversations and beginning to learn–and begging to share what they are sharing and then adding your own thoughts onto it and so that’s what you’ve done with your brand, and that’s what every business and every person in the world needs to begin doing today John McIntyre: it’s interesting one thing I was thinking about when you were speaking is that people it’s hard to get in the game and into business thinking like wow I have to become an expert and behaving like one and talking like one and and everyone will look at me as an expert . So one thing I’ve realized is, just from experience is that that needs to be reversed. That how it actually works is that you have to start acting like an expert before everyone thinks you are an expert. so when you go to this cocktail party or you show up online with a website you start giving advice and you know it should be good advice, but you know overtime what will actually happen is that people will eventually see you as an expert the more you start acting and doing the things an expert do . No one will think you are an expert before that point, so that’s….. John Ferrara: yeah you know they say fake it until you make it John McIntyre: yeah, and that’s fair, and you know part of the is that is not so much, part of the deal, you know I mean , sometimes it is going to be, sometimes you have this element anywhere you have to fake it a bit, at at least at the beginning . but what happens over time is that if you are te sort of person that starts faking it, overtime, because then you start getting more attention , so then you get more clients and customers , then you get experience with those clients, so eventually overtime you develop the skills anyways. John Ferrara: Yeah John McIntyre: but you know when you fake it…. John Ferrara: I was kidding John. I really believe that the more things change, the more they stay the same in social it’s just a new channel of conversations that ultimately is the basics in business that wins game. , and this is what people forget. It’s saying what you are going to do , say what you are going to say and follow up and follow through, and this is where most people fail, because they start getting excited about social media and they are making connections and do all these stuff and what they forget is the basics of identifying people that matters , building relevant and authentic relationship, so then you stay top of mind with that business person, so when they make a bind decision, they think of you, and then you follow through what you promised to do, and you deliver to them to build your reputation and grow your business . It’s really simple. The problem is that we are over connected and over communicated and how is your inbox John? John McIntyre: it’s probably about 10 or 15 emails every now and then. John Ferrara: yeah, mine get thousands and my signals on my social media have hundreds or thousands per day. So we are telling everyone out there that content enables you to build that reputation and connect with people that matters and we teach them to share content on a regular basis. You share content on a regular basis, don’t you John? John McIntyre: yeah John Ferrara: Okay, so if you are sharing content to inspire and educate people on a daily basis, are you going to get connections with other business prospects? John McIntyre: do you mean with email or with social media right? John: yes, of course. John Ferrara: so eventually, your social media connections and conversations are going to get louder than your inbox. So then what do you do? So what ultimately what we need is an engine that listens to our signals, layers intelligent on top of those contracts and connections, identifies the people that matters to and help us to nurture those relationships and to stay on top of mind, because today you live in outlook , address book or google contacts, twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and some kind of market animation and CRM , and none of those things are connected and is hard , isn’t it? John McIntyre: mm . It’s really hard. I’m curious, you know, so based on, if you get thousands of emails or hundreds of emails and thousands of connections in social media how do you …..What it comes to the actual social needy greedy of your daily routine. How do you actually manage all this? John Ferrara: so what I do is, I use Nimble to identify the people that match the DNA of people that matters to me. So Nimble on any signal, on any or in the most important business signals are email and calendar , and then beyond that all the conversations and connections that you are generating through social , Nimble layers them intelligently on top of every person, remember I said I nimble you?. So Nimble essentially takes a bit of your information and ties that to other bits on thousands of data basis to build a social profile of who you are and matches that to the people that matters to me typically from my business, and then surface the ones that are important and then it develops a cycle to stay in touch, cause like Mike West said, out of sight, out of mind, out of mind out of money honey. So how do you keep in touch today? You don’t send them emails and say hey john did you look at Nimble? Did you think about binding? you stay in mind by walking someone’s digital footprint and having valuable conversations so the next time you reach out it’s a warm call and so Nimble manages that not just in the Nimble platform, but everywhere it works, because today we still live in inbox and in LinkedIn-and in twitter and in Facebook and in google plus _or Instagram, or whatever it happens to be. so Nimble automatically builds an intelligent -relationship -platform by gathering your contacts, your calendar , your email and your social conversations interactions builds a data base , keeps in all the data in a daily basis and then you can take it with you in any app, anywhere you are and it adds inside and intelligence to that engagement John McIntyre: it sounds like an impressive software. One thing, What I would like to thing in the morning is that you wake up one day and you get started, it’s time to do that, time to do this, time to connect, you, what happens? What’s the process? So you log in and you see someone over here and you. How does it work? John Ferrara: sure, so in the morning, is get an email, and it’s called them Nimble daily, and the Nimble daily essentially tells me the key things that have been going on for the day, and the most important things are the basic stuff, right? It’s the meeting you’ve set, you’ve scheduled, and the activities, the tasks you’ve created for yourself, those are the core things that you need to focus on. Then beyond that, there are signals that happen, so people plus one comment, retweet , otherwise engage with you, Nimble looks at all those signals , layers intelligent on top of all of them and surface the top ten to you. So that’s my Nimble daily, that’s how I start. I get an email, and there is also a today page in Nimble that shows me all that. so , like for the meetings , I’ll review who that person is, the history of our relationship and what I want to accomplished in the meeting , for the task and review the tasks and prioritize them . and then for the signals we then respond them, so Nimble gives me the ability to reply or otherwise engage with those signals: birthdays, job changes, etc. and then during the day, I’ll go back and look at those signals, or more importantly, whatever I happen to be, I’ll use Nimble to Nimble those people, so I’m sitting inside my inbox, and I’m looking at a message from somebody. I can Nimble them and Nimble tells me exactly who they are , so I’m sitting there inside the email that you sent to me in Gmail about this podcast , and inside there is your record in Nimble including who you are , where you are from, where you work, what your influential is , the history of our conversations , and what you are saying to the world, and then from here and can do the follow through tasks that I need to do, because every engagement email, social or conversation in person, in the phone , in Skype result in a follow up or a follow through up task that you should be doing, because if you don’t have a purpose, for the connection, ultimately it’s just blind bumping in the night, and so I would then schedule the follow things that I need to do and I might not have a specific thing, but I might want to stay in top of mind , because basically we connected and I might want to stay connected with you to develop a relationship . I can set a touch cycle and stay in touch , because Nimble knows every time that you and I have connected , I’s knows the last time we connected , so I can say to Nimble , I want to connect and stay connected with John every three months or every 30 days and If I don’t stay connected with you Nimble will remind me to reach out , and rather than send you an email, and saying how is that podcast going, or have you tried Nimble, I might walk in your footprint and then share some of your content and add value to it. John McIntyre: Oh I see what you mean, so it lets you add a lot more, instead of just doing like oh hey checking in, hey have you tried Nimble yet?, it’s going to be like; hey there is this great podcast , you can share it and then they all see that you are sharing it and then we can talk a week later and then you check and I’m more receptive to you John Ferrara: Bingo! Bingo, bingo, and that’s the natural thing we should all be doing, but the thing is, is hard to do that at scale. And so, wouldn’t it be great if you knew you were having a meeting with somebody and the system actually said: hey why don’t you go and share some of John’s comments before the meeting or after the meeting? or if there was no connection or conversation 30 days after a meeting it says: hey you took the time to meet with this guy, you should follow up and follow through , here are some things you should do . And I think we all need a second brain in our over connected, over communicated world, and Nimble was designed to help you do that, because it’s just hard , you know there is a Dunbar’s limit. The limit on the Nimble connections you can actually maintain as a human being. and there was a study done by this English fellow, google it : Dunbar’s limit, and so basically, it’s limited by our contacts, so all of our contents are about the same , it’s that thing in the back of your brain , and it’s about a 100,000 people max and the average network in Nimble is in the thousands and so, John there are people that you’ve met two years ago, that you’ve lost touch with , that could be powerful for your business , but you don’t know it and they are forgotten John McIntyre: so you are saying Nimble has an outgrowing to figure out base on who I’m connected right now . it actually tells me who it’s worth to connect with? John Ferrara: Mhm John McIntyre: ooh, because that’s even more interesting. so there is a lot in there, I can go and add in people that I actively want to connect with , but this is also is going to give me a list of people that , of you know, based on your profile already , you should go and connect with these five or ten people as well John Ferrara: Exactly, so what happens is that Nimble maps the background of people and companies across all their identities. and then we bring the data down, because ultimately a data base is as good as a data, and so imagine if infusionsoft had a data base on people, that you can then segment based on who they are , what their business is about and their interactions that they have with you , your team and your brand or email calendar or social. What can you do with that? John McIntyre: that’s a pretty interesting stuff. That’s for sure. John Ferrara: well the thing I mean is this , today, when you sign up for a product, you get a generic message , day one here are some links, day three: how is it going?, day seven: what did you sign up? , right? John McIntyre: yeah, John Ferrara: Imagine if the message was longer than this. Day one: John, as a strategist in the marketing area, I know you understand the power of authentic one to one conversations and connections, that’s why we believe Nimble, could power your engagement in a much more intelligent way. We look forward to help you grow , will that be different than here are seven links? John McIntyre : much better, yes John Ferrara: Ok, so imagine me being a kid, 25 years ago in trade market and animated processes actions based on triggers . I invented animated marketing, and I’m here to reinvented John McIntyre: ok, I’m curious, can I tell do with Nimble? Can I go and set up like an email like an email funnel or is it just for social stuff? John Ferrara: so, I’m building it one day at the time. So, what I’ve done so far is integrated your contact calendar and communications on email calendar and social, so you have a data base that automatically builds itself. so you add Nimble to all the things you have, we then bring all your contacts together, map their profiles, bring down the data, the next step is that you are going to be able to segment that data on any of that information, so you can say: give me everybody who is influential in marketing who as a club score graded in this, who you’ve contacted in this amount of time , or I’m not connected or I’m connected or all those different things. Can you imagine? John McIntyre: yeah John Ferrara: ok, that’s segmentation. once you segment them, then you can put them into processing tracks, so if this and that for people in companies, if you look like this , then do that , if I do this or I don’t do that, do this. So the segmentation would come next, and then after that you’ve have the deep tracks. So the deep tracks might me emails or might be social, they might be things you want to do. So if you look like this add it to the list. If they look like this, then follow them. If they look like this, then send them, put them in this track of email drip. If they do this or don’t do that, then do this. John McIntyre: yeah, that’s very interesting, so then you can have a funnel, so instead of just being an email funnel, you can say hey first send an email, then twit them and say: Did you get my email?, then twit one of the articles on their website and you can automatically do all that process John Ferrara: Bingo John McIntyre: that’s pretty epic. I’m actually signing up now, integrating my twitter account, I want to have a look at this John Ferrara: So, Nimble, is the simplest , smartest social, sales and marketing platform that is designed not for sales people, but for the whole company, cause it not just sales people are attached to costumers , everybody in the company touches the customer across entire life cycle , and you shouldn’t just have a sales system and sales , a marketing system and marketing, accounting system in accounting , etc., right?, so that’s what power Goldmine was in just in sales the whole company adapted it. So Nimble is a platform that the whole company can use, so no matter who picks up the phone, you know exactly who they are, the history of the conversations, and how you might serve them. John McIntyre: yeah, very cool man. Alright, so if people want to go and have a look at this, like I’m right now, what’s the best place to do that? John Ferrara: Nimble.com. They can sign up, it’s a two weeks free trial, be sure to load our chrome widget, that’s our smart contact up. So basically, you can Nimble everywhere you are, so imagine if you are LinkedIn and you are looking at a profile, you can Nimble it. And if they are in out Nimble system already, you get not just the LinkedIn profile , which is the resume what they want you to see, but you get their Instagram , their twitter, their Facebook, their google plus, they Angelis, whatever you need, Imagine being inside of hubsweet and being able to bring in Nimble and help discover on every contact that it’s in there, being in twitter, being in Facebook, being in a Forbes article and wanting to know who the author is , you can Nimble them . So Nimble is a verb John McIntyre: Nimble is a verb, I like it, I’m going to Nimble, I’m going to Nimble you after this call and see what I can find out. I just signed up man, I’ve just imported my data, so I’m going to have fun playing around with this this week John Ferrara: Awesome John McIntyre: John it’s been good to have you on the show man John Ferrara: John I really appreciated, I love to teach, I truly believe the more people you help grow the more you’ll grow. that services is the new sale , and I encourage your audience to follow me on twitter and is johnGillian_Ferrara , because I’d love to learn more about them and how I might be able to serve them and help them grow. John McIntyre: cool, fantastic. All the links to nimble and twitter on this show are at The post Episode #110 – Jon Ferrara on The Importance of Relationships and Social Media In Business Today (turn contacts into gold) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

May 12, 2015 • 0sec

Episode #109 – John Keel on Bulletproofing Your Online Reputation (Ecommerce and small business musts)

When someone recommends you a local business or restaurant, what do you do? EXACTLY. If I read your mind right, Then you would Google them to look for reviews. From here on out, FEEDBACK & REVIEWS will be the number 1 metric small local businesses NEED (important for Ecommerce as well). John Keel works with small businesses, managing their local listings.. ..and their reputation. He creates online popularity. He’s on the forefront for small businesses (any biz under 20 mil per year) with their online rep. John KNOWS what works. John’s been doing ranking and PPC since before Google was a company. He knows ALL the new tricks too. Let’s put it this way… …Perry Marshall (his good friend) went to his seminar on PPC marketing before being the “Google Ads Guy” That alone should say it all, John’s kind of a BIG DEAL. John thinks SMB are the savior to our economy, He ranks businesses NOT based off SEO and stuff Google can wipe out… …but on REVIEWS. On Reputation. Becuase their is absolutely no point in ranking your business, If you have NO reviews, or bad ones… Better to have reviews before going gung ho on ranking. Maximize your efforts right? Let John teach you all about this in today’s show. In this episode, you’ll discover: how to avoid not being trusted (and a solution that would gain you trust each time you open your mouth) sales processes online and offline are changing and you’re either riding the change-wave or you’re not (learn this drastic business growth change) the neat trick behind placing cookies on your readers’ browsers that retarget them with your ads over and over (increase your conversion rates) laboring to convince people they need your solution is the wrong way to go about your service (learn the right way) how most business can generate massive reviews by doing one extremely simple action that takes 2 seconds a simple, friendly technique to ease feedback out of your customers the number of reviews that you need in order to be safe, and how to grow them from there Mentioned: Marlon Sanders improvedresults.com want to set up a 15 minute phone call for some quick, free advice? Call him at 513-257-8633 Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Coming Soon The post Episode #109 – John Keel on Bulletproofing Your Online Reputation (Ecommerce and small business musts) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

May 5, 2015 • 33min

Episode #108 – Brian Lim on Launching Your Business Into Outer Space (current business trends and growth tips)

Brian Lim builds space ships. Really. He works with and in the space industry. Ask him what he was doing 2 years ago, and you’ll laugh at his transformation. Brian’s workplace launches “something” (what actually gets launched into orbit is G-13 Classified, unfortunately) into outer space once per week. WHAT!? That’s what I thought too. And today he came on the podcast to talk about some very interesting subjects in relation to business and the future. Learn why Uber’s growth took them from an idea, a concept… to worth 10 billion dollars (and more real life examples of today’s astronomical growth possibilities) Learn why the average lifetime of a billion dollar company is now 15 years, compared to the prior average 60-year lifespan. Learn how to build and control your very own satellite in outer space from your Android phone. Things are changing. In order to last in business today, You gotta stay on the edge of innovation now. No business is safe, It’s anybody’s game. Business today is EXCITING. So arm yourself with the knowledge you need to stay competitive. Because there’s always something more to learn. And that latest thing is what will keep you relevant in today’s fast-paced business world. It’s easier to do more now. It’s cheaper to do more now too (look up The 50 Dollar Satellite). So if you are interested in stepping into the arena that is creating future trillionaires, NOW is the time. No matter your background or formal knowledge… …SPACE is the future, And ANYONE can join the movement. It’s unbelievably easy. Let Brian share with you how he did, and how you can do it too. In this episode, you’ll discover: how just having a lifestyle business usually is not enough to satisfy that entrepreneur-hunger (once you’re there, chances are you’ll want MORE) that innovation is getting faster and faster, so to survive you better be ready to learn (time to break out of the linear mindset) how you can turn a $250,000 investment into a Space Business (run your business from SPACE) a little known fact about GPS devisees you never knew… but that could catapult your space business’ success the space industry today is similar to the internet back in the early 1990’s (the next gold rush?) that you can own your own asteroid by taking it and claiming it (wild, wild west anyone?) how to develop the trait of admiration and use it to go as big as you can Mentioned: www.deltavspacehub.com Bold Singularity University Instagram WhatsApp PhoneSat Get in touch with him on Twitter: @BoldBrian Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. It’s John McIntyre here, the autoresponder guy. I’m here with Brian Lim. Now Brian is a very interesting guy and a bit different from the usual guests I get on here, you know, I’ve spoken to marketers, entrepreneurs and business guys, and Brian is very much a business guy and entrepreneur, but why I put him on the show is that I’ve been reading a book called Bold by Peter Diamandis. And it’s all about how fast the world is changing and how much faster it’s going to change over the coming years. And where this fits in the business is, I think, a lot of people, when it comes to marketing, everyone’s talking about how you can build better sales, how you can build a better business. Maybe even sell your business later on with all the startup stuff. But very few people, you know, before… When you’re doing that, a lot of people think that’s freedom. That’s, when you get there, you can be happy, you can retire, you can live on the beach. Or you can go to Thailand and live on the beach and, you know, work while drinking coconuts or something. But you get there and then you realize it doesn’t make you happy. All you’ve really done is created a platform on which to do something interesting with your life. And, so, I wanted to talk to Brian, have a bit of a chat about once you get to that point, what some of the opportunities, what’s going on in the world of business right now, in term’s of what’s next, what’s gonna really get you pumped up and excited, and passionate more than just, you know, building an internet business, something like this. Something that’s gonna change the world. So… It’s a bit of a cliché, but I like it. I like it. Brian, how are you doing, man? Brian Lim: Very good, John. How are you? John McIntyre: I’m doing good man. Now what the… I should have asked this before we started but I was thinking cause you’re originally from Singapore but you’ve been in Australia for a while… Brian Lim: Yes, that’s right. John McIntyre: Okay, so do you have… Cause I think, you said mate before, do you have like an Australian accent, do you think? Brian Lim: Oh I think I have little bit of it. You know, if you wanna come get a schooner with me I’m happy. John McIntyre: Haha that’s kinda funny too and a bit ironic. You’re from Singapore but you’re in Sydney right now. And I’m in Singapore and I’m actually from Sydney. Brian Lim: Haha we’ll swap places one day. John McIntyre: One day, man, let’s do it. So before we get into some of this singularity stuff, the exponential stuff, can you give the listener a quick bit of a background on who you are and what you’re up to? Brian Lim: Okay so I am actually the space guy and what I… You know, when I go to a club and try to talk to a nice lady and they ask me what I do I’ll just say I build spaceships. John McIntyre: What’s the response to that? Brian Lim: Haha you know, I’ll just say a lot of people think I’m just pulling their leg. They think I’m at a bar, I’m just trying to drop an interesting conversation. So you build spaceships. Cool. And then the guy says yeah, I’m a vampire. John McIntyre: So you actually build spaceships? Brian Lim: Yes I do, sir! You know um so what I do is that I am right now working with the government of Australia, universities in Australia, corporate entities in Australia on the design and manufacturing of spacecraft and building space business ecosystem to actually take Australia to space. John McIntyre: Have we ever been to space? I don’t think we have. Brian Lim: Well actually it’s funny. Australia is actually the third country to have ever put anything in space. Alright? Right behind after Russia, the U.S., it became Australia, right after that. And the second busiest spaceport in the world today is Woomera, which is in South Australia. It is the second busiest spaceport in the world right behind Cape Canaveral. John McIntyre: So when you say it’s the busiest spaceport, I mean like um I don’t know how much space traffic like if you say you got the busiest airport there’s a ton of traffic, you know, through that. So when you say the busiest spaceport how much traffic goes through, you know, the second busiest spaceport? Brian Lim: Basically, they launch something every week. John McIntyre: Wow, okay, so… Wow! That’s more than I thought. And this runs to… Satellites, international space stations, you know, what sort of… Well, what’s around, launches and traffic, what’s going on? Brian Lim: You know what, actually no one knows because all… It’s the second busiest but nobody knows what’s flying, it’s all military confidential. John McIntyre: Hmm, interesting, okay. Fair. So maybe the military is building us huge base on the moon right now and no one even knows about it. Brian Lim: Exactly, they’re defeating our alien master overlords. John McIntyre: It’s one of those things, well, it’s like the movies when alien attacks the planet and only the CIA or only the special, you know, spies and agents know about it. No one else seems to know about it and they never find out and they get their memory wiped out. Maybe that’s what’s happening right now. Brian Lim: Yeah. Potentially, yeah. Very MIB-like of you! John McIntyre: So you’ve been to Singularity University, you said you did the International Space University which… Is a Space University. And they have got five spacetops and three of them are going pretty well. So what are you thinking, I mean we had a bit of a chat about this, so where do you think this is going? We talked about like… What I find really interesting about this is the whole… We are using our brains to think linearly. In terms of one plus one plus one, you know… Take one thirty times and it gets to thirty. Whereas if you do like one meter exponentially by doubling it every time, you get some pretty big numbers. And it’s very interesting, right, because no one… It’s very much that people don’t understand it. So when we think about computers getting faster every year our brains don’t grasp the speed at which the things are starting to move. Where’s it all going? Brian Lim: I think you gotta look at… One very simple way to look at is innovation. Okay? Everyone knows that innovation is getting faster and faster and faster. So the question to ask is when is innovation going to be so fast that you cannot keep up anymore? So right now, if you think about it, the internet, when it was invented in 1990s, took 7 years to be adopted by 25% of American population. Now, electricity, on the other hand, took somewhere around 40 years, when it was invented. So, if you think about that line we’re gonna approach a point where adoption of new technologies is going to be so rapid that nobody can actually keep up anymore. To give you an idea, Uber, as everyone knows, is a car company, a ride-sharing company, right? Now it came into Australia two years ago and now, two years on, it is taking 20% of the taxi market. Outright. And no one would have expected an organization like Uber to appear. I mean when it first started it wasn’t worth much. Now it’s worth what, 10 billion dollars. So companies like that are gonna come and go. Stat says that an average lifespan of a billion dollar company used to be 60 years. It’s now gonna be 15. So a lot of work we gonna create is going to become irrelevant very quickly. And we have to be accomodated and get used to the fact on how do we constantly innovate to stay in touch or how can we build a business or an organization that can last for centuries past this point. John McIntyre: That sounds like it’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in the sense that if… Cause I’ve heard this before too, like, the billion dollar company lasting 60 years, now it’s lasting 15. Someone said recently… There is an article on Forbes, one of these sites said, something like 75% of what’s on the Inc. 500 or the Inc. 50, some of the top companies in the world… None of those companies exist yet. I don’t know what the actual stat was but it was like 75% of the companies in 2020, that will be like 75% of the biggest companies in the world in 2020 don’t even exist. Yet. Which is kinda crazy, it’s like wow, what will those companies be? Brian Lim: You know what, I have spoken to Peter Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil and a whole bunch of other people… We don’t know. We actually have no idea what it’s going to look like. So when you think about it for a moment it’s not that we don’t know. What it translates into is it’s anybody’s game. John McIntyre: Yeah. One thing I find in this is, like, you are doing like a self-help work and that’s going on about… And then you gotta get in touch with your dreams from when you were a kid. If you wanted to be an astronaut you’ve gotta get in touch with that and find out if you can actually be an astronaut. If you can’t be, go and work for a space company for example. And where this is interesting is that a lot of people who hear something like this and it’s… Even if they are very successful with what they do already with life they gonna have the attitude of I can’t really build a space thing. It just feels like it’s so far out of reach. Or you can have these multi billion dollar companies, you know, like Instagram and do it in 18 months or something. And I think that people are gradually waking up to the point when this is the exponential thing. When you start to grasp the potential of how an exponential curve works, anyone, if they’re willing to do the work and get involved, can go from being just a random person with maybe a small business or something like that, some mild success, but nothing in the grand scheme of things, to going and going, and doing something absolutely life-changing for billions of people on the planet. Brian Lim: Exactly. And that’s one of the opportunities we have, it’s that we’re now in an age when you can build a big business and you could also save the world at the same time. If you wanna be a billionaire, just sell one dollar product to a billion people. John McIntyre: It’s like Whatsapp did, right? One dollar a year. It sold out to Facebook for 19 billion dollars, though. It’s incredible. And when you think about how fast this world is being created. You know, you got Instagram in 18 months, and Whatsapp, and Viber, with something like 900 million dollars. And Instagram had 13 employees. Brian Lim: Yep. 13 employees and it was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars. John McIntyre: It’s incredible. And obviously it’s not as easy as just sitting down, building an app and then, you know, you’re gonna make your billion dollars. But it’s exciting to give in to that freedom thing. Once you’ve got a business and you’ve got your freedom and whatever that means to you, whatever level you need to be at, then it’s a bit like you can do anything you want now with your life. You have the time, you have the money, for the most part. Now you can do whatever you want. So what’s gonna get you most excited when you get up in the morning to go and do stuff? Would you really want to sit around and play video games all day? Or would you want to go and tell people at the bar that you build spaceships? Brian Lim: You already know my answer, I’ll do the second. Any day. John McIntyre: Cause you have an accelerator, eh? Brian Lim: Yes. John McIntyre: So do you work with younger people or less experienced people and set them up, mentor or coach them, that kind of thing? Brian Lim: Yes, we do. John McIntyre: How does that work? What sort of barriers and problems do you run into? Brian Lim: Well I think the first thing is perception. When I say that this is mentality of to do space you need to be a rocket scientist and I’m not a rocket scientist and therefore I can’t do it. And that’s the first thing I’m faced with as a challenge. And you know what’s the funny thing… I’ll give you a real example. The satellites were launched, it was called the GRACE Mission. It was launched to measure the gravity of the Earth’s planet field accurately. And on board it had a few sensors. It had a gyroscope, threeaxis accelerometer and a GPS and a few other instruments. The first mission was about 200 million, the second was 520 million. And if I were to compare that with something that you already have, which would be your smartphone, it’s no more than a $1,000, you have an accelerometer, you have a GPS, you have a touch screen, a decent speaker, you know. The cost of this is amazing. So the truth is that we can now actually build satellites really cheap. In fact, anyone in your audience can google it, it’s called PhoneSat. NASA built it. They basically figured out how to put an Android smartphone in a satellite and make it work. So if you know anything about programming, you’re using JavaScript to actually write the Android app. Which translates to that if you can make an Android app or do decent basic programming, you can control a satellite. John McIntyre: So you can actually launch your own satellite from your house into space. Brian Lim: Not from your house, just yet I don’t have enough rubber bands to do that, just yet. But you can actually do so. Just from that perspective alone, of difficulty, it’s incredible. You can do something. The next challenge I have is people think it’s really expensive. If I ask you right now how much do you think it costs me to put something in space, what do you think it will cost? John McIntyre: Five… Well… I’ve kinda read some of these books, I was gonna say, like, $5,000. Brian Lim: Five thousand dollars, actually, you’re right. Let’s not kid ourselves here. So the $5,000 is a launch cost for what we call a CanSat. It has a size of a coke can and it’s a really small piece of hardware. And it’s basically there to go up there and say beep beep beep I exist. John McIntyre: So you can’t spy on your friends with that? Brian Lim: No, unfortunately. The cheapest satellite I’ve ever seen so far built that works, right? It’s $50. It’s called the Fifty-dollar satellite. Okay? You’re not gonna make a commercial product of it but that’s how cheap it’s getting. I’ve calculated. If you have about $250,000, you could actually sit down and design a viable space business. Now, 250 is build, launch and maintenance of a satellite. You could actually figure this out. You could do it. John McIntyre: Cause one thing I wondered about is how this translates to… One thing, we kinda sit down and play around with some of this stuff and spend a bit of money just as a hobby kind of thing, but how do you make this? How do you take that $250,000 and make it a business? Brian Lim: Okay so this is one of the challenges, is that you don’t know space and people don’t understand the model. So one of the interesting things that people do is actually education. If you think about it for a moment, when you have something up there, what are you providing back to Earth? John McIntyre: Information. Brian Lim: Exactly. So the value of information is of course greater than the hardware itself. So if you provide education let’s say I’m gonna teach kids on how a spacecraft works, they go to walk with me to my journey on building a spaceship and it goes up. That itself is a potential business. Especially with the focus on STEM education. If you want to talk about… If you put a big enough camera on board then you fall into the model of Planet Labs where you’re taking photos of the Earth. You know, they’re telling you what’s going on. Now let’s go on to the next one. We have a special kind of area which you think you always know as GPS. It gives you position, navigation and timing. Now what’s really cool about this that people don’t realize is that GPS is not as accurate as you think it is. So when you use GPS, not the cell phone towers, but ‘GPS’ GPS it’s plus minus 10 m accuracy. Now for you to go down the street to find something there it’s no big deal, right? Now if you’re flying an airplane and you’re gonna hit the runway or you are trying to maximize the land on a farm for you to plant crops, 10 m is suddenly a very big deal. So there’s a lot of people who are building technologies and services around augmenting GPS to make it more accurate. And I’ve been reading recently on a brand new model for space that at least was brand new to me, is that people have been using GPS to measure waves. So imagine it goes over the ocean, GPS hits the ground, it gets reflected back to space. So the signals are then read by a satellite that determines the height of a wave. So potentially it could be a disaster warning prediction mechanism. Well it’s checking the Pacific Ocean on a regular basis and it could say I detect that a tsunami is happening because the wave has gone up past a certain height. And I’m tracking it’s movement on approach to a coast. These are the kind of businesses you can build in space that are actually real today. I love the conversation of, like, asteroid mining and space tourism and other things. But those things take time and they are much further away. John McIntyre: So it’s all about if you wanna get in space tourism you need to be Richard Branson with a billion dollar budget to buy and build and fund the project. But you’re saying you could be anyone and put together a company for $250,000. It doesn’t even need to be your 250 grand, you can go and fund that with investors. And you’re in business, you’re in the space business! Brian Lim: Pretty much! John McIntyre: This is pretty exciting to think that anyone these days could start a space company and you’ll be like hey girl, I build rockets. So it’s cool, but in terms of viability of the business model, is this something that the market is ready for? Or is it sort of still like a tinkerers, kinda like a hobby field? Brian Lim: Okay, the best way to look at it is to imagine that the space industry now is how the Internet was in early 1990s. You know, it was a Wild Wild West. There was a lot of unknowns. Nobody knew how to do everything. If you could figure a way to make money – awesome. And if you didn’t, there were plenty of failures as well. But the opportunity is there. When we say we don’t know what the next business is going to look like it’s very much a Wild Wild West situation. John McIntyre: I like that. Just like the Internet was. That’s a good parallel. But what that means though, is that maybe not right now, maybe not for five or ten or twenty years, that this is going to be at some point some kind of a space bubble, just like there was the 2000 tech bubble. When it sort of reaches that fever pitch where everyone’s going crazy cause all of a sudden there are companies that are making money. And investors are going insane trying to get in on act. The whole thing is gonna implode. And it’s going to be like Internet, in that sense it’s a really interesting way to think about it. Cause then what happens in 2025, the whole thing implodes, you get in on 2026 on the ground when it’s all just completely messed up and it’s really easy to start a company, really cheap. Or you just buy someone’s company. And then it goes back up again, 2030, 2035, so just give me a lot of, like, this riding the ups and downs of the next few decades. Brian Lim: Bubbles will come and go. There’s the housing bubble and everything so no industry is ever immune to it. The difference, I would say, is that the assets… Imagine this. The height of the bubble… Let’s say I am going to go and capture an asteroid and bring it back to Earth. And this asteroid has a trillion dollars worth of ore. Okay? Somewhere along the way the bubble bursts. And then my company goes bankrupt. But you know what, I still have a mission. Bringing back a one trillion dollar asteroid. That’s halfway progression. Let’s say that I’ve already got the asteroid and I’m on my way home when it bursts, somebody’s gonna buy me because they want that asteroid. Because that’s business. So the bubble’s gonna be a very different kind of bubble. You gonna have very smart people who know how to buy the right assets to go through the bubble. John McIntyre: That’s interesting too, I’ve just realized. Like if you wanna buy some land and get the oil out of it or buy a mountain and mine some gold, you need to buy of someone else. But when we’re talking of space, this is virgin territory that no one’s been in, so it’s like the first settlers, that no one owns it. So if you’re the first person to find the asteroid, you don’t have to buy it. It’s just your asteroid cause you found it first, right? Brian Lim: That’s right! John McIntyre: That’s kind of insane to think about it cause I’ve never, none of us grew up in that kind of thing. Imagine if you could just walk into the Blue Mountains and you’re like I like this cliff and this patch of land and these 10 acres here. I’m just gonna build a house right here cause I like the place. It’s mine now. Brian Lim: Pretty much. John McIntyre: It’s pretty interesting too, I like how simple it is for someone to get into as well. How long do you reckon before it’s gonna start picking up… It sounds like it’s right at that point now where it’s starting to kick into the next gear. Brian Lim: You know what, I’m gonna go against that and say the gear has already kicked in. So I could tell you it’s been about what, 200… No. There was a billion dollars investment that has already entered the space industry. Like Space 2.0, all us small guys, a new companies getting started. Alright? And we also have… Space Skybox Imaging was sold to Google for half a billion dollars. And that’s the first exit. John McIntyre: What was that Space Skybox, what’s that? Brian Lim: Skybox had a very interesting business, Skybox basically built satellites to take pictures of the Earth like most people. But what they were trying to take pictures of was factories. They were in parking lots. They wanted to know how many trucks was going out of the Foxconn factory making your iPhone. So they could then go on the stock market and hinge their bets on buying and selling people stock. John McIntyre: Okay, interesting, if you see a whole ton of trucks going out of Foxconn, you’re like Apple’s just made a bunch of sales and the share price of the company is going to grow in the next few days or few weeks, so it’s getting a jump on the market. That’s pretty interesting. Brian Lim: Exactly. So they were bought by Google and they’re doing their thing. So where we’re going is absolutely incredible. It’s almost impossible to figure out what’s gonna happen next. John McIntyre: Are you excited about it? Brian Lim: Without a doubt. Honestly, what I’d be doing in space if I was not excited about it? No, I think it’s a very boring place, meh… John McIntyre: I’m not working in space right now, but if I was, I imagine that when I get up in the morning and it comes to telling people what I do, that kind of thing… It would be really hard not to be excited about it. It would be just like I’m working in space, like what… What’s better than that? Brian Lim: You know, it’s really exciting to wake up every morning… I’m reading books, talking to people that I never thought possible. Like I honestly started my space journey in January 2013. A little over two years ago. And I had not have expected to be sitting in the position when I’m now having conversations with NASA, the European Space Agency… In the early days of delta-V when we were getting it off the ground, we had this really weird conversation that came across our table. We actually met a diplomatic mission from Japan to Australia. You know, for diplomacy stuff. And they actually mentioned they were interested in providing discounted launches on the Japanese space rockets as part of the diplomatic package to improve relations with Australia. Now leave it at that, okay, but the very fact that that was even mentioned… Now I’m a startup trying to get stuff off the ground. I’m not expecting to be talking with big government. Let alone oh, we need you to improve our diplomatic relations with another country. John McIntyre: This is top-level stuff. Brian Lim: It’s absolutely insane. So now I speak with people that I didn’t even believe would take my call two years ago. John McIntyre: We’ve been up in the world, man. Brian Lim: Exactly. John McIntyre: What they all say, what Peter Diamandis mentions in Bold and it makes a lot of sense, that right now we’ve got billionaires and billionaires are getting created fairly quickly. He mentions that space is gonna be where the first trillionaires are made. Brian Lim: Yes. And I actually agree with that. If you think about it, when I said one trillion dollar for an asteroid, I’m not actually pulling it out of thin air… If you pull up the data on how big an average asteroid rock is and you find the right kind of asteroid, some of them have right now market value of over a trillion dollars in ore. John McIntyre: Can you sell that on the open? Is there a market for a trillion dollars worth of ore? Brian Lim: Well, considering the global economy is 263 trillion dollars when I last checked, I think the answer is yes. John McIntyre: Haha, what sort of ore are we talking about? I’m gonna look this up. Is this platinum or something? Brian Lim: Yeah, we call them platinum group metals. They are the heavier metals. So what happens when a planet is newly formed, you know, it’s bombarded by asteroids. As it cools, heavier metals sink to the core. So the Earth is quite a cool planet, so lot of them have sunk into planet. So the ones we have been mining are relatively recent and I would say the last 250,000 – 500,000 years. So when they run out, they run out. But the asteroids still have them. John McIntyre: Yeah, okay. Interesting, interesting. This is big stuff, man, this is like next level. I really think there is that clear path, someone going from… And someone’s looking at this project and thinking well, I just got a website and kinda sell a few products online and stuff, okay, I’m gonna do space… It’s like, well… Brian Lim: Okay, I’m gonna cut you right there because I’m gonna say something for your listeners. Because if you say I just build a website, I just fix computers, I can’t do space… John, you didn’t actually ask me what was my background before space. And I’ll tell you that my degree was in IT. I would be fixing your internet connection and reinstalling your print drivers. You cannot ever tell me that you can’t do space because you just build websites. I still can’t fix the CSS template on my website by myself. I still suck at basic website design and construction. I have a freeking degree in it and now I’m doing spaceships, spacecrafts. You can because I’ve done it. John McIntyre: How did you make the transition? How do you go from being an IT guy who fixes computers to being in space? Did you go Singularity University, was there a quick transition like that? How did that happen? Brian Lim: Well, I actually thought about it for a while and I applied to actually study at the International Space University. It’s an incredible university. I only did a five weeks summer course. That’s all I could do. Alright? Five weeks. I got basic knowledge. I got all the slides, I got all the references and all I did after that was I started reading. My first 12 months after that was just studying and talking to people. Non-stop. I still don’t know the exact technicals of certain details but I knew enough back then to begin the journey. Now I sit here, I have finished five stops. I have created an accelerator. And I’m looking at technology, some solutions that will get me out to places. I only finished Singularity University last year, from June to August, when I did the Graduate Studies Program. Alright? It’s part of my journey on the way. It was, though, how I begun. John McIntyre: In this moment I’ve been thinking about, is reading Bold, the book by Peter Diamandis, this idea that it’s not impossible to get into, the way I was thinking about it, if I’m so excited about this, what would be the next step? And obviously, you can read a book about it, but ultimately you gonna be connecting with other people who are doing it. So what do you do there by going to the International Space University or going to Singularity University or going to find it even just online… Yeah, even like this, this is how I reached out to you, through a mutual friend of ours, I be like I heard you’re into the space stuff. Can we have a chat sometime? Cause that’s where it starts. You meet someone who’s, I mean… And now that you’re listening to this, you gonna have the same experience when you, if you hear someone, even if you’re one step or two steps removed and you can kinda put yourself in their shoes and think maybe I could do that, maybe, like, it doesn’t sound that different to me, I just fix computers, how hard can it be? And that’s exactly the sort of response… That’s exactly what happens when you spend time with people who are playing at a big level, you start to level up. Without even trying, it’s just how the brain works. Brian Lim: Exactly. You wanna be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond? Take a pick. John McIntyre: So it really seems like it’s just a decision. Just making that. You’re not gonna wake up tomorrow and just start a… Well maybe you could just start a space business. Most people, they already have a job or have a business. So someone who could have a job right now and they could still, conceivably, realistically, within the next couple of years, get into the space business. If they want it. Brian Lim: One hundred per cent. John McIntyre: Maybe they will be the first trillionaire in a few years time. Brian Lim: Yeah. Totally agree. You know, you’re reading Bold right now, and so, one of the things I think you eventually reach in the book is that everyone you admire in your entire life, be it your parents, be it the billionaire, the teacher across the street… Whoever. The people you admire, you admire them because of the ability to overcome the circumstances that were placed before them. So if you look at your life right now, you have things that you have to be responsible for. Be it family, a house, a wife, a partner, who knows. Being able to understand and be responsible for them while making sure you can chase the dreams you want to chase is what gets you places. And every single one of persons that you probably have ever interviewed, you’ve ever admired, has done that to some degree. And the better you are at it, the better you will go places. John McIntyre: Absolutely. Cool. I think it’s a good note to finish on. So before we wrap this up, if the listener wants to learn more about you or maybe get in touch with you or hear about this accelerator, where is the best place for them to go? Brian Lim: Alright. So for my accelerator it’s www.deltavspacehub.com. Alright? And if you wanna get in touch with me, my Twitter handle is @BoldBrian. John McIntyre: Sweet. Cool. Anywhere else or that’s the two things you wanna mention? Brian Lim: You know what, I think that’s great place to get started. If you need to find me, I’m sure you will find me at the TED conference this year. John McIntyre: The TED conference? Okay, the TED, not TEDx, the actual TED conference? Brian Lim: Okay, I am going to TEDActive, which is the conference that runs parallel to the main TED, run by TED this year. So I go there every year now. I just spend time with the people there. So if you see me there, say hi. John McIntyre: Say hi, for sure. For sure. Cool. Alright, man. I’ll have links to all that in the shownotes at themakemethod.com. It’s been really good talking to you. Thanks for coming on the show. Brian Lim: My pleasure. The post Episode #108 – Brian Lim on Launching Your Business Into Outer Space (current business trends and growth tips) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Apr 28, 2015 • 0sec

Episode #107 – Tammy Camp on Being An Elite Distributor… NOT a Marketer

Ask Tammy Camp if she’s a marketer and she will tell you no VERY FAST. But when you find out that she’s produced over a billion dollars back in the day… …as an affiliate marketer, You might not believe her when she tells you she aint a marketer. That’s because what she does is called distribution. She’s a growth and distribution expert. If you worked with 500 startups at a time, I think you would qualify as a distribution expert as well. Tammy and her team will be running the Weapons of Mass Distribution conference coming up here soon… Pure distribution. No marketing. You might think that this means no lifestyle type biz for Tammy… Nope. Let her tell you all about her past lifestyle business success, And her new J-O-B and the even better lifestyle it provides her. From business growth hacking, To developing a BIG scale mindset (a must), To dozens of real world examples and tips on how you can get started in distribution too, Tammy has an impressive resume and loads of golden insider-knowledge Listen in and learn about this exciting business model. In this episode, you’ll discover: How reinventing the wheel doesn’t always work for business growth (copying proven models does.. see how she borrowed from PayPal’s methods) the scale mindset that is necessary for massive growth (she didn’t want 200 onboard, they got 4 million instead) The main difference between silicon valley startup companies and digital marketers getting started online The AARRR philosophy edge that makes distribution different than marketing how the AARRR strategy will make you win by thinking bigger the importance of knowing where you need to focus on (you gotta put in your 10k hours somewhere) An idea sex tip that will help you earn millions of dollars given by Elon Musk’s ex-wife How Mark Zuckerburg was able to propel his idea into a world changing platform (his ability to learn was a HUGE factor in Facebook’s growth) Why you need to be able to learn on the go The 3 things that you must know in order to create a successful company (learn to be a jack of all trades, excelling with at least 2 of them. that you do no need to be a tech guru or even a tech person at all to build a successful SaaS company (if you have business and process down, you might have what it takes) how easy it is to get your dream career going in Silicon Valley (this is the same for both coders and marketers alike) why working for a company does not in any way mean you can’t live a lifestyle business-type life (FREEDOM is still there for you if you can get your stuff done!) Mentioned: Weapons of Mass Distribution Stellar – first head of growth at this payments protocol Co. Digital Marketer Perry Marshall singularity university Travis – CEO of Uber HustleCon – The startup event for non-techies Sean Ellis – Growth Hacking – (creator of Dropbox referral program) Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. It’s John McIntire here, the autoresponder guy here. I’m with Tammy Camp. Now Tammy, we met on Facebook, of all places, in group for internet marketers. But as you’ll find out in a minute, Tammy is definitely not a marketer. She doesn’t do marketing at all. What she actually does instead is she works with 500 Startups, she’s on the Growth and Distribution Team, and they’ve got a conference coming up that’s not on marketing but on distribution; it’s called, “The Weapons of Mass Distribution”. So she doesn’t want to call anything marketing, but it’ll be a little bit similar to what we usually talk about, but from a different angle. So I thought it’d be interesting to get Tammy’s perspective because from way way outside the internet marketing zone, in the world of San Francisco startups, from AWS. She’s in the AWS headquarters, I think, right now. So this is like being smack dab being in the center of startup lands, and I thought we’d have an interesting discussion. Let’s find out what she has to say. Tammy, how you doing? Tammy Camp: Hi John, thanks for having me. John McIntyre: No worries, thanks for coming on the show. So, before we get into what you actually do and some of what the startups do for email and distribution, could you give me a list or a bit of background on who you are and what you do? Tammy Camp: Sure. So I actually started in 2001 as an affiliate marketer. Back in the day, I think I’ve generated over a billion dollars’ worth of affiliated revenues. And after that— John McIntyre: Did you say ‘billion’? Tammy Camp: Yeah, billion. I was a super, super affiliate for many, many years. So that’s how I got my start in Growth and in Distribution. And I moved to San Francisco because I wanted to be in Silicon Valley. Since then, I’ve been at Walmart labs; I built their product API that they’re using today. Also, I was the first head of growth at Stellar, which is payments protocol, and we grew from zero to four million users in four months. John McIntyre: Wow. Tammy Camp: And now, I am at 500 Startups, and I’m a distribution hacker in residence, and basically what that means is that I—it’s basically an entrepreneur in residence. I’m building my own things, and at the same time, I’m helping all their batch companies, because 500 Startups is an accelerator and a venture firm. Actually, one of the most active venture firms in the world. We’ve invested in over a thousand companies, and we have about a hundred fifty million dollars under management, but they have the funds and then they also have an accelerator program. There’s about thirty companies in each accelerator program that we have about once every quarter. I’ve actually been the distribution hacker in residence there to help those companies with their growth and distribution. John McIntyre: Wow, okay. So sounds like you’ve…We spoke a couple of weeks ago about doing some work together but what I thought was that you were just into startups and you always sort of lean that way, but you said you started in the affiliate world. Tammy Camp: Uh huh. John McIntyre: That’s a very interesting start. Tammy Camp: Yeah, you know, gotta start somewhere. I didn’t even know anything about…when I first started, I didn’t know what marketing or anything was. Somebody showed me how to buy ads one time and then I just started making money and then I started making more money and then doubling down, so I didn’t actually realize, I didn’t set out to be like an entrepreneur, I just ended up in that situation. John McIntyre: Right. So what happened? Because a lot of people who might listen to this are gonna be in a position where they’ve got a job, and they’re not an entrepreneur and they’re not working for an exciting company like 500 Startups, and to them, what they want to do, is they want to quit their jobs and somehow make a couple thousand bucks a month so they can travel, and that’s only some people. So what would you say to someone who’s…there seems to be this transition, people have a job they don’t like, and maybe they go off and they do their own thing, make a little of money, and as that scales up, they start to think, “You know, life isn’t just about making money and living on a beach in Thailand or whatever that happens to be, there’s actually more than that.” So what’s driven you to go from your being an affiliate, and I imagine having a lot of freedom where you can live and travel and do all sorts of stuff, to go on live in San Francisco and get more what sounds like a job, but a very entrepreneurial one, and a new routine? Tammy Camp: Yeah, I think I have just as much freedom as I did when I was working a lifestyle…when I ran a lifestyle business. I’m very much still travelling the world. I just got back from Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, but instead I have my trip paid for, I get to go talk to exciting new companies, and kind of plan my trip. Next month I’m going to Dubai and Jordan and Oman, so I’m still getting to travel everywhere I’ve always wanted to go because everybody in the organization travels all the time, I mean you just volunteer for the trips that you want to go to. And I have freedom. So as long as you get your work done, and it’s always exciting, and you can just do it from anywhere in the world, so I think the concept of you being stuck in a cubicle at a startup is not correct. You know, you’re just working from a coffee shop to working from AWS Law. Working from home, working from your hotel room in the city, I feel like it’s the same. John McIntyre: Yeah, okay, okay. It’s a bit like— Tammy Camp: And we get unlimited paid vacations too, so. John McIntyre: Wow. So what does the limit go with that? Obviously you can’t take eleven months off a year. [laughter] Tammy Camp: No, I mean, obviously you’d have to be qualified to do this job and execute. If you don’t, then you probably wouldn’t have the opportunity to do something like this, so you have that freedom but you have to be responsible as well. And I don’t know about you, but if I have over a week vacation, I am not doing anything, I just get so antsy. I have to have something to stimulate my brain. John McIntyre: Yeah, I feel you on that. So, let’s talk about this distribution vs. marketing, because there’s a lot of people online who are going to do what we call marketing and they do paid ads and build a sales form, you know, that sort of thing. And you just told me that you built four million users in four months. Tammy Camp: Right. John McIntyre: That’s a lot of users. Tammy Camp: Yeah, so I think— there’s different approaches, so how we look at things at 500, we look at things in five channels called The AARRR, the pirate. John McIntyre: [laughter] I remember this. Tammy Camp: So pirates [creatics 7:00] Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue. So we look at all of these things. You have to have all these things dialed in to have a successful product, right? So Acquisition is just like one part of it, so obviously Acquisition can be like a lot of paid channels. We do the same, do adverts, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, marketing. But then when you start thinking of the other four, I feel like it starts getting more technical. Has anybody in the internet marketing world talked about churn? John McIntyre: People have…Are we talking about software products or any sort of membership platform? That’s a big topic that comes up. Tammy Camp: I’ve actually haven’t heard anyone talk about it. Is there like a churn master? Is there like a mastermind group for churn? There must be, right? John McIntyre: Well, I’m sure if you go talk to… the thing that’s going around a lot, if you look at digital marketer, I think that a good example right now is Perry Marshall, and he teaches this and the whole basics of his sales front where like you, the whole idea is to lower your acquisition cost as small as possible and increase your customer lifetime value as high as possible. So business is really just filling with just those two numbers. Get your CAC down, get your lifetime value up, right? So then it’s a matter of, alright, some things you convert and anytime you can optimize your own version; you’re dropping down your CAC anytime you add more products or more expensive products or decrease the churn, all those things, that increases the lifetime value. So the whole context of that, when someone has a membership community or a software app, there’ll be experts out there like the Software Sasquatch or the Membership Zeitgeist, those guys probably talk about CHURN, but I’ve never heard of a guy being the churn guy or girl. Tammy Camp: Maybe there doesn’t need to be a churn— John McIntyre: It’s a big issue though, especially for startups. Tammy Camp: I actually saw it happen ‘cause the very forum that we met in, Ryan’s mastermind, I think he had like a one dollar promotion and it went all the way up too…I was watching the group went up to 820 members during that promotion, and just this week, I saw it go down to 711. John McIntyre: Huh. Tammy Camp: So if you think about it, that’s like 10%, and that’s actually very high, that’s a very high churn rate where we are. It’s like, anything more than 2%, you have an issue that you need to address. John McIntyre: 2% per month? Tammy Camp: Yeah. 2% per month is the standard. John McIntyre: So I think it’s interesting. I’ve been thinking about this a lot and the reason why you take startup where there’s a monthly fee, there’s sort of valuable…because I was signed up to AOL, which is an email software platform. When I signed up maybe four years ago, I was just getting started, and I used them until about six or seven months ago. So you see, if you calculated it, that’s about 30-50 dollars a month over four years, and then it ends up being fifteen hundred bucks or two grand, depending on you know how you calculate it. And so it’s pretty incredible. But the reason why I was with them was because I like all the little sales bundles that I have and the different pieces. It’s really annoying to go and try to move from that platform. Tammy Camp: Oh yeah, absolutely. John McIntyre: I just cancel everything I’ve had set up. Tammy Camp: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they’ve done their job. [laughter] They kept you in the software product, right? John McIntyre: Right, right. So sounds like part of the problem here is, like with the membership community, for example, is most people I know, people often sign up and stay for three months on average. You have some people who stay for a year or longer, but the average person will stay signed up for three or four months to something like Ryan’s thing, there’s a lot of these different groups. And the reason why is the only stickiness is that you’ve got a couple training programs and a forum. And there’s nothing to really stop anyone from cancelling. If you cancel, you don’t lose your data. You lose access, but you don’t lose the last three years’ worth of customer data and CRM sales form or platforms, so. Tammy Camp: Well, you never lose that data for any of those platforms. That’s a migration problem. John McIntyre: That’s true, that’s true. You don’t even have to migrate. If you’re using an educational, like that facebook group, for example, you don’t really have to migrate from that to another group. It’s sort of like, you don’t need to have that sort of thing. You can cancel it and business, or your life, would go on. There’s nothing to migrate. Tammy Camp: Oh, sure. Yes, exactly. Sure. John McIntyre: So one thing I’m interested in, a lot of people would be interested in, is this idea of forty thousand people, or four million people in four months. How does that happen? Tammy Camp: That’s purely on referral. It was a payments protocol and enabled people to send money simply for free in any currency, and so applications would go on top of it. Protocol mean like SMTP. SMTP is the protocol that email runs off of, right? John McIntyre: Right. Tammy Camp: It’s free, no one owns it, and we’re basically building the same thing, you know, it’s still in existence, but for financial services, for remittances and money transfers and stuff. So basically what we built at that education program into the mandate of what we’re doing and we just looked at PayPal because Keith—it was actually started and funded by Stripe, which was the payment processing company, and then Patrick calls in Keith Rabois, which is in the PayPal mafia, were on the board, and they pointed us to the direction of looking at PayPal. Now, when PayPal started, it was back in the day where people were very scared to move money on the internet, and they were finding a hard time getting users. And what they did was give away ten dollars to people. They funded everybody’s account ten dollars. And that’s basically what we did. We funded everyone’s wallet with ten dollars’ worth of Stellar, which is the currency that is native to that protocol. John McIntyre: What’s 10 dollars with Stellar worth? Tammy Camp: Ten dollars. John McIntyre: Ten dollars like US? Tammy Camp: Yeah, ten dollars— John McIntyre: That’s forty million dollars. That’s a lot of money. Tammy Camp: So yeah, we gave it away. I think you can still get it now in the giveaways. John McIntyre: I’m going to get my ten dollars. Where’s the site? Stellar? Tammy Camp: Yeah, stellar.org. Dot O-R-G. So yeah, giving away free money works. [laughter] John McIntyre: Okay, okay. So how’s this different from PayPal? Tammy Camp: So Paypal is an application or service that’s on top of the existing payment system. You know, ACH and Swift and Fedwire, right? We’re building a Swift 2.0, right? So all of those, ACH, Swift, and Fedwire, have been built over the last thirty years, so a lot of that actually predates the internet. If you think about mobile phones, the penetration of five years has been crazy. So, I’m having all our financial services built off of technology that predates the internet. You know, obviously it needs an upgrade, so this is our solution for that. John McIntyre: Okay, okay. So when that happens, right, because a lot of people would be, because people usually think when they’re quitting their jobs or building their business, they’re thinking “Well, I’m gonna go and get a thousand sales. Make a couple hundred thousand dollars,” and here, the way you are and the way people in Silicon Valley think about scale, you’re not thinking all, “Let’s get a couple hundred users,” it’s, “let’s go get four million users.” Tammy Camp: No, we were thinking, “Let’s go sign up the world.” John McIntyre: [laughter] Tammy Camp: No, that’s actually what the mission is. It’s to sign up the entire world to be on that protocol. Just like SMTP. Think about email. John McIntyre: Yeah? Tammy Camp: SMTP is a protocol that powers email, right? We want it to be as ubiquitous as email. John McIntyre: Okay, okay. Tammy Camp: Right? John McIntyre: [laughter] Tammy Camp: Why, you’re looking at me like— John McIntyre: Well, it’s funny, I’m asking so many questions and all you’re gonna say, “We’re gonna build this thing, we’re gonna get everyone in the world,” and alright, cool. Like I don’t even know what to say to that. I think it’s awesome. This reminds me of Singularity University. Tammy Camp: Yeah. John McIntyre: Which you’ve been to. Is this one of those projects that stems from Singularity University? Tammy Camp: It’s an area that I grew to love because I went to Singularity University. John McIntyre: Interesting, interesting. So sounds like this idea when people think about, you know, “Let’s go think big, let’s go get every single person on the planet to use our product” that sounds like, you know, people can talk about marketing strategies and how optimized your facebook app and landing page, and all that stuff, but one thing I find funny: people first get into that, when people are first learning marketing, they often think that marketing is the most important thing, but [inaudible 15:56] Tammy Camp: I’ve heard of it, right? And actually engineers…it’s the reverse problem here in Silicon Valley. We have these amazing engineers and developers and they’re like, “Oh, this is the most amazing product,” right? But then they don’t have marketing for it and it fails. John McIntyre: Yeah. Tammy Camp: Right? ‘Cause they’re like, “Oh, it’s so awesome that I don’t have to market it. They’ll just come,” right? John McIntyre: “No, we don’t do marketing. We only do growth hacking and distribution.” Tammy Camp: [laughter] John McIntyre: Or [laughter] you saying, “No, I’m not a marketer. I don’t even do marketing. But this product is so good that it will distribute itself.” Tammy Camp: I think we think of it in, again, going back to AARRR, [laughter] you know, we tend to think in that mindset. An app scale. If we can’t get several million users, then the market’s not big enough, right? John McIntyre: Right. What would be your advice to someone who doesn’t think like this? Like someone who’s not thinking like this, they’re currently thinking, “I just want to quit my job,” or, “I just want to build this business and spend more time with my family.” Tammy Camp: Well that’s respectable, right? I started out that way, so I’ve actually been in that situation. So, absolutely, there’s nothing wrong with it. John McIntyre: What would be your advice to someone though, there’s a lot of people like you who want to think bigger? Isn’t it like that, follow your passion; everyone’s looking for that. Everyone’s looking for meaning in life right now, in one way. Tammy Camp: Really? Or is it just you, John? John McIntyre: [laughter] I’m totally projecting, yeah. Tammy Camp: I think you are projecting. John McIntyre: [laughter] Tammy Camp: You are! You’re totally projecting. You’re travelling the world; you’re like, “what is the meaning of life?” You’re applying to Singularity. You’re like, “Okay, I want to think bigger.” So this question is for you. John McIntyre: [laughter] It’s for me. That’s what this podcast is for. Tammy Camp: Yeah, okay. John McIntyre: That’s the reason to chat to some of the cool people who are out there. Tammy Camp: Yeah, great angle.[laughter] John McIntyre: So what then? You still haven’t answered the question. What’s the advice, then? Tammy Camp: Yeah, I was like, “What was the question?” before I started giving you a hard time. What’s the process into thinking bigger? John McIntyre: Well, the question was, “What’s your advice to someone who wants to think bigger?” Tammy Camp: That doesn’t want to move here? Cause there’s a whole different vibe here. It’s like the streets are cut with— John McIntyre: What’s your…Yeah, if you were to give a lecture on— Tammy Camp: Well, what I did, I’ll tell you what I did. John McIntyre: Okay. Tammy Camp: I was very attracted to it, right? So I moved here from a perfectly great lifestyle in Florida. I moved here and I just immersed myself in everything. So I went to Singularity University; I did a graduate studies program, it was this three month course. That was on NASA Ames on Mountview. So I stayed there, and we just did lecture after lecture after lecture about innovation and education, global hub space, poverty, energy, education, and security, so it was like seven challenge areas. And they just brought in everyone—it was like one TedTalk after another of the people that were the top of their fields in those categories. It was just entertaining. So I feel like if it’s just taking their time to learn. It is all about time, right? Enjoying your thousand hour, your ten thousand hours. John McIntyre: Right. And part of it too is doing the ten thousand hours on the right stuff, because you got a thousand hours on optimizing your Facebook landing page— Tammy Camp: Yeah John McIntyre: But this is talking about learning something entirely different. Tammy Camp: Yeah. John McIntyre: You know what, I was on Quora the other day, reading a—it was a post from Eli Musk’s—I think ex-wife—Justine Musk Tammy Camp: Yes. John McIntyre: Someone asked a question, and you know, about becoming a billionaire. And she mentioned something where it’s, it was a good idea, and she basically said that if you want to be really good at one thing, which might be business, for example, not facebook ads. Let’s just say good at business. And then get really good, so you spend ten thousand hours on business, and then do your ten thousand hours with engineering, and then you combine those two things together and you have idea sex. I like that phrase. Tammy Camp: Oh, that’s great. John McIntyre: And so that sounds like that’s what happens, right? If someone was to go to Singularity University and didn’t have any skills yet, might not go anywhere. Whereas someone good at marketing, good at programming, good at something like that, and they mix that with some of the big grand challenges that are out there right now, like the fact that all the systems that our finances run on were built fifty years ago, then to actually start to combine stuff and come up with these solutions. Tammy Camp: Yeah, yeah. There is some truth to that, because if you think about all the people, the billionaires that have been minted here, they’re all both technical and very good at business. Look at Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber, he’s both technical and just a bad ass in business. You know, look at Mark Zuckerberg. He started out as a programmer, but his ability to learn—it’s all about your ability to learn—so he was able to learn business, and learn it at a very high level and have those right people around him. And Drew Houston, the CEO of and founder of Dropbox. Same thing. He was an engineer; he was a very fast learner and could actually learn how to play the game. You have to have complementary skill sets. John McIntyre: Right, right. Tammy Camp: Be multifaceted, right? John McIntyre: Right. Tammy Camp: You can’t just be good thing. You can’t just be good at one thing, you have to be good at multiple things. And that’s how it is with products too. The product has to be good, all the marketing channels and growth channels need to be good. John McIntyre: Yeah. Tammy Camp: And then it needs to solve a problem, right? John McIntyre: Right. Tammy Camp: Those three things make for a good company here. John McIntyre: Right. One thing I wanted before was to ask different people this. There’s a lot of typical stories: Mark Zuckerberg, he’s cranking out programs at fourteen years old. And then you’ve got guys like, they probably get their start on the internet. I’ll be more like this, right? I mean, I’m not really a coder. I can build a site, and do some stuff with CSS, but I’m not building any apps, for example. Tammy Camp: Right. John McIntyre: And so, I know you’ve got a lot of friends like this, right? We all have some degree, maybe in science and stuff, but our real skill is in marketing and copy writing and coming up of angles and the sales-y side of it. So what I’ve wondered is, “How much room is there?” because it sounds like it’s a lot. Is it possible? Sounds like the usual thing is that someone comes in, they’re a coder and they learn how to do business. Tammy Camp: Hmm. John McIntyre: Not the other way around. Tammy Camp: That’s not true either. There’s been business people that have made it without wanting to learn it all as well. Let me think. So the Wildfire crew, they exited for Google for five hundred million, they didn’t know how to code. Is that what you’re asking? John McIntyre: Yeah, yeah. That’s interesting. Tammy Camp: There are some, yeah. There’s loads of them here. Absolutely. I’m like trying to think off the top of my head, “What are the billion dollar companies that…” John McIntyre: I didn’t know Tammy Camp: I have to take a look at it, actually. John McIntyre: There’s actually a conference, the [vessel 23:05] the the other day, called, “Hustle Con”. Tammy Camp: Yeah, exactly. John McIntyre: That’s exactly what this is for: guys who can’t code, but want to build a big business. “Start-up Tactics for Non-Techies” is the tagline. Tammy Camp: Yeah, so actually. That’s true. There’s billionaires, startups, retail necks you’ve probably never heard of. It’s like SaaS, the same thing, right? A lot of these blue apron marketplace or subscription mail service have a five hundred million dollar valuation. Yeah, they’re there. John McIntyre: Yeah, yeah. Tammy Camp: Thumbtack is a service listings marketplace; they just raised over a hundred billion dollars. I don’t think a lot of those guys are technical. They were just very good at process. John McIntyre: Interesting, interesting. And so, what happens if someone just shows up, they do what you did, right? They’re just gonna go, “Screw it, I’m gonna go to Silicon Valley. I’m gonna go to San Francisco and grab an apartment and figure something up.” What would be the process for that happening? Tammy Camp: [laughter] The process for it happening? John McIntyre: Well, you know what I mean, right? If someone said, and I think you’re pretty right because I’m just asking because I’m bursting right through this , and so if I was to pack up and stop doing what I’m doing right now, just screw it. Tammy Camp: That’s exactly what you do. You pack it up, you get an apartment, you move here, and then you start going to events and you start socializing, you start meeting people and you start telling people what you’re passionate about. And then they think of you when they find a match. I mean, it’s a small community, there’s only seven hundred thousand people that live in San Francisco, it’s so small. John McIntyre: Doesn’t really seem like a small place. Only seven hundred thousand? Or do you mean seven hundred thousand— Tammy Camp: In San Francisco. No, the population of San Francisco is seven hundred thousand people. John McIntyre: That’s tiny! Okay, and then so the tech community— Tammy Camp: It’s like this at large, at large the San Francisco bay area is bigger, so it’s like 4 million, and that includes San Jose—well, actually, I don’t know. But it’s small. It’s smaller than you think. Everybody knows everyone here. It’s a very small— John McIntyre: So if you go to San Francisco and you start going to the, I guess, different meet ups, cause it’s a small community, you’ll be bumping into the same people everywhere. Tammy Camp: Yeah. John McIntyre: And at the time, they’re going to remember you and opportunities Tammy Camp: Yeah. Everybody needs people like…It’s so difficult to find people to work here, you know? John McIntyre: Really? Tammy Camp: Absolutely. John McIntyre: I thought the tech bubble was five years ago and all the billionaires have been made. Tammy Camp: No. [laughter] All the billionaires have not been made. But yeah, it’s really tough to find good people here. John McIntyre: Huh. Tammy Camp: Because everybody’s like, if you’re good, you’re snagged up very quickly. John McIntyre: What about good coders, programmers vs. good marketers? Or like copy writers. Tammy Camp: Oh, both. Both, yeah. Copy writers are…there are so many people that need copy writers right now. So many people that are looking for copy writing people right now, yeah. John McIntyre: It would be fun. Tammy Camp: So yeah. John McIntyre: That’s what I thought about, yeah? Because it’s such a different life to go in, the whole life like working at home and travelling around, next month I’m going to Columbia, that’ll be cool, it’d be great to be in Columbia and do salsa dancing and much of the stuff like that. But there’s something like…you do it on your own, you kinda hang around, you’re not really involved with this grand mission. You’re not really on a team where you’re fighting for something. And so there’s sometimes, and I know a lot of people will get this, sense of, well it’s fun and everything, sometimes you miss that camaraderie of Silicon…jobs are not really the right thing—working for something that’s bigger than just you, or bigger than just travelling around. Tammy Camp: Right, sure. Yeah. John McIntyre: It’s interesting. Tammy Camp: Yeah. John McIntyre: So we’ll finish up in a second, we’re coming right on time. What are you trying to get to? What’s your main reason why? Tammy Camp: You know, there’s no reason. Well, it’s all about the journey, not the destination, man. John McIntyre: Are you trying to be a billionaire or are you just hanging around and be where it’s happening and be part of something? Tammy Camp: No. No, you know what it is. I just want to solve problems. I want to solve problems in effective ways, and the company I’m working on now, no one’s solving a problem that I have, it’s a personal problem, and I think a lot of people have this problem, so I just want to solve it. See where it goes, you know? We’re problem solvers here, yeah. John McIntyre: Very cool, cool. Alright then, let’s wrap around here. Before we go though, someone wants to learn more about 500 Startups or maybe… Tammy Camp: Oh, WMD. That’s right. Our conference is coming up next week for 500 Startups. It’s called “Weapons of Mass Distribution” and if you go to my twitter, @tammycamp, you’ll find a code to get 75% off-no, seventy five dollars off the ticket. I think you just use TammyVIP at checkout, and it should take it right off your ticket. John McIntyre: Alright, nice. And what are they gonna learn? Tammy Camp: Oh, they’ll learn from the best, the best growth actors. John McIntyre: [inaudible 28:01] Tammy Camp: You know what, there’s a lot more people that are better than me! Like Sean Ellis, he’s the guy that actually coined the term growth hacking. He was the first person who did marketing for Dropbox. He actually came up with that referral program, give 20 get 20, in like, free storage, and that’s how Dropbox became so popular. So that was by Sean Ellis, he’ll be there. And actually, James Currier, he was the growth person at PayPal, way back in the day, so he’ll be there talking. So a lot of the big, big names that have grown these billion dollar companies are speaking at the conference. John McIntyre: Yeah. Very cool, cool. I’ll put links to that in the show, it’s at themcmethod.com. We’ll see if some people can get there and grow. Weapons of Mass Distribution. Not marketing, distribution. Tammy, thanks for coming on the show. Tammy Camp: Thanks. Thanks for having me. The post Episode #107 – Tammy Camp on Being An Elite Distributor… NOT a Marketer appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Apr 21, 2015 • 0sec

Episode #106 – John Sonmez On Being A Niche (& Rich) Rockstar In Your Industry

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