Beyond 8 Figures

Anik SingalAnik Singal is an online entrepreneur. He is best known for his company, Lurn. Anik Singal has sold over $100 Million worth of products online, all by just using a computer and simple systems. He has made it his personal mission now to teach his secrets to Entrepreneurs around the world looking for true financial freedom.How would Anik define what he is doing? (1:58)Anik is working against people assuming he only does internet marketing, and that’s the only thing he has accomplished. He loves digital marketing, and it has been an obsession and hobby since he was very young. His bigger goal, however, is actually to not just do digital marketing but rather to serve entrepreneurs. Today, Anik will do something like work with a baker who owns a bakery shop or he will help the person who does his car’s detailing scale their business, etc.Anik’s business does not have a mission or a vision, but rather a purpose statement. The statement is that they want to be a transformational home for entrepreneurs.They have a physical and virtual home for entrepreneurs that acts as a ‘playground’ for them as they can run through several training courses to further their businesses and build their network. Being an entrepreneur is a lonely and tough business. As a developer, you have to work every day and your people surround you.But as an entrepreneur. You just do not have the time for those people, and so Anik made it his company’s purpose statement to make that community available for entrepreneurs all over the world.Where did Anik come from, and how did he get to where he is now? (3:44) When Anik started to get interested in digital marketing, he didn’t understand nor care for the concept of scaling. All Anik wanted was to get started. But with $100 on his name he wasn’t about to go and just buy a franchise.What initially attracted Anik to the online world was the fact that the startup capital was so minimal. Especially today, there are so many tools that can do the hard, heavy lifting for you in the online business world. What really addicted Anik to digital marketing, however, were the margins.He didn’t have to deal with physical production, warehousing, design, prototyping, or patenting as a virtual product.   An online virtual product is delivered instantaneously when someone buys it. So those profit margins help you advertise more as you grow and upscale, faster. The scalability of an online, virtual product is amazing, Lurn’s customer base is now 56% outside of the United States. What did Anik sell and how did he do it? (13:06)Anik tried many different things and he felt that some things he had, he had to reshape and put them together differently.Anik likened it to building your own pizza. You take all the ingredients but if you don’t assemble them in the right order and do it right, it’s not going to be a pizza.So what Anik was able to do was find out that he had to stop driving traffic to the sales page of someone else.He was trying to be an affiliate, he did not have his own product. He was trying to promote software he had already has gotten good at using and he was trying to send traffic straight to the person he was an affiliate to. The affiliate asked Anik to mix things up a bit and write an actual page. Using a took called Microsoft front page, which Anik reveres highly, he wrote an ugly page. Essentially what he did was write a review page for the product rather than sending people straight to the product. He wrote a pre-sale page and before bonuses were even a thing, the affiliate asked Anik to write a bonus page too. Anik’s bonus at the time was, that if you bought his software you got his cellp[hone number for free, and he would offer support on the software for free. This strategy only lasted a few days before that offer was taken off of the table. But the strategy did end up working and it gave Anik a creative way to create traffic for his product. LurnLurn is an online (and offline) transformational home for entrepreneurs everywhere.Founded by Anik Singal in 2004, our approach has always been a straight forward one:To empower others to create and grow passion-based businesses, to encourage big ideas that will change the world. To educate people about how to be the best entrepreneurs they can be. ResourcesConnect with Anik: LinkedInLurn: WebsiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Naveen Jain is an entrepreneur driven to solve grand global challenges through innovation. He is the founder of several successful companies, including Moon Express, Viome, Bluedot, TalentWise, Intelius, and InfoSpace. Naveen is a director of the board at the Singularity University and the  X PRIZE Foundation. Naveen Jain has been awarded many honors for his entrepreneurial successes, including “Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year,” “Albert Einstein Technology Medal” for pioneers in technology, Recipient of “Ellis Island Medal of Honor,” and many more. How did Naveen come to be so successful? (0:54)Naveen does not define success by how much money you have in the bank but rather by how many people’s lives are positively impacted by what you do.Naveen likes to instead focus on what people can learn from one another.It’s not just about money. When people start focusing on money, they always end up falling into the same trap. If you focus too much on making money, you’re never going to get it. You have to enjoy the process, and that means doing things that you care about. After that, everything will start falling into place.Naveen grew up poor, never really having a place to eat or sleep, and this shows that anyone can make something of themselves, and it all comes down to finding your true passion or obsession in life. You have to find out what you would die for and then live for it, and the money will come. What did Naveen do to make a positive impact on so many people through his business workings? (5:32)Naveen is a firm believer that to have a good life; you need to do a tremendous amount of good first.The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunities. If you can find a product that is will help a  billion people, there is nothing that can stand in your way to make an enterprise from it.   The reason for this is that doing good and doing well are not mutually exclusive.That is why Naveen encourages us to focus on the most significant problems currently facing humanity. If you start working on fixing those problems, those are multi-hundred billion-dollar problems. So to be a billionaire, you have to solve a $10 billion problem. These problems are what humanity should be thinking about; even if you can only solve a tiny part of it, you still make a difference. The reason people get so focused on things like money is that they believe in scarcity and that there is only a finite number of what they seek. Naveen said, and so forth. Naveen used his savings to start his first business, and it turned out quite successful because they tackled a major problem.  The business was about seven years before smartphones came out around 2003. Naveen had an interview with Leslie Walker in Washington Post about how soon there would be phones you can carry around you.That would also have your email, calendar, weather, stocks, and even using your phone to make a payment without a credit card. The interviewer did not believe Naveen. But Naveen started a company solely on the premonition that was going to happen, and it did seven years later. When you notice a problem, you have to ask yourself if this is the problem everyone wants to solve, and then you know it will have a massive market. Once you find the root cause of problems, it becomes straightforward to see the patterns of what you need to do to solve them.You don’t have to make the technology yourself. There are plenty of qualified people you can get to make your technology. Your job is to define the problem and the solution clearly. Moon Express Moon Express is a company with the mission to redefine possibilities by returning to the Moon and unlocking the many mysteries and resources for the benefit of humanity. Moon Express was the first company to receive U.S. government approval to send a robotic spacecraft beyond traditional Earth orbit and to the Moon. ResourcesConnect with Naveen: LinkedInMoon Express: WebsiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Brian Smith was born in Australia. As a chartered accountant, he used $500 startup money and founded UGG Imports to bring sheepskin footwear to America. After 17 years, as sales reached $15 Million, he sold the business to Deckers Outdoor Corporation. The UGG brand has since exceeded over $1 Billion in international sales. Brian is a passionate innovator and entrepreneur, and he is considered one of the most sought-after business leaders in the country today. As a media guest and an Inspiring speaker, he is committed to teaching his breakthrough business strategies to new entrepreneurs. How did Brian start UGG? (1:12)Brian had just graduated after studying for ten years to become a chartered accountant, and he quit the job the same day. Brian hadn’t wanted to give up before graduating, wasting all that time he had spent studying, but he did hate it the whole time.Something inside of Brian wanted to be entrepreneurial. After a lot of meditating on his way back to Australia, Brian figured he would go to California and find the next big trend. He chose California because all the big brands like Levi’s, waterbeds, and surfing brands were going there and doing well, so it seemed the natural thing to do. He spent the first few months surfing and making friends in Malibu. It was when it started getting cold in late October, and he was pulling on his sheepskin boots from Australia that Brian realized no one in America has sheepskin boots. That was the lightbulb moment for Brian and started the journey of building the UGG Brand. UGG is now a brand so widely recognized that almost anyone brings up the brand with a fond memory as soon as they find out Brian is the founder. There was an initial rejection from Americans as they found the idea of sheepskin footwear alien. A friend of Brian mused that the weather in California was too hot, and Brian reasoned that California and Australia were identical in climate. Brain realized it was the American’s lack of knowledge of sheepskin footwear; that was the real problem. Australias innate knew sheepskin footwear, and how rugged it is, you cannot rip sheepskin, you can get it wet, even when it’s wet it insulates so your feet stay warm even in snow, etc. To be a good entrepreneur, you have to have a level of ignorance when you start because if you knew your obstacles, you wouldn’t have gone for it. Brian was faced with really considering giving up. Still, he kept brainstorming; he realized the reason all of his friends in Malibu thought it was such a good idea was that they had already been to Australia and had come back with a couple of pairs of boots for their buddies as well. So it was through the surfing community already knowing sheepskin footwear and spreading the word that UGG boots eventually started picking up speed. How did Brian procure funding once he had a demand going for the footwear? (9:02)Brian and his friends borrowed around $500 to send to Australia to get samples, so they were initially underfunded. The samples arrived back while Brian still had zero orders, but he and his friends were sure they would be instant millionaires with how good the stores were that would be selling them. That’s when they realized they needed money to get the ball rolling. Brian’s roommate overheard them talking and told Brian about some guys in his office looking for investments.They received $20,000, which is like $75,000 by today’s standards, and they sent $15,000 of that down to Australia and ordered 500 pairs, which arrived swiftly. Buying pairs at about $30 a pair and planned on wholesaling them for $50 - $65, the retail price was usually $60-70-80 a pair.However, once they had the inventory and went back to the store manager that said he loved the footwear and idea but could not sell it in his store. Going store to store after that, every store ended up rejecting the boots. So all the stores initially excited about the concept wouldn’t actually try and sell any of the footwear. In their first year, they sold 28 pairs, making only about $1,000. To make a living, Brian and his friends did any job they could find. Obviously feeling somewhat disappointed, Brian decided not to give up, likening starting up a business to raising a child. He states, “You can’t birth adults.” And so the birth of UGG was those initial six samples, every store rejecting the idea and the business went into this horrible ‘infancy’ where it laid dormant for a while and Brian had to nurse it and care for it through it not giving anything back. So eventually, the boots started to pick up speed with Briand and his friends, never giving up on the idea. What does Brian think is the most critical strategy that helped him leap from idea to enterprise? (13:50)In Brian’s case, he knew how popular the footwear was in Australia, and he knew how big the American market is. He also knew how similar Americans and Australians are, so he had to figure out precisely what causes the aversion Americans were feeling to the product. Brian was at a trade show in Las Vegas, the Ski show, and after five days of talking to ski shop owners, they still did not have a single order. On the last day of the show, a woman came up to Brian talking about Madden Slash, and he told her to try on the footwear. She slid one boot on before getting really excited and saying she could sell them as after ski boots. She ended up ordering 60 pairs from them, which was the most significant order they ever received. And Brian finally realized that you should never try and sell a shoe to a sales representative without insisting they try on the shoe themselves first.He considers this his most significant breakthrough for UGG in the 20 years that he owned it. UGGFounded in 1978 by an Australian surfer on the coast of California, UGG® is a global lifestyle brand renowned for its iconic Classic boot. First worn by Hollywood royalty, fashion editors, and then the world, UGG® designs and retails footwear, apparel, accessories, and homewares with an uncompromising attitude toward quality and craftsmanship.ResourcesConnect with Brian: LinkedInUGG: WebsiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Beyond 8 Figures is a podcast that takes you through accomplished entrepreneurs’ stories as they share their knowledge, advice, and history about starting their businesses, scaling them, and exiting them in a lucrative state.The Ins and Outs of Beyond 8 figures (0:13)Beyond 8, Figures focuses on sitting down with outstanding entrepreneurs as they share their tools, tactics, and strategies that they used to get to where they are now.Starting a business is hard, but lately, it’s easier than ever to start. Scaling and selling your business is where the real challenge appears.  They also speak about mistakes that you might make and how they could discourage you, and how to tackle objectives that discourage you. Some exciting guest stories (1:09)Some entrepreneurs had to literally break everything, from their business to their mindset, to learn how to thrive in the business world. Sometimes starting a business, especially one that’s never existed before in the business sector, can feel like throwing spaghetti at the wall, waiting to see what sticks. Real success comes from focusing your time and energy on your business, figuring out your business plan, and pushing for that growth. Sharing Success (3:27)Many of the guests are very transparent and honest about what went down in their personal lives while they were in the process of scaling their businesses. They were sharing the ups and downs and how they persevered through it. Sometimes they wanted to give up, and that shows that even if someone is a millionaire or a billionaire, we are all still human, and that means anyone can reach success. That willingness to share that Beyond 8 Figures manages to pull out of their guests ensures audience members are receiving quality advice. The guests on the show try and share as much advice as they can, bar violating confidentiality agreements from exiting businesses, on how they started, scaled, and eventually exited the business. Types of guests Beyond 8 Figures try and procure for each episode (5:13)Beyond eight figures tries and bring you successful entrepreneurs that have hit or gone over the $10 million marks with their businesses. They look for passionate people willing to share both the business and personal side of starting, growing, and exiting a business successfully.They get accomplished entrepreneurs who will spill the beans some millionaire/billionaires try and keep to themselves. ResourcesBeyond 8 Figures: WebsiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.