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008: Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com | How to Bootstrapped a $38 Million/Year Business
Hey everybody this is John Corcoran and welcome to the latest episode of the Smart Business Revolution podcast. This is episode number eight and in this episode I talk with entrepreneur Andrew Warner. Andrew is the founder of MixerG.com which is one of the most popular web based video interview shows for startup entrepreneurs in that community and it's really a tremendous resource for any entrepreneur. But before Andrew started MixerG he actually built a very successful company Bradford and Reed which eventually was bringing in about 38 million dollars a year in revenue and in this interview he talks about that he talks about some of his regrets from building that company and he also talks about an unexpected trick he used to get a woman who he deeply admired one of the biggest leaders in his industry to work with him even though he was a small fry at the time. And he also talks about his big plans for bringing greater meaning to MixerG. So let's get going. Welcome to the Small Business Revolution. Revolution. Revolution. Do you want a revolution? Do you want a revolution? Do you want a revolution? The revolution? It's going on right now. Welcome to the revolution. The Smart Business Revolution podcast. Your source for how to grow your small business without working 24/7. Now now your host for the revolution. John Corcoran. Hey everybody this is John Corcoran and welcome for joining us for another episode of the Smart Business Revolution podcast and today we're going to be talking to Andrew Warner. But first I want to tell you a story. I'm recording this in January of 2013 and I got back recently from the new media expo which I've written about on my blog and unrelated to that. I've been on a bit of a tear recently reading a lot of books, a lot of business oriented books. I read Jim Collins, I read Dan Pink, I read Chip and Dan Heath, I've read Malcolm Gladwell and I read one particular book that really resonated with me. It was Chris Brogan and Julian Smith's The Impact Equation and I've done a video review on my blog reports and maybe you saw that if not you can check it out. They talk about the four elements of building a business, goals, ideas, platform and network, goals, ideas, platform and network and those are the basic four elements of how to communicate a message. Whether that message is you're a service professional like a lawyer, accountant, a doctor or something like that or you have a small business like a flower shop or a cafe or you sell pastries. Those are the four different foundational pieces that you need to have if you really want to grow your reputation, grow your message in the greater global economy or in your small community. They point out that although they're really known for social media these are the four elements that you would use even if it was 100 years ago and there wasn't any social media and you're just trying to communicate on a soapbox. So I bring these up because I personally went to the new media expo and have been trying to devote a lot of energy to that network element. That's where I feel like I have failed in terms of increasing my exposure and increasing my reputation as an individual who has something to say in the business community and I hope that you'll think about that as well for whatever type of business you're working on and whether you have articulated and written down your goals whether you continually generate ideas and communicate them in some fashion whether you're expressing them in terms of a blog post in videos in podcasts or expressing them in terms of pastries that you produce or flower arrangements if you have a flower shop. Those are the four basic elements that you need to think about and it's a great segue for today's interviewer Andrew Warner because you take a look at what he's done and he had a genuine interest and passion for entrepreneurship. He built his own business that ultimately was producing 38 million dollars a year in revenue but he loved hanging out with entrepreneurs. He loved talking about entrepreneurship and so he followed that passion and he created this website slash platform now called mixerg.com which he established him as a real authority, a real thought leader but it also allowed him to network with an amazing array of individuals. He's interviewed over 700 entrepreneurs now and they're all grateful to him for giving them a little bit of exposure through his blog and so it's an amazing tool that he used and now he's even going the extra step. Now he's actually using a lot of those individuals and they're coming up with courses that they sell for a premium amount which many people are willing to pay for because of the value that he brings and he conveys. So I'm recording this in early 2013 but whenever you're listening to this I want you to ask yourself if I'm a business do I have all four pieces in place? Do I have clear written goals? Do I have articulated ideas? Do I express them whether it's in whatever format it is? Do I have I built a platform for myself? Am I working on networking with others who are useful to me in a and I need to emphasize this point in a not a selfish way but in a way of expressing just genuine regard for people and getting to know people? It is really such a key point that you can't lead with what am I going to get out of a relationship whether you're networking with someone face to face at a cocktail mixer, whether you're at a friend's house no matter where you are you have to establish genuine human relationships first and that's something that Chris Brogan has written about extensively on his blog. So anyways that's a long intro for Andrew Warner but I thought it might be a little bit relevant because he's done such a marvelous job with Mixer G of illustrating those four foundational points in that book The Impact Equation by Chris Brogan and Julian Smith. I hope you enjoy the interview and you have any comments afterwards you can go to the blog to smartbusinessrevolution.com/podcast and the number eight and leave comments there. Great. Welcome everyone this is John Corcoran and really excited today to have with us Andrew Warner. Welcome Andrew. Hey thanks for having me here. So excited to talk to you so I'll have to admit I'm a little bit nervous doing an interview of Andrew Warner who has interviewed over 700 different entrepreneurs and business owners and celebrities and you know I feel a little bit like I'm giving stock picking tips to warn Buffett or something like that. So I'll do my best. So let's kind of jump right in. We're going to get into asking you a little bit about your background as an entrepreneur but one big thing that really stood out for me was this story of this billion dollar contest that you did a couple years ago as part of your company Bradford and Reed. So tell me about the origin of that how you came up with that crazy idea and how it resulted. Yeah we said that if people we offered people a lottery with 77 numbers that they could possibly pick they'd pick their their lucky seven numbers and if we if our computer system actually picked the same seven numbers as they did they would win a billion dollar jackpot and just offering a billion dollar jackpot got us a huge amount of attention. I got to be on Good Morning America USA Today covered it a bunch of websites covered in newspapers all over the world including one in Russia that my Russian friends said his parents read. You know you've made it. Once you hit the Russian press you know you're gonna pick the right and you know what the idea came to me when my brother and I were walking through a conference and we discovered that you don't actually have to pay off a jackpot yourself if somebody wins. You just have to buy insurance per entry and if a person wins the insurance company pays it off. So I imagine as more people enter your premium win up on that insurance. Same amount what they do at what's our risk per entry and we'll just charge Andrew per entry plus you know a nice fat profit for themselves. And in fact this insurance is called SCA promotions. They you'll start to see their names in all kinds of contests like the free throw shot at a basketball game if you make up if someone from that shot from half court I should say then and they win a million dollars usually SCA that backs those kinds of contests. So we did it. It got us a ton of attention got us a ton of members unfortunately nobody won. I wanted a winner because I didn't have to pay the money the insurance company did not want a winner. No one in our audience gets the right seven numbers. Well that eliminates my next question which was what do you do with the billion dollars. The reason that we did it of course was we paid a price per entry every time someone entered we asked them for their name we asked them for their email address we asked them for the home address we asked them for permission to email them and then we offered them a few lead based offers like sign up for Time Magazine etc. So we knew how much we were paying per entry to the insurance company we knew how much companies like Time Magazine were paying us every time one of our members signed up to their magazines and we knew where where the business model was. Okay so two questions which you can answer or a declined answer if you so like one is what was the ROI on that? Did it pay off? It did pay off from what I remember but not nearly as much as it should have. What happened was we lined up all these sponsors who were supposed to pay us per entry and then there was a meltdown in the tech industry where a lot of our guys went out of business or they were going out of business and even though we had them signed to a contract if they just literally could not afford to pay no way to get them to live up to that contract and so that was an issue. The other thing that I felt was a failure for me was that my plan was to build up this asset by getting millions of registered members onto this side and then get them to keep playing and so on and then maybe spin it off as its own business maybe even sell it as its own business and we did get three million members within three months which is unheard of three million members who gave us their real names because they wanted to make sure that if they won the check was signed over to their real names their real addresses because they wanted to make sure the check was sent to them properly their real email addresses so they'd know where to be alerted if they won three million solid members but the valuations for internet companies started to go down at that point because of the meltdown and so that that was painful. That said it was good but it wasn't nearly as great as I imagined it would be because of outside factors and that kind of that's painful that something outside of my control could influence my results so much is sucky. So let's reflect on that a little bit before I get back into the origins of how you became an entrepreneur but how did that experience with that contest building that is and how has that affected you going forward? You know it taught me that it's not all my own personal willpower up until that point I felt that whenever I wanted out of life I could just will I could will this conversation to go my way I could will you to do what I want not necessarily by pushing you aggressively but by just wanting it bad enough more than the next you'll pick up on my vibes and I want this that you'll just say I can't fight it this guy's just going there I'm going to go along with it and I realized all there's some issues that there's some things that I can control that way and we invested millions of dollars in this contest I mean it costs a lot of money to buy those and to buy those entries it costs a lot of money to build a site to get the promotion team in place and I learned that in the future if I was going to invest that much money I've got to understand that willpower is not enough. Well there were a lot of people who were caught flat-footed around that time period this this was uh when exactly one's a contest the '09 or so? Yeah '09 2000. Yeah. Take a few steps backwards I think from that answer that you just gave you kind of demonstrated that you really had being an entrepreneur within you but what age did you realize that this you know that this was for me starting new companies and investing in companies and not going to work for someone else? Oh as far back as I remember I don't know that I specifically said don't go to work for someone else but there is a certain entrepreneurial creativity that I felt that I actually feel a lot of other people feel where as a kid I bought these sticks of gum for descends and there were 10 sticks of gum and I sold each one for 10 cents a piece and I doubled my money and more than just making money I got to just feel commerce I got to feel that I could sell I got to feel the mechanics of of entrepreneurship and I feel that there are a lot of us who've had these moments in our lives where we were creative entrepreneurially and we expressed it but as kids we weren't encouraged to continue to express it as kids we were told don't do it my my little business was shut down quickly by my elementary school teachers I've talked about this on Mixer G and heard other entrepreneurs say that similar things happened to them one person who stands out of my mind is the founder of StubHub ends up building this multi-million dollar company sells to eBay clearly he did good things with entrepreneurship but as a kid when he expressed it he was shut down and I feel that we need to encourage more people to to express that entrepreneurial creativity if someone sat down and drew in school we might tell them well don't draw well you're paying attention to the teacher but do continue to draw well actually the offer you a class that will teach you how to draw but if they were to try to you know express their entrepreneurial creativity they get shut down hmm it's really unfortunate that it works that way your early expression of your entrepreneurial creativity was shortly after graduating from NYU you and your brother went into business together and you formed Bradford and Reed which was your original business so first of all your last name's Warner and there's kind of a funny story about how Bradford Reed got his name can you share that with us yeah the Bradford and Reed name came from me and my brother looking through a book of American and British last names what we were looking for was a name that sounded so impressive that if I called up a prospect to sell them they'd say well I don't know this guy could be important he could be a lawyer who has an issue with us let's take it be a bad capital firm or an investment firm let's just take it and figure out what it is and if I called from so-and-so.com they might not take it seriously they might say I don't know this company another.com screw it let's send them the voicemail but if I call them from Bradford Reed oh my get right through and I have an opportunity to sell and I can sell. You know I think Tim Ferris has a story in his book about rather than calling yourself president or CEO of your company you should do vice president because no one who has a one-person operation calls themselves vice president yeah it's a great idea how is it working with your brother I'm curious because you know I'm a lawyer and there's a lot of family disputes that end up in litigation for unfortunate reasons so a lot of times family partnerships don't go so well how did that work out beautifully and the reason to work out so well is because he and I he and I are so rational and we're so determined that if you're absolutely determined to build a successful company and we were and frankly I was really hungry for money at the time nothing else matters I would sacrifice everything to be able to make it work and I knew that he had the chops to get me to where I wanted to be and I couldn't sacrifice that I would do whatever it took I would deal with any frustrations I would get over them quickly I would bring myself back to to reality and rational thought just to get to get to what I wanted so you guys did a lot of different things you did the grab.com billion dollar contest and you had electronic greeting cards which was another really profitable area of your company as well what else did you do not so well looking back on that period cool great question here's what we did that was we did a lot of things not so well what happened was we had this great mailing list of 20,000 people who gave us their email addresses and that allowed us to experiment with new products that we would then email to these 20 million people excuse me so 20 million people to send to a new contest site fantastic 20 million people to send to a greeting card site fantastic here's what it didn't work so well we saw hot or not.com doing well where people would see a picture of a guy or a girl they would rate them and just keep going all day with rating and viewing other people's ratings so we came up with our own version of that I forget what it was called but we said we can't do ratings they already did it let's just do who is the hotter of the two show you two pictures you pick the one who's the hotter of the two and we just give you a rating for each one generated by what everyone else thought in in these little battles total failure it didn't work there was no business model behind it we were just trying to copy someone who was successful there was no um there was no there was no love for it you know you need to coddle a business for a while you need to really think about the mechanics of it in order to get it work to work it's not enough to just say it works for him and I have this audience I'll just copy it hmm interesting so eventually you were working with Bradford and Reed and you were working really long long hours and and you kind of burnt out of that experience and so you took some time off to relax tell me about how you got to that point of deciding that you needed to take some time off and and what you did during that time period I needed to take time off because I did not ever arrest I didn't have any outside interests you mentioned Tim Ferris when I interviewed Tim Ferris he talked about the need to exercise as an entrepreneur and Y Combinator 2 says that that's one of the important things that they want the entrepreneurs they invest in to do to take to go and exercise and I used to just laugh at that why do you need to exercise what are you going to be a meathead go and work you know exercise it's for people who are too stupid to work work all day long because you want to keep building if you have anything else in your life that you're more interested in than work even for a few minutes means you don't love your work enough then improve it so that you love it more than whatever else could take up your time but what I found is that when work suffers if that's all you have in your life then your whole life suffers and when your whole life suffers then you start to doubt yourself you start to lose excitement and motivation for life and so anyway we talked about how the internet bubble burst and the like my customers started going out of business started away on me it started to weigh on me so much that I felt like everything in my life was going badly and frankly everything in my life was going badly because all I had was this and so that's why I got burned down that's why now I run that's why I try to have outside interests so that when work stinks I could still feel like hey you know what I just did a 20 mile run on my own this Sunday I'm feeling like I could conquer anything I don't care for extinct I'm gonna make it better because I'm a guy who ran 20 miles in this new neighborhood on my own you know so did all that come from that time period that you took off after selling Bradford and Reed I had to actually learn to be interested in other things I had to learn how to have conversations with people because I didn't know how to have a conversation with someone that didn't involve me getting to a goal selling to them or convincing them to work with me or whatever so I actually wanted to therapy I explored outside interests I pushed myself to talk to people and what I did was frankly I just completely disconnected I didn't work at all for years I think it was three years maybe I don't know for years just no work at all just having a good time going out every night reading the paper you know cover to cover the Wall Street Journal every article that they put out that day I wanted to read I traveled to Europe where I got to just wake up in every morning and say what do I feel like doing today should I just go explore the city or hop on a train go to another city or do I want to go back home you know that was a really good life yeah but I imagine at some point you knew that you'd go back to working and driving and in my mind I said this is cool I'm never going to work again ever hunger I had for some reason associated or I'm over it or I'm too burned out I just was never going to work again okay so something so something must have changed so so what was it that what did you just wake up one day and say you know I want to try something else yeah I think at some point I just got over it I said I need something a little more meaningful well you know I always wanted to to do this thing that Del Carnegie that Del Carnegie did or that Andrew Carnegie did by funding Napoleon Hill's education of our study of successful people so I was wanting to be able to do that I could do whatever I want now let's go do that so before we get into talking about your current project mixer G which you're really well known for I wanted to talk a little bit about just entrepreneurship in general and in particularly you know I spoke to a class the other day of new entrepreneurs these are people who had relatively new companies or were starting new companies and one of the major questions that they had was confusion really they knew how to cook Mexican food or they knew how to make juice or whatever it was they wanted to do fashions but they had questions about the process of starting a business whether it was correct legal entity or business license or for me DBA and I'm just wondering how in your early 20s was that not a barrier to you how did how did you just blow past those sorts of things all the many different barriers that you have just starting a business because none of it seemed like a barrier because I studied other people who got through it and I realized that the kind of company that you know the legal entity that you pick is important but it's not what you should be spending the most time on the business card is important but it's not what you should be spending the most time on the company name is important but it's not what you should be spending the most time on it's in my mind back then it was just finding a model that worked and just trying it seeing seeing if you can make it work the way you imagine it would we did was email newsletters and it worked well but that's spectacular it wasn't really it wasn't going to be that multi-billion dollar multi-million dollar vision that I had for myself adjusted and adjusted and adjusted and during this time period while you were building Bradford and Reed you've mentioned leaders like Warren Buffett and you mentioned the Carnegie's as being inspirations to you this is kind of a two-part question but who who were your icons during that time period and also was there any direct mentors that you had that you could turn to while you're building that business other than your brother no I should have had some direct mentors I should have I should have asked my college entrepreneurship professor to help me out to talk to me every once in a while I think the same thing that drove me to succeed is what made me think that no one would want to be my mentor I was driven to succeed because I felt like an outsider like all these people didn't value me like the rest of the world didn't care about who I was and I was going to show them by making so much money and building such a successful company that they had to pay attention and as much as it was an entrepreneurial need to be creative it was also a need to prove myself that way they kept driving me and if you feel like you have to show everyone else that you're valuable by building the successful company it's natural also to feel a not valuable enough for anyone to want to mentor me in a time with me that's an interesting conflict there yeah and what I ended up doing instead was I went to books I went just to to audio programs to just learn from other people and when you see people who want it who build it who make it happen if you study how they do it you start to see some patterns you start to see that it's okay to do things that other people think is not okay to do I talk about this a lot Ted Turner was a big hero of mine and when I hear about Ted Turner going to John Malone's office who owned Ted Turner of course the guy behind TBS and CNN and Cartoon Network and so on when he goes into John Malone's office who ran one of the major cable companies and kisses his shoes and says please run me like she's doing shtick but he's coming into the office and doing something you're not supposed to do in a business setting because he's so determined to make it work you start to think hey you know what those rules that you're supposed to follow as an entrepreneur as a business person they don't apply for a real entrepreneur do whatever you want it's okay to want it badly it's okay to to try something brand new to be sticky to push and so that was a huge influence on me one of the things that I did fit that helped me a lot was I wanted to work with this woman Roslyn Resnick she represented big email mailing lists and she sold ads in them but the most credible and the biggest she didn't want to deal with these petty guys who are just you know spam obviously no spam she was big uh she's a big anti-spam speaker but also she didn't want to deal with the petty stuff and I was petty I was small I was tiny when I wanted to work with her but I needed her revenue and I wanted to grow with her and she wouldn't her company wouldn't work with me so I took I went I took a check for all the money that my brother and I had in the bank the time two thousand dollars I drove to her office and she wasn't there but the first person I saw who I talked to on the phone I said here's a check for two thousand dollars sell my ads for a little time and if you don't make enough money on me to make it worth your while if you don't believe that I'm going someplace that you want to come along to cash this two thousand dollar check and you'll be able to and you'll be able to profit from this relationship at least financially and at that point they said okay I'll think about it I could believe that the guy didn't say absolutely jump on it but you know I guess he didn't have the authority to but word quickly got to Roslyn she came into the office she heard about the guy who did it she took the check and me into her office she talked to me and she said okay well sign you she saw that anyone who's willing to do that is someone she wants to work with and that's not the kind of thing you're supposed to do you're not supposed to just march into someone's office on an ounce you're not supposed to say you have to work me I'm gonna pay you when they're supposed to pay you with what they're supposed to pay you you're not supposed to pay them but anyway they're no rules make the rules yourself they'll be on legal rules they're no rules you know that that leads me to another question do you think that starting this new challenge of launching Mixer G where you've interviewed some really big names people who at least early on didn't know who you were do you think that that became an equivalent challenge for you whereas with Brevard and Reed you obviously done really well but the access to interviews to these big celebrities big names became a similar challenge as you had to breaking through with this woman Roslyn not really inner getting people to say yes to interviews is so much easier than people imagine it's I'll tell you why it's easy because if you're willing to talk to enough people and if you're if you're willing to talk to to not be defined by your failure to not be defined by now it's easy to get a yes for interviews there are people right now who are dying to be interviewed by anyone I'm not just talking about nobody's I'm saying that there's a successful person we all admire right now I don't I don't know the name but at any given point there is who is now in a book tour or who is now launching or is now just looking for google hits or is now just looking for experience doing interviews or being on camera or just testing with equipment who will say yes there's someone right now who will partner with anybody there's someone right now who will buy from anyone you just need to you know think about where those people are and how do I get to them and ask them and be willing to accept no and come back and ask someone else or ask that person again in the future um the big challenge for me now that's the equivalent of making a killing like that that was the vision that I had for for Bradford Reed is to bring some meaning to all these interviews I can't be the guy who dies being another Larry King congratulations to Larry King on building such a successful career interviewing people and really making news through his interviews and shaping shaping politics through some of his interviews but that's not my vision for myself I don't want to just help other people communicate their message I want to draw some meaning from all these hundreds of interviews that I've done and do it in a way that then allows other people to to live better lives because of it okay and is is that um what is the answer to that is it the the premium subscription here's something that I'm noticing now more and more and I can see why people do this my audience has heard me say this this process of finding the pain entrepreneurs who don't just want luck into success who don't have the luxury to buy their way to success they talk to customers they find their customers pain and then they say if I sound that for you would you be willing to pay me for it if they found a pain that's painful enough that significant enough for someone in someone's life they will get a hell yes and of course payment once that solution is built and it doesn't even here's a the surprising thing doesn't even have to be a perfect solution if you could just it's it's a big enough pain and you could take away even one percent let alone ten percent or fifty percent or fifty one percent if it's a significant enough pain any amount of pain relief that you can offer is going to be helpful and people are going to appreciate it to pay for it and so that's your that's your mission people will actually pay just to have you understand the pain there's this great book at the author's name but it's about manic depression by the book is called an unquiet mind and the woman there says she talks about how crazy her life was both in the manic and the depressive points but she says what she really needed from a therapist wasn't the answer she just wanted to be heard that alone provided relief and i feel the same thing is true even for people who have business issues like i don't even know how to hire employee or i'm intimidated by my cfo because he's older than me or i don't know how to talk to customers or i don't know how to talk to male customers or women customers if you could just understand their pain enough that makes them feel heard you've mentioned books a couple times and i'm a little thrown off here because uh you know it's like you're missing your trademark hat or something there's usually the stack of books over your right shoulder there i'm wondering what have you read lately what would you recommend in the early days there was literally just book cases all along the wall behind me completely covered and probably some on the floor i love reading books um i just moved to this new office and what i'm finding is i don't read paper books so much anymore and i do want to have as clutter free of life as possible so i'm not buying books just for props and believe it i can't i can't display them but what i'm reading right now uh what was it that i just read i just read a story about the founding of pixar some reason i can't think of it the the author's name even though it's tremendous and it helped me interview uh the co-founder of pixar to hear to read just stories of how companies found it you could get lost in those stories and draw your own meanings to go from them to me it's as much fun as non-fiction and then the other book that i'm reading that's excuse me it's much fun is fiction the other book that i'm reading that's non-fiction is mastery by robert green the guy who wrote power this guy just takes a topic like how to get power and he breaks it down into um uh components of how it's been done throughout the ages and then he tells you stories of how people have done it throughout the ages i love it oh that sounds great i want to move to talking about mister g because we don't want to gloss over that so so tell me what the origin was of mister g because i know that it the original goal behind it the original idea behind it was not a success so tell me a little bit about that okay and i should say before we even get into that that one thing that i don't want to brush over and i feel like because the economy is kind of bad we don't talk about we don't talk about success much we don't talk about the the fruits of it but i should say that i call my my audience freedom fighters because when i ask my entrepreneurs why interview why they do it they say because they want freedom and if you take a look at what i got at the end of bradford and read i got so many things but one of the best best advantages freedom freedom to do nothing if i wanted to freedom to read all day if i wanted to freedom to start a company that was a dream mind if i wanted to we are going through so much pain as entrepreneurs rejection embarrassment you know you published your your facebook profile which are about to launch and your friends from elementary school see it and they judge you and they're critical of you and your frenemy see it because you know everything read and your frenemies are watching you and it's embarrassing when you do sometimes fail in public like that with those people who are waiting for you to fail it's embarrassing when as one entrepreneur told me he went into a grocery store and he put his credit card down and there was no money in his credit card there are times when this stuff happens and it's painful like you wouldn't but like most people want to subject themselves to this kind of pain and we do as entrepreneurs and the benefit of it is well there's benefit to our customers because their lives are better because if we found their pain we've solved in one percent we've made their lives better measurably better but there's also benefit to us the freedom to be able to whatever we want if you just can't you can't understand that you know we grow up with this idea that we have to listen to our parents and then to listen to our teachers and then eventually listen to our bosses and then eventually listen to everybody but to really get freedom is it's it's priceless and it's worth the battle and it's great that we're hoping everyone else but I want to also say that what we get for ourselves shouldn't be undervalued and there will be a time when the economy does better people start bragging about all the things that they want to be okay to talk about the rewards of our labor and at that point maybe it'll be more acceptable to say yeah there's something in it for us which is freedom but even then it'll be obscured by people talking about the roles is that they drive or the Teslas that they drive I just want to emphasize now and for always that the benefits of freedom the benefits of creating something that changes people's lives and ours is so worth all that that's a great entry point into the founding of mixer D because that's where that's where you were oh and we you and I before we started recording this interview talked about Howard Dean's campaign and I watched Howard Dean this guy who was basically a nobody governor from Vermont right that's right yeah Vermont just like nobody he starts to build more a bigger war chest than anyone else starts to get these people who meet up throughout the country more than anyone else he's getting passion he's getting excitement and what does he do to generate this well he uses the web and one thing that he does with the web is get people to meet up in person and I thought okay this is the way to start a movement get people to meet up in person they help shape the movement and then they help they help add a megaphone to the movement so I started creating these in person meetings and then they got bigger and more people came and the one bad mistake that I made was I never told people what the meeting was what the purpose was of those meetings it's too embarrassed to stand up and say hey what I'd like you guys to do is to understand that we can build great businesses that we should help each other do it that we can discover newer ways to build businesses together I didn't say anything about it I just said let's get together and good things will happen too embarrassed to say I don't yet have the answer and I'd like you still to know that this is where I'm driving to because you know I was proud I said I'm the guy who succeeds I'm the guy who knows that instead of adding meeting instead of standing up and over and over saying this is what I'm trying to do and I'm not there yet but I want to create groups that will eventually be big where entrepreneurs will help each other I said let's build software that will help and then I got deep into building software and I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building software and then since I've spent my own money building software for my own group I said well I need to recoup some of this money or else I'm an idiot you know wasted money the way to recoup that money is to now create a web app let's call it an invitation web app that anyone else gets to use and then I'll build the business off of that and I completely got diverted from my mission all because instead of standing up and saying what I wanted I just did what I was thought I was supposed to do big stupid mistake and that was the first version of Mixer G it's called Mixer G because I was creating these mixers and they had this energy about that and it was gonna be Mixer G this word that I could trademark it is still a good word I think there's something to it I think it could work even if I figured out how to make it work today I should stay away from it well it obviously works now it's just a different incarnation so what point did you pivot pivot from in-person meetings to essentially a web interview show now well the big turning point came when I admitted failure publicly I said I failed and I think about all these entrepreneurs who I ask to do interviews about their failures who are too embarrassed to say to even admit that they failed to themselves let alone to my audience or to you know their own customers I'm so glad I said I failed I said it publicly you can go to my site and search for I failed and see it on Mixer G.com today and it was a huge turning point for me because by saying I failed I didn't have to put up the pretense that this was a success you know and pretend that it was success and and pretend that everything worked out okay I got to say I failed and then I got to say I need to I need to make this work and then I got to be open about what I was trying to do and when you when you're vulnerable and are open about what you're trying to do people can relate to it and they want to help or at least they could understand it they didn't understand what those groups were that I was doing but when I did I failed video post I actually looked the camera and said to anyone who came to my site I failed I said what I'd like to do is learn why I failed and learn from other people why they succeed and that's what I'm going to dedicate my my life to and I'm going to do it by interviewing and I did and the audience got to see me got to see me struggle to learn what mistake I made and to figure out how I how I could have done it better and they got to follow along and watch it that's really interesting and eventually you kind of evolved a little bit and moved beyond just the straight interviews and also doing courses tell me a little bit more about the other offerings that Mixer G has now of course this came from me saying I'm not going to spend any money on Mixer G it has to survive on its own or fail on its own but if I'm going to be that fool who just keeps spending hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars on his own product that nobody else cares about then I'm just I've got a hobby that isn't changing the world and so I started getting some ad revenue and that did okay and then I said I'd like to get some real revenue and plus I don't think people respect anything that's free they respect what they pay for and that's a good indication that I'm doing something right if people are willing to pay for it so I started selling stuff on the site my own stuff and it didn't go so well I'd sell something like a collection of I don't even know what but it didn't I don't remember anymore but I would sell something and it didn't work well and then I'd be embarrassed that it didn't work well or wondering why it didn't work well and I'd take too long to figure out why it didn't work well and how to do it better next time and then I finally said hey you know what one of the reasons why my interviews worked and I got better as an interviewer is I committed to a schedule of every frickin day doing an interview and that got me better and it kept me from hiding from my my setbacks and it got me to to learn and then apply what I learned instantly not wait a month to apply it and hope that I remember but if I ask a long question the next time I the next time I had an opportunity to do an interview was the next day and I could fix that by asking the better question next time and so I said I need to set up the same kind of schedule for selling things and if you do a search on my site right now for testing Tuesdays you'll see a post that I did where I said I don't know what to sell you guys but I think it's important for me to sell and so I'll do testing Tuesdays where every Tuesday I'll try to sell you something you don't don't and of course if you let if you buy it in your unhappy with it I'll give you a refund it's all good data for me I'm just trying to figure out what works and did you create these products or these where you were affiliate for the other products I have wanted to create it because my goal wasn't to generate revenue for the sake of generating revenues to improve the products that I created to improve its utility to my audience and so I created a collection of e-books that I hired a writer to create based on my interviews I did live webinars I did all kinds of stuff and then eventually evolved into into courses where entrepreneurs come and they teach a topic that they're good at and even that evolved the way that we do it involved. Great I want to wrap this up because we take it a lot of time here but before I I'm starting to wrap but the big message there is to me and anyone who's listening is anything you want to do really well set up a schedule where you're forced to do it over and over and over with no outs I've talked about this too about my dating I didn't know how to date in the Bradford and Reed days when I wanted to learn how to date I said I'm going to California to Southern California at that point and I'm going to go out six out of seven nights and every night that I go out I'm going to talk to five groups of girls or five girls and I'm going to do it all I'm going to do it over and over so I could fail and learn and improve and not hide from it and over and over I did it and I actually would even put up a post on Craigslist saying I'm looking for a wingman somebody to just go out with me and that I'm even more accountable when I told him that what we're doing for the night is talking to five groups of girls whatever it is that you that you want to get better at if you force yourself to just to do it over and over and over again you will learn to get better you will stop hiding from your failures and instead just look for ways to repair them the fact that you know that you're going to have to do this again tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next day is going to force you to say what do I do to get better at this because I can't keep sucking that's a great lesson and the last question I did want to ask about which is related to the message that you were just sharing which was your your interview technique and you mentioned that you've gotten better over the years I think you do a tremendous job on MixerG of conducting your interviews but who has inspired you is there anyone that you've modeled your interviews after or your interviewing technique after the only person who I've I've modeled myself after is Charlie Road you don't at the end of a Charlie Road interview you say boy that Charlie Road is a great guy you say oh I get that guy I get the guy who we interviewed I understand him and that's that's what I want in my interviews and people tell me that I should express my personality more and and I'm working on it but at the heart of it it has to be you the listener understanding the real story of the entrepreneur not me manipulating that entrepreneur story to fit my narrative or to fit my need to sell you on a message but the truth of how his how he really or she really built their business great Andrew I I've taken a lot of your time and I just want to thank you for taking the time to talk to us and share a bit of your experiences and so tell us where can people learn some more about you I always say that find a way when you listen to somebody online to not just be a passive listener but to find a way to connect with them and I actually watch relationships being built with my interviewees by people of the guts to say hey I saw you on mix or gee thanks and I'm totally inaccessible I mean my email address is out there but I I'm not checking email because I get flooded with email but there's so many ways to reach me still like Twitter live in person events that I get that I do for drinks find a way whether it's me or someone else who you've heard whose work you read to connect with them and say hi I saw you there because the connection even with someone like me who pushes away email who doesn't who doesn't who doesn't make himself excessively open it's it's an incredible way to connect I'm now insecure about the way that I'm saying this if someone at the end of this says I saw you it worked out great or I like this one piece you'll just be reassuring me and making me feel great and as a result of you making me feel great I will then want to make you feel great or want to do great things for you which isn't to say hey do this for me make me feel good but to just take that away I think from any way I'm rambling here at the end but anyway I always want to leave that as a message for my audience at the end of interviews and so I figured I'd also squeeze it to your interview connect with the person who you watch you are not just a passive viewer like watching Spider-Man on the movie theater you are an entrepreneur you're someone who's leaving a legacy or someone who's trying to interact with this world not passively watch it and if there's someone whose message you heard or you read and you connected with it anyway find a way to talk to them in person or talk to them on social media or connect with them beyond just being a passive viewer and I hope you do it with me is what I'm saying so what you're saying is please cyber stock me please cyber stock me and say hi oh great Andrew I really appreciate you taking the time and good luck to you but thanks for having me on thank you for listening to the smart business revolution podcast with John Corcoran find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com and while you're there sign up for our email list and join the revolution revolution revolution and be listening for the next episode of the smart business revolution podcast [BLANK_AUDIO]