Networx: A $10M Business Built in 50 Hours

How does a site that was built in 50 hours become a $10 million per year business?

John Rydell is the founder of Networx Online, a company that makes it easy for home-based salespeople to create web sites that collect leads and generate business.

I invited him to tell us the story behind that company’s success. I also want to find out about this other businesses, especially MeetingBurner, a fast, free way to hold online meetings and webinars.

John Rydell

John Rydell

MeetingBurner

John Rydell is the cofounder of MeetingBurner, a fast, free way to hold online meetings and webinars.

 

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Full Interview Transcript

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Hey there Freedom Fighters, my name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. It’s a place where entrepreneurs come to tell you how they built their businesses. The question for this interview, and you know I like to focus in on one big question, is this, how does a site that was built in 50 hours become a ten million dollar per year business?

Well, John Rydell is the founder of Networks Online, the company that makes it easy for home-based sales people to create websites that collect leads and generate business. I invited him here to tell the story behind that company’s success and I also want to find out about his other, newer business, MeetingBurner, which is a fast, free way to hold online meeting and webinars. John, we got a lot to pack into this interview and I appreciate you talking about all of this.

John: Thanks, Andrew. Happy to be here today.

Andrew: Well, let’s start with the end first. About what happens when you build this great big company. Can you tell me the story, well, tell me the story about your daughter that you and I talked about before the interview started.

John: I’d love to. One of the benefits that I’ve had in building the business for the last ten years is that although I work way too hard, it gives me the flexibility with money and time to go and do cool things and so my 13 year old daughter, well my daughter who just turned 13, had the opportunity, I had the opportunity to go to her and say, hey, on your 13th birthday, anywhere in the world, where would you want to go?

And we’re here in sunny southern California but she said, Dad, I want you to bring me to New York City. So, just a father/daughter trip to New York City and we listed out all these things we wanted to do, you know, go stay in Times Square. go see a couple of plays and the final thing on our list was, we want to talk to Al Roker and be one of those people holding up the Happy Birthday sign on the Today Show and so that final morning, this just happened I think last weekend or the weekend before, we woke up 7 a.m., bright and early on the East Coast on a rainy morning and got our picture there with Al on the Today Show wishing my daughter a Happy Birthday. So, cool benefit for me, great opportunities. Something neither of us will ever forget.

Andrew: Yeah, the freedom to be able to do whatever you want and in this case, whatever you’re daughter wants. So, 50 hours, did I get that number right or did we in our research and in our previous conversations exaggerate. 50 hours?

John: It might have been less.

Andrew: Less than 50 hours. All right.

John: One weekend.

Andrew: One weekend. All right, so you build it in a weekend. How long does it take for you to realize, hey, this thing is working out, or is the 50 hour website something you trash and then build the real thing afterwards?

John: yeah, we, I think we mentioned it before but the great part of the story even starts a little bit before that which is, I was working with my business partner, Paul Rydell. He’s my brother and my business partner and we were trying all sorts of different technology ideas, this was ten years ago.

And literally, the genesis for the one that built Networks Online, I was sitting in my spa one day after working at my day job, reading a magazine and found and article, an interview, sort of an interview infomercial with a guy named Cory Citron, who was doing this weird nutritional vitamin thing. We didn’t even understand it but I got in touch with (?) and sort of explained to him hey, what if we can bridge the best of your nutritional vitamin work with a cool online system? And he said if you guys build that, I bet you like 25 or 50 of my reps would pay you $25 a month to use that technology to help them sell more nutritional vitamins.

So I go to my brother and I say look, we’ve got to do this this weekend. We’ve got two days. We have to build this system that will help these guys and our vision was, it’s sort of pathetic, but our vision was put on 50 people who’d pay us $25 a month and have $1,250 a month of recurring revenue. That was our, I’m not saying we didn’t have bigger dreams, but that was the initial why we were working that weekend and I guess I want to say the rest is history.

We put that thing together, hacked it. No writers, no designers, just my brother, a coder, me sort of doing the business side and we woke up a couple of months later with 2,000 people paying us $25 a month for this online system to help them sell. So $50,000 a month coming in and we had our total expense was one $99 a month server.

Andrew: One server for $99 a month was your expense. $50,000 comes in in revenue. And when you say a couple of months, I know some people mean a few months when they say a couple. How much for you?

John: I think it was like two.

Andrew: Two? So within two months, you’re doing this?

John: Yes.

Andrew: All right. Now I know that it’s not all that easy and you’ve had your ups and downs and in this interview, I want to dive into the ups and downs and that’s the reason you’re here and that’s the reason we’re going to spend an hour, not just 15 minutes. If this was a more shallow interview, we’d have done this, we’d have excited people, and we’d have sent them off to go click to your website or go buy my something that’s going to tell them how to do the exact same thing.

John: Go tell them to win the lottery like I did.

Andrew: I’m sorry?

John: Go tell them to win the lottery like I did.

Andrew: It’s not a lottery in. I see the ups and downs and I want to dig into it. Actually, you know what, if it is a lottery, be open with me and we’ll talk about that in this show.

John: It’s not, I was joking.

Andrew: If it was just luck, I want to hear that too. But hey, before we go into that story, I do online meetings all the time. When my team and I do online meetings, we as often as possible try to broadcast someone’s computer screen. We try to do video because if we do video, then we’re kind of forced to pay attention and I can’t go and look at my iPhone. If we broadcast screens, then it means that the team in here has something to look at. They understand what I’m talking about and so they’re deeply engaged and they deeply understand. So all that’s to say I’m really passionate about the online meeting software business.

I can’t stand with a passion WebeX because their software stinks on ice. They charge me thousands of bucks for this garbage and in order to cancel, I think I had to sign a fax and go find a fax machine to cancel. WebeX is the worst. I never rag on anyone but I’ve got to rag on them.

So, Meeting Burner, you built this software. What does it cost for me to use it? How are you different from Go To Meeting, which I have had good results with? What’s the deal with that?

John: The genesis for Meeting Burner was a little more than a year ago now, and again, we haven’t got into it yet, but networks had evolved. We were working with independent sales people all over the globe and we were buying on their behalf. We were buying online meeting software from a lot of the giants, a couple of which you just mentioned, other big players as well. And so my brother and I would write a check each year for $100,000 and the feedback we were getting back was what you just said, Andrew.

People were unhappy. It was clunky. It didn’t work well. It was too expensive. We were hearing all this and spending $100,000.

Andrew: By the way, if I wasn’t in the space and you told me $100,000, I would think, if I hadn’t used it, I would think he’s exaggerating or he has special needs. I ended up paying, I don’t know what it was, but it’s thousands of dollars for a few months worth of service. It is very expensive. Because I was paying thousands instead of using some free software, I thought I’m getting the best product out there. I’m paying the most. I don’t mind paying money. I want quality and I expected this is the best quality that exists and I was wrong.

Sorry, I’m going on my little tear here because this is really important. You get the right software, the meeting goes well. You get the wrong software, and then people have to deal with slowness. People have to deal with lack of video that works properly. You call the company up and they tell you not my department. Then you get to the right department that is supposed to talk to you and they tell you it’s your computer that maybe is slow. Maybe it’s bandwidth. They have you chasing your tail all day long.

This is really good software when it’s done right and a headache when it’s done wrong. And it costs a lot of money. I better step away from this whole Meeting Burner conversation. Look at how passionate I am. I don’t get this passionate about politics.

John: So with Meeting Burner, our goal was to create something that was simple, easy, and for most of our users, completely free. And so one of the things we wanted to start with is, we’d watch people over and over try to set up a meeting. And first of all, people don’t even like to go to a meeting to begin with, so a lot of them are waste of times anyway. But if it takes 15 minutes at the beginning of your meeting just to have everyone install some software on their desktop and try to get it through the corporate firewall, and get the IT department. It’s just a pain in the neck.

So our first vision was, whatever we do, we want there to be no installation for the participants. So at Meeting Burner, as long as you’ve got a computer that has Flash on it, which is like 99.9%, you click one button, and 7 seconds later, the participant is in the meeting with nothing to download. So we get all that junk and waste of time out of the way.

Andrew: All right, free for most people, get to share video, get to share a desktop, easy to use, you even have a cool URL that I get to give people. In my case, it’s andrewwarner dot, what was the URL for meetings?

John: Enterthemeeting.com.

Andrew: So if I want someone to enter my meeting, it’s andrewwarner.enterthemeeting.com, super duper easy. If I want to use Skype, which I love, I have one button that I can use to fire off Skype. And then I use, I guess, your Skype account to connect me to my guests or something. That freaking easy, I love that. I’m not here to sell. I refuse to accept any percentage of sales that you make or anything like that. Whenever I get this hot, people say, “Andrew you should take a percentage and keep running my interview!” I go, “no”. I want people to know this is real passion here. All right. John, I promise I’ll let you talk so much more in this interview. I get really passionate about meeting software.

John: Hey, you’re helping me.

Andrew: I got to back up. All right. So the original idea was, you had this conversation with Corey. Corey is, if I’m understanding you right, a guy who runs a multilevel marketing business, right?

John: Yes.

Andrew: How does that work?

John: Corey at the time… don’t want to make this too complicated, but at the time, Corey was a distributor in a network marketing business. So he didn’t own the company. He just had a group of people, his own team, I dare call it a “pyramid,” that’s sort of the evil word. But Corey had a whole large network of sales guys who were underneath him, who were all working to sell this sort of cutting edge liquid vitamin. And Corey’s been in the business a long time, he’s still in the business. He is actually now an owner of his own network marketing business.

So he became, no longer a distributor, he actually owns one himself. But what we wanted to do is, we wanted to leverage… because historically, all of network marketing was, go to your friends and family and harass them and try to get them to sign up at a hotel meeting. And so we said, if we could build some great online technology, ’cause that was certainly the wave of the future 10 years ago, still an important part of our lives today.

But if we can build online tools to help those guys promote their business and expose other people to the business without dragging them down to some crazy hotel meeting, that that would be sort of the marriage made in heaven. And back in the day, what we actually came up with was… there used to be brick and mortar, right? Everything was done face to face, belly to belly.

And then during the dot com boom, everything was going to be on the internet, you were never going to meet with a person, you know, too extreme the other way. And so what we came up with was “click and mortar.” We wanted to take the best of the internet and combine it with face to face relationships, and help those network marketers to sell more of the liquid vitamins or whatever else they were doing and selling in their business.

Andrew: Can you tell me about your background? What were you doing that allowed you to say, hey I can build this website… my team and I, my brother and I could build this website in a weekend and we can keep building it and improving it over time? Where were you just before?

John: I have a computer science degree. From the third grade, I’ve wanted to combine business and technology. Worked for Eccenter for a while, out of UCLA. But the truth is, right before we created this, I was the Chief Operating Officer of an investment management company. And people were like, well what does that have to do with technology at all? And I was lucky enough, blessed enough, fortunate enough… I walked into a company in the mid-90s as their IT manager, and I love business so much and I love technology that I used that IT manager to go out and learn everything about finance at the company, human resources, sales, operations. And from there actually leveraged and became the Chief Operating Officer of a company that we took from about 50 million in assets under management to 2 billion when I left around 2001.

Andrew: Can you give me an example of how you go in as an IT guy and end up learning about the business? What did you do? Give me one small example of how you got to learn from the business.

John: I sort of had that interesting combination of skills that I hope more people would have, which is I like to ask a lot of questions. And so as the IT guy, I would sit down with someone, you know, say in our client relations department, the people who were meeting with the clients and we’d really look and say, what is it that you do on a daily basis to serve these clients and to help them with their investments and how can I make that more efficient and easier for you?

Andrew: And so what did you do? Give me an example of something that you did based on a conversation like that.

John: One of the things, that, I mean, it sounds crazy because technology has changed so much in ten years, but we had these regional branch offices and back then we had a centralized database in Santa Barbara, where headquarters was, and literally the people out in the branches would only get updates once a day from corporate. I know that sounds crazy but that was just ten years, but that was the world we lived in.

And so, in meeting with those branch offices, they were like, look, it just kills us out here, outside of Santa Barbara because we can’t service our clients right because we have to wait until the next day to know what their account balance is and to get updates. And so we put in a wider EN network actually based on sort of using the internet infrastructure, back then ten years ago which was leading edge, that made it so that those guys out in the region had the access to the information they needed in real time, rather than waiting for a nightly update.

Andrew: All right, so this is 2002 that you launch your business, that you launch networks. And in 2002, anyone could set up a website by at that point, the whole, the software was available, WYSIWIG was widely distributed. Why did people need your site? Why did Cory and his team need your software instead of just building their own?

John: I think we brought a couple interesting ideas and concepts to the thing. To that initial service, even though we just built it on a weekend. One of the things my brother and I had seen in the technology world was the use of subscribing to mailing lists and auto responders, something that became relatively prevalent but back ten years ago, that was only for computer geeks who were doing that type of thing. And so, one of the concepts that we built into the system was the ability to put a prospect or lead into our marketing system and it would send a series of automated emails as if it was coming like from Andrew or from Cory off to one of his friends.

And ten years ago, there wasn’t nearly as much spam, people actually read their email, they responded to it, they’d take action on it. And so that was one of the critical things that we sort of brought from the geeky tech world to the sales world who hadn’t thought about it before. And it was, boom, I mean it worked, it was viral, people responded to it and it was a hit.

Andrew: I see. All right, so you build this. What is that first 50 hour version, what does that look like, what’s in it, what’s left out?

John: I mean, 50 hours, it was the simplest little website. I was actually in preparing for this I was going to go on, what is it archive.org and actually go try to look at it and see what it looked like back then but I couldn’t find an old enough version. I mean, basically a couple little links like, you know, here’s a list of your contacts, here’s the auto responder that’s going to send out, here’s how you cancel your account. Even from then we didn’t go for the whole like WebEx, you didn’t have to fact in your cancellation, you know, a cancellation button. But one of the funny stories is, remember, we thought we’d have 50 people maybe.

We didn’t have a merchant account, we didn’t have a banking relationship. So we just worked with PayPal and we just put up a simple little PayPal link, probably again ten years ago, not that common and we created the biggest mess you have ever seen in your entire life. Because it’s one thing to keep track of 50 people with PayPal and put them on a recurring monthly charge, but when you have 2,000 people on PayPal, we had no idea who our customers were, who was paying, whose credit card was declining. It was a complete disaster. I remember looking at this print outs and these spread sheets a couple of months later trying to figure out even who our customers actually were and who wasn’t a customer at that point.

Andrew: So, first of all, did PayPal even have a recurring billing system back then? I didn’t know they introduced it in 2002.

John: I actually don’t remember whether we were pushing the monthly charge to them or whether they were handling, my guess is actually, even ten years ago PayPal had a recurring system but they didn’t have good API’s so you’d sort of put someone on the recurring billing and have to manually go in there and click to cancel them. It was a mess.

Andrew: So, John, I hear a lot about entrepreneurs like you who launch within 50 hours and the show off within 50 hours isn’t that you can build a good site within 50 hours. What we’re saying is, when we’re saying it took us a very short amount of time, is we allowed ourselves to have an imperfect product in the marketplace. And that really takes a lot of gut. A lot of entrepreneurship is putting yourself out there.

And the first product is putting yourself out there as it is, but the first product that wasn’t polished, that isn’t perfect, is just putting yourself out there even more. So I often hear this. What I’m wondering in this case, especially since I wrote down the word ‘mess’ as you were talking, is what’s the advantage of having something that ends up being a mess? What’s the advantage in your specific case of launching so quickly?

John: Obviously, the first thing that comes to mind is being quick to market. Right? We wanted to be in there. I don’t know if someone else was about to invent this. But I didn’t want to take the risk. I thought I had something good. I wanted to be the first one out there. But more importantly for me, my brother and I have had a hundred ideas. Maybe we’ve even had a hundred ideas before we came up with this one.

And so, we had learned that you want to fail fast. You want to put something out there and either learn whether you’re on to something, like does the market value what you’re doing, are they willing to give you their money? Or do they go, ‘Ah, I don’t understand it. I don’t want it. I’m not interested.’ So for me, as quick as you can, get customers to use your service and more importantly, to actually pay you to use the service. Because then you know whether there’s a market there with a demand for something people are willing to pay for.

Andrew: I see. So because people were paying you, you knew you were onto something. And you want to know that quickly. And if they hadn’t paid you, you would have known this didn’t work. What did you build in the past that you had to scrap quickly because you saw that people weren’t paying or not interested?

John: Like everyone in the world, we’re probably not fast enough at scrapping things. But one example is, we built this first system and we knew in our minds, hey, we had 2,000 paying subscribers. Two big things that were standing out for us. First of all, if we can build it in 50 hours, there’s going to be competition and somebody else is going to build it.

Andrew: I’m sorry. I want to get into that, too.

John: Oh, sorry.

Andrew: But take me back to a previous business that you launched with your brother that you put out there and the market said, uh-uh, this is not the right one.

John: Oh. One of the things we built around the time that we started networks was a website called searchshot.com. And it was actually a search engine like Google.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

John: But instead of displaying text, we displayed little icons showing you the pictures of each website that you were about to go visit.

Andrew: I see.

John: And we were like, ‘That will be way more useful.’ And it turned out that Google now does that, ten years later. But ten years ago, we couldn’t find a single person in the entire world who had any interest. They didn’t want to use it, we had no revenue model, and it was cool technology but we quickly abandoned it because it just wasn’t going anywhere.

Andrew: How long did it take you to abandon it.

John: Well, we probably held on too long and kept dabbling for months and months and months and hoping for a breakthrough. But eventually just said, ‘Look, forget it, it’s just not going to work.’

Andrew: Yeah. I sometimes hang on way too long, too. It’s hard to say no.

John: It’s hard.

Andrew: OK. So you launch it, you get your feedback, and people are buying. In some ways it’s more of a headache that so many people are buying, because you have to fix it, you have to make sure they all are serviced properly. Or else I imagine Cory would go find another solution. So what did you do after you ended up with so many customers and so much revenue?

John: As I started to say before, there were two things we realized. One is there’s going to be competition. Because if you build in 50 hours someone is going to come do it. And number two, no offense to Cory and his group, but we were concerned about the long term viability of the specific product that they were selling.

Andrew: Of the liquid vitamins that he was selling.

John: Of the liquid vitamins.

Andrew: Why were you concerned?

John: What’s that?

Andrew: What got you so concerned?

John: I would say my gut business sense said that their product was a little over priced. I don’t want to say anything bad about them. But I was concerned about the long term viability of the business they were selling.

Andrew: OK.

John: Of the product they were selling.

Andrew: All right. Fair enough. So then . . .

John: So on step one, in terms of (?), we said we need to make a better service. Not just one that we built in 50 hours, but we have to add a lot of bells and whistles and things that make it more…better programming, better ingenuity, better writing, better copywriting. We have to build this out, so that the next two kids can’t come in and build this one weekend themselves in 25 hours. So, we spend a bunch of time working on those things.

Andrew: What are those things that you needed to build out? What did you have to change from version 1 to version 2?

John: Let’s see. Back then I think everything was just making it more robust, and making it more professional. For example, we had a contact list that would basically just list out your contacts. We said, we have to turn that into a real contact manager where someone can go in, read the notes about someone, understand where they live. We added a little section that shows the weather of where they live, so if you’re calling someone long distance you can have an engaging conversation with them because you knew right then and there, hey it’s raining, so I can tell Andrew “what’s it like? It’s raining where you are”.

So making the contact manager truly more robust, and then on the professional side, bringing in real designers, real copywriters. You know, a lot of the power back then were these emails going out, and so we wanted to have not just something that Paul and I wrote one weekend but to have something that was written in a compelling way by, and tested by, a copywriter.

Andrew: I see. How do you confine the right copywriter?

John: We’ve built the entire company virtually, so over the years we’ve used eLance and Odesk now working with people…I don’t remember 10 years ago exactly what was there. One of our greatest sources over the years of finding new staff has been from our own existing user base. We either work with a client who loves us or an end customer who, maybe they’re selling liquid vitamins but they fall in love with our service and want to do customer service with us. So about half of our team has come from people who were actually users to begin with, who we then got to know and made part of our team.

Andrew: All right. Then you did have a big obstacle. I said at the beginning that things weren’t always rosy, that there were some down periods…do you know the down period that I’m talking about?

John: About six months after we launched, that initial liquid vitamin system? And we were working hard to go find new customers and make it better. They went to basically zero users. I’m not sure they actually got to zero, but nowhere near 2,000 any more. My brother and I at this point were spending every waking second of our lives trying to build up the service, make it better and find some new, additional clients. My wife’s a CPA, so from the beginning, she was our accountant as well. She was with us, we’re making $50,000 a month, it’s all good, we’re going to take on the world and all this, and there was one month, sitting on our own house. I still remember how it felt – she walked in the door, she’d done the books that month, and she said “Guys, great job this month. You’ve worked every second of your entire lives, and we’ve lost $6,000″

Andrew: Wow.

John: We were net negative $6,000 that month. Obviously, we’d stored some away, but when you bet everything and you quit your job and you’ve got little babies that you’re supporting, it doesn’t feel good on any month where you go negative. You know, we weren’t using venture capital, we’re using our money, and there’s something about when you work 18 hour days and you lose money…you remember that moment!

Andrew: Yeah, that’s what stinks about entrepreneurship – that there is no guarantee. Not just long term, but you can work, as you say, long, long hours and still end up losing money. There’s no base. There’s no minimum wage for yourself.

John: People will probably laugh and say 2well, what’s $6,000?”, but it was that emotional element. That we’d put everything we had in and that trend was negative. The good news is we started going in the right direction after that.

Andrew: Why 6,000 negative? I’m looking at your expenses, at least the ones that I know up until now, roughly a hundred bucks, right, a month? That’s where you started. Where did the extra thousands of dollars come from as you were building up? What else did you have to spend money on?

John: As we built out the service and were planning for the future, we were taking that money and basically reinvesting in it.

Andrew: In what?

John: We started to do, for example, we had to hire a couple of people to do customer service, because literally in the beginning, we were making all that money, but every single time someone wanted to cancel an account or had a question or anything, they just emailed my brother directly. And if they called, he answered the phone. And so we had to bulk up our customer service. We had, at that point we’d started building some new systems to work with other companies. So we were building out those websites, paying copywriters, designers. We were really investing in the future, but still the net of it all was negative that one month.

Andrew: I see. I’m still at that point here with Mixer G. Whenever someone calls that customer service number that we have on the web, they end up on my cell phone and they’re more shocked than I am. I’m shocked my cell phone rings, and they’re shocked that it went to my cell phone and I’m the one who’s picking up the phone. Did you end up hiring people? Who’d you hire to answer your phone for you?

John: The first person that we hired to do customer service was actually one of our users. I don’t know if we… I sort of used that usual approach where you don’t want to ask your users, “Do you want a job doing customer service?” So we always phrase it, “Do you know someone who might be interested in doing customer service?”

Andrew: I see. That’s a good way of saying it, of asking someone without having them feel hurt if they’re not the right fit.

John: Right. Like, I don’t want to offend you, Andrew, and ask if you want to do our customer service ’cause you like answering your cell phone. But if I say, “do know anyone who’s interested?”

Andrew: Isn’t it amazing what we get hurt by? It’s like, I remember even in high school I’d walk through, I don’t know, Toys R Us or something… maybe not Toys R Us in high school. I’d walk through some grocery store, and someone would say, “Do you work here?” And I’d go, “No! I don’t!” like so insulted that they would say I work… meanwhile, I was working at a basement in one of my dad’s customers’ stores untangling hangers. That’s way worse than working in a supermarket, but if I’m there shopping at the supermarket and someone says, “Do you work here?” I get really upset. So that’s a good way to put it. Do you know someone who’s interested who’s interested in whatever?

John: So that was a good trick, and then another one of our first hires. I can’t even remember the exact order anymore, was a gentleman named David Roth, who today is our VP of business development. And David was one of the first users of the liquid vitamin service, and he was so in love with the idea that he could put people into that autoresponder and they would respond and sign up and get started with the business. David was like, “This is the greatest thing in the world. I don’t want to sell liquid vitamins. I want to take this technology and bring it to like every other sales guy on the planet.” And for 10 years, I mean… David loves my business more than I even love my business, ’cause on Day One, he was using the tools to sell as a sales guy rather than an outsider like me selling the service into the sales guys.

Andrew: But you know what? There’s a challenge in that because, if he’s someone who loves that product so passionately that he’s entrepreneurial and he wants that upside, especially if he’s selling liquid vitamins in a multilevel marketing format. He wants a huge upside and here he is coming to work for you where you can’t get the promises of instant riches and all that. How do you compensate someone like that?

John: We compensate… my view from Day 1 was, everyone that I can possibly compensate on a performance basis, that’s what I do. So for David, and I don’t know how public I want to get, we won’t disclose his actual income, but he gets a percentage of all of the accounts… if he sells an account and brings it in, or if he’s the account manager on the account, he gets paid per user per month just like I do.

And we actually invented this thing for our company called Networks Points where we measure on a monthly basis, not the net revenue to the company, but it’s almost a model of the net revenue, so that you can see for any particular account or system or line of business that we’re doing, exactly how many points it’s worth on a monthly basis. And then I can reward my team either directly or indirectly. You know, “Hey, maybe you, Andrew, you’re a great promoter, you get two cents per Networks point per month.”

And the great thing for me is, A) people are incented. I mean, David wants to grow his revenue, and if he brings in great big accounts, great, he can make a lot of money. There was some other point to that. But not only can he do that, but also on the rare terms when we do go down, I don’t have to have some sort of hard conversation with David about how he’s going to make less money. He just literally looks at the sales points, and when we’re doing good and growing, he makes more, and unfortunately when things go down he makes less, and all my costs go like that rather than having a whole lot of fixed costs with a bunch of employees in cubicles who aren’t incented and trying to reach the same goal.

Andrew: All right, speaking of highs and lows, you had that low, you lost $6000. What do you do to come out from that?

John: As I said, we were reinvesting at that moment, trying to get ready to build other systems. And we built two out of the gate. The first one was with a company called Tahitian Noni International. They were, they still are a relatively large network marketing company. And at that point our benchmark was, like, we’re going to get 2000 users on anything. And Tahitian Noni was way bigger than the liquid nutritional vitamin company. So we poured all this effort into making their system great, didn’t launch it real quick.

And I think they put on a couple hundred users, which is a nice account, but we were completely dejected because we thought 2000 was the baseline, and so everything would be bigger than that from that point forward. And when they put on a couple hundred, it was pretty eye opening for us. But still, our goal was let’s diversify, let’s go get accounts, the more 500, 1000, 2000, even 100 user accounts that we can put on the books, the more users we’ll have and the business will grow. One other…

Andrew: What did you have to change in your software or business model to go from creating sites for one company’s sales people to creating sites for multiple companies’ sales people?

John: The first time we built it, obviously all the code was just all around the liquid nutritional vitamin company. And part of what we did is built this platform that we actually called Leap Box, still around today. It was sort of this idea that the leap box would sit in the center, and we could build individual modules or systems for each different company we were working with. But 80% or 90% of the code would remain exactly the same. So they’d be using the same contact manager, the same customer service buttons, the things that can remain the same from group to group. But we could skin it as we go with all these little enhancements.

Andrew: You and I met through Zack of Conversion Voodoo, conversionvoodoo.com. Phenomenal company, and they know all about increasing conversions obviously. Back then, you were still trying to figure out conversions, that if you can get more conversions for your clients’ clients, then you can win over more of their business. What did you learn in the early days? Teach us what you, when you were just getting started, learned, so that some of us in the audience who are just getting started can learn too.

John: I think at the very beginning, one of the things we measured the most was all around the email.

Andrew: Like, whether you collect email or not, or how effective email was?

John: More about how effective the emails were. And so looking at emails and even subject lines 10 years ago and really trying to look at, when this email goes out and promotes something, what is the response that we get to that specific one? And what can we do with email headlines and what impact do they have? And nowadays should it be an HTML email versus a text based email? We dug into that stuff at the beginning. And the tools weren’t all that sophisticated. We would just…

Andrew: The ideas were. Do you remember what you changed about the headline? Do you remember what worked for you about the body? Was it a specific call to action that shocked you that it worked? Was it placement of different elements that worked?

John: One big thing I learned early on was that you need to be a scientist and not an artist, because we’d have no idea when we did a head to head test. I literally to this day still have no idea what’s necessarily going to work or not work. I mean, I can rely on my experience a little more than I could then. But we’d try good head to head headlines, and the one that seemed pathetic would be the one that outpolled. And so you try to get your ego out of it and really just scientifically measure A versus B.

Andrew: So how do you do that, without… Do you take a small portion of your customer’s audience and you test on them? What’s your system?

John: Yeah, I mean, today we use a system called Blocks. It’s become a little bit more sophisticated. But basically, we can take any two A B tests, real simple. I mean, there’s people that do all this multivariable testing and do a thousand different things at once. And we’ve always tried to keep things pretty simple, which is here’s the baseline. Now let’s throw 10% of the traffic at, you know, this is A, this is B, let’s peel off 10%, make one little change, see whether it’s better or worse, and then just keep doing all those different changes till you optimize it.

And that’s what Zack and Conversion Voodoo, they’re absolute masters at that stuff. But part of it was Zack starting with us years ago just doing real simple little, you know, is it better to say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy holidays”? And he runs that blog post every year. He’s been doing it for like 6 years all based on this one little test. Is it better to say “Happy New Year,” “Merry Christmas,” “Happy holidays.” And there’s like a triple difference in those different headlines with the content the same. And how would you ever guess that?

Andrew: What else do I want to know? Other tactics that you use to help your people sell more. Drip marketing was working for you guys. Today, frankly I don’t even think I have a drip… I know I don’t have a drip marketing campaign on Mixergy. Shame on me, I should. But you had it even back then 10 years ago. What else did you have that were key marketing elements that we can learn from?

John: I think… I mentioned this before, but strategically was this idea of “click and mortar,” so that we were trying to find concepts where we’d leverage the technology with the human relationships. And so, it sounds sort of silly, but over time, you know, you were bagging on fax machines. We built up a service called Fax Burner which allows people to get a fax and turn it into a PDF instead of going to their home and buying a fax machine. There’s actually, I think, sadly one over there still. But just these tools and concepts. And one of my mentors has always said, “You got to be doing something that’s either going to help people save money or make money.” And so almost everything that we try to add to the system is either, instantly, how does this save me money so I want to use it? Or, how does it help me build my business, like the Autoresponder campaigns, like online movies.

One of the other creative things we did just came to my mind, is early on, we wanted to create really compelling websites that would sell the concept of you know, joining a network marketing company or buying a specific product. And text was out there, but text was getting old, and people didn’t have high enough quality video yet so they could do a good streaming experience, so we started building these little cartoon movies, where we’d have an animator draw a really nice cartoon with a beautiful voiceover that would promote something.

And the results were shocking for a while, because it sort of bridged between when text worked and now when video works, but we had these little, you know like the mini little John Rydell that would run out under the screen. And he’d have a pretend little PowerPoint there and he’d talk people through it. And it was wonderful fun, and we could compress them down so they worked with people who were still using a dialup modem at the time, which not that long ago is what people were using. It was a cool concept.

Andrew: Right. I could never go back to those days. How did you get other network marketing companies as clients? How did you get them on board? What was your process?

John: Our main… it’s not that hard to find lists of network marketing companies. One of the things we’ve always done is have a network of people that tell us what companies are doing well right now, what leaders are having success, and so building up direct relationships with them. But our sales pitch, if you will, to a leader is, we can come in and we can build a tool that’ll help your entire sales team be more effective, right? So we’ll customize it for your team, we’ll help them be more successful at whatever they want to sell. And quite honestly, we will revenue share back to the company that we’re working with, so they get a set of distributors that are more effective, and we’re doing all the work and putting some money back in their pocket at the same time. So our best clients are more like partnerships where we’re working together to generate revenue and to help their sales guys succeed.

Andrew: So at the top of the interview, I introduced you as the guy who built the 10 million dollar business. And I know it’s 10 million because Zack told me via email when he introduced me to you. I get a lot of my guests through past guests like Zack, that’s why I keep mentioning Zack. Ten million I feel is such a big number that a lot of people in the audience there, just it goes in their heads and they don’t really process it. Can you take us to a more emotionally connected number? The first million. Do you remember, what was it like to earn that first million?

John: Hmm. A more emotionally connected number.

Andrew: It wasn’t a million?

John: Yeah.

Andrew: I have a good story. I live here in a town called LaDera Ranch. I’m working from my home office right now. When we moved to La Dera Ranch initially, when we started the business, we downsized into a smaller home, I worked in a little bedroom, it didn’t look pretty like that behind me, and one night, they were building these sort of this plain community so they’re always building these new bottle homes and stuff.

And one night right at the beginning they opened this new street called Foliate [sp] in Sedona and my wife and I went there sort of in this visioning, dreaming experience, maybe we just wanted to see the new homes. I walked in this model home, walked in the front door and down the hallway and looked in this actual office that I’m sitting in today and I was like “I have to.” “I have to have the success so that instead of working out of this little bedroom I can walk down the hallway into this big, beautiful, giant big windows.” I’m like ” I’ve got to live there.”

Years went by and they sort of built those models and built some other ones and we actually ended up coming back and I don’t live in that exact house, but I live in a replica of it that’s 200 yards away, literally, from the very first home that I went in. So perhaps that makes it more real. It’s not a billion dollar mansion, but my vision was to sit in this seat, in this desk, in this office and look out that window and I made it come true.

Andrew: Wow. Did you have a picture of it around the office to keep yourself going or just have it in your mind?

John: I actually had an electronic version. I didn’t use it as my screensaver but I admit that I looked at it periodically…

Andrew: Uh huh.

John: …and I said I’ve got to go sit in that office. I’ve got to go work there.

Andrew: So you launched Networks in 2002. 2007 you launched Phone Burner. I think it was soon after you launched Fax Burner and now Meeting Burner. Tell me about Phone Burner. Why did you decide to launch a new product and why Phone Burner?

John: Phone Burner, the concept basically is if you are a independent sales person, small business owner, you need to make a lot of outbound calls. That tends to be a tedious process, the phone is scary to people, they don’t want to do it, so we wanted to bridge the best of telecom with the best of internet, and give people a simple easy way for them to put on a headset and not do the auto-dialing where you get a call at home at night and you get that two second pause and you know there’s going to be a foreign telemarketer on the phone.

Andrew: Right.

John: We wanted to give people real power and that’s what Phone Burner was all about and still is today, is connecting sort of a list of contacts with a list of phone calls you need to make and make it fun and easy rather than the burden of picking up a phone over and over again.

Andrew: And selling essentially to the same clients they were using networks. Is that right?

John: Yes. Again it started with our existing user base and knowing, hey we understand this market. This is something that we know they do a lot of. Remember that David Roth talked about how many people used to call and how could we build something that a more enjoyable experience? The cool thing about Phone Burner is because it’s viral, I get stories all the time from dry cleaners and lawyers and different sort of small business owners who have heard about Phone Burner even though they aren’t in our target market and they love it and they use it and are excited to use it every day.

Andrew: How is it viral? How do you promote yourself in a system that makes phone calls on your customer’s behalf? It’s interesting now that I mention that it was viral but I think what it is is that launching out of network marketing, that business, those people tended to tell other people about the tools they’re in, the business they’re in they’re always promoting it and so we always sort of get these shoots breaking out of network marketing where you know where maybe someone’s spouse is working an herbal life business but the husband is an attorney and so they get exposed to the service that way.

John: Fax burner. By the way, Phone Burner is that profitable yet?

Andrew: Phone Burner has been around for years and yes it’s profitable.

John: Fax Burner next. Why did you decide to take on the fax machine?

Andrew: Same old thing, this was more in the genre of not helping people make money but helping them save money and axing sucks. No one wants to send a fax. I swear it’s even gotten worse in reliability than it was years ago with all the digital phone lines and it started with our own users. They did not want to go get one more phone line and pay AT&T or their local provider. In view of all that I wish I didn’t have a fax machine. But basically, they wanted us to manage the number, and if a fax came in we grabbed it, we turned it into a PDF, sent it off to them via email. That’s how people like to work today. And so we actually turned Fax Burner into a mobile app. So it’s available. That’s actually where most people get it, is off of the Apple store. It’s completely free. We give it away.

Andrew: If I understand you right, I can take this document here, I just take a picture of it with my iPhone, and then fax it out and pay paper fax. If I’m right?

John: With Fax Burner, I think we let you send a couple completely free. Most people use it predominantly for inbound faxing. Because . . .

Andrew: If they need a number to get a fax.

John: If they actually send it. Go ahead.

Andrew: Sorry, you go ahead.

John: No, I was just going to say most of it is for inbound faxing. But yeah, absolutely, you take a picture of a couple different things, pick who you want to send it to, and off it goes.

Andrew: How can you tell which businesses to launch? I understand Phone Burner looks like a great idea, especially now that it’s profitable. Fax Burner does. How do you figure out which new product to launch and which one is going to fit well with your business?

John: Part of it is gut, but part of it is asking and surveying existing customers, something that we try to do before we ever launch anything. Which is, ‘Hey, we’re thinking about building x, y or z.’ Whether it’s a new function, whether it’s an addition to an existing service, whether it’s a whole new paid model. Asking them which ones they like the most and then, more importantly, which one would they actually be willing to pay something for. Because there’s often different answers, right? Sure, I’d love to have Meeting Burner if it was completely free. You know? But what are you willing to pay for. So surveying people.

And part of it is just hearing our customers. I mean, with Meeting Burner, I don’t read a lot of the customer service questions, but things get escalated up to me. And I was just hearing over and over and over how bad people’s experience was with the online meeting services that we were bundling. And it’s almost insulting to spend 100 grand and have people be unhappy. That doesn’t feel good.

Andrew: Noah Kagan, when he heard about your business here with Meeting Burner, apparently he said it was boring.

John: Yes.

Andrew: When did he say it was boring? Why would you and Noah talk?

John: Zack was out to lunch with him, is where that actual initial discussion came from.

Andrew: I see.

John: And Zack was down there trying to promote and get Noah excited and this and that. And Noah was like, ‘Online meetings? No one wants to go to a meeting. No one wants to do an online meeting. Why don’t you do something cool and sexy and fun?’ And we’re like, part of it is business. We had an existing user group of business owners who don’t necessarily want some new toy to play with on their iPhone. They want something that practically helps them in their daily life to either save money or make money. And so people can call it boring, but it’s $5 billion a year already being spent on online meetings. And so call it what you want. I call it opportunity.

Andrew: When you guys blogged about it, I think Zack told me you got tens of thousands, 20,000 unique hits to that post. I remember looking at it, because I saw it on Hacker news. Did Noah ever reach out to you afterwards after he said that? Was he upset, was he excited that you guys pointed out the value of the business?

John: [laughs] He was excited and we’ve done some work together now. I’m not sure he wants to admit it but he’s promoted Meeting Burner [laughs].

Andrew: He has it on the site. Right, he did. He had you guys as an (?) deal, right?

John: We haven’t done it as a deal because we don’t actually have any paid model today.

Andrew: Oh, is that right? OK.

John: So today we’re still in beta testing and we’re not launching publicly until February 7th. So Noah’s revenue model is predicated upon us having revenue.

Andrew: Right. He wants you to sell something and then . . .

John: Unlike you, he wants money [laughs].

Andrew: [laughs] That’s right. I do get a lot of emails from people who say, ‘You should interview me, I’ll give you a good cut of the sales I’ll make because I’m a good salesman. I can tell good stories.’ What else? What else do I want to know? Here’s one issue that I know that other companies who have done meetings using Flash have had. Right now you and I don’t have earphones. If you use Flash, Flash doesn’t have the noise canceling ability that Skype, which we’re using right now, has. Which means that the person either has to wear earphones or get a special mic. What do you feel about that, what have you noticed?

John: So far, with our meeting platform we use, we allow people to dial into a conference bridge, which is still how the majority of people do it, or use Skype to get in, or the host can simply use an experience like we have going here and everyone can listen. We’re working on technology right now, because everything we built is modern and it’s sort of cool (?) technology that lives in the cloud, we’re going to be able to use that same phone bridge technology that will take a Skype caller, a flash based user, as well as a conference call person, and that core technology there on the server side is what does all that noise canceling and echo management and all of that. It’s not easy to do, but it’s the same technology today that lets us do the phone bridging, putting it all together. So it’s good stuff and we got real smart telecom people figuring it out right now.

Andrew: All right. I’m kicking myself for not trying this. I’m clearly very passionate. I have tried it, but not tried it enough and you’re right. Actually, as long as you give people the ability to use Skype, then the noise canceling thing isn’t an issue. Then if they’re happy using their computers to talk instead of using phones then that works for them too. All right.

But I created an account but I haven’t dug in deep enough and I’m surprised because I’m so into it. You know why I don’t? Because I always need to have somebody else that will be on the other end of the experiment with me and will be very patient because I love playing around. Like look at this. Apparently Apple has some kind of sharpening tool that I’m using right now. Look, this is what my web cam would ordinarily look like. Like that.

John: Huh.

Andrew: This is what it’s always looked like. I could add a sharpening tool to it and look at that. That’s pretty freaking good, right?

John: I like it.

Andrew: Play with it. Oh this just looks weird.

John: That looks like instagrams.

Andrew: Yeah, I have an instagram feature on here too. Let’s take it back to .4. So yeah, I do obviously love playing with this stuff. It works well, right?

John: Yeah, it looks great.

Andrew: You could almost read the text on the back here. Let’s do this for people who are reading or doing something else in the background while watching, if they want to jump in. This is what it’s like with zero, and this is what it’s like with the level that I’ve picked here. And I’ll keep testing different software because we do courses now with video and I want to make sure that everyone looks good, that we can share screens.

All right, let me do a quick plug here and show another tool that we’ve been using for courses and then I want to ask you one big, very important question that anyone who’s watched past interviews will be happy that I asked you.

John: OK.

Andrew: All right, here’s what I want to try to do. This is a first here on Mixergy. Let’s see if we can make it work. Oh, OK. Great. Now, come on. Almost. Hang on. OK, wait. It launched. Let’s get rid of this. Oh, here we go. This is it. This is my spare monitor. So now on my second monitor, I can bring up. This is how Ian and his friends down under are watching Mixergy. Can you even hear it?

John: I can’t hear it.

Andrew: Oh, there. Like watching it. I dig that they’re watching. There he is. They’re watching on the computer screen. That’s, by the way, why I decided that. Let’s bring it back to zero. Got to learn here. There we go. I’ve got to now sharpen my video because I see that they’re watching on this big computer screen. I want to make sure I look good. Otherwise, I start to get really self-conscious.

One of the reasons why I did that is because I wanted to test the new technology for courses. The other reason is that I wanted to say what Ian told me when he sent me that video. He said ‘I’m a premium member and my friends and I were able to go back and listen to past interviews and programs with people like Kevin Hale, whose interview is one of my favorites in terms of building company culture and how to do it when you’re working remotely.’ So what he’s saying is, he’s getting to put the courses and the interviews up on a big screen and he and his co-founders and friends get to watch it and they get to learn from successful entrepreneurs how they built their businesses.

So in addition to interviews like this, anyone who signs up for Mixergy Premium gets access to courses where past guests come on, they turn on their computer screens using meeting software, that’s why I’m so excited about it, and they say this is how you build up traffic to your site. Or they turn on their computer screen and they say look, I’m going to show you how I take these users and turn them into customers.

We had the guy from (?), Nathan turn on his computer and say this is how you get customers from Facebook and he just walked everyone through the process and then he put his Excel spreadsheet on the screen and he said this is what people’s reactions were. He had to hide the email addressed within the thing but it was an original Excel spreadsheet. He says look, this is how I sell.

This is how I get these guys to go from enthusiasm to customers to etc. And all that’s available if you’re a premium member. You just go to Mixergy.com/premium. And if you’re not I hope you join us and become a member so you can get access to all these courses. All right. So here’s the thing that I’m wondering, Zack’s been on here. He had these great, great ideas for increasing conversions. What has Zack done for you? Tell me one of the most powerful conversion tactics that Zack implemented on one of your businesses.

John: The number one thing Zack has done.

Andrew: Yeah, let’s blow people’s mind. I think he’s the one who said that, he recognized that if you have a cup of coffee on an envelope it looks authentic. You know, like if you have that little ring. So he found a way to get every, or maybe someone else found a way, to get every letter that went out and every direct mail piece that went out to have that brown ring that looks like it’s a coffee stain so that people would be more likely to open the envelope. That’s the way that he thinks. How has he used that thought process to help your businesses get more conversions?

John: Wow. You’d think I’d have the perfect one thing and so I’m going to dodge the question for a minute and hope that I come up with.

Andrew: OK. I’m putting you on the spot.

John: But part of it is this thing that Zack and I always talk about, which is our “Find 7 Things That You Can Do 10% Better” and you double your business. So, it sounds corny at first, but if you think about it, you take, like, so there’s less magic and more of the grunt work of like, OK, move the coffee cup, use a blonde woman instead of a dark hair woman, say Merry Christmas instead of Happy New Year. Like, take all those little tiny things, you find 7 of them and geometrically progress it and literally makes your business double. So that’s one of the things that Zack and I talk about all the time and so maybe that’s why I’m not as excited as, like, there’s not the magic doubler. At this point, maybe we’ve been doing it so long like I just got to keep inching our way through this thing and just gutting our way through it. And I wish I could come up with just that magic, magic doubler but the truth is in our business and maybe this is what the people, maybe they don’t want to hear it but it’s the truth, is find 7 things and do them 10% better and that’s as good as one giant killer [??] and all of us can find 7 little things to do a little bit better.

Andrew: That is inspiring. Ian Dooley of Workingsoftware.com.au, the guy who was on the screen there. Let me know how helpful that is. Everyone else, give me feedback on this interview. And if you want to try, if they want to try MeetingBurner how do they do it. If they want to try this software that I’ve been talking about.

John: Up until February 7th we’re still in Beta so it’s completely free. We just comp you an account. So just go to MeetingBurner.com, you don’t have to put Andrew’s special link because he’s not getting paid. Just go to MeetingBurner.com and if anyone who signs up before February 7th, we’re sort of, we want to be good to all of our Beta testers who have been with us for the last year, so you can still sneak your way in and we’ll grandfather you into an account. We’ll grandfather you into an account that’s better than what other people have ongoing even after February 7th. Love to have you as one of our users.

Andrew: Oh, wow, so there really is an advantage to joining and trying it out early, in addition to getting it free they’ll also have better pricing and better relationship with the company going forward.

John: Absolutely.

Andrew: In the comments, if anyone’s listening all this way and wants to experiment with me with MeetingBurner, can you please just say yes in the comments, I’ll see your email address and it won’t be public. I want to try this with someone in the audience. Someone who will let me play with all the different levers and see what works. Alright, so, John, thank you for doing this interview with me. It’s great to hear your story. Congratulations on all the success with networks online and all the Burner companies including and especially the new one, MeetingBurner. And Zack, thank you for making this introduction, this great interview.

John: Thanks Andrew, do we have 30 more seconds to make fun of Zack real quick?

Andrew: Yeah.

John: Because this will be good.

Andrew: I actually have a lot of respect for Zack. I don’t have the kind of relationship that you do. I’m not sure that I’m in a position to make fun of the guy.

John: No, well, you can always cut this out at the end, right?

Andrew: No, we can’t cut it out. But go ahead, it seems like he has a good sense of humor.

John: No, you’ll like this. You’ll like it and Zack will harass me for the rest of my life and there’s probably actually some business in here, but the way I met Zack, I was living in Santa Barbara, he was a student at UCSB. I needed an assistant to help me way at the beginning, answer some emails and things before we even started networks. I put an ad out in the Daily Nexus, the Santa Barbara paper, the UCSB paper looking for basically a secretary and Zack applied. And so two rules there, Zack didn’t want to be my secretary, he was just looking for cool entrepreneurs to meet and I, as the person looking for someone, was like, whose this kid, this guys amazing and so ten years later, we’ve done tens of millions of dollars of business together because Zack answered an ad to be my secretary when he was still at UCSB.

Andrew: And he wasn’t looking to be a secretary, that’s just his way of meeting entrepreneurs?

John: He was like, this sounds interesting. I wonder what this guy’s doing. Applied for the job, put this whole entrepreneurial resume together, and basically said call me. Let’s get together. And then we did, and the rest is history.

Andrew: What do you do with him, to stay in touch with this guy who’s obviously not going to fill the role of a secretary?

John: I was so confused looking at his resume. I was like, wow, he’s like 20 years old or 22 years old. I don’t remember how old he was at the time. But I was like, I got to meet this guy. And so, I said let’s go out and meet at UCSB, we’ll have a burrito together. Ten years later, when we’re together for lunch we go have a burrito together.

Andrew: That’s awesome. I’m glad you told that story. I didn’t realize that.

John: That’s how it all started and it’s been a great relationship for both of us. I’m glad he introduced us to one another.

John: And you know what, I’ve got to tell you, I think Zack in his interview here on Mixergy made a mistake. The mistake is this, I think he said that he works on commission, that he doesn’t take a price that he just takes a percentage of the lift that he gets you. Which in many people’s minds, even people I believe, I don’t know the specific reaction he got, I believe based on the feedback I heard, a lot of people said, I have a hundred orders a year, if he can get me to a thousand, and my business deserves to be a thousand, then I’ll give him share of it.

He must have gotten pelted with a lot of those offers instead of the high quality guys like you who have high revenue, want to increase a little bit and share the results with him. That’s my sense when I think about the way he told his business and when I think about the way other people talk about it, I say, oh I shouldn’t have let him just leave that out there.

John: Zack’s doing just fine in his business, but if you want to take a business lesson out of that, I think that Zack and a lot of us say no to a lot of potential clients. Where it’s true, Zack could make a lot of money helping someone go from tens of units to a thousand units, and make that margin, but the reality is, Zack can make more money helping someone go from a million units to 1.1.

Andrew: Right.

John: Million units. So, you know, all of us in life, it’s real hard as an entrepreneur because I get people all the time that are like, John, build me a system. I need it for my business, I need one for this. And, I’m like, as much as you want to take that business in, because you built it, and you want to take those customers, you still have to be smart and profitable, and find the right ones.

Andrew: Yeah. Speaking of being smart, I should say, anything that I’ve said earlier about other online webinar and software, my own personal experience, I don’t know if that’s universally true, they all might be great angels. I don’t know. I was ranting there for a moment, I don’t want any hassles from them. I hope I get to interview them in the future.

John: You do, too. We’ll take them.

Andrew: It’s great meeting you. Thank you all for watching. Bye.

John: Thanks, Andrew.

Who should we feature on Mixergy? Let us know who you think would make a great interviewee.

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