Andrew: Three messages before we get started. If you’re a tech entrepreneur, don’t you have unique legal needs that the average lawyer can’t help you with? That’s why you need Scott Edward Walker of Walker Corporate Law. If you read his articles on Venture Beat, you know he can help you with issues like raising money, issuing stock options, or even deciding whether to form a corporation. Scott Edward Walker is the entrepreneur’s lawyer. See him at walkercorporatelaw.com.
Do you remember when I interviewed Sarah Sutton Fell about how thousands of people pay for her job site? Look at the biggest point that she made. She said she has the phone number on every page of her site, because, and here’s a stat, 95% of the people who call end up buying. Most people don’t call her, but seeing a real number increases their confidence in her and they buy. So try this. Go to grasshopper.com and get a phone number that will make your company sound professional. Add it to your site and see what happens. Grasshopper.com.
Remember Patrick Buckley, who I interviewed? He came up with an idea for an iPad case. He built a store to sell it and in a few months, he generated about $1,000,000 in sales. The platform he worked is Shopify. If you have an idea to sell anything, sell up your store on shopify.com, because Shopify stores are designed to increase sales. Plus, Shopify makes it easy to set up a beautiful store and manage it. Shopify.com. Here’s the program.
Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. And you know what this is, this is the place where entrepreneurs come to tell you how they built their businesses. They come to share with you some of their outrageous stories. Hopefully we’ll get some of them here in this interview. Basically what they’re doing is telling you how they did it so you can go out there and do it too. Hopefully, you’ll be generous too and come back and do an interview like today’s guest. Tell us how you did it so they can follow in your footsteps. Big question for this interview is, how does an entrepreneur generate over a quarter million dollars in revenue within his first year by helping businesses with their Facebook strategy. Nathan Latka is the founder Lujure.com, which helps business create custom fan pages in under 30 seconds. Nathan, I talked really quickly in the intro because I’m really excited to have you on here. Welcome.
Nathan: Glad to be here, Andrew. Feels like home.
Andrew: I understated your revenue. We’re going to get to that in a moment. I understated your revenue though. First quarter million. You did more than that. What did you do last year, your first year in business?
Nathan: We did just over $430,000.
Andrew: $430,000 in revenue. Why are you sharing this with us? Why are you coming on here and being this open?
Nathan: You know, it comes down to the fact that I remember about 18 months ago, when I lost my job at a recreation center. I thought that I needed to start a company somehow, I had no job. So, I started researching things on line. This crazy guy, who had some gift card businesses, popped up in Google search. I’m wondering what’s this guy up to? Mixergy? I started watching interviews religiously. I set aside an hour a day to actually act on those. It turned into what it is today. The reason I’m sharing it is because you’ve done so much, and the guests you’ve had have done so much for me. I’m just trying to give back.
Andrew: Wow. I’m really glad. First of all, I’ve talked to you via email over the past few months. I realized you were on to something. I didn’t realize how big it was until you and I had a conversation. It’s amazing. I can’t wait for people to hear your story.
Nathan: It’s definitely not traditional. I know if folks watch until the end, they’ll understand why.
Andrew: Alright, I’m going to make a note to make sure we find the whole story out including this nontraditional part. Are you talking about how you did a comb over to attract cougars? We’ll find out about that. How you got a customer off Twitter? Is that what you mean by unconventional? We’ll find out about that. We’ll find out how you auctioned yourself off on Facebook and what your mom thought about it. Let’s get down to what the product really is. In fact, I think I’ve got a way of showing your website on the screen. Will this do it? There’s your web site, right?
Nathan: Yup.
Andrew: What is this web site? What is this business?
Nathan: Lujure is a drag and drop system to help you guys put together Facebook fan pages in under 30 seconds. You don’t need to know coding. You don’t need to know design.
Andrew: Who is the typical customer?
Nathan: The typical customer. A great example is a guy named Nezzy Carter, who used to work in a marketing firm. He quit and started his own company and needed a fan page. He builds them for himself, and he also builds them for other people.
Andrew: And what do you do with fan pages that the average person can’t do on his own by just creating a Facebook Fan Page.
Nathan: You can set up a Fan page, no problem, through Facebook, but when you actually start talking about strategies of making money on the Fan page, generating leads, traffic and revenue, it’s absolutely imperative that you set up things like email capture forms on the page, videos, share buttons. There’s a mobile strategy. That’s kind of what our company helps you do.
Andrew: What are you charging for this?
Nathan: We call it the free 3-3-3 plan. Free, $30.00 a month, $300.00 a month or $3,000.00 a month.
Andrew: OK. Those are the different plans that you have?
Nathan: You got it.
Andrew: Everywhere from free to, how much?
Nathan: Free to $3,000.00
Andrew: Free to $3,000.00 a month. All right. Let’s go back in time. December 2010 is when the business launched?
Nathan: You got it.
Andrew: Where did the original idea come from?
Nathan: I lost my job at a tennis recreation center, and it was, like, let me start a company. I was on Facebook as a college student, so I said, ‘What the heck. Let me figure out how to make a business out of this.’ So I had my boss at the recreation center, I was teaching tennis, I asked him if he was going to fire me to fire me publicly instead of me quitting, because I knew I could generate press about that. Little college student loses job, you know, I could build PR around that. So I called up some outlets, got an article, and I really wanted the cover article. I couldn’t get the cover, so what I did is I bought like 50 of the newspapers and I rearranged them, so I put my story on the outside, so it looked like I had the cover, and I walked in and started pitching social media consulting just randomly, it was four days before Christmas, to these businesses. They’d immediately ask, ‘You’re a college student. What do you know about social media?’ And I would do one of these, so if, Andrew, I was pitching you, I was making eye contact with you, I’d look down at the paper to pull your eyes toward the paper. And they’d say, ‘Oh! You’re on the front page of the paper.’ And I’d say, ‘Heck yes!’ And then they’d read about it. And they’d say, ‘Wow!’ So I immediately got credibility that way.
Andrew: You got him to fire you publicly. What about that says you are a guy who knows anything about social media?
Nathan: Yes. The great thing was, is that I was working in a recreation center, I had nothing to do with social media, so if I got publicly fired from a recreation center, if I’m pitching social media to someone, they’re not going to think, ‘Oh, he’s bad quality because he got fired.’ I could have just left, but I really wanted him to fire me publicly, so I could get a story out of it.
Andrew: So it’s getting a story, and getting your name out, because of this thing that for many people would be embarrassing, or an insignificant moment in their lives, because you were able to get some traction with it, and get people to talk about it, you were able to say to these businesses, ‘I can get you talked about also.’
Nathan: Exactly.
Andrew: OK. Ari, who did research on you, told me that from January 2010 to April 2010 you founded something called ‘The Social Consultant’ or you were a Social Consultant. We can’t really figure this out. Facebook Fan Page Consultation, Professional Social Media Branding and Imaging, this is while you were still working for this other guy?
Nathan: This was after I lost that job. What happened was I started thinking about a company called the Social Tee, where it would be funny ways to wear a tee shirt to market you product. I’d sell it to chicks here at school that on their chests it would say ‘You’d tweak these,’ or something. Then on the back it would say at (@) whatever their name was. When you’re walking around at a party, people could follow you on twitter if they want to catch up with you later, just seeing your shirt. I remember living in this cold, brick dorm room, Barringer [SP] here at Virginia Tech, and there was no way I could do this, because I was literally sleeping on inventory. So I thought, ‘I’m getting out of this tee shirt business. It’s horrible, but it was [??] tee. After that I launched a company called ‘The Social Consultant’ which took, basically, the tee shirt services and moved them to online, so I could do them all from my dorm room. What I did was I charged $800 a month, and I would go in and post an update every day to these fan pages, or twitter things, and I got to about five or six clients, and Andrew, I tell you what, it was draining. I would hate having to wake up in the morning. I’d get out of bed, brush my teeth, and then I’d have to go update all these profiles. It just sucked. So I saw Tim Ferriss’ interview that you did at that point, and said ‘I have to think about outsourcing something.’ I said, ‘Let me try outsourcing these updates. I’ll get them and then outsource.’ Long story short, that failed, so I started a company called the Fan Page Factory, and this is where the seedlings of what Le Jour started to build.
I was on a break from college, and said, ‘Man,’ and I was drinking a Red Bull, actually. I’ll never forget it. I was wearing Christmas boxers, drinking Red Bull in my room, and I thought, ‘Let me just hustle and sell a Fan Page. I don’t know how to make them, but let me just try it.’ So I searched ‘Executive’ in search, because I knew if I did that people who called themselves an executive I could pitch it and say, ‘hey, you’re not really an executive unless you have a custom banner.’ I kind of changed their reality. I’ll never forget it, her name was Carrie Wilkerson, we’re good friends now and she turns out to be the most giving person I’ve ever known.
I called her, pitched this to her, built her a page, she used it, and then she bragged about it to all of her people when she spoke. I got a lot more business and that’s how Fan Page Factory started.
Andrew: I see. So you find her on Facebook, you convince her that she’s not really an executive unless she has a polished looking fan page, you create the fan page for her, and then you say, ‘I’m going to do this for other people.’
Nathan: Exactly.
Andrew: That became the business that that you kept on going with until you launched Lujure.
Nathan: Exactly.
Andrew: OK. All right. Why do you think that outsourcing management of other people’s Facebook pages and Twitter accounts didn’t work? It seems like a nice idea, maybe not the big hit, but one that could still do well and bring in enough revenue while you figured out what the big hit was. Why didn’t it work out well?
Nathan: Because posting an update isn’t something that has to be automatic. You have to attach a brand personality or an emotion to it. That person has to be an ambassador. They have to speak their own language.
I saw you just interviewed Maury Smith. She’s known for turquoise and cheers and this bubbly personality. She couldn’t call up someone at [??] and say, ‘hey, copy my personality. Put cheers at the end of all my messages and call it a brand update.’ It just doesn’t work. You had to be closer of a touch point than just outsourcing it.
Andrew: I see. That makes a lot of sense. That’s too bad, by the way. I’d like somebody else to take over my whole Mixergy and Andrew Warner Facebook presence so I don’t have to be on it as much.
Nathan: Yes, I can understand. That’s a pain point for a lot of folks.
Andrew: All right. Now you found something that works. It’s still pretty labor intensive because you have to go and find clients because you have to create these Facebook pages because, frankly, these small projects end up getting you a lot of headaches from customers who want a tweak here and an adjustment there and they don’t understand the limitations of Facebook.
How do you make this scale? What do you do next?
Nathan: This is a great question, and it’s what I had the most fun with. When I started launching these tabs that I had customized for people I was charging $3. In the span of when I launched it over three hours I got overwhelmed with orders so I upped it to $700.
Andrew: $3? And what you’re doing is you’re creating that tab on the Facebook page on the left margin there’s a tab that says, ‘wall, photos,’ whatever the hell. You’re creating a tab for them and you’re making that the start page for them.
Nathan: You’ve got it.
Andrew: And you’re charging $3 for that and you’re doing it manually?
Nathan: Exactly. Interesting story here. I was an architect major at Tech, so I was in that. I knew nothing about coding. What I did to teach myself is I Googled and finally learned that Facebook had it’s own thing called FBML and that’s what you had to use to create these tabs.
I will never forget watching at least 100 hours of Youtube videos of this little Chinese man who uploaded videos of himself teaching FBML. I’m sitting there with Dreamweaver on one side and Facebook on the other trying to learn it. I got to a point where I was dangerous enough where I knew design and I knew the code. I used an application and could pump these pages out.
That’s how it worked. It was only me at that point from my dorm room. We did about $73,000 in Fan Page Factory over six months, so it really did take off.
Andrew: Even when you’re charging $3, let’s step into how you found your customers. When you’re charging $3, how does anyone find you?
Nathan: It all started with Carrie Wilkerson. What ended up happening was I started getting a lot of clients who were women between the ages of, I’ve got to be careful here, between the ages of 35-55. And I was like, why is this? You’re friends with Neil Patel, and they go into all these analytics and stuff, but I could never drive an analytical reason as to why these kinds of clients, these women, would purchase.
But I played into it, so I was telling you before the call I ended up growing a comb over, I took a black and white shot of me with this cheesy face like this, posted it on my Facebook profile, and all of a sudden I had these, for lack of a better term, cougars posting on this update. There was this one lady from Australia who had a husband and three kids and she was like, ‘it’s OK to be hunky, talk to me about Facebook tricks.’
I started building this brand focused on that demographic and I think it’s really important to understand your demographic so I played to that. We just started getting a ton of orders from this same demographic.
Andrew: Let me pause here for a second with this story. You’re saying that the way you got your early customers was by saying, “Cougars are into me.” These older women who are into younger guys. These women who are into me, probably like comb-over guys with black and white photos. This whole look they like. You just post it up. That still doesn’t explain how they found you. Are they friends of yours? Did you start friending their friends? What did you do?
Nathan: Yes. What I did, I had this picture of me, in the bottom I put a little thing that said, ‘Fan Page Factory’, like Founder of Fan Page Factory. The only reason I put that picture up was to get a bunch of engagement on it which would drive their friends, which is probably my same demographic, back to our Fan Page Factory fan page.
Pull in more traffic which in turn would lead to mores sales.
Andrew: But it’s just you flirting with women online is what got you customers?
Nathan: Essentially.
Andrew: OK. What am I getting wrong about this? You are a guy who listened to this stuff and still does. You know what interview I just posted earlier today, you mentioned it.
Nathan: Yes.
Andrew: You know that there is someone who is listening to us right now, who is saying, “I know it’s going to get exciting when he tells me how he got his first $100,000 and his fourth $100,000 and so on. But I care about the first four clients. The first 400 clients.” I want to get depth for them on just how you did it.
Just having that page up with even a good-looking shot, even one that touches the right spots, doesn’t mean that anyone is going to discover it on Facebook. What do you do to get people to discover it? How do you make sure that they click that little link on the bottom and know what your business is? Know that they need this?
Nathan: Hyper, hyper, hyper targeting. So many people, entrepreneurs especially, when they start they try and cast a net sort of using a harpoon, basically. You have to hyper target to the fact that you know that you’re client buys their bedsheets from Kohl’s. That’s how well you know them. That’s your target.
Even if it’s a target you don’t know if they’re going to respond well, the fact that you’re going to speak their same language is going to naturally draw them in. If I give a actual stuff, like ‘Boom’ fan page. Facefolder[??]/pages to get your page set up.
Lujour.com, put up a tab, right? The third step is find, you can spend some money on Facebook ads. Facebook ads is a great way but put an email capture on your landing page, capturing their email. Start talking their language.
If I was targeting Soccer Moms, I could send out an email from the email capture form and say, Hey, really trying hard to get your fan page done but you had to take your kid to the soccer game yesterday. Or, I know you do that between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. everyday but I know you’re free usually during 12 to 1 p.m. because they’re at school.
You’re not having to clean from breakfast in the morning. Your not having prepare for dinner yet, that’s when you target them.
Andrew: So you’re saying today, if you had it to do it over again, what you would do is create a landing page for your fan page that collected email addresses, that collected email addresses by speaking their language and giving an incentive to give up their email address and invite you into their inbox to continue this conversation. That’s what you would do today?
Nathan: Absolutely.
Andrew: Back then, though, how did you get people to come to your fan page, you were’nt buying [??]
Nathan: Yes, I know. It’s a great question. I tried other crazy stuff. The whole point that I started a fan page instead of a website was because starting a fan page was free. I didn’t have to pay hosting. If I got a website, I had to pay $10 bucks in hosting.
In fact, a competitor owned the website the fanpagefactory.com, they still do. The fan page, when I set it up, I started trying crazy stuff. I talked to you about this. One of them was, you know what, let me auction myself off on Facebook. I never heard of anybody doing this, I’m a college kid, I’ve go no strings attached.
I’ll just put up a thing, I’ll use a discussion group and say people can just bid on me. You know, not knowing if this would work. It circles back, let share how it happened. I put it up and I’ll never forget going home that evening, thinking, “Man, are people going to actually bid on this?” Well, sure enough, I just said, “Win– Oh, what’d I say?
Like “Win a week with a college entrepreneur for a week of social media training. I’ll go anywhere in the world. You pay for travel and I’ll stay with you for a week.” I was like, ‘This is cool. I’m going to get to go somewhere crazy, you know, all this.’
I went home and the next day when I came back from classes into my dorm room, I saw that people had started buying. In fact, there was a peanut manufacturer from Wyoming who bid $600.00 bucks. Then there was guy from Dr. Cleaners [sounds like] in Kansas, who was, like, $800.00 bucks. I was like, “This is awesome!”
Well that night, bidding was still going on. I went home and told my mom. I’ll never forget it. It was over a spaghetti dinner. I said, “Mom, you are not going to believe what I’m doing. I think it’s just genius.” She’s like, “All right. What? What’s going on?” “I’m auctioning myself off on Facebook. The highest bidder gets me for a week and I’ll travel anywhere in the world.”
I tend to just do stuff like this, right? She turns into Mom-mode, starts freaking out. She’s like, “Nathan, if you go anywhere in the world, some people are going to pick you up and gang bang you in the back alleys of some town.’ I’m like, ‘Mom, that is brilliant. This would be great. That’s another newspaper headline. College entrepreneur fights off people trying to beat him up in a back alley, and social media saves him.’ She didn’t like it. She actually ended up buying me one of those things that flip out of your key thing that’s like a dagger, before I went. She’s like, ‘Take this with you.’ Anyway, I went back the next day, and the bids went up to 2,000 freaking dollars. $2,000, and you have to understand. I was in college. I had no money. Zero money, and I’m just like, ‘I just got $2,000 from some random person online.’ They said they’d give me $2000 if they won this auction on Facebook. And sure enough, when the auction closed, I told my friends to go post on the stream. ‘Nathan, he’s so cool.’ to build the value. The auction closed. I posted my PayPal email. I’m like, ‘There’s now way this guy is actually going to pay me.’ It turns out, when I refresh my PayPal, I have $2,000 in my bank account. I’m like, ‘This is it!’ I’m doing entrepreneurship the rest of my life. I don’t know how this worked. It’s about generating PR, and it worked. So, I ran with it. Actually, you probably have questions about that, so before we get into that, I’ll stop.
Andrew: Keep going. Keep going.
Nathan: The person that won was a guy who worked with NASA. Crazy. He worked with NASA and he also had a brother who was a dentist. Him and his brother wanted to write a social media book for dentists. I was in Virginia Tech, which was southwest Virginia, and I really, really wanted someone from Australia or the Caribbean or somewhere fun to win. This guy was from Richmond, Virginia, which is not a fun place to be. Long story short, they won and I called them. I said, ‘OK, Steve. You won. Thanks for the money. Let’s get going. When do you want to do it?’ And he says, and I’ll never forget this, ‘Nathan, you’ve been publishing so much value on your fan page. You’ve been helping so many people, that I just want you for a week. I want to pay to put you up at the Marriott in Richmond to relax.’ I was like, ‘What? This is incredible.’ I ended up going down there and he put me up in the Marriott. We ended up doing a little bit of work to strategize for dentists on Facebook. It was a remarkable trip.
Andrew: So, he pays you. You get to relax. You get to feel appreciated. You to get to help him with his project. It sounds like you’re also luring in other potential customers who see the auction. Maybe they lost the auction that they bid on, but then decide that they want to buy a page. Am I getting it?
Nathan: Exactly. That’s the real story here. The only reason I did this auction, besides PR was to figure out who my competitors were. Put yourself in my shoes. If you’re building fan pages and you saw me auctioning myself off for social media services and you saw people publicly saying, I’ll pay $900 for a week with this guy, Nathan Latka, you’re going to call them and try to sell them your own services, because it’s public. But, I was friends with everybody bidding on me. They knew me. So, I called every single one of them, out of curiosity, and asked if anyone else had called them during the auction to sell to them. You wouldn’t believe it, over 30 people contacted those bidders trying to sell them. Some of those people I thought were my friends or allies. I thought they were supporting me, but they weren’t. They were going behind my back trying to sell to my customers. Some of those people might be watching today and they don’t know that I know that, but I do know that. I used it. I used it great. I worked JV’s around it. I got insight about what people were charging, what people were selling. I was feeling really good at that point.
Andrew: Were any of those bidders legitimate or were they all you, trying to figure out who else was in the space?
Nathan: Oh, no. They were all legitimate.
Andrew: Some of them were not legitimate. Some of them were you or your friends bidding on you.
Nathan: No, my friends weren’t bidding. They were just putting comments, like, ‘You guys should bidding higher. He’s worth way more.’ Stuff like that.
Andrew: And those were the friends who were getting phone calls.
Nathan: No, the business owners who were reading my friend’s comments and would be like, ‘Yeah, I should bid on this.’ When they bid and said, ‘I’ll put $800 on this.’ They would get called.
Andrew: These were not friends of yours, but they would get phone calls.
Nathan: Exactly. I knew that I could call them and ask them if competitors called them, because they were putting money on me. They already had some kind of trust in me if they were putting money out.
Andrew: Back, maybe 10 or 20 years ago, were guys like you who were building web pages for people, collecting money and doing outrageous things to get attention so that they could sell web page design. You were doing that in the Facebook world. Creating Facebook pages the way that people used to create web pages for customers.
Nathan: You go it.
Andrew: And you got to how much revenue doing that?
Nathan: We did over $73,000, and I probably should say this, but I love it when I watch interviews and people say, ‘I probably shouldn’t say this.’ and then they say it anyway. So, I’m going to say it because I think it’s cool. I had no idea about taxes at this point. This won’t get me in trouble and you’ll see why. I had no idea about taxes. My mom said, ‘Nathan, you need to depreciate something so you’re not paying taxes on this.’ So, I went out and bought a Prius, gas efficient. And I thought I was really cool paying cash. I was paying other people for outsource things. Long story short, at the end of that year, when I reported $72,000 on income, I took it to a CPA finally. I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll have to pay a couple hundred in taxes. No big deal.’ Now, keep in mind that my bank account didn’t have $73,000 because I was spending a lot of it. I got my tax bill back and it was $17,000. I was like, ‘Oh shit.’ I ended up almost having to take a loan out to pay the taxes back on the revenue I had made. I had no idea about taxes, but just to clarify so I don’t get a call from the IRS, that’s all cleared up now. I paid. It was a really funny story.
Andrew: Where were you spending your money so that if you get $75,000 you don’t have $17,000 to pay for your taxes. I understand the Prius, paying cash. What does that cost, $30,000.
Nathan. It was about $24,000.
Andrew: You’re still sitting on $50,000. Where did the rest of the $50,000 go?
Nathan: I was investing in my education. I was flying to seminars. Nick O’Neill talks about this, how he was flying all over. It’s expensive to wine and dine and go to these seminars. I was investing a lot in my travels.
Andrew: It really it is, actually. Even when people go and speak at a conference. It could sometimes be more expensive than going to attend the conference. You have to pay your flight, your hotel, and then there are dinners, drinks. And you’re not making money at that period, because you’re out there talking to people and hanging out.
Nathan: Exactly.
Andrew: Of all these conferences that you went to, what’s the one that you got the most out of?
Nathan: Bob Burg ‘The Go-Giver’. This is also where I met Terry Wilkerson, my first client for the first time. In Florida. I went down there, and I was, ‘I’m just going to Florida. I’ll go to the beach for a few days. Go to this conference.’ It was great. Bob Burg is the best selling author now. I met a community there. It was so amazing. So many people that are still really good friends now. My goal in going to that conference, which is the wrong approach to be taking, was that I’m flying down, I’m spending $2300, I need to sell at this conference at least of $2300 worth of stuff. I got my hands on the square pretty early. I started pitching this to people at the conference, and they’d say ‘I can’t pay. I don’t have cash.’ and I’m like, boom, ‘You got a credit card?’ I actually sold about $1800 worth of fan pages there. I sold three fan pages.
Andrew: You went to the Go-Giver conference, and you’re charging?
Nathan. I know. I know. It’s bad. It’s really bad. Bob, I hope you’re not watching this. I apologize.
Andrew: What did you get out of it.
Nathan: Andrew, connections like you wouldn’t believe. I focused on just building relationships with people. I would always ask very open ended questions. I wanted to understand how to talk to somebody like Bob Burr, so I invested time before the conference and watched about four hours of YouTube videos of him. I understood his mannerisms, and I understood what he was like. I was trying to figure out any way that I could relate to him. I noticed he always drank Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. So, when I went to the conference, I also drank Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. He always writes on this notepad with a specific pen that I saw on the videos, so I went out and bought that same stuff. That is subconscious, but naturally gives you something to talk about. I was trying to build this wrapper, and I still do that to this day. I will research and watch people online. Some people, you can watch on a YouTube video, and you know when they get nervous, they flex parts of their face or they perspire several places. It can give you a real advantage.
Andrew: Before we ask the next question, let me try something here. I want to try to load up a page while we talk. I’m trying a new system to see if it works. Let’s see if it works. No. I know what I need to do. Here we go. This is Bob Burr’s page, and I need to shrink it.
Nathan: Yup. There you go.
Andrew: This is your home page, and this is your Facebook fan page. Let’s minimize that so it fits well on the screen. We might have something here. This is you.
Nathan: Andrew, I didn’t know you did screen sharing. I’ve never seen that on an interview before.
Andrew: You’re the first person that I’m testing this out with. This is something that we use for the courses, and I thought, ‘You know what? Let’s see if it adds some element of understanding to the interviews.’
Nathan: Yes it does. Go to my profile. You can check Bob Burr first if you want.
Andrew: You mean go to your profile on Facebook? This is your profile. What are we supposed to learn by watching this?
Nathan: Go to the top and click my cover picture. Go to the real one in the bottom corner. Click ‘photos’. I hope nothing I regret pops up in here, but whatever.
Andrew: I hope something you regret does pop up in here. Where are photos? Is it here?
Nathan: It’s in the middle of the time line. This will be really funny for your viewers to see this. I’m going to give you the link to the picture that I posted of the comb over.
Andrew: Oh no. I can’t. If you tell me where to get that I can get it, but I don’t think I can show it this way. I’m still experimenting with this system, but if I click, I think it will disappear.
Nathan: That’s OK. Scroll back up to the top and click ‘profile features’, the one that’s the profile pictures album, the third one. Scroll down. Keep going.
Andrew: Let’s give it a moment to load up. Is this it?
Nathan: Yeah, that’s it. You can see the comments too. So, you see what I mean.
Andrew: I do see what you mean. It’s kind of interesting actually, that I was able to show the video. I do see exactly what you’re talking about. This does look like Donald Trump with a comb over. You look good though. To say that it looks like a bad comb over does this photo an injustice.
Nathan: I tried my best.
Andrew: I see that you’ve got yourself a business where you’re building Facebook pages for customers and it’s going well. Things are going hot, but you want to take it to the next step. What is the next step?
Nathan: The next step was me thinking about a way to automate it. How do I make money while I sleep? What can I do. I realized that you have to empower people. You have to empower you, the person that wants the fan page, to build it yourself. You’ve got to be the smart person who builds the system that allows them to do that. Otherwise you’re going to keep doing manual work. I refer back to the Tim Ferriss. I read his book, and he mentioned a thing getfriday.com. I went there, I hired an outsourcing firm, and I paid them $4,000 to try and build what Lujure is today. It just failed miserably. I would have to go in, and for every little change I’d have to screen shot it, circle it, write what I wanted to be changed and email it back to them. It was a nightmare. So, I told them to keep the $4,000, and that’s when I came back to Virginia Tech and the great entrepreneurial community in Blacksburg, and I found my two co-founders of Lujure, Brian Putt and Joshua Gunter. They’re the two technical co-founders.
Andrew: Let’s hold off on talking about Brian and Josh for a moment here. I’m curious about why that didn’t work. You used a company that Tim Ferriss recommended. You paid $4,000, so this isn’t a cheap project. Why didn’t it work when you outsourced the development of Lujure, your business?
Nathan: I got so frustrated with the fact that I didn’t understand. It was really me. I got so frustrated with the fact that I could not communicate every pixel and how I wanted it, to them. It was so much work trying to communicate back and forth. I had 26 credit hours in this semester while I was doing all this. I had a packed schedule. Classes from 9:00 until 6:00. I’d eat from 6:00 to 7:00. Work. Go to the gym from 11:00 to 12:00, and then work from 1:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m., because that was when I could work with this outsourced firm in India. It was too time consuming. They didn’t understand that I wanted the perfect experience for people. Lujure was about experience.
Andrew: Is it that you were trying to get them to do too much?
Nathan: Probably.
Andrew: Maybe you were trying to get them to do too much. Probably, you’re saying. It’s also that you couldn’t talk to them directly. It seems it was all screen shots, pixels on a computer screen. What else was it that was an issue? Did you use the wrong firm?
Nathan: It wasn’t the wrong firm. Outsourcing is brilliant, you just have to understand what things are appropriate for outsourcing. Building the software you want to build a whole business around is not an appropriate thing to build your whole thing around. It would be like Nick saying, ‘I’m going to outsource it all [??]. It’s just stupid. It doesn’t make any sense.
Andrew: OK.
Nathan: I was being lazy.
Andrew: All right. So now you’ve got to find co-founders. You’ve got a business, a track record, revenue, customers, and all that. When you bring in Brian and Josh, do you split up the business evenly with them? Or do you say, ‘hey, I’m the guy who’s really founded it. I’ll give you some shares in exchange for helping me code this up.’
Nathan: Exactly. I understood the value of having technical co-founders and I made it very clear that it’s not equal but I wanted to make sure that they were excited about it. They had their own computer repair company at that point. I got them on board and they were the guys where we would sit in here, and you tell me when you want to see this office because it’s pretty stunning, but we got in this space and we just cranked out long nights. Pizza, beer, we worked great together and we still work great together today.
Andrew: But you own the majority of the business?
Nathan: Yes.
Andrew: Actually, do you want to show us the office? This is the place that spawned over $400,000 in revenue.
Nathan: Yes. All right. I will do my best here. This is kind of the side office. Now, this is nothing fancy. This is like a rag that none of us has wanted to touch. It has been here for awhile.
Andrew: You and I talked about a week ago, maybe 10 days ago, that rag was there and it’s still there now?
Nathan: Yep. We have ladders in here. We have some storage up there. This is probably the newest thing in the office. This is our revolutionary air conditioning system, which now is pointless. We’re above a bar in downtown Blacksburg, so this is an old grease thing that you dip fries in. It’s up here. We just left it here.
You can see some more moldy rags, some spackling. This place is janky, but it’s awesome. Actually, this is kind of cool. Let me see if I can get over here.
Andrew: Don’t forget that spot where you were sitting. It took us a long time to find that perfect spot for you.
Nathan: I’ll remember where it was. This is some of our plans for like [??] and stuff on the wall right above the old paint and our t-shirts. There are some more plans there on the thing. There are some old rags down here. I hope what I’m showing to people is that having a space like this is awesome. It’s way better than a corporate space. Why? Because it has character.
You can unify people around it. It has no heat, so when it gets cold, we’re all forced to stay in the same room, which helps brainstorming. It’s like we have to huddle for heat. It’s great.
Andrew: How long does it take them to build the first version of Lujure? The next step in your business.
Nathan: We worked probably about three 138 hour weeks. All of us, all together. That’s all we did.
Andrew: Three weeks of 138 hours each?
Nathan: Yes.
Andrew: OK.
Nathan: And we got it up. In fact, if you want to keep testing your screen share thing, you can actually search Lujure platform in Google, and you’ll see our first iteration is still actually ranked near the top.
Andrew: You said specifically 138 hours, why not 140? Why not over 100? Why did you say 138?
Nathan: That’s what it was. We were like, ‘man what did it actually take us?’ because everyone would ask us. People we were trying to partner with were like ‘well Nathan, why shouldn’t we just build this ourselves?’ and I was like ‘well, because it took us all 138 hours for three weeks.’ We knew what it was. We went back and calculated it specifically so we could answer that question.
Andrew: I see. Let’s try bringing up the screen. This will work better in courses. I’m coming up with more technology to show off web pages in courses and a few other things that maybe I’ll show you later. I just did a search for Lujure platform.
Nathan: Go to images.
Andrew: Sorry?
Nathan: Go to images.
Andrew: Oh, go to images. All right. Let’s see what comes up here.
Nathan: Let me see, if you keep scrolling down further…there it is up one more. All the way on the right.
Andrew: OK. This one.
Nathan: No, up a row on the right. The one right above that one. That gray area. That was our first platform, baby.
Andrew: Oh, I see what we’ve got here. Let me see if I could bring this up. I see you can’t see my mouse, that’s why you didn’t know when I was saying this one or that one. That’s good for me to know. On the left side is basically the canvas, on the right side is the different elements that you allow people to put on their canvas on their Facebook fan page. That means you allow them to add YouTube videos with drag and drop. You’ll add them to RSS through ‘drag and drop’, flash through ‘drag and drop’, et cetera. This is what you are giving them. This is what took three weeks of 138 hours each week.
Nathan: Yes. Man, there’s some memories. [??] back to me.
Andrew: All right. Now, you do this. How do you get customers to use… I see the first version. Let’s understand where you thought the revenue was going to come from. Did you plan on charging monthly fees? Did you plan on offering free? What was the model going to be?
Nathan: Here, and you already alluded to this actually. All those people I had done custom work for, would always call me back to make changes.
Andrew: OK.
Nathan: It was really easy for me to back to that customer list and say, “Hey, you want to be able to make changes as much as you want? Just buy the platform. We didn’t have a free version. We thought– We were all on our high horses, right?
We were like, it’s going to be $30 bucks a month and that’s what we’re going to do. People jumped in, actually 27 I think when we started. They jumped in and they started paying. I just sold that old customer base and we didn’t have a free plan for several months.
Andrew: OK. You sold a customer base, $30 bucks a month. What did you use to accept payment? That’s been an issue for people in the audience. I want to start asking questions about it.
Nathan: I used 1shoppingcart to start.
Andrew: Get out! Wait a minute.
Nathan: Absolutely hate, I hate them now. Because…
Andrew: Why?
Nathan: … they charged every time I called for support. I remember talking to them. You’re going to laugh when you hear this. You’re going to think bullshitting but I’m not.
I called them and said listen, “I’m just starting out to be an entrepreneur. One day, one day I’m going step on [??] success and when people ask for my recommendation for a shopping cart, because you charge $10.00 every support call, I am not recommending your service.” We don’t use 1shopping cart anymore.
Andrew: What did they say about that? They didn’t care did they?
Nathan: They didn’t care. I was trying to get up to managers and tell them. You know, in a world of social media, I’m going to have a soapbox here. In the world of social media, you have to care about that stuff, absolutely have to.
We use Chargify now.
Andrew: OK. All right. I’m interested to see if someone from 1shoppingcart contacts me to talk to me about this. In the past when guests have talked negatively about a brand… I don’t know if almost always. Often, the brand or someone at the company, usually it’s the founder who’s listening will email me and start talking to me about it.
I am really curious to see what there approach to social media is. Do they at least have an alert on their name and do they at least contact me. We’ll find out.
Nathan: That would be interesting.
Andrew: What is the next step? What is the next big milestone for you guys?
Nathan: The next big milestone is, we wanted to started JVing with people. The question they always asked was, “How many users do you have?” I was sick of hearing ‘How many users do you have?’ If I had a million free users but no revenue, who cares?
If I have two users paying me $10 grand a month, that’s better than 10 million free users. But, people cared about influence more than revenue. They wanted to know that we had a ton of users. So, we introduced a free brand.
When we introduced the free… Go ahead. I lost your audio, Andrew. I can’t hear you.
Andrew: Here it goes. I’m messing around with too many things. By JV, you mean basically, you want to partner with people on an affiliate basis. Where they were going to sell your stuff and collect a commission. I see. When you talked to them, they said, “How many customers do you have?”
When you didn’t tell them that you had that many, they thought, “This guy’s too amateur, too young or his business is too young, anyway.”
Nathan: Exactly.
Andrew: Who did you contact? Who said that?
Nathan: Who said what? Oh, the JV partners?
Andrew: What kind of partners said that to you?
Nathan: I went out and I looked at big, people that were influential in the space. Even some of my past users. They loved the platform but all they cared about was making money. They wanted to know how many people we already had interested.
I remember being so freakin’ frustrated, you know, that people cared more about the number of users you had and the revenue that you were doing. I didn’t understand it at all. There is an interesting story there. We launched the fir-
We added 4,600 free users which was cool for us.
We’ll get into that later. We added a lot of free users. When that number started growing, more people wanted to JV with us. We were like, yes, we have ‘X’ amount of users. They’re like, ‘Wow!” No one ever asked how much revenue are you doing which seemed so stupid to me.
Andrew: How did you figure out your pricing?
Nathan: We pulled it out of our ass.
Andrew: OK.
Nathan: I mean, being completely honest, we’re like, “You know, people are going to think we really thought hard about $27.00.” We ended up introducing a $5.49 plan or 27. People are going to be thinking, “They read some psychology book about numbers and this is what converts well.” [??] made that up.
Andrew: What about $3,000? That seems like a really high price point. Where did that come from?
Nathan: [static]
Andrew: Sorry, let’s give the camera a chance to catch up. There we go. Yes. Tell me a little bit about pricing, about the $3,000 price, specifically.
Nathan: Got it. So we updated all of our platforms. We ended up deleting the 549 account because it was making up 80% of our support and less than 10% of our revenues, so we cut it out. We stuck with just the three options. We said three, three, three, three because it’s easy. We made that update when one of my mentors, Pat Matthews at Rackspace, forwarded me a link when iCloud released and he simply said, ‘simplicity in pricing.’
And I was like, I love it. So we’re going to do three, three, three because the iCloud is 20, 40, 60. Super simple. And you know Steve Jobbs isn’t sitting there saying, ‘oh our margins are this and this.’ It’s just simple. It’s beautiful.
The reason we added $3,000/month is because we were leaving money on the table. We had people asking us, ‘how can we pay you more? We want to work with you more. What can we pay?’ So we added a plan.
Andrew: They didn’t say specifically, ‘we want this and if you give us this then we’ll pay you more?’ They said, ‘we want to pay you more?’
Nathan: Well, some of them gave us specific stuff like they really wanted a designer on call. We [??] that. They wanted analytics and some other features, so we started thinking through that. We haven’t acted on them yet. Design is basically a $3,000/month plan to get [??] service and we actually don’t market it. You’ll notice it’s not on our pricing page.
Andrew: OK. All right. It does sound like you’re giving them a lot of attention for that much money. Did you say that Pat Matthews was one of your advisers?
Nathan: He was one of my mentors, yes.
Andrew: How did you get Pat to be one of your mentors?
Nathan: Pat, along with [??] and Doug [??] all started Webmail.us here in Blacksburg, right at Virginia Tech. They even [??]. They had connections in Blacksburg, so that’s how I met them. Now we stay in very close contact and I ask him about everything that I do.
Andrew: So you just reached out to them and said, ‘hey I’ve got this connection to you. We both went to the same school, we both like the same city etc, would you mind helping me out, and giving me feedback on my ideas?’
Nathan: I had seen them at conferences [??] at Virginia Tech’s Entrepreneurial Club so I was in charge of getting speakers in. Bob Summers is an adviser in Blacksburg as well, and [??]. There were multiple ways that I was connected with him. What I started doing was I had a list of about 15 emails of people I consider to be just top quality people and I’ll give them an update every two or three weeks with a headline like, ‘Lujure crushes projections or something.
I’ll put it in [??] so then they get excited about what we’re doing, right? And they want to talk about it.
Andrew: Oh, cool. All right. What else am I missing? You get the first version of Lujure out to people, they give you feedback on the product, they give you feedback on partnerships, you build it out, what else do I want to know? What about the next big milestone in the business?
Nathan: The next big milestone was our goal to get 25,000 users and we did much quicker than we anticipated. Once we hit that, and keep in mind that we were [??] from day one. Our first month we did like, $5,500 in revenue. On the second month we grew again. On the third month we were paying ourselves pretty much full time salaries. However, we negotiated this whole office space rent for free because it was so crappy and we said we’ll put some paint on the walls if we could get it for free.
We were finding creative ways to minimize our expenses, too. I did the same thing [??]. I went to them and said, hey [??]…
Andrew: Sorry, you did what? While we’re waiting for the connection to catch up I should say the background has changed because you went to a different room to get direct connection to the internet, and that’s why suddenly there’s a different background in the interview. So you said for the office space that you’re renting, what did you tell them?
Nathan: Yes. We were trying to minimize our costs and our co-founder knew the owner of this restaurant so what we did was we said, ‘hey it’s prime downtown Blacksburg location, if you give it to us for free, we’ll sink some cosmetic stuff into it and make it awesome.’ That’s what we did. In fact, I don’t know if you can see the floor here, 53 cents of square ft AstroTurf. Boom. That’s how you make a floor entrepreneur grade, and make it look like Google offices.
So we did fun stuff like that to make it a really cool space.
Andrew: I love ideas like that. Going through my notes to see what we missed. Twitter. You got a customer form Twitter. How did you do that? Do you know the story I’m talking about?
Nathan: I do. We had just hired support and sales people. I was bring them in to do a live demonstration. They were not familiar with the space. Keep in mind that they use Facebook and Twitter for personal stuff. I’m like, ‘Guys, here’s how you have to do it.’ I’m praying that my live demonstration works. I find a guy on Twitter who’s really upset with one of our competitor’s platforms. I simply reached out and said, ‘I see you’re trying to brainstorm and XYZ wasn’t working. Give us a call. Here’s our number. We’ll brainstorm.’ He immediately called my cell phone, so I picked up my phone and said, ‘Nezzy, let’s brainstorm. Tell me about yourself.’ I went on his Facebook page and learned about his family. I said, ‘Tell me a little more about your kids. I see that they’re into baseball and soccer. I used to be a baseball star, but then I traded it for this shitty entrepreneurial thing.’
I talked to him a little bit, because no one is ever going to hang up on themselves. We built it into a conversation about Lujure. The call took 43 minutes, and the sales people are going, ‘This guy’s not going to be able to close this sale. It’s not going to work. It’s through Twitter.’ Sure enough, I go, ‘Nezzy, listen.’ This is from your mindframe persuasion thing, I’ve changed it a little bit. ‘Let’s discover Lujure together. If you’re serious, but only if you’re dead serious about growing your social media presence, let me connect you with our annual business plan.’ I was going for the home run. It was an $1800 sale. He said, ‘Let’s do it. Absolutely.’ Now usually you hang up at the point and they never buy. I said, ‘Nezzy, listen. I really want to make sure that you get this bonus graphics pack, so I need to confirm that you go. I want to stay on the line with you while you check out to make sure it goes through OK’. So he started putting his credit card information in. It went through, I refreshed Shopify. All the support people are surprised. I sent him the bonus, and he was thrilled. They’re going, ‘Oh my gosh.’ I’m inside playing trumpets. They were excited; the support people had a lot of fun. Now, I couldn’t work with a better team. We manage our fan page 24/7, make calls. I personally have spoken or texted to every single paying Lujure user, which is a lot of calls and emails. I really pride myself in that. It’s been a blast.
Andrew: How much has that phone call been worth to you guys in business so far?
Nathan: $1872. He bought the whole year business plan at a discount.
Andrew: Wow. Unreal. That really is the way to use Twitter. What else do I want to know? You mentioned that that came from the Persuasion program that we did on Mixergy. You really internalized what you learned. You and I have talked about what you got out of Mixergy and how you used it at Lujure to grow the business. Can you tell people how you learned in a way to make sure that you used what you’re listening to and, not like most people, just hang out and let ideas pass right through them.
Nathan: Admittedly, I never make it through a whole interview in one sitting. Lewis Howes is a great example. I love webinars. Lewis is a real personal guy. I try to be personable. We’re a lot alike in a lot of ways. I was studying, literally studying how he did webinars. I’d sit in his webinars, learned how he did it. I started doing it. It’s now a core part of our platform. I was sharing some of the numbers with you. I’m happy to share it. What I do is, I’ll sit down and watch Lewis’ webinar. I’ll think about how I can use it for myself. When I tell someone that they can post a picture of themselves that looks like Donald Trump in black and white to sell to Cougars[SP], they should thinking, ‘What kind of imagery or graphics is really going to hit home with my demographic? What’s going to get them to respond?’ They should be thinking about that.
Andrew: I see. You’re not just listening, you’re thinking, ‘How can I use what I just heard in my business?’ If you were in the audience listening to yourself, listening to this guy talk about how he did this black and white Cougar [SP] photo, you’d be thinking, ‘How can I adopt it.’ You do this for everything. You’re listening to Lewis to see how he does webinars to sell courses. You’re thinking, ‘How do we use webinars in order to sell Lujure?’ In fact, you did share the numbers with me. You use webinars right now to sell Lujure.
Nathan. Yes. It’s one of our main drivers of revenue. Our product is different than Lewis’ in that we have a monthly recurring. I know he has an up sell like that. I did a webinar today with 100 people on it, by the end of the webinar, 21 purchased a plan. So, you can do the conversion rate map yourself. It’s pretty remarkable. The art of a webinar is to not make it about you. Look through the attendee list. See who’s on there that’s already using your business plan that love you. Unmute them and say, ‘Hey, power user x, give it to me real. What is Lujure like? How does it empower you? Agree or disagree, is it the most remarkable platform for fan page customization?’ They’ll be like, ‘It just changed my business.’ They start going off. Then I unmute the people who are skeptical, and they start asking the power users questions. I’m sitting back, drinking my Starbucks, acting like I’m some master mind, when really I’m just learning from Lewis.
Andrew: That’s so cool. I think you’re taking this a step further. Lewis has done this. I know that what Lewis will do is talk to people that he sees are listening in the audience. You’re saying that you’ll unmute them and talk back.
Nathan: I’ll unmute them and let them talk to the people who are new potential buyers. It works great. They talk forever. I record the whole thing and it’s like an ongoing social proof thing. It’s remarkable.
Andrew: What else have you learned that you used well?
Nathan: I love the one that you did with the guy with the cats. I don’t remember his name but he had cats.
Andrew: Ross Jeffries. The cats kept walking through the corner of his screen.
Nathan: I started using his whole, I don’t know how to explain it, broad based appeal. ‘Do you have deep desires for your fan page? Do want to them all to be met instantly?’ and I snap to make the noise. ‘Understand?’ and I laugh at it because, every time he would [makes snapping noise], so I’ll do the same thing on webinars and it just works great. You’re allowing your audience to create their own story in their head. You’re just setting a bowl to hold all the water. Then you just swirl it around and create velocity, and boom it turns into sales.
Andrew: Let me ask you this as long as I’ve got you. What could I do better. You’ve seen a ton of the interviews. You know what worked for you. What’s not working for you? What could I be doing a lot better?
Nathan: I love sharing the screen. Absolutely love that.
Andrew: You think I should keep that? Keep doing the screen sharing?
Nathan: Absolutely 110%. There’s so much value to being able to see it. If I knew you were going to ask me that, I would have gotten my book where I had taken notes, because I make notes about things that I think would be better. If you have two people on an interview at the same time, with different view points. One really believes in one shopping cart and the other hates one shopping cart.
Andrew: One person believes in infographics, the other person doesn’t. You want to hear from both at the same time and have them debate it out.
Nathan: Exactly. Neil Patel versus what?
Andrew: I like that idea.
Nathan: What I think is going to happen, and I think it will help you market Mixergy, is they are going to ask their audiences to come comment and support their viewpoint. It gets people passionate about the side they’re fighting for. You create this really cool dynamic.
Andrew: I have to find a way to make this work. What topic can I get, and who can I get to debate it?
Nathan: Take Mari Smith versus Lewis. What could be better, LinkedIn or Facebook for a social market?
Andrew: Interesting. All right. I love that. When you take notes, how do you take notes that are different? How do you do it? Do you want to go grab that notebook? While you’re doing that I’m going to play to see if I can get the web going again. OK. What happens if I go to Twitter. Let’s see if this will work. There you go. You can see the footer screen works. I think we might have something here. I actually only added this for the courses, but I think it could help for interviews too. I’m not sure. A lot of work to do this while I’m doing the interview.
Nathan: All right. Are you ready Andrew?
Andrew: I’m right here.
Nathan: What I do is whenever we do a new project, we create a project cover page. This is for our new editor that I’m designing. I’ll have this on my desk for whenever I hear an interesting interview. I’ll go back and watch all the ones about software and user experience. I’ll take notes about it here on the project page for our editor. Then, the second part of that is that I’ll start sketching out what our new editor could look like based on things I’m learning live from the interviews. I’ll sketch out ideas. Then, I’ll talk to my coders. I’ll say, ‘Hey guys, this crazy guy named Andrew Warner on Mixergy, he knows a thing or two about entrepreneurship, interviewed this really cool guy who said we should do this.’ Then we’ll implement it. We’ll test it. We’ll do the webinar stuff. It works out really well. I take all my side notes and ideas in this little black book. You can see here, I just jot them down and then I’ll come back through. It’s notes and all kinds of stuff. I’ll go back through and make them actionable by putting them on those project pages.
Andrew: Do you ever feel like when you’re taking notes and don’t use what you’ve taken notes on, do you ever feel guilty? Do you ever feel like, ‘Well, maybe that interview or course wasn’t useful, because I took notes on it, and I never even applied it.’ Does it become a burden?
Nathan: No, because a lot of value is in the thought process.
Andrew: In just thinking, ‘How could I use this?’
Nathan: Exactly:
Andrew: Interesting. I’d like to get people to think that way too. Maybe at the end of each interview, challenging the audience by asking, ‘How could you use this?’ Let everyone say how they could use what they just heard in the interview or the course, and let everyone vote on the best potential application. The response that gets the most votes, gets something, maybe a half hour with the guest. I don’t know what, but there’s something to that.
Nathan: I love that. One thing that I do during the webinars, is I’ll say ‘The next thing I’m going to show you is going to blow you away.’ And then I’ll do this corny little joke, ‘Is everyone sitting down? Because if you’re standing up and get blown away and fall over, we’re not liable for any broken limbs.’ Everyone’s like, ‘Hahaha.’ Then I say, ‘In order to use you as a demo, go post on our Facebook page about what you think about the Remarkable As You Are platform and include a link to your website to use it.’ So, I drove hundreds of comments to our page, which leads to this social thing. You could do the same thing. I’ll do it here. Let’s assume this is our interview, I’ll say, ‘Hey entrepreneurs out there. If you’re selling software, and we’ve had a little success with Lujure. Did over $400,000 in revenue. Below, tell me your biggest problem about selling software through your Facebook page. Ten days after this interviews is posted, I’m going to pick one of those comments. The one that gets the most replies from their following, I’ll do a 30 minute consultation with them.’ What that’s going to do is driving a bunch of engagement, and when I post to try to win the 30 minute consulting, I’m going to go tell my friends to reply to it for a higher chance. Audio. Audio.
Andrew: Too much stuff here on my screen. Let’s do it right now. You’ll give 30 minutes of your time to help anyone who gets the most votes. What do they have to add in the comments and get voted up on? Do you want to say their biggest problem with social media? Do you want to say how they would use this? What’s the most valuable for someone who’s trying to learn from this interview?
Nathan: What I’ll do is say, ‘Guys, if you’re a startup entrepreneur, and you sell software and make money through your fan page. If you’re having trouble with it, take a second right now. Literally stop watching me and just listen to my voice and write a comment below. Scroll down the page, right quick. I’ll wait for you. Scroll down, and now pick out a comment and go ahead and in that comment, leave a sentence about what you think about this interview and a second sentence, tell me your biggest obstacle about selling through a Facebook page. Then, go tell your audience to click ‘Like’ or reply on your comment. The comment below that gets the most replies or likes, I’ll take 30 minutes of my time and consult live with you.’
Andrew: Perfect. In private so they can say whatever they want. You’re the guy who got to over $400,000 revenue last year. You’re the guy who knows Facebook incredibly well, and you know how to use Facebook for business. It’s an incredible opportunity. We’ll leave it open for the next ten days. I’m curious to see what happens. I want to see if the comments are more useful if we do this.
Nathan: Let’s test. it.
Andrew: All right. Let’s test one more thing. Let me bring this up on the screen. All kinds of technology here today. I want to try different software for the courses, and I figured maybe some of it will trickle into the interviews too. This is Mixergy Premium. Look at all these guys who are teaching how they built . . . Could you lower your audio? I think that’s squeezing back. Usually at this point, I would read somebody’s email and say, ‘This is someone who’s gotten a lot of benefit out of Mixergy. If you want to get even more, then just go to Mixergy.com/Premium. This is the web page where you can get courses from other Entrepreneurs on how to do taxes right for entrepreneurs, how to focus, how to outsource, how to buy ads properly, etc. I don’t need to read email, because you’ve just given me the best testimonial ever in this interview when you talked about how much you got out of the interviews and programs here at Mixergy. So, if you want more, go to Mixergy.com/Premium. Let me bring up that page. Also, let me show you this? I’m playing around a little too much here, but what do you think of this?
Nathan: It’s great.
Andrew: I think we could even take notes during an interview.
Nathan: Will they see the person’s face still or will it just be notes?
Andrew: Yes, I think they will see the person’s face, absolutely.
Nathan: I do like that. When you did that thing with Stella from Fee Fighters.
Andrew: Right, that was a course.
Nathan: I like that.
Andrew: Now we’ll have the ability to show web pages, we’ll have the ability to show notes as we’re going through it. We’ll have the ability to show my face, your face and so many other things I’m playing around with. Thanks for being so patient as I tested out this technology and as for some reason the connection had trouble earlier today. Final question. You’ve now done this. What do you wish you knew about a year ago before you launched Lujure that you think other entrepreneurs need to know too. Is there one thing that would have gotten you here faster?
Nathan: Yes. This is it. Are you ready? I’m going to speak specifically to all the people in software who are watching, because I think that’s a large group of your audience. Understanding the idea of the lifetime value of a customer. In other words, a lot of our first signups for $5 have turned into $300 a month now. If I had the foresight to invest in getting those $5 users in the beginning, knowing what the lifetime value would be, I would have put a lot more energy behind that, and I am now. Understanding the lifetime value of a customer.
Andrew: Lifetime value of a customer. How do you keep track of the lifetime value of your customers? How you can estimate how valuable someone is when they come in the door and just give you an email address or register for the free account?
Nathan: We use MailChimp for email, so we track the emails. We track how many sign up for a free account. We then track within the free accounts, how many of them purchase in Chargify. How many times they get on our webinars. I get data from our webinars. Who watches our screen for the most amount of time. Who asks the most questions. I get their interest rating, how many polls they’re taking, how many times they’re really looking at our screen and not just hiding it and listening. I contact those people and reach out to them. These are the people . . .
Andrew: There goes the connection one more time. I think we get how you’re using it. We just lost the connection there. How can people on this page get one of your webinars if they want to see what you’re like on a webinar?
Nathan: They enter in right there, and put in their email. Right when they put in their email, they’ll get an email for signing up that has a webinar link in it.
Andrew: The website is lujure.com. Nathan, thanks for doing this interview with me.
Nathan: You’ve got it, Andrew. Keep the stack of books behind you.
Andrew: You do like the books behind?
Nathan: I do. I absolutely do. I was going to put them behind me just for this interview. Thank you.
Andrew: Thank you and thank you all for watching.
