Andrew: Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses.
About a year ago, this guy who I’d known for years emailed me and he said that he was coming out with a book, which I thought, “Great. I can’t wait to get it on Kindle.” Then he said, “No, no, actually it’s a journal. I’m expecting people to fill it out, get out a pen or a pencil and start filling it out.” I thought, “This is a little bit weird. Are people actually still writing down on paper? Aren’t we all doing everything on our phones?”
But it was John Lee Dumas, a guy who I’ve known for years and has always come up with interesting projects, so what I said was, “John, I want to buy the first copy that you come out with.” He said, “Andrew, I’ll send it to you.” I said, “No, no, I want to buy it. If I like it, I want to buy it. I want to do the right thing.” So, I sent him money and got the book and then in addition, he generously sent me multiple copies of the journal. I have it here. I get it.
At the same time, I feel like it’s an anachronism, which is like in a world where everyone is doing this–everything is on my phone, my journal is on my phone, my photos are on my phone. Why is this guy sending me this, a book, a piece of paper bound or a collection of papers bound and why is it working and how well is it working? And that’s the goal here. How do you sell something that is old technology in a modern world and get people to love it and to keep buying it?
And the journal that I’m talking about is called “The Freedom Journal: How to Accomplish Anything in 100 Days.” And his new journal he’s coming out with for 2017 is called The Mastery Journal. It’s going to help you. There it is. He’s holding it up on camera. It’s “How to Master Productivity, Discipline and Focus in 100 Days.” I’ve known this guy for a while. He is disciplined and enormously disciplined, one of the most disciplined people I know. We’ll find out about the journal. I want to know the business behind it.
The whole thing is sponsored by two great companies that have sponsored John’s podcast. He’s the host of EOFire. So, he knows about them. The first will do your books right. It’s called Bench. They’ll really get your accounting done properly. And the second will help you hire the next great developer or designer. It’s called Toptal. I’ll tell you more about both of them later.
JLD, good to see you, man.
John: Always a pleasure hanging out. Even if we’re not on a cruise ship, it’s still fun, Andrew.
Andrew: Right. We hung out on a cruise ship last time and that’s where we did the previous interview.
John: Yeah.
Andrew: How many of these, this previous book, did you sell?
John: So we launched The Freedom Journal on January 4th of 2016 and as you mentioned, you were the first person to actually part with hard-earned cash. Because I had about 200 copies that I was just going to give out to friends and to influencers. You’re both, so I wanted to send you one. You said, “No, I insist on buying it.” I even had a link for it. So, I just had to send you a PayPal link. That’s how you ended up paying for it.
Then I mailed out a few to you and that was really awesome. During that 33-day Kickstarter campaign, we ended up doing over 9,000 individual sales of “The Freedom Journal,” doing over $453,000 revenue, making it the sixth-most funded publishing campaign of all time. Since then, we’ve continued to just crush sales, which I’ve loved to see. I didn’t know if it was going to fall off a cliff afterwards, like the hype is over now, but it’s just continued to have legs.
People are actually on their third journal now. We have people that are 300 days in, which is like so mind-blowing and great to see. As of today, at TheFreedomJournal.com, we actually have a little ticker that shows you every time a sale is made, it goes up one. So, we’re over 16,200 sales at the time of our talk. When this goes live, we’ll probably be over 17,000.
Andrew: So, when you did over $400,000 in the Kickstarter campaign, how much of that is profit?
John: A lot of that is profit because of the route that I went. I decided to do a high-profit margin book where I got it printed, looked at a lot of places. Being an officer in the US Army and raised in America, I tried to get this book done in the US. We went to a lot of places. I use a great company called Products.com to kind of help me find the manufacturer and they were great. But I couldn’t get this book quoted for under $20 in the USA, which is insane, but there are just so many things that go into this. It’s the gold emboss. It’s faux leather. It’s gold leaf. It has the bookmarks. It has the elastic thing. I wanted all of these things.
So we went over to China and we did the exact same search and they came back and they were able to make the book for us for $6.25 per. Of course, I had to buy 20,000 of them, which I did. That was the bulk price. So, the book cost is $6.25 per and we sell it for $39. So, the profit margin on each book after shipping is around $24 of net profit per sale.
Andrew: We’re looking at roughly over $300,000 in profit selling it.
John: Oh yeah.
Andrew: Okay. Just in that Kickstarter campaign?
John: Just in the Kickstarter campaign. We do about between $25k to $35k per month of net profits.
Andrew: Here’s the thing. I get other people doing it. But you had a successful course. You were doing millions, literally, right?
John: Yeah.
Andrew: Selling online courses. Why go from digital to paper?
John: Yeah. Great question. There are a lot of reasons. There’s a quote that I shared with you earlier that I think is important here. It’s by Mark Twain. It’s that, “Whenever you find yourself in the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” And I looked at my life in late 2014–sorry, late 2015–and that’s where I was. I was on the side of the majority.
I was doing the courses, the virtual, online, the PDFs, everything was in the cloud on the computer, which by the way is amazing. We still run Podcasters Paradise, which you mentioned, over 3,000 members, over $4 million in revenue. It’s amazing. We still do it. But I said, “How can I not be on the side of the majority? How can I do something different?”
And then because of the financial success that we’ve had doing almost $10 million in the past four years of total revenue, I said I actually have money in the bank, a lot of it that’s growing some nice savings account, but how can I invest that in something that maybe other people can’t. I said if I’m willing to drop $150,000 on inventory that has not been sold yet, that really puts me in the minority because number one, I had that kind of money to drop. Number two, I had the audience that I knew would support that. So, I had these two really key things that a lot of people don’t even have one of, but I had both of those things.
So I said, “This is going to be something that’s going to be hard to replicate.” That’s, Andrew, what it really comes down to. I wanted to do something that was hard to replicate. That was creating a physical product that was beautiful, that was faux leather, that was all those things and that was a physical product and took so much logistics and that was The Freedom Journal.
Andrew: I also feel like a lot of bloggers and podcasters write books. I feel like I should do that too. I’ve got to work on that. But the interesting thing about a journal versus a book is in a book, I might read about goal setting. I might read about how to accomplish something in 100 days and a lot of the ideas I’d nod my head and say, “That actually makes sense. I should do it.” With a journal, I’m being pushed to do it to think about it and I can see whether I’m actually doing it or not because if I’ve only filled out two pages, then I know that I’m actually not walk the walk. That’s interesting.
The other thing is you mentioned some people buy multiple copies of it. I may really like the book “Influence” by Robert Cialdini, maybe ten times more than another book, but I’m only going to buy one copy of the book.
John: One time.
Andrew: Maybe I buy it in paper form and then ten years later I buy the digital version, but that’s it. I’m done. Here, someone could maybe buy it multiple times a year multiple years and it becomes their journal. That’s interesting to me. And frankly, you don’t have to write as much. This is a 300-page book just about?
John: Yeah.
Andrew: The first 10 or 20 pages are ideas. The next of them is your reader writing and filling it in.
John: The same, I did day one, night one, sprint one, quarterly review one and then just replicate, maybe, just replicate. So, as the author, absolutely. That was the case. Also one thing, I think, Andrew, that you’ll resonate with that I’ve definitely resonated with as a podcaster–I mean, hey, brother, I was listening to your 2009 episodes of Mixergy in 2012 as I was getting inspired to launch EOFire. What does that mean? Evergreen. I get that. A lot of people I don’t think really understand the power of evergreen.
So, there are a lot of great books out there. There are some timeless books. We’ve all heard of them, “Think and Grow Rich,” etc. There are timeless books. But the majority of books, you’re not going to read, “How to Crush Twitter” if it was published in 2010. No matter how good the book was then, it’s not relevant in 2016.
The Freedom Journal, non-dated. It is just how to accomplish your number one goal in 100 days. These are timeless principles. This is a timeless book. If it takes me ten years to sell out my inventory I have–I just purchased another 30,000 that are currently in the South Pacific right now headed this way–guess what, the book is still going to be selling then because it’s still going to be relevant then.
Andrew: Who do you get to ship for you?
John: Who do I get to ship?
Andrew: Yeah. It’s not coming into your place where you’re living right now in Puerto Rico. Where are these books and who ships them out for you?
John: So, I get them created in China and then they put them on the slow boats, they call them. It takes about six to eight weeks. One goes to the port of LA. The other goes to the port of Philadelphia. They get unloaded there. There’s one company called Shipwire, who has multiple locations throughout the world, but I use their LA and their Philadelphia locations to store half of my inventory on each. So whenever somebody orders them in the U.S., whichever one’s closer, it goes to that one right there, and then if it’s international, they’ll send them overseas.
Andrew: And Shipwire connects to Shopify, so it’s easy when someone buys to automatically ship out.
John: All automatic. Yeah.
Andrew: I see.
John: And one more thing I think is important on this note is I also use Amazon FBA incredibly much. It’s amazing to use Amazon’s power. I was just mentioning to you yesterday. I did like 12 sales on Shopify yesterday, which is a good day, 12 Freedom Journal sales. But I did 33 on Amazon. So, it was a massive–
Andrew: How are people finding you on Amazon? Are they hearing you talk about it on your podcast and then going to Amazon and looking for it?
John: Amazon has an amazing advertising feature that people aren’t using yet. It’s really like Facebook’s advertising feature back in 2013 or 2014, when people didn’t quite get it yet. It’s an incredible opportunity for the advertising feature on Amazon. We’re using it. They have what’s called an AOS score, like your Amazon after sale, whatever they call it, but you see the percentage of how much it costs you per sale. So, right now I’m doing my Freedom Journal sales at 6% and 7%, so it’s costing me basically like $6 to sell a $39 journal.
And then Amazon handles everything because of their FBA, fulfillment by Amazon. They handle the shipping. They handle returns. If someone wants it gift wrapped, they do that. They do all of those things. So I’m coming up for key terms under journaling, under freedom, under goals, under motivation, under happiness, planners, all these things my book is showing up. People are going there and snagging it. Again, 33 people just yesterday. That’s just one day.
Andrew: So I kind of felt like when you were doing Kickstarter it’s because you then create a deadline for everyone to act by, an event worth talking about and that’s why you would do Kickstarter. Unlike other people who do Kickstarter to get enough money to go pay for production, you had the money and I think you paid for it before you even did your Kickstarter, right?
John: Yeah.
Andrew: So then once you have that Kickstarter setup, talk about the campaign to promote it? I know I was part of it. You’ve reached out to other people. But what worked for you for getting sales on Kickstarter?
John: So we’re getting another great benefit of being a podcaster now having done over 1,500 episodes is that’s 1,500 successful, inspiring entrepreneurs that I’ve interviewed. So, I was able to reach back out to them and say, “Andrew, I’d love to know what value I can add to your life, of course, but right now I have something if you’re willing to add value to my life.” At that time, it was The Freedom Journal.
Andrew: Did you go to every single one of the guests that you had on?
John: Individual emails.
Andrew: Individually emailed them. I know your assistants–
John: Individually emailed–
Andrew: Every single one. So, I understand how you can say, “Andrew, if you can help by having me on the podcast, that would support the book.”
John: Yeah.
Andrew: But what did you ask of other people who aren’t podcasters who are just entrepreneurs?
John: Email. Email is the only thing that matters in my mind. It’s the only metric that sold Freedom Journals. We made a huge mistake last year. I was talked into it even though I knew it was a mistake of doing a thunderclap.
My advice to anybody is thunderclap is a waste of social capital. It’s a waste of social favors. If you’ve built up a favor for somebody, you’re giving them the easiest out by just saying, “Click on this and send a tweet out when the thunderclap happens.” Listen, tweets don’t matter. For very few people, Facebook posts don’t matter that much. It’s an email to that person’s list or it’s nothing.
Andrew: To their mailing list? People give it to you for free?
John: For free.
Andrew: You just said, “I had you on. I’m working on this project.” I remember you saying, “It’s a passion project of mine. It also supports Pencils of Promise,” which is a nonprofit. “Will you help me get the word out doing anything that makes sense?” And I thought, “Let’s do an interview.” But other people would email their list?
John: Yeah. Absolutely.
Andrew: For no commission, nothing?
John: There’s no affiliate whatsoever. There’s no commission whatsoever. That thing you said about Pencils of Promise was definitely a huge thing though. I brought in Pencils of Promise. I was very honest and said, “Hey, every time we hit a funding goal, I’m going to personally be writing a check on behalf of the backers.” So, it kind of gave a good story for people to mail and say, “Listen, this isn’t another big campaign, like John’s doing something cool with Pencils of Promise.”
We ended up doing that. I ended up writing three checks for $25,000 to Pencils of Promise. I was one of their biggest donors for 2016. I should have gone to their black tie gala, but I was stuck down here in Puerto Rico doing some other things. But it was a really great kind of combo pack to be able to reach out to other people and say, “Listen, I know you’re not going to get a cut of this,” but allow them to say, “I have no affiliation with this. I’m not getting a dollar of this. I just like John. I like what he’s doing with Pencils of Promise. I think this book can genuinely help.”
Of course I sent them copies or a preview of it so they knew it was real and legit. And let’s be honest. They know there’s a chance six months from now or a year from now when they do something, they can come on EOFire, my show that got two million listens last month and maybe have an interview. If they say yes, it’s probably a lot more likely that I’m going to have them back on as a repeat guest. If they say no, I’m not like a vindictive person, but they’re probably not coming back on my show.
Andrew: So they’d email their whole list. Who’s someone who got a big list for you?
John: I can tell you right now. Hal Elrod was huge. He was one of the bigger ones. Amy Porterfield–massive referral, Rory Vaden was a huge one. I actually kind of had these top of mind because I’m just in my dashboard looking at the Kickstarter referrals. Those are three of the big ones. Pat Flynn did a couple of podcast sponsorships or he like used his sponsorship spots to–
Andrew: Promote your book.
John: Promote The Freedom Journal because he was launching one the same time, so I had him on my show for his book. So you just kind of like do the thing and reach out to friends, ask for favors and do what you can to reciprocate.
Andrew: What else worked for you? So, asking people to do it and not a thunderclap–thunderclap means we’re all going to say that we’re going to tweet at the same time and thunderclap will make sure the tweets go out at the same time.
John: Right.
Andrew: I get it. You’re right. That’s a waste of social capital. You’re asking them for a favor and you get nothing in return, essentially, for that. Asking them to email their list is helpful and then if there’s something else that makes sense, being on Pat’s program, being on mine makes sense too. What else beyond influencers helped you?
John: Okay. So I built an email list up pre leading into it of just The Mastery Journal. It was just–sorry, The Freedom Journal, just The Freedom Journal interest list, nothing else. I would run Facebook ads to giving away the first 30 days of The Freedom Journal for free, fillable PDF, beautiful, all those things–by the way, which I sold on the Kickstarter campaign for $17. So, there was real value.
Andrew: So, if somebody gave you their email address, they got the PDF version of some of the pages. Is it all the pages?
John: The first 30 days.
Andrew: The first 30 days of The Freedom Journal. I see. Got it. And so that built up a mailing list of people who were interested in possibly getting the hardcover version.
John: Totally. And then every single day for all 33 days of that campaign, I emailed that list. It wasn’t all fluff like just, “Buy The Freedom Journal.” It was a really valuable value bomb on something to do with goals or mindset or something, them saying, “By the way, here’s where our Kickstarter campaign is at. If you haven’t bought yet, click here and do that.”
So, that was a huge thing that, again, if you build an interest list up like that, hit that list every single day during your launch because they opted in just solely for The Freedom Journal interest list. They can unsubscribe at any single time. I did not do that with main email list for EOFire. I mentioned it a couple times throughout that 33 days because those people did not sign up to be pitched The Freedom Journal. But those people that did for the interest list absolutely did. So, every single day I did another one, another one and that worked really well.
Andrew: What about–you also did a series on your show of interviews around The Freedom Journal, right?
John: Yes. So I reached out to 33 of who I thought were my best past interviews. At that point it was like over 1,300 or 1,400 interviews that I’d done. I brought them on. It was like the Chris Brogans, the Michael Hyatts, like just like my big name past guests, brought them all on, had them on the show and we just talked about how goals have impacted their life.
It was a completely different shift away from the EOFire flow, which we went right back to afterwards, but it was just about how setting and accomplishing goals has turned them into a success. By the way, a cool thing that I did was I usually will schedule my interviews to go out for 30 days. Right now I’m done for December. They’re just scheduled to go out.
But I didn’t do that for The Freedom Journal. Every single morning, I would wake up–that’s not true. I would wait as late as I could to the end of that last night and I would record a little intro for The Freedom Journal where I would say, “Hey, guys, right now this is a live update. We’re at $145,000 on day three. We’re breaking some records. We’re doing some cool things. If you haven’t checked out TheFreedomJournal.com Kickstarter campaign, head over there.” So, I had a live update in every single one of those 33 on EOFire.
Two things I did, Andrew, that you might find interesting. Number one, I also on day 34, I went back and I took all of those pre-rolls out. So you go back and listen to those episodes now, they’re gone because they were just there. I replaced that episode within Libsyn with an episode that didn’t have that pre-roll. So people can’t hear that kind of live thing of something that’s not live anymore.
Andrew: Yeah.
John: Number two, I took those 33 episodes that I recorded and I launched an entire separate podcast called The Freedom Journal Podcast. I had this podcast on New and Noteworthy now with the exact same episodes that I had on EOFire just under a different podcast, just 33 episodes, The Freedom Journal Podcast. Now I’m in New and Noteworthy. Now I have my typical subscribers for EOFire and I use that combination to really mix that.
Andrew: And it’s in both programs?
John: Both.
Andrew: Both. Right. I’ve thought of doing that for Mixergy, taking all the, let’s say, what I was thinking was all the female entrepreneurs and turning that into a female entrepreneurs series and making that into a whole separate series on iTunes. The reason that came to mind is so many people ask for more female entrepreneurs. I’m having a hard time getting more on, so something like that would make sense.
John: Yeah. I launched a Top Ten podcast. It was just EOFire’s top ten ever most downloaded. That was a separate podcast. It was like the all-star edition. I used the intro and outro to drive people back to the main show. That’s what I did.
Andrew: Right. Actually, before we go on to what else, let me talk about my sponsor. You record your sponsor messages ahead of time, right?
John: Yeah. So, this is live. This is how the pros do it, guys.
Andrew: It is live. The first sponsor is a company called Bench. I remember at Mixergy I was such a jerk to one of my sponsors and I didn’t mean to be, it’s because I didn’t send invoices out in time. The whole revenue and expense of Mixergy was a mess. Did you ever have that at EOFire?
John: No. Sorry.
Andrew: From the beginning, you were always organized. What did you use?
John: Kate Erickson.
Andrew: Kate did the books for you?
John: All of them.
Andrew: In QuickBooks?
John: Yeah. So we use Xero.
Andrew: Xero. I tried Xero. At the time I tried it, it wasn’t. . .
John: It wasn’t there.
Andrew: It was antiquated. It wasn’t there, exactly. All the text on the site was like this tiny 1999 text. It just wasn’t fully working, but I could tell the promise of it. So, instead I was using QuickBooks. QuickBooks is a mess. It was out of date at the time. It wasn’t easy to stay on top of that and everything else that I had to do at Mixergy. Yeah. I fell behind.
When you fall behind, you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t how much revenue you have. You don’t know what’s working for you. You don’t know which interviews, for example, are bringing in revenue, which sources of revenue are producing, where my money is going. I think there are a lot of entrepreneurs out there who are doing this and they’re going, frankly, John, through their own version of private hell because they can’t admit it. You can’t say to people on your team, “Dude, I fucked up the books.”
You can’t say that. You can’t say that to anyone because it’s such an amateur mistake, but we all do it. So what many people will do is they’ll hire a virtual assistant and say, “Here’s Xero or here’s QuickBooks. Go and enter everything into it just like you would enter into an Excel spreadsheet.” The problem with that is they make mistakes. They don’t know the details. They don’t know how to organize it. They don’t know how to categorize things.
So then some people will go and hire a bookkeeper. The problem with a bookkeeper is a lot of these bookkeepers are a little bit shady, frankly, or maybe they’re human. They have issues that come up in their lives that keep them from showing up, like they get sick. They have kids, issues all over the place, kids like they give birth and they can’t show up for a couple of months.
That’s why I like having a service. The reason I recommend Bench is these guys use software to pull in people’s data from Stripe, from PayPal, from wherever so that you know where the revenue is coming from. It’s all sucked in by software properly and then they have human beings go in and organize it right so that every month you know exactly where your money is going. Every month you know exactly what’s bringing in revenue. You have a scorekeeper keeping track of what’s working and what isn’t.
If you want to sign up for Bench and you’re listening to me, you should check out a special URL they created just for us where they’re going to give you, yeah, a 20% discount off their regular rate, but they’re giving Mixergy people something they’re not giving anyone else, which is a free trial. They’ll do your books for you for free over this free trial period.
All you have to do is go to Bench.co/Mixergy. You’ll get a nice low price, good team of people doing the work for you and a trial period that they’re not offering anyone else. Look at the upper right of that page and you’ll see it. I’m glad to have Bench as a sponsor, Bench.co/Mixergy.
Was there anything else about the Kickstarter campaign that worked for you before we move on after that?
John: Yeah. Let’s talk about intra-campaign right now because this is something that I did that just kind of came to me like by day three that worked so well. This kind of points to what happens when you do actually have the inventory. So, I had the inventory. All 20,000 of my books were at Shipwire just kind of waiting until the end of the campaign that I could immediately fulfill.
That was kind of a good bonus of the campaign is that I could say, “Guys, if you buy the early bird, you’re going to get your book as soon as this campaign is over. We’re going to be shipping them all out.” That was cool. There wasn’t this six to eight to who knows long. I just actually got something in the mail from Kickstarter. It’s called Ruggie. You wake up out of bed and you stand on it. It tells you your temperature. It tells you what time it is, how long you slept. It’s a pretty cool thing. It took like 14 months to get to me. I forgot that I even had bought it. So, that was random kind of comment.
One thing that I did that worked really well because I had the inventory was whenever anybody bought the actual hardcover, the $39 hardcover, I individually messaged them–again, Andrew, I do things all the time that don’t scale. I do things that don’t scale because they work. I reached out to that person individually and yeah, I did have a text expander message for the.
But I said, “Hey, Andrew, text expander message which said basically, “Thanks for supporting The Freedom Journal. You got a hardcover $39 journal. If you upgrade your pledge today to the five-pack, not only are you going to get the five-pack, I’m going to mail you a Freedom Journal today. So, you’re going to get one in your house.”
Andrew: Before the campaign ends?
John: Before the campaign even ends.
Andrew: So if they upgrade, they’ll get the book that they bought right away.
John: Right away.
Andrew: That’s really smart.
John: Hundreds of people were just like, “I just want to start my number one goal right now.” We’re talking early January. They’re like, “I’ll up to the five-pack. I’ll give some to my friends.” So, that was an individual thing that I did every single day that worked to tens of thousands of dollars of revenue. That was a massive win.
Andrew: Why did you do that yourself? Why didn’t you get a virtual assistant to go and email on your behalf or frankly you know how to use automation software, why didn’t you do that?
John: I just liked being connected to the campaign. It was doing those types of things that gave me ideas to do other things. I think that’s kind of one thing a lot of people don’t realize is that it’s when your hands are in the Playdough that you think of actual designs to make. If I had just come up with that idea and given it to someone else and had them do it, I might not have come up with that next idea or that next idea, the next idea. I ended up coming up with an idea of if someone was at the five-pack, I would send them two signed Freedom Journals. I would actually mail them to me, sign them and then mail it to them because I just, again, was looking to just continue to pour gasoline on this fire. All these ideas were coming to me because I was in the mix every single day. Like my 33 days during the Mastery Journal are blank calendars because every day I’m going to be right here in this room just doing things, talking to people, coming up with the ways that I can just add gasoline to this fire.
Andrew: Starting from when? It’s January 23rd?
John: Yes.
Andrew: That’s when the campaign goes live on Kickstarter.
John: Yeah.
Andrew: Similar situation where you’re reaching out to people like me. You emailed me. We’re not recording in December, 2016. You said, “Andrew, it’s coming up in January. What do you say?” I said, “Yeah, sure.” And then before I knew it, you were on my calendar for like a few days later.
John: Hello. Here I am.
Andrew: Yeah. So, what you’re doing is you’re saying you’re whiting out that space so you have a lot of time to just come up with ideas and experiment.
John: Exactly. It is my sole focus, no travel, no nothing, just TheMasteryJournal.com.
Andrew: Do you ever look at people who have software with a little bit of envy because they don’t have to do this stuff. I’m looking at our friend Laura Roeder. Do you know Laura?
John: That’s the example I was going to give if you didn’t.
Andrew: Right. She went from this kind of marketing, where she was teaching, to now having software. If she had to take some time away, she could. She doesn’t have to do this stuff anymore. Her site just works without her in many ways. Yeah, she’s still doing promotion, but she doesn’t have to do this. She doesn’t have to sit at her computer for 30 days straight to launch something like this.
John: SaaS is amazing, software as a service. I love the model. I’ve actually had a couple ideas. I had a mastermind down here which you were invited to which you bailed on.
Andrew: I had a kid.
John: Obviously understandably so with a new child. I shared one of my SaaS product ideas during that mastermind and it’s just one of those things where I would love to get into that model at some point. At the same time, I love doing this, like this is something that lights me up. It’s something that I really enjoy. You’re a good friend. I consider you a good friend because we’ve been able to do this a number of times but also meet in person and further our relationship.
I’m a people person. I’m a type A. I’m an extrovert. Listen, I know it’s trendy to say that you’re an introvert as an entrepreneur and that’s cool. But I’m not. I’m not. I’m a person that likes to connect, that likes to kind of be out there, that likes to improve my speech, likes to improve my talk just because it’s all things I need to get better at. It’s doing these types of things that help.
Andrew: I noticed that. I’m an extrovert too. There are times that I need to be by myself, but I love going out and meeting people. I think once you know how to do it right, you can’t help but get fired up by that.
John: Can I share something with your audience that they might not know of you?
Andrew: Yeah.
John: One thing I really admire about you, I don’t know even know if I’ve told you this yet, but you have an incredible way of commanding a room. You will walk into a room and there will be like four or five little mini conversations going on, everybody’s kind of stuck in their own little conversation because a lot of times that’s what it is. People are stuck in conversations because you’re talking one to one to somebody and you’re going back and forth and it’s nice, but you’re like, “I can’t just stop talking to this person,” and they’re thinking the same thing. So, you end up just talking to one person all night and you’re like, “That was lame.”
You come into a room and I’ve seen you do this multiple times. One was up in San Francisco. We had Scott Dinsmore and Jadah Sellner and other people hanging out. Another time was on the cruise, you’d come in and be like, “All right, guys, look at me. Not because I want everybody to look at me the whole time, but because I want to make this meaningful. I don’t want these pointless chit-chats happening.” You’ll command a room and you’ll make something meaningful happen from that. So, that I really admire that about you.
Andrew: Yeah. I used to be a real introvert and then I learned how to get out there and have conversations. One of the benefits is that you can actually shape the night into something you get excited about. That day when you happened to be in San Francisco, you texted me and said, “I’m in town. Do you want to get together?” I came out. We had a great set of conversations. I won’t talk about the details of it. And then from there, I said, “Let’s go get ice cream,” and we all went out for ice cream. Then we all went out to get Indian burritos, which I freaking love, right?
John: We took Tim Ferriss there the next night and he was like, “This place is the best.”
Andrew: Really? Tim Ferriss had an Indian burrito?
John: Yeah.
Andrew: I’m surprised.
John: At that restaurant that you took us to.
Andrew: Yeah. It’s very carb-heavy. I’m impressed that you guys got him to do that.
John: He’s slow carb. He’s a slow carb diet.
Andrew: Still, that’s like a heavy carb.
John: Yeah. That’s heavy.
Andrew: It was fantastic. Then you launch it. Then you start promoting it further. What else worked? After you’ve done so much, you’ve told your audience about it, was there a point where you said, “I’ve got to give it a break?”
John: You’re asking like what else worked. We were continuously running Facebook ads the whole time, just continuing to stay top of mind.
Andrew: Who does your Facebook ad buys, by the way? You’re fantastic at it.
John: Thank you. I’ll give a shout out, Ethan Sigmon. If you just Google him, he’ll come up. He’s a great Facebook ad guy, cool dude, does some great stuff.
Andrew: My friend Brian Harris I think spent all of 2016 trying to figure out Facebook ads. He’s hired people and it didn’t work out. He’s done it himself and blogged about it and it didn’t work out. I think he finally found something that worked, but it took him a freaking year. How do you end up with Ethan?
John: So I’m at ClickFunnels, Russell Brunson’s conference. Russell like brings me up on stage and was talking about podcasting and what happened when he came on my show. We sold like 800 of his books within the next day. So, he was like kind of bragging to his audience about the power of podcasting.
I came off stage and I was walking back to my seat and Ethan comes up to me and he’s like, “Dude, such a fan of your show. So cool to see you here. I do Facebook ads. I’d love to prove my worth to you. Let me run your ads for like three months for free, your budget and nothing on top of that.” He did it. He just crushed it. I was just like, “You’re hired.” So, now I pay him his monthly rate and we go from there.
Andrew: Okay. So buying Facebook ads worked for you. Any other kind of advertising work?
John: Instagram advertising works. We were doing the exact same thing on Instagram that we were doing on Facebook. YouTube advertising did not work. We tried lots of YouTube advertising, no good there. We did very, very little like pay per click on Google just because it was very obvious at the beginning it wasn’t working. You have to go to your audience, like you have to go to your people and that’s where Facebook and Instagram just thrive.
Andrew: You’re targeting your audience or are you also targeting Mixergy fans because they might be similar audiences?
John: That, Lewis Howes, Mixergy, Amy Porterfield, Tony Robbins, like just people are following those influencers for a reason because they want to change their life or they want to set and accomplish a goal that makes sense for them.
Andrew: What was your funnel for that?
John: My funnel for that?
Andrew: Someone would click that ad and then what would happen after that?
John: Take them directly to the Kickstarter page. The Kickstarter page itself, that’s what I do love about Kickstarter is an incredible sales page, right at the top there’s a video. We did an amazing video with Caleb Wojcik, who’s actually Pat Flynn’s video guy.
Andrew: I hired him too.
John: He came over to my place, did the video, crushed it. So, that’s just like a great three-minute video right off the top. Side note–The Mastery Journal’s video we shot all on site here in Puerto Rico. Beautiful.
Andrew: Who did that?
John: So I had a guy–
Andrew: Who shot the Mastery one?
John: His name is Chris Lo of Situasian Films. That’s his business. So, he’s from Idaho, actually, which is pretty cool. So, he came down, spent the whole weekend here. I put him up here with Brandon T. Adams. They’re both buddies from Idaho. They came up–no, sorry Iowa, Des Moines, Iowa, not Idaho. They both came down, had the weekend, shot it on site here. So, everything you see in The Master Journal’s video is from like my deck, my balcony, really cool sites.
So, sorry, getting back to the point, when you get to the Kickstarter page, it’s a sales page. It starts with the video. Then it just goes down. There are beautiful pictures. There are .gif images of the book opening and all like the words. So, it’s a sales page. Then to the right of the sales page as you’re going down are all the reward levels you can just click right there.
Andrew: So you’re saying they created a great landing page. Why should you mess with it? But today, don’t you do a course around it, someone comes in from one of your ads, they enter their email address, you do a course that teaches and then sells the book. Am I remembering that right?
John: I have a course that’s completely free called FunnelOnFire.com. Free course and it just teaches you how to setup a funnel on fire.
Andrew: No, I mean don’t you have a course that leads to a sale of The Freedom Journal?
John: Yeah, I do, FreeGoalsCourse.com.
Andrew: That’s it. So someone comes in, they learn how to set their goals. They learn the whole process and then you say, “If you’re interested, I actually happen to have a book where you can go through this every day.”
John: And we track the sales from that and it’s astounding, like literally 65% of people that complete that course, meaning to all eight days because it’s an eight day course, 65% at least get the digital version of The Freedom Journal.
Andrew: At least buy it.
John: Yeah.
Andrew: 65% of people who go through the course buy something.
John: If they do all eight days–not 65% of people that start it, that finish it.
Andrew: Got it.
John: Will at least buy the digital version, which by the way, is $35. I get more excited, not really because I really want people to like have this in their home, of course, but again, this is $39 and it costs me $6.25 to make. I actually do free shipping, so I eat the shipping. I spend about $6 or $7 to get it to somebody. So, that’s where my profit margin is $24 per book.
If you buy The Freedom Journal digital pack only, it’s $35 and that is all profit. There’s nothing taken out of that. So what you get with that is the actual fillable PDF, 100 days, you get the audio book, which I created, so it’s narrated by me. You get the mobile app.
Andrew: Facebook group.
John: You get access to our Facebook group, all that stuff.
Andrew: What’s the mobile app?
John: It’s The Freedom Journal mobile app, which every single day, you click on the mobile app and it says basically it has checkboxes for you to check off doing all the tasks you have to do. What’s really cool about is after you check off those boxes, it takes you to the next page, which is a camera and it says, “Take a picture of your actual Freedom Journal and then share it on Facebook,” like of that day you did.
We’re constantly having people share their day 34 on Facebook. People are like, “What’s that?” And that’s just continuing to do it. That’s, again, why we’re doing $25,000, $35,000, last month November, our most recent month, we did $34,000 in revenue from just The Freedom Journal.
Andrew: I’ve been meaning to ask you, by the way, EOFire used to be Entrepreneur on Fire.
John: Yeah.
Andrew: And then became EOFire. I saw something on the bottom of your website that said something like, “Not connected with Entrepreneur Magazine or something.”
John: Magazine. Yeah.
Andrew: What’s the deal there with the name change and how that’s connected?
John: So Google the words “entrepreneur sues entrepreneurs” and you’ll see about 15 pages come up with very relevant content to that. Long story short, back in 2012, Andrew, Entrepreneur Magazine reached out to me with a cease and desist and said, “If you don’t stop using the word entrepreneur in the name of your podcast, we’re going to take you to court. We’re going to sue you.”
Fortunately–because I wasn’t making any money at that time, so I didn’t want to fight then financially–my father is a lawyer. So, he went back and forth with them literally for three years. He knows how to do the lawyer thing, so back and forth and back and forth. The whole time I’m still building my brand Entrepreneur on Fire. They wanted the website transferred to them, which by the way, side note, was ranked higher in Alexa than their website was.
Andrew: Interesting.
John: They were just asking the obnoxious requests, like, “We want that domain, EntrepreneurOnFire.com.” So all these things. Then finally I was like the business is like three years old. The actual name, John Lee Dumas, which meant nothing in 2012 actually means something in 2015 to some people. I feel like the brand can survive. So, I just kind of wanted to put it behind me. They were actually started to get even more aggressive, like it was actually getting turned up a little bit.
Side note–I reached out to Mark Cuban because he wrote an Inc. article about these kind of trolls that are out there. He actually didn’t mention them specifically but he kind of hinted around Entrepreneur Magazine. So I reached out to him. He got right back to me via email. He was like, “Hey, dude, reach out to this woman. She’ll take care of you.” It was this law firm in California that does this kind of stuff pro bono. I talked with her for a while. She’s like, “Do you want to go big with this?” That was one of her questions.
At the time, I was just like, “I really don’t. It’s so distracting. I’m doing so well and making so much money. Do I want to take 90% of my focus away from this to do that in the court systems and all that?” So long story short, I said I think the brand can survive the name change to EOFire. They sent us a document that basically said, “If you do that, then we’re fine.” That was the final document. We went from Entrepreneur on Fire to EOFire with John Lee Dumas.
Andrew: They’ve been doing that for years.
John: Years.
Andrew: And there is no reason why. They could basically own a word from a dictionary. There is no reason except that they still have a little bit of firepower left and it’s not worth wasting money to go after them. Why didn’t you change the name earlier from EOFire to something else?
John: I just thought that Entrepreneur on Fire was such a good name, if I can be a little honest for a minute here. Like the key words were great. I was ranking number two in all of iTunes for the word entrepreneur of course because my podcast was named Entrepreneur on Fire. I was doing great on search terms on Google. It just made sense. When I would talk to people, I was like, “I have a show called Entrepreneur on Fire.” That just made sense as a word. People got that, “He must interview entrepreneurs that are successful or there’s just something along those lines.”
Andrew: Yeah.
John: Whereas EOFire, it kind of clouds it a little bit. Of course Entrepreneur Organization did pretty well getting the word EO.
Andrew: Is that why they changed it?
John: No. Just because honestly I hadn’t ever thought about EOFire until post launch like in 2012, the tenth person said, “How do you spell entrepreneur?” This is, by the way, pre-Entrepreneur Magazine reaching out to me. I said entrepreneur is a tricky word.
Andrew: It is.
John: I would actually look at my little logo here to read it myself. So I was just finally like, “I’m going to make that change preemptively just for a short URL. So I went and bought the domain EOFire.com and just started sending people there as a short one so that when Entrepreneur Magazine reached out to me, I kind of had an easy switch, but again, I didn’t want to make it quick because I just didn’t want to give in that easily and also because I really thought there was huge value in that name Entrepreneur on Fire.
Andrew: I would have thought they would have given up at some point. But I’m wondering if that’s why Entrepreneur Organization became EO, that maybe they’ve got–
John: That’s a good point. Wow.
Andrew: I wish somebody would just fight them or that maybe a friend of mine would buy them just so as long as somebody is taking advantage of the fact that entrepreneur the word is owned, it might as well be a friend.
John: I would love that.
Andrew: What a thing. All right. Second sponsor is a company called Toptal. Do you know Toptal?
John: Yeah. They were a sponsor of EOFire.
Andrew: What do you know about Toptal? What do you remember?
John: That they’re great, number one. If you’re looking to design an app or you’re wanting to think about what it would look like to have a SaaS product, start to put that thing together, these are the top three percent because they really go through and they qualify people and it’s like you reach out to somebody, it’s not going to be like that horror story from India that you’re going to hear. These are people that have been vetted, that have been qualified by Toptal, the top three percent. You’re going to get a finished product in your hands, meaning by product that developer is a finished product.
Andrew: Yeah. I have a listener who I had on Mixergy who runs a company called Tatango who said, “You know what? I heard you talk about Toptal. I know you and the way you vetted me, so you’ve got to be a good person to listen to when it comes to hire a developer.” He said, “I’m tired of talking to dozens of people trying to find the right developer. You know what, Andrew? I tried it.”
So he and his CTO called up Toptal and they told them what they were looking for. They got two developers. They said either one could be fantastic. They ended up going with the one that felt right. Now his CTO says, “This is a CTO-level person that they got.” Last week, he came out to scotch night and he brought me one of my favorite whiskeys ever. I’m blanking on the name.
John: While Andrew is talking about his favorite scotch, my favorite scotch is Oban 14-year.
Andrew: Here it is. He brought me a Leopold Brothers rye. So hard to find, but his concierge at his hotel helped him find it. He said, “Thank you, Andrew, for introducing me to Toptal. By the way, we’ve hired six more developers because Tatango grew so much, all for Toptal. Thanks for the intro.”
So, I’m going to say this to anyone who’s listening to me. A lot of people from Mixergy obviously have been signing up to Toptal and hiring developers. There’s a reason why these guys bought up all of 2016. Now they’re talking to us about whether they could buy up every ad in 2017, which I don’t want. I don’t want all my eggs in one basket. It’s because it works for our listeners. If you’re looking for developers, I urge you to try the best of the best.
Go to Toptal.com/Mixergy. They’re giving Mixergy people something they’re not giving anybody else. You’ve got to go check it out at Top as in top of the mountain, tal as in talent, that’s Toptal.com/Mixergy.
By the way, you’re making good cash from advertising. Do you have a process for recording your ads? That’s one of the trickiest things for me, to find a way to keep making it fresh and to sell someone else’s product.
John: Again, that goes back to Kate. That’s why she’s such an integral part of the team. So, when we find sponsors that we want–again, we have 60 sponsorship slots per month. I don’t have any pre-rolls.
Andrew: That’s huge. That’s two per episode.
John: I have two mid-rolls and two post-rolls. I did away with pre-rolls about eight months ago. It was a personal decision for my podcast. What happens was when we have a sponsor come on, we just ask them to provide around ten bullet points of really what the essence is of what they want. And then Kate takes those bullet points and she knows me better than anybody else and she will craft unique reads for those reads that get approved by the sponsor, then I actually read them and the sponsor gets to hear them first and then and only then after they give the green light will they actually be utilized in an episode.
Andrew: I feel like your ability to read ads like that has gotten better. I’m still not there. I can’t sit and read. I’m guessing it’s because you just keep doing the ads, right?
John: Again, just like I said, I love doing these types of interviews because every time I do one, I get a little bit better. Same thing with that. You go back and listen to my first few ads that I read, it’s a nightmare.
Andrew: I’m thinking the Mastery video was one of your best videos where it was written ahead of time but it felt natural as you were doing it. I said, “This guy is actually getting like broadcaster quality performances now.”
John: That means a lot coming from you. Thank you.
Andrew: What’s your process for improving? You and Kate give presentations a lot. We talked about it. I invited you to a dinner with other presenters at one of the events we were both speaking at. You obviously think through this process. What’s your process for improving as a presenter or as an ad reader or any of this stuff?
John: So this is really key because whenever anybody presents like the first few times, they’re super nervous before they present. Then they get off stage and no matter how they did, by the way, everybody in the room comes up to them and they say something along the lines of like, “Wow, great presentation.”
So even though we know it wasn’t and even though in our heads we know we’re not quite there yet, we hear that over and over again and it actually starts to seep into our brains and that’s the worst thing because guess what? There’s nothing else they can say. They just saw you speak. You’re on stage. They’re walking up to you. They are just going to say, “Great job.” There’s nothing else they can humanly say besides those words.
Andrew: Yes.
John: So I always am very thankful and I say, “Thank you so much.” And then I don’t say anything right there because there are usually a few conversations to be had. Later on, I’ll find those people and I’ll walk up to them and be like, “By the way, I really wanted to thank you for the kind words you said after my talk, but I know there are some areas I can improve. You’ve seen some great speakers today. If you can kind of take the best other speakers have done that you think I can probably implement into my talk, what would they be?” Then you’ve given them this opening to give you the real feedback they would give you if they were drinking the truth serum.
Andrew: I see. Come back to them and ask them that.
John: Yeah.
Andrew: I see. Come back after when there aren’t the expectations to say something nice.
John: And open the door by saying, “I know you’ve seen other talks. What did you like about theirs that I can implement into mine?” You kind of twist it in that way. Here’s a great honest piece of feedback that I got from one of my first few talks, nobody would say this to me at all when I got off stage, but when I went back and asked, people were just like–this was consistent from like three different people from individual conversations.
They were saying, “John, you weren’t walking with a purpose. You were just kind of like walk, turn, walk, turn and it didn’t feel natural. You never stopped. You didn’t own it.” They said, “Some of the people that we saw that were speaking were commanding the stage. They would stop.” Another was like, “John, you never stopped to take a breath.” This was back in 2012 when I first was getting my teeth cut. You’re just like, “Blah, blah, blah,” and they were just saying, “Some people can control the room with silence.”
And that sometimes is the loudest noise you can make is to stand up on stage when you’re making a point and just stop for a second because people, they’re on their phones, they’re like, “Wait, something happened. Pattern interrupt.” They look up and they’ve got you back. You’re back in now. Let’s do this.
It takes confidence. It takes really being comfortable in yourself to stand up in front of 1,200 people, which I did when I keynoted at Icon and Podcast Movement and not say a word and just sit there because people actually start to sweat a little bit and they’re like, “Did this guy just forget his lines or is he going to freeze?” And then you just come back at it and they’re like, “Wow. That has been the biggest thing for me.”
Andrew: So then do you do the same presentation, the same basic talk and then you can take that feedback and keep adjusting it?
John: No. I don’t do the same talks. I always like to mix it up because I like to make my talks very time relevant. So I just kind of take all that stuff I was sharing.
Andrew: It’s the techniques that you then bring back and keep working on.
John: The walking and the commanding the stage and owning your words and acting your words. I study people like Michael Port, who’s amazing at this. He has a book called “Steal the Show,” which talks about great techniques, so just some things like that really helped.
Andrew: What I’ve found helpful was doing–first of all, I’ve got to always do a dinner with the speakers because it’s such a great way to meet some of the best people who come to conferences. I try to do that every single time. It’s a bit of work but it’s worth it. The other thing is you noticed at that one dinner that we went to is I asked everyone who spoke to give feedback to everyone else, like what do you think worked and what didn’t.
I remember yours for me, which was, “Andrew, you’re really good at presenting to them but not with them and you should be asking for more interaction with the audience.” In some rooms, you could do that really well. I know Kate did that at Podcast Movement, where she actually handed out sheets to people. She asked them to do things. If they did it, then she gave them a copy of The Freedom Journal, which was a nice way to promote it. In other rooms, it’s a little bit harder to do in that same way. So, you have to find ways to still bring people in.
Noah Kagan did that well once. He asked people a question. To get them to actually answer, he’ll say, “If you answer it right, I’ll give you a hot sauce right.” His talk was Blowing Your Mind with Hot Sauce. He would ask you a question and if you answered it, he’d give you a hot sauce, which got people to pay attention.
John: Totally.
Andrew: Fired up the Socratic method. What about for improving your podcast? I know that one of the best things that worked for me was I spent months going over the transcript of each one of my interviews with a producer to say, “What did I do here? Why did this guy clam up? Why is this guy angry at me?” to understand the subtleties of the way I was communicating. Do you ever do anything like that, any post-mortems like that?
John: Yeah. So, for me, doing over 1,500 episodes now–I know I’m talking to one of the few people that can even talk around those numbers because you’re even higher than that.
Andrew: I’m not sure I am. Who knows?
John: You’re close. You’re around those numbers.
Andrew: I’ve done a lot. Yes.
John: One thing that I’ve really found helpful is when I do repeat interviews, when I actually go back and interview a person a second time, I’ll go back and listen to them back to back. I’ll go back and listen to episode 700 with Sally Hogshead and then episode 1,223 with Sally Hogshead. So, over almost two years have passed at that point. So, I’ve hopefully taken my game higher.
So, I just listen to how I interact with her differently and the nuances I picked up and I try to say which ones are working, which ones aren’t because that’s a really good baseline because I’m talking to the same person but I’m kind of at a different place as an interviewer.
Andrew: Yeah.
John: That’s a really helpful strategy for me.
Andrew: I find when I go back to listen to the earlier ones, I can see I was not a great presenter, but I was incredibly sincere in what I was curious about. I keep trying to come back to that because as long as I’m sincere what I’m curious about, it doesn’t matter if I don’t say it exactly right. How are you doing on time? We’re close to the top of the hour here.
John: Yeah. We are.
Andrew: Got another ten minutes?
John: I’ve got ten more.
Andrew: Maybe five or so. Cool. So, then, what I’m curious with you is where you get the ideas for the next thing? The Mastery Journal, is that something that your audience told them they had a problem that you’re helping to solve or is that something that you felt helped you? Was mastering a topic something that helped you and you said, “I want to share this with the world, I want to evangelize it?”
John: That’s a great question because I kind of look back over my journey with The Freedom Journal first and I said, “How did that idea come?” It came from my audience, Fire Nation, coming to me and saying, “John, what do all of your guests have in common, like the Andrew Warners to the Chris Brogans, fill in the blank, what is the one commonality?” Doing some deep soul searching, I realized all of you guys can crush goals. You set goals. You accomplish goals. My audience was missing that. So, that’s what The Freedom Journal came from.
So fast forward a year, here we are today from that launch. This year has been kind of a different cadence. People have been saying, “John, here in 2016, you’ve been running your business for four and a half years. You’ve grossed $10 million. What are you doing right? What are your strengths?” I would always try to be as humble as possible and say my weaknesses could fill a book this thick, but my strengths, although few are mighty. Those strengths are I am incredibly productive. I am super-disciplined and I am a zeroed in focused individual. Those are my three greatest strengths.
I would always get the feedback from people saying, “Wow, those are areas I really struggle in.” At least one, usually two, sometimes all three people were just like, “I don’t have that skill set. Those traits aren’t mine.” So I said, “Hey, just like I solved my listeners problems of setting and accomplishing goals with The Freedom Journal, maybe now I can train people how to become more productive, more disciplined and more focused in that same timeframe of 100 days,” because I’m a big believer in Parkinson’s Law–tasks will expand to the time allotted. So, I’m big on the timeframe. No matter what, there has to be a time limit on that.
So I sat down, I spent the entire year of 2016 just researching productivity, discipline and focus, those three different traits to take myself to the next level. I was already really good at it, but I wanted to become great and I wanted to come up with a system that I knew would guide people to master those three skills–productivity, discipline and focus in that 100 days because that’s not a lot of time when it comes down to it to re-train yourself to act differently, to reprogram all of things that we have in our head.
So The Mastery Journal was a huge challenge, I will be honest. The freedom journal just kind of came out of me because I just saw what was needed. The Mastery Journal, I had to go deep. It took longer to create and I think it’s going to–a phrase I like to use is it’s going to help less people more, if that makes sense.
What I mean by that is like everybody wants to set and accomplish a goal. That’s a homerun. This crushed it, almost 17,000 sales to date. But to do the work of mastering productivity, discipline and focus, not everybody is going to be game for that. I get that. This is going to help less people, but those people that actually commit to it, it’s going to help them so much more.
Andrew: Like what? What are they going to be able to master? What are you thinking people will use this for?
John: So let’s start with productivity. People are spending their entire days and they’re not producing anything of quality.
Andrew: I see. It’s not mastering like teaching or giving presentations or selling. It’s mastering productivity. It’s mastering focus.
John: Totally. This is actually a great learning point for everybody listening. The fact that you had that question right now this late into the interview having seen my support page, that’s huge. Now that I know that, I have to zero in and be more clear on what this actually is. So, exactly, this is about mastering productivity.
Andrew: At the end of 100 days, I’ll be more productive in the things I do. I’ll be more focused on what matters.
John: You will have the system where every single day you now know how to be incredibly productive. When you want to turn it on, you might not always want to and that’s okay. It might be scotch night last night. You want to dial back to productivity. That’s fine. But at least now you know the knob to turn on how to produce quality content.
Discipline–same thing. Discipline is so key because people don’t even–99% of people listening right now, if you want to consider yourself in that 1%, good for you, but 99% of people they don’t tackle every day with a plan. They let the day tackle them. I call it OPA, other people’s agenda. You wake up, you get on email, on Facebook, on social media, you are putting out other people’s fires, other people’s agenda.
Then finally when you turn to your own agenda, you’ve already used the best brain cells, you’ve already used the best energy that you have for the day. It’s too late. It’s over. So discipline is all about minute one, setting a plan and executing on that plan so we train you in doing that.
And then of course the third one is FOCUS, my acronym, Andrew–follow one course until success. FOCUS, there’s so much distraction in this world, the weapons of mass distraction. This lets you put those blinders on and just accomplish what matters with that focus. You combine those three traits together, you win.
Andrew: All right. And the URL for that if anyone wants to go sign up and get it?
John: So TheMasteryJournal.com. The Kickstarter campaign launched January 23rd of 2017 and it runs until February 24th. It’s a 33-day Kickstarter campaign. Like we talked about earlier, the sales page will have everything over there, Kickstarter, TheMasteryJournal.com. If you’re listening to this after February 24th, that will become a website where you can go and learn about The Mastery Journal and purchase off of Shopify.
Andrew: I’m not going in before the Kickstarter campaign, let’s see what happens if I go to The Mastery Journal.
John: You’ll love it.
Andrew: I see a page with what’s coming up and how I can get my first 30 days for free which is essentially what you were saying worked for you before. You’re doing it again now.
John: Totally.
Andrew: Of course. TheMasteryJournal.com and my two sponsors who I’m grateful for sponsoring is the company that will actually organize your financials right–look at John, John’s always had his numbers organized properly. That helps you grow. You’ve got to get somebody to do it. If it’s not you, if you happen not to be dating someone named Kate or have someone named Kate who runs your organization for you, get somebody right to do your books for you and I really recommend you check out Bench.co/Mixergy. Of course, if you need a great developer, go check out Toptal.com/Mixergy.
Thanks, JLD.
John: Andrew, always a pleasure.
Andrew: You bet. Thank you all for being a part of Mixergy. Bye, everyone.
