Before we get started, tell me if you’ve got this problem. You’ve got a great product, but you’re not getting people to even try it, let alone buy it. Well, the problem is probably that you’ve got too much text on your site, but check out what these start-ups have done.
Here’s SnapEngage. They’ve got a video explaining their product right underneath the free trial button. Here’s SendGrid. Right next to the get started button is a video explaining the product, video much more than text. It helps people understand what you’ve created and convinces them to try it and buy it.
The company that I recommend you turn to for this is Revolution Productions, same company that did both of those start-ups and many others’ videos. Revolution-Productions. And when you go to their site, Revolution-Productions.com and contact them, I want you to talk directly to the founder, Anish Patel. Tell him I sent you. They’ll take great care of you and make sure you have good video that convinces people to try your product.
Next sponsor is Grasshopper.com. I want you to think of them as adding super powers to your phone. Want extensions you can add it? Want a phone number that catches you anywhere you are? You’ve got it. Want to take your voice mail messages, maybe, and convert them into text? You’ve got it. Anything that can be done with a phone, pretty much anything… I can’t imagine what you can’t do, Grasshopper.com will do it in a very user friendly environment so you can keep adding features and adjusting them yourself, Grasshopper.com.
Finally, Scott Edward Walker is the lawyer I’ve been recommending long before he even paid me for a sponsorship. I don’t even know, Scott, why you even bother paying me. I’ve been telling people for years to try you, but you do so I’ll tell my audience right now. If you need a lawyer, if you’re an entrepreneur, especially if you’re a tech start-up entrepreneur, go to the lawyer I recommend. As you can see on this website, Jason Calacanis, Neil Patel and many other entrepreneurs recommend Scott Edward Walker of Walker Corporate Law.
All right. I’ve talked too fast and for too long. Let’s get right into the program.
Andrew: Hey everyone, my name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. How does a training and consulting company generate $6 million in annual revenue? Well, joining me is Ed Roman, founder of TheServerSide.com, a community website for programmers that earned that much revenue. He sold the company back in 2002.
I invited him here today to tell the story behind that business and to talk about what he’s currently working on which is LeanMovement.com, a community of lean startup practitioners who help founders reduce waste and implement the lean startup methodologies. Ed, welcome.
Ed: Thanks, Andrew. It’s great to meet you.
Andrew: Thank you.
Ed: I’m happy to have this opportunity to talk to other entrepreneurs. I appreciate you giving me the time for this interview.
Andrew: Thanks. Thank you for doing the interview. The first question I imagine my audience is wondering is the guy earned $6 million in annual revenue doing what? Can you give us a few examples of the products or services that you are selling at TheServerSide.com?
Ed: TheServerSide.com is a community for Java programmers, for hard core server side programmers building complex IT systems. Our mix of revenue was advertising off the website. We had traditional banner ads as well as newsletter embedded ads as well. We also had sponsored white papers, so this is content that if you’re a vendor in the Java space, you might want to do a soft sell promotion for your products or services. So, you might write an informational white paper, so you would actually have that as sponsored content on the website.
We also launched our own series of conferences called TheServerSide Symposium which hosted international conferences for programmers, and we had them in America, Asia-Pacific and Europe. We also did training consulting to help people with their Java systems, to make their deployments work well.
Andrew: You owned 100% of the business?
Ed: Well, I was the single sole founder of the business. Along the way I did one acquisition of another professional services company. We merged the two companies together, and all of my employees had stock so it was really shared among everyone.
Andrew: Six million. How much money did you invest in the business in order to get it to that much in revenue?
Ed: There was actually only a $25,000 investment initially. That’s one nice thing about a consulting company, when you start work consulting; it’s really a very low risk type of business to begin. I started out like most consulting companies do, which was to do sub-contracting to other consulting companies. But there you don’t even have to generate your own leads for consulting. You’ve got them coming in already.
It started very small then. I started to build my expertise in programming of Java. I’ve got a programming background. I have a computer science degree. I kind of started out as a very geeky engineer and kind of turned into a businessman at the time out of necessity. Basically we started out doing that kind of subcontracting, consulting. While that was happening I was kind of realizing that Java was taking off as a technology and that it was really the future for IT systems back in the day.
I also realized that there were not a whole lot of books written on server side Java programming. I thought hey, why don’t I write a book on this serve side Java technology? I wrote a book called Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans. That was a book on how to build complex business systems in Java. It took me about a year to write this book. It was originally going to be just a six month project.
Originally I was doing that so I could do consulting at fairly high rates given my notoriety as an expert, basically, in Java. From all that, I actually kind of realized that the book could become an unfair source of leads for doing training and consulting. That’s kind of the genesis of all this. I wrote this book, it took a year, and then in the back of the book there was a little advertisement saying hey, if you liked what you read in the book then email me or call me. I’ll come out and I’ll teach you how to program in Java myself. It started off as kind of like a one man training and consulting company. Then, over time, I started slowly, organically hiring people in a sort of virtual office environment.
At first it was just myself. I did all the sales, the marketing. I did all the accounting. I was kind of the company lawyer. I would find contracts on the internet and kind of mark them up and change them and send them to clients. Over time I started to realize that I could outsource these roles to other people. This is the first time I ever managed anyone. This is the first time I ever ran a business. I was pretty much just a kid out of college figuring this all out and I made a lot of mistakes.
Andrew: Let me ask you something. You’re now the second person, I think, in the last week who told me he published a book to get credibility and grow his business. The first person was the founder of Start-ups.com and when he told me about it I said boy, that’s a smart idea. For days afterwards I realized, wait, that takes an insane amount of time. I understand that it builds your credibility, but is it worth the credibility boost to write a book and to spend, in your case, a year?
Ed: Well, I think I’m kind of a perfectionist in my personality. Not all books take a year to write. For me, my book was about a 600, 700 page book in the end. [??] faster than that. These days what I would recommend, if you’re thinking about getting notoriety in a particular space, is to start out by doing blogging first then kind of have the book pulled out of your blog entries. That’s like a much safer way to experiment and test to see do people like your writing? Do you enjoy the writing process? Once you get a blog posts made you kind of stitch those blog posts together then create a book out of that. Ash Morgan did that recently for his book Running Lean. If you read the book [??] they talk about that as well.
Andrew: I think Running Lean, wasn’t that just a collection of interviews like this?
Ed: Yeah, it was a collection of blog posts, basically, about the lean start-up methodology.
Andrew: I see. OK.
Ed: Literally, the book was kind of pulled out of blog posts. I’d say that would be the more modern way to write a book.
Andrew: And the credibility that comes from it? You were able to get leads but tell me about some of the credibility boost? Or how would it influence your credibility to have a book published with your name on it?
Ed: The nice thing about publishing a book is that there’s something powerful about the written word. It’s actually surprisingly easy to get a book contract. At the time I was just kind of like a kid out of college who had never even written an article before. I was fortunate because I was in the right place at the right time. It was a supply and a demand imbalance for technical writers. There still likely is, especially in the programming space. I was fortunate about the timing there. I’d say that was probably the biggest thing right there. Making sure you’re on some sort of new type of technology, something that’s very hot, where there really isn’t a lot of competition for writers. If you can find a niche like that then that gives you an opportunity to write a book.
Andrew: OK. Now I imagine the audience for something like that isn’t huge so how many leads are you getting a week from that book?
Ed: We were getting, at first, quite a few leads. I would say one or two leads a day just coming off the book. These were very high quality leads. We’re talking Fortune 500 companies like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Metropolitan Life Insurance. Those were some of our customers for our training and consulting. The reason this worked out was because the technology was very new and it was being accelerated at that moment. Pretty much the writing was on the wall that the industry would be adopting this new type of technology. By getting in early and by being one of the first books whenever there’s a new kind of technology that has a change in the world you can kind of benefit from that roller coaster and ride that wind.
Andrew: Why didn’t you decide to become the consulting company that did development work for Java, that maybe outsourced to other people but you were the front and the face of the developers that did the work? Why did you decide to go to training?
Ed: That’s a good question. I believe there’s really only three different ways you can differentiate a professional services firm. You can either be the low cost provider, which is the company that does the work the cheapest. You can be the company that gets the work done the fastest, the quick provider. Or you can the luxury, kind of the high end provider, the provider that provides the highest quality of service. It’s very hard to be all three of these because all three of these axes are competing with one another. It’s hard to be the lowest cost provider but also be the provider that has the highest quality.
We decided to focus and pick one of those niches. The niche we picked was the highest quality provider. Since I had written that book that kind me an expert in Java. I thought hey, why can’t I just kind of scale that idea and sort of empower other leaders and other experts to write their own books in Java? That’s kind of what our business model was.
It kind of started off as me and then my biggest challenge was how do I take my personal brand, Ed Roman the Java expert, and turn that into a company brand where I am basically empowering other leaders to write their own books and to speak at conferences and to do all that stuff too? Because at first when you get leads for a consulting company based on a book every one of your clients is going to ask for you personally to deliver the services because you are the expert. But that doesn’t scale. You can’t hold a business off just yourself performing all the services.
I started downplaying my own notoriety as an expert and I started to have my employees also write books and speak. That was a much more scaleable way of doing it. The next thing about that sort of access, of being the high end provider, the guys who wrote the books, who spoke at the conferences, is that you can actually charge premium rates for training and consulting. We were able to charge, at our height, about $650 an hour for training which gave us very good margins. It comes out to about $25,000 a week for that type of service.
Andrew: $25,000 a week you were earning for training people?
Ed: That’s right. Now, it is kind of a hybrid product and service because you have a training course and the training course has to be maintained. You have to have people maintain that training material but it’s a much lighter type of product to maintain than a traditional product that involves software.
Andrew: You were going out to their companies to do the training on site, right?
Ed: We actually had people coming to us as well. We would host our own training courses where we would enroll people individually, one at a time. They would use their IT budgets to pay for that.
Andrew: Everything that I know about you, and we know each other a little bit through some email conversations we’ve had and through some research that I’ve done on you. Everything that I see says this guy is really organized. He likes to spend time getting things right. Tell me about the process of putting these first courses together. What was that like for you? Considering how much attention you like to put to detail.
Ed: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’d say at first the natural extension of the book was a training course. If you write a book you’ve got chapters in that book and it’s explaining something. That book can then be leveraged to create a training class out of that book. That was kind of the first iteration of that. At first it’s very, very hard to scale training. Because if you create a training class the first time you’re making it, it’s for you personally to teach that class. How do you then take that same course material and get someone else to teach that class? That’s difficult because they wind up just reading the slide; they wind up not being able to actually add their own personal stories to the mix.
It’s especially challenging when you’re building a business where the whole differentiation is that you’re the high end, luxury type provider for these services. Where you have the top experts in the field. You really want to make every person customize the materials to their needs a little bit. To add their own stories, to have them rehearse. That’s the way that we scaled it. We would do this thing called co-teaching where we would have two people teach a class together. Then they would learn from each other’s stories and they’d be able to add that value to future classes.
Andrew: I see. How long did you go teaching the courses yourself before you brought in other people?
Ed: It was about, I would say, 18 months or so doing it myself. Then (inaudible).
Andrew: You made a lot of what? Sorry, the connection was just going out there.
Ed: We made some bad decisions at first in terms of hires. We had some people who were not able to teach the classes correctly, people who just weren’t reliable. And so, slowly over time we started to realize that if we’re going to be the luxury provider for this, if we’re going to be in the highest end of the service, we have to really back that up.
And so, we created what’s called ‘A better than money back guarantee’ for our services which says basically if you’re not satisfied with our services for any reason, not only do you get your money back but you get to keep the training material as well. And so, it’s our way of saying hey, we believe in our product and making that line in the sand was a way for us to force ourselves to really have excellent training material and to back up what we were claiming.
Andrew: You’re saying we for . . . At some point you started saying we. Who’s we? Was it first you working by yourself and then you brought in trainers, or was there someone else in there before you brought in trainers?
Ed: It was just me at first. Over time I started to realize that I couldn’t scale it by myself, so I started to hire trainers to deliver some of the services.
Andrew: I see. Those are the trainers who at first didn’t work out so well. Why? What was it that you were doing wrong in retrospect when you were hiring?
Ed: The first mistake, you’re 21 years old. You’re running a company for the first time. The first instinct is let me hire my friends. Let me see if my friends can work it out, and that was a disaster obviously. Then, you start thinking, well, all right, maybe some of my former co-workers that I’ve worked with before could work out the business. You’re not really network established of who you could bring in.
But then as you start to network in the industry, you start to realize who the real movers and shakers are. And so, by being that luxury provider it helped us because we were able to say; if you want to work with the best, then contact us. It’s kind of like the GE philosophy. They rank their employees as one, two or three where ones are the most amazing employees, two are kind of average, and three are kind of bottom of the barrel. The whole theory here is that ones hire ones, twos hire threes and threes kill your company.
Basically, if you’re differentiating yourself as the high end luxury provider, you’ll naturally attract other people who like that type of mentality as well. And so, over time it became naturally for us to attract some of the best and the brightest in the industry by maintaining that quality level.
Andrew: But, Ed, when it was just you and some friends or contacts who weren’t doing such a great job, how can you still call yourself the luxury provider and recruit ones, as you say?
Ed: Well, ultimately what we had to do was pretty much at the beginning there was a couple of customers that weren’t satisfied, and we had to refund them at the very beginning of our services. Ultimately, it comes down to you, you as the leader of the business. If you can deliver compelling vision to others and inspire them, the people that we were talking to originally were people who were sub-contracting to other businesses, who didn’t have an equity position in any sort of real business. And they were living at the mercy of other businesses leads.
And so, the vision that I pitched to them was we’re part of something larger. I have ownership in this. You’re part of a team where together we’re all leading this business together, and we’re all setting ourselves apart from the rest as a luxury provider. That vision resonated with people, and fortunately I was able to find people that actually were inspired by that, and they attracted other people, and it cascaded from there.
Part of the thing that helped with this, by the way, was [??] website, TheServerSide.com, that community website was our way of giving back to the community and help the community. And so, that naturally attracted people who really cared about the technology.
You see in the developer world there’s a correlation between people who have a passion and a love for technology and people who are excellent at their job. And so, the people who saw us building this website got inspired by that, and they wanted to work with us naturally.
Andrew: Can you tell me a little bit about what made a great trainer? When you were selling luxury, what was it about certain trainers that made them luxury, that made them so good that people would pay extra just to learn from them?
Ed: That’s a great question. If you look at what makes a good trainer, it’s not just understand the technology. It’s being able to communicate in a way that people understand.
For example, as you speak to me right now, you can hear that my voice is going up and down, kind of like a roller coaster. That’s kind of a learned skill that takes time for people to get. You do that yourself, and that’s why people listen to you when you’re doing these interviews. So a lot of people who are good at technology, at first they don’t have that skill set. We started to invest in our own trainers and send them to what’s called, train the trainer classes. Which is kind of like just a one or two week class where they teach you soft skills like that, to help make you an excellent trainer. Things like, don’t stare at the slides, don’t read from the slides, things like that, and that all helped out a lot. I’d say the magic combination is someone who can communicate well, who’s reliable and who also understands the technology really well as well.
Andrew: OK. And you were starting to say that TheServerSide.com helped grow your reputation and your business. Why did you originally launch the website?
Ed: It’s an interesting story, um, so, this is actually kind of a funny story actually. I was at a conference speaking once. This was back when it was just a one man show, just me doing everything. I didn’t have any other co-workers, so I was running a booth at the conference, trying to get leads for my business, and in the a booth, I couldn’t leave the booth to eat dinner because I was the only employee, so I had to actually have food delivered to my booth.
So I was sitting there eating food at my booth and this kid from the University of Waterloo came up to my booth, his name is Floyd. He kind of felt bad for me; he’s like what is this guy eating at his booth. So he started talking to me, and we started to hit it off from a chemistry perspective and it turns out that he had actually heard about me, and heard about my book, and he was a Java programmer himself in college. And at the time I was thinking about building TheServerSide.com, to kind of give us an unfair advantage as far as [??]. So it would give us leads for training consultant. And so he and I started talking in the weeks after that. And he seemed like a natural fit to help build that website.
So we thought, we’ll build a website for programmers, to help them, and well build that in the Java language itself. So it’s a Java community built in Java. So he started doing that programming for me. He did such a good job that I eventually promoted him and he was in charge of all the content for the website. So he was responsible for the content in terms of like the articles. Making sure that everyday there was something new posted on the home page, that it would be sticky so people would come back. And eventually, he did such a good job at that, that I thought, I’d put him in charge of profit and loss for the business. So he was in charge of that for a while as well.
So basically, this kid out of college who was a sophomore at the time, ultimately became my number one star employee, and now that we sold the business, he is running his own business, which is pretty much one of the largest programmer websites in the world, it’s called InfoQ.com, and he also has extended this model and is now running the largest programmer conference in China, for programmers. He’s taking this whole business model and exploded with it. And now it’s more than Java, it’s Ruby on Rails, and other technologies as well. I really learned a lot about investing in the person in terms looking for someone who has ability versus experience.
It would have been very tempting for me, and I almost did, you know, go with someone to build this web site for me that was, someone who already had a lot of experience building these Java websites, but I took a chance on this kid and over time he and I became not just amazing business partners, but amazing friends, and it’s all because he had that innate ability. And the lesson I learned from that is, if you have to hire somebody, and you have to choose between ability and experience, I would always the ability over the experience. Ideally you want both, both ability and experience but if you can’t get both, then the lesson I learned from is to go with ability.
Andrew: You said earlier that he made the site more sticky. How did you guys make the site stickier, meaning keeps people on the website longer and hopefully bring them back, right?
Ed: Yes. So the biggest thing we did was make sure that everyday we posted something knew on the homepage. Which it seems like is what you’re doing with Mixergy.com as well, and I think it’s a really smart approach because eventually starting thinking hey, I can make this my homepage. I can return to this on a regular basis. And I think that’s a very important thing to do when you’re building a community website. So basically we were scouring the internet for news articles related to Java, we basically [??] those on our website, that way we would some sort of fresh content. So we’d have a mix of other people’s content as well as original content we’d create as well.
Andrew: And when you say re-post other peoples content, you mean copy paste their stuff on your site?
Ed: Well no, through the Fair Use Act, on the internet, you can’t just literally copy other people’s content. You can summarize it, so you can write a few paragraphs talking about that, and then link to the original code. If you get their permission you can copy and paste their content. What we were trying to do was put all the best content related to jobs in one place, then to attach discussion threads to each of them. So, we would ask the audience thought provoking questions like, what do you think about this, what do you think about this news article related to jobs, and then that would start a whole conversation.
Andrew: But not in blog comments, but in the form of a link to a message board where they can engage in other conversations too.
Ed: We actually had message board technology integrated into our website. We posted an article, and it would summarize the article, and then beneath that there would be threaded conversation.
Andrew: And the threaded conversation was it different from blog comment section or was it just blog comments?
Ed Roman: It was just blog comments.
Andrew: Oh, that’s it. Oh, I thought that you had a full membership, not a membership site, but a full community site with a message board where people are talking about it.
Ed: We had that, too. We had a message board area of our site, where you can ask and answer questions about jobs and we also had a news area of the site, where there would be news posted about jobs. You’d have to log in to post anything in terms of posting questions, or replying to other people’s comments, or blog for the news part of the site.
We also had interviews, kind of like what you have here, where we would, we called them hard-core tech talk, where we interviewed luminaries in the job industry. The nice thing about that is that when you’d interview someone, they would actually promote their own interview and that would help us get traction on the website and help us keep the traffic coming.
Andrew: That’s what I’ve been telling people who want to do interviews. That they’ve got to take advantage of that they need to first know that that’s available to them and that’s one of the reason to do interviews. But also it’s not enough to hope for the person who promotes it, especially in the early days, you want to ask them to promote. You want to send them a link. You want to encourage them to send it out to their friends. Were you doing interviews the way I do it at Mixergy, where you were recording it and posting the full recording on the site or were you doing something different?
Ed: No. We did traditional interviews, we had a camera man. We would host our own conferences and we would speak at other conferences. So, while we were at the conference, we would email every speaker that was famous and important in the space, and would arrange to meet them in a hotel room, and spend 30 to 60 minutes interviewing them. Then we would edit them down, and then post them on the website.
Andrew: OK.
Ed: In addition to that, we would post excerpts from books on our website, as well. Talk about e-books back then and that was also a good way to get us to have users to register for our site, to give us their email address so, we would market to them and monetize the users that way.
Andrew: So, you would get just excerpts from the book and tell your audience that they needed to give you their email address in order to get the excerpt, it wasn’t even a full book.
Ed: Some of them actually, my books, so it’s kind of interesting, my book was a — I convinced my publisher, about ten years ago, to actually have my book be available for a free download in PDF form on our website. That was the first time they’d ever done anything like that before, they’d never given a book away for free before, and it’s a big risk for them because if the book sucked and people didn’t like it, then it would trip sales of the other printed book. There was also channel conflict essentially there as well, because why buy a book if you can just download the electronic version for free?
Back then there weren’t really any e-readers and the Kindle wasn’t out back then and things like that. People weren’t really used to reading books electronically back then. So, the compromise I went to with my publisher was all right, we can given the book away for free in PDF format, but then the PDF has to be non-printable, that way people can’t print it out. Even that I thought was overkill because I thought, hey, for a 600 to 700 page book it’s going to cost you more in toner and paper to print this, than to just buy it. Plus it’s not nicely bound like a real book would be so, we just put a message at the beginning of the PDF file saying, hey if you like reading this book and thought it was interesting, consider buying it. That was enough and the sales actually went up when the book came out by about 20%. It was a good experiment and it worked out pretty well and I don’t think it would work unless the book is high quality, because otherwise you’re just educating people that you don’t have a great product.
Andrew: At what point did you start the first conference? Did I give the timeline: ’98 was when you launched the business, 2000 was when you launched TheServerSide.com, and when did you come up with the conferences?
Ed: Yes. So that was actually done in 2002. It was actually at the moment we sold the business. So, 2002 we found an acquirer, Precise Software, it’s a publicly traded company and they needed professional services staff to help them deliver services for their product, that was kind of the impetus for them to buy us,, and then they realized hey we have this community website too and that can also help them generate leads for their business too. So, when we got acquired it was a big up hill battle for us to convince them to let us do these conferences, because they’re fairly at risk in terms of their budget.
Eventually, they kind of realized, “Hey, this is something that might be worth looking into.” So they gave us the budget for that, and that was during the time that we had an earn-out. An earn-out is when you sell a company. Part of the money is what you get up-front; part of the money is earned over time, depending upon whether you hit revenue goals. That’s pretty typical for a consulting company, because for a consulting company, you’re really buying the people. There isn’t a lot of IT that comes with you. For us, we had some IT. We had the community website, TheServerSide.com. But to make sure that the consultants stay on for maybe a year or so, part of the compensation that we received was this earn-out. To help us hit this earn-out, we started the conferences.
Andrew: Were you still doing consulting at the time?
Ed: At the time, I was not. I was personally was managing the business.
Andrew: But the business was doing consulting?
Ed: The business was doing consulting and training. Yeah.
Andrew: So it was still in the consulting business. Was training bringing in most of the revenue, or was consulting doing that?
Ed: I would say it was mostly training. I would say probably 60% or so was training, and the other 40% was consulting.
Andrew: OK. And when it did $6 million a year, what year was that?
Ed: That was in 2002.
Andrew: 2002. So this was right after you sold? It did $6 million. And just before, what did it do?
Ed: Well actually just before was when it did $6 million.
Andrew: Oh I see. Wow.
Ed: Then we basically did 20% quarter-on-quarter growth during our earn- out period for the next year.
Andrew: OK. So did you launch the conferences before you sold? I think I might not be following.
Ed: No, we launched the conferences in the first quarter after we sold the business.
Andrew: So before you sold, you did $6 million. Before you even did conferences?
Ed: Mm-hmm.
Andrew: Yeah! That’s the part that I couldn’t believe. Really? So just training and consulting did $6 million; with the majority of it, over $3 million coming in from training?
Ed: Part of it was ad revenue from TheServerSide.com too.
Andrew: OK.
Ed: So there’s about $1 million there, just from the ad revenue. We were able to charge about $300 per 1,000 impressions. The reason for that is because if you look at the Java space for IT, people there are responsible for big purchase decision authority. They’re buying hardware. They’re buying applications servers, web servers. Back in the day, you’d buy a lot of this stuff. So with those budgets, it’s very hard to reach that niche market of IT decision makers. Fortunately, we were able to charge pretty high rates. These days, it’s one tenth of that, just because time has passed.
Andrew: What about this? Yes, you did tell me in the email leading up to this interview, that CPMs were high back then. When you launched though, this was right after the Nuclear Winter that the Dot Com World went through, right? Actually you launched just before – ’98. In 2000, you come up with the website and things are still OK in the space. 2001 and 2002 were tough years. Why didn’t they affect you so much?
Ed: I think that had we not sold our business at the time we sold it, we would have been in fairly bad shape, eventually. Because what was happening in the Java space, was we’re training. Whenever you have a new technology, at first people need to know that technology. Right now, that technology is Ruby on Rails. Everyone wants to learn Ruby on Rails. It’s very hard to find a programmer who knows that, and so people pay top dollar for those programmers. So rates for training people are very high in that new technology. But over time, people learn that technology, and the rates start to come down a time. So every year, it becomes harder and harder. There’s always some margin pressure on you.
So we were lucky, I would say. We found an acquirer that needed our services at the time. They’re trying to bolster their quarterly numbers because they’re about to sell their company. Low and behold, one quarter later, they sold their company to Veritas; and then a quarter after that, Veritas sold themselves to Symantec. After that, then Symantec realized, “Hey, Java training and consulting has nothing to do with viruses. So we’re just going to go ahead and divest this asset.” So they basically spun-off TheServerSide.com again; and the training and consulting never endured that series of acquisitions. Now the company’s being run by a company called Tech Target, which manages a ring of websites.
It’s kind of funny because it taught me a lesson about how important timing is when you’re selling a company. You have to really be able to act quickly. We had about a three-week period when we were getting acquired; that if we hadn’t have acted in that three-week period, then we wouldn’t have gotten acquired by that particular acquirer. Because they wanted to basically bolster their quarterly revenues at the time they acquired us; and they were getting close to the end of their quarter.
Andrew: What was your motivation to sell?
Ed: I mean, I’d been running the business for four years, and I had a different vision for what I wanted to do with my life, after that. So there’s some personal reasons there. But I’d say the bigger reason, from a company perspective, was that margin pressure. The fact that, if you’re doing training and consulting in a new type of technology and that technology is what you’re an expert on; but people are starting to learn that technology, and the margins are going down; you’re probably in a race against time to sell. So our options there are: do we learn some new technology and become experts in that, and write books on that new technology; or do we just provide an exit to the employees who have been breaking their backs, and then do something else that people want to do.
So that’s kind of what we did.
Andrew: You said you had something else that you wanted to do personally. What was that?
Ed: I’ve got to give you some background information here. For most of my life, I’ve been fairly overweight. I used to weigh about 60 pounds more than I do right now.
Andrew: Wow.
Ed: And, when you’re living like that for most of your life, eventually you realize, “Hey. Maybe I should be getting in shape. Maybe I should be doing something about my weight.” So I started thinking about that, and I realized, “Hey. I don’t like exercising at the gym. Exercising at the gym is boring.” Working out on the treadmill, lifting weights – it really wasn’t doing it for me. But video games have always been a passion of mine. At the time the Nintendo Wii system was coming out, and I was thinking, “Hey. Maybe I could make a company that builds exercise video games. Video games that help people exercise.” So that’s kind of what I did.
I took a year off after I sold the business, and I just did nothing. I was an unemployed bum for a year; doing nothing and just relaxing, because I was tired of running companies. And then I taught myself how to make these games. I made some cell-phone games for a while, but that wasn’t really doing it for me. Then when the Wii system came out, I saw “Oh that’s a great opportunity.” I started kind of pursuing my passion, and I made two exercise video games for the Wii. One of them is a game called “Helix,” which is a game where you’re basically doing martial arts to the beat of techno and house music.
I can kind of demonstrate. So it kind of looks like this – you’re doing these punches, uppercuts, back fists; all to the beat of techno and house music. So that was a fun little game. It was a good starting point for us.
Andrew: This was Ghostfire Games; was the name of the company, right?
Ed: Yeah. Ghostfire Games. Right.
Andrew: OK. What was the other game?
Ed: The other game is called “Rage of the Gladiator.” So if you’ve seen a movie like “300” or “Gladiator,” “Rage of the Gladiator” is themed after that. It’s a medieval combat game. You’re basically a gladiator in an arena. You’re basically kicking ass and taking names, and hopefully losing weight all at the same time. So I kind of scratched my own itch, personally, to build this company.
Andrew: Let me pause here for a second, because I want to find out what happened with that business. I think I know where you’re going with this. But first, I’m curious about what you did in that one year when you weren’t working. You weren’t just laying around for a year. You were exploring. You had…suddenly, I’m imagining, you were a millionaire at that point, right?
Ed: Right.
Andrew: You had the freedom to do whatever you wanted. What did you want to do? What was the thing that you said, “Now I can do it. I’m going to do this?”
Ed: Really, what I started to do was realize that I wanted to network with entrepreneurs, because I wanted to find a business partner to start my second business with someone else.
Andrew: Really? Why’d you feel so invincible and so smart, that you felt like anything you touched next would just work out?
Ed: Well I did feel that way. When you run a business for a while, especially with a virtual office, it eventually starts to get lonely. You know, you’re running a business on your own, from your home. If you don’t have a good balance between your social life, and your business, it can really wear on you. A lot of people that I knew who ran virtual offices had told me the same thing. So I really wanted to explore the idea of working with someone else, and partnering up. Because when your working with someone, and you have the right synergy and the right chemistry, then it’s a whole “1 + 1 = 3” kind of philosophy here.
So if you talk to a lot of start-up incubators and a lot of venture capitalists these days, they very rarely fund single-founder start-up companies. There’s a reason for that: because they know that when there’s a team involved, there’s a much higher chance for success; and it’s also a lot more fun. I wasted to explore that idea. So I met someone in the game industry – his name is Dustin Klingman [sp]. He and I had great chemistry as potential business partners together. We both saw the game industry in the same way. We both realized that we want to make games together. And over time, we started to talk and started to develop some game ideas. We started to put some pitch-docs together; and we spent a few months trying to find a publisher that would fund a game for us.
That project failed. We were never actually able to find a publisher for our game.
Andrew: OK.
Ed: The reason is that we just didn’t have a track record. We never made a game before. I mean, I was some guy who was an expert in the Java space.
We both worked for a Java company. It has nothing to do with the game industry. So pretty much switching industries made me lose all of my credibility, and made me start pretty much all over from scratch again. Eventually I just got frustrated, and I thought, “You know what? Trying to find a publisher to fund this thing. It’s taking up time. It’s not working. We don’t have the credibility. Why don’t I just put my money where my mouth is and fund this myself, but he had a different risk tolerance than I did.
Andrew: OK.
Ed: He didn’t actually want to self-fund a game himself. He wanted it to be paid for by someone else. Because of that risk tolerance difference, we parted ways, and I started to ghost fire games as the sole single founder ironically, again. The whole reason why I did this in the first place, it came full circle and I wound up being the sole founder again.
Andrew: I see. You just went right into another business. Your fantasy wasn’t to do what I wanted to do which was to go out and learn how to date and move to a different part of the country and explore the personal side of my life. You’re laughing. That wasn’t any part of your interest.
Ed: I did that, too, but I was actually married at the time.
Andrew: You were; I see. All right. Then, did you want to go for trips with your wife or do something else?
Ed: I think that at the time I was pretty much a workaholic at the time.
Andrew: Even in the time off.
Ed: Even in the time off.
Andrew: You couldn’t wait to get back to be a workaholic.
Ed: I don’t know why. For some reason, I guess it’s a personal thing, but when I wake up in the morning, if I’m not accomplishing something every day, for some reason I’m just not feeling good about myself. I don’t why it is. It’s always been a part of me. And so
I have a work like balance, kind of a work hard, play hard mentality where I’m working for part of the day. Maybe, it’s only four hours a day. Maybe, it’s only two hours a day. If I’m accomplishing something every day, then in the evening I can enjoy myself more. It’s just always been part of my personality.
Andrew: Are you still married now?
Ed: No, I’m not. We realized that we didn’t really have the chemistry, and we were more like roommates than, I guess, a married couple. And so, these days we’re still friends, and actually she’s partly investing in the next game that I’m making, so that’s nice.
Andrew: She’s investing?
Ed: Yeah.
Andrew: I’ve got to ask you a personal question. At first, I’ll tell you that there’s no editing in here, so everything we talk about just goes right into the interview. We never go too far off topic, but I’ve got to ask you. When you were married and you finally came into some money, especially considering that you were overweight, did you feel like I can finally go out there and date but I’m married? I can finally go and enjoy this money and maybe, use a little bit of it to get nice clothes or a car that might impress girls or just the fact that I have this exit might impress them. And now, I can’t do it. I missed that opportunity.
Ed: No, well I did buy myself a car. I do admit to that. I did buy myself a nice Lexus car. It wasn’t really to meet women. At the time I didn’t really have eyes for anyone else. I was pretty content with my marriage, and I guess when I was growing up I always had a hard time dating. And so, being overweight most of your life that will do that to you. These days it’s a lot easier for me, but at the time it wasn’t.
And so, I’d say that the biggest thing I wanted to do was to find some new passion of mine that was related to games because that was my passion, and that’s where I was driven. I did play a lot of video games that year though. I will admit to that.
Andrew: Video games.
Ed: Everyone has fun in different ways. For me, it wasn’t about traveling the world. It was about playing board games with my friends, playing video games, things like that. These days I’m less of an introvert. These days I would love to travel more. I was just in Montreal two weeks ago speaking at a start-up conference, and so that thrills me these days.
And so, these days I have different interests. I’m into salsa dancing. I perform improv comedy. I’m less about the games these days.
Andrew: What do you think it is? You know what? I always thought that as I did these interviews, if I gave people room to be open they’d be open and it’s true. They have been here, including talking about when they spam, talking about how they did the wrong things at times. They tell their stories pretty openly.
I thought that if I shared that I was feeling like this reject who couldn’t get a date and that was firing me up early on in my business, and that got me to build up my company. When I sold the company, I had the opportunity to date, I would jump on top of it. I thought if I revealed that in these interviews that other entrepreneurs would say, Andrew, that’s exactly it. I didn’t think I could ever talk about it publicly, but you just revealed it about yourself and I’m going to open up.
I think I’ve done 580 interviews with entrepreneurs, plus or minus, more or less. And I don’t think anyone’s ever said, yeah, Andrew, you’ve touched on how I feel. I wonder if even the audience is going, this guy’s a mental patient. Let’s get right back to Ed’s story because I don’t want to hear any more about this reject from elementary school who was fired up by the wrong things. Let’s get right back to business.
Ed: I think your motivations are great, like if I was single at the time, I would have thought exactly how you’re thinking. Right now, I am single, so these days it is part of my incentive. I would like to start to make my games succeed, and part of it is, yeah, I would like to have that success under my belt. So obviously if you’re single, that is a motivation, just not at the time, I was married.
Andrew: I see, OK. And now you want another success for what reason? What is it that you want now?
Ed: That’s a great question. So it’s kind of a dilemma, a paradox I have right now, which is if you start a business, and it’s just purely for money, really what legacy are you leaving in the world. For me it’s kind of like that balance of, can I do something to make money, but also in some ways helps the world. And the dilemma with the video games is that the mark of a good video game, is that people get addicted to the video game.
And a video game addiction is a big problem, I for awhile, have been addicted to video games. So I think that’s the moral paradox I wrestle with. And that’s kind of why I pursued the exercise game, Genre, because this is a way to make video games where I’m actually making money, but at the same time I am helping the world in some minor way. I view my success as I am successful if can trick people into exercising where they don’t think they’re actually exercising.
Andrew: So, going back to those [??] games, how did it do?
Ed: This is another good story. So Ghostfire games is actually, we made two games, the first game was a break even game. The second game actually fell; we actually lost money on the second game. Right now, the business is actually operating at a loss. And so the company has not yet succeeded. The story behind it is actually kind of interesting, because it taught me a few lessons. And it’s one of the reasons why I got into a lean start up methodology, and we’ll talk about in a minute.
So, whenever you’re starting a business, its always I believe, today, in your interest to be able to experiment quickly, to do very small experiments, and then based on the results of those experiments we then move forward or change direction. In the game industry, it’s very difficult to do that, especially if you’re building console games, like Wii games, because you pretty much only have this one shot. You build this game, you put it on the market and then you hope it sells.
That’s a very traditional development process. So, we built these two games, and it turns out at the time, when the Wii was coming out, they launched this service on the Wii called a Wii where. Which is a downloadable game service for the Wii. If you have an iPhone, it’s very similar to the iPhone’s app store. These are little $10.00 games that you can buy, not $50 or $60 like you buy in stores. So the Wii came out, and everybody was excited about this downloadable game store. They thought it was going to take off just like the iPhone’s app store has done well, or on the Microsoft Xbox they have their own game store called Xbox live arcade which has done very well too.
So all the predictions were that it would be a very good app store. It turns out that, due to kind of cultural differences, Nintendo has two arms, there’s Nintendo Japan, and Nintendo America. Nintendo Japan hasn’t really fully embraced the internet, like we would have hoped. And so that downloadable game store didn’t quite work out. It wasn’t marketed well, it’s a very cumbersome process to buy the game on that app store. So we made a good game that got good reviews, but didn’t sell well.
And part of that is because of this downloadable game store, and part of it is because of me. Because I could have probably marketed a little better too, I made some mistakes there as well. So having learned those mistakes, I kind of for awhile I was getting a little bit upset and depressed. I was thinking you know, maybe I’m a one hit wonder kid. I made this one training company, it did well, and now this game has lost money. So what’s happened here.
Then I started to realize, there must be a better approach to starting business, other than taking this big risk on one game. And so I started doing networking again with entrepreneurs. I spent nine months just having conferences, every entrepreneur I could meet in Austin, Texas. And every entrepreneur I met, I asked them to introduce me to two other entrepreneurs. Eventually I met all the good entrepreneurs in Austin. Eventually I met this entrepreneur named [??] who was focused on the lean start up methodology as a way to kind of reduce waste and start a business with small experiments.
And at the time I had never thought about starting a business in that way. I had always just kind of taken a big risk, and hope it paid off. So starting to kind of research this methodology, and that’s what kind of was the incubus to start this community website leanmovement.com, to tell other entrepreneurs who start their businesses in a kind of reduced risk fashion. The whole vision here really, is a start up company is a temporary entity whose purpose is to find a scalable and reasonable business model.
So the purpose of start up company is not to make money, but rather to do experiments to find that right business model, to iterate toward that right business model.
Andrew: So once you find a good business model, you’re no longer a start up, you’re saying. That’s a good line.
Ed: That’s when you change from a start up company to a real company.
Andrew: OK.
Ed: And so, the silver lining here though is that for years I was trying to get my game on the Xbox, and Microsoft is very selective about getting games on the Xbox. I knew the Xbox would be a platform where the game would sell well due to the historical sales of other titles on that platform, but they kept rejecting me. I would fly out there, and they would say no. It took about four years, but just recently in the last two months fortunately they finally said yes, we’ll take it. And so, the silver lining here is that the game actually might turn a profit after all.
It’s kind of weird because I went back and I researched this lean start-up methodology, so of the press about this game not making money and now finally the game actually might make money, now that I’ve researched that.
Andrew: You’re saying that the lean start-up methodology helped you build a product that makes money?
Ed: No. What I’m saying is that I got lucky.
Andrew: I was going to say, because I don’t see the connection to the lean start-up. You’re saying that you just can’t use the lean start-up methodology.
Ed: I got lucky, and Microsoft decided hey, we’ll take this game on the Xbox because they thought it was high quality on the Wii. We did our job there, but really it was very political. It was a political decision for them to accept it. Fortunately, I had a champion at Microsoft who liked the game, and so he pushed it through. And so, I’m hoping we can monetize that and make a profit off of it now.
Andrew: How did you get a champion at Microsoft? I don’t want to leave my audience with this expectation that they need to wait for luck. I want them to understand that there are certain things that you did that got you lucky. What I’m picking up on is this person internally at Microsoft who championed your work. I want to know how you got that person since that was a big contributor?
Ed: A few years ago I flew to Microsoft to pitch the game. At the time the game was very early. It was not a very advanced game at the time. I remember in the room almost everyone in the room didn’t like the game except for one guy, and he seemed to be a positive . . . saying good things about the game. And so, I just remembered who he was.
Over the next few years I stayed in touch with him and just asked him how he was doing, asked him does he think there might be a new opportunity for the game. And then recently, the Connect system came out. And so, when the Connect came out, that’s been the fastest selling consumer device ever, it’s been a supply and demand imbalance again for games because they needed content on Connect.
And so, I talked to him and I said, hey, remember this game that you liked so much? It would be a great fit for Connect. He had remembered the game. He had remembered who I was. And so, by maintaining that relationship and by being persistent, that was how I was able to get what I want in the end.
Andrew: All right. Well . . .
Ed: Just first by being observant and noticing who actually seemed to like the product I was pitching.
Andrew: And staying in touch with that person for a couple of years.
Ed: Sorry?
Andrew: And staying in touch with that person for a couple of years.
Ed: Yeah. Just being persistent, yeah, exactly.
Andrew: Hey, we started out this story with you training others. I’m curious about who trains you. How did you become the entrepreneur that you’ve become? Who trained you? Where do you turn for training?
Ed: I have had a few different mentors. I believe that if you surround yourself with people who are of high integrity and high character that rubs off on you. And so, I’ve tried to keep my close circle of people who I can learn a lot from, from the value perspective. For example, the guy, Soleil [sp], I was telling you about, the co-founder. I merged my company with his company, and we sold the business together. He has extremely high character and values. The guy, Floyd, I was telling you about, same thing.
From the business perspective, business mentoring, there’s this guy whose name is Joe Liemandt. He’s in Austin, Texas, and he started a company called Trilogy. Trilogy was my first job out of college. I was this kid out of Cornell. I had never worked in the IT industry before. I joined this company, and then after about three days of working for that company the CEO flew all of us, all 20 new hires, to Las Vegas and basically required that we gambled two weeks of our salary on one number on the roulette wheel.
You’d spin the roulette wheel, and if it lands on your number you get everyone’s salaries. You win like a year or two worth of salary. Otherwise, you lose two weeks of salary. This was required of all new hires at Trilogy at the time.
It sounds kind of crazy, but the reason why they did this was to infuse the attitude of risk and reward to new hires that it would become a very entrepreneurial type of environment. As a result of that, Trilogy had all these little start-ups happening inside of it. This was a 1,000 person company. It was basically a bunch of start-up companies.
Trilogy ultimately failed as a company, and now they have reincorporated as a different type of entity, but Austin, Texas owes a lot to Trilogy, because a lot of the entrepreneurs and startups in Austin are basically ex-Trilogy people who got their entrepreneurial attitude and vision from working in an environment like that where there’s a lot of risk and reward. This is the same company where, if you want, you can gamble up to half your salary each quarter, and if your business unit hits its quarterly numbers, you can get triple your salary back. So that’s the kind of environment I was working in, when I first got [??].
Andrew: That’s pretty impressive. Impressive and a little scary. All right. Let’s see what else I want to know while I’ve got you on. You saw my site, you asked me for help with your interviews, and I gave you a little guide that I send out to people who are curious about how to do interviews. You said it was helpful. I want to turn to you now and ask you for help. You see the kind of work that I’m doing here? How can I do it better? What should I be doing differently? What do you see on there that makes you feel like Andrew needs to be aware of something different or needs to adjust? Give me some advice, based on what you’ve seen on the site.
Website Expert: Well, I really like what you’ve done here. I’ve noticed what you’ve done and how you’ve monetized the site. I don’t know if you could talk freely about your numbers. I know you have a post on your website about how you’ve monetized things, in terms of having sponsors for your website, but I also notice that you have subscription content for these master classes.
Andrew: Um-hmm.
Ed: So how is that working out for you financially? Is that a viable revenue stream for [??]?
Andrew: It is, and I don’t talk about the numbers yet. But it’s just been fantastic, because it’s predictable revenue from people who have a vested interest in guiding me in the right direction, because they just paid me. I guess I should tell people that when they buy a premium membership, they get access to all the past interviews (hundreds of them) and all the past courses (dozens of them at this point) and all the future courses.
So once they pay, they know that they’re going to get the future courses. They have an incentive to tell me what kind of courses they want in the future. It’s not like the person is just kind of hanging out here, checking out the website, and if they’re not happy with what I do next week, then they can go check out someone else’s site. No, they just paid, and so they have to give me usual feedback. And man, they have been. And so, I get to improve the site with them, based on what they want.
And I also get to create something that people like so much that they’re willing to pay for it. And to me, that last part is critical. I gave up more revenue from advertisers, because I wasn’t willing to spend time on improving on the ads or on selling more ads. In fact, I don’t even accommodate as many people as I can with the ads, even though they would be willing to pay more money to get their ads up there soon, or to push someone else out of the way who’s not paying as much money, I’d go with the cheaper, easier solution for ads. That’s why people see the same advertisers over and over.
And I do that because I want to create something that’s so good, that an audience of people are willing to pay for it. I want to create something that’s so useful that people will tell me “I’m so glad that I paid, and I want to pay you more. Here’s what I want next.” That, to me, is really meaningful. And my challenge is, how do I make the courses more useful, so that you can actually see more of a measurable result from it, so that you can feel like because you took the course, you get something back quickly and then roll it out further. That’s where my head is at now.
Ed: It’s interesting, because I see this business that you’re running here as having a lot of potential in terms of scale. And what I’m wondering is how do you scale this business personally. Because right now, your personal brand is very tied up in the business.
Andrew: Right, right.
Ed: I get to interview with “the” Andrew Warner, during this interview. But how do you separate yourself from that business. How can a business be automated in such a way that your personal brand isn’t typed up with it? See, when I built the server-side dot com, I actually divorced my personal brand from the brand of the community. And that was intentional, because I wanted to be able to scale the business and be able to take time off if I wanted to.
Andrew: Right. If I took six months off, and there weren’t interviews for six months from Andrew, but there would be maybe some guy in India at an outsourcing company, you know, reading my questions, it wouldn’t work as well. You’re absolutely right. So what do you recommend? What do I do, and what do people in the audience who are in a similar situation do?
Ed: Well, it’s a tradeoff. I’m making this decision right now too. I’ve got this website leanmovement com, right, for [??] startup practitioners. Now I could have called that my own personal blog or something like that, and I could have tied up my personal brand with the community site as well. And there’s an advantage to that.
If you look at Donald Trump, for example, the Trump name has luxury as a connotation for that name. People associate luxury with Trump. But if Donald Trump ever sold his business, it would be challenging, because he would have to go along with the business, too because his brand is tied up with the community brand.
So I think the first question you have to ask yourself is “What are my goals personally as an entrepreneur here?” You get a lot of benefit from interviewing people on this website, because it promotes you personally within the entrepreneur community. You’re building good will with all the entrepreneurs that you’re interviewing here and you get to meet all of these amazing entrepreneurs and talk to them. Down the line that might pay off for you in terms of businesses you might start. I think it’s actually really brilliant what you’re doing there.
I would think long and hard about divorcing your personal brand from the community because you, I would say, get a lot of personal benefit out of doing it. It really comes down to what are your goals personally. Is this business going to make you enough money on your own that it will hit your financial goals? The intangible benefit that you get from interviewing people is worth a lot of more than that.
Andrew: Yeah. All right, so there you go guys in the audience. How do I divorce myself from you? That’s Ed’s question for me. I see what you’re saying and that is something that I’ve started to think about. A few months ago I was close to burning out from doing one new interview every single day. I was actually burning out my audience because they couldn’t keep up with all the interviews. I had to think about how do I deal with that? How do I get some time off for myself when I need it? How do I still continue to produce for my audience? I’m still working on that. You’re right, that’s the next challenge.
Ed: I think that you actually have something here because Mixergy could scale beyond just entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are just one niche. There’s lots of niches where you could interview experts in different industries. That could be a whole business in itself. That’s what I’m interested in. How do you scale the concept of what you’ve done here beyond just this niche? ‘Cause this is a limited niche, the entrepreneur niche, even though there’s a lot of money and [PC] and all that stuff happening here. The average purchase decision authority of an entrepreneur is actually fairly low.
Andrew: Right. They do not have much money.
Ed: They’re bootstrapping a start-up company. What kind of ad rates can you get from running an entrepreneur website? You’re getting a lot of goodwill out of it, which is great, so there’s this intangible benefit. But the question is can you take this concept to other industries where you can actually charge higher rates? That really depends on what your goals are in terms of finance and all that.
Andrew: Well, I’m committed to this audience and this niche personally but I see what you mean. I used to think hey, entrepreneurs have tons of money. They’re the ones who are owning the companies. They’re the ones who are buying and selling companies. They’re the ones who are making the big decisions at the business that they run and how could they not be bringing in tons of cash and then have the ability to spend it? I’m realizing no, they don’t have a ton of money. For the most part they’re either scrappy because they need to be or they’re scrappy because that’s what got them there. They’re not throwing around a lot of money the way that even HR representatives of companies do.
If I were to do this just for the money I might say HR people are people out there, pretty social, they need to hire. I’m going to do a Mixergy for HR people where I interview the head HR person at GE, who’s like a C level [roll], from what I understand, and every other company. I get their best learnings out there to other HR people and they get their companies to foot the bill for that and for the courses and maybe even come out for a conference. But unfortunately that’s not where my passion is. I feel like the HR people are great but the real movers in the world, or at least the ones who I connect with the most, are entrepreneurs.
Ed: Maybe you stay on Mixergy as the guy interviewing entrepreneurs but then you scale the model out to other [??] that do those interviews.
Andrew: I like that actually. I think that might be right. All right, I’m glad I asked you that question. That’s got to be a question that I ask every one of the smart entrepreneurs that I interview.
Ed: Well, if you ever do that call me and maybe I’ll [??].
Andrew: Actually, let me read an email from a person who just took a course. This is from Steve Campbell. I’m trying to read emails from people in the audience at every interview when I can. Steve, actually, I gave him a free copy of one of my earlier courses to get his feedback and here’s what he said.
He said, Andrew, I watched the course at the end of July. After two weeks in August I sold an additional $2,000 worth of ads on my site. The course he took was the “How to Sell Ads” course which I did with Todd, the founder of Buy Sell Ads. The guy knows a ton about sales, of course. He says I sold an additional $2,000 worth of ads using just two things that I learned from that class. I don’t know why he didn’t use more of the stuff but if he used two I’m happy there too. He goes so I signed up for Mixergy Premium, if I can get that value from one class who knows what I can get from more.
I love that. He’s paying $25 a month. When I sell an ad it’s way more, it’s more $100’s and I’m sure I could get even more. But to me that fires me up that he actually got big value, measurable value, out of taking that course. That makes me proud. Steve, thank you for telling me. Guys, keep the feedback coming. Even when I stink. Even if you see that I’m going off on the wrong track, keep the feedback coming. But when there’s something like that it sends me home feeling great.
What do you think, Ed? Not bad, right?
Ed: No, I love it.
Andrew: Did you see how I stammered through it just ’cause I got a little embarrassed as I read it. I got embarrassed at my own pride at that.
Ed: You shouldn’t be embarrassed. You’ve got a great site here, you should be proud of it.
Andrew: I appreciate it. Thank you Ed. Thank you all for watching. Bye.
Ed: Thanks.
