Andrew: Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. Before I interview them, I spend about 20 minutes just busting their chops, making sure I get as much detail as possible. And before that, Ari, Ari Desormo, our producer, spends an hour with them going through their story. And before that, Andrea Schuman goes and researches them. So we do a lot to make sure that guests are a good fit.
The thing that I don’t want to do is just stick with the highly venture-backed entrepreneurs who then end up selling their companies, because I think we end up with a very, very false sense of how business works. Those are easy to check, right? Before I had Airbnb on, I could easily confirm that everything they were going to tell me was honest and true. It’s out there.
When there’s someone who’s not an Airbnb, I think their story is maybe even more important to hear, but it takes more research. I say all that because Jordan, who you’re about to meet, just spent about 20 minutes going over a story with me, having me research it real time and, as I said, the rest of the team worked on it too.
The story here is about a former emu rancher — emu, yeah — emu rancher who ended up creating a development shop that built apps for at first small to medium-sized companies and later on enterprise businesses. The company was called Chamber Development Services, and his name is Jordan Bryant. And I invited him here to talk about how he got his clients, how he was able to build apps for them considering that he’s not like a pro developer, and also why he ended up selling this business and what he sold it for.
This whole interview is sponsored by two companies. The first you already know. Frankly, at this point, if you’re looking to hire a great developer, you can say it over and over in my voice probably in your head, Toptal. The second is a company you probably have never heard of, but it helps companies like mine grow their email list and get more subscribers and so on. It’s called ViralSweep, and I’ll tell you how I’m using them to grow our subscribers. But I’ll tell you more about those later. First, Jordan, good to have you here.
Jordan: Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. I really appreciate it.
Andrew: Was it a little awkward that I just like said you’re on, but let’s make sure you belong on and you’re really on?
Jordan: Yeah. Now the pressure is kind of on, right?
Andrew: Yeah. You know what? I couldn’t see your website. It wasn’t live. You sold your company to someone else, but your old website didn’t redirect to the new business. The whole thing was like really hard to confirm, but I appreciate your openness about what happened with the business, how you did. It wasn’t the huge mega success, but it was a success, for sure, and I want to find out about it. I want to learn from it. Actually, I said it was a success for sure. Do you feel like this was a big success, Chamber DS?
Jordan: I set the bar really high for myself, so in my mind it wasn’t a massive success, but definitely it was a great learning opportunity, and I did have some success that I could use as a springboard into the next thing. So, yeah, I’d say it was a success.
Andrew: Yeah. The emu thing I was smiling as I said. It’s your parents who had an emu ranch, but you really had emus. What are emus, actually?
Jordan: Yeah. So emus are like a six-foot bird, right? It’s like the size of a human. My childhood was like “Jurassic Park,” essentially, these velociraptors roaming around in these big five-foot tall reeds.
Andrew: They’re very like hairy-faced.
Jordan: Yeah. They have long, blue necks. The females actually make this deep bass sound at night, so you can actually hear it from like a football field away. It was an interesting upbringing.
Andrew: So all night long you would have that. And your first taste of entrepreneurship came when your dad sent you out to sell jerky.
Jordan: Yeah. So we raised emus. We slaughtered them and we turned them into products. We had jerky, chapsticks, lotions, a bunch of different things. My family, they’re just a bunch of jocks. So we were very highly engaged with the sports community. So we’d go to these sporting events, and I would go around and sell emu jerky and chapsticks and lotions, and that’s really where I got my first taste of how to communicate and sell products, value exchange and the whole biz.
Andrew: Is it weird as a kid to go around selling to people emu, your parents’ stuff?
Jordan: I guess I didn’t really see it like that because I didn’t know any better. I hadn’t really been influenced by society like, “Oh, it’s selling,” with the bad connotations. But I saw my dad doing it, so of course I wanted to follow along in his footsteps. I thought it was a cool exercise or thing I could do to relate to my dad.
Andrew: I did weird things like that. It’s not weird. It’s just weird compared to what your friends are doing. They’re all going home and hanging out. A few of them have jobs, but they’re like proper jobs at the mall. I did two things that were a little weird. One was I was handing out flyers for my dad’s store, and the other was I sold sandwiches and drinks door to door at stores. The store owners couldn’t go out to get food, and the food that was available to them was not especially healthy, so I sold that door to door.
I remember one time as I did that, a girl, who I was into in school who was a year older, saw me. I said, “What do I do at this point? I’m selling sandwiches here. This is not cool.” So I opened up the cooler, and I offered her a soda. It was a little weird. But for you, it was just what your dad did. Did your mom do it too?
Jordan: Yeah. It was a whole family thing. So I have a little sister as well. At that time, I was like 10, 11, 12. It was literally since I was born until I was about 16 that was my whole life on that ranch. So very, very young age, for sure.
Andrew: All right.
Jordan: How old were you when you were doing the door to door?
Andrew: I was doing it in late high school and then through college. I made more money doing that than I would have at a job. Then I finally felt like I stored $20,000 in the bank. I got to that level, and there was nothing else I could really do. I felt like I couldn’t use the money. I tried to figure out how I could invest in real estate, because I was listening to these radio guys who talked about how it’s so easy to invest in real estate. I’d buy their books and I’d try to do it, but I kept getting laughed at as a teenager. Even in my family, people weren’t going to help me with it.
So I said, “I’m not going to benefit as much from getting another $10,000 in the bank as I would if I went and worked even for free and learned more.” So I went to work for a Wall Street broker, Stephanie Winston, and I did it for free. Then I went to work for a headhunter, Paul Sorvera, and I got paid. It was definitely a come down in money for both of those positions, but I learned a whole lot more, and it set me on a different path and it was worth it.
Jordan: Very cool.
Andrew: It’s good being entrepreneurial as a kid. I remember people would worry about like even a $5 meal. I thought, “$5 meal? I make that every minute when I’m selling. That’s nothing.” I would like have pockets full of cash. It’s not that much money. We’re talking about over five years I saved $20,000, but it does feel very powerful to be able to do it.
Jordan: Yeah. It just changes your perspective, right? Your world grows beyond what you — your small little world becomes bigger.
Andrew: I had this cool experience where in college someone was fighting over a beer, who should have paid for it. I said, “You know what? I’ve got the money here. Let me pay for it.” That just quieted everyone down that I could pay for the freaking beer. So did you get to keep the money from the emu chapstick and everything else?
Jordan: No. It was just kind of the family thing. I wasn’t old enough to understand really the value of it. But then when I was a 19-year old, that’s when I got into my first real business venture. It was one of those college painting internships.
Andrew: Oh, really? Okay. That’s where somebody pays you and other college students to paint their homes?
Jordan: Yeah, essentially. It was kind of an internship, but I managed the whole business, went door to door, knocked on a thousand doors before I got my first lead, never painted a house in my life. That summer, those couple months, I did about $140,000 in revenue, painted like 55 homes, was one of the top in the nation. That’s where I really got the bug for just doing business and from there I jumped into other stuff.
Andrew: I remember selling sandwiches. The sandwiches would go bad unless you sold them right away. So there’s no procrastination. I knew that if I pushed myself past the fear of going and talking to someone new and trying to sell them a sandwich, if I pushed past that fear, I would get an easy $5, likely I would get $5. And if I did it three times, for sure I’d get at least $5, maybe $15. So it’s so hard when you know what $15 can get you to not say, “Go do it right now.” There’s no procrastination.
Jordan: Right.
Andrew: It’s not going to happen tomorrow. I have to do it right now. What’s one thing that you took away from that?
Jordan: I had a very similar experience. I’m sitting at this door, knocking on this stranger’s door. They have no idea who we are, and I’m trying to sell a $5,000 paint job. I’ve never painted in my life. So, to persevere through all that rejection, that was a big a takeaway of mine, and you really don’t have to have the experience to do something. They have to trust that you can follow through with what you say. So really, for me, the big learning lessons are how to connect with people that you don’t know and really how to sell yourself through a lot of failure.
Andrew: What about this, Jordan? I always thought that if I could push myself through all that failure, then talking to girls would be super easy, but it wasn’t.
Jordan: Really?
Andrew: Like all the stuff that was working for me for door-to-door sales should have helped me. It didn’t. I was still intimidated. I still thought, “If I fail, then everyone knows that I’m a loser here for failing, or I don’t know what to say.” You’re smiling at that. You didn’t experience that.
Jordan: I didn’t really experience that. No. I think I focused a lot on the body language, and I took every opportunity as a chance to learn how to communicate.
Andrew: So you were confident enough to try to talk to girls and ask them out and be okay if they said no?
Jordan: Yeah. I just kind of was brought up in kind of like a culture where it was okay to talk to girls.
Andrew: What was the culture? I grew up in New York. It was okay to talk to everyone.
Jordan: My dad was a jock growing up, three-sport athlete in college, so very social guy. So I just kind of had that influence growing up. I was really confident talking to girls. I have a little sister, and I always was hanging out with my mom. I was around women my entire life.
Andrew: I was too. It didn’t help me. Maybe if my dad was more of a jock — my dad is so un-jock like. We’ve never thrown a football or baseball or anything. He’s so un-jock like. Last night, I was on my exercise bike just working out. I was going for about two hours, and my dad said, “You know, they say if you work out at night, you’re not going to fall asleep. Aren’t you worried about that?” I said, “I think I’m okay. Two hours is going to knock me out pretty good.”
But the interesting thing I filed away in my head is this guy is looking at me exercising, and he’s looking for the problem in it, like where’s the danger in exercising? I definitely didn’t come from a jock background. Maybe if I did, I’d be able to throw a football a little bit better and number two, approach women and not think my world was going to collapse if they weren’t into me.
All right. So I see the painting job. Let’s go into this travel agency, because, frankly, that one didn’t work out, but you did get a lot out of it. What was the goal with the travel agency, and what was it and why didn’t it work out?
Jordan: Yeah. So just kind of like the sandwich experience, like painting houses was not sexy. That’s not something I can go to a party and be like, “Hey, girl, what’s up? I run a painting business. Really sexy, right?” So travel was a lot more sexy. I wanted to do a high-end concierge service, something where I could be connected with limo companies and clubs and restaurants and be a baller at that age.
So what I tried to do is take the model that College Works had of hiring interns and running this really structured internship for people and translating it into this travel industry. So what I did is I took the whole model, replicated the whole training process, really the whole structure. I built a brand. I spent a ton of money in legality. I built this company without sales. So I figured, okay, I can go door to door and sell paint jobs. I can go door to door and sell travel trips without any experience.
That was not the case. There is just so much more logistics and so much more liability. It’s not like a local thing where there’s x-material and y and blah, blah, blah. No. You’re traveling across countries sometimes across the world. You don’t know the people you’re traveling with. There are just so many variables, and it’s way harder to build that trust that you could follow through.
Andrew: I see. I guess if you come in and paint my office — I was just told this green was horrible for my backdrop — but if you were to come in and paint it and get it wrong, some other guy can come in and fix it. But if you send me on a weeklong vacation with somebody and I hate it, then we’re both upset and the person who I’m with is upset at me for picking you. I see. That’s why it failed?
Jordan: Yeah.
Andrew: That’s part of the problem with being a good salesperson. You feel like you could persuade and you stop — I stopped, anyway, for a while in my life saying, “What is it that they really want?” I started to think, “I could sell it. What do I want them to have?” When it failed, how much money did you put into it?
Jordan: I was about $17,000 at that point.
Andrew: Painful, right? I can see in your face you’re a little embarrassed by that.
Jordan: I was like a college student too, so that was the world.
Andrew: Yeah. I kind of feel like the whole travel agency business died as soon as Expedia, Priceline and the others came around, but I could see how you said, “You know what? We’re going to be the concierge version of that. Some people want something higher end.” Was there a definitive end, or did it kind of unwind?
Jordan: Yeah. I’m a big proponent of mentorship. I had this mentor who was kind of high up in Accenture. I got on the call with him at some point when I was toward the tail end of this thing. I started walking him through all the cool stuff I’d done, thinking he’d be so proud, and then he started asking me some basic business questions like, “How many sales did you have? What did they think most valuable about your service?” Just all these basic questions you ask before starting a business. I didn’t have answers to any of them.
I went and did a quick questionnaire to some of the people I’d been talking to, some of the leads. It was clear that I did not have the ability or resources to follow through at that time. It was kind of a timing thing. I wasn’t willing to invest the amount of time I think it would take to where it needed to be. So, at that point, it was not the time for me. I put it away.
Andrew: So you definitively said, “It’s not the time for me. I’m closing it down.” The reason I’m asking is because that takes some guts, and it takes you figuring out that you failed and coming to terms with that. Did you have to do that?
Jordan: Yeah. I did. It’s not something I like to do. I like to win. That’s the environment I grew up in.
Andrew: You came from a jock mentality, right.
Jordan: Very competitive. I don’t lose. Yeah. It was very humbling, but I took it as a positive, because I went through the whole process of building a company. I did the LLC on my own. I went through the whole legality and structuring and all that with insurance and errors and omissions and all these things. So now, when I take it to my next venture, I have that foundation built. So it was almost like an investment into an education even though it didn’t create the return I was hoping for.
Andrew: All right. Well, you figured something out. You then moved on to another business, which we’ll talk about in a moment. But first, I’ve got to tell you about golf balls for a second. So I heard about this — you’re going to dig this — there’s a company that sells lost golf balls. I’m not a golfer, but apparently these guys hit the golf balls one time, they get lost, and basically it’s good golf balls but they go to waste.
So there’s a company that finds these lost golf balls, cleans them up and resells them. The reason I paid any attention to it at all is because they did this contest where they were offering all kinds of prizes, golf balls essentially. As a result of doing this contest, they ended up with — I had it right here in front of me. There it is, 15,675 unique entries, meaning over 15,000 email addresses in their database because people entered. You put your email address to enter the contest.
The thing with the contest they did, it also has a viral component. When you enter the contest, you’re incentivized to tell your friends to enter the contest and get them to do it. We’ve seen this a million times, which means to me that I thought it was played out, but it’s not. These guys got 15,000+ people to subscribe and go through this contest.
But the thing that really caught my attention is they also sold $50,000 in product to that list. So they did this contest giving out golf balls. They ended up getting over 15,000 email addresses, and to those people, they sold over $50,000 worth of golf balls, recycled golf balls. I said, “Maybe the whole viral contest thing is not played out. Maybe there’s something to it.”
And the company these guys partnered up with is ViralSweep, which is now a sponsor of Mixergy. We’re working with them. But not only that, they created a contest for me here at Mixergy because, hell, I’d like to see how many email addresses I get, and I’d like to see if we can sell to that too. I thought my audience would like to do this, not so much because they want to win — I’ll tell you what they’re going to win if they enter the contest. But to get a sense of what this is like to run one of these contests. If you enter, I’ll share whatever numbers I have with you.
Here’s the thing. If you want to enter my contest, I’m going to give the winner a stand-up desk. I’ve moved to a stand-up desk. Jordan, are you in a stand-up desk? No, you’re in a sit-down desk, aren’t you?
Jordan: I’m mobile. That’s what I do. I’m standing up, I’m sitting down, in the car, in the Lyft, everywhere.
Andrew: I like having a home base with everything exactly where I want it to be. For a long time, I was sitting down, and it was starting to get a little bit tough especially a little bit tough. I’d stand up behind my desk. I’d peer at the camera a little bit. I’d move around the camera. I finally said, “Let’s get a stand-up desk.” Huge change. So we’re going to give that to the winner.
I’ve switched over from earbuds to these Air Pods, so good. This is the best Apple product I’ve had in years. I love it. So we’re going to give that. We’re going to basically give Andrew’s ideal office situation to the winner. You’re going to go see everything that I like to have in my office.
So, if you want to enter this contest, it’s at Mixergy.com/win. It’s run for us by a company called ViralSweep. The reason we’re using ViralSweep is because I don’t have time to go figure out how to get the legal issues handled for a contest. Have you ever run a contest? You get one of those software apps, Jordan. Then they tell you, “Go talk to your lawyer about how to get the,” whatever the legal link that you have to have.
Jordan: Terms and conditions and all that.
Andrew: The terms and conditions. I have to run a freaking lawyer through this before I run the contest? No. I like that these guys do it. I like that they pick the random person for me. I like that they make sure that my people, who are super smart, aren’t going to cheat to see what they can get away with. I like that they track the entries. I like the whole thing. These guys just take care of it all for me, which is why I’m working with them at ViralSweep.
ViralSweep is running the contest. I hope to sell through this. I hope to generate more email addresses, and I will share those numbers with everyone who enters the contest. So if you want to try this contest, go to this URL. It’s Mixergy.com/win. If it works for this golf ball company, it’s got to work for Mixergy and it’s got to work for the person who’s listening to me. So go try my contest, and then if you want one of your own, check it out. We’ve got information leading you to ViralSweep right on my contest page. Again, that URL, Mixergy.com/win.
Jordan: Do you know what the time frame was for that golf ball example, because I think that’s really interesting?
Andrew: They actually ran multiple contests. The first one was February 3rd through March 9th. They got 12,286 entries for that one. Then they just kept doing it. There isn’t a single contest that they did that got more entries than the first one. The first one got 12,286 entries. They did other contests that got anywhere from roughly 2,000 to roughly 5,500 entries. That’s over the course of about half a year.
Jordan: Not bad.
Andrew: Interesting. Why do you need to know the dates? I feel like you’ve identified something that I didn’t think of and I should be aware of.
Jordan: Yeah. I was just curious if it was something that was really fast because like, for example, if someone doesn’t just have the money sitting around to hire somebody, if they want to take out a loan if they believe in something, if they can recoup that capital or cash flow to cover those payments.
Andrew: What do you mean? What’s the expense in this?
Jordan: Yeah. I don’t necessarily know their model and how they charge, but I’m also just considering if it’s something where you think you can generate some cash flow from it and rather than just putting forth my money, if I can use the bank’s money or a lender’s money and then make small payments to there, but then —
Andrew: And what would you do with the money?
Jordan: The money that I would get? I don’t know what the service costs.
Andrew: You don’t need a bank loan for it, for ViralSweep? No. It’s peanuts.
Jordan: Yeah?
Andrew: Oh yeah. We’re talking about basic software. It’s not the kind of cost that you would need to go —
Jordan: Oh, so it’s not a service. It’s like a software.
Andrew: It’s software and a service, and it’s both fairly inexpensive. We’re not going to have to go to the bank to the get a loan to work with them. I like the way you’re thinking about it, but no. It’s definitely a do it for you type of operation, but they spent a lot of time with us trying to think through what the contest is. I think your best expense is going to be, “What do you give away?”
And so a desk is going to be expensive. The Air Pods are a pain in the ass to get. It took me six freaking weeks, but it was worth every second of waiting. It’s whatever you give away. These guys with the recycled golf balls, they have to give away golf balls. It definitely cost them money. It costs them $6,269.58 worth of golf balls, but it’s over a few months, and they generated enough email addresses to make it worth its while.
Jordan: Cool.
Andrew: I like how into it you are. It means that even though I bumbled the freaking ad read and I like to think of myself now as a way better pitchman, that it still went over well.
Jordan: Yeah. I’m curious. I’m always curious about everything.
Andrew: All right. If you guys want to check it out, it will be on Mixergy.com/win. Jordan, it’s not up right now while we’re recording. It will be up when this episode goes up. We want to get the contest started right when this episode is published.
All right. I see the first business sucked for you. It didn’t work out well. I was going say sucked, but I don’t know. You then get into something new, This Generation Marketing, what do you think of that?
Jordan: Yeah. So a buddy of mine that was in a couple of my business classes. He knew that I was doing things with that painting company and I was successful with that and then I was doing this travel thing. So I just wanted to stay connected. He himself was doing a mobile app venture. He had worked on this app for a couple years. He had a couple developers. He pulled me aside and said, “Hey, I think if we put our heads together, we’ll be able to create some successful business or whatever.” We were just out of college, so, “Yeah, sure. I’m kind of ramping down this travel thing. Let’s see what we got.”
So he came over to my house, and I had this plumber working on my sink. We were trying to brainstorm what could be an idea that we could easily fulfill, like go out today and start executing on. We had this idea like our generation, we’re great at social media, where a small business like this plumber maybe not so much. We started asking him questions, kind of surveying him while he’s working on my sink.
Andrew: Okay.
Jordan: He’s like, “I want to invest in social media. I want to invest in a better, responsive website. I just don’t even know who I talk to. Is it someone your age that would help me?” We were like, “Yeah, we could totally help you with that.” So this birthed This Generation Marketing.
Then we started going door to door, knocking on small mom and pop shops, taking my experience of doing it with the paint company, because that’s something I was just very confident in and selling social media management and small responsive sites to these little restaurants, like boutiques and things around town. And we wanted to scale that, though, because I didn’t want to be knocking on doors for the rest of my life.
So this idea that I had was going to chambers of commerce, because they do all the work of connecting all of these SMBs, and then they offer these yearly packages with all these services and when doing some research, we found that not a lot of these chambers have digital service offerings. So we were willing to, if they sold them to all of their hundreds of companies that were in their package, that we’d give them a discount.
So I was then going to all of these chambers pitching to the boards, and they were all excited about it. Then we wanted to kind of rebrand specifically to the chambers, so we bought the domain, ChamberDS.com, Chamber Digital Services.
Andrew: I get it.
Jordan: So that was kind of that venture.
Andrew: And they were actually helpful for you? They actually got you customers?
Jordan: So we were getting through that process. So while I was getting through that — it was long because there’s a whole board, they have monthly meetings and it’s not a quick turn thing. While we were doing that, we were also getting inquiries from mobile apps. So, because my business partner was working on that venture, he had a couple developers that were working on his app. He just brought an idea to me and said, “Hey, what if we actually develop this app? I have the developers. We have the opportunity.” I’m like, “Sure, let’s try it.”
So, while I’m doing this chamber of commerce deal over here, we’re actually developing our first mobile app on the side, and that turns out to be very profitable. And so, while we’re kind of waiting for things to turn up over here on the mobile app side, we’re also now starting to make strategic partnerships, and we got deals flowing in. This is just blowing up, so it’s kind of like, “Whatever,” over here. And then we just had the domain. We didn’t want to invest in the whole business side like I did with expert travel again. So we just kept Chamber DS, and we just made a little tweak to Chamber Development Services, chamber like a gun chamber, where development only takes one shot.
Andrew: Got it.
Jordan: Then we just kind of ran with that, and then just sales just kept coming in and did around $700k in their first year, and so we’re just trying to keep up with the business that happened over here.
Andrew: Before we started, you said $600k the first year.
Jordan: Yeah. So it was over — so $600k was the goal that we were trying to achieve, so we did over — we did between $600k and $700k. It was almost $700k. So our goal was —
Andrew: So let me understand how you got so many sales in the first year. Where did you get your very first customer, the one that was brought to you?
Jordan: So the very, very first customer was from my business partner. He was going through Epicodus at the time. It’s a code school here in Portland, Oregon. Part of going through that program, they offer this kind of side gig where if you go out and you find anyone that has a mobile app idea and you bring it to the school, you get two or five percent commission.
Andrew: What does the school do with it? They get paid to build the app for them?
Jordan: Yeah, I think they get a very low rate, and it’s more of just education for all the students there that get to work on an app, like a legitimate app for business. So in bringing this in, he’s like, “You know what? I have a couple opportunities that I’m bringing to this Epicodus, but if we were to do it ourselves, what’s that commission structure? What’s our profitability on a job like this?” So we ran the numbers, and obviously it was way more profitable if we managed it, because we just cut out all the overhead and all that.
Andrew: Two to five percent or just a handful of percentage points is not enough. He was going door to door saying, “Hey, do you need an app?”
Jordan: More like cold calling.
Andrew: Who was he cold calling?
Jordan: I never really dug into this, but our first client was this eye physician, a local physician. It cost us $2,500 to make. It was a $5,500 project. This eye physician needed this PDF, this app that just housed PDF for the patients in the waiting room that just wanted to educate themselves on —
Andrew: I see. When I heard about this, I said, “What kind of eye doctor needs to have his own app? What does he want, people to schedule with him with an app? Why doesn’t he just use a webpage or something else?” I see. It’s in the office. He doesn’t want to be one of these jerks who forces you to use a billionth copy of a billionth copy of some piece of paper form that once made sense. He wants to give his patients an iPad, have them fill it out like human beings and then hand it over. I see. You guys created that for him. And $5,500 is what you charged. He was willing to pay $5,500 to just stop jerking around his patients with papers.
Jordan: There’s that and he saved paper. The money on printing paper, on paying his employees.
Andrew: Really? The iPad would be about $500 plus $5,500 for you, $6,000 just to avoid paying paper. That doesn’t seem like a fair tradeoff.
Jordan: But it’s a one-time deal, right? So all the paper he would have to pay for, and if you have all the clients that are running through there on a weekly basis and then paying all these employees on a weekly basis to generate this, the time that goes into doing that.
Andrew: You know what? Now you’re making sense. I feel like $5,500 is still a lot. It’s low for an app, but it’s still a lot to solve this problem. But I get it and you guys built it for him. It cost you $2,500 to build it. Who created the app?
Jordan: Yeah. So it was one of the developers that was working on my business partner’s app. It was an iOS app. So I was working on his app. So we just brought him over to work on this app, and then he ended up sticking with us as we continued to develop more apps.
Andrew: Okay. All right.
Jordan: So it’s just someone that he had in his network, that I think he actually got from just one of those online companies, this developer that he hired from online, like an Upwork.
Andrew: Oh, I see. Okay. I kind of feel like this would have been a great software for you guys to create for all doctors, just one app that any doctor can use. They’d pay you monthly for it or pay you one time for it. But that’s not the direction you guys wanted to go in. You didn’t want to create your own product at this stage. You just said, “We want to find more guys like this doctor.” So I see how you got your first customer. I see who built it for you. What about the next batch of customers? Did they come from cold calls, like you mentioned before, or was it something else?
Jordan: Yeah. It came from strategic partnerships. But I think what you just brought up was really interesting and why we went the route of the service company that developed the product as opposed to just trying to IP some of this project. I think that we saw the opportunity to learn how to create successful products while also getting paid to learn while also learning how to do a service business. So, essentially, we were learning how to run a product company and a service company at the same time, which is why we pursued this route. Being young, we were just trying to learn. Eventually, we wanted to do that. We can get to that later in the story, but we ended up taking equity in products and so forth.
Andrew: Oh, you did?
Jordan: Yeah.
Andrew: Who owns equity now, now that you’ve sold the business?
Jordan: So I personally own equity in those. We can talk about what the merger was like. They didn’t buy out the business. It was more of they —
Andrew: An asset buy.
Jordan: Yes, essentially.
Andrew: How were you going to explain it? It was more like a what?
Jordan: It was more like licensing some of the assets, so like an asset buy.
Andrew: All right. One other thing that you did to get — actually, let’s talk about the cold calls. What else did you do?
Jordan: So what we did is we created strategic partnerships with local shops in town, because when doing some research into just the market, just the landscape, we found that there’s just this big gap. There were a couple small development shops, two to three developers that were almost just like devs for hire or freelancers from online. And then you have companies like Emerge Interactive here in town or Fueled out of New York, and you have these big agencies that build apps of $200k and above.
But then there’s this kind of middle ground, of the $20k to $100k range, where there wasn’t really a shop or agency that could provide strategy consulting, the business strategy and the ongoing support and kind of some of the higher level advisory services on top of just designing and developing, because typically that would take more acumen and more people, thus more overhead and that’s why they kind price themselves out. I think we just kind of had a unique skill set that allowed us to play in that middle ground.
So, knowing that, we could provide that service at that middle ground where these top tier shops were turning these opportunities away. We then just sought to connect with these shops that were turning projects away that were $100k or less, offer them a finder’s fee for referring projects to us and making a warm introduction, and that’s how we just got all of our leads.
Andrew: How hard is it to get those kinds of partnerships?
Jordan: It’s not just, “Hey, we can take your leads from you,” right? For us, we put together an entire process for that, an entire system. So we put together pitch decks. We put together examples. It’s like trying to win a client, but we were doing that specifically tailored to each agency. So there was totally a vetting process. By someone making a warm introduction, they’re essentially putting their reputation on the line.
We had to take that into consideration, making sure that we had all of our testimonials wrapped up, a bunch of references. We gave access to our code bases so they can see that we’re actually producing quality code so that they know when we’re making the introduction, they’re in good hands, giving examples and things for them to click through so that when they are making an introduction and saying, “This is a reputable company, we suggest talking to,” that they actually believe that, that they had confidence in us to do that.
Andrew: Give me an example of a typical customer that you got through these kinds of relationships?
Jordan: Yeah. So I’ll use GrowBaby. That was one of our first milestone wins, I guess you could say. They were a nutrition company, like a family-owned nutrition company. Emily was the person that we connected with, and her mom started the company. So it was really just like a family-owned kind of smaller business, someone that doesn’t have more than $20k to $50k to spend on a mobile app project. Her project was $21k, the GrowBaby Nutrition Tracker for moms, pregnant moms.
So those were kind of the typical clients that we got referred to initially, and then once we started to really prove that we can handle higher scale things, it became more about we were building our reputation online and we started getting signups through our website. So we almost had that organic snowball just from our traction. So it just started with those strategic partnerships. And then that created the cash flow that we could then invest into our own marketing engine, and that’s where the whole thing picked up.
Andrew: I’m looking at GrowBaby right now. The app as you have it now, is that what you guys built for them?
Jordan: So now I don’t believe there’s one in the store, because her company ended up getting this massive grant from the whole state of Florida. I think Florida is mandating the use of her program. They’re going through multiple million-dollar rounds of doing these research studies to really back what they do. So, right now, it’s not a focus of theirs. So I don’t even believe it’s in the store anymore. But we built their entire app platform, and that’s what you’re looking at.
Andrew: The reason I say that is it doesn’t feel like the middle has enough potential customers in it. I understand on the low-end people who don’t have much money to invest in a website, for example, or maybe just enough to invest in a website, there are a ton of those, companies that need a really polished major app. There’s a lot of revenue there and a good market there. But that middle ground seems really rough, right? There aren’t that many people like GrowBaby used to be, where they had just a few thousand dollars for an app. Is that true?
Jordan: I don’t know. I don’t believe so. It really doesn’t — if you get traction and you validate your concept, then it should be sustainable to get to the next level and to justify more investment, whether it’s from its own sales or whether it’s from your business being able to budget something because it’s generating the revenue. So I think it just comes down to being able to connect a benefit to the app. It’s got to produce at any level. I think it’s just starting out at a level that makes sense for you or the business.
Andrew: I guess I just don’t see that middle ground of apps doing well. If you look at the app store, independent app makers just don’t do well anymore.
Jordan: Right. Independent app makers, I agree, because there’s more that goes into building a successful app than developing it, and it takes a lot more acumen to do so. There are several steps that go into making an app, and a lot of times someone is just good at one of them, so it takes really a team of people to do that or someone that has a very well-rounded experience in building a lot of successful apps.
Andrew: Tell me again what kind of agencies introduce you to these clients.
Jordan: So Knuckleheads was one here in town. Forix Solutions was another one and Emerge Interactive.
Andrew: What do they do? What do these businesses do? They were building websites for clients and so they were able to transfer some of those clients to you?
Jordan: They just have their own marketing engine. They were getting hit up on their website just through Google search, and then typical biz dev, they jump on the phone, qualify them and if they’re not a good fit, they’d make an introduction. They’d make an introduction to us because we were a reputable partner.
Andrew: I see. If they were too small for Emerge, Emerge would say, “Hey, you know what? We actually are going to charge more than your budget, but I have a company that I could recommend.” They feel good about you, because you showed them your code and you also give them a little bit of a commission for making the introduction. Is that right?
Jordan: Right.
Andrew: How did you get the developers to build this out?
Jordan: So we just recruited them?
Andrew: From where?
Jordan: We looked on LinkedIn to find anyone that was in our area that we could sit down with. Good people know good people. So we just put our feelers out in the development community just to get introductions to people. I looked to various online resources, like I mentioned Upwork. I think oDesk was one of them.
That was more my business partner’s realm, responsible for his CTO/COO looking for more the production side of it and just made sure that we always had just a pipeline of talent. It really didn’t take more than a couple developers per project at a time, so it was really easy to scale up. Once we had the projects coming in, we had the money, it was easier to find people to work on projects.
Andrew: Cool. All right. Let me talk about Toptal, actually, and this feeds into it. Do you know much about Toptal?
Jordan: I don’t, actually.
Andrew: There are agencies just like yours right now listening to me and they probably are doing what you are, which is kind of hustling for each new customer, hustling to get the right developers, the right designers for those projects. Well, those companies should know that many of their competitors are using Toptal as their secret fulfillment center, secret weapon.
What they do is like you, they get a client and instead of going to those cheapo sites and so on, what they do is they go to Toptal and say, “Look, I’ve got a client who needs a mobile app. It’s going to be iOS. We also need an Android component. Here’s how our project is going to work. Here are the kind of people that we need. We’d like two different people and we need them to work on this project within this period of time.”
Toptal goes into their network of top developers that we need. We’d like two different people. We need them to work on this project within this period of time. Toptal goes into their network of top developers, the kinds of people who won’t just do exactly what you tell them but will actually think through the problem and come up with a better solution, often, than you could, CTO level, Google employee level people.
Toptal goes into their network, brings those out and they say, “Okay, look, Jordan, your company needs these two people here they are.” You get to talk to them, make sure that they really are the right fit for you and if they are, those two people work for your clients as if they work for your agency. Your clients do not even have to know the two people you hired from Toptal are actually from Toptal. As far as they know, you’ve got all the resources that you need in order to build it out. You’ve got the best developers for them.
So that’s one of the things that I had no idea was going on with Toptal until I had drinks with one of the people there, with a matcher. A matcher is someone who, if you work with Toptal, is the first person you’re going to talk to. You tell them what you’re looking for. He goes into the database and he’ll match you with the right person. And he said, “Hey, we actually have a lot of these agencies who work with us and we are their team. We are their staff. It’s basically two people with a phone and we do the development.”
So if you’re out there and you’re running an agency and you want to hire the best of the best or frankly if you’re just running one project and you need the best of the best, you owe it to yourself to go check out Toptal, and that’s T-O-P-T-A-L. And frankly, if you’re a Mixergy listener, they’re going to give you 80 hours of Toptal developer credit when you pay for your first 80 hours and that’s in addition to a no risk trial period of up to two weeks.
So many people who have listened to me have at least written them down, and many have actually signed up and worked with Toptal, and I urge you guys to check them out. Go check out top, as in top of the mountain, tal as in talent, Toptal.com/Mixergy.
All right. I see where you’re getting your customers. When you get to roughly $700,000 in sales, how much of that do you guys get to keep?
Jordan: We were operating about 40% to 50% profitability per project, but when you have — we were investing into growing. So we were increasing our overhead, and when there were times that we weren’t selling, where I was more involved with the growing and recruiting and training and those aspects of the business, I was essentially just the salesperson that grew into that point. That’s where we needed to have that runway to do that. I would say we were operating net around 15% to 20%. Andrew, I think I lost you. I can’t hear you.
Andrew: Sorry, 15% to 20% ended up coming in after your salaries?
Jordan: Yes.
Andrew: Okay. All right, so roughly $140,000 in the bank. That’s ideal, actually. Let’s say even less than that. At 15%, you’re roughly $100,000 in profit after your salaries. That’s not bad for a first-year business. Okay. And then second year, how did you do?
Jordan: The second year, we were more profitable. So that’s where I actually ended up buying my business partner out at the end of that first year. There are things I wanted to do with the business. We weren’t seeing eye to eye. That’s where I ended up doing that. Shortly after that, that’s where I started to collaborate with Emerge doing stuff with them.
Andrew: Before you start to basically shift your business to Emerge, there was a period there where you only had $1,500 in the bank.
Jordan: Yeah.
Andrew: What happened? You’re smiling at that too. What happened there?
Jordan: For me, just challenges are funny. They just happen. It’s how you come back from it. So what had happened was our model, we take 50% upfront and then 50% upon completion. But me being the sales guy, I’m loving upsells. As we dig into a project, because we have a very tiered approach to developing these projects, we’d start to identify other opportunities for them.
So, as we start to match things to their business and some opportunities that we saw with their business growth on those sides of things, then we started adding little features and tweaks here and there. So we take the 50% down, and then we would move the other 50% to the end of the project. What had happened was even though we got 50% here, as we continued to add things, it kept pushing that bigger payment further and further away. So the overhead was consistent, right? So we kept paying —
Andrew: You still have to pay your developer every week even though you’re going to get the rest of the money after the project is done. You’re saying if you added an extra $10,000 to the cost of the project, you wouldn’t take $5,000 now when you agree to add to the project and then $5,000 at the end. That extra $10,000 that you discovered while you were working on the project, you’d get paid the whole amount of it after the project was done.
Jordan: We got paid the 50% upfront.
Andrew: Okay.
Jordan: We were still doing that, but we still pushing back at 50% towards the end. So it allowed us — it wasn’t like this, but it was kind of just like this, and we eventually got to the point where it’s getting really low. So to solve that problem, what I had to do was jump on the phone with a lot of our clients and create these milestone payments. So we sent them kind of the prototype we were at, so like the 75% mark, we’d jump on the phone, tell them, “Hey, here’s where we’re at with the project. We want to do some walk-throughs with you, show you where we’re at, give you code up to date essentially to negotiate getting half of that payment upfront.
Andrew: I see.
Jordan: That’s really what saved our butts.
Andrew: Okay. Why did you decide to — what do you call it? You don’t even say sale. Why did you decide to move your stuff into Emerge?
Jordan: So a lot of it, in growing really fast, a lot of my time and focus was on recruiting people, training people, legality, process. It was just being inundated with just management, with just company management. I wanted to more focus on just the personal growth aspect, so through leadership. So I had a podcast at the time, The App Academy, and that was a huge driver in our growth.
There was just a lot of things I wanted to do to grow to be a better leader, and I just found that as fast as I wanted to do it, I wasn’t allowing myself enough time to do it. So really making the transition was an investment into leveling up as an individual quicker so that I could get to where I want to go quicker at a bigger scale.
Andrew: So you’re saying you wanted to grow your podcast more than you wanted to grow your business?
Jordan: The podcast was a piece of it. I wanted to grow my knowledge base quicker, and I was focusing more in the day-to-day, more of my energy in the day-to-day than actually learning and growing beyond that.
Andrew: But don’t you learn and grow so you can grow your business? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to build your business up, bring in your people to help you out and take more time to build your knowledge at that point?
Jordan: Yeah. That’s definitely one way to do it. I saw that I could leverage the Emerge Interactive platform. They’d been around for 18 years servicing massive companies. So, rather than trying to work up to that point, I would quickly jump into a portfolio and with a massive team that had all of that.
Andrew: I’ll be honest with you. Something doesn’t feel like I’m getting the full story here, and that’s what I’m trying to get at. If the business is doing really well, why not sell it at a strong exit? If the business isn’t doing well, but is profitable, why not grow it? It seems like maybe you were kind of flat and weren’t bringing in that much money, but you had enough for a salary. You had enough for a profit. What am I missing here? Be open.
Jordan: Yeah. No problem. Like I had mentioned earlier too, I ended up buying out my business partner because we weren’t seeing eye to eye. So I was also stuck in the relationship. I felt like I was stuck in the relationship and it wasn’t something that was conducive to the lifestyle I was trying to have. I didn’t feel fulfilled. So it wasn’t really the fun thing I thought I was working for and looking forward to.
Andrew: Did it feel like a job?
Jordan: Yeah.
Andrew: Because you’re basically booking deals on one end and selling them to someone else. Is that what it was?
Jordan: It was just kind of like the culmination of just the whole thing. I wanted more, and I felt restricted to do more. I felt like I was owing to somebody else, and I felt like I was doing most of the work because I had all the business background and he brought kind of the mobile app specific acumen, but we reached a scale to where that didn’t really do much anymore. It took a lot more to run the business at that scale. There’s a lot more focus on the business. I had all this experience to do all that.
So I felt like I was lifting 90% of the business and being rewarded for 50% of it, and there really wasn’t openness and willingness to make things fair. I just reached really a roadblock, and there was really no give on that. So it was one of those things where I just wanted to get out of it.
Andrew: Okay. You were starting to say earlier what the deal was. What was the deal?
Jordan: What do you mean?
Andrew: What was the deal for the exit? What did they pay?
Jordan: There was no money in that.
Andrew: No money?
Jordan: Yeah.
Andrew: So they get the company and then what?
Jordan: They didn’t get the company. They get access to all the assets. So they could use all the portfolio and everything that I’d done, and then I essentially get full carte blanche to the resources and the platform to use for my personal ventures. So if you now needed to create an app, they would do it for free.
Andrew: No. You still have to pay for the developers.
Jordan: Right. There’s a lot more flexibility in the pricing because it’s something that —
Andrew: So you gave up this business that was doing well just to get a discount on your development work in the future for projects that you haven’t even launched?
Jordan: It’s not about the development. It’s not about building the product. It’s about the IP. It’s about being able to leverage the portfolio and the resources and the knowledge there.
Andrew: Like what?
Jordan: So I kind of compare Emerge Interactive to just like the Justice League. You have all these superhumans that are amazing at what they do. Any time, I can go talk to an art director that is just leaps and bounds ahead of anyone that I’ve ever talked to, a user-centered designer that is top-notch. So we developed platforms for the biggest companies in the world. We’re the best at what we do. So I get to just tap into those resources whenever I want.
Andrew: Have conversations with them?
Jordan: Yes, have conversations with them.
Andrew: And what else?
Jordan: Yeah, as well as being able to work on their projects in the lead role to where I can have control over where things go with mobile projects. Right there, that’s just access to experience.
Andrew: So you help guide the company in their work. They give you input into your projects, and that’s what you sold the business for? It was a profitable business?
Jordan: Yeah.
Andrew: Profitable business. You sold it for access to the people at the company who you could go and get insight from and help with whatever you’re thinking, but not actual work, just help and you also get to guide where Emerge goes as a business? What am I missing here?
Jordan: I sold it for knowledge. I did.
Andrew: You sold it for knowledge?
Jordan: Yeah. I’m confident I can start a business. That’s one thing that I know I can do. So, for me, if you understand how to identify the problem and to solve it, you can make money. So, for me, I think I have all these business ventures that I’m working on, on the side, and they’re more the long tail game. But for me, I needed a quicker route to knowledge and experience, and that’s not something that I saw happening very quickly with Chamber DS, especially with the partnership that I had.
So it was more feeling claustrophobic and wanting to get to the experience and the knowledge quicker. And that’s where I saw an opportunity, because in acquiring the business 100% from my business partner, it was just such a long, drawn out process where I wasn’t really focusing on sales. So the company itself was falling stagnant. I wasn’t investing into something that I knew I would have to valuate and pay for.
Andrew: Okay.
Jordan: It was at a time to where if I was going to make any sort of move, that was the perfect time to make the move.
Andrew: Let me get a sense of how you think. Let me tell you about an issue I’m working on and maybe you can help guide me.
Jordan: Okay.
Andrew: You’re the mentor guy. I didn’t even get into like how you’ve had great mentors your whole life. So I’m really into chat bots as a way of growing people’s marketing. I’ve been teaching it, and now I’ve got students who can build chat bots. I want to help them get more clients. I’ve been listening to how you’ve said that you worked with different agencies and got referrals from them. What do you think? If I wanted to get more clients from my graduates of the Bot Academy — it’s interesting how we both have the word Academy in our titles — what’s a good way for me to get that?
Jordan: So where I’ve gotten a lot of my success is just from creating relationships. So I’ve used strategic partnerships and mentorships. So, for me personally, with my skill set and my success and history of doing that, that’s where I would go because that’s my superpower.
Andrew: Partners? Yeah. I’m trying to think of what’s a good partner for that, and the only ones I think of are anyone who’s like a consultant selling marketing automation help. They should really be doing this work themselves. They should learn how to build bots. It’s not that hard in doing it themselves.
Jordan: Yeah. That’s a tricky one. I’m not too experienced in your niche specifically to advise. But online, you’re going to be way better equipped to answer this question than I am, but like partnering with webinars and —
Andrew: So far my best answer is anyone who’s seen me talk about it and decided they didn’t want to learn from me but still wants a bot, and that’s a big number of people who say, “I get it. I don’t want to do it,” they’re a really good referral to our graduates. That’s where our best ones come from, people who say, “Andrew, stop telling me how to do it. I’m never going to do it. My team is not going to do it. I want to pay you guys to do it for me.”
Jordan: I’d say what makes any entrepreneur successful is the list they have, the audience and what they’ve captured. So I would say with my relationships and my partnerships, I look at the audience they’ve gathered and the marketing engines they’ve built and how can I incentivize them to let me tap into that. So that’s where maybe with the bots, there are webinars you can co-host, where you can leverage their network and figuring out what’s the best way for you to be valuable to them.
Andrew: That I’ve been doing. What I’m really interested in are the partnerships that you’ve done. I do see the value in something like that. I’m going to have to think about who would be a good partner and maybe someone in the audience will have some feedback and ideas for me. It’s Andrew@Mixergy.com if you guys want to reach out and let me know what you’re thinking about that.
All right. You know what? Jordan, I feel like there’s something I’m missing here.
Jordan: Okay.
Andrew: The numbers are solid, $700,000 about the first year. Second year, how much?
Jordan: Second year we’re about $400,000, but more profit?
Andrew: Yeah. More profit per dollar in revenue or more profit overall?
Jordan: More profit in dollar per revenue.
Andrew: Got it. Okay. Now, you sold the business, or you gave it away for knowledge. I’d teach you for free right here, Mixergy podcasts. What are you doing now with yourself?
Jordan: Yeah. So now I run a podcast, Mobile First. That’s powered by Emerge Interactive.
Andrew: I see, actually. So that’s the other thing that was confusing. I went to Mobile First. The website is EmergeMobileFirst.com. So are you an employee of Emerge?
Jordan: Yes, right now I am.
Andrew: I see. So one of the responsibilities that you have is you create their podcast?
Jordan: Uh-huh.
Andrew: I see. I get it. And because you’ve been in the space, you have enough knowledge to guide the questions and find the right people. Like, I know Rand Fishkin isn’t going on just about anyone’s podcast, but you got him on a podcast recently. So, because you’ve got experience here and credibility here, you get better podcast guests. You have better conversations with them. And as a result, you help bring in new clients to emerge.
Do you feel like maybe you never had the employee experience and now by working for a big company that’s one of the big things that you get to see what’s it like, how do they run their meetings, how do they staff up, how does the leader get to take some time away. Is that what it is?
Jordan: You nailed it.
Andrew: I feel like I missed that in my life. I did it a little bit in college, but not enough.
Jordan: It wasn’t even necessarily the employee experience. It’s seeing how something to this scale operates so that I know how to operate at this scale. It’s been a really fascinating learning experience of just how things are structured and how someone can get to this point really just figuring it out. Me having the relationship with the owner being a mentor and friend of mine before coming on to work with them, I get kind of a unique insight into his personal life as well as the business persona that he has.
Andrew: Yeah. I see the value in that. I would like to see and experience how a company is run from the inside, including some of the broken parts of it. Andy Ratcliffe, I think, told me the best companies are often mismanaged. I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Think about some of the best successes out there. Their management wasn’t great, especially not at first, but the product and everything else made so much sense that they were able to keep growing.”
I think sometimes it’s helpful to see that from the inside, to realize all these people who seem like they’ve got it all together actually don’t have it all together. I’m not that far off. Even that is useful. But I want even the details. I’ve got someone in my office here who’s using my office for today because I invite anyone who’s listening, essentially, who wants to work in the office to have space in the office, use the internet, get coffee, make themselves at home.
One of the things that I’m going to do with him is I want to see how he runs his company. So right after you and I are done, I’m going to go talk to him and just have him turn on his computer, show me how he manages it, show me how he communicates with people.
Jordan: That’s cool.
Andrew: I feel like that is a little insight and maybe you’re getting much more because you’re on the inside.
Jordan: Yeah. That’s totally it. For me, it became incredibly apparent that an organization inherits the weaknesses of the person in business.
Andrew: Right.
Jordan: Even at the larger scales. It’s almost amplified at the larger scales. I just learned a lot just being on the inside. But with that insight at an organization of this scale, I’m also allowed the freedom to focus on doing some of this stuff.
Andrew: Not just freedom but the support. Like who is Alice Puckett?
Jordan: Yeah. So Alice Puckett, she’s our community manager. She sets up all the podcast interviews for Mobile First. She also assists in all the marketing, which is kind of what I lead at Emerge. Also, she helps with this, setting this stuff up.
Andrew: Yeah. The fact that you work there means that Alice is following up with us, making sure you’re booked here, making sure we understand why you’re worth having on here and what’s exciting about you and sending us articles about you. All right. Do you regret that Alice introduced you to me because I’m such a hard ass sometimes?
Jordan: We’re getting there.
Andrew: Is that right?
Jordan: No, no, I’m just kidding.
Andrew: It’s okay to say, “You know what? What the hell, Andrew? I’m here as your guest.”
Jordan: I love being drilled. This is perfect. I don’t have a lot of opportunities like this where someone gets to call me out on my BS. This is really refreshing. I want to do more of this. You’re, like the caliber of person you are — I’ve looked into your background to see the type of entrepreneur you are, and I’m just really inspired. I think this is a great thing for me.
Andrew: Thank you so much for being on here. Anyone who wants to go listen to your podcast, they’re especially a good fit if they’re what?
Jordan: Well, I think for this specifically, Tactic Mobile is going to be a better fit for them. So someone who has an idea for a mobile app, someone who’s interested in learning more about that process.
Andrew: We’re talking about TacticMobile.com. You’re teaching them how to create their own mobile app.
Jordan: Yes. I’ve even put together something special for you, Andrew, and Mixergy. It’s at TacticMobile.com/Mixergy. So I have a book that I’ve created, Tactic Mobile. Everyone can just get that for free.
Andrew: You’re going to give them the book. What’s the book about?
Jordan: The book is about really from start to finish, so over three years of doing this, all that I’ve identified to make a successful app and all my podcast interviews on App Academy, digging in to that formula. So whether they don’t know where to start or they’ve even started, the whole process to consider I include. It’s a ton of how-to examples, tools, resources.
Andrew: For coding up the app themselves?
Jordan: Not for coding, for the business side. So the strategic side, building. I mean, you can hire someone through the resources you mentioned. You can find a developer to build. But what they’re building, is it the right thing? Is it going to be profitable? Is it going to be valuable? These are the things that people often miss. It’s how to validate your concept, the business and then how it’s enable by the technology that’s something that’s talked about here, but it’s outside of it.
Andrew: That’s at TacticMobile.com/Mixergy to get that book where you get the three-part formula for creating a mobile app. I see that here. All right. Cool. Thanks for doing this, Jordan.
Jordan: Yeah.
Andrew: The two sponsors I mentioned to you and everyone else, the first is that company where you can hire your developers to build your app or anything else, they are — is that a little bit of a conflict for you, that I’m talking about Toptal?
Jordan: Not at all.
Andrew: It’s individual developers, not an agency that will help you strategize and build your products, right? So if you guys need developers, go check out Toptal.com/Mixergy. And if you want to see me use the same software that this golf ball company used, go check out Mixergy.com/win, as in you’re going to win. I hope you win, Mixergy.com/win. The tool that we’re using and the company that set that up for us is ViralSweep and basically you can see how the whole thing works if you go to Mixergy.com/win.
All right. Jordan, thanks again for doing this.
Jordan: Yeah. Thanks, Andrew. Appreciate it.
Andrew: Cool. Thanks. Bye, everyone.
