Andrew: Three messages before we get started. If you’re a tech entrepreneur don’t you have unique legal needs that the average lawyer can’t help you with? That’s why you need Scott Edward Walker of Walker Corporate Law. If you read his articles on Venture Beat you know that he can help you with issues like raising money or issuing stock options or even deciding whether to form a corporation. Scott Edward Walker is the entrepreneur’s lawyer. See him at walkercorporatelaw.com.
And do you remember when I interviewed Sara Sutton Fell about how thousands of people pay for her job site? Look at the biggest point that she made. She said that she has a phone number on every page of her site because, and here’s a stat, 95% of the people who call end up buying. But most people though don’t call her, but see a real number increases their confidence in her and they buy. So try this. Go to grasshopper.com and get a phone number that will make your company sound professional. Add it to your site and see what happens, grasshopper.com.
Remember Patrick Buckley who I interviewed? He came up with an iPad case. He built a store to sell it and in a few months he generated about a million dollars in sales. The platform he used is Shopify. If you have an idea to sell anything, set up your store on shopify.com because Shopify stores are designed to increase sales. Plus, Shopify makes it easy to set up a beautiful store and manage it, shopify.com. Here’s your program.
Hey everyone. It’s Andrew Warner. I’m the found of mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart and the big question for this interview is how can your business attract raving fans by having real human interactions? Jonathan has been the Ambassador of Buzz at Grasshopper for about three years now. In that role he helped Grasshopper get mentioned in the media over 500 times and built thousands of thousands of relationships with his customers.
He recently created a course about how he himself did it to teach companies like yours how you can create an army of brand loyalists. The course is called Learn to Buzz and is available at learn2buzz.com. Jonathan, welcome.
Jonathan: Thanks Andrew. I’m so pumped to be here. I think you can tell by my smile. My cheeks already hurt.
Andrew: I am, I think, you might be able to tell, a little nervous about doing this. It’s so odd, when I interview strangers I’m like ready to rip into it. When I interview friends, when I interview people who I’ve seen do this stuff for a long time, I get a little nervous because I feel like having a friend watch you at work, what if he sees there’s nothing special here, what if he sees that I’m a screw-up. So I am a little nervous.
Here’s what I will say. Usually at this point in the interview I ask you a numbers question. We agreed we weren’t sure, this is your own project you’re working on, we weren’t sure if we should be giving away Grasshopper numbers, plus we want people to build a relationship with you before they get these numbers, so if you guys want to see how profitable this is or how financially significant this is to build these kinds of loyal fans as opposed to buying pay-per-click ads.
Just go to his site, learn2buzz.com/ppc, pay-per-click right? So learn2buzz.com/ppc and you can get the numbers yourself. Let me ask you this, instead of the numbers, give me an example. What can someone who takes this on, what we’re about to teach them do? Maybe you could talk about the Inc.30 opportunity that you got the guys at Grasshopper?
Jonathan: This was one that really warmed my heart. When I first start at Grasshopper I was told more than anything [??] the founders, they wanted to get on the Inc.30 Under 30. They’ve been on the Business Week Top 25 under 25 and there’s this weird relationship between the two. Essentially the Inc. doesn’t want to write about Business Week and vice versa, but to get them both that’s quite a statement. Entrepreneurs who got famous they want to be in the Inc.30 Under 30.
Andrew: Sorry, we cut out for a moment there. You’re telling me there are so many successful entrepreneurs at Babson that they actually compete with each other for these slots at 30 Under 30, there are that many of them out there?
Jonathan: There’s not that many real solid entrepreneurship programs out there and especially not ones in a city that is as entrepreneurial as Boston. So you can be imaging together, produces some successful people.
Andrew: So these guys wanted to get in there.
Jonathan: Real bad. So we had tried for years and it’s not hard to know an Inc. reporter and that reporter will recommend you and submit your form and you do this two years, built relationships and relationships, and nothing. Finally I get pulled into their office, they’re like, “Listen, you’re 29. This needs to happen now. You’ve got to figure out a way.” Through one way or another, I actually helped out . . .
Andrew: You helped out what? Sorry, for some reason the connection’s coming in and out here, but I don’t want people to miss this. What did you do?
Jonathan: There was a woman who was throwing an event from Inc [SP] in Boston. They’re in New York, so they don’t know the scene as well, where they should be promoting. I just did her a solid and helped her promote the event through my local connections. Just doing a good for someone.
It turned out that she was also responsible for throwing the national In Connection in Denver, and they were looking for a round table to meet with the President of Inc. Of people to give their opinions on what do you think about the Inc 500, what do you think about the Inc 5,000?
I said, “This is perfect. Let me get our CEO of SIMAC in there, who has very strong opinions and it’ll be really good for him to meet the president of Inc.”
Helped out the president, gave him some honest feedback. Then he just looks him in the eye and says, listen. Come on. We created a national entrepreneurs’ day. We got the president to recognize this. How could we not be in your Inc 30 Under 30?
They hashed it out a little bit, push comes to shove, we made it in. Both founders got in the Inc 30 this year. It was a huge win, it was kind of like you got the warm fuzzies. It was a good feeling moment, it was a culmination of probably two or three years of bugging those founders, who kind of allowed me to be who I am. I knew it was one they were proud of, that they showed their families.
Andrew: This is just one win out of 500 wins. All of these RAs, you and I talked before the interview, started to actually show measurable results for the business. You get new customers, you get new business, and of course it’s fun to be on these lists. And you’re able to do it.
I know there are two things my audience is thinking right now. First of all, they’re thinking, is he a natural? Is he someone who could just naturally connect with people and make stuff like this happen, and press is just thrown at him and business success just comes his way?
Second thing they’re wondering is, how can we do it ourselves? We’ll get to the how they could do it, but we’ll start off with, are you a natural? Are you a business guy who just was born pumping out deals like this and making media opportunities like this happen?
What’s your story? What was your background?
Jonathan: I have a finance degree. Which for those in the entrepreneurial world, is the hardest degree to get in college. It doesn’t help you [??], believe it or not.
Andrew: It doesn’t help you . . . sorry, the connection cut out. But it doesn’t help you do much more than read a financial chart. They really don’t get into the business of business in finance class, the ones I took anyway.
Jonathan: No, absolutely not. They certainly don’t.
I didn’t know what to do out of college. I knew that I cared more than most people, and I wanted to get out there. I thought sales was my calling. The person who cares more, the person who works harder, gets further. So I did accounting, finance recruiting out of college, and was making 70, 80 cold calls.
[??] accounting managers, CFOs. I sat in a cubicle with my direct managers on the left and right of me, scrutinizing every call. [??] at one point, Andrew, don’t be yourself. We know what works. I couldn’t imagine . . .
Andrew: That’s what they told you? Their advice to you was the opposite of other people, they said don’t be yourself?
Jonathan: Don’t be yourself.
Andrew: Be our script.
Jonathan: I know. It’s like you’re brought up and told the exact opposite. I couldn’t even fathom that they wanted me to be someone else. It was brutal. 80 phone calls every day. It’s not even designed to build relationships with people.
I would get home from work and [??] in the shower, Andrew. Right, like why I couldn’t just [??] out of the shower, you know?
Andrew: You cut out for a second. What did you say that you did in the shower?
Jonathan: I would say I would have to have a beer in the shower when I got home from work.
Andrew: Beer in the shower, because you’re so depressed about where you work. Why beer in the shower, out of curiosity?
Jonathan: Excuse me?
Andrew: Why beer in the shower?
Jonathan: Well, you come home from a hard day and the first thing, I want to wash the day off me. Just take a shower, start over and have a beer. Most normal people can wait until they get out of the shower, but this job ate away at my soul so much that I couldn’t even wait until after.
Andrew: I see. Boy, you know what? I’m trying to think if I was ever at that point. Not exactly like that, but yeah, those low moments in business. They just don’t prepare you for them in business.
Frankly, even as much as I love Inc Magazine, I feel like they talk about just the highs. We don’t see that there are these low moments in business, there are these low moments in life.
All right, and you figured out a way to get out of there, to go to work at Grasshopper where you could be yourself and connect with people in kind of a systemized way and we’re going to teach some of the processes that you used there. So, I see what you’ve been able to do. Help my audience achieve something similar. Why don’t we start off by talking about how you deal with setbacks in business. There was a recent technical issue that you guys had. Talk to me about it and how you handled it different from how most people would.
Jonathan: Yeah, it’s a great example, right? I kind of really enjoy talking about the hard times because there’s enough people out there who are talking about the people that make $10-20 million, right? Let’s get in the trenches.
Andrew: Right.
Jonathan: So, to be very upfront, Grasshopper had it’s second issue in a year, essentially and so you start to get some really vocally upset people.
Andrew: What’s an issue? I should say that Grasshopper is . . . actually, you say it. What is Grasshopper?
Jonathan: Yes, so I mean, Grasshopper is a just really awesome virtual phone system for entrepreneurs, so just a good tool to help your business sound a little bit more professional.
Andrew: OK. So you guys are, you’re the back-end, the backbone of people’s phone systems. The tech issue was that the phone system went down a second time within a year.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Andrew: And what happened?
Jonathan: Right. And so the problem was, someone would call the number and they would get a notification saying that we were down, so they weren’t confused. You know, the customer understood that it was a Grasshopper issue and not the company that they were calling issue. But the calls weren’t getting connected, right? So some people who use us are emergency relief and doctors, right? And so it’s so unacceptable, right?
But what the point is, is that, in any of these situations, regardless of what your business is, I mean, you need to have a product that works, right? You could have five people like me who care about the business more than anyone, and you don’t have a product that works, you don’t have a business. I think that that’s an important factor. But there’s ways to help what’s a bad situation turn into a good situation more quickly, right?
Andrew: Exactly. You know what? Because I understand that . . . I can accept that you need to have a great product, but even the best products in the world are going to go down. Look at how many engineers are on Gmail and every once in a while, Gmail will go down.
Jonathan: Right.
Andrew: The big question that I have is, how do you guys take that negative situation and turn it into something that actually works, in some ways, you could say, it worked in your favor, where for others, it’s something that they have to sweep under the rug and have to dig out from under for years or, you know, feel shame about and have to apologize to the audience and world for years about. What did you guys do? How did you handle it? What happened?
Jonathan: So I’ll give you one, specific example. So, people were really getting upset via Facebook and, I’ll venture to say some people were just, kind of, exaggerating for a reaction, claiming that we lost them $50,000 over the weekend.
Andrew: That’s what they said.
Jonathan: Yes and if you do that math, your business is making millions upon millions of dollars, right, if that’s what you make just on the weekend. Assuming you have a legitimate business, right?
Andrew: Right. It’s always, if you bring that up to them, they always say things like, “No, this was the one weekend I did the push.” You know what? Maybe for some people it is, but it feels like everyone has to exaggerate how bad their problem is for effect and to make you feel bad and I guess also to make you guys pay because you have to pay for screwing up.
Jonathan: Right. Exactly. You get it, right?
Andrew: Yep.
Jonathan: And so, instead of us kind of coming to our own rescue, which is so clearly biased, we had a customer, right, someone who cared about us and our community, responded to this guy and he just did the math, right, of what this person would make if that’s really what they made. And he said, “You know what? This is probably bullshit.” Like, someone else called bullshit on him, right? And, from our perspective, we really respect someone who also is having their phone out because of us, right? This person is also having a problem take the time to have a. little bit of humor and make a real point, right?
If there’s another way to communicate your issue, if you really lost that much money, posting it on Facebook isn’t going to get it for you. Calling us and talking to us is going to be a better way, right? And so, this whole idea of creating brand loyalists, and what we’re going to talk about, you have to influence good behavior, right? I know it sounds like I’m talking about a dog, but it’s just, that’s not the point, right? The point is, you just have to say “thank you” sometimes. So this guy was really awesome. And so we baked him a dozen homemade cookies and wrote him a note and just said, “Listen, man, you stood by our side not, you know, during our high point when we were doing something really cool, but you stood by our side during a tough time and that’s something we’ll never forget. So, you know, enjoy these cookies with your family and your kids.”
And, you know, this guy tweeted back saying, “Oh my God. You’re a customer for life. We really appreciate this.” It’s just crazy, right, that something so small, five minutes of your time, $20 of our budget, which, by the way, was less than we were crediting people for the outage, right, made this guy a customer for life. That’s powerful.
Andrew: I didn’t realize you guys baked your own cookies. You went to that level, you went that far and made your own cookies yourselves?
Jonathan: Yes. Most of the time we actually have this unbelievable woman who runs an Etsy shop who bakes cookies. But we do have a couple of girls in our office who are spectacular.
Andrew: They bake cookies; you guys sent it out to him. He said he’s a customer for life and your customers; we understand are worth, I think, David one of your co-founders said a thousand bucks a lifetime, the average customer?
Jonathan: Yes. I think it’s about $35 to $40 a month for 12 to 18 months, so I think that’s about that number.
Andrew: That’s a nice trade offer. What about the influence he had on other people? Did you see that there were more customers coming in from that? Did you guys measure that?
Jonathan: You mean from this specific guy?
Andrew: Yes, exactly, but he was that grateful. Actually in my notes, I saw that my researcher when she was doing a background on you, I’ve known you forever I don’t know why we needed to do background research, but I remember, she told me the cookies are really impressive, it’s just a part of who they are, actually she didn’t know that you guys homemade those cookies, we just thought that you bought homemade cookies.
Jonathan: Yes.
Andrew: Did you end up getting other customers through that?
Jonathan: Yes. It depends, we sent cookies before, obviously is what she’s seeing. Sometimes that actually generate customers. But in this point that wasn’t the goal. The goal is stop the bleeding. This guy stops, what was a very aggressive conversation. That was as much of a win as we wanted. The goal is not to get customers acknowledged, it’s to stop, literally restart the system and move forward. In this case that worked absolutely perfectly.
Andrew: Okay give me another tactic, what else have you guys done?
Jonathan: Yes, in terms of specifically of with this. . .
Andrew: How about this, one of the things you told me is we need to listen, we need to listen to our customers. Everyone says listen. How do you guys do it that’s different from they way everyone else says it, that sounds a little generic?
Jonathan: Yes. I actually love to give you an example that has nothing to do with Grasshopper. There is this company called BuzzStream they are a CRM tool, contact management tool, they don’t do anything out in ordinary. I can’t help but talk about them, because they did something during their beta process that just has blown me away for the rest of my life.
So same story, just like a lot of companies find out about companies, I read about them in a news article. They are a new CRM so I happen to need a tool signed up for their beta process, was using it, I really liked some of their features. They were missing one key thing, guys, they were missing the ability to set a reminder created task, for some one who’s as ADD as I am and talk to as many people, you need that.
I emailed then and I said, ‘Listen here is my role at Grasshopper,’ it was awesome. ‘I just want to talk about it. I really, really want to tell the people I work with to use this tool, but in good faith I just can’t recommend it without this feature. It’s too important to anyone’s job. I couldn’t recommend it.’
I just love writing feedback, Andrew, I sent this to info@buzzstream.com. Some generic thing, it made me go to sleep at night, but I didn’t think it was going anywhere. Paul May, who is the CEO and founder of BuzzStream, within 24 hours, by noon the next day picked up the phone and called me back.
I just paused for 5 seconds. He could have just responded to my email. Would have been ridiculous enough. He took the time to actually pick up the phone and call me back. Spend five minutes thanking me for taking the time and for being this vested in his company to give him feedback. Thanking, and then he did something that was so smart, this is what really impressed me, he made me feel like a stake holder in their company.
He made me feel like I was needed in order to build this future. And that any thing that they could do if he could just have 15 minutes of my time at some point in the next two weeks to describe what I needed. Not only would they build it and they would give me a discounted price for my life, what ever it is. But I could be the reason that this future was created for everyone else.
We are all humans, that feels great. That feels . . .
Andrew: You know what? I’ve got to ask you about that.
Jonathan: Yes. Please.
Andrew: Because we all say listen, and we get great feedback, like you just gave BuzzStream, but don’t companies get just bombarded with feedback? Am I the only one who walks in to his inbox everyday and just gets hundreds of emails? Many of them are actually really good feedback, really good future requests, really good suggestions for how I can improve my job. I can’t do them all.
You must have even more, you have more customers, you are touching and reaching more people than I do here at Mixergy. How do you do it? How do you listen? How do you make everyone feel listened to and generally listened to them without being so overwhelmed that can’t get any of it done?
Jonathan: Yes. What I decided to do is just take the stupidly honest approach. So someone has a request, I give them what I think is fair, right? Like 5 or 10 minutes, which I think is really fair to give someone that I have no relationship with whatsoever, right? I listen to it, I write down the idea, I’ve either heard of the idea before, and if I have I tell them what I know about it. Otherwise I take it to the right person in the company. I walk up to their desk because I can. Psh. And I say “Hey, this guy just made a really great idea on this feature. You know, what do you think?” I get their feedback? And then you know what I do that really makes it crazy? Is I follow up with the person. Right? Most people listen to the feedback. Very few people follow up, like Paul did, right?
So oftentimes, I actually have to tell people, this isn’t in the product pipeline for another two years. We’re probably never going to build it, to be completely honest with you. But what, the fact that I told them that, and then didn’t just lead them on, and I listened to them and I followed up, makes them want to stay on even without the feature, right? Which is kind of the really powerful part, you know.
Andrew: That’s the part that I have to do and sometimes I have to just grow, get some guts, so that I can say that to people. Because I do think that if I explain to them why we can’t do it now, why we may not be able to do it ever, that they’ll accept it and they’ll respect it. But at the same time, I feel like, well, I’m about to say no to this guy. How do I say it right? Doing these interviews and hearing stories like the one just shared there is, it’s empowering me to be clear with people when they give me feed back and say I can’t do it, here’s why, I’m sorry. And most people accept it and actually send a thank you note to that. So I can feel, send a thank you know about that.
Some people are upset, that’s fine. But it hardly ever happens. In my mind, actually, I can’t even think of one. But my mind, it feels like a lot of people are going to be upset. Like, everyone’s going to say, “you jerk! I just gave you this great suggestion and you just told me why you couldn’t do it. Jerk, you don’t care about me.”
Jonathan: Right, but how high quality is that customer?
Andrew: Yeah. And it doesn’t even happen that much. I can’t even think of one time that that happened. Might have.
Jonathan: Right.
Andrew: Do you have another example of that? I’ve got one here in my notes. Do you want to talk about Yippit?
Jonathan: Oh, god. These guys are awesome. And such a quick win.
Andrew: What’s Yippit?
Jonathan: Yes. So Yippit is a social deal site. It’s not ordinary, it’s not different from than the thousands of ones that are out there. And they’ll be the quick to tell you the same thing. But the founders, they’re smart people, right? So they put this very simple process in place. And I looked to it and I talk about it in the course because it’s an example of when you do good things, good things happen pretty often. So they put in a process in place where everyone who unsubscribe from their service gets a personal email from one of the founders.
It doesn’t say what you think it’s going to say, which is “How can we win you back? We miss you.” Or something clever like that, right? It’s not like Groupon where you can pour, they get that picture of pouring hot coffee on someone, right? It’s genuine. And it says, “Listen. We feel like 10 minutes of your time is worth $10. We’ll give you a $10 Amazon Gift Card if you just be brutally honest with us for 10 minutes and tell us if there’s anything we could’ve done to keep you. We don’t want you back, but we want to understand, because we’re a start up, and this is all we have.”
And then they hired a virtual assistant, for pretty inexpensive, to conduct the phone calls. So this is brilliant. This is really smart. You’re making people feel connected to your brand. The short result is, just like anyone else, they followed up with a random Gmail address, who turned out to be an executive producer for CNN money, was so impressed that this company decided to do that, right? And by the way, he was going to feature a daily deal site anyway.
But the point is, there’s a thousand, and because they were doing something cool like this, they stood out. And they wanted to support entrepreneurs that were doing something as personal, as genuine as this. So they got on the two minute segment, blew up their servers, like when you see the link to the blog post, every key performance measure that they have, was higher than it’ll ever get for the two days after that. And it’s because they listened!
Andrew: You know what? I didn’t think, how do you get all those phone calls handled, but you’re right. Just get a virtual assistant. Actually, most people will not even respond to that, even if you offer $10. Actually I don’t know what the numbers are. But I found that not that many people take advantage of that kind of a deal. So it does feel like something that I can actually manage here with my numbers.
Jonathan: Yeah, and I’m saying, I don’t know how much most people make, but $60 an hour…
Andrew: Right.
Jonathan: That’s pretty good money, you know.
Andrew: I want even more of this. I want lots and lots of ideas like this. How about, I’m jumping around, you and I have notes from our pre-interview.
Jonathan: Yeah, please.
Andrew: Let’s talk about the way you guys build relationships with other companies? How do you do that? Why do you do it and how do you do it?
Jonathan: Right. So you do it by just getting out and meeting people, and talking to people. I have a good amount of people who ask me for advice. “How do you get started in this type of thing?” And one thing I recommend to everyone, Andrew, is just build a list of companies who you think are the coolest. Not Google and not Microsoft, but companies other than that, that you see everywhere. You’re constantly clicking on articles in their Twitter feed. You constantly see them in the media. You constantly are at networking events and see people there wearing their MailChimp shirts.
You can’t get it out of your head. It’s like their following you. Write down all these companies. Find the person who’s behind that success. Who is the hustler in that company? Just write them a real human email and tell them that you need help. Humans like to help other humans and if you reach out and say that you just need help and if you could have ten minutes of their time just to learn and help grow, you’d be surprised how many people actually respond to you. Everyone has a mentor.
I bet you had a mentor who gave you time for no reason other than they cared. I had that, it was David Hauser and it was other people and I try and do it for people. So don’t think that people won’t respond to you. You start to build relationships and credibility and some grand equity with these cool companies. Then when you’re out at events and you’re out meeting people you can actually go up to them and say, hey I just talked to your founder. It’s a starting point. It’s a talking point.
So at Grasshopper that actually helped us launch this thing called The BarCamp Tour, which is this fantastic partnership between WuFoo and MailChimp and Shopify and BatchBlue and we travel around the country just helping support [??], which are these awesome entrepreneurial un-conferences. You and I were talking earlier and it’s crazy. When you do things like this and you meet other people who are doing cool things, great things come from it.
One example is Chris Coyier, who is kind of the lead, he calls it the lead knucklebuster at WuFoo. He has this site called CSS Tricks. I don’t know how he did it, but he gets like mashable leg traffic, like 2 million people read his blog.
Andrew: For a site about CSS?
Jonathan: For a site about CSS. When we travel people come up to him and they go oh my God, are you Chris Coyier from CSS Tricks? They’re like little girls seeing Justin Bieber, it’s silly. Him and I were just having a beer, being friends after one of these events. The next morning he was blogging about how you need to have a phone number behind a credit card charge so that it shows up on peoples credit card statements.
You know what? Because we were fresh in his mind and we had just had a beer together, he put Grasshopper as a great example of how to do that. If we don’t have this relationship maybe he doesn’t do that. He probably sent 400 people to grasshopper.com of which at least 10 signed up and that was never even the intention of BarCamp Tour. It’s just a good thing that came from getting out there.
Andrew: The BarCamp Tour happened because you guys as a company network with other companies. We think of just networking with individuals, but I think you said it, I know you said it in the pre-interview, you guys have a list of wanna-meet companies, companies that you admire that you don’t just want to admire from afar, but you want to meet and network as a business with. Grasshopper needs to know MailChimp because MailChimp is so cool and want to get to know the guys at WuFoo.
Do you have this hit list? I’ve seen people who are networkers, I think even Keith Ferrazzi said he had a list of people he wanted to meet in his life and he just kept networking his way toward building a relationship with them. Do you do the same thing with companies?
Jonathan: Yes, I have a stupid, simple word document that says awesome companies and if I ever travel to a conference in one of those cities, you’d better believe I Tweet at them and try and call them and try to go and just hang out in their office. They always want to let cool entrepreneurs work in their office and it’s a great way to have a cup of coffee with someone there, build credibility and then who knows when I have an idea to pitch to them or some way that maybe we can co-market. This is kind of an in, I’m the guy that was working out of your space last month.
Andrew: That’s cool That’s powerful because I know that when you guys had this idea to do BarCamp you have the power to not just have the idea and say it should happen in the world, but to pick up the phone and know that your calls with get answered and the companies that you work with will be good companies and that they will be willing to put up money for this idea. You’ve give me three that you’ve done it and if you don’t mind me being greedy I want to know more.
One thing that you do is, you have this hit list and when you’re in town somewhere you say can we get together for a drink, you say it on Twitter. You also will say can I use your office space and that’s a way to network with them and I know companies would love for entrepreneurs to come use their office space. Even here in my office I’ve done it because I heard [??] did it.
I announced it in my interview with the founder of [??] and these two girls who were traveling the world, can we use office space while we’re in your city? Sure, come on in. I’m open up to others. To anyone who is listening to this of course you guys are welcome to come to my office. I’m in Washington, D.C. right now. Check before because I don’t know what city I’ll be in when you do this. When you’re in town you do that? You will also call them up and just ask them for advice, can I just have ten minutes of your time? What else do you do to connect with other companies?
Jonathan: And this is a common theme Andrew, outside of this tactic, but just try and help them for no reason. Reach out to them and say listen, your company is awesome, it’s really relevant to our market, if you ever want to guest host on our site.
You have this blog. You have this property that you can offer to people for free. You can give them a valuable link and you can give them a platform to tell a cool story. Why not just offer that to someone and see what happens. Maybe the reciprocate then and now you have a link on their site and you open up. I can’t tell you how many relationships I’ve cultivated and it just start as something as stupid as will you tell your story on our blog.
Andrew: I didn’t realize you had guest bloggers on your site?
Jonathan: Oh yeah? I’m sure I could hook you up if you wanted.
Andrew: You what? For me? I’ve got too much work to do and interviews [??] want to put this interview up there.
Jonathan: I know. I know.
Andrew: You know what? I did a course here on Mixergy on guest blogging, and the woman totally won me over. She just showed me all the stats of how much traffic you get from doing guest blogging, of how much credibility and link juice you get from it and I said I want to do it, I just don’t have the time for it, but when I get a little bit of free time I just want to hire a guest blogger.
I’ll pay them to blog on other sites so we could have a Mixergy post on Grasshopper if you’d open it up to us or maybe on Mashable, I know Mashable has accepted some of my viewers for guest blogging posts. Why not just have a Mixergy guest blogger, just go out there and blog on other people’s sites?
Jonathan: And the crazy part is when you look at the analytics, cool posts that we put together internally don’t get half as much traffic as the guest posts do.
Andrew: Really?
Jonathan: Guest posts are consistently the best viewed traffic, consistently.
Andrew: Go figure. You have this thing where I’ll tell a story about this, but let me give you a tactic first, you give me your story and I’ll give you a story of how you’ve done this with me. I’ve heard you say this before, be the easiest person to work with all the time no matter what. Talk to me about that.
Jonathan: I’ll give you an example. I had spoke at a conference start-up riot in Seattle. We’re talking flew there, landed at 4:00 a.m., slept 3 hours, gave a keynote, was on this panel all day long, talking to people all day long, talking to people to the point where my body hurt from talking to people. I get a Tweet from Paul Hontz from the Startup Foundry.
He has a really cool startup line and we’ve talked a little bit. He comes up and says Jonathan I need your help, could you connect real quick. At this point it’s 6:00, 7:00 p.m. and I have a red-eye out of Seattle at 11:00 p.m. He’s like, listen I do these action classes for AppSumo. This is his job. This is how he makes money.
He said I line up two people every week and they both canceled on me this week. It’s unheard of, it’s never happened. I literally interview two people so this doesn’t happen. Is there any way that you can help me out? And do you know what my response was? Absolutely. And not only was it absolutely, but I got excited about it.
We had to literally travel around Seattle and find a hotel who would just let us use a random conference room because we didn’t even know where we could go. We went on this adventure together because he needed that right?
The point is you drop everything for the media. You drop everything to help out a fellow entrepreneur and what happens is you create a relationship that is, I don’t even feel like memorable really does it justice, that night at Midnight you can go and look and Paul Tweeted out, I will buy 5 Grasshopper subscriptions for any one of the Startup Foundry readers right now.
He did that because I was just the easiest person and I was enthusiastic and no matter the fact that I had to take the red-eye and I had no juice left, I just found some, because he needed that. That is a relationship that I’m convinced will never die as a result of that.
Andrew: How can you do that? You have so much going on. You’ve got to deal with inbound requests from bloggers. You have to deal with your list of media that you want to get into. You have to deal with customer service and Tweeting. There’s a lot going on. How do you do that? I ask because I can’t find the time to do that and I love my audience and I’d love to drop everything every time they needed something from me, but it’s really hard. You have other responsibilities. How do you make it all fit?
Jonathan: Absolutely. Let’s call a spade a spade. This situation worked. I didn’t have any energy, but I could physically do it. So the point is, you just have to pick and choose and a lot of in this business is your gut, and I think the most important thing, and we were taking about this is, when someone needs something. There is a difference when someone is in a time of turmoil, if that’s even the right word, or they are struggling and you can help them out.
For me, anytime I see someone struggling, anytime I see someone who is clawing trying to get a job, scrapping and doing whatever they can. For me, that sends a up a flag. That’s when I kind of put on my hat. I say, ‘If there any possible way you can do this, if you can make this work, just find a way to make it work.’
Andrew: I see, you are saying in those desperate moments that everyone has; if you are the guy that comes through. You either have all the resources come through, come through for them, because if you do, you have won them over. You have done a good thing, and if you haven’t won them over, you just put something great into your universe. It will come back to you because people can sense that you are that kind of person. I see what you are saying. In that situation, when someone is desperate, most people want to back away. Most people say, “Uh, dude, I’m so, I’m so sorry that no one decided to partner up with you, because you can’t get your sh**t together and people dropped out,” you know.
That’s what many people will say, they will be judgmental, I know I’m jumping in there.
Jonathan: Absolutely.
Andrew: I want to ask you another example like that if you have it. But let me jump into with one of mine. Just happened earlier this week. I screwed up big time. You guys are so good this way, this has happened a million times. I screwed up, this whole freaking year, I didn’t bill you guys. Your sponsor, you’ve bought ads, as the Grasshopper, I know this is, you are doing this separate from Grasshopper. As a guy who works at Grasshopper, you bought ads and I didn’t bill you. And I thought, holy crap, this just feels so bad, I screwed up their books, I don’t know what it is, I apologize.
I sent it over, not only were you so freaking nice to me that it was like, I just did you a favor. The way you responded, but within hours I looked at my PayPal account and the money was in there. I know that 24 hours hadn’t passed and it was right in there.
Jonathan: Yes.
Andrew: That’s like one little thing. I remember one time, I don’t remember what the reason was, but I changed my photo on Twitter to the Grasshopper Logo, I did it for a while. People emailed me and said, ‘How do I buy that? That’s great, how do I buy that?’ I’m not selling that, they did something great, I forget what it was and I just wanted to show appreciation. That’s what it is you guys just win people over that way.
Jonathan: You do good things, man, right? In my most creative day I would of thought that you could change your Twitter picture to that. Right? I didn’t even know that, that was on the table. I didn’t know that was even possible. But you do good things and other people, it comes around, it really does.
Andrew: It’s something in me that I used, I’m such a freaking grouch, I have so much coming on, so many people want stuff, everyone want stuff, and I want to do stuff for everybody. But I can’t, so I get grouchy and in those moments of how you did it, Gary Bannor [SP] comes through like that for me and for others. I go, “I didn’t earn the way that Gary treated me, when Gary spoke at South-by-Southwest at my event and he helped me sell ton of . . .
Jonathan: Yes.
Andrew: . . .I didn’t earn that. I got to be that kind of person, I feel such a sense of gratitude to him that if I could do that to someone else than, I’ve repaid him a little bit. Anyway what I’m saying is you guys, you and Gary and how many others? Tim Ferriss, Dave Frank, they just make me want to become a better person. Hearing these stories makes me want to spire to be like that. Give me another one. There was one other one that Start Up Right, that you told me in the pre-interview that was worth mentioning. How you had to drop everything.
Jonathan: Yes. Sunja who is the guy who runs Start Up Right. I mean this is a . . .
Andrew: Conferencing now, actually conferencing now all across the country.
Jonathan: Yes. But he started in Atlanta, they did one in Seattle recently. He is a good person, he created a really cool technology I believe made him a lot of money, and now he put his time back into throwing this event to help start-ups. In other words doing good for people, and I know you know that, because I know you support him as well.
There was a really unfortunate situation happened, like it does in life, and his keynote speaker couldn’t make the conference.
Andrew: Oh, right, this was Reed.
Jonathan: No, no.
Andrew: This was a different one. Okay. Go ahead.
Jonathan: This was Noah actually.
Andrew: Okay. Oh, right.
Jonathan: We might of done this in Atlanta and Seattle.
Andrew: Maybe. I was in the hospital one time just before I had to speak, but I was able to make it. Okay, yeah, Noah couldn’t make it to the conference, right?
Jonathan: Right. Neither could David. I saw an opportunity, and I knew that I had content that was really valuable. I said, ‘Listen man I’ll be out there tomorrow if you need me to.’ I think it was under three days notice. I created an entire presentation, flew myself out there booked it, like I know that he was in the red for the event, so Grasshopper covered all of our expenses, you know what I mean. Which is uncommon when you’re a keynote, believe it or not. And we just did it, and we just did it like menchias, because a fellow entrepreneur, someone else whose a good person needed help, right, and he never forgets that and the reason I love this example is because he just started doing these career fairs. These awesome career fairs.
And he’s doing them all across the East Coast and he e-mailed me and he said, you know, I know it’s not even close to enough of a thank you, he’s like, but if you or anyone else from Grasshopper wants to do recruiting at any of these events, he’s like, it’s beyond free. He’s like, your there, just consider it done and let me know what I can do to get you guys, cool people, because he knows we’re hiring developers, right? And that just comes around, it’s like if we don’t drop what we’re doing to help him, he doesn’t do that.
Maybe we recruit at these events and we get the developer who builds the most kick-ass mobile app for us, ever. Right? And it’s this circle man, and at the very least he will never ever, ever forget that, right? And if anyone ever asked him about anything virtual phone system, you better believe he’s going to tell them Grasshopper, right?
Andrew: Alright, the media, we mentioned that you got over five hundred media mentions, which really for a phone system that’s not AT&T, for a software company that’s not Google, to get that kind of coverage is tremendous. One of the things you told me is that you help the media do their jobs.
Jonathan: Yeah, you’re correct and let me just reiterate that our product is not interesting, it’s not sexy, right?
Andrew: It’s the least sexy thing ever, you know, the sexy thing on my iPhone is my iPhone, it’s what Steve Jobs put on there. Here, people are talking about Grasshopper and want you to speak at conferences, and so on. So, part of it is that you’re just so good with the media. Tell me how you’ve done it and give me an example if you got one.
Jonathan: Yeah, so I think the bigger idea here is the earlier that you can accept that your company is not media worthy and not the most unique idea, the more you will actually get in the media. Because you’ll start to think of really creative ways that you can get mentioned, right? And so, one thing that we do, and I like to say that it’s a win, win, win, because it gets us into the media but it also helps us create this army of brand loyalists, right? This is what this is all about is we connect people in the media with our customers. Right?
And so, I had gotten David Houser, our founder, covered on B-net and it was a simple article, like Technologies You Love, right? But it allowed you to give two sentences about your business and a link. You know, and that’s really valuable man, for any start-up, you have to be getting these medium level mentions, especially on a site like B-net which is a very high quality site, right? And so, every time I work with someone in the media, I end my e-mail saying, hey listen, thanks for your time, if there’s ever anything I can do to help you, outside of Grasshopper, you know I work with thousands of entrepreneurs, if I can ever make a connection for you or just help you, just ask man, it’d be my pleasure, right? And it’s two sentences, it’s three sentences, it doesn’t hurt and this guy responds and says, you know what man, if you know anyone else that you think would be good for this, feel free to pass them on. And so, instead of just saying, oh, OK, thank you, I acted on it immediately, right?
And there’s these guys who are customers of ours and they’ve really helped us out in accounting and I wanted to help them out and I know he’s just been trying to get guest posting, he needed a little push. I connected him with this guy from B-Net and he got written on there and this guy from B-Net, I wish I could show you the e-mail, he literally e-mailed me back and said, Jonathan, I don’t know how to thank you, but thank you for doing my job for me, right? And meanwhile, I’m sitting here like peeing my pants, excited, because this customer of ours now can barely control how excited they are that I made this connection for them, meanwhile this person in the media is telling me, thank you for doing my job, right?
It’s like I’m making my customer more excited about Grasshopper and I’m helping them with something that has nothing to do with our product, right? Because again, our product is not sexy. I helped them out with another part of their business. And this media person now responds to my e-mails because I didn’t just pitch my business, I actually helped them do their job, right? I helped inspire them to some level and so I’ve made both of these relationships stronger and I didn’t have to be a salesy, spammy kind of PR person at the same time. Right?
Andrew: So, what you might be seeing on my face is a sense of overwhelm. How do, do you, does a company need to have someone like you, does it need to have a Jonathan, Ambassador of Buzz, does it need, do we need to have someone who does that? Or, can an entrepreneur whose running a business have time to respond to B-Net and also remember to follow-up and say if you need someone, and if they do say they need someone to be there on the spot to make those connections.
Jonathan: Yeah, it’s actually a fantastic question and in my course I talk about this as well, man, but this all translates to a founder as well, right? If you’re a founder of a company you have negative free time, right? So, I would recommend that you spend five hours a week, dedicate and hour a day to trying to do things like this, right? I understand where you can’t be spending more than five hours doing this, because you need to move your products forward, because again you need to have a product that people like and that’s helpful to them otherwise this is all out the window.
Andrew: Right.
Jonathan: But, if you are founder of your company, man, God, no one else is going to promote your product, right? No one else is going to bleed your company other than you so you have to be doing this stuff.
Andrew: Dave Seamack [SP], they do this too?
Jonathan: Yeah, so, before I was doing this, David was doing this, right?
Andrew: David, the he’s the CTO, the titles don’t really mean that much, just co-founders are the titles of the company. So, David was doing this.
Jonathan: Yeah, but the problem was that he didn’t have time to do it. And he was fortunately in a situation where, you know, he had paid PR agencies in the past and in-house PR people, and sales people. And he kind of left with a really sour taste, Andrew, with all those people, because none of them had the real desire to build a relationship, right? None of them cared about the culture as much as someone who has the beer cart go around every Friday, right? Like you need to be there for these things in order to do this job. So, he put that money and invested it in someone like me, right, and he gave me a chance, versus giving it to an agency who just, frankly, didn’t understand us. You know?
Andrew: I’m going to ask you about one other thing that I don’t tend to think of as building relationships with the media, but has translated to great relationships for you, but, I’m wondering how you learned this stuff. Where? You don’t have a background where you learned PR. There was no magical book that taught you all of this. Where did you figure out how to do all of this? Where did you figure out, you know what, it does make sense for me to follow-up with the reported to say, I will help you out if you ever need anyone, where it doesn’t come across as a little too pushy or a little too needy, or whatever. Where’d you learn all this?
Jonathan: Yeah, I mean, I would like to say I’m an entrepreneur myself, I just tried a lot of stuff, man, right? I tried stuff and any time something worked or had a really bad reaction, I like sat there and I read it again and I would make a very strong mental note, right? And so, what happened is, I didn’t really know what I was doing the first year, you could only hear me talk about this and I only wrote this course when I hit year three, because eventually I saw, you know what, if I send an e-mail that ends like that twenty times, three or four people really respond. And those people become repeat customers. And I can get twice as much value for myself, for my community, for the same amount of work, right?
And it was only after writing like 45 hand written notes that I got a call from the reporter on the Wall Street Journal, who said that they’d never seen that before. Right, when you get that phone call, that interaction gets burned in your face, right, you can’t help but not want to right hand written notes after the Wall Street Journal calls you because of it.
Andrew: What’s the Wall Street Journal story?
Jonathan: Yeah, so a year ago there was this guy, Raymond Flandez, who writes small business for the Wall Street Journal, and if you start to look and you really read the Journal every day, there’s only three or four people, out of like a four hundred person organization, there’s only a few people who write on each topic, right? So you can start to narrow it down. So what I did was, any time there was an article I liked, right? Any time, I wrote hand written note to that person. It’s not hard to find the Wall Street Journal address, right? And I didn’t ask them for anything,
Andrew. I just said, listen, I read the Wall Street Journal every day and this stood out to me, here’s three bullet points why I really loved this article, if there’s ever anything I can do to help you in the entrepreneur world, don’t ever hesitate to ask, and I put my business card in there. And I did this every time I saw an article I liked. Finally, this guy calls me back, he’s like Jonathan, I’ve been doing this for twelve years and I’ve never gotten a piece of snail mail from someone who wasn’t trying to sell me something, right, from someone who just cared and just wrote me a hand written note. You know people e-mail him hundreds of times a day, but he’d never gotten one of these. And so, when he needed a source, he thought why not give it to this person who cares.
Andrew: What a great story. That to me though, feels like something, you know what actually, I shouldn’t say that it’s something that you have to have an outside person for, but you have to have, it has to either be an outside, separate person I should say, who does this, or it should be something that you absolutely care about. It has to be one of the things that you commit yourself to, I feel. Like, you can’t commit to this and blogging and making every speaking event and you know twenty other things. But, if you say, something that’s really important to my business is building this buzz, this connection with customers and with the media, the way that you guys are talking about, the way you guys have at Grasshopper, that it just has to be a focus on a long term commitment.
Jonathan: Yeah. You know what, there’s just something that I have to share with your audience. David Hauser, who’s our founder, he helped me create this idea, because on my second month on the job, he sent me to launch one of our products at TechCrunch, in San Francisco. I couldn’t believe that he gave me the opportunity, with two months, to go there and do this, right? I couldn’t believe it.
On the same note, he couldn’t believe that this new hire for him, spend 12 hours on his feet, screaming until he had no voice about the product. I see him every single morning for 5 minutes. We have a stand up every morning. He sent me a hand written note to my house, to my home address, that said, ‘Jonathan, we could not have done this without you. You have no idea how much it means to me’, I brought this home, I showed this to my family, I couldn’t believe that the founder of a company, who is my dream, he’s so successful, he’s such a good person. He could’ve just told me this in our meeting, but he took the time to write a note. And I saw the effect that had on me, and I thought, you know what, I want to have this same affect on other people.
Andrew: All right. You’re winning me over and you’re making me realize how many things I’m not doing enough of.
Final point from our interview is, you say, it’s all great to be at your desk and get a lot done, but you’ve got to push away from your desk and get out of the office. Tell me how you’ve done that?
Jonathan: Yes. I think it’s important to do in your local community, right? Because your local community is like your low hanging fruit. You got to have a brand presence there. You got to find the local blog, that talks about all these events, you got to get out there twice a week, once a week, and have your brand have that face. That’s important.
I think the example here is, every once in a while, you need to go where your customers are, right?
So we identified at Grasshopper like three or four events a year, where we know cool, fun, entrepreneurs that really want to hang out and talk and meet you, go. One of them happens to be LesCon which is in Atlanta. A lot of people know the guys from KISSmetrics, right? Neil and Hiten Shah, right? And I’ve talked to Hiten a couple of times. And we threw a pre-party at this event, which cost us $700, not a lot of money, and he was there. I made an effort to go up to him and talk to him, and just say, “Hey, man, like, I know we crossed path in the virtual world, but just want to give you a real hand shake, like a real life human interaction.” And I tweeted at him the next day, right? So, again just getting out and just talking to people. Just being myself, right? Just being real.
And he ended up using me as an example of how you can be human in his speech. So meanwhile I’m touched, right? Of course. What it makes me, it bursted into my mind that I must have created a memorable reaction in him, right? He used me in his speech in front of 100’s people.
So not only did I get out and I made a relationship, when I got back into the office, right? While the coal was hot, I sent him an email, right? And I said, ‘Listen man, we are two cool brands, there has to be something we can do, that’s fun, that’s exciting, that’s a little bit different, and again, even if just guest blogging on each other’s site, there has to be something. And he said, ‘You know what, you’re right, I don’t necessarily have the time to do it, here’s my colleague, if you have any ideas, we want to hear them’ . So the next day, I didn’t wait, right? Again, the iron’s hot. I sit down, I spend two hours, just thinking of things that we could do together.
One thing happened to be, ‘You know what, let’s do an A-B test, on cool startup sites with the phone number, without a phone number, so it will prove or disprove my hypothesis, that phone numbers make you sound more personal, make people feel more comfortable with you’. Or ‘We could use your Kiss insights to hold the A-B testing. It’s a really cool way, people will get some really great statistics, and end up helping our businesses. Maybe we’ll just have a fun time while we’re doing it, right? ‘
He loves the idea. So the moral of the story is, we pushed out this promotion, in the 2nd week in July, which is a usually really slow signup months because it’s in the middle of the summer, right? People aren’t quite as active. It turns out CEO comes into my office and says, ‘What did you do? This is our highest signup month in July in 8 years of business’. And it was the week where both of us were blogging about each other, right? The most signups, we weren’t talking about each other’s products, really right? We were just talking about this fun hypothesis and how we’re going to test it, and we got the most signups ever in July.
And again, it was because I got out of the office. I made a connection. I really followed up. And again with cold marketing, just found a way to help both of our businesses. And it results in this fantastic sales week for Grasshopper. Which for me was such a win.
Andrew: And this is you blogging about how you’re going to do this, them at KISSmetrics blogging about what the hypothesis is. You hadn’t, in July, done any tests yet. There was no feedback yet. It was just, ‘We’re going to test this out.’ And people signed up because they wanted to try it on their own, too.
Jonathan: Yeah. We were literally just saying, ‘Here, fill out this form if you want to be one of the start-ups that we do the test on.’ Our CTO was just to get people to fill out this Wu-Foo form. It wasn’t even for close to sign-ups, because there’s no data that we have that proves it.
That’s when we thought the silence was going to come. But what happened was is, our communities have so much trust in us that when we talked about another cool company that we always didn’t talk about, they wanted to know. They were curious.
Curiosity, sometimes it leads to sales.
Andrew: I see. I could actually see someone who’s on KISSmetrics’ site, they train their people to test the hell out of everything and they gave them the tools to see if the test worked. They say hey, you know what, here’s a test I haven’t thought of. I keep thinking about button colors, about text, but I didn’t think of the phone number.
It’s just a few bucks. I’ll go and I’ll get a phone number from Grasshopper, I’ll pop it up on my website. I don’t need them to tell me universally what works and what doesn’t, I’m going to see on my own website, and boom, you get some orders from it.
Some of those people end up seeing big results, and they keep those phone numbers up forever and ever. What was the result of the test by the way, out of curiosity?
Jonathan: It should be coming out in a week.
Andrew: A week from now it’s coming out? All right.
Jonathan: Just very unofficially, we recently got an email from one of . . . and this is just because I love your community, by the way. We got an email from someone saying that the biggest thing that he noticed was an increase in conversion rate.
The people that got into his products actually were more likely to sign up for the paid version as a result of being able to talk to a real human being. Which I think is so cool, I love that stuff, man.
Andrew: This is kind of evil, but I know of an entrepreneur who says, I know having a phone number is going to increase my sales, but I can’t handle all the calls that are going to come in. I’m just going to put it on there, and I’ll have it all go to voicemail, and we’ll deal with it . . .
Actually, I guess he them transcribed and they deal with some of them when possible. But there’s no way he can answer the phone. It has to go to voicemail, and you have to get a phone call back later or an email or something, in order to deal with it.
But he has to have it up there, because it increases his conversions. He sees the numbers go up because of it.
Jonathan: Crazy, man. I’m really fascinated by that sort of stuff.
Andrew: All right. If we go to Learn2Buzz.com, you can teach us . . . is this stuff teachable?
Jonathan: Yeah, and if the only proof is the fact that at Grasshopper, I had to hire someone to work with me. My cohort, my second ambassador of buzz, Stephanie Bullis. I brought her on and I trained her.
One day, when I don’t work at Grasshopper, she’s going to do a fantastic job. She’s just as good as I am. We have our different personalities, because you have to put yourself into it, you know. She’s fantastic, man. She could have done this interview when it comes down to it.
Andrew: She can talk this stuff, too. Are you leaving Grasshopper, by the way? Is that’s what’s going on? Are you going to just do Learn2Buzz.com and become a consultant, teaching other companies how to do buzz?
Jonathan: No, I don’t want to become a consultant. One day, and David knows this, it’s in my core. I want to found my own company. I want to create something that helps people. That’s my calling in life.
Right now, I just felt like I needed to do something. So on nights and weekends I started a course, because I had so many people . . . Like today, I’m in Boston, and I had two meetings with people who said, I’ll buy you any dinner you want. Just help me become an evangelist. Help me become a grand ambassador.
There are only so many times you can hear that before you’re like, I need to share this. What type of entrepreneur am I if I know this? This changed my life, Andrew, as a human being over the last three years. I was able to be successful. I was able to change as one person, the perception of a huge multimillion dollar company.
If I know this, if this is what I go to sleep with every night, how do I not share that? It started keeping me up, so I wrote this course, because I wanted other people like me, who think that this is their dream, I want them to be able to do this job.
I want other founders who know that they need this help to understand how to find something. That’s why I created this, and if this allows me to make enough money on the side to one day create my own company, then I can’t think of any better situation that could possibly be.
Andrew: Well, I’ve known you for a long time. This means a lot to people, so I’m going to explicitly say I trust you. I have complete faith if Jonathan says that he can teach you how to do something, that he can do it.
I’ve worked with him for years, and I could think of a couple of other people who are just as dependable and just as caring. But I can’t think of any way that you could do any more. Jonathan’s a really good person. Check out Learn2Buzz.com. If you want the numbers that he talked about earlier, go to Learn2Buzz.com/numbers. If you’re ever in his town, do what he does to other people.
Say, hey, Jonathan, what cities are you guys in?
Jonathan: We’re in Boston.
Andrew: If you guys are ever in Boston, email Jonathan and say, hey. I’m an entrepreneur; I could use some office space. You do this to other people. Do you mind letting me use your office space in Boston while I’m here for the day?
Jonathan: I might even buy you a coffee and bagel in that.
Andrew: He might even buy you a coffee and bagel. You guys still give out chocolate covered grasshoppers anymore?
Jonathan: No, we’ve retired the chocolate covered grasshoppers.
Andrew: All right, so you’ll have to settle for a bagel and coffee.
Until then, Learn2Buzz.com. Oh, and I get nothing out of it. I cannot take cuts of what happens from what people do in the interviews. I feel like it ruins my journalistic integrity.
Jonathan: I begged him, by the way. I begged him to take . . .
Andrew: You actually didn’t, but you know what’s happening? Companies now are saying, Andrew, the interview I did or the course I did got me so much business, I want to come back on.
I go, I think the story’s been told. They go, “We’ll pay you a share of what we earn from it. Do you want it?” I can’t do that. I just want the interviews to be good for the audience; I don’t need a cut of anything.
Jonathan: By the way, that’s why you have such a compelling audience. No more genuine person on the planet.
Andrew: Appreciate it. Thank you all for watching. Go out there . . . even if you don’t want to take the Learn2Buzz course, we’ve got so much good stuff in here. I’m looking forward to all the feedback.
Every time I do an interview like this, I get feedback from people who say look, this is what I did. I want this. You’re welcome to send it to Jonathan, I know he’d love to see it, but I personally want to see that what I’ve done here for the last hour has been useful.
If you’ve got any results, send them over, I’m looking forward to seeing it. Thank you all for watching.
