Andrew Warner 0:04
Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. I’m especially interested in what entrepreneurs are doing now post COVID. And specifically, when their whole world got turned upside down, how did they respond to it? Joining me as somebody who I’ve been talking to via email for a while, and I’ve wanted to have on here and I’m so excited that he said yes to do it. We actually talked yesterday, we both got so fired up, when when the call is over. I leave the bedroom and I go over to see my kids in the other room and my wife goes, What was it? It was so exciting you what, we could
Unknown Speaker 0:36
hear you through the walls in the house. And it’s because what Scott to know has
Andrew Warner 0:40
done, he created a way for Well, you know, I’ve been saying in these interviews that so many entrepreneurs I’ve interviewed had these little businesses when they were kids that they’re so freakin proud of. They can’t stop telling my producers about it. And that’s why we include in the interviews, and a lot of times it gets shut down by the school by a teacher by the principal, whatever Well, Scott said, What if we create a way to encourage kids to sell to create businesses, and we teach them how to do it, and we give them everything that they need in order to do it. And by the way, he had this idea to do it all online just a few weeks ago and COVID hit. He created new software to enable kids to do this. He got a team of people together to teach kids, he got thousands of kids interested in doing this. And, you know, up and running, and he’s got success stories. And so I was frickin lit up. And I wanted to have him on here to talk about how we did it. I want to get to know him, get to know the business that he started before its apex leadership. I’m going to read directly from your LinkedIn profile to describe it. elementary school leadership and fitness company that raises money for the top elementary schools in America, over a million students served. That was the business that he had before. He now has a new business called happy I’m not going to describe it because I think I’m not going to do it justice. He’s wearing this little device under his shirt that will do stuff for him. We’re going to talk to him about that. But I also want Want to understand what he did to create my first sale? Calm and encourage kids all over the all over the country all over the world? to sell, right?
Scott Donnell 2:11
That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. A lot of fun, a crazy whirlwind couple months here with the pandemic, and protests. And I mean, I’m talking to my entrepreneur friends every day, and we’re just trying to encourage each other, right? That’s the goal.
Andrew Warner 2:24
And I think that a lot of us were saying, let’s just see what happens. And then we’ll, once things change, we’ll figure out what to do based on the change. But then there’s some people who said no, I’m not going to wait for things to change. I’m going through the change I’m going to create. Anyway, Scott, I should say this interview is sponsored by toptal for hiring developers and Hostgator for hosting websites. I’ll ask him about it. But tell me about the day Apex Apex leadership. Yeah, the day that you came in and notice that things were gonna change what’s Apex leadership and how to do change?
Scott Donnell 2:51
Yeah, so um, it was a it was a massive business that went to zero dollars in revenue overnight. So We started this thing my wife’s a teacher. So we want I wanted to help her school raise money and kind of get away from the product sales and cookie dough and all that kind of stuff. Do something healthy. So we created Apex leadership Co. And we’ve been growing it to raise money for schools for nine and a half years or so.
Andrew Warner 3:18
Okay to help schools raise money without having to bake cookies and things like that. That’s what they were doing before. organized way. How do you help them raise money? So it’s basically a
Scott Donnell 3:27
two week program where we bring in young athletes kind of right out of college. We teach them leadership and fitness with games every day. We’re at lunch and PE and recess. I mean, it’s just a total fun couple of weeks and then at the end of the two weeks, we do a giant fun run. Okay. The whole community comes we have blowup tunnels and tents and jerseys for all the kids. It ends up raising like $50,000 for the school.
Andrew Warner 3:51
Runs needs to raise money for the run. Yeah,
Scott Donnell 3:54
they get the money goes to the school dollar a lot from grandma dollar lap from their neighbor. Right so we just caught made the whole thing it’s hassle free for schools, Apex leadership co we started franchising it in 2013 we’ve been on Entrepreneur Magazine top 500. Since then we’ve got about 120 franchises 3 million kids now, sir, it’s been around New
Andrew Warner 4:13
Business nationwide, maybe 20s in the mid 20s 1920s raised for schools and then you get a commission from that. Exactly. That’s right. Okay. And you do it on the franchise model why franchise,
Scott Donnell 4:26
because franchisees, they are local, and we didn’t want to have some big corporate overlord that are just trying to do this all over the country. When it comes to school fundraising you need to know the local market and so we want local people that have kids that went there that give back there that can be there to serve them and it’s ended up being the perfect answer because it’s like staying power in that local market. What’s your kind of all this revenue they and all the money we raise, we get a royalty so the franchisee comes in. They buy a zip code like a territory. We’ve got 300 territories in America buy a territory from us. They serve those schools. We give them all the inventory and shirts and printing and prizes and web and training. And then we get like 8% of whatever the franchisee makes. So for us it covers our home office team and our we give them a new theme every year.
Andrew Warner 5:17
Bottom line, what did you bring in last year? 2019 Oh, roughly I’m not looking for accounting.
Scott Donnell 5:23
Well, it’s public. I mean, we’re a federal you know, a franchise company it was definitely over a million for sure. A couple maybe a couple million I mean, when you’re doing 25 that’s not bad. You know? No, we’re a lot of it is just a lot of movie 3 million customers. You know, you’re making less than $1 a customer it’s kind of a lot of people less profit, but it’s been
Andrew Warner 5:44
where the majority of your time went last year? No, no, I
Scott Donnell 5:47
I do Okay, um, but I still own the company. Right? Okay. Um, I brought in my top franchisee to run things when happy came about last year that we launched the biotech company choose how you feel happy. Maybe ap be.com we’re going here public here just in a little bit. It’s gonna be fun. But COVID hits in March, right? Yep. So we are, you know, we’re serving hundreds of thousands of kids at one time all across the country. We’re in 35 states and then school shut down. quarantine. Bam, every state, it was like two states, or Seattle was first New York and then the rest of the country boom, the world shuts down. So we have, you know, we had a million dollars sitting there and inventory that we had purchased for our T shirts and what Yeah,
Andrew Warner 6:32
and we had 500 employees, just trying to figure out what to do, because we couldn’t be in school. So and by the way, these employees are within the franchise system to not just your home Tina has how much the home office?
Scott Donnell 6:43
We’ve got about with our Arizona teams, I’d say maybe about 35 people,
Andrew Warner 6:49
okay, all right. So all this is shut down. And it’s now on you to try to figure out what to do.
Scott Donnell 6:54
Yeah, and you know, the first week was just like breathing into a paper bag. Trying to figure out
Andrew Warner 7:01
you literally start to worry.
Unknown Speaker 7:03
Um, it is, of course, what do
Andrew Warner 7:06
you do when you’re learning? Where does your head go? Do you worry about losing your house losing the face what
Scott Donnell 7:11
the fear is wetting your pants and courage is doing what you have to do with wet pants
Andrew Warner 7:16
that everybody has fear in a different way. You me it is. What are these people going to think? And then where? How bad? Am I going to suffer over the next few years with like, will I be able to live in a house? Yeah. And just let your head go. I hope
Scott Donnell 7:31
this doesn’t sound callous. I wasn’t scared about the virus. I went to the business. And I think every entrepreneur feels the same way. The first thing is, oh my gosh, I hope I don’t die from a pandemic COVID and then the second thought is, oh my gosh, what do I do with my employees? How do I provide for their families? How do I you know, help my customer okay. It’s like, if I,
Andrew Warner 7:51
if this happens, all these people could be hurt because of this thing that I brought them on board for and that’s where the panic goes, or that’s where the worry goes. Okay.
Scott Donnell 8:00
honestly probably 90% 99% of the planet that and obviously we want to be careful we want it you know I’ve got little kids a third on the way my wife’s due in a couple weeks we got to make sure we’re careful you know from the virus so we didn’t go out we did the shutdown we were careful luckily we were a virtual company from the get go so we’re really good on zoom. But yeah, I mean it was I’m not gonna lie it’s it’s it’s work it’s scary and I’ve had this idea right the kid business you know, the my first sale calm idea has been in the, in the drawer for years, right? We’ve done these children’s business fairs for fun for like eight, nine years. about that.
Andrew Warner 8:43
This is your mentor Jeff sandefur.
Scott Donnell 8:48
That’s right. Yep. in Austin, Texas, who
Andrew Warner 8:50
is who’s Jeff and how did he get you started with these these in person things.
Scott Donnell 8:54
Jeff sandefur is one of the is is labeled as one of the top 10 Socratic teachers in the world. He is a incredible businessman. He’s made multiple billions for a billion with a B for a lot of people for a lot of years in the oil and gas world. He went to Russia when the wall fell. This guy’s like the most legendary person I’ve ever met. Well, he started acting academies. Okay, I went, I did an MBA program through him. It’s for entrepreneurs in Austin, Texas, incredible program to teach entrepreneurship. And one day after I did the program, I graduated about 12 years ago, he called me maybe about eight, nine years ago and said, we’ve been doing these things in my backyard to help kids learn business. We just invited the neighborhood kids, create a business on a Saturday and invite all your family and friends to buy it from you. You know, paper airplanes, key chains, he was just in his backyard, in his backyard with 20 kids make sense? Great idea. A great way to teach kids entrepreneurship, teach them profit. They build tons of confidence talking to save, you know, strangers safely and selling product. And he’s like, you got to try it. So I literally was like, okay, so we did it. You You’re in Phoenix in our first year was 200 kids and 1000 people. And it was this awesome kid because you know, fair, the kids all made like 300 bucks. It was amazing. They were
Andrew Warner 10:11
so like that type of thing. They make the thing at home, even if it’s a paper airplane, they invite a few friends. So maybe their grandmother comes, maybe a neighbor comes over they, they bring them over, those friends and family can buy the kids stuff, but also other kids stuff. And we’re talking just like a buck or two, right from what you told me.
Scott Donnell 10:29
So it’s right.
Andrew Warner 10:30
Wouldn’t you do it to support some people, some kids?
Scott Donnell 10:33
I would I love it all my friends to come and everybody just brings all their cash they have I brought thousand dollars in one just for fun, because my job is to buy from all the kids who don’t have a lot of sales, right? Yeah, it’s the most fun day of the year. And we’ve been doing it for eight years. And just as
Andrew Warner 10:48
he said, Look, I’m doing this in my backyard. I think you should be doing this too. You did it. Yeah. Started out big. You expanded it so you have some experience helping kids sell and all right.
Scott Donnell 11:00
Well, and it’s just look, we all have kids. And it’s what we always want our kids to learn, like the goal of a parent is to help your kid learn how to take care of themselves, right? And there’s just gaps in their school education. Every school system has gaps in what we want our kids to learn. I mean, especially when it comes to grit and perseverance and resourcefulness and confidence and gratitude and business skills, right profit, like, Can you make something with your hands of value to fill a need in your community? And if you didn’t
Andrew Warner 11:30
learn that, as a kid, it’s huge. You told me this before on our call that it’s not just about teaching them how to make money. I thought what what the big benefit of this was, if you teach them how to sell if you teach them how to act, ask for the sale. They’ll have a skill that they could use later in life that will keep them from going hungry and allow them to fund their dreams but you’re smiling because you see it as something more than that. What else is there? How does this teach them grit?
Scott Donnell 11:56
Okay, so that’s a great question. The The main thing behind all of this is giving kids confidence for the future. Okay? Because confidence is is the number one most important asset? Right. I’m in a bunch of masterminds and Strategic Coach and Genius Network and all these great masterminds. The number one thing we always talk about is protecting your confidence. Okay, your reputation.
Andrew Warner 12:22
You know what I was getting myself if I could protect my reputation confidence. I think that, that I’m so much more capable than if I could even protect my skills, right? But I sometimes feel like maybe that’s the wrong It feels wrong. Even though I know in my experience, that’s the right thing for me to focus on focus on my competence, focus on my trust that I could achieve what I want. Maybe I’m going to on off on too many tangents with you, but I just want to soak up so much. Why do you Why do you think that it’s important to preserve our confidence?
Scott Donnell 12:56
Yeah, everything leads from that You can make money, you can lose money. You know, you can try a different a bunch of different jobs, you can do a lot of things. But confidence is what sparks the future. It’s what sparks new businesses. It’s what sparks new opportunities. It’s what gives people hope for the future. And so for kids, our whole goal here is if you can make something with your hands at an early age, and sell it at a profit to other people who love it, that’s confidence for life that nobody can take away. Right? We we teach kids like, Look, try things, try to it failures, not scary. Failure is hard, obviously. But we try things because it builds our confidence. You’re never a failure. Yes, failure can happen but you are not a failure. Right. That’s what builds confidence in kids.
Andrew Warner 13:46
You know, that sounds good. I could see the importance of confidence actually, right in this story because COVID hits you could have just spiraled out of control. You would have been fine to say let’s just follow everybody. Let’s take a few months. This is not the right time to do anything. Let’s see How things pan out. But instead, you had the confidence to say, I think I could find a solution to this. And so you decided to do one. So we we took these business fairs that we’ve been doing, and we turned them into an online program for kids, we decided to create my first sale.com. It’s like Etsy for kids. But we throw in a ton of training videos, and we build a community of kid entrepreneurs, like live on zoom Q and A’s and we give kids step by step, how to launch and grow your business. So we’re just basically building a tribe of young Rockstar entrepreneurs ages, like five to 17 is the max age, but usually it’s like five to 15 or so and then building it along with you with each other on your platform. And I asked you, why couldn’t they just go do this on Etsy or Shopify yesterday? And before we get your answer, I should tell people about my sponsor for sponsors a company called hostgator. If you’re a creator, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re somebody who wants to start to build businesses, go to hostgator.com slash free Extra, they’ve got that middle option that you’ll see right at the top of the page, it will allow you to create unlimited domains, they will host unlimited websites for you. That means you could just come up with an idea, create it, scrap it, come up with another one created scrap it. And just by doing that, you’ll get really good at it. Nobody wrote their ideal perfect novel The first time they sat down at a typewriter, you start by starting small and then you build it up. If you haven’t started yet, go to hostgator.com slash mixergy. And bring your ideas there. If you’ve had an idea in the back of your head for a long time, be inspired and go do it. And frankly, finally, if you’re somebody who has a website right now you love it, everything’s going well save some money by having an hosted by good hosting company that doesn’t cost as much as their competitors. It’s hostgator.com slash mixergy. When you throw that slash mixergy at the end, you get a lower price and they charge other people and get tagged as a mixer to customer which means that I will always have your back hostgator.com slash mixergy so grateful to them for sponsoring. Sorry, you were going to say and just as I interrupted you with with that ad, so why couldn’t you use Shopify or Etsy for these kids, what do you want to do?
Scott Donnell 16:05
It’s more about community, right? Kids need a group. Kids need a tribe of people to help them take the next step. What we found is they need to learn this sort of like building blocks, you know, like, okay, I figure out what my passion is what I love to do, where my skills are. Okay, here’s a need in the community. Okay, I have an idea. cool idea. Well, now we got to learn about pricing. Now we got to learn about making the product now we gotta learn about profit. I got to make sure I price it above my costs. So I can have some leftover. Like, this is how kids need to think right? Yes, step by step. Yeah. As they try little things, and they sell their first customer. I mean, it’s called my first sale because of the feeling a kid gets from a sale is the best feeling ever. I mean, my first business was in third grade. I told us we, you know, I may be geckos. I made little key chains. Wouldn’t it be dollar? Lm? Yeah, it’s like these little beads and you use thread you make it look like a gecko. It was this was all the rage when I was kid. Well started selling them door to door and to all of our family friends, I sold hundreds of these things. Wow. And all my friends were making them for like a quarter. And they loved it and they weren’t going to recess at school or they weren’t eating lunch I got, I got in trouble. By the principal I got suspended because he was mad that I was like, using all my friends for a business even though it was a voluntary transaction. Yeah, I
Andrew Warner 17:22
wish that they would encourage it, it. They always feel like you’re taking advantage of the other kids who are doing this work for you, because they’re selling it to you for less than you’re going to help someone else. But I wish that they would just understand that, first of all, they’re encouraging the entrepreneur who’s doing it. But number two, they’re showing the other kids Hey, I know an entrepreneur. I know somebody who does this, I think I would have been much more willing to run if I knew somebody who was a long distance runner. When I was in school, I know that there’s so many things that I was more willing to do, frankly, reading books on my own, because these kids would sit down and actually read books for fun that they liked. I never would have done that on my own except that I saw a bunch of them sit around reading So I picked up a few Judy Blume books, and I read them as a kid. I feel like by working for you, it’s not that they’re being taken advantage of, they’re starting to understand, hey, there’s somebody around who’s an entrepreneur and he doesn’t have to be like this guy, Bill Gates, who I see on TV or Mark Zuckerberg. Alright, so you got shut down. And that’s the thing that bothers me a lot that a lot of teachers shut you down. You um, yeah, you you still feel power Did you feel as an adult motivation because you did it as a kid?
Scott Donnell 18:27
Yeah, I mean, it’s look it. It can be, can be taught, but a lot of it’s caught. Okay. Like there are there are millions of kids all around the world. Many, many millions that are creative, that are driven. They just need an outlet, right? And this is what we’re trying to build like, yeah, you can go to Etsy or go to Amazon, your mom, I can create a page blah, blah, blah. We want to the tribe with videos to help train them. We have a video on safety on what is shipping on. Hey, here’s 10 great ideas for you to sell them. your neighborhood and your school and church groups and for agents, sports teams. And then we got to a business fair like all these ways for you to sell more and more products geared towards kids, not to mention the pages themselves. Like, it’s not like star reviews like you do on Etsy. It’s like thumbs ups, reviews. You can’t it’s let no less than three no more than five and they give you tips on how to have a better business that kids post lessons learned. on their page. They earn badges for the first shipment, the 10th sale, I got $100 in revenue, right? Like they set a goal. Like we have a girl, Dave Asprey, who is you know, he was on our challenge yesterday teaching the kids about entrepreneurship, his daughter, Anna, she has these homemade cards that are gorgeous for like five bucks, and she hit her $400 goal, like in a day. And it was amazing. She was so excited. And she’s I think she’s 13 years old now. And she actually use using part of the profits to help buy a like a part of the Amazon rainforest just to keep it like stay And he put naturally all these kids are setting goals all over the page, and it’s on their own store page on the website. So it’s not just like a tribe for curriculum and videos and coaching, live q&a. It’s actually a store page with shipping and processing. And we’re all we do it all for them.
Andrew Warner 20:15
At first I thought, Boy, you took on too much you could have launched faster without without creating your own online like selling platform, your own marketplace. But I agree, just like Etsy created a different feeling. By putting together all these people who have homemade products, they created different feeling for the customer. You did the same thing when now not judging them in comparison to some beautiful Etsy maker but in comparison to other kids and environment that puts us in the frame of mind to be as generous as you were when you had $1,001 bills in your pocket and ready to just support a kid. The other thing though, was security you thought was important, right? You wanted to make sure that you weren’t collecting data on the kids. What what type of things do you not do because you’re dealing with kids?
Scott Donnell 20:56
Well, there’s a lot there, right like number one, the parents Guardian has to have the account. Okay? Kids are not allowed to be communicating with strangers online. We don’t let them put their emails, no phone numbers, no personal parents contact information that’s put on their personal social media accounts, not even their address, their home address can be out there. This is all coordinated through mom and dad’s email. All we have is a kid’s name in the city. Okay, so like, Betsy, age eight, in Phoenix. That’s it. And it’s a cute picture, and it shows all of her reviews and she’s got 21 customers, and she’s made $145 to her $600 goal to take her family on a trip to Disneyland or something like that, right. I think I literally saw
Andrew Warner 21:38
that goal that somebody had and I love that they’re showing what their goal is. Uh huh.
Scott Donnell 21:43
Yeah, yeah, because we want to have it set a goal to reach that goal right and they create a video we teach them how to produce a quick video of their pitch. A good sales pitch is what it is why it’s the best ever in the benefits the customer and then how much right so the kids have a video of their pitch and their products. They show pictures. on there have them making it. So it’s very kid friendly. Its whole. The whole point is what did I want? When I was a kid? What would you want when you were a kid? And then we just give them an outlet, right? And I’m looking at it. Now this is such a camp, a school camp project. Here’s someone who made a key chain. I think we made these key chains. It Hillcrest Day School in Queens
Andrew Warner 22:21
are Hillcrest camp in Queens. And so she’s selling it for three bucks. You know, this kid created a whole company for a company named h and h and k key chains.
Scott Donnell 22:32
Yeah, we’ve got over giving plate is one of my favorite ones on there. Her name is Jilly. And she created the giving play and it’s basically a plate that says the giving plate and she gives you a poem with it on a card that says, I am the giving plate. I go from home to home and I don’t have a real I don’t have a home like I have cookies and brownies and I’m always being given from friend to friend. And she’s sold like tons of these already. Right? So it’s really fun stuff. There’s like clothing brand Their sugar scrubs key chains I mean the list is growing we just had 14 more like in the last little bit so you and I couldn’t talk last week because you are launching this right? And for you a launch doesn’t mean we’re launching the webpage and then buying some ads to get people to come in here you are doing almost like an info marketing launch right with an educational component. Am I right about that? Yeah, yeah, so we did what’s called a kid biz launch five day challenge. So if you people go to kid biz launch with a Z kid biz launch.com. It was just our opt in page for free and kids join the challenge. We have about 800 kids around the world join 2020 countries. And in five days we had you know, some big names come in and teach them about entrepreneurship. We learned the five P’s right, passion, product, pricing, profit and pitch. And we got them excited. All these kids are launching their own businesses and a bunch of them are going to go to my first sale. Right? And it’s just a blast. I mean, locally, you can do local dog walking, it can be a service, it can be a like YouTube videos for people or songs or it can be products that they actually shipped to you, right? We had a show every day at a child would come on zoom with you and a guest speaker, they would hear about their entrepreneurship journey as kids. And then they would What? build something, sell something what the goal was for every kid to make a prototype of a product. So we chose it by day two, and they make a prototype by day four and today’s day five so I’m actually going live the last day and for in like 40 minutes. Oh, wow. Okay, no wonder you had a sense that you’re in a rush and we definitely pick this uh, we we picked whatever time we could. Yeah, okay. It’s it’s fun because today now we’re going to learn how to market it. So they have their first customer in mind right? then sell their first customer today and get that awesome feeling that you get the first time you sell right, the first podcast you did. The first time is so awesome for kids. We want to just capture that feeling. So that’s what today is, it’s actually getting your first customer with your product. Wow. So these people already got these kids already got customers, but now you’re going to teach them go send a message to grandma. Go call up your grandfather, that type of thing. Yeah, yeah. So actually, what we’re doing is saying, Hey, guys, join, join my first sale. It’s like $77 for the whole family for the whole year. It’s nothing. So what happens when I do that? And they go join the program. And we’re going to do live q&a every week, we’re going to be you know, they can create their store page and start selling. And then we give best practices, we’re going to do like zoom masterminds, where we like put them in small groups of like, five kids at a time sharing what they’ve learned about getting the word out and selling to their community and little tips on profit and bundling and, well, it’s gonna it’s perfect for what I wished I’d had when I was 10. Right.
Andrew Warner 25:48
77 bucks is what you’re aiming for per month per year. for the whole year year. Yeah,
Scott Donnell 25:53
like nothing. Yeah, that we have. Why are you doing this? In the first day when they start launching the product? There are you’re saying They can you repeat that the kids make, okay, so we have most of our kids that launched the beta group are like 567 hundred bucks already. Okay? So you make back that $77, right when you launch. So you do the first 12 videos that teach you everything from the safety and the pricing and profit and everything. And then you launch your page and start selling your community. And once you get the word out, these kids are making hundreds of dollars just in the first couple of days on average. So the 77th just to make sure we don’t get random people coming in for free, right? It’s you got to make sure you’re serious about this and we verify
Andrew Warner 26:32
what’s your vision with this. I mean, you’ve got a company that you’re about to take public, as you mentioned to me, you’ve got another company that’s been running now for about a decade. Why Why do this?
Scott Donnell 26:44
This is a Passion Play. I want my my daughter Reagan’s or my son’s lawyers to this is what they already talked about. What is daddy doing? Why does he you know, what does he sell? What is it you know, I want them in like two three years to have an outlet. An easy outlet to be able to create an opportunity and then sell it to all of our family and friends in our neighborhood and the school and the teacher can send it out. We’re just trying to give them the right Allah to learn these skills, because it’s all the stuff you’re not learning in school. Yeah, our vision here is what’s all the stuff that might be missed in the normal education world? And what can we do to teach it to kids, because parents want their kids to learn this stuff. They want them to get an advantage, like a huge edge. But a lot of times when mom and dad says something, it goes in one ear and out the other. But if we can have like other kids, teach them or us, you know, fun people that are really cool on a zoom or a cool five minute video, it just sticks right? Like I’ve gotten probably 100 messages from parents just this week on the challenge. They’re like, I’ve been telling my kid that for five years, and you say it, and you look like a hero in 10 seconds, right? So that’s what we’re trying to do is kind of create that kid Etsy meets like an ed tech kind of play, right? Like, let’s get these kids all the way to college. You know, if they want to go to college learning these life skills. That’s the goal.
Andrew Warner 28:02
I, I wanted to find something like this for my son, my my older son really loved that we did a lemonade stand last summer he’s been dying to do it. You can’t do a lemonade stand now because of COVID. And I wasn’t sure how to teach him to sell online. And I’m not looking to in to inculcate or to I’m not looking to get my kids to go into my world, if they want to just be communists living on a commune somewhere, it’s fine. I got no hang ups on it, do whatever you want. But if he’s interested, I want to find a way to do it. And, you know, obviously, it didn’t feel like the right fit for it or Shopify, maybe Shopify, actually, I’ve been a little bit drawn to Shopify as a model. What I like about this is you get everybody all in together. Do you feel like now with kids going back to school mind, I’m going to go back to school any day now? Do you feel like maybe it’s a little late to involve them in a program like this?
Scott Donnell 28:56
Yeah, I don’t. I mean, a lot of the people we’re talking to you Summer is going to be big. A lot of people want this over this summer. And really like, this is what parents want their kids to do. Like after school on the weekends, it’s not crazy hard, like once it’s set up, and they’re just learning these awesome skills, we’re going to be going live Q and A’s every couple weeks. The goal is to keep them moving down the field, keep them excited, keep them engaged, you want them to just pull out, right. We want them to make sure that they’re learning new new skills every couple of weeks as they grow up. So I think this is something that’s gonna be great. When you’re back in school, even on holidays. A lot of families are like, yeah, this is cool. And you can have more businesses, you don’t just have one business. You can have as many pages as you want, right. We’ve got kids with multiple businesses already on different store pages. So just try out certain things right, learn as you go. That’s the fun part about it.
Andrew Warner 29:50
One of my favorites is this fitted cloth reusable mask with adjustable nose bridge. It’s so fitting for right now. So we missed it. My kid missed it. Are you doing it again? Is there a way for somebody to go to my first sale or
Scott Donnell 30:07
once you once you sign up on my first sale, you’re gonna get all the recordings, you’re gonna get all the videos, you know,
Andrew Warner 30:12
I go to my first sale calm. I hit Sign up now. And then Oh, and I get my phone My name not his name good. Yep. And then he gets to watch the videos, the two of us can sit and watch a video for an hour is that what it is? It’s five
Scott Donnell 30:26
minute videos and there’s 12 of them that take you through everything start to finish to launch your business. And then we do follow and then you join the tribe, right? We go we have a will put you in a private Facebook group with all these other kids. We’re going to be going live with CEOs. They’re going to be sharing their stories as kid entrepreneurs and what they learned. We give you more creative tips and best practices, more videos coming right now on grit, on resourcefulness on gratitude gaps that are that don’t have like a school course but these are the things that we want our kids to learn.
Andrew Warner 30:57
All right, so I said I take them in there. The Learning Create something, they’ll create a page, he’ll create a page. And we’re up and running. And then if he wants to do more with you, then we could do 77 bucks a year and he gets zoom calls with other I’m assuming six year olds like him, or around his age.
Scott Donnell 31:14
Yeah, we have hundreds and hundreds of kids that are five to 15. And they just joined the Xoom. They’re on mute. And then we bring in someone like yourself that would come in and we say, hey, teach us we’re going to a half an hour show because that’s the attention span. Yeah. And we’re going to share all these cool ideas of what happened when when you were a kid. What were your lessons learned? What do you wish someone taught you? Tell us about your life and what your job is and what you want kids to know. Right? Okay. And we just have, you know, like Dave Asprey was a great one yesterday or Joe Polish a couple days ago, you know Asprey from bulletproof coffee I interviewed him years ago, I didn’t realize how big bulletproof was I should have tasted it before I did the interview. frickin things amazing. dollars in revenue now it’s sorry, how much 100 million
Andrew Warner 31:55
hundred million. You know what, I’d love to see one of his coffee shops. here in San Francisco, you know why frickin guys, they knock him off all the time. And they even use the name bulletproof coffee, my favorite, most elegant place in Napa for me to sit and spend a day working. They have knockoff bulletproof coffee. I go, you guys should be way above this. You should be like you’re the most elegant. Everything is taken care of. If I asked for hot sauce, they give me a little bottle of special hot sauce. You know what, everything is too beautiful. And you’re knocking off the bulletproof coffee and you’re not even pretending to change ingredients.
Unknown Speaker 32:31
Yeah,
Andrew Warner 32:32
yeah. Anyway, so yeah, amazing stuff that he’s Why is he involved with you in this?
Scott Donnell 32:37
So he and I met with happy which is the biotech company. So I got asked to run because you know, we’ve got millions of customers and I know consumer tech and that kind of thing. And I invested in this technology over 10 years ago for the biotech play.
Andrew Warner 32:50
You know, maybe we pause and we’ll come back to happy I just want to close this out with we’ll spend a whole segment on happy but I want to close it out by asking, were you able to hire the apex People back in how what happened to all those, all those franchisees who, who had furloughed employees?
Scott Donnell 33:07
Yeah, so we brought we brought home office to help, right? I’ve got coders on on the team, I’ve got people that help with the online and the admin work. And so the marketing and all kind of stuff and now we’re giving affiliate links to all of our franchisees to help all their schools while they’re at home.
Andrew Warner 33:25
They bring in their schools got it. Okay. Makes sense. Speaking of you and I were talking about affiliate links, I told you that my policy is that I don’t want to make money off of my guests. I just want otherwise we’re kind of in cahoots and I don’t want that I like them to know that I’m here to understand their business not to not to support and cheer them on but actually I am here to support and cheer on I just want to financial interest. But you said that there was some kind of discount that you give my listeners what’s the thing?
Scott Donnell 33:47
Well, I gave you two links for all your listeners and they can keep that price forever or they I didn’t check email this morning on my first sale calm slash Andrew
Andrew Warner 33:59
beautiful. So that’s what my son should go whenever he wants to go start off my first sale comm slash Andrew and
Scott Donnell 34:04
that will take you to the homepage but it’s there forever. So that’s gonna be the $77 when you click the red signup button, okay wherever and then for the happy calm slash Andrew happy calm slash Andrew we’re gonna give everybody like 30% off for the happy devices too. So
Andrew Warner 34:20
yeah, those are the two links I’m going to give out to you and happy is h a p p. h a p p comm I’m a little concerned about that name. Let’s come back to that in a moment. First, I want to tell people listen, if you’ve got an idea as a side business, and you don’t have developers who are able to do this thing or a side project, and you need somebody to get it done, somebody who has experience building it, you want to hire from top towel. The beauty of hiring from top towel is they have the best of the best developers standing by all you have to do is get on a call with one of their managers tell them what you want to have done. I wonder how long would it take in them. If you didn’t have your own developers how long a top tile developer would have been able to build my first sale I bet that they could have built it fairly quickly for you. Well, now that you know about them, if you have a side idea, if you need Something that you can’t find your developer that your developers don’t have the capacity don’t have the experience to build, I want you to go over to top tau comm slash mixergy. When you do, you’ll get 80 hours of developer credit when you pay for your first 80 hours in addition to a no risk trial period. Really, this is a set of developers who are Google level Facebook level developers, but they happen to live outside of Silicon Valley. And up until recently, all these big companies didn’t want people who are working remote so these great developers would go to top towel and they’d get Remote Jobs through top towel. If you want to get started. The first thing to do is get on a call with the top town manager talk to them about your needs and see if it’s a good fit. If it is great if it’s not they’ll tell you it’s to ptl comm slash MIXE rG why to get that special 80 hour of developer credit immediately go to top Tao comm slash mixergy. Alright, so happy Why is it called Happy? Why the spelling
Scott Donnell 35:54
because first of all the logos are be on there. So happy Be and we want people to feel happy. That’s the whole point of the happy tech. Little
Andrew Warner 36:05
Are you worried like I am that you might be confusing people who want to type in happy, like I’m happy go lucky.
Scott Donnell 36:10
Yeah, but we are going to get we’re actually close on rankings for actually typing in happy with
Andrew Warner 36:15
scores. So we’ll get that
Scott Donnell 36:17
to once we build our sales a little bit more, but it’s unique. I like because people say the word happy and they think, Oh, these guys want you to be happy. And I love that so much that I’m okay with a couple of misspelled letters. You know, before we go into the history of it, we should explain what it is. What is it? Yeah, so here’s the elevator version. It’s using informed magnetic fields that have 15 years of work in the labs and $80 million behind it to help you feel it’s it’s helping certain receptor sites to literally help you feel alert. Sleepy, focused, calm.
That those types of feelings at the click of a button literally,
Andrew Warner 36:58
I didn’t know you were wearing You’ve got it underneath your shirt. It’s like a necklace. You go to the app, you press the button to say what you want to feel. And then you feel it if you want to be sleepy so you could take a nap you press that button and it helps you feel sleepy. And what did you dial in now for this call?
Unknown Speaker 37:13
Pick me up, pick me up. Like we
Andrew Warner 37:15
just get a little bit of energy.
Scott Donnell 37:17
Yeah, it actually mimics like smoke break, to be honest. So it’s like a little bit of a buzz but it’s also a focused feeling. So don’t do that. It’s it’s sitting right by your chest. How’s it making you feel picked up our we’re gonna get deep into science. But long story short. The company that we licensed this technology out of is called emulate therapeutics out of Seattle, Washington. And they’ve been developing these texts in 2002. Actually, they use this magnetometer technology that allows allow it creates recordings of certain magnetic fields that are derived from things like sleep aids, or muscle relaxants, or energy drinks or happy
Andrew Warner 37:59
hour Do you mean My energy drink that I drink kicks off an energy field, a magnetic field. Oh, so,
Scott Donnell 38:06
yeah, there’s okay. So here’s a question. There are covalent and non covalent bonds in your body. You lost me already. That’s the part that’s high school that I didn’t do well with. Okay, let me let me I’ll try to simplify it. When you take certain, you know, vitamins or you know, you drink caffeine or you drink all these things. There are non covalent bonds in your body, which is basically just an exchange of electrons. Triggers are a response in the body without there being like a chemical bond right there. Okay? Um, I’d be profaned is that way. Any hormone or suppress, interestingly is that way? Well, these guys have a patented process with 38 patents where they can actually record that trigger like that, what what’s going on there, and they can play that on your body Through a really precise magnetic field, it’s got 2.3 million endpoints like an electrocardiogram with like a billy like millions of endpoints on it. And they their goal is to try to trigger a similar response. And so that’s what we’ve licensed from them is specific signals that you can play that that trigger that mood response. And we just finished our blinded studies to in your city right there in San Francisco. You know, it’s awesome 150 sessions. So basically, it’s like, hey, it’s either on or off, you know, or sleepy or alert, which one is it? And people are almost 100% accurate in their guests, which is really cool.
Andrew Warner 39:34
What do you mean, you put them into sleeping mode on the app? And then you say, How are you feeling? And you then see whether it corresponds to what you just dialed up for them?
Scott Donnell 39:44
Oh, yeah, they can tell they can all tell all these random study patients that we have, that we’ve never met before they try it out and then we say percentage
Andrew Warner 39:51
and end up feeling the way that there’s that way that you’ve dialed in for them.
Scott Donnell 39:55
100% on or off like it’s either on or it’s off and is inaudible So no one’s gonna know right? Hundred percent success, right?
Andrew Warner 40:02
And that people know this thing is on even though there’s no physical evidence that it’s good.
Scott Donnell 40:08
You feel the sensation. You feel okay? Yeah, yeah, the first time you do it, it might take 20 minutes, it might take a little bit once you build those pathways, but now I’m in like, three, four minutes. I’m dialed in. I feel it. I love it. Okay, and so the only thing that was difficult is the relax, which is a muscle relaxing and the sleepy which is like a sleep Bay, like those are similar. So those people had they knew it was on not off, but they didn’t know which one it was. Okay, so that was the only one that was like maybe 70% accurate. The rest of it was close to 100 or 100. Which is cool.
Andrew Warner 40:40
All right. I am being redirected from that link to an Indiegogo campaign. That’s, that’s done, right?
Scott Donnell 40:46
Yeah, no, it’s still in demand. So you can buy right there and that’s where we’re getting the discount. So Indiegogo is our presale page. So we’ve got over half a million dollars sold there. Almost 1200 backers, and we’re shipping product, I’d be Got 1500 units coming from our manufacturer to land that fulfillment in like seven or nine days or whatever depending on the pandemic and what gets held up but yeah,
Andrew Warner 41:11
what’s the refund policy on this? So if I buy one of these and then I don’t get to sleep the way I’m supposed to and I’m supposed to wear it around my neck while I sleep like a necklace, right?
Scott Donnell 41:19
No, no it’s not just for sleep and you
Andrew Warner 41:20
people know if i sorry if I want to if I want it to make me sleepy. I feel like I’m pretty good on the rest of the days energy.
Scott Donnell 41:26
Yeah, I think he would wear it for like half an hour before bed. Okay, while I’m reading
Andrew Warner 41:31
got my Kindle in hand. I got this on around it helps me fall asleep and then what I do is my habit now is when I put the Kindle aside, I hit the button on my phone to keep track of how much I’m sleeping. At that point. I would take it off my my neck and go to sleep.
Scott Donnell 41:45
Yep, yep. The Mark if you heard of aura ring, I know something else. But I know everyone’s aura right now. Yeah. Um, so the people that helped grow them to their hundred and $50 million valuation now whatever they’re at, I don’t even know conscious partners did all their marketing and their messaging and their pay per clicks. They’re now our partner. Okay. So it’s an incredible partnership because they know the right audience, the right messaging, the pay per clicks, and ads, they are helping get the word out on happy to the world and building our e commerce platform. And we’re really, really excited about it. They’ve also all tried it. And they also all love it, right? Everyone who’s invested or an advisor or Dave Asprey, I mean, he did the alert signal, and in 30 seconds, his heart rate went up, he loved it. He was like, Oh, my gosh, I’m hooked. Let’s get this out to the world. Right?
Andrew Warner 42:30
So if I get it, and it’s not good enough for me, or doesn’t do it for me, do I get a refund?
Scott Donnell 42:36
Maybe all your money back? Because I want the device to give to someone else.
Yeah, how do you get involved in this? Um, yeah. How did I get involved?
Andrew Warner 42:46
Yeah, you said 10 years ago, roughly a decade ago, you got into this. Well,
Scott Donnell 42:50
I invested hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in this parent company out of Seattle. Okay. They’re actually working with cancer patients. They’re using a frequency that helps people with brain tumors to mimic I saw like chemo today but they it literally is like a frequency that mimics chemo without obstacle logical side effects. I mean, it’s an amazing technology. It’s a way it’s probably warrants its own one podcast later on, but the I invested in them out of Seattle over 10 years ago, and I’ve been following them for over a decade. I love what they do. They’re an amazing company, they’re going to change the world. They already are in amazing ways. They’ve got hundreds of patients they’ve worked with. They’re in like FDA, and all that kind of stuff. But they came to me about a year and a half ago and said, we want to try to do this consumer side like that doesn’t have anything to do with the medical side. Like people want to feel like alert and sleepy and relaxed and calm throughout the day. Well, let’s let’s create like a medical wellness or not, not a medical product, a general wellness product, like a consumer product, like Halo neuroscience or Muse or Neo rhythm or Apollo, like there’s a lot of these, you know, stim companies out there. And they asked me if I’d run it because they’re all old scientists and doctors that are brilliant. Our chief scientist and was brought Cialis to market Okay, so they know what they’re doing. But they’re mostly on the science and medical side and they needed somebody with the consumer tech expertise that I have. So that’s what I came in and we launched happy.
Andrew Warner 44:14
So what do you do to get people to to buy it from Indiegogo? How’d you get customers?
Scott Donnell 44:19
Yeah, so well, I put in the first big chunk of change to make sure it worked, right? Because I’ve got 50 family, friends and people I’ve partnered with invested I didn’t want anyone to put money until I felt it and I loved it. Okay, so we did all the animal testing all that kind of stuff. That was all last year in 2019. We launched Indiegogo. It was an accident for the success. It was supposed to be like 20 grand family, friends, just test the messaging. Okay, so we made some videos, we’ve got some pictures and referrals. And then all of a sudden Dave posts it to his whole network. And then you know,
Andrew Warner 44:52
Joe Paul, you’re connected to him from the Genius Network.
Scott Donnell 44:55
Yeah, yeah. And then and then Joe polish is who is another one of our investors who tried out the tech He’s like, Oh my gosh, you got to talk to Martin Tobias who runs upgrade labs, right the biohacking conference and and then Dave Asprey and so I met with both of them. Martin tried sleepy, fell in love right there. Dave tried alert and he fell in love right there. And then Matt staying with High Times Magazine, he tried to calm signal and he fell in love right there. And the three of them have been the catalyst of this whole thing. So they just like went boom. And they just told everyone in their networks and then we went from like 15 grand which was the goal and to like half a million on their on in the last few months on Indiegogo. So it exploded by accident. And now I’m trying to catch up for manufacturers
Andrew Warner 45:37
and they weren’t they weren’t getting a piece of the business or anything.
Scott Donnell 45:41
They have investment in the business. They also they
Andrew Warner 45:44
liked it so much that they had invest By the way, if you see me lose my attention for a little bit, you did lose my attention. Here’s why. When you said we were trying to get $15,000 out I wanted to fact check you and see because is this bs I don’t want to curse because there might be kids listening now and then that I went to the Internet Archive this national, like treasure? And sure enough, Yeah, you did. And because it does show that the first goal was $15,000 Yeah. And now when I go to the page, it says, it seemed to say that the goal was half a million.
Scott Donnell 46:15
Yeah. And it wasn’t even for fundraising. Like we’re giving most of that away to Indiegogo and our, you know, partners who are helping us learn the ads and stuff. It was just for messaging, like Will this work? How should we message it? What’s you know, choose how you feel? Is that good messaging we Yeah, millions and millions and millions of dollars, right? This was just for like to see how a soft launch closed beta would respond. And then bam, you know, social media gets ahold of it. We get these crazy trolls coming after us saying this thing is crazy and fake and there’s no way you’re this is possible. And then we get a ton of sales from it. So it’s just been a whirlwind from the trolls.
Oh, all these trolls all over the world, like half a million views all over the place. They’re like, there’s no way this is possible. You know, magnetic fields can deliver biologic effect. So we then we had to release a white paper that had 37 major references to huge studies that show Yes, actually, magnetic fields do have a biological effect. I actually
Andrew Warner 47:10
think a lot of people are gonna say, What is God doing this thing is just he’s selling snake oil. I feel like even aura ring, which we were talking about is like the leader in this space. That’s a ring you put on your finger, and it measures a lot of things. But what a lot of what I’ve heard people like it for sleep tracking, look at this, make sure you get on my iPad. Maybe I shouldn’t show you. There’s what seems to be a really good review of it from somebody whose photo is her a woman putting the aura ring on her middle finger and holding it up and basically saying, Yeah, I like it. But even I’m a little skeptical. So the aura ring, which is the leader in the space has a lot of skeptics to
Scott Donnell 47:46
every every good entrepreneur has skeptics and enemies. I mean, I’ve got Facebook pages against me. I mean, every good entrepreneur is going to make waves. I mean look at Elon Musk. The guy is a savant and half the world hates this guy. Okay, the other half loves them to death. So I feel like, especially if you’re going to innovate, which is what entrepreneurs do, right? They take goods and resources to a higher level of productivity. You have to venture into new space and you’re gonna have enemies. So
Andrew Warner 48:17
I want to go and see who are these enemies and sure enough here this is one on Reddit. I’ve been loving Reddit for AI people, just to hear what people are thinking anatomy of a snake oil product. Yep,
Scott Donnell 48:28
it’s one. You’ve seen that one. Oh, yeah, I’ve seen them all. Like, there’s dozens because one big guy posted one to his followers, because a lot of them saw our Indiegogo campaign. They’re like, Oh, you should take these guys down. He’s never tried it. He’s never seen it. He just I was gonna say could Did anyone get their first app yet? No. Oh, we have we’ve had 400 people use it and they’re all like close, like either in the studies groups, right? None of these people have ever tried it, but that’s the thing is like, Okay, number one, we’re not snake oil because we’re going to give you your money back if you don’t like it. Number two, we’re not snake oil because we’re doing blinded studies. We just Didn’t haven’t published yet for all of you, trolls. And number three, like, give it a break, like why don’t you just take a second and learn what’s actually going on before you just like, look and i and i with them. Like there are things out there that are snake oil, there’s a lot of it, there’s a lot of there’s bracelets and random things you can put on the claim to like heal your whole life and your, your, you know, you’ll lose 100 pounds with this, you’ll blah, blah, blah, there’s a lot and you got to be careful. So I’m not against them, right. In fact, I if I were them, I’d be like, Hey, where’s all the studies? Well, it’s like, cheese. We’re a year in. We just got our units a few months ago, we have to do the studies on the unit. We just finished 150 user sessions. So give us a sec. instead. They just want to make a bunch of money with their online takedowns. Right.
Andrew Warner 49:46
So now you’re going public. How does it work in Canada, I thought if someone’s going public, they can’t do interviews. I was I had an interview scheduled with or committed to I think with Eric from zoom and I could tell as soon as he backed out of the entry interview that he was about to go public. And he could I don’t think he could even tell me, Andrew, this is why I’m not doing the interview. How is it that you could do an interview with me when you guys are going to go public on the venture Venture Exchange in Canada?
Unknown Speaker 50:11
Because it’s not for sure.
Andrew Warner 50:13
Just, it seems like that’s gonna happen. So
Scott Donnell 50:16
yeah, we have we’re not like we’re not like in the last marching order last few weeks kind of a thing. We don’t have a date out there. We’re taught we’re discussing it internally. You know, we have this company out of Canada that’s helped us raise millions of dollars to prepare for it. Right. But yeah, there’s there’s nothing public about it. It’s not a for sure it’s not voted in. It’s for us, it’s better than taking VC money, and losing droll, and losing board seats and that kind of thing. So that’s why we say, you know, we think this is a better alternative for us in the Canadian markets, because we’re going to get the word out to a lot of retail people. Right? So but it’s not confirmed yet, right? It’s just something we’re trying to discuss. And it looks like the it’s the TSX Venture Exchange, right? It’s the Yeah, it’s that’s most likely if we knew I’m getting the Q Yeah. Okay.
Andrew Warner 51:08
All right, we should go it’s a venture capital marketplace. All right. So for anyone who wants to go check it out I’ve been checking out these links is hap b.com slash mixergy I like how there’s the mixergy offer in the mixer g name on that page. And then what was the other one for the my first sale calm slash mixer? Am I right? Or no both of them are slash Andrew slash slash Andrew right right. Excuse me slash Andrew because I was worried that people would misspell mixer G or say mix energy so thanks for using slash Andrew. So there it is, guys. If you’re listening to me and you want to go check them out, go to my first sale comm slash Andrew or hap be calm slash Andrew. I get no commission from that. And I want to thank the two sponsors who paid for this pay for ads in this interview and then I do get paid for that hostgator.com slash mixergy for hosting your website and when you’re hiring developers, no better place than top towel comm slash mixergy Thanks, sim congrats
Unknown Speaker 51:58
by Scott. Good to see me Same here.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
