How The Founder Of YSN Bootstrapped A Business By Writing A Best Seller

Jennifer Kushell wanted to build a multimedia company that helped young adults as they transitioned from home and school into the real world. But a tough economic climate meant she couldn’t raise much money from investors.

So she decided to write a book.

In this interview you’ll hear how she took the advance she got on her book and invested the money into making the book a best seller. The success of the book raised her profile and grew a community, which she used to launch her business.

Jennifer Kushell

Jennifer Kushell

YSN

Jennifer Kushell is the founder of YSN.com (“Your Success Network”), the first professionally focused network dedicated to supporting emerging adults (Gen X and Millennials) as they transition from home and school into the real world. She is also the author of the New York Times Bestseller, Secrets of the Young & Successful (originally Simon & Schuster), The Young Entrepreneur’s Edge (Random House) and Solo Para Emprendedores (Grupo Norma).

 

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Full Interview Transcript

Andrew: This interview is sponsored by Wufoo. Do you have an embeddable form or survey on your website right now? If you did, you’d be able to collect information from your audience and use it to build your business. Go to Wufoo.com right now and, for free, you’ll get embeddable forms and surveys. Wufoo.com. It’s also sponsored by Shopify. Many Mixergy listeners were telling me that they heard me talked about Shopify, they went online, they created their store. Now, they’re up and running with a new store from Shopify.com. Don’t you have an idea for a business, for a store that you want get up and running? With Shopify, within minutes, you can have it online, and within weeks, you can start interacting with your customers. They’ll make it easy and give you all the tools you need to grow your business. Check out Shopify.com.

It’s also sponsored by Grasshopper. It’s the virtual phone system that entrepreneurs love. If you had a Shopify number right now, you’d be able to get calls no matter where you were in the world. You’d be able to set up extensions for the people in your company, or, virtual extensions to give the impression of size. Maybe one for a sales department and an IT department and any department you want. Get all those features and so many more. Check out Grasshopper.com for a full list of all of the features that they have at reasonable price. Grasshopper.com. Here’s the program.

Hey, everyone. It’s Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. Today, I’ve got with me Jennifer Kushell. She is a bestselling author and the co-founder and President of YSN.com (Your Success Network) which is a network for entrepreneurs in 110 countries. Jennifer, first of all, welcome, thanks for being here.

Interviewee: Thank you. I’m thrilled to be with you today.

Andrew: What is YSN.com?

Interviewee: YSN was started a couple of years ago to be the first professional social network to help young people all over the world toward young, hungry, ambitious entrepreneurial, even if they’re not entrepreneurs, help them build their professional identity and connect with people just like them. As you and I know, we’ve been entrepreneurs since we’re very young, it’s very difficult to find other people who support you sometimes. So, I’ve been building online communities since 1993, believe it or not. This was really our initiative to help bring these next generation of people together and really armed them with the tools and the resources they needed to be successful.

Andrew: I invited you here because you had a unique way of launching the business, and we’ll talk about how you did that. But, I’m intrigued now, you said that you and I have been entrepreneurs for a long time. I’m wondering, what was the first business that you started? The first lemonade stand or the first shovel snow business or whatever it was.

Interviewee: I was actually 13, and I started a little t-shirt company. I was painting t-shirts then you’re selling them at school, and my [xx], ‘Let me get you a receipt book and let’s do this properly.’ We started buying wholesale and I started selling them out and then I moved up on to something else by 15. Then, I had five by the time I was 19.

Andrew: Five businesses by the time you were 19.

Interviewee: Yes. I’m a serial entrepreneur.

Andrew: When you were selling t-shirts in school, did the school allow you to sell your t-shirts or did they stop you or did they ask you to take it outside the school? What was their reaction?

Interviewee: No, they actually liked it. I went on to people selling stuff at school, so [xx] formal policy. You know, people liked me, I was always a nice kid and everything. But, I also did t-shirts that supported the school teams. So, the football players and everything, I would do these t-shirts with like fans in the stadium and then put t-shirt jerseys and everything on it. So I was really supporting team sports, too, by doing this. No one’s going to shot me down.

Andrew: The money was all going to you or did you split it with the team or the school?

Interviewee: No. I was making $20 or something on the t-shirt after, you know, my economics weren’t that good. [xx] I look back. No, I was fine, I was just keeping it, but I was just [xx] into my inventory.

Andrew: You said that at 15, you started another business. What was that?

Interviewee: At 15, I was doing gift baskets. I was very crafty and I went to a [xx] seminar and I learned about gift basket making that you could build a whole business around it. Since I already knew how to buy wholesale, I started doing gift baskets. Then a few years later, we had the riots in Los Angeles, and safety was a big concern for a lot of people. So I met an LAPD officer who’s doing training courses for women to teach them how to be safe. We started doing safety training courses for women together, so I was like partnered with an LAPD officer.

Andrew: Again, this was for profit, your entrepreneurial business.

Interviewee: Yes. Absolutely. I think, like a lot of young people, I had a series of different businesses that started out at a very young age. Every time they got a little more sophisticated, a little more successful, I started to network a little more, bring in people to work with me, started my marketing. It just escalates from there, and that’s why I’ve always been such a big proponent of getting young people to start in something in business very early.

Andrew: Even if they don’t want to be entrepreneurs in the future, do you suggest that they start businesses?

Andrew: Even if they don’t want to be entrepreneurs in the future do you suggest that they start businesses?

Interviewee: I actually do because I’m one of those people that believes that entrepreneurship should be core curriculum in all schools. I don’t think you have to own a business by any means but the overwhelming number of young people around the world do dream of having a business at some point. And the reality is with the economy being so tumultuous whether you’re a doctor, a lawyer or an artist people forget we’re all in business. It doesn’t matter what you do. And if you have entrepreneurial skills, your law practice, your medical practice, your chiropractic practice, whatever it is is going to be stronger. Even if you’re a hardcore liberal artist and all you want to do is create all day long if you want to sustain yourself you need to be entrepreneurial. So I think it’s one of those reading, writing, arithmetic type skills.

Andrew: You know my school taught us…we had a foundry class. We learned how to…we had a woodworking class. We had a music class. We had a dodge ball class. We had all kinds of classes about everything but not about business. And that seems typical. Why do you think schools aren’t teaching business entrepreneurship?

Interviewee: I think they’re starting to catch on but when you look at traditional academics and what teachers, typical teachers, think kids need to know they’re trying to prepare us for the real world. But more in theory and more conceptually and not so much practically and that’s one of the big problems. I do a lot work with charitable organizations and one of the groups I’ve been working with for 15 years now is the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship. They’ve taught a quarter of a million young people, mostly inner city kids, how to build their own businesses. So I think when you have an outside organization that brings it in with a top class curriculum and all sorts of resources, schools are more likely to adopt a program like that.

Andrew: What did you learn as an entrepreneur in your teens?

Interviewee: What didn’t I learn? In my teens…the most important thing in my teens is that I could take control and ownership of my life. Like a lot of people I went through a phase where I was very effected by cliques and by people telling me what I could do and couldn’t do and who I was. I’ll tell you one thing, I have really bad ADD, which I know a lot of entrepreneurs do, and when I was a kid if I wasn’t following the conversation of what my friends were talking about, which typically bored me, they would call me an airhead. I am so far from an airhead. I’ve been tested with IQ’s and everything. I’m so far not. But I felt really persecuted when I was a kid that people just didn’t understand me and entrepreneurship was my route out. It was my way of taking ownership of an idea, of what I wanted to do and channelling my passion and interest into something that adults understood. The kids didn’t understand but it actually got me out of being so concerned about my immediate environment and started to look at who I was as a person and what I could do in this world.

Andrew: It’s interesting because I was the same way. I would just space out in conversations because I had no interest in them. I found that a lot of my friends, when they weren’t in school, they would get together to go drink beer or to have these dopey conversations. I couldn’t focus on them. They thought it was because I had a problem with drinking beer or with just staying focussed in conversations. It’s not. Just that their conversations weren’t engaging enough. The issues that they cared about weren’t engaging enough. Now, somebody in the audience is asking, and I won’t call them out by name here, but they’re saying, ‘I never really cared if someone had a business as a child. If you’re an adult this info doesn’t help much.’ What do you think of the value is of learning what a…of talking about your and my teenage businesses.

Interviewee: Wait. You’re saying that the guy’s saying being…

Andrew: It’s a girl actually.

Interviewee: I’m sorry. Learning about entrepreneurship doesn’t help if you’re an adult or if you’re a kid?

Andrew: If you’re an adult to hear what entrepreneurial businesses somebody had as a kid doesn’t help.

Interviewee: I actually take issue with that because if you’re an adult and you’re working in the business world, or you’re an entrepreneur yourself some of your best resources might actually be young people with their own companies. If you’re an executive at a Fortune 500 company and here’s an example. I worked with one of the biggest companies in the world; they had a $250 million a quarter advertising budget. I, in my little company, had been strategies sometimes than their seven major agencies that we worked on and I was their secret sauce in a campaign. They wouldn’t have known that. When I worked with Business Week I was helping them strategically position how to make young people learn about Business Week. There are whole rooms full of 40, 50, 60 year olds executive couldn’t figure that stuff out. So if you’re an adult and you’re in a position of power, you’re a manager…there are one billion people entering the workforce right now. Many of them are young and ambitious and hungry just like we are as young adults right now. Give them a chance. Help be that person that brings them into the next stage of their life. And I promise there’s a lot of benefit out there for you too. You get cheaper labor, you get more creativity, you get people who haven’t been jaded by a lot of experience and you get people who will sometimes kill themselves to make you happy and make your business successful.

Interviewee: …that person that brings them into the next stage of their life, and I promise you a lot of benefit out there for you too. You get cheaper labor, you get more creativity, you get people who haven’t been jaded by a lot of experience, and you get people that will sometimes kill themselves to make you happy and make your business successful.

Andrew: I think that people are saying that she got pawned or that she…I guess people are being a little bit critical of her in the comments. I think it’s a fair question to ask, what’s the value of it?

Interviewee: It is.

Andrew: And that’s why I brought it up in this interview. One of the reasons I ask is I want to know how someone is shaped, how the person I’m talking to came to be the person that I’m talking to. I also like to hear about people’s teenage businesses because that’s when you have the fewest resources and I want to see what can somebody with very little resources do.

I’m always curious to say if I were to drop the entrepreneur that I’m interviewing in a brand new city and say go build something. I’m not gonna give you any resources. Maybe we’ll do housing for a month, but then you have to take it on from there, I wonder what could they do. And I think what they did as teenagers is the closest we can get to seeing what they would do if you were to drop them in a city randomly.

And as you said here, there’s a lot of potential power in our teens, in people who are younger, and we need to find a way to harness. We’re showing through your experiences that you had that.

Interviewee: Well, and I wasn’t all supported by any means, just like none of us are. There’s a reason people in their 20s today have a mid-life crisis or a quarter-life crisis because most of us are not happy. Less than 25% of people love what they do. That’s a tragedy as I’m concerned.

So I think all of us, if we are young, if we are ambitious, if we entrepreneurial, we’ll tell other people while we’re helping ourselves. And you know, it propagates positive peer pressure instead of all this negative crap.

Because there’s enough people in the world who are always gonna tell you that you can’t do what you want to do. And that’s just ridiculous. And unfortunately, sometimes the people who are [? 11:55] are the ones who’ve got the worst selves.

Andrew: Yep, yep.

Interviewee: 1993, you were 19 years old. You co-founded Young Entrepreneurs Network. What was that?

Interviewee: That was me as a 19 year old being really frustrated about people not taking me seriously as an entrepreneur. Wherever I went I talked to people who were building businesses, who wanted to be entrepreneurs who want to know what to do or who to talk to and most of the time they were [? static].

We started back on the little floppy disks that were hard and did a FoxPro based contact management system because I knew young people needed to manage their contacts. And then we moved to CompuServe and we were online in a community in 1993 on CompuServe.

I think we were probably one of the first communities ever online. And we started to get young people from all over the world. When we moved onto the internet in ’94 I think or early, early ’95, I had people in 75 countries that found us.

Then from there I got all these media people calling. I got my first article in Entrepreneur magazine, Elle magazine, U.S. News & World Report, they started calling me a guru and then I got hundreds of newspapers around the country started writing about it.

But what I found was that in my effort to try to help people like me connect I opened up a Pandora’s box of issues that people were not being supported and taken seriously. And as I started to connect them, all these new opportunities opened up for me.

I did a ton of media. I started speaking professionally. I even got brought in to global companies to help them understand the next generation workforce. So it was an extraordinary experience.

Andrew: Now I want to intentionally get sidetracked for a moment here and find out how you got to be an authority on this space, and the reason I’m asking is I want people in my audience to become authorities in their own areas because if they are they’ll be able to get more customers, they’ll be able to get more partners, they’ll be able to get speaking opportunities which will expose them to more people. I’d like Mike B. in the audience, and Jang in the audience, and Moses and Dan and everybody else who’s listening to me to have that.

What did you do early on to become that authority?

Interviewee: This is a great question and kudos to you for bringing this up because I think a lot of people today, they see that they have the ability technologically to be broadcasted out to all sorts of people, but they don’t take the concept of expertise seriously.

I think we all have to hold each other to higher standards. That said, what I did was when people started…when a magazine like U.S. News & World Report calls you a guru, I freaked out. Most people would’ve been like jumping up like crazy, but I freaked out because I was like wait a minute, I’ve met a lot of people who are in their forties and fifties who are real serious experts who’ve been doing this for 20 years.

And here I’m this kid. So, to me I really started to dissect what is it that makes an expert? How do I walk into the industry conferences? And how…

Interviewee: Of the most powerful people in the industry and I accepted them, and I cover this in our book to walk people through how to do this, but I broke out what are the things that they’ve done and what do I need to do. And there are a couple key things that you see in experts in any industry. They write books, they start organizations or companies, they volunteer in their communities, they get involved in civic organizations, they often publish now in blogs or podcasts. They build a platform. They connect themselves with other professionals. They (0:15:33.1 INAUDIBLE). They travel. They meet the leaders. They get mentored by the big people. They make an impact in their industry and they get real world experience. It’s not just aboutÖI didn’t write a book having read three other books and said, ‘Hey, let’s write a topic because it’s hot.’ I literally have met with tens of thousands of young people. I’ve traveled over a million miles around this world to work with this next generation workforce. There’s almost no one who can say that. But I was always so sensitive about being young and being called an expert that I wanted to be taken seriously and I wanted to pack that with as much substance as possible.

Andrew: Putting information out there, starting groups, I could see that actually is a pattern here in my interviews with people who have become leaders in their space, who people do look up to, and the first book that you wrote was 1997, a book called No Experience Necessary. And now I understand one of the reasons why you wrote itÖwhat was the message you were trying to get out with that book?

Interviewee: I was trying to show young people that you don’t have to wait to be older to do things of significance with your life. And if you’re serious and you want more, it’s out there for you. You just have to understand a few tricks and tools and strategies. And that’s what I did and trying to teach people the fundamentals of business. And then the other part that I love the most about the book was in that and The Young Entrepreneurs Edge, the last section was all about life as an entrepreneur and very few people talk to you about how to launch a family PR campaign if your family doesn’t believe in what you’re doing or how not to get carded when you’re entertaining clients or how to build substance and expertise. There are so many things you just don’t know what you’re a kid because you’re balancing between partying with your friends or stopping and doing your business. And so I really started to get at those issues, those daily issues that we all struggle with because entrepreneurship is not a bed of roses by any means. It’s really, really hard. But when you’re young you have no contacts and so I wanted to drag people out and say, ‘Try it. Test it. See what it’s like and your whole entire world is going to change forever.’

Andrew: You know what actually? That’s interesting because you’re right. When someone is 24 years old, they can still very often pass for 20 which is underage for drinking and even if the waiter isn’t sure, if the waiterÖeven if the waiter is sure that they’re 24, they still have to card them and that’s an embarrassing thing to happen when you’re trying to convince somebody to buy from you. So what do you do? What was your advice?

Interviewee: One of the thingsÖwell I used to say in that book, it was a little bit a while ago, but I always said dress professionally, make sure that you carry props. Carry a briefcase, not your backpack from school. Have a nice pen. Bring a copy of The Wall Street Journal or a magazine or something. Set the stage so that you look a little more professional. You’re right. The worse thing in the world is when you’re trying to schmooze business and all of a sudden someone calls you out on how old you are and before you’ve gotten a chance to really show how incredible you are and what you can really do, all of a sudden it’s like oh my God. You’re 15. You’re 19. You’re 22. How could you possibly be sophisticated enough to help me? But that’s why I think you’ve got to establish yourself when you’re young very quickly with people. Build thatÖmake sure your biography is substantive. Make sure you make your connections through other reputable sources. Make sure that people can Google you and find really good stuff. Then I think it’s a lot easier. When they do find out how old you are, it becomes kind of funny but they’re not going to dismiss you for it.

Andrew: Tanya in our audience says she just got carded today and she’s 27 years old. So it’s an issue when you’re young.

Interviewee: Yeah, don’t worry Tanya. I’ve gotten carded in my thirties. Don’t worry.

Andrew: Alright, let’s talk about the second book, Young Entrepreneurs Edge. What was the purpose there? What was yourÖ.what was the message that you wanted to get out to the world?

Interviewee: That was taking things to the next level. I had started the first book with Princeton Review and we did a nice job with it. I wasn’t thrilled with the packaging and the branding and it was my first book. I knew absolutely nothing like most people who write their first book. But we moved over to Random House and did a massive update on the book and it was actually a next generation of the first book. And so we just got a lot more sophisticated. Technology was starting to become more advanced. There were a lot of branding and packaging comments and things like that that we had to talk about. WeÖI brought in a lot of stories. By then there were a lot of very cool, young entrepreneurs who were building multi-million dollar companies, and so we started to profile them and interview them and get feedback and that’s —

Jennifer: That was taking things to the next level. I had started the first book with Princeton Review and he did a nice job of it. I wasn’t thrilled with the packaging and the branding and, you know, it was my first book. I knew absolutely nothing like most people who write their first books. But we went up to Random House and did a massive update on the book and it was actually a next generation of the first book. And so we just got a lot more sophisticated and technology was becoming, you know, more advanced and there were a lot of branding and packaging comments that we had to talk about. We brought in a lot of stories. By then they were very cool entrepreneurs in multi-million dollar companies. We started to profile them and interview them and get feedback. And that’s, you know, a lot about how the third book came about.

Andrew: Before we get into that, did that third book happen before WYSN? Or did you first come up with the idea for WYSN and then create the book?

Jennifer: Well, actually, how you described it in the interview, how you wrote about it, it was really just that. The book spawned a company. But we did strategize the whole thing all at one time. So, what happened is that my partner and I – the dot.com world had just crashed – He was in the restaurant industry. I was running Young Entrepreneurs Network. I had two or three million dollars coming from a big bunch of capital firm and the week the market crashed the VC firm went out of business. All of his financing crashed and we’re like “what are we going to do next?” Like everyone else. We decided to go off to a beach in Belize and figure out what we were going to do with our lives. And, granted, we were really lucky to be sitting there instead of going to pink slip parties. But, you know, being the entrepreneurs it was time to reinvent ourselves yet again. So, we’re sitting on the beach and I remember the sun was setting and I promised him I wouldn’t talk business. But the whole we’re talking and he said, “Jen you have such an amazing platform, you’ve been in front of hundreds of millions of people, you have all these followers all over the place. But you’re focused on entrepreneurship. And many more people need the messages that you’re talking about.” So, on the plane we were talking about what if we called the young and successful. You know I had all these media contacts and everything and I had done two books already. By the time were were sitting on that dock we were thinking “God, with all the millions of people right now struggling or trying to figure out what they want to do or just placed out of their jobs – Who’s teaching us how to be successful at an early age? And we were big readers of the Steven Cubbys and the Robert Kiyosaki and Anthony Robbins and everyone and all of those guys were starting to write books that were – not dumbed down – but starting to target the younger demo. So they were doing This and That for Teens and This and That for Young People and we said “Let’s build something that is all about the young people. It has all the references, the cultural information. We’re the same age anyway. Let’s show them what it actually takes to be in your twenties, your teens, your thirties and knock it out of the ballpark regardless of what industry you’re in. And so we were loving this idea and Scott’s really like the big, crazy strategist – he’s always wanted to own one of these billion dollar companies – and so he started talking about how this could become a major multimedia company. And we were looking at Martha Stewart and Omni Media and all that. We stayed on that dock for like six hours until the sun went down and we both looked at each other and said “We need to go home.” We were supposed to spend a week in Costa Rica after that, you know, doing kayaking and all sorts of things and we just said “Screw it.” This could be the biggest thing we’ve ever done in our lives, we’re going home. And we flew home the next morning, realized that the best we could build a major media company without a lot of money, because we just didn’t have a lot of money, was to do another book and make that book a best seller. And we figured if we did that as a platform – doing a book is not easy. I mean anyone who has been there knows it. It’s like the worst term paper you’ve ever done times fifty. And so we figured that if we came up a branding, the packaging, the positioning and the messaging really came home with people we’d have the foundation we needed for an on-line resource to help people globally. And we got connected to the right people and we sold the book into Simon and Shuster the first day, which is crazy, and the book was their first in twenty years to hit the New York Times Best Sellers list before cut date and that was how we started YSN and built this whole on-line network. And there was a lot of other stuff that happened too.

Anthony: Yeah, I want to dig into that. What you were referencing earlier was the post where I said you were going to be an interview here on mixrd and I said you were the entrepreneur who bootstrapped a business by writing a bestselling book. And in our pre-interview you talked about how it didn’t just happened that you ended up having a bestselling book. You really thought through the process. So, let’s talk about how you did that. Excuse me.

Jennifer: No worries. Like anyone who – you got?

Anthony: No, go on please.

Jennifer: I think that like anyone who writes a first book or starts a first business you’re really – you really don’t know a lot about what’s going on. What we did was look at the anatomy of what it takes to be a best seller. Cause we knew that if you can put billions of dollars into building a brand you can get a lot of media attention if you do something good and significant. So, we started to talk to – we went to the bookstore for example – and we looked at all the books in the genre we were looking at and tips for anyone who is looking to write a book – go look at the acknowledgement. Look at who all the best authors in your industry thanked. They will publish with the same people. They will thank the same publicists. They will thank the same attorneys. They will have the same friends reviewing their book and we created a map of the universe of all the best sellers and the really good books that helped people get to the next stage in their career.

minute 25 to minute 30

Interviewee: ÖWe found those key people who made all the difference in those projects. Then, we started realizing, ‘Okay, there are books like Chicken Soup for the Soul, biggest selling book in history next to the Bible.’ Those guys were cranking out a whole franchise. They started doing a lot of seminars and workshops teaching people about how to build books and all that. So we went to everything they did, we found all the new entrepreneurial people who talked about packaging content and everything.

To be totally honest, I wasn’t all about monetizing content, I would just want to help people for so long. I still do, but a lot of what I saw was kind of cheesy; but at the same time, it taught us about the publishing world. Because I have the platform of having worked with Princeton Review and Random House, we went right in to Simon & Schuster and they had created the genre of self-help, really. They wanted to make their list younger. So, with the platform I had and all the entrepreneurial ideas we had, they said, ‘We’re going to bank on you, guys.’ So, we got the book sold in, we did a crazy, crazy job. We were at Kinko’s until four in the morning on dozen of nights getting this package together to present to Simon & Schuster. We used to bring them McDonald’s at three in the morning so they put our jobs in front of other people. So, by no means were we like living it up as we were [xx].

Andrew: So, I could see now, you do all your homework, you get in front of Simon & Schuster, they say, ‘Yes, we’re going to publish your book.’ How do you get people to buy it? I’ve done interviews with authors here who were really excited for the first few weeks that their books come out. They’re eager to do interviews and eager to talk about it, and for months afterward, they’re depressed. I didn’t understand why they didn’t want to talk about their books after that initial rush. Until I had a one-on-one conversation with an author who said, ‘You know, what happens is we think that the publishing company is going to promote the hell out of our book. They’re going to make us into superstars and they’re going to, at least, give the world a chance to buy our books, and they ignore it. We don’t want to talk about it afterwards because we’re so upset by what happened.’

So, that’s the common story, you had a different story. How did you get people to even know about your book, let alone buy it?

Interviewee: I can’t say we had a different story. We were a lead title of Simon & Schuster, which is a big deal, we’re working with the top people there. But just like everyone else, if you’re not a multi-million dollar author already, you’re not getting the best of their resources and their time and energy, and that was really hard for us, too. One of the things that we realize is that it’s kind of hard to be very entrepreneurial. On one hand, no one’s going to know about you if you don’t come with the marketing force, a marketing plan and a massive amount of ambition and connections and platform. But, if you do too much and you bug them too much, you become high maintenance and a pain in the butt to them.

So, it’s kind of a hard balance to run, but the reality is the stuff that we did to get on the bestsellers’ list was stuff that we did not, stuff that they did. Being with them, we got distribution, which is the biggest thing in the world. They put us in all the publications and things like that. But, I got to say, the big publicity that really knocked it over the wall was mine, the events that we did or the things that we did. So, I was networking and building relationships with journalists for years. I was sourcing hundreds of journalists before I even got to that stage of writing the book.

I was at a cocktail party with the Editor of Cosmo, and she’d interviewed me a few years before, but I stayed in touch with her. She said, ‘Tell me what you’re doing, you’re doing this book, whatever. Let’s do something when it comes out.’ Cosmo writes about sex and about relationships and stuff like that, and I’ve got in columns in Cosmo before that are like this long and a page that this big. I got a four- or five-page article at Cosmo, and they call me the Career Doctor and I went through all these scenarios of challenges young people were having in their careers. That came out the month that we launched the book. It came out when we launched the big campaign online, to get everyone who’d followed us through all these years to go out and buy the book, to talk about it. We donated a ton of books to non-profits.

Then the other huge thing that we did, we had gotten a six-figure advance from Simon & Schuster, which, again, is very unusual when you’re still early. But, we did a 10-city tour and we launched parties and we called it the summer of success store. We brought out the coolest, hippest, neatest, most ambitious young people in cities all across the country, and we hired an event planner who was real cool. We went to LA, we did our launch party in Los Angeles. We had a thousand people show up at our launch party at this amazing club in downtown LA. Then we did New York, we had 600 people in Manhattan, we went to the Hamptons. We even had Tara Reid and, I think, someone else. Carson Daly was there at that party.

Interviewee: …and organizations and everything. So I became a very valuable source to them. So let’s say a journalist calls me and says I need a really cool, young entrepreneur who’s doing video interviews with cool people online. Most people would say yeah, you should interview me because I’ve done that, but I would say no, talk to Andrew at Mixergy.

Andrew is amazing, he’s worked with all these cool people, here’s his email, let me send you an intro. So I became a resource to them and that’s been one of my big secrets with building media attention, that as I did try to build expertise of real substance I became an information source to journalists.

So in a lot of cases they were writing about me, but in even more cases than I’ve been written about, I’ve given them great sources, and along the way I’ve made a lot of friends as a result. Because can you image? I went to Blog World this year and I write for Huffington Post on the side, I got some of the busiest people in the blogging world in Huffington Post for the first time.

So it’s like I’m doing it because I want to put great information out there for people that helps them, but at the same time I can do a lot of good things for people who are building their brands too. Even if it’s someone who’s really successful like you who’s doing Mixergy.

Andrew: Well, thank you. I think someone in the audience asked how did you even start getting those relationships with the journalists? Why did they start calling you, Jennifer, and why aren’t they calling them yet?

Interviewee: Oh, for sure. The biggest thing is networking. I would go to entrepreneurial conferences all the time. I’m a big conference person, I have a wall of conference badges that would make you laugh. So anyway, I go to conferences and journalists go to conferences. They go to sessions. And anytime I would meet someone I would sit and talk to them. I’d just build a relationship with them. It wasn’t about oh, you work for this magazine, can you write about me? Journalists are people, they’re business contacts, they can be friends of yours.

If you treat them like people and networking just becomes part of what you do on a daily basis to enrich your life and others, people start to like you, they start to talk to you. Ask some questions about what kind of things do you write about? How long have you worked there? What are you working on now? Is there something I could ever help you with?

And then they say well, I was kind of thinking about doing something like this. Then you say wow, I have great sources. I could get data for you. If you need any profiles, I know lots of people. If I just pitched myself again, my relationship would’ve been limited. But instead, I was a wealth of information with journalists, and I still am to this day, so they call me when they need something. Sometimes I get in and sometimes I don’t, but that’s not a tit for tat kind of relationship.

Andrew: Another thing you said that I wrote down was you had followers who then went out and bought the book, and then you got them to promote it to their friends. How did you get that initial followership? I don’t even know if that’s a word. How did you get that initial audience and how did you talk to them?

Interviewee: Well, followership was from doing everything I’d been doing since I was 19 years old. Remember, I’m 19, I’m starting an online community. So I had people who knew me who knew I was a champion for them. When I wrote in magazines or I did speaking engagements at colleges or whatever I did in the early days, I was helping people with their careers.

So when I kept these online communities I just kept gathering people together and connecting them with others. And I have people to this day who still follow me from 10, 15 years ago.

Andrew: How do they follow you, do they subscribe to a mailing list? I mean, what communication system do you have?

Interviewee: I started with like speaking engagements of course. So I’d go speak at conferences and people would run up to me and say oh, my God, I say you speak last time, or I read your book. So they read the material you put out, they come to conferences and events that you do. If you do tele-seminars or things like that…like a lot of people ask me to come and be on their tele-conferences and stuff like that. So they’ll learn about me there.

So of course I’ve learned as we all have over the years, you have to leverage online tools. I gave a lot of people business cards. I’ve literally gone through cases and cases of business cards, and I have banker boxes full of business cards myself at this stage.

So it’s a lot of one on one. It’s a lot of people calling, a lot of people visiting, a lot of people seeing you at the conferences. And of course now I’m on Twitter, I’m on Facebook. I’ve always had bulletin boards or online communities so people could follow that way.

So you know, I have a good 25,000 people right now online, no actually almost 200 kinds of industries [?] who use YSN to stay connected to us and the things that we’re doing, and other people that we surround ourselves with.

Andrew: Earlier I thought I heard you use a word, was in mung?

Interviewee: What was the context?

Andrew: That’s one of the things you use to get people to read the book. I didn’t want to interrupt you because you were… Sorry?

Interviewee: No, that’s OK, I didn’t…I don’t know.

Andrew: It’s okay.

Interviewee: It was just media. A lot of connections. A lot of high profile people. We did a lot of deals with non profits. So I’d say to someone like Andrew, ‘Here are five non profits that help young people that we support. Andrew, if you could go buy a book or buy two or three for friends but if you’re interested in buying ten, buying 20 we’ll donate it for you to a network that teaches young people how to be entrepreneurs.’ And a lot of people did stuff like that so they bought in bulk which helped also.

Andrew: All right. Last bullet point here that I wrote down is secret sauce. I’ve talked to investors like Paul Graham who cranked out dozens of companies, Paul Graham specifically, crank out dozens of companies. I talked to the people who he backed. I said, ‘What’s his formula?’ He doesn’t have a formula. And I’ve talked to others who’ve built multiple businesses here at Mixergy and I’ve tried to figure out what their formula is and they don’t have a formula. How are you able to get a formula when these guys don’t follow a formula themselves? When the most accomplished people don’t have one?

Interviewee: It’s one thing for one person, even a very successful person, to analyse their own path, to look at their own history. It’s very hard for some of us to see what we’ve done and be able to look at it objectively. What we did that was different is — remember, this is 17 years now I’ve been working with young, successful people. So not only have I had my own experiences of starting multiple businesses and doing all these things and writing about everything that I’m doing all the way through but I’ve sat down and worked with and talked to and helped hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of people, at a time through these processes. So what we really tried to do is look at what are the distinguishing factors. I don’t…I’m not going to say one size fits all or one system fits all but we absolutely saw there were a series of tactical strategies that people use, whether they know they’re using them or not, that do separate them. It’s the network that they built. It’s how they package and position themselves. It’s whether they have a compelling message. It’s whether they understand how to dissect industries. Whether they’re good at opportunity recognition. Whether they have those core entrepreneurial skills to make something happen out of nothing. It’s the communication ability, to broadcast your message out and to have people follow you and listen respond to you want to listen. It’s that special ability to be a leader and have someone respond to you and want to join you. There are all these different things. And we started to write about all of that stuff and it got such an incredible response when we did it in articles or speeches that we put it in this book. And event his new Fast Track program that we just launched. I believe I can turn around people’s life around, their career around, in hours. I’ve done it hundreds of times now. And so for me I just want more people to know how to do it. I think career centres should be teaching this. I think teachers should be teaching this. I think parents should be teaching this. So there is a way you can build your success methodically and strategically. And I think all of us [INAUDIBLE] happy and successful as a result.

Andrew: I wrote down a note to come back to talk about Fast Track and how you can turn people’s careers around in hours. But I’ve got to ask a question that Jang in the audience asked, Mixergy’s producer asked earlier. She said, ‘Have you had any challenges? Any major setbacks?’ Because so far it looks like…can you talk about one of them?

Interviewee: Oh my God. I’ve had so many challenges you have no idea. There are days I can barely get out of bed in the morning because I’m so exhausted, depressed, angry, angry at the world. Talk about setbacks, okay? I’m sitting on a company right now that we’ve raised over $5 million with our business right now. We have a very substantial business. We’ve split off three other spin off companies from YSN that are all b-to-b. Talk about setback and challenges. I’ll give you two examples. The week that the market crashed I had spent…I had just spent a year trying to survey young people in 50 countries about their career aspirations. I flew to Singapore, I flew all over the place. I sat with these kids from Nigeria and Azerbaijan and Lithuania and had them fill out these multiple page surveys. Spent $25,000 doing this whole campaign that a lot of people laughed at me about because no one has information on the next generation workforce. I got to New York. I was booked on Reuters, on Fox, on CNN, on all these different shows. And what happened? The day before I was booked the market crashed. I sat in New York with…waiting for the media guys to say, ‘Wait until the media cycle changes.’ We’re talking about the crash, we’re at Wall Street, we’re doing Lehman Brothers going out of business this week. We’ll get you…we’ll try to get you in tomorrow. Tomorrow came; we’ll try to get you in tomorrow. Tomorrow, tomorrow. I did the biggest research and the only media play I got that week was all about teaching young people who had just lost their jobs what to do to jump back in.

Interviewee: And the only media play I got that week was all about teaching young people who had just lost their jobs what to do to jump back in. Did I get any play on my global study which had never been done by the biggest institutions in the world? 50 countries I have data on.

The next great thing, OK this is funny. Talk about subfacts, we filled out this global opportunity system to help, like eHarmony for careers technology which we actually built. We spend millions of dollars building it and we, I spent two years courting 70 Fortune 500 companies Synthesco, Unilever, Cargill, Walmart, the biggest employers in the world. We were testing the system, I had thousand of young people coming in to be, we matched them, their values, their drivers, everything and the market crashed. And all of recruiting stopped. All of the contacts that we had spent two years building, couldn’t, wouldn’t even return phone calls any more because their departments were being demolished. Our guy who had build two years of relationships with Walmart, they had 2.3 million employees, they went from 70 people in their HR team to five. Where are we on the totem pole about recruiting the next generation then?

So, that’s one of the bigger things that happened to us.

Andrew: Mike B. in the audience is saying did he hear right? Did I hear right that you spent millions of dollars to develop a piece of software?

Interviewee: Yes.

Andrew: Wow. That’s a heavy investment. And because the market turned, you’re not able to capitalize on it.

Interviewee: Yes, but don’t say not because we’re entrepreneurs and we shift when we have to. We all know, the market crashed, the recruiting died, and we said what can we do with this? We have millions of dollars invested and brilliant technology, what do we do? And we actually created a new company out of it that, now my partner runs, that’s called Humantelligence, and it’s next generation business analytic software for big companies. And now we are working with the biggest companies again in the world and have offices actually in Europe even, now. And we’re helping these big companies use this behavioural science that we created to make smarter decisions about, not just hiring, but lateral movement and growth and development and really investing more deeply in their workforce.

So, we spun off a whole other company that a lot of people are saying could be a massive, massive business. That’s that now and we have a big team and engineers and big office in L.A. and we’re continuing to grow that and I continue to focus on my love and passion which is helping all these young people in their careers.

Andrew: One of the viewers in the audience is saying Andrew, you should tell her about Wufoo for surveys. No need to travel the world and then he says ha ha.

Interviewee: Wufoo! I’ve heard about Wufoo but I really don’t know… Wait, tell me, tell me.

Andrew: They’re a sponsor of mine and they do online surveys that you can imbed on your site. A more serious version of that question is, why are you travelling instead of just doing these surveys online or getting somebody locally to do the surveys for you?

Interviewee: Wait, I missed your last part. Why do what?

Andrew: Why travel to do surveys? Why not have somebody local do it or just do it online?

Interviewee: Well, I do do a lot online and I can’t be on a plan, well, I travel 100,000 miles a year, but I can’t travel more than that, I’ll kill myself. But it’s, but travelling, if you’ve ever travelled you don’t, we’re in Europe, Buenos Aires right now. That’s the coolest thing in the world to me. When you, it’s one thing talk to people online and get to know them online and it’s another thing to be there with them. To go to their homes. To go out and to have dinner with them at night, you hear their hopes and their dreams and their aspirations.

I also do a lot of speaking. So I travel all over the world speaking about the next generation workforce to big global companies. But that opens up my life. I don’t want to be stuck in an office or behind a computer all day either. I got to go, last year, to, I keynoted at two big conferences for Starwood Hotels. They paid me a fortune, I spoke to all their biggest people globally and that was huge for my business too. I got also flown to Greece. I went to Athens first class. I got put in a huge suite with a butler. I spoke to 300 people, the top people in the travel and leisure industry. Now, if I want to go to the Four Seasons in Paris, I know the managing director, I want to go on a Crystal Cruise, I can go there.

So it’s the experiences you can have if you get to speak at a high level, or even just fresh conferences when you don’t have any money. I just got back from PubCom and I had the time of my life and that, I always thought those were all the nerdy programming guys who do webmaster world but it opened up my, a whole world to me. I got to meet extraordinary people and learn about technology in ways I never thought I would. So, I like to get out and experience things and experience people. And I think it’s just, it’s great advice for all of us. It just enriches your life

Andrew: Tanya, who earlier was wondering why I even asked you about your career or your start-ups in your teens…

Andrew [50:00]: Your start-ups in your teens, apparently we turned her around, we won her over, she that’s story is really inspiring. Ruby in the audience is saying, “Oh my God, millions,” and a few other people brought this up, “we’re just tossing millions here and millions there, you raise five million dollars is all this money you’re investing in software and other companies it’s all coming out of this five million?”

Interviewee [05:25]: We have private high net worth investors that have invested so that we’ve been building the technology businesses from there. Instead of going the venture capital root, which we haven’t done, you know, you retain a lot more equity in your company and a lot more control if you do it independently and that’s what we’ve done.

Andrew [50:41]: We talked about you bootstrapped the business by writing and publishing a best-selling book, how’d you make that into a business, how’d you transition there?

Interviewee [50:56] Oh, what happened from there?

Andrew [50:58]: Yeah. Now how do you go into, we now found out how you made the book into a best seller, how did you go to having that book to having that business?

Interviewee [51:09]: Yeah, well, the big thing is, a lot of people think if you write a book, you own a business. Not true. You write a book, you have a book. You write a book, you have a little bit of a platform but you don’t have a full platform. The way that people who write books make money, unless they have a lot of them or they self-publish them and sell massive amounts, is; they do speaking, they do consulting, they do special projects. I got hired as a spokesperson for some big brands that flew me all over the place and had me do media, you know, had me talk about campaigns they were working on.

[51:39] But, you have to make your money in other ways, your book becomes a high-end business card in a way. It becomes something that is a calling card for you, people read it, they fall in love with you, they want to follow you, it’s a door opener but it’s not always a money maker.

[51:59] So, my heart and soul are about being and Evangelist. I love helping people, if I didn’t have to make a dollar for the rest of my life I’d be thrilled because I could just focus on doing great things for people but that’s my fix and the way I can feed my fix, as an addict, is to work with big companies and I love it, I gotta say. It’s really, really fun to go into big multi-billion dollar companies and helping them build campaigns that help young people. That I love but it’s necessary, and this is weird for me to say this, but business is a necessary evil for me to do the things that I want to do. Or consulting and all that stuff.

Andrew [52:31]: I see, so if I’m hearing you right is that you wrote the book, the book gave you creditability to go do speaking engagements and do some consulting work and from that you started the business. How do you go from speaking and consulting to building YSN?

Interviewee [52:49]: Well, we were working with some very big media companies, as we have over the years, and because we have so much content and platform and I have a reputation in the market we’ve had a lot of big companies ask to acquire us. Content companies, publishing companies, things like that.

Andrew [53:07]: To acquire YSN?

Interviewee [53:10]: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew [53:11]: I’m sorry, I just want to go back to, before where we are today, how do you transition from writing this successful book to having a business, to having YSN.

Interviewee [53:22]: Well, here’s an example I did at one of the consulting projects that I did to make money while I was doing other things was a big campaign with Visa. We were brought into Visa to do this major campaign called Idea’s Happen that helped give 12,000 [AUDIO INTERFERENCE] young people $25,000 to build their dream. I got paid as a strategic consultant, we did events, we did campaigns, that got my name out in front of a lot of different people, so that was a huge, huge platform builder for us. That lead to projects with Bank of America, we helped them reposition their youth marketing. So, I started do a lot more things like that but along the way, you know, you get spokesperson person opportunities, that I got paid a lot of money to fly all over the place.

[54:06] I don’t know, it’s just one thing after another comes up, I mean, today, I’m really looking at how we take everything we’ve done to the next generation and build new types of revenue streams that enables me to focus on helping as many masses that I can. But the world’s changing so dramatically and just like we’ve had to do a couple times, you have to kind of reinvent yourself and figure out what comes next and, so, the technology’s phenomenal, I can reach people who don’t even have a telephone but have a Skype connection. So, I’m trying to look at the next generation while we continue to build the big B2B business.

Andrew [54:45]: I see, what’s the biggest part of your business?

Interviewee [54:52]: I guess you’d have to qualify how you define ‘big.’ It’s all subjective.

Andrew [54:55]: Oh, not big but what’s the, what’s the biggest part- [55:00}

Andrew: what’s the biggest part percentage wise, revenue wise of your business? Is it speaking still that represents the biggest source of revenue? Is it the online network for entrepreneurs? Is that that it?

Interviewee: No, no I don’t monetize the online network right now. I mean I am looking at ways to do it without being obstructive or annoying [laughing] but I tell you it’s more work we do at the company. You know when they hire me as a consultant to do workshops, to train their next generation people ñ ya know that’s fairly lucrative. And then on the other side, were getting big contracts with big global companies for the technology that we built.

Andrew: I see, and you build technology for them. Is that a major source of revenue yet, and I’m not going to get into specifics on the revenue, we talked about that before the interview. But is that already a big part of your businesses?

Interviewee: It’s big but it is literally is going to change. I mean if everything continues to go the way that we will, it will be changing exponentially over next few years. I think we’ll be adding zeros to the revenue numbers very quickly right now. So, it’s still I think in its infancy in some ways even though we are doing really well. We have a big office, we have a fulltime stuff, benefits, that kind of thing. That’s a lot more [xx] for building online communities but we’re growing steadily but also trying to be very lean and mean right now. So, ya know the market hit us like it hit everyone else. Ya know, we had multi-million dollar deals that were closing when the market crashed – that didn’t happen. So, we’ve been in sustaining mode too but we continue to fight and we continue to grow. And, I think very good things are happening. We have very powerful people in the world saying you know we think you’re sitting on a billion dollar company. So we’re just putting all our energy into it as best as we can.

Andrew: Really? Ok. Is YSN.com the main website?

Interviewee: NÖ , well, it’s my main website. The other stuff is under the radar right now [laughing]. We don’t have a lot public about the other companies right now. So, this is actually probably one of the only interviews I have ever done that even talks about it.

Andrew: Oh cool.

Interviewee: But, you’ll have to wait and see.

Andrew: Right now the business is.. it’s still you doing consulting and training and helping big corporations and you’re shifting now towards building software that stands alone and I guess software that you will be selling.

Interviewee: Well, I don’t want to say shifting. We’ve spun off. Three other companies [xx]. So I’m maintaining my focus on the YSN and I am going to take that to the next generation right now. But we have a big team of people here that’s really focused on the B to B side. So I’ll continue to be a resource to them as like the domain expert in recruiting and work force and getting people and all of that. And also, I typically am the one who controls what the consumer sees. So, I’m the one with the more intimate connection with the consumers and then there’s the technologists and the operations people and the partnership managers and all that.

Andrew: One more thing from my notes from earlier. I said that we’d come back to fast track and how you can turn around someone’s career around in hours, how do you do that?

Interviewee: Thank you. It’s really just taking the best of everything that we’ve learned. I created this program called fast track to success – thirty days to transform your life and career. Which, I swear to God, I will guarantee anything on my life that this will make a significant difference in someone’s life. It covers the big essential things like we talked about. How you brand yourself, how you package yourself, how you articulate what you’ve done, how find something that you love. All of these four things that anyone at any age and any stage of their business or professional growth can use it to fast track. So, it’s in its beta format right now. It’s an online program. We’re looking at different ways to deploy it ñ maybe one chapter a week or something. But I really,Ö I’ve done this enough where I can sit with someone and talk out what [xx] what motivates them. I can see the essence of someone internally and I’ve tried to systematize it. I’ve tried to write about it, I’ve tried to articulate it in other ways so I don’t physically have to be there to do it and if you look at the profiles on our site, you look at the assessment tool that we have, you look at the fast track ñ all of that is my effort to try to scale what we do, what I do in person to help people when I’m not there, help people help other masses of people.

Andrew: I’m looking at the audience here and what they are saying, I don’t have enough time to go through all your questions here ñ interesting comments though. Thank you Jennifer for doing this interview, if people want to follow up, if they want to connect with you, what’s the best way for them to meet you?

Interviewee: The best ways is onÖ I mean I’m on Twitter, I’m on Facebook, I’m YSNjen on Twitter and then also YSN. You can go to visit YSN, we will be making major changes with it in the next few weeks so I am really excited about that. But, just stay in touch with me online. I’m really easy to find and I love meeting people and I love hearing about your stories and I love promoting people that are wonderful like you. And thank you to everyone that has been listening and writing questions. It means a lot to me and I hope we can, I’ll continue talking.

Andrew: Me too. And thanks for coming here. Guys thank you all for watching.

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