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- [Announcer] Support for this program is provided by Tailor Brands, a business builder offering LLC formation, compliance servic... designed to help you start, manage and grow your busine... (dramatic music) (dramatic music continues) - [Narrator] You asked how it began.

Here you go.

(dramatic music continues) (dramatic music continues) - But what about the city of the day after tomor.. Say the year 2000, I think it would be completely different.

In fact, it may not even exist at all.

- People would typically compare the rise of the internet to the development of the printing press in the 15th century.

The scale is dramatically different, but the idea that suddenly for the first time people had much wider access to information than they'd had heretofore is similar.

(dramatic music continues) Something that's captured on a tablet or papyrus in Egypt can flow across space, right?

So it's not communication that's limited to just a few people who happen to be present when something is said and can hear it.

It also can be read today, when it's written tomorrow, a year from now, 30 years from now, a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now.

(dramatic music continues) With the advent of the printing press, this precipitates sort of an explosion of the availability of printed texts, which brings within reach of the common person access to a lot more information and the interplay of ideas that otherwise have been restricted.

- A world in which we can be in instant contact with each other wherever we may be, where we can contact our friends anywhere on earth even if we don't know their actual physical location.

- The advent of electronic communication made the communication experience richer and more immediate for people.

- A man who conducts his business from Tahiti or Bali.

- [Lee] Eventually with the television, all of this comes into the home.

- Any administrative skill, even many physical skill could be made independent of distance.

- In the industrial revolution, what you see is larger and larger industrial enterprises being built where more and more individual employees are plugged into specific roles within those factories.

People maybe became comfortable with the idea of working for a large employer and having the security that came from being a part of this large enterprise.

(dramatic music continues) But at the same time, you become very dependent on a single employer.

Perhaps you become constrained and that your role within that factory is very limited.

In the 21st century, we are increasingly empowered to create and do things on our own.

- [Arthur] They will no longer commute, they will communicate.

- The internet gave the broad powers of creativity to individuals and connected them with a potential audience spanning across the whole world, and pretty much everybody in this country has access to a laptop and the internet.

Along with that kind of creative empowerment comes perhaps a desire for more freedom and flexibility in other aspects of your life.

Work being just another part of your life that you fit into your schedule that you do on your terms.

(dramatic music continues) - When that time comes, the whole world will would've shrunk to a point.

- [Narrator] Here's what I found for "I need freedom."

- I went to school for architecture, thought I was gonna do that for the rest of my life, and then in 2008 I was called into my boss's office and he told me to sit down and then, you know, I started hearing on the news, all the stuff about the recession in 2008 and I finally realized that I was just part of those statistics.

When I got laid off, it was the worst thing that ever ha..

But when I think back now, it turns out that that was the best thing that could ever happen to me.

(soft dramatic music) - In a different lifetime, I was a school counselor, I was all excited, graduated college, spent eight years, got a master's degree, all that good stuff.

The housing market crashed, the budget cuts.

I was working in California at the time and I had lost my job.

I was just depressed.

The the first thing I sold on Etsy, it was like a really gaudy little like carpet bag purse that had like fake little jewels on it.

It was still really cute.

- It's a natural thing to want to go for the gold.

You're looking up the mountain towards the cool jobs, and then I got close to a couple of those and I had the one job but there were big meetings and there were, you know, having to get on planes and then sometimes, you know, a client yelling at you.

Even if I make less money, I wanna work for people that I want to be around.

- I didn't have control and freedom over my time, over my day to day.

I would be helping to share somebody else's voice, message, and mission with the world, which is good for them, but it wasn't good for me, and I realized that, that I really wanted to be spending my time and energy doing other things.

- I started off as a life insurance agent about 10 years ago.

Really nothing was working for me in traditional marketing, so then I found a guy online who was also a life insurance agent making money by, you know, generating leads online and selling life insurance.

One day he sent out an offer to all of the members of this insurance agent forum.

It was 500 bucks to develop a website for us.

I was in a lot of debt.

Of course I had to charge the $500.

Within a few months, you know, of putting my head down and working just really hard, I was able to start drumming up some traffic and leads from my very first website.

- But when I got the job I realized what probably a lot of people realize when they get something that they've been told they need to get.

It's like it's not as good as you .. Like I got five kids so this little $80,000 a year job isn't really all that it was made out to be.

And then I remember it was Halloween, we had this call.

On the way there, they're telling you it's two little Black kids, one of 'em screaming and his leg is like snapped in half.

You know, the kid ends up dying, obviously, he was breathing a little bit, you know, but he ends up dying.

My sons are that age, you know what I mean?

Two weeks later I just broke down crying randomly in the morning with my wife.

In the meantime I was coaching at a local high school.

They all say they want to go to the NFL and they want to go to college, but they had like zero idea about what it really l.. and so I took a few of these guys under my wing and just started mentoring 'em, would pick 'em up after school and take 'em to the gym to work out with me.

I have podcasts and you know, teaching people how to systematically achieve at a high level.

- This swipe and scroll culture, consuming a lot of things over a long period of time rather than one thing over a long period of time, I didn't really find that to be satisfying.

The idealistic side of me was like, yeah, I'm gonna create this podcast that actually defies all that and then we're gonna just sit down and we're gonna analyze one thing over the course of the season.

You kind of take a step back and realize that yeah, I just spent 13 hours of my life dedicated to one thing and hopefully I got a lot out of it.

- You really have to differentiate yourself from everyone else because it is more competitive.

People are like, well I gotta find some place, something with no competition.

No, the money is where the competition is.

What you have to be is different.

- I'm living in the middle of nowhere, and usually in the desert where fighter pilots can practice and train, and so I went to school to become a teacher, but you were competing with so many other military spouses for those jobs that by the time I got up the wait list, we had moved.

I decided to start a family blog where my family could see what we're up to because they only saw us a few times a year, and it turns out that my family never read it but a lot of other people did.

Without even realizing what I was doing, I ended up in the travel niche.

A year and a half to two years into it, other companies started asking me to write for them and I just said yes because I needed work.

- We bought our first house and we were really poor and we needed furniture.

Being the typical guy, I thought I can do this no problem, and I actually just sold that table 'cause we needed room for a new one and I sold it for over a thousand dollars.

I could go to school and have a bunch of college debt or I could just drop out right now and we could give this whole handmade business a go, so I dropped outta college.

After building that table and kind of falling in love with the process of woodworking and doing something with my hands, I thought, man, this is something that could be a really fun career.

- The people who do the best are the people that just don't give up.

They set a long-term timeframe.

Like they don't want quick wins, like quick win.. but if they don't get them, they don't get discouraged.

- I felt like there was something sort of missing in my life and so I was exploring all kinds of things including cooking and sewing and a lot of different creative endeavors.

But I sort of settled on painting and drawing is something that I was interested in.

I was pretty terrible at it at first, but I took classes and started making stuff pretty regularly.

I found that it kind of fed me in a way that my regular job didn't.

A couple years into it, sort of making stuff and sharing it on the internet, I started getting inquiries like, can I buy that thing from you or would you like to have a little show in my shop?

I was like, oh I guess I'm an artist.

I guess that I can maybe sell some of these things, still never envisioning that I would build what I have now.

- Our company favorite sock that like we're most well known for is like our goat socks.

I took headshots of my actual goats and put them on socks and so people think it's cool 'cause they have like actual names and stuff that go with them.

Nike came out with these new things called Nike Elite Socks and I was going to school every day and literally nine outta 10 kids was wearing like these socks, with the same exact socks.

Like they had four different colors and like that was it.

And then I sort of ran across it here on Instagram.

The socks that I had bought, they took two weeks to get here and the service was just awful, the quality wasn't very good and so I was like okay, someone could probably do this better and there's a huge demand for this.

I started printing socks basically outta my garage.

- [Narrator] A micro business is a business that operates on a very small scale.

- It's a small business, maybe just you or maybe you and a few other people, typically bootstrapped, that is usually built for the purpose of supporting yourself while you live a lifestyle that you prefer.

- [Narrator] Passive income is earnings derived from a rental property, limited partnership, or other enterprise in which a person is not actively involved.

- Money that can come in through investments for example or through a business that you own but don't actively operate on a day-to-day basis without a direct correlation to time input.

Not getting a high hourly wage, it's obliterating that link between time and money.

- [Narrator] Here's what I found for starting an online business.

To start an online business, you must find your passion, pick an income stream, find your audience, test your idea, begin, and grow.

Here's what I found for finding your passion.

- What is your superpower?

What do you have?

What ability do you have?

What's that thing that makes you unique that not anybody else or just a few others may not be able to compete with you on?

(keyboard clacking) - I understand what kids my age want to wear.

You could ask my parents to choose from 10 designs which one would do best and they would get one outta 10, like it would just be random, whereas like I'd be able to pick it out, like just because I can sort of tell.

- I was in a number of bands over 10 years and then I kind of stopped doing the band thing and I went to college for classical music composition and analysis and so when I got out of college the initial idea was to kind of merge those two worlds somehow, and the podcast idea came about about essentially applying classical music analysis to contemporary works and that was one of the ideas that was kind of a genesis of Dissect.

- I'm kind of a romantic and so I love to think about like the homes they've lived in and what they've seen over the years.

Like if you think about a hundred year old rug, like how many places it's been, and even thinking about the people that weave or knot them is really romantic to me.

- These hats here, I'm so proud of them because I have a big head, so there's a functional need that I like these hats, plus I just like dumb things on dumb hats.

These used to be on all your uncles or your first day of Little League.

Watermelon, I like watermelon so I made a hat.

I'm just stupid.

- What do you know a lot about, you enjoy doing so that you don't get burned out?

I think my blog has 1300 posts on it and you think, I bet there's not very many things that you enjoy doing that you would like to write 200 separate posts about doing.

- I think it up, I order it, I produce it, I negotiate it, I wait for it, I put it away when it gets here, we grab it, we ship it back out.

There's just some cool odd rhythm to that.

I like that.

- [Narrator] Here's what I found for picking an income stream.

- If you need cash sooner than later, I would choose freelancing and sharing your skills with others.

- There was one guy that pulled me aside and said, you have the work ethic, you can do this from your home, you can do this from a little space you rent, I'm proof, and he showed me kind of what his setup looked like and it's not like he was making lots of cash but he was taking his kids to school every day.

Like I think it was like 2010 or 11 where I did like 60 logos in a year, so that means like there's enough folders where like once a week something was happening.

I just saw him about two weeks ago, this guy.

But I got to say to him 13 years later it's worked out really good.

Thank you because that guy changed my life.

- [Narrator] A product is an article or substance that is manufactured or refined for sale.

- When we got married, we spent all this money on photogra.. My wife is, she's a crier, happy tears not sad tears, and we looked all over the place for a handkerchief to dry her tears for the photos.

Ultimately we found this place in China but they were a factory.

They weren't willing to sell us just one or two and so we ended up buying a couple hundred of these and we used maybe six of them, sold the rest on eBay, and they sold like hotcakes.

Three years later when she became pregnant, we got back in touch with this vendor and we were like, why don't we just try selling thes.. that sold really well three years ago?

And the rest is history.

We launched a site, ended up making six figures in profit, which incidentally was my wife's salary at the time and by the time her maternity leave was over, we had already replaced her income and she could quit with, you know, a peace of mind that we were still okay financially.

- I knew that I was good enough at that 'cause I had done it previously with basically every product you could imagine.

So I was like, okay, if I can do this with every other product, I can do it with socks and I'm gonna do it really well with socks.

If you have a product that works really well and you're able to put it in front of the right people and sell enough of them and like people start talking, then it's not a matter of, well I know this about business and that about business.

It's a matter of I know how to use this platform extremely well.

I've had experience doing this, I've had success doing this, and I can replicate this through different products.

- [Narrator] Information is facts provided or learned about something or someone.

- A digital product is something like an instructional course or a PDF ebook where it doesn't cost you anything to physically sell the product.

So once you've created it, designed it, it's a one-time cost of your time and maybe some design fees and then you've got really an infinite return on investment every time that you sell that.

- I also teach online classes.

I work with three different platforms and I also just started releasing my own classes on, you know, they're kind of like scrappy 'cause I film them myself, but I sell them off my own website so I make a hundred percent of the proceeds.

- When I was playing in the NFL, it wasn't necessarily the guys who were the biggest, fastest, strongest.

Everyone was big, fast, and strong.

The ones who stood out were the ones who were mentally to.. Like I remember the first client I did this with, her name was Alexis.

I would take her and her dad in the back of the gym after I got done training.

I would start to bring some awareness to the power of their thoughts and how to sort of go about this in a systematic way.

That was when I sort of decided, man, like I think there's a place for me, you know with this.

- [Narrator] To advertise is to describe or draw attention to a product, service, or event in order to promote sales or attendance.

- My goal ultimately when I did this wasn't to make money, but then I figured out I could make money and then when I became a single mom, I wanted to double that income.

You know, you get more page views, then you get more ad revenue.

- If you have a website and you have traffic, you can insert these advertisements that are then autogenerated on your website and then if people click on those ads, you get a little bit of money and some change.

The day that I installed AdSense, I had a number of people coming to my site already and then 15 minutes later I check and I had a dollar and 18 cents in my account and yes, I know you can go into your couch cushions or look under the seats of your car and probably find more than that, but it was one of the biggest moments for me.

- [Narrator] Affiliate marketing is a marketing arrangement by which an online retailer pays a commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals.

- You can develop an affiliate relationship with another company and they might have a product that would fit your audience's needs.

- Those companies will give you a link and you put that link on your website and if people click on that link and they purchase, then that company will give you a little bit of a percentage as a result.

- Amazon has an affiliate program so you get a percentage of any sale that comes from your blog or website.

It doesn't matter if they're buying a hammer or an air conditioner.

I mean I obviously don't write about hammers and air conditioners.

I write about other people's books or art supplies sometimes.

- [Narrator] Personal branding is the practice of people marketing themselves and their careers as brands.

- It truly is what people are saying about me when I'm not at the conference or the coffee meeting or the dinner party.

That's your brand at the very core, right?

- I was giving advice but I didn't put myself out there.

I wasn't like, oh, look at me, I'm Megan and like I wouldn't have said, oh, I'm the face of a brand.

I don't know who it was or how I finally came to accept the fact that I have built a brand based on myself.

- It goes beyond just pure reputation.

It's financial opportunities, it's obligations from a content creator perspective or a coaching or mentoring perspective and so on and so on as well.

- You come at it more as like a influencer in the marketplace before you actually become a merchant in the marketplace.

- [Narrator] Here's what I found for finding your audience.

- You use content but what really matters is audience.

Audience is how I've been able to build all these businesses.

- [Narrator] Digital content is any content that exists in the form of digital data.

Forms of digital content include information that is digitally broadcast, streamed, or contained in computer files.

- And you have to become what I call an audience architect instead of just a content creator.

You want to choose the audience you want to attract, not just deal with whoever shows up, but in order to attract an audience, you have to offer them something and that's where the content comes in.

(keyboard clacking) - I now also have a blog and podcast and that wasn't something that I started initially as a business.

I started it because I just, I had something to say, you know, I had some ideas that I wanted to share and I wanted to spread.

It took several years but eventually it started to grow legs of its own and it grew to the point where I was actually able to drop all of the freelance writing.

- You don't just wanna put out content that hopefully you'll rank in Google for, but content that's really gonna help somebody when they come to your site today or even five years from now, - You can casually listen to "To Pimp a Butterfly" and you'll get some surface level things and you might enjoy it as entertainment.

Me listening to Kendrick Lamar and feeling like I was missing something and also me feeling like I was missing something in the way that I was consuming led me to this format which was, okay, I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna spend an incredible amo.. with one thing that I know is trying to tell me something.

It struck me that why couldn't I do this on a podcast?

That's the easiest way to distribute it.

Like I in a million years would never have thought someone would be willing to listen to like a 13 hour analysis of a single album.

Season one of Dissect, for many, many reasons, changed my life.

- It's not the business necessarily that determines, it's the prospect, it's the customers.

The best advice is to start with one platform and one type of content that in your estimation is a foundational element of what your particular audience will want because people want information before they want to be pitched, right?

And if you don't provide that, just say click away and they'll go find someone who will.

Don't be boring, don't worry about saying the wrong thing.

Say the right things for the people you're trying to attract.

- [Narrator] Here's what I found for testing your idea.

- There were these two Mixergy listeners named Evan and Walker who moved into college, looked around and said the job site here in our school is just horrible.

It's a mess, it's slow, it's ugly, it makes it hard to find jobs, and they said we could do better, and it failed.

It just absolutely failed.

And I said, well, we were a little bummed, so we went out for a drink and we discovered that the favorite dive bar on cam.. was closing down and people were upset.

We created a t-shirt that essentially said "Save our Dive Bar."

So we put up a website and we said, anyone who wants this t-shirt should go and buy the t-shirt online, and once we get enough sales, we'll go out and print it and we'll give it out and people g..

But they actually bought, we made money with this thing, this little silly t-shirt site.

We noticed there were a lot of other organizations on campus and the problem was if they were having a club event, they wanted to print up t-shirts and sell them, but how many t-shirts do you print up?

And so we said, what if we create a website that lets you pre-sell your t-shirts?

This little website became something called Teespring.

Once they addressed the pain, they were able to get customers who are happy, who were satisfied, who were generating sales for them.

- [Narrator] Market research is the action or activity of gathering inf.. about consumers' needs and preferences.

- Places, literally creating a spreadsheet, listing all the different places where these people are.

Blogs, forums, communities, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, the whole lot.

Where do these people hang out?

The second column are gonna be the people, the influencers who have already earned the trust of that particular audience.

So these are the people who probably own those b.. or host those podcast episodes.

You want to understand who the top players are in this sp.. What products are already out there serving this audience, what are the price points?

How much are people paying for these things?

And just that exercise alone, which will not take you more than 20 minutes to do right now, will give you a good understanding of where your position in that space can be.

So this is where you wanna discover the plan.

The P-L-A-N.

The P stands for problems.

That's the thing you wanna know.

In this target market, what are the problems that your target audience has?

Does that align with the problem that your idea is solving?

Maybe it doesn't, in which case you would then adjust or then reconfirm whether or not that is a problem that you should actually be tackling or not.

Beyond that, you also have to start to understand the language that your target audience uses, and this is really important because you can have the best solut.. but unless you know how to talk about it, unless you can really relate to that target audience, it doesn't matter.

Those are things that you can then include on emails, on your sales page, when you have real conversations with people and you're actually testing this thing.

Anecdotes or stories.

I prefer to find real people who you can have a conversation with what their struggles are.

So I can, when I'm coming up with my solution, visualize them and hear them and put more effort and love into that thing that I'm producing.

And then finally, based on all that research, you want to come up with the need.

Well the need is the solution that you have.

Is that actually in alignment with the problems that you've discovered?

- [Narrator] A test market in the field of business and marketing is a geographic region or demographic group used to gauge the viability of a product or service in the mass market prior to a wide scale rollout.

- The truest form of validation, which is actually asking people to transact with you in some way, your email address or subscribing for a seminar or a webinar.. 'Cause let's say you go to this target audience and you say, hey, I'm providing this free workshop, sign up here, it happens on this date.

If you get zero people interested in that, well then that tells you something, right?

It tells you that maybe something needs to be tweaked or maybe the offer was wrong or there is something that happened that didn't go the way you expected.

Well at least you found that out now.

But if you do get people to subscribe or to join you on that webinar, well then keep going.

That's a great sign.

- [Narrator] Here's what I found for beginning.

(keyboard clacking) - You never wanna be the smartest person in the room.

If you are, you're in the wrong room, plain and simple.

You wanna be the dumbest person in every room you walk into.

- I haven't been woodworking very long and everyone's always like, man, how did you learn how to woodwork?

And I think it's crazy when people don't know how to do things in our day and age because we have this thing called YouTube and you can literally learn anything.

I'm sure if somebody came into my wood shop and watched me build something, they'd see 20 things I'm doing wrong, but the end product is right and looks good and is enjoyed, so I think that's all that really matters.

- If there is a problem that I'm experiencing, nine times outta 10, I can pick up the phone and talk to one of my friends or contacts that's already had a solution to that problem.

And if they can't help me, then I'm pretty sure that there's gonna be a book out there.

(keyboard clacking) - There's kind of these standard things you do when you start a business now.

You buy a domain name.

- [Narrator] A domain name is an identification string that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control within the internet.

It's your website name.

- When you're just starting out, you can get by with as little as probably less than $500 because you've gotta get hosting.

- [Narrator] Web hosting is an activity or business of providing storage space and access to websites.

It's where your website's data is stored.

- [Chris] You've gotta get a theme.

- [Narrator] A theme dictates the look and style of your website.

- [Chris] An email provider.

- [Narrator] An email service provider is a company that offers email services like collecting email subscriptions, building lists, and sending mass emails.

- All of these are really inexpensive, probably way less than you think, like hosting for example's like $5 or $7 a month for the lowest plans.

So even if you hire an attorney for a couple hours to review your terms and conditions and your privacy page, you could still get that for less than $500.

- When I was creating music, I loved putting together the packaging and picking out the right font for the cover.

Like that interest was always there for me and it kind of was a through line.

I knew I needed a great logo.

Social media was gonna be an important tool, not only visually, but just like community involvement.

- The other thing that most people are gonna wanna do is get a business license and probably a fictitious business name for their website name.

Less than a hundred dollars for both of those combined in most places.

- [Narrator] Here's what I found for growing your business.

(keyboard clacking) - I remember one time I was shopping at Amazon and then my kid like vomited in the bathroom and I just forgot about it and then Amazon sent me an email to remind me to complete the order.

You have to own your own customers because for our store I would say that over 30% of our customers are existing customers.

- My mailing list is by far one of my most successful ways in terms of driving revenue, which has been huge for me, and so like I'm consistently trying to like how can I get more people on my mailing list?

Like not only how can I get more people on, but how can I keep them on and like keep them continuing to purchase because at the end of the day, like, that's what you want is for these recurring customers and building those relationships because when you have someone who's purchased .. they're gonna come back a seventh.

- We do a giveaway, we give 'em a free book, ebook of wedding ideas.

Second email is like we introduce the company, tell them what we're all about.

The third email is like we introduce them to all of our products.

Initially we kind of email them every day and then it gradually tapers to once a week, and we basically send them craft ideas that they could do for their wedding or special event and interspersed within those are coupon codes if they haven't purchased.

If they start a checkout but haven't purchased within 48 hours, they get a coupon.

If it's even longer, they get a larger coupon just trying to save the sale.

Anytime they come to our site and they look at a product, they're sent an email with the exact picture of the product they were looking at as well.

We ask them to leave a review on our products, we ask them to take a photo with our products, and then once a month we'll send out an email campaign either with a coupon code or a piece of content, and whenever we blast the entire list, people always inevitably buy something.

And all these sequences that I'm talking about here, they're all automated.

Like we don't have to do a single thing.

(keyboard clacking) - We are on your norms, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube.

There's definitely one that sticks out as the one we see the most business from, and that's Instagram.

We try and post at least twice a day at the exact same time every day, and I actually have reminders on my phone that remind me, okay, you need to post now.

And they'll comment like, oh, that's my table you're working on!

Or oh I can't wait, it's looking so good.

Every once in a while you get buyers that are like, that's my table.

What are you doing?

That shows your buyers that you're not afraid to show the process.

We're not cutting any corners.

We're doing everything the right way.

You can see that quality and time is going into each piece that we make.

They can see that they're getting a piece th.. that we're spending a lot of time on.

- I don't want people to feel like I'm blatantly marketing to them, and I love the social media aspect 'cause it does make me feel connected to my customer, which is especially important for me because I don't just get to have an open door for people to walk through, so I feel like that is kind of my like little open door.

I try to respond to everybody's comments and interact with other people's pages and just create kind of an authentic connection.

- Like Twitter was probably the first social media channel I got on and you'll see that it's my largest following and a lot of that just has to do with time and consistency.

I would jump on and participate in different Twitter parties.

I have different systems set up to anytime I write an article, whether it's for myself or somebody else, I send everything to Twitter.

- One of the things that Facebook offers that Instagram doesn't is the shareability is so critical.

If you make something that a lot of people like, then it just gets shared exponentially.

- I take all my content and put it on Pinterest, 'cause I want people to be able to find it.

I have a lot of Las Vegas content.

I lived in Vegas for a couple of years.

They want to know where to go to breakfast and so they're reading about it, but then they'll see where it says, here's some super hot nightclubs, here's how to get a club promoter, here's how to, and so the next thing you know, they've clicked through to five different a.. - I call it marketing like a magnet.

So you want to attract the best and at the very same time you repel the rest.

I want to attract the people that do get me and understand me and what I can do to help them and further their life, and they're the people that will ultimately end up spending the most time with me.

(keyboard clacking) - Thinking of part of your job as marketing or of being a marketer is really important in getting comfortable with that as a business owner.

- [Narrator] Search engine optimization is the process of maximizing the number of website visitors by ensuring the site appears high on the list of search engine results.

- SEO is nothing more than reflecting back the language of your intended audience back to them.

I always tell people keyword research is necessary for SEO, but it's really market research.

- [Narrator] Keyword research is a practice of finding and researching alternative search terms people enter into search engines while looking for a similar subject.

- You're getting a look inside how people think about a topic and the words that they use, and now that we're switching to natural search, voice search, it's even more organic.

You know, people are now, instead of keywords, they're phrasing things in the form of a question.

- I would say about 50% of my traffic comes from Google or search engines, whether it could be Bing, it could be Yahoo.

They're still around and they send a surprising amount of traffi..

I've had to educate myself on, you know, okay, I wrote this article, but how do people find it?

And man, if Google will pick it up, then that's great.

I only have a handful of articles on the first page of Google, but I have hundreds of articles within the first three to seven pages of Google.

- [Narrator] A social media influencer is a user on social media who has established credibility in a specific industry.

- A-list sluggers, there's like a hundred, 150 of 'em,..

In terms of influencers, there's like 60 in this market, 90 in that market.

Like there's so many of them, but they all have such influence over that cert..

They have more influence over a certain type of demographic.

They have like a team of like 40 people worldwide now.

They're like these influencers in sort of the sneaker community.

I send them socks, they take cool pictures and post about 'em and like basically link back to me.

Now when you're getting blasted out to 150,000 people on a weekly basis, people come to you and like, okay, this guy's legit, this guy approved him.

Like, I like this guy.

So that's something I've been using as a tactic from the very start.

- I had a design, a design sponge feature I think almost three years ago was like on my kitchen makeover.

I still get traffic from that blog post.

- I have to find out where these people are and I have to get them to hear my voice because I feel like that's an asset of mine.

I don't have any products out or anything yet, so I need to get my voice out there.

I need to get my message, and that was guest podcasting.

I appeared on all the shows I could and I cold emailed 'em, you know what I mean?

Just like, hey, I'm the Niyi Sobo, former NFL running back, now mindset consultant.

Here's what I can do for your audience.

Here's why I think I'll be cool in your show.

- Part of what I have to do every day is like create stuff that's gonna sell what I do.

(keyboard clacking) - It's par for the course.

When you first start running ads, you're .. but they lose that initial amount of money and they give up and they just say it doesn't work.

- Being able to find and like fine tune ads, whether that be like Google AdWords or Facebook ads to turn them into direct profit.

I know that my ad's good enough that if I put $1 and I'm gonna get $3 back.

It's one of the toughest things to do, but having the ability to do that and know that you can market basically any product to anyone in the world through those different like mediums is super important and be able to understand how that works, and if you're able to do that, you can sell basically anything.

You're able to test different ads, right?

You put very minimal amounts of money into each one, sort of testing the engagement on each one.

So if you can develop an ad to a point and keep testing it and testing it and fine tuning it to a point where you're putting money in and you're getting a dollar more profit or even a cent more profit out of it than you're putting in, then you can just dump unlimited amount.. and more profit comes out.

It's literally just like a hamster wheel, like you keep running on it.

The problem is it's extremely difficult to develop those initial ads and actually develop the ones that are gonna be profitable and successful.

Like I know for me, one picture from a different angle can do 15 times better than the same picture from a different angle.

So it's like knowing exactly what they wanna see and be able to maximize upon that and then reach new customers is super important.

(keyboard clacking) - I have the rug in my hand, however that came to me.

From there, I take it to my studio and I prep it to be photographed.

I usually take a video, a little iPhone video and kind of think about what my social media post of it is going to be.

After I edit the photos, I list it online, you know, the description, measure it, I list the colors, and the listing process probably takes maybe about, you know, 20, 25 minutes.

It sells, I look it over, I make sure it's everything I promised it to be.

I clean it, I always vacuum everything before I ship it out.

I write a thank you note, I roll it up into a little rug burrito and I wrap it in Ty Vex, which is what I use to ship the rugs out.

Print a shipping label, stick it on, load everything into my car and then I drop it off at the post office.

- After we like press the design onto the sock, whatever design we're pressing on there, then they come through and get packaged, and then downstairs we also have sort of like a shipping center where we go through daily.

We're shipping 40 to 50 things a day, depending on like if they're bulk orders.

Sometimes we ship to like Amazon to get the little prime button, so some of our inventory's there.

You're able to offer free shipping.

Usually if your product's even more expensive, people will end up buying it because it says free shipping.

It's just sort of a psychological thing.

When you do charge shipping, make sure it's as cheap as it can be and it's as fast as it can be.

All that sort of like just making the customer process for them as seamless as it can be has been like my one big thing that I've been successful with.

- [Narrator] To start an online business, you must find your passion, pick an income stream, find your audience, test your idea, begin, and grow.

You asked about endurance.

(keyboard clacking) - I'd been working 15, 16 hour days for about three years.

On the outside, I could be deemed a success, but I was an utter wreck physically, mentally.

But really that was also the year when I truly identified myself with somebody suffering from what is now known as superhero syndrome, and that is believing that as the entrepreneur, you must do everything.

- If you're good at, you know, singing, then sing, you shouldn't be managing your backend and setting up your microphones if you're Beyonce, right?

- Delegate your weaknesses.

Work on what you're great at.

You've only got so many hours each day where you can actually work.

So why would you be working on stuff that you're no good at?

I sat down and I figured out all the different things that I hated doing, the tasks that I was struggling to do and perform myself, and that was a tough one because I had superhero syndrome.

I thought I could do everything, right?

And then the last kind of list I put together was all these things that I thought that as the business owner, I shouldn't actually be doing myself, and that was a big one as well because I might've enjoyed doing those tasks, I might've been very good at those tasks, but the bigger question was, as the head honcho, should I have actually been doing it?

- Yeah, I can't take half of my day to try to make a small change on a website.

- Keeping track of spending and taxes and all that.

- Paying somebody else to do something can be actually a better use of money than doing it yourself because they're gonna do it faster, they're gonna do a better job, it's gonna help you in the long run.

- And by the end of 2010, I'd hired eight people to ultimately replace me in the business.

Not two or three, eight.

So it just goes to show you how much of a micromanager I really was.

- All I do is record my podcast episode and my team comes in, they edit it, they upload it to my media host, they schedule it out, they create the blog post, they do all of those things so I can just focus on the interview itself, then go off and do something else.

- Is it better to make a ton of money and not have free time to spend with our child?

And we hired first one employee and then two and then three.

And it was hard because employees are expensive, especially now with taxes and healthcare and everything that you have to consider.

But it's freed us up to be able to spend a lot of time as a family.

Now we can go on vacation and things keep running and our employees are doing it and yeah, we're not making as much money, but we're not losing money when we close down for vacation, so there's a definite give and take there.

(keyboard clacking) - People set grandiose goals and then they quit too quickly, and the reason why is 'cause we just want everything fast.

You should set a massive goal, but you need to break it down into really small, fragmented pieces.

Something literally that you can do, you know, this week.

So I would break it into quarterly and then down to weekly goals.

Otherwise it's just gonna be too overwhelming.

- It's GPS.

What's the goal?

What's the purpose?

And then my strategy.

Then I figure out what actions need to be taken.

(keyboard clacking) - Probably for the first few years I would have long nights.

I mean you're talking, I would be up until midnight, one o'clock, we were in a lot of debt, I had a newborn baby, and I worked on that thing day and night until it was successful.

- I think it's actually easier to start a business while working full time than it is to just quit cold turkey.

Because when I started my business while working full time, I didn't have that much time, so I had to plan very efficiently.

- [Narrator] The Pomodoro technique uses a timer to break down work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length separated by short breaks.

- That's essentially where you're going to set a 25 minute timer and you're going to have one goal to focus on and one goal only.

You're gonna start the timer.

You're gonna start to see the first few seconds tick off, so your brain clicks into that mode of, okay, I have 24 minutes and 57 seconds left.

Let's get down to business.

You will focus and you will get X done in 25 minutes, so you need to set those time bound parameters and that's what Parkinson's law is all about, is that tasks will expand to the time allotted, so allot time to your tasks.

- If you have time to do one thing a day, then Monday do Twitter, Tuesday do Facebook, Wednesday do your blog post.

- [Narrator] The Pareto principle states that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the origins.

- What's the 20% that's working?

And let's double down on that.

Let's amplify that.

What's the 80% of things that I do that take up most of my time, but provide very little results?

Let's get rid of that and keep doubling down on your 20%.

So I might have doubled down in the last five years, 10 times on my 20%, so now I'm hypothetically at my top 2%.

Those are the only things that I do.

- [Narrator] Batch is to arrange things in sets or groups.

- I was able to start day one doing four interviews on Monday and then four interviews on Thursday, so now I had five days a week to work on other things in my business.

So I always stay at least 40 interviews ahead, which for me, a daily podcast, is 40 days ahead.

So that when I want to travel to Europe, my podcast is still going live every single day because I have that bank of interviews queued up already, releasing every morning at 3:30 AM as they go live.

(keyboard clacking) - They were initially your standard issue South Asian immigrant parents who really wanted me to go to grad school and get a good job.

They wanted stability because they had come from a place of turmoil.

- With those type of stats, if you're gonna come at that logically, I guess no one would start it, right?

Martin Luther King was depressed the last couple years of his life.

People were getting killed on behalf of his vision, but his vision was so strong he persevered.

So that's what my wall represents.

It's like, yo, these are some people who really inspire me, who really changed the world, and let me not be so arrogant and myopic to believe that my little problems are so much bigger than anyone else's.

- I have, you know, these like vulnerability hangovers.

Like I've put a new piece of work into the world and it didn't get the response I was hoping for or whatever.

You have the opportunity to inspire a lot of people and like stand up for stuff that you believe in and you have a platform to do that and that's all really exciting, but at the same time there are just some mean people out there and they can often ruin your day.

You know, the anonymity that people feel, that causes them to be jerks more often, and that can be really painful for those of us who like run our businesses on the internet and are just getting up and trying to do the best that we can every day, so I know I've been doing this for a long time, so I've worked really hard at sort of keeping the negative stuff at bay and part of how I do that is just unplugging and walking away from it pretty frequently.

That part of it is hard.

- Now my parents are happy because they see that I've got a nice life.

I'm doing probably better than they expected.

What they wanted was to know that I would have a stable and secure life in the United States.

You can't ever be fearless.

You simply have to be brave and proceed despite your fear.

(keyboard clacking) - I remember one entrepreneur saying to me, I've got this business that's actually starting to take off.

I don't know when I should leave my job.

- If you hustle and you're frugal, you'll get ahead.

You'll get ahead, you'll have enough in the bank, you'll be able to buy whatever you want.

What does that even mean?

Records?

- I've always lived significantly below my means and I pay into my savings as though it's an electricity bill.

I take it with that level of seriousness.

- This sweatshirt, you know, could be washed, but it was 25 bucks.

You know, I have one, I don't need eight of them.

- Whenever I go back to Nepal, I see trash fires, I see three year olds pooping in the streets.

When you really internalize that idea by seeing it, you know it contextualizes a lot of the so-called sacrifice.

- You're not gonna make any money in your first three months.

All the good stuff happens I would say after year one, and your first year is all about kind of learning and getting used to the ropes.

- By 2011, so how many years is that, five?

Something shifted for me, like I started to get regular work, I started to have regular sales in my Etsy shop, which in about two more years after that really like ramped up to being super consistent.

That was when things really started to take off for me.

- It took me almost eight years before I started turning a real profit in my business.

Even that was a slow process and really struggled financially, and when I focused all my energy, not only into my business but then into one type of specific product, that's when I achieved the financial success that I need to live the lifestyle that I like to live.

Don't give up for a long, long, long time.

Yeah.

- [Narrator] You want to know what now?

- Both my wife and I bring our kids to school together.

We're one of the only husband/wife pair that's able to do that, and we've even had other parents at these schools and even the teachers come up to us and ask us, how is this possible?

- I've got all the time, you know, in the world and flexibility in the world to spend time that I want with my children, to go on vacations.

I don't have to ask permission to anyone because I'm the boss.

- I really enjoy working by myself and having control over my day and choosing when to interact with people and when not to, which you don't really have the luxury of in an office, and when you run an online business, you can be more solitary and there's a lot of freedom in that.

- We're consistently selling things to people in Saudi Arabia and Australia and France and London.

People that would never buy our pr.. or even know about our products if we weren't an online business.

- The way that I construct my life hour by hour is totally up to me, and I think that's the real benefit.

Being able to clean your house on a Wednesday at 1:00 PM, I mean, that's pretty cool.

- My wife works at home with me and we're able to go to lunch together.

Sometimes we'll go out for a coffee.

I do work.

I don't wanna make it seem like I d.. - People from Texas don't necessarily ever leave their ..

Growing up, I never left the state of Texas.

I never in my wildest dreams would think, oh, I'll swim with elephants in Thailand or I'll learn how to make a cocktail in the Dominican Republic with a professional bartender that looks like he walked off a movie set and like I get to stand next to him and introduce him and tell his story.

I just never would've guessed that would be my life, so.

- Online business as a whole has evolved a lot in the last five years.

And guess what?

It's gonna evolve again in the nex.. and the five years after that and so on and so on.

- People plan too much and go, well I need to do this and this and this.

Like just go start doing stuff because you're gonna learn a lot more from doing stuff than you are from sitting in a room planning a whole business.

And usually if you start without too much of an understanding, you're gonna fail a lot, but you're gonna learn a lot more from those failures than you would from just planning everything.

- Everyone knows they should read, they should work out, but they don't have time.

You could get up an hour earlier, why don't you?

Because you don't have a strong purpose.

You don't have a reason why you're doing it.

So if you have a reason, you'll get your ass up.

To me, there's no way I'm not doing what I'm doing, and I quit my job last year as a firefighter, so now I have to do it.

- Can you have this little micro universe in your backyard where you make cool things and you sell some cool things and they go out into the world and other new stuff comes back in and that stuff goes and there's a little cycle.

You may never be famous, you may never be rich.

You're doing it.

- Keep trying things until it works and things might change in the future, but at least keep trying, keep shifting, keep being agile.

You can make things happen - If you have a passion and you are really dedicated to that passion and to yourself, then yeah, you can create your own job and live a life that some people view as a dream life.

Yeah, that sounds, you know, kind of like a little cheesy, but it's absolutely true - The challenge with listening to stories that are exciting, that you get lost in, is that you often just stay lost in them.

You know, you hear these entrepreneurs talk about how they built their businesses.

You learn from them and you get excited about it, and then you want to learn more and hear from other people, and instead of doing something about it, you just get lost in learning and get lost in their world, and so the thing that I would leave everybody with is the idea that once you hear someone's inspiring story, once you see what someone has done, to just take a step.

(dramatic uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) - [Narrator] The end.

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