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Hello, everyone. Digital Domination Summit 2013. Marco Montemagno here. And with me I'm
really happy to have the founder of Mixergy, Andrew Warner. Hello, Andrew. How are you
doing? >>Doing great. Thanks for having me on here. So I just want to start by giving
a little bit of context about why, Andrew, for people who maybe simply don't know Andrew
or maybe they're not entrepreneurs and they're not inside our tack board. I just want to
give a little bit of context of why I think you, Andrew, should be and are a great guest
for Digital Domination Summit. And I just want to tell you this story. I think it was—I
don't know—a few years ago. I was hosting this television show on Sky News in Italy,
Sky TG24 is the name in Italy for the Sky News Network, and I remember once I was just
surfing around and I found this Mixergy.com, this website. And I thought, "Well, let's
have a look." I saw this interview, this guy. It was you with a guest, just doing an interview,
a split-screen interview. And in the beginning I thought, "Come on. You can't do interviews
like that." I was coming from television. >>It's so amateurish to just have this split
screen. Yeah. I thought, "Come on." When you do television, you start to become very arrogant.
That's my experience. And also you have 6 cameras and people taking care of everything.
You're just there, you talk, and good (?) can make that you have great hair. You can do
miracles. But anyway, I am very curious. So I started to check the videos and I thought,
"Gosh, this guy is amazing." And I started to follow videos, 1 hour long videos that
in television is impossible. I mean, you have to speak 10 seconds and then cut and everything.
And so I was really surprised, I was really impressed, and from that moment I started
to follow you, and you really inspired me. I mean, today I wouldn't be here if I didn't
meet you online. And this is the first time we meet, by the way, in person. So really
from that moment I thought, "Gosh, Andrew Warner sooner or later I would love to do
an interview with me," just to share your tips and your knowledge. So here we are. That's
the reason. I'm honored to be on here. >>Right. And by the way, isn't it amazing that there's
going to be someone who's listening to us right now whose life is going to be equally,
maybe even more, impacted than yours was when you were listening to my old interviews? And
I believe 5 years from now that person will come to us and say, "I saw you, Andrew and
Marco, and as a result of this interview, my life changed," and then they'll tell us
how. And that's, in my mind, when I'm about to do this interview, that's what I want to
shoot for. I want not just 1 person but multiple people to come and say, "My life has been
impacted," send us letters and tell us how much change happened because of this interview.
So let's knock this out of the park. What's your first question for me? >>Yeah. By the
way, I hope to change it in a better way. [laughing] >>Oh, right, right. [laughing]
"My life is destroyed." >>Yeah. No, they're not going to say that. >>Let's go straight
to the point. I mean, Mixergy is a great story, also a great community. You found also a business
model. You've been doing— I think you're close to 1000 interviews with entrepreneurs,
which is probably a Guinness World Record, so super cool. And also we didn't say that,
but you did interviews with Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk, I mean, a lot of
great people and a lot of great entrepreneurs. So on one side this is your skill; on the
other side you are an entrepreneur by yourself. So you know a lot of things, and often you
know more than the guests you do the interview with. So the first thing is positioning. How
did you find your niche? Why did you choose to launch this split-screen interview business?
And what kind of tips could you give to our viewers today? >>So here's the thing. In 2008
I remember looking at my wife's face and at the time thinking— she was dating me—I
was thinking, "She couldn't possibly want to be with me." "I am such a loser. What happened?"
And I didn't say this out loud, but in my head every time we talked that's what was
going on. And the thing that happened was I went from being a guy who had this really
successful business—Bradford & Reed was my first company. We did online greeting cards,
I did over $30 million, and with each one of those $30 million my chest puffed out even
more. And I thought, "I know everything." Actually, in conversations I would push because
I felt like I knew everything. And then I took some time off after that and I went to
start this online invitation site for events. I said, "I was in greeting cards. Now I'll
do invitations. Here comes more millions." "Here comes more success." And I couldn't
get people to use it. My best friends wouldn't even use it. My wife, who was my girlfriend
at the time, used Evite instead of my own site! That's how badly I was doing. And because
I had some money, I kept throwing money at the problem. I kept spending more on developers,
more on design, and meanwhile, it was a complete failure. And so in 2008 I said, "I'm not going
to keep being this idiot anymore. I'm going to stop." "But I have to figure out what I
did wrong." And actually, if people look on my site they'll see I did this post called
"I Failed," sometime in 2008 where I basically explained what I just told you, but I said,
"This isn't the end of me." "I'm going to talk to the most successful people I know
in an open way, "admit that I don't know everything, and instead come to them and say, 'What can
I learn from you?'" And if I could have learned from them in 5 minutes, I would have done
it in 5 minutes, but I felt, "You know what? I'm not that quick. I need an hour of in-depth
conversation." And so that's how I found my niche. I found my niche by saying, "I have
a problem here." "Who out there can solve it?" And I knew that guys like Seth Godin,
who I admired, whose book I read for a long time, people like the founder of Sun Microsystems,
Wikipedia, they weren't just going to talk to me. But I thought, "If I start doing these
as interviews, they would talk to other people through me." I'd get to ask my own issues.
"I know that there are other people online who have these same problems." "They don't
know where to come up with a business, they don't know how to solve their other issues
in life." "I'll ask these questions, and other people will learn with me." And that's how
the whole thing started. And sure enough, I wasn't the only person who needed to know
how to start a business properly, who wanted to know how to avoid making these stupid mistakes.
Others wanted to learn, we all learned together, and we all built these businesses along the
way. But how did you start contacting all these people? You started from scratch or
you just had your previous network of contacts and you started from there and then you said,
"Okay, this is my base and then I build up from it"? You mean how did I start asking
the guests? How did I get them? >>Yeah, yeah. I remember actually being at William Quigley's
office in Southern California. He is one of the heads of a top venture capital firm. We
were all there at this party, a startup event at his office, and everyone wanted to talk
to him, but he was too busy to talk to all the entrepreneurs in the room—except for
1 guy, 1 guy who happened to have a camera with him who was doing an interview for this
little website. And I said, "Wait. Everyone wants to talk to William Quigley." "William
Quigley wants to talk to that guy." "Not only that, but he is ushering him into a private
room where they could talk without noise. Why? Because the guy has a camera?" I learned
a lesson there. If you're going to do an interview, people want to do it. People actually want
to set up a good environment for you. And so William Quigley is one of the first people
who I asked to do an interview. He brought me into his office, had that quiet conversation
with me. I took a tape recorder with me, and that's how we got started. That's the thing.
If you want to, people will do interviews with you and they'll have deep conversations.
Right. So Tip number 1 is while you're finding your niche, 1 good, interesting format could
be interviews. Then you can find video, text, whatever, but interviews is always— And
I was thinking, when you get a degree and often you try to do interviews with people
for your final research in university, I would say most of the time if I think about my university
time— I'm old now, but in my university time a lot of people said, "Yes, come in."
"You just have to do this university research." So interviewing opens a lot of doors. >>It
does open a ton of doors. And I think anyone should do it. >>Why did you choose video?
I mean, some people choose audio, some people decide to do—I don't know— just write
a post and interview via email. Why did you choose video? It was very easy. I initially
started with audio because that's the way I prefer to learn. I'm a long distance runner.
In fact, I just did 22 miles on Sunday. I'm really proud that I did it here in the streets.
And I was listening to a podcast and audio books the whole way through on my run. So
I love audio, but what I discovered was that if you just put a piece of audio online, people
don't even notice that it's there. It's too small. They don't feel connected to it. So
when Seth Godin came on, I told him that we could probably get a bigger audience if we
do video. He said, "Let's do video. Let's try it." >>Marco laughing. And video Skype
basically has a plugin that makes it super easy to record. I actually didn't even have
to hit the record button. As soon as you called my interview Skype account, it started recording
this conversation for us. All I did is a little bit of editing, post it online, and we're
done. I want the simplest solution. >>Right. And I recommend that to anyone who's trying
this. I don't think you want to do writing because writing means that you have to listen
and then explain what you learned, like explain other people's ideas on paper. And you're
never going to get their ideas perfectly right, and it's always going to create a little bit
of friction. I prefer to just have the person say it and post it online. For me I want to
learn in the conversation. Any tips, Andrew, about tools that you're actually using or
tools that you would recommend if a company said, "Okay. I want to do a split-screen interview.
Where do I start from?" We were talking before about I saw recently this Zoom.us. I have
no idea, I have no connection with them, but I sometimes come up— >>I say whatever the
simplest tool is. What do you use? What do you recommend? >>Simplest, simplest tool.
The thing is that unless you're going to go high-end polished, people don't care about
the look. And you shouldn't care about the look. It should be about the ideas. It should
be about the conversation. It should be about you getting to know your guest, you learning
from your guest, and the audience learning along with you. I don't think it needs to
be all that fancy. So for what I use, because I'm on a Mac, I use Skype. Everyone seems
to have Skype. And I use Call Recorder, which is a program by Ecamm which costs, like, $20.
It plugs in to Skype. But I've seen the Huffington Post use—what is it?—Google Hangouts.
It comes with the recording built right in. You don't need to download anything. You just
go to Google Hangouts, you create the group, and you have a conversation. Keep it really
simple. It's about the ideas. And the more basic the software, the more people feel like
they could relate to it, like they're just listening in on a conversation instead of
watching a production. Right. And also I would say a mic like the one that you have. So a
USB microphone is always good to get the right voice. Also USB microphones now, they cost—I
don't know—$50, $100 maximum. So you can get great audio. Promotion. This is the third
part. Okay. You find your niche, you decide the right format, you say, "Okay, I go for
videos." Oh. No. Let me ask you 1 more question about video. Why don't you go straight on
YouTube, for instance? Everyone says, "Oh, YouTube is the second search engine in the
world." "You have to be there." So it doesn't look like you're going too much on YouTube.
Or maybe you will go. I don't know. Why did you decide and what did you decide about it?
I'm not against YouTube. I just feel like I want the conversation to happen on my site.
I want to get to know the audience in a way that I don't feel I get to know people on
YouTube. YouTube is great for big reach, but I don't really need that reach. I want to
have a good conversation with a smaller group of people. Also, the number 1 search engine
is Google. I show up with my videos from Wistia on Google, and my image shows up, I get to
control the environment that people come to me on. I also don't just want someone to watch
my video and disappear. I want to build a relationship with them. I use a tool called
Wistia, which allows me to ask for email addresses before people watch the video, allows me to
get a sense of how much people have watched, to see what they rewind so that I know what
to emphasize and what goes over well. It does all kinds of cool things like that. If it's
an hour long video and you watch it on YouTube and then you don't finish it and you come
back the next day, you have to find your spot. Wistia now, I just saw they have a tool that
will allow you to automatically pick up where you left off. I don't want to make it into
a commercial for them, but that's what I like about Wistia. They're great guys, great company.
Chris Savage is one of the speakers at Digital Domination Summit. I totally agree with you.
Very interesting. Also for SEO reason it could be a great choice. Promotion. How do you promote
them? Okay. You did a lot of videos, but then how do you really start it? Now it's easy
for you because, I mean, Mixergy is a well-known brand. Everyone knows Mixergy in our industry.
But in the beginning, how did you really do it? And in 2013 is it something that is still
possible to do— >>Oh, yeah. Even more. I'll give you 2 tips for promotion because I know
the problem that many people who are listening to us have. I had it where I used to have
a blog with the site that didn't do so well. I couldn't get people to even read the blog.
I couldn't get them to read the blog, I couldn't get them to use the site. Where would I put
my attention? I said, "Well, I have to let go of the blog." "I'm not going to now promote
2 different products, neither one of them well." And the problem was I would write a
blog post and then have to wait for people to discover it or go and tell everyone to
go watch it. Similar with any product, you have to create it and then you have to go
out there and hunt for an audience. Interviews are a little bit different. If I do an interview
with Guy Kawasaki or Tim Ferriss, Tim Ferriss has these tremendous fans online who are all
in the startup space. I do an interview with him, his fans will find me, they will re-tweet
me. There is a Twitter account that's dedicated to just promoting things that Tim Ferriss
is in. That kind of promotion doesn't happen if you're just a guy on your own. If I interview
an entrepreneur that TechStars invested in, David Cohen, the guy who founded TechStars,
is very likely to tweet it out. The other people who got investment money from TechStars
tweet it out too. So the idea is if you do an interview with someone, that person's audience
will find the interview and then discover your product. That person will often help
you promote it. The people who are super fans or super connected to them will help you promote
it. It's much easier with interviews than it is with other kinds of content. >>Yeah.
This is also great too because if you get the right people, and if you create a great
interview—this is an other important point, that you always create, you study, you do
really well your homework, in my opinion, you try to really go deeper with all the guests
so the interview is not only about talking but you really go deep— and a lot of interesting
things are coming out from the interview, then obviously there is value over there.
So I think the guest is happy to share and re-tweet everything and also his community.
So Andrew— >>I'm sorry. I promised 2 things to your audience. I'll quickly give the second
one. The second one was I was active on a community called Hacker News, which is a site
for startup entrepreneurs— >>Yeah. >>It's a great site. And they sent me a lot of traffic
because I just kept talking to people who were big users of that site. And so when they
saw that my articles appeared there, they voted it up. I interviewed the guy who created
Hacker News. Of course that audience was going to vote up that interview. I interviewed other
people who he invested in. Of course that community was going to vote it up. And it
really helped me get a base, a base of solid people who I care about. And when I hear others
say that they're building a site like mine, I ask them, "What's your community? Where
are you talking?" If they don't have one, I can see a problem immediately because that
community will help get you traffic but also give you an understanding of what they want,
which will help shape your product. So I promised 2 things. There they are. One, interview people
who have followers, and more and more people have followers today, much more than they
did last year, certainly more than years ago; and find a community to be a part of. >>Perfect.
Andrew, with all the Digital Domination Summit guests, I always start to say before the interview,
"We have to stay 10 minutes, 15 minutes." And then after so many years in television
where you have 20 minutes and that's it, and then someone starts to say, "Cut, cut, cut,"
and you have a microphone in your ear and people say, "Stop, stop, stop, it's over,
it's over," and you always have this pressure, in this format I feel so relaxed and I say,
"No, if something is interesting, just let's talk about it." And so I want to just go a
little bit further with you to cover the last step of your process, which is partnership.
So did you develop during these years any kind of partnership that supported Mixergy?
Some web television shows, they work with affiliation or they try to find media partners
or some kind of partnership with AppSumo or Udemy for courses. Which was your way, and
what do you recommend in 2013 on this topic? Those 2 partnerships helped a lot. I helped
Udemy back when they were just getting started and needed people to put courses on their
new course platform. Just this morning I looked on Twitter, and someone bought that course
that I put on there just to experiment with them. Same thing with AppSumo. Noah Kagan
is an old friend who I got to know through interviews and offline too. And when he started
AppSumo he needed a course to put on the site and he needed someone to lead it. I did it.
He emailed it out to his audience of—I don't know—¾ of a million people. They got to
know me. That's huge. I also sometimes will do partnerships with people who have contacts
with entrepreneurs that I want to get a hold of, and they introduce me to them and that
helps a lot. We do a series together. Andrew, super last question, I promise. I ask to all
the guests what are their best 3 apps, or what are their best 3 websites or 3 online
platforms for doing business that they really would recommend in this moment, because I
always see that the kind of website or app that you use on your phone every day shapes
a little bit the way you work and the way you are— Right now I'm going to give you
a couple of tools that work for me. The first is I use Downcast for listening to podcasts
and actually listening to any kind of audio. It has really good controls that let me quickly
fast-forward 30 seconds or rewind 20 seconds if I need to, and I could do it just from
my iPhone's clicker. So if I'm running and I have my iPhone in place, I hit that button
that's near the mic, and I can fast-forward by 30 seconds or quickly rewind and say, "What
did he say?" and listen to that part over again. That's incredibly helpful. You also
were asking about websites. I use a tool called Pipedrive, and what I like about Pipedrive
is it forces me to think about steps that I take in order. So if there's a process that's
really difficult—here's one. How do you find a stranger, find the right stranger who
we want to interview, get his contact information, get him to do a pre-interview on our site,
get him then to do an interview on the site and publish it? All those steps. If I do it
on my own, I could remember it, but if there's a team of people who are now helping me, we
lose track of who is doing what with them and where each person is. Pipedrive.com is
a program that allows me to lay out my steps in order and then say, "Okay, this is my job:
to get him from Step 0 to Step 1, to put him on the board," which is find a guest. Someone
else takes that guest and invites him. Someone else takes that guest and does a pre-interview
with them. It makes it really easy to collaborate. And let's see if I can give you 1 other one.
Here is one that I just installed today. I'm not sure how much I like it, but I think it's
worthy of recommendation. It's an app called Triage for the iPhone, and it shows you 1
email at a time. And if you can respond to it right away, you can hit the reply and give
a quick response. Or you can flick it up and mark it as read so that you never see it,
or you can flick it down and say, "I'll handle it on my computer." So very quickly you get
to go through your email. >>Repeat the name. Triage. >>Triage. All right. Okay. I heard
it on Daring Fireball this morning. I read it. So I thought, "I've got to get it," and
it was worth trying. >>[chuckling] Let's try. Excellent. Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.
Andrew, thank you so much and good luck for everything. Thanks for having me on here.