Made It with Connor Tomkies

In this episode host Connor Tomkies sits down with the seasoned entrepreneur, podcaster, and founder of Mixergy, Andrew Warner, to explore the intricacies of entrepreneurship in the digital age. They delve into the critical role of becoming a micro-influencer as an entrepreneur, share personal journeys of business successes and lessons learned from failures, and discuss the strategic advantages of outsourcing and harnessing international talent. The conversation also touches on future trends, including the potential of service-based business models and the significance of content creation and influencer marketing in scaling businesses.

[00:00:00] Chapter 1: Introduction to Entrepreneurial Influence
[00:03:17] Chapter 2: The First Million: Strategies and Paranoia
[00:08:11] Chapter 3: Evolution of Email Marketing and Co-Reg
[00:10:47] Chapter 4: From Failed Ventures to Dog Genetics Success
[00:13:32] Chapter 5: Building and Scaling Support Ninja
[00:17:08] Chapter 6: Future Ideas and International Hiring
[00:20:07] Chapter 7: The Ongoing Journey of Mixergy
[00:23:38] Chapter 8: Service-Based Business Success Stories
[00:26:21] Chapter 9: Assembling Your Marketing Department
[00:29:12] Chapter 10: The Importance of Being a Public Founder
[00:31:24] Chapter 11: Entrepreneurial Investments and Founder.org
[00:32:51] Chapter 12: Closing Remarks and Future Plans

Andrew's Stuff

PodCast Site: https://podflow.com/
Andrew's Site: https://mixergy.com/
Andrew's X: https://x.com/AndrewWarner?s=20
Andrew's Book: https://www.amazon.com/Stop-Asking-Questions-High-Impact-Interviews/dp/1737676540

My Stuff

Podcast: www.mysecondmillionpodcast.com
Website: https://www.connortomkies.com/
X: https://twitter.com/ConnorTomkies
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connortomkies/

Creators & Guests

Host
Connor Tomkies
Tweet stories and lessons learned. SupportNinja | Acquired by Boston Ventures. Hear Made It Podcast Here: https://t.co/QjryGKbaKS

What is Made It with Connor Tomkies?

"Made It" is a podcast hosted by Connor Tomkies that delves into the journeys of successful entrepreneurs who have not only built and exited their companies, but who are writing the next chapter of their journeys. The show focuses on the unique challenges and lessons learned while moving beyond the exit, offering insights and strategies for listeners aiming to grow their own businesses. Through engaging conversations with various guests, the podcast provides a blend of motivational stories, practical advice, and insider tips on entrepreneurship, business growth, and personal development.

Andrew Warner: More entrepreneurs are going to become micro influencers of themselves. They need to do it.

When I don't know who you are. I don't trust you. I can go Google you, but I don't see anything when I Google you. And if they're hoping that LinkedIn is gonna be enough, it's not. It's not enough.

Narrator: Hey, co-founders, welcome to My Second Million with Conor Tompkins, where we meet with badass entrepreneurs who've successfully exited their companies. In this episode, Conor chats with Andrew Warner, a seasoned entrepreneur, podcaster, author, and founder of Mixergy. So without further ado, Andrew Warner.

Connor Tomkies: can I tell you about the second million that we made? I think, that's where we're going to start, right?

yeah, that sounds good to me. The second

Andrew Warner: million was so much chiller than the first. The first, I had finally got a customer who was going to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars for Co reg. Co reg is where someone signs up for your email newsletter, and you say, What would you like to sign up for this other newsletter?

And even today, those Co reg deals go for like a buck. Newsletter publishers will pay you a dollar per subscriber if it's a good subscriber. We were getting roughly that. And I found a way to get a ton of registrations. It was when you're sending out a greeting card, I would say, Hey, you're emailing the greeting card.

Do you also want to get my newsletter, Andrew's newsletter? And people would say, yeah. And then I'd say, would you also want to get this other newsletter? And a significant number of people said yes to that too. And so we got hundreds of thousands of people within a month who signed up for this one client's newsletter.

And I am paranoid. I think they can't afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is a lot of money for them. And so I start to call them up to say, do you really have the budget for this? And I don't know who to talk to. And I'm in super paranoid mode because I had affiliates that I had to pay for.

I break into a board meeting and I didn't realize I was in a board meeting, but they, but someone said, look, there's this guy who's calling and he's paranoid. Let's just talk to them. And so the CEO goes, hey, just put them in. So in the board meeting, he takes my call on speaker. And I say, um, we have, uh, Um, $235,000 from last month.

And I'm really happy that you're a customer. But do you think it's something that you could, is it okay? Are you able to pay it? And, and he's like, yeah, it's not a problem, Andrew. Do. Is anyone not paying you on time? And going, no. And he says, yeah, it's not a problem.

I took a photo of that check and I sent it to my dad, like, look, your son made it. And this company had raised millions and millions of dollars. Their valuation was based on how many registrations they got. They were able to monetize the hell out of each email registration. The dollar was not an issue.

But then that got us to the million that deal with them and I was able to keep getting them more Subscribers and then once we hit the million I felt entitled to the second one. I felt like yeah, of course Maybe they should be paying me more.

Who else should we be getting in? Who else should we allow to pay us hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in order to buy core edge deals from us? And then I started to act with a different attitude, more bravado, more expectation. And that changed things. That allowed us to make the second one faster.

Connor Tomkies: I think there's almost like a discomfort when you're first getting started around asking for money, receiving money, asking for permission to receive that money.

Andrew Warner: And even just what's the process we're going to use to get this, what's the machine going to look like? What's the process look like? So I knew I wanted to get into email newsletters in the beginning. I thought my genius idea for getting subscribers would work so well that we would be flooded with subscribers.

So here's the deal. We had email newsletters.

And I would monetize it with advertising. I thought the way that I would get subscribers was I would offer 10 cents to a charity if somebody subscribes. So now people have an opportunity to support a charity that matters, but they don't have to take money out of their pockets.

All they have to do is subscribe and this would be genius. And people would think that I'm so caring and I rolled it out.

I started saying this. And nobody cared. It was not a way to get subscribers.

It was just such a bomb. So that part of the machine was a complete failure.

Connor Tomkies: This part of the business, that's your first 2 million? getting, uh, you said co reg, right?

Andrew Warner: I created essentially an online greeting card and when you sent the greeting card there was a check box for you to sign up to my email newsletter. Then this guy Allen Stein I'm gonna keep saying his name because I gotta find out where he is. He's he was a good hustler in the newsletter business in the early days

he \told me about how he had done Coleridge. And at first I remember thinking, you're giving away your subscribers. What a mistake. Somebody signing up, you should have their full attention. And then I got desperate and I realized, if I could get a dollar every time someone signs up. I bet we can make our stuff interesting enough to compete in the inbox with one other message from this customer who's paying us a dollar and so I said sure let's do it and so then the first part of the machine was greeting cards the second part of machine was co reg the third part was actually getting somebody to pay us for a co reg and then once we had that then everything was in place, but it was a lot of agony to get to that

Connor Tomkies: Essentially made your own little marketing flywheel and you're just trying to figure out what were those three points, to get it going and you were doing this early. Co reg now, if you know the beehive platform, like the newsletter platform, they now have it built into the platform.

So you can just say "Hey, I'm open to other people subscribing to newsletter X, Y, and Z, and I'm going to pay, I think now it's like 2 and 50 cents or something like that per subscriber.

Andrew Warner: The one idea that I would have for this whole co reg business that exists today is to think outside the newsletter. There are plenty of things that people are doing today that they're using their email address for, and a checkbox that says, do you also want to get this? thing would work.

I'll give you an example. I love writing with AI. I did a search yesterday on Google for tools that will let me write with AI. IAnd sure enough, there's a Chrome plugin that will let you write with AI

And I registered by putting my email address in, And then they said, okay, congratulations. You're in the free version and you should pay to get the next version. If you like it, can you imagine if instead of losing money on the free version or using it as just a hook that one day I might pay for his next version, monetized it instantly, what that would mean for his business and how would he do that?

Well, there are a few AI email newsletters that are doing well. Imagine if he said. While I'm signing up to this, do you also want to be aware of other AI tools? Check this box and we'll sign you up for an email newsletter that'll tell you about other AI tools.

He's now making money from each new trial and that to me is where people should be thinking. How do I get someone to subscribe to an email newsletter while they're doing something else?

Connor Tomkies: Can this apply to short form video content where you're on TikTok and you're like, I want to follow Andrew or I want to follow, this person and then you hit that follow button and then Andrew, you're like, Hey, if you like me, you might want to follow like these people, right? And then there's a chain that you start to develop because I, I'm inside the space and I still don't know all the people I should be following.

It would be nice to get some recommendations.

Andrew Warner: I'll tell you where I think that there's more room for growth. I've been watching ConvertKit do the, this email ad platform, but I don't think that people are using newsletter email ads the way that they could be used.

They're using them as just plain old ads. And what they should be aware of is you can actually pass along an email address in a link in an email. So imagine if I had an email newsletter and I said, if you like my email newsletter, you should read this other one that I read too. Here's what I like about it.

Click here to sign up. They click and they automatically have their email address passed over into the next person's registration. And you can even set it up so as soon as they click, they're signed up. One click for sign up. I think that's helpful. Truthfully, it's not as useful as co registration.

It's not as big as co registration, but I think that there are ways to do email that the people are not doing yet.

Connor Tomkies: How do you think this is going to change as, emails already getting saturated, people are looking for more specific content, AI is going to help add to the proliferation. How do you think that that's going to change this space?

Andrew Warner: After I sold that email and greeting card business. I remember talking with the founder of Goodreads, Otis. He was a friend and he was doing a little bit of email and he advised someone else to do email marketing and I remember at the time saying, Email's dead. We already exploited it.

I thought we had already saturated email with our greeting cards and with our clients email and others had done something similar. And I was wrong. That was a long time ago, I think we keep saying email is dead, and it somehow survives.

it's harder if it's one way interaction, right? You send out this newsletter and it either hits or it doesn't, but there's not like a feedback loop. I guess I should share it really quick.

Connor Tomkies: So for my second million podcast, I had, three companies that were of decent size and one of them completely blew up and that was called Delegated. It was a mobile app concierge for Airbnb and VRBO rentals. It made money, but the issue is that it didn't make any profit. So even though it was generating, cash, it was leveraging these third party services at the time that weren't making any money.

I would say Uber, Lyft at the time, early DoorDash delivery. we have all these different properties around the United States that we were helping deliver groceries. it was making money, but it wasn't successful.

Andrew Warner: Wait, this is for Airbnb owners to delegate some of the purchases they need to maintain their Airbnb?

Connor Tomkies: This is for the guests that are arriving. And so at the time we were a group of students and magic had come out this text to get anything platform, And I was like, this is so magical. It's so easy to set up the barrier to entry is like.

Something that a college student could possibly do. And so I walked around campus trying to find a bunch of developers and other entrepreneurs that were interested in starting this next thing. I was all hyped up on our own excitement, That we're going to build this one app that's going to consolidate everything.

And We found out that it wasn't niche specific enough. We wrote all these lines of code.What back when that was really hard to do is omni channel support, And we built this massive thing to do a very simple thing that wasn't generating profit on top of these subservices, essentially.

Andrew Warner: Okay. Alright.

Connor Tomkies: it wasn't, it was a little rough. we were getting these requests for these people that were staying at these properties. well, we decided to niche down and focus on Airbnbs. And we know when people are arriving because we had access to the API on the backend. We can send you a text and pick you up from the airport.

We were. helping people get these things on the fly. And we're having these people called delegators, pull over on the side of the highway and try to fulfill requests. so I feel like this doesn't count, but this is like my second million failed

Andrew Warner: Okay.

Connor Tomkies: addition. The one that actually worked was Embark, and it was a dog genetics company. Essentially we built a box and it had a swab inside of it. We would send it to Illumina for genetic processing. Adam Boyko and Ryan Boyko were two brothers. Adam was a professor of dog genetics at Cornell, and we made this chip that processed a lot of genetic information.

And we were on Good Morning America, and we sold out boxes incredibly fast. and so that was the second.

Andrew Warner: How big did that get?

Connor Tomkies: I would say that they're in probably mid nine figures as far as revenue and they raised money with SoftBank two years ago, at a 750 million valuation for A dog genetics company, which is pretty crazy.

Andrew Warner: I like that because it also eliminates a lot of the fears that people have about data being available, if you're doing 23andme, you're worried about where your data is going and they're worried about how much information to give you but if it comes to DAODS, we're much more open

Connor Tomkies: That was one of the reasons why we did it is there's limits on genetic information for humans and what type of research you can do with that, but dogs also get glaucoma. And so if you understand that a dog has these genetic markers and it tends towards this health condition, you can sample size hundreds of thousands of dogs, get hundreds of thousands of different genetic markers, and then apply that to human research.

Andrew Warner: Hmm

Connor Tomkies: And so we weren't sure what the marketing message was for this company. Do people want to know if their golden retriever is actually a golden retriever? Do they want to know their ancestry piece? and so we were on this like news station and they had this little ticker tracker saying would you be interested in getting this product?

Yes or no. And. You could see it change as we were doing the messaging. And so we were talking about the ancestry and people were like, yeah, sure. I'll get it. And then we started talking about like 160 different health conditions that we could help figure out for your dog, whether it's skeletal dysplasia or not.

And then it bounced up to 90, 95%. That was more exciting than I think some of the other startups or companies I've done that are more bootstrapped.

Andrew Warner: I see it sold everywhere It's basically anywhere from a hundred to two hundred dollars depending on which test you get and where you get it Is there ongoing revenue from this or once you buy it, you're done.

Connor Tomkies: I was working with them for the first year to get it launched. And what they did after that is they started looking at, how can we use this for getting people set up with the health insurance? How can we do this for other types of health and nutrition needs? but for the most part, most customers it's one off.

and I think that's probably a pretty big opportunity is to look at. Other parts of the customer life cycle, which is can we help with dog training? Can we help with connecting them to other types of health and nutrition?

Andrew Warner: All right. What was the third one?

Connor Tomkies: The third one is support ninja. So that's a little bit of how we met is I met Andrew and Bali for the running remote conference. And I ran an outsourcing international hiring, managing and training company, for. Companies like Uber, Lyft, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And so we had these offices, scattered around and we met at this conference for, essentially companies that are running remote prior to the pandemic.

Andrew Warner: That one, grew up pretty fast as well, not as fast as Embark. but that one did pretty well Can you say what it's sold for?

Connor Tomkies: It's currently underneath a private equity company. it's sold for around 40 million initially, and right now it's probably going to be selling, in the next couple of years. And it's probably going to be in the mid to upper. Nine figures, hopefully.

Yeah. Fingers

Andrew Warner: to them?

Connor Tomkies: Yeah. So I stepped down as CEO in June and right now I'm just sitting on the board.

but I am probably their biggest cheerleader on the sidelines as opposed to a good founder.

Andrew Warner: I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs try it and it just didn't work for them. I don't know why it might've been that They were looking for other startups like them. as someone who's done interviews with entrepreneurs for years, I would have tons of people say, customer support stinks.

It's too painful. And they would say, when you're starting out, you can't do it 24 hours. So I will do it for you. Thing is that when companies are starting out, they can't really afford it. And I know that's one of the issues, right? What else have you seen that didn't work for others in that space?

Connor Tomkies: It's interesting that you think it's exciting because when we were getting into it, it wasn't exciting. This is the industry where, it wasn't a good industry. If you think about call centers and India and the different places, it's not an exciting. Business model for people to get into.

And I was talking to another entrepreneur that's well known. He's like, how did he get into this outsourcing space? It's so exciting. and he called it a sexy business idea. And I'm like, man, it's not like that, but where I see people fail is that they don't really understand the value proposition for what they're doing.

you can get 24, seven support. That's important, but that's very niche. What you're really doing with. Having an outsourcing company and why I'm passionate about it and why I think everyone should do it. Is used to only be able to hire people that will live on your street or lived in your city or your block and with the internet and without sourcing, you can hire the best person wherever they might be at a lot more diversity to your company.

These people are fantastic. It's like you're a hundred X in your recruiting pool. And if you realize that there's that element to it, that the dollar goes a lot farther and can have a much bigger impact in some of these different countries, and you can bring in diverse talent. I mean, it's a no brainer.

Andrew Warner: I was also thinking of it as, text based and for some reason, text based support feels more exciting than another call center. But is that what you were doing?

Connor Tomkies: So we were doing a lot of different stuff. We were doing a lot of, text support, a lot of asynchronous support. So that's like email that's crossing over into to chat. we did have some voice support, but. It was a lot more than that. We also had EAs, we had people that were doing different types of marketing jobs, a lot of different job descriptions, we were doing internationally,

Andrew Warner: So now you tell me of about a future idea based on this Knowing that you can get a group of people in a country where it's less expensive to hire them Support people in countries where everything's more expensive. What would you do to create another support ninja?

What's one that you would think about, or how would you think about coming up with another place to apply that?

Connor Tomkies: I would just remove the friction from it because people get intimidated. If they're thinking about hiring internationally, they're like, what are the different requirements that we have to meet? So I would probably look at all the major ATSs, applicant tracking systems. You guys, so this is like your jazz HR, your Dover.

These are places that I would work with to create an integration. Where you post your job description and it doesn't just go to Indeed or LinkedIn, but it also helps post it internationally to all these different places. And then you have a broader application pool, essentially.

Andrew Warner: So, think of it like a widget, one click. Apply, help get international talent. you're already going to be posting to these places. Just post on my place too. So it's part international recruiting agency, part outsourcing BPO.

I see. if Support Ninja does customer support, in addition to other things, this business would help, hire by doing the work involved in screening.

Am I right?

Connor Tomkies: That's right. if you think about the different categories that we have here. So we have one, which is full blown outsourcing. That means that you have a facility, you have full time employees in that country. You have a legal entity in that country, Let's put that on the far right.

On the far left, you have something like Fiverr or Upwork, where you have all these independent contractors. They're on this platform. They have maybe a payment processor and they send the money and they let them deal with some of the legal ramifications of being paid. and then there's a whole wide variety in between,

And so, another area that's inside here is People that help out with the legal ramifications of hiring inside that country. There's a pretty wide category of these businesses, but what they're not doing is providing it as a logical frictionless alternative or option for every remote position that you might be posting.

So that's what I'm trying to eliminate. And that would probably combine personality index, culture index, profiling to it. I definitely recommend, a company out of Columbia called Toray that's helping with building a international focused ATS system that's using, AI to help bring that to the forefront.

Hey podcast listeners, eight years ago, I started a company called support Ninja. It's an international hiring, training, managing, outsourcing company to help you find the best talent anywhere. If you guys are interested in hiring international talent, check out support, ninja. com. Cheers.

Connor Tomkies: Hey podcast, listeners, we are currently looking for sponsors for this podcast. If you guys are looking to connect with other business owners that are scaling and growing their company, and you guys are interested in a spot on this podcast, uh, we're looking for you. So reach out to Connor, tomkeys. com or operator equity.

com. And we're glad to help set you guys up with a spot on this podcast. All right, cheers back to the pod.

So Andrew, I want to bounce it to you really quick. Mixergy's at, you've done over 2000 episodes. What are you, what are your plans next? How do you see Mixergy growing, evolving, changing, staying the same?

Andrew Warner: be honest with you. I don't know. I've used Mixergy as a place for me to learn what I couldn't get anywhere else. I'm not sure exactly where my curiosity is right now. And so I'm leaving myself very open to talking to people and seeing if something is exciting enough that I want to spend more time on it.

I'll give you an example of how I've used it over the years. I had a software company after this greeting card company that didn't work. And I said, all right, I'm going to talk to software entrepreneurs and other entrepreneurs and see what does work. And then I thought it would be another software company, but then it turned out the content was blowing up. And I would interview people who kept saying that they had content businesses that were doing well. And I said, yeah, but it's not going to do that well. And then they ended up just doing incredibly well and having happier lives. So one example of that is Ramit Sethi. Ramit Sethi was a guy who had a blog about personal finance.

And I thought, come on, don't you want to become a software entrepreneur? And the more I talked to him, the more I realized. He's doing really well thinking about ideas and personal finance, helping people save money, get better jobs. He's super happy. His business kept growing and was profitable consistently.

Just a little while ago, he got a show on Netflix. I don't think he needed software, but I had to do a set of interviews. About software and have other entrepreneurs redirect me to content to finally appreciate the value of content on Mixergy. After I built Mixergy as a content site, we had courses, membership, Advertising.

I got overwhelmed. I couldn't keep it keep track of it all even with a team of people. And so I said, how do I organize this? And I did a series of interviews on how do I systemize my company? And I got to ask all the things that I couldn't ask of the book that I remember my entrepreneurship professor at NYU gave us.

He gave us the e myth revisited and it talked about, how to systemize a business, but I still had questions like. What happens when you have a creative business? Can you really force people in a creative business that's constantly changing to systemize? How do you do it? And I had to get a lot of feedback from people who are in software who are in creative competitive businesses that kept changing And the answer was some things you can some things you want to leave up to people to to be creative about but when they Are creative have them think about how they came up with what they came up with so documentation works there Today, I'm, I'm a little bit more open minded again and trying to see what comes next.

Connor Tomkies: Do you have any contenders? Anything that you think is, might be, might have a little kernel of something that's

Andrew Warner: I'll tell you what I'm really, all the things that I've been curious about. One of the things that I've noticed is that these services based businesses are doing well,

I had a few people actually reach out to me, especially after I wrote my book. Here it is. Stop asking questions about how to do interviews. They said, well, can you just produce our interviews for us? And so I started saying yes, and at times just introducing my producer to them. So, Greg Eisenberg, who's got a great podcast, one of my favorites.

He hired, Ari Disurmo, who was our editor, to work with him part time. And then my first million guys, they hired Ari, and they checked in with me to say, Is she really good? I said, She's absolutely phenomenal. And they work with her now full time. but I then took on other people who wanted to Have their podcasts produced and I started producing podcasts for them.

And now I'm kind of interested in how businesses like Video Husky, which are services based businesses that are super systemized. How did they work? How did they deliver? How did they get customers? And so I'm interested in those kinds of interviewees and I'm learning a lot from them.

Connor Tomkies: So can you share a little bit about video Husky? Like I've seen their website, the outsource video editing, but can you share a little bit about what they are and why they're interesting?

Andrew Warner: They're, outsource video editing because this founder decided that he was doing ad buys and he realized that video ads were doing well, but it was a pain to get video made. It's always been a pain. And yes, you can use automated tools to do it, but they never feel as good as a really well done video.

And he liked Design Pickle, which basically said, pay us a monthly fee and we'll create all the images that you need for your ads. And it did really well with ad agencies. And he said, you know what, I'm going to create the Design Pickle, a video. And then he went to this, one online group called Dynamite Circle.

And he said, If I could get 10 within this limited amount of time, then I'll start this business. At the last minute, he hit his number and he got enough customers that he was able to build this up and he hired a video editors and he started to systemize his business.

I forget where, where it is today, but he got to a million relatively easily.

Connor Tomkies: How did he get to a second million? Do you know

Andrew Warner: No, you should talk to him about that. I, to me,

how he realized that there's some people who are just going to churn, how he, even built his software stack to make sure that he was organizing it all well.

He signed up for a program with the founder of design pickle to teach him how to run this business and also just learn from him. Russ, who created Design Pickle, he is a maniac in some ways. He didn't just show him how to create this business. He spent a lot of time showing him how to become a better, stronger man, be more ambitious, work harder, exercise more.

And I remember Justin telling me, you know what? I'm not that motivated. I don't want to be that. I just want to build a nice solid business that will let me live a life that I want and he's doing that.

Connor Tomkies: And I think it's like for entrepreneurs, there's different levels of what type, what that life looks like for you, right? What does that entrepreneurship life look like? So you were talking about video Husky and. what I'm seeing is that there's these agencies that are taking one part of what a marketing department will look like. And they're saying, I'm going to do this part of your department for this flat rate fee, and then you're just building like Legos, essentially a marketing department.

So 2, 000 for unlimited video editing, 5, 000 for podcast. You know what I mean? And then you're building your department that way. Have you even seen this?

I wonder if that model is going to do well. I wonder if there's going to be someone that's going to be the Lego master builder.

I don't know. That's actually a good question, do you hire Design Pickle and Video Husky and someone who does your text and someone who does this? Or Do you hire someone who puts them all together and gets you the best of them? Or do you hire one agency and you say you do it all?

Andrew Warner: I don't know. I'm getting the sense that maybe it can all exist together. Maybe there is someone who just manages that stack of all these different outsourcers you have. Like you say, the master builder.

Connor Tomkies: It's almost going to be entirely based on the influencer that's backing that product. They're like, Oh, I want to do. like support shepherd, because that's what is big on my first million. Or they're like, I really want to use this website designer because that's tied to this influencer. I think that might be where it kicks in

Andrew Warner: definitely think that that's a big entry point.

Connor Tomkies: I do know of some people that are interested in looking at building these influencer marketing, almost agencies, like matching businesses to influencers. I'm a little curious to see how that's going to play out. that could be pretty big. I can see each company having their own influencer signed almost like a sports athlete,

Andrew Warner: I also think that more entrepreneurs are going to become micro influencers of themselves. They need to do it. I was just at Noah Kagan's house yesterday. And I said, Noah, you used to be public because you had this need for people to like you, to know you, to admire you, to whatever it is.

You don't seem to have that anymore. Why are you writing this book? Why are you doing a YouTube channel? Why are you doing a podcast? Especially since Noah is someone who has interest he likes to go for long bike rides. He likes to disconnect from the world Why is he putting in all this effort when he doesn't need it emotionally and he said, you know Every business needs to have somebody who is well known who stands out I've noticed this myself when you want to buy something you do look to see who is this guy?

guy I talked to you about that plug in maker from for AI I didn't know who the founder was. He signed his thing and he said, thank you for trying out my tool that will let you do AI on every website and now go install the plugin. And I realized. I don't know you. I'm not gonna install a plugin on my computer that gives you access to everything I write.

When I don't know who you are. I don't trust you. I can go Google you, but I don't see anything when I Google you. I think we are all doing that. We're all Googling the people in our lives and if we're, and if they're hoping that LinkedIn is gonna be enough, it's not. It's not enough. It needs to be something more significant.

I'll even take it a step further when my kids want to get together with someone. I make it easy for them to get together with them, but I also Google the parents, and if the parents are someone, are people who are interesting, who I feel like they're safe, who are doing something meaningful in the world, I'm much more likely to say, yes, I see what you're doing.

Go ahead, let's spend time together. I'll spend time with the parents. We're Googling the parents of the kids, that our kids want to play with. And LinkedIn is not enough.

Connor Tomkies: It's kind of hard to imagine that you need to build your online presence to get access to some things. There's a difference between being a public founder and being a private founder. And it's, there's pros and cons to being both. I mean, being public facing is hard.

Andrew Warner: You know what though? Entrepreneurs find a system that works for them. And so Noah's not recording every single week the way that full time content creators might. I'll give you an example, of why it's important and then how people do this. Jess Mah is a founder I invested in years ago.

She created what was supposed to be a QuickBooks killer. It didn't work out. She ended up creating a bookkeeping service that has all these outsourced bookkeepers who will, run your books. And if you're using QuickBooks, she'll do that. You're smiling. You recognize her.

Connor Tomkies: She's blowing up. She's done a lot of really cool stuff.

Andrew Warner: Her latest thing is. What she calls MAWEI, it's a collection of companies that she invests in. Her team reached out to me to say, Can you interview Jess? I asked her, I said, Jess, why are you doing this? You're busy. You don't have a passion for this anymore.

She said, when I'm hiring someone, they're googling me to see what comes up. She can't do a full time podcast. So what she does is her team will book her on other podcasts. They booked her on Pep Laya's podcast, My First Million on my podcast. Maybe they'll do a couple of others. I think she's going to eventually need to find a way to control her own message.

At some point you run out of other podcasts to do that you feel you can trust. And they could manipulate everything the simplest manipulation is when does it run right you do an interview today? And they say you know what I know you put in all this time you interrupted your day I'm not gonna run it for two months because I have a backlog or because I'm flaking out or I'm not gonna run it at all because it doesn't fit in with my style I think she would be better to find her own way of getting her message out there now for someone like her Instagram is not enough.

She can't post photos of herself flying around on her plane, right?If someone's gonna go work at that company, they don't need to see her on her plane. It doesn't really add much.

You want to know, what are you about? And so she's gonna need to find a way to do it. For some people, it's writing. For other people, it's podcasting. For some people, it's something else.

Connor Tomkies: What I liked about what she said is. That she didn't view it as like a venture studio geared towards science specifically, but more like an extension of herself.

And these are the things that she's interested in. And she was building a team around that. And I thought that was such a cool or fun, way to look at it. It's like amplifying what she's able to do on a day to day basis on a personal and business side.

Andrew Warner: She has an interesting point of view on that.

Connor Tomkies: a lot of entrepreneurs, whenever they exit, they don't know what they want to do, but they know that they have a skillset and that they're passionate about these different areas. They probably have more ideas than they know what to do with. And if they can find things that they're interested in and build a team around it, then.

Good on them.

Andrew Warner: Yeah.

Connor Tomkies: Andrew, I appreciate you jumping on to my second million. because what's better than 1 million? I think it's 2 million. I think that's really the secret sauce here,

Andrew Warner: Where should people find you? And then also, oh, I know one easy place where people can find you. And then, uh, also I would love to hear where they should go whenever they're talking about building out their own podcast.

I think if they want to build out their own podcast, your former business partner and I created a podcast production company. It's called Podflow. And even if they're not looking to work with us, I wrote the book on podcasting, interviews, stop asking questions. I love talking about it. And if they just reach out to me and mention that they saw me here or heard me here, I'll help them out.

Connor Tomkies: That sounds good. and also guys, I'm launching founder org. It's a community for entrepreneurs that are going to be paired with an entrepreneur. That's maybe 1 or 2 steps ahead of them. There's also going to be small groups and educational content. The 1st course is going to be coming out in February is on how to sell your business and it's going to be a little bit of a cohort.

So if you want to join other founders. To get in a room each month and talk about was a framework that you need to have in place before you go to market, how to make sure you get the best exit multiple whenever you guys get there, check out founder org. com. We're glad to help you

so guys, that's the pod.

Narrator: That wraps up today's episode with Andrew Warner. For more inspiring stories and valuable lessons from successful entrepreneurs, be sure to subscribe to our podcast. Thanks for listening. Until next time, keep pushing boundaries and writing your next chapter.