Digital Chatter Episode #007: Brian Lofrumento

Eric: Hello everyone and welcome to Digital Chatter. My name is Eric Sharpe and I'm here today with Brian Lofrumento. Brian, say hi.

Brian: Hi Eric. Glad to be here. Super excited to talk to your audience today.

Eric: Heck yeah, man. So Brian is actually has ended up being a great friend of mine. I have watched him grow over the last couple of years and vice versa, no doubt. And Brian is very similar to me. We are both young Internet entrepreneurs, serial entrepreneurs, doing lots and lots of incredible things on the Internet. And I brought Brian on today because he has a fairly unique experience and I wanted him to share it with you. So Brian what don't you tell everyone just a little bit about yourself.

Brian: Yeah I would love to. I mean so my entrepreneurial journey, depends how far back you want to go. I like to say that every single entrepreneur remembers their first ever dollar that they made. Eric, I'm sure that's true for you. And so I was 19 years old and I loved soccer. I still do to this day. I loved writing and I love the internet. So I figured why don't I write about soccer on the internet. I combined all three. So I started a soccer blog. It was called Premiership Talk and I was a freshman in college and I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't intend for it's be a business. But by junior year of college I had my first 1000 dollar day which felt really cool as a 21 year old back then I had a team of 20 writers all in England working for me. So it was a really upward trajectory from there and things really took off. Largely because when I was 16 years old I had this internship in high school that taught me about search engine optimization. So I used search engine optimization to grow this soccer sites over three and a half million readers from over 200 countries. So it became a worldwide phenomenon where people were tuning in.

Brian: And I was flying to England all the time. It's a really exciting journey. From there, I graduated college in 2011. Eighty thousand dollars in student loan debt. So everybody said to me what they tell every entrepreneur: don't be crazy, get a job. You need those benefits, you need to pay off those student loans. So I fell into that trap and I did exactly that and I took a job. I only lasted in corporate America for four months at my first job and 10 months at my second job before in 2012 I finally quit, started a search engine optimization agency. Grew it to six figures really quickly. That's about the time that I met you, my business partner and I went separate ways almost two years into our journey. So I really branched off and said "What the heck am I about?". And I did some soul searching I wanted to figure out who is Brian, what does he care about, what's his impact on the world's going to be. So since then I published Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur. Paperback book that has reached readers in almost every single state in the United States and all across the world. I've launched one of the top business podcasts in the world, and I've created online programs and courses that have been gone through that have been purchased by over 3000 students from around the world. That teaches them how to build their own successful businesses online. So that's my story in a nutshell.

Eric: That's awesome. Perfectly done, Brian. Obviously you've practiced and done this before. I think a lot of people see you as a unique person and they think you know wow. He started off in college and he did this thing and he realized it wasn't for him. Coorporate America wasn't for for you.