REACH OR MISS - Entrepreneurial Marketing Success

David is the founder and CEO of Warm Welcome and was recently named a Top 100 Tech Innovator and Influencer.

In today’s market most businesses struggle to stand out in crowded markets. Warm Welcome helps businesses upgrade from boring text to personal video so they can build meaningful relationships that drive real revenue.

David has bootstrapped several startups into multi-million ARR. Revenues from Warm Welcome, along with his other four companies, exceed $6 million in 2020.

Over the previous years the pursuit of efficiency and automation has created a lonely world that is actually disconnected from what we need the most – people!

Most passionate about

• First is my family; we just moved to Florida, and I have two young boys, two and four. So that's an exciting, exciting time of life.
• My business babies and the startup guide; I have a few tech startups, and we're working on selling one of those and working on building one of those. The newest one is called Warm Welcome.
• it's a way to personalize your business and build trust quickly through video.
• it's a way to stand out in your market.
• It is a way to make things more personal, more human by moving beyond kind of boring old texts, emails, or text on your website and putting a face behind it, putting a smile behind it.

David’s career and story

• I remember back in sixth grade, I went down to the store and started buying up candy bars on sale, Reese's peanut butter cups and everyone loves them. And I started selling those, and the school shut me down...
• I saw problems back then and enjoyed solving them and enjoyed coming up with a better way of doing something or at least something that I thought was better.
• So, then I went on to college and actually ended up dropping out of college and starting a service business of photography and love doing that for about 10 years; it hits all the typical scale problems that everyone has in the service business, whether you're a photographer or contractor.
• So, I started to build communities around the software. One of my mentors, Tim Sanders, said, your network is your net worth. And I thought about that, and I thought I need to build a network: I need to build a community of people that knows me and trust me. Through the community, I started to hear other people's problems and try and come up with solutions for those. And so that's been what pulled me into tech.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• When I was 16 years old, my dad sat me down and said, David, if you do your business about helping other people, you always have plenty of work.
• I think that's probably the best advice out there and something that we often miss when we're building a business or building a product; we tend to think a lot about our business and our product. Still, really we need to be thinking about the customer and thinking about the problem that the customer has and how we are going to help them solve their problem.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• One thing that I've had a tendency to do is to take too much time building what I want to build, a product that I think is the right thing for the market instead of building an MVP or building a beta prototype that I can then take to the market and get their feedback on it earlier.
• With green.com, I spent about a million dollars more than I needed to spend building that. It cost me a couple of million bucks to get that product going. Because we spent our whole first year building, building, building, building, building, and so what we were essentially doing was baking the product. And then by the time, we presented it to the customer and they gave us feedback on it, we couldn't re-bake it. And so, it almost cost me the entire...

Isaac Kuhlman has been an Amazon Brand Developer since 2013, responsible for more than $12 Million in revenue. He is the co- founder of REAL Coaching with Kirsty Verity where they have helped over 1,000 Amazon Sellers grow their businesses with the right strategies to achieve their freedom goals. They specialize in taking sellers who are stuck or plateaued in their business and break through to reach the real success they desire.

Now he gets to enjoy real freedom and pursue his lifelong passion for Rock music-- having produced and recorded an album, bicycling 11 miles a day, writing a poetry book and traveling the world.

Most passionate about

• I'm an Amazon seller and have two brands on Amazon. Then we provide coaching through Real Coaching, which is a company I started with my business partner, Kirsty.
• We help entrepreneurs establish sustainable long-term businesses on Amazon—not just selling products, but actually getting businesses set up and built, finding products that can be sustainable and that are not just fad-products.
• I've always wanted to be somebody who educates but also leads other people to build an opportunity for themselves.

Isaac’s career and story

• I grew up pretty poor. I graduated from high school and took a couple of scholarships and a grant to go to school. I still had to pay a bunch of student loans. Actually, last year I finally paid off my student loans from 2004, when I graduated from college.
• I got a history degree with a pre-law or political science minor. My school didn’t have a pre-law major, but they had a pathway. I was happy that it didn't work out in the end because it kind of built a fire inside of me.
• I met a guy who was working in an Amazon business. I didn't know that much about Amazon. I had shopped on it a couple of times. I knew some stuff about online and Facebook, but it wasn't like I was savvy about e-commerce selling.
• We worked together for about two-and-a-half years, selling a lot of stuff. Then we branched off and went our separate ways. It changed the situation.
• I didn't have any plan. I had limited funds in the bank. Then I went out and started my own brands and the coaching business and all that stuff.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• I think Robert Kiyosaki has a quote similar to this: People who fail quit easily. Winners always try to fail as fast as possible.
• People are so afraid of rejection or failure, of something not working out one time, that they don't even get started.
• In my opinion, you only fail if you give up. You want to keep finding these things that you can do better.
• The only way you can do things better is to make mistakes along the way. Mistakes are the best learning tools in the world. Put your hand on a hot stove. You’ll remember never to do that again.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• This was very early on in my Amazon business. There was a person who said they got a defective product and they were going to sue us.
• My response wasn't overly negative, but it was kind of skeptical—pushing off the blame, but at the same time it wasn't helpful because it kind of made it seem like it was all their fault.
• We eventually got him to calm down. He wanted to write every Amazon customer and tell them, like, all this stuff about how it was a bad product.
• He was writing a bad review. It became a huge issue when it could have been resolved just by checking the tone of the email.

Biggest success with customers

• This was back around 2014, and a customer had received a product. They bought it from the Amazon listing that we created, but that didn’t necessarily mean that they were going to get the product from us because other...

Josh Little is the founder of four tech companies–Maestro, Bloomfire, Qzzr, and Volley–that have collectively been used by hundreds of millions of people. With two successful exits and third pending, he’s currently on a mission to save the working world from death-by-meetings with his fourth creation, Volley.

Most passionate about

• I am trying to save the world from “death by meetings,” as we all have gone remote with the recent pandemic and realized that we still need to talk to move work forward.
• We are aiming to fill the gap between Slack and Zoom. Most people would say, “Well, I don't see a gap there. I'm either Slacking my team or I'm Zooming with my team back to back all day.”
• There's this whole spectrum in between that Volley is aiming to solve. With Volley, you share asynchronous video messages. Imagine video texting. If you could text someone with a video, that's kind of what Volley is like.
• Volley allows teams to move work forward faster by replacing their meetings with asynchronous video conversations. The ultimate goal is to have productive conversations that don't interrupt each other's productivity because meetings are quite interrupted.

Josh’s career and story

• I started as a teacher. I was a preschool teacher, a social studies teacher. I actually was four years into a music education degree. The only reason I wanted to be a teacher was to be a music teacher, but I did realize that the same skills that made me a good teacher also made me good at sales.
• I left teaching to go into sales. I went to three Fortune 500 companies and did really well at each of them. I'd usually become the number one rep in the division the first year I was there. They would invite me to be the sales trainer and show everyone what I was doing.
• I left Stryker, which was my last corporate job, and started my first company, which was Maestro.
• From Maestro, we built Bloomfire. Then, after Bloomfire, I built QZZr. After kind of a long break and pondering what I wanted to build, the next idea, Volley, came.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• Be remarkable because the definition of the word “remarkable” is “worthy of remark.”
• To truly be remarkable is to have people talk about the way that you engage with customers, the way that you show up in a conversation.
• I aim for every interaction with a customer to be in some way remarkable, where they walk away from that conversation and say, “Wow, he really cared,” or “He really understood my problem,” or “I love how he was vulnerable there at that moment,” or “That was really funny what he did.”

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• With customers, my biggest failure has been withholding truth or withholding reality from a customer because you want to make customers happy and you don't want to initiate conflict.

Biggest success with customers

• I believe that I'm doing the best work of my life right now. I've had great success.
• With two of my companies, I've had successful exits. I really think what we're doing for teams and communication right now with Volley is extremely important work.
• The reason I say that what we're doing is a success—and this is very recent feedback we've been receiving from users—is that Volley has helped increase team connectedness and brought back the fun and the spontaneity that we once had as a team but that we then lost when we went remote. I think that's really powerful.

Josh’s recommendation of a tool

• Volley: That’s a tool that I'm using right now for reaching out to my customers. We're using our product as our support tool.
• LinkedIn and Zoom: LinkedIn is a great way to

Scott Prisco is a nutritionist and entrepreneur with a passion for helping others. He founded Priscotty Pure, a wellness company that assists people in reaching their optimum state of well-being through unique supplement blends and an electrifying health movement.

Scott is also a mover and shaker in the CBD space. He founded Inception Industries Extracts, a manufacturing company that specializes in the production of high-quality, water-soluble powders and liquids, made from hemp-derived cannabinoids. The company uses a proprietary nanomolecular encapsulation technology to drastically increase the bioavailability and effectiveness of its outputs. Inception Industries Extracts formulates ingredients for clients in the nutraceutical, nutricosmetic, and functional foods industries, both domestically and internationally.

Most passionate about

• Right now, I'm most passionate about helping people. We are a wellness supplement company. We make supplements and blends—from beauty products to CBD, sleep, digestion and everything in between.
• I am also passionate about my other company, Inception Industries Extracts, which is a CBD manufacturing company.
• We manufacture water-soluble ingredients for beverage companies and functional food companies, both domestically and internationally.

Scott’s career and story

• About three-and-a-half years ago, I suffered from depression and anxiety. I started using CBD when it first came on the market and became popular.
• I found a little bit of relief from the anxiety. It helped my mood.
• I have a nutrition background and I've always been into science. I read a ton of journals and scientific studies, and I really love chemistry as well.
• I linked up with a guy who had been making water-soluble ingredients for a world-renowned beverage company for the last 25 years.
• I took that and we applied it to the CBD. I started Priscotty Pure, which began with one product: a water-soluble CBD powder.
• We started selling that and then we got a lot of interest from other companies. We ranked pretty high on Google and got a lot of interest internationally and domestically, from beverage companies, functional foods, and nutraceuticals.
• I think that the CBD market really got played out a little bit. There were a lot of people getting involved in it and putting out products that weren't very good.
• So, it started as a CBD company, but then we pivoted and ended up selling other things.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• Be open, be malleable, be ready to pivot because you really don't know who your customer is.
• A lot of times, the best way to decide who your customer is, the proper customer you should be targeting, is to put out the product and see who interacts best with it.
• Don't think you know everything. Just be open.
• A lot of times, you’ll see that who you think you're going to be targeting and who you think is going to be buying your product will be different when the sales start rolling in. That’s what we’ve seen. Analytics help us on the backend.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• I’d say it was when we first started Priscotty Pure with that one water-soluble CBD product.
• We anticipated a higher volume of sales.
• We didn't really plan.
• It was such a slow start.
• We thought it was going to sell like hotcakes.
• Luckily, we got a lot of wholesale interest. We focused on that for a little bit, as we were building up the Priscotty Pure wellness business.
• We just fell into that and it really helped hold us over. It allowed us to eventually re-reinvest that money into Priscotty...

Unfortunately, you won’t find my room on Clubhouse. Not because I’m not on Clubhouse. I am. There are some fantastic rooms there, and I’ve heard some meaningful discussions. I actually thought about opening a room, and I even decided what it would be called and who my partner coordinators would be.

But then I realized that I had totally forgotten the law of FOCUS. This law has a few meanings. I first read about it 25 years ago in what I consider to be the best marketing book I’ve ever read: “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” by Al Ries and Jack Trout.

The law of focus says, “The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect’s mind.” We must create a clear identity in the minds of our target audience. The best way to get ahead of the competition is to be very clear and focused about what word we own.

But it starts much earlier. There are two decisions you should make regarding the basis of your market strategy: Who are your target customers and how should you define your product or service so that your potential customers understand its value?

As an entrepreneur today, you are probably confused. There are so many options, so many people who might need your product, and so many ways you can present your product to your customers.

Because there are so many options out there, you must find the customers who feel that they must have your product, that it solves their problem or best fulfills their need.

The problem is that to focus and be the best solution for one or two specific target audiences, you have to give up on so many potential buyers. Here comes the law of SACRIFICE—you have to give up something in order to get something. There are three things to sacrifice: product line, target market, and constant change.

So many opinions are out there. Everyone knows what you should do, who your target market is, and what marketing activities you should run.

But here is the truth: NOBODY KNOWS. You can’t know until you search the market from the point of view of your potential target audience.

Searching the market is not complicated today. In most cases, you don’t need an expensive research company. You can learn more about how to do it from my short guide, The three free, practical steps to researching and finding your market.

Here are two examples of entrepreneurs who managed to build a successful brand by focusing on and owning a single phrase in the minds of their target market.

How did they manage to do this? They focused on the right things and sacrificed other options.

The first entrepreneur is Mike Stelzner, who created the leading social media blog “Social Media Examiner” and the Social Media Marketing World global conference.

Stelzner managed to own the phrase “Social Media” in the minds of his target audience.

Michael Stelzner is the founder of Social Media Examiner, the author of the books Launch and Writing White Papers, and the man behind Social Media Marketing World, the industry’s largest conference. He’s also the host of the Social Media Marketing podcast, the founder of the Social Media Marketing Society, and the host of the weekly Social Media Marketing Talk Show. Michael’s Career

• “I started as a writer. Then in 2009, I did what I call ‘my great experiment’ when I was able to secure the website, SocialMediaExaminer.com for $10. I connected with some of my friends who were writers and encouraged them to write for this movement that I was starting, called Social Media Examiner. In 2009, not a lot of websites were giving out a lot of free information, and this thing just took off. In months, all of a sudden I had a crazy successful blog on my hands!
• And then the rest is history …...

My podcast, REACH OR MISS for entrepreneurs, reached its 200th episode, and - as part of the celebration - I decided to change its title to REACH OR MISS - Entrepreneurial Marketing Success.

The 1st secret - your “big idea” or what you are “one of a kind of?”

As I see it, the power and beauty of entrepreneurship is that it allows you to share or create what you are “one of a kind of” (the best at). That’s what entrepreneurs should focus on.

I’m aware that many people choose to enter the entrepreneurial world to leave their 9 to 5 jobs or to make more money, and these are good reasons; not every entrepreneur wants to change the world or make an impact. However, once you decided to become an entrepreneur, your chances to make an impact on more people and move the needle is significantly higher if you focus on your unique, powerful abilities.

I believe entrepreneurship is changing the world, not only because it can create technological or behavioral revolutions, but also because it enables entrepreneurs to choose to do what they are the best at and that means less mediocrity and much more greatness in our world.

What any entrepreneur should look for while deciding about his/her professional direction isn’t only where they can make a living, make more money or determine the leading trends today (although these are good and important parameters as part of this decision). Entrepreneurs should start to look for their professional direction after answering the question, What am I “one of a kind of”? Meaning, what will I be outstanding in doing?

The answer to this question lies in the meeting point between what you are best at doing and what you most like to do.

That will also be the direction where you have the best chances to achieve significant success

Once you’ve found what you are “one of a kind of,” you should find what product or service you should create or offer - one that answers a true need and brings value to a significant number of people or businesses.

Blake Jamieson is a fantastic example of an entrepreneur that is one of a kind at what he does, and he literally created a new market category that fit his talent.

Blake Jamieson is a pop portrait artist in Manhattan, NY. He paints pop art portraits for professional athletes and celebrities, including Howie Mandel, Drew Brees, Joe Montana, Gary Vaynerchuk, and over 250 other professional athletes in the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS, and PLL.

Blake’s path to becoming a full-time artist was far from traditional. Despite his passion for art at a young age, Blake decided to forgo art school for a more “practical” degree, studying Economics at UC Davis. After graduating, Blake began his career in digital marketing at Zynga. He worked in digital marketing for nearly a decade, working for small tech startups to publicly traded companies.

On his 30th birthday, Blake decided it was time to stop building someone else’s dream, and start to following his own passions. He began painting full-time nearly five years ago, and has carved out a niche that allows him to paint every day.

Most passionate about

• I’m a portrait artist located in NYC. I’ve had an interesting rollercoaster of a journey up until this point, but what I do now is paint portraits of professional athletes.
• Primarily, I have worked in the NFL, although I do work with other athletes who play soccer, lacrosse, hockey, and more.
• I created this niche for myself where an athlete, or the spouse or girlfriend of an athlete, is looking for a painting that will capture special sports moments for them. I’m often the person they turn to and I’m very fortunate to work with awesome people and get to paint every single day.

On my weekly podcast, I ask my interviewees about the digital or technological tools that they recommend using. However, I tell them that I’m not looking for the shiniest tool in the endless list of them. I’m looking for the tool that they use most and that helps them succeed.

Five tools help me as an entrepreneur who has worked with thousands of entrepreneurs on their marketing success.

My first tool is Canva. Canva is also one of the tools that Guy Kawasaki recommended in his interview.

Canva helps me get much more traction with attractive, powerful visuals. With a huge free photo stock, and very easy and intuitive design options, Canva is here to stay.

My second recommended tool is LinkedIn. You probably want to tell me “LinkedIn is a social media platform, not a tool.” That’s right, LinkedIn is defined as a social media platform. However, for me and many of the successful entrepreneurs I interview on my show, LinkedIn is a tool that we use daily to find and engage with potential customers, close deals, and turn them into loyal customers and fans.

Guy Kawasaki was the chief evangelist of Apple and a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation. Today, among his other positions, Guy is the chief evangelist of Canva, an online graphic design tool.

When I asked Guy what he is most passionate about today, he talked about Canva. “Professionally, I’m most passionate about Canva. Canva is democratizing design, trying to enable everyone to make great designs very easily.”

When I asked about the tool he uses most, Kawasaki answered:

“In general, social media is a gift to entrepreneurs, but within social media it’s Facebook! Facebook is so fantastic that you can target a specific age group, gender, in a specific geography with a specific interest. It’s the best marketing thing that exists.

“The second social media platform I would highly recommend is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is for your personal branding, for your personal awareness, and for your personal professional development. As a person, if you don’t participate in LinkedIn, you don’t exist in the world. LinkedIn and Facebook, that’s about 80% of my social media activity.”

My next tool is Feedly. Feedly is a content curation tool that provides me with endless updated content topics.

Using a content curation tool not only helps you to build a constant presence in social media but also allows you to build yourself as a leader in a specific market by providing current information and relevant analysis in a specific field.

I learned about using content curation tools from Richard Chowning.

Chowning is the founder and director of Africa Mentor, whose mission is to help businesses put their best foot forward in Africa. Chowning is located in Texas. Africa Mentor has official representatives in the Ivory Coast and Ethiopia and has relationships with governments and private sector businesses throughout Africa.

“I want to recommend UpContent, which is a curation tool,” Richard told me. “My dream was, when I decided to establish Africa Mentor, to help the economy of Africa, help people and companies that want to establish their businesses in Africa get into the continent, succeed, and create more jobs and lift the standard of living…

“…I’ve chosen to use a lot of social media to become known. I have more than...

Since co-founding Escape Fitness, taking it to a $33 million-dollar global business chosen by big brands and independent fitness professionals, such as the UFC, Equinox, 1Rebel, Sanctuary Fitness and more, Matthew has continued to be a powerful advocate for functional training.

Their goal is to motivate and inspire people to get started and create exercise habits that last. Matthew travels the world, helping studios and gyms to turn their visions into world-class fitness destinations and awesome training experiences. During the pandemic, Matthew has become an advocate for at-home training and maintaining physical and mental health to persevere in the face of life's challenges.

In addition to being a father, he has started five companies and sits on the board of three companies across three continents

Most passionate about

• I'm very passionate about the health and fitness space.
• We have a company that I founded with my father 21 years ago. We started making basic equipment for fitness studios and gyms.
• We are very much into helping and motivating people to get fit.
• I predominantly work with a lot of the business community.
• We have a number of different channels within the business that we supply.
• Probably the biggest channel is the gyms, personal training studios, and fitness studios.
• We also do quite a bit of corporate wellness.
• It’s important to think about your model and how to adapt it and evolve it so that you can deal with things like the pandemic that is going on at the moment.
• It’s also important to realize that the people who are at the end of the website or email or social media app are humans. What do humans need?
• As we said at the beginning, there are two things. Look at the stuff that's constant. You mentioned marketing where it's people to people. If it's not business to business or business to consumer, it's people to people.
• If you go too much down the technical route and lose that human connection, then you're not going to get that engagement and that same experience.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• You’ve got to look at the new technologies and how your business evolves, but you've almost got to say, “Well, look, what is an important thing for human beings and for people and how can you do that in a way for social media?”
• I suppose my advice is, it depends on who we're talking to. Don't forget that we're all human and don't let technology confuse you.
• Try and understand how you can use that technology to create deep and meaningful personal relationships.
• Nowadays, in order to be successful, you've got to really narrow down on that audience.
• Humanization and personalization are probably two things that are key today.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• One of the most difficult things for me to get over is when we have a customer who’s not happy with us. For us, the customers or clients, whatever you call them, are almost like family.
• Maybe someone buys a product and we let them down, or we messed up the delivery or they have a product and it has an issue.
• We had a client whom we started to work with and they were a long way from where we're located—the other side of the world almost.
• A big percentage of the product that we shipped them was wrong.
• The quality control wasn't what it should have been.
• They brought the containers into the country and then they started to distribute them to gyms. We'd read that they'd realized it had this same problem.
• So, it wasn't just a...