REACH OR MISS - Entrepreneurial Marketing Success

REACH OR MISS - Entrepreneurial Marketing Success

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REACH OR MISS - Entrepreneurial Marketing Success episodes

  • Ep. 186 – Devin Miller: “Responding to customers right away has grown our business better than any-thing else.”

    Devin is an entrepreneur, patent and trademark attorney, and an Intellectual Property expert.

    He specializes in protecting startup and entrepreneurial companies with IP Legal Advice, setting them up for success in their business! In addition to founding and running Miller IP Law, he is the co-founder of several startups including a multi-million dollar startup for wearable glucose monitoring.

    Devin has worked with the likes of Amazon, Intel, Red hat and Ford. He is passionate about helping businesses and has a drive to educate and entertain listeners with years of experience as a calm speaker, and veteran podcaster.

     

    Most passionate about

    • My main focus is on what's called Miller IP Law. It's a patent and trademark law firm that helps startups and small businesses.
    • Another focus is on startups I founded: one in the wearable space, another that is a software as a service startup, and a couple of others that are getting ready to launch.

    Best advice for entrepreneurs

    • The first thing to do is define who your customers are—not broadly saying, “We want to sell our product to everybody who will buy it,” but saying, “This is who we want to really serve.” This is your best first step.
    • For our company, startups and small businesses are where we want to focus because that's who we enjoy working with. You get to have a lot more impact. They are a lot more fun to work with.

    The biggest, most critical failure with customers

    • We built our system so that it would automatically generate invoices based on some of the information we provided. Then it would send the invoice to the client or do automatic follow-ups.
    • We didn't understand, or we didn't account, for every possibility. We had one customer who received the wrong invoice. It was the wrong amount and it wasn't in the right name. It was just a flaw in the system that we've since corrected, but back then the customer said, “Hey, this isn't the right amount.”
    • LESSON LEARNED: It's finding that sweet spot: “Hey, we're automating what we can but it doesn't impact the customer touch, that customer-centric focus.” Today, we make sure that we can maintain those human touches where they're needed.

    Biggest success with customers

    • Responding to customers right away has been one of the biggest impacts. It has grown our business and had a better customer impact than anything else.
    • We set up a system; 90% of the time we respond right away, and 95% of the time we respond within 30 minutes. We have a strict drop-dead rule: 100% of the time you respond by the end of the day.
    • I can't count the number of times a client has reached out and said, “Hey, thank you for your quick response,” or “Hey, it's great to get a quick answer; you guys are so much more responsive.” That's probably helped us grow our business.

    Devin’s recommendation of a tool

    • We use HubSpot a lot. It's how we track the customer experience.
    • HubSpot has been our customer relations management tool since our first year. It's a bit more expensive, but it accomplishes what we need.
    • It provides a wide variety of ways to track the customer journey, making sure we take care of them. We can automate the things we need to and make sure we're not automating things we shouldn’t.

    Devin’s one key success factor

    • The one factor for me, personally, is the ability to press forward. There are going to be good times, bad times, easy times, hard times, and everything in between.
    • What has driven our success, or made the difference throughout everything, is the ability to say, when everything is hard, “It's not easy but I'm going to continue to press forward. We're going to figure this out. We're...
    24 min
  • Ep. 184 – Three things good businesses do well – With Bill Flynn

    With more than thirty years of experience working for and advising hundreds of companies, including ten startups, Bill Flynn has had a long track record of success; five successful outcomes, two IPOs, and seven acquisitions, including a turnaround during the 2008 financial crisis. 

    He has been a VP/Sales eight times, twice a CMO, and once the GM of a division of a $100MM+ IT services company until he pivoted to becoming a business growth coach.

    As a coach, Bill has earned certifications and cultivated partnerships from organizations such as ScalingUp, Metronome United, Predictive Index, MassMEP, Small Giants, and The Neuroleadership Institute.

    He is also an author and international speaker. Bill’s best-selling book - Further, Faster - The Vital Few Steps that Take the Guesswork out of Growth continues to garner a 5-Star rating.

     

    Most passionate about

    • I help leadership teams take the guesswork out of growth.
    • I'm probably most passionate about my daughter.
    • On the professional side, I think it's a shame that really good ideas, really good people, and really good businesses either go out of business or struggle for completely preventable reasons.

    Bill’s career and story

    • My goal over the next 20 years is to share, with as many people as possible, that there’s a lot of predictability in business. Most people don't know that. I've been studying it for about 30 years, and I found that there are a few things that good companies do well.
    • We never really teach people how to be good team leaders. It's a skill that can be taught and you can get better and better at it, but we don't teach it.
    • The second thing: Strategy and execution are two really important pieces of the business. They are two sides of the same coin and those who do it well, create a system.
    • The last one is cash. That should be your primary growth metric. Once you are no longer a startup, once you're a scale-up or a real business, cash should be your primary growth metric. It takes cash to grow and you typically have to invest in front of growth.

     

    I want to invite you to the free live training about 7 practical ways to get more customers: www.getmorecustomersregistration.com

     

    Best advice for entrepreneurs

    • I have a particular set of things that I recommend. One is to solve a problem that's worth solving for yourself and your target customer.
    • It has to be interesting to you. It has to be something worthy of the other person. There may be a lot of problems out there to solve, but if the target customer you're going after doesn't have it high enough on their priority list, then it doesn't matter to them.
    • Don't run out of money!
    • Then you get to the entrepreneur who now has a business that's growing. There’s some predictability and scalability to that business.
    • At a high level, a few things truly matter in business—and, really, in life. As a leader, you need to focus and figure out those few things that matter to you.
    • You really need to focus on the demand side of the equation.

    The biggest, most critical failure with customers

    • I was a sales-guy at one point, in my 20s. I started off on an inside sales team for a company. We sort of competed with Novell at the time, in the 80s. And I was really, really bad at it.
    • The failure was in trying to tell them why they should buy from me, instead of understanding what caused them to buy.

    Biggest success with customers

    • My greatest success is the reason I'm a coach now.
    • The reason I do what I do today and why I say this is my biggest success is that two
    40 min
  • Ep. 183 – The secret of winning your customers: The What, The Who, And the How.

    Getting customers is what entrepreneurs say they struggle with most.

     

    When we talk about entrepreneurship success, we still talk about very low success rates (The last formal numbers are still between 5%-10%. Of course, it depends on how success is defined).

    The first reason (42%) entrepreneurs say what they fail for is “No market need”. There are usually two reasons for not finding the market need:

    Either you didn’t focus on the right customers, Or your product definition wasn’t correct.

     

    The What

    A product or service definition contains 3-5 words; 

    your answer to the question, “What do you offer?” Based on the answer to the question “What problem do you solve”

     

    Why is defining your product or service critical?

    • ⌘ That’s how customers will find you
    • ⌘ It differentiates you from your competitors
    • ⌘ It attracts clients
    • ⌘ It’s the basis for leading your market category

    The one rule of defining your product: In defining your product, you should focus on your customers’ point of view:

    You need to learn what your customers are looking for; How customers, people who are seeking solutions, and providers talk about the problem and solutions within your space

    We look for what they need or want: What words do they use to look for the solution?

     

    Remember, it’s always about them! The customer always looks to find ‘WIIFM’ - What’s In It For Me?!

     

    There is one story I like most as an example for the “what” part, finding what solution and product (or service) you should provide.

     

    The story of Mike Allton who provided one product and found out his customers want something else…

     

    Mike Allton - The award-winning social media blogger and author turned his successful website business into a social media blog and guidance source. Mike Allton is a Content Marketing Practitioner, award-winning Blogger and Author in St. Louis, and the Chief Marketing Officer at SiteSell. He has been working with websites and the Internet since the early ’90’s, and is active on all of the major social networks.

    Mike teaches a holistic approach to content marketing that leverages blog content, social media and SEO to drive traffic, generate leads, and convert those leads into sales.

     

    Mike’s story

    • I started the Social Media Hat back in 2012. At that time, I had been building websites, and as part of that website business, I was blogging about social media marketing in order to give my prospects and customers helpful information. It didn’t attract people who needed websites, it attracted people that already had website and wanted to learn about their social media opportunity.
    • So, as a result, I wasn’t growing my online business, but I discovered that I like to write and I like to teach people how to use social media blogging.
    • I realized that the content doesn’t help to sell websites, however I decided to create a site about social media blogging and that what I did.
    • I’ve used my site as a testing ground for anything related to online marketing. I execute the test and write about it and I found out my audience really appreciates those kinds of insights.
    • And in the meantime, I was experiencing making money through the website and I tested that as well. Affiliate relationships, Google AdWords, Display ads, and many other monetization techniques. The most successful way to make money is to have a product that can you sell a lot of, so it can scale.

    What is your one key success factor?

    • One thing that comes to mind: to have specific online relationships with people that can help you and show you the way to achieve your goals.

     

    The Who

    Most entrepreneurs have a very clear...

    43 min
  • Ep. 182 – Joe Karlsson ”It took me years to get there, but right now I have my dream job!” Can you say the same??

    Joe Karlsson is a software engineer turned Developer Advocate at MongoDB. He comes from the frozen tundra of Minneapolis, Minnesota (and yes, it does get really cold here, and no, not everyone here has the accent from the movie, Fargo).

    Joe has been primarily a Node and JavaScript engineer. He has been writing, teaching, and talking about code his entire career. Sharing what he knows and continuing to learn about programming is truly the thing he loves doing the most.

     

    Most passionate about

    • I’m most passionate about Developers Advocate. I work for a database software tech company called MongoDB. As part of my job, I get to hang out with developers all the time. I make cool tools for them, or documentation, I speak at tech conferences and I make videos at Twitch stream.
    • Whatever developers need, I make that for them.
    • I still consider myself a software engineer, but I'm just better at engaging with developers.

    Joe’s career and story

    • I first started learning how to program. I started learning it out of fear of not making money when I was a professional.
    • I actually was an art history minor, and then I switched over to computer science for fear of being poor.
    • I went to school during one of the last financial collapses. Then I worked as an engineer and programmer for years. I hated it. I was so bad at it.
    • I was ready to quit programming, and I moved to Hawaii to become a surf bum. Then I met some hacker punks down there, who were making fun stuff, making art. It got me very excited about making stuff just for fun.
    • That changed the way I looked at programming. I've been trying to share the joy that I felt ever since.

    Best advice for entrepreneurs

    • I feel like it would be best if I spoke about how to engage the developer's perspective. That’s the primary customer of many businesses, and I feel like even if your direct customer isn't the developer, most entrepreneurs are now engaging developers as either employees or contractors or building out a product.
    • I get calls from business people and entrepreneurs all the time, asking if I would be willing to join them for their startup. It basically ends with them just calling me and giving me a 15-minute pitch without allowing me to talk at all about the product. That leaves me completely unimpressed and uninterested in their thing.
    • Developers are more interested in learning and growing and playing, I think.
    • Entrepreneurs need to figure out what developers are interested in and know that that's going to be something different from what another customer is going to be interested in.

    How you managed to speak with developers

    • My primary development market is JavaScript and Node. It's like the language of the web.
    • I'm trying to provide lots of interesting content for developers, like career advice, learning stuff, tips and tricks, that sort of thing. I sprinkle product information in there, too.
    • Authenticity is super important. That's what doesn't work with business people. Sometimes it feels inauthentic. It feels sales-y. It feels like a pitch. It feels like a commercial.
    • I try to be an authentic human being with feelings and fears and anxieties, while also talking about a product.

    The biggest, most critical failure with customers

    • I've been a technical lead at several large tech companies. I feel like a couple of them didn't quite understand my need to teach and grow, to help out the developer communities. That caused friction with them.
    • Today, speaking at conferences or streaming and engaging with developers is my full-time job. However, in the past, I was doing that on nights and weekends. Sometimes I'd miss work to do it. I caused some friction with the...
    29 min
  • Ep. 181 – Lisa McLeod: “The money always follows the meaning”. How to find your entrepreneurship’s Noble Purpose?

    Lisa McLeod is the global expert on purpose-driven business and the bestselling author of Selling with Noble Purpose: How to Drive Revenue and Do Work That Makes You Proud.

    Lisa has spent two decades helping leaders increase competitive differentiation and emotional engagement. Her work debunks the myth that money is the primary motivation for most employees. She developed the Noble Purpose philosophy after her research revealed, salespeople who sell with Noble Purpose, who truly want to make a difference to their customers, outsell salespeople who focus on their own targets and quotas.

     

    Most passionate about

    • The thing I am passionate about today is thinking about people waking up excited to go to work. But, as the years go on, and especially today, it’s hard to wake up feeling like you have that sense of purpose.
    • And if you’re not waking up feeling like that, your employees are definitely not waking up feeling that way.
    • To create a successful business, you need two things: You need competitive differentiation, a way to stand out, and you need emotional engagement. You need people who care passionately about your business as employees because that’s the way to create passionate customers.
    • The thing that will help you acquire both of those is clarity about your noble purpose. Why are you in business? How do you improve the lives of your customers (beyond just making money)? What is the true north star of your business?

    Lisa’s customers

    • We work with organizations and a lot of startups. We want to identify the answers to three questions: How do you make a difference to your customers? How do you do it differently from your competition? And on your best day, what do you love about your job?
    • How are you going to move the middle for your customers?
    • It goes beyond a standard value proposition.

    Lisa’s career and story

    • I started my business because I was a VP of sales for a large consulting firm, and I had a baby. I couldn’t work 70 hours a week and travel four days a week anymore. And I thought, ‘How can I still work in this field of helping organizations with sales but work differently than I did before?’
    • I got into the world of noble purpose when I did a big project for a big biotech firm. They wanted us to identify what separated the top performers in terms of sales and revenue.
    • We found that all the top performers had that sense of purpose. They didn’t want to just hit the numbers. They wanted to make a difference.

    Lisa’s best advice for entrepreneurs

    • Find where you are already living your purpose. If you are a business and you have customers paying you, any customer with any amount of money, you’re doing something for them. They chose you for a reason.
    • My advice to entrepreneurs is: Go talk with your customers. Don’t just ask them “What did we do well?” Go deeper and ask, “How did our work impact your life or your business? How did it make a difference to you?”
    • You’ll start to see the basis for your noble purpose. You need to name it and blame it and then start activating it in the hearts and minds of your employees.
    • That’s when you create one of those organizations that can’t be beat. Two tips for activating your noble purpose among your customers: The first is to tell many stories about how you helped your customers. How did you do what the customers needed next? The second tip is to ask your employees how you can contribute to that.

    Biggest failure with customers

    • This is an easy answer. It was more than just a failure with a customer, it was a failure of a business. Our entire company failed. It was during the recession. I’d had my sales consulting business for some time and my husband, who was a...
    30 min
  • Ep. 180 – Entrepreneurial Marketing Success – The 3 successful entrepreneurs that affected you most
    Guy Kawasaki, David Beebe and Kate Erickson talk about three revolutions you must implement in your Business today:
    • ✓ The ‘customers who are fans’ revolution
    • ✓ The social media revolution, and
    • ✓ The broadcast revolution

    Hi, entrepreneurs reachers.

    How are you? We are at the end of the summer. Probably the strangest summer most of us ever went through; the world has changed. Dramatically. The scary thing is that we don't know what the new world is going to look like. Everything is still shifting; what I do know that this is the best opportunity for entrepreneurs to take the time and make their entrepreneurship the business they want to have.

    And I want to help you at this uncertain time. So I went to look for the entrepreneurs that affected you most by analyzing which entrepreneurs you chose to listen to most and what they stand for.

    These are the results:

    The first entrepreneur that most of you chose to listen to is Guy Kawasaki.

    Guy Kawasaki was Apple's Chief Evangelist, and today is the Chief evangelist of Canva. Guy's approach to customers represents the biggest marketing revolution: The 'customers who are fans' revolution. That’s what marketing gurus like Mark Schaefer and David Meerman Scott (both were the firsts to understand the huge effect of the social media and content revolution) write about today:

    Mark Schaefer wrote in his last book Marketing Rebellion about "The most human company wins," and David Meerman Scott and Reiko Scott wrote in their excellent book Fanocracy - about turning fans into customers and customers into fans.

    Let's listen to the main parts of my interview with Guy Kawasaki:

     

    The ‘customers who are fans’ revolution

    Guy Kawasaki

    Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva, an online graphic design tool. He is a brand ambassador for Mercedes-Benz and an executive fellow of the Haas School of Business (UC Berkeley). He was the chief evangelist of Apple and a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation. He is also the author of The Art of the Start 2.0, The Art of Social Media, Enchantment, and nine other books. Kawasaki has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

    Guy’s Career

    • My career really started in the jewelry business, not tech. I started a part-time job when I had my MBA at UCLA. I worked for a jewelry manufacture in downtown LA. It was a small manufacturing company owned by a Jewish family, and that’s where I learned sales and marketing. I worked there for about six years. I have a deep understanding and love for many Jewish things.
    • I was in the jewelry business, and then I got an Apple 2, and I fell in love with computers.
    • I worked for 6 months for a small software company that was acquired, and my roommate eventually hired me into Apple. I went to work for Apple as an evangelist, I left to start a company, and later returned to apple as Apple chief evangelist, and yet again left to start a company… Basically; I’ve been in Apple twice, and I’ve been an entrepreneur, speaker, and author since then.

    Customers

    • My target audience for Canva is anyone who wants to make a design, so this means anybody in the world… We try to democratize design so anybody can create beautiful designs. That’s a few billion people… I hope people realize how necessary it is to use design as an element of your communications because it helps you stand out.
    • From the very start, the goal was to empower people. Just like when I went to work for Apple, the goal for Apple was not to make a business computer but to make a computer that anyone could use. The same thing is true for Canva; it’s not a...
    54 min
  • Ep. 179 – Climbing mountains and entrepreneurial success – The 6th and newest part – Some of the most amazing mountains’ stories you heard

    Hi, my Reachers.

    This is the third ‘Mountain Episode’ in 2020, and I think you would love this amazing series of the Reach Or Miss mountains project; Today, I want to share with you the 6th and newest episode where successful entrepreneurs share their mountains stories.

     

    Listen to these incredible mountain stories I heard from the successful entrepreneurs I recently interviewed on my podcast.

    You can then listen to the full interview with each of them and hear about their visions, struggles, and how these entrepreneurs reached their success.

     

    From the entrepreneur that climbed the Kilimanjaro

    To the entrepreneur that quoted, “We don’t climb mountains because they are there; we climb mountains because others won’t.” And said it’s the same with entrepreneurship - “I do what I do because others won’t.”

    To the entrepreneur whose company’s name is Stone Pick “because, as entrepreneurs, we see our goal at the top of the mountain.”

    The one who said that with the acquisition option for entrepreneurs, “it’s like having a helicopter drop me off at the top of the summit instead of climbing by foot.”

    And the entrepreneur that went up to the base camp of Mount Everest, and plan to go to Peru for his next mountain.

     

    I hope these mountain stories will encourage you to find out what should you – as an entrepreneur looking for your breakthrough to success – take from their stories to help find the necessary steps to reach your peak?

     

    Many entrepreneurs climb mountains, while others use mountains as a metaphor to describe what is necessary to conquer the peak – including the fatiguing yet rewarding journey to the top. Still other entrepreneurs use mountains as an analogy for a significant goal they wish to achieve – such as becoming a billion-dollar-market-cap company.

    For many years, I’ve compared the act of taking possession of your potential customers’ minds and of building awareness, likability, and trust of a leading brand to the act of climbing the highest mountains.

    You climb step by step to the peak, reach your position as a market leader and a leading brand, and then start climbing a new mountain with a new product line or another brand.

    The idea of mountains as representations of a strong position in the market is mentioned by Al Ries and Jack Trout in the excellent book, Marketing Warfare.

    “In military warfare, mountains and higher altitude areas represent strong positions and often are used to present a strong defense. In marketing warfare, the question is one of who holds the mountains in the consumer's mind.”

     

    So, at some point after the launch of my podcast for entrepreneurs, I started to ask the successful entrepreneurs I interviewed about their habits or dreams of climbing one of the highest mountains in the world.

    Listen to these new inspiring mountains’ stories, find which entrepreneurs and stories you identify with most, and review your entrepreneurial objectives, market overview, and plan. By making your business as strong as possible, you will be able to quickly and easily achieve entrepreneurial success.

     

    John Jonas: “After a month of working with Philippine Virtual Assistant I realized that there are two of me… I replaced myself in my business…!”

    John Jonas has helped thousands of entrepreneurs succeed in their business by doing outsourcing differently. He created and runs OnlineJobs.ph, the largest website for finding Filipino virtual workers, with over 1,000,000 Filipino resumes and over 300,000 employers from around the world using it.

    He works about 17 hours per week, choosing to spend his time with his family rather than working.

    John’s...

    27 min
  • Ep. 178 – Jeremy Parker swag.com “I’m never satisfied in terms of customer success. We should go above and beyond to make our customers’ experience great.”

    Jeremy Parker is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and serial entrepreneur. He is the Co-founder and CEO of Swag.com, the best place for companies to buy quality promotional products that you'll actually want to keep. 

    They work with 5,000+ companies including Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify and Tik Tok. They are #218 on the 2020 Inc 500 (fastest growing companies in the US). Jeremy was also named by CrainsNY as one of the 40Under40.

     

    Most passionate about

    • I’m working on com. We provide custom promo products that people actually want to keep. We launched the company in early 2016 and we are the fastest growing promotional products company in the country. We were just named among the 500 fast-growing companies in the US—the “number 218” fastest-growing company in the States.
    • Our main passion at this point is taking the easy and streamlined buying experience that we developed, not only to buy swag but also to distribute swag and send swag to all remote addresses. Especially now with the pandemic, people feel so disconnected.
    • The difference with our swag platform is that, from the first day, we’ve focused on the millennial customers who expect everything to be fully automated and very easy to work with. With time, our customers asked us to not only hold the process of buying and delivering their product but also store it for them and shift it to each of their customers directly, as well as monitor their inventory. That’s what we’ve worked on in the last two years.
    • Right now, when most companies are working from home and everybody is disconnected, our feeling is that our distribution platform will be very useful.
    • Today many leading brands are working with our platform, from Facebook and Google and Amazon to Netflix and Spotify and TikTok to smaller startups. Our platform scales with the businesses as they grow.

    Jeremy’s career and story

    • I’m actually a filmmaker. I even won the Audience Award at the 2006 Vail Film Festival for a documentary I made with my brother. After we won this award, I realized my passion wasn’t to become a filmmaker.
    • After college, I started my first business. I had no experience in businesses and I thought that starting a T-shirt company would be easy and focused and a good opportunity to learn how to run a business. It sounds simple but you need to learn manufacturing, and how to run a website, and how to do marketing and PR and customer service. I started this T-shirt company and became better and better. It helped me find out what I’m good at. I became good at user experience design and branding. That’s what I fell in love with.
    • After the T-shirt company, I worked for MV Sport, one of the largest players in the promotional product space.
    • I was introduced to the promotional products market at the age of 22 and everything in this space was done very manually. It was all about catalogs and presentation decks and phone calls to close the sale.
    • From my experience showing was always focused online, I didn’t want to speak with people while I purchased something. Over the 10 ten years, I watched the promotional products space very closely and realized that the market got bigger and bigger but the buyer changed. The buyer now is a millennial and the platforms were not built for today's buyers.
    • That was kind of an a-ha moment for me: to build a platform with a great user experience that will answer the needs of today’s buyers. And that was the initial idea for Swag.
    • In the first year, we didn’t build any platform. We focused on learning from our customers about what they need and want. The knowledge we got at the beginning gave us a shining light on what kind of platform we should build.

    Jeremy’s best advice for...

    33 min
  • Ep. 177 – Dr. Travis Zigler: “To become an overnight success, you need to be persistent for years and years…”

    Dr. Travis Zigler is a recovering optometrist turned e-commerce entrepreneur. He is the founder of Eye Love, whose mission is to heal one million dry eye sufferers naturally.

    Dr. Travis and his wife, Dr. Jenna Zigler, use the profits from Eye Love to fund free clinics in Jamaica and the US through their charity, the Eye Love Cares Foundation.

    Previously, Dr. Travis and Dr. Jenna owned two optometry practices, which they sold in 2017 to focus on their online efforts. Dr. Travis enjoys reading to his son, Jude, traveling to Jamaica, and playing the ukulele while he drinks his morning coffee.

    Due to the success of Eye Love, others have asked if Dr. Travis would help them grow their business online—more specifically with Amazon, which is one of his superpowers. As a specialist in Amazon PPC, Dr. Travis blogs about Amazon PPC and selling on Amazon.

    Travis's favorite quote: Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. - Gandhi

     

    Most passionate about

    • Today I’m 36 years old and a millennial and my career has taken a crazy turn. I was originally an optometrist, so I’m most passionate about eyes—and specifically dry eyes. I’m on a mission to help one million people heal their dry eye problems naturally. That’s the basis of my main business, called EyeLove.
    • My second passion is helping brands and brand owners scale their sales on Amazon. We saw a lot of success using Amazon to sell our products.
    • We also have a foundation which is all about helping to end preventable blindness. Most people don’t know that there are around one billion people who are blind due to a lack of glasses. We work kind of exclusively in the Caribbean.

    Travis’s career and story

    • My wife and I are both optometrists. We were working for my uncle but something was missing. Then I got the entrepreneurial bug, so we moved across the country from Chicago to North Carolina. We opened two practices and then came across a course about selling on Amazon. We started to sell on Amazon as a sunglasses company.
    • Then we started to realize how big of a problem dry eye is. It affects 40 million Americans—over 10%. The existing products were very expensive, so somebody came to us and asked us if we could develop one.
    • That’s how our first product for dry eyes was born—from listening to our customer. Since then, we have been on a mission to come up with organic, natural eye health products.
    • The key takeaway I have for this podcast is: Listen to your customers. They are the ones who pay for your service or product.
    • Today my wife and I work together; I’m the CEO and she is my COO. We always joke that I try to ten-X the business and she tries to prevent us from going bankrupt.

    Travis’s best advice for entrepreneurs

    • One of my favorite pieces of advice is that to become an overnight success, you need to be persistent for years and years.
    • The reason we are successful and somebody else isn’t is that we wake up every single day knowing exactly what we need to do that day in order to move our business forward.
    • We found what we like to do and we just do that every single day. When you are persistent long enough, everything pays off. Your business will grow; you’ll hit a tipping point.
    • Each of us knows exactly what their one thing is. I know that my one thing is podcast interviews and content creation. I try to get on at least one podcast a week.
    • Getting in front of other people’s audiences is my one thing. Hopefully, one of your listeners will resonate with what we are saying and they will follow us, either from the business side or from the healthcare side.
    • We focus on two main things to attract customers. First, we have our YouTube channel, The Dry Eye Show, with 41,000 subscribers. The second is podcast...
    37 min

About REACH OR MISS - Entrepreneurial Marketing Success

From the publisher's feed

The REACH OR MISS podcast is about the customer focused entrepreneur. Hayut Yogev chats with Guy Kawasaki, John Lee Dumas, Michael Stelzner, Kate Erickson, Chris Brogan, Mark Schaefer, Joe Pulizzi, Marcus Sheridan and more successful entrepreneurs and opinion leaders about their Customers Approach and Focus.