The Invisible Mentor

Posts Tagged ‘Gary Vaynerchuk’

Interviewee Name: Andrew Warner

Company Name: Mixergy.com

Website: http://www.mixergy.com

Andrew Warner – Your Invisible Mentor & Workshop Leader

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Andrew Warner: I founded a company called Mixergy.com and that’s where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses, and I do it for an audience of rabid entrepreneurs who are eager to soak up as much information as they can from other entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. These are people who know about Hulu.com and know that they could be watching The Simpsons, Family Guy and whatever nonsense they could be watching on TV, but they choose to watch a program where entrepreneurs are talking about business instead.

Avil Beckford: What has been your biggest disappointment in your life – and what are you doing to prevent its reoccurrence?

Andrew Warner: I went to high school without getting dates. I went to college without getting dates. I shouldn’t say none at all, but practically none. I didn’t know how to talk to people, I especially I didn’t know how to talk to girls. It was de-motivating for me because I just kept saying to myself, “You know one day I’ll be able to do anything. I don’t know how to even apply myself to this. I don’t know what book I could read to learn how to talk to people and girls, and have interesting relationships. I don’t know what class I could take.” When it comes to dating, these people are charlatans selling junk.

But I said, “If I apply myself to business, I’ll have enough money and success in my life that I can do anything with my life and that’s when I’ll get there.” And that was a big disappointment. I had free time in my mid twenties when I could start dating, and it was tough to do it. It was tough when you don’t know what you are doing, and it’s tough when you have the expectations that I do. I didn’t want to just date whoever came up. If I’m walking down the streets and there is a girl who I’m interested in, or if I’m at a party and there is a girl who I’m interested in, I wanted to be comfortable enough to walk up to this girl and at least say, “Hello,” and figure out if there is some chance to date. Or if I’m at a party, I want to know that it doesn’t matter if all my friends see me fail if we have mutual friends who are going to know that I asked her out and nothing happened.

I want to be able to go over and say “Hello” and see if there is any connection there and if there isn’t any connection romantically but we are meant to be friends, or some friendship clicked and I want to be friends, I just want to be able to do it that way, and it took a lot of work, and it took a lot of effort to be able to have conversations with strangers where I put myself out there. But it’s a big help and it’s a big accomplishment for me on a personal level, and I also think that once you conquer something outside of your level of comfort you feel like you can conquer anything, you feel like you are much more open.

If I just went from one business to the next without exceeding at them I would feel great in my own little world, but if I’m at a party and having a conversation with a stranger maybe in the back of my head I saying, “I’m not good at this, I’m good at business, put me in an office with them and I’ll know how to deal with them there.” But I don’t know how to talk to them at a party. But that opened me up and I’d say, “You know I don’t know what to do, I know what to do in an office.”

Once you get outside your comfort zone once and you learn that you can do something tough that wasn’t who you thought you were, you start to feel like you can do anything and sure enough I started doing long bike rides after that. I started running more, I started swimming, and things just opened up. I started being able to just go anywhere and be able to do anything and say, “Hey tonight I feel like going to Vegas, who wants to go? Nobody?”  I’ll go and I know I’ll find some people and I’ll be able to hang out. “Who wants to try this trip to Europe, nobody feels like it?” It’s good I’ll go there on my own and I’ll be able to connect with people. It’s very powerful.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Andrew Warner: To say I’m not going to create a web app. I’ve interviewed lots of entrepreneurs who have web apps or iPhone apps. There are all kinds of stuff and it’s very easy for me to start to think that’s the only success in life, that’s the only direction in life. It’s a lot harder to say I’m kind of curious about going in this other direction. I want to see if interviewing people can lead to something valuable for myself, something meaningful for myself. A life that I can care about, can it help with what my guests are teaching? Can it help others who are listening in on it? Let’s see if that can help them, and if that can help them, and I can be helped along the way then let’s see what big impact we can have on the world. And that’s not to build a web app and charge $10.95 a month, get a $1 million by the second year type of business. It’s not a build-a-business raise some funds, sell it for $1 billion five, 10 years from now type of goal, but it’s a goal that says people I admired left a legacy beyond building a business, they left a legacy of ideas, and I want to be in that world and I’m going to take a shot at being in that world and that’s a tough decision to make and it’s tough to stick to it.

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

Andrew Warner: Starting a business with my brother was a huge one. Before he and I started, I was going to publish a magazine about business success. I wanted to just write about successful businesspeople. I wanted to cold call and sell it over the phone. I wanted to build it up like one of my favourite magazine which was Forbes Magazine. When I was growing up, Forbes Magazine was very different from what it is today. It was more focused on successful people, how they got there, their challenges, and uncovering successes in areas you would have never expected. There was a guy who was in the chotsky business who was on the Forbes 400 list, and another guy who was recycling cans and was on the Forbes 400 List of Richest People in the World.

I love listening to that, I love reading those stories and I wanted to be a part of creating stories like that and passing them on to others and building a media empire from nothing. That was the vision but it was going very slowly and then my brother comes in with his internet experience and starts cranking out these products, and he said, “You know I don’t have much time to sell, and I don’t know how to sell, so maybe we can team up.” So we partnered up and created a newsletter business, we created a greeting card business and then we got into all kinds of other businesses, but it all happened very quickly and it was a huge decision for me.

The second big decision was dropping out from that partnership and saying, “Hey, there is another part of my life that I want to go and explore, and I’m going to have the confidence to know that if I leave here I can always build another business so I’m just going to disappear from business completely.” I’m going to say goodbye to everyone but I’m not going to stay in touch with people who I worked with, I’m not going to keep pinging them so that one day if I want to get started again I can have that network up and running. I want to be fully focused on what I need to do and what I need to do is explore the fun part of my life, the non work part of my life. I want to ride my bike every day up the Pacific Coast Highway for 10 hours and not worry about having to pull over to make a few calls to people, but to get lost in the ride. I want to go for long runs. I want to go swimming in the mornings and spend four hours from 6 to 10 am focused on swimming. Or travel to Europe and not have a cell phone with me, and if I need to talk to anyone I’ll just go find a pay phone. I’ll go that basic and that helped me to discover a part of my life that added depth to who I am.

The third event was to put myself out there. I was the kind of person who liked a lot of privacy. When I decided to do Mixergy, I put myself out there and got on camera, I’m not a camera person. I was on Good Morning America once, if you could see the video, I looked stunned, I didn’t look comfortable on camera. But I decided to really reach out to people and have a connection with them. I needed to be on camera, I needed them to see me, I needed them to hear me, I needed them to hear me fail not because I want to fail, not because I want them to hear me fail but because I had to open myself up to failing publicly on camera, on audio, on the internet with strangers who I don’t know who are watching me, and with old fiends or frenemies who are wishing me ill.

People in high school or elementary school could be saying, “That guy thinks he is going to go start a business, I can’t wait for him to fail and fall on his face.” Those people are watching and saying, “Look at him, look at how goofy he looks. Look at how odd he looks on camera.” To put myself in front of all that was a big step but it was worth it because yes all those people out there I’m sure are saying, “Look at this idiot on camera, just another guy on video on the internet thinking he’s going to be famous.”

But for every hundred of those there is one person who is saying that I connect with Andrew, when he talks about being a loser in high school, or being a loser as far back as elementary school, not knowing how to connect with people, not knowing how to have a conversation with them, that’s me.” Or maybe they say that’s me now, I’m in my twenties, thirties, forties, and that’s an important connection.  For every one on who says what kind of upstart are you? Someone in the audience is saying I’m watching this guy grow, I’m watching him learn and I’m learning and building along the way with him and I’m seeing him get better and better and we are on this path together and you know that Andrew who is there by himself on camera with the light in his face because someone in the audience said he needed a light in his face because he was looking too dark, he needs some help and I’m going to help him out. I’ll tell him how to improve the website here, or how he can find a person who he never would be able to interview otherwise, or how he can connect to someone who he should get to know, and when you see the guests who I have on Mixergy, it’s not because I know them, It’s because someone in the audience today said, “Andrew needs to meet this person. I want to introduce Andrew, I want to help him out.”

I interviewed Scott McNealy the cofounder of Sun Microsystems, an incredible success story with some difficulty along the way. I never would have gotten to meet him. I never would have gotten to have an hour-long conversation without the help of the founder of a company called Ingboo who did an interview with me. He thought, “I have an advisor on my company Scott McNeely, I’m not even paying him, he is just an advisor but I want to help Andrew out and I want to get more people to know what Scott is thinking of. I’ll introduce Scott to Andrew then he can do an interview with him.”

And so being public like that has led to connections that I never would have access to, led me to meet people and talk to them one-on-one in a way that I wouldn’t have had access to and if you watch for the next five, 10, 20 years I’ll be public in one way or the other. You’ll get to see more of the fruits from this hard work, more of the fruits from putting myself out there, risking the ridicule that I’ve gone through over the last couple of years doing these interviews.

Note from Andrew Warner: It’s not about what I’m doing here at Mixergy. It’s about what others are doing and the person who is listening to us. If there is anything in here, anything that resonates with them I hope they just go out and do one thing about it right away and do it really crappy and do it badly. If you always wanted to blog but you are embarrassed to put yourself out there, blog and do it badly, you’ll improve later, but you just need to get it out there. If it’s to start a little business don’t go and incorporate, don’t go and set up the paper work perfectly, just go and build the site that’s going to promote it.

Just go and do one thing where you can see the result and then build on it ,and build on it, and build on it, and if you’re not proud of the first thing it’s fine, it will just push you to create something that you’re a little less unproud of, and a little less unproud of and then before long you’ll be very proud of it and then you’ll be incredibly proud and you can’t wait to show the world what you did and bring the world into your passion.

And it doesn’t start with that greatness and your vision of who you are, or who you think you’ll be when you launch something that you’ve been carrying around. The first step is to launch an embarrassing version and it will be a start, and then you’ll build and you’ll build and man when you do that, come back and tell me. Come back and tell me what you’ve built because I love to hear people who hear me, who watch me, read some of what I’ve written because we’re together and there are few people who are willing to do it.

If you look into a bar and say, “Who wants to do shots with me?” there would be tons of people, if you want to hang back and watch football there will be tons of people who want to do it, and if you want to just hang out in life, there will be tons of people who want to do that with you, but there will be very few people who will say, “You know, I’m going forward with you. I’ll start off with the crappy version with you. I’ll take a risk on something that’s really meaningful to me with you. I’ll go not with you side by side holding hands, but along side you in a way where we both do it,” and when you do that you just start to open up yourself to what you really want to do and you start to open up yourself to other people and that’s the life that I want to be living.

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Interviewee Name: Andrew Warner

Company Name: Mixergy.com

Website: http://www.mixergy.com 

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Andrew Warner: I founded a company called Mixergy.com and that’s where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses and I do it for an audience of rabid entrepreneurs who are just easy to soak up as much information as they can from other entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. These are people who know about Hulu.com and know that they could be watching The Simpsons, Family Guy and whatever nonsense they could be watching on TV, but they choose to watch a program where entrepreneurs are talking about business instead.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Andrew Warner: I check out who my upcoming guest is and see if I need to do any extra research on him. The heart of my day is doing research for the interviewee that and I going to have on, and I never know about the person’s industry as much as he does so I like to prepare. And I like to find out where the person’s customers come from, how much company revenue, and if they really run the company they say that they ran. I usually do that part of the research beforehand and I like to be extra sure before I go into the interview. Then I do my interview, which takes an hour, maybe an hour and a half which includes setup. I send the interview over to Joe my editor who makes sure that it sounds good, comes across well, that we have sponsors in the interview and that it is everything that people expected from us.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Andrew Warner: It’s kind of tough sometimes. We all get a bit frustrated, I know that this year I did an interview every single day and some days I say, “Why am I even getting up to do another interview? Who is going to miss it if I don’t do one today?” But I think about all the people who I’ve interviewed, take the founder of JibJab, he told me about how he built this incredible company back in the nineties, then the internet dotcom bubble burst. He suddenly found himself with no more money to pay his employee, no more customers, down to nothing.

But he kept creating his funny videos, he kept posting a new one not every day like me because his takes up a lot more time. He kept on improving and improving, and pretty soon a lot of it became a huge hit, and he got on Jay Leno, all the news programs seem to carry his videos and suddenly his business was revitalized. And it wouldn’t have been revitalized if he just kind of sat on his butt and said, “Hey you know, let’s wait for the economy to turnaround.” It wouldn’t have been revitalized, if he just said, “I created these good videos in the past, somebody will discover them.”

It only turnaround because he got up every day and built his business, and got up every day and thought about how he could be funny, or how he could make his videos more impactful, and that’s what happened with him. And I have tons of stories of entrepreneurs like that, and I think of how they did it, how they left their mark on the world and I want to do the same thing.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Andrew Warner: I would start off a lot simpler. The simpler, the better. I’d maybe say to myself, “Why bother recording my interviews with entrepreneurs, why not just write down some notes and quickly post it. Why not offer a list of possible guests who I might have and see who the audience is into that they would want me to pursue and only then go after those guests.” I just find simpler ways to do things; it’s so easy to get caught up into things. I used to create these – in addition to the hour-long interviews – two or three-minute clips from the interview where I would analyze what the interview was about, where I would show a clip from the interview, and it just took forever to create. It took too long and nobody at the time was paying attention to the work I was doing, and I was just getting sucked into all this extra work that nobody noticed. What I discovered was if I could just do the interview, post it up, and maybe later on add a transcript it drew its own audience.

Avil Beckford: What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

Andrew Warner: I made a lot of discoveries, and the most surprising and important one is to publish every single day. If you look at the top bloggers the one who we respect, most of them publish every single day. You look at Gary Vaynerchuk, he does videos every single day. You look at Fred Wilson, and Seth Godin who sometimes publishes two posts a day. You gotta just get up and do it every single day.

I started doing an interview every day because I said, “I’m a horrible interviewer and I use the phrase uhmm a lot,” which is really bad when you’re trying to pay attention to someone to hear them say, “Uhmm,” over and over again. My thoughts sometimes wondered; I’m a lot clearer now because I spent the last year just work on being comfortable in front of the mike talking to people and I did it for myself.

I said, “I’m going to do an interview every single day so I can get better at expressing my ideas so I can get better asking questions and shutting up when the answer comes in instead of interrupting so I get better at learning about the people who I’m talking to.” What I discovered was by publishing every single day, my audience grew, by publishing every single day, the access that I had to new guests grew. By publishing every single day, people became more familiar with me. I don’t fool myself into believing that every one of my audience reads and looks at every single interview that I post every single day, but they do know that I’m there all the time, and they do know that when they come back to the site for something new, they do know that more of their friends were interviewed this year than last year, that more of their friends talked to them about my work this year than last year, every single day. I would say every single day is more important than great quality.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?

Andrew Warner: The best answer I could give that would encompass both tech entrepreneurs and bloggers and anything to do online is this, it is okay for version one to not be great. In fact, it’s a point of pride that version one sucks. The teacher I respected most at college was the one who worked really hard, really cared about his work, who was doing something with his life and trying to get us to do something. And the message he left us with was, “In life, anything less than an “A” is not okay, you can’t go to work for the New York Times and have a few typos and say, “It’s an A- so it’s fine.”

Back then in his world, it was absolutely true. Anyone who saw a typo in the New York Times was holding it up like a trophy to prove that they were geniuses, that they were better than the New York Times. Today, it doesn’t work that way. Today you look at your favourite news source, or most reliable news source, and unless it’s the New York Times, for many people it’s not anymore, it’s full of typos. I look at the tech blogs that I admire, they have typos and their audience corrects them. They make mistakes with some of the information they release out there but they don’t hold themselves to knowing everything, they improve and improve and improve.

It’s the same thing with the web apps that we use. I ask the entrepreneurs who I interview, “What was your first web app like, how did it work, what was in there?” And you should see the look on their faces; they look like they were just kicked in the teeth. It was so bad for them to remember, but it was okay, people forgive, it’s not like in the auto industry if you bought a car and it broke down on day one, you just wouldn’t want to buy American again if it was an American car, never mind that, you wouldn’t want to buy whatever manufacturer it was, you wouldn’t want to buy from the country that made it. Today, if you get a web app and it’s broken or doesn’t work, you go and tell the person who created it, “Hey, I found a flaw,” and they appreciate it and you feel good that you were able to help out.

It’s the same thing with the interviews I do, the first ones were terrible, the ones today aren’t perfect, still I think I have a lot of rough edges and I still need to work on the way I express myself, in the way that I ask questions, and the way that I lead my guests through their stories. But it’s okay, the audience gives me feedback, I improve every day and people are very forgiving of mistakes. In fact, they respect people, they respect producers who are willing to make mistakes, what we don’t respect are people who aren’t willing to put out.

If you don’t get stuff out there we don’t have any respect for you. If you’re just sitting on the sidelines criticizing, we don’t have any respect for you. If you’re sitting on the sidelines waiting for something to be perfect and then only do you launch, we are going to laugh, so that’s huge and that changes the whole way that the world works, it changes who can start creating. It means more people can start doing it with fewer resources and less perfect results and just improve and improve and improve.

Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Andrew Warner: I kind of think that the only big threat is myself. What happens if I get hurt and I can’t continue my business?  Because I’m doing interviews, it depends on me and I’m not running a business where anyone can jump in and take over any part of my work. I’m putting myself at risk that way, but I believe that I‘ll find a solution to that too. So I guess the only threat to my life is me not getting up every day and being willing to do something, not being willing to adjust, not being willing to create, not being willing to listen to the feedback I’m getting from the world. If I don’t do that I’m destroyed.

If I get up every day, if I work, if I take in information, if I learn, if I talk to the people in my audience, if I talk to the people in my world, if I talk to people who are completely out of my world and I learn from them, and I have the determination to make something happen, life will be good. But it’s a challenge I have to tell you because there are some days when you don’t want to get up, there are some days when you doubt your whole direction, there are some days throughout my life where I’ve said, “Am I doing the right thing?”

I started out with nothing, and it took me forever to build the first company, and it feels like forever. It was really two years until we were on a roll financially, but it felt like forever. Every one of those days I said – and we are talking about the previous company that I created Bradford & Reed – “I’m going to absolutely make it and build something great,” but also at different moments in those days, I said, “What if I fail, What if I’m an idiot over here, what if all these friends of mine are going off and starting companies or going to work  for great companies and they’re on the right track and I’m a complete failure. And what happens when we meet in five years and I can’t even afford to get into the restaurant to have dinner with them, let alone have a conversation with them because I’m so embarrassed that I failed completely and miserably.” And all that stuff is going through my head, and I said to myself, after I felt like I’d had some big financial cushions, some confidence in my own abilities, “I’m never going to have those doubts again, that’s it.”

I now know what I’m capable of, now I’ve given myself an incredible cushion financially; there is no reason for me to be worried; there is no reason for me to have doubts, I can approach life with complete confidence like those self-improvement gurus up on stage. I have to tell you that it doesn’t happen for me all the time, there are some days when I say, “I can’t believe I asked that question in the interview, I can’t believe I made that financial decision, what am I even doing having interviews on the internet, or what am I doing talking to these people, when I don’t know their businesses, and have to go and ask them questions and dig in deep into their companies, or why did I make that decision to put my money in this bank, invested here and not there.” So that’s a big challenge, but overcoming it has incredible rewards.

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Andrew Warner: I’m looking at people who talk about businesses, like the guy on CNBC who brings in entrepreneurs and talk to them about how they built their businesses. They would tell him their stories and he would shake his head and say, “Wow! What a country, this is incredible, can you believe that this is happening?” And he would have some younger people on, say they were 17 years old, and he would say, “What were you doing when you were 17 years old?”

But all he wants to do is be amazed that this exists in the world, he doesn’t want to stop and say, “Wait, let’s think about this, when you’re giving me your numbers, is it that you made $2 million in sales or in profit?” There is a big difference there, is it net or is it gross, what are the margins you have in the business? So he doesn’t dig into those questions and a lot of people don’t. They just need that number and that’s it. The other thing, he doesn’t say, “How did you get here? What did you do?” and I know that it’s boring for a television audience if the host stops an entrepreneur and say, “Okay I understand, now that you’ve got a business that’s doing $X billion, you’re amazing, you’re fantastic, you skydive without a parachute, you’re so fantastic that even when you do that you still land on two feet, but let’s go back to when you were just starting, how did you get your first customer when you were nobody? What did you do to get your second customer?” Just go really granular and I know that it may be boring if you tell me about how you sat outside an office of a potential customer, and you tried to get a sale, and I know it will sound bad that you didn’t get the sale, but I want to know about that on Mixergy.

I know for a mainstream audience that would be terrible, but on Mixergy, for my audience of entrepreneurs, we want to know that stuff. We want to know how you did it, we want to know where you failed, we want to know where you succeeded, we want to know what you did that made you who you are, we don’t want to just be in awe of what you created, we want to know how you got there, and we want to know what we can do to get there because we’re not just here to be passive viewers and audience members in life, we’re here to be in that game.

Avil Beckford: What do you observe most people in your field doing badly that you think you do well?

Andrew Warner: If I were doing a dating show, I would talk about the big LOVE, I would talk about how you meet people but I would also get so annoyingly granular that it would piss off many people. I would say alright, “When you kiss, do you put both lips on, what point do you open your mouth, how long do you keep the kiss there?” I would get that frickin’ granular. If I were interviewing two people, I would say, “What was the first thing you said to her? When did you know he would be the right person? What did you say after that? How did you feel?”

I want to know every single thing. That sounds really nerdy to get into that when it comes to kissing, it sounds equally nerdy when you get into it with business. When someone is asking me about business and he is saying, “What did your landing page say? How did you get people to convert from viewers to customers?” That stuff is so frickin nerdy when I say, “How did you have the confidence to hire people when you did not have the money to pay them?” Some people when I interview them and ask questions like that will give me these little smiles like, “Come on you just do it,” and I say, “No you just don’t it because the rest of the world just don’t do it. Put yourself into that frame of mind and tell me how you did it, where did you get that confidence? Did you wake up in the morning and say, ‘My life is absolute garbage unless I build this company.’Did you have a mother or father who told you that you have to make it or else you’re a bid failure? Did you have the confidence because that year you happen to be in a relationship and the girl or guy you were dating were making you feel you were on top of the world? What did you do specifically, let’s get into that and if you think it’s nerdy, suck it up and deal with it.”

That’s what this is about, and it’s the same thing for landing pages, the same thing for sales, the same thing for why you decided to sell your company. I want to know the whole thing. I want to understand every part of it. And that’s just the way it is and if you look at the people who made it they have that kind of passion, they have that kind of interest.

I used to read these stories about real estate guys – hoteliers, and the interviewers who are writing pieces about them would inevitably say that when they were walking down a hotel with the owner of a hotel, the “son of a bitch” picks up pieces of paper on the floor that missed the garbage. The guys would be multimillionaires, billionaires, have drivers. They would be in a conversation but could not keep from picking up that piece of paper. It’s that kind of attention to detail they have, and that’s the kind of detail that the reporter reported back then when I was reading about this stuff, and it’s that kind of interest we have with businesspeople. We want to know why, how, specifics.

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?

Andrew Warner: I want to do an interview every day, not for the rest of my life, not because it changes the world for me to do an interview every day, but because it meant a lot to me. So I started doing these interviews, and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get those interviews up every single day. I couldn’t find enough guests, I couldn’t find enough time to record the interviews, I couldn’t find enough time to post them and I didn’t understand why. Why can’t I even post an interview a day? What’s taking me so long? Where is the problem here?

What I didn’t realize was, I was adding all kinds of nonsense to the process that was adding time but not adding value. Like I said earlier, I was starting to say, “Nobody will want to watch an hour-long interview unless I pull out the most important parts of the interview so I started recording these little commercials for my interviews which would take forever, and no one is going to view the interview unless I pull out the key points.”

So I started writing a blog post about those interviews, and I said no guest is going to want to do an interview with me in the first place unless I show him why he should do an interview with me so I started writing these long emails to every single person who I wanted to interview. And I said, “I cannot interview everybody it has to be the best of the best of the best,” and so I was limiting the number of people who I could interview. So all this little stuff that I thought was essential that I didn’t even realize I was doing, that I didn’t even question whether it was important to the process. I just kept on adding and adding and adding until there was no time to do an interview a day, till there was no time to think, there was no time to be really productive.

It wasn’t until I said, “Let’s go down to the bare minimum, what do I absolutely need to do?” It’s going to irritate some people if I go down to this level, it’s going to irritate some people if they don’t see in text the key points of my interview, but that’s okay. It’s going to irritate some people if they don’t see that little commercial with the three minutes of the most essential information from the hour-long interview.

And most people weren’t irritated by that. I just needed to get down to the basics so that I could do more, and the same thing happens in life too, doesn’t it? You start to think I need to have a car to function in life. I need to go out to lunches and dinners with friends because that’s important to do in business and in life and I need to buy this and I need to add that, and I need to have the best of everything. And then nothing gets done.

I went to Argentina and I sold my car that I loved, I put a lot of my things in storage, I gave away a lot of my stuff before I went away. I took just two bags and a dog with me, and my wife took two bags and our cat with her and we moved to a new country that we didn’t know anyone in, that we didn’t know much about and we lived there for a year and we realized that a lot of the stuff that we had was just empty distractions that were keeping us from the stuff that we wanted to do and that’s the big realization that I made in life, and I just keep thinking whenever there is a problem I think, where do I buy the solution, who do I give money to so they can solve the problem, what piece of new technology do I need to buy to solve this problem?

What I discovered is the better answer is the opposite. It’s what do I need not to do that won’t require this new technology, that maybe won’t require some of the technology time that I’ve put in so far. What is it that I don’t need? And that’s a much harder question to ask because there is nobody advertising less. Apple is advertising the iPad, my friends are advertising the iPad, companies that I do business with are advertising the iPad because they want me to buy it to interact with their new software. My friends are advertising it because they think it’s so cool and they can’t help but tell me, so when I have a problem it’s natural for me to think, well this is the solution, of course I’m going to think that because it’s been advertised to me. What I’m not going to think, “Look at this office, there is so much frickin’ things here that I’m trying to produce.” Maybe I don’t need to produce that for what I’m trying to get involved with. So that’s the big challenge, the big realization that I’ve had.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Andrew Warner: There were lots of big breaks, but here is one. I went to downtown New York, not too far from my office to talk to a customer of mine. On my way out of there, I heard this guy say, “I’m sorry guys I have to run, I don’t have the time. I have to go and look at an apartment uptown. I can’t help you guys today, maybe tomorrow.” So I recognized the guy and said, “Mike, I’ve got a car downstairs, my brother and I will give you a ride up to your apartment and you can get there on time.”

So we’re driving up to the apartment and the whole time I’m thinking, “I should be at my desk, I should be working, what am I doing, just kind of hanging out, what’s wrong with me here, I’ve got to be more efficient,” but I’m enjoying the conversation so I continue, and Mike and I are having a great conversation with my brother, and it’s terrific. I pull over and let Mike out in front of his place and he says, “Thank you! By the way I know that you’re trying to build up your business Andrew we have this customer called Life Minders, they have been buying lots of advertising from us, if you email or contact them and mention my name they’ll buy from you. Alright, goodbye!”

He leaves and I’m sitting there stunned, the guy just handed me a customer, one of his best customers he just introduced me to. That would never have happened if I was just sitting at my desk. It would never have happened if I didn’t get to know him, if I didn’t have this conversation. I called up that Life Minders, and they ended up buying from me. The very first cheque to me was for over $300,000. I looked at it with my brother. We had never seen that much money in the business. I don’t think either of us has seen that big a cheque ever in our lives. It turned around our whole business. We were deep in debt at the time. We could barely pay the bills at the time. That cheque turned things around.

The next cheque from them was for I think $1 million, the next one was for $2 million in advertising and it turned around our business. And what I learned from that was to just go out and have conversations with people and get to know them and really learn from them. That kind of information would never have been on a blog, would never just be on the internet somewhere, and would never have been advertised. I had to get to know Mike to get that kind of information.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Andrew Warner: Before Mixergy was a series of interviews with entrepreneurs talking about how they built their businesses, it was an event that I would put on with some friends. But that wasn’t enough, I needed software to let people know who was coming to the event, and I wasn’t happy with evite and all the software that was out there so I said alright, “I’ll create it, I have experience in the internet space, I know how to create software. I’ll just create my own invitation system.”

I started and then I paid a little bit of money to have it done, and I thought it wasn’t exactly what I wanted, so I’m going to pay more, I’ll get what I want so I paid a little bit more and then I said, “That’s not really it, I’ll pay a little bit more and get what I want.” This isn’t what other people want necessarily but I imagined what they needed and wanted and I said, “It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work out, it’s just money, I can live my life and I’ll be fine, this thing will be fine.” Then I started spending more and more money and before I knew it I was spending, I think it was $300,000 that went into this little piece of software that I wanted and I was never going to be in the invitation business.

But when you spend more than $50,000 or $100,000 on a business, you are in that business. So I started focusing more on the invitation business, how do I improve it, how do I do it even though I didn’t care about the invitation business, I just wasn’t passionate about it. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I started to say maybe I could sell that invitation business and then do what I really want because you know if I could just improve it a little bit, and I can tweak it, I know that I can make it work. I know I have made other things work that didn’t work out first. I’ll just you know spend more time on it, then I’ll flip it and make some money on it and then life will be great.

What I didn’t realize is how much I didn’t like being in that business, and if you don’t like being in a business, and if you’re just in it because there is some money down the road. If you are just in it because you happen to be in it, or if you are just in it because you are too proud to say it’s not working, then your life is just going to be miserable, and the business is never going to go anywhere. The best thing I did was say, “I admit I shouldn’t be in here, I don’t even know how I got here, and I admit that it failed and I’m going to move on.”

I even did it by video, “I’m too embarrassed to admit it, but I’m going to say it publicly, because I have to get past this embarrassment, and I’ve got to just own it and see how it feels afterwards.” I did it, I admitted it was a failure, and man life felt so good. I remember riding my bike in Santa Monica, California where I live and I was just enjoying Kanye West who was on my iPod, in a different way. I was enjoying cycling in a different way, I was just feeling like there was a world of possibilities now in front of me because this shackle that I had imposed on myself, that I put on each ankle and both wrists were removed. I removed them and it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be for me to remove it, and it didn’t feel bad for me to remove it. It felt great and now I feel like I can do anything.

This was my biggest failure and also one of my biggest successes.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Related articles

• How Andrew Warner built an email list of 23 million subscribers (startupfreedom.com)

This is the second part of Nathalie’s interview and there are quite a few nuggets that will resonate with each of us. One of her five life lessons that she has already learned at the tender age of 24 is to learn to accept feedback and not take things  personally. This reminded me of the Four Agreements: Don’t take things personally, be impeccable with your word, always do your best, and never make assumptions.

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

I am known as the raw foods witch, and I help people to eat more fruits and vegetables. I have a background in software engineering and all of my nutritional knowledge is self taught based on the experience of the results that I have had eating this way.

How do you integrate your personal and professional life?

I do not see a big difference between my personal and professional life. I try to live by my values. I am very environmentally friendly and it’s important for me to believe in what I’m doing.  I like to support certain types of organizations, restaurants, where I buy my groceries. I like to have a good balance where I spend time with my family, boyfriend, friends and a good amount of time on my business. In my mind it’s all the same because anywhere that I am, I am going to be thinking about my business, ways to help others, and things to recommend. If someone recommends a book to me and I read it and enjoy it, I am going to recommend it to my clients. My personal and professional lives blend together.

What’s a major regret that you’ve had in life?

I think it’s only a half regret, but I think I regret going into computers instead of business school, but at the same time I think that I would have ended up in the same place. But a part of me regrets having that kind of background. I would have liked to know about building a business, marketing and about the legal aspects of a business instead of the technical background that I have. I think in the end I would have been able to learn both things so it isn’t the biggest regret ever.

What are five life lessons that you have learned so far?

1. To not second guess myself. There were many times when I made a decision and wondered if the other way would have been better. Now I am a lot more comfortable with the decisions that I make.
2. Life is short. There is a lot of heart disease in my family, and that in part brought me to discover raw foods and adapt to this lifestyle and realizing that we are here for a certain amount of time and have to make the most of it, and we also have to take care of our health.
3. My third life lesson is to follow your passion and doing things that you think really matter in the world. So I was working in a very corporate environment, and it was really good money, but it wasn’t what I thought the world needed in terms of what I could offer it.
4. Learn to accept feedback and go with the flow. I am a perfectionist so when someone criticizes my work, my website, I have to look at it and take what’s useful and make the change. I am learning not to take things so personally.
5. I am very focused whenever I have something to do, but I have to tone it down because for a whole week I could be working on my website at the exclusion of everything else or I could be exercising and doing nothing else so I have to balance all of this. I am working on this because I have a Type A go-for-it personality.

When you have some down time, how do you spend it?

I like to read and I read quite a bit. I also like martial arts, swimming, playing games with my boyfriend and friends, card games, board games, that kind of stuff.

What process do you use to generate great ideas?

Most of my ideas come to me right before I fall asleep, go for a walk and when I shower because I am relaxed then. When I take a break from work I get ideas, all my ideas come to me at once and I have to write them down immediately or I might lose them.

What’s your favourite quotation and why?

“Well-behaved women never make history” by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and the reason why I like that quote is because society has a lot of expectations when it comes to gender, and as female entrepreneurs, we have to be bold and be who we want to be and not shy away from our potential and what we can do in the world. For me, well-behaved is bucking convention and going against the norm.

How do you define success?

I define success by the way you feel, and I know that some people define it by money, your house and by more tangible stuff. But I think that success is more about the inside and how you feel on a day-to-day basis. If you feel like you are contributing and being rewarded for what you are doing and feeling comfortable in your space in the world, then you are a success.

In your opinion what’s the formula for success?

The formula for success will depend on the person. For entrepreneurs it’s putting yourself out there and deciding what you want to do, how you’re going to help people and going forward and creating great information and being there for people, but also taking a look at all the things that contribute to success, such as are you sleeping enough, are you eating well, are you exercising and creating a legacy, which is one of the things that will be there for generations to come.

What advice do you have for someone just starting out in your field?

Start local if you can and one of the things that has been useful for me is doing talks, and demonstrations, and connecting with people in person. Beyond that is building your website and creating your marketing. Having a website has been great for me because people have been able to go there and get information. From there keep building your offerings.

If trusted friends could introduce you to five people that you’ve always wanted to meet, who would you choose? And what would you say to them?

The number one person would be Steve Jobs and I’d like to know how he keeps his drive and doesn’t get distracted from all the rumors. It would be interesting to learn how he keeps level headed.

Another person, who I have met (she was filming a movie in my small home town and I waited around until I got to meet her. It was a very short meeting) who I would like to meet again is Angelina Jolie and I would ask about her work with the United Nations and all the volunteer work that she does.

I would also like to meet Bill Gates and ask him how he manages his foundation and find out where he is going with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I would like to also find out what motivated him to start the foundation.

The fourth person that I’d like to meet is Gary Vaynerchuk. I feel like I know him already because of all his videos but I would like to ask him how he manages his time. He used to answer all his emails and now he doesn’t anymore, but he does everything himself and I’d love to know how he does that.

I would love to meet Hillary Clinton and find out how she ran her campaign.

Which one book had a profound impact on your life? What was it about this book that impacted you so deeply? Did you have an emotional or intellectual attachment to this book? Why?

It would have to be Wishcraft by Barbara Sher. It took me out of the way I used to think about life, doing things and achieving goals. I like the way she describes how to get other people to help you to reach your goals. It was very step-by-step which was awesome. One exercise I liked was designing five or six lives and see how they each did and it was really interesting to see how you could have different options and you didn’t have to have one you and you could take different aspects of all those selves and incorporate them into your life right now.

One of the things I wanted is to have clients and do more one-on-one coaching and consulting and the other part was writing so it was really interesting to see how one of the mes would be a writer and the other a coach and I thought to myself that well I could do both, so I did.

If you were stranded on a deserted island, what are five books that you would like to have with you and why? Summarize the book in two sentences.

I would take Tribes by Seth Godin which is about leading people where there was no leader before

I would also bring The Purple Cow by Seth Godin as well, which is about how to make your business and your offering different.

The End of Overeating by David Kessler is about how the commercialization of food has made it easier to eat a lot more of it

Nine Lives That Are Holding Your Business Back And The Truth That Will Set You Free by Steve Chandler. And that book is basically just taking away all those things that you tell yourself to keep you from doing things that you really have to do in your business. That book has changed the way that I think about business.

Another book that I really liked is Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robins. I read that one quite a while ago but I think that I could read that one over and over again. That book has everything to keep you going.

What one music CD and movie would you like to have with you (on the deserted island) and why?

I like the movie Hook and it’s about Peter Pan and I also liked A League of Their Own, which was about women playing baseball during the war.

I really like Sarah McLaughlin and I could listen to her over and over again.

What excites you about life?

There are really very few limits and that excites me, and more people are living an alternate lifestyle eating more raw foods.

How do you nurture your soul?

I meditate a little bit and I love going out into nature, sitting under a tree or by the water and connecting. I find that great for my spiritual side.

If you had a personal genie and she gave you one wish, what would you wish for? Or, if I gave you a magic wand, what would you use it for?

I would wish for a solution to our overpopulation, and not a gruesome solution but one that would take into account everything that the planet needs, that people need. The solution could be really simple like people cutting back on certain things that they considered necessities. I want to heal the planet.

Complete the following, I am happy when…..

There is sunshine and I am with people that I love.

What nuggets can you take away from Nathalie’s interview?

Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know what you think about this.  Click on the comment link below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the left side) by email or RSS Feed. I created a Mini Learning Toolkit and you can grab a copy by clicking here.

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