Many successful entrepreneurs I know outsource a lot of their work to the Philippines because you can find great workers at a fraction of the cost. Well John Jonas is the founder of onlinejobs.ph, which is a job board for Filipino workers. And today he’s going to teach us how to hire from there.

But before we begin, I want to give a quick shout out to Privy who is a sponsor of the show. Privy is the tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store. Now, Privy is an email list growth platform, and they manage all of my email capture forms, and in fact I use Privy hand in hand with my email marketing provider.

Now there are a bunch of companies out there that will manage your email capture forms, but I like Privy because they specialize in e-commerce. Right now, I’m using Privy to display a cool wheel of fortune pop up. Basically a user gives their email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store. Customers love the gamification aspect of this, and when I implemented this form, email sign ups increased by 131%.

There are other cool things that you can do too also. So let’s say you offer free shipping for orders over $100, well you can actually have Privy flush a pop up when the customer has $90 in their cart to urge them to insert one more item. Bottom line, Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers, which I then feed to my email provider to close the sale.

So head on over to Privy.com/Steve, and try it for free. And if you decide that you need some of the more advanced features, use coupon code MWQHJ For 15% off. Once again that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve.

I also want to give a quick shout out to Klaviyo who is a sponsor of the show. I’m blessed to have Klaviyo as a sponsor because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my store. And over the holidays right now, I actually depended on Klaviyo for over 31% of my revenues. Now, Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores, and here is why it is so powerful.

Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought, which makes it extremely powerful. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week, easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special auto-responder sequence to my customers depending on what they purchased, piece of cake, and there is full revenue tracking on every single email.

Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can actually try them for free at mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, now on to the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast. Today I’m happy to have John join us on the show. Now, John is an entrepreneur who has been making a full time income since 2004. He runs the popular site onlinejobs.ph, and he’s helped thousands of entrepreneurs succeed by teaching them how to replace themselves through outsourcing.

Anyway, many of you probably know from my blog, but we have three full time employees at BumblebeeLinens.com which is our ecommerce store right now. We used to have four; we had to let someone go. Anyways, the minimum wage in California is actually going to creep up to seventeen dollars in the next couple years, and we’ve kind of come to realize that there’s many tasks that can be outsourced to someone virtually.

Now John’s company does this in his sleep, and so I want to kind of pick his brain today. And with that, welcome to the show John, how are you doing today man?

John: I’m good, thanks for having me.

Steve: John, for everyone out there who doesn’t know you, can you just give a brief intro of how you founded onlinejobs.ph in the first place, and what you’re up to today?

John: So I’m a terrible employee. I graduated from college in 2004 and had a job for ten months, and my only goal there in that job was to quit, because I don’t know it just doesn’t, it doesn’t work for me.

Steve: What was your job?

John: I was a programmer. I graduated from college in Computer Science. I was in programming. And I really like programming, it’s really great, but just working to make someone else rich just doesn’t work for me. And I found myself like stealing their time and…

Steve: Did you outsource your programming job to the Philippines or?

John: I didn’t know how to at the time otherwise I totally would have.

Steve: Okay, all right.

John: So since I learnt to make a little bit of money, I quit my job and started working from home. And I had these people working for me in the Philippines within a couple of years, and they were working on my business at the time, I was doing affiliate marketing stuff. And I just found myself; I have a mastermind group that we have a phone call every week. And I found myself teaching what I was doing every single week because there were 15 of us on the call, and every week people wanted to know more because it was so successful what I had kind of stumbled into.

So the way that we found people was crappy at the time, and so after a couple years I was like, there’s got to be a better way to find these people because this is so good. That’s when I started onlinejobs.ph, which is the marketplace to find the workers. So that’s kind of how I got into it.

Steve: So I’m just curious why Filipino workers and not a different country, like what’s special about them?

John: So I didn’t know this at the time. So one day I was talking with the owner of BatCountry.com [ph] and this is 12 years ago. And they were huge, and I was nothing. But he and I had some similar things that we were doing. It was like a side pet project of his and my main business. He says when you are registered outside with some of the stuff; make sure you go to the Philippines with it. I was like what? He said yeah because in India when you tell them something and they say yes, that means yes I heard something come out of your mouth, it doesn’t mean yes I understood what you said.

And that was a big shock to me, like I had never thought anything of the sort. I just thought [inaudible 00:06:37]. And he gave me a reference where I could hire someone, and I think what it really was, was it was hope that like there could be something different than what I had previous experience. Because I think most people I knew at the time had experienced what I experienced in outsourcing and it was just painful, it was a problem.

And it kind of gave me hope that maybe there’s something different. So I ended up hiring someone and it was completely different like it changed my life. Where he gave me a reference where I can hire an individual full time person. They speak good English, we’ve never had a communication issue, they’re honest, they’re loyal. The person still works for me today 12 years later. They’re hardworking, they’re pleasing, they want to make you happy. I have taught him everything I can teach him I think. And he has started to run businesses for me that have made hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And along with their honesty and their loyalty, they’re not entrepreneurial, so they don’t want to steal your business. So there’s all kinds of cultural things that when you combine it together, make the Philippines a very different experience than the beastly world that we are at. At least I have never heard, I only try to cover different countries, but I’ve never heard someone say to me like, hey, I’m finding the same experience somewhere else.

Steve: Okay, so it’s a cultural thing. Did you ever try to hire someone in the states or?

John: Yeah. So way back then, I actually tried four different people. And with what I was doing then, I taught them stuff, and the very first thing they did was quit, because it looked like, oh I can do this on my own.

Steve: Interesting okay.

John: And I have two people in the states that work for me today, actually three people in the states that work for me today, just growing the business, doing different things.

Steve: And why couldn’t those employees be outsourced?

John: You know sometimes I think they could. I have an amazingly good writer here in the US who I love, like she’s a really great storyteller, and I love her style and it just fits me, and so I keep her. I have a girl who is really, really creative with Facebook or with just advertising in general, and so she runs our ad team with someone in the Philippines running ads, and a designer in the Philippines. And I have another writer here in the US who does other odd stuff.

Steve: Interesting okay. So yeah I was just about to ask that question, so would you say like the writing talent is better in the US than it would be over there?

John: Yes. I mean you could — so like if you read my blog, if you read the blog, working with the blog at jonasblog.com, there are blog posts there written by me, by people in the US and by people the Philippines, and I would eventually guess you couldn’t tell which are which [overlapping 00:09:44] the byline of the author.

Steve: So let’s switch gears a little bit then we’ll get back into the outsourcing thing a little bit, but how does one start a Filipino outsourcing company from the United States, like did you travel back and forth or did you do everything entirely in the US?

John: I did everything entirely in the US, all in the US.

Steve: Okay that’s interesting. So how did you get started with something like that when you started?

John: So like I said, the dude that I was talking to from back [inaudible 00:10:13], he gave me a reference to where I could hire someone. At the time it was a company that has offices in the Philippines and it was agentsofvalue.com, it’s still around. They have offices in the Philippines, they recruit Filipinos, bring them into the office, and they like offer you a menu like here’s this person that we have, here’s this person that we have, and they have like 12 people that you can pick from.

And then they mark up their salaries and listen to you basically. The good thing was it was a full time thing where like that person only worked for me full time. The problem was when I had the first person quit and leave because of office politics, it was like this is work, you can’t quit, you’re an amazingly talented programmer, just because you’re not able to work in this office, you’re going to work for me still. So that was kind of how I got started, and then it kind of spiraled from there with hiring more and more people, and more and more people asking me why and how are you aren’t these people, how is this working out for you?

Steve: I mean the company itself onlinejobs.ph like how do you — it’s like a chicken egg problem, right? I mean you got to get people and you got to get demand?

John: Yeah. So how I did it, we built the site and actually I just had my guys in the Philippines build the site, and I just I really just told them, hey, look here’s the concept, like look at Monster.com. This is what it is, we want a dumb down version of this, right? And I had Bill [ph] and I had this guy who was a programmer and a reasonable designer, and so he just did the work. And I was very much uninvolved and it was very crappy. But that was in 2008 when he was building it, but it worked.

So I wrote some copy for it. And then I was teaching employers at the time how to find people, and it was the possibly at the time it was really painful. And so in the Philippines I just sent an email to all my guys in the Philippines saying, hey, we have this site, how do you think we could market this in the Philippines?

And they were like, oh I can tell my friends about, oh I can post on Friendster, which was the Facebook in the Philippines at the time. I can post classified ads, I can do whatever. And that was all we did, and within a couple of months we had like a thousand visitors.

Steve: Interesting, is that why you registered the .ph domain?

John: It is, so it was yeah to attract the Filipino workers, because I knew that was part of — I knew I could bring employers to it because I was teaching them how, and they were really flocking at the time to us. And so it was a matter of kind of get the Filipinos just to recognize this and sign up. And that turned out to be even easier because the job situation in Philippines is so different that yeah.

Steve: It must be pretty bad over there right for them to…

John: Philippines, it’s a very third world country, and it’s a weird employment situation where there’s tons of temporary and part time work. So like I’ll tell you, the only time I’ve been there was in 2010. We spent a month in the Philippines on vacation with me, my wife, and my three kids at the time. And so we were on this remote island, and I’m in the grocery store and I see this kid stocking shelve. And I start talking to him like, hey, are you from here, what do you — no I’m not from here. I’m from Manila, which is a 14 hour boat ride away. I’m here for six months to do this part time temporary work. In six months my contract is up and I go back home.

Steve: Interesting.

John: Yeah and then it was like we had an assist come to our apartment every day, and she was two dollars an hour, and she was the exact same story. No I’m from near Manila, I’m here for six months and then my contract is over, I go back home. And then what? Then I find another job. Like this I don’t understand it, it seems super inefficient, but this is how this tons of work is, they’re so — when you offer them a full time stable job, it’s really good for them.

Steve: Okay, so the way you marketed it early on in the Philippines was just kind of like word of mouth it sounds like?

John: Yeah like we just — in fact I think I had six people working for me at the time, and I just said, what can you do, and they all went and did something. We never run any ads, we never put up like billboards or anything like that, we just talked about it online, and then people started talking about it online, and it kind of snowballed.

Steve: What about in the US, how are you getting your customers? So did you have to have critical mass obviously first in onlinejobs.ph in terms of Filipinos before you started getting business in the US for it?

John: So because I was teaching employers at the time, I was teaching how do you do this, how and why, like why do you go to the Philippines instead of somewhere else? Why do you use the Philippines instead of Odesk, which is what it was before Odesk and Elance? Like what’s different about this? I was teaching that and I would say like, look here’s a good way to find people, onlinejobs.ph is one way, and here’s another way is value. So some people started using Online Jobs, the poorest did.

The Filipinos were coming, and then there were jobs, and so people were like, oh my gosh, I got a job, they’re telling their friends. And they’re part of every good experience and they’re telling people.

Steve: And so you never had to run ads to begin this either, it was just word of mouth as well in the beginning?

John: Yes, which is not a great story for me to tell you for other entrepreneurs, right?

Steve: No, I’m just curious.

John: You got to run ads, and we run ads today, we didn’t when we started.

Steve: Okay, how does the business model work, is it just like a straight finder’s fee from the employer side?

John: No, well it’s a recruiting fee. So you pay to recruit people, you pay a monthly fee, $50 to recruit people for a month, it’s the cheapest recruiting fee that exists. You pay 50 bucks; you recruit whatever you want for that month. So you need to hire three people, hire three people. And then when you’re done recruiting, you cancel that monthly fee and those people are still yours, we don’t take a cut from their salary, we’re uninvolved in the process after that, we just provide the marketplace.

Steve: Interesting. Is it sticky though, like do people just tend to come back over and over again?

John: Yes and that’s what we’ve found is that someone who hires someone one time, or even someone who maybe doesn’t even pay, they just look at profiles and see what there is, we find that person is going to come back. And whether it’s in three months or whether it’s in two years, they’re going to come back. So it took me a long time to figure this out, because often there is a long delay like someone sees it and realized it, and they’re not ready to hire someone right now. But we use BluPro for analytics, it’s a Google Analytics.

Steve: Sure.

John: By looking at people’s behavior over a long period of time like individual behavior, I finally realized what was going on and why it was growing when we couldn’t track, because people were waiting six months, and then coming back and hiring someone.

Steve: Let me ask you this and let’s get more into like the actual outsourcing process. So when people come to me or when they’re looking like the first thing that most people think of is Upwork, right? So can you kind of describe the difference, like what’s the main difference in going Upwork versus someone from the Philippines?

John: So the main easy difference is turnover. So in Upwork, the whole purpose of what they’ve set up is for someone to get a job, get that work done, get paid and get feedback so they can improve and get another job and get feedback and prove to get another job, right? Because in Upwork you have to have feedback in order to get a job. At Online Jobs there’s a feedback system, there’s a rating system that you will find very few ratings on people, because what most people do at Online Jobs is they hire someone permanently.

And if they find someone who’s good, they don’t leave feedback, like saying, hey everybody, this guy is really good, right? Because you hire someone full time permanent, and they work for you for as long as you manage to be successful. So that’s why like the first I hired 12 years ago, still works for me today.

Steve: Interesting, so you’re not looking for odd jobs on Online Jobs, you’re looking for full time employees?

John: Yes.

Steve: Okay, interesting.

John: And you can get odd job stuff done, but like at Upwork you go and post here’s what I want done, and people will say, oh I can do it and here is how much I charge, here’s my hourly rate. At Online Jobs, people say, here’s my monthly, here’s what I want per month.

Steve: I see interesting.

John: And so it’s a different concept. We’re like at Upwork you’re guaranteeing yourself one 100% turnover with the workers in your business which is fine for if you just need a small thing done. But most businesses need long term stuff done over and over and over again, and that’s what people find at Online Jobs.

Steve: Okay and then can we just kind of talk about like the going rate for someone in the US versus someone equivalent in the Philippines?

John: Yeah so like who?

Steve: Let’s talk about developers.

John: So I don’t know the developer costs in California.

Steve: It’s really expensive.

John: [inaudible 00:20:11] I would bet that a PHP programmer like a good PHP programmer is like 70,000 a year here. I have four full time PHP programmers who I would put them up against just about anybody, and they cost me between $800 and $1200 a month full time.

Steve: Okay, so it’s a factor of two cheaper than.

John: It’s a factor of ten cheaper.

Steve: Factor of ten, 1200 a month, that’s – okay.

John: So 1200 a month versus like well so like 800 a month, my guess is 800 a month, right? And that’s $9,000 a year.

Steve: Interesting, yeah that’s crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was off by order of magnitude there. Yeah that’s crazy.

John: I mean it’s hard to say you’re going to get twice the output from someone in the US. You’re going to get more probably depending if you hire the right person you’re going to get more. Twice maybe, ten times, not a chance.

Steve: Interesting, so this is something I did want to ask you, like what are the kind of like the best jobs that you can outsource, because I’m an electrical engineer. That’s kind of why I started with developer, because there’s a lot of nuances to being a developer, right? There’s quality of code, there’s just ways of thinking, efficiency and that sort of thing. If you’re getting like a better quality person in the US, could there be like some negative long term repercussions going forward? Maybe PHP isn’t a good example because most PHP scripts are pretty straightforward.

John: Yeah.

Steve: But for anything really complicated like an application, would you outsource that?

John: I personally would, like I had to develop a lot like we have a windows application that we had someone developing to do, and he’s been great. He’s a full time worker, he works for us, so when there’s a problem he just fixes it. We have an IOS staff that has done Philippines, actually there’s a fifth developer, our IOS developer and he cost me $1200 a month and he’s pretty good at that. I think I mean whatever we ask him to do is not normal, and he figured out and made it work how we wanted it to work. So I don’t know the long term repercussions…

Steve: Or technical debt is more like what I was getting at but…

John: Technical debt?

Steve: Yeah like where you just slap something together and you get it working, but then it’s like spaghetti code or…

John: So here is what — I find the opposite problem. In the entrepreneurs I have talked to typically, I find the opposite problem usually where like people get so into getting something perfect and exact and beautiful in the beginning, they never make sales. And that’s where most entrepreneurs suck is in not making sales. And so they are so concerned with it being precise and beautiful looking code that it doesn’t matter.

Like I have a good friend doing this right now, and I can tell him stop it, like what you’re doing is not going to work. This doesn’t have to be perfect, you don’t have to have this extra feature, your code doesn’t have to be beautiful, it doesn’t matter. You’re not making any money from it and you’re not going to until you stop doing this it make sales.

I just want to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six-day mini course on how to get started in e-commerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell, all the way to getting your first sales online.

Now, this course is free and can be obtained at mywifequitherjob.com/free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email, and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/free, now back to the show.

So what are some of the best things to outsource? Like social media, I’ve had friends do writing to a certain extent, you mentioned earlier that the writers that you have in the US are better, but you do have writers and in the Philippines, right?

John: Yes, so like I have – I’ll tell you the things that I have. So we have good design work done.

Steve: Like graphic design you mean?

John: Graphic design.

Steve: Okay.

John: Programming, any admin, or customer service stuff is done in Philippines.

Steve: How does that work, so they’re in a different time zone, right? So is it just email support then?

John: So we do email and chat support, and we hired three young people to cover the three eight hour shifts, and we have an extra person that fills in time for other people. So like we’ll have a couple of hours of downtime and that’s why we can hire a couple more to fill those in, but we’re pretty good with our support. You can hire phone people, and it’s a question I get asked often. We don’t have it, but it’s not that hard to do with all the different internet voice systems that exist today.

Steve: Sure of course.

John: So social media only is done in the Philippines, our Facebook gets done partly in the US and our advertising, I mean our Facebook Google at role [ph] being — all gets partly done in the US and partly in the Philippines.

Steve: Are the prices like still around a factor of eight to ten then cheaper?

John: Yeah.

Steve: They are, okay interesting okay.

John: I mean like it’s — let’s see, we pay the person, our Facebook person in the Philippines, our most expensive, our most highly paid person, our ads person are like $8 an hour, $8 or $12 an hour. Per person in the US is $50.

Steve: Okay, wow. But the expectation is always to hire them full time, right?

John: That’s mine, you can hire part time.

Steve: Or what I mean is like a long term relationship is always the expectation.

John: Yeah, so let me tell you kind of what that does for most entrepreneurs, what I’ve seen. You had a contract worker; you have to put a similar effort in to hire that person as you do to hire a long term person. Then once you hired them, there is a difference in what your brain will allow you to do. So for example, I work like 12 hours a week because I have given everything that I do to someone else in the Philippines. And I’ll take that step further.

So every day when my guys in the Philippines logs into my email accounts and archives all the emails he knows I don’t want to see, so I have a clean inbox and more. It makes my day more efficient. That’s something you would never consider doing with a contract worker, it’s too painful because you’re going to teach them and they’re going to leave, whereas the person that does this has been with me for 12 years, and I know he’s not going to leave. And so I can make my life better because…

Steve: You he’s not going to leave, is that because it’s just turnover in general is really low because it’s a cultural thing or?

John: It’s a culture; yeah it’s a cultural thing. So I’ll give you another example. I had a girl once who was doing a bunch of work for me, I love her, and I put her in a client facing position. This was the first time we’d ever done this because of who I am, like people look at me as my employees are amazing because I tell amazing stories about my employees. So I know that someone — when people find out who my employee are, they are going to try and hire from me, right?

So I put her in a client facing position and said, hey, you’ll get second job offers from other people now, and I just want you to be careful. You know I’m a stable employee. She interrupted me and said, oh don’t worry sir, I get jobs offers from people every single day, I’m not leaving. And that’s kind of if you treat them well in the Philippines, that’s how it is. Like just because they get a job offer that pays them more doesn’t mean they’re going to jump ship. They’re probably not going to.

Steve: Interesting.

John: And that makes a really big difference in a long term business situation.

Steve: So that sounds like that’s one of the key advantages, right? You get loyalty, they’re not all mercenary as long as you just keep them happy, they’ll stick with you?

John: Yes. It’s critical, it’s critical, right? Like a programmer, they write code, they know the code. It’s so hard for someone else to come in and learn and understand stuff.

Steve: Right that was the other question I was getting at with the developer stuff, but yeah it sounds like your developers have been with you for a very long time.

John: Yeah, like we have a good developer, they don’t leave. We don’t let them leave, that’s not true. The very first guy I hired was a programmer, he left years ago because I was paying him $500 a month, and the guy was amazing. And this was ten years ago. And he got a job making $2500 a month in Singapore.

And I was like, okay, this is your dream, I know this is your dream, this is what you want, and I also know that I can find someone else who is just as good at $500 a month. And you can’t – it’s not 500 today, it’s a 1,000 or $1200. But he said, in leaving he said, but don’t worry sir, I’ll keep working for you part time at the rate you’re currently paying me. So like that loyalty is…

Steve: So John, are you just a really good employer, like what are some of these things that you do that keeps them happy, or is this like a consistent experience across a lot of the people that you’ve interacted with? So it is a consistent experience under certain circumstances. So I think I am a good employer, but I can tell you the things that make me a good employer.

Steve: Okay.

John: So often and I get the sense that your concept of this is that I don’t know if I can trust this person. I don’t know if I can trust him to do good work, I don’t know if I can trust them to be honest or whatever.

Steve: Yeah, that’s the angle I’m taking yeah.

John: Right, their idea is I don’t know if I can trust this person. So you’re looking at it like skeptical of them, they’re skeptical of you. And unless you shift your mindset to, I have to trust this person and I’m going to treat this person as they’re sitting next to me, and I love them and they’re amazing, they’re going to continue to be skeptical of you. As long as a Filipina is skeptical of you, until they trust you, they’re not going to do great work, because in the Philippines they don’t want to lose face.

And so they really want to make you happy, that’s how they are as a culture. They’re a pleasing culture. So if they don’t think they’re going to please you, that you’re not going to be happy with their work, they’re not going to try and do their best, because they’re going to hold back and just be conservative with stuff. And that makes their life not great.

And if you do things to push them to where they trust you less, they start to get more and more hesitant rather than more bold. Rather than trying to impress you, they get more hesitant to the point where they’ll disappear. And that’s really the situation where most people lose a worker is not working, is working less, most of the time because they don’t know if they can trust you.

Steve: I guess the same is true of any employee, right?

John: Yes, but it’s more so in the Philippines because of their culture. Yeah, these are like general good management practices, but I found a lot of people don’t do. So here’s an example. I recently had a guy who worked for a friend of mine who I know is really, really, really good, this employer. He worked for him for four years. It’s Brad Callahan. A lot of people know him; he runs a very well done software system. This guy worked for him for four years. His business was changing, the thing he was working on, he didn’t need him anymore. He said, hey, can you find this guy a job?

So I had at the same time a CEO of another company who said, hey, I’m interested, do you have anybody that you trust. So I sent him this guy, it was a perfect match, right? One day later he said, oh this doesn’t work, he’s not good enough. I was like, what do you mean? Well he showed up an hour late, and he didn’t do this thing exactly right how I asked him to. I was like well dude; he’s been working you for two hours, like you’ve got to have a little bit of patience here. This guy is 14 hours different time zone from you.

And so that’s usually a situation where I’m like this doesn’t work for you. You should not hire someone in the Philippines. You have zero patience; you have zero tolerance, this is not going to work for you. But, so for the people that I see succeeding, they’re willing to put up with, oh you made a mistake, let’s fix it, and move on. Here’s the mistake you made, let’s fix it and thank you for trying really hard, that’s their attitude.

Steve: Okay and then I guess these are just all true as if you were just hiring someone in the US, right? I guess that’s the mindset that you really need to take. You shouldn’t think of these people as like temporary workers that are just doing the jerk that you don’t want to be doing, so to speak?

John: Yeah I mean like the thing that I see often is like, oh just fire her, just get rid of her, oh they suck, just get rid of her. You know like it’s a robot on the other side of the world without you know it’s a robot. And when you realize after you have someone working for you for a while and you start to get to know them and their family, you realize, oh my gosh, like life is a struggle over there.

This person is putting for some serious effort to do some amazing stuff for me, and right now they’re having a problem in their life like their mom died and they live far away, and that’s why they’re not showing up to work, and they don’t want to tell me why they’re not showing up to work because they’re scared that I’m going to be disappointed in them. And it’s not working right now. Where a lot of people are like, fired, you’re done.

Steve: So John let’s switch gears a little bit, and I’m assuming that like maybe the majority of the people over there are like this, but I imagine there’s always going to be some bad players, right? And so what are some of the processes that you have in place to kind of weed out the bad people from the good?

John: So one of the things that we have done at Online Jobs is created the ID proof system which is a reading on zero to 100 of, is this person who they say they are, because it’s a virtual system where like it’s easy to create a fake profile or create 20 fake profiles, and trying to get 16 different jobs and doing very little of each to just get paid whatever you can. So ID proof is a good move. I have looked at thousands of profiles and started recognizing patterns of here are things that cheaters do. And so we put that — I put together into an algorithm that’s pretty good.

So if someone’s ID proof is low, you’ve got to be really, really careful when you’re hiring them, and I’m not saying that you can’t find someone who is good. There are people who come in and they’re like I’m not willing to put in the effort to make my ID proof high, the score high because I don’t think this is going to work. Because they’re skeptical of getting a job online, often in the Philippines they don’t feel like this is going to work. So you can find it but someone whose ID proof is high you’re much more likely to find…

Steve: What about during the interview process, like once you actually have them on Skype?

John: All right, so here is the next thing, don’t do Skype interviews.

Steve: Really, interesting.

John: Yeah so Filipinos are again they’re a very pleasing culture, and they are also skeptical of their own talents. So like you get someone who has not worked for an American before, and they haven’t talked on the phone before, and they’re very scared of their English, like of you judging them in their English. So they will feel like they’ll know, they’ll understand you on the phone, they watch American TV and American movies. But they’re very worried that you’re not going to understand them, and you’ll be disappointed in them. So I skip the Skype interview.

Steve: Interesting, okay.

John: Because what I find is you schedule a Skype interview, your schedule of five people, three and a half will not show up. You have lost a really good person who was a programmer that didn’t need to be on Skype and they didn’t want to go on Skype with you and so you lost them in the interview process. So the way that I do my interviewing is I ask lots of questions over a long period of time. So what I find with this is — so it’s a remote worker, it’s not someone that’s in the office every single day, you get to watch them.

Their attention to detail is important to me, their responsiveness is important to me. And I can gauge that pretty well in an interview process where I send them an e-mail a day or two emails a day asking them one, two, three, four questions each time. They have a hard time faking it. If they faked their profile or their friend helped them write the profiles and their English is flawless in their profile, they’ll have a hard time doing over a two week process where they’re entering three questions in emails a couple of times a day.

So you get to see their English; you get to see their attention to detail. I ask them four questions, they only answer three of them, why? I get to see how responsive they are. Do they take two days to respond to an email or do they take two hours, because if they take two days during an interview process, the chances of them taking two days after the hire then is really high and that has worked for me.

Steve: What about live chat?

John: You can do live chat yes and then you get to see kind of how quick they are right? There are things to be concerned about. So like live chat is good, you can fake live chat. So okay, most people in the Philippines have their own computer. Live chat will tell you maybe how fast of a typer they are, or how slow their internet connection is, or how poor their computer is maybe. But going into the internet cafe you can change that. You can get a fast computer, you get fast connection.

If you’re writing emails back and forth a whole bunch of times, and they’re taking more than a day to respond, that to me something is wrong, and I get that through email. Like you’re going to work through internet café, you weren’t able to get to the Internet cafe today, or not every single day for two weeks, and that just tells me this is going to be a problem, right?

Steve: It’s interesting. The reason why I was like wondering about your email method, it makes the whole interview process really, really long and drawn out, right?

John: It does.

Steve: Like weeks?

John: It can be, it depends on the person. You’ll get a gut feeling pretty quickly often. And often times I’ll do it, like if I get someone who is responsive, I will send them an email every time I get one back. And often, our times will overlap; they’re in the same — later they’re getting up early, because like in the Philippines it’s very common to be up at 5 am, just because of the way the sun is different there than it is here.

So you’ll get four hours in the morning when they’re up, or four hours in the afternoon like they’ll come online at two o’clock, and I’m still working at two o’clock. So you’ll get sometime where I can send them an email and they respond, and I can send them an email and they’ll respond, then I’ll get a whole bunch of questions in over a three day period and hire someone.

Steve: During the interview process, do you actually have them do some work for you?

John: Not often. So that’s something that you can do it, and I have done it over — I have done at times, and I’ll do it with multiple people sometimes, where the only issue is you have to tell them you’re going to pay them, because Filipinos are scared of doing work and not getting paid. So you tell them, hey, look, I want you to do this test task, I’m going to pay you regardless if I hire you or not. Here’s the [inaudible 00:41:42] no, I’ll pay you, can you do this?

Steve: That’s really interesting that you don’t recommend Skype. It sounds like you don’t use — you personally don’t use live chat, you just do this email type of interview drawn out over a couple weeks.

John: Yeah. You can try Skype, but like if someone in the Philippines doesn’t have a microphone on the computer because they don’t, then you just lost a good — because now they know that Skype interview is required, and I can’t get a job with this person for now, another missed opportunity. And if they were really talented for a programmer position, you just lost a really good time to review.

Steve: But how do project reviews for like a developer position for example? Oftentimes it helps to talk via voice, right?

John: Yeah, I don’t do it.

Steve: You don’t do it, okay. So I’m just curious about your process then, so do you have them create the specification then you review it or?

John: Do you mean for a feature?

Steve: Yeah for example.

John: I will create the spec.

Steve: Okay and then…

John: With the developers I am very involved.

Steve: Okay but not by voice.

John: No.

Steve: Interesting okay. That could take a little bit of getting used to actually.

John: So actually okay so it’s not by email either. So first of all email — we use Basecamp, whatever.

Steve: Okay sure year.

John: Transfer and save things like that. But what I do is a lot of video. I do a lot of screen capture video explaining things and showing my screen exactly what we’re doing, exactly what I want. And I have found that to be super, super effective. So they’re hearing my voice, and this is a big deal with what we talked about earlier of getting their trust, is them hearing your voice in these videos. They learn to know you, come to know you and they trust you. So I found that videos are a big deal [overlapping 00:43:54].

Steve: Yeah these short like one or two minute clips essentially?

John: Yeah or five or 15 pop ups.

Steve: Okay and then they don’t produce videos back for you, do they?

John: Sometimes they do yeah.

Steve: Okay interesting.

John: Yeah, they’ll take screenshots and say like this is what I’m seeing, we’re working through an issue, also looking – this is what I’m seeing, and we’ve got to find that, can you reproduce this for me? Like they’ll say, how do you reproduce this?

Steve: So John, let’s kind of end this interview with like some gotchas, like what are some best practices, and what are some things to watch out for?

John: Don’t pay someone ahead of time. When you’ve hired someone in the beginning, don’t pay him up front, and always pay after work is done.

Steve: Are they at a salary in the beginning or you’re just talking about the very first task?

John: No, sure the very first task. No I always start people on a salary. Different people do this differently.

Steve: Sure, I was just asking your process yeah.

John: My process is I start on salary, and I have started lower than what they want, and then I raise it within a couple of months to what they want to. Gotchas, so what most people will find the biggest problem is the disappearing Filipino, where they do good work and then they disappear, and it’s unbelievably frustrating because you spend a lot of time recruiting someone and then to have them disappear.

What I have seen is 97% of the time that issue is with the employer not the worker. Now it’s a cultural thing that the employer need to understand, but usually when a Filipino disappears, it’s not because they don’t want the job, because they do, it’s because they don’t understand something you’ve asked them to do, or they don’t know how to do something, or they’re uncomfortable doing something, or they don’t understand your instructions. And even though you think your instructions were super, super clear, you’ve got to find another way to explain it.

If they’re disappearing, if they’re not showing up to work, that’s usually the problem. And so when I hire someone, I tell them, I know that you’re going to get stuck on something at some point and you’re going to want to disappear and not say something to me, don’t. You can’t disappear, that’s the worst thing you can do. And it’s been interesting, like I got an email once from someone that said, Sir, I don’t want to send you this email, but you told me I can’t disappear, so I’m not. I have to tell you what’s going on, here I go. That was what she said in her email to me.

So if someone disappears, you seek them out and say, hey, I know you’re stuck on something, what are you stuck on? What can I help you with? Will solve 90% of the issues in hiring Filipino workers. That’s a really big one.

Steve: Okay interesting.

John: Another one is internet and power outages, where like there are times in the year in different places of the country where they have scheduled power outages, because of not enough power to go around. So and usually it’s in our winter and their rainy season, now their dry season, their warm season, where they’ll have four hours every single day or six hours every single day with no power. And it’ll be in the middle of the day and they’ll just start sending you emails, I’m sorry, I couldn’t work today for three hours because our power was out, I’ll make it up for you tonight or on Saturday.

Steve: So it’s just basically have the expectation that these things will happen so you don’t get mad at them?

John: Yeah and that is a big one right there is don’t get mad at them. Well like it’s okay to mad, I get it, but especially in the Philippines if you yell at someone, like in the US you yell at someone, they get over it. In the Philippines that’s not the case where you yell at someone and then they don’t trust you anymore. And yeah these are good general management practices, but anytime you’re going to give some negative feedback to someone, start with positive, lead with positive, it will make such a difference.

Steve: Okay, all right John that’s some good advice. Yes some of it seems very specific to Filipinos which is really useful. I never thought that giving a Skype interview for example would be a negative thing, and you could be missing out someone really good by doing that.

John: I know and it took me a while to figure it out, where like I’m scheduling these interviews and they’re not showing up. And now today I see it every day, because I have a girl in the Philippines — actually I stopped her from doing it, but she does recruiting. And she schedules these interviews, and she’s like, oh three of the four didn’t show up. Like stop doing this, they don’t want to do it.

Steve: Yeah I know it’s really counter-intuitive actually to someone in the states. John it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today. I want to give you the opportunity to tell us where people can find you if they need to get ahold of you or your services, where can people find you?

John: So I am infinitely available through email, and if you submit any contact us form on Online Jobs, you would — if you want me, you’ll get me, it will come to me first. But if you say, hey, send us to John; it will definitely get to me. You can get me on Facebook even though I really dislike social media. If you send something to me on Twitter @JohnJonas, it will get to me also. Yeah, so I’m available through business and any communication except for phone.

Steve: Okay awesome. Well thanks for coming on the show John; I really appreciate your wisdom in teaching us what the nuances are interacting with a different culture.

John: Yeah, thanks for having me, this was really good.

Steve: All right, thanks a lot John.

John: Talk to you later.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. I’m actually in the process of trying to hire an employee in the Philippines right now and John’s advice has actually been invaluable. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode190.

And once again I want to thank Klaviyo.com for sponsoring this episode. Klaviyo is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants, and you can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on auto pilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

I also want to thank Privy.com for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use to turn visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture, exit intent, and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. I like Privy because it’s so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop ups for any primer that is closely tied to your e-commerce store. If you want to give it a try, it’s free. So head on over to Privy.com/Steve, once again that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve.

Now, I talk about how I use all these tools on my blog, and if you’re interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email, and I’ll send you the course right away, thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information, visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.

But before we begin I want to give a quick shout out to Privy who is a sponsor of the show. Privy is the tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store. Now Privy an email list growth platform, and they actually manage all of my email capture forms. And I actually use Privy hand in hand with my email marketing provider.

Now there are a bunch of companies out there that will manage your email capture forms, but I personally like Privy because they specialize in e-commerce stores. Right now I’m using Privy to display a cool wheel of fortune pop up. Basically a user gives me their email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store. And customers love the gamification aspect of this, and when I actually implemented this form email sign ups increased by 131%.

So bottom line, Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers, which I then feed to my email provider to close the sale. So head on over to Privy.com/Steve, and try it for free. And if you decide you need some of the more advanced features, use coupon code MWQHJ For 15% off. Once again that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve.

I also want to give a quick shout out to Klaviyo who is a sponsor of the show. Always blessed to have Klaviyo as a sponsor because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store, and actually over the holidays, I depended on Klaviyo for over 35% of my revenues. Now, Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores, and here is why it is so powerful.

Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week, easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special auto-responder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there is full revenue tracking on every single email sent.

Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used and you can try them for free at mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again that’s, mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, now on to the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast. Today is a special New Year’s episode where I want to take some time to recap the year, which incidentally was one of the most challenging years that I’ve actually had in a very long time. And because I have a lot to talk about, I’m actually going to split this into three separate episodes.

And in today’s episode, I’m going to go over some of the lessons that I learned this past year. And in subsequent podcasts I’m going to do a detailed breakdown of how my business has performed this past year and exactly what strategies I employed to grow them.

In any case I first want to talk about my 2017 a little bit. It’s been a little over a year since I quit my job, and I want to talk a little bit about how my life has been like post day job as I’ve been running my e-commerce store and I’ve been blogging full time since then.

So first off let’s rewind back to October 2016. And I remember being really excited when I finally gave notice for my day job, and in fact the first three months of freedom were awesome. I worked out every day, I got in great shape. I went to all my kids’ sports games, I went to all their activities, I did pick up, I did drop off, spent a lot of time with family, and life was great.

But then I remember four months had rolled around, and I actually started getting bored. Now don’t get me wrong. I was still working on my businesses, and they actually both grew in the double digits in 2017. But something was missing in my life. I missed hanging out with coworkers, I missed being around people who are smarter than me for eight hours a day. I missed the challenge of working in tech.

And keep in mind at my job back in the day I was working for a company called Cadence. I was working with all MIT and Stanford PhDs, and everyone I felt was just smarter than me and I felt challenged every day. But once I quit, I almost felt like I lost part of my identity. I was designing hardware and microprocessors for over 20 years. And it was just kind of depressing for me to put that part of my life on the shelf, because when it comes to tech, like tech moves just so quickly, and if you haven’t been in tech for I would say over a year, it’s actually really hard to go back to it.

And so by quitting my job, I felt like I just basically put that chapter of my life behind me, and it made me a little bit sad actually. Now I can’t really complain because my schedule for 2017 was really fantastic. I would basically get up, I would work maybe from eight o’clock until eleven or twelve, have lunch with my wife on a regular basis, then I would work out, and then I’d basically have the entire afternoon free. And it sounds like a great schedule, right?

I finally had time to work on some of my other side projects that I was meaning to start. I had a couple of other projects lined up which I never talked about publicly. But unfortunately, they either didn’t pan out or they’ve been kind of just dragging along and not getting that much traction. And then in July I actually ended up tearing my Achilles tendon, which pretty much made me bedridden for several weeks.

And it was really debilitating. I couldn’t exercise, I couldn’t walk. My wife had to shuttle me everywhere, and in fact the running joke was I was like the third kid. My wife would have to drop my kids off at school and then she’d have to drop me off the doctor or physical therapy. And after I tore my tendon, I ended up spending a bunch of weeks just lying in bed watching Netflix. Incidentally I think I’ve watched every awesome Netflix series right now, so if you guys need any recommendations, I’m your man.

But after tearing my Achilles tendon, all of a sudden I was in the worst physical shape of my life. And as I was lying in bed watching Netflix, I remember waking up and thinking to myself, I’m actually really tired of having too much free time. I am too tired of not having enough mental stimulation. I’m too tired of the lack of social interaction, because I wasn’t really talking to anyone. All I was doing was just lying in bed and watching Netflix all day.

By the way this isn’t meant to be a depressing episode I promise. The good news about getting injured and having all this downtime and all this free time in the afternoon was that it actually forced me to sit down, think about my life, my priorities and basically what makes me happy in life. And today I kind of want to share with you guys what I learned this past year about happiness and business. So here it goes.

All right so lesson number one, and this first lesson is a little bit counterintuitive. So lesson number one is to not set goals. Now I remember way back in 2009 when I started mywifequitherjob.com. One of my goals was actually to make enough money with my blog to quit my job. And it happened in 2016 October, I ended up quitting. But here’s the thing, I ended up quitting without a plan, or without a next set of goals.

And that’s actually one of the reasons why I kind of think goals suck. Once you hit them, you’re kind of left wondering what to do next, because a goal, it almost sounds final, right? You’ve hit this goal, you’re done, now what? And so instead of thinking about goals now, a better way to think about your life and your business in my opinion is to have an overall vision and a purpose for what you’re doing.

So let me give you a quick example. Back in the day, I used to be super focused on growing Bumblebee Linens and My Wife Quit Her Job like basically maximizing its growth. And don’t get me wrong, business has been good, and I now run two kind of legit seven figure businesses. But here’s what I discovered, and this is more amplified I guess in the past couple of years. Growing our businesses further has not equivalently furthered our happiness, and when I say we, of course I’m talking about my wife and I.

And I remember back in the day when we were trying to grow these two businesses a lot and really quickly, whenever we set these goals and we met them, we were really happy. But the happiness only lasted for a couple days and then we forgot about it, and then we were back at the grind. And here’s the thing about growing really quickly also.

Growing any business quickly can be super stressful. Every new product launch, every new sales channel that you want to add, it just adds to the stress. And especially over the holiday season when the customers are coming in, I always pitch in and answer phone calls, and there’s always a mad rush to orders, and it’s not comfortable. I mean the money is good, but it’s just not a comfortable situation.

So these days, my wife and I, we shoot for steady manageable growth instead of putting our foot down on the gas, because the added stress and the extra money is simply not worth it. And don’t get me wrong, it’s not because we don’t like growth, but the fact that the additional money doesn’t add to our happiness leads us to question why we continue to try to really grow our businesses. And that’s why we’ve kind of dialed it back a little bit and are shooting for steady manageable growth instead of trying to spike growth which is very uncomfortable.

And this all goes back to this long term vision that we have. Instead of setting monetary goals or business goals, our long term vision and our goal with our business is actually to spend more time with family and reduce stress. And all of our actions, all of our decisions relating to our business revolve around this goal. And in fact, my main struggle because I’m a very motivated person in general, my main struggle is actually keeping my ego in check regarding growth.

I see some of my colleagues and some of my peers who are just killing it online and making lots of money, but they aren’t happy in their either their family life or their social life. All right so instead of setting goals, what you want to do is you want to have an overall vision for your lifestyle and work to make your business fit your lifestyle, because at the end of the day your goal is to be happy.

All right lesson number two. This is something I learned in 2017, there is much more to happiness then being financially free. I remember when I first quit my job back in October 2016, I felt like I had made it. I didn’t really have to worry about money anymore, and I had time to spend with family. And so I thought that things would be all good. I thought that things would be perfect from here on, that I’ll just be happy. But it turns out this last year was challenging for me because I wasn’t really mentally stimulated.

So when it comes to happiness, I like to break it down into five basic areas wealth, mental stimulation, family, social stimulation, and physical fitness. And if I were to rate these categories with my life today, in terms of wealth I’m doing pretty well, like we don’t spend that much money so we actually don’t need to make that much of it.

But both of our businesses bring in more than enough money to provide for the kids. We already have their college education kind of set aside, and we can pretty much do whatever we want to do. We already have our house, and as I mentioned before we don’t really spend that much money, so we’re pretty good in the wealth department. But what I discovered this past year was in terms of mental stimulation, that’s kind of been lacking for me.

As I mentioned before in my last job designing microprocessors, that took a lot of brainpower to kind of come up and solve these complex technical problems. And even though I’m still working on my blog, teaching my class, and trying to grow Bumblebee Linens, it hasn’t been the same level of mental stimulation. And so that is definitely a department that is lacking for me right now, and it’s something that I’m looking to improve in 2018.

Now the third factor is family. And in terms of my family life I think it’s pretty great. I never miss any of my kids’ activities, I’m there chauffer them around. I’m there to teach them basketball; I’m actually going to be an assistant coach this following season for their basketball team. So in terms of family, everything is great.

Social stimulation is another thing that contributes to my happiness, and that part has been lacking as well. And so now that I don’t have to physically go into any office, I basically work from home. And that’s actually been pretty tough for me, because I don’t get a chance to talk to anyone. And so that is definitely something that I want to improve in 2018.

I know I talked about going to a co-working space in the past, but the Asianness in me refuses to spend money on a space that isn’t really necessary, because I actually have the entire house to myself. But what I do plan on doing is probably doing a little bit more volunteering perhaps in 2018.

And the final factor that contributes to happiness is physical fitness. Now I didn’t think that this was a big deal, but when I tore my Achilles tendon and I couldn’t work out or do anything, it actually made me a little bit depressed. And I discovered it’s mainly because whenever I’m stressed out or whenever I have something on my mind, I usually go running or I play sports. And the fact that I couldn’t do that anymore kind of led to this decline in my physical fitness, which eventually made me a little depressed because I wasn’t able to go outside and actually do stuff.

And so once again you know now once I become healed which is hopefully going to happen in another two or three months I would say, I’m going to work on my physical fitness for 2018. So there you have it. When it comes to business happiness, it’s more than just about wealth. Instead of blindly going after growth, you’ve got to take into account the other factors in your life like mental stimulation, are you challenging yourself, is your family and love life adequate, are you getting enough social stimulation and is your body in shape?

Find the areas that are lacking and work on those instead of blindly pursuing wealth or trying to put the pedal to the metal with your business. All right, lesson number three that I learned, routines are important. I’m going to talk about my Achilles tendon again, but when I tore that thing, I was kind of lost for two months mainly because it threw me off my schedule.

As I mentioned before prior to my injury, I was probably in the best shape that I’ve been since college, because I was working out at set times during the week, and I never missed a workout. And similarly I was actually working on my businesses on a very strict schedule as well. So for example every Sunday I write a post at Starbucks for four hours. Every Thursday I work on Bumblebee Linens. Every Wednesday I run office hours for my class.

Here’s the thing, when I got injured it actually disrupted my routine, and when that happened everything went to crap. I stopped writing, I stopped working on our store, I stopped working on the blog. And what I tried to do is I tried to find random bits of time here and there to work on my businesses, but in the end nothing really got done because it wasn’t on my schedule. And it was only after I adjusted my schedule to kind of fit some of these pieces back in even though I couldn’t walk or move, did everything kind of fall back in place.

And so if you want to make forward progress with your business, always set aside blocks of time specifically in your calendar to work on these specific things in your life otherwise you will never make progress. Because when it comes time to making progress in business in life, consistency is the key. It’s not necessarily how fast you do something, but how often you do something, how consistently you are able to do something.

All right so here’s lesson number four. If you’re not sure what to do right now, if you’re not sure what business that you want to pursue, then just focus on making others happy. Now as I’ve mentioned before, I’m kind of in limbo right now. I’ve got lots of free time. A couple months ago I actually even considered getting another full time job. But in the meantime as I’m trying to figure things out, I’ve actually focused all my efforts on helping others, so helping students, helping readers, helping listeners with their businesses, and it’s actually made me very happy.

Now I’ve got a bunch of students in my class making six figures now, and I’ve even got a handful of students making millions of dollars per year. And in fact one particular student just wrote a book about her million dollar multimillion dollar journey, and I’m actually really excited to help her promote it. So I’ll probably bring the student back on the podcast to talk about it. But I don’t have everything figured out yet, but helping others and seeing them make progress has actually made me very happy in the interim.

Now based on my emails, I know many of you out there are kind of not sure what business you want to pursue, or what product that you want to sell. And here’s my advice to you, if you’re not sure what to do, or if you actually lack the money to go start a business, just go out and help someone. We are all experts or we’re all good enough at something to teach others something. So what you want to do is you want to document it, write a blog, put out a podcast, create some videos.

Putting yourself out there and building an audience will actually lead to other business opportunities going forward. I remember back when I started mywifequitherjob.com back in 2009, all I did was I started writing about my experiences running my online store Bumblebee linens. And it started out slow, but over time people started to find me. And they started to read about my experiences, and all of a sudden these people they wanted to start their own store because they wanted to spend more time with their kids and family.

And so I started building an audience, and even though I didn’t make any money for the first three years, people started asking me for a class. And after a while I started getting traffic as well, which I would use to promote affiliate offers. I was getting paid for advertising. And then I started my class, and that’s actually when all the money started rolling in.

I didn’t really have a master plan, but I just started documenting everything. And when it came time to monetize everything, I had this audience that I could sell to. Okay and so if you’re not sure what to do right now, just start documenting anything that you’re an expert at or anything that you’re good at and start building an audience now.

All right lesson number five which is something that really hit home for me after I got injured, you need to appreciate what you have in order to be happy. Now prior to my injury I was often jealous of a lot of my Stanford classmates, and every single year I attend this retreat with my other classmates in this entrepreneurship program that I was a part of at Stanford. It’s called the Mayfield Fellows program. And it’s basically a program of entrepreneurs.

And every time I go, I feel inferior because many of my classmates in this program have actually gone on to start eight and nine figure companies. And just as an example Kevin Systrom of Instagram was actually part of this program. Meanwhile I am hawking handkerchiefs and I’m teaching a class, certainly not a glamorous business that requires VC funding that will result in a nine figure exit.

So I always felt a little bit inferior kind of going to this conference. But the fact that I got injured and I couldn’t actually do any work or go to work has really kind of taught me to appreciate all the lifestyle businesses that I’ve started. Because I’m my own boss, I can actually afford to be injured for months and not have to go to work. I can spend as much time with the kids that I want. I don’t have any obligations whatsoever, and I have the flexibility to earn money from anywhere.

And so this injury has taught me to just be thankful of the businesses that I’ve created, and not to be jealous. Well it’s impossible not to be jealous completely of some my peers who are doing really well, but it’s been really good. And whenever I compare myself to someone else, that’s when I tend to get depressed. And so it’s still work in progress, but I’m trying less and less to be jealous of others and appreciate what I really have today.

All right let’s number six is to focus, focus, focus. Now since I had a lot more free time this year, I had my hand actually in a lot of different cookie jars. One I had this SaaS business I was trying to start, I haven’t told you guys about this yet because it didn’t go anywhere. I had another project in the influencer space that I wanted to start. Meanwhile there is also this pet coding project that I was doing in my free time as well.

And the end result, nothing got done. I fell into the trap of trying to do too many things at once. And in fact I see this quite often with the students in my class. They try to sell on Amazon, they try this on their own site, they try to learn AdWords, they try to run Facebook ads, they try to build their Instagram following all at once. And when you try to do too many things at once, it just doesn’t work. You don’t end up making progress on anything.

So in order to make progress, you’ve got to focus your efforts on one thing and do it well. And that is definitely going to be something that I’m going to be trying to do for 2018, focus less on trying to have my head a whole bunch of different things and focus on doing what I do best and doing it well.

Lesson number seven, work with people who will challenge or inspire you to do better. Now here’s something you probably didn’t know about me. I used to actually be against working with other people, because I tend not to trust other people to do as good of a job as I can. And I actually love being like a one man show. But over the years I’ve come to realize the importance of having a partner.

So for example Bumblebee Linens would never have happened if I did not work with my wife. And my conference the Sellers Summit would never have happened without Toni Andersen. And I’ve actually learned over the years that working on business projects is so much more fun and fulfilling when you partner up with somebody who will challenge you, or inspire you to do better. So going forward I will look for people that I really want to work with because that tends to make whatever project that you’re working on more fun and not actually feel like work.

Lesson number eight, treat your customers like royalty. Now I’ve actually always known that word of mouth is important to any business, but I actually didn’t fully realize it until this past year. Now a good portion of our business at Bumblebee Linens is B to B. So we get hotels, we get event planners; we get bed and breakfasts and even small airlines buying our products.

And in this past year we actually got a bunch of new B to B customers without actually doing a single thing. Usually the way it works we either cold call or we reach out to people who have purchased in large quantities, and see if they want to purchase more. But this recent crop of B to B customers just happened just out of the blue without us doing anything. And what was funny about this was that they were all in the fashion space, and they all had retail stores.

And it turns out that the fashion community is very small, and one of our best customers kind of switched companies and started spreading the word about our linens. And all of a sudden this past year more retail fashion shops started buying from us because of this one customer. And when you think of word of mouth, here are just some interesting statistics courtesy of the Research Institute of America for the White House Office of Consumer Affairs.

The average business actually does not hear from 96% of their unhappy clients, and each and every dissatisfied customer will on average tell nine other people. And if we put these statistics in perspective with a couple of numbers, every customer complaint that you receive means that you really have 24 other dissatisfied customers, and these 24 customers will go on to tell a combined 216 people about their negative experience with your business.

But if you address these customers who are complaining, up to 70% want to do business with your business again if the complaint is resolved, and up to 95% will do business if the problem is resolved quickly. Now instead of focusing on complaints, the same is true if a customer is really, really happy with your business. If a customer is really happy, they will tell their friends and the effect will be amplified in the opposite direction and they’ll tell other people about your business, and you’ll get additional business based on this.

Moral the story, don’t piss any of your customers off because they can do a lot of damage with negative word of mouth. And on the flip side, try to go out of your way to make customers happy, because they will actually spread the positive word about your business and get you more customers exponentially.

And my final lesson for 2017 is to take action. Now I know a lot of you guys who are listening to this podcast are on the sidelines and you want to start your own business, but you just haven’t had the courage to pull the trigger. And so I want to tell you a story about how I launched my Create a Profitable Online Store course. And I remember back in the day, a whole bunch of people were asking for a course, and it was always on my to do list, but I could never pull the trigger.

And finally what I ended up doing is I ended up launching the class. I gave a webinar and I just launched the class without any material at all. And I said, hey if you guys are willing to pay me some money, I promise you that I will put out content on a regular basis and put out a good class. And I ended up selling 35 courses and made about ten grand. And as soon as I collected that money, all of a sudden I was like, oh crap. That actually forced me to go out and produce the course that I just pre-sold.

Incidentally this course has made millions of dollars for me over the years. And to think back, if I never did that pre-launch webinar, I’d be missing out on millions of dollars today. And so if you guys are having problems taking action, put yourself out there, make some sort of commitment to yourself and just get something out there, because if you don’t take action and get started nothing is ever going to happen.

All right, and so those are some of the lessons that I personally learned in 2017. And looking back on this podcast now and just kind of listening to what I just said, it seems like injuring my Achilles tendon had a large part in a lot of the lessons that I learned mainly I think because it made me appreciate what I had, and it made me just kind of reflect on everything that just kind of happened this past year and what makes me happy. In any case I hope you enjoyed this episode. I will probably do more of these solo episodes going forward in the coming year. And here’s to a great 2018.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. As I mentioned before, 2017 was actually a very challenging year for me, mainly because I briefly lost sight of what makes me happy in life, and I hope that you don’t make the same mistakes that I did. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode 190.

And once again I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Klaviyo is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants, and you can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on auto pilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

I also want to thank Privy.com for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use to turn visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture, exit intent, and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it’s so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop ups for any primer that is closely tied to your e-commerce store. If you want to give it a try, it is free. So head on over to Privy.com/Steve, once again that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve.

Now, I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you’re interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email, and I’ll send you the course right away, thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information, visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.

Perry is one of the most sought after business consultants when it comes to pay per click advertising, and he’s known as the godfather of PPC. And today we’re actually going to pick his brain on how to grow your business with the 80/20 rule.

But before we begin, I want to give a quick shout out to Klaviyo who is a sponsor of the show. Now I’m super excited to talk about Klaviyo because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store, and I actually depend on them for over 20% of my revenues. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider.

Well, Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores. Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought, which makes it extremely powerful. So let’s say I want to send an email out to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week, easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special auto-responder sequence to my customers depending on what they purchased, piece of cake, and there is full revenue tracking on every single email.

Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used and you can try them for free at mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s, mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. And if you’re interested in starting your own online business, head on over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just enter your email on the front page, and I’ll send you the course immediately. Now on to the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast. Today I have an extra special guest on the show. He is one of the world’s most sought after business consultants, and is the author of many bestselling books in the PPC advertising industry including The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords, and The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ads. He has consulted in over 300 industries, and he’s known as the godfather of PPC.

Now does this man sound familiar? Well it’s none other than Perry Marshall. And with that welcome to the show Perry, how are you doing today?

Perry: Great Steve, it’s a delight to talk to you and you’ve got a pretty great story. We were talking earlier about your story of living in Silicon Valley. Living in an expensive city is no day at the beach.

Steve: It is not yeah, but there’s perks, you can’t buy the weather anywhere else, right?

Perry: Right, right. Well, I live in Chicago and our weather isn’t always that great, but it’s a great city. So you have these tradeoffs, like well are you willing to pay to live in a world class city, and all the things that — and I think it’s worth it. I think the connections that you have and the things that you can do, and so probably a lot of your listeners live in expensive metros, and have to thrive in the competition, right?

Steve: Absolutely.

Perry: It’s a pretty new topic.

Steve: So hey I actually know your work because I think back in 2007, I think I picked up your Ultimate Guide to AdWords. But for the benefit of the listeners, can you give us like a brief background story about how you got into PPC in the first place, and then eventually what led you to focus on like the 80/20 principle of sales and marketing?

Perry: Well, I want to quickly start by connecting with the name of your show. So my wife quit her job when our first was born. And a few months before that I had gotten laid off from my engineering job and gone into sales, which was kind of being thrown in the lake and see if you can swim. So I’ve lived this man, and it was a good two years of bologna sandwiches and rum and soup, dialing for dollars and pounding the pavement, and so man I totally get it.

And look I think that when you take on that extra burden of being the breadwinner, and of course it could be the woman being the breadwinner, it could be the guy being the breadwinner. But I think there are just situations where you put yourself in the situation, it’s almost like a movie, like what is this character going to do anyway. And well he’s got a battle ox, and he’s got to go through wars and battles and go on ships in the stormy sea, but you end up being a lot stronger and having a lot more moxie.

So I say there’s two kinds of people in the world. There are poodles and there are or are wolverines. And the way that you become a wolverine is your wife quits her job if you have to make it work. So that’s like the early back-story.

Steve: Was that the last time you did engineering by the way, because I know we’re both electrical engineers, was that the last time you did electrical engineering?

Perry: Well, in a sense I still do it, which is a whole another story, which if you want to get into we can talk about, but actually I feel like in engineering background is a liberal arts education for the 21st century.

Steve: Interesting.

Perry: It’s really helpful, and so I’ve always had a hand in — and I mean I even regard a lot of what I do now and what we’re talking about as engineering. Like all of these marketing problems are really engineering problems with a whole bunch of human psychology mixed in. In fact I think part of my job — I got this customer named Ari Galper. He lives in Australia and he does not have an engineering or a mathematics bone in his body.

But he said to me the other day, he goes you know Perry, you actually did teach me to think like an engineer, and I can put on that hat when I need to. And there are times when it’s really called for all the way from, hey I get this agency and they want to manage my clicks, all the way to somebody wants to buy my company, or somebody wants to sell me their company, or they want to sell me their website or any of those decisions.

There’s a little engineering problem, like well is the money going into the black box and coming out with more dollars than went in? Those are all engineering problems.

Steve: Okay interesting. Okay so I didn’t mean to interrupt you. You were talking about — you left off on I guess the meat of the story how you got into PPC.

Perry: Yeah so after a couple of years, I started to find my way and I discovered direct marketing. And I worked in a company that sold industrial hardware and software, and the company got sold and I got some stock options, and I hung out my shingle. It’s like dude, now you’ve got like make this thing work, and you’ve got to generate leads. And Google AdWords came out about six months after I quit my job. And I was trying to generate leads, I had this little CD I would mail out called guerrilla marketing for high tech sales people.

I was looking for people to fill in that form and request the CD. And Google AdWords came out, and after about three days of playing with those I was like, oh my word, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life, this is amazing. And so I grabbed onto it and for about a year it was my little secret, it was like I’m not telling anybody about this, a seeker fishing hole.

But then Ken MacCarthy who ran the system seminar for internet marketing, which as far as I’m concerned at the time was the best seminar for marketers on the internet. He said, hey you know Google AdWords, why don’t you come and speak at my seminar on Google AdWords. And all of a sudden I found myself in the Google AdWords business, which I didn’t even really know was a business, because it kind of wasn’t at the time.

And then what happened over the next couple of years was it just exploded and went crazy, and I found myself on the inside of every business that you can imagine like seeing their numbers, seeing their clicks, seeing their conversions, how it works, every kind of product you can imagine. I mean I remember when my first customer sold Japanese maples trees. And there was another guy who sold a summer camp, and there was all these people selling different things, and some of them were physical products and some of them were services and you just had this vast thing.

And well, so fast forward and here we are and all this stuff is normal now. In fact direct marketing is normal and tracking conversions is normal, and all this stuff that Claude Hopkins wrote about in scientific advertising in 1918, which is 99 years ago, is normal, right? And so, massive paradigm shifts.

Steve: So given that, so one of the common questions I get asked, I mean you’re familiar with all the PPC advertising platforms. So most of the listeners are on the e-commerce space, and one of the common questions I get asked is hey I just launched this site to sell physical products, and I really don’t know where to start with generating traffic, like should I go with Google, should I go with Facebook, should I go with a marketplace? Like can you kind of walk me through like the thought process on how you advise a client when they come to you with such a question?

Perry: Yeah, and this is a really good question, and so let’s just start — let’s try to keep you from getting eviscerated, okay? So first off you can’t master six PPC platforms, and like there’s this whole sort of social media guilt trip like, oh you got to be on LinkedIn and Pinterest and Facebook and Twitter, and [inaudible 00:11:04]. Like you can’t, you just can’t, and especially if the person who’s asking this question right now, there’s no possible way.

Here’s what you can do. You need to master one form of traffic and one form of conversion. And before you go doing anything else or get distracted by anything else, that’s what you’ve got to do. And so you need to pick a platform that’s appropriate to you, and I’ll get to that in just a minute, but then you need to really just hone it in and narrow it down, find probably some niche within the niche that you can master. And just like ruthlessly knuckle down on that one thing.

And it’s almost like do not pass go [ph], do not collect $200, do not skip around, do not get distracted. And I mean if there is anything that is just the mortal enemy of most people today, it’s just in the list, distraction.

Steve: Yes.

Perry: And it just it robs people of their whole life. So now you got to pick a platform. Well, I got a few things that might help. On our website, well we have a few interesting little websites. So is Facebook for me, is AdWords for me? And you actually get a score. So if you go to is FB for me, isfbforme.com, you can answer a dozen questions in about 60 seconds, and click the button, it’ll give your score on a scale of one to ten. How suitable is Facebook for your business?

You can go to is AW for me, which is AdWords for me dot com. And same thing for Google, and it’ll tell you not only Google’s search, it will also give you Google display, it’ll also give you a competition index of probably how much are you up to.

Steve: Can we talk a little about how that works?

Perry: Sure, sure, sure.

Steve: So like what businesses are more catered to Facebook, kind of like on a high level versus AdWords, versus the display network?

Perry: So really oversimplified summary is Google is the yellow pages, Facebook is the coffee shop. If what you sell is cultural and emotional, and relational and identity oriented towards the tribe that you belong to, then Facebook is really up your alley. If what you sell is more analytical, if it’s more business to business, if it’s more propeller head or more technical, Google is probably better. I mean just think of it from the standpoint of what is the state of mind of a person who is on Facebook versus what is the state of mind versus they’re on Google.

They’re using different sides of their brain really, and the whole entire platforms really reflect a different side of the brain. And so now both — there’s a lot of overlap between the two. Another thing about Facebook is Facebook is easier to make a splash; it’s easier to just go make something happen today right now. You could come up with a good ad and you could post it, and you have people responding in seconds.

But it tends to wear out, things you do in Facebook tend to have a limited shelf life. Whereas Google is a more — if you can get dialed in and optimized, which might take you months, it will run in run for a long time. So it’s kind of like a freight train. It takes a while to get going, but the momentum is tremendous. And so, there’s pros and cons to all these platforms.

Now, here is another thing that I think can be very powerful. Remarketing or retargeting which is when you go, you look at a dress on eBay or Amazon or somebody’s site, and then all of a sudden all these little dress ads are following you around. I think everybody has seen that. That is actually an underrated form of marketing that people have a lot of skittishness about. And they’re kind of resistant to do it, they’re like, well that’s creepy, I don’t really want to do that.

Plus those people even visited my website; I don’t want to have to pay to bring them back again, like that doesn’t seem fair. Well, all of those are reasons why you should actually do it. And what I want to say to you is that it’s probably the first thing that you should do before you go do everything else. If you have any traffic in your website, now if you’re starting, if you just bought your domain name yesterday, you have zero traffic; it’s going to do you no good.

But most people already have some traffic. And what’s happening on your website right now is three or 5% or 10% or 1% are doing whatever it is you want them to do, and the other 90% aren’t. Now out of the 90%, probably 70 or 80% will never do what you want to do ever, ever, ever. But there’s this like top like you already skimmed the cream off the top, but then there’s the top of what’s left that you can get to engage with you if you use remarketing, but you will lose them if you don’t.

Now, here’s why I’m actually telling you this. The reason I’m telling you this is because this is a great way to start either Google advertising or Facebook advertising. It could even be a way you get into You Tube where if you’re in a really competitive market and the clicks are expensive, and it’s hard to get a conversion for an acceptable cost, start with three marketing. And draw little concentric circles and make them wider and wider until it’s actually working with cold traffic.

And so remarketing becomes like a clutch that you let out so the engine doesn’t stall. And I just think, that’s probably going to help some people really…

Steve: When you’re talking about remarketing for AdWords, are you talking about just bidding higher for the people who already visited your site for your search terms?

Perry: Oh okay. So there’s several kinds of remarketing. So there’s remarketing lists for search ads, RLSA, which means you can bid very differently for people who already have visited your website on Google search than for people who didn’t. But there’s also remarketing on Google’s display network, which is an entirely different thing. So, all the banner ads on The New York Times, and in everywhere on the internet, in text ads.

So one of the problems with remarketing is people just keep seeing the same thing over and over again, they become banner blind. Well, you don’t want to do that, you actually want to take maybe your five best campaigns and put them all in rotation, so that the person who visited your website is now being introduced to multiple angles on what you do not just this one thing. And that makes the advertising interesting instead of boring and repetitive, and it makes it less creepy and more relevant.

Steve: I just want to take a moment to thank Kabbage for being a sponsor of the show. Now if you run a successful e-commerce business like I do, you probably know that the worst thing that can happen to you is to run out of stock. Now my wife and I regularly import container loads of merchandise from China, and sometimes you need a short term loan to buy enough inventory to meet demand especially during the holiday season.

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Kabbage has supported over 100,000 small businesses with over 3.5 billion dollars in funding. So visit Kabbage.com/wife. There is no cost to apply or to set up your line of credit. And as a My Wife Quit Her Job listener, when you qualify for funding, you will get a $50 visa gift card that you can use anywhere. Now that’s Kabbage with a K, K-A-B-B-A-G-E.com/wife. Once again that’s K-A-B-B-A-G-E.com/wife, now back to the show.

Can you comment a little bit about like the major differences between Facebook ads versus the Google Display Network?

Perry: Okay, so Facebook is always based on targeting some fixed audience. I mean pretty much any context like; well okay I’m targeting fans of a certain TV show, or feeds of a certain website or even some custom audience. It’s a finite audience which you are saturating. Well, Google Display Network is not like that. Google Display Network is always a passing parade, there’s always new people coming through. And so that makes Google Display Network much more evergreen.

So on display network, you can have text ads, you can have banner ads, there’s an enhanced ad where you actually load up all these different bits of text and images, and Google actually try different combinations for you. So all of these all these things exist.

Steve: There’s a reason why I’m asking these questions Perry. So I do, I run all the ads, all my own ads in all these platforms. And the only ad platform that I’ve never quite gotten to convert that well is the display network outside of dynamic retargeting.

Perry: Oh? Okay.

Steve: Yeah and so originally when I got you on here, I wasn’t going to talk about this, but I’m just kind of curious now since I do have you on. Of the clients that you’ve had gotten the Google Display Network working for like kind of what has been your strategy?

Perry: All right, so there there’s a bunch of strategies because there are a bunch of different ways that you can target. And so here’s kind of how you need to think about it is what’s going on for the most part on the Display Network is that there are a bunch of advertisers who have gotten locked in. And when you have a locked in, it is a magic carpet, right? It is and there is — like if you have a mass consumer product that could appeal to lots of people, there is gargantuan amount of traffic on Google Display Network, I mean you can hardly believe it.

Well so what happens is, what a lot of advertisers do is they use cost per action bidding and they lock in on a certain set of websites that give them an acceptable return on investment. And so now they have a very tight feedback loop, so they’re saying, I’m willing to pay $3 a conversion or $30 a conversion, or whatever the number is, so Google just show me these sites that get me these conversions. And so when you do that, you have to pay your dues at first, but once you start to get it locked in, it gets super locked in.

And then those sites become very difficult for other advertisers to wedge in on, because the existing, the incumbents are already in there, and Google always favors an incumbent. It’s just like elections; it’s actually for all the same reasons. And so the really like dreadful part about Google Display Network is that there’s millions of sites, and Google is prone to show your ads on sites that are full of all these people that are just doing ring tones or really low quality traffic.

Furthermore, there’s click fraud and like all these like scammy, spammy sites that run Google ads. And so there’s a whole lot of swamp land in Google Display Network, and so you actually kind of have to double down to figure out where to target. And Google Display Network — I mean I can’t even keep track of it, my co-author Mike Rhodes actually keeps official track of all these things. But I think there are something like eight to ten different targeting methods on Google Display Network.

So you can target by keyword, you can target by website, you can target by something called in market, which might be a good place to start where Google can figure out this guy is trying to buy a refrigerator right now. This whole group of people that you can target, all appear to be buying refrigerators in the last two weeks, and so you can target them. You can upload lists to Google, and you can create similar audiences, which is not as effective as Facebook’s version, but it does exist.

Steve: So do you recommend starting with keywords or these different audiences that you’ve been talking about, like in market audiences?

Perry: I would start with the less commonly used methods. Now, we have some chapters about this in our Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords book, and we also have a course center website called Display Expert Series, which is a real deep dive into how you do it. And if you’re going to spend money on Google, I would suggest availing yourself of a resource.

Another method that can be affective is category targeting. There are about 2,000 different product purchase categories on Google. And so if you’re selling baby stuff, then you can target baby clothing and things like that, and zero in a lot closer, and you need to take a mentality like — I call it toehold, foothold, stranglehold. You don’t try to kill the whole elephant all at once. If you can get a few whether it’s keywords or websites or categories, if you can get a few sites and a few targets that lock in, because you’re going to end up with certain pages that convert at an acceptable price.

And once you get into that virtuous cycle, then you can continue to expand. And you have to — especially at first you have to spend a lot of time eliminating all of these sites that don’t convert. It’s just this huge game of elimination.

Steve: So what I’m hearing is basically you want to go really narrow and maybe even pick specific pages on the web that you think are going to convert and just get those pages, and just kind of gradually build up your…

Perry: Okay, I don’t really go so granular that you think you know what the pages are going to be. That’s really dangerous. In fact guessing that I found is almost impossible. But what you can do is you can limit your exposure, you can pick some narrow band of some topic or some keyword, and then you can find some pages within that, that convert, and you can ruthlessly eliminate the rest. And once you start to have some that convert, then finding similar ones, it just becomes a lot easier.

Steve: Okay, so when it comes to someone who is brand new, and a lot of these listeners are probably just getting started with their sites, which platform would you recommend they start with? And I know it depends on the nature of their business, but so I kind of teach AdWords, not the display network obviously, but I mainly tell people to start with Google Shopping and Facebook depending on what type of stuff that they sell. Like what is your kind of recommendation, and if you have any sort of clients that you’ve — client examples that you’ve used to advise them, that would be great.

Perry: Well, I would certainly start with this is AW for me, is FBfor.com. I would start with the scoring, and I would at least start with what gives you the best score. And then I would shut out all the distractions, just try to hunker down, and I would start with remarketing which exists on all those platforms. And then I would expand outward to colder and colder forms of traffic. And the Holy Grail is that you actually get it to work on completely cold traffic instead of traffic that in some way, shape, or form has already been warmed up before they got to you.

If you expand out in those concentric circles, that’s the best way to ensure you don’t lose your shirt. Like if you’re just retargeting people that already visited your site in the last three days, it’s almost impossible to go broke or wake up the next morning having spent $2,500, and feel like you have a hangover, which is you really don’t want to have a bad experience right out of the gate, and then be soured to the whole thing, because PPC is like crack cocaine if you can get it to work right.

Now, I want to make sure — I mean answering your — you talked about Google Shopping. Google Shopping is definitely one of the less picked over, less competitive compared to a lot of other — so like compared to Google search. So Google search if you’re like in the local market is usually pretty reasonable, but a lot of national markets it’s very, very competitive, whereas Google Shopping is more reasonable for most people.

Like I have a client right now, and they were experimenting with, well they’d been doing Google search for a while, and they never could quite get it to convert an acceptable ROI. I started working with them, we did some aggressive experiments for a little while, they got a little bit of improvement, but not all that much, and basically we switched all of our efforts to Google Shopping, and that appears to be working better. And now they can hang out there for a while, and they can develop that.

So let me give you an example of what they’re trying to do. They have thousands of products. And some people would be tempted just like throw a bunch of mud at the wall. What I told him to do — and like a lot of the stuff they’ve sold, they’ve sold like little tiny quantities of most of it, and they’ve sold large quantities of only some of it. And I said, so what I want you to do, think about — so the way I do 80/20 is there’s the 20% that generates 80%, and there’s the 20% of the top 20%, which is the 4%, that gives you 64% percent.

I said start with that 4%. In other words start with the 4% of your SKUs that have generated 64% of your sales, which is almost exactly what the ratios are going to be. You have about 4, 5% of what you sell is two thirds of your business. It’s almost always true. I said just target those products on Google Shopping and ignore all the rest, and just get those working. That way you’re going to risk less money, and you have a way, way better chance.

And then within the 4%, you’re going to find the 1% that’s probably 50%, and you want to own it. And one of the most important things that I could ever tell you is you want to pick a couple of specific niches and completely own them, and you want to be number one. Being number one on the internet is great, being number four is terrible, it sucks.

Okay so I haven’t heard your whole story. I’m willing to bet money that when your handkerchief website went crazy, and you replaced your wife’s income, it was because within certain platforms, maybe it was search engines or advertising platforms; you were the number one handkerchiefs guy.

Steve: That’s correct. We focused on that, and we were the best, and the largest brand in handkerchief. So we ranked on Google, and our AdWords actually really made us a lot of money in the beginning.

Perry: Right, so you weren’t number one on handkerchiefs at the local mall, but you were number one on here, just on Google. And you’re like oh my word, honey, look at all these thousands of people every day, they’re looking for handkerchiefs on Google, who knew. And she’s like, really, wow, well I do not understand it, but I do accept it. And you’re off on your adventure.

Steve: I just want to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six-day mini course on how to get started in e-commerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell, all the way to getting your first sales online.

Now this course is free, and can be obtained at mywifequitherjob.com/free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email, and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/free, now back to the show.

So I’ll just try to summarize what you said. So for Shopping, pick your highest grossing products and then only bid on those in the beginning for Shopping.

Perry: Well yeah, like whatever the most with the highest margins and the most profitability and the most uniqueness and the best unique selling proposition, and the least me too thing that you have. It’s probably going to be all of those things, and you just leaves are down on that.

Steve: Okay, what is the disadvantage of just bidding on all of your products, but even like at a low bid just to see if you can get in those French clients who just happen to be looking for those products online?

Perry: Well, okay just think of it like this, every single product that you try to sell, you’re going to spend a certain amount of wasted money 50 to 95% of those, and you’re going to find out that they don’t work, okay? And it might be 99; I mean you may have a very low betting average on most products. And so if you have 30,000 products, and if it takes you $10 of advertising to find out that this product doesn’t work, then you could spend $300,000 just to know that 29,950 products don’t work. Like the odds are so tilted against you.

I mean you really; you can’t go into this with a bunch of blind optimism. That is just a recipe for disappointment.

Steve: So you’re recommending is go with the best product and just kind of gradually expand your product base on that?

Perry: Yeah.

Steve: Okay, and I heard you mentioned earlier with the retargeting, what time window do you recommend people start out with for like quick wins?

Perry: Well, it depends on what you sell and what the time — but most people are going to know, do people shop for my product for five minutes or five months, right? And so if it’s a short time window, well the smallest time window that any of the retargeting platforms give you to my knowledge is a day, and it’s pretty hard to risk that much money if your retargeting window is one day. It’s pretty hard to go along with that. I find a lot do well with maybe three days, but of course if you’re selling a $100,000 piece of machinery or something, then you might go several months.

Steve: And in terms of advertising, so once you have the retargeting mail done, what is your strategy for getting cold traffic to convert?

Perry: Well, so first you need to test a lot of different things. And the number one deficiency of most ad campaigns is they test this really narrow impoverished range of hooks in USPs and graphics and language. So the classic thing that we did in all the early Google Books is we showed people, if you change this one verb, if you change just cheap to free, or if you change half price to two for one, or you do these kind of simple little changes, that’s how you split test.

And so people sit there and then they split test commas and verbs and capitalization and stuff. Well, in principle that’s fine, but really the principle is forest, trees, branches, leaves. You tests like, am I in the right forest, let’s try these wildly different locations, let’s try — so I’m writing ads and one ad is about absolute fear and terror that something horrible like could happen if you don’t solve this problem. Or another ad is just how you’re going to be absolutely in Nirvana if you can solve your problem.

And so one is towards and one is away from you. You test black versus white, you test heavily contrasting ideas. And you see you can do that with retargeting. And so if you test ten radically different ads, you’re probably going to find that the difference between the best one and the worst one is at least three to one. Well, if you do this several times, and all of a sudden you come up with just really fantastic ad sleighs [ph], then you probably got an ad that can convert cold traffic. But 90, 95, 98% of your ads are never going to convert cold traffic, and they’re kind of doomed from the start, you just don’t know it.

Steve: What is your opinion on losing money on the cold traffic, and then making up for it on the retargeting? Do you do you always – let me see how I can phrase this question, do you always assume that your cold traffic efforts are going to yield a profit?

Perry: Well, probably the realistic assumption is that your cold traffic is going to break even, and that you’re going to actually make money starting with the second sale. In most markets that’s roughly the water level of equilibrium is most people are actually going slightly negative to acquire a new customer. And the really smart players, they figure out how to do that, they know that they can afford to do that, and they’re prepared to do it.

Steve: So when you’re calculating like the ROI of your campaigns, do you look at it holistically then across all the campaigns, or do you do it at the individual campaign level?

Perry: Both. So now if I’m going to lose money on the front end to acquire a customer, I’m really going to pay attention to what I’m doing. I mean look, it’s a very common strategy, in fact the bigger the companies are, the more they’re doing it, right? Like Amazon has been losing money acquiring customers for a long time, but of course I think we all know the reasons why they can afford to do that. But you still need to put every individual thing under a microscope, and you need to know, it’s like well, I’m willing to lose 15% acquiring this customer because I know that 1% of these customers go on to buy my $10,000 thing, and it’s worth it.

But you’re always dialing it down. Even after you get a few of those customers to come and spend the $10,000, you start to go, oh you know what, those customers are from these certain kind of suburbs, with these kind of backgrounds or these demographics, and I’m going to turn off all my losing money campaigns that don’t cater to that demographic, because now I know what my high end customer actually looks like, and I’m going to do my loss ladder stuff to acquire those people.

Steve: Okay. This kind of leads me to my next question is how has AdWords evolved over time? Like a lot of people believe today that AdWords is just so competitive and the cost per click is just so high that it’s just really hard to break into the incumbents as you mentioned before. And so have your strategies kind of evolved since that first edition of your book?

Perry: Well, so what you said is true, but there’s a yin to the yang and here’s what it is, is that — and this is sort of true of all the platforms is they are so aggressive, meaning Google, Facebook etc. They are so aggressive in developing new features and new menus and new ways of targeting, and all this kind of stuff. Most advertisers, like 90% of advertisers only use about 5% of the features, and 5% of the targeting methods. Ad it’s actually only a tiny percentage of huge advertisers that take advantage of all the stuff.

Meanwhile, there’s all these nooks and crannies that are on these platforms that in any particular one niche like handkerchiefs, hardly anybody is using at all. And so it’s the principle of the slight edge, it’s like if you’re slightly better than everybody else in six or eight areas and not just one, then eventually you’re going to edge out the competition. And you just you really have to know your numbers, your tracking has to be set up exactly right, it needs to be feeding you the right information.

And then also very few companies are actually methodically systematically testing stuff. Like even just basic A/B tests, very few companies actually do that the way they should, and almost none of them have a master plan for, oh I’m going to — so I have architected these me tricks of things that I’m going to test, and I’m going through all the different contrasting ways that I can present and offer. And so between now and next October, I’m going to go through this whole battery of options here.

And when you start combining those together, you really can win. And I’ll tell you something else just for free. The Google reps, 98% of them are just dialing for dollars. And they give them a script, and Google is a really trusted brand, and they’re friendly and they’re Googlers and all this kind of stuff. Okay first of all, most of them have never spent their own money on any advertising campaign. Secondly, they’ve got a quota.

I’ve got a friend who owns an agency, he won’t even talk to Google reps. His staff is instructed, I don’t talk to Google reps, sorry. Like the Google reps are astounded, like everybody wants to talk to me. Well, look, who’s paying for Google Earth, and who’s paying for all this stuff, right? Who is paying for Google Scholar and like all these other things? It’s you, okay? If I had a dollar for every person who says, yeah the Google rep called me and suggested this thing, and I lost $20,000, and this happens all the time. Google is not your friend.

Steve: This has happened to my student also. Like a Google rep called them, and they’re like, oh yeah, start the campaigns. And they blew by a $1,000 in a day and a half, and then they contact me. And I look at their campaigns, and it’s all display network, they’re bidding on games and all these like wasted areas, so yeah.

Perry: Look, Google is a casino, and they are stacking the deck against you. All the default settings when you open a new account, they’re all tilted in Google’s favor, okay? They’re out to get your money; they don’t care if your business succeeds. You have to sleep with one eye open, and frankly like if you’re not willing to invest in some education, don’t bother. Who are you kidding? You’re going to go into a game that’s existed now for how long, 15 years, and you’re going to play against the casino, and you think you’re going to win without going to card counting school, are you crazy?

I mean really? I mean and I know there’s a cynic who is going to go, oh Perry is just saying that, he’s self-serving. Well, there’s a reason I’ve made a living teaching Google advertising. It’s not like Google is helping me. But hey, if you want to go give your money do a Google rep, go ahead, it’s not my money.

Steve: I mean Google is — the interface is just so much more complicated these days too, like Facebook is just so much easier to teach. I don’t know, you’ve got your work cut out for you there Perry.

Perry: Well, I agree and we teach Facebook too, and I think Facebook is easier. It’s easier at the beginning, it’s in fact frankly it’s a lot easier. Google is this long optimization curve. But the nice thing about Google is once you get the freight train going, I mean it’s really awesome.

Steve: Yeah, it’s I think you forget it almost, yeah. Well hey Perry, we’ve been chatting for quite a while, and I want to be respectful of your time. Where can people find out about your services, what you offer, any books that you recommend, and that sort of thing?

Perry: Well, I think you should go to is AW for me, is Facebook for me, and sign up for what comes next. We have some free courses online, and look, if you’re going to spend any kind of real money in this, I would suggest that you get our Google AdWords professional courses. There’s Display Expert Series, and there’s AdWords mastery for people. Like if you really got to do this, then do it right, and Mike Rhodes and I will teach you how to do it correctly, and it’s at perrymarshall.com.

Steve: Cool. And I’ll link up all those resources in the show notes. Perry, it’s a pleasure having you on, and finally able to chat with you after I guess ten years is when I first encountered your book. Really happy to have you on, I appreciate your time.

Perry: It’s an honor to be on, and congratulations on what happened when your wife quit her job.

Steve: Yeah, and it’s cool. It’s nice to talk to another electrical engineer on the show as well.

Perry: You bet.

Steve: All right, take care Perry.

Perry: Take care Steve.

Steve: Hope you enjoyed that episode. Perry has been doing this for quite a long time, and he’s actually one of the entrepreneurs that I followed early on with my businesses. For more from information about this episode, go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode185.

And once again I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Klaviyo is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. And you can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on auto pilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

Now, I talk about how I use all these tools on my blog, and if you’re interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email, and I’ll send you the course right away, thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information, visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.

But before we begin I wanted to give a shout out to Seller Labs for sponsoring this episode, and specifically I want to talk about their awesome Amazon tool, Scope. Now if you know me, I always get really excited about the tools I like and use, and Scope is a tool that actually increased my Amazon sales on several listings by 39% within the first week of use, crazy, right?

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Now, I also wanted to give a shout out to Klaviyo who is also a sponsor. Now Klaviyo is the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store, and I actually depend on them for over 20% of my revenues. Now you’re probably wondering what’s Klaviyo all about, and what makes it special. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores, and here is why it’s so powerful.

Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send an email out to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week, easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special auto-responder sequence to my customers depending on what they purchased, piece of cake, and there is full revenue tracking on every single email.

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Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast. Today I have someone extra special on the show, and by extra special I mean that this person is one of the main people responsible for getting me into entrepreneurship in the first place. And this person is none other than Tina Seelig. She is a professor in the management science and engineering department at Stanford University. She is also the faculty director at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program of which I was a member, and most importantly she was actually my professor of entrepreneurship way back in 1999 along with Professor Tom Byers.

Now Tina is also a well accomplished author, and has written 17 books that have sold extremely well. She’s an accomplished public speaker, and travels the world teaching entrepreneurship as well. And with that, welcome to the show Tina, I am so happy to have you on today.

Tina: Thank you so much, it really is my pleasure.

Steve: So what’s funny about this interview is that we’ve always had this like Professor-student relationship. So I actually have very little knowledge about your past. And so I was just kind of curious for my knowledge at least, how did you get into entrepreneurship, and how did you end up at Stanford?

Tina: Yeah, you know what, it’s such a funny question, because of course all of us have such interesting, and circutous paths in our career, and mine certainly is. I don’t know if you know I started out, I did my PhD in Neurophysiology. I did my PhD at Stanford Med School, and when I finished way back in 1985, I said, you got to be kidding, I really — the money for research was drying up. I was going to have to go do post docs all over, and although I was you know really love neuroscience, I don’t think I was the best neuroscientist in the world.

And I thought I really want to get out into industry and see how people take their ideas, like the things that come out of the lab and actually turn them into products. So I ended up going into industry, which is its own interesting story about how do you actually transition from being a scientist to going into the industry? That was not an easy path, and I’m happy to share some of the funny stories there about trying to sort of change careers. But it’s a very long circuitous path doing lots of different things.

And then in 1999, which is the year I met you, I saw a job posting about this new Stanford technology, this program, and I thought, wow, that sounds like an incredible confluence of education and technology and entrepreneurship. And I threw my hat in the ring.

Steve: Wait, was that the first year?

Tina: Yeah, you were like my first students, the first Maytho [ph] fellows.

Steve: I had no idea, wow, that’s so awesome, I did not know that.

Tina: I was totally green, I was totally green. Honestly, I wish we could go back and do it again.

Steve: So Tina recently sent me one of her awesome lectures on bringing entrepreneurship ideas to life, and that’s what I’m going to discuss today with the listeners here. So here’s the thing Tina, so many of my listeners and readers, they often complain that there aren’t creative or they aren’t innovative. So the question I’m hoping that you can answer today is one, can you learn to be more creative and innovative, and can you actually teach entrepreneurship? Like a lot of these people come to me and they say, hey I’m just not a creative person, I don’t think business is cut out for me. Is this like an innate talent?

Tina: Oh my gosh! Thank you so much for asking this. Honestly I get asked this all the time, and I am delighted to answer this question. First of all creativity is not like eye color that you can’t change. It is something like every other skill that can be learned, can be improved, can be mastered, the same is entrepreneurship. I mean would you ever say — I mean no one says, can you teach math, or can you teach science or history or even can you teach music or sports. Like we assume you can teach us. I mean I might not be a world class musician or athlete, but certainly I can get better with training. And so the same is true with creativity and innovation and entrepreneurship.

The other thing that is critically important here is that we are all creative. I mean look at any little kid, they’re creative. Think back to when you were a little kid, you know everybody is creative, and unfortunately our school system is designed to essentially beat it out of us, because — and this is sort of one the areas I’m most passionate about is like how do we rethink the way we teach, because our school systems are designed in ways to be able to measure the impacts of teaching. Well that sounds like a good idea right, except creativity is hard to measure.

And so because it’s hard to measure, we don’t teach it because it’s hard to measure. In fact one of my favorite quotes about this is the quote is, “Not all things that count can be counted, and not all things that can be counted count.” And unfortunately the problem is because creativity is hard to count, we don’t count it and we don’t teach it.

Steve: I already knew the answer to that question before I asked; of course the answer is yes. And so I want to talk about your entrepreneurship framework, kind of regarding how you start from an idea all the way through the implementation of a business, and I’d like to actually address the creativity and innovation problem first. How can you become more imaginative, creative, and innovative?

Tina: Yeah, so first let’s start out with the definitions, and I have to tell you I fell into a trap that everybody falls into, the trap is around using these terms, imagination and creativity and entrepreneurship and innovation, all sort of interchangeably. And so it becomes a big soup, and therefore what you think we’re talking about is really different than what I think I’m talking about, and we’re talking past each other, and it seems very unscientific. And so, I decided to put a stake in the ground with some very clear and easy to remember relationships and definitions. So here they are.

Imagination is envisioning things that don’t exist, pretty straightforward, right? I mean it’s something we all do right; I can envision a butterfly flying around my room. Creativity is applying that imagination to solve a problem, innovation is applying the creativity to come up with a unique solution, and entrepreneurship is in applying the innovation to essentially scale the idea. So what you’re seeing here is a hierarchy of skills from imagination to creativity to innovation to entrepreneurship.

One thing I want to underline, highlight, bold is that the difference between creativity and innovation is very important. Creative ideas are new to you, but innovative ideas are new to the world. And it’s really important to distinguish between those two, because if you really want to come up with innovative ideas, something that is new to the world, that’s fabulous. But if you use the concepts of creativity, you’re going to really stop short of coming up with reaching that goal.

So anyway, those are the definitions, and I like to compare it to learning how to talk. So if you think about it, babies naturally babble right, they just make noises. They apply those sounds to make words, apply the words to make sentences, and the sentences to make stories. And it’s the same hierarchy going from sound to word to sentence to story is the same as going from imagination to creativity to innovation to entrepreneurship. They each are the application of the scope before.

Steve: But the baby learning how to babble and speak is not innovative, right? It is just…

Tina: Well, I’m just using it as a metaphor, just as an example. And the idea though is that — and this is very important is that, in this I call the invention cycle is that when you get to the end, it leads back to the beginning, which is one of the most powerful parts of this framework is that once you’re entrepreneurial and have scaled your ideas, you can only do this by inspiring other people’s imagination. So it leads to their — it triggers the cycle for them as well.

Steve: So what are some exercises, so you mentioned like innovative means that something is new to the world and not just to yourself. So for those people out there who don’t think that they’re innovative at all, like what are some exercises that you can do to actually come up with innovative ideas?

Tina: Great, I love that question. This is what I spend 99% of my time in my classes doing, it’s coming up with ways to do this. So the most important thing is to question the question you’re asking, that is to reframe the problem. That’s where the innovation comes in, is when all of a sudden you look at the problem from a very different angle. For example, let’s say it’s your birthday, when’s your birthday?

Steve: May 19th.

Tina: Okay, so we have some time to plan here okay. We can say, okay Steve it’s your birthday, we’re going to brainstorm about the best birthday party. And that might seem like a really good idea to brainstorm about the best birthday party. But if we question that question, and change the word party to celebration, let’s plan the best birthday celebration, what happened to the set of solutions?

Steve: So that opens it up to more.

Tina: Many more, what if I said, let’s find the best way to mark your birthday. That becomes an even bigger set. What if I said, let’s come up with the best birthday present, or the best birthday card or the best way to surprise you on your birthday, or the best birthday ritual? Here is the key; the answer was baked into the question. When I ask the question, there is an assumption about what the answer is. If I said we’re going to have a birthday party, the assumption is it’s a party. And so if you really get good at questioning the questions you ask, in fact I like the concept of frame storming.

It means you actually brainstorm about the questions you’re asking before you even start thinking about the solutions. This is something I feel so passionate about. What happens is people rush to the solution, because that’s the way our school system is, right? You get given a question and you have to rush to the solution, you know what’s the sum of five plus five, ten, right? I get to the answer. But what if I question the question? What if instead of asking, what’s the sum of five plus five, I said what two numbers add up to ten? We’re not going to come up with an infinite number of solutions. So you need to fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

Steve: We need some examples here.

Tina: Okay, I’ll give you lots of examples. I mean I gave you the birthday party example, but imagine, let’s make it really serious. Let’s say I’m really interested in dealing with people with cancer. So I could say the problem I’m trying to solve is how do I cure cancer. That’s, again it sounds like a great question, but what if I say well how do I prevent cancer, or how do I allow people to live better lives with cancer, or how do I deal with the families of people with cancer?

So if you actually spend the time thinking about the question you’re asking, you’re going to really open up the frame. So question the questions. One great way to do this is to unpack all of your assumptions about a topic. So I could, I don’t know, pick any topic, it could be restaurants, what are all the assumptions I have about a restaurant, or a hotel, or a family vacation? And once you unpack all those assumptions, you can then turn them upside down to start coming up with some really interesting new ways of looking at the problem.

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I see, so instead of limiting yourself with your language like the birthday party analogy. Everyone throws a party for someone right, but by opening it up; you could probably come up with something a lot more special, maybe a lot more meaningful by just making it more open ended questions.

Tina: The other thing is more innovative, right? I mean now this is really critically important because not all the time do you want to come up with a innovative solution. Sometimes a creative solution is just fine. I mean I don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day I make my kid a lunch for school, right? So sometimes I just want to open the refrigerator and I use my imagination which is envisioning things that don’t exist, a lunch. And I go, okay fine I’m going to take the peanut butter and jelly and make a peanut butter jelly sandwich.

So sometimes you know if I’m trying to get through traffic on the way to work, I don’t need an innovative solution, I just need a creative solution to do this, and that’s fine. And I think we should acknowledge that creative solutions are incredibly valuable for 99% of the problems we solve in our life, but for that 1% where you go, I really need an innovative solution, I need something that no one has done before, that’s when you really have to push further.

Steve: When I was listening to your talk, one thing that really struck me was one of the analogies that you specified about puzzles versus quilts, I want you to go into a little bit about that, and how we’re trained in a certain way in schools, and how this puzzle versus quilt analogy really works.

Tina: Yes, so I love this analogy, and I did not come up with it, I borrowed it from a colleague, Heidi Neck who’s at Babson. But I heard her talk about this and it really resonated with me. The idea is that people are really not tapped into their motivation properly, and that we don’t really think about it. Most people in the world just follow the motivations of other people. They go to work and they just follow instructions. And they are puzzle builders; they are people who basically — I mean think about doing a jigsaw puzzle. You pull out all the pieces, you start putting maybe this picture of the Eiffel Tower, you know someone else took the picture, someone else made the puzzle. You’re making the puzzle, but here’s the problem, you’re missing a piece, what do you do?

If you’re a puzzle maker, puzzle builder, what happens is you’re missing the piece puzzle; you go, well, I can’t complete this puzzle, too bad. And these are the people who at work say, oh I’m sorry that part is out of stock, or you know the person we need is on vacation. I mean they have lots of excuses. But a quilt maker is quite different, they look at what the end goal is, okay I want to make a quilt, and they look at all the resources they have at their disposal to get to that goal.

Again it’s falling in love with the problem not the solution. The puzzle is the solution, the quilt is the problem. So it’s like, okay how do I get there? And I’m going to use all the resources at my disposal. In fact there’s a great story I tell in one of my books about Peter Diamandis, who is the founder of the X Prize and Singularity University, he’s a really big thinker, he’s out there thinking about how to mine asteroids. And he walked into a colleague’s office, and the colleague had a sign on the wall, Murphy’s Law, if anything will go wrong, it will, Murphy’s Law.

And he got so upset, and he picked up a sharpie and he went up to the poster and he crossed out, it will and wrote, fix it. If anything will go wrong, fix it. And that was the point, it’s the difference between the puzzle builder who’s saying if anything will go wrong, it will, versus a quilt maker who says, I’m going to figure out, I’m going to find a piece, I’m going to find a solution to get me to my goal.

Steve: So one thing I really picked up when I was a student of yours was that there’s no right way to do anything, and a lot of my listeners are following these step by step programs on how to start a business. There really is no exact formula, right? You kind of just have to take what you’ve got, and then make the best of what you have. And when something breaks, you just got to find a solution, and there’s no really like set path, and the people that get stuck are the ones that you know they run into their first roadblock, and it wasn’t in their little protocol sheet on how to deal with it, and then they quit. And so that’s why I really loved your puzzle versus quilt analogy.

Tina: Yeah, one of the biggest problems is that people don’t really deeply think about tapping into their own motivation. I do an exercise, and in fact I would encourage people to grab a piece of paper and a pen or just to say remember this, because it’s pretty simple exercise, but you can do it right now, okay, do you have a pen and a paper?

Steve: I can.

Tina: Yeah.

Steve: I don’t, you know what I can’t walk right now, I’m still like, I still have my torn Achilles.

Tina: Oh no, you can’t walk around, okay.

Steve: I can type though, I have…

Tina: It’s okay, it doesn’t matter, it’s pretty straightforward. Imagine a two by two matrix, a vertical and a horizontal line, a little chart. And on the vertical axis is passion, so high passion on the top, low passion on the bottom. And the horizontal line is confidence, so high confidence on the right, low confidence on the left. So the upper right hand side is things in your life where you’re highly passionate and highly confident. The upper left is you’re highly passionate, but not confident. The bottom left is not passionate and not confident, and the bottom right is highly confident, but not passionate, makes sense?

Steve: Sure, yes.

Tina: Well you’d think it would be super simple to fill this out, and to put things in your life into these categories. But it’s harder than you think because people often don’t even think about the things in their life and how they fit into these boxes of what things they really care about, and their level of confidence in being able to deliver.

But what’s really interesting about it is once you do this, and I really encourage people to do it. It takes a little bit of time, but it’s really well worth it. If you start realizing why are things in these different categories, like what about the things that you’re highly passionate and highly confident, so what would be something for you, you’re highly passionate and confident?

Steve: And confident. Right now I’m feeling pretty passionate and confident about this podcast for example.

Tina: Great, perfect. Do you spend time doing it?

Steve: I do, absolutely.

Tina: Yeah, of course you spend a lot of time, right? So you’re passionate about it, and then that led to your doing it, which has made you confident, right? So essentially you would not be confident if you hadn’t actually been doing it?

Steve: That’s correct.

Tina: Right, your confidence comes from the fact that you’re actually engaged in doing this. But what about things that you’re highly passionate, but not confident, can you think of something there?

Steve: Yes, raising children, I’m not very confident, but I’m very passionate about it.

Tina: Okay, well that might be, I might ask you to come up with a slightly different example because…

Steve: How about teaching children, is that more specific?

Tina: Teaching, yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ll see in a minute why. Okay so let me ask you this, teaching children, so you’re passionate about it, but why are you not confident?

Steve: Because I’m not sure if the tactics that I’m using might have like long-term repercussions.

Tina: Okay, and what would make you more confident?

Steve: If someone blazed the path for me and gave me like some guidelines on what has worked and some statistics maybe.

Tina: Okay, so more information, maybe spending more time actually focused on this?

Steve: Yes.

Tine: The things for most people that are in this category are things like skiing, or singing or cooking or whatever else, and they go, well how do these fit in your life? Well these are things I dream about doing, they’re not things I actually do. And what’s going to change to get it into the upper right quadrant is actually doing it, right? I mean I can say I’m really passionate about anything, but unless I actually do it, I’m not going to become confident.

Now the things in the bottom lower left hand quadrant, you’re not passionate and you’re not confident, how do those fit into your life? I mean what might be an example?

Steve: Of something I’m not passionate about and not confident about?

Tina: Yeah, yeah. It’s hard.

Steve: It’s hard because like if I’m not passionate about it, that means I’m not thinking about it.

Tina: Yeah right. So let’s say maybe water polo.

Steve: Yeah.

Tina: Okay right, so you don’t do it, like if you’re not passionate and not confident, you’re not doing it, you’re not thinking about it, it’s not even in your world. And maybe if it’s something that you really have to do, like maybe it’s you know washing dishes or doing the laundry, you might even choose to outsource to someone else, you might make a deal with your spouse that, you know what, honestly I’m not passionate nor good at this, and maybe you take that and I’ll take something else. So maybe you outsource to someone else, maybe hire someone to do it.

The most interesting quadrant that was the lower right, where you’re highly confident but not passionate, can you think of something?

Steve: I’m not passionate, not off the top of my head.

Tina: I know it’s hard.

Steve: Yeah.

Tina: So the thing that’s so interesting is that most of the things that are in for most people in the lower right quadrant are things they have to do for work. It might be doing spreadsheets or writing reports, or if someone’s at home it’s like cleaning the house, but you realize what is it that has limited their passion for this, I mean at some point they might have been passionate, why is it been lost? And you realize that in this chart, the way to get from the bottom to the top to increase your passion is a change in your attitude, it’s your mindset.

And to get from the left to the right from a change from low confidence to high confidence is your actions, right? So let me ask you Steve, who’s in charge of your attitude?

Steve: You are.

Tina: Yeah, who’s in charge of your actions?

Steve: You are.

Tina: You are, that’s the point, you put things in this chart as if somehow it’s sort of carved in stone, but we are each responsible for understanding and for managing our attitudes and our actions. Now it doesn’t mean that everything in our life should be in the upper right hand quadrant. We shouldn’t be necessarily passionate and confident about everything, but to be very thoughtful about what things we want to have there and to basically say, okay these are the things I’m going to put my energy into. And I think that probably when you’re working with people, you see the same thing is that what’s getting in the way of their success is many times their attitude, and many times their actions.

Steve: That’s correct, but if they’re not passionate — so one question I often get asked is, should I pursue this business if I’m not passionate about it?

Tina: Well okay, this is super interesting question. I love this because people often talk about their passions; I need to find my passion. And it is the wrong question to ask, because passions do not come from nowhere, passions come from engagement with the world. So let me just give you a bunch of examples. I mean it’s not until you’re engaged in the world that you start seeing things that might spark your passion. I tell a story, I don’t know if I told it in that talk that you watched about Scott Harrison, did I tell that story?

Steve: I don’t remember the name.

Tina: Let me quickly tell you.

Steve: Sure, yeah.

Tina: Scott Harrison spoke at our entrepreneurial lecture series, and he’s super impressive guy, started an organization called Charity Water. And they bring clean drinking water to the hundreds of millions of people around the planet who don’t have access to it. Now very impressive guy, but he wasn’t always such. In fact in his 20s, he was a self described loser. He worked in New York, he was a nightclub promoter, and his job was to get people drunk and the drunker he got them, the better, he was really good at this. And one day he became an alcoholic, a drug addict, his life was a mess.

And one day he woke up, he was down in South America and he said, you know my life is a disaster, I am really a loser, I need the opposite of my life. And to make a long story short, he made a decision that he wanted to do volunteer work, and he started writing letters to all of these charitable organizations around the world, and honestly they all wrote back and said like no, you can’t work with us, you do not look like you could contribute. He kept writing letters and finally he was invited to go on and work with an organization called Mercy Ships, where they send doctors on these floating boats to parts of the world where they don’t have access to doctors.

So he jumped at the chance, and he went to Liberia, he didn’t even know, this is important, he didn’t even know where Liberia was. He had to look it up on a map. He went there; he was quickly taken with the fact that so many people there were stricken with horrible water borne diseases. He thought I have to do something about this; I have to do something about this. And so he went back to New York, and using his knowledge of how to promote things, he had been a nightclub promoter, he started promoting the idea of helping people get access to clean drinking water.

And the point is before it is your passion; it’s something you know nothing about. He didn’t know about Liberia, he didn’t know about their water issues, he didn’t know about the diseases. But once he was engaged, he started getting excited about how he could make a difference. And engagement is the master key that unlocks everything; you need to start doing things. And here’s what’s really important, you don’t need instantly to be struck by lightning to say, oh my God this is my passion. You start with a little bit of motivation, like wow, maybe I could do something to help these people, or maybe I could solve this problem.

Tina: My guess is this is true with you in your business, like your wife had a problem trying to sell some of her products, and you thought well you know let me do a little experiment and see if I can be helpful. And like wow, that’s really interesting, you got some really puzzle results, then you got more motivated, am I telling the truth here?

Steve: Yeah, actually the problem was that she wanted to stay at home, and we needed to earn income through a place to sell.

Tina: Okay, exactly and you had like, okay how do I do this? Let me do an experiment, right? And then you go, okay, well that worked, well that’s kind of interesting, let’s try something else. And you kept — your motivation led to some experimentation which led to more motivation and more experimentation, and pretty soon you were so motivated, and you said, okay great, now I’ve got something. And this is a very key part of this invention cycle is understanding that motivation and experimentation process.

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Back on the axis that you were talking about confidence versus passion, do you actually recommend people look at what they’re confident at but not necessarily passionate about when thinking about something to pursue?

Tina: That’s a really good question, yeah that’s a great place to start. But you don’t have to, because you could go there and say, okay how do I change my attitude about this thing that I’m really good at right. Like maybe I’m really good at cooking, but I’m not really passionate about it. Okay, how can I leverage this? I think it’s probably more fruitful to start in the upper left hand corner, and say, what are the things I’m really passionate about that I’m not confident, how can I build my confidence? Because I think the passion is probably a much bigger driver than confidence.

Passion leads — the reason that you’re confident about your podcast is you started with a little bit of passion, a little interest, which led you then to do, to the behaviors. I think that that’s often the place to start is not your skills but your interests, does that make sense?

Steve: Yeah, the reason I’m asking that question is because in that lecture that you gave, which I should probably link up to after this in the show notes, you had an example of a waiter.

Tina: Oh yeah.

Steve: He might not necessarily have been passionate about waiting, but he figured out different ways of getting higher tips through experimentation, but he was…

Tina: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes but what I would say there is — so let me just replay that little story. The idea is that anything — the idea is that you can start anywhere, and this is the point is that you can start anywhere, you don’t have to be in some fancy place, you don’t have to get on a boat like Scott Harrison to go to Liberia. You could be a waiter at a restaurant, and by really paying attention, you’re going to notice opportunities. You’re going to notice, wow people are ordering a lot of gluten free food, or wow you know, how can I get higher tips, or wow there’s one customer here who’s diabetic and has certain needs.

And you could use that small motivation to solve that problem to end up building up to a whole career, right? If you’re just interested in getting higher tips, let’s say you’re just really want to earn more money, and you start becoming an expert on customer service because you’re seeing every single day what experiments you do lead to higher tips, you can then parlay that into you could become a consultant to other waiters, you could start a consulting company, you could write a book, you could make a movie, you could start a whole you know restaurant chain based on your insights.

So it doesn’t really matter where you start, and this is really critically important. But there it was based on again motivation, on my passion for earning some more money that had led me to do some experiments.

Steve: Let’s talk about the experimentation phase. Let’s use that waiter analogy real quick, let’s say this waiter you, he’s been working in a restaurant, he wants to start his own restaurant, and he’s deciding on the menu, right? What are some of the first steps?

Tina: Yeah, I love this. So one of the concepts I talk about in my book is one that I learned from my colleague Alberto Savoy, and he’s just so brilliant. And he started several very, very successful companies, but also had some failures. In fact his first company, they sold for 100 million dollars, the second company lost 30 million dollars. And he thought, wow what happened here? And he realized that oftentimes you are building the wrong it. You might be able to build it right, you know how to build it, but you’re doing the wrong thing, and he realized that you need to do these tiny, tiny little experiments, and he calls them pritotypes [ph].

So with the restaurant, the pritotypes could be super simple. What I would do and what he would recommend is, let’s say you want to put together your menu, just start putting some things on the menu that you haven’t even made, and see if people order them. You can always say, oh out of stock on that. But let’s say I thought, well I wonder if people would order lobster, and lobster is going to be really expensive for me, and I know so I’m going to have to charge a lot of money in my restaurant. I can just put it on the menu and see how many people order lobster, and I go, oh I’m sorry, unfortunately we ran out a lobster, we had all the fresh lobs — we don’t have it, but you know would you like to have some other thing, okay?

And you can quickly get some data. You can do this in so many ways. These pritotypes are such a fun and easy way to get to data about whether your idea works very, very quickly. One of my favorite — can I tell you my favorite example?

Steve: Yeah absolutely.

Tina: Is Jeff Hawkins who happens to be a good friend of mine, and I’m just like his biggest fan.

Steve: Palm Pilot, right?

Tina: The Palm Pilot, he’s the founder of Palm and Handspring. But most importantly he’s a self-taught neuroscientist, and has — is like running a company now called Numenta that is really trying to reverse engineer how the brain works. And when he was starting Palm though, he knew he could build it, he knew that he had the technology to build this handheld device, but he wondered would people want it? I mean really the Apple Newton had failed, so would this be something people want?

So you know what he did? He just made a block of wood, a block of wood, the form factor of a Palm Pilot, and he just covered with a piece of paper, a little sleeve of paper and kind of wrote on it the things he imagined would be on it. And so that was his text, he carried it around for a few weeks to see how he might use this thing. And so once he realized, hey guess what people would actually find this really interesting that he decided it was time to start — go into the next stage just trying to build it.

Steve: I’m just curious, did he have other people like unbiased people carry on the…

Tina: Yeah, it’s a really good question; because it’s a really good question how many people do you have to test it with. And I would argue you would need a lot more people, but I love the idea that you know just the concept that he carried around a block of wood for a few weeks, and wanted to get a sense of like how he might use it. But in a real pritotype you would give something like this to other people as well.

Steve: So you’re implying that you shouldn’t even invest any money into this or anything before you…

Tina: Oh yeah, you should be able in a very short period of time with a very small amount of money. One of the biggest problems is that people fall in love again with their solution, so they spend a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of resources, a lot of energy building something and only to find out afterwards people don’t like it. But you know a few Google ads, a few you know put up some flyers. Let’s say I want to run a workshop, I can put up some flyers around campus and see if people time often call me. If I get enough, guess what, I’ll schedule the workshop.

Steve: So let’s the reception is positive, like how do I still know whether the idea has legs or whether it’s innovative enough so to speak?

Tina: Say more, what do you mean?

Steve: What I mean by that is, so you’re in the beginning where you were talking about creativity and innovation, and innovation is something that the world doesn’t necessarily have, it’s new to the world, right? How do I know whether the interest is innovative versus just something that’s nice to have, does that make sense at all?

Tina: Well, I think the key is whether people are actually going to buy it, right? People need to have skin in the game, and one key thing that people often don’t realize is I can ask people for their opinion, I can say do you think people would like this, do you think people would like this, would you buy it if I made it? And they go sure, sure. It’s easy for people to say that, but if I actually have to do something, even if suppose giving you my e-mail address, or putting five dollars down, think about you on mask, he the Tesla, he makes people put $5,000, I think it’s 5,000. Put some amount of money, a significant amount of money down before they buy the car.

Steve: I see, okay.

Tina: I mean that is a perfect example of skin in the game. People have to say, yes I want it and I want it so much, I actually will give you some money for it. Then you’ll go build your car.

Steve: Okay, and so if you have – let’s say people are willing to pay you money for this, and you think your idea has legs, what is kind of like the next step, how do you actually take that then, and actually turn into a real company?

Tina: Yeah, so that’s really important. So in each of these stages of the invention cycle, there is an attitude and an action. We talked about that framework, the confidence, and passion matrix and looked at the importance of attitudes and action as well. Attitudes and actions happen in this entire cycle, and I’m going to get to what happens in entrepreneurship in one second. So imagination requires engaging in the world, and envisioning what might be different. Remember we talked about your passions follow engagement, so engaging the world and envisioning might be different.

Creativity requires motivation and experimentation. We talked about that, that a little motivation, a little experiment. Innovation requires focus and reframing. We talked about that looking at problems from a different angle to come up with something really new. And entrepreneurship requires persistence and inspiring other people, okay. So persistence is all the things they teach in all of our other classes, strategy finance, marketing, organizational behavior, leadership, all this stuff. But the inspiring other people is one of the key things; it’s being able to tell a compelling story that engages other people in a really meaningful way.

And that storytelling ability allows you to attract people to your team, attract investors, interact customers, attract people who are going to write positive reviews about your product, all those things that are needed. Because to be successful it’s a barn raising, it’s not an individual effort, you need to get other people as motivated and as excited as you are.

Steve: Can you give us some examples?

Steve: Sure, I give you lots of examples. I have talked to so many entrepreneurs, and they all say yes, this is exactly what I had to happen. So let’s just…

Steve: I guess what I’m getting at is you know, is the product itself good enough, or I mean does it always have to have a really good story along?

Tina: Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. You can have the most amazing product, but if you can’t tell a story that places me in that, you know places me in the story, and allows me to see what the world would be like after this product affects me, you’re not going to sell it. You do this all the time Steve. You have a story to tell that allows people to see how their life can be transformed by using the tools that you deliver, and that you teach. I know that, I mean people are inspired by the vision that you’ve created a future for them.

Steve: I guess it’s just something I don’t really think about specifically.

Tina: Yes, but it’s really helpful. So the story structure I like the most is called the story spine, and it’s a super simple framework. It’s been picked up, and it’s used in many places, it will sound familiar. It’s a little harder to use than it sounds on the surface, and it takes some practice, but here’s an example, super simple. Once upon a time, sounds familiar already?

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Tina: Okay, once upon a time and every day. So now what I’ve done is I’ve set the stage about here’s what the problem statement is. And it doesn’t have to be once upon a time, it could be you know what, there are 500 million people who suffer from debilitating tremors from Parkinson’s like diseases. And every day they struggle with feeding themselves and buttoning their shirt and drinking a cup of coffee, and this is incredibly stressful to them and their families, and I paint a picture of what this is, and then I go, until one day. And that’s where you have your intervention, until one day, and here’s my invention.

And then you paint the picture of all the consequences. You go because of that, and because of that, and because of that, because of that, because of that you can have as many because of thats as you want, until finally and ever since then. So what I’ve done is I paint a picture of a problem, and it could be any problem. Every day, our kids walk to school, and they carry big huge backpacks, and they end up really hurting their backs, and it makes them — impossible for them to study in school, and this is such a terrible thing.

You could pick whatever you want, until one day we came up with a way to put all the books on iPads, and because of that the kids have their information with them all the time, they don’t hurt their backs, they blah, blah, blah. And because of that you know and as a result until finally all kids have their books on these iPads, and ever since then this has become the standard for the way we deliver this.

Steve: How does this model apply to a product that isn’t necessarily have utility value, for example like clothing or jewelry, like how would you frame the story there?

Tina: Well if you think about it, the way that the clothing and jewelry is actually sold, it’s very aspirational. You paint a picture of what your life is going to be like, if I wear these jeans, I’m going drink this Coca-Cola, or wear this necklace, I’m going to be cool, and I’m going to have lots of friends, and my life is going to be better. I mean people buy these things because they actually have some sort of dream and vision of what they’re going to actually do for them.

Steve: Okay yeah, yeah.

Tina: I mean is that true?

Steve: yeah that’s true.

Tina: And so if you look at any commercial, you’re going to see this story spine play out. I could give you some examples that I can send to you that you can put some links of fabulous commercials that tell use the story spine incredibly effectively.

Steve: Do you have any thoughts about how to stay persistent; is this just a mindset sort of thing, like how do you force yourself to stick with something even though it might not be working at the moment?

Tina: Yes, so when you go through the invention cycle of going from imagination to creativity, innovation to entrepreneurship, the mindset piece, the engagement, the motivation, the focus, and the persistence which are the four attitude pieces of it, get harder and harder. I mean let’s not pretend it’s easy, and that’s why not everybody is successful, because that focus and that persistence that requires in the innovation and entrepreneurship stage are really hard. And it’s particularly hard when it’s against in the face of disappointment, when things don’t work, and you have to keep pushing.

But that’s what differentiates those people who are successful from those who aren’t is being able to really muster the grit that’s required to get through the hard times, and also to build the team. And I just want to say, one of the most effective things is to build the team around you to buoy you up, and to help support each other when things are not going well.

Steve: I was just curious like kind on the flip side how do you know when to give up on an idea?

Tina: Yeah, super good question. I get asked this all the time, and it’s something that you know we all have to struggle with internally. Interesting enough many years ago one of the PhD students in our department did her research on when do founders sell their companies. And there had been a lot of research that had already been done about why do big companies buy small companies, but she looked at it from the other — she sort of reframed it, said, let’s look at the small companies, like why do they sell?

And it was always when there was some life event that triggered that. Like you know what, I really don’t want — like I’m burned out, I don’t want to work this hard. Or I just had a kid, or my wife is going to, or husband is going to leave me if I don’t stop working this much. There was something that was going on in their own personal life that led them to make that choice. And that’s true in everything we do, we have to make that choice of how much we want to keep putting into a problem. If you’re passionate enough about it — one of the things I do, an exercise with my students on risk taking and failure, and I go through this whole exercise with sort of giving them the opportunity to put a financial value or a time value on different things.

And I’ll go like how much time would you put into solving a problem that you weren’t sure you could solve, like curing cancer? And it’s really interesting, different people have really different amount of times. Some people say a lifetime, like I would commit my lifetime to this, and other people go, you know four years. People even know in advance how much they would put in, how much persistence and grit they have.

Steve: So would you recommend that people kind of bound their efforts then?

Tina: I think really knowing yourself well enough, and taking on projects that fit within the scope of what you’re willing to give, I mean there are some people who say you know what, honestly my priorities in my life are this right now. I mean so for example your wife wanted she work at home, she probably wanted to stay home with the kids. She probably said, I have this much time to put into my work.

Steve: That’s great, yes.

Tina: And that’s her middle like down this, this is what I can do right now. Or I’m training for a race, and this is how much time each week I can put in to train…

Steve: Actually we gave ourselves two years to see if we could make it go out…

Tina: Exactly, and you go I’m going to go handle to the metal for two years, but you said, I’m not to do this forever. You said, I’m going to see what happens. But it might be something like if you had a family member who was suffering from some ailment, you might say, I’m going to give my life, my entire life to try to solve this problem.

Steve: Right, right okay. Tina we’ve been chatting for quite a while. I know you have another appointment in like five minutes, so I wanted to just end with, Tina where can people find you online, what is your next book that’s coming out?

Tina: Yes, so thank you for asking. I’m easy to find, I’m on Twitter at @tseelig, that’s T-S-E-E-L-I-G, and I also have a website which is just TinaSeelig.com, and I have medium where I blog. So you can find me there at Tina Seelig medium. But I’m super excited; I have a new book coming out in just a couple weeks, on September 26th.

Steve: Oh that’s right around the corner.

Tina: It’s called Rules — yeah it’s called Creativity Rules, and I’m super excited to share it. It describes the entire invention cycle framework with lots of examples and also some assignments at the end of each chapter that leads you through the process.

Steve: And Tina is an excellent teacher, she was my professor way back in 1999. Entrepreneurship can be taught, and hopefully we touched on a bunch of the things that are necessary for you to get started. I highly recommend Tina’s — I’m going to link up her speech which is podcast based which was excellent. She’s an excellent public speaker, and she’s an excellent writer as well. So I highly recommend that you guys go check out the book.

Tina: Great, thank you so much, it was really a pleasure, and looking forward to seeing you again soon.

Steve: Yeah thanks a lot Tina, thanks a lot for coming on the show.

Tina: You too.

Steve: Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now I owe so much to Tina, it is actually her class that I took back in the day at Stanford that actually gave me the courage to start my own business. Anyway do yourself a favor, head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/Tina, that’s T-I-N-A, and go pick up her book. It’s called Creativity Rules: Get Ideas Out of Your Head into the World. I’ve read it myself, and it’s a great book if you have ideas and don’t know where to start with your business.

I’ll also be giving out copies to anyone who purchase my online store course and pays in full until October 1st. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode180.

And once again I want to thank Seller Labs. Their tool Scope has completely changed the way I choose keywords for both my Amazon listings and my Amazon advertising campaigns. Instead of making random guesses, Scope tells me exactly which keywords are generating sales, and within the first week of use I saw a 39% increase in sales. It is a no brainer. So head on over to Sellerlabs.com/wife and receive $50 off. Once again that’s sellerlabs.com/wife.

Now, I also want to thank Klaviyo which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on auto pilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you’re interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.