008 Defying the Odds: Travis Stephenson's Journey from Zero Coding to an 8-figure Software Empire

Welcome to another exhilarating episode of the Paid to Create podcast, where we crack the code of successful entrepreneurship! Join us as we journey alongside Travis Stephenson, the mastermind who launched an eight-figure software empire from scratch. Travis will be spilling the secrets of his groundbreaking approach to building a business that didn't just thrive but skyrocketed with every feature he added.
In this enlightening conversation, Travis reveals his strategy for pre-selling each feature to a fresh audience and crafting a robust training mechanism around it. He underlines the critical interplay of personal and professional life, a balance often underestimated by many young entrepreneurs. How did he build commercial-grade software without any background in enterprise-level development? Find out in this episode!
Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, seasoned business owner, or a curious listener, this episode packs a treasure trove of insights. It is more than a success story—it's a blueprint for ambitious minds who want to change the world through innovation and perseverance. Travis's tale is not just about building a software titan, but also about staying true to one's values and fostering happiness in work and life.
Discover how the game-changing power of marketing platforms like Kartra can transform your business. Uncover the essence of authentic marketing and learn how to frame messages that resonate with your audience, all while standing out in the marketplace with your unique spark.
In the world of entrepreneurship, it's not just about tools or platforms—it's about harnessing your strengths, confronting your weaknesses, and leveraging them to craft a business model as unique as you. It's about staying agile, adapting to changes, and keeping the fire of learning alive. So, if you're seeking to elevate your business game, you don't want to miss out on this episode. Dive in now, let's get Paid to Create!

Transcript

Travis Stephenson (00:00:00):
I released it with two features. And then once we had those two features, I realized like, wow, there there's so much more that this can do. And then I started just adding one at a time. And our sort of secret to the build the whole time was pre-selling the next feature set to a new audience and building an entire training mechanism behind that new thing that we were going to add.
Sarah Jenkins (00:00:24):
Welcome to the Paid to Create podcast where we dig into the secret strategies of successful creators making a lucrative living. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.
AJ Roberts (00:00:33):
I just have to tell you about Kartra, the marketing platform that has seriously transformed my business. You know how running a business can be insanely time-consuming, right? Well, Kartra has been a game changer for me. It's honestly like having an entire marketing team in my pocket. And what I love most is that it automates all the tedious daily tasks for me. From marketing to sales, to even customer experience. I can't believe how much time and energy I've saved since I started using it. And get this, with Kartra I can create websites, funnels, courses, membership sites, email campaigns, calendars, surveys, you name it. It's made managing my business so much simpler and more affordable. Honestly, I can't recommend Kartra enough. If you're curious, head to paidtocreatepodcast.com/kartra to start your trial. Trust me, you won't regret it.
(00:01:20):
Hey everyone, welcome to today's episode of Paid to Create podcast. I'm AJ Roberts. Alongside me is...
Sarah Jenkins (00:01:24):
Sarah Jenkins. Hi.
AJ Roberts (00:01:25):
And today's guest is Travis Stevenson. Travis built an eight figure software company, sold it last year. He now owns Wealthery, which is an education company basically focusing on income, growth, health and relationships. And I'm really excited Travis to have you here and dive into your story. You've had quite the wild ride.
Travis Stephenson (00:01:44):
Yeah, thanks. Yeah, so now we run a company called Wealthery. The idea of it was to, because I had a background in creating income, obviously in the digital marketing space, but wanted to do so in a way where I didn't have to sacrifice my relationships. Because early in my career, I got married, I wouldn't say early, I guess I was four or five years into it, got married and I wanted to make sure that I was able to focus on that. And so I put that as an importance. And then health has always been pretty important to me. So making sure I didn't sacrifice those things in order to achieve some sort of income status and then eventually be left solo without my wife and completely out of shape and just trying to figure out a way to do it the right way. And then I figured, man, there's not really many of that people talking about it. I wanted to make the new things that I'm doing kind of focused on that.
AJ Roberts (00:02:42):
Yeah, I love that It's so important to weave the threads of our lives together. I think so many young entrepreneurs don't realize how intertwined it really is. And having kids myself, Sarah has kids as well, being a parent, being a husband, being a wife and building a business is a whole different game. But before we talk about what you're doing now, I want to back up to the software company Chatmatic. Yeah, obviously that's how we met with what you were doing. But how did you get the idea for Chatmatic and then what was the thing that you said, okay, this is the direction I'm going to go, because you went all in with that and built a phenomenal company.
Travis Stephenson (00:03:21):
Yeah, so it's funny because I actually love telling this story because I get a lot of questions all the time about two things. One, when I got rid of Chatmatic and/or sold Chatmatic, when I was no longer a part of the administration there, everybody was asking, "What are you going to do now?" And so a lot of people assume that you've got one great idea and you just got a million of them. When you're an entrepreneur, you just keep having great ideas and you're moving on immediately. And it's not always the way that it is. And it's just funny because for me, the genesis of this great idea came from doing something that literally anybody else can do. So I want to backtrack and tell you guys I cannot write a single line of code, maybe a single line somewhere. I can copy and paste the Facebook pixel like the best of them.
(00:04:11):
Do I know what it means? No. So it wasn't like I had some predisposition towards wanting to run a software company. What I was doing, and I remember exactly when this happened, this was March of 2016 and I'm in the marketing space and all the big companies that are in the marketing realm I subscribed to all of their developer stuff and their marketing stuff. And so I subscribed to a brand new event that they were putting, Facebook was putting on called F8. They had just kind of started F8. And so I was like, well, I'm going to go and watch online, it was all virtual. I'm going to watch this event. So I'm literally doing my work, casually on the side screen I've got F8 going and I'm just kind of in and out.
(00:04:59):
And the big announcement for that year's F8 was we're announcing a Messenger API so you can actually, and he goes through the whole spiel and I'm like, wow, what he's describing is it would allow you to build automated sections of your business in an app that eight hundred million people at the time already had in their phone. So I was like, that sounds cool. I want to see what can happen.
(00:05:20):
So I instantly, again, I'm not a developer, but they had opened up their developer documents where you can go and find out what's possible. And most of the documents are written in layman's terminology so you can read it and it's like, okay, yes, I see what they're trying to do. And then it gets into the code and you're like, that's where I fall off. So what I did, and this is my first real delve into software, is I took the layman's stuff and I found one or two features that I thought would be really cool.
(00:05:51):
And I went to Upwork and I put a job posting up and I said, I want somebody who can build this, and this is what's wild. I had no idea people would come to me like "Hey, this is how we can do it." And so I'd be like, "Okay." The one thing I understand is he was talking about use this kind of database. So then in the next conversation I had, I was like, "Well, I was thinking about using this kind of database," and then I would get an extension off of that. And so off of the very first piece of information that one guy was like, "Well I can tell you this. You're going to need a big database to handle all that messaging." "Okay, cool, big database. Got it, what do I need?" That's an example.
(00:06:30):
Or "Let's talk about data visualization. What did you have in mind for that?" And I'm like, "I don't know, what did you have in mind for that?" And they're like, "Well, I would do it kind of like this." And so for instance, one of the things that we did was originally was the front end, you know, want to build it in Bootstrap because it's pretty easy and everybody can do that. And I'm like, I don't know what Bootstrap is. So I look it up and I'm like, okay, it's a JavaScript language and it allows things to be built like nesting dolls almost. I'm like, "Okay, cool. All right, got it. Next conversation." And I literally would never hire the people that would give me the suggestions because they weren't total package yet. And I wanted to hire somebody based off of a full idea. So I ended up having this full idea and I'm like, I want to use Bootstrap and I wanted to have MySQL and I wanted this.
(00:07:16):
And eventually somebody was like, "Yeah, I see what your plan is. I can write all these languages, let's build it for you." And I was able to reduce my cost from the initial sort of guesswork was like 50, 60,000. It'll take six months, eight months, I got it down to 15,000 in three months by knowing what to ask for and by selectively removing certain things. Like, yeah, I know in a year I'll need that, but I'll put that off until I'm profitable. So again, I had no background in making a real enterprise level sort of commercial grade software. I just asked around until I could put the pieces together like a puzzle pretty much. And I released it with two features. And then once we had those two features, I realized, wow, there there's so much more that this can do. And then I started just adding one at a time.
(00:08:05):
And our sort of secret to the build the whole time was pre-selling the next feature set to a new audience and building an entire training mechanism behind that new thing that we were going to add. Like, oh hey, we're adding a new drag and drop builder. That was a big undertaking. We had to bring in a whole new development team for that. So I made all of my marketing about well we're going to have this drag and drop builder that doesn't do X, Y, and Z and that doesn't fail. And so then more people would jump on and my existing customers would be like, this is cool, I'll stay around for that. And obviously it's not easy because I tried to grow it without doing the... One of the people I spoke to early on who was in the software space was like, "Look, the biggest mistake you can make if you are trying to grow this is giving lifetime deals," doing anything that's "Be the first thousand people in and you get it for life."
Sarah Jenkins (00:09:03):
We know nothing about that. We would never.
Travis Stephenson (00:09:06):
Yeah, exactly. And you do that and then what ends up happening, obviously for us, what I wanted to try to avoid, and we did it a little to my internal list, because I knew I could expand out from that. We took about 50 people at a thousand to start and then I ended up kind of getting beaten up a little bit because I had to change that deal in about two years. I'm like, look, I can give you 10 licenses essentially, which is more than anybody is using. But they still weren't happy.
(00:09:36):
But I was trying to build that out, having no idea how to really formulate a real recurring system. But then I just knew, hey, one more feature in three months or four months, and I could keep that moving. And that's kind of what I did. And I just spent, I did big... I never had anything evergreen. I just did big quarterly release events where it's like, hey, now we're going to focus on this and then we're going to focus on the agency version of that and then we're going to focus on this and then the agency version of that. And so I was kind of creating methods for people to use it successfully. But it was all for me a guessing game as we went through it.
Sarah Jenkins (00:10:14):
Well that's funny that you say that. I mean I'm a CEO of Kartra, my husband and I built it, we're co-founders from the very, very beginning. I've never seen code. I don't know how to do that stuff. That doesn't mean you're not good at business, doesn't mean you're not good at selling what people need or you understand that the need in the market is what you're going to fulfill. I can't touch code.
(00:10:30):
I can send an email, apparently I have a signature and stuff that somebody made for me. It's great.
Travis Stephenson (00:10:36):
That's dope.
Sarah Jenkins (00:10:36):
But then you covered something else. You said you were already launching the next sale based on the next fees you were going to release. That's kind of what we started with Paid to Create. You're paid to create something. Whether you're a doctor and you're paid to create health and medication or you're a lawyer you're paid to create the contracts and the court wins. But you as a marketer are now paid to create something that the customer needs. Without the software background you still understood how to do that though.
Travis Stephenson (00:11:01):
Yeah, and I think what's also important about what you said that I found to be really helpful was I think a lot of people go into thinking about creating a software and they are instantly in over their head mostly because they don't think of themselves as a team building entrepreneur, big software CEO. And I definitely didn't see that. And part of one of the things that helped me back was I never put people in positions to elevate the company because I was an entrepreneur, solopreneur type. But once I realized, I had moments where I was like, okay, I'm going to bring this person in. And then it was like, whoa, they can own that and they can take the company in a whole new direction and then they can own that and the profitability doesn't have to suffer from that. And I think that I had to graduate to that as it became necessary.
(00:11:47):
Versus most people look at software and they're like, well I got to know how to hire somebody for product and I got to hire somebody for front end and I got to hire somebody... It's like, no, you really don't until you have to, until you can justify it. And it's like I came out with an ugly product. It's crazy. Our very first product UI didn't make a whole lot of sense. There was four pages to it internally, it was pretty ugly, but I just had one big focus and I'm like, just show stats. That's all I want to see. When you log in, show some stats. So it looks like there's momentum and we had, I would say in six years we had about four iterations of our front end. And I'm talking completely rebuilt from the ground up iterations that sometimes would take six to eight months and cost anywhere between 80 to $120,000 for our small tool.
(00:12:33):
And it wasn't that big on the surface to a lot of people, but I would've never known to do that had I not brought a lead developer in who was like, "Well this is one of our limitations. We can't do the drag and drop builder because it needs to be in this format." And it's like, "Okay, so what do we do?" "Well, let's rebuild it from the ground up." And then it's the next thing. So I was literally shooting from the hip the entire time. It's just that as long as you have a good enough product that stands on its own for the first entry level product that you're selling, if that can stand on its own for the price you're selling it at, any feature you add after that is going to increase retention and make people happier. It's just getting to that first one that overwhelms I think a lot of people.
AJ Roberts (00:13:12):
I think what was super when I listened to that story, couple of the things that really stand out. Number one is how... You had the idea and I'm guessing, you saw, okay, well if we can directly message people, that's going to have a better rate of back and forth conversation than an email or whatever. Because like you said, it's already on their app, it's already there. So from the marketing standpoint, your head's going, oh okay, we can communicate better with this. So that was really the idea. It's like we can tap into this and it's like you saw the vision. But you took your time and I think this is key. You were like, I don't understand a certain thing and so okay, I'm going to go ask questions and build it until I understand what I need, then I'll go develop it.
(00:13:58):
And the key is, and I think this is what most people don't think about, is if it does what it says and gets the result, it doesn't really matter how ugly it is. It doesn't really matter the way it's looked because if you can position it and people can see how it's going to help them, you'll get those early adopters because they share that vision. And I think that's the key.
(00:14:23):
In software what I see with a lot of companies is they don't have the marketing and sales background. And so they have an idea for a software, but the software doesn't have that what's the benefit to the user? And if it does, they don't know how to position it and that's why they end up having to take money early from investors. It's why they have to build the team because they're like "I don't understand why this isn't selling. We've got our first a hundred beta users." And it's like you are doing a launch and getting a thousand people and they're going, "How did you do that?"
(00:14:51):
And it's because there was a demand in the marketplace for something that is better than email, that gets more people to show up to registered events. And you found a mechanism that does that. And I think that that's key. When you built out Chatmatic in the beginning, did you know that it would essentially be one of the highest ways to communicate with prospects and customers?
Travis Stephenson (00:15:20):
I mean sort of. It's funny because when I first started building Chatmatic, what I saw in my mind were two features with the API that they had released. And the first feature was the ability, and again I'm a marketer by trade and I wasn't looking at this as though... The way that you describe it is the best version of what I would want to tell people. Like, "Oh, I saw this grand vision for automatically communicating with people and having this great interaction." What actually happened was I'm a marketer and I know the importance of having an email list. And as I'm reading the documentations, two features stood out to me. And the first feature was something called comment replies where if somebody comments on a post or an ad of yours on Facebook, you can automatically message them with a message.
(00:16:05):
So I thought, well the marketer in me knows that I can run an ad on Facebook directly for comments that's going to get comments and then I can instantly message those people without having to have a link on it. This is very interesting and obviously commenting naturally and organically happens on Facebook anyways. And then a second feature was they had released this feature called Merge Fields where you could merge in somebody's email address if they had associated it with a Facebook account, you could show their email address in the chat. So now somebody comments on your post, you send them a message to say... I tested this out with a pug page to try to see, this was back probably seven years ago when e-commerce was still hot and print on demand was a big deal. I did a print on demand pug shirt because my wife is super into pugs, I use that as my example.
(00:16:55):
And I created a pug fan page and I grew it. And then I would post stuff on there and every day I'd post something, I'd get a ton of comments, I would automatically message those people with my software and I would essentially collect email addresses from that and then email them print on demand shirt stuff. And in my mind, that's all it was. When I first started Chatmatic, that is literally what it was. And it's funny because I created it to be the gimmick that it sounds like, that it's a more of a gimmick tool than it is a software that could help some big company. And so I built it with those two features and then I realized, whoa, we're right on the cusp.
(00:17:31):
Now I've built all the hard stuff like the communicating through the API, the getting Facebook approval. I've done all the hard stuff, I can add as many cool features as I want. So then I was like, well what would I want to do now as a marketer? Now we're starting to see that next problem, which is, we're sending messages to people, they're responding but we're not. So let's add that feature in to be able to at least respond. So I built a very crude sort of back and forth, not drag and drop builder. And conversations I think now kind of have to be drag and drop because you have to be able to see the flow of the conversation and break it into pieces. When I created mine, it was literally like, A and B, and then it would branch off A and B and you'd have to make an A message and a B message and then it would be like A, B, C.
(00:18:18):
And it was really confusing. It would take a lot of time. But it worked. And again, it was ugly. It did the job. And then eventually we got enough people to say, "Hey, this is good. If you wanted to make it great, you could make this more visual." I said, "Okay, great. Now we've got enough customers to justify making this feature go great. Now I'll put that money in." And so then what I would do is I would just tell all the people, number one, I would turn them all into affiliates, which is one of the things that really turned me on to using Kartra in the first place was every product that I sold could instantly be something that my customers then sell.
(00:18:52):
And this goes back to me graduating college. My first job out of college was as a telephony salesperson. I would walk around to real estate agents. Now I was in Palm Coast, Florida, which is dead, retirement community like 2008, middle of the recession real estate. I've got to go sell a service to real estate agents.
Sarah Jenkins (00:19:11):
Sounds fun.
Travis Stephenson (00:19:12):
I walk in and they all said to me, "Look, I don't know where..." because my software would help them track where they were spending their money with a different 800 number for a business card for a flyer or whatever. So they said, "Look, I'm spending $2,000 a month, I'm just getting by. I don't want to even test the waters on improving this. I just want to survive right now." So I was getting nos in my face all the time. So the guy who hired me signed everybody in the office up for an MLM because nobody was selling anything. So he signed us up for prepaid legal and I remember he was like, "You're going to also offer people prepaid legal."
(00:19:47):
And I never did, but the guy that was the coach of our prepaid legal came in and this was the most interesting pitch that stuck with me forever was he basically came in, he gave us the whole spiel and he is like, "Do you think that's valuable?" And I was like, "Yeah, I do." I'm 21 years old. No, I don't think having a will is that big of a deal for me right now, but I do think it has some value and having access to a lawyer if I get pulled over, there's some value there. Sure. And he said, "So if you think it's got value, how upset do you think your parents are going to be when they get pulled over and they find out you never told them about this?"
(00:20:24):
And I'm like, "Oh, that's an interesting pitch." If you think it has value, then don't you think somebody else will? And so that's why I've tried to create affiliate platforms for everything that I've created because if you are a customer and you found it valuable, don't you think there's one to five other people that might also find it valuable? And now at 40%, 50% commission, if you find two people that also think it's valuable, you paid for your membership. So it's just an easy way to... Having that added in was always really nice. But that's one of the other things that we added into our initial roll outs was, "Hey, why don't you try telling other people about it?" And we never really blew it up that it did have that additional feature set that was really valuable to that person. Hey, if I want to tell somebody about it, I have the ability to make money off of it.
(00:21:09):
So that was always really cool. But I winged it, learned as I went and never had that ultimate game plan until I'd say the last three years. Then I was like, okay. And that's actually why I sold the company because I ended up telling people, I listed it on different sales websites, and I would tell everybody that was interested in buying because you're going to get the question just like if you're selling a car, why are you selling this? If it's profitable, why are you selling it?
(00:21:37):
And I had the answer. If you ever want to sell a software, use my answer and I promise you it'll help. Tell the person, look, "There's a certain CEO that takes a company to this level. And I think I was that guy who just bootstraps and I'm a marketer and I can make sales happen. Then there's another kind of CEO..." Because now what you're doing is you're making them feel really good about themselves. "There's another kind of CEO that takes it to the next level and hires teams and implements bigger strategies and escalates things. I'm not that person and I know the software can go somewhere if that person comes in." And so instantly everybody was like, well, I think I'm that person so I should come in. And I'm just being honest with them. I wasn't lying to them, but that was the reason that I kind of moved on from it was I don't think what I enjoy doing that's not what... I didn't want to be that person to take it where it needed to go.
Sarah Jenkins (00:22:29):
That's so funny. We had that with my late husband and co-founder, Andy Jenkins. He took it to a certain level and he couldn't really grow or manage a certain amount of people to get to that next level of software. And I was like, "I could totally do it." So I'm actively doing it. But then there'll be another level where I'm like, "Ugh, I'm out of my depth here." Yeah.
Travis Stephenson (00:22:48):
Yeah. And it's funny because I find that women a lot of time, my wife would make a great CEO because organizational skills, ability to handle pressure and stress in a certain, but I almost look at it, a lot of women don't look at the pressure and stress as stress the same way that I do. I look at it and I'm like, man, this is stressful. And it's more like, no, we can just put this and that in place and this in place and then that happens.
(00:23:14):
I'm looking at, this is stressful because it's going to take this much time. And my wife, for instance, looks at it and says, "It's not stressful because we have a game plan." And so I do think that a lot of times women probably don't give themselves enough credit that they could be great CEOs for that exact purpose, that you do things differently than guys. And I almost wonder why there aren't more co-CEOs just for that purpose of here's a guy CEO, here's a woman CEO, they're co's and they're going to handle things a little differently. I guess that's why you would have COO and a CEO kind of roles. But that's why I didn't grow a team. I don't have to worry about figuring that out.
Sarah Jenkins (00:23:54):
Well look at Mark Zuckerberg. He had Cheryl Sandberg, I think that was who ran the show. And then he was the CEO and the vision. So she handled the ops, she handled what was stressful. When I'm baking a pie, I start knowing this is going to be three hours in and it may not work out, but if my kid colors on the wall, I'm super stressed out because I'm like, "Oh, how am I going to get that out." I have no idea how to get marker out of the wall. But with the company hiring and firing and trying to grow, at least the level that I feel comfortable is not as stressful. Yeah, you're right. We think of things differently.
Travis Stephenson (00:24:22):
A hundred percent. My wife stresses over my kids leaving stuff in the playroom and I look at it and I'm like, I didn't even see it. I didn't even know it was there.
Sarah Jenkins (00:24:30):
How would you not see that train? What if you stepped on it?
Travis Stephenson (00:24:35):
A hundred percent. But meanwhile, if somebody's not doing something in my company and I'm like, I don't know, they're not performing the way that I want or it's like this. And she's like "Get rid of them." And I'm like, "It's a harder conversation than that." But it's like it's so much easier for her.
Sarah Jenkins (00:24:46):
It's not, we're cutthroat, man.
Travis Stephenson (00:24:50):
And people say that men aren't the emotional ones. We're the ones who are digging into the emotions going, "I can't do it." Women are like "Cut his throat." You're like, "Whoa."
Sarah Jenkins (00:24:56):
AJ is way nicer than I am. That's obviously a fact.
Travis Stephenson (00:25:02):
See, hey, we need the ballot.
AJ Roberts (00:25:03):
You gave the professional answer in terms of why you sold it. And it's actually right there probably whoever's listening that any business, that's the right probably answer to say. And I know you probably felt like that because I've had a lot of conversations with people who have sold and that is why they sold. They got it to where they wanted to get to and to go to the next level requires them fundamentally to change who they are, which is a non-negotiable for a lot of people.
(00:25:30):
It's like, this is who I am, I know what I'm good at, and this is time for me to either step back onto a board of directors or to move on from the company. But I sense based on what you're doing now and how you explained the new company in the beginning, there was also a soul reason. There was something inside of you that said, okay, it's time for me to transition. Can you talk about that? Because I think, and I've witnessed this with several people, is they grow a company and at first they're very aligned with it. And as a company grows, there seems to be this split and what's needed in the company is different than what's needed to give them fulfillment. And was that what was happening?
Travis Stephenson (00:26:12):
Yeah, a hundred percent. I think there's a time where a lot of entrepreneurs or people in the digital marketing space especially where you're like, okay, almost no matter what I do, I'm going to figure out how to make money. I know that. And so once you've been doing it long enough, then you start to play in the role of...` And I think this just happened as I aged, I got married, I had kids, and I started to think, I'm just genuinely not happy doing this role because there's always a fire to put out. I mean you guys know with software especially until you bring other people in who can handle those fires, they're the shield for you at that point. When you're small enough, you're putting out all the fires, you're dealing with every fire, you're literally talking to developers who have a massive problem that they can't solve.
(00:26:59):
You're helping them solve something that they created and you don't even know code. So after a couple conversations of, I enjoy helping people, that part gets my day going. What I don't enjoy is the fires. And that's when you start to go down the other line of, again, as an entrepreneur, you're always going to have fires to put out these specific ones, dealing with them 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And then the customers, the loudest customers in software companies are typically the most unhappy ones. And it's like if you're on the front line of that, it's literally every day your whole company's behind you and you are literally the one taking all the shots because you're dealing with support saying that this sucks. And then you go to the dev team and you're like, "Why does this suck?"
(00:27:48):
And they're like, "I can't fix this." And you're like, "How do I tell people that we can't fix this right now?" It's like you're literally just getting beat in the face every day. And so you start to ask yourself, and I would tell my wife, "Look, I just don't think I'm happy." I can stay in this grind for a while and I'm making money and that's fine. I have nothing to complain about. But actual happiness, what I'm doing this for is to provide for our family, is to be able to enjoy it, is to be able to... I know I could make money doing a lot less, probably making more money.
(00:28:18):
And another thing that also kind of came out was with Chatmatic and with other tools that are in that realm I was a hundred percent tied to an application. So I was 100% tied to Facebook. And I thought at any moment, and this kept me up at night, at any moment Facebook could, and they were known to do this, shut your app ID down like that and give you no reason for it, "Oh, it was a glitch, sorry."
(00:28:46):
It's like, well, that glitch was in the middle of a spike in traffic. You can't have that because I look like the bad guy. When I tell the support staff, "Hey, we got to tell everybody that Facebook did this. It was an error, they fixed it." But it cost that person $10,000 in the middle of a launch, it's really tough for us to say, and you guys get it because landing pages and obviously if a landing page goes down for a minute, red sirens go off and it's like the world ended and it's like, okay, [inaudible 00:29:14]
Sarah Jenkins (00:29:13):
It's personally your fault for sure. Cloudflare sucks. And so Instagram's down, Facebook's down, but it's definitely Sarah Jenkins fault that Kartra's down.
Travis Stephenson (00:29:19):
You hit the plug and [inaudible 00:29:22] unplugged the whole... I can't believe you did that. You turned the server off.
Sarah Jenkins (00:29:24):
I'm such an asshole. I know.
Travis Stephenson (00:29:26):
And that's exactly what, so it's those kind of factors start to play in and here's what's great, I look at it and I am one of those that lives by the idea that I'm not going to regret anything that I did regardless if it was bad or good as I'm coming up to where I'm at in my career. This was one of those things where I look at and I go, I loved every minute of where I was at. It does become its own beast. And again, what you said before was, I grew Chatmatic to the point where it got where I wanted it to get. And that's the other funny thing is I didn't start it thinking I'm going to take this to this level. I just thought, Hey, I could sell this. When I started, I'm like if I had a software that had these features, I could sell the shit out of it.
(00:30:10):
And that's all I thought of. And I was like, and I'm going to do that and I did that. But then eventually it literally created its own beast of like, well now I've got a group with eight thousand people who are committed to using this tool versus all the other competitors out there and they're living and breathing this the way that I'm living and breathing this. And it's like now it has a life of its own.
(00:30:32):
And so you have to assess, am I the best partner for this person in its new life, or should I turn over the keys to somebody else? And so yeah, it had more to do with just ability to sell it and the ability to move on. There was some sort of software related, I guess, changes that I wanted to make that I'm like, if I go down that route and let's say one of the features was we were going to integrate directly with a platform like a Shopify, you go down that route, you better be ready to fully commit to, okay, now we're a Shopify based company or we're with this company.
(00:31:07):
It's like, but I don't have a background in Shopify. Man, it would really help if somebody was involved in this company that takes it the direction that they know where they're going to go with it. And this is what's so funny is you've heard it a million times, if you niche down, you can actually charge more for whatever your product is. So Alex Hormozi does a great job of explaining it in his book. He talks about a time management software, that's $9 a month. And then a time management software specifically for car mechanics that work on 1960s Corvettes. It's like such a specific software you could charge a hundred dollars a month for it because it helps them.
(00:31:43):
And I thought, here I am, I'm making sales, I'm working my tail off to try to make sales on this thing that does everything. Whereas if I just went and made this a HubSpot software, I could charge 10 times the price and it only integrates with HubSpot, but it does everything that HubSpot does. It's like now all of a sudden I could make more money. And we initially aligned specifically actually initially we were like, Hey, let's build our first API into Kartra because I use it. I'm our most active user. Let's build that API out and then see where we can take it from there.
Sarah Jenkins (00:32:16):
All right, I'll argue I am the most active user, but you can go ahead and claim it if you want.
Travis Stephenson (00:32:23):
Not of Kartra, of Chatmatic. I was the most active user of Chatmatic. So I thought if I'm going to collect an email address from this thing, I want the API directly so I don't have to use Zapier for my own thing. And so that's why I was like, I'm going to build that in. And then around that time, I had had it listed for a while for sale, and it was around that time that the actual deal came in. So we were like, all right, let's put those things on hold and let them take it in the direction they want. But yeah, definitely other means, and I do think that your North Star, so to speak, of what you want to do and what's fun. If you ask yourself every day for a month, am I having a good time?
(00:32:55):
It's actually, going back one of the lessons I learned was from a book called The Five Love Languages, and they talk about ask your spouse once in a while how's your love tank? Well, I apply that to other areas of my life. So it's if I feel like I've not been going to the gym, it's like, okay, so how's my fitness level? How's that? How's my tank at? If it's normally at a 10 on a good level, if I'm at a two, I got to step that up. And that idea is what sort of bothered the idea of Wealthery. The same thing with relationships. So you do the same thing with your spouse. You say, "Hey, how's your love tank?" Because if it's not above a seven, I'm kind of slacking. Well, it was the same thing with happiness level at work. It's like, how's your happiness on a day-to-day basis?
(00:33:38):
Because what you do and where you put your energy and your focus, whether it's making you money or not, doesn't always dictate is it making me happy? So I found that I was at this level of a two and I was at this three for months straight. And it wasn't because things were going in a bad direction, it just wasn't what I wanted to do. And I'm like, man, there's no reason I should be unhappy and have this tool. Somebody else could be really happy doing it. And so I think all those factors aside, I was just like, Hey, let's just see if there's any interest in somebody actually buying this thing. And I did have a decent amount of interest from multiple parties and ended up settling on this guy Neil, who runs it now.
AJ Roberts (00:34:18):
Awesome. So obviously the journey was what, 2016 is when you launched?
Travis Stephenson (00:34:26):
2016 was when I got the idea. December of 2016 I launched and then I started taking it from there.
AJ Roberts (00:34:32):
So essentially six years you worked on Chatmatic building it, getting it to the point to sell. What were some of the biggest struggles and lessons you learned over that time? Because knowing software, I know there's a lot of hurdles, but also being a marketer and combining those words becomes, there's lots of things that I've experienced, but I'd love to hear what your experience was over those six years and some of the biggest lessons you took away moving into the new business that you're going to do differently.
Travis Stephenson (00:35:02):
Yeah. I learned so much about formulating a good marketing strategy from the standpoint of, when I look at it now, I'm like, I can't believe I made any money because I was marketing a tool that didn't have as many features. And I actually, I leveraged this to a lot of people as well to tell them, wow, look at what you can do. Because I'm like, I'm competing in a space with a nine hundred pound gorilla, which was ManyChat at the time. They had $25 million in funding and they had a access to the API two years before I did. I had no funding and got access to the API the day he announced it. So I'm fighting this massive uphill battle. Then you've got other applications out there coming out of the woodwork from Y Combinator and all these other places and it's like they all had something that I couldn't, which was a free trial. Free trial until you used it to the point where you now had to pay for it.
(00:35:57):
I'm like, I can't float that. I can't give everybody free access to the tool. I got to pre-sell it. I got to do this. So definitely one thing that I learned was that there's always a way to position your platform, even in an industry that is completely inundated. And again, ManyChat for instance, they had over a million users and there was a pretty interesting stat that only about seven million pages at the time were even using Messenger. So one fifth, one fourth of all of the people that were using the system in general were using my competitor. So it wasn't like there was a whole disparity, oh, there's a bunch of tools out there they can pick and choose. It was like, no, pretty much everybody's using that one because it's completely free. And every YouTube video, it actually became the bandaid for Messenger.
(00:36:48):
If you said, "Do you have a bot?" You would say, "Do you have a ManyChat?" Was what people were ending up saying was like, "Oh yeah, do you have a ManyChat?" And it's like, "No, I have a Chatmatic. No, I have a different one." But that was one big thing that I learned is even when you face the nine hundred pound gorilla with all the funding, with everything else, I would literally tell people, it's crazy that I'm actually able to sell this thing. Because I looked at what they did and I said, they have a really complicated mess of settings that you have to go through to even figure it out. All I want is for it to be easy. So we're actually going to remove features that ManyChat thinks, oh, we're so cool, you can integrate your Stripe. And I'm like, I'm a really active Messenger user and I never take credit cards in Messenger.
(00:37:36):
I'm not even going to worry about adding Stripe and things like that. I would just say, I'm going to take that out because that's not what most people need. It's just a small group of it, but it's like you can get lost in those settings when you go in there as a normal marketer. So we just flipped the script instead of saying, oh, we're going to compete with them. One big lesson that I took out, and sadly it was probably three years into our development, one of the big lessons I took out was, you can look at your competition, but don't look at them and say, Hey, they did this, we've got to do this. You're going to get a lot of customers who say, "Hey, so-and-so added this, can you do that?" But to look at it and say, "Well no, because Jim over there got a really nice haircut, it doesn't mean that I'm getting his haircut."
(00:38:23):
It's the same kind of idea. So-and-so went vegan, I still eat steak. So it's like you have to have your own individual identity and stand by that. And definitely to put a little bit of a mark in your mind ahead of time of where do I want this to go and I can't be them because they have $25 million in funding. So what can I be? That was definitely a huge lesson.
(00:38:49):
And yeah, I learned a lot about myself as a manager because I went in with... Meanwhile, I paid full price for a management degree from a university and it does not teach you how to be an actual manager. I always say it's funny because what I learned from college would've made me a really good front of house manager at [inaudible 00:39:16]. That's about where I could have gone.
(00:39:19):
Maybe I could have managed a Staples, I think something that. But I never would've run my own business based off of that information. It didn't set me up at all. But I learned a lot about myself in terms of that. Am I good at this I bad at that? What do I need to fix and work on? And I thought it was really funny that I see a lot of people in the SaaS space especially, they get hooked on all these... They're like Silicon Valley junky information guys where it's like they start, and I'm not knocking this because I have a cold plunge. It's like every SaaS CEO, I have a cold plunge first thing in the morning and then you got to read eight minutes of David Goggins and then you got to take notes and look at this book that I'm highlighting every paragraph in it. And you got to go to this event and you got to sit front row and you got to join this mastermind.
(00:40:14):
And it's like, I literally didn't do any of those things. And again, I love cold plunging, don't get me wrong, but for a different reason, it's not for this is going to make me the best business person ever. It's like, yeah, it's a challenging thing that I'm going to do that's good for my body. But you can do great things without having to follow the exact mold that everybody else is following. There's some cool things that you can definitely take from other people who are really good at what they do, but I think a lot of people fall into the trap of, I'm just going to do what he does or I'm going to do what she does. And it's like, you got to figure out what's my role, what makes me happy? What am I going to enjoy doing? Because you get a four X lift in your productivity.
(00:40:59):
And a great example of that is this. I transitioned into my new company, essentially, I launched that new company June of last year. August of last year we finalized my deal with Chatmatic where I was essentially no longer a part of that. And since then, the million dollar threshold is a pretty big one for a lot of people. It took me about two years to get over a million dollars with Chatmatic and then we started to scale. It took me nine months to get a million dollars in my new company. But it's not because what I'm doing now is so much better. I sell something now for $97. It's a different ballgame, but I'm doing what I enjoy. And I think that that gives you that, people can see that who buy my product. It's a lot easier to create marketing material and business plans and things when you enjoy what you do and you feel like this is my place versus I'm kind of out of my depth where you're always reacting versus being proactive.
(00:41:52):
So that was a big thing that I took into what I'm doing now is, all right, make sure it's in the space that you feel like is your space. Not like I'm trying to read every David Goggins quote and read these SaaS books and I got to watch these SaaS podcasts and do whatever, tattoo SaaS on my back and all these crazy things that these people want to do. It's just, it's amazing.
(00:42:15):
But yeah, I just kind of focus now on my own realm and it's one of the reasons I'm not diving into AI and diving into every other opportunity that's coming out. I love them and I've chatted with you for a second about AI and some of the tools that are out there. I think they're amazing and I know about them and I delve into them, but as a marketer it can, oftentimes everybody just says, "Hey, that's a new hot thing. I'm going to make as much money off that new hot thing as I possibly can." But that's not my zone yet. So I'm figuring that out. Stay in that good zone of creativity mode.
Sarah Jenkins (00:42:52):
Well I think you developed your own sense of style, your own sense of self. When you talk about the cold plunge I would rather, my husband Ricky's like, "Let's do the cold plunge." I was like, "I will divorce you if you throw me in that pool. There is no way I'm getting in the cold water. That is uncomfortable. It's terrible." However he thinks he should do that for his health. So we're going to allow that in our relationship. And I don't have to be part of it.
(00:43:10):
You did the Chatmatic thing and you decided first of all to have an affiliate base so someone could promote what they believe in that you're doing, which was smart. But also you saw the need in the market. The pattern interrupt of having a marketing message in front of you when you're doing your social thing is extraordinarily powerful.
(00:43:24):
And back then it was unheard of. So when you've got your business emails, you delete and sort, you get your Facebook and it's your friends, but then you get this message and you're like, "Oh." So you are more open to it because the pattern interrupts. So you had that edge on what you knew that people wanted.
(00:43:38):
And if you were vegan, then that's where your audience would want to hear from you because you'd be passionate about being vegan. So you said you're doing things, you're not going to follow the crowd, you're not going to do what everyone else is doing because you have your individual selling model that works for your voice and what you believe in. And so some people can be awesome employees. They go to school and they're really great at doing sales or really good at banking or ops or whatever, because they don't have the entrepreneur spirit, it won't allow you to be a good salesman, it won't allow you to be a good operating employee. There are certain skills that you have other people don't have and you've learned to utilize those in the moment that's most important.
Travis Stephenson (00:44:15):
Yeah, and I think that's a great point that a lot of people probably need to consider more. And I tell a lot of my employees, "Look, you don't necessarily want to be the CEO, the head of this company." And I try to make it very visual, like, "Hey, when you leave the office, you get to be done and your stress level is now done. And if I text you, it's usually not about anything super urgent. And in the morning when you wake up, you don't have to check on any red alarms, fires." And I'm like, "Hey, that's not bad. And when you take your vacation, you literally, your mind gets the checkout. And I can't tell you how relaxing that must be. Whereas if you were in my situation, there is a positive side to it obviously, but realize you don't see 90% of the negative stuff because I shield you from that as being where I'm at. So take that as a positive thing and you'll know if you're meant to do something like this because you'll start to feel like you more of that. You want more of that, you thrive in those areas."
(00:45:18):
And as somebody who's like a manager to other people, I could tell them ahead of time, "Look, you don't thrive in that arena. You could be a great CEO of a specific thing, but not of a business like this." So I think identifying what you do and what kind of makes you enjoy your time is huge. And so many times we get caught up in like, well, I'm doing this because I was taught to do it this way. And especially now, I came into marketing probably about almost 14 years ago and things have changed dramatically since then.
(00:45:54):
The frameworks that we use, the copywriting so you can learn something and then a year later it be completely different. And look at the evolution of reels for instance. Almost every ad that we run that does really well is a reels style ad. And it's like a year and a half ago that didn't even exist. So your whole marketing game plan can change. But being adaptive to that and figuring out, okay, I don't like doing it this new way, but this is the way that it's supposed to go. I'm going to shift and do this other thing, which I do like doing. So being open to that I think is huge. Most people buy a course and they don't think about how they want it to translate to them. They just do what they're told. And I have actually had a tough time because I teach that way.
(00:46:37):
I teach, I am not going to tell you exactly what to do. I'm going to give you the power to do this in the way that you are supposed to do it. Which is a more difficult way to teach people, but it's like teaching somebody to walk versus just holding them up. They need to go through that muscle memory practice. But yeah, it's definitely a lot. I learned a ton through that six year process and definitely came out the other side better and developed some great relationships.
(00:47:06):
I still want to get into SaaS. I'll still have software, but now it's going to be more direct application based. So we're developing one that does a very specific set of features. Not like I'm going to develop another tool that does everything that's possible with this potential thing. It's not going to be tied to any approval based APIs that one company can say you or you can't do this.
(00:47:31):
We lost Chatmatic for, I want to say we lost it for 46 days, because the craziest story. Somebody made me the admin of their Facebook page and they were selling watches.
AJ Roberts (00:47:42):
Oh man.
Travis Stephenson (00:47:43):
And Facebook... Because they wanted me to make a bot for them they made me the admin of this page. They were selling watches, they were selling a lot of them. They were drop shipping. Well, their page got a lot of negative reviews because of shipping time. Facebook reviewed their page and said, these guys are spamming people. They're scamming people. From what I could tell they weren't necessarily, but maybe they were. They literally disabled our personal Facebook accounts. Everybody who was an admin, all their personal Facebook accounts got disabled. So I submitted an appeal. Every day for 46 days I submitted two appeals, one in the morning, one in the afternoon on the Facebook appeal thing.
Sarah Jenkins (00:48:20):
Wow.
Travis Stephenson (00:48:21):
I kept getting, this is our final decision. You're never going to get this approved you lost your Facebook, and I'm talking about my wife's Facebook page, said, married, but didn't even say my name. They removed me from ever having existed on Facebook.
Sarah Jenkins (00:48:33):
You don't exist. You suck so bad, we're taking you out.
Travis Stephenson (00:48:35):
In the social world you don't exist when they removed you. And so 46 days later randomly, Hey, we reviewed your system. It looks like you never did anything on this fan page. Here's why we removed you, we're going to enable you again. And in the snap of a finger, I was back like nothing had ever happened. So I kind of was a little bit jaded in that. I lost full control of my company for 46 days and had something bad happen, we couldn't have fixed it. And it was all because of some random glitch that I had no control over. It seems a little strange, so now no more tools that are built on systems like that.
Sarah Jenkins (00:49:18):
Exclusivity.
Travis Stephenson (00:49:18):
Yeah, exactly.
AJ Roberts (00:49:19):
It's so interesting because a lot of that comes, you mentioned earlier about doing what everyone else is doing. And so if a new platform comes out, TikTok or something, you see a bunch of people creating stuff for TikTok, you think, oh, okay, I have this great idea for TikTok. And the second thing you mentioned that I really liked was it's really about teaching the concepts, principles, and theories. Those are what stand the test time, direct response copywriting. Whether it's in a sales page, in an email, in a messenger, in a video reel, however it is, it transcends platform. Those principles can be played over. The whole idea of building an audience, whether it's an email list, whether it's a following, whether it's inside a group, whatever. The concept of having an audience to market to transcends platforms.
(00:50:08):
And I think that you really have to be careful when you're building a business to not get into this, like this is the only way, right? Now, this is the best way I've discovered, and I'm going to share this with you. But what I think is key for people to do is if you have no clue, it is best to do paint by numbers, but then you have to start analyzing it. And that's the difference between an amateur and a pro, right? An amateur just keeps trying to look for the best way, but they never get started. A pro gets started and then says, okay, well maybe this will work better for me or maybe that will work better. And especially knowing yourself. Are you someone who's going to get on video or are you someone that's going to sit down and write all day? Can you crank out content or do you just turn on a camera? If you're going to turn on a camera, do you work better with scripts or do you work better without a script?
(00:50:55):
Does a script actually handicap you? Do you work better with slides or face the camera? These are all things you only learn in the game. And so that's the thing. And I think one of the biggest things I admire in you is you had an idea, you got started and you figured it out. And through, whether it was because you couldn't afford to copy the competition or whether it was, well, if they're all doing that, I need to do something different because what's the point of being the same? If I do the same as everybody else, I'm going to get the same results as everybody else.
(00:51:25):
And we've talked about business models before. When you look at certain industries, there's different business models. And if you are the business model of giving up most of your company and taking on outside investment, then you could probably follow that model. But if you're going, no, I don't want to do that, you have to find a different way. And I think that is really, really key. And I think that's one thing that a creator, does when they're up against the wall they figure out, what do I have and how can I leverage and use that? They get resourceful. They don't think to themselves, I can't afford this, so I can't do that. It's like, what can I do? How do I actually pivot this and turn what others would consider a negative into a positive?
Travis Stephenson (00:52:09):
It's funny because I actually teach a theory in my company to our students. I teach a theory called the 13 Stories, and there's 13 stories that I believe everybody can tell in their marketing that I'll turn into sales. If you tell the stories, people will relate to you. And because I found it, I'll tell a story and I'll give you an example.
(00:52:28):
My wife and I started a nonprofit six years ago, eight years ago. Well, we started it six years ago, and it's in honor of her mom who passed from multiple myeloma. We started this nonprofit where we will donate, 10% of our money every year goes to this nonprofit. We don't raise money for it, and we don't look for outside money. We just take whatever money we can give and instead of giving it to taxes or giving it to a nonprofit where we don't know if it's going to somebody's salary, if it's going to this person, we pay directly for people's cancer treatment when they go outside of Western medicine because insurance doesn't cover it.
(00:53:00):
So I go through and I tell that story. So one of the stories that we talk about is called a charity story. What's funny about it is when I tell my story, that story, it makes people understand, okay, he's a real person. They can endear to me, but everybody responds same way. I lost this person to cancer. What you said really resonates. Wow, it's great that you did this. I also like to donate to those causes. That one story gets a hundred people, a thousand people, a hundred thousand people to go, I'm like this person in this exact way. The one story. And when you tell those stories, everybody relates to you in these 13 stories, you're going to get everybody essentially to relate to you if you tell all 13 stories. And one of them is a resourcefulness story of in your marketing in an email or in an ad, you tell a story about how you created something big without having a lot big in your favor.
(00:53:54):
You used your resources that you had. And people can say, there was a time that I didn't have much, or maybe I don't have much now and I can take it there. But what's funny about all the stories that I teach is I tell people from the beginning, if you tell my story, it ain't going to work. If you tell my charity story, it ain't going to work because it's my story and it means something to me, and it's my wife and it was her mom that we're doing it for. That story makes no sense if Jim next door tells my story to his people, they're not going to care. So I tell people that all the time. It's like everybody has these 13 stories. You tell them and you went from, nobody cares about me, nobody knows about me to, well, now there's all these people, 10 people with every single story resonating with me.
(00:54:43):
Now I've got 130 people who feel like they know me and are just like me. And in fact, we're all human. So we all are pretty much similar. You guys probably donate to causes that are similar to I do. And then I know for instance, your background was in power lifting. I went to a power lifting gym when I very first started CrossFit. So I know about that space. I could tell a story in my marketing about the first time that I walked into a power lifting gym being two hundred pounds and 18% body fat. And I was working out next to a guy, Brandon Lilly dead lifting nine hundred pounds. And you get overwhelmed and you think, whoa. And somehow that story plays into my marketing. But somebody like you is going to see that and read that whole story because you're like, he's got to be talking to me.
(00:55:27):
But if I don't tell that story and I only tell one version of it, hey, I did this and it's completely unrelated to you because this particular story doesn't matter to you as much, then you're not going to resonate with me. You're not going to follow me as much anymore. And that's why it's like again, what you said, it's the whole saying different strokes for different folks. It's like every golfer has a different swing. If you all try to be Tiger Woods' swing, it's not going to work the same for you as it did for Tiger. And I think that knowing that also takes a lot of stress off. If you look at it and you go, I have to do it my way because that is the only way it'll work. If I do copy what he does, if I take his exact ad and I replicate it and I tell his story, it's not going to work for me. That's so relieving knowing what's not going to work that I get to focus on what is going to work.
Sarah Jenkins (00:56:17):
Don't tell Travis' story. Got it. Yep.
Travis Stephenson (00:56:20):
No, I love stories. Just don't tell mine.
AJ Roberts (00:56:24):
Yeah. I think the other part of that, I always say this when I worked with fitness trainers, it's like there's this unconscious communication too. And if you are telling a story that isn't true that you don't actually have a deep connection with, the other person sees through it. And so I always, I'd say to male trainers, who do you want to work with? And they'd say, pregnant women. And I'm like, how do you think a pregnant woman is going to respond when you are telling her you just got to follow your diet. You just got to do this, you got to do that. You don't have that experience. You've never gone through that. So there's always going to be skepticism and doubt, which is always going to result in them not following the plan, because in the back of their mind, they don't truly buy in.
Sarah Jenkins (00:57:06):
Did you ever try to take a pregnant woman's cake? Don't ever do that.
AJ Roberts (00:57:10):
Yeah.
Sarah Jenkins (00:57:11):
That's a huge mistake.
Travis Stephenson (00:57:13):
Bad move.
AJ Roberts (00:57:13):
That's the key. And I think the thing with stories is what you end up getting is an audience of people who are where you have been. So you can be the lighthouse, you can be the guide, you can be the mentor because you've actually walked a similar path to them. And what you do is you show them, I'm just a person you, I've gone through what you've gone through. Here's what I did. And it gives them the hope and they resonate better because they say, I am like this person therefore my characteristics, my behavior, my habits are very similar. And if this person can do it, then so can I. And all you are doing is showing them that there is a way for them to move forward. And I think that there's so much more power in that than traditional advertising or whatever where they try to be generic, they try to do this, and it just falls to the wayside.
(00:58:04):
Because now we live in a world where you literally can connect with any odd niche or favorite thing. And it's like my wife, she loves to do crochet. And there's a whole group of crochet people in San Diego and they do this crochet drive where they go to sheep farm and goat farm and llama farms and these farms set up. And it's one day and they have this, it's almost like a scavenger hunt, but at each stop, the people are selling the wool and whatnot.
(00:58:39):
I'm like how weird that this is a thing. But because it is, there's no longer the same distance between people there used to be. And because of that, it allows you to be your authentic self, which does keep you aligned with what you're doing. And goes back to the happiness factor. If I have to do something every day, would I choose to do this for free? And if the answer is no, I'm not saying quit your job and go do it. But start thinking, how do I make my perfect day my actual day? Because at the end of the day, we live in a time that you can do that. And there is evidence for people like you, people like us, all sorts of people that you go, wow, that's really crazy. I mean, look at Mr. Beast. He literally gives millions of dollars away a year and somehow just keeps making more money. It's fascinating, but it's possible.
Travis Stephenson (00:59:33):
You can just reverse engineer what you want. And I think what's funny about what you were saying just there about if you're not been in their shoes, I tell people this all the time from a marketing perspective, because I teach affiliate marketing and a lot of affiliate marketers, they want to use the lazy way, which is, hey, you should go check this thing out. So let's say I'm promoting Kartra and I don't use Kartra. I obviously do. If I don't use Kartra, and I look at you and I say, "Hey," this is exactly what it sounds like. When you don't use something and you try to tell somebody, you go, "Hey, I don't use this thing, but you should go check it out. You'll love it." And I try to relate that to what if your friend comes up to you and says, "Hey, what did you think about that restaurant?"
(01:00:14):
And you go, "I hated it. Not going to spend my money there again. You should definitely go check it out." "What did you think of that movie?" "I would never watch it again. Don't want to see it again. Hated it. You'll love it." That person's going to go away. "Whoa. What are you trying to say about me that you don't like this, but you think that I will." And the very subtle difference is, "Hey, I like this thing. You might too." That's the only difference. "Hey, what'd you think of that movie?" "I honestly really liked it." Guess what that person's going to do? I think I'm going to like it now too because again, that's what happens when you have similar backgrounds to people.
(01:00:47):
And so it's so much easier to sell anything you want affiliate or your own when it comes from a place of, "Hey, I did this thing. "I just made it easier or "I've got some information for you that's going to help you also do this thing. Here's proof that I did that thing. If you want the outcome that I got, or similar, you can check this thing out." And it's like people massively over complicate that and they think, well, I got to come up with some crazy marketing method and I got to have this image. And it's like this. And it's like, it's so much more simple when you try to frame your message of I did this. This is the result I got. And actually the marketing system that I teach everybody with every kind of marketing that they use is to tell the story of beginning end and how. And what's really cool about those three stages is you can mix them up and they make really cool marketing messages.
(01:01:41):
So it's like when I started out building Chatmatic, I had no idea what I was doing. That's my beginning. And then eventually I ended up building a company that I was able to sell that was a multi seven figure company, made up to eight figures. I was able to do that through this. Well, then you can switch those around and you can say, "I was able to sell a multi eight figure company. And when I first started out, I didn't know anything about the company and I was able to do it doing this." You can create almost this unlimited amount of marketing messages that appeal to different people by taking the beginning of your story, the end of it, writing them out, how you're able to do it, and then just rearranging those things. And you keep telling stories about that scenario. And as long as you're actually doing it and you're not taking the cheap road out and you're just saying, this is what can be done.
(01:02:24):
I mean, it'd be really hard for you guys to be like, "Hey, you can make really amazing funnels. We've never made one in Kartra. We've never made a funnel but we know you can do it." It's different when they're like, "Hey, we built our platform off of this. Here's some great examples of people doing really great things with this. If you want similar results, you can use a similar tool."
(01:02:43):
And that's where I got a lot of my affiliate commissions from you guys is literally just telling people, "Hey, this is what I do." I never took a, and this is a testament to the platform, I guess a little bit, but I never watched a single training. I don't have that mentality. I was like, I'm going to break this thing if it's worth its weight in salt, I'm going to break it or I'm going to figure it out. And it's like you go through and you press every tab and you're like, okay, so what does that one do? What does that one do? Okay, this is starting to make some sense.
Sarah Jenkins (01:03:11):
I'm sure you did both of those things actually back [inaudible 01:03:15]
Travis Stephenson (01:03:15):
Oh yeah, I had plenty of broken pages. I'm sure I had plenty of broken pages, but I think throughout time I might have had four support tickets. And they were all for things that I just couldn't figure out slash were things that we were asking, can we get this implemented in? But it's funny because a lot of people get stuck on the minutiae of what... My favorite is, "Well Travis, what if I do this and then this happens?" It's like, let's figure it out. Again, that's my mentality. Let's figure it out when it happens. And actually hilariously enough another thing that I teach in our platform is one of the big differences I've noticed after coaching a bunch of women and a bunch of men in the same space, is women like those details of, okay, so when that happens what am I doing after?
(01:03:57):
Men are like, we're cavemen. We just bang our head into the wall and we go, okay, so that wall's not going to move. I'm going to have to walk around it. Women want to know if I walk in that direction, I'm going to bang my head. What do I do after that? And so having it laid out for them in those different ways is always interesting. But also understanding yourself in that way. If you're trying to build a business, trying to grow something, understand, am I the person who needs all the details laid out ahead of time, or am I the person that's going to go bang my head at the wall until I actually get the result that I want? But either way, having a game plan obviously is huge, but it's got to be your own thing, not somebody else's.
AJ Roberts (01:04:33):
I'm thinking of every IKEA purchase that me and my wife has done. [inaudible 01:04:39] She's like "Have you read the instructions?" I'm like "Instructions?"
Travis Stephenson (01:04:43):
Hundred percent. There's definitely a moment where I should probably read the instructions [inaudible 01:04:49].
AJ Roberts (01:04:48):
Well, there's always that part you get to the end and you got this piece and it's supposed to go in and you're like, okay, well it's not going to go in. And then you look at the instructions.
Travis Stephenson (01:04:54):
I hate that.
AJ Roberts (01:04:55):
And that was the third step so now you have to take it all apart.
Sarah Jenkins (01:04:58):
It's like my husband, the instructions are wrong. They're written poorly.
AJ Roberts (01:05:01):
And then when you've throw them away and you got to move somewhere. Done that. So Sarah, any other questions?
Sarah Jenkins (01:05:07):
No, man. You covered so much.
AJ Roberts (01:05:08):
Yeah. Is there anything we didn't cover you wanted to cover today?
Travis Stephenson (01:05:13):
No, man. I'm just glad to have the conversation. I like having elevated conversations. It's always fun. So hopefully somebody out there hears it and makes something of it, or maybe they're on the fence about starting something and they figure, you know what? I'm not supposed to have all the answers before I do it. If nothing else, they get that out of it.
AJ Roberts (01:05:33):
I think there was a ton of value. Where can people go to learn more about what you're doing now and follow you?
Travis Stephenson (01:05:39):
Easiest way, I'm probably the most active on Instagram. I mean, I'm on Facebook. Both of them are at The Travis Stevenson on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook. We are developing our main website, wealthery.com. So it's just wealthE-R-Y.com. But yeah, you can find me on Facebook, on Instagram. Feel free to follow me on there or chat me up. I'm always kind of on and around.
(01:06:03):
So I do a lot more now with my reels because I figured out that you can take really good trainings and you can cut out reels from them. I found a guy who's really good. I don't have to tell him the timestamps that was my biggest issue. I just say, "Hey, this is a really cool hour. Can you get me 10 reels out of it?" I pay them. I, so I'm way more active on Instagram because I actually have a way of grading the content. I'm not a content guru myself, so I'm more active on that platform. But yeah, I'm in the Kartra group. I'm in all those.
AJ Roberts (01:06:34):
Well, guys, go give Travis a follow, check out what he's doing. It's very, very valuable. He's a great man and he is doing some amazing things. Thanks again for listening to Paid To Create. We'll see you on the next episode.
(01:06:46):
I just have to tell you about Kartra, the marketing platform that has seriously transformed my business. You know how running a business can be insanely time-consuming, right? Well, Kartra has been a game changer for me. It's honestly like having an entire marketing team in my pocket. And what I love most is that it automates all the tedious daily tasks for me, from marketing to sales, to even customer experience.
(01:07:07):
I can't believe how much time and energy I've saved since I started using it. And get this, with Kartra I can create websites, funnels, courses, membership sites, email campaigns, calendars, surveys, you name it. It's made managing my business so much simpler and more affordable. Honestly, I can't recommend Kartra enough. If you're curious, head to paidtocreatepodcast.co/kartra to start your trial. Trust me, you won't regret it.