On this episode of I Know This Guy… we speak with Travis Steffen. Travis is currently the CEO of Growflow, best selling author of Viral Hero and a serial entrepreneur. We dive into Travis’ past and how he pivoted from a potential NFL career, to MMA fighting and found his way into the realm of entrepreneurship. Travis blows our minds with his insights on virality as it applies to marketing and provides countless productivity tips.
Make sure to check out our Halloween giveaway here:
Date: October 16, 2020
Episode: 25
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Travis Steffen, a CEO of GrowFlow, a Best Selling Author of Viral Hero and a Serial Entrepreneur
Subtitle: “Reality is a choice”
Final Show Link: https://iknowthisguy.com/episodes/ep-25-viral-hero-travis-steffen/
In this episode of I Know this Gal…, Norman Farrar introduces Travis Steffen, a CEO of GrowFlow, a Best Selling Author of Viral Hero and a Serial Entrepreneur.
He turned from a potential NFL career to MMA fighting and found his way into the realm of entrepreneurship. He blows our minds with his insights on virality as it applies to marketing and provides countless productivity tips.
If you are a new listener to I Know this Guy…, we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Facebook Page and let us know how we can help you today!
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Hayden 0:00
Hey there, guys and gals, we’ve got a special announcement for you. Since Halloween is upon us, we thought we would do a Halloween giveaway. Because Halloween is the official holiday of I Know This Guy. All you have to do is click the link in the podcast description, fill out a short survey, and you’ll be entered to win a $50 Amazon gift card to buy all those online snacks for yourself. That’s enough for me and now for the rest of the episode.
Travis 0:30
So basically what I would love to do, it’s like to me unlocking access, like economic access to space for the masses. To me, it would be like a bigger deal than inventing the internet, because you’re just unlocking, not just unlimited like possibility, but we don’t even know the kinds of things that we’ll find.
Norman 0:59
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of I Know This Guy. The podcast where we dive deep into the lives of some of the most interesting people I know. Before we get started, please like and subscribe to I Know This Guy wherever you get your podcasts. By the way, like kids want me to say something about ringing a bell? What the hell’s a bell?
Hayden 1:34
So Dad, who do we have lined up for the podcast today?
Norman 1:38
Well, do you remember Andrea Lake?
Hayden 1:40
Yeah, of course I do.
Norman 1:42
Well, this is the gentleman she recommended. Travis Steffen.
Hayden 1:46
I remember she had many great things to say about this guy.
Norman 1:48
She certainly did. But wait till you hear his story. So from what I understand, he was a tier one athlete in football. A football injury caused him to realize that maybe he wasn’t cut out for football, okay, that he couldn’t get to the next level. So he had to rethink what he was doing and it changed his life. So wait till you hear the story.
Hayden 2:17
Wow. Yeah. I’m excited. Can’t wait to hear what he ends up doing.
Norman 2:22
Let’s get started.
Norman 2:26
So, welcome to the podcast, Travis. I can’t wait to learn more about your interesting life that seems everybody knows about.
Travis 2:34
Thanks for having me.
Norman 2:36
I was talking to Daniel de Masa, and your name came up, then Andrea Lake said that Yeah, you got to talk to this guy. So I’m looking to dig into your background and hearing some of these crazy stories that I kind of heard. So. Anyways, yeah, let’s get started. The podcast is called I Know This Guy and it’s all about interesting people. So welcome.
Travis 3:04
Thanks for having me. What’s, What can I tell you first?
Norman 3:08
Well, why don’t we dig a little bit into your background? So, I really want to know what makes Travis, Travis.
Travis 3:15
For those of you who don’t know, my name is Travis Steffen. I’m a technology entrepreneur. I live in Los Angeles. I was born in Chaska, Minnesota, but raised in Muscatine, Iowa. A lot of farm and factory folk, they’re very blue collar, really great place to grow up, learned a lot about hard work and work ethic doing more with less. My folks were incredible, amazingly supportive. We never had a lot of money, but we never went hungry. Definitely wanted to create something more with my life and so I thought that was going to be the NFL for a little while. I thought that was going to be I mean, that’s what I had in my head when I went to play college football at the University of Northern Iowa. Division one school really incredible athletes there and very quickly learned that I was not on their level whatsoever. Had it not been for an untimely Achilles tendon tear, I probably would have not had the, I would have been probably trying to still somehow make it work. Just being stubborn and never wanting to give up and so forth. The thing that you’re instilled in as it’s from a very young age, as an athlete is just like never ever, ever, ever, ever give up ever, which isn’t the best advice in all contexts.
Travis 4:38
Those guys are just genetic freaks. There was no competing with most of them. They were also thinking a lot faster than I was. In that context that was not as quick as they were in terms of reaction and just they were on a completely different level. So when I tore my Achilles, I had no plan B. There was nothing else in my life at all. I was not taking school seriously, I hadn’t taken school seriously for my entire life, despite just skating by on natural ability, but it was kind of a hyper masculine culture. So, being smart was not socially rewarded, so to speak. So I was more gravitating towards climbing to the top of the social hierarchy by whatever means necessary and that looked like athletics. So that’s what I tried to focus on. But knowing that a torn Achilles was going to derail all of that, I had to come up with another game plan and a couple things happened that that next year when I was just kind of out of commission physically, I discovered professional online poker was terrible for a little while and then discovered some of the online poker training sites at the high stakes online pros put together cardrunners.com, deucescracked.com, a couple others, and just got so obsessed with that world. So I mean, just space basically put the athletic training program mindset into professional online poker and said, alright, I’m gonna create this framework, this training plan for myself, every single day in logs, my progress, joined a bunch of study groups and watched every video I could find on those sites where these high stakes pros were just talking through their thought processes and right away, that was a big aha moment for me, because I started to realize that being smart was actually really cool. These guys were living incredible lives, on their own terms, they were effectively self employed and it was fascinating because they were living these lives that didn’t even seem real and I realized that I wanted to do that. Now, I also realized very quickly, that I was really bad at it. So it took about a year for me to even become a breakeven player. But after a couple years out of it, I became a winning player enough so that I actually started to teach on some of the online training sites, not like actual gameplay, but I was in graduate school for Exercise, Physiology and Biomechanics. So I was actually making a video series on how to treat poker like a professional sport and that ended up being my graduate thesis was about when I went to grad school for Physiology and Biomechanics, and Exercise Science, it was all about how do I can basically create this, this aspect of this existing huge industry and I was the first to do it and so I got a number of high stakes pros that were clients, started making series is for all the the big online training sites, started writing for cardplayer, and Bluff, and all those magazines and then April 15th, 2011 rolled around and that was the day that the Department of Justice and DOJ said we’re accessing every online poker site in the United States actually, like they passed a law back in 2005, that disallowed banks from transacting with online poker sites in the US, but a couple sites decided they were going to go a different way and they got popped for money laundering, and they were masking their transactions. So all of the US players’ funds got locked up. Now, thankfully, I realized that I did not want to only make my living from professional poker and at that point, I had been boxing since I was 12 and I transitioned into MMA when I was 19, or so after I rehabbed for my Achilles tear 19 or 20 and did end up moving to Thailand for a little while and trained and fought over there and then came back and just decided, Okay, I don’t think that I want to get punched in the face for living. I’m going to go all in on this online poker stuff, but I’m also going to, it was actually an experience I had, I was training with the Miletich training center team. I actually interned there as well and they were some amazing former world champions that trained out of that gym Pat Miletich, Tim Sylvia Jens Pulver, Matt Hughes, Robbie Lawler, all these guys that are just like legends, absolute legends, former World Champions, and there are even more that came out of there as well. But I was at Mani Cox’s house, who was a manager for a lot of those guys and I had been over to Jen’s pullovers house previously, and the thing that blew my mind was he was a multiple time world champion and fought all over the world. He was living in a house like the one I grew up in. I’m like, how is this guy not super rich. He’s really famous. This doesn’t make sense and I went to his manager’s house that no one ever heard of, and it was like an episode of cribs and I’m like, Okay, I’m on the wrong side of this game, I need to get into business. So I started my first company, which was a mixed martial arts apparel line, basically like a clone of the clothing line, Tap Out with my own brand, and drove around to all the Midwest, mid tier fight shows and set up booths and tried to figure it out. I had no business background, I know what I was doing and started that company with a portion of my online poker bankroll and also with my student loan check. So I took a lot of risk. But, in poker, you’re kind of trained to be just hyper desensitized to financial risk in every way, shape, or form, because otherwise, the swings in those games will absolutely crush you. So thankfully, when the poker world calls Black Friday, when the DOJ and FBI raided pokerstars, and Full Tilt poker and seized all US players funds, a good chunk of my bankroll was already out and I had already started a couple companies.
Norman 11:13
Travis, I just want to understand this. So it was completely legit Monday, Tuesday, everybody’s funds get seized?
Travis 11:23
Yes.
Norman 11:24
So no warning, it was legal, and then all of a sudden outlawed.
Travis 11:28
So the UIGEA, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, passed in 2005, it did not make it illegal for you to play online poker, and it made it illegal for the banks to process the transactions of the poker sites themselves. As a player, we didn’t know who had what deals with the government. We didn’t know anything like that we were playing because they accepted player funds and we’re making a living and yes, so basically, from the player’s perspective, Yes, exactly that happened and I know, there were several of my friends who were who had not cash out a good chunk of their rolls to focus on business and they had not, they had just been even more successful than I was. So some of them had like a million dollars locked up. If they didn’t see for years, I mean, five, six years.
Norman 12:21
So they did release it after a while.
Travis 12:23
You eventually had to file suit against the DOJ, I think it was, like hire a couple of attorneys to prove that you were in, that those funds belong to you, and so forth. But there were a lot of pros who opened accounts under age, they would do that and like their parents name and things like that. So there were a lot of hoops that a lot of people had to jump through to get their money out and some people just gave it up. So the DOJ probably has a good chunk of those funds.
Norman 12:52
It amazes me that this can happen. I know a friend of mine had an online gambling site and he had asked me if I wanted to get into the business. But his deal was he was in Costa Rica. So when all this stuff was happening, and I don’t know if this had to do with the poker side, but I know on the gambling side, and sites around the world, or in the US were just shut down and luckily, he was over in Costa Rica, where he was able to survive because he had it hosted over there. It really is too bad when you’re doing something like you said, it’s like a sport. It is a sport and then you’re doing everything properly, and then you get screwed.
Travis 13:36
Yeah, and most of the pros like they were all doing things a legit way. They were paying their taxes there too. I mean, in the UIGEA itself it was really sketchy. I mean, it was a pork barreled into a port security bill after 911 that had to pass. It had nothing to do with port security at all. But some senator somewhere I forget the ones the senators name, but he had a son that basically like, was a degenerate gambler and so he had a personal vendetta for all of the internet gambling because God forbid it was his son’s fault for being irresponsible and having a bad habit. It had to be the industry’s fault, right? So he decided to be really sketchy and pork barrel it into a bill that was all about like anti terrorism. These sites were all offshore. None of them were headquartered in the United States. They’re all in like Malta and the Isle of Man and stuff like that, where they had legit licensure and so forth. The problem came to find out later, a lot of those sites were masking their transactions as e-commerce transactions like flower sales or golf balls and things like that and clearly that they were doing that to get by the banking issues that they’re having. So, but it ended up being a blessing in disguise for me because around that time, I had already been having a conversation with myself like do I want my legacy at the end of the day to be I was trading money with a bunch of other nerds on the internet and it was fun. I really loved it, I still do. But it definitely was not exactly something that I want to be remembered for, if that makes sense. So I started getting into the startup world more and more, had to start from absolute scratch on that, because I was only partially taking it seriously. I was only really doing enough to just like build a good little business that was making some money and had a couple employees. But it wasn’t something that was my life and very quickly, it became that and I realized that I could parlay my competitive nature that came from sports and from poker into business and that ended up being more competitive and more of an intellectual puzzle to solve and any of those other things had been. So really quickly realized, okay, this is something that I need to jump in with both feet into started, a number of companies over the next decade, I’ve been fortunate enough to have sold seven of them in that time, I have written a couple books, and now a venture partner and a couple VC funds, real estate investor, living right on the right on the ocean, and beautiful Marina Del Rey, and now sitting here and talking to you.
Norman 16:32
Very good. Now, we did skip over all that other good stuff. So just tell me. I am a huge MMA fan. Hayden knows. I mean, I’m watching every fight. So when you go over to Jen’s house, why, I don’t get like you said that the trainer’s house was a crib,
Travis 16:55
The manager.
Norman 16:56
Yeah, the manager. So what was the reason for that?
Travis 17:00
Yeah, well, Mani Cox, he was just an old school fight manager and he also was a small show promoter, and he had his hands in a bunch of different businesses and things like that and I didn’t know him all that well. But I knew him enough to know that he managed a number of the fighters, if not all of the fighters out of that specific gym and they were all fighting all over the world for a number of years. So he had a portion of all that, he had a portion of all of the sponsorships that they negotiated. He also was a promoter. So he had a portion of the ticket sales and things like that from his events and I don’t even know what else he was involved in. But he was involved in a lot of things and Jen’s like to be a world champion like he was. I mean, he’s an incredible guy, like I was an intern, and he let me train him. He believed in me, like I was 20, maybe 19 or 20, at the time and in undergrad, and he bought right in and was like this is this is awesome and so we became fast friends, and but I just learned that there was really no money in that sport at that time and there still really isn’t, unless you’re at the top of the top, somebody that’s in the middle of the road, you might make six figures, but a lot of the guys will have to have other jobs. They’re not going to be living lavish lifestyles like you would as a professional athlete in one of the other big four major sports, even though it’s really heavily covered by sports media these days. It’s still light years behind other sports in terms of pay, and that’s by and large, because that sport was only started in 93 completely, like the other ones have been around some of them for like 100 years.
Norman 18:45
Right. Yeah and the price you have to pay at the end of the day can be pretty tough.
Travis 18:51
Indeed. Yeah. Yeah. It’d be great at anything. I mean, Jens had to just live and breathe fighting. So he wasn’t spending time learning business at all. He didn’t need to, that’s not what he did for a living. So he just loved it. He did it because he loved it and I wish that I was that guy, to be honest with you, there are parts of me that wished I was so in love with one specific thing enough to want to give up a larger financial windfall. But that’s never been something that has clicked with me. I’ve always been more about resource allocation so I can build and grow and learn and start new things and be exposed to new things and that’s always been more much more my path.
Norman 19:39
It’s funny, I love watching boxing. I love watching Muay Thai. I love watching you name it. I’m into combat sports and when you’ve got one opponent and you’ve got against the ropes, and you can tell that certain people just don’t have that Killer Instinct, they’ll hit them, the knee will wobble. They don’t see it. Oh, I don’t know why they don’t move in and I’m kind of curious. You’re very successful. Is it because of that Killer Instinct?
Travis 20:15
I’m actually gonna surprise you and say no. I realized a few years later, after I retired from all athletics for the most part. Now, I still do like triathlons and ultra marathons and things like that. But that’s just more for fun. I did not enjoy competing in sports at all in hindsight. What I really loved more than anything was training, and learning and it was the process of being in the gym, and getting better every single day and seeing the summation of the small efforts day by day actually, yield results. That’s what I really was in love with, the actual competition was something that I really did not like at all. So I would say that my success is more, it’s more about that, it’s more about the day to day, it’s more about the process. That like just the summation of the small efforts, day in day out, like, for example, I very tightly managed my own productivity. I don’t know if you can see this, this is this is today, this is my task list today and so like, you can tell, and this is just a day like that feeds into a larger spreadsheet that’s broken out into the week, which is broken out into quarterly, which is broken out into annually. So every action I take is just explicitly deliberate and meant to evoke a very specific result, there are no wasted movements, I’m always blocking out time for learning and for improvement, for implementation. I’m always taking notes. So what I’m more in love with than anything is the process. So the killer instinct, I’m not sure that I actually have that to be fair. I just have the willingness to show up every single day and do the right things.
Norman 22:12
And get back up.
Travis 22:12
There’s that. Definitely. You have to do that.
Norman 22:15
So for anybody that is not watching the video. Travis just held up a pad of paper and I’m curious, why the pad of paper and why don’t you just break it down on Google calendar is something 15-minute increments?
Travis 22:32
Yeah, good question. So the easy answer to that is I’ve found that personally, it’s not as effective. I mean, as a tech entrepreneur, you would assume that that’s the first thing that I would do is somehow productize it. But I found that just for me in the way that I think and the way that my brain works, I found that when I first got started in business, I just had a legal pad and pen and eventually this whole system of categorization and prioritization and status indicators, batching, all these different things that I do now productivity wise, it’s just evolved through that, just through necessity and every single iteration that I make every six months or so I’ll run out of pages, I’ll have to alter it a little bit and print a new one and things evolve in things evolve out of it, just based on how I’m using it, whatever I’m writing in the margins are on the back, I’ll create little systems for that and without fail, things will change. If I were to do so, and I do use my calendar, and I do have a virtual assistant that’ll do a lot of my scheduling and things like that. We have a lot more infrastructure at my current company, like we’ve got 60 people and so quite a bit of that does also happen and the larger plan like the weekly, quarterly and annually, all that stuff is digitized. But the actual day like today, it just always felt more effective for me to have something clunky and annoying in my hands. That is just, it’s just there and I can’t shut it off. I can’t put it in my pocket and the act of physically checking something off of the lists releases endorphins, so it’s addictive to actually do that. You’ll find that people who do this, after they do something that’s not on the list, they’ll add that item to the list just to check it off. It happens to everybody. It’s fascinating.
Norman 24:28
I’ve got a question here and I know we’re going down a different path but I love blocking time. I do it in 15 minute increments and I do it on Google Calendar. I do my A task in the morning, I block off time for my email, I do my sees all at one time. So I can just get like 10 items or 10 tasks off. Is that how you’re doing it? When you come into the office in the morning? Do you just go directly to your A task?
Travis 24:56
I categorize a little bit differently and people ask me about this specific system that I use. I didn’t actually learn this from any resource. I didn’t learn this from any gurus. It was created by me, for me. So I tried like, people ask me, Hey, can you teach me this thing and I say, I can, but you might pick up some good habits, but my brain is not your brain and vice versa. So what works for me may not even work for other people, and vice versa. So well, the way I actually prioritize and categorize, I categorize by either venture that I’m working on, or the initiative inside the venture that I’m working on and so I’ll have blocks of the day that are devoted to those and then I’ll number things as well, in terms of the priorities. But inside of that, what I’ll do is, I’ve noticed personally that if I’m focusing on something cognitively challenging for more than maybe 45 minutes or so, I’ll start to slow down. So I have various things like every task on my list is no more than 15 minutes long each and if I have something that takes an hour, it’ll be 15 minute chunks, like four 15 minute chunks and the reason why that’s important is because then I can stagger in something that’s cognitively challenging with something that’s more like brain autopilot that still needs to be done. So you’ll see items on my list, like getting the mail or showering or eating a meal. Not that I have to remember to do those things like I don’t have some sort of weird short term memory loss or anything. I’ve found that if I alternate cognitively challenging, and non cognitively challenging tasks, I don’t reach burnout during the day, like I don’t have to take breaks. Those other productive items that don’t require conscious thought, are effectively my breaks. But it’s also still me being productive. So just fits the puzzle pieces of my day a little bit more closely together.
Norman 26:50
So the big question, and I don’t know, you can take some time to answer this. Regular desk or stand up?
Travis 26:57
I had a different answer to this pre COVID. I do have a standing desk and so I’ll use a standing desk for maybe my first couple hours of the day. But I would say about four or five hours of every one of my days, I’m spending on calls. So I don’t even need a desk for a lot of those calls. I’ll just have them on my phone and I’ll pace. I’ll lay on the couch or walk around outside. Just kind of whatever I haven’t been doing the last hour, I’ll just try to alternate that and get a change of scenery, get some fresh air, get inside, draw the blinds do that in the dark, just something a little bit different to always keep, additional stimuli coming in and keeping things fresh.
Norman 27:42
So I’d like to dig back a little bit to your backstory. I’m very interested in how you went from going from the gyms, selling apparel and then going to wear. How did it evolve?
Travis 27:57
Yeah, good question. So I graduated college, I got my master’s in December of 2010 and I was running two companies at the time. I was running the clothing company and I had recently maybe a year prior started an online fitness subscription site, which I had just maybe a couple months prior accepted an offer to merge that with another site that was getting more traffic but didn’t have the quality of content that I had. That site was called workout box, and ended up running that for about five years. But rewinding a little bit, I moved to Los Angeles with an intern of mine. She was moving out to Los Angeles and a friend of hers was moving out to Los Angeles and I thought to myself, well, there’s a lot more opportunity out there. So do you guys want to have a third roommate, so moved out was not making much money. I was maybe drawing $500 a month salary from workout box and I was the rest of my money was coming from online poker and was basically living on an air mattress in a closet and funneling all the rest of my cash into the companies and just like trying to figure it out, because I didn’t have a business background at all. I was just reading books, reading blog posts, talking to anybody who would talk to me, I had no mentors in business, I knew nothing. I knew less than nothing. So I got a bunch of DVDs on successful entrepreneurs and started watching them over and over and over again, because I also didn’t have any friends in Los Angeles. I’ve never been to California. So what I did was I realized that in one of those DVDs, one of the one of the things that they talked about was you have to find a mentor. Well, I didn’t know anybody like that. So I just called everybody on the DVD and one of the people who was on that DVD was Andrea Lake who was I think a previous guest of yours. She was the only person who even gave me the time of day and in hindsight, I understand why most of the rest of them didn’t, because this happens all the time every day. But thankfully she did and she got on the phone with me and just was very generous with me. I mean, she never, like people think of mentors, I think sometimes they think that it’s somebody who’s going to tell them exactly what to do and that’s not how it goes. She more would weigh in with her opinion, or a few words of advice here and there and we became friends more than anything and I just suddenly, she would introduce me to people where it made sense to do so. So I suddenly began to very slowly build a little bit of a network and I could ask people questions, and I could meet people and figure out what they were doing and show them what I was doing and get your feet wet with their thoughts. So little by little, I started to just build up a little bit more knowledge. But I was also doing a lot of things on instinct and thinking to myself, how would somebody do this, and it was just reading and trying to figure it out. So anytime I met somebody that had an MBA, or had a more traditional business background, they’re doing things in a completely different way and we were both fascinated with one another in that context, because anybody that had that traditional background, they weren’t doing things the way I was, and vice versa. So we would then learn from each other and get a whole lot out of knowing each other and so I was adding value to these people, just through doing things in a way that they had never seen before and they were doing things in a way that I hadn’t seen before. So that was actually really serendipitous, that was not deliberate.
Norman 31:34
I was just gonna say one of the things that Andrea mentioned, during the podcast, was the way you approached her and it was completely different. She said most of the time. Unfortunately, I don’t get back to people. But the way that you approached her stood out that I if she just said, I knew if I reached out to this guy, it would be different and she also said what she was kind of interesting, the student became the teacher.
Travis 32:01
Ah, that’s a nice word to say.
Travis 32:05
I’m not sure if I ever completely earned that. But that’s very generous for her to say, I would say still to this day, like her superpowers I could never, I could never have do what she does in so many different ways. I’m much more of a in the seat builder, executer, get things done, kind of guy and she is much more of the go out and meet everybody in the world and connects people kind of person. So in that way, we became like a really good pairing. Really good team. So we still learn a lot from each other to this to this very day. We just have very different strengths. But that’s flattering that she would say that.
Norman 32:52
Well, Yin and Yang, right?
Travis 32:54
Sure. Yeah.
Norman 32:56
Alright. So you’ve been on a podcast, and I’m not sure if it was just recently but Ryan Tansom and you mentioned that it was about stability and I found it really interesting. Your search for more stability. Have you found it?
Travis 33:17
Oh, man, I’m not remembering the context of the conversation. But I honestly think that one of the very strange silver linings about COVID and the pandemic in general is that it kind of forced me to be more rooted in one place. I’m very much a creature of habit. I wake up, go through a very ridiculous morning routine, work out and then I’m in the chair and working for the whole day. But I strictly cut myself off at like 5pm, I don’t work anymore, the rest of the day and then I just make time for other things and I’ve never been more productive in my life. It’s fascinating because pre COVID, I was traveling every other week for the whole week for business meeting with investors, meeting with strategic partners and trying to craft joint ventures and working on big sales deals and things like that and since COVID hit I mean everything happens digitally so I can have a very structured existence which has been it’s like perfect for me because I very much do thrive on routine. So I would say yes, I have found stability through routine, but I do still have a very high appetite for risk and I think I probably always will. So like for example right now I’m making another real estate purchase and it will like it is going to zap me for every single dime I have and I’m like, just split up by that experience, like just being able to, to be on the edge like that and push the boundaries. Like I don’t crave safety ever. I need risk always. That probably makes me sound like a lunatic. But it’s also served me pretty well, most of the time.
Norman 35:28
Yeah, I talked to Daniel De Masa and that yeah, that’s something that he says about you. So I want to know a little bit more about the viral hero hero book. So how did that come to be?
Travis 35:47
So viral hero actually started out as the blog of one of my prior companies. So I think it was company number six, if I recall, six or seven, one of those in there basically was a company called Up Share. It’s not around anymore today, the buyer, I believe, eventually shut it down or rolled it into their existing services, a competitor of ours. But we had to sell that company, it was a very strange series of events that led from some of my own and actually, we’ll go into that later when we talk about failure, I suppose. But the when we actually sold the company, the blog was one of my favorite parts and so I carved that out of the sale, and I kept it as my own and it just kind of sat there for several years and then a publisher heard me on I think it was Entrepreneur on Fire, or something like that and this was several years ago now and he must have heard an old episode and I basically, he reached out and said, Hey, this is fascinating topic that you talked about. Are you interested in writing a book about that said, Look, I kind of already have. So we took all those posts, gave them to an editor, she crafted them into a really wonderful format and it’s now on Amazon, and anywhere books are sold. Viral hero is basically about viral product mechanics. So when you think about viral marketing today, unfortunately, the tech media and business media and just the mass media in general has hijacked this word, this word virality and they’ve assigned it to social media, it’s actually not, it’s a very misleading thing, because it has nothing to do with social media. Virality, as we all know, now, if we’re talking about a virus, ie COVID, it spreads when an infected host comes into contact with other people who could potentially also be a host and just through that, just through touching them, or through some sort of an interaction of some kinds, a percentage of those people will also then get infected and then we’ll also spread it. Viral Marketing is effectively that but in business, and that has a much more broad application than just somebody sharing somebody posts or somebody’s video on YouTube or on social media at all. So I basically took all of the sites that I could find online from epidemiology and virologist, but I also took a lot of the research papers from big name investors, really, really smart entrepreneurs, that was still only scratching the surface of maybe, in the collection of it was maybe 50, like 50% of the way there and I said, Okay, how can I start to create something more complete, to teach people how to build businesses that actually can grow themselves and what I found by going down that rabbit hole was there are actually 12 types of virality that I dissect in the book. I dissect the math of virality, the business of time virality and business together. We talked about a lot of business metrics and how they relate to viral marketing, and so many different things. I also tried to ensure that it was written in a very friendly and approachable way. They’re really fun animations with a little Kung Fu Panda character, to just make it a little bit more fun. So I can promise anybody that is listening to this, and that’s interested in business. It is unlike any book that you’ve read on growth or marketing at all. If you read it and you disagree, I will refund 100% of your money.
Norman 39:36
That’s a deal. I actually, as you’re talking, I’m going I gotta get that. I’m in my day job. I’m in e-commerce and a lot of people come to me and What do they say? I want a viral video. So I manage people’s brands and of course they want a viral video. It’s simple. Let’s just be the Harmon brothers and pop them out one after another. But they don’t realize the process and it’s interesting that you said that I didn’t know the book actually laid out, you said 12 different steps?
Travis 40:11
12 different types of virality, much more than Yeah, much more than 12 steps. Like, for example, speaking of viral videos, I’ll give a free little nugget here. So, when people think of virality, they think of videos and that’s just kind of how the media has used that term. But if you think about the actual mechanics of a virus, and the way that a virus is transmitted, and the way that a virus continues to live, let’s think about the flu, like influenza for a second and say, Alright, when you have a flu strain, inevitably, epidemiologists are going to come up with some sort of a vaccine, a flu shot of some kind, but the flu continues to exist, why because it mutates and it becomes resistant to those specific vaccines and so it continues to live on because it continues to mutate. So if you think about a video, what happens when everyone in the world has seen that video, it dies, because everyone’s either exposed, and it becomes like, it’s either you’re infected for a bit, and kind of you recover, or you’re already immune, you don’t care about it at all. So that’s if that video itself were a virus, it would be a very ineffective virus. Now, on the other hand, if you think through a different lens, and you think about who is actually behind the videos, like what are people actually sharing and the answer is, they’re actually sharing YouTube. They’re sharing a YouTube video, the constant there is the YouTube player, the company itself uses different forms of user generated media as their viral mutations. Every single video, I mean, however, many different millions of if not billions of videos that are on that platform. Those are all separate viral mutations and by having all of those as subtle differentiations, between the strains of the virus, so to speak, no one is ever going to become immune to YouTube unless video so somehow it goes by the wayside. What the constant there is, the players being spread, the hosts are becoming like new fresh hosts for that virus, they’re going to continue to share it and continue to pass it on to more and more people. So every single time a video is shared, YouTube’s viral mutation is succeeding and so that becomes viral media and that’s more of a direct response marketing engine than then actually viral marketing. Because like, if you think about another form of virality, so that one is either embeddable or viral signature marketing, if you think about, for example, viral collaboration, some famous products like Dropbox or Google Drive, one of their core pieces of value is file storage. But what a lot of people think of when they use those tools is not the file storage itself, they think about the shareability of the files, the access than other people can gain. Now, if I send you access to a folder on Dropbox, I’m also becoming effectively a viral marketer of Dropbox, but you never know it, because you’re just getting core product value by getting access to files. So you and I can collaborate and create something of our mutual interest. So if you think about virality, through that lens, and the mechanics, the product mechanics that go into it, it will completely change the way you think about business in general. So that you can start to build in core product value around the concept of exposing others to what you do and the value you provide. If that’s the way that you do things, you won’t have to buy ads anymore, you won’t have to create content anymore, you won’t have to spend money on a PR firm anymore, unless you’re getting into crisis management or something like that, which is another story. But users if they have value, if you’re actually adding value to their lives, they will be your biggest sales force.
Norman 44:22
Okay, so I’m really curious, 50,000-foot level. If I were to say, okay, creative process and I mean, you’re big on this. So you’ve had hit after hit. Where do I start? If I’m listening to this, and I’m saying, How do I even look at trying to create something viral? Are there some common denominators that I could look at, to build out some sort of viral campaign?
Travis 44:52
Yeah, before we go into that, I’ve had some hits. I’ve also had some misses. I don’t want to claim to be like having the Midas touch or anything like that. I have learned a lot on the job and I’ve had some failures as well. But I have thankfully started to see more pattern mystic success because I’ve been able to leverage concepts like this quite a bit. So two answers to that question. One is about just business and idea extraction in general and the other one’s about viral mechanics. Biggest thing. So backing up, one thing that everyone talks about in business is that most businesses fail, plain and simple and to me, I was not really satisfied with that concept, because I thought to myself, okay, there have to be some core things that successful people who are having more hits than not are doing that other people aren’t and the biggest thing that I’ve found, like, if someone were to ask me today, what do you do when you have a new idea for a company? The answer that I always give is I try to forget it. I try to forget it period, like, because at the end of the day, statistically speaking, I’m an outlier. If I was my customer, and I was the only customer I needed, my opinion would count. But since that’s not the case, I’m an outlier. I’m one blip on the statistical radar, and I’m not building for that, right, I want to build for pattern ristic success across all of my prospective customers. So what I would do instead is I would take that idea, throw it a million miles away, and go talk to a customer segment that has money and I would have framework based structured conversations with that customer segment, the ones that have readily available contact information, and I would try to extract what’s painful, what they’re going through, what are they using to alleviate that pain now, where they’re going to find solutions for it? how valuable it would be for them if someone solved it, and what the ideal solution would be for them, if they could, like wave a magic wand and find the perfect solution to that problem. I’ll have 20 or 30 of those conversations, and try to find patterns in all those responses and that is what leads me to an idea that I would act on. Now, ideally, if we want to tie virality into that I would take some of the more powerful viral engines in terms of like just the, the flowchart of how they might work or from a concept perspective, how could I ensure like, for example, one of the kings of viral marketing is inherent virality, meaning there’s no value in a product, unless others are using it with you. For example, we’re on Zen caster and stream yard right now I’m on your podcast, there’s no value of either of these services whatsoever. If you’re using them by yourself, I imagine, like one of these, maybe you can live stream to yourself, for some reason. But for the most part, there is zero value for either of these services, if you’re just using it in a vacuum by yourself. The value becomes when you expose it to others and in so doing, you’re becoming that marketer, but you’re not seeing it that way. You’re seeing it as I’m getting product value that I want and this is from a selfish motivation. So what I would then do is I would marry those two together somehow, how can I take the problem and the solution that this customer segment with money and readily available contact information has given me? How do I marry it structurally speaking with a business model or a product structure, a product architecture that is just viral in nature, whether it’s inherently or not and how do I fit those together in a way that it was that would actually make sense and yield real value to the customer? If I can find the answer to that, then there’s something that’s worth investing in.
Norman 48:53
That’s a completely different approach than I’ve ever taken. Wow. That’s crazy. I got to, Hayden make some notes.
Haynden 49:04
On it.
Norman 49:05
Okay, good. Alright. So let’s jump over to scaling companies. So you’ve got a bunch of companies, you’ve had to scale them? How do you scale companies systematically?
Travis 49:16
So scale is a funny word. I mean, for those of you who don’t know, scaling is basically how do I ratchet up the magnitude of those I can serve? Or how do I ratchet up the magnitude of my measurable success in some way. So you might scale revenue, you might scale market share, you might scale staff, things like that, whatever you need to crank up. So when I think about scaling first and foremost, like for me, I’m the kind of entrepreneur that I have a certain level of scale in my head and if a business does not show a clear path that, I’m only interested. Now some people want to run lifestyle businesses to give them a really cool life so they can travel the world, have fun, and actually not have to work very much because they have a business that runs itself. That’s great. That’s not me. Like, that’s a lot of people, that’s most people. That’s not me. I’m more of like, I want to change the course of humanity forever and so I have a certain level of scale in my mind. So this is something I’m always thinking about. I’m glad you asked this. So the way that I think about it typically is very structured. There’s a great book that I would cite as the foundational knowledge that I started to craft around this for myself, when the pieces started to fall together a little bit more for me, and it’s a book called Traction. Unfortunately, it’s not the one by Gino Wickman. That’s a different Traction book. It’s fine. Not my favorite. But the one that I’m talking about is by Justin Maris and Gabriel Weinberg and what they’ve done is they’ve created a really actionable, very specific, very framework based path to just specifically marketing and growth and when they’re teaching, it’s more about customer growth and revenue growth and so they’ll basically take every what they call traction channels, which are basically like avenues of marketing, like direct sales, digital advertising, social media, PR, live events, like they have 19 different channels that they’ll list out, they’ll then say, Alright, we’re going to do a force brainstorming exercise to come up with three or four different ideas around every single one of these channels, every one of them and they won’t stop until they have as many ideas as they can on each one of them, regardless of how ridiculous they might sound and the reason that that’s important is because one of the ridiculous ideas that you come up with through this forced exercise, where you would have previously been like, that’s not the channel for us, it doesn’t fit, that could lead you to another really lucrative and really powerful idea for another channel that could fit perfectly for you. So once you have all those ideas, you’re going to go through and they recommend what’s called an ICE score, which stands for Impact, Confidence and Ease. I’ve actually added the two additional criteria in there, it’s cost and velocity. So impact confidence, ease, cost and velocity. So I would score them, low, low medium, and high for each one and I would pick. I would go through first and foremost, you’re going to find, once you go through that process of scoring, you’re going to just like x the whole bottom half, like the worst scoring things right away. From there, you can say, Alright, like and this is all called they call this the bullseye framework. So that’s the outer ring of the bullseye, you’re going to ignore it for now. So you have now the two inner rings, right? So you’re going to say to yourself, okay, if I had to get rid of another 10 of these, or let’s say another six or seven of these, so it leaves me with only three. Which of them can I research a little bit more to figure out which ones are not going to be the best for us right now. So you do a little research, and you trash the next ring of the bullseye. So now you have the very inner ring, which is three more ideas and you’ve got these three channels with at least three or four ideas each. You’re saying to yourself, okay, what can I do to determine which which of these is the winner, so you’re going to do what they call a smoke test, like you want to have a very cheap, quick and not resource heavy way to test these in a live environment to see which one will yield the most results for you in the quickest period of time and then will also show the most promised down the road. Once you’ve done that testing, you trash two and you pick one channel only and then you become the world’s foremost expert on that one channel, you make as much value out of it as you possibly can and this is just because as a human being in terms of time and energy and attention, like you can’t do five or 10 different marketing initiatives at once you’d not be any good at them, you’re going to be very mediocre at all of them. So you can choose one and you could become the best in the world at it and implement that as much as you possibly can then look to systemize and automate it, you can potentially just outsource it if you want to, if you can really create standard operating procedures that are very specific. Once that is yielding reliable mechanical results for you, go back and recycle the same exact process again, this time, using your numbers and where you are now and what your goals are. Now, after you’ve implemented that channel, you’ve seen results, go back and do the same thing again, go through the same exercise again. This time your company’s a little bit further, you’ve learned more certain channels might be appropriate for you now than they were before. That sort of process can also be used to scale other aspects of your company. Staffing and hiring resources like fundraising, things like that. That type of approach can be repurposed with some some minor alterations for any of those areas. So for me, it’s about systems, your business is a system of systems.
Norman 55:05
So on the other side of the fence, what do most people do wrong to get started with systems?
Travis 55:14
Probably not having them? Yeah, well, I mean, what they should avoid is flying blind. I think the big mistake that people make is not knowing, like not having a clear definition of success that’s based on facts. So people might think to themselves, alright, my conversion rate on a page is 10%. This sounds so one, only one out of every 10 people is becoming a customer, that sounds really bad. Just they’re going on instinct, they’re like, well, that must be failing. Now, if they were going through a process of doing their research and figuring out what the other benchmarks are in their industry for products like theirs, and so forth, they might find that the industry standard is six or 7%. So they might actually be crushing it and not even realizing it. So their problem isn’t actually in their conversion rate, it’s in the cost that they’re paying for their traffic or something like that. So if you don’t use like facts and science to define what success looks like, and define what good is, you’re going to be flying blind, and you’re going to be going on on instinct, which effectively is just gambling and you don’t want to do that in business, you want to always have the edge. So like, for example, one of the tools that we use at Grow Flow my current company, we use a tool called Culture app to do a lot of our like HR engagement surveys, performance management, things like that and it’s a really cool tool, because with our engagement surveys, they sound endlessly boring, but like we’ll do, we just did like a diversity inclusion survey a couple months ago, right? With everything that’s going on in the world. That seemed like a perfect time to do it. So we did it and had they not had a really great feature that would benchmark our, like the responses from our team against like the top 10% of other tech companies under 200 people, we would have no idea how to measure ourselves against those companies to know like, are we succeeding in comparison to other companies? Are we better than them? Are we failing? Are we like, how much are we failing by and so where should our attention go here? Without that comparison, it becomes really difficult for you to really just have any direction towards which initiatives you should greenlight because one of our core values is companies to do less better and we want to make sure that we’re picking the right things to do and we’re not doing everything. So that’s a really easy way for people who are thinking about systems to actually use them effectively.
Norman 57:52
So we’ve touched on systems, what about weighing risk, especially like it, if you’re going to well, risk when exiting, so you’ve had successful exits. What pushes you to pull that trigger?
Travis 58:08
It’s been a little bit different depending on the company. But like, in past companies, there have been times where I’ve said to myself, I absolutely hate what I’m doing. This is not what I thought it would be and it’s not going to scale to the degree that I thought it would, it’ll probably be a good business. I might get rich off of it in some like by some measure, but it won’t be meaningful for the entire world. So now that I know that now that I have that information a year or two years in something like that, I’m gonna look to sell it. So that might have been one reason that I’ve sold a couple companies before another reason might be, I just realized that some of my hypotheses were wrong. I remember there was a financial, it’s difficult to describe it. It’s kind of like a hybrid of Venmo and cryptocurrency years before, cryptocurrency became a popular thing and I realized very quickly that I didn’t know anything about financial licensure and we had built a product and we had beta users, and they were really excited about it. But my attorneys basically said, you can’t take this to the mass market because you don’t have any licensure or permits to do what you’re doing. In fact, there’s no legal precedent for doing what you’re doing, you’re basically creating a new currency and also you’re like a money transfer service, you’re gonna have to go raise a bunch of money and I didn’t know anything about fundraising at the time. So I opted to sell the assets in the company to Canadian financial institution. So that was another reason that I sold one of them and then there just have been a couple good offers that I was ready to move on and do something different. So it really kind of depends, I think, lately, what I’m working on now is much more in line with, we’re at a later stage in the game so our exit strategy will be more like a larger acquisition or an IPO or something like that, we just raised a Series B at the very beginning of COVID. So like, all of our hypotheses are proved out now it’s just up to us to execute as well as we possibly can. We got like 1100 customers across 10 states and I think we’re at about 6 million in annual revenue or something like that. So it’s still the company is still young and we have a long way to go. But like, I think that this point, it’s just up to us. It’s a new industry for us to really lead and advance the industry and become the 800 pound gorilla. So, the exit strategy there is just going to be a little bit longer, longer term might be a couple years down the road, and it might look like a NASDAQ listing. So we’ll see.
Hayden 1:00:54
Hey, there guys and gals. That concludes part one for our interview with Travis Steffen. Make sure to tune in next time to check out the rest. As always make sure to subscribe to the podcast keeps you in the know and helps us grow this show. Also, just a reminder, check out the Halloween giveaway, simply click on the link in the description. It’ll take you through all the steps. That’s it for me and I’ll see you next time.
Hayden 0:03
Hey guys and gals, this is part two of our interview with Travis Steffen. If you haven’t heard part one yet, make sure to go back and check it out. As always make sure to subscribe and like the podcast wherever you find it. That’s enough for me, enjoy the rest of the show.
Norman 0:18
In every episode, we always like to ask the guest for a quote, what do they live by?
Travis 0:25
I think the one that I gave you was realities of choice. I mean, for me, one of the first coaches that I hired in business was actually someone who is very, very deeply versed in law of attraction, which I thought was total garbage. When I first got into the game, like, I was very, I’m very left brained, very analytical, very scientific. But I did start to see evidence and parallels of a lot of very successful people that I really respected, that were completely living and breathing this thing and so I hired a coach to help me figure it out and help me figure out is there something here, her name is Christine Meyer, she just came out with a book, and really, really smart, just in this, especially in this one realm. Very quickly realized that, like, I mean, for a lot of people listening, like you’re typically most people will have a very strong opinion one way or the other about, like law of attraction and manifestation and so forth and they’re either going to be all for it or are all against it and what I would say to those people is, if you really think that the dramatic limitations of our biological human minds to understand everything about the universe, like if you think that that’s accurate, like your brain is actually able to perceive what’s really going on around you in every way, you’re kidding yourself. Like, we don’t even know what happens when we die, like this is that, like, that’s our limitations are pretty dramatic in the grand scheme of things. So for me, I had to just open my mind to another possibility of saying, All right, I don’t know everything, far from it and this seems to be a parallel with that a lot of the world’s most successful people live and breathe. There has to be something here and I need to find out what that is. Very quickly, I realized that it was like the power of my own belief in my own thoughts that we’re going to, like helping craft the world around me is beyond just the power of positive thinking, it really is beyond that. I’ve seen some very spooky and dramatic things happen through just being very disciplined about my own thoughts and what I allowed to permeate my headspace and so I’m like a firm believer in that, your reality is what you choose it to be, it doesn’t mean you’re going to close your eyes, snap your fingers, you wake up in a completely different world. No. But it does mean that like, for example, if I’m somebody that just has a very simple life with a very normal job, and I’m not satisfied with it, and I want to be Mark Cuban or something like that. Basically, I would have to close my eyes and start to think, okay, like, if I was Mark Cuban today, sorry, how would he feel and start to feel like that emotion that you imagine someone in that seat feels and then imagine, alright, what action would he take if he’s in my shoes, and just start to like, allow that to happen and you’ll become that person, you might not have the results, that person will eventually yield. But you can like make a decision to be the hero of your own story today and I’m not that guy. Usually that will be like the Gary V just to motivational stuff rah rah, like, I’m usually not that guy. I’m very practical, and actually kind of anti a lot of the stuff he says for the most part. But in this one case, I think like your reality around you is absolutely a choice. Like if I could wake up tomorrow and say to myself, I want to be an angel investor, having never done it before and say to myself, all right, so as an angel investor, I obviously need to learn as much as I possibly can about how to become the best angel investor in the world and I need to access to deals, I need to access to the network just like any great angel investor would, like this would be an ongoing practice for them. So that’s what I’m going to do and just the act of living that alread0,y like in that moment, that decision to start living that like that’s what I am. So this is what I do today. It goes astoundingly far.
Norman 4:40
So you’re also visualizing
Travis 4:44
Yeah, I mean, visualizing, but even beyond that. So it’s beyond just visuals like, it’s immersive, you’re actually living it and it’s not like even VR where it’s like, Okay, I’m living this thing, but I actually know in the back of my mind, it’s not real. Excuse me. Basically, it has to be 100% your reality, like, I’m deciding right now, this is me now, like, this is me now and that’s just how it is right? Like, it’s not, this isn’t a mask I’m putting on, this isn’t a costume that I’m putting on that I’m taking off and then I’m like, actually secretly, this old version of myself at the end of the day, like, I’m just making the decision at that moment, like, this is me now and that’s it and this is what’s happening. This is what’s in the process of happening and I just have to take the actions that are required along the way. For example, if I woke up tomorrow, and I said, Alright, you know what, I’m gonna, like, I want to go to Miami. Is there any doubt in my mind that I’m gonna like, that I’m going to be in Miami a week from now? No, because I have a GPS, I have a car, I have money in the bank, so I can buy gas and if I don’t, then I have every means to get that. But there’s a path, there’s a very clear path and all I have to do is follow it and thankfully, in today’s day and age, like everyone, basically everyone has unlimited access to unlimited information. You could ask me any question right. Now, I could say Hold on a second, get on Google and I’ll have the answer for you. So basically, it’s just a decision at this point, like this is me, now, the path is already there. Like I just have to do five minutes of research and then I have to execute and there’s no hesitation. There’s no doubt like, this is the like, I am this person and I just have to do what this person does.
Norman 6:45
I was thinking, while we were talking earlier on. I’ve never asked anybody this and I thought it was always this crazy question. But after hearing you say this, is that really your secret sauce?
Travis 7:00
I would say yes, I would say more so than people think. I have some gifts, I suppose. But most of what I do is learn behavior that anyone could acquire, like I don’t have, I wasn’t born into money. My mom was a teacher, my dad worked as a construction inspector for the city. We didn’t have money, we didn’t really have any money. I didn’t have anybody that was a mentor, I didn’t have any special access. I didn’t go to school for this or anything like that. I just kind of figured it out along the way, through making decisions and saying, Okay, I’m deciding that now I’m an entrepreneur and I just have to figure out what that means and now I have to figure out what the first thing is like, people I think oftentimes get wrapped around the 2 million things they have to do to get where they want to be. But if that’s just your identity, all you got to focus on is what you have to do today and that’s a much less daunting task. So for me, I think the secret sauce is just making a plan and believing and not being afraid of going broke. Like that’s another big thing. I think so many people are terrified of going broke and like I’ve taken huge risks before and I’ve gone so, so far beyond broke, like, there have been times in my life where I’ve been nearly a million dollars in debt. Not even owning any assets, like this isn’t, buying a bunch of real estate and having a title to a bunch of homes that have mortgages on them. This is like actual reality, like almost a million dollars in debt. Because of some really crazy things that happened in business. Even in those moments, like there was, I mean, there’s a little bit of anxiety there. But like the decision that I made mentally was alright, well, I’m gonna figure out a way to pay it back and like, for example, this last round that we raised for GrowFlow, like we’re a Cannabis software company, we build software for large Cannabis and Hemp operations across the United States and not the most popular sector for institutional investors. A lot of their LPs are not wanting to dabble into something that’s federally illegal, even though we don’t touch the plant. But it is still a very nascent industry, there’s a lot of volatility, there’s a lot of people going in and going out of business and a lot of investors didn’t want to touch it. So I probably talked to 100, I think the last count was like 194 investment funds at the end of the day that we pitch to and 192 of them said no. It would have been very easy for me after 50 of them, or after 100 of them or after 150 of them to be like maybe we need to figure out another way, because that was over the course of eight, nine months, even though the company was really healthy and growing really fast and the team was awesome and there’s just a ton of opportunity there and it was just the decision was, this is going to continue until we closed around or every investor in the country gets a restraining order against me. Like, those are our two, but it was binary, one was going to happen or the other was going to happen and I think just through that one decision, it became very simple like, this is going to be my life until it’s not. So I think just the commitment has been a secret sauce as well and I think honestly, a lot of folks who have had certain disadvantages in life, sometimes will, unfortunately, use those as, because I’ve had them too. I haven’t had the same ones as others have. But I think everybody is born on a different base around the base path, so to speak and everyone has some advantages, some disadvantages, some people are smarter than others, some people are stronger than others, some people are more resilient than others. Some people have a deeper network or more money than others, so you basically have to use what you’ve got, you have to play the hands that you’re dealt and regardless of what those hands are, and regardless of what your advantages or disadvantages are, I think it’s just important to make a decision and just stick to it until you reach the result that you want and you’re going to slip up and fall on your face and just kind of like every one of those times, you just have to be like, Alright, what did I learn? Alter your approach and try again.
Norman 11:42
Yeah, I always use the expression that, you get kicked between the legs enough times, the next time you get kicked, it’s not so bad.
Travis 11:54
Yeah, sure.
Norman 11:55
It’s still bad, but not so bad.
Travis 11:57
Yeah, maybe I’ll wear a cup the next day. Yeah.
Norman 11:59
Right. Exactly.
Norman 12:05
So now, I want to talk about hurdles and struggles. One thing I talk about, and I hate hearing, is when people say that people are lucky or the right place at the right time and they don’t realize how hard people have had it to get to where they are. So let’s talk about that. What have been some of your major struggles and how did you overcome them?
Travis 12:29
Yeah, so I mean, and I’ll tell you a good story about that. But first, I will talk about luck a little bit. I do think that luck exists, I think luck exists for everybody and I do think so one of the things that they teach you in professional poker is, in the short term poker is a game of luck. Plain and simple. You can’t control what cards come out, you can’t control what cards your opponents are dealt, or that you’re dealt and you can’t control what the dealer flops on the table. All you can do is make the best possible decisions you can with the information that you have, it’s a game of incomplete information. However, in the long term, poker is a game of skill, because inevitably, the odds are going to even themselves out. If, for example, I get all in with you before the flop, and I have a pair of aces and you have a pair of twos. I’m a four to one favorite, plain and simple, I’m gonna win 80% of the time right there. But 20% of the time, you’re gonna catch a two, or you’re going to get back to a straight or something is going to happen, where I’m like, my money will go to you. But as a poker player, I’m celebrating that hand regardless of the outcome, because I know that 80% of the time, like I have a positive equity in that decision 80% of the time, and I will get every single dime I have in the world in on that hand and I’m the kind of guy that will take an even bigger risk and say I have a 50.1% edge, I’m getting all my money in the middle. Because I have a statistical edge. If you continue to play hands, and you continue to play hands over the long term, the luck will even up. So that means luck absolutely exists. But it exists in the short term and if you continue to play hands and you continue to try over and over again, you’re going to reach the long term the statistics will even out and a lot of old school quotes will say like I find the harder I work the luckier I get kind of thing and that’s why, it’s all it’s just simple math. So like for me, I think the hardest workers are the ones that definitely put themselves in a position to get lucky more often than others will. So let’s see for me, something that happened that did not go well. I was running a workout box for five years with my business partner Simon Turner. He’s a brilliant engineer and we built that company up, ended up selling it to a publicly traded company in Las Vegas. I took my portion of the payout and I started a company that was kind of like a rent an engineer fractionally with product management included service. So as basically, if you can’t afford a full time software engineer as a start up, or something like that, you can rent a portion of the software engineer, and you’ll get product management included, give us your job, we’ll do it, it’ll go a little bit more slowly, but you’re gonna pay less, it’s gonna be a fixed monthly rate. So that started to take off a little bit, we cracked, low six figure revenue in the first year with the skeleton crew. But I realized that I just hated running that company, it was a lot of just angry client babysitting. So I looked to sell it, sold it to graphic arts from a man in Manhattan. But I had sold, that was some of the fifth company that sold at the time, and I was in my mid 20s. So I was cocky, I was pretty brassy. I was like, I’ve done this before, it’s fine and I didn’t hire an M&A consultant, I didn’t hire a business broker, I just went with an attorney to draft the paperwork and went that route. So they negotiated a deal with me, they would make a down payment and then they would do an urn out and like, as the company moved on, like, they would just pay me a chunk every month and that’s how I was going to move forward. So, took my deal with them and I got back in business with Simon Turner and he had just like, I think bought a piece of real estate with his chunk and we leveraged that sale into a hard money loan that allowed us to start another company, which started doing phenomenally well. We had like 250,000 users within six months and we were just about to add our monetization pieces and the buyer of the prior company came back to me, and they said, we’ve run the numbers and we’ve realized that is going to be more expensive for us to pay you the money that we owe you than it will be for you to sue us and have us defend ourselves in court for the next couple of years. So go kick rocks, and we’re gonna keep your company and not pay you another dime, See you later and obviously, I’m panicking because I’m like, well, we had a contract, like, in my naive 25 year old mind, contracts are the law, right? So no one can break them and blah, blah, blah. Well, what most people don’t realize is like when you get to that level, people break the law all the time and it’s a lawyer game, like it is a game of lawyers and settlements. It’s a cost benefit thing. Your favorite companies have broken the law so many times that they will forget how many times they’ve broken the law and they’ll settle out of court and things will happen like that, or the people that they’re up against, like, they’ll know that they shouldn’t even sue them because the other side is going to have a ton of legal firepower and way more money and they’re never ever going to win. So my attorney basically said that they’re right. Like, they’re correct in their calculations. So I was crushed, because we had to go back to the hard money lender and say this deal was now off so that what we leveraged against is incorrect and they called the loan. So suddenly, I had several hundred thousands of dollars of debt on my shoulders and Simon had the same thing on his. Now we both did what anybody would do in that situation: we moved to Silicon Valley into jobs at an early stage startup and we just decided to build somebody else’s company for a little while, while we started to pay those debts back by any means necessary. Unfortunately, shortly thereafter, life happens and one of Simon’s close friends was mentally ill, they went on vacation together in the Canadian Rockies, and his friend killed him and so Simon’s debt then goes over to me. So I have both of our debt now. Yeah, so he, like, I didn’t want that to go to his family, his family wasn’t gonna be able to afford that. So now I have just half of a million dollars in debt and I’m thinking to myself, What am I going to do here? Like, I don’t want to declare chapter 11 because it’s going to be so hard from I won’t be able to be an officer and publicly traded company for a certain period of time. I won’t be able to go get a loan from a mortgage banker for seven years at least, or something like that. Like there are a whole bunch of things that happen when that occurs, and it would torture my reputation with a bunch of other people in business because I would have completely screwed over this lender. So I started thinking to myself, okay, what can I do? Like, I’m just going to figure it out and I have recently heard a podcast with Chris Sacca, legendary VC with Lowercase capital, who, gosh, like he was a day trader before they own a craft, he was leveraged to the max. I think he had something like, I don’t know, it was like he had smoked for like $25 million, or something like that and he was in debt that much and I basically just figured out a way to pay it back and after listening to a couple of those episodes, I’m like, all right, I am going to figure this out. So, just do some creative negotiating with the lender, consulting deals, starting other companies on the side, working my ass off in Silicon Valley, and doing whatever I had to do and after, like, I think three years, I was able to get out of the hole and it was just living in a studio apartment the whole time and gave up my car, like everything like that, and just did what I had to do for those three years and then the second, I had that debt wiped away called the company that I have been building. For two other founders, I was not the founder of that company. That’s not the CEO. I was like, Alright, this is the end of my tenure here and I’ve got to go back to doing what I do and so that was, it was a huge failure, because it wipes away all of my prior successes, like financially, basically overnight, and then some, and I had to start from way below scratch. But, in hindsight, everyone pays tuition. Yeah, it is what it is.
Norman 21:24
On Amazon, we call it the Amazon tax. So at the end of the day, what did you learn from it?
Travis 21:37
Well, I mean, the tactical things I learned from it was like, don’t skimp out on your service providers when you’re trying to make big deals, like make sure that you’re looking at a lot of experts and pay them their money, they’re worth it. That was a big one. Another big one was I was really getting a lot of gratification, a lot of validation from being seen as an expert at that point in my life and I told myself, I am so naive and I don’t know what I’m doing nearly as much as I thought I did, I’ve just effectively been, I’ve been very fortunate, like, I’ve worked hard, but I’ve been very fortunate and I have a lot more to learn. So I’m going to go on a hiatus of teaching anything to anyone. So you’ll probably see a gap in any of my media appearances for about four or five years and those ended in like 2015 and they didn’t start again until this year. Maybe last year and that’s why because I basically said I want to go on hiatus from teaching anything, I’m going to go back to being a student, even if somebody is like, just like an Uber driver, or they’re working at a restaurant or something like that and like some people go, what can that person teach you? A lot, like they actually have a lot of really great lessons to teach and a lot of awesome wisdom in life. So I wanted to be everyone’s student for many years and so I’m still on that train pretty hard. But I did decide inevitably, like, Okay, I’m gonna start to give some of the lessons that I’ve learned to others again, but it did forever change me in that way. I’ve never even considered the same mindset where I’m like, Oh, my gosh, I just know everything and everything I touch turns to gold, I was very cocky at that point in my life, it’s just, it was not the way to be successful at all.
Norman 23:25
So let’s turn it around. Let’s talk about some of your successes.
Travis 23:29
I mean, like, on the surface, like this is a harder topic for me to talk about, because I’m like my own toughest critic. I suppose the exits have been lovely. Like a lot of them, I haven’t even raised money at all. So I’ve owned like either 100% or 50% of the equity and I’ve had a co-founder or something like that. There was a company that I started with a friend of mine who’s now one of the sea levels at a GrowFlow with me. He and I started like a side hustle in 2015 and maybe we invested three $400 on it. One of the first clients that we got, six weeks later, he was like, this is awesome and I really want to buy your company, like would you sell it to me? I’d give you like 50 grand for it. Like done. Like, this is of course Yeah, sure, like a six week turnaround, turning $300 into 250 grand. Sure. So that was a fun little win and then another one that I’ll share that was fun was every once in a while I’ll search for like fun little unique opportunities and so I found that there was a guy that had been squatting on the domain name, thebomb.com, which is a fun little just phrase that a lot of people will use in pop culture or something is thebomb.com and he was just squatting on it. There was nothing there and so I just looked and did a DNS search and got in the Whois database and I found who the guy was and started to try. It just bludgeoned him with emails and eventually he responded and was like, I was like, Hey, I would like to buy this domain from you, are you planning to use it for anything and we got into a dialogue, eventually he sold it to me for $17,000 and I turned around, and there was a website, I don’t know how big they are these days, but there were maybe three or four years ago. They’re huge The Chive. The Chive was like a big file content site and I think they were like the ones that were created like the whole Keep, keep calm and carry on kind of anyway, big, they had a lot of traffic and they were a huge, huge, uniquely generated content, meme site, things like that. So I turned around, reached out to them through Andrea, actually, and Andrea actually came in on the deal with me and so we bought thebomb.com for 17 grand and four days later sold it to The Chive for 80 grand. Just that was fun, a fun one too.
Norman 26:01
Nice. Nice. Well done.
Travis 26:05
Thank you.
Travis 26:06
Yeah, so those I would say those are my favorite. They were not like the biggest things that I’ve done, but they were probably like, the closest thing to alchemy, like just turning coal into gold. Like in one swipe of the wand, the magic wand so to speak. So those are some of the ones that I’ve made that are my favorites.
Norman 26:24
Yeah, so those successes sound fantastic. But I do want to know a little bit about GrowFlow. Can you tell me more about that?
Travis 26:31
Sure. So GrowFlow. So actually, this is the company, the first company that I’ve actually come on board as CEO for actually didn’t start this company. This is the first time it’s ever happened in my career to date. I was always very just, for whatever reason married to the idea of being a founder and inevitably, I just found that so I had been working with the two founders of GrowFlow, since they started the company. They went through an accelerator program that I was a guest mentor at and they saw my talk and reached out and basically said, hey, we’ve done everything that you said to do in your talk, this is what happened, like, what can we do now and that’s pretty rare, when you get somebody that implements things that explicitly and it’s just that willing to because I mean, if you’re giving advice, most people will think it’s amazing and then they’ll just go back to living their lives. They won’t actually implement things and when you hear about somebody actually taking your advice, for me anyway, I’m much more inclined to give them more, because I know that it’s not going to go to waste and not wasting my time. So I started to have calls with them once a week for about 45 minutes and I said, All right, have you thought about this, do this thing do that thing and they started to realize very quickly over a couple years, the company was growing faster than they knew, I mean, this was their first company, they didn’t really know much about scaling companies and they approached me and said, Would you consider coming on as CEO and I had just started another company, and we had just raised money for it and so I was against it. I was dead set against that. I said, Look, I’ll help you with your search, because I’m not sure if this is the right time for me. But at one point, I said, Alright, you know what, until we find the right person, I’m going to come on board for 90 days just like I’ll be the Ghost in the Machine. Like no one will know that this is me, no one on the certain like in the outside world will know that I’m running the show, like I’m just gonna put the hat on for now and then when we find the next CEO, like, I’ll transition it to them and really quickly, I found that the team was really enthusiastic about having a new leader and I was not expecting that. I was expecting a lot of people to be set in their ways and really loyal to the founders and they were but the founders weren’t the only ones that knew that they needed some more seasoned leaders of help. So actually it was a really great situation and I agreed to come on board, full time as the CEO and had to find a CEO of my other company to take my seat, which, he’s still there today and that’s going great. So GrowFlow is we do compliance inventory management, point of sale, analytics and sales tool for Cannabis and Hemp companies in the United States. Basically, we are the backbone and the back office software that helps Cannabis companies run their businesses. We are one of the market leaders. I think we’re the number two or three option in the country right now. But we will just based on our pace, and our trajectory, we will be number one easily within the next calendar year. We’re about 60 people today, about 6 million in annual recurring revenue. We’ve raised $10 million total, eight and a half of that came April 1 of this year. So right as all COVID shutdowns are happening, and then the financial, the world financial system just cratered. So we are very grateful and very fortunate to close that when we did.
Norman 30:15
Well, very timely.
Hayden 30:19
So at the beginning of the interview, you said, you got into business because you wanted to make change in the world and you were trying to think of ways of like, visualizing how you could achieve that. So at this point, do you think, are you happy with the amount of change? You see the change that you’re making the world and maybe, if not, what’s the next big thing for you?
Travis 30:42
Yeah, I’m definitely not happy, I’m not satisfied whatsoever. I definitely think that like for example, the level of impact I want to make will be one where it’s, like, will change the course of humanity’s future forever and so like, I’m not satisfied with just having a good business, I’m not satisfied with just having a market leading business, I’m not satisfied with anything like that and business isn’t even the end game. It’s like the engine of impact. So like, for example, one of the ventures that I’ve always, always wanted to get started with, but it’s, like a theoretical mega structure at this point, it’s a space elevator. So it’s basically like, it would require raising well over a billion dollars, and mounting a 100,000 kilometer long cable off of an oil rig off the coast of Ecuador, along the equator into low Earth orbit and then having robotic tethered climbers transport large, heavy objects into low Earth orbit without rocket propulsion like that’s, theoretically speaking, that is one of the only possible ways to colonize other planets, unless you want to send like a couple people, and very few very light things through rocketry to like, populate that planet. But there would be no mass migration event, there would be able to be no mass exploration. Because rockets like there are only 10 entities in the history of humanity, who have ever sent a rocket into space, ever. Like SpaceX has spoiled all of us by making us think that rockets are easy. They’re not, like one of the hardest things to do for human beings to do, they’re prohibitively expensive, they’re horrible for the environment, they can’t carry heavy objects to space and they’re super dangerous, one out of every five or six of them explode. So it’s a scary thought to think that we’re basically tethered to this rock and we’re just like prisoners on it, we couldn’t get off of it if we tried. So basically, what I would love to do, it’s like to me unlocking access, like economic access to space for the masses. To me, it would be like a bigger deal than inventing the internet, because you’re just unlocking, not just unlimited, like possibility, but we don’t even know the kinds of things that we’ll find. Like, I would love to be a part of something that’s that impactful. So I’m like, to me, I haven’t even gotten to my own one yard line yet.
Norman 33:32
So Hayden, with that being said, you know what’s really cool?
Hayden 33:37
Norman 33:38
We’ll know that guy.
Norman 33:44
So we’re winding down to the end of the show and I always have one question that I like to ask our guests and that is, do you know a guy?
Travis 33:55
Yeah. I mean, one of my closest friends.
Travis 34:03
His name is Joe Stolte and right now he’s the Chief Revenue Officer for GrowFlow. Well, actually, he was the co-founder that I sold that company with and I told you that we sold it in about six weeks. So Joe, I actually got really close with Joe because we started basically like an accelerator like a tech incubator house together in Venice Beach. It’s like a seven bedroom, three level house with several different startups that were in it. He was running a music company. I was running a couple different companies at the time and he had that traditional business background. He had gone to school for business. He had been a manager at, he had been management consultants, he had been like a leadership position at Microsoft. He had run a venture fund. He was a real estate investor. He was doing all these things in very specific ways that I was completely unfamiliar with. So I basically was like a sponge and listened to everything that he said, and we just really fed off each other’s energy and we’re still really close today. But like he’s, like still probably one of the most impactful people in my life. Like, I definitely feel like I’ve learned more from him than I probably have from anybody else at this point.
Norman 35:17
Oh, that sounds great. I can’t wait to reach out to Joe. But I’ve got to say, Travis, there was a ton of information that you provided today. I thoroughly enjoyed it and Hayden’s gonna have a lot of writing to do, because there were so many references that you made, I got to check them out. So anyways, thanks again for being on.
Travis 35:37
Awesome. I appreciate you for having me on, Norm.
Hayden 35:42
That concludes our interview with Travis Steffen. Make sure to tune in next time for an interview with Bob Heere. Bob is on faculty at the University of North Texas in the sports management department. This is a great conversation because Bob’s one of those guys who construct those himself into uncomfortable situations and has a pretty unique view right now because of his place in sports and education, both of which are heavily impacted by COVID. Anyway, make sure to check it out, and I’ll see you next time.
