On this episode we have the architect behind the new Penn Station – Alexandros Washburn. We get into the obstacles of pulling off a 25 year long project like this and the politics behind city planning. We learned a ton about the behind the scenes of what goes into a city like New York, you don’t want to miss this one!
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.
