Chris Krimitsos - Start Ugly

Full Episode Transcript:

Chris Krimitsos - Start Ugly

Are you stuck in your creative journey today? We talked to the incredible unique solopreneur Chris Krimitsos. Chris the author of startup, many talk about culture and community as it relates to their companies or events. But there are few people on the planet who have truly woven both of these key elements into their business.

Like Chris has done with PodFest. Chris will inspire you to clear your path and start ugly today. What's up. How's it going guys? Thank you for that intro. I love the intro to your show is amazing. Thanks, man. Yeah. Yeah. Those things are fun to make. They really are. It's exciting. It's exciting. I can't believe that we have you.

You're fresh off pod master masterclass right last week. And I always think to myself after seeing you on the screen so many times during pod Fest and the virtual stuff that you're doing and the masterclass I'm thinking to myself, do you just go to sleep for four days? I did this weekend. I slept in the afternoons.

I I barely recovered, but yeah, it does take a lot out. What happens is you wake up still with adrenaline the next morning, and then you pass out in the afternoon after you go. As the last stretch was a five day stretch and then you've you recover over a couple of days, for sure.

It's unbelievable. And so for those of you, and you don't know yet what pod Fest is, you cannot change your channel, go to another anything, because you're now talking to the person. If you've ever thought about doing a podcast, if you've ever thought about starting a YouTube channel, you've ever thought about doing anything from a content creator standpoint.

This is the man who can get your mind junk cleared. If you pick up this book, I'll start ugly and really get you on your path and get all of that stuff past you. Because I think Chris I've used start ugly thing. I put this book. Behind me in my office. I do, zoom calls and everything. And like we all do, and I put it behind me.

And the one of the reasons why is that I'm always referring to it so I can just point to it. But also it's like this post-it note for ugly. It just shouts at people and they're like, Does that say ugly behind you? So it's a nice little conversational thing as well. And it looks like you actually put a sticky note on it, right?

Yeah. My favorite story about the sticky note graphic was my friend has his mom saw the book on the table and she goes, why would you put a post-it note to deface your friend's book? And she got really upset with them and he couldn't stop laughing cause she didn't realize it was part of the book cover and she was admonishing her son.

Like how could you do this to Chris's book? Start off by talking about this premise. I'm very familiar with it. I use it all the time and I knew that on me. And if you say start ugly, a lot of people think we'll just go without doing anything. And that's not really what you're talking about.

You're talking about doing it the right way and just clearing some stuff out of the way before doing it. So if you would just maybe unpack the the startup. Yeah. So start ugly. It's very simple. It's not, it's no matter how we all start at anything. If you look back on it, you're like, wow, that was a start ugly.

Even if you had it buttoned up. So the premise is not start ugly, stay ugly. It start ugly and perfectly execute from the beginning. But most overachievers use the word perfectionism to get started and most not necessarily underachievers, but people that are afraid of getting started. They'll say they're not ready yet.

So you have those two extremes, but underlying both of those is fear. So it's the F being afraid of what's on the other side of it. So start ugly just says, Hey, do some research, put a timeline, announced that you're going to do something and get started. And really the cool part about the book is unlike most business books, it's a parable, it's a short story about someone experiencing that they're stuck, which is basically all of us at some point or another, and they have to find their start ugly moment.

In that moment. It's a big crescendo bye in the book. So it's a really interesting case study. Amazon has been very supportive of the book. We've sold quite a few times and it's a, we purposely made it a 30 fiercely know like myself, 45 minutes, tops read and you feel accomplished. You understand the point.

And I took the. We give podcasters this advice all the time. They ask us how long should our podcast be. And we always say, as long as the content is good. So the book is 99 pages and most of it's graphics to be quite Frank with you, there's a lot of graphics in it intentionally. So we designed the graphics to integrate with the word.

So I'm a big fan of the. Physical copy, because it's good to have around staring back at you. I like, I know you say you ha I have mine. I carry mine wherever where people think, Oh, you're promoting a book. I go no, exactly what you said. And I say it all the time. I put it like right here. And when I give myself excuses, why I can't get started, I'm like, okay, my advice, I'm the start ugly guy.

I got to get started. And I always learned from starting. Cause then you learn, okay. I didn't know that to do these three things and you could get gone thinking is I'm the biggest time stealer that we all have? We think too much, therefore we don't get started enough. Yes. Perfectionism, like you said, is just a, it's a major crossroad for a lot of people, myself included.

And of course, we all go back to that. First time we got in front of a camera, we got in front of a mic and we're all cringing me. You know what? No one else remembers that stuff. Yeah. I like to go back and listen to that stuff because I like to feel good about how far. That I've come. And I think it's important for people that helps with that perfectionism thing.

Nobody remembers that time in high school when you embarrass yourself and did whatever you did, it's really about living in, in the now and getting things accomplished going forward. So it's a great story. And I like the example you use to at the beginning of the book where you have the, basically the lumber company and how the evolution of.

Of the guy for getting where he had come from. And I think that so powerful that we always forget, like we, and even you have some examples later in the book of companies like Sears and circuit city and how they've, they didn't adapt to change. Heck we could even talk about blockbuster, great companies that had a great idea, but they forget that we have to always be trying things by starting ugly.

h with Sears, they started in: 1896

And they were the first catalog company, or at least the first that would cater to people. And what they did was they catered to African-American households that wanted to buy really nice goods watches and different things, but they couldn't go into stores to buy them. So they were able to cater to a and be revolutionary in that African-American households could buy goods through the catalog.

And then they were able to transition from a catalog company to a big box. They were the first big box retailer. I know a lot of people know Walmart Kmart, but it was Sears was the first, but then they were also the first to do private labels, diehard battery. You go craftsman tools like these things.

Sears is pioneer from the beginning. And the craziest thing I know, we all know this. Most of us know this anyways in the nineties, when Walmart beat Cedars. That was the moment for Sears to go back and be an online catalog company and beat everybody. But unfortunately they didn't have the vision Jeff Bezos and Amazon did.

And all these big companies gave that territory over to Amazon. And Amazon was focused on being a catalog company to everybody. And if you guys recall the case study with Amazon is very simple. Amazon chose books, and that was it actually a very pivotal choice because at the time books were something, everybody searched, they were decentralized, not every bookstore had every book and something where Jeff could have created a centralized repository of books.

And if he didn't choose books, I don't know if Amazon would be here today. So that was a very crucial decision in the company's founding. Now we all know what people don't realize is they know Amazon is of course it's the biggest company. No, they weren't. They were a little company where a guy had a little, a lot of people.

I've seen the picture of Jeff in a crappy little office with Amazon, almost spray painted on a sign behind him. And now they're this behemoth that just keeps growing and it's because. They haven't forgotten the start ugly philosophy. And if anyone does, if I do a lot of stuff on Amazon there's links that are still broken, that they're fixing in real time, Amazon is the ultimate start ugly company, and they're starting ugly across spectrums that most people have no clue about.

So it's interesting to watch. How quickly that philosophy has allowed them to become the largest corporation in the world. Yeah. And even some of the things they're doing now and it started with I can't say her name because she's in my room here and what that's doing for voice, which when you think about podcasting is voice.

And so now they're even putting podcasts in Amazon music. And I think dad is a major step. It goes back to, Hey, w why not? We've already got. All this data on people. We know what they like, things of that nature. I What are your thoughts on that? Chris? I have a partner that's on the cutting edge of what we call ambient voice technology.

And that's a, what? Alexa, Google mini, all that stuff is Siri. My first thought is a poor Apple, had the advantage and anything else? Steve jobs passed away. They shelved Siri has not really improved since it came out, but bayzos put it out. Understood the vision to let's experiment. I have a friend that's one of the first hundred developers on Alexa.

He actually created the official hurricane tracker for Alexa cause we're in Florida and he and I are partnering up creating ambient voice technologies for podcasts or so it's an area that I play around with quite a bit. Amazon is already a player, which is really surprising to me. I do know that Amazon's a big player.

We all know Amazon's a player, but for Amazon's downloads to start showing up on people's players, as quickly as it has really surprised me. I would think it would take maybe a couple of months, but they're going to be very dominant very quickly. I believe. Cause I'm watching. I get to see 'em because of what I do.

I get to see people's downloads a lot and I always, if I'm consulting, I want to see what's going on and Amazon's registering the way now Spotify is registering almost across the board, depending on where you're at, but now Amazon shown up overnight as one of the top download producers for these podcasts.

Or so if that's what it like right out the gate one or two things are I got to look at one, it could be that these are the early adopters there's that got onto Amazon. And there wasn't enough inventory just yet. I don't think that's the case. I think Amazon knows how to integrate things and over time they'll integrate it.

However, I do think there's a first mover advantage and then the invoice. So let's talk about these devices in our homes. What people don't realize is they're getting smarter every day. So I talked to my Devices. And I ask them questions and I engage them. And were they pretty dumb six months or a year ago?

Absolutely comparatively. But as they progress, they get smarter and they anticipate. Eventually Jim and Christie's things will be prompting us before we prompt them. And then for podcasting, I don't see people listening to podcasts like in the house, unless it's a news flash weather. I just don't see us listening to an hour.

Cause you're not gonna listen to an APS episode. It's I can see music, but I can't see We're going to listen to Joe Rogan together and you got your little girls, like I got two daughters, your wife's in the other room. Maybe she's not a fan of Rogan. She wants to listen to a meditation thing. So there's certain things that those things will be good at.

However, there it's integrating now with our, like what you said with the podcast. So the question is, and you're asking the right question. How does that play out? What, what does that integration, that hybrid model look like? So one of the things we think is going to happen. So let's say the two of you have.

This cast on Alexa and I talked to her and I said, Hey, I want to see this exact show Dealcasters. But I also want to ask you guys a personal question that has nothing to do with the show, but it's your expertise. So I'll say, Alexa, can you send a question into Chris and Jim? I want to ask about the product, blah, blah, blah.

You're then are going to receive that question. So every day you can say, Hey, any questions for us? And you're going to answer it to Alexa. This is something we're developing. So then that answer is catalog for the next thousand questions that are the same. So you never have to answer it again. Now that's level one level two is if you guys become really famous and people are seeking you, which could happen, honestly, because of the way everything happens.

You can charge now for that for that premium service of asking the Dealcasters premium questions. So then you could charge a $5 Patrion fee. Let's call it or Alexa fee. For me to then have direct communication with you on a monthly basis, you might have a thousand people paying you. So that's where we see that evolving that to tell you any further than that.

I don't know. And I don't like predicting, like when COVID happened, everybody predicted that we're going to go into a huge recession. That didn't happen. So I always say whatever people predict, I usually say the opposite is going to happen. People got hurt all that. Yes, economically, but people are buying more stuff than they ever have.

And obviously Amazon's doing great. Some companies not. So you gotta be careful and prediction. So right now I can only see that far out. I don't know what that next frontier is. Cause it might, it all depends on human beings, that's actually a great a great point an idea, because as it is if you think about chatbots, a lot of.

Chatbot stuff is about frequently asked questions that if you ask the body can answer it. So that makes a heck of a lot of sense to allow this highly intelligent AI, to be able to do the same thing for you. And I think that's actually pretty exciting. I guess we're going to have to, we'll be getting an invoice for this for this advice you gave.

So I think the deal with that for us on deals, there's a lot, listen to the, I don't think we'll be searching with our fingers pretty soon. So I do think it's going to be talking to the devices because think about how much more intuitive it's Hey can you get ahold of Chris and Jim? Or can you ask him XYZ?

So then your bot, your voice bot will answer me back in your voice. So we all know about deep fakes, but basically just means that these robots could mimic our tone and our voice. So I can see Gary V having Gary Vaynerchuk was, if you don't know, he's a very famous entrepreneur, but I could see that I could see people paying for premium access to Gary and he gets, pray, ask thousands of questions.

So he could funnel that into some kind of tribe. And then who knows, maybe it's not a pay. Maybe it's Hey, I'll let you into my tribe. If you do these five things on social for me. But that's, what's about to open up and I don't I'm getting on the forefront with my partner, Steve, on this we're joint venturing, and we're going to figure it out together.

We'll see. I don't, I think in three years we'll have a more better picture. In the meantime, I think we're all going to be experimenting, trying to figure it out. Any any thoughts in general? I feel like. Casting the net wider for podcasts in general, outside of the the voice activation thing has got to be great for the podcasting space.

There's so many opportunities right now. You could have niche contents. My wife has a, you saw it up there, the women's meditation network and it's for women meditation's for women only. And then she has sleep meditation for women. Those two on the bottom there. Yeah. She just got this going today.

We got approved. So I was so excited for her. The cool part about that is these are meditations and all she did was cast a wide net, but saying, Hey, it's only for women. So how cool of all the thousands of meditations? There's none that say we're for women only, which gave her a really leg up. And in her niche, it's a wide niche, but she gets, I don't want to give out a numbers, but.

Six bigger downloads a month number. Like she gets a lot of women all over the world downloading her meditation sites. Awesome. Now, Chris, do you do you use any of the specific devices? From Amazon. Are you using all of them? Are you using like the Google home or you playing around with different ones?

I use Google home. I got to get Alexa situated. I'm afraid I'll get addicted to it, to be quite Frank with you. And I drive my wife nuts already with the Google home minis. But we buy everything. So for podcasts, it's a conference, it's a physical conference and now we have all these virtual platforms we just created.

But for pod Fest on whatever day that is at, Amazon's Hey, we got our deals. Cause it's I think it's on Monday cyber Monday or whatever, I'll buy like $10,000 worth of toys on that Monday for us to give away a podcast. So people are always feeling, how do you get so much, so many toys? I'm like, I buy them on cyber Monday.

I get them for like half price. I buy as many as I can. And then we do two things. During that week, if you buy a ticket for pod, you get one of those twice. Like we actually ship it to you and then whatever's left over, which is literally like hundreds of toys elect we've given I think we've given at least 200 Alexis out at least.

And echoes we give those out like the water at our events. And then during the live event, we'll have 200 prizes just from Amazon, from whatever we bought on Amazon. And then our sponsors will give us another three to 400 prizes. So then anyone that visits, the sponsors winds up getting a.

So it's a Dealcaster of itself. It's Hey, here's the deal. If you visit our sponsors, you give them love. We're going to, we're going to get you pretty much are like 80% guaranteed to win a prize. It was incredible. When I went in March, it was my first pod Fest. And I won't, I could talk for an hour about everything that I learned there.

One of the things was the sense of community which I was, I'd heard about, but really had a chance to experience there. But what you're saying was we got to the end and, a lot of my friends, like Audrey bell, Kearney and Mark deal. And in these people, we were all just sitting in that area.

And when you started doing the prizing and I looked into the back of the room and I saw these tables and table the tables of gear and just look like person after person, I was like, Man, if you don't get something like, it was just so easy to just go in support the sponsors, just, check off, go through the expo and do that and end up with something really cool that you get to take home.

It was it was a great experience spot. And Chris would you also say that you your start ugly book? That even really ties in to how you started what's now this world record event, right? You started this business association, did you talk about that in the book that.

You just went in with a, you had a plan it's like you say in the book, you got to have a plan and it wasn't about perfection. And I thought it was funny cause I'm actually a member of an American Legion is like he had all these people left these papers on the chair and you're going to throw them out and then say, wait a minute.

io, I put that I've done over: 2000

You must have done more than: 2000

Diaz, who was Allegiant. And he, he he had, he was like the in charge of the American Legion locally. He was the guy in charge of the making sure it was okay for everybody. He goes, why don't you have your event at my place? I go, how much? He goes, 300 bucks. I'm thinking prices. Let's have it at the American league.

And it's a business. It was a business group for owners of companies. Small business owners and it was in June, in, in Tampa and the air condition, this place busted. And I think it was June or July. It felt like July, but June is hot. It was like a hundred degrees plus the humidity.

So now everybody's showing up and the Legionnaires the night before smoke cigars, that's what they do. Like I think I have, my event was on a Saturday, something on Friday night, they were smoking cigars. So when I tell you it stunk to high heaven, it was gross. So now, and now I've told everybody, please wear your Sunday best everybody's wearing suits and stuff in Florida in the winter time summertime people in general don't wear suits like they do in the colder cities only because it's so hot, you just don't wear suits.

So now, a friend of mine is yeah, tell them to dress up. And then I had five slides. I did the slides I'm defeated at this point. Cause I'm like, Holy crap. It's everybody's shirts are melted. I brought them all into this nasty smoke-filled place. But they saw my, they saw the love I had for the community, what I wanted to do.

And Jim, like you said, I was about to throw all these back then I put pieces of paper and you put your credit card information on the paper. I know it sounds like so old school, but it's not that long ago. And that's when my friend Barbara was like, what are you doing? I go, I'm throwing out the thing.

No one filled it out. She goes no. Every fifth paper as like someone's credit card information, I was like, Holy crap. I was. And I had 20 of them and I started my group, but it was a, that was definitely, that's what I call start ugly. Now, if I said, next month, we're at back at the American Legion.

Now that's the problem. But I transitioned into a hotel. Cause someone at that meeting said, why don't you have it at the local hotel? And I'm like, I could only afford three, 400 bucks. They'll give it to you locally. If you have a 30 day window and that's what happened. So I got better as now. You've seen where I'm at, but I've gotten better, but it's a lot of iterations.

To get to that level of learning every time I stepped out. So thank you for reminding me of that, Jim, that was a sweet, bittersweet memory, for sure. To me, it's what helps inspire all of us to say, look, cause we all it's funny when people see where you are today, Chris. They don't realize where you've come from.

Like we all have to start or, start ugly. Chris stone helped me and Christian, I had read your book and we're ready to go. And we kept making these excuses and Chris is like, dude, you guys just got to put that podcast out there and get it going. And we're starting to get some traction, too many people get all wrapped up, talking about like the lumber company into this perfection and then nothing can change and it's gotta be exactly this, or it's not going to work.

And. We keep ourselves from success by getting that into that perfection mindset. I agree. I agree. A hundred percent, Chris, these guys, what did you have? Like a 11 podcast recorded and you hadn't put it, you had to eat it. Didn't put out a pot. You didn't release it. I was like, what are you doing this for? I, you just didn't, what's the point?

Rob Walsh has an interesting step because a lot of strategies like, Hey, get 10 20 in the bank. He says the shows that just start with one actually lasts longer than the people that are banking the ones in the thing. And I think it goes by the people banking 20, 30 shows are so worried about the release and they have so much pressure.

Where's the person that's just Oh, I'll just put one show, see how it goes. They build momentum because they haven't put all that pressure on them. So that's behind the scenes. They've said that they've seen a difference. So it's interesting to hear that, Jimmy did mention, so this summertime we decided to set a Guinness world record and it was a start ugly moment for me because quite honestly We did a pre week event.

And the reason is I didn't know how to use the technology. So the pre week was for me to literally start ugly pre week before the main week. So imagine you really don't know how to use the technology till the week before you're actually going to do it. And that's our philosophy and the kid helping me out.

He's not a kid is a man, but I'm a bit older. But he's bright eyed, bushy tail, but you need that around you. And he's he goes to me. This is like trying to build a plane in midair. I didn't realize we were moving that fast when he said that, but we had five weeks. We gave ourselves five weeks to set a Guinness world record.

And what people don't realize is when you're talking to active pod-casters creators, there's not a lot of them. There's about. 330,000 of them globally. And then of that group, how many of them identify with them being pod-casters because half of them just do whatever their subject matter is. They put it out.

So to get 5,000 individuals was quite a feat and we were able, we broke the record by three, we just got, we got the official certification about a week ago. It was one of the coolest, hardest, most rewarding things we've ever done. And I believe March next year, we're going to go forward again. We're gonna try and set the record out of reach for anyone.

So we're going to as a community to come back and just set the record out of reach. That's awesome. I think that's a Testament to the community that you've put together. Man. I mentioned it earlier, but the support system behind that I believe Chris, like if you said 24 hours from now, I want to do another world record.

You would have. Tr a huge strive of people that would support you on it, just because of, what you've done and what you've given back to everyone. Yeah. And Chris, that's one thing I would say too, that I really admire about about the other Chris, not the Chris stone, but I admire as well with you, Kristen, but you are such a giver.

I've seen that as I've gotten to know you and see what you do, you're so always helping others. And I think that. Is what, feeds into this growth of this. And it is truly a commuter. The moment I see the intro that you guys prepared, it tells me that you are not just showing up. In your underwear because the moment I see they're not being dead serious, there's people that we don't know that for a fact, at least your dress when we had the transition.

Cause we did the Florida podcast association once a month and we have to positions to zooms. Part of my caveat was like, please show up with clothes on. I didn't care how you just have something on. But the truth is when I see that B roll package of your intro. Okay. I understand that you've put some effort into it and a lot of them, here's what I'll tell you.

And it's very simple. A lot of people will say, I don't know what I need to do. First thing, if we're talking about podcasts, there's one very simple thing. Your download numbers. Tell us if you're increasing or decreasing. So that is a metric you want to watch too. Are you on topic? Is your show named properly?

A lot of people will choose names. No one can research. They can't find it. This show is appropriately named Dealcasters. It's very specific and they stick to the theme of a Dealcaster. So how are you naming your show is a congruent with the content that you're providing. Are you doing any marketing?

Are you doing any social media? Are you doing any paid marketing? And then the last thing is who are you asking for feedback? So for instance, I would pay someone like a Dave Jackson from school of podcasts. And to give me objective feedback, Dave will. Okay. But are you listening? Most people don't listen, you guys know this better than anyone because you've been around the block or two, most people ask for feedback because they want a Pat on the back.

So I always ask, what kind of feedback do you want? Do you want me to say you're doing a great job? Some people need that. That's fine. But if you're asking me for like real feedback where I have to now relisten to the show and give you point by point, what can be done better, that strategic advice.

And usually you go to professional. I would say, Dave Jackson is the best for that. Invest in it. And then listen to the, listen to the feedback. You don't have to listen to all of it, but there's always going to be things in there. You're like, ah, I heard it about that. Or someone left me a comment about that.

If you're hearing it twice, I'll give you guys an example early on. There was a meditation feedback meditation podcast. And she was a fan of John Lee Dumas and John Lee Dumas starts his episodes episode number one of whatever. He liked announces the episodes and she was doing the same thing. And I said, Hey, no offense, but I don't know anyone listening to a guided meditation that needs you announcing the episode number because it's not something that's sequential.

It's evergreen content sounds like basic. For Cigna, I'm going to do it that way. So now I know that this person doesn't really care about the audience. They care about what they're putting out there. Luckily for them, they were early adapters. They got a huge audience because they're in a niche that a lot of people needed the content, but.

That's someone that doesn't care. They're going to do it their way. You can't help that person there. Yeah. Looking and you guys know this in the book, our main character have had to have a come to Jesus moment to accept feedback. And that is the problem with most of us, all of us thick headed up to a point until we are ready to listen.

Was the guy with a guy that the was that ended up drowning because everybody was warning him over and over again, and then went to heaven and God was basically like, look, I gave you all these warnings, three shots out, like it's one thing to have the faith, but you've got to do that.

Yeah, that was a, that was another great part of the book for sure, man. And yeah, to your point, I think. A lot of people when they're asking for feedback, it's do you want to get better? Cause if you want to get better, you've got to be open to feedback. You've got to have a little tough skin and you've gotta be able to whoever you're speaking to, take it for what it's worth.

But if I can't imagine if you gave someone their opinion or somebody like a Dave Jackson or a Matthew Passey or all of these people that are. Professionals that have been doing it for years, auditing podcasts and helping and consulting and helping further. It's man, be open to what people have to say.

And to your point, what a lot of podcasts are stoked. Don't do is identify that are their ideal listener and speak to that person and give to that person. And then everything else comes, don't show up and start talking about yourself when no one knows who you are. There's a lot of fundamentals there.

And I've been very fortunate and blessed as I come to Atlanta, I speak all over the country, but literally I have corporations pay me a lot of money for, I do power days. I don't do. And then if someone's my hour, I do an hour, but very rarely I. I contribute one day out of my month to do consulting.

I don't really enjoy it to be honest with you. I like, I enjoy helping people in the podcast community for free, actually more w for whatever reason, it's just easier. I love it. They're part of my community, but when I deal with big corporations and they're paying me five or six grand for the power day they're paying for the information.

But also I look at that as respect that they'll listen to what I tell them. And we've had really amazing successes supporting them. And honestly, the only reason I do it, I feel bad for them because they'll get someone that just started a podcast to consult them. Meanwhile, I see thousands of. Case studies across spectrum from B2B podcasters to ambient voice technology.

I'm looking at, I can tell you the paid metrics of how to acquire a listener right now. It's $5 per listener. If you're to pay acquire, used to be $2, it doubled it's going to go up even more because listeners are worth a lot more than that. But I can tell you all these things that, might be a guy with a hat and a t-shirt, but I'm someone that in the industry that has spent seven or 10 years having fun, but I'm not like.

I'm behind the scenes paying attention to everything I see. So like the thing people have to understand is understand who you're talking to and understand what they're telling you, because you might not even recognize the messenger. Cause in the podcast space, we don't wear suits. So you might be conditioned to listen to some consultant in a suit, which is okay.

Consultants are great, but it might not be the person that you need to get the consulting advice from. And I would tell people, be careful taking advice from family. Like family loves you and they just want you to be happy. So they might not give you the constructive feedback that you need, unless someone in your for instance, I do strategy, it took my wife a long time to ask me for help.

But when she did, we're able to put down the strategies in our podcast and she's literally tripled in her downloads. But sometimes when, you guys know it is like spouses, whatever, you gotta be careful on that because there's different things that are going on. So yes, if your baby, you can take stuff personally, and yeah.

Family can be sometimes the other way too, maybe a little bit too detrimental and could, maybe so you could go a lot of different ways. It could go a lot of different ways. So the key though is to. Have an open mind audio is growing. We're not at the now that Amazon think about it, Amazon just came on board.

So to say we're still at the tip of the iceberg, it's still going to go through the roof. I love how you actually say, cause it fits in with your book cover. Don't judge a book by its cover to same thing. I think a lot of us I. I am most terrified of having to wear coats and ties anymore.

This is I usually wear a polo shirt. I would almost prefer to wear jeans as opposed to slacks, but I get it. There's still people stuck in that mindset, or I don't know if you guys have ever done it, you walk into a car dealership completely under dressed.

Cause you want to see how they treat you. They have no idea what you have, as far as a. Funding goes. I think that's a great point. Jim fruit for you and Chris, I'll give you guys this example, and this is why everybody in our community is treated equally. I'm talking about from the speakers to the sponsors, to the attendees.

I think all three of us have a lot of value out in the marketplace. Imagine if you came to my conference and we were too busy for you. So a lot of conferences, what they tend to do is they cater to their speakers and the speakers become superstars. What I've learned is the community, has you never know who's in your community first off.

Yeah. From a human level, I believe we're all equal, right? Like we're all human beings walking the planet, we all have different gifts. I think we'd all agree on that. What I realized was like, we have just as much talent in the community as on stage. So now what happens and I think you've seen this, our community teaches the stage.

There's no, like it's all fluid. Like even the sponsors, everybody integrates and it's because of my, I would go to these events. And I would say up to the speaker, Hey, I have an opportunity. Meanwhile, they don't know I have a full running promotional company and they would be like, yay, I'll talk to you later and they'd walk off.

And I'm like that wasn't the speaker's fault. I want to be very clear. That was the promotionals fault for not telling the speaker that we're all one big organism. We are helping each other. So they made, they elevated the speaker so high that there they wouldn't interact. So I do believe that we're all, that's what the community of podcast is really about.

And I know people here say it, but you'd have to come to experience it. It's very unique. Yeah. And I think what that spurs is his creativity in the podcast and community. I was, came from the music business where it's highly competitive. It's highly competitive. From labels, it's highly competitive from artists.

It's super competitive in this space. I, at first I was very shocked about how no one treats anyone else like their competition, even if they're speaking generally about the same thing, because it's my voice is my voice. Your voice is your voice. My voice may not be for everyone. Your Mo your voice may be for someone else.

So how can we work together? Maybe how can we the rising tide and the ships and that whole thing. And that really was an eye opener for me. And I think being a pod Fest really catapulted that for me and being able to witness that in person, I guess it was the last conference in person.

And it was the last conference of its size in Orlando period. And probably, yeah. And I will tell you too, Chris says, because I am new to the podcast world in the sense of having a podcast, but being someone that live stream, and then go on to, even though it was a virtual event, but just the feel of community from the get-go with pod Fest was just.

Amazing to me, cause I've been a part of the social media community and more of this kind of like competitive nature at times. And not everybody truly trying to help each other out. I Not to say there's a lot of folks that do help each other, but I just was just really. Amazed at how much these people just genuinely care about each other, because nobody is like you said, everyone has a different voice.

It's not only want people to listen to my podcast. So I'm going to trash this other person. There's none of that. Part of that I go to a lot of these conferences, unfortunately it's pretty much par for the course what you're saying, what we don't want. YouTube conferences, especially at ruthless because they could and that's why you see a lot of the younger generation.

They have a lot of cyber bullying issues. So you tubers can see each other subscriber numbers. So what happens is very much like the music business, it's who's got a record deal, who's making money. They bully each other. So not only do they forget about the bullying, but they treat each other differently, like on a caste system based on your a million suburb, that's a subscriber, a hundred thousand subs or half a million.

And what are you guys doing with streaming? The way I look at fast, we also own vid fast. We want to bring a creative village, think of like the Olympic village, where we could bring all the streamers, the pod-casters, the YouTube burrs under one roof, where we could treat them all with respect and dignity, and then they could conform to the overall cultural of our community, which is being kind to one another and helping each other and rising tide in abundance.

Unfortunately, I've gone to a lot of these conferences. It becomes a ego Fest. And the key part is we have to always establish we're here to support each other. And I was surprised both of you. I will tell you this for pod Fest global that's the virtual event where we had over 5,000 attendees. I was shocked to see how that feel of the live event actually carried over into the virtual.

And people said they loved it as much as a live event. We weren't expecting that feedback. And we got it across. And what happened was people we had 167. So we just have called Hoover. So we had 167 meetups that the community generated with 3,884 people attending that we had nothing to do with that's the community supporting each other.

And it was insane what happened and we're excited to do another podcast global next year, bringing everybody together. Chris, this has been amazing. Get, start ugly. I don't know what you're waiting for. This is a. What'd you say 45 minute read Chris, if you're slow.

It's a, if you're a quick reader as well. Yeah, it depends. There's a lot of good stuff in here, but I gotta share with you guys when you get the book page 91. So this is when I did my first draft and I sent it into a friend. This is what I received from my friend. This is a critique says first comma.

Please know that I love you, in the first sentence of someone's feedback is that it's about

the hammer is about the drop, but this is not good. Second sentence is page 91. First paragraph. Does on the plus side comma, you have that starting ugly thing in quotes down, which gives you something to work with. Now that's a friend of mine that literally for a living, she reviews books and stuff, and she was right at the time the book was okay.

I had the main character like dying off. She's you can't do that. You got to give us redemption hero's journey. Haven't you heard of that? And I said, No, he becomes an alcoholic. He loses everything. That's the real story. She goes, that's not going to help any of us. So at the time I was like, you know what?

That's a very good point. So I really I thank her. I put it in there because I love her because if she didn't have the guts or the balls to say, Hey, man, this is not a good draft. Like the story needs work. I wouldn't have this masterpiece that I have now, if she didn't give me the honest feedback. We rewrote it a bunch of times till I was happy and she loved it and then we published it. And the other thing is. Don't let anyone else tell you what to do. As far as I got a lot of feedback from people, you should make it a business book with business equation. That's and I just want to create a story.

I'll create a one-page with this, like there's a seven step process, but that's about it after that, let everybody else discover how they want to start ugly. And I don't want to tell them exactly what to do. That's up to them. I had a martial artist teach me once in life, you got to functionalize your art form and this guy was a crippled.

He was a criminal martial Arlis he basically one leg was six inches different than the other leg. And he had spinal bifida at everything grown up and he wound up training like five or 10, like grand ma like some of the top martial artists in Lakeland, Florida with no air condition in the middle of Florida.

And he always said, he goes, most people don't know how to functionalize their art. And I said, what does that mean? He goes, you need to know first who you are. And then you need to take whatever that our form is and you got to functionalize it to you. He goes, most people copy, and that's why they never get anywhere because we could sense that blueprint or that thing.

He goes, you got to functionalize your art form. So for me, functionalizing my art is my events are my art form and we do it differently because I don't. I want to listen to the audience and create something together. So when you guys talk about it's all about the community, it is because the community says, Hey, can we do this?

Let's do it. So I appreciate you guys for having me on this amazing show. I'm excited. I'm excited to hear the presentation on how to get the most out of Amazon. I think that's going to be amazing. But I appreciate you guys sharing the stage with me and have me on the show. Thank you, Chris St.

Chris, what's the best way for people to say connect with you or, even if they are interested in pod Fest and like you mentioned, you got some other things coming up, bid Fest, and which I'm excited about that's expo or vid Fest, expo.com. And then if you want to just reach out to me directly, Chris dot com and I'm on three social platforms, send me a message.

The key thing though, is if you could make it out to our events, it forget about the content. The people, honestly, that we have are just amazing. The people you could meet and make friendships with. I get it that the content draws you out, but it's the community. That'll keep you stay in there. So that's, what's really unique, Chris, thanks so much for your transparency, your vulnerability, and of course, being such a important part of the podcast space in the community.

And man, just for sharing your time with us today, man, we really appreciate it. Thank you, Jim. Thank you, Chris. Thanks for having me on deal. Castro's man. Get your deals now we got, we gave away some good ones for you guys to get. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Dealcasters. Congratulations. You've taken another step forward in your content creation journey, please.

Don't forget to hit the subscribe button. Follow button here in your favorite podcast player. So you can be reminded every time we drop an episode, we'd love hearing and from our listeners and viewers, and if you're wanting to watch our shows live on Amazon, feel free to follow deal. Casters live as well at deal pastors dot line.

Follow us on Twitter. Or subscribe to our YouTube channel, where we also included added content that you cannot find anywhere else. If you have questions about this episode or have something you want us to review, you can also email us@diocastersatdealcasters.ly. Thanks again for listening and the deal don't fear the gear.