Creating an 8 Figure Business at 24 Years old at Heyo.com with Nathan Latka

Founder, Chief Executive Officer at Heyo.com – Nathan Latka

In this in person interview we dive into how Nathan knew NOTHING when he started at 21 and had $70,000 in revenue before he ever build his product. It’s exactly how an entrepreneur should validate an idea, and he didn’t even know it! A few short years later they have grown massively, but Nathan doesn’t think that he had any special knowledge beforehand. He was an architecture major! (He also now reads 3 books a week and teaches us his process for cataloging all of that information – don’t miss that!) AND he gives us some amazing case studies for his business Heyo.com

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder
• Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow
• The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century by Steven Watts
• The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance by Ron Chernow
• Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
• The Barefoot Executive: The Ultimate Guide for Being Your Own Boss and Achieving Financial Freedom by Carrie Wilkerson
• For Entrepreneurs: Blog of David Skok, Matrix Partners
• SaaS Blog – Chaotic Flow by Joel York
• Download a PDF of Nathan’s Book Reading System + Example Summary

 

Go to Heyo.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and today on the show I have Nathan Latka right here with me. I so appreciate it. He's only in town for a couple of days and I wrangled him so that we could do an in-person interview. I'm so excited. He's the founder of Heyo.com - he'll get into exactly what it is.

Nathan: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Jaime: Poor guy didn't know it was a video interview, he had to go and get changed. I feel really bad. So why don't you first tell us what Heyo is?

Nathan: Heyo helps small business owners capture e-mail leads from Facebook using contests.

Jaime: Awesome. So tell me more about you got into that.

Nathan: Like from the beginning?

Jaime: Yeah.

Nathan: Like so many other stories it was in a cinderblocks stacked up 10 foot by 18 foot dorm room at Virginia Tech where I was studying architecture. I was in a class one day where I heard a fifth year talking about how they couldn't get a job. This was in 2008 so no one was building; no one needed an architect.
"
Jaime: And when you're an architect that's no good!

Nathan: Yeah, I was in bad shape. I went back to my dorm room and said "I need to figure out how to sell," and it was definitely all about me, it was about me having an insecurity at that point. I went online and I said "What can I sell?" and I used Facebook - as a student I was always on Facebook - and I said "Well, if I'm going to sell something, I want to sell something that I know," so I sold Facebook fan pages at $695 apiece, sold 100 of them over six months and that was the start of how I got into this business.

Jaime: You're going to have to tell me how to do this - so a guy in a dorm room, architecture major, not even tech in general.

Nathan: I couldn't tell you the difference between HTML and WWW.

Jaime: Oh no, you own a tech company now! So tell me about how you actually decided to sell fan pages and how you learned how to build and market them

Nathan: You give me too much credit. I wasn't actually that intelligent. When the dot com boom happened these companies like Weebly and Wix popped up - drag and drop website builders. So when the social boom happened we got drag and drop Facebook fan page builders. I just looked at the dot com boom and the business model that worked then. I didn't do anything innovative, I just copied the ones that worked and didn't do the ones that didn't work and that's what started the company. I'll never forget the first sale - do you know a woman by the name of Carrie Wilkerson, the Barefoot Executive?

Jaime: Yes, I do.

Nathan: Now you have to picture this - I was much scrawnier.

Jaime: How old were you?

Nathan: I was 21. I was significantly scrawnier than I am now. I was wearing a pair of Christmas boxers my ex-girlfriend had purchased me, that's why she's an ex.

Jaime: Don't buy Christmas boxers!

Nathan: So I was wearing these, and you have to picture this - so I was in a room about one third this size and I was under my bunk bed on Facebook and I said "Let me search executive in Facebook search," because my thinking was that if someone called themselves an executive I could call them and say "Are you really an executive? You don't have one of these new executive Facebook tabs," and Carrie was the one that popped up, because her name is the Barefoot Executive. I called her and after an hour she ended up buying one for $695. But the reason I started this story by saying you give me too much credit is that I didn't know how to actually build the fan page I was selling. I didn't want to spend the time to learn. I said to myself "If I can sell at least $10,000 worth of this thing, I'll figure out how to build it."

Jaime: That's an incentive.

Nathan: I was just lazy. I'll be blunt and honest - I was just lazy. My thinking was "If I don't sell enough of these, Carrie will appreciate that I'll give her a refund and say that I couldn't do it or I couldn't deliver the quality that she wanted," and she'll be totally okay with that.

Jaime: So tell me how you got Carrie on the phone for an hour and sold her with no selling experience.

Nathan: So I searched "executive" on Facebook search, she popped up, I clicked on her profile, it was her face with a red background because that was her branding then, the Barefoot stuff, clicked on her website, found her phone number and got her on the phone. I said "Is this Carrie Wilkerson, the Barefoot Executive?" She said "Yes." I said "Carrie, have you heard about these new things called executive fan page tabs?" and she said "No." I said "Well you know, you're not a true executive unless you have an executive fan page tab," and it was much an emotional sale. Many people would say it was like emotional warfare, almost. I would try to convince the other person that they weren't an executive unless they had this thing that I could offer. That's how I did it. If you know Carrie, you'll know that she is un-egotistical. She was probably thinking "I love how this college guy is hustling. I want to support him," which is great, and we're great friends now.

Jaime: Nice.

Nathan: That's how I worked.

Jaime: Had you read selling books? Were you like "I'm going to use this emotional tie," or were you like "Hey, this would be cool."

Nathan: Again, I was in architecture. No. I didn't have books, there was no one I was studying, I didn't know what the talk was, I just figured it out.

Jaime: So did you consider yourself a hustler? Because a lot of people wouldn't go "I'm going to call them up and sell them something that I don't actually have."

Nathan: Yes, I would say I'm addicted to hustling.

Jaime: It's ridiculously impressive. I remember my mentor made me cold call 50 people.

Nathan: I remember this.

Jaime: It's nerve-racking. He doesn't even think it's nerve-racking. That's where your strength is. At the time I was freaking you. So you have a huge strength - hustling.

Nathan: Yeah, I had nothing to lose. I had just heard a fifth year say he couldn't get a job from the top architecture program in the country. I thought if this can't get me a job I'm not going to put myself through this, I'm going to call people and sell.

Jaime: With no sales skills - go you! Take me through what else happened - you got one and you're like "I'm awesome!" How did you take the payment?

Nathan: Paypal. What I had done was I had set up my own fan page with a Paypal button to checkout on it because I didn't want to pay the $10.99 to GoDaddy to buy my own website URL so I just set it up on a Facebook page and said "Carrie, have a look at the page, checkout," and that's what happened. Within about six months I'd sold about $70,000 of these things and decided at that point that I would learn how to build them.

Jaime: Take me through that. So you sold 100, which is really impressive. Was it all the same?

Nathan: Mainly. Once it worked with Carrie, Carrie then became a marketing force for us. You know she speaks a lot, many of you may have seen her speak from stage. She told the world about us, so I'm so thankful for that.

Jaime: So thankfully you got an amazing person. If anyone hasn't checked out Carrie, go to BarefootExecutive.com. She's got an amazing website. She helped you market, that's insane. So when you did actually deliver that first product? Because you said you sold 100 and then thought about learning how to make it.

Nathan: I delivered it to her about five and a half months after the initial sale.

Jaime: Was she cool with that? Did you have to touch base with her?

Nathan: Well when the sale happened I said "I want to make sure this is right for you. I want to take the time to get it right. I'll keep you updated but my plan is to get this to you in the next five to six months."

Jaime: Okay, so you told her five to six months in advance?

Nathan: I did.

Jaime: So you planned on hustling for six months?

Nathan: Exactly. And If I couldn't sell X amount of them it wasn't worth my learning howto code them.

Jaime: Did you actually learn how to code them?

Nathan: I did. Are you familiar with FBML?

Jaime: Yes, it's Facebook Markup Language.

Nathan: I'm impressed! Do you have a technical background?

Jaime: I have a degree in IT - I'm a geek. Unlike you, who has a tech company.

Nathan: We'll let that go under the rug! So I learned FBML and I did that through watching YouTube videos. Once I'd done that, I started building and it took me about three hours to build each tab, so it took a lot of time. That point was when I learned that it would be significantly more powerful for me to build a tool that Carrie could use to build this herself, versus me manually coding every one of them - and that's when I launched Lujure, the drag and drop Facebook fan page builder.

Jaime: So, number one, you're like "I know there's a market - I sold 100 of them," which is very impressive, especially because you could have just sold Carrie and then learned FBML and made her page and then sold the rest of them.

Nathan: That semester I didn't have time to invest in 100 hours of YouTube videos to learn how to code unless I knew it was going to be a big return. I just didn't have the time.

Jaime: That's really impressive then, that you decided to do it that way. Most people wouldn't have done it at all. So you're creating over 100 pages, it's taking you over 300 hours, which is still a good return - $700 for three hours.

Nathan: For a college student, yes.

Jaime: $70,000, very impressive. But then you're like "Okay, there's more to this." So what did you do from there?

Nathan: Again, I looked at the dot com boom and looked at Weebly and Wix - it's all drag and drop. You would get significantly more leverage on your time by letting Carrie access your software and letting her build it herself. This is where I started thinking about efficiency a lot. This is going to surprise a lot of people, but I'm white, I'm a male from northern Virginia and if I live to be the average that white males in north America live to be, I'm going to live to be 88, which means I've got about 2.2 billion seconds left to live, and every second that I put in to doing a one-off piece of work doesn't get me long term leverage so investing some time in building a software platform that allowed this to happen was really valuable and that's why I made the transition.

Jaime: How old were you at that time?

Nathan: About 22.

Jaime: Already knowing how much time you have left and going "This isn't worth it!"

Nathan: I still work on this a lot every day, but if you're not operating every day with some kind of urgency, you let your mind float to things that don't matter. I actually really enjoy having that pressure. "Nathan, you're going to die any second. Do something important right now."

Jaime: How old are you right now?

Nathan: 24.

Jaime: And how much is your company worth?

Nathan: Eight figures

Jaime: Everybody - that's how that happens! You have that sense of urgency, that's really impressive. Did it seem like a false sense of urgency, though? I mean it's you going "Oh my gosh, I only have this many seconds left," but in reality you're 22 and still in college, right? So how did you go "I'm still in college but this is so important - I need this leverage?"

Nathan: That's a great question. The answer is that I brainwashed myself. It definitely was a false sense of urgency but I had convinced myself that every second was so valuable that I needed to do something big with it, which made every other decision really easy because you're going "Is this buying me extra seconds or is it not?" and if it's not, you stop doing it.

Jaime: That's an insane question to be asking yourself when you're 22 years old.

Nathan: I'm a little messed up!

Jaime: So every decision was easier to make because of that? Because a lot of people have issues making decisions, especially people listening now who have corporate jobs and go "I can't do this? and make excuses but what you did was squash every single excuse and say "I don't have much time."

Nathan: Correct. I think every person has to know what the opportunity cost of what they're currently doing is. So, for the person in corporate that's listening right now that's thinking about trying to get out into their own business, quantify what having your own business means, like actually brainwash yourself every morning to put yourself in the shoes of "I left corporate. I'm running a business that's doing $10,000 a month and I feel great, I have more time to spend with my family, more time for vacations and I'm happier and I have more freedom." Actually brainwash yourself every morning to feel what that feel likes so you can make the opportunity cost impactful and then every day that you're in corporate it becomes easier and easier to say "Corporate is not right for me," and you take action faster.

Jaime: Did you do that? Give me tips for brainwashing yourself. Some people talk about visioning or whatever it is - tell me what you do.

Nathan: Visioning is not as good a headline as "brainwash yourself".

Jaime: Totally.

Nathan: I have a unique strategy for this - what I like to do is, about every two weeks, I read a bio of someone that I really admire. Most recently it was Warren Buffett - I read everything, listened to "Snowball" which was his audiobook, it's really long. Did you read that?

Jaime: The book is like that thick.

Nathan: I did the audio version in the car.

Jaime: That's smart because I started it and I haven't finished.

Nathan: I listened to the audio version in the car, read his reports all the way back to 1962, understood what he ate, his relationship with Suzy, their kids and then I would do things and create feedback loops in my everyday life that matched huis. For example, he drinks two Cherry Cokes a day - one at 10:30am and one in the afternoon - so I started doing that. Because every time you physically pop that Cherry Coke it's creating a trigger that clicks my Warren Buffett trigger and then the process I put myself in is to think like Warren Buffett and hopefully the result is that I'm more Warren Buffett like. So when you talk about brainwashing yourself, I study bios of people that I admire, I create cues in my everyday life to trigger a reaction to think like that person and the result is that I am ideally more like that person.

Jaime: Like the decisions they would make.

Nathan: Does that make sense?

Jaime: It totally makes sense.That's a really interesting thing, using triggers in general. But you read bios so often, how many triggers do you keep?

Nathan: Great question. I typically stop ? what will happen is the cue of popping a Cherry Coke and drinking it to cue a Warren Buffett trigger and a process and I put myself in his mind, there will be decisions or ways that I like about how he thinks and then I can take that thinking process and make that the trigger, versus the Cherry Coke.

Jaime: Okay, that's super cool. One of the things that I talk about in my book is reframing and putting on the brain of a millionaire. So you go "I have a hard decision to make," whatever it is, "If a millionaire who had done this before was here, how easy would it be for them?" It would be super easy, because they?ve done it a thousand times before. That's what you're doing - you're putting on the mind of this amazing person who can do something better than you and then you can bring it back whenever you need it. So tell me about a time when you've brought it back up - when you've needed to be Warren Buffett or anyone and you've pulled that trigger back up.

Nathan: So one of my weaknesses is that I don't have a lot of patience, and my executive team will tell you this. When I see an opportunity I'm willing to go all in and be as creative as I need to be to make it happen, but that can be a weakness. If I taste blood in the water I'm going to go after it. Well, if someone knows that, they can get a little vial and if they put a drop in the water I'm going to chase this thing that doesn't exist.

Jaime: Good to know about you!

Nathan: Yeah, if you want to fake me out, pour some fake blood on me. So the answer to your question - Warren is extremely patient, to the extent where he once, back when he was investing in Berkshire Hathaway, was looking at buying additional stock in that same industry, and a gentleman said, and I'm making these numbers up because I don't remember them exactly, "It's $20 per share," and Warren said "My max is $19.50," and then just waited. He didn't try to make it happen urgently and eventually the guy came back and said "Okay, I'll do $19.75," and Warren said "You made me wait. Now I only want to do it for $19.25," and he got a better deal. Recently we were negotiating a distribution channel deal and I wanted to just get the distribution channel secured but instead I just let time go buy, executed some patience, and got a much better deal, and that was using that Warren Buffett trigger.

Jaime: That's really impressive. Did you know that you needed to bring that up? Did you drink a Cherry Coke?

Nathan: No. I wish it was intentional. I'm not at the point yet where I can pull on demand. I'd like to think, though, that for the two weeks that I'm actively practicing that person's mindset, some things get ingrained in my subconscious that allow it to happen naturally, without cues.

Jaime: I love that. Tell me two of your favorite biographies.

Nathan: Walt Disney and Warren Buffett.

Jaime: Really?

Nathan: Both of them. Some other ones - Ford, Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan - these are all recent ones that I've gone through. "Titan" is a great one about Rockefeller.

Jaime: Nice. I'll definitely post links so that people can check those out and we're all going to be drinking Cherry Cokes.

Nathan: In the comments below, when this is posted, tell me how many of you guys have used triggers in your life before. Just say yes or no in the comments and I'll engage with you there. I think a lot of people use triggers, it's just how many of those become habits? You have to work really hard to make a trigger a habit.

Jaime: How did you learn about triggers in general?

Nathan: I read a book called "Habits". First I found a guy called Nir Eyal at NirAndFar.com. He talks about how to create products that get people hooked and he just released a book called "Hooked" which I highly recommend in addition to yours. It's a great book. The "Habits" book also talks about how you have a cue, a reaction and then the outcome, and if you can control whatever the cue is and what the outcome is and just change the reaction, the thing in the middle, it helps you take back control of your daily life. So that's how I learned about it, it was that book.

Jaime: It's really impressive how much you're reading. I have questions, because people that are ridiculously well read, which it sounds like you are, that's a ton of content going in - how much can you actually digest per book? I know a lot of people go through this - John Dumas was talking about this not long ago - when you're veracious at reading, you can love every second of the book but implementation or actually using some of the pieces is difficult. So how do you do it?

Nathan: I have a process and it's pretty streamlined. I find it difficult to read the book and take notes and establish actions at the same time, so I'll read a book with this pen, and I have 100 of these pens, this exact style because I'm scared they'll stop selling them and they won't have them anymore, so I used these pens and I will underline anything in a book that I like and I'll write in the margins things like "Use this on your next webinar," if it's about a presentation tactic that J.P. Morgan used when he was raising money for the light company he was taking over with Tesla. So I'll underline and after the book is read I'll wait about two days, or until the next weekend, and on that Saturday I'll take the book back out and I'll make notes - so anything that's underlined I'll type into a Word document. Here's the thing - I'll type all of those notes into a Word document and typically it will be three or four pages but I have to get it down to one page, which is really difficult.

Jaime: I bet.

Nathan: So I have to eliminate it down to one page because of what you described - it's very difficult if you have a lot of fluff. If you force yourself to be an essentialist you get only what's important. So I print that off, take that piece of paper and fold it into the book cover and then put that book back on my bookshelf and I have them all organized based on whether they're theory, bio, etc. and I can pull that one page out any time and typically what I do is, after I've made that one page, I'll read it every morning for three weeks, then I'll only read it once a week for three weeks, and after that I'll only read it once every half year, so June and January.

Jaime: How do you keep track of that?

Nathan: It's totally systemized. So in that book cover I keep a little tally in the upper right corner of that page of notes so that I know what I've read and what frequency I'm reading it at, and that's the trick for me to make habits that make my life better.

Jaime: That's ridiculously impressive. I have never heard of anyone, out of everybody I've interviewed, everybody I'm friends with that are very successful, nobody has had a system like that.

Nathan: I'll take a picture and you can upload it with the episode.

Jaime: So why isn't it digital?

Nathan: That's a great question. I don't do eBooks or anything and, frankly, it's because I don't know how my system would work in that way, if that makes sense. There's something about underlining. I do a lot of reading on planes as well and I really just like having the book and underlining and, I don't know, I can't explain it. I run a software company but I'm very not tech-savvy in some regards.

Jaime: Which is insane. Thinking about it, I interviewed a guy called Amos Winbush III. He was a singer/songwriter who started a tech company and when he first started, everyone was like "Oh, you need a software bumper," and he was like "I don't know what that is." I'm having the same issue with you - you're so not tech and yet you started a tech company. So I wanted to get into that, but before we do, why don't you take those pages, because you've typed them up and they're on your computer already, why aren't you searching those when you need things?

Nathan: Again, I take those print offs, they're on my desk every morning, I get to the office at 5:45 in the morning and that's the first thing I do before 6am when I do the most important thing that day. if they were on a computer and I sat at my desk every morning and I opened the computer to read, there would be something on my computer that distracts me, versus just one piece of paper and I have my coffee and I have the smell of that Columbian aroma hitting my nose and I just focus on the paper and the lights are on, the sun's not up yet, and I just have my one desk light focused on this paper and I'm just in it.

Jaime: That sounds awesome.

Nathan: I'm sorry.

Jaime: No, it totally does. You're like "I'm in it."

Nathan: You're just in it; there are no distractions.

Jaime: I'm really impressed. So tell me about this - you get your first 100, you decide you need to start making it so that they can do it themselves, you're not a tech - how do you find somebody to help or did you do it yourself?

Nathan: There are a lot of different things I could chat about here so keep me focused! Just keep me in check. I founded an entrepreneur club at Virginia Tech and the reason I did that was to find technical cofounders. So I didn't want to go out and say "Holy cow, I need technical cofounders!" because then they would have leverage, you're going to have to have an equity negotiation. So I was able to found the E-Club and then watch technical people operate under the E-Club and eventually two guys called me asking for advice on their computer repair company. They asked me if I would recommend that they opened up a brick and mortar. I gave them advice and then called them back and said "Listen, I'm building a software company. I've got $70,000 in sales already. I need technical cofounders. Here's the equity that I'm willing to do. Are you interested? I need an answer by 5pm." They said they stopped their business, said yes, and that's how we started. They were two technical guys who knocked out the code.

Jaime: That's insane. So you knew, going along, when you created this club, that that was the reason. You're very intentional with everything you do. You're like "I'm doing this so I need to set this up in advance." That's really impressive.

Nathan: Thank you.

Jaime: Alright, so you've gotten these guys and you're hoping they're tech enough, I mean they seem like they're etch enough, that they can actually carry it out. Did you know?

Nathan: I had no idea.

Jaime: Did you just like them?

Nathan: Well yes.

Jaime: Thankfully.

Nathan: I was also like "Holy cow, I have $70k in sales - how do I deliver? What do I do?" I just wanted to start - again, I didn't have patience. I actually knew these guys for about a week before founding the company with them, which has now turned into the mammoth that it is today. There's a long story - they're no longer with the company and I would have done things differently at the beginning now that I've been through it once, but that's how I got technical folks on the team to build the original products.

Jaime: So what would you have done differently? Because everybody listening, if they wanted to start a software company, because we have a bunch of geeks that are listening to, and Amos Winbush III, the guy who founded a tech company, found his guy on Craigslist and he's still with him to this day so it sounds like a wonderful story - "Find your guy on Craigslist" - but you found some guys, didn't know them all that well and it didn't actually work out, so what would you do instead?

Nathan: There's only one thing I would chance. See if you can guesses. If I told you there's only one thing I would change, what would you guys guess?

Jaime: I don't know.

Nathan: There's only one thing - I would have done the exact same thing, I would have gotten a guy off Craigslist, I would have gotten folks from E-Club, but I would have put everyone on an investing schedule and it wouldn't be the typical one where there's a one year cliff and then it's 25/25/25/25 over four years, I would do a three year cliff where you then get 75% in year three and then 25% after that.

Jaime: How long did they actually last?

Nathan: About two years - and they were great for taking the company from zero to $60k a month but after that one got married and the other one wanted to move back towards his family. This is all I had and it's what I love and it's what I want to do, I want to do it for the rest of my life, and they were definitely not in that mindset so it was a challenge.

Jaime: You were obsessed.

Nathan: I was totally obsessed and I'm still obsessed.

Jaime: That's interesting. It took you to where you are - two years and $60,000 a month is still ridiculously impressive for these two guys you had only known for a week helping you out. Was it a partnership that worked really well at first or were there always issues?

Nathan: It did but issues arose when we started to have discussions about things like payments. It makes sense to do annual payments in a SaaS business because 65% of churn is from failed credit cards. Well, if you only have to charge a credit card once per year, versus 12 times per year, churn decreases. They didn't understand what different revenue looks like - so if you're taking $300,000 for the year, you divide that by 12, that's topline revenue, and then you have to do financial planning against how to use that revenue. There was a lot of stuff like that.

Jaime: I'm impressed that you learned that. You were an architecture major. They were tech, they had the information on technology. You had to learn business from scratch.

Nathan: Well, business is about being empathetic. In my opinion, it's all empathy. Architecture, in my opinion, outside of acting, is super empathetic.

Jaime: Really?

Nathan: You're thinking about where to place a wall so that, when this person is sitting in their home that they've worked their whole life for, the sun hits them in the right way and warms their body so that they can enjoy reading a book. You're thinking about all of this stuff as you're designing a building, you're designing this experience. So instead of designing walls and doors, you're designing emotions and feelings. It's really the same thing, in my opinion.

Jaime: That's insane. So tell me one amazing thing that you learned in business that made all the difference. Because as you were going through, yes, empathy is great, but you were just talking about finance and that's not something you can get from empathy, I'm assuming, unless there's some correlation that I don't know about. So tell me, as you were learning about business, what were the top one or two things that really made a difference to you?

Nathan: Do you want me to give you the URLs of where I learned or do you want me to talk about the tactics of how I learned, my learning process?

Jaime: Well now that you've said URLs you can't take that back, so you need to tell me the URLs.

Nathan: ForEntrepeneurs.com is written by David Skok, with major partners, and he specializes in SaaS. I learned everything I know about the SaaS business from that blog, along with Joel York at Chaotic-Flow.com. Those were my go-to for the SaaS business.

Jaime: How did you find those?

Nathan: Google.

Jaime: Really? And you just read a ton.

Nathan: Right, and read and read, and tested and read, and failed and then read and tested.

Jaime: So give me some tactics that worked really well or failed as you were going through.

Nathan: Here's a mistake that I made early on and you guys might find this valuable - I wanted to change the pricing from X to Z because I believe this is going to happen. So I'm going to be practical - we had a $3 per month price point, I said "I want to go up to $10 per month because I think churns will decrease because it's a higher price so more people will use it because they're emotionally committed so I think that will result in X." What's way more impactful is to articulate to yourself the potential outcomes of your experiment and what decision you'll make if that outcome happens and then actually do the experiment because if all the decisions that you're going to make for all of the outcomes are not good for your business, you shouldn't do the experiment.

Jaime: So you were just looking for data for data's sake.

Nathan: That's exactly right. So if you're thinking about "Should we move to only annual pricing or keep it monthly?" we'll say "Okay, if the data says revenue will increase 35% and churn decreases 2% on this plan, what would the decision be as a business?" If that decision is impactful, then execute the experiment. If not, then move on.

Jaime: That's really interesting. Now I really want to know - how did you actually deal with marketing? Because you said you were doing calls and calls and calls for the first set, and of course online marketing is one of the biggest things that you guys do now, so tell me how you started learning that and what worked for you.

Nathan: What worked the best for us was that the product marketed itself and I'll tell you why - every time someone built a campaign with Heyo it would say "Powered by Heyo" across the bottom and that was our number one source of new customers.

Jaime: Seriously? I just thought those were little extra things.

Nathan: No, it worked for us, it still works today, and we got it from an iPhone case study that I read about how Steve Jobs used that as the main way to get iPhone proliferated throughout the market.

Jaime: Really? And that cost you nothing? So the more you get out there, the more you're going to have.

Nathan: It's not going to cost us nothing but it's that our costs are focused on the usage of the product rather than a new marketing channel that we want to spend on, so if we can focus our energy on making the product more valuable we know, from the data, that it will naturally grow.

Jaime: Which is so awesome, because of course that's what you want to be focusing on, caring about customer experience.

Nathan: Exactly.

Jaime: That sucks, though, for people, because they hate hearing stuff like that.

Nathan: Let me be more specific - back in the early days, 35% of the new traffic to our website was coming through "Powered by Heyo" so if you guys are building a product and there's something you can build into it that allows that product to market for you and drive more traffic back to the site. What we did with that traffic was we then said "Okay, we have all of these new customers joining, do they want to become affiliates? Can they then do a webinar with us? Can we do a podcast together?" but we didn't do the podcast thing because that wasn't big back then.

Jaime: "Back then", ten years ago.

Nathan: Back when I popped out of the womb! But there were other opportunities from that.

Jaime: Okay, I find that interesting. It's not like you're not looking at marketing and trying to figure out the best ways to do it, it's just that you found something that worked really well and so you moved forward on that. I'm really impressed. If you guys check out Heyo.com, your copy and your pages are ridiculously impressive. You must have spent a lot of time with convergence.

Nathan: What do you mean when you say the copy is impressive?

Jaime: I was reading through it going "I want this," just because of what you said, because you were so sure of what you were saying, like "This is it, guaranteed." It was very, very persuasive.

Nathan: Our secret to marketing Heyo is really simple - every morning at about 2:30am an e-mail goes out to the whole team and the subject line is "Campaign Report." When you open it, it shows a few things - the top five campaigns launched by customers yesterday with their name, a link to the campaign, the impressions the campaign has and the e-mails they've captured from that campaign along with the result. So we get about 60 of those in our inbox every morning and we can then reach out to customers and congratulate them. We then take those stories and just put them into our website, we put them on our blog, we guest blog with them and it fuels itself that way.

Jaime: And you're helping other people so you want to make sure that other people get it.

Nathan: That's correct.

Jaime: You have the prefect model - you help people and you make money.

Nathan: It's the secret. Three days ago there was a guy called Dylan, he's the social media manager at a company called Burt's Chips based in Avon, Britain, and they've developed this unique sale that they put on their hand fried chips and they sell it, so they've launched this campaign with us and even though all they're giving away is a bag of chips, so like $3, and salt, the campaign, over the first seven days, captured almost 4,500 impressions, or views, and of those views, guess how many turned into an e-mail lead for them?

Jaime: Usually it's super small, like 1%.

Nathan: They captured 2,600 e-mails from 4,500 views. That's not a mistake and it's not an accident - we built the platform.

Jaime: All that and a bag of chips.

Nathan: The reason I bring that story up is because we see those every day, constantly, and it's because we keep that focus on the customer.

Jaime: So it doesn't even have to be a huge contest. A bag of chips and some salt got 2,600, which Is really impressive. Tell me another story about somebody who's done that.

Nathan: Amy Lombard is ex-corporate, so she left corporate, created a company called Mixed Bag Designs, so she makes handbags for women that she sews together herself. She launched a campaign and there are six specific pieces of a Facebook campaign that you have to have if you want to convert about 10%.

Jaime: Oh.

Nathan: Did you like that?

Jaime: Yeah, we'll talk about that in Insiders.

Nathan: Exactly. But these six pieces work across any industry, so Amy launched it with these six pieces. To give you an example - putting a countdown one third of the way down the left side of the page directly under your logo converts significantly different than if you put the countdown at the top and the logo under the countdown.

Jaime: Really?

Nathan: So we've optimized all of that and we do that in real time. So Amy launched this campaign and she captured about 955 impressions. Her fan page has 2-3,000 people on it. From the 952 views she captured 380 e-mails.

Jaime: That's really impressive. So is she doing paid traffic to that ad?

Nathan: I should step back - our campaigns are meant to be run with no ad spend, so none of these have ad spend. The reason they got so much traffic was because the user can go to the Burt's Chips campaign, they enter their e-mail, then they click like, share and Tweet, which then pulls in their audience. So it markets itself.

Jaime: It's social and it's a contest and everyone's obsessed with contests. So is there anything specific? I assume she was giving away one of her bags.

Nathan: She was.

Jaime: Which is really awesome, and then she could probably do that once a month or something like that, over and over again. What's the best contest you've seen? What has somebody given away that everybody went crazy over?

Nathan: A campaign that came into my inbox this morning is Pro Audio Star on Facebook, so they've giving away a speaker that's worth around $180. This isn't a sexy thing.

Jaime: Audio is totally sexy!

Nathan: Audio can be sexy. It's captured 18,000 views and they've captured 7,600 e-mails from this one campaign.

Jaime: For $180.

Nathan: Well that's the prize that they've giving away for a lead that's worth $2.85, so we helped them get basically $14,000 in revenue for that.

Jaime: Are those your high level companies? Because I know you have different price points. Are you helping them personally with their campaign or do they set those up on their own?

Nathan: No, our focus at Heyo is to build the most valuable social marketing tool at $30 a month. Our goal is that we want to be serving 500,000 businesses, like the ones that are listening now, the ones like Amy Lombard, by 2017. 500,000.

Jaime: By 2017 - what are you guys at now?

Nathan: Several thousand. When we were about eight months we raised $550,000 from folks like Dave McClare and Paul Singh and Pat Condon, founder of Rackspace.

Jaime: How did you get to meet these people? Did you have really good financials you could show them?

Nathan: Yes, there's a trick to this, to raising capital. What I did was, when we were 4-5 months old and people starting mentoring us, let's say you were one of those people, I would say "Hey, Jaime,I would really enjoy your feedback today over coffee. Do you mind if I add you to our mentor and advisor e-mail? You'll get an e-mail once a month, it will be less than 670 characters and take you less than 30 seconds to read and I will keep you updated on the business. Can I add you?" and you say?

Jaime: Nobody says no, I'm sure.

Nathan: Yes, so this list grew and there were some potential funders on that list and they started getting updates and saw us executing month after month, 10% month on month growth, and I started getting e-mails from them, saying "Can we invest?" and that's what happened. I said "Well, what does it mean to invest? What do you mean "can I invest?" I don't know what that means." They explained it, we raised capital and that's how it happened.

Jaime: You're really good at premeditating. Everything is about what you're going to need in the future. You set up the e-mail list so that way it doesn't seem like you're asking and asking. Is that something that's just innate? You're creative and you just do it that way, or have you been planning forever, knowing what's coming up?

Nathan: I think the latter would give me way too much credit. What I know is that if your business or what you're working on can capture people's mindshare and they're thinking about you more, they win,. The brands and the businesses people think about the most are usually the ones they buy from, they're the ones they talk about, they're the ones that randomly come up at picnics and backyard barbecues and that means you win. So this mentor thing was me giving a shot of dopamine to everyone on my mentor list every month.

Jaime: "Hey, look at me!"

Nathan: Yeah. I think if I had to sum it up, I didn't know what the outcome was but I knew that getting smart people thinking about Heyo was a good thing. I think you can definitely teach setting yourself up to get lucky.

Jaime: I love that. It's really impressive and everybody should steal that tactic as much as they can because having mentors and people being supportive of you, it's one thing to have a coffee and they forget about you later.

Nathan: Which is typically what happens.

Jaime: Exactly, so that's genius. I'll stop telling you you're a genius, I think it will go to your head. We have to start wrapping up really soon so I ask the same last question every time, it's what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Nathan: My answer to that question would be to eliminate two things from what you typically do. I'll tell you specifically how I did this so that you guys can get ideas - typically, in the morning, the first thing I would do was roll over, check my e-mail, then I would get to work and I would be on e-mail and by the time I went to tackle important stuff, team members were in the office and I couldn't focus. So what I eliminated was I don't check my phone or my e-mail until noon.

Jaime: What?

Nathan: Yeah, until noon, which is why I was late this morning. So the first thing I do when I get up is I do 30 pushups. Every morning; it's a habit. When I hear the alarm go off, it's 30 pushups, keep my mind on it, and I've eliminated checking e-mail which has allowed me to create space in the morning. If you can start teaching yourself little things, if you start eliminating one thing every week, and practice keeping it eliminated, you'll get way closer to $1 million way faster.

Jaime: I've never heard that before and I adore it. So give me some other ones that you've done so that we have a list in case some of you don't check e-mail until noon, which I'm sure none of you do.

Nathan: So I just donated all of my clothes and what I've done is I have a basket, and I can send you a picture of this, in my room where it's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesdays, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and it's the exact same jeans and shirt in every basket so it's these jeans, the style of jeans, and it's always this American Apparel style shirt in either a medium or a small and usually it says Heyo but sometimes I'll do grey or another color, so I've streamlined that and here's why it's important - you guys probably write about this in books, but when we wake up we have this much decision making power and the first thing that many people have to decide on is what to wear or how they want to do their hair, whatever, so then you only have this much left. You check e-mail and by the time you get to work you have this much left for all of the important decisions. So the way I'm doing it, now I don't have to decide what to wear because I know I'm going to wear the same thing every day and it makes it way, way more streamlined. I've just started executing that this past week.

Jaime: That's really interesting. You're really paying attention to the decision making. So how are you feeling in regards to that? Are you feeling like you have better decision making power for longer?

Nathan: I can listen harder, like later on in the day.

Jaime: Really? Instead of being in that mental fog?

Nathan: Exactly right.

Jaime: That?s really impressive. I know I keep asking more questions - I really appreciate you coming on the show. Tell us where we can find out more about Heyo.

Nathan: I've enjoyed being on, Jaime. If you guys are listening and you have questions, I'm extremely active so I would love to learn what industry you guys are currently in right now - post it in the comments below and I'll give you some suggestions of things I recommend so you can start building your own business in that industry and get to $1 million quicker in the next one to two years. So I'll do that and you can also find me at Heyo.com. If you ever see me and you yell "Heyo!" I will run up and give you a hug and we'll talk about business. You can also go to Heyo.com and sign up for a trial. We'll make it free for folks that are listening so it's easy for you guys. Check it out and that's where they can find me. I'm also on Twitter - @NathanLatka or @Heyo

Jaime: Beautiful, and of course we'll link up to everything that he mentioned, all the books and of course Heyo.com. I hope you guys have an amazing week. Take care.

Nathan: See you guys.

Jaime: Nathan was awesome and introduced me to a ton more millionaire that I can have on the show. Thank you so much, Nathan. The interesting thing was is he didn't really talk about his company at all and I wanted to know more about it. So, I asked him to do a Webinar. It's going to be this Wednesday night which is July 9th at 6 pm eastern. You can sign-up for Nathan's Webinar if you go to EventualMillionaire.com/heyo. Pretty easy to remember. Go sign-up for that Webinar and what he's going to do is teach us how to make 2-3 thousand dollars on Facebook while you're building you million dollar business. I love how he named it that because he knows 2 or 3 thousand is awesome for right now, for sure, but later you want a million dollar business. Awesome. I hope you have an amazing day and take care. 

Announcer: Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

Tags: Business Building, Business Growth, Business Marketing, Business Scaling, business startup, Decision Making, millionaire interview, Nathan Latka, Startup, Strategic Decision

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Visioning

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