The Future of Ecommerce for Influencers with David Perry

Perry is the CEO of Carro, a new e-commerce partnership network used by over 30K Shopify brands.

GetCarro.com helps brands gain attention, sales, and new customers by partnering with other brands in the network. “The goal is to keep users on your store, adding all the things they need directly into your cart. Carro provides all the other products they want that you don’t currently sell.”

Sony PlayStation acquired Perry’s previous company Gaikai to establish leadership in the future of streaming video games from the cloud. This service is called PlayStation Now.

“Every successful influencer turned their followers into customers. However, about 99% of influencers don’t have customers. They send all of their clicks to somebody else.” – David Perry

Episode Highlights:

• Perry talks about his video game industry career and business
• How and why to he switched industry – from video games to eCommerce
• How he tapped into influencers for his new business, Carro
• How to find your element in your industry to start a business
• How to make an investor get interested and invest in your business

Websites:

DPerry.com
GetCarro.com

Connect with Perry:

LinkedIn – Perry David
Instagram – Carro
Facebook – Carro
LinkedIn – Carro
Twitter – Carro

Transcript: Download

Video Transcription provided by GMR Transcription Services.

Jaime:	Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I am Jaime Masters, and today on the show, we have David Perry. Now, he runs GetCarro.com, which is a brand new e-commerce. I’m really excited to talk to him about that, but he was also in the video game industry, and even sold his last company to Sony PlayStation. Thanks so much for coming on the show today.

David:	Thanks for inviting me.

Jaime:	I love it when I see somebody who’s been steeped in an industry for so long switch. So, first, let’s talk about the video game type of company that you sold to PlayStation, plus you had many decades of experience in that. Tell me a little bit more about that first.

David:	It’s funny because my first computer was called a Sinclair ZX81. It was a black and white computer, and so, I was there when graphics were just sort of blobs, and I didn’t need any art skills, and the music was beeps, so I didn’t need any music skills, but boy has the video game industry moved on.

	What I learnt from that space was that if I just made a game – like, let’s say I make a game called Jumpy Boy. Nobody cares. And then, if I make something with a license on it, like one of the first games I did was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, suddenly you’re No. 1 in the charts, so branding and licensing and the power of that is quite shocking, and it can have a huge impact on your career.

	And so, once you get known for doing that, I ended up doing the Terminator, and the Matrix, and Aladdin for Disney, and all kinds of different games, but the video game industry, for me, was so fun because I got to watch the whole industry grow. I used to walk into meetings in Hollywood and there’d be a bunch of old, tired executives there who had never played video games, had no interest at all. To them, this was just a coffee cup deal they were negotiating.

	But, as directors have now got control, and as all the executives have changed out, they all have grown up playing video games, and we’re welcome everywhere. The music industry loves video games, the sports industry, everywhere you go, you’re welcome now.

	So, the last thing I got really interested in was this idea of what’s the future of games, and the way I feel is that everything is becoming – I guess our impatience level is defining what works. You see TikTok and things like that. We’re so impatient these days. We just want access to everything.

So, we come up with this idea that if you can have all the movies ever made everywhere instantly, and you can do that with books and music, why wouldn’t that happen for video games? Someday you’ll just wanna be able pull up any game you can remember or any game that’s just out and be able to play it instantly on whatever device you’re sitting in front of. And so, we started building that technology, and that’s why Sony acquired us, because it actually worked. So, that’s an exciting future.

	And, as that continues, the future of the game industry – just to give you a little read on that – I believe that when the games aren’t running locally, when you won’t have to buy consoles anymore, then they can actually give you more computer or more performance in the cloud than you would be willing to pay for anyway, and so, someday the games are going to take a huge step up in quality because it’s not about what you’re willing to pay for hardware-wise for your house, and everyone having to buy the same piece of hardware is just a waste of money. So, that’s sort of the prediction for the future.

Jaime:	All right, you’re speaking my language. Everybody that listens knows that I’m a geek, and I used to be in the video-on-demand industry, and I totally played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when I was younger. So, that wasn’t in your bio. That’s why my mouth was open. I was like, “What?”

	And, the future of technology – when you started that company that was really more in the cloud, was technology even there yet? I feel like it’s a catchup game to try and be like, “Oh, eventually, we’ll be able to stream” because we couldn’t. Before, everything was so small. We couldn’t actually do that. How did you know when it was gonna be ready to be able to actually go into full production?

David:	Yeah, what happened was – you’re absolutely right. The numbers were scary. The cost of sending a lot of data through the internet was actually expensive, and so, what we would show investors was the graph of the price of sending data, because it keeps going down and down, so yes, it’s expensive today, but it is gonna be –

Jaime:	You’re like this, with your fingers crossed. “No, don’t worry, it’ll totally be cheaper.”

David:	And it did, and so, in reality, it’s okay. But, the one that was the harder one for us was how on earth are you going to pay for so many servers? You could have hundreds of thousands of servers. How are you gonna do that? And, we ended up finding an investment company that invested into Netflix and Facebook and helped them build out their server networks, and once they agreed to fund our servers, then no one ever asked me the question again. It was kind of like, “Okay, we believe you.”

	Then, Samsung signed a deal with us to power all of their televisions with this technology, and so, once that happened, that’s when Sony swept in and bought the company.

Jaime:	That’s huge thinking. I know you were steeped in tech since way before even Pong days, but how did you just know that this was gonna be the future and then go all in on it? Because that does seem pretty scary back in the day, when we hadn’t had that before.

David:	Yeah, I was actually spending some time in Asia. I was one of the first westerners to visit the Asian video game companies, and they were so welcoming that we’d taken the time to travel there and meet with the CEOs of all these different game companies, and it allowed us to get a read what happens when you have millions of concurrent players trying to play games. What are the symptoms of that? What changes? They really were pushing on this idea of games being free, and then, you can pay later in the game. If you want to engage more, then you can pay for the things you do, and it’s a very profitable way to make video games. You make billions of dollars if you do it right.

	And so, I was fascinated by this, and we went out there to learn, and we were just sort of listening, but the clear thing was how do you get more people into the game in the least amount of time? And, if you have to download, there are some video games that take hours to download. You get all excited – “I wanna play this game” – you sit down, and it goes, “We’ll be ready in four hours,” and you’re like, “Ugh, I wanna go do something else.”

Jaime:	Yeah, you’d put it on before you went to bed, and then it’d be downloading, and then you go to bed. I know the drill.

David:	Yeah. So, the world doesn’t work that way anymore. The technology we built allowed us to do things – we did a demonstration with YouTube, so, Google was very kind and worked with us to make it so you could be on YouTube and then you could jump right into a FIFA Soccer game. So, the idea that I’m not leaving YouTube, I’m still in the browser, and now I’m actually in the video game – that’s the way I think it needs to work. So, imagine you’re on YouTube and you’re watching somebody playing a game, and then you can just click and be in the game. There’s no reason why you can’t do that today.

Jaime:	My attention span – my ADD would just – I’d be playing games all day long. It’s true. Do you worry about that? I know you were saying TikTok. Our attention spans are getting kind of ridiculously sad. I have teenagers. And so, how do you feel about that? Because I love the future of technology and it’s so exciting what we can do, but there’s also some detrimental brain stuff – so we’ve heard, anyway.

David:	Well, what’s probably my best advice is if you want to work in any of these spaces, go get some teenagers. It’s almost a prescription. If you wanna understand, get some teenagers and watch how they interact with things. My daughter is just like, “Come on, what’s happening?”, and it’s like, “Give the computer a minute,” because she just keeps tapping the button. “Okay, okay, why is it not responding?” They have no patients. And so, it’s fascinating, and so, that sort of changes your perspective on things. Why does TikTok work? Well, it’s actually technically very difficult to do what TikTok does to serve that video at that performance that quickly, just instantaneously.

Jaime:	Seriously. I know.

David:	Yeah, what a challenging thing to do. On the other hand, to make it so that it’s intelligently giving everyone their own feed is another whole thing, and it works very well, and the engagement is incredibly high. So, I don’t think that’s going away. I think if anything, that’s gonna continue and become – it’s funny, I watch people make a video, and the video’s three minutes long, and if you watch a teenager, they’re done within 15 seconds. They’re like, “Get to the point.”

Jaime:	It’s insane. My friends had a viral video way back in the day. It was called EP Bird, and they did Diet Coke and Mentos, and so, we did all this research, and it was like average watch times for music videos were five or six minutes back in the day. Now, if we can last eight seconds, that’s amazing. It’s kind of sad that our attention span – we always need that. But, the good thing for the video game industry is that that’s perfect for it. We’re engaged, and it works really well. You’re doing something completely different now. How did you go from your knowledge base and everything having to do that, and it sounds like you’re excited over the future of that space, to “completely switching” industries?

David:	Well actually, the thing was that I technically retired. So, I built the coolest mancave that probably exists, with metalworking and woodworking, C and C, 3D printing, photo studio. It was just glorious. And, I imagine this place is fully decked out, and I’m ready to start, and one of the first things that I was doing was photography, and I found that no one really cared about my photography until I got some social media influencers in there, and once I started taking pictures of them, then people would freak out and go, “My God, it’s blah-blah-blah. I love this person. Will you introduce them to me? I wanna marry them.” I could feel the difference.

	And so, these would be friends of my daughter, and I would notice in my room right now, I have 15 million followers’ worth of influencers, and I didn’t really have any perspective on 15 million people until I went to an Ed Sheeran concert at the Rose Bowl, and I looked around, and there was about 60,000 people, and they seem like ants when you’re looking at 60,000 people, and you go, “Wait, there’s 15 million worth of followers that they speak to every day,” not a concert once in a blue moon. Every day, they’re talking to 15 million people.

	And so, I asked them what’s that like, and they said the problem that they have is their dream would be to work with the brands that they like and not just random people that are trying to get them to sell stuff to their audience, and so, that caused me to start thinking about it. I was also buying a lot of equipment for my workshop, so I ended up – some photographer would be “This is the best light ever.” I would buy the light, and then it’d be like, “He’s right, that’s a great light.”

	So, I was being influenced, and I was feeling the value of the influence, and so, you can imagine that’s all going around in my head, and then I get asked to help teach some high school kids about investing, and I’m the investor, so I’m gonna be in a room with a bunch of high school kids, and they’re gonna be pitching and stuff like that, but there’s also gonna be an entrepreneur there, and he’s gonna be coming from the other perspective.
	Turns out he’s working on influencer marketing. We’re sharing with each other, and I’m like, “This is really interesting. I gotta learn more.” So, we met afterwards. We’d gone on a whiteboard for a huge whiteboard session, and then he said, “Would you like to be the CEO?”, and then I joined his company, and that’s where I am today.

	So, we dove into this idea of can we help you work out who your authentic influencers are, the people who actually like your brand, and then make it easy for you to interact with those people. So, we built some technology on Shopify. It’s called Carro, and Carro, C-A-R-R-O, basically allows you to work out who those influencers are and then connect with them and let them – we have a really cool tech that you can let them shop for free. That’s quite exciting for them. Imagine they’re buying your products, and then they get a message saying, “Hey, we love what you do. Please stop buying our products. Here’s a link, and you can shop for free.” The response is, “Oh my God, I like your brand.”

Jaime:	“You love me? I love you! This is perfect!”

David:	One of the secrets of influencer marketing is if it’s the other way around, if you just trouble them, they’re gonna ask for payment, and they’re gonna also delete your post the moment they can. So, the minute that post can be deleted from their feed – they never wanted it there, it’s not any product they use, they just want rid of it, and so, they do delete the post.

	So, Facebook – sorry, it’s called Meta now – wrote a success story on our app because of the authenticity of it, but what happened was then COVID hit, and if you think about it, we’re really working hard on trying to help get more attention to brands because you’ll never meet a brand that’s like, “Please, no more attention.” They can never, ever have enough attention. So, that seemed like a very good strategy.

	But, when COVID hit, it was loud and clear that at this point, you have a network of so many different brands. We have over 30,000 now. Together, they have 350 million visitors a month. And so, if they were gonna pay Google or Facebook for clicks, is there any way we could get them to share traffic? And, our thought process went along the lines of if this was an organism with 350 million people hitting it every month, can you push your products into someone else’s traffic.

	So, I make helmets, you make bicycles. Maybe we can work together and I’ll put my helmets into your bicycle traffic, and if you like, I’ll sell your bike, it’s up to you, but let’s work together. And by doing so, this helmet company suddenly gets orders that they weren’t getting before.

	So, being technology, we just do it all digitally. It’s virtual inventory, virtual warehousing. There’s no need to actually try to guess what helmets are gonna sell anymore. In the old days, you would look at all these helmets and go, “Hmm, I think I’ll go with the gold one and the one with lemons on it.” How do you know those are the ones that are gonna sell? You don’t.

And, what sizes are you gonna buy, and how many are you gonna put in your warehouse? And then you have to freight them to a warehouse, people have to touch them, storing them on shelves, insuring them, etc., and then shipping them. So, the idea being why not leave them with the manufacturer, and whenever you sold the helmet, they will ship it, which means the helmet only moved once, and it only moved when it sold, which leaves more margin for both sides to share.

	And so, this is something that we went down this path of we can build this technology, so we built it, and there’s lots of brands now cross-selling each other’s products, and once you start to do it, it becomes addictive. When you add helmets, then do you want gloves? Well, do you wanna buy those gloves? Do you wanna gamble on what gloves? Do you want clearance sales to get rid of all those gloves that you didn’t sell?

Jaime:	Seriously.

David:	Or, do you just wanna do it digitally? Then you can have all the gloves, all the sizes, and all the colors today at no cost, and just see if you can sell them. So, that’s what Carro is really all about, is this cross-selling.

	But, what happens is then, you suddenly go full circle, and you go, “Well, hold on a minute. Influencers need this too.” Because every successful influencer – the really successful ones – turned their followers into customers. I would say about 99% of influencers don’t have customers. They send all of their clicks to somebody else. Amazon, have my clicks, merch company, have my clicks, and that means you own all my customers.

	So, the Kim Kardashians with the Skims, which is worth over $3 billion now, or Rihanna with Fenty Beauty, over $2 billion, they have customers. They want customers bad, and they build customer databases, and they understand their customers, and they reach out to them. You can remarket your customers for future deals, like people wanna work with you because you have so many customers.

The followers is exciting, and it’s great, but there’s a lot of people with followers, there’s very few people with customers. And so, I think that’s really gonna be the future of e-commerce for these people, and why it really matters is at the end of the day, it’s down to the dollars and cents. Amazon actually publishes what they pay. They pay three to five percent for the vast majority of the categories that influencers influence, and they keep the customer.

	So, in this scenario, if an influencer pays $30.00 to Shopify, they now have their own Shopify store, and they can either build it themself or have somebody build it for them, but the net result is they’re now able to store, and handle, and own the customers, and they get the retailer cut, so they don’t get – no more affiliate fees, no more codes that you have to have everyone typing in to try to get you your payment. It’s your store, your customers, and you get the retailer cut, which is usually five to 10 times more. So, this isn’t a three percent improvement on your business, this is literally five to 10 times more because they have changed roles. They’re not an affiliate anymore, they’re now an actual retailer.

	And so, this is actually really fun. You can imagine having that conversation, even with an influencer’s manager. They’re like, “But I’m always chasing to try to work out how many things something has sold, and I never think the numbers are quite correct.” Well now, they’re your numbers, so you’re in charge. It’s very exciting for these people.

Jaime:	Well, that’s why I’m having you on the show right now, because I work with influencers, and I coach e-com brands, and we’re all siloed, and it’s like, “Oh, in order to get the brands that you want to work with, you have to reach out to them directly now.” Do you know what I mean? It’s just so archaic when you look at what we currently have, especially because technology can do some of this stuff, and then we’re paying Meta for ads.

Costs are going up like crazy. That’s why everybody else is jumping on TikTok and all these, trying to get in front of organic companies as e-com brands, even though they kind of suck at that because they’re not influencers. You know what I mean? There’s so many problems in the industry that this solves, which is awesome. I was like, “Oh, the little guys are all getting together now.” I feel like it’s easier to be able to do it.

David:	That’s really what it is. Rebel Alliance. Arm the rebels.

Jaime:	Seriously. I should have worn my hat. But, how are you seeing it? Because you’re used to new spaces, I totally get that, but for everybody who’s not used to being a futurist or whatever you call yourself – I’m making that up, it sounds like you’re a futurist, looking toward the future and trying to solve problems on a bigger scale – how do you dive into something like this? Because you guys have 30,000 brands already on it. That seems like a hard thing to do, even just to get one side of the equation, let alone both sides with the influencers, too.

David:	Yeah, it is complicated because every brand has a different store setup, they tag things differently, so we have AI running to try to make sense of a lot of these things. We just added a new feature, which is check upsell. So, our tagline for the company is “sell more together,” which means we have to do everything from that perspective.

So, if you say, “Well, but recommendation systems have been around forever,” yeah, they have, and they all do the same thing, which is to look into your store and recommend your stuff. So, would you like some coffee with your coffee, if that’s all I’m selling? That’s not the best upsell ever. Or, if I’m buying an electric toothbrush, why don’t you buy our electric shaver with our electric toothbrush? That’s not a great upsell. That’s not gonna convert.

	So, because we have all the data, we’re able to really understand what would convert, and we also have really cool brands, so we have Kendall Jenner’s Moon Oral Care, which is – she has toothpastes and things like that, so if you put Kendall Jenner’s toothpaste with an electric toothbrush, that’s the highest-converting thing you can put with the electric toothbrush. So, it’s up to you. You wanna put the shaver? Please do. It’s your checkout. But, if you want us to power it, we have an insight as a network that no individual brand has, so therefore, it would be impossible for them to do this, so that’s why we can really help.

	And, the idea for the company is to be just technology for these people, wiring it all together, but I wanna be crystal clear. We don’t own any products or anything like that. We’re not building any brands. It’s a bit like Uber doesn’t own any cars, or Airbnb doesn’t own the apartments, or eBay doesn’t own the products getting sold in the network. It’s a technology to enable commerce. And, that got PayPal excited. They ended up investing in our company because we’re actually helping businesses grow, and there’s certain investors out there – that’s their charter, is to support companies that are helping small business grow.

	And so, this is actually a fun project to be involved in, but one point Leeds has talked about was the way I like to think is if you wanna disrupt something, you don’t have to be a futurist. You don’t have to have any crazy insights. The trick is to sit there and say, “How would I beat that company?” So, if you wanna say choose any company, how would I beat it, then once you’ve thought how to beat it, then say, “How would I beat that?”, and once you’ve thought of that, “How would I beat that?”, until you’ve got nothing left. If you start heading that direction, you’ll seem like you’re a futurist.

Jaime:	That is technically problem solving for the future, so yeah, that’s amazing.

David:	The way I describe it is I describe it as the game industry. The whole game industry is on a train. Imagine they’re all on the same train. That’s the game industry train, and some people miss the train, and they’re running down the track. Someday, hopefully they’ll get to be in the game industry. And then, there’s people who are trying to think forward, like what’s next, and they usually think of small, incremental things. I call it going to the next station. They’re at one station ahead. So then, you just keep going, what’s the next thing, what’s the next thing, and that’s the easy way in any business. And, if you’re like, “Well, I need a filter for that,” we’ll save people time. That’s the most valuable thing.

	In video games, there’s a lot of people selling things in the games now, and some developers will build 20,000 items for you to buy, everything in every color and every size, and it turns out the thing that sells the most out of all of that is the thing that saves the most time. My point is I can sell you all these different colors of armor, or “I notice that you’re walking a lot. Would you like to buy a horse?”

Jaime:	Yeah. Holding the button for a real long time is real annoying.

David:	I’ll sell all my armor and take the horse because you can get around faster. So, that’s one of the secrets, is to understand people are happy to pay money to save time. You see that even with valet parking or anything at all. There’s so many examples out there where people will pay more if they can save time, and in the game world, that can save days, or in certain games, maybe weeks if you can speed things up, so the value is immense there.

Jaime:	I love this. Now, you already had a business network. You got PayPal to invest in you, but you had a lot of successes beforehand. For somebody that might not have your amazing network, starting at the beginning of an industry, how does someone get into something like this and be able to do something as big as you’re doing without necessarily knowing all the people?

David:	Well, I have this weird thing where I usually find myself already doing it. I don’t actually sit there and go, “Shall I, shan’t I, what should I do?” With the last company, I needed to learn about the cloud, and servers, and transit deals, and all that. I didn’t know anything about it, so I went on Wikipedia, I searched the top internet companies, and I called all of them – only six at the time that were major – and most of them didn’t return my call, but one did that actually mattered, and they said to me…

	This sales guy gets on the call. I think they thought they were gonna sell me service, and I said to him, “Can you give me a map of the United States that shows the speed of your network?”, and he’s like, “What do you mean?” I go, “I know that the wires aren’t all in straight lines from your data center, so I wanna understand. It's gonna look like some weird kidney shape around your data centers – how fast can you serve data.”

He goes, “It would be so amazing if I had that. That would be so valuable. It would help me do my sales job so much better,” and I said to him, “Well, would you like us to make that for you?” He said, “Would you be willing to talk to our executive management about that? Because that would be amazing.” So, I flew out to St. Louis, met with the CEO of the network, and I pitched him, and I said, “We’ll build this for you.” He said, “Okay, you can use all of our data centers for free,” and that was how we started.

Jaime:	Okay, so, thank you for that, because everyone’s like, “He Wikipediaed, randomly called, and ended up selling the company.”
David:	For money.

Jaime:	That’s really, really impressive, and it was just because you had a need that they really needed and you could capitalize on that. Were you also really good at sales? Because turning a salesperson around is interesting.

David:	No, it was just listening. So, it’s something I’m not good at, and I need to do it more, is just listen. When you get on a call with people, instead of diving into your pitch, have a listen and see what they are looking for, and then, your pitch goes that direction, and it saves so much time. It just saves so much time because in this scenario, that was a need that they clearly identified, so I’m like, “Let me see if I can help you with that,” and that was really unfair competition. Trying to compete with us when we had a major Tier 1 network giving us full access to the network for free – that was a game-changer.

	The point is that you kinda just need to get on with it, and I think one of the other things is to work out what it is that you actually like to do. I think that’s important. I used to go to the TED conferences, and there was this dude – his name was Sir Ken Robinson. Sadly, he’s passed away, but he was respected as the No. 1 speaker at TED. He was just the guy, and you should look up his talks. Standing ovations. I got to meet him once just by accident. I walked into a party, and he was there, and I said to him, “I was there the day you gave your speech. My God, that changed my whole life.”

But, what he talked about was something called your element and how there’s something you’re built – you as a human being – you don’t know it, but your DNA is built to do something, and what happens is when you work it out, it’s something that you actually enjoy so much you would do it for free, and that makes you dangerous because now, other people who have to be paid to do that thing have a problem because you’re gonna be all over them like a rash because you’re doing it for free, you’re up thinking about it at night, you’re super passionate about it, you care, and that’s the hard part, is you have to find your element.

	It’s funny because he said to me the No. 1 question I got after his speech – he wrote this book, The Element, which I thought was funny the No. 1 question was “How do I find my element?”, and so, he wrote another book on how to find your element. And, that’s something I would highly recommend people think about. If you haven’t found it yet, if you haven’t found something – for me, it’s clearly technology, and I go down the rabbit hole on things because I find it really interesting.

	The whole influencing thing now, e-commerce – what am I doing in e-commerce, for goodness’s sake? I’m a video game person. But, I look at the space and I see opportunity in so many different dimensions, so many I could start 50 companies in the space, and I find it fascinating. It’s also cool when you have teenagers because they get it too, so they have opinions about this, they’re interested, this is a good brand, that’s not a good brand, and if anything, I think it’s been very interesting as well because my family’s more involved because they’re interested in this versus transit deals for cloud gaming. Not so interested.

Jaime:	They’re like, “Cool, Dad. I’m good. Keep going.”

David:	Not so interested. So, that’s something as well, just follow your passion, whatever you’re really into. You actually are dangerous if you do that.

Jaime:	Okay, I have so many questions when it comes to that. No. 1, finding your element – doesn’t it seem sort of ever evolving, though, especially for people that have lots of different “passions”? Is finding your element problem-solving for a lot of people? Do you know what I mean? It’s exciting to problem-solve, and I find a lot of business owners are like, “Ooh, I just like going down this path.” How do you define your element specifically?

David:	It’s funny because I, one day, sat in my office going, “What is my element? What is it?” I realized what it is is learning, and that might seem boring – “Oh, you just like learning?” No. What it means is you’re podcasting. I want to know everything about podcasting. I’m not going to be podcasting, so that’s not gonna be something I’m gonna end up doing, but I have a Shure SM7B here, I have a Rodecaster with me, because I wanna understand it.

I don’t want to have any mystery at all in what goes on, and so, photography. I find who are the best teachers in the world – oh, they’re gonna be teaching at Canon for free? I’m over. And then, you start to get to know the people there, and they’re like, “Oh, we’ve got this other great photographer coming. Would you like to listen?” “Of course I would.” And, you start learning, and it’s like drinking through a fire hose, any industry.

	What’s actually occurred in my career is the more I’ve done that – I’ve had people come up to me, animators, “Oh my God, you’re the only person that really cares about our animation.” I’m fascinated by your animation – how it works, the timing of a reframe, how Disney does it versus how other people do it. I’m interested in all of that. And so, by doing that, they appreciate that you appreciate what they do.

	And, when you start to learn what people’s jobs are, what they do, how they work, whatever it is, you should try everything – golf, skydiving, waterskiing, scuba diving. Whatever it is, you have to try it. You don’t have to dedicate your life to scuba diving, but you have to try it.

	And, what you’ll find in business is – an example I use – I was flying to New York once, and what I do is I like to talk to the person beside me to work out what our rapport is. What is it that we both are into? And, if you’ve been trying a lot of stuff and learning about a lot of stuff, you’ll be able to survive a conversation on just about any subject. And so, I turned to this guy on this flight to New York, and I’m like, “So, what do you do?”, and he says, “I import iron ore into the United States.” And, I thought to myself, “Dude, you’ve got me. I have nothing.” I’m literally sitting there going, “I got nothing.”

	And so, he’s playing a little handheld game – it was a tennis game – and I say to him, “Oh, I know the people that made that tennis game,” and he said, “Oh, I invested in this game.” Suddenly, you have rapport. We’re suddenly talking. Now there’s something, there’s a connection there, and we’re talking, talking, talking, and then, he’s like, “I’m gonna go and see U2 in Madison Square Garden when we get to New York. Would you like to join me?” I’m like, “Okay.” I had no idea how wealthy people who import ore are, but he had the entire row of seats to himself.

	So, imagine the two of us with a row of seats just watching U2. It was fascinating. And so, I was sitting in the U2 concert, going, “If I hadn’t turned to this guy and said hi, then this would not be happening.” So, the more you do, the more you’ll have the confidence to just talk to anybody. So, I’m not this super confident person at all. I grew up in Northern Ireland in the countryside in a little cottage. But, over time, I’ve learned that if you really absorb – when I give a speech now, I’ll literally be talking to the sound guys about which microphones and whatever, and they’re like, “Nobody asks. What are you doing? This is not a conversation we have with anybody.” So, to me, that’s really, really important.

Jaime:	I’m laughing so much from this because I joke that I wanna know everything, and I don’t know that I’ve met anybody that asks as many questions to random people as I do than you because I also talk to the sound people and ask them what their stuff is just for fun because I’m curious, and curiosity leads me in different ways where I’m like, “Huh, I do wanna know everything,” not that I’ll use it or remember it because I’m getting older, but it’s a fun path to be on. How do you pick, though? So, you have this wide plethora of all of these things, and if you didn’t sit next to the entrepreneur that was in influencer marketing, would you be in this company right now?

David:	No, I wouldn’t. That’s what’s interesting about it. I gave a commencement speech – just as an example, I didn’t get a degree. I didn’t even complete high school, so I left high school to start in the game industry because I got a job offer and my teachers didn’t know what to do. “Should you leave? Shouldn’t you leave? This is a terrible idea.” Some of my teachers were like, “No, this is an interesting idea.”

	So, I ended up having to make a decision. Do I go? Don’t I go? I had to actually move to England to take that job, and the industry grew, so thankfully – at the time, the industry wasn’t that big, so it was a little more difficult. But, years later, the university I would have gone to – it’s called Queens University in Belfast, a really amazing university – they contacted me and said, “We’d like to give you a doctorate in engineering.”

	And so, it’s kind of funny because they call me Dr. Perry when I walk around there. And so, this is funny because to me, you don’t have to – the rule is if you do something for 12 years successfully, then they consider that you earned your degree anyway. And so, to some extent, to be able to find an industry that is something that you care passionately about, and then for it to pay off in all kinds of different ways, is really quite interesting. I like the way that went.

	But, there was one question you asked me which I didn’t completely answer. You asked me about getting investment or how to find these people. One thing that jumped to my mind was I once spoke on a panel of investors. Imagine I’m sitting at a game industry event with a panel of investors, and I said to the audience, “I think I know what investors are looking for. I think I know what these guys actually want.” And, the investors were like, “Okay, what is it we want?”

	And, I said, “The one thing that they don’t wanna do is they don’t wanna pay for education, so they do not want to use their money to educate you. They’re almost allergic to it. And, what they actually want you to do is to find some gold somewhere and prove it’s there – see the gold? I see the gold. Look, I’ve been digging into the ground, and I see the gold. Do you see the gold? I see the gold. We need to get some heavy machinery in here to get this gold out of the ground ASAP.” And, they’re all nodding. “That’s exactly what we do.”

	And so, it’s a very simple example, but it helps filter when you think you’re ready for investors. I’ve met a lot of people who are like, “Can you introduce me to some investors? Because I have an idea.” And it’s like, “No, they don’t want to invest into ideas. They wanna get the gold out of the ground.” So, it’s your job to do the prospecting, it’s their job to get it out of the ground. People will pitch me, they’ll say, “What do you think of this idea?”, and I’m like, “It’s okay,” and then they’ll go, “What about this one?”, and it’s like, “Okay,” and “What about this one?”, and they got 50 ideas. They do this with games, by the way.

So, “If you don’t like this game, I’ve got eight more I can show you,” which shows they’re not really in on any of them, they’re not committed to any of them, they’re just – I call it the buckshot technique, where you’re firing against a wall and just hoping that somebody will choose something and go, “Okay, I’ll fund that.” That’s not how investors work. So, once you understand that your job is to get the prospecting out of the way and then bring them in, then it’s not hard to get investors.

Jaime:	Yeah. Coming from the guy that got PayPal, so, yeah, he knows better than anyone. That analogy is perfect because it is. People are like, “Oh, I have this thing that might be silver, or it might be this, or it might be this. You wanna help me figure it out?” Nobody wants it. No. Time is the most precious gift that we have.

	And, on that note, I know we have to start wrapping up, and I could ask you a million more questions. I literally have a million more over here, but I’m gonna ask the last question, which is what’s one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

David:	Sadly, there’s a couple answers to that. There’s not just one answer. If they know what they’re going to do, if they know what they’re built for, then there you go. That’s the answer. Go do that thing. Go after what you’re built to do. Stop and look at yourself and go, “What are my skills? What am I actually really good at? What am I really into? What am I passionate about?”, and then go do that. That makes you very, very dangerous, very hard to deal with, hard to compete with. I wouldn’t wanna compete against you doing whatever that thing is. So, that would be my No. 1 advice.

	No. 2 is if you’re already in something or in a certain industry, ask yourself, “How do I save time?” I know it sounds crazy, but I try to buy a car, and they still put all that stupid paperwork on the table, and I’m looking at all this paperwork going, “Are you kidding me? What is this? This is 2022, and you have to sign all this paperwork?” Everything can be improved. So, just put those glasses on and go disrupt something. There’s endless opportunities.

Jaime:	I love it. I’m gonna have my kid go listen to this interview, too, just so you know. I don’t know that I’ve ever made my son listen to an interview, but I’m totally gonna have him listen to this. Tell everybody where they can find more about you and how they sign up for Get Carro.

David:	So, for Carro, if you have a Shopify store or if you know somebody who runs an online business on Shopify, if they go to GetCarro.com and if they mention this podcast, then they will get super VIP support, and make sure they ask for support, so don’t have them just try to work it all out themselves. They will go much faster if they reach out to us, and we will give them all the support they need.

Jaime:	Thank you. Now I’m gonna go tell my clients that so they’ll listen to this too. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

David:	No problem. Thank you so much. This is fun.

Categories: All, Business, Featured Millionaire Interview, Millionaire Interviews

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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