[00:00:27] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to The First Customer podcast today. I am extremely lucky. I usually say very lucky. Today. I'm extremely lucky to have Johnny Trevisani. one of my friends from a former life and, pilot, author, entrepreneur, engineering manager. Philly's fan who doesn't have his Philly's hat on.

John, welcome to the show, buddy. Thanks for joining me.

[00:00:50] Johnny: Thanks, Jay thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.

[00:00:52] Jay: Also a musician, too. I forgot about that. I see the guitar back there. I forgot you play music, too. You just don't have enough 

[00:00:58] Johnny: Yeah, well, my mother used to say, Jack of all trades, master of none. So that

was, my mother was really good at that stuff. So,

[00:01:05] Jay: Speaking of your mother, where did you grow up? And did that have any impact on you being an entrepreneur later in life?

[00:01:10] Johnny: yeah, so I grew up one of five. I was one of five kids, youngest, and there's a big age difference between me and the rest of the four. So I had a lot of alone time that allowed me to be, let's just call it an entrepreneurial spirit. I would say getting myself into trouble. But it's called an entrepreneurial spirit. Yeah. So I did a lot of that stuff and, I had a lot of different interests during that time.

[00:01:37] Jay: All right. So we're going to fast forward a bit to your own business that you started. You had your own company, you had employees, you had the whole deal. and then you went back to the nine to five life, which I am curious about. But tell me a little bit about the business you started. Where did that come from?

[00:01:49] Johnny: as with any business, it's solving a problem. So, my problem at the time was I like to play golf. Another thing. So, play golf and it sucked at that time to get tea times because you had to literally call up the course, wait on the phone, hopefully they answered it and then try to get a time. I was like, that's stupid. You should just put everything online. Let me order it. And at that time they didn't do it. This is early 2000. They didn't have that. They didn't have real time. there was a couple of people reselling tea times, which was not really what it was, but they didn't have real time. Like, this is a book. And they were, they thought that their book was like the Bible.

Like, you didn't change their tea book. That's, you know, so I had, we had, I developed a system. There's real time, that manages all the tea times, but also just put everything online. There's a bunch of different features on it. And. so it solved my personal problem, which is I wanted to get T TIMES. So, and I figured other people would want that as well. and that was a really cool experience because, you know, you have this product vision, and to see it go from like this idea to people using it and multiple, courses using it exceeded my expectations. I, partnered with a, somebody else who I thought who did sales because I'm not a sales guy.

I'm a product and engineering guy. so, you know, it's not my skill set. I don't think I can sell. I don't know how to structure any of that stuff. So, we did the whole VC thing. We've got money, got angel money, got VC money, did the whole thing and, And I learned a ton about what you're supposed to do when you get your money. Because what we learned was, or at least what I learned was, the person that I partnered with said,yeah, we don't need to start using that money until we reach, you know, 250, until we raise like the minimum, which was 250 is what he told him. We were trying to raise a million. We raised, we were expecting to raise 250.

This isn't the time. We just, we're just trying to get off the ground. even though that the advisors. To him told him just put 20, 000 50, 000 because it just goes to an escrow. You don't worry about it. Never told me that. So we started burning money. I didn't know I'm using it. I'm putting up servers.

I'm putting up. Yeah, we didn't meet that. So there's a limit. There's a time limit for that money. And that's when if you don't read it, then everybody gets their money back. That's not a good thing. so that lasted not. You know, that lasted for maybe two years, you know, that, that run up because it was me and my own systems running it.

And then when we started getting people and starting hiring people, which we did, I had an engineering staff supporting me, we had, we hired another salesperson and we started burning through a lot of money. So again, I didn't know that. And after I got through that, my friend said, Hey, you got your MBA. So,

That's very true. I mean, it's a, that's a common story is that people who didn't get an MBA kind of get one by Scraping it out and figuring it out, for the first bit there. But it was really cool because I remember being at one of the golf courses, right? And, you know, I'm just installing something or whatever I was doing. And then there was a guy that comes up and he's like, what's this? Because we put placards out there saying, make sure you use it. We had a product called Pro Shop Express. and they were like, what, I can do this online? And the guy was like, yeah, he goes, great. You'll never hear from me again. Like, that was his idea. Like, he never wanted to call the course again. He hated it. And I was like, see that's exactly what we were looking for. Right? Like it told a story, like it solved his problem to solve their problem as well.

So it was really cool. It was a lot of fun. Probably the most fun I've ever had

[00:05:34] Jay: have you wanted to chase that feeling now that you've done it? Have you, are you itching to create something again like that?

[00:05:41] Johnny: Yeah, I think everything's been created by now. I think

[00:05:44] Jay: There's not everything. Come on.

[00:05:47] Johnny: I

don't know. I'm sure there's something probably something out there. there's that feeling. I gotta think that, you get beat, you know, it's a tough thing to put that much energy into it and then have it fail. And fail for things that you should have known, you know, like, these are the obvious ones.

like, 1 of the things I probably would do differently. Would be, it wouldn't be just, it was product. I would get a finance person, you know, the triad of startup, you know, you get the sales guy, you get the finance guy and you get the product guy. We didn't have the finance guy. We had the finance guy that probably would have done the right thing, but, you know, and when I had a patent pending, I had a patent pending for my software design and that's expensive. At that time, it was very expensive. So, that went away. You know, I had push notifications and that stuff. So, can you imagine?

[00:06:36] Jay: you were ahead of the curve. 

[00:06:38] Johnny: A little 

[00:06:38] Jay: Now everybody, now it's all online. Now they call you, they tell you go online and book instead.

[00:06:44] Johnny: Yeah, right, exactly.

And actually, we used it for, we used that system for an off Broadway, my, some, you know, my brother was actually producing an off Broadway,play, musical, and, we used that system for the ticketing.

[00:07:00] Jay: what does off Broadway mean? I mean, that's a stupid question, but like What? 

[00:07:04] Johnny: So, this is Broadway. And then there's a bunch of other 

[00:07:07] Jay: okay, so it's like near Broadway.

[00:07:10] Johnny: yeah, down in that district

[00:07:11] Jay: Okay. 

[00:07:12] Johnny: There's a lot of theatres there.

[00:07:13] Jay: All right. I never, I mean, I got that like off Broadway wasn't on Broadway, but I wasn't quite sure what 

[00:07:20] Johnny: Yeah, they're smaller. I mean, they're

smaller theatres and stuff. And then the idea is if you get a foundation for it, you can maybe go on Broadway. Just like anything

else. 

[00:07:29] Jay: What the hell made you write a book about serial killers?

[00:07:38] Johnny: well, it's an interesting topic to me. This particular thing,the genesis for this was based around, I heard a quote and it was from Jeffrey Dahmer, and Jeffrey Dahmer said, a refrigerator broke and the meat spoiled, because that's what he told the police that showed up at his door about the smell that was coming from his apartment. I was like, man, that's so chilling. Like. that just got me into the mind of the serial killer. So I went down that route. So my first love was more psychology than tech. so I was always interested in, in, in psychology things. and that's where that went. And it led me down to understanding their words, how they think or what they're thinking and how they could possibly come up with what they say.

It was really crazy. so I just went on a lot of research ramp for. And it was just me just learning and I was like, this is kind of cool. Maybe I can make something from it. You know, it was like I was just on an information seeking, you know, journey. And then out of that, I was like, wow, this is actually kind of cool.

So learning a lot about not learning. I shouldn't say cool. Let's put that way. So it was gruesome. And it was dark, but

[00:08:49] Jay: And it was fun.

[00:08:51] Johnny: hey, well, I gotta tell you, you know, writing it when I jump ahead to when I'm getting published and they were like, okay, you need to flesh everything out. Oh, my God, that was a really rough time because, you know, picking and choosing what you put in the book.

And then it was a, it was really not a helpful experience. I had to step away and I will go for walks and stuff to come back because it gets really dark. But so I just was really interested in that subject, you know, and pop culture is going to support that because, you know, now you can throw anything up on Netflix and Hulu and you're going to see. nothing but serial killer stuff, you know, and true crime. So it was interesting for me more from a psychological perspective. I really just was really curious about their headset. And so I was like, since I had amassed all this information, I said, well, maybe I can make something from it.

And so I started to make a, make a manuscript. So I made a manuscript. It's like, all right, see what this is.

[00:09:54] Jay: Did you just like Google that stuff though? Did 

[00:09:56] Johnny: No, it was, I was, no, because 

[00:09:58] Jay: did you find out even what to do?

[00:10:00] Johnny: so, yeah, that's a good question. So, I had, in order for me to use any of that data, I had, it was all hard to be public. So, you know, it's public, it was, these are court records, these are, and so that's actual, like, going to, I went to libraries and such, and to research.

And yeah, you can go up online, but they also have to be public. So it wasn't like I just sat in front of the screen and I was actually hunting things down. and the same thing with images. Any of the images have to be public. So any of the, you know, any mug shots and such, they're all public. But, you know, if somebody takes a picture for a magazine, I can't, unless I give citation, I can't do it. so it was that kind of thing. I kept that, that, at least try to keep it. On the up and up. but yeah, that was just a lot of research. I read books and then from the books, I would then research what they said. And then, you know, there was a lot of interesting reading and a lot of interesting watching. and, so after I had that manuscript, I said, all right, well, see, you know, this is cool. I think everybody's going to want this, you know, I do have kind of a different sense of humor, but I just thought that, other people. Might want to also read this. So I then bought a book that said how to get published or whatever it was, like the idiot's guide to publish or whatever. and what I learned from that was that guy knew the person that wrote that book knew more about the market than I did, because it was a bad book.

It didn't help me in any way, shape or form. all it did was I amassed, piles of rejection emails and letters and everything, it was just. You know, I went to publishers and unsolicited material. They don't like,all different tiers of publishers, not just like the penguins and the random house and such, but other tiers of publishers.

Nope, they weren't, you know, unsolicited material. So then I went to, to, to agents, literary agents. Again, same thing. You can find literate agents that may be looking for unsolicited information and manuscripts, but they're few and far between. So I just got a lot of ghosting and I got a lot of rejection. So after a while, I was like, whatever, you know, I spent a while trying to do that. And I figured, nope, I guess maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the market isn't there. Maybe nobody wants this. But what I did was, because, you know, I'm in tech. I kept all the data on my research in the database, so I just kept that into a database. And so what I would do to learn new technologies, new languages or frameworks and such, I would write to that. So I would write the basic same app every day, every time, just with new platforms, just for my, as I would learn new technologies. and one of which was like, I was like, all right, I'm going to write an Android app.

Sure. I wrote an Android app. Do not download it. I think I'd removed it. It was brutally bad because I'm not. You know, I just wanted to prove the technology, whether or not I can write an app and then I can go to my database and come back and display it. That's all. but what was really odd about it was like, I put it up on the store and I was like, boy, I wonder if anybody's actually going to download this and that's all like numbers, click.

And I was like, wow, I got 10. Wow. I said, maybe I'll get to a hundred. That's what I was saying. Maybe I'll get to a hundred. I was thinking that. But then when it passed a thousand and 5, 000 and such, it was kind of crazy to me. I'd never thought that so many people would download this awful app, but just had an interest because there was no marketing at all.

This was just organic that, you know, I stopped looking at like 30, 000, like a lot of people started downloading it. and so I started developing, I developed an iOS app. Again, not a good app. I'm just trying to figure that out. Works. The app worked. It displays it. And then I watched the numbers. Thousands of people, tens of thousands of people are downloading the app and they're rating it. I don't know why they would rate it. It's awful. I would rate it a two. but they were rating it and they were downloading it and I was getting that demographic information from it because I was like, wow, look at this. You know, the numbers were consistent. 55 percent women to 45 percent men. Never thought of that.

I would never thought that the numbers would be slanted Women, and that went from every, you know, slice from 20 to 30, 30 to 40, all the way up, it was sliced up that way, because I would have figured it would have been like 16 to 45, you know, 16 to 25 kids, 

like boys, but it wasn't, so the demographic information was just unique to me.

I was like, that's really kind of cool. And one of the other apps that I wrote was a Facebook app. Because I wanted to learn how to do that. So I wrote a Facebook app that would populate, you know, this stuff onto their onto a page and again, it was just organic. And then I watched the number of people liking that page. More thousands of people starting liking that page. I'm like, well, I guess that's just what it is. And the demographics are the same 5545. it was still crazy, even if Facebook. And one of the persons that would like the Facebook and, you know, follow the Facebook app was a. was an editor for publishing for a book.

And so he reached out to me and said, Hey, would you be interested in making book? And I thought, I don't trust, you know, like I'm my red flags are up. Is this guy real? I don't know. So, talk to him. He's real. He was an editor. he's an author himself. And he's an editor for a smaller, publishing house. I was like, yeah, sure, let's talk. Talked through it. convince the main publisher that this would work, because Brian, who was the editor, he contacted, he truly believed that this would sell. He really thought this would be a book that would sell. Now I had all this data to tell the publisher saying, nope, look, thousands of people. You know, these are tens of thousands of people that are all downloading these apps that are on Facebook. They're definitely in the ecosystem for this market. There's a market for it. So it satisfied his business objective. Like, I'm not just going to waste my money putting out, you know, publishing a book. I'm going to, you know, make sure that this sells. and yeah, so that ran pretty quickly that cycle of being contacted by the other there to talking to the publisher and stuff like that was relatively quickly. It was maybe I want to say 5 to 6 months. And during the last month before it went to, to final, it was, there was a lot of rewriting and such.

And that was when it was got dark because I really had to focus on it. It wasn't just sort of like a side thing now. I

[00:16:46] Jay: Mm hmm. 

[00:16:47] Johnny: on it. And it got, it became very difficult and arduous for me to sit and write. And pick and choose what I was going to use because it's dark, it's a dark subject. but it worked out and, we did cover art and stuff and we, and that was another thing that was kind of fun. It was like, well, the cover art, I gave them the cover art for the very first one, which I still love, cause I thought it was eye catching and it was gruesome and I thought that it would help, you know, and they used it for the ebook, but they didn't use it for the paperback cause they paperback.

They wanted something more recognizable from the curricula. So they, we used. Pictures from them, as opposed to the ebook, which was, you know, a generated, something I conjured up in my head. I thought it was more shocking. but yeah, so we did that and it launched on ebook 1st. And, and that was another thing to sit there and watch, you know, I was looking at the number, like, I don't have the numbers because I'm not the publisher, but I can look at, like. The top 10 lists and top 20 lists

on it because it launched on Amazon and I was like, wow. It's top four in true crime, like it reached one in a couple different categories, not true crime, but like, I would never guess. So we're selling and that was another weird thing to see that. Wow. Look, it actually, the idea worked and it's actually selling and people are doing it.

So now we're into multiple years. It's still selling. It's just like the editor, Brian, who was the editor, agreed. He said, you know, this is going to continually sell. This is going to be like a coffee table book that people buy and put on the coffee table and go, Oh, this is interesting. And it'd be a conversation piece, which is what it turned out to be.

And it goes through cycles in it. But what was really interesting to me that I learned was. Every book, you know, is a product and it undergoes the same scrutiny that you would have if you were going to launch a new product within my, my, my golf tea time product, right?

So it goes through the same thing, identifies the market. Who's going to buy it? Why is it? Why is it unique? What's the differentiators between you and competitors? You know, how do you get a market? How are you going to talk to them? All those things relate to a book, which is a creative effort. You know, I just thought that was very helpful. And if it was in that original book that I bought, probably would have been helpful.

[00:19:08] Jay: Yes. Well, I mean, does that, did you learn enough that you would want to do it again?

[00:19:14] Johnny: yeah, absolutely. in fact that we were, they were talking about follow ups and I talked about other follow ups. So, maybe not doing the same thing, but doing something else in the same genre, but something, yeah.

[00:19:25] Jay: Did anybody give you shit for Did anybody hit you with like the, your glorifying serial killers, giving them a stage, all that sort of stuff. Yeah.

[00:19:36] Johnny: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're just going to have to accept that

it's not going to hit everybody.

[00:19:42] Jay: Right.

[00:19:42] Johnny: said, don't buy it. You know, like,

[00:19:45] Jay: Yeah. 

[00:19:46] Johnny: it's okay. I mean, you know, people make, you know, I don't know. People make dishes that people object to. So,

[00:19:56] Jay: Right.

[00:19:56] Johnny: because they, you know. Some people are vegan, and they don't like people meeting meat, so they're going to object to it, and they have a valid point. They have a valid point to me, saying it might be glorifying it. I don't know if I'm glorifying it, I'm just telling you what they're saying, and then the background around it. So,

[00:20:12] Jay: Yeah.

[00:20:13] Johnny: it's gruesome, I mean, in some cases, but I think it talks to their mindset. That's why I thought it was different.

[00:20:22] Jay: And does it, like you said, the cycles, does it follow any sort of pattern? Like when the Dahmer series became like a big thing, did they kind of come back around? Was there, has there been any events that you can kind of tie back to? It's popularity coming back up.

[00:20:36] Johnny: no, honestly, because we thought we would see a tech uptick when Dahmer hit. No, it was just consistent. We had some weird uptick in 2021. Sold it. It was actually our largest year of paperback sales.

Like, and no one really knew why.

Like, the publisher didn't 

[00:20:55] Jay: at liberty to say how many you've sold or per year or any, like any sort of numbers?

[00:21:01] Johnny: so I don't have any distinct numbers, but I was told I'm an, I'm a 5 percenter. And what that means is, in independent publishers, because they're independent publishers, they're not like the random houses where they're putting millions of copies out. if you read a certain threshold, which is the majority of, most of the majority of books sell under, I think most independents sell less than a thousand.

Like,

it's really small. But if you sell, more than ten thousand copies. Then you're in the pot and you're in the 5%.

And I'm already in the 5%,

which is 

[00:21:36] Jay: they don't tell you how many you sell though. That part's bizarre to me.

[00:21:40] Johnny: The book industry is an interesting thing because there's the sale and then there's the distribution.

And so the big ones, they ship them to the stores. And then they, and then, you know, they're shipping 300 copies or something like that, and, then they might sell 20, and then the store sends back the other results, but they

already counted for the 300. That's why, when you look at the New York Times, best sellers, it's mostly a little bit about just the shipping more so than actual sales, but don't get me wrong. They're selling hundreds of thousands of books, but just exactly how accurate that is, we're not sure.

[00:22:16] Jay: Interesting. Yeah, I've talked to a lot of people lately that have been Authors and have talked about the process and how Amazon has kind of made that easier over the years and like now apparently it's not you know, I don't know. When did you write your book? When was when did it come out originally?

[00:22:32] Johnny: 2015.

[00:22:34] Jay: Okay, yeah, so what not eight years ago something yeah interesting

[00:22:39] Johnny: now it is. Yeah,

[00:22:43] Jay: you have a hard stop so we're gonna wrap it here I do have one question for you though. This 

[00:22:48] Johnny: go for it.

[00:22:48] Jay: non business related, non book related. Let's just go with a bucket list item. Anything on earth, if you could do, and you knew you couldn't fail, what would it be?

[00:22:59] Johnny: But I knew it could fail.

[00:23:00] Jay: You knew you could not fail.

[00:23:01] Johnny: yeah, so, something in nonprofit related to pets. Like, I would love to do something to like a. Big farm and give home to dogs and stuff like that. Love to do that.

[00:23:16] Jay: Dog farm. Johnny's dog farm. 

[00:23:19] Johnny: Johnny's dog farm. Yeah, 

[00:23:20] Jay: I have not heard a dog farm, so that's a, you win another unique answer for Johnny. All right, well, John, you're a legend, I, I love, having you in my life, and I thank you for being on the show, and we'll catch up again soon, all right?

[00:23:32] Johnny: Thanks again.

[00:23:33] Jay: Thanks John. See ya.

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