The D2Z Podcast
Gen Z entrepreneur and DTC agency leader Brandon Amoroso talks with some of the best in the marketing world. Brandon and guests reveal their top business-growth strategies for anyone in the online space–whether you are a brick-and-mortar business looking to scale or an established online business trying to grow. Consumer marketing is under constant and dramatic change, so Brandon aims to tackle new problems with a fresh Gen Z mindset. The D2Z Podcast delivers insights, strategies, and tactics that you can use and aims to shift how you think about business and your relationships with your teams, partners, and customers.
The D2Z Podcast
Creating an Entrepreneurial Playbook - 140
In this episode of The D2Z Podcast, Brandon Amoroso interviews Travis Stephenson, a seasoned entrepreneur who shares his journey from being fired to building successful online businesses. Travis discusses his ideation process, the importance of solving personal problems, and how he leveraged referrals and cognitive biases in marketing. He also reflects on his recent travels and the lessons learned from his previous ventures, emphasizing the ease of starting a business today with modern technology and AI.
Here's What You'll Learn:
❗Travis's journey began after being fired from a job.
❗He learned the ropes of digital marketing by working with affiliate marketers.
❗Identifying personal problems can lead to successful business ideas.
❗Traveling with family can inspire new perspectives on work and life.
❗Cognitive biases play a crucial role in marketing effectiveness.
❗Referrals can significantly boost revenue for digital products.
❗Modern technology has made starting a business easier than ever.
❗AI is set to revolutionize business operations and marketing strategies.
❗Creating experiences for customers is key to driving sales.
❗Building a strong referral program can enhance customer engagement.
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction to Entrepreneurship and Background
02:59 Ideation and Market Research for New Ventures
06:10 The Importance of Problem-Solving in Business
08:50 Embracing Change: Traveling and Business Growth
12:03 Lessons Learned from Previous Ventures
15:02 Marketing Strategies and Cognitive Biases
18:05 Leveraging Referrals for Business Growth
20:59 Technology and Tools for Modern Entrepreneurs
24:00 Conclusion and Future Aspirations
Travis Stephenson:
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/travisstephensonofferatti/
Brandon Amoroso:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonamoroso/
Web - https://brandonamoroso.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bamoroso11/
X - https://twitter.com/AmorosoBrandon
Scalis.ai - https://scalis.ai/
Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to D2Z, a podcast about using the Gen Z mindset to grow your business. I'm Gen Z entrepreneur Brandon Amoroso, the former founder of Electric and now the co-founder of Scaless, and today I'm talking with Travis Stephenson, who's a serial entrepreneur who has built and sold multiple online businesses. Thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Thanks, man.
Speaker 1:Appreciate it. So before we dive into things, can you give everybody just a quick background on yourself and your entrepreneurial journey?
Speaker 2:Yeah, quick is tough. I've been doing it for a while, going all the way back. I was fired from my job as a virtual office assistant. I was literally the guy that like, there was this company where you could rent a bunch of different office spaces and use it as a virtual office. So if you're a lawyer but you live in Miami and you were coming to this town, you would have an office and we'd have somebody answer your phone and you could have coffee.
Speaker 2:And well, that was my job was to clean the Keurig machine and wipe off the whiteboards, and that was my my job, one of my jobs. After college. I went job to job for a while and had my business management degree, had hopes for a whole big future, and I got fired from that job actually for being two minutes late. I wasn't quote, unquote, I was not management material, which was awesome. Got fired from that job and then I went played funny enough, played poker online to pay my rent for a while and then took a job from somebody who was looking for a personal assistant on Craigslist and they were moving to town and, long story short, they had a company that was in the digital marketing space and so they were like, look, you're not right to be our personal assistant, but you might be good for this other thing. That taught me the ropes. For two years I was working with affiliate marketers, helping them find offers they could promote, and, um, then I just sort of took off on my own, started making my own stuff, cause I also realized, like this is what I hope everybody realizes by 2025, hopefully, um, everybody realizes this that almost everybody who has a digital product there's most of them aren't doing anything better than what you could do, um, and so there's all these people that are creating digital products and they're making a lot of money doing it, and most people just think, oh, I could never do that.
Speaker 2:I had the different mindset. I was like I saw behind the scenes and I'm like I could absolutely do this. Look how easy this is for these guys. And that was 15 years ago, before all of these great website building platforms and before everybody made it easy, um, you know that that was quite a long time ago. So, uh, then you know, just fast forward, I I've had a bunch of different companies that I've started little, mostly little more offers than companies, um, that have done really well, and I've been in the digital space since then. For eight years, I ran a software company called Chatmatic which automated Facebook and Instagram Messenger. We were like a very, very, you know step cousin of ManyChat basically, which everybody kind of is aware of, and sold that company in 2022, kind of got back to my roots in marketing and I've been doing that since then.
Speaker 1:Nice. And when it comes to your ideation process for building your next company, how does that typically happen for you? Does it come out of your you know what's?
Speaker 2:funny, I have spent a ton of time. So in August of 2022, when I sold my company, I spent three straight months looking at the market just to figure out what is working. What should I do? Because everybody was asking me at the time like, hey, you're an entrepreneur, you've been doing this for a long time, what's your next thing? And I was like I don't know, it doesn't just come to you, like I think most people think it does. So I started studying and one of the things that I found was fascinating that there's five places where really great ideas come from, and it's one of the things that I teach now and the first one is paying attention to your problems. So, if you want to create a business, look at the stuff that you have struggled with or that you are currently struggling with, and figure out can I create a solution or did I already create a solution? And a great example would be sleep.
Speaker 2:Right now, a lot of people are having issues getting good and quality enough sleep, and I, for a while, was one of them, especially as an entrepreneur. A lot of entrepreneurs suffer from this, like shutting the mind off and um, I've used this little tracking device on my wrist for seven years and I know what my sleep is and I've tracked it for a long time. And, uh, I started getting a lot more into it and I started figuring out. You know what I need to figure out how to get my sleep better, because it'll make me feel better throughout the day. My mental cognition is better. I don't need supplements. I'm good if I sleep well, and so I got to work figuring out what can I do to make my sleep better, and now my sleep performance on average is almost about 100% every night, where it used to be 75, 80. And so I solved my own problem, and now I realize, as a digital entrepreneur, I could create a product out of that by helping other people do the exact same thing that I did, but they don't have to trial and error it, they can just do what I did. And so paying attention to your own problems is number one, paying attention to shifts in the marketplace. So if there's obviously AI is coming out now, what kind of opportunity can you jump in in AI? That's a big one. Then another one would be pay attention to your curiosities. So anything that you like, anything that you're interested in, kind of go down that rabbit hole.
Speaker 2:I think, as adults, a lot of people are taught to stifle their imagination. It's like, hey, yeah, don't go too crazy thinking that you're going to do this. You know it's. Um, you're not pretending that you're going to win the lottery, but you do have to let yourself pretend like, hey, you know, I've always thought about this would be really cool. I wonder what I could do in that instance, like, how could I make something out of this? Allow yourself to do that, not just to go oh, that's stupid, I'll never do it.
Speaker 2:Um, and then another big one is to um, brainstorm with friends. So, find friends that you can bounce ideas off of. And, sadly, if you don't have any friends, I would tell you this little piece of advice Um, number one if you have friends that you can't bounce business ideas off of, they're probably the wrong friends. If you're actually going to go into the entrepreneurial space, the people that don't that, that don't agree that you should be pursuing things, they're never going to have good things to say about your ideas. What you need is somebody else who's also seen the light. And and so, number one get better friends. But number two uh, chat, gpt and these AI agents are really great for this as well. You can bounce ideas off of them and, um, just feed them everything you know about a topic and see like, hey, how could I create a product out of this? Um, but those are like the four major ways that I always tell everybody is like look at your own problems, talk to friends and people that you know. Uh, pay attention to curiosities, look at what's shifting in the market. Um, those four out of the five, those are the ones that seem to be where most of mine come from, because that's where Chapmatic came from for me.
Speaker 2:I was looking at the shift in the market and I was paying attention to a curiosity. A lot of my other products digital products have all come from problems that I've solved for myself. I was like, hey, I wanted to build I'm trying to look at some of these awards here and what they were. So there's a product up here that I was able to take my messenger automation company, and I grew a great agency where I was helping e-commerce companies leverage messenger automations to make more sales, and so we actually taught that to other people. So now I was able to do it myself. That was based on a problem that I had how do you start an agency, right, how do you start an agency? How do you get clients, how do you get them results? And so I took that mechanism and I solved it for other people and sold that and I think those are great ways to start businesses is just look in those areas.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean. To your point about a chat GPT. I mean even being able to create individual GPTs, uploading a bunch of information to them, like training them over time.
Speaker 2:It's a hundred percent, it's definitely that's the first piece of advice I give almost all of my members when they come into any of our programs is create an AI brain that will be able to think for you, organize data for you. You should journal into it Like it's. It should be a place where all of your thoughts, All this stuff that I'm telling you how do I use it for something, and it will give you some good ideas.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what are you really excited about this year and beyond?
Speaker 2:Sort of. I mean definitely new stuff that I'm working on. So two years ago I started a brand new digital product teaching people like an educational product, and it did really well. We were doing a hundred thousand plus months. I sold my house and my wife and I kind of woke up this morning, one of the mornings, and we're like, man, we're, we're in this routine. So I have two kids and we're in this routine of waking up every morning breakfast, run out the door 20 minutes to school. Then you got to pick them up at two, 30, whatever, and we were like, well, we're about to do this for 18 years, basically. So are we ready to like commit that? This is the? We're just doing that now? And we were like you know what? I run my business, I can run it from anywhere. Let's sell the house and let's travel, let's do the whole digital no man thing for real.
Speaker 2:And uh, we found a traveling school, a world traveling school program. Uh, it was called boundless life, and they had um, a location in um, portugal, and they had another location that we wanted to go to in Bali. So we went three months in Portugal, we went to Dubai and Singapore on the way, and then we went to, uh, marrakesh, and we got to go to Bali and Tokyo and spend a bunch of time in Kauai, and so we just spent 18, 19 ish months traveling. Um, literally last month, we got into our our new house that had been remodeled. So, um, for this year, I'm actually kind of excited to just buckle in on business and not do all the craziness of like traveling with kids and flying across the world and all of that, which is, I mean, I mean, it's super exciting. Don't get me wrong, it was amazing.
Speaker 2:But, um, I'm excited to like focus on more stuff that lights me up versus stuff that you know it's really easy as an entrepreneur, and the reason I sold my previous software company was because it's so easy to get into a rut of like just doing what you have to do to get by and you don't love it, you don't enjoy it, and so it's actually, you know, in a lot of ways, you're working harder than you would at a job. There's no guaranteed paycheck, there's significantly more stress, so I don't really think that that's like what everybody will should want to do. So what I've kind of really focused my energy and effort on since August of 2022 is let me do stuff that I really like and even my previous product that did really well. I shut it down, cold Turkey, about three months ago and I'm going to do more of what I focus, what I actually really enjoy. So that product was great, it was making good money, but it wasn't firing me up. I wasn't excited about it anymore. The people that I was helping I didn't really feel aligned with that anymore. Um, so I was like you know what? I'm going to go into this new thing. So the thing I'm kind of excited about long-winded answer is I have been kind of self-writing my own book with nobody's help.
Speaker 2:We'll see how it ends up coming out, but it's basically a book of all my most important journeys, so the things that I've learned about in the building of a business.
Speaker 2:So it's called the experience engine, which is this idea that you can create these experiences If you want somebody to buy from you, if you want somebody to give you money. The key to all of it is get them to experience something, because that's when they're going to make the decision to buy, whatever it is. So it's kind of exciting because they always say that the physiological effects of exciting are the same as nervous, right Like, your palms are sweaty, get cold sweats, heart race. So I don't know if it's excited or if I'm nervous, but to go down this pursuit of trying to sell this book and build a company off of that by teaching these things that you're never qualified to do it, you just have to decide that you're going to do it and so, um, that's kind of what I'm excited about is going into a niche where I get to work with entrepreneurs, people who are, you know, doing big things, and kind of help them achieve that same thing. So we'll see, I'm excited or nervous, I don't know yet.
Speaker 1:What would you say like the biggest learning lessons that you've taken from the previous businesses that you'll, you know, definitely take in and apply to this new one that you're that you're starting?
Speaker 2:Uh well, so the number, so it's. It's, there's like categories, right, there's like running and operating a business, and then there's also marketing and selling that business. Then there's individual things, like you know how I'm running Facebook ads versus this, but, um, there's something really cool that I was kind of just writing about, which is what's on my mind, and it's this topic of um. I read in a report not long ago from Google about these six cognitive biases and they tested it and this was this was cool and anybody in the marketing space can appreciate this. They tested these six cognitive biases, which are things like social proof, having a list of details of what the product is. As a shopper, if we see these things, we're more likely to buy. And they did these massive tests across thousands of different transactions and they found they did this test on shampoo, which was amazing and it kind of dictates the whole thing. They had one shampoo that was brand A and they introduced that to a shopper and 100% of the shoppers bought shampoo A because it was the only one that was offered. Then they offered a second shampoo to another batch of shoppers and that second brand that nobody knew about got 25% of the sales and the original shampoo still stayed with 75%, which is good. That means the first shampoo has good staying power, right, it had a good brand. People knew of it. It was hard to get somebody to change. Google then added these six cognitive biases to the second brand of shampoo and that second brand got 90% of the sales and the first brand only kept 10. So one of the really cool concepts was I was reading that study and then I went back through all of my marketing and I realized, like all the things that I've done that are successful, a lot of them were following these six cognitive biases that you know are that should be present in pretty much everybody's marketing.
Speaker 2:And since I am more, I guess you'd say, in the marketing side, like, I'm not like the business coach. I'm not going to teach you how to grow a hundred million dollar business. I'm a marketer. That's what I've been good at. I'm good at getting eyeballs, getting attention, uh, and turning that attention into transactions. Um yeah, if you want to learn how to run a 20 person sales team, I'm not the guy.
Speaker 2:And so it was just really interesting to me to read this study and go man, there are ways that we can hack winning in our industry, get sales over brands that have more authority over you, brands that people would normally choose over you 100% of the time. By adding social proof, by adding scarcity effects, by adding a list of what is on each sales, what the benefits are, we can actually reverse engineer getting more market share. And I think by teaching people how to do that, how to make your experience engine full of these moments, right Like, can you have? Can you implement any of these ideas into your ads? Can you implement any of these ideas into follow-up emails? Can you implement any of these ideas into your content? By doing that, you're you're really cultivating an experience for the end user which then gets them to relate to you and then to buy from you. So I would definitely say biggest sort of learning experience is um a. You're closer to massive numbers than you think.
Speaker 2:When I launched my last program two years ago, I did not expect it to do. It did $6 million in a year while I was traveling the world. I did not expect that when I set out Um but B, to just like line up and pay attention to the things that we now know actually work and then just work on introducing those. Get a bare minimum viable product. Get that out to market, prove that there's some leg room in this product and then work on improving it over time. Add the little details as you keep going through.
Speaker 1:When it comes to you mentioned the explosive growth that you had of that product that you launched. What are usually the main levers that you're pulling to get that top of funnel into the?
Speaker 2:I believe there's three different what I call. So I call the entire thing the experience engine right, and I believe that there are three fuel types that I know about or that I pay attention to, and that is obviously content. The other one would be money or ads in this case, and then the other one is referrals. I think the most interesting one that nobody pays attention to is referrals. I have a great stat line.
Speaker 2:When I was running my offer, we did around $6 million in about a 12 to 14 month period I don't know the exact dates, but in that timeframe we generated about $1.3 million in revenue specifically from affiliates. And now here's what's interesting I only invited one affiliate I think it was one affiliate, it might've been two One affiliate who was not a customer to promote my offer. What I did was I invited every customer to become an affiliate and many of them did, and what I found actually was, out of 19,000 customers, 500 of them became affiliates active affiliates, which means they drove at least 10 clicks to our offer. So there was a lot of them that signed up, never did anything, but 500 actually drove meaningful clicks. And what's amazing is I had this digital product that was teaching people something One affiliate promoted and got, let's say, a hundred sales. Out of those hundred sales, five of those people would also become affiliates and they would get five to a hundred sales. And it started this like chain of wow I'm getting sales without having to do anything. It started this like chain of wow I'm getting sales without having to do anything. And what's amazing is I did.
Speaker 2:I broke it all down and just by offering an affiliate program, I made $600,000 in net revenue and earnings in my pocket from them promoting my stuff in one year and I think that's probably one of the most overlooked things is like look, you're creating a product. People that buy it are going to like it. You can not only offer them an incentive to get this free by telling other people, but if they like it, they're going to talk about it anyways, so you might as well give them a link where they can make money off it. And that was definitely a huge I would say a huge lever that I pulled. That made a lot of things possible, because if you don't just offer the ability for them to promote, then they won't, in which case you lose all that revenue.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but your product has to be good and people have to like it. I think I've seen so many stores where there's a referral program or whatever. Maybe they don't get adoption because this is not Well, a lot of people's referral programs are also trash Like.
Speaker 2:Let's be real, if your referral program is 5% off my next shopping experience, I'm not going to go out of my way to tell anybody anything. But if your referral program is for every person that you send, if they buy something from me, I'll give you 50% of what they buy, um in in revenue. Well, that's going to open some doors. Now, physical companies can't really do that as much Digital products can. We can offer way more margin because we don't have any ad cost when somebody is promoting for us. So our normal ad cost is 30% at least. Maybe sometimes, as you start to scale, 50, 60, 70% of the front end value. Well, if it's an affiliate, I can give 70% because I'm still making 20% after my merchant fees, merchant fees and all the other stuff. So, yeah, I think having a good referral program is definitely a key. But then also I learned this from when I still had a job. This was back when I was 21, 22. The guy that I was working for he had me selling tracking services to real estate agents and I never sold anything. But because I wasn't selling anything, he wasn't making money off of me. So he actually signed me up for an MLM called prepaid legal, which is like a MLM for legal services, and one of the things that stuck out to me was during that time when he signed me up for that. He said something that I'll never forget and he basically said look, if you're benefiting from this, don't you think you're going to your mom and dad would benefit from it, don't you think you're? You know, it was kind of that warm market pitch where it's like you know your mom and dad probably need a will. Why don't you introduce them to this? They're going to love it and then they're going to get benefit out of it. And I think about that all the time. When I'm building products now is like if my product is good and my product is going to benefit people, there's a really good chance it's going to help other people. And this goes out to like let's make it simple, right?
Speaker 2:I've been getting into sourdough bread lately. Let's say that you made a course about making sourdough bread. If I have friends come over to my house and I give them a piece of my sourdough bread and they ask me where did you start learning how to do this? I could easily refer the course that I took that taught me how to do that. If I don't have a link to do it, I'm probably just going to say, oh, some random course. But if I have a link that's going to pay me 50%, I'm going to tell everybody, even if I'm not the best at making sourdough. I'm going to tell them because, like, yeah, I did learn a lot from this. This was great. So that digital market, I think, opens up a lot of opportunity for that.
Speaker 1:What sort of like technology you know stacks are using now versus you know when you, when you first got started. How much easier has that made this process for you.
Speaker 2:When I when I first got started. You're talking 15 years ago. When I first got started, I was having to use WordPress to build websites and, in fact, my very first product this was before ClickFunnels and all the amazing platforms. I use a version of GoHighLevel. Now that's our own called Wealth Reconnect. Very first product I paid 1500 bucks to a guy out of Pakistan and he made a five page template builder for WordPress that would allow you to build name and email opt-in forms. That's all it did. So for 60 bucks you could buy this and we would install it on your website and it gave you like this drag not a drag and drop, but like a very easy to change opt-in page for WordPress Cause we all had to do that. That was back when you had to upload files to the SMTPs and servers and all this Um. So now it's significantly easier. I tell people all the time there's definitely more businesses out there, so there's more competition, but it's way easier to start a business now than it ever was. I would go back to eight years ago. Things really ramped up and it's just been getting easier and easier.
Speaker 2:Implementation of AI my stack involves you can always look at your tech stack by looking at your browser tabs right, I have my marketing CRM software, I have my community group platform, which is all built into the same thing, and AI, and that's pretty much most of what I'm using. I've got a couple of other softwares here and there that aren't primary to my mission. I've got a couple of other softwares here and there that aren't primary to my mission, but they're important, they do good work for me and I like them, but they're not part of what I would call my primary stack. It's like I want one thing where I can do all my pages email marketing, one sort of CRM type system, and then the handful of other little details here and there, but AI and the CRM are the two big ones.
Speaker 1:I'm really excited to see how far AI can take it when it comes to some of these autonomous agents, and I feel like we're just sort of scratching the surface of what we'll be able to do 100%.
Speaker 2:I've been seeing some stuff lately about AI and AI agents and some of the automation capabilities that these things have, and it's phenomenal. I mean, the world is going to look so different every year until we hit some sort of terminal velocity where everything is easier. But yeah, I think AI and the AI agent world is going to be a huge boom this year.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of your insights, but before we hop, can you let people know where they can connect with you online or learn more?
Speaker 2:yeah, my, my most active platform is instagram. I'm the travis stevenson s-t-e-p-h-e-n-s-o-n on instagram. Um, I'm most active there. I talk most about what I'm doing on my projects. I am pushing out some effort on my youtube channel to try to try to give the world some transparency and what it looks like to build a digital business. That'll be coming through soon, but, yeah, those places. And then I have a newsletter paidcreatorscom or it's paidcreatorsbeehivecom, but you can find paid creators newsletter. You can Google that and find it.
Speaker 1:I think I've seen that before in like the boost marketplace.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yep, yeah, cause we have a pretty large newsletter of job seekers.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, we, we do. We have about 80,000, 60,000 subscribers right now in the like sort of entrepreneurial space and we get a lot of different offers and whatnot from there. I love beehive, it's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it's so much better than what existed before it.
Speaker 2:I mean, yeah, that's crazy yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, again, thank you for coming on. I'll make sure to include, uh, all those links in the show notes that people can reach out. Uh, but again thanks for coming on for everybody listening. As always, this is Brandon.