CASEY ZEMAN | Founder Of EasyWebinar Gives THE BEST Entrepreneurial Advice | Millionaire Secrets #50

Welcome to the Millionaire Secrets podcast, where the most successful people in the world share their secrets to help you create the awesome life you desire. Welcome to another episode of Millionaire Secrets. Jeff Lerner, your host here. Excited to be back with you for another show. I am joined by Casey Zieman, who I'm tempted to mispronounce and just say, casey's a man.

You can call me Zaman, I'm okay with that. But you know, technically it's Z. That's my superhero name. Ziman Zaman.

So anyway, Casey and I connect immediately because we're both fathers. He's got three kids, I've got four, actually. He's kind of got four kids. He's got three biological kids and one technological kid called Easy Webinar, which I've used. And it's a very sick piece of software. And it's not just a great piece of software, but it's a great piece of software that does a very great thing, which is empower people to scale and automate webinars, which to some people, webinars like a weird word that sounds like two words mashed together and they don't know what it means. But to people who know what a webinar is, they know. It's like, I don't know, it's like a howitzer, man. It's the trump card. If you get one dialed in, your whole life changes. So. So we'll talk about that and many other things, I'm sure. Casey, welcome to Millionaire Secrets.

Jeff, thank you so much for having me, man. I'm excited to talk. We already talked before the show resonated. Just to preface this, I'm actually on a farm in Iowa right now. Normally from la, but we've been here sort of quarantined for last like four or five months. And so I'm in my wife's childhood bedroom. This is her parents farmhouse in Iowa.

So that is super. What part of Iowa?

Like on the Minnesota border.

Okay. My business partner lives in West Des Moines.

Okay.

I wondered if you were close. But anyway. Well, that's super cool. I can't imagine why you wanted to get out of LA in the middle of quarantine.

Yeah, right before the lockdown. Why would I want to do that? Three kids having to homeschool, Right.

Yeah, my family, every summer we normally go to Southern California for like two weeks, take a bunch of. A bunch of kids. I have two teenagers and we take their friends and stuff. We're like, yeah, we're not gonna do that. So we're Going up north to like the mountains in Utah just to get a little more rustic, kind of same deal. We're gonna be in a cabin and just chilling.

Yeah, I mean, we have the self isolation, you know, so it's been pretty cool. I mean, we normally do this over the summers anyway. Come to the farm and then go to where my family is off a lake, you know, in Michigan. So. But this is nice, but it's, you know, it's kind of way different than obviously what we know in la, but LA is different at the moment, so we can't, you know, there's not much to do there. So.

Yeah, my cousin lives there and he sends me updates and I'm just like, so grateful to live in kind of a small town, little more bucolic setting. Okay. So, yeah, like you mentioned, we were talking before I hit record and I'm like, I totally should have been recording all this because it was two marketing nerds, just two marketing nerds who are also dads, just kind of like talking through what it's like. And, you know, the point of Millionaire Secrets, the reason I started this show, even to kind of tie in with what we were talking about, is like, I don't want to be a professional podcaster. That's not my gig. I have a big. I have a big education business. I teach a lot. You know, we have tens of thousands of students, and that's a very meaningful and important part of my life. But day to day, a lot of that work happens now through sequences and people.

Right.

We have a big staff. And so the podcast for me is about the long game and we, you know, building relationships just like this one, Creating a network, creating awareness, doing things that, frankly, aren't gonna pay off today, tomorrow. Like, I'm not getting paid for this time, frankly, you're not getting paid for this time. But a year from now, we might do something cool together, right?

Exactly.

And I think that it made me think as we were talking. And this is, you know, I always want to serve the audience with these conversations. You know, I know that there are a lot of people that are looking at the Internet. They might be looking at your software going, well, could this be the thing that unlocks my future? They might be looking at my education company going, could that be the thing? Right? They might be looking at a course on how to launch a podcast and say, could that be the thing? Right. I think one of the challenges that people have is there's a lot. You know, you were talking about blogging, we were talking about Podcasting, writing a book, SEO. There's a lot of things that are good to do if they're good to do for your situation. But a lot of people, I think, are maybe sometimes grasping at the right tool to solve the wrong problem or, you know, or vice versa. Right. And so I think people got to be honest with themselves and say, what, where am I? Right.

Yeah.

And what do I need to solve my. To solve my problem? And so for a lot of people, I guess the question is, should most people start a podcast?

So I, you know, I think that, I think a labor of love is something like a podcast, but it's, it's, there's not a big payoff at all for a long, long, long, long time, right? There's a lot of, it's just like creating a YouTube channel. Got all upfront work, a lot of, a lot of work. Consistency, a lot of upfront work. Not a massive payoff, right? And so if you're like, I think if you're depending on where you are in your business, right, if you're, you know, just starting out or, you know, you're seasoned a bit, you've been doing it for five, ten years, you are almost to the seven figure mark. Maybe you're to the seven figure mark. Maybe you're pushing into the eight figure. You know, it depends on the season that you're at in your business, like so. And also the time you have. Because I, what we were talking about was like the long game. Are those things like creating a podcast and doing initiatives like that? Short game, or are creating systems that will generate revenue now? Right? And I think it really has to be, it's dependent upon where you're at in that season. If you're needing revenue now, you have to focus and prioritize those systems first. And then if you get those in place, the long game is important, but it's, but you have to treat it and understand it's a long game. I mean, like affiliate marketing and building relationships with people is not, hey, I can do this right now, today. Whereas, you know, if you are a massive hustler, you can put together an offer, a funnel and ads to promote that funnel and potentially even see results coming very quickly. So I think it's just, it depends on where you're at and, you know, how much you can prioritize because obviously you and I are our dads. I mean, I know my time is like, I don't have, I feel like I have no time even, you know, with that, right. I don't so it's like we have to. We have to covet our time, especially because we want to devote it to our families as well. So it's like, where do you prioritize? And so I think once if you get the systems in place, like where you're at, Jeff, you know, this becomes a labor of love. This becomes a long game, and it'll probably pay off because you're gonna be doing much more, you know, partnership stuff. Right. As you said, you're writing the book, you're building these relationships that all that stuff, it just. You don't maybe see it today, you maybe see it later, or maybe people are like, yeah, I know, Jeff. Hey, man, I'm gonna promote your book. I mean, it becomes. There's less of a. I have to follow up five times, 10 times. You know, there's. It doesn't. That's. That goes away. And then there is just this. More of it. There's an easy. It's easier at that point. You know, the.

Yeah. What I. Here's what I'll say about doing a podcast. And I realize most of my audience isn't listening to my podcast because they want to start a podcast. That's not why people listen to podcasts. But I think there's a more universal principle at play with whether you start a podcast or frankly, whether you build a software company. I mean. Yeah, nothing's more thankless than building software until it isn't.

Right, Right.

It's great when you sell a company or whatever, but like that.

Yeah.

People don't see that the decade before that, but there is something universal. And I think if this is something that you don't have to wait to start, and really, you don't have to wait to realize the benefit of.

Yeah.

If you start giving, giving value, attention, giving intention, giving opportunity to others, you start a process.

Yeah.

That'll come back to you in some predictable ways, but mostly unpredictable ways. And I don't think it's ever too soon to start that. I don't think it's ever too soon to be selfless. And I say all the time, like. Like poverty is the most selfish state of mind because you don't have. You feel like you don't have the luxury to take care of anyone but yourself.

Right, right, right.

And I think the hardest thing is to be selfless when you're also trying, you know, either desperate or maybe just urgent.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I'd love to hear your thoughts. I mean, again, nothing's more thankless than building software until it isn't But I'd love to hear your thoughts on general, on the idea of like this cliche of giving value, but in some non cliche ways that it really is the right move.

Well, I mean you have to have like a level of faith I think. You know, like when you're, when you're at that point, when you're semi desperate or you've had semi, you've had a semi success or maybe you've had a proof of concept in something, right? And the faith is that this will pay off at some point, right? I mean if you hire somebody to work for you, you know, that claim that they can do X, Y and Z, you know, there's only so much you can have them claim before you have to have a semi, a little bit of faith that they're going to be able to produce the results they're looking that you want, right? Especially if, you know, if you're gonna have to spend 15 and you only have five. You know what I mean? So I think that we are also talking about this, that you know, to be able to take a risk which in our minds may be mitigated like a, like a, you know, like risk that, you know, it's a calculated risk, right? All the way to is this stupid or not? Right. I think it's like there's a lot of, you know, there's a fine line between you know, being, you know, stupid or you know, just like, you know, like having that a little bit of faith that you can pull yourself up and actually get something done. Right. I mean, so when I was starting the software game, you know, I was a course creator who started to see success with webinars. But I was running webinars every single day and I was getting burnt out. So I talked to some developers about doing an automated webinar because I think there was another product out there that talked about automated webinars. This is even before the Evergreen Business System. I don't know how long ago you've been doing this, but like even before then and I was like, I asked some developers, you know, I wanted to get this developed and for WordPress because I had a WordPress site. And so I talked to them, they gave me some quotes and then, you know, I had, was starting to be built and I, and you know, I made money in my education program, right. And I spent it on my SaaS platform. And you know, part of that was, you know, I went in with ambition. You know, I had, you know, wild dreams and ambitions like maybe I can do this you know, maybe I can do this. I didn't go to school for software. You know, I had no idea about any of this stuff. So I just found somebody on Odesk at the time, you know, it's now upwork, and just went that way. And I had no idea about anything regarding software. I didn't know about how to create a SaaS company. I didn't know about wireframes for the product ahead of time design. Just like everything that you should know about creating a software company and creating software in general to create even a minimum viable product. I had no idea. I went completely blank. Luckily, after a while, luckily it paid off, you know, because I think we did, you know, after I dumped a bunch of money into it in 2000, like end of 2013, and then in 2014, it was still clunky and crazy, but I was, I maybe, you know, made $100,000 on the product. But then in 2015, I started doing and leveraging partnerships, right? So I went into affiliate marketing at the time and then, you know, got the tool and had some, had some people using the tool. I mean, the biggest thing I can say for how we grew and how we were able to launch is I reached out to people I knew from when I was doing my course stuff. I said, hey, can we set you up with a webinar? And so I started seeing results because we had John Lee Dumas using our automated webinar system and Kimber Luna and a few other people that were having success with our webinar platform. And that allowed me to go back to them when we did our launch to say, hey, would you want to launch with us? And then we did a million dollar launch in the beginning of like the end of 2015 was the first time we ever did that. And that was when EZ Webinar was a lifetime tool, right? So even then I was selling it for life before, like, you know, as a license of like 500 bucks or something like that, right? Not even full SaaS. We didn't go full SaaS monthly until 2018. And that's the crazy thing. And it's, it's just because I never, I grew up, I grew up, I came through as a product creator, right? Came through as someone who, you know, just was, was the launch concept. And so in 2016, I vowed to try to go and just, you know, do this without affiliates, right? So 2016, 2017, we did everything mostly without affiliates, right? Because I wanted to. I mean, I knew that if I was just solely relying on affiliates, things would be, you know, things would probably shut down. So I started spending more time with just us getting our systems in place so that we could sell better. And then, you know, reaching into 2018, I put easy Webinar into its own corporation. So first I had to figure out systems for selling, and then I had to be better at creating an organization because I sucked at that, right? Everything was under my own, you know, my S corporation. You know, money flowed in right into my bank account. Only until 2018 did I create a separate bank account for Easy Webinar. C Corp's Easy Webinar. You know, started to treat it like an actual organization and company and had C suite level positions. SOPs mean all the boring stuff that you can think of did we actually start to do well? And then we. I mean, we always did well, but we. That's when we started to see a lot more upward trajectory and growth. Because then we became a monthly SaaS platform. We focused on churn reduction on the back end, we focused on retention on the front end. We only created a free trial last August, right? That was the first time we created a free trial. And we've seen a massive growth from the free trial. So I've gone through all the ups and downs and the, you know, weathering the storm and having to figure out sort of the best way to do all this. And, you know, it's never, obviously, it's never a straight line. It's like, you know, it's knowing that you could be better. It's knowing that, you know, it's like I'm never resting on anything because I, I know that I'm not the smartest one doing this stuff, right? So I always go back out and try to reassess, relearn, reimagine. And, you know, we do it from a business perspective, organizational perspective, and then going back into the product and saying, how can we improve the software tool itself? You know, so those were. That's kind of like the, you know, the growth story, you know, but, you know, it's been a very interesting process. If you'd asked me, you know, 10 years ago if I thought I would have had a software tool, I would have said, like, no, that doesn't make any sense.

So here's what my brain is extracting from your story, and I'm applying some of my own history to it. But it's kind of where we started with the long game conversation is, you know, I've known a fair number of SaaS, CEOs, but there's a much smaller group of SaaS CEOs that don't have to go raise money for their platform that are actually self funded, which maybe I'm making an assumption there, but I didn't hear you say anywhere that you went and brought on VC. Right?

Yeah.

So that's a pretty small group of SaaS CEOs that actually get to profitability building software that they pay for the development of. I mean, obviously I, you know, Brunson did it with clickfunnels.

Yeah.

I know. I actually talked to a guy yesterday who did it with an agency software. But I mean it's a small group of people, like probably less than 10% of SaaS CEOs. So yeah, it's really hard. Like you just told the story in a. You know, fairly. Yeah, there were some twists and turns, but like was also kind of an elegant telling, I know, from the people that I know that have done it that it is brutally hard to be. It's like, it's literally like trying to fly a plane and assemble the plane at the same time and trying to fly a plane that isn't actually built to fly yet. It's like you're doing this or I don't know, you're like turning some cranks so fast to make some flaps go like this.

Right, brother. Trying to get this thing off the ground. Right.

I mean, it's exhausting. And so, so first of all, I just want to acknowledge you for that.

Thank you, man.

And get to, you know. But also to some degree you were able to do that because of relationships. It sounds like, I mean, at certain point you're like, hey, we gotta fund this. Let's do a launch. We need affiliates. Obviously it's not our long term plan to you to rely on affiliates. Which by the way, I launched an online education company which is an industry that's hugely driven by affiliates.

Yeah.

And we had a. For the first year we did and I was kind of morphing out of a previous offer, but for the first year I did that, I basically killed my whole affiliate program because I wanted to be self reliant and control my own destiny. And now we reopened affiliates and we probably get, we have like an 8020 guidance internally where we want, we don't want more than 20% of our traffic coming from affiliates. But my point is, I'm right there with you. Like I, and I appreciate how hard that is too. Once you have affiliates, they're like, they're like, it's the crack. And it's so easy to get hooked on it.

Yes.

And then you go, no, I'm not going to do crack. I'm going to go to the gym and get healthy and create my own endorphins. That's exhausting to me.

I think you're 80, 20 does make sense. It's exhausting. But your 80, 20 does make sense. Like. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if it, if it should be more than, you know, 20, maybe 30% of your revenue or your traffic. Right. Coming in from affiliates. Because if you can get, if you can, if you can sustain yourself without them, I think that's the key factor. Right. And being able to have those systems in place all the while. The icing on the cake is the affiliate program. Right. I think is. Yeah.

And that itself is long game. Because affiliates are short term, man. You call it. If you got a guy who's got a big list and you call him up and you're like, bro, like I owe you one. Just hit your list, Pop, you can make a couple hundred grand and it's so tempting. But this, and this is what I've learned. And again, I hope people are extracting less. I want people to be able to extract lessons from everything we're saying that they can apply no matter what stage they're at. And this long game, this beginning with the end in mind concept, if you can do it the hard way and actually do it and pull it off and by the way, we're capable of so much more than we think to where you actually probably can do it the hard way. Even if you don't think you can, you should, you should. If you can self fund and bootstrap, you should. It's so easy to go raise money, especially with SaaS. There's guys throwing money. They'll buy 80% of your SaaS platform.

You know, I mean, I mean it might be okay, you know, we're not. And I think that's, that's the thing. It's like, you're right, it's not the easiest way to go. But you know, it has its rewards. You know, it definitely has its rewards. To be able to say that and to do that you're going to have people on the other side of the table that's going to say no, why would you do that? It's nuts. Get a vc, hire vc, dump some money into it, show that your revenue growth is X, sell it for 10x later. Right. I mean you're going to have people that would say, completely contrary to what we've said. But I do Think that there's something to be said about going through the licks. You know, if you've been punched a couple times because you've. You've done this on your own, that's just gonna make you stronger for anything. I mean, when I was first starting out, even growing my online business, like, I went from a real estate company where I was doing like $245,000 a year, and I bought my house. And then suddenly the recession hit and I went from 245 a year to 15,000 the next year. And so I had a. I had to figure something out to keep my house. And that's when I went into online marketing, when I started learning about YouTube and became a YouTube marketing person. And that was my first course all about YouTube.

When was that?

That was a long time ago. That was like 2010. Okay, 2010, 2011. I didn't make any money online until, like, 2012.

You started in 2010.

I started being a learning about this stuff in 2010. Still a mortgage broker in 2010, and then still doing that in 2011, but then pivoting over to being a YouTube consultant. So I started consulting people like estee Lauder, Dell, HarperCollins with video marketing stuff. And then I had the dream of creating an online course. And So I spent six months building a course all about YouTube called YouTube Revealed. And when I finally finished building it, I couldn't get it off the ground. I couldn't let. No one would buy it. I couldn't get people to buy it. And that's when I, you know, that's when I saw people doing webinars. And literally the way that I got people to buy is I started doing videos in YouTube, inviting people to a workshop. This is before I was doing anything with ads. I was mostly doing all organic stuff. So I'd invite people to a workshop all about how to get it on the first page of Google using YouTube, and they show up. And I was so terrified about selling. I just did like, free, no pitch webinars just to build value and to get, like a list built up. And I was just. I was so bad at doing webinars that I was like, I was just petrified until people were like, is there something we can buy here? And I actually did these webinars while finishing my course. And I was like, I still have to add this thing or that thing or this thing or that thing or this thing or that thing. And it's just like, you know what I mean? It's like it was that whole Fear of launching, you know, perfectionist thing. And finally people were like, can I buy this? You know, where? How can I do this? And then I started selling because people were direct messaging me and I started selling that way. Ad, Hoc, right? And then eventually I was like, I just have to, I have really have to promote. I have to pitch, I have to make a pitch in a webinar. So I think that's when I started doing it. 2012, maybe three months in, I started pitching on the webinar and started selling my course at 197. And I was, you know, I was terrible at it, terrible at it. But I still made sales. I remember one of my first good webinars, I made a couple grand in sales and I was like, oh my God, it's amazing. But then I had a bunch of people, like, refund, and I was like, what, what's happening here? So I raised my price by a hundred bucks and I had double the sales, but still some refunders, which is kind of weird. And then I had some guy who was like, I want to promote your product. I like it a lot. I came through and bought it, but we have to bump it up to 997. So I was like, okay, how am I gonna do that? So I was like, I'll just add this like 30 minute coaching consultant thing to it. And then, and then when I put it out there on a webinar, I sold just as many as I was on Trend at the 297. But I had iPad, I had zero refunds. And so I was like, I think I'll just keep it at that, make sure. Because I had also I figured out, or kind of I realized that, you know, higher the price, better clientele, fewer people are going to refund. Right. And then I added in, you know, conditional money back guarantees about, hey, going through the course, send me homework, you know, and then if you send me the homework, if you show me you're doing the work, then you can get refunded after 30 days. Right? That became our new policy. And then that, of course also creates no refunds as well. You know, not to mention the tool. The program was actually a good program. So I just learned that process. Right. I don't know how I got on this trend of talking about that, but yeah, that was the kind of the thing I had to go through.

I know at least one person who is super interested in conversations about pricing, reducing refunds, you know, how to, how to shift your avatar and find your optimized funnel, your Dialed in funnel points. So at least one guy could have just this conversation for hours. I realize we probably will find, you know, we'll navigate into other things too. But, like, I actually think there's huge value here. Like, you may not somebody listening. You'd be like, well, I don't have a thing. It's never too soon to start reframing your view of the world into the way a marketer views the world. I think there is so much power in the way marketers view the world because, you know, here's the thing. I'm always kind of making assumptions like, well, who's listening to Millionaire Secrets? And. And I have limited information. I know what YouTube tells me about the demographics of my channel. So basically, I know how many men and women there. There are, and I kind of roughly know how old people are, but that's not like, particular. And I know what country they're in. That's not particularly useful.

Right, right, right.

I know who ends up in my education company, and that's more useful. But even that's kind of anecdotal. You know, what I hear from people and from the, you know, advisors and our support and all that.

Yeah.

So we're always kind of drawing. And I know who messages me. I know who I get DMs from. I get a lot of DMs from young people. But frankly, I think that's just because young people are more comfortable DMing.

Yeah.

You know, so what I want everybody to hear is as marketers, as entrepreneurs, and as business owners, and we use the term marketer like, it's this, like, special thing. But I think every business owner should be a marketer. If you're not a marketer and you own a business, you're basically at war with yourself.

Right.

Like, I'm not a marketer. Do you not like money? Why are you in business? Like, what?

Yeah, you know, or like someone who says, like, I'm not a salesperson. Like, you know, like, you are.

You run a charity.

Yeah. Like, you don't. Being a salesperson is not like being a slimy sale. Like, being slimy and salesy, like, that's the opposite of what you should be. As definite. By definition of what is a salesperson or a marketer, you should just be someone who's so, like, so passionate about your own product that, you know, when someone buys it, it's not like, thank you, thank you, thank you for buying it. It's more like, yes, you were gonna get so many results from this product. It's like, that's not. What is that? That's just you believing in what you have. Right.

And the person that got ahold of you and said, listen, man, you need to charge more for this.

Yeah.

And you need to add the value to it such that you're really, really confident charging more for it.

Right.

That was a bit of morphing, Casey, into a marketer.

Yes.

Marketers should be excited to charge for their products. They should be excited to take money for their products, because a marketer is somebody who's. Who's. Who wants to serve and believes in the value of what they offer in order to serve. Right.

And get that result. They want that person to get the result. It's like you spent 10,000 with me. I'm excited for you because you're gonna get a result. You know, like, that's. You. People should be feeling that they should have that. That belief pattern in what they. And what they're doing.

And when you see. Here's why I love being a marketer, and I used to really struggle with this. I had my own version of your journey. Like, I had deservability issues. I didn't. I felt guilty. I was, like, relieved when people would refund because I'd be, oh, I don't owe them anything. But, Mark, becoming a marketer is about becoming objective for me, and it's which. Becoming objective is about getting out of your feelings and also getting out of your what you imagine other people's feelings to be.

Yeah.

And by the way, it makes you. For me, I'm a way better husband, a way better dad, I'm a way better leader, I'm a way better CEO, and I'm a way better salesperson, because I actually feel like feelings are like this tyrant, and I don't want to be ruled by a tyrant, mine or another person's.

Right.

And I think that marketer think is the cure for so much of what ails all of us. And I hope everybody hears that and goes, man, I want to start to view the world through the lens of demographics. And by the way, let me say that I'm not talking. I'm actually, in a way, I am. I'm talking about the good kind of profiling.

Yeah.

The profiling. That's not about who can I harm, it's about who can I serve the best.

Yeah. Because if you're out of alignment with that, that's when emotions. You're either getting emotion toward, you know, getting some emotion coming at you, or you're having an emotional experience because someone's not aligned with getting a result from you. And so you are having a feeling about it.

Yeah. And I love that view of the world. And I think that like if, you know, I get messages from kids, like I said 14, 15, 16 year old, hey, I want to be a million. You have a show called Millionaire Secrets. I want to what? What's the secret? I want to be a millionaire. I'm like, listen man, there's not a lot you can do right now without your parents permission, but it's never too soon to start changing how you are evolving how you view the world. Right. And this is the kind of stuff that I hope people take from the show. So let me back up then to when you're in real estate first. How long were you in real estate?

Oh man. I mean, I was an actor in LA and then I didn't like being a broke actor so I went into real estate because I also had like a girlfriend and I was wanting to marry her and so I went in real estate. I was probably in real estate for like three years and then sort of the market crashed at that point.

So you were. Okay, well, hold on then. I want to back up to when you were an actor. How long were you an actor?

I mean, I was, you know, right out of college. I went to school for acting and opera. Right. So and then I though I, I was first going to school for theater and opera and then I combined them together to me for music theater. And then I went to Chicago right after school and was in, you know, plays and I did a couple movies there and commercials. And then I went to New York. Then I went to LA for pilot season and then I liked la, but moved back to Chicago, did more stuff there and then moved to New York. And just like every, every move I did, I was always doing like something like a play or something like that, but you know, not 100% successful. And then I moved to LA the last time and you know, did some episodes of stuff, but still I was always working at a restaurant. I mean my friends that I know now, like I have so many actor friends who they've been in a hundred credits but still, you know, aren't necess. They don't necessarily have foundationally home, you know, kids. They may have kids, but they don't have, I don't know, like a stable.

Like a stable base.

Yeah. Because as an actor you're still held within somebody else's decisions on how you generate revenue. Right. Unless you are creating the content yourself and producing it yourself. I think you know, for me, I felt like I was at the mercy of my manager or agent, right. And I just didn't like that. So I went into real estate and started my own company basically with a friend of mine. And then we did that. And then when that fell apart, I was like, I'm never going to be working for somebody else. I have to figure something else out. And so that's when I found out from one of my friends was actually doing Internet marketing. And I learned from him, and I had a figure something out. First I was looking for leads for my real estate company, but then I started liking marketing. I started liking YouTube. And he said to me, focus on one thing. Find out what you're good at. Because I didn't know what I was gonna sell. I was just absorbing marketing. And so I started to dabble into YouTube and I started getting good at YouTube with customers or with clients. And I was like, you know what? I'm this. I'm going to create a course and become a video marketing guy. You know, that's what I did effectively. But. And then I couldn't sell it until I started using webinars, which became the proof of concept that webinars work. And I want to not just be someone leveraging it, but create a tool for people to leverage it. Right. I love that there are people that are our customers that can do 20 to $40,000 a day using our system. Right. And that's their.90% of their revenue comes from the tool that we give them, as you know, that they have in their marketing engine. Right. And that feels good. It feels good to know that we have that responsibility and then also that we are. We continue to problem solve, to make sure we get better and better at it. You know, I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm a glutton for punishment, but I just like that. That I have to. I have. I have to apply more to. It's not just me, it's the people I serve that I have to make sure things are working better and performing better and better and better. Right. It is a harder road in the sense that you, you know, if I took every time our server would crash personally, because I sometimes do. I'm like, oh, God. I'm sure Russell Brunson takes that personally when something closes down. But we've had to put things in place, processes in place, like just ways to buffer against any issues that would arise. Right. And. And we take on that risk and responsibility because we want to do bigger things. I think in the Marketplace, we have a new brand coming out, Easysuite.com so we have a new CRM tool built for sales teams. It's like a lighter version of a Salesforce, but it's also a combination of close IO or close.com and a few other ones because it has a lead finder tool, has an auto dialer, and it's a pipeline management type of thing, you know, and we. We just see that tool and easy webinar going under that brand and just, like, tools for selling better. We just want to be able to create tools that help people sell better. But leveraging what I personally believe in, which is like, you know, engagement, direct connection, conversation, community, those are things that I've always done because I started as an actor. I love video, and it just. That. That is sort of in the back of my mind all the time of the products I'm creating. I just want more conversation and connection.

So I'm always. And I appreciate you sharing your backstory with me, because I'm always looking for the real. I mean, our show is called Millionaire Secrets, right? Like, what's the real secret? Because, like, we were talking about before, you know, a million people apply for entrepreneurial greatness, right?

Right.

A very small percentage of people come out the other side. You know, it's like. It's like being a Navy SEAL or something, right? Like, there's hell week and there's buds. Only for some of us, it lasts for years. Some of us, it lasts for decades. And so I'm always trying to get back to the source energy of, like, what gave this person the ability to see it all the way through. Were you thinking about that?

I was gonna tell you, Jeff. So when I went from $245,000 a year to 15,000, right. First off, I can say that my wife is probably the main reason for any hunkering down and pushing through the crap, right? Just banging through walls. Okay? I give it to my wife, and I give it to my wife because, like, at the time that I was doing this, where I was gonna lose my. We almost went into foreclosure twice. And my wife was like, you know what? She asked me one night, like. Because I was like, let's just short sale the house, you know? Let's just short sale the house and. Or let it go to foreclosure, you know? And she was like, but if we do that, how would that make you feel five, ten years down the road? You know?

Like, she.

She. She didn't just say, like, no stupid ass, like, don't let that happen. You know, make.

Figure it out.

She didn't. She didn't say figure it out like that, but the way she positioned it made me realize that, like. Like this is crunch time. I had to make something happen. Right. I was up against the wall. Something had to happen, something. And so I let that pressure fuel moving to the next phase of being able to accomplish this. Right. Or generating revenue as a consultant. Right. So I think that I allowed that stress to manifest into actually a milestone of success and then another milestone of success. Right? And so I think if we apply pressure and enough pressure and have something to lose, then we're going to be able to accomplish a bigger goal. Right. If we're comfortable and we have nothing to lose, then what is going to be the driver towards the end? Right. What's going to motivate us to the next level? So I don't know. And I think that once you stretch your abilities to be able to motivate yourself, that muscle, if you do that enough, then the next time you have to reach that next milestone, it's easier, right? Just like working out becomes. Working out becomes easier, Right? Like lifting the heavier weights becomes easier when you lift heavier weights. Right. And so we train ourselves to where hard is hard, but it's. But we can eat. We can do it in an easier way. Right. We still are handling. You know, we're still breaking through walls, but now we're stronger, we can break through those walls. So that makes sense. Or am I just.

Oh, it makes. I mean, yeah, you're preaching to the, to the converted here. I, at this point, I get very uncomfortable. And by the way, literally, I was recording another interview earlier this afternoon, and we talked about the exact same thing. And this was a guy that had lived in his car. This was a guy that was in prison for a couple years. And it's easy to look at him now and be like, oh, you know, his life so great. He speaks all over the world and gets paid, you know, $50,000 for a keynote. But, man, we got into the exact same conversation that, like you, you will rise to the level of your conditioning and comfort of with doing really, really hard things. And if you don't have a level of conditioning and comfort of doing really, really hard things, there's no level to rise to. You're just. You're soft.

Yeah.

And so let me ask you this, man. Now you're the successful SaaS CEO, and, you know, do you still try to make things hard or seek out challenge or make sure you don't like lose your edge.

I think what I do is I look at it, I have to keep like, now I'm responsible for more people, right?

Yeah.

Like we've got employees. Right. So when we're looking at that, I have to be able to say we can grow while at the same time I have to make sure that my employees and the people working for our organization and company are doing the utmost they can. So I think I have to make harder decisions instead of doing the hard work. In terms, I'm not talking about me staying up till 2am having to create a page. Right now I have to make more harder decisions on who we hire. I have to use intuition and also just know if I should be relying on my, on someone on my team in a good way to make decisions or if I should be making the decisions. So now I think it's more about making harder decisions. So I don't think, I try not to make, I don't, I'm not trying to manifest hard. I just have to make hard decisions. You know, whether it's dropping somebody and hiring somebody else that, you know, that's cost, you know, twice as much. Right. Or something to that effect. Right. We just have to make harder decisions and it's, it's about getting to that harder decision faster, making the decision and then going with it faster, you know.

So, but that to be clear, there was a time when you were staying up till 2 o' clock in the morning building that page.

Yes, yes, there was. Yeah, I was, you know, I, I was having all nighters when I was doing my, my launch stuff, but that was me, you know, it was me. I was. No, I had, no, I had maybe two people working for me, but they were like off and on, they weren't on salary, you know, so it's, it's, it was different then, you know, and.

I know that now.

It's, it's.

Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.

Go ahead, go ahead.

Well, I was just gonna say I know that a lot of people listening might be at the staying up till two in the morning, building their page phase. Certainly I've got thousands of people in my education company that are, you know, and I assume a lot of them also listen to the show that are in that staying up till two in the morning list, you know, building the page or hopefully listening to the show phase. And obviously I spent years there. And by the way, I don't know if, you know, I was a professional piano player who wrote couple musicals and we probably have A whole other thing. We can talk. And I did some acting and, you know, started my own show. And that was a whole other world, which, by the way, nobody works harder than actors and musicians. I mean, that's, that is brutal. And with, with.

You have to have a thick skin and you know, disappointment after disappointment. I mean, that may be the reason.

Like no certainty whatsoever about anything.

Right.

Which is. Which itself is its own excruciatingly difficult way to exist of just with like no certainty ever.

Even if you, even if you get something. Yeah.

The gigs fall through all the time, you know, I mean, anyway, so that's a whole other conversation. But to get where Casey is right now, making hard decisions literally with other people's livelihoods hanging in the balance of those decisions. If it weren't for all the nights building pages at 2 in the morning. That's what I mean about the conditioning.

Yeah.

That you're meant to stack hard, you know, on top of hard. You stack a little harder and a little harder and a little higher stakes and a little bigger consequences and a little more liabilities. It has to stack that way. You can't, you can't go to the, you don't want to go to the top too fast. Honestly. If you get, if you, if you change your altitude too fast, you get the bends.

Yeah.

You know, like your brain gets all scrambled. So anyway, listen, man, I actually know that you have another commitment and we have to wrap time wise and I want to respect that. But man, despite the name of your platform, Easy Webinar, it's actually good to embrace the difficulty and the challenges. But. But let's talk a little bit or not get into a whole thing. But I want you to share. We didn't even really get into talking about webinars. Yeah, I think everybody knows what they are. I talk about them just, you know, I talk about marketing automation a lot on my show. Like where how can people go learn more about the amazing world of webinars and your software in particular.

Well, if you go to, if you go to just easy webinar, like easy webinar all spelled out. I have two masterclasses. Right there at the top there's a drop down and you can sign up for a how to sell your stuff 24. 7 leveraging one webinar and then another one that's basically how to create a six figure or how to create a high converting sales webinar. So I think it's six steps to a high converting sales webinar. So Both are good. A 24, 7, 1. If you're someone who understands webinars, but you want to be able to sell more consistently with them, you want to create a process using webinars to sell your products better. That one is really good. The other one teaches a framework, a six step framework on how to basically sell better on a webinar. Both are really good to go through, but I'd say do one and then the other. But then if you guys want to, anyone wants to direct message me, you can just do it @caseyzieman on Instagram and just connect with me and tell me where you found me. And I'd be happy to help out with anything, you know. Any questions?

Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna sort of, you know, edify to my audience. Like, Casey's a really smart guy. It's really hard to build SaaS products. It's really hard to also be a great marketer. And a lot of tech CEOs are not great marketers. So to find someone who's both, I'm going to suggest is that that's a person that you want to learn from. So definitely get involved in Casey's world. Check him out on Instagram, check out his platform. Also, we have put together an offer for the audience. That's our free book. It's a, it's an, it's. This is a printed copy, but it's actually an ebook. It's pretty short, but it's the millionaire shortcut. And it's the fastest way to become a millionaire in the new economy. And it's basically like, I can sum it up by saying it's like everything I did in the last 12 years, including using webinars, by the way. And if you go to millionairesecrets.com Caseyz then we will know that you, you heard about it on this episode and get that for free. Also, check out Casey's stuff. I just want to say thanks to the Millionaire Secrets audience out there. Appreciate you all so much. Hope that this conversation has encouraged you that like, look, if an actor and a jazz pianist can do it, and especially Casey, what I love, I just have to say, and we were talking about this before we even hit record, that like, you don't have to be great, you don't have to be confident, but there's actually no substitute for like acting the part.

Yeah.

And backfilling it with actual skill and ability. And now I understand why. Because you're an actor. So.

Yeah. Yeah, I took on the part and then the part became me. Right.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's amazing. Anyways, thanks for your time, thanks for being on the show and thanks to the whole audience out there. We'll catch you on the next episode. You just finished this episode of the Millionaire Secrets Part podcast. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please like and share this episode. And do leave us a review. Let us know how we impacted you today. Your next step toward creating your awesome life is to join me and thousands of others in the Entre Nation community where you'll receive free training, networking with other awesome life seekers, access to live events, discounts, merchandise and other awesome perks. Head over to www.Entre Nation.com that is www.Entre Nation.com and join us today. And of course, do please follow me on social media. I can be found on all the major social networks at jefflearnerofficial. Thank you again for listening and please go be aware.