Daytime Drama to Digital Dreams | Daniel Goddard

Welcome to another episode of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in Montclair, California. Thank you for listening. No idea where that is. It's a huge state. So, um, thanks for listening anyway. Joining me today, Daniel Goddard, not Goddard. I don't know if I even did that right. With Under the Inn and Disco. Welcome to the show, Daniel.

Christian, it's a pleasure.

Can you give me the proper Australian pronunciation of Goddard?

It is Goddard. Okay. Basically, you take your O's and you make them sound as round as you can. Turn your R's into H's. And then you write. The easiest way to learn to speak with an Australian accent is if it ends in -er, you put an A on the end. So here, faster would be faster, faster. And if it ends in an A, you put an -er on the end. So pasta here would be pastor in Australia. Easiest way to do it. If you just switch those out, most people will think you're Australian.

When I, when I go undercover, I will do that. So Daniel, why don't you let the listeners know who you are and what you do.

Sure. My name is Daniel Goddard, or Goddard. Very nice. I've spent a large amount of my life as an actor. I've done over 1,000 episodes of soap opera, in particular one on CBS called Young and the Restless. I left Young and the Restless in 2000— sorry, 2020. God, the years go quick. 2020, and I began my entrepreneurial endeavors of launching my digital marketing company and my AI networking solutions company. I've always been an entrepreneur at heart. I think acting and the way I kind of— the way I interpreted my acting career was always from a branding mentality and the branding perspective, because what you have at the end of the day is a brand that you are packaging and putting out there to an audience, which if you're looking at running a business, your audience are your customers. So at the root of who I am, I've always been an entrepreneur at heart. So, um, it's an interesting time ahead. With the advent of AI. And I'm looking forward to what comes next.

So, well, you know, when, when, when I saw you in the green room, I knew that you weren't— you had to be in front of a camera because you're too beautiful. You're not like me with a face for radio.

Well, as they say in Australia, you have the face that could have launched 1,000 ships.

Perfect. So what— talk about that transition. I mean, you have a successful career. Why did you opt out?

I think life has its path for everybody. You know, you could spend your life trying to go in one direction and life will always take you, I think, where you're meant to be. I mean, if you want to get philosophical about it, I mean, we're merely organisms on a rock hurtling through space in a universe that's 14.3 billion light-years wide. Therefore, we're merely passengers in a car being driven by someone that we didn't appoint, nor do we know where we're going. So, I think the sooner you come to the recollection or the revelation that you have control over very few things in life, all you can really control is how you react to things, and the path you're on becomes much easier and you kind of go with the flow. I know that's a big Oklahoma thing. You guys are oil states and the flow of the oil is kind of symbiotic with that mentality and it's part of the earth and we harvest the oil. And I think we become too wound up with the attempt to control our lives. We become too focused on things we can't control. So, I think the sooner we come to the revelation that We are merely here for such a short time and we will find our path. And that's— I think that that's led me to where I am now. There is a greater cause, I think, for what I'm doing. But in a nutshell, I think that's kind of how I've got to this place.

Okay, so I'm going to read between the lines. I love your answer, but does that mean that this decision was not consensual? Like, were you forced on this path of entrepreneurship?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think everybody's forced in their own way because I'll put it this way. You can have, for example, something, a plant that you've been watering, you put in the sun, you do all the things right, then the plant wilts and dies. Did you do something wrong? If you did everything right, then maybe that plant was just not meant to be in your life. Maybe that plant was not meant to be nurtured and grown by you. So Harking back to that mentality of we are where we are and where we are because we're merely a sequence of events and experiences that have culminated to our present moment. It's a yes and a no answer.

That's as good as I'm going to get. Okay. So why did you pick marketing as your business venture?

Well, marketing is at the root of all things, you know, whether you're an actor or you're a business owner, or even if you're a student in, in school, you're marketing yourself, you're branding yourself, especially nowadays more than ever where we have the web and we have remote, uh, workspace, uh, remote sort of working collectives, social media. I mean, it's, it's really given people an opportunity to go down new lanes, check out new avenues. I mean, you look at the story of Ray Kroc, who founded McDonald's at 53. He was a salesman that just traveled. I don't know if you saw the movie Founder with Michael Caine. I did not, but I heard it's good. Very interesting movie from a biopic perspective. You see that Ray Kroc was on the grind. But he was always in sales. And I think what happened with him is that everything was always marketing and branding to him because he was in sales. So ultimately McDonald's to him was not about making hamburgers, it was about branding and marketing hamburgers. So at the root of everything, you have to find some way to market and brand. Look at Elon Musk. I mean, you can look at ventures he's done, And at the end of the day, a lot of it's just marketing. You know, he went to Australia to sell like the whole, the Giga battery thing that he built there, which is an enormous thing. And it's a marketing branding thing. Everything is Mars. Are we ever going to go to Mars? Who knows? Really? Are we going to go to Mars? I don't think we'll be going to Mars to live on Mars until the Earth is at a point where we have to leave the planet. Otherwise, who is going to want to go to Mars? No. What are you going to do when you get there? No. Live in a hermetically sealed metal environment until they can somehow create an atmosphere. So, you know, I think that he's an expert marketeer. He's a genius when it comes to creating product as well. Steve Jobs was an excellent marketeer. I mean, he was not a coder, never wrote code, you know, but he knew how to sell. He knew what customers wanted, and he created an exceptional company. So, you know, it's at the root of everything we do, it's marketing, Brad.

So you chose that because you perceive it as foundational, not that you had a background per se in it or a particular passion for it?

Well, I did have a background and passion in the fact that when I started on a TV show back in '99, it was called Beastmaster, which I had a pet eagle, a pet tiger, and pet ferrets, and it aired in the US and I'd moved from Australia to the US and I booked the show and we did the show. There was no social media back then. So the first letters you get from fans is fan mail, like it's in the old days. And then from there, websites became sort of like the focal point of communicating with fans. And within that website, you build a chat room where fans can go and congregate and chat. So I think I learned quickly that branding is in the acting business key to success. It's your safety net. If you have fans that understand your journey and can come on your journey with you and then meet, mix, and match with each other, then they form relationships. That turned into social media. And now from my perspective, that's going to evolve into Disco and what Disco does from an AI networking perspective. So it's all about creating branding experience for consumers that are aligned with your product. And your product generally is who you are and your brand. Everyone's a brand nowadays.

I want to pause and ask a question now. Beastmaster, I apologize, I've not seen any of your—

No worries. You can Google it. You'll see me in a loincloth.

It's very exciting. But isn't, wasn't Beastmaster like an '80s?

Yeah. Was this a remake? Yeah, with Mark Singer. Then they turned it into a TV show. And then in the third season, Mark Singer, came onto the show as a character. So yeah, it was based on the movie by, uh, okay, Andre Norton, or the books of Andre Norton.

Very good. I'm gonna have to go back and, and, uh, I now have something to do this weekend. There you go. Um, so your, your, your marketing company, uh, Under the Inn, which I, uh, as, as we were in the Green Moon room, I, I asked, does that mean under the inn as in a hotel and you said, no, it's Under the Influence. What do you guys do at Under the Inn and why did you name it that?

Sure, absolutely. Named it that because we all technically, from a social media perspective, everyone wants to be an influencer. So the idea of being— we're all under the influence of trying to find fortune and fame and success and brand identity. Um, for Under the Inn basically specializes in creating brands from scratch. Uh, we do everything from building websites, social media management, um, email marketing, branding, uh, SEO, all the things that you need to do if you're going to start a business. And, and predominantly what we specialize in is people saying, hey, I've got an idea for a product, something I want to do. I want to create something and they don't know what to call it. They don't know how to put it together. They don't know, they understand what they're trying to accomplish and then it's our job to shepherd them through that creation, growth, evolution, launch stage. A lot of the things we come across are people who have not much experience in branding or marketing and there are common pitfalls they all would fall into unless you could kind of steer them clear of that. The most common pitfall is they want to name their brand something that either has nothing to do with the brand or it's going to be competing from an SEO perspective with established brands and therefore the chance of being found in an organic venture or an organic way is next to none. And my personal take on all branding is if you can't create organic growth for it, then you're basically pushing a boulder uphill because you can, then you have to start throwing money at it. And once you start throwing money at something, the results you get from a consumer appreciation and a love point of view are never genuine. So you need to have something that has some form of organic truth to it. And then once you know that, you know, you're on a path to something. So then you start unfolding it further from there.

So do you primarily work— I mean, it sounds like maybe a lot of, uh, personal or consumer products, or do you do also services?

We do services. Um, we do— we have a very, very successful real estate graphics, uh, division. Basically, realtors will have a listing, and what we do is, uh, if you go to undertheinn.com and You look, there's 3D, we call it 3D realtor listing services. We will take a listing you have and then we add visual 3D graphics to it, which will show the comps in the area if you have drone footage. So you'll see what houses or what businesses are around, everything about that business. We can do graphic fly-throughs of a house if you have drone footage and add graphics. So as you go through the living room, it'll say living room, it'll show features in it, square footage, et cetera. So we have multiple things that we do as a business. But as you say, it's true. A lot of it is consumables where someone will say, like, we have a brand, it's called— someone came to us and said, we want to launch a product that's like a face lotion, which is an anti-aging face lotion. So I said, okay. And they told us a little bit about the product and the chemistry of the product. So I said, do you have any ideas about what you want to call it, what it does, and that sort of thing? They said, well, it makes you look younger. Um, it sort of seals in the, the organic chemistry of the skin and stops the environmental factors from attacking the free radicals. I said, so it's kind of like a time machine? They go, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it said it's a cream. And they go, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we said, why don't we just call it Time Machine Cream, you know? So then we launched Time Machine Cream. Um, we, we launched a very interesting one called Backpack Buffet. Basically, it's a buffet of backpacks. They're, you know, It's like 700-something backpacks. They're all custom-created backpacks. So everything you want to create has to have some form of brand identity that's easily recognized. Like, I've had a couple of people come to us, and there's an app that we're building for someone at the moment and designing with them, and it's a nutrition app. And they explained the fundamentals of the app, and they said basically, you know, it allows you to choose foods that you can eat and it looks at the macros and the algorithm decides whether with your weight goals, those macros will help you get there. I said, so what foods can you have? They said, well, you can kind of eat like— I said, well, can you eat like a lasagna? And they said, yeah, yeah, because what we'll do is if you have a lasagna one day, we'll balance it out something else with another day. I said, so basically you can eat what you want. They said, yeah, yeah. So the app's called Eat What You Want. So it's how do you get to the the crux of what it is that the brand is meant to do and what's the pain point it solves. And once you know what that is, you want to define it as fast as possible because most people will understand it immediately. You don't want anyone having to read something and go, well, what does it do? Right. Then you have to explain it. Well, if you have to explain what it does, the name alone should explain what it does. And then when you're off, once you get that done, as I say, the rest of it then is building out. How does the brand look? What's the color palette? What's the website like? In a nutshell, that's kind of our philosophy on branding and launching brands.

So do you oftentimes have to rebrand products? I mean, do you do that as well or no? Like they come to you and say we've—

No, no, we don't because No, because once you brand it, if your branding and the naming of the brand is on point, it's then about adjusting the journey of the brand. It's about adjusting metrics, about adjusting, you know, once you start to see there's some sort of organic growth, then it's about running ads. And our ad philosophy is pretty simple, which is, you know, if you give me $1,000 and let's say it's going back to Time Machine Cream because I've established what the brand is and what it does. You don't just make an ad and spend $1,000 on an ad. You know, you want to make 3 or 4 different ads, run each ad maybe $10, $15 a day for a week, 10 days, get some metrics, see what the best one was, what the second best one was, discard the 2 that didn't do any good, and then go back with the 2 that worked maybe run them for another 10 days at maybe $15 a day. It's all about getting data. It's all about getting metrics because you can sit there and I've met a lot of people that go, oh, it's the greatest thing ever. I love it. I love this. I love this. Okay, but why do you love it? Well, it's just great. Okay, why is it great? Well, because— okay, keep going. Keep going. Well, it was my idea. Okay, so it's great because it was your idea. Okay. All right. Okay. How about if it was someone else's idea? Would it still be great? Uh, I suppose so. I said, well, let's take our ego out of it and let's be objective here. And you start to realize pretty quickly that it comes down to getting the data to see if your original idea was correct. And once you get that data and you kind of see that, you know, you can then steer the product towards a demographic that naturally has a proclivity to want to consume that product. Like you might find Time Machine Cream is huge in Japan market. In Japan, it's almost like that movie Spinal Tap. I don't know if you ever saw Spinal Tap. Oh yeah. At the end of Spinal Tap, they're in Japan. They're the biggest band ever, right? Because Japan had a propensity to be attracted to what that band was doing. And next thing you know, it's the biggest band in Japan. I discovered this growing up in Australia. We would I've had bands come out to Australia that were American bands that were huge, enormous songs that were just enormous songs. And my wife's American and we're around the same age. So we grew up with the same genre of music. And I'd be like, oh, have you heard of this song? Never heard of it. How could you not have heard it? It was the biggest song ever. It was huge in Australia. Didn't even chart in the US. So you start to realize that the world is full of many different people who consume many different products for many different reasons. So most brand people and marketeers kind of go, let's just look at the US. So most people who want to launch a product go US, US, US, US. That being said, if you're shipping something that's heavy, you don't want to start shipping it to different parts of the world because you'll get killed on shipping. And if they return it, you're getting killed on the return. So if it's a digital product, go global as fast as possible. If, if not, if it's a heavy product, you have to start looking at is it worth launching something that has weight to it? Because you have to ship it. And how much are you going to spend in the beginning on shipping costs versus marketing costs? Because how much money do you have to invest in the launch of your product? So a lot of factors involved in it, but at the root of it, it's got to be an identifiable brand that people relate to.

You triggered something in my memory. One of my favorite bands growing up was, uh, INXS.

So, um, Yes, I saw them multiple times.

Yeah, the great— I, I, I, I think Shabu Shabba was my favorite, uh, album. And then they got popular and then I didn't really like them as much. Like, you know, it happens.

It happens. It always happens. X was a great album, but I mean, like, uh, you know, then they had Listen Like Thieves. Uh, there was a bunch of stuff and But once again, so you want to use INXS as a good example for branding. They didn't have to brand themselves. They didn't have to run ads to say, hey, we're a band you've never heard of. We're playing at this location. Come and see us. Organically, they built a following. It's like REM and like Dave Matthews Band. They build an organic base in colleges and then they can eventually go and play at a stadium. Which they'll run ads for at that point, and they'll go on talk shows and be like, hey, we're playing at this thing. It's like, you know, at that point you're marketing. But when it first starts out, if you've got something that has value to it, the customer will find you. And then you treat those customers from the very beginning like they're gold and you never betray them and you always keep true to them.

Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now. Yes, in Oklahoma, uh, in the small town I grew up in, It was Inks.

Have you heard that new band Inks? When I first saw InXS, I thought it was Inks as well, and I realized it was InXS. Yeah, yeah, that's funny. Yeah.

And of course I was like, no, you rube. So going back to your starting under the inn, what were some of the challenges that you had as an entrepreneur?

Getting your first clients.

Well, and I find this interesting of marketing companies marketing themselves, and a lot of them struggle with that, right? So how did you tackle that problem?

I began our first— and I have about 10 employees now, which I've acquired over the years that basically are an excellent fit for the company. We've gone through more than 10, more than 20, 30. You find people just come and go in your life, especially when you're building businesses. But I had a client that I knew before a client. I knew them and they were doing backyard workouts. Okay. And this was sort of just prior to kind of just into COVID a little bit, um, at coming out of like end of 2020 maybe. And they asked, you know, they had no idea, and they said, well, I've got a workout thing and like moms come over and we work out in the backyard and I take them through a workout. I said, well, what's the number one thing that everyone wants to work on? They go, oh, they want a great butt. Women want a great butt. Great butt.

Said, okay, I approve.

Well, Oklahoma. And I said, okay, so do you have social media set up for it? And she's like, no, I don't. I said, okay, so you don't have a handle, you don't have a brand name, you have nothing. I said, okay. I said, so backyard workouts, okay, which means you have no overhead of having to rent a space. I said, what backyard? Well, either my backyard or it's a group of moms and we all go to their backyard. I said, okay, cool. So you have no upfront costs about where you're doing the workout. And you're not marketing at the moment. You've already got a group of moms. I said, okay, cool. I said, so what we should call it is Backyard Booty Club. Backyard Booty Club. So next thing you know, I go and film the workouts and I cut the content and I put it together and launch her Instagram. First client. And then if you do it right. You know what the hardest thing is, to be honest with you, is when you do something and you launch it and then all of a sudden you have this expectation, oh my God, it's going to blow up. I'm going to get all these new clients. Everyone's going to see it and da da da da da da da. It doesn't work that way. And it never does. I was watching a show last night with my wife and somebody had an idea. Next thing you know, it's a big success. And I look at her, I go, that's how it works. Of course that's how it works, right? And especially in soap opera, that was one of the biggest jokes to me is like, somebody's like, I'm gonna launch this business. And 2 weeks later it's a billion dollar company, right? You're like, God, if I only worked like that, right? But Backyard Booty Club led to other smaller brands, stylists, people like that, that were in that sort of Backyard Booty Club space that then I would then launch their brand. Find a little catchy name for it. It was only social in the beginning, and then they needed websites. So then websites would start to develop. So it's not like I launched the company with the idea of do everything all at once. Stay in one lane. What are you— where is the space that you're good at? If it's just coming up with an Instagram handle that's got a great name and then creating some original content for it, stay in that lane. Because everyone needs that, you know, but if you start trying to do everything all at once, it's like they say, a man chasing two rabbits catches neither, right? So I think the goal is to try and choose the lane, stay in the lane, and just chase one rabbit, and then constantly assessing your rabbit-chasing techniques to see if you can make them more efficient.

Yeah, I think that is sage advice. I talk about that a lot with businesses of truly understanding the problem that you are solving for your customer or client. Like, you know, and the more clear you get on that, the more value you bring and the more value you can extract. And of course, it makes it easier to market. But absolutely. So many people do have the mindset, and we had that mindset when we started our business, and it works until it doesn't work, which is trying to be everything to everyone, it becomes too complicated and you can't grow and scale it.

It becomes complicated because there's too many moving parts. And in the beginning, you don't have the infrastructure to deal with all the moving parts. So it ends up, it's like juggling chainsaws. Eventually it just comes tumbling down with catastrophic effects.

Yeah, I was having an interview with a gentleman a few episodes back where he also has a marketing company, but he came in after it had been established 20 years and they had originally developed some technology to basically do the targeted Google ads before that was possible. Before it was available from Google. And so they had this whole agency built around this technology, and then the technology shifted. And essentially they were still trying to run two companies. They had a, a technology company and then they had a marketing company. And it's kind of like, it's real hard to do both, like almost impossible.

It's very hard to do both. And ironically, because I'm in the same position, I have a technology company and a marketing company. It's hard, but they're separate. They are separate. What I find is interesting is that from acting, it incubated the marketing company Under the Inn. Under the Inn incubated Disco. So it's almost like those Russian dolls where inside one is another one, another one, another one. Or you could say it's like the movie Alien. Inside you, there's something living and it starts bursting out.

Whichever analogy you prefer.

We'll go with the Russian dolls. It's less graphic. Exactly. And you start to realize though, that when you're launching in a different company, you have to market it. So if you've already got the marketing, if you've got the, if you've got the marketing experience and the trauma from the failure, yes, then you're well ahead of the curve. And for me as an actor, when I spent many years auditioning, a lot of rejection. There's always a lot of rejection because it's never about you. It's always about When you go into an audition for something, 9 times out of 10, they don't know what they want until it walks in the room. They can have it written on paper where it looks like, you look like a young Orson Welles.

Thank you.

I think. So I said a young Orson Welles.

Yes, thank you.

So Maybe you don't, but you do. I'm just—

for this story, for this story, I've never been— I've been— I've never been compared.

You've never got Orson Welles before?

No, but I love it.

You've been around people who don't see your true talent shining through. So, you know, you, you would get an audition breakdown, and let's say it's for an Orson Welles biopic, right? Okay. Or, or better yet, it's not Orson Welles. It may be like a character that Orson Welles had moments in his life with, and they need to cast Orson Welles, right? You can walk in there, you go, oh my God, I look just like Orson Welles, I sound like Orson Welles, all I gotta do is not mess it up and I'm gonna get this job, right? That's not how it works, because you could walk in and do it, and then someone could walk in after you who doesn't even look like Orson Welles, and some creative director goes, How about we cast someone who doesn't look like Orson Welles? Because it's going to be so different because no one's going to expect it. And then you're sitting there going, I don't get it.

Why?

Yeah, why would they do that? You have no control over that. So the sooner you learn the only thing you have control over is you going into the audition, being a professional, getting the dialogue getting the professionalism and the scene, getting it all together, putting it out there, walking out, forgetting about it, and moving on with your life. You will suffer and carry anger and angst and all this stuff as you start to go, what's wrong with me? What's wrong with me? It's not me, because humans will always default to it's not me, it's someone else. Yes. Most people aren't self-deprecating enough to go, oh, it is me. Oh, I do make these mistakes. Oh, I do always do that. I need to change that. Most people will never face the traits that they possess that are leading to their lack of success. It's always, it's not my fault. And that's just a human survival thing because we— Yes. Right. So the sooner you can get to that place where you recognize that adversity is the best thing you have because steel sharpens steel. Yes. And nothing grows without stress. You know, if you want to make a muscle grow, you have to put the muscle under stress. If you don't, it's not going to grow because we adapt. You go out in the sun, you get a little bit of a sunburn. The melatonin in the skin or the melanin in the skin, you know, leads to the skin darkening to help the body deal with the sun. So it's the stress of the UV radiation that causes it. So the sooner you get to that revelation and you get to that point where you accept it, you're already in front of everybody else.

So how did you translate that to your business?

You will present someone with the best idea they've ever heard, with a design for the best website they'll ever see at a price they'll never find anywhere else, and they still say no. Mm-hmm. And then you say to yourself, what could I have done different? How could I have got that? The answer is you couldn't have. You couldn't have. You couldn't have. And I suffered from, in the beginning of the business, undervaluing so greatly the cost and the pricing of the services we were providing out of fear of not getting the job that I forced myself to be in this position of everything was so cheap that when you got referred by word of mouth, they already went, oh, they're only this much, right? So to try and push your pricing up, they're like, but no, no, but I got told you're only this much. I know, but we're increasing our pricing. Oh, oh, okay. Well, that's okay. All right. Well, uh, and then, because a lot of people, especially people who want to launch a brand, don't understand you get what you pay for. You know, they truly do think that everything is equal and they don't understand that it's not, you know. And I remember seeing this Instagram reel once and it's this guy talking about, um, what'd he do? He was a floor sander and he stained floors, okay? And he was talking about, you know, I gave this client a price to do their floors and they said, well, how long is the job going to take? And they said, I can get done in a day. And they're like, well, why is it so much? And the person replied, you're paying for my experience. If you want, go and get someone else who's cheaper, who's going to take a week to do it. But right, you're paying for experience because you want the job done as effectively as possible, as quickly as possible.

Right. That to me is a value proposition. We're only going to take one day. And not disrupt your household.

Right. So you're dealing with trying to get that message through to people because everyone is like, well, there's someone out there that's cheaper than you and they say they've done this or they've done this. I've seen their work. So why are you now priced like this? So you end up when you launch your business, always thinking, being fearful of saying, this is what I'm worth. This is what I'm worth. This is what I'm worth. And that goes back to acting. You get your— you get broken down over time and going, well, what is my true worth? You know, because I don't book, I go to auditions, I think I do a great job, I think that, you know, I almost get it. You know, you go out, you come back, you meet producers, you go back to the network, you read for the network, it's between you and somebody else, but it's never you. You're always the bridesmaid, never the bride. And then finally you get something. And then you start going, oh my God, I got it, I can't believe it. But it's so short-term. Look, I was fortunate with Young and the Restless. I was there for 15 years, and that's why people talk about soap opera. I'm like, no, you don't understand, it's the greatest job out there if you're an actor. It's like, if you love doing something, you get to do it every day. It is a grind to be able to metabolically— to metabolize all that dialogue and then release it, where you make it sound real, you make it sound normal, and then do it over and over and over. Like, there are many— there's very few skill sets, I think, on this planet where you can harness the skill set, but the application of the skill set is always a different set of circumstances. Like, you can learn to be a carpenter, you're cutting a piece of wood. You're building the frame for something, right? Give or take, it's always within the realm of something that you've mastered. But acting is always going to be different words in soap opera. Like, what you'll say in one episode will never be the same as what you say in another episode and another episode. So you're having to learn something new all the time, but it's still the same skill set, and that's what's exhausting about it. Because it's not like you learn a song, you go on tour and like the Rolling Stones will go out and they'll play, you know, a 60-year career, but they've already been playing the same songs. It'd be like having to write new songs every time you go on tour. Every night you sing new songs, right? So you've got to get to this place where you start to say to yourself, I learned that rejection is my best friend. Because in rejection I either discover whether I'm meant to be doing this or whether I have the tenacity and the wherewithal to endure it until I succeed. And then when you do succeed, it makes you realize that iron sharpens iron, and that's kind of like the world we live in.

That's some more sage advice.

I love it.

So tell us about Disco.

Disco stemmed from both acting and marketing, where I would do fan events and I would be at a convention or at a location somewhere, and, and people would line up and they would get an autograph and a photo and stuff. And you'd see these lines—

wearing a shirt or not?

Uh, for the Beastmaster, it's funny, I went to Comic-Con and did Beastmaster in '99. I went in my loincloth, and it was— I've never been to Comic-Con before. It was an extraordinary experience. Um, That was shirtless, but since then I've tried to stay— I've tried to be clothed, although I did auction off my pants I was wearing once in Canada at a convention to raise money for breast cancer charity. So I auctioned off my jeans, and so I had to find another pair of pants to come home in because I just flew out for the day. Then once I auctioned the pants off, people like, auction your underwear off. I'm like, Okay, no.

Um, so what happened? So weird.

Well, you know what's interesting though, going back to like brand loyalty, I mean, your, your fans are— you will very rarely find more ardent and loving fans than soap opera fans, or other than Dallas Cowboy fans. You know, it's like, you know, that's a psychosis. Uh, those people are mentally ill, but Well, I've heard many, many similar, uh, well, you know what's crazier is, is that, you know, we talk football, but that's a different conversation. Um, from what happens is that we, I would stand in line, the people would stand in line and they'd get to the front of the line and they'd be standing with someone. They're normally not on their own, you know, because humans don't like experiences which are strange and new and awkward. We are designed to avoid that. It's a survival thing, right? It's just programmed into how we— it's like a fight or flight thing or survival of the fittest. So they would get to the front and then I'd be like, hi, nice to meet you. Where are you from? They introduce themselves and I'll be like, how long you guys known each other? And like, oh my God, we met 2 years ago watching Young and the Restless, and we met because we loved your character, and we met at another fan convention, or we went to a chat room on a website and we discovered each other. But they had this commonality of Young and the Restless, my character. And then along the way, they started going, we both realized we love to sew, we love to go fishing, we, we have kids this age. And they started to realize that what brought them together was just the tip of the spear. There was a whole— or if you do iceberg, there's a whole understructure of the tip of that iceberg. So disco came to an idea or to its origin by saying, okay, how do we take people that would never meet, that would never otherwise know someone else existed, and find a way to help those people meet each other? No matter what circumstance it is. And then we found 3 use cases for it. Basically, the first is a convention space, the next is the college and school space, and the other is the dating space. 3 separate lanes, but with the same parallel direction. What we discovered was, is that we wanted to create a piece of technology that would allow someone to define themselves and they create their profile They then choose from 100 social tags and 100 work tags, whether it be movies, hobbies, sports, work could be from your profession to networking to marketing to podcasting, whatever. And we have these hashtags. You then choose the hashtags you want that would define you. You then can then walk around anywhere. So let's say you're at a convention. You could set your radius down to like 0.2 miles to 10 miles. So you're at the convention, you set it down to 0.2 miles. As you walk around the convention, as you cross paths with people and they enter your radius, you get notified there's someone with commonalities and similarities to you. The AI then will allow you to choose the tags you have in common to start creating a conversation with that person. So you don't have to do the heavy listing, lifting of it's a stranger, what can we talk about? Well, we know what you have in common. But most humans, even when they know what they have in common, and we discovered this from college kids, most humans have an anxiety when it comes to structuring and creating new conversations with strangers. So the AI and the technology that is now available does that heavy lifting for you. So we now have the ability with Disco to allow people who are strangers, who have massive amounts of commonalities that would never otherwise meet the other person, either in person or remotely, make these connections, streamline them through the AI conversation, and then get straight to either deal flow or get to friendship. For colleges, what we get to do is we allow also the user to place their profile at any GPS location anywhere and basically drop into that location. So if everyone's dropping into a convention, you can meet and match, connect with people who are either there or like you remotely dropping in. We allow you to drop into 10 different locations at once and place yourself at 10 different areas. We call them disco billboards so you can place yourself there permanently. Colleges had— we partnered with Syracuse, Kentucky University, Southern University, and about 9 others. And the goal for them was how do we help alleviate social anxiety disorder in our students? Because they discovered most kids, let's say you're in Oklahoma, and you live in a small rural town and you're going to leave there and move to a bigger place, a bigger city with bigger college. It's terrifying. They told us it's terrifying. The first year, these kids have a very difficult time unless you're on the football team or a sports team or on the math team or something, and you're forced to be around people that you have commonality. They have a very difficult time. So how do we solve that? And our proposition to them was, so kids, before they— let's say you want to have 5 colleges you can go to. You can place your profile at 5 of these locations, and then everyone can do the same thing. And then mathematically, our algorithm will match you up. You can have conversations and go, oh, wow, I want to go to Texas Tech because that's the one where I met all these people. We're going to be studying the same things, we have the same hobbies. And on day 1, you've got your tribe, you have your group, you got your clique. So we started to realize that how do you take strangers and mesh them into a safe place, whether you're a businessman or you're a kid, so that you can create what matters the most, which is relationships with people that will help you on the mission you're on, whether it be make friends, create deal flow, et cetera. So that's where Disco's origin came from, and that's the pain point we're solving. I love it.

So how do our listeners find out more about you or Under The Inn or Dysco or Beastmaster or running the restaurants?

Sure. So if you're interested in marketing or just want to reach out, you can go to undertheinn.com. That's under the I-N, not I-N-N. So it's undertheinn.com. Take a look at the services. There's a schedule a consultation. Just reach out and we can chat. Dysco is D-Y-S-C-O. Ko.co. And the reason we did that is because we wanted to have our own SEO footprint. Because if we did Disco, like Disco, you're not going to get found. If people hear about, they go, I've heard about that, they'll search Disco and all of a sudden they're going to find a John Travolta movie or they're going to find something, right? Right. So you need to have a proposition where once people understand what the branding is, it's easy to find. That being said, Go to dysko.co, see about the app. Uh, it's available, uh, in the iOS App Store and the Play Store. Um, and once again, the whole purpose of it is to help people meet, match, and connect in a way that they have not yet been given that opportunity. Because whether we're on Facebook, whether you go to a Facebook group, you're in a— you're into a certain thing, you just chat with people, you still don't know anything about them. I mean, I've had Zoom calls where you'll have 20 people on a screen and you go around the screen. Hi, I'm Daniel. This is what I do. And everybody does it. 20 minutes later, no one's even listening. People are kind of like nodding. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. So with Disco, it's like instantly I would know who those 20 people are because everyone can drop into one location. We're going to have a live video feed so you can broadcast yourself wherever you are. But the goal is to how do I meet people just like me or are trying to achieve the same things I'm trying to achieve and get to the nitty-gritty and the crux of what you're trying to achieve as fast as possible because the time and technology is moving quickly.

I love it. Listeners will have those links in the show notes. If you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you heard, shoot us a message and let us know, and we'll get rid of Daniel.

I was going to say, if you don't like it, it's my fault. Yeah, and I'm still going to live with that. I can't— I've been a scapegoat for many a person in my life, so just get— I, I will wear it well.

Awesome. Until then, ta-ta for now.

Thank you.