Redefining the Book Industry | Django De Gree II

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 Nayberth, Pennsylvania. No idea where that is, but thank you for listening. Joining me today is Django Degree from Focus on Words. Django, welcome.

Thank you so much for having me. This is wonderful.

So, uh, tell, tell the audience who Django is and what Django does.

Yeah, so I am an author and a founder. Um, so as an author, I wrote a book called I Hope You Wake Up. Um, I'm writing my second book called, uh, They Lied to You. And I am the CEO and co-founder of a company called Focus on Words, where we help authors make more money and make it faster. Um, we empower them to be able to sell directly to their readers through our platform, and allows for them to be paid within 72 hours with an 85 to 90% royalty, um, rather than the normal, which can be anywhere from like 3 to 9 months. And, you know, sometimes people make as low as like 5% royalties.

So yes, that— yes, that, that's a whole lesson to learn, is— yeah. Uh, so now, okay, now I've already got questions. So, uh, how do you do the fulfillment then?

So basically think about this like how people run a Squarespace or Shopify site, but ours is specific to authors and books. We've built out all the infrastructure for like metadata and other things to be tracked. And so then the fulfillment actually happens either from the, the author where they want to send signed copies, like I have a big, big pile here, or they allow for us to publish them or distribute them. So we are either, you know, shipping the books out from our warehouse or we're fully publishing the author and we actually then have the ability because printing their books to ship those out.

Okay, so how many authors do you have on your, your platform currently?

We have 1,000 authors on the platform currently.

So how long have you been doing this?

Uh, we've been public since February. Uh, we worked on the app for about a year before that because we wanted to make sure we built an app that actually worked for authors. We found that a lot of them aren't very technologically savvy, so we focused on like building usability for authors, which is a little bit different than what I had built in the past. So, um, It was just a real big focus on usability for the authors. And then we launched in February and we went from about 200 authors to now we're at over 1,000.

That is impressive.

Thank you.

That is impressive. Now, you, you kind of alluded to maybe you had built software in the past.

Mm-hmm.

So tell us about that.

So before I got into building software, I did— I was in technology sales. So I worked at Salesforce, all kinds of other companies, and then I got into product and started building apps. We built apps for like gyms and all kinds of other And then I actually went full-time into product management where I worked with like GM, Shell. I worked with a company called Collagia where I was the head of product. We really focused on just like usability and actually building the platform from scratch. Like the interesting thing about building products is that it's not a right way. There's like maybe the best way for what we're building and that constantly changes depending on, you know, the future of what we're building and the technology that comes out. So that's what I like typically focused on. It was like electrification apps. Apps. I built some stuff in the crypto blockchain space. And then most recently, outside of Focus on Words, we built an app for, uh, it was visual analytics while I was with Collagio.

So, so are you the project management guy or are you the coding guy?

The product manager. So in the jobs that I had in the past as a product manager, the difference is like a project manager and a product manager could be on the same task. Product typically is actually deciding what we're going to build. Whereas like project is like I'm managing the project. Now product manager can be a project manager, which I was in all those cases. But then now being like the founder of the company, I have a, I have a designer that we work with. He's one of our co-founders, a technology chief technology officer who's another one of my co-founders. And then we have 2 engineers outside of them and then we have some growth guys and marketing people that are on the team.

So, so is this your first uh, entrepreneurial endeavor?

Uh, no. So one of the first entrepreneurial endeavors we had, uh, was with one of my co-founders. We actually built a— for the— for a lack of better words, like a venture studio where we were building our own apps and building apps for other people for like a mix of equity and cash. We built a, um, a music magazine alongside some apps, and we sold the music magazine. It was like a digital music magazine that highlighted artists at the time, which is kind of how I got the idea around authorship. Um, that first stint in the music industry really showed me what happens when you commoditize a product like music or books. Eventually it just cuts the bottom people out and they don't make any money on the platform anymore, but it's the only platform where you can sell. So that's what I didn't want to see for authors, and that's why we built what we built for— with Focus On Words.

Okay, so how long ago did you write your first book?

Uh, a little over a year now. So I wrote the first book, like, in defiance of personal development, because I felt like everything I had read up to that point, the answers eventually kind of failed me. And I was like, well, how can everybody have such different answers? So then I started looking at different questions. And that was sort of the concept of the book. I was just diving as deep into questions as I could. And for me personally, I just think what matters is awareness, like the awareness to be willing to ask the question and be willing to have whatever the answer is today. That you need to really have. And that's, that's sort of how the book ended up being written. And that's why it's kind of called I Hope You Wake Up.

I love the title and I'm intrigued by the second title. So, so tell us about the book. What is the book about?

So I Hope You Wake Up, the first book, is 49 questions and ideas around reality, wondering, hey, what if, like, the concept and the questions that we're asking are wrong? And that's maybe why we're getting the wrong answers. Like when people tell me me, they feel a certain way. I have like friends who reach out to me all the time. I always ask them to resay something without the word— a word that they're using, because then it makes you have to describe the thing a little bit deeper. So like, in I Hope You Wake Up, I ask a question like, can you unconditionally love anyone if you don't unconditionally love everyone? Now you could say yes or no, it's up to you. But if you say I only love these people, that in a weird way is setting a condition. So, you know, it's up to you on what you decide, but So many times I asked the question of, you know, like, why can't love ever work? And so then I started asking these different questions, you know, questions like, you know, what would you— where would you vacation if there was nothing to vacation from? I don't know. You know, what kind of life would you like to gift your time? Like, these are all just like questions I just started asking myself every day. And then I kind of put what happened for me. And that's what then led to the idea for the second book, which is like They Lied to You, like everyone has been super confident of the answers that they have. And in turn, I don't think that they knew they were lying to you, but I do think theoretically, if you actually dive pretty deep, you start to realize that oftentimes, especially— I'm in Western culture, so I don't try to speak for like Eastern culture— but in Western culture, we're so confident of our answers that even when things are yelling at us that maybe we're making a wrong decision, we're like, well, this is the best answer that we have, so this is all we can do. And we never ask another question. And so that's the concept around, um, They Lie to You, which I've been writing on Substack a lot about, just putting things out there, letting people know what the book is going to be about. That's— I don't know, I'm just excited about it because I just want to— I want to help people have better questions, because sometimes we never even ask. I think some people live their whole lives and never even get to ask a different question, and that's all I want for my readers.

That, uh, you, you sound like a philosopher king, um, more than, more than a, uh, tech or author?

Well, think about—

would you accept that label?

Well, so I would say this, like, I've created a company that for all intents and purposes, people told me that couldn't exist because of what the book industry is. That's what they told me. They said, hey, Django, you can't pay royalties that fast. You can't pay within 72 hours. You can't do these things that you want to do for authors. Authors aren't going to work with you. They're not going to use technology. And my thesis was, maybe the information that we have doesn't work because we're asking the wrong questions of the authors. So that's why I spent 8 months working with them than sitting down with them and asking them, hey, what is the challenge that you have? And so like being an entrepreneur in a lot of ways is, I think a lot of entrepreneurs are not as creative. They do a really great job of like, what's the word? You build like the version of something for someone else or like you build like a, just an alternate to the initial question that was asked. And we're just kind of, iterating very slowly. But every now and then someone comes along who does a giant iteration that makes us sort of question what's possible for something. And I mean, I don't know that that's me, but I really do care about reading about like Steve Jobs, for instance, who spent as much time as he did in India before he came back and said we could put glass on phones. And people were like, that's ridiculous. Everyone wants keyboards. I kind of feel the same way about authors. And I saw some problems that the authors had that they couldn't communicate when I spent time with them. That I realized was probably the reason nothing existed like what we're building. So that's why we did it.

Yes, I, I would agree with everything you said. I think, um, entrepreneurship is about solving problems, right? Um, but to your point, I don't know that we, um, often go beyond the surface level. Um, and, and I, I equate it to essentially treating the symptom. So, so you're, you're, you're solving the surface level pain, but you're not solving the real underlying problem. And I think to your point, it's probably a lack of questions, like a lack of understanding, like you're, you're not going deep enough to really solve it. Yeah.

But I also think, like, let's be honest with ourselves, most of the, the solutions that we create are only going to become the problem again. Like, I think about that with streaming services. Like, I remember when streaming services started and they were like, you're never going to have to buy all these packs packages, everything's going to be in one place, no commercials. And yesterday I had to switch between 3 different streaming services, and all 3 have commercials even though I'm on a paid version. And I think at this point we're getting pretty close to being back to where we were with cable television, but now it's just streaming. We've just like traded for another thing. Like, it— there's— in some ways, life is change. Like, that's my thesis about life. And I recognize that at some point the company I created potentially could end up in the same space that the book industry is in now, but at least I could try to be aware of that and make decisions based on that. I think everybody thinks like they're the exception to the rule, and you're— we're typically not. We're typically just— we're typically the rule, just telling ourselves we're not. And so, you know, I think about that with streaming. I remember buying Hulu and Netflix for the first time, and people were just like, this is it, completely different, nothing like anything that has ever existed. And now I have Disney+, Paramount+, HBO, Netflix, Amazon. In order to watch football, There's episodes, there's like with the new— I'm sorry, collective bargaining agreement for basketball. It's on HBO, it's on Peacock, it's on Amazon, it's on Hulu. It's like it's everything that I had before when I left. So it wasn't the exception. It was actually just a new rule that was the exact same as the old rule. It just had a really good— we had a really good time for a couple of years and now it's, you know, we're—

well, I think it goes back to the economics of it. You know, people were spending $150 a month on cable. And, and so the streaming came in, you know, $20. And so people didn't stop spending the $150. They just bought a bunch of $20 items, you know, because that was what they were used to spending. It was funny, though. I was talking to some older folks like me the other day, and the one thing that has changed is there is no appointment TV. Like you don't schedule your life around TV. You can watch whatever you want, whenever you want, which I don't think fundamentally is— the only thing different would be live, live sports. You know, you still have to sit down when it's on because they're not changing the game time for you.

That's true. But I don't know that it's better. You know, like you think about some moments that we had in television where everybody sat around and was excited to watch something and then you could talk about it the next day instead of, like, hey, did you finish the third episode? It's like, no, no, don't tell me yet. Is it, is it better for community? Is it better for the collective? I don't know. I mean, I don't, I don't have the answers. I think it's better for the individual to be able to do whatever they want, but also, as the individual, does it make us more disconnected if we have to, uh, taper like what connects us? Because, you know, people are all on their own time zones. I mean, I don't, I don't know, but truly, truly the philosopher king. I don't, I don't know the answers. I'm always just asking questions. And I, then I do the best that I can with what I have, you know, and I, well, I love that.

And I love asking questions. And I think, okay, I'm going to pivot here and go back to the business model. So 8 months of research. Yeah. Why did you take so long? And I'm not saying that it's that long, but like, why did it Take that.

Yeah. So to give you background, when I was working on a music app a long time ago, one of the issues we had was we sat down with the artists, we did some really quick research, and then we built the thing based on the research we did. And then when we gave the artists the platform, it turned out the information they gave us was what they wish they did and not what they actually did. So then the platform was useless for them. Because we're just blind to that. So I spent a lot of time meeting with authors across all different pieces because there are independent authors that are, you know, putting their book out on Ingram or KDP. There are traditional authors who sign with, you know, a traditional publisher. There are hybrid models where it's 50/50. And then there's all the different books— children's, romance, personal development, spirituality. And so I was trying to just map the entire industry because I didn't understand like, why were there— why was there— why was there such a focus on, like, hybrid model within the personal development spirituality space, but almost none in the fiction space? Why was there, you know, so many people reading romance novels rather than, you know, like, children's books? Like, why were things the way they were? So the more that I dug into it and the partnerships that we created, that gave me a better and better understanding of the industry. Fundamentally, what I did realize is what we can support is the time that it takes to pay an author. Because what I didn't realize is within the book industry, there's like a whole— there's a wholesale industry, which is basically like Ingram wholesales books to a bookstore or to Amazon or whatever. And then in turn, they have the right to return that book within a certain time period. So you as a publisher or an author kind of have to wait on this extended period of time before you can know whether or not, like, you can pay out a royalty. And the challenge with that though is, is that when you sit like Ingram sells a book at a 50%, gets the book at a 50% discount. So we sold it at $10 rather than $20. And now the splits just start getting thinner and thinner as we think about like book costs and all this other stuff. So when I'm sitting down with authors, they're like, hey, I make a $1 to $2 royalty typically, and I'm not going to get paid for 9 months, but my publisher wants me to I wanna, uh, do this giant ad campaign for my book and I just don't know where to start. And I was like, yeah, it's kind of interesting. That would mean you'd have to have a $2 customer acquisition cost. I don't know anyone who has a $2 customer acquisition cost. I also don't know anyone who sells anything and doesn't get paid for 9 months. And so I was like, maybe there is a way that we can help you by helping you get more information and data, you know, like understanding who your reader is and then also pay you faster and more so that maybe you can keep spending more money. To get your book in more of the right reader's hands. And that's like the thesis that eventually I came to. There are some things I can't help with and can't change of like reader behavior, but taking that time actually helped me get below the surface because, you know, people just say stuff. People might be like, you know, all readers don't know how to do that. Readers don't want to sell books. You're like, really? That seems weird. Like, why wouldn't they want people to buy their books? Then you talk to a reader and they're like, I don't care about making money. I just want to make an impact. It's like, okay, well, how would you make an impact? Oh, I would like to get my book in people's hands. It's like, do you not want to sell it? No, I do want to sell it. Okay, so you do want to make money. You just like don't know how. That's all. That's, you know, like when I was having those conversations, I stopped. I didn't stop at the surface level. I was like, okay, I heard you say you don't care about making money, but you also are willing to sell books. Those two things don't make any sense. So then when I get deeper, you realize it's like, I don't— the real answer is I don't know how to sell my book. I don't have any data and I don't know how I can, you know, make my money back ever. So I'd rather just say You know, I want to make an impact. And that, you know, that, that's what we did. That's why we took the time to understand why people were saying the things they were saying. And now we're actually supporting the authors in the capacity that we can.

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. So yes, because a lot of times people don't tell you the truth, not because they're trying to lie to you, because they don't know the truth themselves, right? They, they tell you what they think, but without that, that's an incomplete understanding of the problem, right?

So that's why we all— that's why we have so many infinite answers like, I don't know, being in America, like, I hear two sides yelling at the other side, calling them idiots for what they can't see. And I think everybody's kind of wrong. I just don't know that we have the right answer, um, when it comes to any of this. I just—

probably because we're not asking the right questions.

I agree 100%. I think it's not even that we're not even asking the right questions. It's like, um, like, for instance, this is like something I think about all the time. If I was in a in a trillion dollars of debt right now, uh, most likely life would be pretty painful to eventually get out of that debt. For me personally, at an individual level, I'd have to cut back. I'd have to not have certain things. I'd lose certain parts of my life. What happens when, like, a government is trillions of dollars in debt? What, what would those cuts be like? In a way, the government is made up of all the people. Does that mean that, like, some people then just have to take a loss, or some people going to lose their life? I don't know, but, like, It seems like everyone's trying to come up with an answer that doesn't involve pain for anyone, or at least for their group. And like, you know, it's like maybe we're just not willing to come to grips with what happens when you end up in a certain amount of debt. You know, like that's— I don't know.

Django, you are preaching to the choir here. I mean, I agree. I— not to get political, but I will say this, that there is a whole lot of discussion about things that people think are important. However, very few, if any, are talking about the thing that is the most important. Like, it's kind of like all of this is rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic. It doesn't matter, the ship's going down. Like, if you don't, if you don't plug the hole and do something about that, none of this, none of this other stuff matters. You can keep talking about it.

Right. I mean, like, yeah, we're just like, okay, well, what if I take the plug out of this hole and put it in this other hole? And it's like, yeah, see, we fixed that hole. But it's like, okay, but you just unplugged that other hole. And so I just kind of feel like across our entire culture, the trade-off that's necessary to actually solve certain problems that we have would require, like, you know, kind of, I don't know, let's say, for lack of better words, tearing my shirt and plugging it. And that just means I now have— I have a torn shirt. Or someone in the hole has a torn shirt, but someone's got to tear the shirt to plug. Like, we have to take something to plug this hole. We can't just keep unplugging holes and then plugging in somewhere else. And I don't know, I don't think we like trade-offs very much. I don't, I don't think— I guess, like, for instance, in my book, so this is to go back to my book, one of the things I keep talking about is, is there's typically a trade of something. Like in, like, The Alchemist, they talk about like a trade of equivalent of equivalency. I can't think of the full word, but we just like keep trying to figure out how to not do that. So all we keep doing for all aspects of the culture is it feels like trade one thing out for another, and either we're unaware of what we traded and we find out later on, or we don't do the trade and we just kind of like unplug and then plug something else, and we're just sort of surprised that water is still streaming into the area because the place we were all focused on, we plugged.

So yeah. I mean, the economist, the economist would say there is nothing free. There's always a, there's always a trade-off, even if it's just the opportunity cost of what you, you didn't do. So there's, yeah, there's always a cost. There's always a trade-off.

There's always a cost. You just got to know what you want to trade. And that's like, that's what I hope to help people understand when it comes to like my book. And that's what I hope people understand when it comes to the company. Like there's a trade-off to selling what's basically like through our bookstore, which is a direct-to-consumer model, it means that you don't have the same reach as you would technically on like a Kindle Unlimited. And there are some people who make a lot of money on Kindle Unlimited. It's just that there's like 1.5 million books. So 99% of people make no money, right? My hope is, is that maybe we could help, you know, 50 to 60% of all the people on our store to make at least their money back. Like, wouldn't that be great? I think that's cool. But it does. But it also means that like maybe you won't be as big as like Colleen Hoover because you didn't get seen by that many people. But, you know, I—

were you anyway?

Yeah, but, but again, it's like that's a trade-off because that is what everyone's sort of chasing, like the dream that your book becomes this giant book on Amazon. It's, it's possible. I'll never tell someone it's not possible, but at the same time, the majority of people, it's not possible. So all I'm trying to create is something that I would describe as more equitable in potential so that you as an independent author have the highest probability to make some money back, you know, because I'm meeting a lot of authors that make no money back and spent thousands of dollars. Um, and that's— I don't know, that's just the only— it's the only thing I can think of. Maybe just it's like a shared— instead of me trying to blow it out of the park and make boatloads of money on just a few authors, my thought process is maybe we can make money together and it maybe be as close to all of us as possible. That's always my goal.

I, I love that idea. So do you— so I don't know the answer to this. So like, can someone be on your platform and Amazon as well?

Yeah. So our platform, like if you go to my page, which is ropai.me/jengo, my book is there, but I also have every link to where you can purchase my book if you don't want to buy it from there. So, you know, some people don't want to buy from there. They want to buy from Amazon or Barnes Noble or anywhere. And that's what we tell people to do. When we like, when we publish authors, we publish their book everywhere. We try to get them into bookstores. We try to do everything that we can for them. But we also make a point of emphasis that you should drive people to a platform that you own because we're going to pay the highest royalty rate and the fastest because that, like, my mom's not going to return my book. So if she buys my book, I should get the most money out of that, whether that's me just like handing it to her and her giving me $20 or me sending her to a platform where I get a 90% royalty within 72 hours. If I send my mom to Amazon now, she's doing what Amazon wants, which is She's probably going to buy like a blender bottle and like another thing until she's at free shipping because that's what Amazon's whole purpose of doing things with books is. And so then I get a, you know, a lower royalty and it takes longer to pay. And then, and then it just goes by layer. Like, I think we pay the highest royalties in the industry right now, short of like a company that pays a 100% royalty. Then you have Amazon. If you're exclusive to Amazon, and that's because Amazon logistically knows if you are exclusive, you're probably going to send, what, 10 to 20 people to Amazon and then they're reminding ended like, oh, I should buy the stuff that was in my cart. And then there's Ingram and the rest of like wholesaling books where you probably get the lowest royalty over the longest period of time. But that's because you don't know who's going to buy the book, right? If I send a, like we have an author who we sent 100 books to the warehouse and Amazon immediately bought 100 books at a 50% discount. Now we wait 6 months. Will Amazon sell those books? Will they order more books or will they ship all the books back? We have no idea. So I have to wait 6 months before I can, you know, pay my author on the books that Amazon bought. And that's just, that's just the function of the industry, the way that works.

So who do most of your authors use for their printing? Do they, do they use Ingram? Do they use Amazon?

Does the, the vast majority of the authors who joined the platform were using KDP and they, you know, use KDP, KDP, which is Amazon's like distribution service. Technically they can't print or publish with anyone else, but again, they can sell with us if they're selling their author copies. So they just buy a good amount of author copies and either ship it to us for us to ship out or we, or they do it for themselves and they sign the books. Like, because that's one of the things I tell the authors, like, what would matter to you as a reader? Would you love someone signing a book that you bought and paid shipping for? And would that mean something to you? Would that make you feel closer to the, to the author? That's the things that we're just trying to drive to the author to do, the things that would just add value to your reader that would make them want to tell their friend about it or post on social media, because that's how most people discover books.

So That's— and then, so do you do the marketing and promotion for the authors as part of the gig, or is that a separate add-on service?

Yeah. So it's a— so let me backtrack. It's a freemium model. So if someone joins our platform, you get a free profile and you get an 85% royalty. If you pay $20 a month or $200 a year, we put together an entire sales plan and marketing plan, and then we tell you like, hey, look, this is what we think would be a best path if you are going to spend money on ads. And we will run those ads on behalf of you. The reason that we run ads on behalf of authors is that we're the only vertically integrated platform. So if you run an ad on our— on— if you allow us to run the ad for you, then that ad, we can prove attribution, which is the biggest challenge that we have in the book industry, right? If I run an ad to Amazon, I can do some things for correlation to say, hey, I think it was X. Like we joke, we know 50% of ads work in the book industry. We just don't know which 50%. So we do all 100% every time. Because you, you know, you run the ad and you look at, you know, what happened on this ad. Okay, this one had the highest engagement. This one had the lowest click-through rate. Okay, I'm going to double down on this one specifically after running this bunch and then hope that the book keeps selling. It's hard to know. But for us, when we run an ad on behalf of an author, because we have a pixel on our sites, we actually can see the attribution. So we could see like first ad came through, second ad came through, third ad, the person bought. Whereas like with other platforms, there's always that break-off point when you then go to sell on Amazon or Barnes Noble or wherever you end up buying. It's just really hard to understand causation of the sale. So that's what I'm saying. For $20 a month with no additional cost. So like we don't charge an additional amount for running the ad. We just need to know how much you're going to spend on the ad. And then that's what's like— it's not a— typically with marketing companies, it's like, okay, it's going to cost an additional $100 and we'll run the ad. For us, it's just you're paying the $20 a month to work with us. You're getting your 90% royalty, and then we'll run the ads on behalf. Of you.

So do you run the ads on Amazon? What, what, what, what, what are the ads that you're—

All kinds. So we run Meta ads, Amazon ads, TikTok, um, we've run some Google. Again, so this is another reason why we waited a year. Like, there's different ways to sell books based upon the genre of book you have. Like, children's books are typically bought as gifts, so a person might say, hey, what's a great children's book? Uh, like romance novels are typically bought with a bit more urgency because like people will read like 5 books in a, in a, in a day or I'm sorry, not a day, in a month. And so it's kind of hard to actually catch those readers as well because they're typically not buying every single physical book. They're like on Kindle Unlimited. But, you know, we're like looking for where we can do that with an Amazon ad. And then for like personal development, spirituality, we find that you typically have to run a lot of brand awareness where people are learning about you before they buy a book. Because who's to say my book's better than David Goggins or Brené Brown or Tony Robbins or the Bible, right? There's a lot of other concepts out there that are way more proven than you finding this random dude named Django and saying, I'm going to buy his book and take time to read his—

I'm going to buy his book.

Oh, well, that means a lot. But, but again, like, this is a brand awareness moment. And when we put this out, people who have never known me would see me for the first time. And then if there was an ad that retargeted people based upon the fact that they checked out the Profit credible creative, that's like a great way to now for them to have seen me the second time or the third time. You know, the— I joke with authors about this. They're always like, you know, if you write a really good book, the people will come. I was like, you know, I think that's really— well, I say, you know what, that's really interesting. Why do you think McDonald's runs so many ads? Yeah, you know, like all the time on all—

who doesn't know about McDonald's?

Who doesn't know? The golden arches are in some cases with 3 within a mile of each other. Like where I grew up, there was a couple— within a couple of miles, there were like 3 McDonald's. And, and still ads all the time because you also understand there's a concept around brand awareness, like where if someone keeps seeing it enough times, then they're like, I'm kind of hungry. I think I want McDonald's. It's kind of same thing for books. Like people don't really like it when you go, hey, please buy my book, please buy my book, please buy my book. But they would like it if they were like, you know, I saw this guy Django on the Profitable Creative. I'm going to follow him on Instagram. And then they're following me on Instagram and then they see an ad about my Substack article. And then they're like, wow, that was a really good article. And then at the end of that article, they follow me on TikTok. And then that's like 5th, 6th, 7th. It's typically 7 to 10 times where someone has to come in contact with a product before they buy. Like, imagine that for books, you know, it's like it might be higher, but we don't know because we don't— we typically don't have the data. So, but it might be higher, it might be like 12 times, like, who knows? You know, how many times did I come in contact with Tony Robbins before I bought his book? I don't even know. I probably saw him maybe 25, 30 times by just by default because of how many times I'd seen him shared on other people's pages. So that's just like the thing to think about when you're writing a book. It's like, how do I get in front of people in places where I'm not like, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, and you're more like, hey, this is my concept on life, or this is the beautiful romance novel I wrote that's similar to Colleen Hoover, which you probably read, or something, you know.

Those are the little things that we can do to slowly convince people to buy our Yeah, you've got my mind thinking about my own book and the connections I want to make with you. And so this has been a fascinating conversation. So what, you know, starting a software company is a little different. What are some of the challenges that you've had to overcome, uh, in launching this business?

Well, one thing is, is that when you decide to make a company that's not as straightforward as like the Shopify for books, it's very confusing for investors because they want very easy, understandable, like, click-through pieces. For us, like, we've had to build a very complex business that works across the industry. Like, we work with publishers helping their backlist authors, we work with independent authors, we help, we have a distributor, like we have all these things that to a lot of investors, it's just, it's not straightforward. It's not just like we do X for X. And so that's been one of the earlier challenges, but it's one of my favorite challenges because it makes me have to do more, more efficiently. And so instead of, you know, thinking like I've been at companies where you start to think about things from a timeframe, it's like, oh, well, we have, you know, 2 years of burn rate. And you're like, okay, cool. So we're going to hire these people, we're going to do this stuff, you know, we're going to do You're thinking about the concept from like a burn rate perspective. I'm always thinking about like, we gotta get to this next step. Like right now there's a very specific goal in mind that we have to hit. There's no way around it. We have to hit it this way. That I think makes for a better product because you're like, you're thinking about the customer and how to get the customer to do the thing that we need to do next because there's just—

yeah, don't get me, don't get me started on the VC model cuz I don't know.

Well, the VC and it's, yeah, well, so, and I've, I've been around the VC stuff for a while and I, it's nothing against them. I just think like like, here's the thing, if you're a VC, your thesis on life is basically like, I am going to go out and I'm going to find a company that's going to defy all odds. The chances of doing that is like 1%. So you have to rationalize how you're doing it so that when you look back, you at least have your thesis that you followed. Because if you just do it at random, there's, there's thousands of companies reaching out to you every day. So I'm not mad at them at the fact that it was harder. It's been harder for us to raise money. I just think at the end of the day, it makes for a better— it makes for a better product on our part because it's—

So did you do a capital raise?

A little bit. We didn't raise a lot. We did a small pre-seed round and we just kept it rolling while we were building the product. We stayed super efficient. Like the entire team has been part-time up until now. Everybody has had a second job or a main job for the most part. I'm the only person who went full-time for a period of time. And then We raised some money, but we have customers now. I mean, we have 1,000 customers. We have 40 paying authors. We didn't even have the ability to like onboard all of— we were not even planning to onboard this amount of authors this fast.

So I was gonna say, that's, that's pretty quick.

Yeah, we didn't— we, we knew we had a lot of manual processes that were set up because I thought I was going to be able to continue meeting with each person individually. And now we're at the point where I can't to do that. So we've hired on some additional people. But again, that's— I'd rather be pulling investors into what is something that I have more, um, more, uh, ground to stand on than pushing them into, you know, the deal, because then they have more, uh, leverage in that case.

So yeah, I— yes, I mean, it seems to me that— and I don't want to get off on the VC model, but it's like what, what you're describing is the way you build a business that that you know is successful, whereas a lot of VC companies, both the investors and the companies themselves, are really just gambling. And it's kind of like, I don't know if this is going to work, but I think it's going to work. So if you give me some money, you know, and, and, but, but you're, you're coming from a point of, well, look, we already know it works. We've got 1,000 people that have signed up in 3 months. Like, you know, Now, we may not have proven the economics of it yet.

We've still got to, you know, I think, I think the best way to think about it is from what I've seen, there is just a thesis that a VC has. It says we're— our thesis is X and that— and they raised money on that thesis and they have to stay on that thesis, whatever that is. Because if they come back and they say, hey, we broke the thesis and invested in SBF over at FTX, then you're going to look crazy. But if you said like, hey, just fit all the criteria of everything that we said we would invest in, then, you know, at least it's defendable. So from that perspective, I understand that we don't make a lot of sense. But at the same time, when you think about that, you know, for Uber, for Airbnb, for some of those companies that really did change an industry, what you see all of them have in common is having a pretty hard time raising very large amounts of capital at the beginning. And then suddenly, you know, everyone saw it because of the success they had, which which at the end of the day, that's what I believe we're building, something that is industry-changing. But that requires like breaking a few of the rules that we know exist, which—

100%.

The point of VC money in a lot of ways is what is the thesis that you had? And what is the rule of thumb that you basically have? And that's, that's again, that's why I'm not mad about it. And in fact, I— there— our company wouldn't be what it is if we had gotten as much money as we wanted to get when we first started. Like the first idea we had was a reader app that connected authors. And that was when I didn't really understand the author's problem. So not getting that money early on led to the next piece and the next piece and the next piece. And as I say to people, if it was supposed to be another way, it would've been. So I just keep going and keep working on whatever it is that I'm doing, which in this case, Focus On Words, which I love. I mean, it's so much fun doing something that actually changes the lives of people and seeing people actually make their money back. Back on their book. You know, that's something that people say all the time, like, if you want to write a book, it's not about making money. I'm like, why not? Why can't it be about making money? Why can't I make money? I made a product. You don't say that to, like, the, the guy who's selling water bottles that he ordered from China on Amazon. Like, why not the person who, like, spent 2 years in their basement writing a book? If anyone should be making money, I feel like it should be that person. So, right, that's— yeah, yeah, that's my thesis on it. The, uh, I want to ask you, what did— what outside of this side—

well, you can't ask me questions, I'm the host. Sorry.

Oh, you're right, I'm sorry, my bad. It's really interesting to hear your— how you think about things. I was just— I was just wondering—

wondering what was the question?

I'm sorry, I wasn't paying attention. What is— what is your background, uh, specifically that had you so interested? At least because it sounds like you know a lot about VC and some of the other things, so I just figured out—

well, no, I'm— I'm a— I wouldn't say a jack of all trades because I'm not, I'm not really, uh, much of a tradesman at all. I just like to learn. Um, you know, my background is as a CPA, so I, I have been heavily into, uh, the finance, um, economics angle of it for my whole career. But over the last 5 to 10 years, I've really dived into the marketing side of things, the human behavior. I did have a software startup myself in my past. So, you know, again, I know a little bit about a lot of things, but, you know, I think the human behavior element is the thing that intrigues me the most because honestly, it all ties back. Like, you know, I mean, economics is nothing but human behavior on a large scale. I mean, and you referenced one of my favorite books, Alchemy. I thought Rory Sutherland, that book to me was not really about the topic that I thought it was. It really was more of a treatise on you know, the, the Age of Reason and, and like the limitations of it. And, um, yeah, it was about marketing, but it, to me, I got more out of the book on, you know, humans are predictably unpredictable and, um, you know, what does that mean to us in business?

Yeah, I think, uh, I think one of the hardest things as a person who wants to create anything is like you oftentimes are aware of something that is best for people and you start to realize that we don't really do things when they're best for us. We're almost like carnal and animalistic in how our brains can be hacked into doing things that are not best for us, that are like maybe best for some version of ourselves. Like I just read this article— and I, I will— okay, I read it. I read a study and then I wrote an article about it on my Substack about the study that was done where these rats drank, uh, basically a drugged water, and when they were in isolation, they drank it until, you know, they were gone, they overdosed. But when they were in a space that was healthy, they didn't. And so then they were like, okay, well, the case is, is if we just create healthy spaces for humans, addiction won't be a thing. But then obviously humans who are in healthy spaces can still be addicted which made me start to realize that maybe our relationship with everything around us has nothing to do with what's actually happening as much as how we like interpret it individually. Yes. And so for any study that's done in a weird way, especially like psychological studies, I feel like they're all like partially broken because like you can't do a 10-year study on what, what are all of the things that we don't know about this individual that could be the reason that it would mess up our psychological study. So I just— I keep coming back to the same place where I'm trying to understand people and what is like driving us and trying to ask as many questions within a group. So for instance, in my case now it's authors and it's like, what is it that we're saying is true and what is it that is actually maybe the truth that's underlying it? And then how can I actually help you now that I know the actual truth? You know, I kept hearing people say authors can't be helped. Because they don't want help. And I said, well, I think everybody wants help. So maybe they just don't know how to ask for help. You know, maybe they're like drowning and they just don't even know they're in water.

So they don't know what to ask help for. Like what's— yeah, I think you brought up a brilliant point and it goes back to the, I think, a large problem in marketing. Is awareness of the problem. Like, if, if they don't have an awareness of the problem, then it's hard to sell the solution. If you gotta, if you gotta sell it twice, it's a heavier lift, right? Um, but the thing that is easy to sell is the thing that they think they want, or the thing they think they need. And I, I, I've, I've coined the phrase on this podcast, uh, crackhead energy. Or crackhead marketing, you know, and that's what a lot of the marketing services do is they sell business owners that crack cocaine that gives them that temporary high and what they think they want. But it really has no long-term benefit and in many cases is harmful. But that's what they want. And so it's easy to sell it to them.

I always end up taking way longer when I'm not on a podcast to think about, think a thought through. So I'll just say this sort of out loud and it's not fully thought through. You saying that part about crackhead energy, the thing that I've learned about Amazon and almost all e-commerce marketing is that it does an incredible job of selling on impulses. Like impulse marketing is top tier as far as because impulse marketing in a way is probably the most repeatable. Right? If I can make you afraid or make you feel like you need something that you don't need in that moment, and then I tie it to like, it's on sale, or, you know, it's like the JCPenney thing when they tried to say, hey, we're just going to— instead of marking things up super high and saying it's a discount, we're just going to tell you the real price. And people were like, okay, I don't want to buy, right? Like, we don't really need much of anything. So then I have to create almost like an artificial want, but at least now it's repeatable. Like now I know if I can hit you here, here, here, and here, and then hit you with like a perfect deal, what feels like a perfect deal, then you'll buy. And that's like a— it, it's a, you know, it's kind of tough in Western society. We need money to move. And so if everyone stops moving money because they realize they don't need, they don't need anything, then like people are going to not have jobs, right? Then it's like if everyone's like a crackhead, as you describe, crackhead energy, and they are just buying stuff just for the sake of buying it, and now you have all the stuff in your house that you don't use. Like, is it better? I don't know. Like, I— that is where I've always ended up with my own marketing and thoughts. It's like, yeah, I see this path where maybe I could impulse force people to push, buy things, but like, is that, is that, is that the society I want to live in? Is that better? Does it matter that I don't want to do it if everyone else is doing it? I don't, I don't know.

Or that they're going to buy it from somebody else regardless. Well, that, that, that is always an excuse too. And but, you know, I, I think as, as I've, I've been in this industry and been in business 28 years, I realized that's not the type of business that I want, and that's not the type of life I want, where I'm giving people what they want. I'm not going to give you what you want unless it's what you need. And could I have made more money? Yeah. I— but it's just not who I am and it's not what I want.

I agree. I think that we can only live in the reality that we are willing to actually accept. So, you know, if you— sure, other people might do it, but technically, if you keep doing it, you're just exacerbating whatever it is. So, you know, that is the decision you have to make. It is a— look, I don't, I don't know what the right answer is. I— what I do know is that I want to create genuine connection. And I think the only way I can create genuine connection is through better understanding myself, and then taking the time to be open and aware for other people. And that's, I mean, look, that's why we built the company the way we did. And that's why I wrote the books that I wrote. Because at the end of the day, I just, I want to better understand, I think literally, I can only love people to the extent that I love myself. So, you know, as I learn more facets about myself, through others, and I learned to love that about others, I just feel like life just keeps getting better.. So, you know, it's the best, it's the best I can do.

That, that is— yeah, you— I, I couldn't say it any better. And we will conclude the interview with that statement.

How—

Django, how do people find, uh, out more about you and do business with you?

So if you go to wroteby.me/django, which is D-J-A-N-G-O like the movie, that is my account with our focus on words. We're about to launch the bookstore, so the domain is going to be different in the future, but we're going to keep those live forever. So we'll be here. I'm on TikTok and Instagram and LinkedIn, but every one of those links is right there on that page. And that's how you can check out my books. That's how you can find the writings that I'm doing right now on Substack. Like, everything is right there. And that's wroteby.me/django.

So perfect. Listeners will have the links in the show notes. If you like what you heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you heard, either something wrong with you, but, uh, send us a message and we'll try to find something that would assuage you. Until next time, ta-ta for now.