#126: Danny Warshay — See, Solve, Scale

The first paragraph in the book says, we've got a gazillion problems in the world to solve. We need many more problem solvers. And I know this is a method for helping people do it. So my approach to marketing was not, you know, okay, how do we eke out a number of additional sales? It was more, how do I spread the word about this methodology that I know works?

Welcome to the Daily Author Podcast. We talk all things nonfiction books with authors and discuss how they're using their book as a leverage point into more income and impact. My guest today is Danny Warshay. Thanks so much for joining me, Danny.

My pleasure. So good to be here.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited for this conversation. You've done a lot of good stuff in your, your career so far, and you got this great book, but you're the founding executive director of the Nelson Center, as we can see for those watching this video, um, up in the top right corner of Brown University. And you got this great book called See, Solve, Scale: How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success. You're flashing your book.

Oh, we flash each other's copies. Yes.

Got yours right here. It's a great, nice-sized book. I'm like, you know, for someone who reads as much as I do, you could start to appreciate the feel of a book and how you kind of open it and all those good things. And your book really hits the mark.

Well, judging from your image behind you, your obsession with the color scheme, I think, is important. I don't know if I'm included in the yellow or the white background for you.

So it's all based on binding, which is actually funny. So you would be in the yellow. Okay. But when I would think of your book, obviously majority may be white. So that's where the color coordination can come into a little bit of a frenzy, but it works for me and it's obviously a little visually appealing.

Well, then I got the Japanese version here, which is white and I don't know, it's all different color schemes. I've got the Taiwan version, which adheres to the yellow theme. There's One coming out in Korea and China and Saudi Arabia and a few others. So it depends on the version.

Yeah, that's super exciting. And I'm sure for those Asian books, at least, are they opening up right to left or left to right? I know it's a little flipped, right?

Right. Opposite from what I'm used to in this country. And, and I presume the Arabic in Saudi Arabia will also be different.

Awesome. Well, I love it. I'm excited to dive into it. Well, you know, you've been, other than building a startup in the back, you know, early in your career and selling it and having a lot of experience in the trenches of entrepreneurship, you've now been teaching some of the top students at Brown. Some of your students have become, you know, founders of Airbnb and Pinterest and many other amazing companies. Let's kind of just talk about the big question of why you wrote this book. I think for someone like yourself who You've been teaching, you've been talking about this topic, and I'm sure it's a selective group, right, that can get into Brown and come to your sessions, come to your workshops. What kind of led you at this point in your career to decide, let me write this book for— to achieve whatever goal I might have?

Sure. Happy to answer that. I'm asked that a lot. The truth is, it was not my idea. It was my students' idea. And as you say, my background, I always say, in order to teach entrepreneurship, it's a participation sport. And so you really have to do it. And my background in entrepreneurship started, as you say, when I was part of the leadership team of a startup when I went to Brown as an undergrad. We built that company up, we sold it to Apple. And most of my career I've spent doing that, doing entrepreneurship, starting things, building them, getting them funded and selling them. And then out of the blue, about 19 years ago, a beloved professor of mine from Brown asked me to teach at Brown, and we can get into that and what that all meant. And What was it like to have to formulate even a definition of entrepreneurship in a context where Brown doesn't have a business school? I had gone to Harvard Business School. I had worked a little at Procter& Gamble. And so I had to start teaching from scratch. And I thought, well, if I'm bad at it, I'll just do what I was doing before. And I was a lowly adjunct, you know, teaching on the side of most of the startups I was part of. And that went really well. And I learned that that is what I describe in the book, this Japanese word, my ikigai, something that I consider living a life of meaning. And I had real impact on lots of students through the years. And then in pretty big numbers a few years ago, students came to me and they said, you know, you are not doing what you teach us as the 3rd step of the process. you're not scaling. And I thought, hmm, you're right. How interesting when the students become the teacher.

Yeah.

And I said, well, what should I do about it? And they said, well, you should write a book. This was in about 2009, 2018. And I thought, how hard could it be to write a book? I never taught before and I realized I could be a teacher. I had never run a center for entrepreneurship. And about 8 years ago or 9 years ago at this point, the provost asked me to do that and I figured out how to do that. And I figured, all right, how hard could it be to write a book? As we'll discuss in some detail, I'm sure it's hard. But I basically mirrored the content of what I had been teaching for all those years. And now that I've written it and it's been really well received and as you heard, translated into a bunch of different languages and it's become a lead generation tool for my speaking and workshops that I do in big companies and in government agencies and nonprofits and even the military and all over the place. I guess I'm starting to do what my students accuse me of not doing, and that's scaling.

That's incredible. I love when the students become almost the mentors, right? Or the roles are reversed and they can then share what they've learned from you and send it right back your way. I mean, I'm sure you can argue, obviously there's new classes coming through Brown every single year, so there's potential way for you to scale slowly, you know, through that avenue. But I definitely see how the book could be a way to really reach people that you physically can't be in the room with them on a given day.

And I narrated the audio version. I'm not bragging because I had never done that before, but the publisher Macmillan said, well, who else would do this? You know, it's your content. You're used to teaching this. And I said, well, if you can't get Morgan Freeman, then I'll do it. And this was during COVID and they said, we can't have you in a studio, so we're going to ship you equipment to your house. And it feels a little bit like our dynamic here. I was on With a— on live with an audio director and an audio engineer and a theatrical director for like 7 days, 6 or 7 hours a day. And again, turns out you can do things that you don't have any training in, and I really enjoyed doing that. And so the audio version is my voice too.

That's awesome. I think there's a lot of good value to doing it yourself. I know it's a very strenuous process. It's nothing we've never ever done before. I mean, even someone like yourself who I'm sure Obviously, you're speaking every single day, whether it's to students or to corporations. It's a lot of talking, right? Over 7 days to be reading that book.

That is true. And, you know, every word mattered. You know, the title is See, Solve, Scale: How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success. And even See, Solve, Scale, you know, back when I was thinking through originally what I should call this process, of entrepreneurship. It's a structured process for solving problems. And I love alliteration. And so See, Solve, Scale has tended to be something that people remember. And then when I was speaking about it or narrating it in that recording, it was fun to say See, Solve, Scale quite a lot.

Yeah, that's great. Well, just to touch on that real quickly, I think whether you knew it or not, right there, I'm sure obviously you got some marketing chops in you, but The title could be so important. It honestly could be, I think, 60, 70% of why someone probably buys the book, the COVID itself and the title, to really be something that they can then speak to others about, share it, and actually have something that could be memorable because there's so many books in the world. So was there a process? I mean, I guess, did you pull upon some marketing knowledge that you needed alliteration to kind of have something that's punchy, or was it something in the power of 3s? Because I know there's a lot of You know, stuff and talks about, right?

I mean, I remember— Exactly. I took Latin in high school and I remember Cicero advocated the powers of 3. It was the 3 steps that I've always taught in my teaching of entrepreneurship. Back when I would, I was asked by this beloved professor, Barrett Hazeltine, to teach at Brown, I had to think about what that would mean because we, as I mentioned, we didn't have a business school. And I kept hearing this phrase entrepreneurial spirit. Have you heard that phrase?

Yes, that's— I want to get into that. So I love that you brought it up.

Yeah. And I know some of your listeners might have heard that phrase. I was told, oh, you just have to go teach people entrepreneurial spirit. And I thought, I don't even know what that means, let alone I don't know how to teach it. And it occurred to me that my professor appointment was in the engineering school. I don't know anything about engineering. My father was a chemical engineer, and he always would laugh that I was a professor of engineering, technically. But I thought, in engineering, how silly would it be if we would say, just go out and have the bridge-building spirit, if we wanted to teach somebody how to build a bridge? No one would trust us to teach anything if that's how we, you know, just go out there and have bridge-building spirit and throw up a bridge. And if the cars and the trucks come crashing down to earth, Then just go have more spirit. And no, no one, no one would think that were a way to teach somebody in engineering. And I thought, no, in engineering, if you want to teach people how to build a bridge, you can distill some fundamental principles that all bridge building have— has in common, a beginning, a middle, and an end. And I thought I could do the same for teaching people entrepreneurship. No bridge is exactly like any other. No venture is exactly like any other. But in Entrepreneurship, you can distill some fundamental principles. And that's where C-Solve Scale came from. What's the problem you're solving, which is the most important part of the process and often the one that many people overlook. And you become what I call a solution in search of a problem, which is really dangerous and really expensive. And I teach techniques in the book that help you figure out how to figure— how to determine what problem to focus on in the first place. How do you solve it? That's that second stage iteratively. Not getting it right the first time, or maybe even the fifth time, doing it with very scarce resources. And then eventually the scaling part, which my students accuse me of appropriately of not doing, is how do you have big and long-term impact? And that's where you start to appropriate and to attract resources that can help you scale. And so it's a 3-step process. I do think it has that Cicero elegance to it.

Yeah.

I probably have my agent to thank for some of the alliteration in the title. And I do think it's a title that people remember. I mean, there were other titles being considered even more strongly than CSOF Scale, and I can't even believe we were thinking about those because they were so boring. But CSOF Scale tends to be one that— you're right. I mean, I worked at Procter& Gamble in brand management, and so I think a lot about marketing. And I think I'll leave it to your listeners to determine whether it's a good title, but it seems to be based on people's purchase of the book and memory of the process.

Yeah, definitely. I, I just find that also interesting how writing a book is such a creative process to pour your heart and soul into something. So many pages, so much research, et cetera, all to leave up to the title on the book cover to be so important to really have that marketing hat to really just to To move it further, right? To get it further out there. I mean, I— there's plenty of books I can list that I think, yeah, they're good in itself, but I think the title and the book cover has really done a great job of really opening doors for it. And then people can get inside the book because at the end of the day, just like a great blog post or a post on LinkedIn, you know, if it's not going to rope in people from the first couple of lines, you're not going to get to the meat and you really need to spend a lot of time on that, that front part. And I think that's where the COVID and the title comes into play. So you've done a great job there. I do have a question though, kind of around this entrepreneurship spirit though, because you're totally right. There's— I think that's just a cop-out answer, right? Like when you don't have something that you can really give someone a straight answer, oh, some people have it, some people don't, or you got to build the spirit, etc. But the question is, because you've had some really remarkable students come through your program or you've mentored, etc., you know, Evan Sharp at Pinterest and then some other great folks, have you found those individuals have some consistent through line among each of them where maybe there is some natural-born spirit or inclination that they have success within them from an entrepreneurship standpoint?

Well, to be clear, Evan Sharp wrote me a blurb for the back. Uh, he really loved the book. He, he wasn't one of my students, but Joe Gebbia of Airbnb was when he was at RISD. Uh, and I, I love— I appreciated both of their blurbs. And, um, but throughout the book, as you know, as you say, there are some really good examples of my students, it's to their credit, not mine, who have done a great job of learning this process, mastering it, and then applying it to solve very consequential problems. The Casper founders, the Casper mattress founders are really good examples. You know, as I say in the book, they're a good example of what I teach as the benefits of scarce resources. The only thing they knew about a mattress is that you slept on it. They didn't know anything about how you're supposed to knew what the rules were about how to manufacture it, how to source it, how to distribute it, how to brand it, how to warranty it. And all that worked to their advantage because they knew less, not because they knew more. And the incumbent mattress companies who knew a ton had the burden of abundant resources, which is the opposite side of that spectrum. No, I, I think one of the myths that I, I hope I dismantle in the book, and there You may remember there's 11 cognitive biases that I cite throughout the book that I think are common among humans and among entrepreneurs that cause us to make mistakes, not because we're stupid, but because we are saddled with these very natural biases. And then the myths that I think I dismantle include that you have to have a certain personality in order to be a successful entrepreneur. Others are that you have to be from a certain place like Silicon Valley or even the United States or a developed country in general, or that you have to look a certain way. You know, I talk a lot about the biases against women, against people of color. The statistics are just terrible in terms of how little venture support goes to women and Latinx and Black founders. All of that is because people have been left behind. And discriminated against. And so there's lots of biases that we hold, including that you have to have a certain type of spirit or a certain type of personality that you're born with, or that you have to be, you know, kissed by the spirit of Steve Jobs in order to be a successful entrepreneur. A lot of what I include in the book is backing in scientific research because, look, I'm a professor. I'm a full professor at Brown University. And this isn't the Danny story. This is evidence from my teaching of now 19 years. And it's a lot of evidence of academic research that backs up all the assertions that I make. And I know from having now over 3,000 students from all my courses at Brown and elsewhere that I've taught in all the workshops and big companies and elsewhere that I do training in, that I know none of that is true. You don't have to be from a certain place. You don't have to look a certain way. You do not have to have a certain personality type. And I talk a lot about the benefits, the strengths of being an introvert, for example, where lots of people think that you have to be an extrovert. Susan Cain wrote an amazing book called Quiet that I cite throughout the book about the power of introverts. And so again, I think I'll mention the subtitle, which is How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success. And really the underscore there is anyone, because a huge part of the mission of the Nelson Center is inclusion, to make sure that anybody who has an interest in solving a problem can use entrepreneurship in order to solve it.

I love that. Yeah, that's, I mean, it's, to me, it's very encouraging words, right? Like to read this and to learn that and to think, oh, I don't have the makeup or my dad doesn't have a ton of money or access to capital or best network. It's like, no, it's, it's, As long as you have a problem and a passion behind it that you really want to go solve, you can go build something great and go change a bunch of lives. And I think in that, like, you could probably talk at length and maybe you do about the myths and breaking down those myths because that's like one, I think that in itself can be, you know, earth-shattering in a positive way to people who might have so much self-doubt, especially those that are coming in.

Well, it's a lot of what, right? It is a lot of what the book has done and what its intention is and what my teaching is. is to break down those myths that often hold people back. And if you think that, well, I'm a person of color or I'm a woman or I don't have much money or I don't have the right background of training or I don't have an MBA or I'm an introvert and that's gonna mean I'm disqualified from being an entrepreneur. All of that is wrong. And the examples in the book are diverse. The citations in the book are diverse. And what I've heard is that it gives people a lot of confidence and empowers them in order to feel that they are entitled to be an entrepreneur just as anybody is. And again, I know that from having my own experience, but I'm a white male. And so you would think, well, you're, you're among the majority, not the minority. But the examples of the successful entrepreneurs in the book that you mentioned, I think, are good illustrations of that. And I'm really proud of my students and I'm happy that I even had some of the students write the sections in the book that are about them because they would, of course, do a better job than I would. And I'm proud that they did that.

Yeah, that's incredible. I love it. Well, we can go into more of a discussion, I'm sure, at another time, because I do love the concept behind benefits of scarce resources and burdens of abundant resources. But just to share for those listening, like, truly, no matter where you are or how many resources you have or how little you do, You know, you're able to accomplish something great if you really set your mind to it. And obviously if you have the process in place and a big problem that you want to solve. But to that point, I want to kind of talk about now what the marketing world's been like for you, what the lead gen tool of the book has kind of presented itself to bring all these great opportunities your way. What was kind of like, take us back to launching this book and your process of getting the book out. Obviously you had Brown that you could lean on, but was there— A strategic marketing plan that you had in place?

Would it be helpful to take even a step back further into the process of getting the book published? Because it was very unorthodox. It was what I learned is basically the opposite of what you're supposed to do. I was naive. I didn't know what it meant to publish a book or even write a book when those students in big numbers came to me and said, you're not doing that 3rd step. What I started to do was to write a Google Doc, an outline, in the summer of 2018. And before I knew it, I kind of had fleshed out an outline of kind of the courses that I was teaching already, and I figured I would transition that content into a book. That made some sense. And then I started writing. I thought, you know, I don't know where this is gonna take me. I didn't have any illusions really about it being published. But I wrote 10 pages, and I thought, well, I was a history concentrator at Brown, and 10-page paper, that's substantial. And then I had written 50 pages, and I thought, I don't think I'd written 50 pages of anything ever. And I was really proud of that. And then before I knew it, I had written the entire manuscript, and I loved the process. It was a lot of fun. It was hard to find time to do it. You know, I would get up in the middle of the night and just start writing, and I— and that wasn't drudgery. It didn't feel like a chore. I know some authors say, oh, you have to schedule time and do it every day. I just did it because I liked it. It was creative, and it was fun. And, and again, I didn't have a particular goal. I didn't really even know how to publish a book. But then I had this manuscript, and through the grapevine, through a friend of mine who was a prolific author, I was introduced to the group that became my agency, and I learned what an agency is and why it's really important. And they loved the manuscript, and they said this kind of thing from professors is in vogue. And I signed with them and they said they would shop it to the big publishing companies, which they did. And there was a ton of interest, which I was shocked to hear. And they did an auction among the biggest publishing companies and it did really well. An auction meant, you know, what would somebody be willing to pay for an advance? I learned what an advance is. And then they did other auctions with these international versions. And I, what they had done even in between was to write a proposal, which was to kind of reverse engineer a proposal out of the manuscript that I had created. And that's what they used to shop the book around to people because I learned you need to have a proposal in the right format, kind of like having the right pitch deck or business plan that you shop to.

Essentially a marketing plan, which is pretty crazy. Yeah.

And my agency pretty much wrote it for me. I mean, I had some input into it and they did a great job. And so I was shocked. All of a sudden I had these contracts to what normally would be to write the book. And I had already written the book, which is why I'd said it was all kind of backwards. And the US publishing company was Macmillan, St. Martin's Press, a division of Macmillan. And they said that the editor who was assigned to me coincidentally was a Brown grad, and he said, you know, your book is in really good shape. It just needs a little polish. And I thought, oh, that's great. Who knew? And then as we started to work together, he just like ripped it limb from limb. And he said, you know, you have to get rid of this big section and rewrite this section. And I said, Tim, I thought you said that this book was in good shape. And he said, well, It's really well written, but it's not ready for publication. And if I had told you how much work it needed, I think I would have freaked you out. So all of that was preliminary to your question about how do you market it. Eventually, Tim and I worked really well together, and I really appreciated his input. And the book, See, Solve, Scale, is very different in terms of its readability and sophistication from what it had been when I just wrote the raw manuscript. And I'm really grateful to Tim for all that he did to help make it a real readable book. So anyway, that, that's not the question you asked, but is that helpful background? Because I presume some of your listeners don't know what it means to write a book or to get it published. And I did it all backwards and it still worked fine.

Yeah. Or, or they're going through it right now and they're getting their, their baby, their special book ripped apart and they're having trouble, you know, dealing with that. 'Cause it, it's a lot, especially when you go with the top publishers, they have a lot of authority over your work.

Yeah. And, and look, I, I use the word eventually, 'cause initially I think I was a little resistant. It felt like, you know, this is my baby and how am I gonna, um, tolerate this guy Tim who doesn't really know my work ripping it apart and he knows the publishing world, but he doesn't know entrepreneurship. When I say eventually, he was really clear. He was like, I'm gonna give you really direct feedback, and you are the authority in your topic, and you should take it for what it's worth. And if you wanna push back on me about whether you think my criticism is warranted or not, please do. And we developed a very honest rapport that way. He would tell me, this sucks, I don't get it, you know, and he, he was kind of brutal, and even in his language. But I, but again, I eventually, I didn't take it personally and I would say, Tim, this is why this doesn't suck. And maybe it's not well organized or positioned or well edited, but this is why it's really essential. And he would say, okay, I got it. And so I think throughout the process, he learned a ton about entrepreneurship and I learned a ton about editing a book. And it's really the editor who helps you put it into a book format.

Yeah.

And I remember running my manuscript by that same friend, Howie, who was the prolific author who introduced me to my agency. And I said, what'd you think? He said, your book sucks. And I thought, what? And he said, it's really well written. It's got all of your anecdotes from your teaching, but it's not a well-written book yet. It's got to be like reorganized. And that's what an editor does. And so again, I learned the value of an editor, which is indispensable. So if you're thinking, if people are thinking about self-publishing, for example, it's one of the things that you don't automatically get, which you do get through a publishing company. And I presume you could hire your own editor, and I would highly recommend that because just taking the raw manuscript that I thought was so good and, you know, going through Amazon or something and having them publish it, it'd be out there and have an ISBN number. It'd be you know, on Amazon's availability, but I don't think it would be a great book unless you were just like a savant who knew how to publish a book that was really well edited.

Well, those are all great points. I'm glad you brought it up because your job is to write a great book, do great research, and put all the contents together. For you to have the chops to then go be an excellent editor as a professor, entrepreneur, you're right, you'd be a savant. Like, that's something that I don't think anyone has that skill set.

I mean, even if I were to publish a second book, which by the way, People have said, oh, okay, what's your second book? Even Tim, my editor, says, okay, what's the next one?

Yeah.

Because the first one's been successful. So they want to see another one out there. And I thought, you know, now that I know what it takes, it would be a much harder feat to pull off. And even though I know a lot more about editing, I'm not what I would say is a good editor. And so, I mean, And there's 2 different types of editing. There's something called developmental editing and there's something called copy editing. Copy editing, I'm actually good, you know, finding the split infinitives and is there a comma missing and did I misspell a word? I'm good at that.

Right.

Developmental editing, which is more like structurally how the book fits together, how it flows. I remember Tim saying, take out this entire section. And we're just gonna remove it. And I felt so attached. I was like, no, no, I worked so hard in that section. And so, no, it's redundant. We don't need it. You need somebody else to work with you in order to be honest about what works and what doesn't.

You really do. And when I think about all this, I think about the basketball Olympics team where you have all the best players and anyone can coach, quote unquote, right? But there's actually a great job ahead to put the greatest players in the right position and team them up with the right other people that complement one another. And that's how I treat it. I feel like an editor is like that. Like, you come to the table with the best chops, with the best content from the book, but it's not publishable or it's not ready to be published in that sense. And to your point, you used a really good word like readability, and no one really thinks about that initially. Like, you got to think about the reader as they read it. Are they flowing well through it? Is nothing redundant? Is it, is, you know, one chapter leading to the other and they having that nice flow. So an editor is absolutely necessary.

One thing, I agree with you, that's a good analogy. If I could say one thing about the audio version, because I feel like sometimes that gets forgotten. I don't remember the last time I saw the statistics, but I was involved in this pretty intensive recording, as I mentioned earlier. And at one point I asked, by the way, what percentage of the overall sales of CSOLV Scale will be audio, do you think? And I thought it was gonna be a tiny number.

Yeah.

And they said, well, a book like this about entrepreneurship that you read, that you've taught content about for years, could be upwards of 40%, maybe even 50% of the total. And I just couldn't believe it. And I actually said, look, I wish somebody had told me that because I might have designed the book a little differently if I had realized that such a high percentage had been focused on the output in audio format. But the audio guidance I got from that audio engineer, and especially the theatrical director, word for word, you know, they would listen to everything I said. And if I swallowed a syllable at the end, they would say, oh, nope, nope, you ran out of energy at that sentence. Let's go back and do it. Unforgiving, totally unforgiving. If you had asked me in the beginning, just like go out there and record it, read the book into a microphone, I would have done it. But it wouldn't have been anywhere near the quality of what that audio engineer and that theatrical director enforced. They really were, like you say, a coach. And I'm definitely not the men's or women's— men's or women's all-star team that's in the Olympics. Both teams are doing exceptionally well, and they both have really good coaches. I needed somebody to— and in fact, one thing that was weird, it's my work. I wrote every word of it and I was supposed to read it exactly word for word. And often the theatrical director would say, oh, Bob, timeout, you just read something that wasn't there. Like you turned the sentence around or you added a sentence. And I was like, what? And that's a weird way your brain plays tricks on you. You're like, here I am, it's C-Sol scale, I know it, I read every— I wrote every word. I'm reading the manuscript as it's about to be printed, and my brain is improvising, and I'm saying things that aren't there. And they said, no, you have to read it exactly word for word. Well, of course, I'm not used to reading a script. If I'm in front of people or here, for example, I'm speaking extemporaneously, and I modify the content, and I apply it to whatever audience I'm, you know, doing a workshop for or whatever. And that was a weird experience, but I needed somebody to be attentive. And then the last thing I'll say is I was catching typos as we went and the book was about to go to press and I'm just freaking out. I'm thinking, how could there be typos here? So many people have read this, copyread it, proofread it. You know, I had my wife read it. I had good friends read it. We had professional copywriters. And still there are typos. The human brain is fallible. And it— but the good news is they said, don't worry, that's one of our purposes is to catch last typos. And so they would, at the end of each day of recording, send those typos to the printer and say, whoops, we caught these things. I do know there is one typo at least still in there, which is not egregious, but it's just how the process works.

Yeah. Definitely. Well, that's all super interesting to hear. Obviously, hindsight being 20/20, audiobooks are being consumed a lot more than ever before, and you could actually make the audiobook a lot different too. I've, I've listened to a couple where it's almost like a podcast where the author's reading the actual book, but then they'll have a little commentary at the end about whatever they like to say. But I think it's just such a funny action that I don't think you could probably connect it to anything else. Like even when the president speaks, you know, I'm sure he has a script, right? But he can go off tangent if you'd like. The audiobook, like, you have to read word for word. You cannot skip a word or add a word. It's a very disciplined process that I don't think you could replicate other than actually doing exactly that.

Right. And, and that's the funny thing, that the publishers spend so much time with you obsessed about this written version and gave me virtually no guidance to prepare for the audio version, which is why I mean, I worked with— it was a separate division of Macmillan, Macmillan Audio, and they were awesome, just phenomenal. And these 2 professionals who were on with me the whole time, I loved working with them and I miss it. And you're right, at the end of the audio version, there's 2 bonus sections where I essentially do this. I have a conversation with 2 of the experts that I feature in the book, and we have a little kind of podcast exchange. And then there is a cheat sheet.

Yeah.

a PDF that accompanies the audiobook that has some of the imagery that's in the actual book. I try to minimize that so you don't feel like you have to keep going back, or if you're in your car, you're missing something. There's very little of that, but I— maybe that's helpful for your audience just to know that if they're embarking on a written book, they should anticipate what would be needed in an audiobook.

Well, there's so— yeah, I love that idea. There's so much more you can pull from a book in that sense. Complementary guides, little bonus pieces. Perhaps even the chunks that you had to get pulled out due to your editor's direction could be some bonus chapter or bonus type of deliverable. So I think there's a lot of ways you can leverage what you've done.

Well, I have that on my website. My website is dannywarshay.com and it's not a high frills website. There's a big section on it with what I call bonus content from the book. And there is additional content. This, A link to this podcast and a whole bunch of others that I've been on. I'm grateful for that, are on there. And yeah, I feel, I even say it in the book, there's a LinkedIn group called CSolve Scale because in my teaching, I always say that the teaching experience that I have with the students is just the introduction to what I hope will be a lifelong relationship. Yesterday, today, almost no day goes by without my being in touch with one of my over 3,000 students. Same with reading the book. I felt like I don't— it's impersonal. I don't know who's reading the book. I don't get any feedback. I don't understand how the book has had impact the way I do with my students or workshop participants. And so I invite people who've read the book or listened to it to be part of that LinkedIn CSOL scale.

Group. I love it. Awesome. Yeah, that's a great way to incorporate a massive platform like LinkedIn where people are already hanging out and kind of funnel them into something aligned with the book in that group.

I don't know if we have time, but you had asked a question which I didn't mean to dodge. It was, I just wanted to fill in the details about how I wrote the book, but you had asked about promotion and workshops and what's come after the book.

Yeah, an overview of how you've been marketing the book would be awesome. And then kind of just a, again, high level if you, if you want, of how you've used the book or how the process has even come to be true where you've been able to earn these, you know, pretty high-paying or, or pretty enjoyable workshops and speaking engagements from the book?

Yeah, I guess if I take both those questions together, I'd say the book has been marketing me and the content more than I've been marketing it. Part of this is my own naivete. Again, it's my first book ever published, so I didn't have any any kind of manual to rely on that says, okay, this is how you should market it. I didn't have any big ambitions either. The advances were substantial, and so I was happy with those. I wanted to do a good job for the publishers because they backed me. I know people have— the publishers themselves do some marketing, I was actually surprised by, on balance, how relatively small amount of marketing they do. You know, they booked me on media and they booked me on a lot of podcasts and those were great and I love those. To me, each of those is like this, I hope, an instance where I can be my teaching self, where I can offer some value. I never thought about it exactly as, or even indirectly as, okay, I'm marketing the book. I was really doing what my students asked me to do.

Yeah.

I was trying to scale the content. And so I hope that's the way I'm coming across here. Yeah, I hope people buy CSOF Scale, but not because, you know, I want an extra incremental amount of royalty from it. It's because I want to do what my students asked. I wanted them to— I want the book to teach people that they can learn entrepreneurship They can master it and then they can apply this See, Solve, Scale method to solving really consequential problems. The first paragraph in the book says we've got a gazillion problems in the world to solve. We need many more problem solvers. And I know this is a method for helping people do it. So my approach to marketing was not, you know, okay, how do we eke out a number of additional sales? It was more, how do I spread the word about this methodology that I know works. And I think that comes through in the podcasts that I've done that are again linked on the website, comes through in the bonus content. I hope it comes through here, my passion for— again, I mentioned this word ikigai. It's a section of the book, which is this Japanese word, living a life of purpose. Do something you're really good at, do something you love doing, do something that's going to add meaning or value to the world. And do something that's going to pay you for that value that you're adding. And if you do that, then you'll be successful no matter what you do. And I've had students go off and do everything imaginable— public health, the military, the arts, work for government, work in the law, medicine, consulting, banking. And as long as they're doing it in a way that achieves their ikigai, that's what I think the key to living a meaningful life is. And so for me, I think the marketing is a way of amplifying the content in terms. So does that answer that first question about how did I market it? I didn't really think super tactically. I didn't hire—

For sure. Yeah.

PR firm. I didn't hire a marketing agency. The second part, just briefly, the book has become a lead gen tool for me again in a way that I didn't know or expect. But a lot of people now approach me and say, wow, I love the book. I got a lot out of it. But in addition, can you now come to my big company or my big nonprofit or our government agency? Could you— last summer I did 6 workshops for the US military, 2 for the Air Force, 4 for the Army. I'm finding that CSOF scale is finding its way into lots of different places where people need a different methodology for solving problems. And so, you know, for example, when the US Army called, it was a colonel in the Army. He said, I read the book. We need a lot of new ways to solve problems. And I did 4 workshops along the lines of the themes in the book. I've been doing them mostly in this format online. I did one for PwC, which was the biggest I'd ever done. It was 2,400 people. And we had 300 breakout rooms. That, that was kind of crazy. Most of these are in the 50-ish people range, very interactive. Usually I'll assign something to read easily beforehand. Sometimes I'm there in person, but I've learned through COVID that Zoom is a really good method for doing these things remotely. And so that, even more than the book itself, has become the way I'm staying true to my students and doing this part of the process of scaling. And yeah, those tend to be lucrative. And, uh, but, but again, to me, the main mission is how do I scale the message? How do I teach people the See, Solve, Scale method in a much bigger number with much bigger scale effect than I would, even if it were a function of people just reading the book.

Yeah, that's tremendous. I'm so glad you shared all that. I think that's something we don't really hear a lot. People are very focused on, oh my gosh, how do I put $1 in and get $2 out? How do I get this book in front of these people and get X amount of sales? But I think your mentality of just let's get the message out, whether it's for free or paid or with my time, energy, whatever it is, that's what I'm passionate about. That's where the drive is. And then The results speak for themselves. Having that approach, I think, has brought a windfall of positive outcomes in return for you, whether it's through paid engagements or just speaking with so many new people that you probably would've never spoken with if it wasn't for the book. So for those listening, I think they could take a lot away from just that short bit you just shared there.

Yeah, I mean, in the book itself I talk about, and this is where I introduce this ikigai concept, you could do the, you could learn the See-Solve-Scale method really well. You could understand benefits of scarce resources and burden of abundant resources. You could put together a plan the way I guide you through in the book. You could pitch it in the detailed guidance I provide in, in the, in a chapter in the book as well. And if you don't have ikigai associated with that, if this isn't something you love doing, you're good at, adds meaning to the world, it doesn't matter how well you do that, or as you say, how well your plan is for $1 in and several dollars out. In my experience, you're just not gonna be successful. In fact, the lead into that ikigai chapter, I was a venture capitalist for a while, and I remember reading a business plan and meeting an entrepreneur who was putting together a plan that was perfect. It was like, you know, if he had been in my class, it would have gotten an A+. And yet I turned him down because I could tell it just wasn't an area of interest of his. It wasn't passion. It wasn't something he was really in love with. And it was about the bottom line, making money. There's nothing wrong with making money. That's a big part of ikigai. Actually, it's the 4th quadrant.

Yeah.

But it's not enough to dominate all 3. And so I turned him down. And so I'm not bragging. It's not, you know, I don't deserve any extra credit because that's how I think and behave. But I think the most successful entrepreneurs, and I suspect the most successful authors too because authors are entrepreneurs, will be successful to the extent that they love what they do, they're really good at it, they feel that what they add to the world is meaningful, and then the money will follow. It doesn't work in the opposite direction. It's hard to convince yourself that that is something you love If, um, just because you think it's going to make you a lot of money. And so, uh, it's a balance. And I think, um, that may be the way I thought about the marketing approach too.

Yeah, I love it. Well, Danny, this has been a great conversation. I'm so glad you came on and shared all those great pieces of your own journey and then how those listening can take that and put them in, put it into their own life. As we wrap up, anything fun you're working on this year for the rest of it that you want to let listeners in on?

Well, I just got back from teaching in Italy, which was a lot of fun. And, you know, I hadn't been to this part of Italy. My wife came too. She was part of the faculty of this program as well. And again, to me, that's fun. You might say, but that's your job. Well, it's one and the same. And, you know, I love the teaching. I love the different formats in which it's now expressing itself. I love interacting with people who are looking to change the world, and that's what entrepreneurs do. And so That's— and then I've got a number of other workshops lined up and eager to do more. So if people are interested in that, my website, dannywarshay.com, is a good way to get a hold of me. LinkedIn as well. And that CSolve Scale group for CS— on LinkedIn is also a good way to join a group of people who are interested in learning more from each other and maybe supporting each other in that process. I know that there's some aspiring authors there. who've thought that they could learn from that group there as well.

Tremendous. Yeah, you could have a whole new workshop or section of how to apply the CSOLF scale to writing a book. I see a big opportunity there because a lot of books can be blog posts or a lot of books are just carrying on from another topic and to find that new angle or new competitive edge is pretty important to creating a book that can be long-lasting. But—

Well, I think me, look, I, on the one hand, I do care about teaching people a structured process. On the other hand, I think like anything, once you learn it, you have permission to break the rules. I even talk about that in the book. I talk about John Coltrane, jazz saxophonist, and his line is break the rules. But you kind of have to learn the rules first. And so I may have done it in reverse because I didn't even know the rules for publishing a book. And I did it in a way that was, I think, true to my own approach. And in the end successful. In fact, I think if I had done it according to the rules, and I had, you know, gotten an agent, and we had written a proposal and shopped it before I wrote a manuscript, I'm not sure it would have landed as well. And so it was naive. It wasn't calculated. It was just the way I did it, and it worked out fine. So to the authors who are worried about, you know, I'm not doing it exactly the way you're supposed to. I think I'm an example of you don't have to. It may be helpful to know a little bit more than I did about what you're supposed to do and then make a conscious decision about what to do or what not to do.

Yeah, for sure. I love it. Well, Danny, again, thanks for coming on the show. We'll be pushing the book some more. For those watching the video, you could check it out here. It's a little backwards, but we'll be sharing See, Solve, Scale, and we're excited to continue to stay in touch and see all the good work you're going to continue to do.

Sounds great. Real pleasure to be here this morning. Thanks so much for having me.

Thank you.