Business Q&A + League of Legends Ep. #53 ft. @ThisIsMuch

Alright, welcome everybody. Welcome to another business Q&A where we play League of Legends and answer your business questions. I am queuing up with my duo queue partner in crime, Fresh Views, Jason J. Rice Fonseca, who's also in the house playing next to me today. What's up, Jay? Yo yo! And also joined by my co-host for the next couple weeks, I am here with my new— Jennifer Price. Oh, I gotta mute myself there. How you doing, Jennifer?

I'm doing great, thank you. Feeling energized today.

Energized.

It's Friday.

I love it. Well, it's been a couple days off. I've been a little sick and also recording some audio versions of my ebook, so it's good to be back, get one in before the week ends. And, uh, Yeah, so what's the, what's the fantasy of the day today, Jen? What do we got?

Well, my fantasy for, for myself and for y'all is to find ways to dance instead of destroy. That might sound a little silly, but I know there's a lot of despair and frustration going on in the country because of the election. There's also a lot of rejoicing too, but last night in Portland we had several protests going on that turned into riots of violence and people breaking windows and spray painting cars and all kinds of stuff of innocent people. And I just feel like it's not the way to, you know, to get results. And if you want to express yourself, I think that's awesome, but, you know, do it through a different way. And yesterday I got the pleasure of going to a dance class that was so therapeutic and it was all about moving forward and taking action in our lives. And so that's what I would encourage I encourage you all to do is dance. Find whatever your dance is, find a way to dance if you have to spare instead of destroy.

Dance instead of destroy, I like that. What kind of dance class were you doing yesterday?

It was a lyrical class, which is technically lyrical is really anything that has to do with when you're dancing more to the lyrics of a music, and it's more usually more storytelling, and it has in this particular style was a lot of, had a lot of sort of contemporary and probably ballet influence to the dance that we did. It was amazing. It was a Beyoncé, James Blake song called "Forward." So, moving forward.

Well, tomorrow I'm, so at Toronto Dance House we've got a new dance team that I'm going to be joining.

Cool!

And our first lesson is tomorrow, our first class is tomorrow. I haven't been on a dance team in a long time so it'll be a fun fun exercise, so we'll both be dancing. I like it.

I love it. Are you— do you guys perform on the team, or is it just more of a, like, a group thing?

It's meant to be a performance team for— it's so it's for my instructors and for the assistants in my classes to give them an opportunity to continue to learn and grow and learn some new dance moves. So one of our instructors is supremely creative, and so he's coming up with the choreography and is going to be teaching it, and it's an opportunity for everybody to kind of learn and pick it up. The idea is it's going to be performance. I'm not a big fan of performing, so I'm probably not going to go and perform, but I'm going to do the choreo anyway and be part of the team. So I'm excited.

That's cool.

Yeah.

Yay! I can't wait to hear how it goes for you.

So does your dance instead of destroy tie into your quote today, or was that the quote?

It does tie into my quote a little bit, and my quote is from Maya Angelou, and the quote is, "If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can transform 1 million realities." Nice. So, you know, have a fantasy, y'all, and transform the world that way.

I love it. I love it. Cool, well, we're in Champion Select. It looks like I'm going to Teemo jungle, and J-Rise is going to Ryze top. And I'm excited. We're going to get in the game. Let's hit up our first question. What do we got?

All right, cool. So our first question of the day was a question from one of your earlier videos on getting the patent. And so the question was, hello, sir. This was quite motivating and informative. Does one need to patent an online magazine? And I don't know the answer to this. I mean, other than I don't— for intellectual property, I think you can get trademarks for the name of the magazine, but I think the magazine itself, you don't need a patent. But I don't— you know, I'm certainly not the expert on this, so. Take it away, Evan.

Yeah, so you— I mean, you can't get a patent on a name. There would have to be something super unique and different about your online magazine compared to every other online magazine. It's gonna be my— you know, everything inside me is saying no. There's probably like a 99.75% chance that it's a no, but maybe there is something just insanely crazy that you can you can go and get patented, and it's really just talking to a patent lawyer. Yeah, yeah. If you're looking at— I mean, to add more context to everybody else watching and listening, your patent— if you're coming up with a new invention, right, patents are meant to protect an invention for a certain amount of time, so you have to have invented something new. right? Something that hasn't been done before. Even just an addition to something that currently exists, like if you're making a new add-on for a car, you know, you can patent that. Even I looked at our company, my first company was a software company. Once you commercially release something, once you start selling something, then you can't get a patent on patent on it anymore. And so our first version of our software, we couldn't get patented, but the second generation version we could on the changes, like the changes we made—

Oh, interesting.

—between the first and the second. Those, we had a couple unique things that could get patented, but the core of what was in the first version we couldn't because it was already commercially released. So it's basically just looking at what is not currently available on the market. That is super different and unique that, you know, that's what you want to go out and get patented. So is there enough in an online magazine? Are you using tools that nobody's used before? Have you created something that the world has never seen before? That's what, that's what they're going to look for. And it's likely going to be really difficult, but if you still feel like you have something, then I'd encourage you to talk to a patent lawyer to figure that out.

Yeah, totally. Otherwise, I say just go for it. You know, get your online magazine going. Yeah, I want to see it. Yeah, take action. Make it happen.

I love it. Jen's got the excitement this morning. I love it.

All right. I just want to give a quick shout out to the chat room. Yep. We've got Zaino in the house. We've got BestUPro. And of course, Jay and you, and there's Mitch. Mitch is here too. Pretty exciting, guys. Thanks for being here. Welcome.

So we are in game.

I can't believe Zaino— Yeah? Oh, sorry, go ahead.

No, I was gonna say, we're in game. I got my team with jungle. JayRise is top, so We're starting, it's exciting, let's see how it goes.

Oh, new streak. Woo-hoo! Go guys, go! Let's keep my streak of doing this with you guys when you win. Or some wood I can knock on.

I love it.

All right, on to the next question. And this is from Mohammed, and he says, just a question bro, if I'm working in a market that is filled with competitors, They can use anything just to make me lose for no reason. They want to compete themselves only because they control the market. And this was a question that was on the Your Sales Technique video. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, I think this kind of goes back to what we talked about a couple days ago. If you have a lot of competitors, you know, just look at how you can stand out against them. What are the things that you have that they don't? And really highlight that. And then, you know, obviously in any sales situation, you know, you got to just talk to your customers and ask them a lot of questions and find out what they want, and then highlight what you have that they want. And, you know, yeah, that's my thoughts.

Evan Carmichael, I was confused by the question.

Yeah, I'm a little confused by the question too. It looks like what he's saying is that there's a lot of competitors that control the market that will make it really hard for him.

Okay, well, listen, uh, if there's a big market, you're gonna have lots of competitors. A lot of people don't get into a business because they feel like there's already lots of competitors in it. You know, if there's no competition in the industry, maybe it's not a good industry to be in. Like, sometimes being the first in an industry is not a good strategy because there's no money to be made. You're too early. What I would say is understand that there is always room for quality, always, in any industry. Yeah, even the most— like, you could say, hey, I want to get started on YouTube, and YouTube, there's already tons of people, and I'm gonna be, uh, I'm gonna be a makeup channel. You know, I say, "Well, there's already tons of makeup channels." Or, "I'm going to be an entrepreneur channel." "Well, there's already tons of entrepreneur channels." Uh, there's always room for quality. Always. And so I spend very little time thinking about what my competition is doing and much more about how I can make something better. Uh, I think if you're just focused on the competition— there was a really great, um, video. I'm trying to remember who it was. I think it was Simon Sinek. Who was— we're just doing a top 10 on him. He wrote the book Start With Why, if you guys are familiar with that. And he was talking about how he went to Apple and Microsoft, and he was speaking at both of their events. And Apple, a lot of the— sorry, Microsoft, a lot of the conversation was about how we're gonna beat Apple this year, how we're gonna beat Apple. Like, here's why our tech is better than Apple's tech. And like 70% of the conversation was about how to beat Apple, where Apple spent 0% of the time thinking about how they're going to beat their competitors. And I think it's telling in that, yeah, you want to be much more like— you don't want to be, um, just reactionary all the time. Uh, you want to be much more proactive in your approach. And I think if all you do is looking at the competition and saying, well, look how far ahead they are, or, you know, they're trying to squeeze me out of business, you know, like, that's, that's a competitive market. You know, people are going to try to squeeze you out of, out of the business. That's, that's part of business. Yeah, totally. You just need to out-execute. You got to do it better. So that's what I'd be looking at doing. How can you do it better? There's always room in the most competitive market. There's always room for you to do a good job and win some business. That's what I got.

I love it. Good stuff. All right. We got a question from the chat box. I'm just going to jump into it. See here. The lead team— or maybe it might have been meant towards the chat, the people in the chat box. But why not? I'll just— I'll get your thoughts on this too. What are some books we could read on marketing online products? "We want to start doing online personal development coaching, but we are not sure how to market it as a lot of people tend to prefer in-person coaching." So you want to do some online coaching instead of in-person coaching.

And he wants to know how to market it? Uh-huh. And what books to read to market it.

And what books to read, yeah.

Okay.

Wow, I mean, I think almost any marketing book could apply for online as well as in person. I mean, a lot of the same principles apply. It's just that you've got to think about what the advantages are for you to do it online rather than in person. So for a lot of people, they might prefer online. They might like that it's flexible. They can choose anybody that they want. They don't have to choose somebody that lives in their town to do it in person. There's all kinds of reasons why doing something online is awesome, so highlight what those are and use that as part of your marketing. Yeah, I'm trying to think of some of my favorite books, but nothing's coming to mind right now. Obviously you've got to read The One Word from Evan, right? December 6th. That's right, coming soon.

It's coming up. Yeah, actually, so there's a couple of things here for me. One, if I were to pick a book just on online marketing right now, I would probably go with the #AskGaryVee book. Gary Vaynerchuk wrote a book not too long ago. A lot of talk is about online marketing in there. A lot of the problems with the online marketing books though is they're obsolete by the time they come out. Right? Like even Gary's book, he wrote it, you know, 2 years ago, a year and a half ago. Yeah. And then I look at my book, I wrote it, I was starting writing it like 2 years ago. Timeless. Well, yeah, I mean, my book is meant to live forever. The examples are meant to live forever, but In an online marketing world, if you're looking at— there's some basics of marketing that will never die, but the execution will change, right? Like what you do on YouTube versus what you do on Snapchat versus what you do on Facebook, you know, those change constantly. Like I look at the amount of changes I've made just on my YouTube channel and how much— how many changes I'm making and still making. You know, if I wrote a book 2 years ago about YouTube marketing, it would be so different right now. There's still some consistencies in that, yes, you need to make quality content, and yes, you need to, you know, have a regular consistent schedule, but a lot of the specifics would change. So I don't know that if you're looking at online marketing, I don't know that a book is your best place to go. I think just the production cycle is too long unless you're looking for timeless wisdom which can still help you, I don't think that the book is your best bet. I think it's better to pay attention to people who are doing it. I would watch Gary's YouTube channel as an example. I think you'll get better results. Now in terms of—

Yeah, I totally agree.

In terms of marketing, marketing an online business, I would start looking at— so I mean it comes down to your content. And where can you make— oh, bottom lane is having an interesting time there. Where can you make— where can you add your content? So think about the message that you want to put out about coaching. You know, what's so different about your coaching? What's your unique message that you want to bring out to the world? And then how do you want to deliver that? Are you good at speaking? Are you good on video? Are you great at writing? Are you, you know, better at doing interviews? What is the format that you want to share your knowledge? Because you don't want to be everywhere, but chances are your customers are in a lot of different places. So I'd be looking at which other platforms that I want to spend time on, investing my energy into making some good content around. So for me, I like to go all in on YouTube. I like making videos. I like finding ways to make new videos. Even this is, hey, let's have some fun and play some League and also try to help some entrepreneurs and make a new video. And so, you know, that's what I default to. You got to figure out where your market is for your specific skill set. There's a lot of opportunity on YouTube. You know, if you made a weekly video or a couple times a week video talking about coaching The things that hold people back, how your coaching program helps, the common frustrations that people face that you see. If you made videos on that, you'll start getting some clients, you'll start getting some interest. So summing all of that up—

I love that Grishi was here, it should be all about the YouTube, got to work YouTube, right? Yes.

YouTube is a default answer. Yeah, so summing it up, if I had to answer the question and pick one book, it would be the #AskGaryVee book, although I don't think a book is your best spot to go to unless you're trying to learn timeless stuff. I'd be looking at the channel that I want to have success in. So if you want to have success on YouTube, I'd be watching GaryVee and other YouTubers about how they're having their success. If you want to— are we fighting? Are we fighting? If you want to have success on Twitter, then I'd be following people who are really big on Twitter and getting a lot of results there. Hey, I got a kill! Very exciting. Woohoo! Woohoo! We got it. Yeah, and then I would just say— Yeah, I do work fast. Find consistent content, consistent content, consistent content on whatever that platform is that you decide to go all in on.

Yeah, as you were talking, Evan, I was thinking about a couple other resources that might be good for you. And one of them is the online podcast that Amy Porterfield has out, and it's specifically all about techniques to use in online marketing. That might be really great for, you know, that's for more for specific tactics, but And then a book that I have read that's really, really good, especially for anyone, any entrepreneur that's just starting out and wants to really feel out their market and really do some research before they launch it to make sure it's something that their customers really want, is a book called Will It Fly? from Pat Flynn. And it's got some really great ideas for both online and just regular businesses. So I would highly recommend that book, especially if you're in the beginning stages and just beginning to explore how to market something, whether it's online or not. But it is kind of focused more online, so that's why it made me think of it. It's a really good one. It's got really good marketing basics, but, you know, so it would be good for anyone.

All right, I like it. Oh, I got another kill while we were talking. I like that. And we hear the cat again. The cat came back. She did.

It's funny, a couple people asked in the chat if she was here, and I originally said no because she was upstairs sleeping. But of course, as soon as I said that, she wanders in and is trying to join the conversation, of course.

She needs the attention too. That attention-seeking cat.

She loves to chat, so that's her thing. She hears me talking, and she's like, oh, I got to go talk. I love it. That's so funny. OK, let's go into the next question. This was off of one of your videos about apps, how to market apps. And the question was, hello, I want— and this is from Amazing TV— hello, I want to ask you about if you know how to stuff keywords in Android manifest to rank our app. So this specifically has to do with the keywords in apps. And I honestly have no clue on this at all. How that works for ranking apps in iTunes or whatnot. Obviously, if it's a good app, that's what's going to get it ranked high, not necessarily keywords. So I don't know if you have any thoughts, Evan.

Yeah, I'm kind of in the same camp. If I look at my videos and in general my strategy, It's— oh, oh, somebody died. Very sad. I don't focus on the SEO part nearly as much. If you make good stuff, people will pay attention. Like, way more important than keyword stuffing, way more important, is making an app that people want to use on a daily basis. Do that. How do you do that? Make an app that's so good that people want to use every single day. That's what you want to do. I think that in general, instead of looking for— people are always looking for shortcuts, and I get it, but if I had to pick one thing to focus on to help my app take off or my website take off or my YouTube channel take off, you know, if you're making YouTube videos, yes, Do titles matter? Yes. Do thumbnails matter? Yes. You know, do the— does the description matter? Yes. It all matters, but what matters way, way, way, way more is making really good videos. And so I would start there because if I looked at your app, there's probably a ton of improvement, and I would bet that a lot of the— a lot of the people using it right now are not using on a daily basis. And so before you worry about getting more people to come into your app and then you churn them out, make your app better. That's what I would say.

Yeah, love it. The next question is also in regards to the same video, and it's by Boone Engineer, and he says, "I have an idea on an app that'll catch on quick and will trend fast because it is something that millions use every day, but overlook it. How do I pitch it to a company? And I'm assuming you are talking about pitching it for funding to make the app, I'm thinking, which I know Evan can talk a little bit better about pitching something. I mean, I obviously, just like Evan said with the last one, if it's a really good app that people will use a lot, then it will be easy to pitch. But I think too, if you— If you keep in mind who your audience is and get user feedback, it's going to be a lot easier to get something funded, I would think. So those are my thoughts. I mean, I think anytime you're doing any kind of software or app development, I think if you can get user feedback directly, it's going to help you a ton, because it will help make sure you're doing it in a way that will something that people will use, and you'll have an idea what they'll use it for.

So, you know, a little more clarity would have helped, but I don't— you know, I would not expect to go in and expect a big company to fund the development of your app. They're not interested in doing that. Oh, can we get something here? Can we get something here? Nope, JayRyze is not happy. I just want someone to do something for once. We'll see. Jesus Christ. Lee Sin is here. We're in the middle of a big fight. Uh-oh, uh-oh. Teemo's gonna die. Teemo's gonna die. Oh no, no. Wait, wait, I may not die. Teemo. Teemo. Teemo died. Very sad, very sad. I almost got out. Oh, very sad. It's a very sad day. All right, it's okay. Sorry for that delay there. Yeah, okay, so a big company is not going to fund your idea. My take on it would have been I think he's trying to sell it to the company. Like, I have this app and I want to sell it to that company. Understand what they are most interested in is not the app and not the technology, it's the audience. But here's what happens. If they like it, right, if they really love what your app can do, the CEO is going to look to the CTO and say, "How long is it going to take us to develop that thing?" 'Cause I don't want to pay a big price tag for this thing. I just want that functionality. If they love what your app can do, they're going to say, "Hey, how can we just copy it?" Just even look at the— Snapchat came along, had these amazing filters, and now everybody's copying Snapchat and Facebook's doing their own filters and all of this stuff. They do not want to pay. They're not going to want to pay you a lot of money, right? They just would rather get the functionality and build it themselves. So what you can do that they can't do on their own is have an audience. So what they want to see is that you've done the extra work. Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh, Timo's going to die again. No, very sad. Timo's— Timo died. 2 kills, 2 deaths on Teemo. What they want to see is that if you have all these users using this thing, that they can't just quickly go out and replicate the users. They can replicate your technology, but they can't replicate the base that you have. And so that's what you need to go out and do. You need to go out and get some momentum because a big company doesn't want to just buy a bunch of code. They want to buy the user base, so you have to go out and get a user base. And that comes from, if we tie into the last question, making your product better, right? Making something that people want to use on a daily basis. Uh-oh, uh-oh, under attack. Made it out. and if you do that enough, then you'll get attention, right? If you focus on making a really, really great product, you're going to get attention, and you'll attract interest. You know, all the big companies that I work with have all come to me because of the attention that I built up. And so if you make something that is unbelievable that people are using consistently, consistently, it gives you, first of all, you're coming from a position of strength. So it gives you way more to work with. And second of all, you're gonna get a much higher likelihood of getting the deal and a much better valuation because you have something more than just an idea. So, Bill Gates. Those are my thoughts. Love it.

Great thoughts, especially because the question was a little vague, so great answer.

My team just surrendered, so it's game over. Oh. It's always a fast game with Jenny. Either we surrender or they surrender. Oh my goodness.

Well, we broke our streak though. We won the last two, so that's a bummer. That's all right. That's okay.

All right, we'll give everybody a GG.

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. That's how it works.

You gotta dance instead of destroy.

That's right, that's right.

All right, so, uh, how is Jenny— I'm always curious now— how is Jen gonna wrap all of this up into an amazing bundle for us here at the end? The final message is—

Yeah, my final message is, you know, this is going to be kind of related but kind of not, but I feel like it is related to all these questions and just any business, and that is just to go out and talk to your customers. I think the more you talk to your customers, the more feedback you're going to get, and the better your product's going to be, the better your marketing is going to be. The better everything is going to be for you if you want to sell anything and you want to give good service and good value. So go out and talk to your customers. Go take them a coffee or send them an email and ask them for their opinion or send them a survey, whatever it takes.

Very cool. I love it. Well, thank you guys so much for watching. Thank you, Jay Rise and Jen. Jane J, the Jane J team, for joining in. Hope you guys have an amazing Friday, a great close to the week. We believe in you. We hope you continue to believe and rise and fantasize. Much love.

And dance. And what?

And dance. And dance. And dance. Much love. We'll see you soon, guys.