What We Learned Running A Booth At Traffic & Conversion

The trick to us being so connected is we find the connectors and connect with the other connectors.

It's just a network effect, right? It's just. Yeah, it's not rocket science, but we just put ourselves right in the middle of the zone to be seen. The connectors show up, our friends show up, subscribers and listeners show up. And we just figure, okay, so if we have this, like, little pool or soup of things happening, we can stir it up with our own little recipe and good stuff will happen. And it did.

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float Shark with your boy.

My boy, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hey, welcome back to Lifefire Greatness. I am your host, Matt Wolfe, and I'm here with Joe Fear.

I'm in the wrong show. I gotta go. Who are you?

No, we're rebranding our show.

No, we're not.

To lifefire Greatness.

Don't confuse.

Because we looked at all the other podcasts and all of them, all the best business podcasts either have life or greatness in the name.

I think we're onto something here, so.

We'Re just gonna call the podcast LifeFire Greatness. So welcome back to LifeFire Greatness.

Is there gonna be beatboxing?

Will there be beatboxing in life? Fire, Greatness. Lfg.

It's. Yeah. From here on out, the whole show's nothing but beatboxing.

Oh, wow, you're stretching me. I don't know if I have that much in me. Yeah, it's just gonna be the same Boom, boom.

It's the only hour long beatboxing.

That's it. That's all I got. All right, so now we've transitioned back to Hustle Podcast because we have the sign behind us, so we can't totally make it official. LFG.

But if you're watching on YouTube, we could always, like, superimpose life, fire, greatness.

Jacob.

And look, if you're watching on YouTube, look, we got the fire colors going today, so.

All right, do we need a smoke machine?

Matt, do we need a smoke machine? I got a smoke machine.

We have a fog machine at my house as well. Let's make this happen. Lfg.

Let's freaking go.

Let's go. All right, let's go to this episode, huh?

Yeah. So today we're going to be talking about some of our takeaways from Traffic Conversion Summit, except they're not really takeaways from the event.

Specifically, they're not at all. So if you're here to learn about what was spoken at tnc, go by.

The notes or the recordings.

Exactly. Go to trafficandconversion.com or summit.com and go help our friends over at Scalable and Digital Marketer and purchase the notes or recordings because they're fabulous. Yes. And I don't know exactly if they are available for sale yet. They should be because I want to swipe some of my own. I want to get some myself. So it was a great event. We'll just say there was a lot going on, all in a, like a two and a half day period. I felt like it was. It just like it came and gone.

Well, we can talk like real quickly about like the. The grand overview of it. It was definitely the smallest trafficking conversion summit we've been to since the couple that we went to back in the.

Very beginning, as far as we're aware. Yeah.

But also saying that it was very spread out. There was like, at any given time, there was like six speakers going at the same time. So you had to kind of choose who you want to go sit in on, which probably contributed to it feeling a little bit emptier.

Well, it was at the convention center in San Diego. So that place, if you've never been there, it's just huge. It's monstrous and it's wide. It's like there was an upstairs story that was also very spread out. So it was made for a massive event. But like tis the times. I mean, come on. It's tis. It's tis the Times. Times are tough. Live events. I'm imagining we don't hold them, but we attend them occasionally.

But saying all that, I actually kind of liked the smaller volume of people were there because I felt like we got to spend more quality time with the people we spent time with. Instead of trying to be like, oh, I need to connect with this person and this person and this person and this person before we leave. Instead, we connected with a smaller amount of people but for a longer amount of time. And I think that was really impactful. Which kind of led to the discussion we're going to have today, which we're taking notes on. If you go to hustleandflowchart.com notes, you can get the notes for free on this episode.

They're free. Yeah. You don't have to buy these ones, even though you should still get those other ones. Yeah. Go to hustle and flowchart.com notes. It's a new page.

Yeah.

And if you see me gazing at a newsletter, you know you're in the right spot. So it's free hustle and flowchart.com notes. Flow notes, right.

Notes. That's what we're calling them. Yes. So anyway, at the actual event, because we were talking to so many people and having people, like, float through our booth, most of our insights are from conversations and, like, sort of realizations of just examining the event.

Right.

Like, so just kind of like seeing how the event was going on, seeing some of the sponsors talking to a handful of people. Most of our takeaways came from those things and not so specifically sitting in the room watching the speakers.

Yeah. So we had a different perspective being in the expo floor as. As exhibitionists. You were. Is that the right word? No, I don't think so. But that's what you did.

Exhibitors is probably more exhibitors, not exhibitionists.

That's why they put us in the back of the room where no one could see. No, it's not actually. We had a money spot. So thank you, DM and all them for whoever set up the event. I don't think it was actually you guys. It was like Clarion, but either way. Yeah, we had this booth and the expo floor was huge. I mean, it was at a convention center in San Diego and there were like some baller. You know, you had Kajabi there with this, like, looked like it was craned in. Massive booth. I don't know how much money was invested in that stuff. I will just say, you know, now that we've run a booth for the very first time, there are a lot of expenses, at least in the background. Like when you're dealing with convention centers, unions, there's a lot of fees that. Oh, man, we just weren't aware of. I mean, it's cool. Tis the territory. A lot of tizzing happening today.

$400 for power that we hit.

One person.

You. One person used it to charge their cell phone.

Auto. Looking at you.

Yeah, Yeah, I think, like, just to get the union guys to load our stuff in on a forklift, mind you. Like, literally, they had to drive at 100 yards. That cost us $150 each way. Each way. So, yeah, there's a lot of two arms.

Could have definitely done yours as well. Well, yeah, maybe yours.

Yeah, I just had surgery.

Exactly. Maybe not you. Yeah.

But, like, the expenses, we were not really anticipating when we agreed to have a booth. And, you know, we made our money back. We did make our money back off the event.

So this isn't bitching about it. And excuse my language there, but I don't know why I'm Excusing that. I don't know, man.

But don't apologize for being who you are.

Oh, man. Okay, I'll never do that again. Thank you, Matt. But yeah, there's a lot that goes into these booths. So we were looking at some of these large ones, like click up as well. They were like prime position, amazing Booth TVs, tons of staff branding. Like, there's some of these booths and then here's us. We had like our vinyl printed banner on like a. Well, it was like a four by four. Yeah, four foot by four foot on.

Like maybe we'll b. Roll it over something. Cause we have pictures and videos of it.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good idea. Zipped tied on top. Like we used it as our background for a lot of photos with people that we. I was gonna say guests. Cause we did have a lot of guests that we connected with, but listeners. Random. Yeah, we would just like take pictures in front of the banner and it was like, this is so ghetto. Awesome.

I think a good sort of starting point, I guess we've already started, but a good point to sort of jump in is how we approach this booth in the first place. Because we took a totally different perspective than most of the other sponsorship booths that were there. Most of the other exhibitors.

We did it our way.

We did it our way. Cue the Mr. Blue Eyes.

That's right. Why can't I think of his name? Sinatra.

Sinatra did it all the way, but we did it.

Yeah.

So talk about the approach, like having this booth and how we just totally went into it different and everybody that came up to our booth went, this is different.

Interesting. Yes. So we definitely. I think so Doing it our way is essentially getting a booth as a podcast, as being the only podcast there with a booth and in pretty prime location, I would say, you know, we were right next to the war room booth. So it was kind of cool. Like we had good visibility and it was just our two faces postered on the wall or vinyled, I guess, right behind us. So what? We brought EGP newsletters. Like, we just brought all this stuff that we can kind of give away. And we didn't have anything for sale. We had a little discount for Podhacker, but whatever. We weren't really leaning on that. But we did it our way because we're like, you know what, we're gonna just insert ourselves in this conference because we know this is our target avatar of listeners. A lot of our subscribers were there and we met a lot of folks, a lot of our guests and mentors showed up there. So we're like, well, what if we just create our own little party within the party? Party within the party.

Speaking of parties, like, we. We go to the IM party every year. We actually didn't go this year just because we were actually setting up our booth at the time the party was happening.

It's crazy time.

But we've gone to the IM party like every year. And what we've done in the past at the IM party is we've gone and we've just like found a booth in a corner away from everybody, and we would just go sit in the booth and you and I would just start chatting. And throughout the night, people would just sort of flow to the booth and sit down and talk to us. And I remember the last IM party we went to, which would have been about two years ago now. You and I went and sat in a booth in a Corner, and within 40 minutes of us sitting in the booth, we probably had 40. Oh, yeah, 15 people standing around the booth chatting with us. Yeah.

I was going to say it doesn't take long to.

People do attach to the booth, you know, to wander in. It takes usually one and then a couple more, and then a few more clusters fall, and then all of a sudden you have a party.

But then, and then, and then like that same year we were at actually, this was 2020 now. We were at Pod Fest, I think, or Podcast Movement, I don't remember. We were at one of the podcasting events.

Yeah.

And we kind of did the same thing. We went like, upstairs. The event was downstairs. We went upstairs, kind of close to where, like the bars were and stuff. We found some couches that were kind of hidden.

You always need to be by a bar, by the way. That is the key.

That is a key ingredient.

And we had a bar near us by TNC too, so.

And on the last day, we created our own bar, but that's a whole nother thing. But at the Podcast Movement or podfest or whatever event it was, we actually staked out a spot totally away from the event. And we're just sitting in couches. And while we were sitting there, people started flowing to us. And the next thing we knew, there was like 10 people all kind of standing around. It was almost like we created the hangout spot. And so when we went into this sponsorship booth, we're like, let's just do what we've done at the other events and have a booth. We will bring extra chairs and we'll.

See as well bring some extra Open chairs.

We brought a little bit of alcohol. We had some alcohol in our backpacks, and we were all kind of like, sneaking drinks here and there.

Little party cups.

We had little party shot glasses, and we were giving drinks to some of our friends that were going by. And next thing we knew, in the expo floor, we had our own little hangout where people were just floating to us and chatting with us the whole time.

It was rad. I mean, it's was better than we believed it would be. I feel like it opened up a lot of new connections for folks that we didn't know. Like, because it just naturally. People, like, it's just the. You. You find the connectors. Just like everything in life we talk about this is like, locate the connectors and. And, you know, become friends, help each other out. And then guess what? You're going to be introduced to probably some of the best people in the room.

Well, people see us as, like, super connectors, right? People always refer to us as, like, these guys know everybody. If you need connections, go to them. The trick to us being so connected is we find the connectors and connect with the other connectors.

It's just a network effect, right? It's not rocket science, but we just put ourselves right in the middle of the zone to be seen. The connectors show up, our friends show up, subscribers and listeners show up. And we just figure, okay, so if we have this little pool or soup of things happening, we can stir it up with our own little recipe and good stuff will happen. And it did. A lot of big stuff happened, like, perspective changes for us. We made connections with other people and made introductions, talked with a bunch of sponsor or potential sponsors, like big companies there, but also ones outside of there as well.

I feel like, yeah, we just had a lot of big perspective, aha. Moments being in front of people again.

We built much stronger relationships with a bunch of past podcast guests. We spent some time with Steve Sims, who hung out at our booth. We spent some time with Pat Flynn, who came and hung out our booth for a while. We spent some time with Perry Belcher, who came and hung out at our.

Booth for a while. Rich.

Rich Sheffrin spent a bunch of time at our booth. Mandy McEwen came by and spent a bunch of time at our booth. So, like a lot of these past guests, although Perry has not been a guest, but he did say during TNC he was going to come on our show.

Calling you out, Perry. If you know Perry Belcher, hit him up and say the hustle and flowchart boys are waiting for him.

Perry's listen to the. Listens to the show. So if he's listening to this one, we're calling you out.

I said, he's been the hard to get one out of the crew at Digital Marketer Scalable, even though he's doing his own thing now. Yeah, but.

But we had all these people kind of floating by our booth and we were able to like, strengthen the relationships with all these people. And. And another thing sort of changing topics a little bit is I feel like we went into the event with one mission in mind.

We did.

And then on, you know, maybe an hour into day one, we're like, oh, wrong mission. Maybe there's a better mission.

Yeah. So our mission was to sprint to a thousand YouTube subscribers, which we have now passed.

We did it the first day, three hours that we were there.

Right. But we figured like, okay, like this. So we had a printout and we actually just threw them away. So they're in the trash, but we're not going to pull them out. We basically had a one sheeter that had like, you know, hey, we're going to do a giveaway. Here's the giveaway. We still got to announce the winners, by the way. We're a little behind on that, but we, you know, here's a giveaway and. Well, by the time this episode goes live, the announcers announcement will have been announced.

Yes.

So, yeah, it was basically a title of like, what we're doing, we're sprinting, like, we want you to subscribe. Essentially our goal, our big thing, and then what our show is about. And then we had a QR code that basically sent to a landing page and said, hey, subscribe on YouTube, the podcast and give us your email address. That was basically the contest right there. Yeah, nothing fancy. We did okay, but I mean, we.

Blew past our subscriber number. Right.

We were. We were at goal achieved.

I guess the funny thing is we went into the event and I think we had like 994 subscribers. So we only needed to get like six to crack past our goal. So, like, we blew past it cheap at like 1050 by the end of the event, you know, like.

But at the end of the day, we just realized, okay, we are grinding this thing when, you know, we were. So we connected with a lot of previous listeners or current listeners and also, you know, new people. People are like, what are you? What do you do? And let's be honest, like, we refined our pitch a lot over the course of the. I think that was really good is it helps us kind of rein in, like, okay, what do we do on this podcast? Because we can talk all over the place, as you probably notice. But now our goal is to be the number one business podcast.

Number one business podcast.

And you said a good line of what our goal actually is. Our vision for the podcast.

We want to improve the lives of entrepreneurs.

We want to improve the lives of you. Well, you have one life, as far as I know, maybe multiple. But we want to improve your life as an entrepreneur and bring in the perspectives from all the major players. A list players of the world. Yeah. And that's where we're reaching. We're going big with guests. So, like, we have some cool people coming up.

But yeah, let's touch on that again in a minute. Let's close this loop of the sort of change in mission with the booth. So we came in going, let's grow the subscribers on YouTube and let's make that the big push of the booth. And we did that. We blew past it quickly and we're like, okay, maybe that was a little bit shallow of a goal here. Maybe there's a bigger picture thing that we should be focused on. And then Steve Sims happened by our booth, and we got to talking to Steve, and I mentioned this on last Tuesday's episode, but Steve Sims said, here's what you do. You go around and you make some facetime with all of the different sponsors at this event. And then after the event is over, you email all of those sponsors and say, thanks so much for sponsoring that event. We know that events like this couldn't happen without sponsors like you. So we're so appreciative that you sponsored this thing because that's what makes these events run right? And you just give them that thank you. And that's a foot in the door with all of these brands. Now, when you look at an event like tnc, the brands, the sponsors, the booths on the expo are the same exact products that we would want to get in front of business owners who listen to Hustle and Flowchart. So that was the big light bulb moment for us, is maybe we should be spending more of our time getting to know the brands that sponsor things like Traffic Conversion, because those are the brands that we can probably land much larger brand deals for Hustle and Flowchart with Bingo.

And that's. That's what was really cool. Having a booth, I think, legitimized us a little bit more as a podcast because we figured out how to get access to a booth and yeah, it's exactly what happened. What we realized is some of these brands actually were walking around because other people with booths want to go check out who's around them because they're probably bored of just talking about themselves. They probably want to go meet some new people, not, like, folks around their company. So that happened, like, a bunch of times with people who had booths or other companies in general that were there that are curious of around podcast sponsorships. Like, it was wild. I'm not going to. I don't want to blast company names and all that stuff or people. But it was very interesting of how having a booth people walk up to you and almost like, say, we are working together. It's not like, oh, do you guys. It was like, we gotta do some stuff together. That was kind of the feeling I got from most people that were coming over and they're like, okay, you're doing some interesting stuff here. You know, some interesting people. Because we kind of had a flow of friends and people coming around. So it wasn't always us talking about ourselves. It was like, hey, here's Rich Sheffrin next to us hanging out, or here's Steve, or not saying those were the. But like, we had people like them kind of always around hanging. And I don't know, it was just like. It was a really cool environment to just get some connections really fast. You have. You're kind of framed in a different way. Yeah. We're not just some random podcast. Even though we were. To a lot of people, we were in the right spot.

Well, we had.

At least we kept showing up.

There's three people that I remember that came by, and I won't say the company names. Three people that came by that just said, we are a software company that does X. We just got a bunch of venture capital. We're looking to put money into branding and spending on, like, media platforms. Right. Which is a big trend. People came by our booth and essentially, as so many words said, we want to give you guys money to promote our brand.

Yeah. We want to work together and collaborate somehow. Yeah. And that's essentially the mission now. You know, like, that's how. And we've talked about changing this bad boy into more of a media company and leaning into brand partners and doing it differently and extending up what we've already done with sponsorships as that piece of the business, because that's gonna help us engineer growth. We kind of talked about that before. Yeah.

And then circling back around to what you were just saying a minute ago, too. This was actually Something that I think Dan Ryan, a buddy who we shout out from time to time on the show. Dan Ryan.

Hi, Dan.

You're getting your Dan Ryan in, right. So if you're.

Check that box, you owe us a beer, actually. Did we pay him? I didn't pay you back for that beer.

You didn't pay me back.

I owe you. Okay, Exactly.

No, but Dan was saying. So we started to go down this path very, very short amount of time, maybe we were talking about it for like a week where we said, let's just go big. Let's go broad with it. Let's just try to get celebrities. Let's get athletes. Let's get all of these, like, big, big, big name people on our show. And, like, let's just create, like, who's your audience? Anybody that wants a better life. That's who our audience is. Right. And I think Dan was.

Who was that? Everyone.

I think Dan was like, you're gonna get a lot better traction if you just focus on business owners. Right. So we've really kind of leaned back into what you were just saying of like, we're trying to make business owners lives easier.

Right.

That's the broad mission. And what does that look like? We want you to have a healthy mindset. We want you to make more money. We want money to be made easier through things like systems.

We want leveraging new technology, like crypto and interesting ways. Maybe not the obvious ways that you know about.

Yeah. So, like, that's the goal, is to just, like, improve the lives of entrepreneurs. We want entrepreneurs to be happier, healthier, wealthier, have better relationships, all that kind of stuff. But we're still speaking to entrepreneurs in that sort of, like, constraint. We could still go and talk to celebrities. We could still go and bring NFL players on. We've got three.

Right.

Coming up. We can still go. We can still go and get, like, celebrities on.

Right.

The thing is, when we talk to these people, the conversations are going to be geared towards. All right, what advice would you have for entrepreneurs? We're going to ask the questions that are relevant to entrepreneurs and speak to entrepreneurs. And I think that sort of, like, reframing allows us to kind of keep on the path we're going and get bigger and bigger and bigger names, but also stay focused on who we're trying to help.

Yeah. And the who? Entrepreneurs, business owners. We want to be number one in the podcast category for podcasting. Matt's actually been there before. He didn't even tell me until last week. I'm like, what? Hold on. I'm sitting next to a number one podcast guy in business. Said business, not marketing. Right.

Business. Yeah.

This is even harder. That's great. So, yeah, he has a screenshot to prove it. Whatever. Send it to Jacob, throw it to B Roll. Show off your ego, because you obviously don't even tell me about it.

That's how big my ego is that I didn't even tell you I was a number one podcaster.

Yeah. Obviously there were different times, but still, it counts. Damn it.

Josh Bartlett had a little bit to do with it too, because he was my co host.

That's fine. We helped Josh, too. What up, Josh? Thank you. But, yeah, all that to say is we're defining all this. I think this event really helped us clarify who we are, what we do well, who supports us. Because it was very clear that a lot of folks like. Like Pat was one of them. Rich, Pat Flynn, Rich Sheffrin, they came out from other things they were doing. I mean, these folks weren't just hanging around at the conference all day long, you know, Like, I don't think we would normally do that either, typically. Yeah. Like, we like to bounce around. There's people that want to meet up for lunch or go other places around the area.

Pat and Rich came to see us. Right. Like, they came into the event, came to our booth, talked to us, and then left after talking to us.

Yeah.

Which was a really cool feeling that people did come to tnc. They drove down there, they paid for parking, did all that kind of stuff, and then came because they specifically wanted to speak with us and then take off.

Yeah. So, I mean, that. That was one of the elements that were just like, oh, cool. That was like a. We haven't seen people in, like, two years, basically, like, not to that caliber, you know? And I remember walking in TNC the day before, and we were setting up, and you and I both were kind of like a little overwhelming. A shit ton of people here. Like. Like, even though I'm more the outgoing one social guy, I still had a little anxiety. Like a little. Like, for maybe 30 an hour or so, I was like, people, I need to look at someone in their eyes and talk to them again. And you were probably pooping your pants in the corner without telling me, but you rock it always. But, yeah, all that to say is like, I felt like this was like a new. It was just like a new lens to see ourselves in our brand and the people that support us and what our value is that we bring and the things that we've been lacking in at least the media side of stuff, like how we've been pursuing money, you know, in terms of, like, the value we're creating, how do we structure this to actually monetize it smartly? And that's where, you know, the brand deal sponsorships done in these different ways that. We'll talk more about this later. Still early days, but all of these were just like, aha moments. There are a bunch of light bulbs going off, and we're like, damn, we got a lot from this event, and we barely went into any of the rooms. Even though the sessions were freaking money, there was content for everyone there. We were just having too much fun with this, like, machine that we built in the middle of it all. Yeah, Yeah.

I think another. Another big, like, aha. We have. We had, you know, along the same lines of. What you're just saying is that even though we feel like we're playing bigger, I feel like every time we go to an event and get to talking to people like this, we always feel like there's way more gears that we haven't even gotten to yet.

Right.

Like. Like, we. I feel like over the last, like, decade, like, year over year, we've up leveled our business, we've up leveled our thinking, we've up leveled, you know, the.

Spending, we've up leveled the team. We've up, like. We keep on, like, up leveling, and we keep on thinking, oh, man, we're playing big now. And then you go to these events and you get to talking to other people, and you're like, oh, wow, this is not big yet. There's, like, way more gears that we haven't even gotten to yet, maybe in.

Some circles, but we, like, yeah, we go to TNC or like, yeah, all right. We got some work to do.

We were talking to one person who, like, specifically, we went to dinner with him one night, and he was sitting around telling us about how he'll routinely get, like, checks for $8 million off of his real estate deals and stuff like that. And we're like, all right, so that's the level we eventually want to be playing at.

Yeah. And the whole thing was like, there's a different perspective that happens when you receive this kind of money all at once. Yeah. When it's like a boom, even though if it's for investments and it's not necessarily your cash to do everything with, it's kind of the form of, like, sponsorships. For us, like, the whole thing is we're going for bigger term contracts and deals, and because we want A partnership.

We want evangelize brands. We want to. We want to partner with a company where we go all in with that company.

Right.

Like, we want to find a company where we're. We're talking about them on every single episode. When we go on other people's podcasts, we're talking about them. When we go to events, we're wearing their hat. Right. When we, like, we integrate their brand into our brand and evangelize the hell out of their brand so that they get way more than they ever invested in us out of it.

And you know what? The thing is, like, we've been doing this forever as affiliates and as friends. We might as well package it up with strategic companies that also pair well with the brand and the content and our audience and also get a chunk of cash for it, because that. We also are going to engineer a ton of growth for our partner, for our audience to get a lot more value and ourselves. So it's a big win, win, win, win, win thing going on here. Maybe that was an extra win. I don't know.

But too many wins. Joe, cut it back.

Never. So, yeah, I mean, there's. There's a lot of little aha moments we can probably keep going down, but what else you got here?

I'm looking at my notes here. Oh, that was the last thing.

I like the newsletter thing. Yeah. So the EGP newsletter, if you're a customer paying subscriber. Thank you. And you know, if you get the notes, when you get the Notes, Flow Notes, hustleandflowchart.com Notes, you'll see. These are what we publish. Yeah. The slash is going the wrong way, actually. For camera. Those are the notes that we put like eight or nine of those every single month into a package, and we send them around the world to a bunch of people all over the globe. All over the globe. True story.

Unless you're a flat earther, then. All over the plane of existence. All over the plane.

Yeah. Well, we're not gonna argue. If you're gonna be a subscriber, we'll send it to you. It'll get there. However mean it gets there. We had a stack in our office over here of about like 70. Yeah. Of like. And this wasn't all just recently. It was like over the last two years, we had all these returns going to happen with direct mail. Businesses, people move, addresses go bad. Yeah. And these are folks who probably updated. We sent them in like, well, we sent an extra one like we're going to do. Right. And even though it's super cheap. Whatever. It's part of what we put out there is our content. Freely, cheaply, in this case, got to cover some costs. And so we had, like, 70. And I was like, you know what, Matt? I'm tired of looking at that crap over there. And I'm like, we had to stack this much, and they're all in their envelopes. Why don't we tear them all open? Throw that insert that. That little giveaway insert that we printed out. That was your idea. So, like, we basically spent one of these mornings just, like, tearing open 70 of our newsletters that were sent around the globe, even to someone in Norway. That I should know your name, but if you're listening, we gave your thing away. But, like, it's impressive when something comes from, you know, America to Norway and then back. I'm like, this is so weird.

This newsletter. Somebody just got in their hands has been to Norway at one point.

Yeah. I'm like, okay, well, now it's going to someone else. So the idea is we repurposed all those return to senders to us, and we're like, let's do something about these, and let's give them away. And that's what we did. So we had stacks of all of our newsletters on the booth or on the table in the booth, and they were gone by the time that every.

Single one didn't have a single one left.

And it was really cool because on multiple occasions, actually, we had people come through that were featured in the newsletter. Newsletter. And we'd be talking about it. Rich Sheffrin was one of them because we were just talking about our model. And, you know, Rich has his steal our winners model, which is freaking brilliant. And go check it out, because we definitely promote it. It's similar, but different. But he was giving us some tips. We were sharing our tips and all that stuff. And then I was like, oh, yeah, actually, look at that. This is our newsletter. And, oh, you're featured in this one. Here you go. Like, that was just super random.

There was somebody else that I was talking to, and I was like, have you met? I don't remember who. It was like, Tom Brees or something like that. They're like, oh, no, I have it.

And.

And then later on, we were talking about the newsletter, and I was like, oh, here's one with Tom Brees. You want to know about Tom Brees?

There you go.

Go listen. Go read this issue. There's Tom Brees is on page four or whatever.

That was from, like, a couple years ago.

Yeah. I mean, like these stretched all over the place. So people that picked up a newsletter, they just got a random one from whatever month they, they randomly ended up getting. But I was blown away that we gave away all of them. We also give away every single hustle and flowchart sticker. We do not have any more left.

Got one in my house that my daughter found in like a book on my cat. I was like, keep that sticker NFT right there.

And sticker mule stopped selling stickers at 19 bucks. They said last time was the last time they were ever gonna do it. So now we can't get $19 stickers anymore.

It's probably still dirt cheap.

Yeah, probably still. It's probably like, it's no longer 19, it's now $21.

Well, sticker mule, we actually did a little, little, little exchange where they gave us some credit for shoutouts. So. That's true.

That was one of our first brand deals.

I mean, yeah, we didn't get money, but we got credits and we used it. And there you go. See folks, you can work brand deals even if it's not cash.

Barters work too.

Always a way to barter something. J. Abraham, that's what he does. He gets cars out of this. He made a whole career out of it.

Yeah.

Think about, like, if you're thinking about starting a podcast or if you have a show or any kind of media. YouTube blog. Actually, with ahrefs, it was just a blog. Like, it was just. I think it was a link. Yeah, they're like, hey, we'll give you something. Like, cool. All right, sweet. Because we love you guys. Anyway, so this is, this is, I think the ethos that you'll see more and more from us is more friends integrating into our show and cool tools and things, but only if it's valuable.

To entrepreneurs because we're not going to just be like, hey, we're integrating Steve's brand of edible undies. Like, that just wouldn't make sense. And, and if you buy edible undies, depends on the flavor of a guy named Steve. I would check your sources for edible undies. Check sources, because I don't think Steve.

Where do we look for these sources?

Steve's not the best brand. What you really want is, do we.

Go down the street to that little shady store that you've always pointed to. You're like, joe, we should really go to that dark looking store. No, I'm just kidding.

Store like the one with the blacked.

Out windows, the weird figures on the. No, we're not going there.

That's actually a dispensary.

Okay.

That's where we buy our weed.

They're not that shady looking here though. We're in California.

Come on. We have like, we have like Apple store levels of dispensaries here.

We do have the shady ones too, but yeah, we don't need to go there.

Yeah, yeah.

Those days have sailed.

It's true.

All right, well, all that's to say is if you get a chance to get to traffic and conversion, definitely go next year. If they. I'm sure it'll be held next year and ideally a lot bigger because I think they'll have it in a good space for it in the convention center. But we'll see. All that is go out there, go meet us. Because I'm sure we'll be there. I don't know, at the booth again.

But yeah, I don't know if the booth is going to happen next time. But we'll still find. We'll find a chair area and set up and everybody can float to us.

Actually those existed and that would have been.

There's actually a booth.

Right? Remember there was a booth right next to us that we totally could have just done that. Oh, man, that's all good.

We could have just hung out there the whole time and just acted like it was our own booth. Nobody would have said a damn thing.

There you go. See? Figuring out the hacks.

But either way, anyway, grab the notes from this episode. If you notes hustleinflowchart.com notes you can grab the flow notes. That's the action guide, the, the Cliff Notes of what you just listened to. So that's hustle and flowchart.com notes and.

Tell me about Easy webinar. We have a beautiful sponsor. They are beautiful Easy webinars. The sponsor we're talking about here. And that's everything. Webinars. So if you're doing webinars currently, you're probably doing them inefficiently somehow. Maybe your webinar's converting like a mofo. Good for you. Well, guess what? Would you actually know that? Because like easy Webinar tracks all that stuff for you. It also optimizes. Optimizes.

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Just you, no one else?

Nope.

No one else but you. Hey, if you loved what you heard here, go send it to a friend. If someone was itching to go to TNC or something wanting to get a little inside scoop from a different perspective, go share it around.

Yeah.

But yeah, go rate, review, subscribe all that fun stuff and go check us out on YouTube hustling flowchart TV because we're doing some cool new stuff over there and we're growing. And hit that subscribe button.

To help us out. Thank you. Love you.

Thanks, Adam, for the idea.

All right, see you guys in the next one.