The One With Mindvalley Founder & CEO Vishen Lakhiani - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #123

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish and this is the I love marketing podcast. Hey everybody, it's Dean Jackson and Joe.

Polish and we've got a very special guest with a funny, sort of funny name, real smart dude. His name is Vishen Lakhiani. He is the founder and CEO of a company called Mindvalley and he basically leads a pretty dedicated team of over 100 brilliant, mind focused people on building disruptive systems to bring innovation to education under the goal of pushing humanity forward. Now I just read that by the way because that's not how I talk. But Vishen, he's part of Genius Network. He's a very smart dude. Many people listening may have, may do business with his company, may have seen Vishen speak. He does these really cool events called Awesomeness Fest where I've had actually attended and spoken at in the past and is doing all kinds of cool stuff. And you know Vishen, we've been wanting to do an episode with you on I love marketing for a while because we think you have some really awesome stuff you can share with people. You want to say anything about Vishen Dean before we ask him to say what he actually does and how he does it?

Well, I'm very excited about this because I only know Vishen just in tasking and we've met a couple of times. But I've admired what he's done for quite a long time. I think he gave one of the very best Talks at your 25k event last year in New York and I've been following everything that he's done and I'm really excited to hear the story because it truly is a from the ground up a magnificent story thing that he's done building Mindvalley from. I love the fact that he started out just in a small world space, New York and now has one of the very coolest offices, certifiably one of the very coolest offices according to Inc. Magazine in the world, in Malaysia. So it's pretty interesting trajectory that he's taken from New York to Malaysia and building a worldwide staff and a global company. So I think he's going to have a lot to share.

So welcome.

Yeah Vishen. So where are you right now? You in Malaysia? Where are you?

I'm in Kuala Lumpur right now.

I have no idea where that is.

You know you, you go north from Singapore, you make a quick left just before Thailand and boom, you're in Kuala. Wow.

Well, there you go. There we go. There you go. That's pretty neighborhood if you're ever in the neighborhood.

So let's talk about your start, how you kind of got started. And basically let me mention this too, for I Love Marketing listeners. Mindvalley has 250,000 plus students from Mindvalley Academy, and you have over 1.3 million subscribers. And you do all kinds of stuff, focus on mindfulness health and wellness, wellness education. And you're a pretty sharp marketer. And so let's first ask you why do you love marketing? And then we'll get into your story.

Well, to me, marketing is one of the shortest, quickest, most efficient paths to hitting your goals in a business. Dave McClure, who's a famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist, recently put up a series of tweets and an online magazine picked it up. And basically his message was Silicon Valley is retarded when it comes to marketing. And he went on to speak about how so many startups in Silicon Valley raise a lot of money and they get amazing VC money. They pluck equity in their company. Yet these guys who are starting these companies often shun marketing. They believe if you build a better mousetrap, people are going to come. So they keep marketing as an afterthought. As a result, it becomes a slow, wasteful process and money is burned. The failure rate is high. Even the best accelerators in Silicon Valley have like an 85% failure rate. That's millions of dollars being poured down the drain because many of these guys build great mousetraps but have no idea how to position them, how to brand them, how to get customers to find them. I'm shocked when I talk to people who are, say, app developers developing these apps. They've raised tens of millions of dollars and they haven't bothered to understand, for example, how the itunes app store does ranking. So the fact is, when you understand marketing, it's a shortcut to attaining your business goals. It's a shortcut to getting a faster ROI on your investment capital. It's a shortcut to getting more customers raving about your product. But you've got to do marketing. And it's a sad fact that in so many MBA programs they there are absolutely no courses on sales. They focus on hiring, they focus on product design, very little on sales. That's why I love marketing, Joe. It's allowed me to build up Mindvalley. This year we'll probably exceed about 20 million in revenue. But the fact is I built up this entire company by taking 500 bucks. It was between 500 and $700 about 10 years. Three months ago, I took 500 to $700. And just by understanding marketing, I was able to convert, with no loans, no venture capital into a company that this year is going to do about 20 million.

That's a fascinating story. And that marketing is, if you really understand it, just like you said, as a shortcut. It's also a way to do it without raising capital, without having to go through that whole thing and give up a bunch of equity in your company and really build in a sustainable way.

So how did you learn marketing, Vishen?

Well, see what happened was my background is computer engineering. I graduated from one of the top computer engineering schools in the US University of Michigan. And upon graduating, I went to work at Microsoft. And I discovered I hated computer engineering. The only reason I took it was to keep everyone happy because growing up in an Asian family, it was the right thing to do to become a lawyer or a computer engineer. And I discovered I just didn't like it. You know what I really liked? I like photography, I like travel. So I went and I worked on ngo. That brought me a chance to travel. I did some photography. And then I realized something else. Money is kind of nice. So I was broke, living in New York, sleeping on a couch. And I decided, hey, I needed to do something. So my dad was an entrepreneur and I decided I wanted to start a business. So I moved out west to the Bay Area. And for the next two years I tried to start businesses, went around pitching business plans, but my timing was off. It was April 2001. In that month, 14,000 people were laid off in Silicon Valley. The bubble had burst. So there I was, bubble burst, no one hiring pink slip parties. And I was zapping out my resume to every job that I could get on Craigslist. And this one company got back to me and they said, hey, you know, we're looking for salespeople. We are starting out right now. We can't afford to pay you, but if you close something on the phone, you'll get paid. So I was like, fuck, I really don't want to do this. But I ended up taking the job anyway. I knew nothing about sales. And then, because I'm a process given guy, right, Being a computer engineer, I'm used to putting everything into a process, like a computer program. And I noticed that this company ended up going from 0 to 20 million in two years flat. Now, it had been struggling before that, but then they hired this amazing sales consultant who came in and he developed a really beautiful sales script. The company was selling technology to lawyers. Now I was fascinated by the sales script. And I ended up really nailing it, really understanding it and becoming one of their top salespeople. But what fascinated me was how much the sales script resembled a computer program. They are if all loops. If the buyer says this, you do that, you repeat. The sales script was an algorithm. And so I just took to it and I ended up becoming really good. And I realized something. All my previous work, I'd been pitching around business plans. I tried to start companies. I got 30 grand in debt. I was about. I was a kid, I was like 24, 25. And I realized all my failures had stemmed because I was trying to build a better mousetrap that had zero idea about marketing. And in fact, I even labeled sales dirty as something I didn't want to bother to learn. Something for people who you'd meet in a used car lot. Now when I realized how powerful sales was, I worked at a company for two years. Then I decided I wanted to start an e commerce store around my passion. My passion was meditation. You know, it was a. It was a really stressed out environment working in the valley. And I took up meditation and I found it really fulfilling. So I decided, well, you know, I want to start an e commerce store. I'm going to focus on meditation. I applied what I learned in that company. My investment capital, like I said, was between 500 to 700 bucks. And just through this process, I thinking of sales, thinking of marketing as a computer algorithm. I just innovated and innovated and innovated. And now we have seven countries, 130 employees, will do 20 million this year. Crazy great profit margins. And you know, I live a pretty epic life. But it was discarding that bullshit idea that marketing and sales are something you outsource, something you hire people to, but deciding that this is probably the most important thing you can do as a founder and CEO.

That'S fascinating. What was the. Let's talk a little bit about the trajectory then, because it's almost like when you build a company based on marketing. I love your idea of thinking about it as sort of the algorithm or the code. You start with that one little thing and you keep expanding on it. What was kind of the trajectory or the path? Like what did you do initially with that $500? And how did you then continue to grow and starlay that? It's really like a big snowball.

So what I did, Dean, was Google had just launched AdWords. So I discovered this guy called Corey Rudle who had found it a very efficient way to use Google AdWords. To sell. He was selling a book on how to sell your used car. And he was making like, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars on this little book. So I read his work. Corey Ruddell really set me down the path. Corey passed away a couple of years later, but really great teacher in the field of marketing. And Joe, you've heard of Corey, right? Obviously, you probably heard.

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I met him before in the past. And yeah, it was tragic. He died in a car accident. But, yeah, I mean, very smart guy.

But what I did was I learned from Koli. I started testing out different Google Ads. I test headlines. I test the. Then I taught myself copywriting. That was one of the best things I did. I taught myself copywriting. And very quickly I found that I was able to convert. Now, my first month, I made like, maybe four bucks a day. And, you know, another important, really important thing to me is mindset. I believe in celebrating what you do, being happy, setting big goals. I really celebrated the fact that I was getting four bucks and 50 cents a day. The next month, I hit six bucks. The next month, it hit eight bucks a day. By the end of the first year, I had made about $20,000 in profit. Now, that wasn't much, but $20,000 in profit was enough for my wife and I to go, you know what? Let me quit my day job and see how far I can take this baby. So I quit my day job, which was working for that Silicon Valley firm and living in New York. I knew 20,000 would be tough, but we could survive. So it was, we're going to either make it or we're going to die trying. The next year, we upped that, and the next year we hit about 100 grand. And it was just me and my wife helping out with a little bit of customer support. So it was pretty exciting for us. But it was that process of constant innovation. So I would study other marketers. I remember picking up this book by this Internet marketing guy who actually lived in Malaysia, and he talked about why it's really important to get users on your website to sign up to a newsletter. So we launched a newsletter due overnight. The sales went up 96%. And I remember the exact date was May. It took me one month to write the autoresponder sequence. I launched it overnight. My sales were up 96%. And to this day, for example, email marketing is a really big part of what we do. So that's studying the masters. And we would roll out stuff now because I think like a computer algorithm, I develop models for this. So for example, Abraham Lincoln said if you were to give him six hours to chop down a tree, he'd spend four hours sharpening the X. Right? And many people forget, so dive into their business, forgetting the importance of learning. And so in Mindvalley we have a group called a45.5 workweek. The rule is, you know, we're parents, we have boyfriends or girlfriends or family or parents. We shouldn't be working more than 45 hours a week. So try to work no more than 45 hours. But five of those 45 hours you should spend sharpening the X. That's about an hour every day. So I try to spend an hour every day catching up on marketing. That's why I invest in programs like 25K. That's why I know Jo Porter. She puts out some really great materials. I'm constantly learning. Now, as we learn, we have a process where we take the hottest ideas and we rank them. So we go through a priority ranking process for ideas. We use a tool called Basecamp by 37signals. Now my team comes up with three to four ideas every single day on how to improve some aspect of our marketing. We priority rank the ideas. We ask ourselves three questions. What is the estimated impact of this idea? Now the idea may be something simple like test a new headline. It may be something more complex. Like right now we are testing the idea of asking for a phone number on a checkout card or that's a lot more complex, requires a lot more programming. So we ask ourselves, what's the estimated impact? And then how easy is it to roll out? And then is it replicable across our entire network of e commerce sites? Testing a headline isn't replicable because different products require different headlines. Adding a phone number to your checkout is replicable. Once you do it on your checkout platform, all your sites benefit from it. So we give the ideas like points based on these and the highest ideas. We call it the battleground of ideas. So we accumulate, in a good week, we'll accumulate 20 to 25 ideas of things we want to innovate on. We do this because everyone in the company studies, everyone is constantly learning. And then we have an execution team that goes through a very tight execution process to test out these ideas. We test everything. So here are some examples of how it works in in practical terms, right? First as the 45. 5 work week where one hour every day my best marketers spend studying and we even gain it by the process. So you know, if you join in to do product launches at Mindvalley. You start in at level one, after you've studied Jeff Walker's entire 30 hour program and then gone through Frank Kern's Nash control, which is about 12 hours, you yourself to level two, you get bigger tasks to handle. And constantly we emphasize learning. The first Friday of every month, everyone in the company, over 100 people come together for something called Learn day where there are no meetings, nobody works in the business. All we do is we teach or we learn. So someone could decide that they want to spend that entire day reading the latest Jim Collins book on growing a business or the latest marketing videos from our man Frank Kern. You know, and they go through that and other people teach. So learning is a big part. Now from the learning, the next part is applying this. And again we approach it like an algorithm. So I'm going to go in more detail, but again, stop me if you guys have any questions.

No, it's just fascinating.

No, no, it is. I mean I could pipe in and just be insulting or say stupid stuff or ask a question, but that would prohibit the value that you're sharing right now. So keep rolling. This is awesome.

Okay, so what we do is we divide our entire business into a series of environments. Now what is an environment? An environment is basically situation from which you get a customer. So social media is an environment. We get a lot of customers just from social media. And then Google AdWords is another environment. Facebook marketing and Facebook fan pages is yet another environment. Our website itself is an environment because user visitors come there and you want to convert them into a user. Email is yet another environment. So we have these five environments. Okay, now there's actually a sixth one that we just added and that is the customer environment. After sales becomes a customer, how do you bring them back over and over and over again to your products? Now that's the first step. We divide our entire business into environment. Each environment has a dedicated team of two marketers constantly working on growth hacking that environment. By growth hacking, what I mean is constantly working to grow the impact of that environment. Now every environment has an asset that they look out for. The asset is typically something that increases the valuation of the business. So for example, our environment for social media, their asset is organic traffic. Now what they know is that organic traffic is like they are treasure chest of gold. What they need to do is get as much organic visitors to our entire ecosystem as possible. The guys who do Google AdWords, their asset is automated revenue. That means automated revenue that comes in from ad campaigns which are running on autopilot. We spend About a quarter million dollars every month just pumping it into Google AdWords. So every environment has the asset, which is basically that goldmine that they protect. Now what we do is we take the environment and we divide it into something called conversion points. So for example, let's take the environment of email, right? A conversion point is for example delivery. How often are emails getting in people's mailboxes? Another conversion point is your open rate. Another conversion point is your click through rate. Another conversion point are signups. Another conversion point are unsubscribes. Now there are about five conversion points for something like email and it depends on how detailed you want to go. Sometimes it could be seven conversion points. You could look at HTML versus plain text as a conversion point. You could look at list quality as a conversion point, right? But let's say there are five. Now for each conversion point we drill down deeper into what is called a conversion trigger. So let's look at Ena for example, right? If you look at click through as a conversion point triggers that effect, click through would be your reply to address, images within the email, buttons within the email, a PS line, your call to action, HTML versus plain text. So what we do is we. So again you have environment. An environment would be email, you have a conversion point. A conversion point would be click through or open rate or delivery. And then you have the conversion triggers. Now the art is you have really smart people constantly testing out these conversion triggers. So let's take delivery for delivery. We have identified four different conversion triggers. There's your unsubscribe rate, your spam rate, your IP reputation, your inbox placement, your email volume, your number of users who mark your emails as important, forwarding, whitelisting. Now for each of these, my specialists study the best minds in the industry. We look at Groupon, we look@thrilllist.com we look at the best email marketing practitioners from Silicon Valley, from venture funded companies, from major brands. And what we do is we identify their best practices and then we test it on our list. Now the test is called a treatment. So you have environments, conversion points, conversion triggers, treatments. And then you test these treatments. And every time a treatment wins, we identified as a winner. We assemble our entire marketing team, we rave about it, we celebrate, we even pop open a couple of beers and then we make sure to roll out that treatment across all our businesses. So this way we are constantly growing our businesses.

That's such a great thing. That's one of the things about the mindset of really understanding marketing and knowing not only just all the metrics that you can measure just for the sake of measuring, but. But the fact that you're actually going to act on them and that the goal is to know what affects that number and to test your different treatments, I think that's fantastic. There's lots of lessons in that.

Absolutely. And we call this entire process conversion hacking. In fact, we're getting so much enthusiasm for it, we're writing a book on it. There are lots of books right now on agile development. Lean Startup. Conversion hacking is about lean startup, but for marketing. And so many people just underestimate this. They underestimate how powerful this process is. So we try to put everything into a system. So for example, when it comes to writing copy, we have a system for the headline, we have a system for the opening paragraph. So would you guys like to hear our system for headlines?

I don't think that would be valuable at all. We should probably talk about branding or logos.

Of course.

Yes, yes, please, Joe.

Let me say.

Something, let me envision continue this.

No, no, what you just said about conversion hacking. And like lean Startup for marketing, we always talk about the saying little hinges swing big doors. And you just talked about how some people don't realize how impactful and important these things are. I've always said that one of the most important ways for people to really get the most out of effective marketing is to not undervalue the sheer importance of it. Because I think one of the critical determining factors in somebody being able to build a successful company is, is what they place importance and priority on. And so many people view marketing as like something you just kind of got a shoehorn into the business and it's just one of these sort of things. And when you dissect it and you look at it as this system and this process and you hone it, that's why you have a $20 million company that you've built from scratch. And that's the deal. So that is golden advice. And I just wanted to highlight that because I think what you said is so damn important and I hope our listeners grasp. Okay, cool.

So I want to share a system for headlines. Not because, you know, it's like, it's like the best system out there, it's pretty damn good. But because of the message here is system, you got to have a system. So for example, when it comes to headlines for a product, right, most people just wing it. They sit down, they write 25 bit lines and they're like, alright, I'm going to test the best two. That's bullshit. You don't do it that way. So our system looks something like this. We look at Eugene Schwab's model of market awareness. We relate that to Eugene Schwartz's model of market sophistication, and that gives us a pattern for how we want to raise the headline. For example, if you look at market sophistication, Eugene Schwartz said that if there are lots of competitors in your market, the mechanism which is typically what is in the sub headline is what you pull up to the headline, and the benefit goes into the sub headline. It is low competition. The benefit is the headline. The mechanism is the sub headline. Now, again, as marketers, if you don't know that, I can't go into detail. But if you don't know that, that's such a basic thing you got to know, you got to pick up Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. So we start with Eugene Swartz's two models, and then we take that. We come up with maybe 25 headlines, and copywriters are never going to judge in their own headlines. So our copywriters will ask their peers what they think are good, and then we may settle on two headlines. And then we apply Michael Masterson's model of coffee logic, which is a process for rapidly innovating on the headline. Now, we tweak the headline, we make it richer, we make it better, and then we apply basic AB split testing to test two different headlines. So again, if you look at that, there are four different systems that we are using, market awareness, market sophistication, copy logic, and then split testing. But it's systems within the system that helps you create a remarkable way to write a headline. And the model, it's a lot more complex than that. But because of this model, we can generate really effective headlines really rapidly. We can generate sales pages that convert really rapidly before it will take us one day to come up with headlines. Now, we can do it in a matter of hours. And our model for sales copy is equally detailed. We break sales copy down into some 23 different points, and every point has a system to it. So, for example, one element of the sales copy is the order menu. We have tested different things in the order menu. Another one is how do you position your guarantee? We've tested numerous different ways to position your guarantee. We found recently, for example, that if you use the following phrase, you do not have to make up your mind right now for X amount of days, and then write back to us. That simple phrase boosted sales across the board by a good 22%. So we test everything we test the wording, we test images, we test the way we lay out the page. And a lot of it comes from just regular direct marketing principles that so many startups forget. That's why I guess I could say I kind of love marketing.

I think that, you know, that kind of approach, when you start thinking about taking that scientific approach to it, that's where you really have the opportunity to create breakthroughs. That's really why, you know, Eugene Schwartz called it breakthrough advertising, because it really is based on formulas and stuff that is, you know, tested and you can apply it across all different markets. All those things that you were talking about, market sophistication, awareness, all that stuff is all talked about in detail in his incredible book, Breakthrough Advertising. And his book was a book that was written years and years ago, went out of print and was selling on ebay for, I think it was up to $900 these books were selling for. And wasn't it Brian, Kirk.

Joe that.

Decided, well, let's bring this back out into print?

Yep, exactly. They started republishing it and the book sells for $95 now through boardroom. And I highly, highly recommend it. It's actually.

Yeah.

And Brian is in 25k also, which is awesome. So Vishen just reminded me of something too, that I think I'm gonna get a copy for everyone for the New York event because it is such. It was written in 1968. It's an incredible book. And there's something I want to point out about what Vishen is talking about. Michael Masterson also is all of his books are great and Dean, we're friends with him, so that's cool. And basically these books that Vishen is referring to and a lot of stuff, he has nothing to do with technology. It's all about psychology. And that's one thing I want to highlight here because even Steve Jobs said at the 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference that at Apple we focus first on the psychology and the experience of the customer and then the technology. And that's what marketing really is. It's applied psychology. And all of the different things that Vishen is talking about. The way I interpret that is, is just how he thinks through every touch point and every communication and automating and systemizing that process. And just off the cuff, Vishen, I'm just thinking about this. Why do you think? Because you mentioned early in this, when we started that in the beginning you didn't have probably really good perspective or viewpoint of sales, like it was some dirty thing. Why do you think so? Many people are marketing adverse. And I don't even mean like they're not learning marketing. I mean, some people actually view it like it's a bad thing or, you know, I shouldn't have to do marketing. Why do you think that mindset exists?

I think it exists because there are so many bad salespeople out there who are pushy and, you know, you experience these guys and their tactics and a used car lot. I remember going to buy a used car when I was, and I just graduated and I remember the. I didn't recognize them at the time, but after reading Xiaolini's book Influence, I remember the tactics that salesman was using on me. Takeaways, just basic, basic things. And it made me feel crappy. And there are a lot of people out there who use sales and marketing for the wrong reasons. But when you see a really good marketer, when you see the work of David Ogilvy, for example, Right. It creates a different emotion in you. Steve Jobs, his greatest skill was. Steve Jobs was a brilliant marketer. I would say marketing was his greatest gift. It wasn't product design. He was great at product design, but marketing was what he was truly genius at. Now when you look at great marketing, I'm talking about Apple, I'm talking about companies like what other companies. So there's Apple. Apple is a company that really does great marketing that creates an emotion of love with the customer. Now when you see things like that, you really tend to appreciate how gorgeous marketing is. I think marketing, artful marketing is going to make a comeback that a lot of folks in Silicon Valley, just because they've not been exposed to it from the universities that they came from, don't really have much of an appreciation for it. That's one of the things I'm hoping to change with my book, Conversion hacking.

Yeah, I totally hear you.

Okay, go ahead, Tell us about your book, Vishen.

Oh, well, okay. So it basically talks about the model that I just shared on environments, conversion points, conversion triggers, treatments. I talk about how to build teams to do this, how to look at your startup model and identify the environments you're playing at, identify the conversion points. Then it goes deeper and it talks about how to grow your business by focusing on KPIs, smart numbers, revenue. And it's really marketing that put into an algorithm. The idea here is that anyone, whether you're launching an app or you're launching your new startup, you can look at your business in a different way and immediately identify the environments that you're competing in and identify the path that the customer is going to take to become a customer, to go from a visitor or viewer to a customer, and then how to become a genius at fine tuning and optimizing those parts in a really lean way. Now, when you really get good at it, you can do some pretty amazing things. So for example, if you look at the career page on mindvalley, mindvalley.com, we're using really good marketing there to attract talent into our company. And so I get, I mean, I'm in freaking Kuala Lumpur, right, and it's the middle of nowhere, but I get amazing people from all around the world to leave their jobs, come and work for Mindvalley in Kuala Lumpur. And if you look@mindvalley.com careers, you'll see how we apply marketing to attracting really great talent. And there's nothing like salesy about it. It's understanding the psychology of what is going on in the buyers, in this case the job hunters mind. A lot of it comes from observation. So another thing I talk about in the book is how to recognize patterns. So for example, I interviewed hundreds of people and I noticed a pattern. I noticed that the people who were most qualified, they were taking the interview and the questions they asked. I realized that the number one thing that they were looking for was really learning and growth. It wasn't money. It wasn't money. It wasn't finding a job related to their degree. It was growing and learning. The number two thing was happiness. They wanted to be genuinely happy at work. They wanted a job that made them excited about popping out of bed every morning. Third was money. And fourth was meaning they wanted a job where they could do something good in the world. So when we recognize this, we change the entire way we put up job ads. Rather than send someone to a page and go, these are the positions we are hiring for. These are the qualities we need in a developer, the qualities we need in a writer. We changed it. Now, when you go to our job ad on mindvalley.com careers, it's beautiful and it's designed to speak to the heart. It's designed to speak to people based on the four things which I know people truly want. Learning and growth. Happiness, Abundance, the ability to afford the things they want. And the fourth thing meaning. And when we redesign our job app, the number of applicants we got just shot through the roof. Today we get like so many applicants that we actually no longer accept resumes. You've got to create video cover letters to get into Mindvalley. And if you get on YouTube and you type in mindvalley cover letter, you'll see hundreds upon hundreds of COVID letters from all around the world. Some people put in like hundreds. I've literally seen a cover letter where the person put in, created an animated film and spent 300 man hours designing it just to get a job at mindvalley. So again, we get to attract really good talent. But also all these cover letters on YouTube also allow other people to stumble upon Mindvalley and decide they want to apply. But it comes from yet another really important aspect of marketing, and that is really understanding your customer, really understanding deep down inside what, what makes them tick, what is it that they want. And then building your marketing to speak to their innermost desires, desires that they often don't realize. They have a lot of people who are applying for a job, you know, they think they want it so that they have safety and they have a career and they have money coming in. But honestly, when I really interview people and got to the heart of the issue, a lot of people wanted a job because they wanted to grow themselves. They wanted meaning in their lives. They wanted happiness. And that gave us a clue to change or pivot our marketing.

What do you think of that, Dean?

I know it's so. I love how systematic the approach is. And I did have, I think it would be valuable to maybe step back a second and talk about maybe a couple of the steps, a couple of the inflection points along the way. From going from your apartment in New York with just you and your wife to now 130 employees globally. And what were sort of the vector changing things that allowed you to expand like that?

Sure. Well, a couple of things. We realized that like you said, vector changing, Right. The first was Google AdWords. Google AdWords was great. It was a great platform. It's a lot harder to be successful in Google AdWords right now. But if you have the right websites, if you have the right design, if you really care about customers and the experience, you can do well. That was one. And then there was email marketing, learning how to build an autoresponder, how to give away free content, to build a dedicated list. A third one was learning hiring, learning how to really get the best people to work for you. A fourth one was learning management, how to inspire people, how to get people moving towards the common goal. A fifth was learning basically lean startup principles, agile development, how do you grow your company based on empirical data, based on measurements, based on test, based on the idea of looking at KPIs and asking yourself, well, what's the quickest way to increase this particular KPI. Whether it's your cost per lead or your cost per customer, or your break even point on your AdWords advertising. So as we grew as a company, we kept stumbling upon these little things that help us develop a business. And every time I realized that I needed one of these things, I needed to apply Lean Startup, I needed to apply Google AdWords, I needed to apply email marketing. I would approach it in a systematic manner, start myself, build it up myself, put it into a process and hire the very best talent I could to run that process. And then. So right now Mindvalley has some 25 different departments and teams. We have teams that work on our products such as our HitApp and we have departments such as our design department, our film department, our AdWords department and how I run the businesses. I spend 25 minutes every week, just 25 minutes a week with a department. That's really all I need. I only spend 25 minutes a week with my 11 person design department, only 25 minutes a week with Mindvalley Films, only 25 minutes a week with my email marketing department. And even this 25 minutes is super, super, super structured. Every department has about five or six different KPIs that they measure on a weekly basis across 13 different businesses. So they said. So for example, email marketing, which is one of our departments, they look at about 5 KPIs across 13 different businesses. So if you do the math, they are reporting about some 50 different numbers, 50 to 55 different numbers every single week. Now we have a reporting process where they look at the 50 numbers and we have a mathematical formula that creates a smart number based on these 50 numbers. So at the end of every week they send me an email update with what they've been working on, Innovations, test results and the smart number. And my goal is to just look at the smart number and decide if it's grow or if it's shrunk and they let me know the growth rate. If the smart number is on cue, I don't need to do anything. If the smart number has grown, I want to know why and I want to see what hit ideas they came up with and I want to roll these out into other companies. If the smart number has shrank, I want them to dive in deep into the micro numbers. The 50 micro numbers figure out what was it was IP block number two affected by a delivery issue was this particular email for a particular promotion had a bad click through rate because we opted to use HTML rather than plain text. So we go in really deep, we identify what the pain was and we eliminate it. We eliminate it, we set a system and we make sure that pain doesn't happen again. So again, I can go super deep in my company. I have about, I have right now 25 teams. All of them are working on KPIs and numbers and deliverables. So I can go in really deep and look at about 500 different numbers for every business. But I don't need to. I just need to spend 25 minutes with 25 teams. They give me the smart number. And based on the smart number, we decide how deep we want to go and we can grow the entire business. So this is how I'm able to run a company with 130 people. Again, it's management by KPIs, by numbers, by discipline, by systems. You know, Jim Collins said. Jim Collins released a really good article on Stanford Business magazine yesterday actually. And he talks about how you really. There are two kinds of companies. There are companies that tell the time and they're companies that build clocks. Companies like hbo, Sony, they're clock makers. They've built an organization where they can spin off different products. Then you have lots of little Silicon Valley startups which tell the time. They build one product and it's hit or miss. I'm not a one product type of guy. I want to spawn hundreds of companies right now. MindValley launches a new company somewhere on the planet every three to four weeks. So, I mean, we have so many companies launching that I lose track sometimes. But I'm able to manage the entire ecosystem because of systems, processes, numbers and infusing marketing into all of this.

You know what, I want to mention something here, like my friend Dave Keckic, he has one of his credos which is it takes as much time and effort to manage gigantic businesses as it does tiny ones. But the gigantic ones carry with them proportional rewards at playing a bigger game. And so when you hear something like this, vishen, certainly anyone would be lying that has a lot of stuff going on to say there's not complexity involved with building and taking something on. And so, you know, I mean, I tend to think of just like our friend Dan Sullivan, there's survival entrepreneurs, there's treadmill entrepreneurs, there's ladder entrepreneurs, and within that there's people that just don't really move that much and other people that they just keep going up the ladder, which is the projectile that I see you on. When it comes to goals and objectives. There's achievement entrepreneurs and then there's lifestyle entrepreneurs that just kind of want to get to a certain place and that, you know, they fulfill their lifestyle. Then there's achievement entrepreneurs that, you know, you get a gigantic kick and excitement out of growing and launching all of these companies and doing all this other stuff. I mean, you're, you know, you have the Mindvalley Foundation. I mean, you've come to one of the Necker island trips. You do a lot of philanthropical stuff. You have a company. You have Project Renaissance, where you fund and provide free entrepreneurial education to tens of thousands of young people. One of your goals, I know, is to spread enlightened ideas to a billion people by 2050 to pretty much disrupt the traditional education system and do something awesome. And you got a million things going on. How does that impact your ability to, you know, have a personal life or to sleep at night or to deal with complexity? I mean, I, you know, I'm just bringing up things where they may scare people.

I'll give you an idea. Right, Joe. So, firstly, they are cheap entrepreneurs, and they are lifestyle entrepreneurs. But there's also the idea of dichotomy, and I don't believe in dichotomy. I don't believe you have to give up your family or be a worst dad to run a business. And I don't believe in the dichotomy between achievement entrepreneurs and growth entrepreneurs. Sorry, achievement entrepreneurs and lifestyle entrepreneurs. So I really merged both. I've decided that dichotomy will not exist in my life. I consider that a brule or a brule is a bullshit rule. And so I've merged both. So, for example, like, I take Awesomeness Fest. What is awesomeness? That's. It's growing like crazy. It's becoming this crazy, amazing movement. But Awesomeness Best is really my way of getting 500 of the coolest people I know to come and party with me and go through amazing personal growth on a beach once a year, now twice a year. And I take away, like, four or five days of my life for that. I have the most amazing time. Because it's a nonprofit, we end up raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity. And I get to make so many amazing friends. I mean, Joe, you've hired people. You've met so many amazing people in your life right now just from your appearance at Awesomeness Fest. So again, I found a way to merge both. Awesomeness Fest gives me, like, this crazy, amazing lifestyle. I mean, imagine two weeks of the year, fully paid. I get to spend time on a paradise location with several hundred of the most amazing people on the planet, from Hollywood stars to some of the best minds in marketing, to some of the smartest people in Silicon Valley. And it's part of my job. And in mindvalley HQ itself, we've done the same thing. I mean, if you walk into mindvalley hq, people joke that it's the happiest place in the world after Disneyland yesterday, and there's so many parties, there's so many things going on that we really merged business and culture from learn Days, where everybody comes together to learn and grow, to culture days. Yesterday, for example, was Latin Day at Mindvalley. So 12 or so employees who are of Latin origin, mostly from the U.S. cook a meal for the hundred other employees during lunch, they have salsa classes at night, everybody heads out to a bar and it's margaritas on the house, courtesy of the company. And people bond, people connect with each other, work and play. I merge them for myself and my company and my business. My wife and I are expecting our second child and I'm going to spend October, November and December mostly working from home in Europe, where we have an apartment and where our new daughter, Eve is going to be born. And I don't have to be in the office because through the systems that I've put in place, all I got to do is make sure that my key employees, who are a players and super reliable, as long as they know we have a quick little chat on Skype, just a few minutes every week, I know everything is going to run smoothly. So you can merge both. I want to build a business empire, Joe. My goal right now is to get Mindvalley to a valuation of 200 million US. And I know the numbers I need to do to get there. I know I need to be making about, well, about close to 50 million in revenue. I know the profit margins I need to get. And I drill it all down to KPIs to gold, to departments, to the. So everything we do is aligned, is in alignment with this greater goal, a 200 million valuation. But at the same time, I refuse to accept that. To do so, I have to work more than 45 hours a week. So I've built the system to actually manage my work time. I actually, if you, if you saw me, you think I'm one of the laziest entrepreneurs you meet, but I'm not. I'm just highly, highly, highly systematic and efficient at what I do.

I mean, there's a lot of. I never thought of you.

Go ahead. What's that, Dean?

No, I was Just gonna say there's a lot of leverage in that. I mean, just like you're saying you're spending 25 minutes with that department to review what has taken 11 people 45 hours a week to condense into that 25 minutes. So there's so much leverage in doing things on a systematic basis.

Now I'm sitting there thinking he should just really be working a little more. I mean, I'm not fine. I'm finding him quite lazy, actually. This is thinking we. I thought we'd be doing an episode with like, you know, someone that's doing something in the world today.

The key advice for the listener, right? Just key advice for the listener. It all boils down the systems. Everyone here must read the book Work the System. It's a beautiful book. It'll change the way you as an entrepreneur, you got to rework the system. So I asked myself this question. I want to build a company that's valued at 200 million. And I want to do it in no more than 45 hours a week. Because I also want to be a good dad, I want to be a good husband, I want to be a good friend, I want to travel, I want to grow, I want to exercise daily. So I start with the goal and I work backwards. How can I build a company valued at 200 million in 45 hours? And this is what I've created and it's possible for anyone. But if you go in with the idea that you have to be an achievement entrepreneur, or you have to be a lifestyle entrepreneur, or you have to work hard to make your money, or all these other bullshit rules or rules, then that will end up being your reality. But if you understand marketing, you understand systems, you understand management, you understand how to use KPIs, all of these are things you could learn. I never took a business class. I basically almost. I was a guy who almost dropped out of university because I kind of sucked as a programmer. The only thing I got an A for was photography, you know, so I'm not like the smartest kid in the block, but I created a system where I get myself freedom to and time to learn. And if you read the right books and you go in with the right goals and you eliminate the rules, I think anyone can do this.

There's never been a better time to have access to all that kind of information. Never a better platform than with global reach, than building an Internet based company that you can have a workforce where they don't even have to be in the same room. It's awesome.

Yeah, the whole thing, like anyone could do it. I mean, that's true. If they actually are willing to do what it takes in order to do it. There's a setup that is certainly necessary. And one of the things that I want to really emphasize here is if you didn't have the ability to persuade people to buy into your ideas to your products, I mean, you're selling all the time. I have that little video called the selling evil and people that make things happen. Because even the marketing you're doing describing how you hire people is all marketing. This all comes back to the right message, to the right list and putting together an automated, systematic way to do it. I must mention also too, before I forget, that one of your apps, which I'd like you to talk about, can.

You talk about the app?

Because I think that's pretty cool. Meditation app.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yep. Well, I wanted to. I like taking on like really big goals and I want Mindvalley to be one of the leaders in the health and fitness space worldwide. And so apps are really hot. And I decided I wanted to launch an app company. And we want to have the number one highest grossing app in the USA App Store. And so Ombana is that app that we have launched. And happy to say that this week we hit number 11. We hit number 11 in the USA App Store in terms of highest grossing, which basically means your app is making money. That to me is what matters. I'm not going for downloads. I want a real business. But what's really exciting is that we're able to do this for very little money. Our competitors have raised millions upon millions of dollars. We're doing it in a very lean way again, just through really understanding the KPIs and working in a very focused way to make this happen. So right now it's kind of fun. It's like a little game. We want to knock off a lot of those venture funded companies and just grab the number one position. So it's a race, it's a game. I'm just really enjoying. And of course we've also built a remarkable app, Ombana. I mean we get like 80 to 90% 5 star reviews from the customers who download it. And we have 100,000 customers who use it every single week. Yep. Let me mention it.

Yeah, yeah.

It's spelled O M V A N A. You can get it at the App Store and you need to download Renee areas connecting to your inner goddess because that's one of the top downloads on there. And of course, as we know, Renee is Awesome.

Renee is awesome.

I met her at mindvalley. I mean, minevalley's that awesome, not knowing at the time that she would become my girlfriend, but I didn't either. So that was good. That was good.

Yeah.

That's pretty awesome.

At the time we're actually doing this episode. You've got an Awesomeness Fest coming up. I think you might have it sold out or close to sold out or.

But why don't. Why don't.

Because we only got a few minutes left, and there's so much more you can talk about. We can do a future episode with Vishen again because there's obviously so much content he has. But in the time available, I want to get some recommendations on how people can find out about some of the stuff you're doing if they want to get on your list, get any of your products, talk about some of that stuff, your website, that sort of thing.

So just a couple of things. Awesomeness Fest, Bali. So Awesomeness Fest is amazing. I mean, it's like, so amazing that people come back every year. What we want is to build something as beautiful to people's lives as burning them. So it's an amazing. It's an experience for entrepreneurs. That's the best way I can say go to awesomenessfest.com and just watch the video. Bali is sold out, and the next one is happening in Dominican Republic, and we're about over 80. 80 to 85% already sold for that, and that's four months away. And check it out on awesomenessfest.com. what is it going to say about it? Oh, yeah, it's a nonprofit. So I do this for passion, to connect people together because I really love connecting with entrepreneurs. All the money being raised is going to Peter Diamandis Xpress Foundation. They say we are raising about $100,000 for the X Prize. So it's a nonprofit. You know, whatever ticket you buy goes to a good cost. Just know this. 1800 people applied in the first six months of this year for 480 spots. So it's very competitive, but we want to keep it that way because we want to get some of the most amazing people there. It's a lot of it's. And we want to create gender balance. I'm a big. I'm very passionate about woman entrepreneurship. My wife is an entrepreneur. I'm going to have a daughter. I want her to be an entrepreneur. And so Awesomeness Fest has a very much focus on women entrepreneurship as well. It's about 55 to 60% female entrepreneurs, but you know, we definitely want to get more guys there as well. And, you know, if you come just like Jo, you might end up meeting your future girlfriend. So I totally recommend it if you're a guy, but it's a beautiful event. Now, I have a blog where I give away. So are you gonna say something?

No, I was just. I was just gonna say something silly. So it can wait. More about your political correctness of like, we're, you know, really catering to the female entrepreneur sort of thing. When, you know, I mean, come on, we all know the reason you want a bunch of women there. And of course, the question becomes deed. He's like, well, what the hell is he saying? What is he trying to say?

I'm just messing around.

No, this is tried. He's trying to match people up, you know, have, you know, have a bunch of cute people look right around.

I mean, it works. That's all cool. I mean, it works out pretty good for you.

That's why it's called Awesomeness Fest.

I mean, you know, what the hell?

Okay, so, well, then the other thing is, the other thing is I have a blog where we share a lot of really great ideas on marketing. It's called Mindvalley Insights. And my team and I are very free about what we. What we share. So you can go there and basically learn about our copywriting process, how we write headlines. We just put up a blog post, for example, on how we optimize YouTube videos. And we are just starting. We have had this blog for about 18 months. We have a very dedicated audience, and we are just starting right now to launch products. So we have teamed up with a brilliant email marketer, Andre Chaperone. And Andre has a brilliant product called autoresponder Madness, which teaches people how to write autoresponders. Email marketing is one of the first things I did to build up my value. So autoresponder Madness is available there as well. So check it out. Tons of free content, some really cool marketing products that you can buy as well. And I think it will be amazing value for anyone. Yes.

And, you know, we'll send this episode to everyone in genius network in my 25k group, because Vishen's in the group. And this will give everyone, everyone an opportunity that doesn't know all this about Vishen to actually learn even more. And every once in a while, you will run into Vishen at different events because he is a person that believes in continually sharpening his axe, as any smart entrepreneur does. And he's in the business of teaching many other people to do it. So I think it'll be really cool. We should do another episode in 202050 to see if there's actually. If you've reached your goal of reaching.

A billion people, let's mark it in.

So I want everyone to check back in with us in February of 2050 because we may do another episode with Vishen. Yeah, no, you know, so what, what famous last words would you have for entrepreneurs out there that are startups and they're going through challenging times? Because one of the things you mentioned is that you went, you were in debt, your struggles. Anyone can transform adversity if they're resourceful, if they seek out the right knowledge, if they learn the right skills. Just hoping you're going to do well doesn't get you out of a mess. What gets you out of a mess is taking the right actions and being resourceful and doing what needs to be done. A lot of people that listen to I love marketing have very successful companies and many people that listen I love marketing. They want to be business owners, they want to be successful entrepreneurs. They're listening to it because they're looking for guidance and inspiration and strategy and direction and confidence. And that's what we want to provide. So any final things that you would say?

I would say. Well, I would say this right. I think one of the most important things I've learned about entrepreneurship is that entrepreneurship itself is not a goal. Entrepreneurship is a side effect of having the right goals. And I think why I've been able to build mindvalley is because I always started out not with the idea to build a company, but by really going deep and asking myself, what were my end goals? How did I want to. I asked myself three questions. What experiences did I want in life, how did I want to grow and how did I want to contribute to the world? Those were my end goals. Mind value, being an entrepreneur were a side effect. And it's very important to really identify those end goals. I mean, some people call it a bucket list, but that's really what pulls me forward and that's what keeps things in check. So I end up having a really fun life. I end up being able to spend a lot of time with my son who is 6 years old and without having this company distract me from all of that. You got to have the right end goals.

Yeah.

Awesome. Awesome. Love it. And by the way, I will mention, keep your eyes peeled for an upcoming issue of Success magazine because there will be a full page feature with Vishen in it that we are actually running as part of Genius Network, acknowledging it's industry transformer and certainly in the area of what Vishen is doing, he is the top in the world in this category. And I'm sure this is just the start. And so Vishen, on behalf of myself and Dean, really want to thank you for sharing what you're doing, how you're doing it. This is one of those episodes that I think people can listen to two or three times and continue to get wisdom and nuggets and value out of it. And so thank you. And then Dean, whatever you want to.

Say here, I think that was great. You're awesome. Just like awesomeness fest. There's lots of, lots of value there. I think it's. And you've done something that anybody can do. Anybody can systemize processes and you've just over the years taken a disciplined approach to execution and leaving a trail of systems and top level people executing those systems behind you. That's really, I think the lesson that we can all learn from this. So thank you so much.

Yeah. And to our listeners, I just want to encourage you to, you know, share your comments and also if you know anyone that is an entrepreneur in business, which you should share this episode with them, email it out and you know, send it and put it on all the different social media channels and share, share this because there's tremendous value for anyone that lives in the results economy. And also check out some of the products that mindvalley offers because there's a large array of things that will help you become a happier, healthier, wealthier human being. So thank you, Vishen.

Great. Thank you guys.

Thanks, Vishen.

Okay, bye guys.