Episode #766 - How Christian Facey Leveraged His Gift Of The Gab To Revolutionize Gaming

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell. And what was your main skill, would you say that you had at that point? And what are some of the skills you developed quickly over the next two or three years?

Main skill was definitely the, I guess you could say the gift of the gab to persuade people that my ideas were good and worth pursuing. That, that was definitely the first skill I believe I picked up. It's the main reason why the first job that I went into was as a sales consultant at Google, as a strategist. Over the next couple of years, though, I would say the key skill that I gained was how to learn things quickly. And what I would do is I would lean into my weaknesses to figure out how to become smarter. That was the only thing that was on my mind for those first, like, three, three years or so. How do I become smarter to achieve the goals I want to achieve? I'll give you an example. And people think this is counterintuitive and crazy, but it definitely worked. So my main weakness at the time was dealing with large number sets, statistics, data sets. Like, I really hated it. And it was the worst module at my university course my second year. And I don't think I've said this part of the story in public, actually, but in my second year of university, I failed my statistics module. And rather than, well, don't get me wrong, it's a bit worrying, but I was like, okay, need the internship, but I need to improve statistics. So rather than doing a sales internship, I got an internship at Hewlett Packard as a business analyst where all I was doing was dealing with numbers. So I kind of blagged my way in knowing that I. It was literally like, if I fail this internship, which is based around the thing that I am worse at, I will flunk out of university. It will, it will, it will all fail. And I was studying for the statistics retake during that Hewlett Packard internship. Now everything worked out, but leaning into your weaknesses and like, putting a fire under me is how I learned things more quickly than I could have possibly imagined. And once I figured that out, everything was straight A's I did after that because I kind of knew what the, the catalyst was to make myself learn something. So over the next three years, like getting work experience and kind of hustling my way into things that I was less comfortable with that, that was the key skill. And then I used that to learn to code video games, which is how I ended up building audiomob with Wilfred.

Now, I'll give you, Christian, some feedback on what I'm hearing from you that you were doing, that you instinctively did right, that you know, and maybe had something or a lot to do with separating yourself from the other people that were around you. Number one, you talked about, you said I needed to. In other words, I didn't need to have somebody else come and give me something. I've got. You were, you were focusing on what you needed to do to move up. You had obviously had your eyes on moving up. You know, you shift your eye, I need to be up, whatever that is, and I've got to get better. And so rather that first of all, you got, you got your eyes up out of the world is beating me up. You know, that's where, you know, the thing about the knock on millennials is like they, the, the entitlement, you know, every. They want everything given to them and you know, they want to lay around and don't get a dole from the government or something and from their parents or whatever. The idea is like, I want to move up, I gotta do it. You know, and looking up, realizing you're the one who's gonna do it, because it's a real breakthrough in all of our career self development. When you say, you know, this, that they simply simple little phrase, if it's going to be it's up to me, you know, type thing, you know, like, I've got to deal. And you, and you know, you, you instinctively had that early on. And then the other thing I'm hearing from you that you did right, and it seems like it's permeated your approach to things ever since is you wanted to get it fast. I had to get that skill fast if I was going to move up, you know, See, so the speed, you know, the kind of goal to realize you need to develop some skills to allow that to happen and then to make it happen fast. You know, those are ingredients of people looking. Because what we try and do here, Christian, is it's winning is not rocket science. After, you know, after you've done it, you know, it's like, because before you do it, everyone says, no, that can't be done. That's stupid. You'll never do that. And then when you do it, it's like, well, of course you're going to do it. I knew you were always going to do it, you know, that was automatic, you know, you never can do it until you do it, you know, and so it's important to have, when you're on the downside of that, to have the right attitude and motivation and things in your mind. And so congratulations on that. And because we're identifying what separates not just the millennials, you know, successful millennials from the other millennials, is from the successful business people, or just people in general. And kind of by picking your brain. But now you got into coding and you got into coding. Why did you get into coding? Was it because you love, you know, you developed a love for gaming, you had a bunch of ideas for games, or why did you go on and develop the coding?

Yeah, so I wanted to do something more constructive outside of work. And I'm a gamer. I really, really like playing video games. And I had another hobby as well, music productions. I really like chilled out hip hop and jazz music, and I've been producing it on and off for forever now. And I really wanted to figure out how to combine gaming and music together. So I figured out a way of learning relatively quickly how to create video games, mobile games, specifically, because it's much, much easier and much quicker than developing a console game, at least back then it was, and streaming music into them. I just wanted to figure out how to combine my passions.

Well, and so to do that, you needed to learn how to code. And so you learn how what was. And I'm sure you wanted to learn how to code fast. So how did you do that?

Really, really, really good. Good point. So when I didn't really know what kind of code I wanted to learn, I just knew what kind of game I wanted to make. Now I have a very dark sense of humor, and I find games that annoyed my friends very funny. Like Flappy Bird, for instance. I'm not sure if you remember that, that get that tapping game where people like smashing their phones because annoying. So I initially designed mobile games that were annoying my friends. It was really funny and I needed a, like a code base that could help me very quickly deploy games in multiple, like coding formats. Right. And the, the code base is called hacks, like hacking dad, called hacks. And you can deploy HTML5. You could deploy code for Android games as well as iOS games. So I wanted to figure out like, if I wanted to make a, if I used hacks to make the game once, then I could just quickly spit out a game for an iPhone, for an Android, or for a website. And again, it's like pseudocode where you drag blocks together you open up the blocks and you can see all the different lines of code and then adjust the code strings. So that's what I learned. And it was just to make the games as quickly as possible. And I also used it to wireframe other ideas as well.

And so from that, how did you put that? You know, you said you're coding games for yourself. It's one thing to make it create a game. How do you get it sold and market the game and, you know, how did you expand, turn that into something about some income?

So the actual studio failed, but it developed into what is now audiomob, that is, you know, generating a revenue. So the initial idea was to create a. So I started digitizing like Japanese watercolor artwork and making these really chilled out games and then streaming like relaxing music I'd produce and those of artists I'd listen to into the game. And the idea was to try and figure out how to monetize the game. Now, at that point in time, I knew how to make games, but the whole kind of gaming monetization piece, I wasn't as well versed in that. And whilst the games I made, I've been told were good, I didn't master how to market the game or how to market the concept correctly. But what I kept getting a kind of a niggling feeling on here is that there were lots of music producers that wanted to get their music into games and there were lots of gaming developers that wanted music, right? They wanted cool music in the games or wanted to increase retention, I. E. They want their players to play the game longer. And this concept, we were like, okay, I don't really know how to monetize the games properly, but a thing I think could work is streaming audio ads into the game so that a player could continue playing the game rather than being blocked by video. They just listen to the audio ad. And for us, it was a simple concept. When me and my co founder Wilfrid, who I met at Google, and you know, we became friends and we're just like messing around with this tech that we, that I was building. We realized that there wasn't a single piece of technology that could stream an audio ad into a game. And we were like, well, there's billions of dollars in the mobile gaming space and billions of dollars in the audio ad space. Like, how the hell is this not connected? And when we found out the reason why, that's when we were like, okay, I need to leave Facebook at the time Wilfred needs to leave Google and it will raise money to make this thing happen.

So your experience with large companies was primarily Facebook, Google, what, for how long?

Yeah, yeah. So it was mostly Facebook and Google. So between those two, I think I spent six and a half, seven years. And then before that I did stints at some other tech companies. But yeah, most of my tech experiences in advertising at the time.

What did you learn going in? What did you anticipate going into those environments and what, if anything, surprised you? You know, what did you learn?

So I went into. So one of the main reasons I ended up like, looking to go to Google, outside of the fact that it was like at the time, the best company in the world to work for, and I think it's still in the top 10 or so, is I was at an FX brokerage and they were like, if you really want to make as much, if not more money than an investment banker and get all the skills and all the perks, like you need to sell ad space, you need to go to like a Google or I think Snapchat was on the rise at the time as well. And I remember going to. When I graduated from university, I actually got a job offer at Google and I rejected it to go into a startup. That startup was managed very badly and it failed. But I learned a lot and I went into Google thinking, okay, this is the big leagues. I've already got a job offer once. I'm going to need to be like, at the absolute top of my game in order to work there. So I went into Google thinking, like, it's almost going to be like the perks were going to be like the film, the internship, the film about Google. It is actually very similar, by the way, but I expected like the difficulty of the job to be like, unlike anything that I've ever, ever seen before. Now it was like that for the first three months, but then based on the, the, the cold sales experience I had from previous startups and companies I worked at, I actually fit in very, very well. And I ended up managing over just over $100 million in terms of a portfolio within the first 10, 11 months or so.

And what, what, how did you launch yourself in Google? What did you throw your energy behind that caused you to have that kind of success?

It was the same kind of drive that I had when I failed on my A levels, which is, I want to figure out now, not how to, you know, be someone that coasts and retires at Google, because again, it's a very good place to, you know, do work, do enough job, generate tens of millions of dollars for the company and chill. Or it was like that until, you know, the recent kind of changes in the industry. But for me, I was like, I need to figure out how to be the top salesperson. And I, I, I was watching. So I did things like SQL coding because a lot of salespeople don't like technical stuff. And I'm like, no, I want to learn SQL coding. So I did that. And that, that helps me mess around with like, large databases and analyze data in a more efficient way.

SQL. SQL? Or is it SQL?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. And I also was looking at things like, don't get me wrong, I don't agree obviously with Jordan Belfort and the things he did in the past and all that stuff. However, straight line persuasion method, at least the first four hours, really, really good. And Google's internal sales certification framework is so, so similar to the first four hours of straight line persuasion. Sounds getting A to B. And you've got all of these different variables that could steer you off the course. And you need to know what to say in the confines of your product, your features, what you can sell to get them on the straight line. Like that. Doing, learning and learning about sales. Before stepping into Google, like the summer before I stepped in, I just spent weeks doing this. It enabled me to accept the fact that a lot of sales conversations are the same and to like, really realize consciously the structure and then improve my sales game. So, so that, that massively helped me kind of, you know, become a top performer there.

And that was. Talk more about that. Just, just for a minute, talk more about that. Is that, that's a, you said the first four hours. Is that a course? Is that a movie? Yeah, yeah.

So it's a course and it gives you the, I won't say bare bones because it goes into a bit of detail, but how to, how to sell, how to realize the structure of a conversation, how to build gravitas within, you know, the first 10 seconds. And all that stuff is very, very true in terms of how you say hello on a call, the way you phrase certain questions, the way you challenge as well on a call, I'm. My favorite kind of sale as a challenger sell, I like to challenge the client rather than, you know, pansy and be too nice to them. Like, that's not my thing. So it gives you that kind of information and that kind of structure, at least within the first four hours, because that's what I glean from the most now.

So you move forward and was it, was it, how competitive was it at Google? You said you know, you wanted to be top. So was it very clear who the top people were?

Oh yeah. Put it this way, like I remember in the first kind of division that I was in, which was the SMB team, before I moved into agency, I was number two and I couldn't beat the person that trained me. So that was that, that was, that was quite a humbling experience. But there were some really heavy hitters in there. Now I'm not going to mention a name because I want to blow him up. Right. But, right. There was a really inspiring guy that I, that helped train me up. So this wasn't like the main person that trained me. He was like one of the assistant trainers, if you will. And I mean the guy's not even 30 yet and he is, I think he's managing like the global SMB business for a top 20 fortune company. Like it's insane. So some of the people that I joined with have really like gone up the ranks because they are like heavy hitting salespeople that can also manage, also technical, et cetera and it was great to work alongside people like that.

Yeah. And so what, what point did you reach where you said it's just time for me to go out on my own?

Really good question. So if I'm going to be honest, I've always, always wanted to start my own business. Even when I got into Google, like you remember I said that I rejected the drop off for Google to go into startups. I knew I wanted to figure out how to do it. So it was always in my, in my mind that I wanted to do it in terms of when to when I really wanted to like invest my savings and really like go on that journey. I would say it was a year into into Google when I started making my own games and I just really loved the idea of like running a gaming studio and, and figuring out how to kind of go out on my own. But I knew that I needed more traction and more validation of what I was trying to build before I wanted to make the jump. So yeah, I've always, I've always known that I've wanted to jump. It took a while.

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