Back when I used to flip Jay-Z tickets | Vlog #50

Yo, I used to flip Jay-Z tickets. Look, I made a spreadsheet. 4% margin, you know, 4%. That's money, that's money. GaryVee be proud. What up guys? It is future Ryan coming at you. The vlog today was Jim's first day. Gonna be our new sales executive. He's gonna be like doing SDR stuff, AE stuff. It's a hybrid role that we just created. Went through like a bunch of training, so I have like training documentation. We tried to train him on like the product, on the customers, who the customers are, who the company is, this entire space. I did 78 cold calls today. Calls that day, by the way. No big deal. Anyway, uh, glad to be back in the office, back from my trip and everything. We got a lot of catching up to do. Anyway, I hope you guys are out there working hard, being pioneers, being wagoners. Welcome to the vlog. I want to get you like up to speed with the company, familiarize you with like the space, you know, in general. One, the marketing kind of lead gen space, and obviously like the call tracking space specifically as well. And like who our customers are, end users, like who you were targeting, like the HVACs, like the SMBs. But that's only probably like 20% of our customers. Most of our customers, like you saw on like these calls and stuff, are the digital marketing agencies that are like managing spend for them. So like the HVAC guy would hire an agency, like, alright, you guys just take care of my AdWords and my marketing, Facebook ads and stuff like that. Hey, did you see Adrian Nam's email or chat in Intercom? Yeah, this is Ryan Shank over at PhoneWagon. Hey. How's it going, Eli? You don't have to hold down the fort. Mmm, still holding down the fort, man. Yes? 100%. That is like dope. Dude, that's dope. Hey guys, this is Ryan. I was on, I was actually on your website. I saw you guys do some PPC and SEO, and I just had a question. Are you guys— This is Ryan Shankle over at Foldlife. I used to flip Jay-Z tickets. Look, I made a spreadsheet. You used to flip Jay-Z tickets? Yeah, I was mad hood. I don't know if you can call making a spreadsheet and flipping Jay-Z tickets mad hood. I bought like mad Jay-Z tickets. I sat on them. See, I was like, alright, this is my cost. 4% margin, you know, 4%. That's money. That's money. GaryVee be proud. Yo, this is like when I used to like borrow money from my dad. Look at this. Like I had his credit card. He's like, what was the $3.35 at Best Buy for? Any money for me? I just sent the rent payment. I'll send the ticket money on Friday. Like regular vlog, regular vlog, and then— And then it gets there. Okay, so is that what you want to do? Look, and then we found out some news, blah blah blah. Kind of. Thing is, I wanna like, I want our videos to be like almost like, like I told you, like vlog like that and then boom, like me talking. So it's almost like a combined version. Okay. I want people to get more like actionable stuff out of it where it's like they can be key takeaways plus still kind of like vlog style. Yeah, I actually really like the edit today. Oh, thank you. I really like it. Thanks, bro. I'm gonna need you to— dude, I hate the audio in here though. The audio quality, that's why I honestly want to like fucking record Like when you record thumbnails, like I think these real YouTubers spend like a lot of time on thumbnails. Philip DeFranco, like that's a super edited thumbnail. I mean, they took that, blurred the back, put them on glow around, think, ch-ch-ch. I mean, it's not even like hard, but it's just they spend time on it. 20 minutes of Photoshop for sure, you know what I mean? Like per video. Mark Donner, you know. Plus. Alright, so we're gonna intro it here. Can I like plug in with like my— can I like— um, what if I just like Do it on QuickTime. You won't? So as you saw in this video, literally like I used to, like one, I've been just like selling things for a really long time. In the video you saw, what I used to do is I would like buy, this wasn't really good 'cause I don't think I actually made money, but what I would do is I would actually like buy tickets when they went on sale for like concerts. I would literally buy like 20 of them, spend like thousands of dollars. I would sit on them for like a couple months and then I would put them on StubHub and then I would like basically like sell them when the price went up. Closer to the concert time, 'cause a lot of times, you know, like the demand would go up closer to the concert as the concert got closer, sold out concerts and stuff like that. But everything I used to do though, it's like I would still be like selling things and things like that, but I would always sell a decent product, right? So it's like I wasn't selling snake oil. So I was always doing something, selling something. Some things didn't work out, but I never gave up. I always like continued to like just sell stuff. Back in the day, I used to like sell Juicy jumpsuits 'cause it was random and I heard that they were like super hot and in demand. And I would sell like Lacoste t-shirts, although I got into that and it ended up being like fake and I didn't mean to do that. But I would always be like doing something stuff or selling something and trying to buy in bulk and then sell individually and things like that. But a lot of times, it's like I would lose money and I would lose money and I would lose money. But I still would push through and keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it even though I was taking L's. And it's like I don't consider taking an L unless you stop because then you give up. But if you continue to battle through it and you figure out, all right, how do I get this product, either buy in bulk and then sell individually and then be able to make some margin because I'm able to use economies of scale to acquire and then sell it on a retail basis. But it's like, don't give up. Continue doing that stuff and figuring out like what you have to do in order to like make margin as you're doing those things. And it's like, as you're starting out, it's like even like Gary Vee talks about this, going to the garage sale, selling it on eBay. The only problem with that, by the way, it's like, is if you're selling on eBay, it's like you're paying— there's so many fees on both sides of the transaction that it's actually difficult to make money. I think eBay transaction fee is like 10%. StubHub transaction fees, both sides of the transaction, there's a buyer and a seller's transaction fee. It's actually difficult to make money. So those things, it's like kind of harder. But there's a lot of things that you can do on the internet to arbitrage stuff, right? Like you could basically throw up an Unbounce landing page, you can buy some AdWords words, traffic, or do some like organic rankings, then you can get leads to your websites, phone calls, and then you can sell those leads to local businesses because they want the leads, right? And if you're able to acquire the traffic and get a lead for say $15, you can sell that lead to someone else for like $20, $30, $40, or you can sell it to multiple people and have them bid on it. You know, it's a good experience because they're getting multiple bids, multiple quotes, and then you're able to arbitrage that traffic and then resell it in the form of a lead. So like there's tons of things that you can do, and that's what I used to do is I used to just like find out all these little like areas and like just try to sell stuff, lose money, lost money all the time. I was just like, it wouldn't work. And then boom, I was and find little nuggets of areas that would work. And I'd be like, holy crap, this is actually working. And I feel like those times that it didn't work and I lost money, I just viewed that as my education. I'm paying for those learning experiences. I'm going through it. I'm trying to, I'm figuring out the messaging to be able to acquire the customer that I'm gonna sell it to, or get the lead and get the product that I'm gonna then sell it to. And as you can see in this video, I literally was going through my old email back from 2011 of the ticket sales. And that's not the main point. The main point is that it's like, even though I wasn't making money sometimes, I just kept doing it. And then I figured out ways to actually make money. So that's the point. Is like, guys, don't give up. Like, whatever you're doing now might suck, you might lose money, you might take that— think you're taking the L, but you're really just taking the E, that education, right? And then you're gonna figure out how to actually make money later. So keep, keep, keep pushing through. I promise, like, you're gonna figure it out, you're gonna break through as long as you don't give up.