008: Learn From Your Clients with Josh Haynam

Do you know how to generate leads and drive sales today? Marketing is an important asset of your business, and this exactly is the question this show tries to answer. Hello, I'm Takis Athanassiou. I'd like to welcome you to a new episode of Leadership Execution Podcast, a podcast for leaders who'd like to make a difference. My goal is to inspire you to take the initiative to change what no longer works and provide you of the necessary strategies, approaches, and tools to achieve that. Without delay, let's start with today's topic. Hello everybody, Takis Athanassiou here. Welcome to the Leadership Execution Podcast, podcast for leaders everywhere in the world. If this is your first time listening to this show, then I'd like to thank you for being here and I hope to have you on the show again. Now let's start today's episode again. Without delay, I'd like to introduce you to the guest, Heinon. Josh is a young entrepreneur with many great ideas about startup business and content marketing. He is also the co-founder of eDirect Quiz Builder, a SaaS platform aiming at changing the way content marketing is done until now. eDirect is a platform of software tools to generate more leads and sales using quizzes, polls, and giveaways. It's also a tool I use a lot already for my site with great results, and I'm excited about this. It is fun, useful, it directly provokes many interactions and gives results. That means more leads in common sense. It is only fair to tell you that I am an affiliate partner of Direct Quiz Builder because I do believe that this game-changing software can provide real results for your business. But let's better hear what Josh have to tell you today. We will talk about quizzes, startup businesses, SaaS software, conversion and sales in a digital world. First of all, I'd like to welcome you, Josh, on the Leadership Execution Podcast.

Yeah, thank you for having me on.

How are you today, Josh?

I'm doing well. I'm doing well. It's been a good week so far. We're getting a lot accomplished. We're just a few weeks away from the holiday break, so that's always nice to look forward to, but things are still going strong, so it's always a good time of year right around now. It's a good time for kind of jumping into bigger projects. So yeah, doing really well.

Okay, first of all, I'd like to thank you for being here, George. I have so much to ask you, but knowing how busy you are today, I try to limit my questions to some basic ones. And one of the first things I'd like to ask is, I'd like to know who George Heyndom is and how do you start with Interact. Can you tell us something about your background?

Yeah, yeah, so who I am, you know, in terms of startup things. I started my first company when I was 15 years old, so I've been doing that for a really long time. Interact is my 4th company. The other ones did okay, but they never took off the way that this one has. In terms of who I am as a person, I would say adventurous is the word that describes me best, and I think it carries over into my business because when you're starting a company of any type, It's definitely an adventure. You're setting off into the unknown. You don't know what's going to happen. You don't know what you're going to have to encounter. You don't know how long it's going to take. You don't know what the road's going to be like, any of those things.

Mm-hmm.

I actually really enjoy that. I enjoy the unknown and forging ahead and figuring things out, especially with Interact because what we're doing is quizzes for marketing, which no one's ever done before. 99.9% of our customers have never done it before either. So we're figuring it all out together and we're really inventing a new thing, which I enjoy thoroughly because there's so many challenges when you're doing something that is truly new that you just never even think of before you get to them. And so it's just a constant series of running into things you don't know how to do, figuring out how to do those things. implementing a solution and then repeating that process. And I really, really do like doing that, not only in my business but also in other areas of my life. I love adventuring, I love traveling, I love exploring new things, trying new things, trying new foods, all that kind of stuff. So it's all kind of connected.

Excellent. I know what it means to experiment with new trends because I come from an educational background, so I know the power of questions and being Because I've been in the consulting business for a long time, I know what kind of quizzes can interact, what kind of interaction the quiz can make, and that is very innovative, and it is the things that attract me too much to the Quiz Builder.

Yeah, I think the whole aspect of asking questions is really important and something that we have kind of lost sight of. We put so much emphasis on being the loudest person in the room, on being the most eccentric and affluent person in the room. But in reality, no one really cares about those things. I think what people care about is, first of all, themselves, and they care about the fact that you care about them. And asking questions is an amazing way to break through the walls. If you consider the internet to be some sort of wall between people, you can break through by just asking questions. You can ask people about their interests, what they like, what they don't like. Those types of things. Then it becomes a conversation, which is very different from somebody trying to do marketing where you're portraying yourself as this great thing and you're trying to get people to buy your products because of that. I think it's so much more effective just to ask people what they would like, what they're interested in, and what they care about. That's why I think this is such a game changer because instead of— You're not just blasting out a message and hoping it sticks. You're taking the time to understand people, understand what they're trying to get into, and that is very, very different.

Excellent. I think, George, that one of the main strengths of today's marketing is building communities, and I believe that eDirect is exactly the perfect tool for building a community around special interests. I mean, not only for niche marketing, not only for promoting things, but it is a tool that you can really gather interest and find what people makes— to make them better, for instance. I mean, in training we use a lot of quizzes in order to— a person realize what he he is at the moment, and I believe Quiz Builder is exactly the perfect tool for that. So what I said is that I believe Quiz Builder is a perfect tool for community building. What do you say for that?

Yeah, I totally agree. I think the thing about a quiz is that it's very good at starting a conversation. Because once somebody takes a quiz, let's say it's a personality quiz, they're going to be curious about their results and they want to talk about their personality type that's prescribed by the quiz. If it's some sort of assessment where there's correct answers and incorrect answers, they're going to want to talk about how they can improve. If it's a scored quiz where you're giving them a score based on how well they do, they're going to want to talk about that. So it's an amazing way to get the conversation going, and I've seen some really incredible examples of this. Where people make quizzes and they put them out onto their Facebook pages or Facebook groups or some sort of social media platform. And the conversation that ensues around the results of the quiz is very community. It's very pulling people together. People are talking about how they got the same result. They're talking about how they got different results. And it's really sparking a discussion.

That's great.

That's a super powerful thing. When you can get people talking to each other, talking to you as the company that creates that quiz, that's what you want. You want it to feel less like an announcement or a flyer and more like a community forum because a community forum is where real change can happen. It's where real mindset shifts can happen and that's what you're trying to do with marketing. You're trying to get people to— Think about your product in a different way so that they'll want to buy it, and that's what you can do by using a quiz to spark that initial conversation. Exactly.

I think this is a critical question because marketing is about shifting. Marketing has similarities with training because the aim is transformation, a transformation of seeing your product in different ways. Or applying your products in different situations. And in training, it's exactly the same to change a behavior toward a desired one. So what I think that the main strength of Quiz Builder is this spark of interest that can initiate a conversation, and from that startup, you can make another marketing campaign without any problem with that.

Yeah. I mean, it's a great way to gather information and then use that information in a way that informs the rest of your marketing. So since you know so much about your audience once they take a quiz, because they're answering all these questions that are personal about their interests, then the rest of your marketing campaigns are much more relevant to the actual audience that you are already going after, that you're already reaching. So I think it's a very powerful tool in terms of making sure your message is Relevant and on brand and actually connects with people the way that they want to be connected with.

Exactly what I believe. Let me draw you to another direction now. I think that your personal habits have tremendous output in your work and you said that eDirect is your 4th venture by today and I hope it's going to ensure many more. But what it means that what make you tick, what are your daily habits? To be continuing to do what you do?

Yeah, I have a very strict set of daily habits at this point. Strict but flexible. Strict in the sense that I am usually up at about 4 AM and then I work on a focused task after I do some journaling and praying in the morning. After I do that, I go to the gym. And I work out or I go to yoga depending on the day and then I come back and I continue working on my focus tasks. So focus tasks for me are things like writing or working on our product or sending out memos, sending out emails, that kind of thing where I really need to be focused and have my whole headspace in it because before 7 AM most other people aren't awake so you kind of get that quiet time to get get that stuff done. So by 8 o'clock, I've already worked on focused tasks for a couple hours and been to the gym. Then I go into my office and start my regular day. My regular day mainly consists of meetings. So I'll be on podcasts, I will be meeting with my team, I will be meeting with potential partners, customers of ours, talking through the product, how we can improve the user experience. All sorts of things like that. So typically my day consists of somewhere between 4 and 10 meetings that go from about 8 AM to 3 to 5 PM depending on the day. And then once I am done with my day, I will head back home and I usually arrange some sort of event either with friends who I live with or friends who are around. And just kind of disconnect from the day. Sometimes it's watching a basketball game, sometimes it's going on a jog with a friend or playing basketball, anything like that, just so that there is something different going on that's not all work. And then I'm usually in bed pretty early, by about 8:30, 9 o'clock PM. So that's my typical day, and yeah, it starts at 4 AM.

Excellent, because I do believe that without discipline it is very difficult to cope with every challenge you may have during the day, and the venture is certainly one of the difficult challenges around. What I'd like to ask you is, as a founder of eDirect Quiz Builder, what would you say for your product? I mean, it is an innovative product, but it is It takes a lot of time to find the right questions and the right quiz to unlock the right response. What more would you say about that?

Yeah, and it's something that I'm really, really, really pouring into right now. I'd say about 75% of my time personally is going into addressing that issue at the moment. So the way that we're working on addressing it is twofold. The first way is if you want to use a template, so you want to use a quiz that's done for you, we're building a better system to deliver you the right template. So if you are, let's say, a food blogger, we can deliver you a template that's exactly what you would like to see. So if you are a paleo food blogger, we have a paleo quiz for you. What type of paleo eater are you? Something like that. Rather than presenting a whole bunch of templates and making you choose between all of them because that can be overwhelming and confusing. And then once you do get into the process of building the quiz, whether you're going from a template or you're building one from scratch, we're doing a complete guided walkthrough where for each step, you know, each— the title of each question, each result of the quiz, we've got a prompt that tells you Here's kind of the thought process for thinking about what to put in here, as well as this is where it goes in your quiz and this is the purpose of each element. So we're kind of deconstructing what we have, which is a great tool for building quizzes that's very self-service and there's not a lot of guidance. We're pulling it all apart and reconstructing it with guidance built into every single step so that there's no point at which you're confused or lost or don't understand what element you're working on. And then additionally, we're baking in all the information that we've learned. You know, we've been doing quizzes for 5 years. We were the first quiz builder that existed, and we've been doing this so long, we've learned a lot of things about what to do with each element. And so we're actually adding those recommendations into the process as you're building the content. So then it's not only guided and you know exactly where you are, but you know exactly the best practice for each element. And we're going to kind of put everything back together in a very cohesive way that has a nice progress bar. So you see how far you've gotten on the quiz and how much you have left to do. And it will kind of recreate that process to be much smoother.

Excellent. I find it, the part of templates, very useful for my purposes because I use custom templates on my site as well. And the branch logic, it is something that I find particularly interesting in segmentation of my audience to things, to segments I didn't realize that I had before, and that is very powerful for me. To realize that I have an audience I never properly addressed to. And I find it that very automatically doing it without even— with 4 or 5 hours of making a quiz. And that is most impressive because usually you need a lot of surveys and a lot of research behind that to get these kind of results. At the end of the day.

Yeah, I think it's really powerful how much data you can get from a quiz because especially if you're using something like branching or conditional logic where people see a different set of questions depending on their answers, you can get people into very specific categories and that's really important because, you know, like you said, you may discover that you have a whole part of your audience you didn't even really know about and that's important. So if you need to write any blog posts for that new audience, you can do that and you can address people for who they are rather than kind of shooting in the dark, which is much more effective obviously if you're speaking to the actual people who you are already reaching.

Of course, for me it is very powerful because as a blogger I like to provide as much value to the people I serve, so it is very important for me to know that there are people that I didn't have knowledge about them, and that is very refreshing to know about that. Anyway, without delay, I'd like to ask you one last question if you have the time. If you have to give one piece of advice on your other trainers, what would that be, George?

I think the one piece of advice that I constantly have to remind myself of is that the only way you can learn is from the customers you have or the customers that you want to have. There is nothing that will help you get along as quickly as sitting down with the people who use your product, who are thinking about using your product, and talking to them in a very open and candid way about how they would use it or how they are using it. Or what they find confusing, watching them go through the product. You can learn so much because like it or not, the way that you think as an entrepreneur, as a founder, is very different from the average human and you're selling to the average human. So you really need to understand better what they actually do with your product so that you can make it work the way that they want it to.

Okay, I'd like to thank you, Josh, for all of this expert advice because it is very useful, very refreshing to know that there are people that they really work on the edge of the things. And I believe this is one of the things that no one else have figured out how to commercially do it. So I'd like to thank you very much for the interview. Yeah, thank you. And I'd like to ask you to keep up the good work.

I appreciate it.

Thank you very much. See you around. Bye-bye now. Hello, I'm Takis Athanassiou. I'd like to welcome you on the new episode of Leadership Execution Podcast, a podcast for leaders who'd like to make a difference. My goal is to inspire you to take the initiative to change what no longer works and to provide you with the necessary strategies, approaches, and tools to achieve that. Without delay, let's start with today's topic.