Basel:So talk also about Bradford & Reed. What was the business model of your company and how did you get designers to sign up? I understand, initially, it was tough to design yourself so how did you end up getting a lot of people to design those cards?
Andrew: Sure. One of the reasons that I kept going, by the way, was that I used to read Forbes magazine and Forbes had the world's rich list, all of these successful people from all over the world, how they made their money and when you read their stories you see they had these big failures too or there's some guys who it maybe took them 20 years to really hit and so for 10, 20 years, they were just going at it and then one day, something worked out well and I said, "I'm not willing to work 10, 20 years and not see any progress, but I see that this is part of the process," and that's why I'm trying to do with Mixergy and we'll talk about that later.
Basel: Sure.
Andrew: So that kept me going and I said, "All these other guys had these setbacks and they find solutions that help them overcome." I said, "Well, I don't know how to design greeting cards." I don't even like greeting cards, to be honest. I hate picking them out at stores. I hate when I get them. Just shake my hand and say, "Congratulations" or "Happy Birthday" and let me move on. What am I going to do? Put this on a mantle and save it forever? Well, what we ended up doing was saying, "Look, we'll do the backend. We'll create the software that powers other people's greeting cards. All we'll do is we'll make it so easy that if you have a greeting card on-line, you just put our little bit of code on your website and we'll power it and make sure that when people see your greeting card and want to send it to their friends, that they could send it easily, that their friends will receive it and that everything will work fine and that you'll get paid." I knew how to make sales, so I figured, "We'll sell advertising in it for you. You don't even have to do that. We'll make sure that you get paid and that you have a greeting card that works."
Basel: Fantastic. And moving from the business model of Bradford & Reed to Mixergy, what's the business model of your site now and is it profitable?
Andrew: It is profitable. For a long time, there wasn't a business model behind it. It was just me spending money on it. It's a legacy that I want to leave. Then I said, I'm listening to all these guys build businesses and if I don't make Mixergy into a real business, it's going to look like it's, like I'm a hypocrite saying, "Business is great but not for me. I'm beyond business." So I started out by accepting advertising and ads did very well and then I said, "I don't want advertisers to pay. I want my users to love my stuff so much that they pay for it."
So I created a premium program where I basically say, I've interviewed, at this moment, on the website, it says 588 interviews. So I've interviewed over 500 people and they've told their stories of how they built their businesses. Wouldn't it be interesting to have them come back and not just tell me how they built it but show me? Show me how I can do it. Show me their computer screens and if they're really good at getting traffic, I want to see their computer screen and I want to see them. I want to see the article that they wrote that got traffic and then I want to see the e-mail that they wrote and sent to someone else to say, "You should link to this because this fits you."
Then I want to see the back and forth exchange and then I want to see, if it's social media that got them traffic, I want to see the first tweet that they sent out and understand why that worked and I want that for everything. If they're really good at SEO, don't just tell me their SEO plugins for websites, take me to the plugin website, show me the list of plugins that are available, show me why you're picking the one that you're picking, and show me how to configure it so that I can do it myself or that I could hand it to one of my employees and say, "Watch this and then do it yourself." Teach me how I can do, how we can do it at our company and that's the idea behind it and it's premium. I've got now, let's see, 588 interviews, 23 courses like the one that I just described and the model is you pay $25 a month and you get all past courses and all future courses as we build them.
Basel: And everything is on-line? There are no physical courses.
Andrew: It's all online. People will often just watch it on their iPhones or they'll watch it on their computer and do it along with the person who's teaching.
About the Guest:
Andrew Warner is an internet entrepreneur with a focus on startups.
When Andrew graduated from college, he founded Bradford & Reed, a company that ran a collection of startups. His biggest startups did online greeting cards. He was also known for launching Grab.com, an online game site that offered the chance at the world`s first billion dollar jackpot.
Now, Andrew is running mixergy.com where he invites proven entrepreneurs to teach how they built their startups.
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Creating a Business Model
Andrew Warner talks about he created the Mixergy.com business model.
