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Build a $1.2MM company at 18 y/o. AMA!

MB2

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I noticed you had a huge team, what do you do for project management / delegation of roles? I am 19 and built up a 3M business over the past two years, but I haven't been able grow past project management.

Would be great if you could expand on yourself and your process to build such a buisness !
 
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Alex Edson

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I noticed you had a huge team, what do you do for project management / delegation of roles? I am 19 and built up a 3M business over the past two years, but I haven't been able grow past project management.

We broke the business down into multiple components.

I don't know your business, but I can speak to my own experience ...

The talent management business primarily consists of two things:
#1). Acquiring clients (clients) Aka: Salesteam
#2. Retaining clients (clients). Aka: Customer Success Team

That's it! Get customers, keep them as customers. Everything stems from those two goals.

We built teams around both of these core objectives. For our customer success team, we built a team around benefits that YouTubers wanted (content productions services, brand deal services, graphic design services, etc.).

With regarding to building a sales team, the #1 tip I can give you is to incentivize healthy competition within your company. Have a sales leaderboard and reward your top sales performer with bonuses, vacations, recognition, etc.

Get people in your sales team competing to beat each other's numbers.
And cut the bottom 20% of your sales team each quarter.

With regard to technology systems, we were super old school! Our sales leaderboard was hosted on Google Sheets.
 

MrYoshi

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Incredible thread, following you now. Always good to learn from a sales guy as I'm trying to start an e-commerce business that leverages my skills as an SDR.
 
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WealthChaser

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Just leaving a bookmark here. I am attempting to start my own business via internet (first one) and very much look forward to your input. All the best.
 

Alex Edson

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Incredible thread, following you now. Always good to learn from a sales guy as I'm trying to start an e-commerce business that leverages my skills as an SDR.

No problem -- happy to help.

E-Comm like Shopify? Lots of amazing information can be found on YouTube (Alex Becker, Miles Beckler, etc.).

No. 1 tip: Learn everything you can learn about Facebook and retargeting.

3 months I ago I didn't know what a Facebook group was. Today, I've read probably 100+ ebooks on FB ads and can tell you more about it than Zuckerberg can (ok, maybe not .. but you get my point).

Once your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) is lower than your LTV (customer Lifetime Value), you have a license to print money!

No.2 tip: Read every sales book you can. Best 3 sales books I've read:

10X Rule by Grant Cardone, How I Raised Myself From Failure To Success in Selling by Frank Betteger, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
 

Alex Edson

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Just leaving a bookmark here. I am attempting to start my own business via internet (first one) and very much look forward to your input. All the best.

Thanks! Always happy to help other entrepreneurs.

Best of luck on the biz!
 
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WealthChaser

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Alex, I have a question for you. Since I know you do SAAS, how important is it to you to have a "perfect" product vs a marketable one?

For example, I know your latest product has to do with tracking emails. The little I know about email system from troubleshooting, it can be quite tricky to track down where the email actually landed. The receiving server may even receive the email and fail to place in the correct inbox. Because of this, I am sure it is difficult to be 100 percent "Sure" of every result.

How much does creating the 'perfect' solution weigh in on your decision making when starting a SAAS company? Has there been a case where you have abandoned before marketing because you believe the solution would be imperfect?
 

rowz

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Amazing story, Alex, and thank you for offering your time and advice here.

I'm looking to get started on a Youtube channel - do you have any little-known tips to gaining visibility on the platform? I've read and learned some such as:
1. Post multiple times per week
2. Catchy headline/thumbnail photo
3. Collaborate with other Youtubers

And while we're on Youtube, do you have any tips for small startups that do not have massive budgets in reaching out to influencers for collaboration?
 

Ethan_Scott

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At 18 years old, I was..

Damn good at computer games lol.

One hell of an introduction post, and I look forward to hearing more about your progress!

Quick suggestion for Mailtag!

LTV per customer looks a little too low to consider paid advertising, seems to me like focusing on building out a GREAT product and incentivising users to spread the word Dropbox-style like 1 free month per user referred etc could potentially lead to a viral snowstorm of new customers?

Thats just crazy good!
 
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Alex Edson

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Alex, I have a question for you. Since I know you do SAAS, how important is it to you to have a "perfect" product vs a marketable one?

For example, I know your latest product has to do with tracking emails. The little I know about email system from troubleshooting, it can be quite tricky to track down where the email actually landed. The receiving server may even receive the email and fail to place in the correct inbox. Because of this, I am sure it is difficult to be 100 percent "Sure" of every result.

How much does creating the 'perfect' solution weigh in on your decision making when starting a SAAS company? Has there been a case where you have abandoned before marketing because you believe the solution would be imperfect?

Great question.

The answer (in my opinion) is that it's not an "either .. or" type of answer.

Our goal is to build the best product we can and market it the best we can.

I don't really view it in terms of the standard "allocate 90% of your time on marketing and 10% on product development" (or vise versa).

In my view, you need to build a phenomenal product that is superior to your competition in every way. Until you've done this, you really shouldn't advertise or market your product. You need to have a reason for why your company is 1,000x better than the next guy's! Otherwise, why will your competition's users switch to your product?

For instance, we just rolled out email scheduling and email Pings today -- 2 major advantages our product now has over Mailtrack and other (now inferior) chrome extensions. Not only because we made them free (and our competitors are charging), but also because we made them super simple.

What's your advantage? Simplicity? Cost? Great support?

In our case, we chose to make all of them our advantage.
 

Alex Edson

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Amazing story, Alex, and thank you for offering your time and advice here.

I'm looking to get started on a Youtube channel - do you have any little-known tips to gaining visibility on the platform? I've read and learned some such as:
1. Post multiple times per week
2. Catchy headline/thumbnail photo
3. Collaborate with other Youtubers

And while we're on Youtube, do you have any tips for small startups that do not have massive budgets in reaching out to influencers for collaboration?

My first question would be, do you have what it takes?

A lot of people are trying to become influential and simply aren't cut out for being an influencer.

You must practice self-awareness.

In my own case, I recognized I didn't have a "narration voice", so I hired people to record the videos on our company's YouTube channel.

If you think you have great personality that others will enjoy watching, go out and make content!

Catchy YouTube video thumbnail and headlines are important, and so is optimization, but I wouldn't worry about this too much in the early days.

My focus would be on creating content worth watching.

.. I'd also recommend Jake Paul's course on how to become an influencer .. it's very good (full disclosure, Jake is a client of talent management firm I founded).
 
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Scuur

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Great Stuff Alex!

Glad to see someone who is so successful at a young age.

I have a couple of questions for you.

This is a multi-part question. What were your thoughts on Logan Pauls controversial video? specifically, if he was your client how much influence do you have on damage control? How would something like this affect your brand for representing him?

The other question I have I noticed your youtube channel has around 40k views per video. With a low subscriber account. How do you go about doing your research to get more views? Were the how-to videos a build up value drop for mailtag?


Also, a book I love that goes along with all the ones you mentioned is "Never split the difference".
Again thanks for the great info!
 

Danweebly

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I'm 17. What would be your advice for me. I'm currently building a blog which I hope to earn from AdSense.
 

Alex Edson

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I'm 17. What would be your advice for me. I'm currently building a blog which I hope to earn from AdSense.

My advice would be to not start a blog in which you hope to earn from Adsense.

Sounds like your priorities are way out of wack. You should start a blog with the intention to provide value to a massive number of people.
 
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Alex Edson

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Great Stuff Alex!

Glad to see someone who is so successful at a young age.

I have a couple of questions for you.

This is a multi-part question. What were your thoughts on Logan Pauls controversial video? specifically, if he was your client how much influence do you have on damage control? How would something like this affect your brand for representing him?

The other question I have I noticed your youtube channel has around 40k views per video. With a low subscriber account. How do you go about doing your research to get more views? Were the how-to videos a build up value drop for mailtag?


Also, a book I love that goes along with all the ones you mentioned is "Never split the difference".
Again thanks for the great info!

Thanks for your message.

To clarify: Our client is Jake Paul (not his brother Logan).

But to answer your question ... generally speaking, all publicity is good publicity.

Regarding the videos you're referring to (the ones which receives high views), we ran YouTube ads before making them publicly available.
 

Dunkafelics

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@Alex Edson I am going to ask you a different question.

How do you retain all the information that you get from the large amounts of books/posts you read per week?

I am actively looking into topics that will help me streamline the learning and retention process.

I am interested to know what you think.
 

amp0193

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Due diligence people...
Something is off here.

Yeah, he's promoting the hell out of his plug-in on multiple threads on the forum.

Or is there something else I'm missing?


FWIW, this particular thread had some pretty good nuggets, despite the above.
 

100k

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bahahah lol.

No, its not looking that good.

BTW... are you one of the girls he scammed Candice?

Sue his a$$, they are about to make it legal in NY.... so get your money!

 
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G. Wellthy

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Alex I’m concerned that literally any IP loaded to the google universe I have no ownership nor domain over.

Maybe that’s obvious and I’m naive.

For example, when I attach a YouTube link in an email from a private server, does google now have my contact’s information? And assuming this is the case if I’m sending from a gmail account, am I breaking confidentiality in a serious and amoral way?

I’m trying to wrap my head around how available-to-google my data is on YouTube
 

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