How To Create a Course in 5 EASY STEPS - Episode #106 Justin Burns

all right welcome to another edition of the social proof podcast where we find the dopest people to do the dopest stuff and it's very interesting because um today's guest has been uh educating me and i was just sharing with you i don't think we've had let me let me let me back it up let me think let me think i don't know if we've ever had a techie on the show someone that's like built and sold an app for sure knowing this building sold nothing right right technology base but um yeah you're definitely the first um app developer maybe oh i'll be mad at somebody like yo i did it i was i was on that drug before that oh for sure but you're the first person to teach me because this was uh maybe a year ago yeah year year yeah about a year ago um we sat down shout out to marco russell um he connected us right yeah yeah yeah yeah shout out to marquel yeah but for those that don't know uh like introduce yourself to the people so we can get this thing going cause i got mad questions yeah yeah yeah what's going on everybody i'm justin burris i'm the founder of maestro which is an online course platform uh i've actually interestingly enough been in the tech space only for the past eight years yeah only only years yeah i mean i've only been a full-time entrepreneur for nine nine yeah entrepreneur for nine years but see what you gotta understand is like a lot of people who are in this field of technology like developing software doing those things like they've been in the game for i found you know most of their life or they went through college and they had some level even if they dropped out of college they've had some level of experience me i just kind of got into it about eight years ago um so when you say you got into what were you doing before so first of all i'm a fast forward then we'll rewind yeah um give me some of the stuff you did in the space because you built you built two you sold both of them you sold two apps that you developed right i sell one so i sold one and i currently have maestro you're currently on my it was something else you were telling me that you developed where or it was a part of the other software yeah so we so we actually before that well you call them apps right that's what most people know bro most people call them apps right really what i do is call it's called sas so it's called software as a service so most people know what the software apps are of things are on your phone i mostly deal in like the you know what we call like the cloud computing space which is mostly you know like uh where people use these apps on their desktop computers you can use them on your phone but mostly they're known as software as a service gotcha software as a service yeah so it's a software that serves who whatever client yeah whatever market you want us we serve you know uh we serve like small business owners mostly who use like we're mostly like a marketing kind of software technology so god you got you so for one i don't feel like i have the brain for it you know i mean like stuff don't compute no pun intended it doesn't compute with me like that like when you you start talking about the nano techs and putting all this stuff together so have you always been even before you started this field of study were you always like kind of like the technological person bro no no that wasn't that wasn't me no no man where i actually started is interesting man like you know i always tell people like most people when when you get out of cot when you get out of high school right most people in high school it's like you're trying to define your life story you know you go i want to be a lawyer i want to be a doctor i want to do all these things me i know what the hell i wanted to do i didn't even go find i i mean and i and i didn't want to force it either like that was the thing like i didn't want to force it i didn't want to put myself in a position because i saw so many people doing things they really didn't want to do with their life so in that regards i didn't realize at the time i was like making a really good decision kind of waiting um and so fast forward i kind of worked a bunch of jobs hopping from this job to that job you know my friends used to make best they used to say we're going to see where justin gonna get fired again that was yeah that was me man like i was that guy horrible employee everything that was me bro um and i was hopping i mean i didn't even have you know some people they go into a field and they stay in that field but i was just hopping around whatever whoever man whoever gave me a job i was that was official for me like that was like i was just in i was like okay pay how much okay i don't care what it is we gonna do it uh yeah yeah and and so what happened is is um i remember i was a loan officer i don't know how i got i was fired about a month after that i couldn't survive that game uh did you go to college no i didn't no you went to college you know what here's the thing i always tell people like you know how some people say i didn't go to college because i couldn't get the funding this is a true story i didn't go to college because i didn't think i was smart enough to go to college that's how bad it was for me i didn't think i was good enough to go to college so i didn't even try like well i'd even try to get the loads it wasn't and my mom she was pushing me to go hey you need to go do something with your life and i was like i just don't feel compelled to you know get all these loans because i don't even know what i want to do with my life right and so fast forward what happened is is i was fired from this job i was fired from this jobs firefighter shop and then i landed in this sales job that really just shifted the whole thing for me uh you know and i met this dude named mike right shout out to mike man the whole opposite like this but mike was like my greatest mentor right he was this really cool old-school black dude walked around you know with this like he he was just on it he was one of the greatest sales people i had ever met in my life um where were you working at this point this was a company called usa it was a cell phone company and at the time i was 20 yeah i was probably about 20. gotcha i was 20. so i was you know i was just young he was like look i'm gonna give you a chance he said you're going to be selling cell phones and i know again i just got the job because it was paying he said he's like commissions that was the first time i literally heard commit the word commission the word commission the word commission i was like what is that oh okay if i make some side money it's good that's what that's what commission meant for me was you actually made some side money but i was i just wanted the alley that's what my mind was that my mindset was at the time so i got this job and he sat me in the office he said justin i want to tell you something he said come here come and come here because you know you young man your mind is still young and you ain't set in your ways yet he said i wanna bring you outside he brought me outside it was a sales floor and it was probably about 50 people in the store and he said man this is one of the busiest stores in the country and he said but i'm gonna tell you something most people are lazy he said i'm not trying to be offensive to anybody but most people don't want it bad enough and he said if i can instill that in you if i can instill in you not just the hustle but the strategy of knowing how to move knowing how to get it knowing how to push yourself out of your comfort zone and i hadn't had a man up until that point because my father was absent in my life i didn't have a man speak to me like that so for me it was like speaking to my soul on a deep level and even though i hadn't heard it you know we all feel that gut level it was like this gut feeling that was speaking directly to me at the time and i felt it man and i was like let's get it right right you know so for this like there was no much like ambition there was no ambition i mean well let me take that back i'm gonna take that back because i did used to uh work at best buy that was one of my other jobs and i kind of realized the ambition selling speakers man like they put me in a car department i don't know what i was back there doing right because i didn't know how to hook up really a lot of speakers but i knew how to sell them but i was okay at the time right so i would get these speakers and i would resell them uh because they would just give them to me right they would just give us the speakers right and so the boston time was cool he's like yeah you could you guys could take them whatever so we would take them and i would resell them when i would resell them my mom was like what are you doing like i was probably about i was like 16 and i was making about an extra four grand a month just doing that yeah i was making more on my i was actually making more selling the speakers than i was hourly i think i was only making like 1200 a month i was making like four grand a month suddenly speaking so that's kind of where i realized ambition but see the thing is before i even got into entrepreneurship i hadn't even seen an example of entrepreneurship so i didn't know what to label it i didn't know what it what it looked like right so anyway fast forward to to mike man this is where i experienced a level of success and he was he was he worked there too yeah he was the manager the manager yeah he was the one who gave me look the other people don't want to hire me he gave me he just he saw something in me that i didn't see in myself right and so for me i'm sitting there and i'm like why is this man giving me this job i suck at jobs let's see how you know i was counted out of time too like how long am i gonna have this thing um but i always took his words he always taught me this he said justin when is the last time you read a book and i said man school that's when you posted read books right naive he said man self-education is what's going to make you rich and wealthy and also even if you work in a regular 9-5 it's going to make you higher up it's going to help you develop skill sets that's going to make you more money this is mike talking this is my talk so hold up so he's did he accomplish some level of success or he was just like yeah mike was that dude man mike manager at the cell phone company man mike was making six figures at that job you know he was he was and before that he had been in the sales industry for a while and see i didn't understand sales at the time i didn't understand the psychology of sales and and so i went to the library the next day and i got a jim wrong book right he changed my life changed my life in the four seasons the four seasons four seasons left yeah and i and i remember man um i didn't have a lot of money at the time so i saw the cassette joint we still had to you know to see that you sound old now right like you're like dang i used to be a cassette player right so i i saw this cassette player i mean cassette tapes at the library man so i rented them i had an old school cassette player in the drawer at the crib so i went to the house grabbed it and i started listening to a man every day and i started doing exactly what he told me to do man and out of that position from commission i became the number one sales person in that organization for three years straight wow yeah and and i was 19 and listen my mother never made over 25 000 in a year taking care of two kids right i was making 15 000 a month selling cell phones absolutely crazy man so it it it completely shifted my paradigm it changed my level of thinking and it just show i was like here's this kid without a college degree never barely made it grew up on the south side of chicago right who came from a really like bad environment right like came from a really really bad environment i couldn't believe i was making this money but mike didn't stop there mike started teaching me the game and he was one of my greatest mentors man and and teaching me a lot of stuff are you still talking mike now i haven't talked to mike in a minute man i gotta hit up my own dinner or something right i gotta oh i owe mike a lot man it was he was he was a great mentor to me he was one of the the the mentors who really spoke into me and that's the thing man and i always tell people this like i was coachable though i'm pretty sure mike had told that game to a lot of people because he was that type of dude he was an open giving dude but for me i hadn't had mentorship i hadn't seen that i hadn't talked had somebody who cared enough about me to say hey you need to go grab this book it's going to change your life years down the road and just invest in yourself so how long did you work there at the cell phone store i was about three years did you learn tech stuff there no not at all i'm waiting for the time [Music] i always tell people the story is always interested in how i built a tech company because i didn't do it the traditional way i'm not your cu i'm like when people like talk to me now they hear the tech talk but i'm also able to relate because that's not my background right i just understand it enough to have a company now right because i dedicated myself to the craft i dedicated myself years of study and that's what most people don't understand see when you when you have something you want to focus on it could be tech it could be like we look at these guys like elon musk my boy like learning from them but like that's what they did for years man they they were so focused for so many years on their craft that it became an obsession so that's what it became for me right um so three years cell phone company then what so after so here's what happened i got fired from that child eventually did mike fire you no man mike ain't doing like that's what i said so let me let you go look i'm like man let's stop talking about that no bike ain't nobody like that uh it was just you know the company has sold and they made a lot of changes as company do and and it gets you uncomfortable but here's what happened i met this guy who i so i initially sold a cell phone to and i call it like the destiny moment see we all have this destiny moment we all have it you could be you know in line somewhere talking to somebody somebody and mention something about an opportunity and you have two op you have two options your skepticism radar goes up which it all does for us or this what i call this intuition thing comes up right where it's a mixture of them both and that's what people don't understand about intuition is that usually intuition is mixed with that there's a level of fear skepticism all in that they looking for you know the skies to part before they go man i'm supposed to be doing real estate man i'm supposed to be doing this opportunity see for me it was just like oh opportunity let's go like you know so he so he was telling me about this thing i was sitting there at my computer my workstation had my uniform on and he said hey man this thing is the internet you need to look into it what year is this this is probably i don't know what year was it had to be 2007. how to be 2007. how old are you now justin 34. you're 34. okay god you got yourself about 07. yeah this internet thing this internet thing all i heard was the internet and i mean i knew the internet i mean we had myspace right there yeah for sure you know you remember my space we had facebook was lit i don't know if you can get in facebook i couldn't get it i didn't go to college so they let me at that right right but but black you know uh black planet myspace the memories now man so you know here's the thing right so so he said internet he said here's the thing i'm doing this thing called social media and i'm selling these packages to social media to people on you know in these companies but i'm also selling these products on ebay and i'm selling all these different products all the packages he was selling he was just teaching people how to basically see at them times in 2008 or 2007 all you had to do was say you was a social media consultant and you got paid you got you got to check kelly yeah because companies didn't understand what the internet and what social media was nobody really understood it so when you said like hey i'm a facebook consultant back in those days you just got cut a check if you knew how to sell yourself interesting yeah so something's a little market i was lame that was a little lame you know what now that i think about it because um there were people back then that were building myspace pages for you yeah yeah well i guess it never stopped because some people will run your instagram and things of that nature so yeah it's still it's just more common but see back in the day it's kind of like if you were to get into bitcoin years and years ago right or you got into the tech space years ago i mean it's still a good both of them still got good opportunities but if you was the first one in there it's like man i just want to pay you for like just show me the game so that's how a lot of companies were doing so when i heard that he was like man you can make money online you can sell digital products he was just giving me the game sitting there and i don't know why i don't know because i had people like do this he go real estate um and nothing really perked up but when i heard the internet he said something that changed my life he said here's the thing with the internet justin you can make money while you sleep and you can and people from all over the world can buy your programs and products and i don't know why he said and he said that he said there's people in australia buying products from me you ain't got to be a local based business he said you can literally have products and sales coming in like this every single day from the internet you can sell a wide variety of things so what was he selling at that point at the time i mean at the time i didn't believe i was i thought he was pushing weight on the end of that right but but like for me uh he said he was selling these things called ebooks which are digital yeah he was he was selling ebooks in oh seven because back in in 2007 um you know video was really hard to kind of come by right like you can have video trainings but you had to pay you had to pay arm and left cameras are like 10 grand like if you had if you had a video course she was cool but most back in the day it was cool if you had an audio course or if you had you just recording like you you know with just the ebook so he was selling ebooks and i said i e what like i didn't even i was i i hadn't outside of my space and and black planet like i really didn't do anything on internet i ain't even purchased anything on it that's how much like i was like not like i didn't understand any of these things do you remember who that is now i wonder where he's at today no we still talk yeah yeah shout out to brad my man brad yeah yeah he he still does internet things man but he he's the first one who showed me and so what happened is he gave me this opportunity he said look um i remember actually what happened is i got fired from my job right so of course of course it was inevitable he said man you ever thought about kind of like you would work for yourself but before you do that you should transition into something else so i got this company out in california we're actually selling these social media packages i could teach you everything now here's the caveat though he's like we ain't got a lot of money we just a startup sub like that was his company that was his company so i was like bad i don't like i was like i was like i was like will i ever get paid he was like i just want to know was the check gonna be cut eventually right um and he said yeah man we we will eventually pay you you know with this look we're just a startup we're getting started so i remember i called my mother and i was like mom is this because you know i don't know any better right that's like you know sometimes you tell your people they you thinking they're about to be excited they do not at all be excited so what are you talking about brother go get a job right first do that first off bro this is a scam get it together right um and so that's kind of what happened right like she was just and and shout out to moms you know she was one of my greatest supporters at the time but she was just being like you know what any loving mom would do right she was just like you need something stable you need i don't want to see you you know fail i don't want to see you so all those fears kicked in and again like i said before you have this level of that's called intuition and then you have the skepticism radar right and so for me though it was this intuition because i couldn't for some reason man i was sitting in bed and i would obsess and i could not stop thinking about this thing called the internet and i was like at the time it was really the wild wild west it's still the wild wild west today but at the time it was really the wild wild west and i was like i was obsessed and it was like the first time in my life because up until that point i hadn't said i want to be a police officer or an attorney or do this it was the first time my life that i felt connected to something and excited about something the first time and i just couldn't stop thinking about it man so i would go on the internet i would research all this stuff and i just told my mom i said look um i'm gonna make this this decision to get on this plane and go work at the startup company she was just so sad i want you to go to college and she meant well yeah but my destiny was just way way bigger and at the time it was scary because i was the first i was the first person in my family to do that yeah it was the scariest moment in my life and i never forget it i had anxiety i had panic attacks i didn't know what i was going to do they wanted you to where were you living at this point i was in chicago yeah i had a i had a small little 700 a month apartment on the south side of chicago uh and here's the move to silicon valley and it wasn't even come back it was in san diego man san diego yeah but he was like yo i gotta i got a bed for you in a small room you know so are we offering any like any compensation up front man nothing nothing i had to get i had to fly my way out there i it was it was it was it was rough first one the audacity of him to ask someone to just fly out in hopes that you make some money right but shouts out to him because he was still building his company he's just you know he believed in it so you believed in it yeah yeah and and and what happened from there is man it actually ended up working out because months later we had got a big contract i got paid out of that um months later months later yeah i had to it took a couple months there's a period there's a look there's a little how did you eat how did you you know i had a little i had it it didn't take you know look bro i'm from the south side of chicago so you know i had a couple dollars you know how you you know you say hey man i got a couple dollars i know how to get but you know i i watch mines i know how to get by and at the time i didn't have any kids i didn't have a wife so for me i just knew how to you know survive and and i don't know man i felt this like gut thing inside of me that was like man something is about to happen man it's about to go crazy so let me ask you about that feeling man because there's a lot of people who have that feeling but they have that feeling about something different every couple months right so how would you say you differentiate that like because you felt like you just felt something you're just laying awake at night and it's like godly i just yeah this internet thing is stalking me right now stalking my dreams yeah um what do you say to the people who they might have that feeling but that feeling continues to change can you describe yeah i think i think man like you're gonna have that feeling about multiple things right it's really the focus that's going to take you there and you when you get obsessed about something like when you get steps about that one thing and you tune everything out right you start to look at that thing very very differently so for me that's what happened honestly for me i bounced around from thing the thing for years until i found the tech space so for me i didn't just like oh we built the social media company and i went up i'm success that's not what happened um i mean from there like my mom what happened is my mommy got really sick and i had to come back to chicago and take care of her so um you know my man gave me a little bit of you know cash he was very fair about it uh but i was on my own after that and so i had built all these relationships in california and so i was like all right well i'm gonna try to make some money i got some money to hold me over for the next six months so i started really trying my hand in everything while you're back in chicago why back in chicago why couldn't you work for the company remotely from chicago um because at the time there were some you know differences with the partners with what they were doing because i didn't own any of the company so you know they were gonna probably go on another direction you know real real soon so i wanted to do at the time i was seeing all this stuff i'm like okay it's time for me to kind of venture out and really do my own thing and i was like a year later and so i started man i started learning this thing called affiliate marketing while i'm selling other people's products and um i was just doing everything that's interesting though because you got introduced to like the ebook space and now that you under now that you're in it it's probably now you see all these opportunities where you can be an affiliate yeah yeah but if you're if you're blind so if you're not like exposed to certain things you don't even know that there's opportunities yeah that's why i think the most important thing we can have is associations and environment bro right you gotta here's the thing i always tell people man experiences is the new currency experience is the new currency see we view like we got to make money as a new currency for me it's opportunity you know like even me like for example recently i just moved to atl right i had to get out of my old environment because in chicago i have a really close-knit family we're all closed we're always together and it was real hard to leave that environment it was hard you know but i told i had to tell my moms after the conversation my nieces and nephew i had a conversation with my sister this isn't about me moving away from you guys i'm only two hours away this is about me getting out my comfort zone so i can have experiences yeah because it's hard to leave though i mean um you have you you left already you went to california when i was that i was going back and forth to chicago's i hadn't officially moved accountable yeah i think man i think man the hardest thing man is comfort zones yeah when you get that's that's that's what stops a lot of people from their dreams from going after the things they want right it's comfort zones you get comfortable see when you uncomfortable man i don't feel good so you know you what your body or your mind and everything tries to do is you try to snap back and go back to reality because you want to experience comfort we all want to as humans we love comfort right so when you do something different like you move to a new city it's scary man because you're completely doing something different for some people it's easy but for a lot of people if you grew up in a certain environment you have roots there you have you know all these things it becomes harder yeah so for me even like so much opportunity has opened up even me moving out to you know atlanta so yeah so you're in you're in uh chicago then you decide to move to atlanta yeah yeah but that was that was years later man yeah years later so so in chicago is that when you built your first s-a-s what is it sauce sauce as a service no systems as a service software software as a service so it's sas s-a-a-s okay gotcha so people just you know in the industry it's called sas yeah gotcha so you came back you're doing affiliate marketing yeah making money not making money so i probably didn't make money i i had i had really took a lot i was really good at saving some money i didn't really i was i was you know i like to say i was a little cheap you know what i'm saying so i like to frugal that's the word i was looking for there we go that sounds better frugal so i was i was frugal right so i can you know i knew how to like basically stretch money for months and months and months so you know for me i was just i was trying to find like my thing my thing my thing my thing and i think i didn't find my theme really until i really changed my mindset because i started to get so dialed in when i started to go through a lot of personal growth i started to read a lot of books i started to really take it serious right not like cause i was kind of i would read a book like some of us you know we download audible we get the credits we download the audible credits we watch fire podcasts like this right right we come back but you know it's like you'll watch it then you come back a couple months later life that got busy so for me i'm like no no i gotta commit like i gotta go i gotta be so obsessed with this thing i gotta do this every single day of my life in order to change my thinking because i realized i have been so we all are we're all programmed with trauma we all have money beliefs we all have um business beliefs we all have those things so for me i had to figure all that out and so i mean you know i'm sitting in my computer man every day trying to make it happen just trying to figure it out um and i get this letter in the mail because at the time you know when i came back i had i was able to get another place but i had purchased a place because i had some you know that's what i'm thinking oh i can just go back to my regular ways and i get this letter in the mail this was probably about six months in they said hey we're foreclosing now i knew i was late but we were foreclosing on your property um and i said man nobody want to get that nope that make you like that's the worst that is the worst thing man it takes the wind out of you man if you if you like especially in a position where you like you have your developmental mindset you're in personal development and you're like oh yes it's going to get better then life says hey slow down life slower right right and and for me that was the real real at the time i was like i only just loaded i've been like working like what if i slow it down like it and and so man it took it took so it was so demotivating to even experience that and i couldn't call people you know my family because they didn't know they was like they just say get a job like you know so i was kind of i called this thing man like uh i heard tony robbins say this at an event right he said sometimes you got to burn the boats right right you know when you when you you set sail somewhere and you get on this island and it's like you gotta you you it's like are you gonna take the island are you gonna burn the boats i remember hearing that i just didn't know what the hell it meant but sitting in this situation i'm like oh i'm burning the boats like i have very little money in the bank i'm in this foreclosure situation so now i have to develop i have to be self-reliant right one of my favorite books right and it was the book to change really my life about who i was as a person right the 50th law by 50 cent and robert green really i heard it is a really good book i haven't heard it man i've read that book 14 times really it's that powerful because there's so much gold in that book that talks about self-reliance and the mindset that you need to develop in so many facets of life and i would i still even to this day like i got i got that that whole audio book on my phone what did you get from it give me give me some give me some some principles from it yeah so like one of them is mastery um self mastery and it's not like it wasn't just motivation it was practicality so here's what i mean we hear mastery is you got to learn your crab and all this other motivational stuff in that book he talked about what it really meant to what mastery actually meant so he used all these different people these examples like you know um like mastery it has a lot of anxiety that comes with it but the people who want power because we all are really out for power people hate that word but we all want power we all to some level of a degree want some power over some area of our life for sure right you know not power in the sense of like you know the the egotistical power because when people hear power they think i'm talking about egotistical but we're talking about power over something powerful you want to take you want to take power over something in your life exactly you know i want to take power like let's say you're the type of person who you get a paycheck and by the time you're getting another paycheck you have spent the other paycheck and you don't know where it all went yeah and it gets so out of control that you just want to take power over your finances and say okay i'm i'm going to get a handle on it yep and we just don't know how to yeah we don't yeah so so one of the points of that he was talking about you know you have to have self-reliance but there's this period and he calls it that the most successful people in life this is the thing i the most thing i took from it the most successful people in life know how to experience boredom like they know how to deal with boredom like so meaning like you know as humans like we got to always be going out on a saturday night like and i used to be like that i have to be doing something i got to be you know i got to go out with somebody i got to go to the movies i got to do something but we've been um and this may not be a popular opinion but we've been taught like this thing of entertainment we always have to be entertained we always got to be on our phones right but when you study the most successful business owners and the most successful people in history sometimes they went through years of boredom meaning just studying this you know this area of a mastery hmm i like that i like that yeah i like that i like that because we wind up filling our time with nonsense when we get bored yeah and then you look up and 10 years and pass by you like man what the hell i've been doing the last 10 years i never even thought about mastering boredom you have to master boredom you and that was the thing that changed my life is that i had to be comfortable with boredom because see boredom is not just see boredom what people don't realize about boredom is boredom is their greatest ally and they don't even know it see what it does is it shuts your mind down from focusing on all these things like social media is great but it can become a distraction for sure right so the the biggest thing is what here's what i realized even about entrepreneurship that i learned over the years is if i could just be bored for years right it doesn't mean i don't go out doesn't mean i'm not you like live life like i said don't go live life i live life i travel i live life but i realize that there are going to be times where i have to be bored and so this is actually a good segue for the tech stuff because um it's actually how once i learned that principle it set up my mind that okay i can master anything now i just have to be uncomfortable bored yeah okay so you're getting foreclosed how do we get into this tech space so so what happened is is is like i remember like getting this letter and so i realized that i had to master skill sets because at the time um you know a lot of entrepreneurs they have shiny object syndrome right right that's their thing they doing this they doing that so i realized like that sometimes like i don't care like man most of us just can't escape it man golly you're right about that it's hard man it's here's the thing it comes from boredom like you have something you have something rolling and it just becomes kind of mundane yep and instead of taking it to the next level you feel bored so you do something else and you never really get to that next level yeah but see that next level is right after that boredom period right if you manage it if you manage it correctly correct you have to manage it correctly but see that's the currency man see that's the real currency is when you're able to get past that see i think a lot of people are afraid of that because see when you approach say you approach anything real estate whatever you have a lot of anxiety that's really boredom because it's something new but after a while if you just stick with it what happens is you start to get good at it you get good and it ain't no special day you don't come wrapped in a bowl three weeks later it's just it takes a period of time and people don't are uncomfortable with that so realizing this here's what happened i realized i had to sell and so i remember i seen this facebook ad this is what changed my life i seen this facebook ad and it was talking about your business is experiencing up and down income and it was from this guy right and i remember reaching out to this dude i clicked this ad i reach out to this dude hold on a second yo is this camera recording you sure i don't see it right on the screen you're sure i got nervous because normally it's on the day that we had the whole whole day oh my god okay i'm sorry i gotta repeat all that now go for it i'm sorry so where where will you be picking up yes yes okay so so um like getting into the tech space where you you're you're uh you're about to walk into this your own yeah so so basically i always tell people like the hardest moments is where you meet your destiny right and so for me like i click on this ad i started going i bought this course at the time i didn't really understand like online courses digital programs but i go through this program like look i gotta make this like ish happen like i have no choice it was all about like how to sell i forgot who it was by but it was like how to how to do how to sell your services how to sell programs right um and at the time i've been like i'm like i got to make this work because if not my house gonna be sold off right and here's what happened man like i went through border i didn't go out i literally sat in that i sat on that computer and i watched that course i went through it and i started experiencing this transformation of me as a man i started to realize who i was i started to i had to face my demons i had to literally come close to the things that i wasn't good at right and so i remember man now i had to take action all right that's cool right right but i gotta make some money right now i have to actually do this thing so i start uh selling these things called copy i have mastered this skill called copywriting so for those who don't know what copywriting is it's the art of really like what you see on websites what you see everywhere advertisements they all have what's called copy in them right it's the persuasion of words it's the ability to persuade somebody to want to opt into your website or buy your program we all need it we all want it so i said to myself this is a skill set that can make me money for years so i'm a master this that was the and i said i'm gonna tune everything else out i ain't gonna go for the when i see that them other ads i ain't gonna click them right i'm gonna stay focused on this so what happened is right at this point your idea is to be a copywriter copywriter well i'm just going to write in in like you said on a website people support put a lot into that it's not just here's why you need to buy it buy it there's like word and language yeah yeah yeah it's a skill set it wasn't just oh i'm good at i'm already like you had to learn certain words and how they make people feel how the languaging is like and i again man i barely made it out of high school so it was hard for me to learn all of this uh but i learned it and now next i have to go sell myself so what i start doing is i start learning how to put up my own ads and back in the day it's 2008 so i was like advertising what is this so but i had learned a lot from this course and so i met this guy and he wanted to hire me as he said look i know you're selling some of your other stuff but i'm going to pay you a pretty good way for you to exclusively be a consultant with me and you could consult me on a copy and that changed that changed my life now here's the thing guess what he owned technology got it got it you know that's and i i truly believe once you set your mind on something and like you have a passion for it things get out of your way for you to walk the path toward that yeah man all of them you know if you ever see that picture where it's a success and they got all these turns and so that's really what success is but then you get to a point where you get so dialed in that nobody can like your mind is so dialed in you are so dialed in your spirit your soul everything is just focused on this one thing and that's what separates everybody else who's just out there trying to figure it out and that's why they never master anything right so but here was the thing though i had actually sold him i said listen because of what the skill sets i learned from this course i sold him i said look that's great but if you want me exclusively here's what we have to do you have to give me 90 days up front and i'm gonna tell you why you're going to do it okay at this time i started getting my copy that's right i'm swaggy right now right and uh i was like look you got to give me three months so you know i said you got to he's like you got to give me three months in advance i said here's what i'm going to do i'm going to go and i'm going to make an offer on my place to get my place out of foreclosure and that's what i'm going to do and i'm going to have other clients so it can't be exclusive with you so i started literally lining up sales appointments right after that because i said i have to make this happen i have no other option see some of us have options that's why we get comfortable see i had no other option and i wasn't about to lose the place that i had worked so hard for in my life so i said look justin you're gonna have to either man up and do this you're going to have to master yourself enough to make this happen or you're going to go under which option is it so i sat at that desk and all i had was my cell phone that was my prepaid t-mobile joint 50 bucks a month that's all that's called don't call me before sex don't call me before seven and my computer which was uh at the time you know um a white old macbook that my friend handed down to me that's all i had at the time and i got on that phone i closed four deals and i made 20 000 in a week wow and it changed my life and i mean yeah i had made some money but i had never you know i had made you know six figures in my but that was uncle sam took half of that right this was like i made this on my own in my own business doing my own thing not selling not working for another company i did it for me yeah and so i don't know why i gave you the three months up front yeah and he gave me the three months so i had made 20k plus the three myself so i'm feeling myself i got money in the bank i'm i'm lit right and and so here's what i did i didn't stop i didn't stop the the swag i just said i'm feeling good i called up the bank and so my friend thought you got to get an attorney all of this i said no no let me let me try something called the bank i'm turning in the middle for like because i was in foreclosure so you know trying to get me trying to call me get me caught back up right so i said no no let me call him let me try to work something out and i called him and i don't know why i had this confidence i said look i don't have an attorney but here's what i'm going to do here i'm going to give you money up front and i want to own my house matter of fact i only want my house out of foreclosure i want to own it and the lady was like huh and i heard him say huh out loud huh but you're behind or you're in foreclosure and i was like i know that but here's what's going to happen i'm going to make you guys offer that i could pay over a couple months so i built a relationship with this lady in this loan department i'm calling every day we talking and she's like how much and i said well the house was like i think i owe like 100 grand i said look how's 60 grand and i the phone just went silent she said wait so you want me to knock out 40 grand off of this loan amount and you're behind right i said well i'mma put down 20 000 because i had a little cushion i'm gonna give you 20 000 and i'm gonna pay it off in the next six months she said man i i like you justin you know i could just tell you trying to make it happen let me work some things out man fast forward like a week later she comes back to me and said the bank has accepted your offer wow yeah so what if you're not in foreclosure can you just call i don't understand a real estate uh session right now but if you're 94 can you just call say hey y'all i don't want to i don't want to owe you a hundred thousand let me give you 60. i imagine that you could do it um i i didn't i didn't have any steps to do it i just kind of did it and i just talked to the people who handled the foreclosure and you know that's what yeah it was lit and so six months later man and actually i talk about i do this in my webinar right where i always show that story because that story means so much to me while i talk about and it's still i have it in my house it's plastered on my wall where it's a letter from the bank that says you are now officially clear of title and you officially own this property wow and that and so whenever i'm feeling down whenever i'm feeling like man i'm facing this d i'm facing like this whole uphill battle this mountain yeah i look at that letter man i get my power back because i realize man if i could if i could have did it then i could do it any other time amazing so that's how actually um you know working with this working working you know so kind of fast forward and like after that i'm feeling good i got my property and then last and lastly because you you're picking up these clients and you have this confidence to tell them um that you're gonna pay them what is that eight thousand dollars a month or five thousand dollars a year yeah it was like my services were between five thousand and ten thousand a month but i'm talking about for the bank because you wanted to give them 60 you put 20 down so you owe 40. yeah and you're telling them okay i give you eight about yeah basically i ate them off yeah yeah yeah so so based on these first few clients that you closed bruh you're right you're just now you got a career look it sounded crazy at the time yeah but here's the thing right i had to commit that to myself and so i wanted that property i want to get it out of foreclosure as as bad as i wanted to breathe as e.t said i want to it was as bad as i want to breathe man and so that's what happened man like i always tell people man the energy that you put out if you really believe it you'll do it yeah and so that's that's what happened to me so anyway i get into this whole tech space and i'm seeing doing copywriting for these copywriting for these tech companies and they're doing these launches man these launches are doing like half a million dollars in a month and these guys are doing you know i'm seeing guys doing recurring revenue of five million dollars a month some of them i'm meeting all of these different places and i'm like man i've never been exposed to anything like this in my life and i'm like what are these guys doing because tech was like for me at the time tech was like this you know this thing that only the elite and you had to have 20 degrees to have a tech company and own it not really knowing how naive i was thinking at the time and so i became really close friends with this one owner and i made him he had did a launch that did almost close to a million dollars in about two months and so at the time he gave me a bonus he gave me a nice little bottle because you're writing on his because i'm writing all the stuff that's making all the money yeah for sure and so he gives me a bottle of dawn perry on a bottle you know a thing of stakes like i'm feeling good i'm i'm feeling good but i'm like wait a second if you shower me with all of this money how much money are you really making right um and that's when my mindset started to kick in and so here's where it changed here's here's actually like where i knew that i wanted to build tech companies is is this he took me to a conference i said can i go to one of the conferences with you i just wanted to check it out right right and i went in there i'm looking around it's like this event with these come you had to be doing at least over a million dollars in yearly sales in this in these tech spaces and mostly they were what these what's called the sas founders like when you're talking for as a service software as a service so think about it try to educate my audience okay so even like when you think about like mailchimp mailchimp you know we these things that if like let's say if you guys are running business out there you have tools that you use you use like mailchimp um activecampaign or you know website like wix everybody knows you see it in wix commercial you know what wix is uh those are considered software as a service there are tools that people use to build things and automate things that makes life easier so this room was filled with a lot of people um and a lot of them didn't look like me it was about three of us in the room and and i was like why is this and i'm sitting there listening and my you could just tell my eyes what's going up because they're like you can build anything that you can take an idea and turn it into an a a tech company um you could do all these different things and so i'm sitting there listening and i'm like really i'm like a kid in the candy shop i'm standing there like wow really and so i went out to dinner with them and i'm sitting there with some ceos of these major tech companies and they're like talking to each other and they're like how much did you make last month oh how much did you sell your last company and these guys are talking like i sold my last company for 100 million dollars and 50 million dollars and all these different things and these are numbers i had never heard of like i had come from the space where i heard people making money but that's when my like next level thinking had to go up where it's not even just about the money it's like you could build something amazing you could actually build a company and you could change people's lives and you can also um make a lot of money in the process you know so for me after i left that room i was set and i said i'm gonna figure this thing out so you go and build a what was it don't tell me because we talked about it it was a copy it was it was something about like sending out emails or automatic copywriting yeah it was a copyright well so so it didn't even get it didn't even get to that point right it was like what happened is is with with i had worked out something where i said i went to the guy and i said look i'll make you a deal you can't refuse like that you know al pacino style i was like look the guy hired you yeah yeah i said look i'm a i'm a full-blooded entrepreneur this is what i like to do but i'm gonna commit myself to the tech space and build a tech company and i said um i need your help i'm gonna work for you for free for the next six months because i had already paid off my house i was feeling good but here's what you're gonna do for me you're gonna show me everything that you know about the tech space you're going to teach me about how to hire coders you're going to teach me about how to hire people you're going to teach me about all these crazy and that's how i sound like what's this crazy languaging html css coding i didn't understand any of these languages i just knew that they were the gateway to my success and what i was meant to do and i said that's what you're going to do and he at first he was kind of resistant but he saw the look in my eyes man he was like this dude ain't gonna give up like he ain't gonna stop he ain't gonna stop coming and so six months in i told him at the end of the six months i'm gonna have an idea and i went in and i draw this idea out on a napkin and i said i got the product i need you to help me get the name and we're going to sell it so you didn't even at that point it wasn't like you had something planned that you wanted to help no no he was like yo i just need the information i just need the information you're like okay just give me a little time i'm gonna come up with an idea and that's what you'll help me with and i'll just work for you for free yeah absolutely i didn't even know i just knew at that point i was so i found my thing i found something that i wanted to do for i could do this for the rest of my life because it was so challenging and it was such it was such a thing where i said i can literally take an idea that i have and turn it into a tech company um and so i literally wrote it on a napkin and so i literally just duplicate their steps and so what they were doing and this is even you know some free game for the audience because when you have a product one of the things that you could do especially if you don't have a lot of money is you can start to really build relations people even if you're an introvert i was an introvert it didn't matter but you can start there's so many influences we think of influences of people who got two three hundred thousand people on instagram there's people with audiences man who don't have an instagram so you have to find them and they are willing to promote your product because they always are trying to put content in front of their audience right so that was for me because i didn't have a lot of money to spend on ads right because i just spent all this money on my house and i'm like okay i gotta i gotta stack back up right um i figured out like wow these people will promote you they'll take my product earn a actual commission on my product and i'm not out of any money up front that's called affiliate marketing so so how did you so so tell me about the company that you built the i mean the the software that you built yeah so the the software was called script engage script engage yeah so it was just a copywriting app that basically what i realized is and that's what tech companies a lot of times are like they solve a big challenge and so what i realized is in writing for all of these companies is that they needed 20 emails to have a campaign then they needed a sales page they needed facebook ads they needed all of this copy so i figured out man look i'm not trying to replace a copywriter but what if they wrote what if you just answered some questions and then it spit out maybe like 20 or 30 scripts at one time in different categories and at least made the process easier so i'm selling basketballs right yep so i could put into this software the answers to some questions that you you populate okay what is it how much is it what problem does it solve in your own words whatever you plug it in and then it just populates all this populates it all it makes it super easy and it comes hard to build it huh it's it at the it was my first one man that wasn't easy that choice was like i mean it was like what it was and i had made every mistake you think you can make in the book i did but i was lucky to have set up this deal where i didn't do it on my own and so i had this guy helping me so he would come back and help me with little stuff uh and the first the first time we released it man it wasn't pretty uh but then the second time and and i'm not gonna lie like i had probably spent around ten thousand dollars developing this application um but then i came back and he said look applications get better and when you like over time like you're not going to release an application that's going to start off and be out to the gate like you have to applications get better and so um what he taught me was and this is the greatest skill set i built that still to this day like allows for me to really have great looking platforms because i get always compliments people say like man your site looks like your your stuff looks amazing you got some good stuff like people always say man yourself looks good and that's because i developed the skill set of what's called user experience ui see so i don't even know every single coding language like i just have people on my team who are better at that than i am but one thing i won't allow for people to be better at is how a user experience looks so i'm really good at knowing how good how stuff looks so that's what i mastered back in the day and so fast forward we launched the second time i go out and i'm gonna make this thing work i go out i go to conferences i start peop dming people on the instagram i'm going crap i'm going into facebook groups and i said hey i got this product coming out we're going to release on this date i need you to promote it mm-hmm i need you to promote him no no i just said promote it i'm going to give you 30 40 50 commission because you understand that because i understand the affiliate game now so i realized i don't have to pay you to to get a customer up front i could just say hey i know this because i failed the first time i know this now i've refined i've retuned it a little bit and so i'm like all right we're going to go big this time so we we did a um i got a couple people to help me with it we did a launch and we did like four hundred thousand dollars in about two weeks really yeah what year was this this was 2014 2015 2015 2015. yeah so you made 400k on the launch on the launch and so now it's just a product that people bought right that was just a product yeah that people did okay yeah and how long did you keep it before you sold it um i kept that for about at least about a about another year and then uh another marketer acquired it from me so i i sold that what did you make on it on that four before you sold it before i sold it yeah i would say like half a million dollars so when you release it you made four hundred thousand right and then the rest of the twelve months you made a hundred thousand yeah because that's the launch so usually on launches what happens is you build so much buzz right um and then after that the buzz started to die down so you got to keep promoting you got to keep doing that but see i had already had an idea that i was that that was surfacing in my in my head which was what i do now yeah so i had already had it even though i liked the idea there were some limitations that i knew would come with scaling that with skill in that company so if you don't mind how much do you sell for are you like are you i can't i can't tell that i can't tell it let's just say it was it was nice now it wasn't like 50 million okay it was it was it was it was it wasn't 50 million it was close to you know it was it was in the six figure high six figure right yeah yeah um not bad and so what i did was is i took instead of i realized i was like okay that was a little bit of success in the tech space so literally over the past probably man it was only eight years people think eight years is a long time eight years i'm like i did affiliate marketing yeah right how to try all of these things and this is the thing that has gave me the most success so i just put all of my time i was like because i had even made money from selling core online courses and so i help other people with their online people were coming to me like helping them to sell their information sell their courses so i took all that and i said i want to build a course platform because the future is online education and it had changed my life i mean i was a kid again from chicago and what changed my life was going through other people's online courses and so i was more connected to that in terms of a mission because i felt like self-education and people learning outside of college was going to really change lives and change the industry so i had already had like in the back of my mind i was like that's the next compass when i sold it i chilled for a little bit right just a little bit uh but i didn't get comfortable and i took that money and i instantly i went back to my same team um we hired more developers and i said hey let's build this idea and let's commit the next 10 years to it um all right so tell me about maestro tell me uh because you're you're going you're going up against the big boys man yeah so tell me about maestro so so when you have a when you have a great team like it doesn't matter how much funding somebody somebody else has so what i realized here's the thing about maestro um what i realized is that um you have two type of companies right who when you get in the tech space you have either a venture back what's called a venture back company right so those are companies that have the financial backings like facebook is venture backed like all the twitter venture back most companies because it takes a lot to run a tech company it takes you know you have to hire developers you have to hire uh product managers you have to you ha it's more people currency than anything right then you have the tech that you have to build you're talking about you're like get out there grit grind build you got to find experts and you have to you have it seems like your your management and leadership ability needs to be on a higher level than anything else yeah you you ha you in order to build a tech company you have to have leadership skills you don't have to be a perfect leader because no leader is perfect but i realized that i had to get over my own crap in order to really be able to bring something out of bring greatness out of other people to build some really great stuff because you can get a developer and we all some people have heard these stories like man that developer sucked see for me i realized that because of my leadership skills i had attracted a really great leader like developer leader who had built some really crazy stuff before he met me and so we just kind of linked up together we weren't partners you know i owned the company but he was like hey i'm with you up until the long haul and so up until that point i was doing everything man like i was we we didn't know what we were building at the time it was just like we i at the time was like oh you knew you wanted to you wanted to have a platform for people to sell courses or yeah no no i knew i knew i wanted to because i had this passion because again i had had a 10-year kind of experience with digital courses i had made money selling digital courses and actually i had that's how i actually funded the company so i decided i went to a fundraising meetings and i started reading the stats of how you know people that look like me black people how we didn't get a lot of funding in the tech space it was very hard here's what i decided to do i decided to create my own table right and i decided to go the bootstrap way and i said the same way i got my house out of foreclosures the same way i'm going to fund my company and create my own table now that's not to say i'll never raise money because that's not true i'll raise money uh maybe one day potentially she didn't raise any money for maestro no no no no right uh we did have a small angel investor that came along but that was like you know very very small amount most of like 90 was funded by me out of my own pocket so the way we funded that whole company is um you know we sold courses and i started getting i had to get really creative so we would do product launches to sell courses hold on so you build a platform and then you create a course to sell on your platform yeah to fund to fund the development and then it helps with the marketing of the platform correct look what apps are made on this platform absolutely okay so so well tell me about maestro like tell me what it is what is it what it does what makes it special what would people compare it to yeah so you have you know other comparisons out there like when you think about like if you ever purchased an online course on say like fitness or yoga like you've actually watched all these different components more people think it's simple but there's a lot of components that go behind it like protecting your content logging into the site so what our platform does is it's an all-in-one solution that allows for business owner to actually run their business so let's say for example you're we're living in a knowledge space right now like this is the knowledge game that we're living in it's the greatest like the greatest era right now especially with the pandemic everything that has happened people are sitting at home and they're realizing man i need to learn new skills i got to learn new things i got to learn you or you're going to be left behind the world is going to look vastly different in the next five years and the people who are going to be up there the people who have mastered different skill sets so you learn all these different things and so what i decided to do was to provide a tool that allowed for people to make money from their course so maestro what it does is it has a variety of tool sets in it so it'll allow for anybody to get up and going right away selling their online courses selling their knowledge right so all they have to do is literally just just like we've made it so super easy like a lot of a lot of our competitors what they do is they make everything complicated right so you got to have a degree in order to build a course or you got to hire people to build a course here's what we sat in the room and said to each other we said look you want anybody to be able to build an online course in a couple of clicks and five easy steps that's what our motto has always been it's like how can you create a course in five steps because a lot of the stuff i sign up for is so difficult you gotta go in you gotta watch 20 hours of video so that's on top of the course i'm already but not already now i gotta go through tech courses and tech just to understand the tag so i said how can we make it super super easy and make these small incremental processes and systems and tools to make it easy for anybody to create a course and i feel like we've accomplished that because we get so many of our customers that say they love it i mean i just got a testimonial yesterday somebody sent me a facebook message and said man i just made five figures on my launch and i just appreciate that you created this so i like seeing stuff like that because it shows me that the years of hard work that i put into making this great because you know when we first started we didn't have much support it was rough it was tough but we stuck through it and and we pulled out and now we have thousands of users on our platform oh wow first of all congratulations that's exciting appreciate it and uh you got any is it just you as a founder or as like somebody else from another culture behind this no no no no it's me i'm the founder of maestro that's it baby just yeah yeah and a lot of people can't believe that when they see when they go to the site they don't believe that you know somebody of color owns a tech company that's that's like maestro but i founded it um but i have a great team behind me and that's the biggest thing is that um it's not just the justin show it's amazing people who are smarter than i am and a lot of areas who can carry everything and who i challenge as well to think differently and think bigger because like you said it earlier you said man you're going up against you know people who are venture back funded uh but we we welcome the challenge and we're gonna the way we're gonna beat that we're not gonna beat that by having way more money in capital that's not the way we're going to beat it we have to beat it by having a superior product yeah and also going above and beyond for customers um 100 so what what is what is it that um your customers are saying after coming from another major platform like a what like a teacher work a job right yeah definitely um people just love it man like people say it's simple it's way simple it's not clunky uh that's the biggest compliment we get is how easy it is and i'm excited about that and then we just recently innovated uh because i wanna i'm always like here's my level of thought right a lot of people in tech they get comfortable so you when you're going up against someone like me and i mean this may sound a little cocky but it but it's just true when you're going up against somebody like me who is obsessed with improvements then you have to watch out for someone like me because even if you venture back you know i may like i may come up really like my company may grow out of control and the reason why i say that is think about like blockbuster for example they were this big behemoth and they underestimated netflix and netflix at the time was a small little 20 million a year company and they said can you guys buy us so that we can join forces with you and create a billion dollar company and blockbuster turn them down here's the thing that i always tell people that netflix did that was genius netflix didn't come out with a crazy better product blockbuster had to they had you know er they had the they had the location they had real estate people come in like that was the spot on friday nights like you look forward to going into blockbusters just to be there right they had it here's what netflix did netflix was obsessed with improving things with i call it tinkering with making their product better every single day that's what i'm obsessed with that's what my team is obsessed with see because i remember he was launching it and then uh literally the other day is like yo we changed the whole thing we redesigned it and i'm like yo first of all the first one was fire you're like nope you didn't say that you're like you're like hey man that person was fired i was like well you go really like this and and here's here's what we also change with so let me tell you this so one of the things we realized that the course uh landscape has changed over the past few years we saw it coming which is that everybody realizes man there's a lot of money there's a lot of wealth there's a lot of even companies realize man i can make extra revenue by selling my knowledge and my expertise so you are now you know unconsciously you're competing with the person down the street or people who have bigger influences so we said listen a lot of our our competitors have solved two big challenges in the course space number one if you're creating a course you could put it on their platform and do it uh if you want to sell a course you can put it on you know something like some of the competitors you mentioned but they're missing a lot of them missed a third component which is consumptions so that was the thing that we set out to solve that's what makes us different explain it so meaning like there was a study done at the university of pennsylvania look i sound like i'm about to look good oh you see that sounds like he's like i'm about to kill her he was he was general now he got to go super dirty he's i was waiting on this girl but it but only five percent of people complete online courses um five percent five percent of people it was a study now i knew this over the years even watching for my own students um and so what we did was we did something a little bit different we went to work figuring that out because we said that is affecting people's sales it's affecting potential sales it's making your refund rates higher how can we solve a whole different challenge and so we went to work for about a year researching going crazy over the research i mean we were just so obsessed with everything and it's not five percent of people buy the course you're talking about people who actually pay five percent of those people actually complete it complete it dang can you imagine that does that go is that more the platform is it the quality of information or what i think it's a coma so here's the thing right at the studying law i think it's a culmination of a lot of things i think you know we blame the users like they're not motivated but i also think it's response it's our responsibility as course creators and people that provide content to make the content and make the experience as engaging because you have different type of learners it's like it's like the school system right now like i was the rebel i was the kid sitting in the class like man what is this person talking about i have no id and i would literally blink out and it wasn't that i was stupid or slow it was that i was a i was a different learning modality i learned different i was the visual learner i needed to see it not just a video of somebody talking i needed different experiences to be able to absorb the information some people are auditory learners they can hear something and be like i got it yeah i can't hear nothing to be like i got it i never like that doesn't work i have to see it yeah so they got to touch it so you got to see it you got to touch it so what a lot of people who create digital even content people who are just content creators they don't know that they're losing 75 80 90 of their audience by the way they create content explain that meaning like like for example do you have experiences that set up the people like if somebody's going through your course right do you do you have different experiences that gauge where they are meaning like are you if somebody gets get stuck somewhere at say module two do you have a system that's set up to collect that feedback and provide a a system that actually allows for them to push through okay got it okay a couple other factors right is your content set up for different learning styles meaning do you just have videos in your training well you're losing a lot of the stuff by not providing things like workbooks and other learning modalities or summaries that can make it easier to absorb your content do you have these experiences that are set right and here's the thing also about hold on because i'm about to drop my course so yeah i need i need to write this down yeah let's talk like this this is this is one of my favorite like i don't wanna i don't wanna lose this yeah i don't wanna lose this hold on i don't wanna leave thanks i can't i can't lose i can't lose that because i because i want to as i put the course out i want to make sure and i guess now i say it i got to do it now i want to be able to um give them an outside of like the video course like the workbook or whatever right yeah allowing them to kind of reflect or or um what am i trying to say um kind of kind of like summarize the learning summarize the summarize so you have to you have to have things that summarize all this content because a lot of people man you're teaching all of these things and some people it's like man throwing a fire hose on somebody and literally holding it up to their face hoping they drink it oh like you can't you can't push that all into somebody's mouth you have to give you have to really view your audience differently and i feel like we have to start treating our audience in a different way and really understanding that they're people they're people with different personalities they're people with different experiences they're not just this little dot that's sitting on your email list on the computer and maestro kind of walks me through how to make my courses more effective so that exactly actually consume the course and if they consume the course then they'll share it with other people correct but if they buy the course even if even if it's an amazing course and they don't go through it they can't really tell anybody else exactly so that's what that's what we did we instead of us trying to solve the typical problem like everybody else has done which is they've a lot of platforms out there have solved the create and sell you know courses a lot of them don't worry about the consumption because consumption is going to make you more sales it's going to provide a better experience and guess what when people go through your courses now they come up to you you're the celebrity you're the person that you're the company they want to do business with because now they've absorbed all the all the game that you've given them so that's the thing but if only five percent of people are completing them and that's here's the thing that's not to say that people are not going to buy more because they they still buy more stuff yeah for sure but you would have a better like you have better sales if you take if you just really chose to take more of a look at the way you have experiences with your people so like for us for example we know that people are into netflix they used to hulu they abso they they absorbed that we started to dive into like why why is that why are people because it was an easier experience so we changed all of our student rooms to kind of reflect like netflix the netflix experience and it it's a way cooler look people go through the content even more and they absorb that we also added um in our platform customized experiences so this is other platforms office that we've seen it's like for the people that only completed 10 of your content do you have a specialized message that goes out to them to help them push to the next part of your content right that doesn't exist a lot of people don't have that so we create these things called automation experiences where we can literally say hey we want to send these messages to people that only finish 10 of the course or 20 of the course or use this coupon or so we call them experiences i like it i like it yeah okay okay okay all right so so how can first of all i was going to ask you something because there's a lot of content creators or people who want to start a course right and uh kind of tired of all these other platforms because what you're saying sounds it really really makes sense it can help me make more money if i can help people actually get through this amazing content i have so do we got like a discount or something from uh from my friends that's watching this let's let's hook them up man you know all right so all right let me ask you this and i don't i don't know but so with my morning meetup i allow people to join for a dollar trial for seven days so do you have anything set up to where they can kind of get in there and poke around for a little bit yeah absolutely so what we're going to do we usually offer 14 day trial for the people we're going to do a 30-day trial 30 days 30 days get in there and here's what i tell people don't just look at it as a trial like maestro is a tool that can actually make you money and actually change your business forever so in 30 days you should make way more than the cost of what maestro costs so they can get in for free create their course sell their course yep for free absolutely free for 30 days you know what i like about that though man um you are extremely confident in your product yeah saying like yo if you just try this thing you're gonna love it oh i mean it was only that we obsessed about it for about four years you know every single day and it's also man listening to our customers like that's the biggest thing that i do like i'm obsessed with the customer experience and so um when we even even we just launched a whole new branding and a whole new site recently and we went into our facebook group um and we just started getting feedback man love was just like man this product is awesome man it's changed my life just changed my business thank you this looks amazing i can't like that's like in a tech i don't think people understand like how hard that is to achieving a tech product right now everybody's not gonna like your product and that's okay right but me seeing that from like hundreds of people was just like man it was it was it was exciting so now it even has me i was just telling my team this this morning like you know i'm obsessed with making it even better so we got some really even outside of the things that they get in this 30-day trial that's going to make them a lot of money in their business wait until they see over the next couple months six months even this year what we do to even help them like we're obsessed with how can we make more not just put a bun because a lot of a lot of tech people they put a lot of fluff they put a lot of stuff into a product it does this it does backflips and has nothing to do with what you're trying to do right it has nothing to do with what you're trying to accomplish right so we said we're not about to put all this stuff and just throw it in the product for the sake of throwing it in the product let's actually create stuff that they're going to use and let's actually create things that make a difference in this person's business because that's what's going to make sense i love it i love it you know for one thank you you i mean i know you're like super focused on building maestro but i want to build some tech stuff you got to help me man i just want to get in the game because you ain't even hello you ain't even tell the people what i did remember we met up i went to the remember that i went to the mall with you i showed you oh yeah yeah yeah yeah and you had the product and i just straight up gave you some of the game yeah yeah so it was uh it was so dope so i'm like how the heck he do that so i was i was wondering like how to put together like this product or this app and he's like you open your laptop i was like what you mean she's like what's this little website he's like yo you can see the back end of what all these companies are using on this other site yeah yeah and you can see all their plugins and how they built it yeah that's crazy it's almost like you can see the ingredients of it you can see the ingredients yeah and then you study the ingredients and you realize that hey i can do this too i think people so so here's the thing people make technology and even building courses and all this other stuff they they make it complicated on themselves like when we just talked about boredom like once you understand it like for me years ago i was like man what what is this i don't even what html css javascript i didn't understand these languaging uh things now i tell people um i don't understand the full scope of it i have people on my team understand that uh but i'm enough to be dangerous i'm enough to be dangerous like i can look at code and see hey this is bad code this is good code like i could see that uh so for me i'm enough to be dangerous but where my focus is now is just making meister one of the best course platforms on the market today and and and even like now people are saying that but i'm like no wait tc what we do in the next six months it's gonna blow your mind is the goal as a legacy company or to get it to a point and gracefully bow out um you know we'll see but right now there's no plans of selling you know we don't have any plans of selling we're committed to it you know we want to we want to be committed to it for the long haul um you know and that's just where our focus is right now good good well look man um i i gotta i need you to think of a deep ending a deep closing i'm gonna give a quick commercial but then i'm gonna come back and you gotta be you gotta put a bow on this thing all right this whole interview all right cool so um real quick this episode is sponsored by the morning meetup themorningmeetup.comthemorningmeetup.com go to the morningmeetup.com and join uh my program so it is a let me just explain to you justin because it's the most amazing community on earth and i need to figure out a way to make it i you know what maybe we need to figure that out how i can technize because right now it's just hundreds of people that join on a zoom call every single morning yeah it is amazing but then now you got me thinking like i wonder how i can make it even more amazing even though the experience is amazing because we have a theme for the month as it relates to entrepreneurs and every day monday through friday we're supporting the theme of the month and we're teaching a different element so people are growing in all of these different areas like this month we're doing human behavior science so we're talking the science behind sales the science behind um how we think how do we become more self-aware it's just amazing so um go to the morningmeetup.com and just be a part of the community i'm there every single morning monday through friday myself yes myself it's not recording this is not this is not like um uh video modules even though we record the whole thing and they have a chance to go watch it later okay but it's amazing uh community and i'm gonna do do do you a favor and give you an opportunity to try it out for one dollar um for a whole seven days okay just come check us out if you love the program you can stay with us it's 79 a month if you don't just leave it's all good no contracts no obligations but uh join the morningmeetup.com because every time you join the meetup.comthemorningmeetup.com you are supporting this podcast so that uh we can uh keep this thing moving okay so um justin yes sir i have to ask you um i like to make predictions on the podcast i want to know what you see yourself doing or accomplishing or where you're going to be in the next five to 10 years so that i can look back at this interview and say listen justin said he was going to do that five years ago 10 years ago and look he actually accomplished it so what do you think man five to 10 years from now oh i already know talk to me already i already know uh i already in my head already have the next 15 years already planned out so for me um i see maestro really surpassing even my own goals with you know 20 000 plus customers um all just excited growing their businesses um you know i would say in the next 10 years um i'm really excited about what this knowledge economy has created so for me i've recently have have gotten a passion for venture capital because i realize there's a lot of companies that are underfunded a lot of people don't have the same you know they don't have the same ability to be able to you know go four years bootstrap like i have and so i've been recently really trying to um you know start my own investment company and really start to help out and acquire other tech companies so my goal in the next 10 years is to really um be heavy in the venture capital you know private equity space and acquire other tech companies and help grow them from what i've done from this wow yeah clear ain't it clear hey don't get i don't think you'll get no credit i know exactly i know i read this every morning from a four-page document that says exactly what it is because that's actually how i i manifested maestro it's like i said here's like out i think i wrote some recent on my instagram if i said look man sometimes you got to see the building before it's built um you got to learn how to see the building before it's built you gotta and what that means is is you got to tune out the self doubts you got to tune out the haters because you're gonna have haters you're gonna have people who are even people close to you that's gonna say they're gonna doubt they're gonna doubt what your ability is to do so for me i always see the building before it's built yeah so for me people looking at me like this kid like years ago had you looked at me as the kid on the south side of chicago who was fired from every job had you looked at me in 2006 as that kid you would have missed the opportunity in 2020 to experience this right now right and so i even say that for myself in 2028 whenever it is right you miss this opportunity by looking at and some people look at me as like uh you know whatever i don't know what word they put on me for me i'm just i say i'm a normal dude who realized his potential and unlock the facets of his mind wow that's what i tell people who i am just a normal dude that realize how great i can actually be and i didn't want to get in that coffin people saying man justin was this i wanted them to say that dude was innovative man that dude not just how much money he made but that dude figured it out that dude pushed his limits that dude did everything he could that dude did the impossible from having a high school education he did what people doubted he would do see like they i like i like when people like look at me like you know i like when they doubt me and i don't even try to i'm to the point my ego is not trying to prove them wrong my my thing is i'm trying to prove myself right i'm trying to prove it in my head that this vision that you have of changing the world you can actually manifest that you can actually do it i love it so that's where my limits that's what i'm trying to push and so that's the 10-year goal and man i'm going to hit it it's it's no it's no doubt in my mind that that's going to happen i believe you 100 i believe look do me a favor so for oh real quick for the 30 day yeah do they have to have a promo code social media what are we going to do is have a link right below write down okay they click it and they get right access to the 30 days oh really yeah oh okay all right so there's a link below yeah um you click that 30 days free trial touch it kick the tires make some money make some money we should do a make the money challenge make the money make money on maestro challenge yeah and actually um you know we also here's the thing too maestro money challenge my extra money challenge i own ten percent of that okay just let you know uh we also got this thing man and actually i want you to teach in it uh it's called the maestro academy and so what we have back there is just everything is included in there is training on how to grow your instagram how to create videos how to do sales pages all this is free content so not only do you get the 30 days to maestro you also get access to all the free content that's going to help you make more money all of that is included uh even we have a training on facebook ads it's so like all this is content that's absolutely free wanted that to be a netflix experience and it's already in there it's already in there and so three coming with the wow so you get that you get the train you don't have to pay anything else you for the training so you get the training and you also get the technology what else do you need see some people just give you the training which is great i mean there's a lot of great training out there but see with this it's fail proof because you have the tech and you have the training and all you got to do is see all you got to do is implement justin that is a game changer bro yeah because hijabi ain't able to teach you how to run ads no no they're not not a lot of they they don't so for us and even now today we said what like i told you we really live by that code it's like what can we do to make our customers more successful so we created more we're even gearing up to release more content of how to create your course so we actually you you made it as a joke we didn't even talk about this before the actual podcast but we actually are creating a five-day challenge right now of how to get your digital product created in five days that's a good way to erase me out of my 10 percent i was i was doing it already i was pitching it and i was like man we already got that adjustment i appreciate you man um for stopping by i really really enjoyed our interview um let the people know how they can find you though how can they connect with you definitely so you can connect with me you know instagram definitely instagram the justin no i'm single single ladies you can you know this ain't that type of podcast but listen hey you might as well they say you know you don't hit the shots that you don't take i'll be doing it for y'all okay brother tech company got the green eyes and all that hey man you lit out here all right cool what's your instagram yeah yeah so instagram is the justin burns t-h-e justin burns hit me up i'm always on instagram um and you can just hit up our company you know definitely check out maestro for sure.com it's spelled m-i-e most people spell it m-a-e but it's m-i-e-s-t-r-o again you guys will have a link right below get started with 30 days get your training on and the one thing that i would just say even the action step for everybody sign up for the link below and what i want you to do is go through the training and then send me a dm on instagram and you know like give me your success story even if you're just starting off whatever it is and we're gonna help you keep getting further oh i love it i love it well look man thank you so much for uh coming by you are really um outside of you know you having a platform to help people it's really huge that you are a young black man that's doing it because we're underrepresented in the tech space yeah and i mean like severely underrepresented so um hopefully somebody watching this um they see themselves in you and say yo if he can do it i can do it too you remember yeah and that's also a part of what i want to do is inspire the next generation of you know black people and also people that look like me to say man if he could do it i could do it sure and we and you said something that's also one of my driving forces that there's not a lot of us in the tech space and we could build amazing tech companies too we just have to stop thinking about capital as the limitation and think of creative ways and help each other and then yeah we could go get capital that's all great uh but it's also about what creative ways can i do what skill sets do i need to learn that you know can cut this in half and cut this cost in half there's a lot of skills that i have now that i didn't have to pay you know other people to learn or or you know to have to you know uh push it to my company so once we learn that that's also driving forces to see people that look just like me building other amazing tech companies i love it i love it man well again thank you so much for stopping by man and um um i'd love for you to just kind of close us out with a word of wisdom man you've been through so much and you are um actually uh one of the people leading the way for our community um and i like your transparency you're like yo i'm i don't know everything about tech but um i know enough i've been in a lab enough to study it and find out who i do need so that i can build it so um that's really freeing for a lot of us man so if you just close this out with a word of wisdom that'd be awesome yeah man so i would just say you know like some people it's all about perspective right some people say we're living in bad times some people say we living in good times um choose your perspective wisely in this season um in in a lot of rough times and this is speaking to a lot of people that are out there the greatest like the greatest success stories were created from times like this and so if you look at money as a limitation you look at where you come from as a limitation you look at your environment you look at what where you're at all these other things that just becomes what we call stories in your head that only stop you from your destiny then you're gonna stay stuck and small but everybody everybody has a chance to play big like i say that's one of my opening speeches on stage i always start with before i get started i'm just a kid from the south side of chicago who just realized how powerful he was and unlocked his mindset that's what i always start with and so if you're watching this no matter your circumstance no matter where you're at no matter where you're starting not how much capital you have in the bank you have to be creative in this time you have to push forward out of your comfort zone you have to be able to go through extreme you know uh just whatever it takes like that was my mentality that's the mentality i have every day i have challenges even now he was oh he has a successful tech company you know with employees but here's the thing i have bigger challenges now and i have to approach those differently so if you're watching this make sure that you you have that self-belief that you go out and you take risks and you get out your comfort zone you don't worry about the money you lost yesterday or this didn't work and that didn't work if man if i wouldn't even sit here and talk about all the stuff that did not work we didn't even have enough time to talk about all the failures that i experienced as a man or almost going bankrupt or the foreclosure was a small story and so if you're watching this i just want you it's great to watch podcast dave got one of the best podcasts in the game to me but it's nothing it's nothing if you don't get up off of this screen and you might be even taking notes from this and do something with that information because that's where you make the biggest impact i love it i love it man can't close it out no better than that do me a favor man uh go get you some social proof okay go build something go build something study how you build it do not miss the journey don't miss the steps because i need you to go back to your community and teach somebody else how you did it all right we are out of here peace peace you

Channel: David Never Sleeps

Views: 25,622

Rating: 4.9331245 out of 5

Keywords: courses, justinburns, makingsales

Id: Gb8gxJLEj08

Length: 97min 56sec (5876 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021