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(00:00): Hello everybody and welcome to the How to Become More Podcast. And today we have the pleasure having Tracy Hazard from Podetize and we’re gonna be blown away because we’re doing a podcast and she’s the queen of podcasts. So this is absolutely fantastic everybody talks about their mission, vision, and passion and shares with others and stop tiptoeing through life and makes the difference we were born to make.
Tracy, welcome aboard! How are you today? I’m great so excited to be here with you.
I’m excited to have you here as well so.
(00:32): let’s get going right away and tell us a little bit about yourself. Either personally and professionally,mainly but so we have a better understanding of who Tracy is.
Tracy: Well I am the luckiest woman on Earth because I get to work with my best friend every single day who happens to be my husband. And so he and I are Partners in our business and of course in our regular life. The thing that energizes me the most is the way we have brain shared together.
(01:04) We are lucky that I can drop in the middle of something and just say, here’s what I’m thinking. And he has all the context to where that came from because we’ve been together so long. So it’s a beautiful way to collaborate together without this no no no you got to explain everything. I never have to go back to the beginning with anyone and it’s so fabulous. It’s one of my favorite things.
I met him my first day of college he actually insulted me and called me a valley girl which is a California insult
(01:29) from the 80s.And early on we just found we worked really well together and now we’ve been married 31 years and we worked about 25 of those years together. So it’s been fabulous!
We have three daughters and we have this great business that I get so excited about every single day because I get to talk to fantastic podcasters like you Francois and I get to learn something which you know curiosity and learning that I built it into my business and it makes it fantastic for me. We have over a thousand
(02:00) clients that are doing some really cool things out there. And I can’t wait to tout them and talk about them and help them and support them. That’s awesome, thanks for sharing so many aspects of your life. One of the things is many people and myself it’s interesting you said 31.
(02:19) I’ve been married for 31 years as well. Congratulations! It’s a big milestone, right? Indeed, that’s right. We are dinosaurs in these days. And so as you said we connect so much together and we have many people listening right now are the same situation, as spouses some support them more than others.
Tell me a little tidbit of how you made the decision to merge better together and before you do I’ll tell you the following if that’s okay to set the stage. At first with my wife, we were doing things together and then she says oh let’s not do this I go or I tell her hey I’ve researched this thing and it’s fantastic she goes I
(02:57) don’t feel good about it. And that was a very interesting concept and so we sat down and we talked about the following. And we say, Okay since we want because of our religious belief we believe that we’re going to be together forever afterlife it says if we’re going to be together forever let’s make sure that when we cross that line we’re at the same level and one is not ahead of the other so let’s take the time to listen to what the other has to say and find out how it
(03:25) works and blends and then if I’m lower and she’s higher well she’s going to lower a bit and I’m going to get higher and opposite vice versa by doing it this way it took a little bit longer to get things going but now it’s much faster because we respect one another much more so having set that stage what about you because a lot of people are asking us how do you do it well yes and no that’s the question so I was once giving a speech on stage and Greg Reed uh author of three feet from gold and tons of other books asked
(04:00) me this question from the stage and he kind of pissed me off a little bit because it’s like the question that you ask only the wife and the relationship and not the one you asked the husband but he said he said how do you work with your husband every single day and basically not get in each other’s way that’s the way he said it and I was like really kind offended by it and I said look that’s not how this works right we’re in a car together we’re not driving in separate Lanes
(04:28) we’re in the same car on the same path to the same destination which we pre-agreed to right and if we’re going to change our destination we’re going to sit there in the car and argue about it but we’ll eventually agree on the destination or we’re not going anywhere right but here’s the difference sometimes I drive and sometimes he drives sometimes I’m exhausted and I just can’t do anything else and I get to go to sleep in the back seat if I want to right it’s what I call Harmony
(04:57) it is not a so you get your drum solo you get to do those things in harmony you get to shine when it’s the right time for you to shine and when you’re prepared for it and you’re ready for it and but everybody’s building more beautiful music together and that’s how we look at everything that we do there’s no him and me there’s none of that competition going on we don’t do the same job sometimes we go an entire day and never say anything to each other like we do not interact with
(05:28) clients together we don’t have meetings like it just happens like that and other days we’ll spend a whole day like brainstorming and figuring out what the next new thing is so it’s just it living in this idea that it has to be equal or balanced is really incredibly difficult. I was a ballet dancer as a teenager and a young child and I cannot stand out and as good as I was I cannot stand on my toe for life I can’t do it it’s not sustainable balancing yoga I’ve seen people do them for hours on end but most of us cannot
(06:01) do that it is not sustainable to balance but Harmony totally sustainable because it’s a group of you I love it I love the idea that you said that we’re in the same car and sometimes I drive sometimes he drives this is so beautiful because we’re not arguing we’re going in the same direction and if we don’t want we park and then we can talk and then continue but we’re going in the same direction I absolutely love it hopefully all our listeners like now when you’re with your spouses just it’s
(06:31) not you against me it’s in the same vehicle heading in a direction and let’s make sure that we’re in harmony I love to say they say Harmony driving there. this is awesome I love it there are always so many nuggets when we speak one to another I love it cool so you told us a little bit about yourself tell us what is that get you fired up as far as making a difference what makes you and I like to say jump out of bed in the morning it says all right I’m blessed enough that I get to do this so what is it for you?
(07:01) so there are two sides to being fired up sometimes we can be really fired up by something that just like angers us right it just like gets us like we gotta cut we gotta combat this we gotta stop this is not okay and there is a part of that like I really dislike and I get fired up against those that are out there and I the there’s a lot of faux gurus right out there right who tell you that everything’s going to be wonderful you know in the podcasting industry it’s just starting a podcast you’re gonna be great at it do 10
(07:41) episodes you’re gonna be totally fine I cannot stand that kind of misleading information that gets you to plunk down money and get started and then what happens is you feel bad you feel like the failure in it when it was bad advice, to begin with, and I get that we gotta inspire people to do it but I get fired up by giving you not only the realistic view of how this is going to work and what it’s going to be like but also giving you as many tools and coming up with all the different ways to make this even easier for you because I’m a how-to
(08:16) grow I know how to do stuff it’s easy for me and I realize that it’s not always for you it’s not always for my clients and so my goal in the world is to take all that pain all that how do I do this out of the way so that you can just do it and be brilliantly you and none of it feels painful because it shouldn’t get in the way of you getting your message out there and that’s my goal in the world is just to both be fired up by the idea that I can make that happen and I like I said how
(08:49) to grow I know I can make it happen I can’t don’t always have enough Capital to make it happen fast enough but I can’t make it happen and the other side of that is making sure that I’m combating this bad information that you’re that you’re being manipulated with. absolutely I have I have this it’s a representation I call it my easy button and so many people say oh it’s an easy button and I tell everybody there’s no such thing as an easy button but then I mismatch myself because as a
(09:20) national trainer for Tony Robbins always says to mismatch yourself whenever you say something and find out what’s the other side of it and then there is an easy button but only when you paid the price only when you pay the price that’s exactly when you’ve paid the price my father used to say in life when you start a new thing you can make it hard at first and it’s going to be easy for a long time or you can make it easy at first and it’s going to be hard for a long time hence you haven’t paid the
(09:47) price and you said something I’m a go girl I make things happen and most often times when people are the way that you mention and you do it again and again it becomes habitual and there’s nothing easier than a habit providing the Habit is giving us in the right direction and that’s why we need people like you and like me and especially you in the podcasting industry to help people hey you’re wasting time doing this you’re not getting any traction you need to gain traction by this way
(10:15) because you’ve been there done that and so you’re and that’s why people say I’m a guru it’s interesting is you have a proven track record of making things happen and so you’ve yeah I’ve proven expert and see this is what we’ve done this our entire careers because we used to design products that I didn’t mention that part because it kind of seems like it aside to my life today but we Tom and I designed products for Mass Market retail for Costco, Walmart Target around the world
(10:43) Canada everywhere yeah we’re like all over the world we would design products for that and you can still buy some of our products today we did over two and a half billion dollars worth of product design wow and one of the things that I know from doing that is that products have to sell themselves at the end of the day there isn’t somebody telling you they’re positioning on the Shelf happens good package design happens like those things have to be done right but at the end of the day there’s no person there
(11:11) selling it for the company there’s no brand ambassador and standing in Costco going why this chair right like it’s perfect no someone goes sits in it and goes yeah this will fit my house this fits me this is what I want. They’re the ones making that choice and that decision but the product has to sell itself and that only comes from knowing that it’s the right fit it’s the perfect product to begin with and so that’s something that you have to know and do then you have to make sure that you are in this feedback loop of
(11:43) they bought it they love it and they tell someone else about it and when you’re in that place now you have a brand and not just a product I love it that’s really where it grows right so I want stuff this is my always been our mission always because you talk about Mission all the time always been our mission from the day we started working together is we want people to buy what we have to sell right and we want them to buy it we want them to use it and we want them to Rave about it again and again and again so it has to be
(12:19) repeatable that’s our basic goal and mission that underlies everything I do in design. This is cool because basically underlying all of this thing is that you want to have the user experience to be so nice that they want it and then they speak to others about it because you’ve thought about it prior to bringing it to the market and this is that advanced thinking that makes a product that stands on its own and grows legs actually right and so we don’t believe in advertising to start a product or a
(12:52) company and that’s really against sort of the digital marketers out there in the whole thing we don’t believe in advertising first we believe in referrals first if you cannot get your referral base working then you actually don’t have a brand you don’t have a repeatable product you don’t have it because at some point the algorithm is going to screw up and you’re going to end up with no sales right it’s going to happen in advertising the circular misprints back in the day when you’re
(13:17) actually printing ads right it happens and then you had no sales over the weekend if you rely on that solely so we like to build the well first if it’s the cheaper and Grassroots thing to do to build the referrals in make sure the products working you have a bigger feedback loop when you do referrals and then you tack on the next thing and advertising is actually usually the third thing for us so I love it yeah so that’s kind of the model right awesome that you mentioned and and the listeners here that are all
(13:48) entrepreneurs heart-centered service driven sometimes say I love this so people will love it maybe and so they say test the market and you conceptualize in the way that you says referrals and referrals in a way is testing the market you bring it to someone it says what do you think and then they say I love it and as they love it then it starts to process so you’re asking sometimes right sometimes we have to sell our product for free or have to give it away for free in the beginning to start someone I’m not a big fan of
(14:20) freemium I don’t do it in our process we don’t have a free hosting platform for podcasts because I think when something’s free you’re not as serious about it and I think that free is not really free at the end of the day it has a cost to you so I don’t like that model and it but I would like to make it as cost-effective as possible so when I say that our lowest price is still 29 dollars it’s not killing you know it’s not breaking the bank so but coming in at that when you do have to sometimes when you’re
(14:47) testing software you’re doing other things you have to have something free the only commerce you have to prove that someone wants to buy what you have to sell eventually is their reputation and I will put my reputation on the line and recommend a good product and if I’m willing to do that you know you’re on to something and that’s what we call product market fit and to me it’s essential if you dump a lot of money in it product market fit is where it fails and it either fails that you loved your
(15:14) product so much you thought it was amazing but the market didn’t see it like you did right or the market needed something and your product didn’t fit it like it’s the other way around right and you saw a market need but you just mismatched in that way so it can go both ways but it is the number one when I was studying all the product um and I wrote a column for Inc magazine on Innovation for four years and one of the articles I wrote about was this product Market fit mismatch that happens it happens about 54% of the
(15:43) time in company failures it is either the product or the market the two-piece is not matching together that is failure it’s not capital and it’s not team those things are still failure points but they’re not actually the first failure point they just a lot of times you don’t realize it until you run out of money that the market didn’t want it and you weren’t getting the sales you and so the real problem wasn’t the capital the real problem was the product Market fit and I like the fact that again that
(16:12) referral portion is part product market fit is automatically challenged or stamped of approval right off the bat which is great yeah there’s a Jay Abraham who you all probably do know I do consider an actual expert and real guru. Jay Abraham has a video on his website that’s about like the 80 ways to refer like the 80 referral methods and other things I have one in my YouTube channel as well that is our version of referrals and it doesn’t have 80 ways but it has quite a lot I think it has like 20 or something thing but there
(16:47) are so many different ways to look at inspiring referrals in your in your company and we did it in a really interesting way when we first started we went from people shoving their credit cards at us that’s literally what happened is they would say Tracy you have a podcast and your podcast is so amazing you’ve got a hundred thousand listeners in five months what did you do and I would list out all the things that I did because it was way harder back in 2014 when I started and they would go here’s my
(17:14) credit card would you just do it for me and finally I said yes to the first person and so in our first half year we took in 10 people those 10 people referred us to a hundred by the end of the following year wow and that and that all happened because we actually realized okay we can do this we’ve got the capacity we got our system in place we did all that in that first six months with those 10 customers and then we said we can take more and we told them we could take more and they referred the next year we said okay now just telling
(17:46) them we can take more isn’t going to be good enough what are we going to do now so now we incentivize them and we said if you refer someone I’m gonna give you five free episodes in your production capacity which is just a little over a month of episodes and that’s a bit of money to them and so we had a couple of clients who referred so many people they never had to pay for the entire year that’s amazing actually you touched on something that is you know you’re so business savvy is you talked about the
(18:12) referrals and then the referrals will take you only so far then you incentivize them and so this is something that entrepreneurs need to find out I call my philosophy of Life Is “Life is a wood stove and you look at it says give me heat I’ll give you wood” The wood stove looks at it and says no baby, you give me wood and I’ll give you heat.The more wood you give me the more heat I’ll give you hence incentivize is actually to give an incentive to people so they can continue and if we think about
(18:43) it you and I and everybody listening we’re all the same if someone if we like something and someone says hey I’ll pay you to well all of a sudden we start to talk a little bit more about it because there’s an incentive for it so it’s interesting that as money comes in we need to make money go out again because money is not it’s energy it’s not static yeah someone pointed out to me sometimes that and I didn’t think I didn’t know I was going to talk about this you know when you have it in your
(19:11) pointing this way in the bedroom you have a pot of change and you just put change in there you put change coins and he says you know that this is worth absolutely nothing I go what are you talking about he says well it’s not moving it’s not doing it’s just collecting dust actually it is collecting dust yeah unless you make it move out then it creates nothing and then it dawned on me that money is not just pieces of paper that are stacked there it’s what it can provide and do and the more you think about it the more
(19:38) you make it grow and come back and invest and come back and then that flow makes it multiply and when we put our step on the hose it doesn’t work. now my good friend my good friend Maria Simone of Zen moose Capital she always says the money has not left the planet it’s still there it’s in circulation it’s moving it’s energy you may not have it in front of you at this moment but it has not left the planet yes and and just I wanted to land the plane what you said at first is that people that seek
(20:07) freebies people that want free stuff and so as you said that as you do this you attract Tire kickers you attract people that are not committed you attract people that are not so therefore ladies and gentlemen if you’re looking for free stuff and you don’t want to pay Guess Who You’re Gonna attract and so this is the law that’s happening out there we have to make it circulate if we say it for others well we need to say it for us my dad used to say when you point that someone you got
(20:35) four fingers pointing back at you you do and so when we do something free like we have a free boot camp on how to learn how to podcast the reality is that the cost of that course isn’t money the cost of that course is the amount of action you have to take in order to make it happen right at the end of each lesson is you’re gonna have to go do this or you’re not moving forward don’t even bother to like I say it in the videos all the time don’t bother to go to the next lesson unless you’ve created
(21:06) your cover art you went to Fiverr you drew it up yourself I don’t care how you did it but you’re you shouldn’t bother to move forward and listen to what I have to say if you didn’t take the action necessary to actually complete this by the end and that’s what we do is we put action as a cost and because look I know not everybody has money that’s great that’s like okay but you can take action to make things happen yes bootstrapping it Sweat Equity at first yes we all do it and then and
(21:39) that’s the thing I wanted to touch on is that as you get that Sweat Equity and you go to get traction and then money starts to come in then you need to pull it out again you need to put the wood into the fire so it says okay now it’s 29 dollars for that podcast part and then it starts to go so now let’s go to I don’t know what it is 49 dollar and now that’s what let’s go to 129 dollars
.
(21:59) but you’re moving and you’re getting traction and the weight and the worst part is is when you upgrade and you do these things but you’re not using it that’s to me like and then what happens is you get just satisfied and upset with whoever you subscribe from but really we need to think about this on our own look I bought my husband one of these um like it’s like a kickboxing thing it’s got these gloves they’ve got sensors in it and there was a subscription that went along with it a whole year he never
(22:29) logged in once oh come on a whole year who’s that on don’t get me wrong okay kickboxed he just never logged into the thing he did exercise he just didn’t log in to use to learn how to use the sensor and what waste and but it’s on him I can’t get mad at the company for that um we have to own up to the fact that we’re not taking action and that is a hard Truth for us we so often we like to complain about a company that didn’t deliver on something but the reality is at the end of the day we
(23:05) didn’t take the action that was required of us and we are doing if we own up to that then if something’s not right about someone’s product or service they’re going to work with you because if you tried and didn’t succeed I want to fix that nice but if you didn’t put the effort in I can’t make you I can’t make my clients record can’t make them show up right I can’t do it now I built in every way possible I make them live stream I make them make appointments I’m I try to hold them
(23:36) accountable and make themselves by the system hold themselves accountable but I still can’t make them show up and record at the end of the day I can’t do it yeah absolutely and how interesting I like to say that when we blame others or companies or the shortcomings of this and that we are empowering them and this empowering us and therefore we’re like a victim but if we turn it around and we say and this is something that happened to me at first LinkedIn had the hardest time figuring out and I’m still
(24:05) not a hundred percent on it but I said I can’t say Lnkedn’s not working I didn’t figure it out a hundred percent I did not pay the price yet enough in order to make it happen and the same thing with podcasting, if people said hey I don’t know what’s going on I, says we’ll try more but then I’ll tell you you want to fast track it go and see Podetize Tracy well you know we were talking about this before I mentioned Greg Reed in three feet from gold and it is the most frustrating book to me like
(24:33) I know people are like oh inspired you were just three feet from gold this is you just have to persevere that’s the lesson of the book to me the lesson is you dummy go get an expert opinion and find out if it really is you or what’s missing in the process because Francois it might not be linked it might not be you in LinkedIn it might be the combination of you and Linkedin together are not a match for what you want to do yeah and only an expert can tell you that someone who has figured it out so go get we call it an appraisal of your
(25:05) podcast at our company right we go get a podcast power appraisal go get an audit a review there are so many people who are willing to do those things for free do you have to listen to a sales pitch probably in the scope of things but you’re gonna get a review for free and you might get something brilliant in return and that’s really what frustrates me about it is that we start we do internalize this we and some of us do blame ourselves but we aren’t asking the right people to say well I’ve tried this
(25:36) I’ve tried that what did I do wrong and then really taking a good look at everything and say I don’t think you did do anything wrong let’s put you somewhere else and let’s see if it works over here nice it might happen for you only expertise can help us do that so if people were to actually look and find out because you said they maybe there’s expertise on maybe jumping the gun on this but that’s okay then let me see it’s command V there you go and the reason is ladies and gentlemen
(26:09) Tracy told me that my computer was not got a Mac with a new camera and a microphone so you could but look how good he looks right and how great he sounds so it was worth it listening to someone and making sure that these things are working so if someone was to go to podetize.com we’re not yet there but still if someone was to do that can they find something that can help them for their podcast if you can’t find something there I would be shocked so here’s what we do first off up in the top corner somewhere
(26:41) there’s that free boot camp you just click on the boot camp it’s like I said it’s free I don’t even think we do send emails but I don’t even think we really email you if you’re not taking action we’re not pestering you we’re just there to support you and then there is somewhere appraisal or book a call at the bottom you’ll get an appraisal if you already have a show and you want to know what it’s like how it’s rating what you maybe missed in the setup of it there are
(27:05) about seven different technical things that we could get you to fix that would improve the listenership in your show Almost instantly within 30 days pretty good and again walking the talk of saying you need to talk to an expert if it’s not working find out from someone who knows and this is so powerful indeed and then every single day which is actually in two hours or an hour and a half from when we’re recording this so in an hour and a half I go live um on LinkedIn on Twitter on Facebook on YouTube all of those places I go we go live with
(27:40) our coaching call for all of our clients now our clients join us in Zoom they get to ask questions live they can Hot Seat there’s a lot more robustness for them which all you have to do is be a part of our hosting platform for that that 29 a month and you can join in live but you can listen to the live stream and get our tips and we are constantly sharing tips like this week we’re today we’re going to be talking about should you copyright the name of your show nitty-gritty stuff but things you might
(28:09) be thinking about when you’ve gotten 100 episodes in and you’re thinking wow this thing is really going II could do something with it should I copyright it right so there’s a whole bunch of different lessons that we go over at various times we talked about LinkedIn use for podcasters creating newsletters, building your list like we have all of that and then we turn it into our podcast feed your brand which you can also access off the website and that’s free um the binge factor which is the show
(28:36) that Francois came on which is my interview with top podcasters that’s free and also accessible from the site and then we have a knowledge base and the knowledge base is simply you can type in pretty much any topic or question and we have answers and if we don’t have the answer you can submit it and we’ll record it in the next coaching call wow so once again you can see that you’re really structured and structured expels chaos because once we’re chaos that means I’m doubting if I’m doubting
(29:07) I don’t know what I’m going to do therefore I take no action so having some certainty and having a process to follow a proven process enables to accelerate results this is absolutely cool well and the thing is is that is that when we have a location where like a One-Stop shop for information what happens is you can ask things that I have answers to like I like Francois was talking about LinkedIn being a problem but the thing is that I can say oh I know this person that are my clients that have a
(29:36) show on LinkedIn and or they have proven results there I don’t know that they have your answer but that’s worth exploring and because we have access to that kind of data and information we see what works again and again remember I would like things that work again and again I can point you in the right direction and save you some time and that’s my ultimate goal is if I save you time and lots of frustration you’re more likely to hit the success button cool so now you talk about frustration
(30:05) this is one thing that I like in my show is you know Tracy you’re up there you make things happen everything is rolling but each entrepreneur if we ask them how things going we’re gonna say fine super but sometimes it’s hard it’s not easy we hit walls and so for you to be more accessible or how can I say uh vulnerable my question is when is it that at some point or what happened that maybe one morning you didn’t want to get up you wanted to just put the blankets and keep them and he says oh I don’t
(30:37) want to see this day and the reason I’m asking the question is because I want you to tell people that although you can build a big thing sometimes it’s not all Rosy out there and that’s okay and the reason I asked the question also is because since you’re here that means you’re overcome it well let’s go into the sad or the dark place first and to encourage people and tell us a little bit about an experience there might be a few or one that comes to mind to you that one point says man what’s happening
(31:03) with this I don’t like this no more yeah, for the most part, I’m going to say that I don’t let a lot get to me because I don’t see a lot of point to it just to be honest with you like that’s kind of my personality it’s like it doesn’t mean that I don’t hit something and go God that’s a big barrier right like what do I do with that and but I don’t believe that any barrier is insurmountable forever it might be insurmountable at this moment but not forever but where that comes
(31:32) from is this early part of my career so very early on Tom and I had another business together it was called T-tools and T-tools was making stylus pens for handheld computers for the Palm Pilot economy back in the late 90s early 2000s and we designed this really Innovative cool looking it looked like a calligraphy pen but it was a stylist tip point and we were selling them to FedEx and uh pharmaceutical companies and privately through everyone and we had we had a great business going and we were printing logos on them and it was just a
(32:05) lot of fun then we had our patent issued and we thought golden this is a big big deal and those are probably one of our first five we now have over 40 patents between the two of them but this was like one of our first five patents that we had it was in the early days and so we were so excited about it not one week after we received the notification from the patent and trademark office that it was going to issue which means we didn’t actually have the certificate yet but they just gave you the letter of issuance and so
(32:33) it’s just the notice it no so nobody else knows yet so we’re preparing to make a big announcement out there thinking this is a big PR deal we get a catalog that came in the Palm Pilot and we had been trying for 18 months to get into the catalog to be accepted into the catalog and because Palm Pilot prints that and so we open it up and in the middle is a pen that looks almost exactly like us like ours created by IDEO the largest industrial design firm in the world and branded Palm so Palm hired IDEO to
(33:10) create this so we’d been knocked off the moment our patent issued and if there’s anything any patent holder will ever tell you is that defending a patent is next to Impossible because of the cost yes and if you’re and some people’s advice are don’t go get a patent if you can’t defend it we don’t believe in that we think there’s all kinds of other value for it but that’s a whole nother show but that day I literally did not want to get out of bed I cried I thought I’ve got all
(33:40) these I had like 20 employees I had 20 employees that I was like I don’t know if I’m going to be in business tomorrow what am I going to do about this we had literally just moved in a brand new office yeah so we just had the carpeting the walls painted furniture put us in everybody was loading product in that day and I was like I don’t know if I could afford this what do we I mean this is too big they’re gonna take away too much margin and they’re in the box like how am I gonna Market against that I can
(34:09) only have the money for that so after crying for a few hours Tom and I got together some of our partners some of the people we had given Equity to Sweat Equity for starting the business with us our lawyer who we’re still good friends with and who is still our lawyer today ,our lawyer our PR, our publicist and we all sat down in a room and said what are we gonna do what are our options and at the end of the day we decided to go the publicity route and so we put in a PR campaign without social media mind you because keep in
(34:45) mind this is like 2001 and so it’s like January 2001. and so we put in um our publicist sent out all these press releases we put in a whole thing on our website that said do we detect a bit of pen envy and we showed our pen and their pen and their pen was smaller so like it really helped like it was physically smaller than ours so like if ours was above and theirs was slightly smaller below then we did something no lawyer would ever tell you to do which is we put a timeline of every time we met with palm Computing and showed our
(35:19) product in the early days we put a timeline of when we went to Market with it we showed a timeline of when we filed our patent and when it was issued when we created it which you don’t back then it was date of creation not first to file like it is today so it was different back then and so revealing your creation date was something you didn’t do unless you were forced into court but we knew we were earlier than them because we knew when they got hired by Palm Computing because they put out a press release about that so they couldn’t have
(35:47) invented it before they got hired so we knew we were at least a year ahead of them and so so that’s what kind of happened in the whole process was we did this so it went viral via email our fans of our product who loved our product told all their friends and they refused to buy the other product they all boycotted it for us and they doubled down and we sold more product in that month than we ever sold in the prior year and so it turned out to be something so fantastic but what really happened was pure luck.
(36:21) Palm Computing was trying to go public at that moment in time and they didn’t need an entanglement of a lawsuit so our lawyer said it’s going to cost us five thousand dollars which was pretty much the only free capital the only open capital I had to spend it’s gonna cost five thousand dollars but we’ll file it knowing we can’t ever like take the case you know we’re gonna settle and you’ll never take the case to court he’s like but you gotta file it because the big newspaper the San Francisco yes
(36:51) Chronicle the San Jose Mercury Times they all wanted it to be filed so that they would have a valid story to run and so we filed it they ran the story and we settled within a week now we settled and when you win you lose let me tell you they we settled they agreed to give us royalties of the product but then they pulled the product from the market so you got nothing in there but we did get a lot of press we did preserve our patent and that enabled us to sell the company because 911 happened shortly after that so this it took about three
(37:25) months for all this to pan out which is really fast honestly lots of patent lawsuits and all those things can drag out for years in three months we were able to get our settlement and so but 911 happens and we really needed to get out of the business and we were lucky that we could sell off our patents at that point and that’s what we did and we actually returned 5x to all of our investors and so the business for the product and the patents itself and made money so we got very lucky in the next year
(37:56) because of that but this is like this thing can devastate you but what I really learned is even when you think there’s not a way get the right people in the room there is a way through it may not be ideal and what we get caught up in and the reason we get mired in our fears and other things is because we get caught up in this was not how I imagined my business was going to go this is not how I imagined my marriage was going to be like right I imagine something different than it’s turned out to be and
(38:26) we get caught up in that in that discrepancy yeah and we cannot get through that part of it and we and if you can faster throughout that imagined ideal that didn’t come to fruition then you can imagine a new future what does that look like that’s how you get through something and so that’s why it is easier for me now because I have learned how to let that go keyword or key sentence let it go whenever there’s things around it let it go and then focus on where you want to go because if you focus on what’s going
(39:02) bad you’re giving it life and therefore it keeps growing and growing it’s going to eat you alive recognize it that it’s not happening but then turn around says what is it that I really want and nourish that and when you’re nourishing that then it’s taken off and congratulations this is the thing that most entrepreneurs small entrepreneurs oh this is overwhelming and you said I cried for hours it’s okay right like that’s part of letting it go is you do have to get it out of you
(39:29) right it’s okay and but nevertheless, then he says okay what can I do and one of the things I teach all my clients is those three favorite words is HOW CAN I? It puts back the power into your court How can I do this?I don’t know okay do it again how can I do this I don’t know and then continue to ask how can I says maybe I can ask someone else and as you said surround yourself with people that know because there’s always a solution Bob Proctor used to say to every problem
(39:59) there’s a solution because there is for every inside there’s an outside there’s a top there’s a bottom there’s always an opposite so if there’s a problem there’s a solution we just don’t know it yet that’s right aligning ourselves with people that know more than us can enable us to take some traction and make things happen that’s awesome so this is you know one of the things is that we were young we were under 30 right so or we were just over 30. sorry we were just
(40:24) over 30. um but we were young and we didn’t have a ton of business experience so like we didn’t have a lot of those things miring our ideas can this work should this work what will happen with this so there was a little bit of that in there but at the same time even today I would still make the same choice and that’s an unusual thing is like if you would still make that same Choice knowing everything that you know now I’ve gotten that question quite a lot actually on this particular thing
(40:54) is I would still make the same choice I would still file my patents I would still fight it and it would be easier to go viral and put out a social media campaign like there would be a lot of things that would be easier in that process but if you would still do that then it’s fundamental to you that’s critically important I think to understand is that that is going to go with you no matter what your what you have to face it becomes a fiber part of your fiber part of who you are it’s yeah it’s part of the way you fight things
(41:22) part of the way you move through things part of the way you succeed as well because it becomes a part of that absolutely and so so everybody listening that’s what it is if you need to succeed if you want to succeed there’s going to be challenges and you and if you just lower your arms with challenges you’re gonna lose but if you take action and you seek advice from others that’s how you can at least gain traction and how great that all your investors got 5x return on their investment and then
(41:48) you’re able to sell it this is a good thing because a lot of them are family yes but also it would not have happened if you would have let go right it would not have happened if you would let go yeah and there’s nothing worse what’s his name uh well not Tony used to say take the rocking chair the eight you’re 80 years old and you’re on the porch and then you’re with your wife or a partner or significant other and you’re holding each other by the hand and then you think about that situation that you’re
(42:13) facing right now and now you’re 80 years old says I’m happy we went through rather than what if we decided to go through you don’t want to live in what ifs and regrets go for it and make things happen we’re going to fall down on our face that’s when you get back up and that’s okay I love it so what words of encouragement would you have to help people and and the word that you wrote them was participate okay can you elaborate on this yeah I think too often we want passive stuff like you see it
(42:44) all the time like I want passive income I want past like I want to passively do something passive doesn’t really exist right it’s not Energy’s not passive in any way shape or form right it does if you want to return on something then you have to act be active about it and it is false for someone to tell you that you can do a passive investment you have to do the research you have to do the due diligence if you don’t you get yourself in trouble like this frustrates me to no end when I’ve actually turned down investors who
(43:18) only came to have a conversation with me because their friend said this was good I was like well don’t you want to see the deck don’t you want to see these things don’t you want to ask me questions I don’t care if they think it’s right for them is it right for you you have to actively participate in everything you do otherwise you can’t go blaming other people I’m just you know that’s just not it is on you you can’t say oh I got in this bad sock deal because I followed you
(43:47) know uh this famous person into it no who cares it was right for him but he had millions of dollars you don’t you should have thought that through yeah it has to be right for you and that requires participation now levels of participation right like you know let’s be honest with you I don’t want to actively do everything but I need to do the things that are the most important vetting due diligence are one of the most important things you need to do on anything I cannot tell you how many times I find out somebody just paid ten
(44:20) thousand dollars for something and never even Googled whether or not it was a scam anything right yeah it happens all the time number two read the fine print I was so happy a week ago my son-in-law walked into my office here and said hey I was reading I I just took this job with with the guy who’d been doing freelance work for but I took a full-time job with him and in the employment agreement they had this Tech policy and I read it through and there was some weird things because I’m using my own video equipment he’s a he’s
(44:58) a great videographer and he is like I’m using my own equipment I’m not according to this Tech policy I’m not supposed to plug in devices that are you know like hard drives but physically you can’t do my work without plugging in a hard drive because video files are so big the computer would crash right so he’s like um and so I read this and I went to the CEO and said it to him and he said you read it and he’s like I don’t think anybody read it like it was just a pat you know a standard policy they got from their from
(45:32) their Employment Office you know whatever it was the peo yeah it was just a standard thing it didn’t even apply to their business and they didn’t realize it they just took it in and everybody signs it and he read it first and I was like congratulations I left my impression do not sign anything that you don’t understand that so so vetting and Googling things reading things and understanding what you’re buying your deliverables get into it and then making sure when it says you have to do the recording you have to answer emails to
(46:04) give me up an affirmative so we can continue to move forward that’s required of you and every time you delay you cause a delay in deliverables you cause a delay in you getting the return that you expected that has the cost and you reduce your momentum and then you’re complaining well right right and you really needed that result in a specific time frame but you didn’t answer your emails there is nothing that service provider can do for you if you don’t participate in the process now there’s a difference between
(46:42) participation and a lot of work right but you do need to participate in any expectation that you don’t is a recipe for disaster and you said participants is there are plenty of those offering assistance but too few are participating in the process meaning we can’t blame that there’s no information it’s there but we just need to go out and so yeah but it’s going to cost me money well it’s going to save you money basically there’s this thing about money so it costs money or is it a cost or an
(47:11) investment and that money what’s the ROI well what’s the CEO the cost of an action cost of an action is very expensive way more than many people can think it’s actually higher than failure absolutely yeah and it’s directly linked to failure as well yes cool right on so do you have a special MVP like Mission Vision passion formula I’d like to share with the audience is something that you’re obsessive in your focus yeah so we actually have a mission here in the office and I’m going to read it just
(47:41) so that I don’t mess it up but we’re reinventing brand marketing with an obsessive podcaster-centric focus on solutions to get hosts seeing heard found and rewarded in a noisy digital world and we wrote that all together as a team because I wanted my team and I have a have 80 staff members around the world so it’s not a small team and we came to up to with that because what we wanted to do was to really set the tone for where our Focus was where are the problem was for our client base the noisy digital world and them
(48:19) getting seen heard and found that’s the real big problem for them and so that it puts this thing that we measure every single email we write every single product and service we come out with everything’s measured against that so it is our mission vision and passion all built into one rather than having all those things separated and we use it externally as we use it internally I love it so we do have core principles on top of that that we do you know and one of those big things that I really besides participation being an action taker
(48:53) that’s what we call it in our principles but the other part of that is being a problem solver sometimes we have to solve our own problems and sometimes we have to solve systems problems and sometimes we have to solve our client’s problems but being a problem solver is the mindset that we need to stay in because then you’re not in this uh it’s not me I like what you said I’ll paraphrase it and saying that your mission is your large print but it’s also reflected into your small print it
(49:21) is and that that makes a big difference to someone’s sustainability and how people would like to refer you and then continue on with you so what’s next on your to-do list any professional project that our plan in the future for Tracy and Podetize we are always going like you know 100 miles an hour that’s kind of our thing but right now we are you know we we actually are not jumping on the AI bandwagon we’ve actually been using artificial intelligence for 18 months already wow
(49:51) and so yeah and in fact some of it we’ve even been using since 2018 so even longer than that we’ve been using transcription AI since 2018 and what we’ve um learned from it is how bad it is what we really learned from it is that because of these what they call large language models if you’ve been seeing the news out there LLM’s they call it every time they say an AI it’s got all these acronyms right a large language model that most of these were built on were radio and television broadcasts
(50:23) where they learned how to transcribe and business transcription that happened from law offices and medical offices and other things where you have large transcription sets that’s what they trained it on it’s predominantly white male in the entire language model set which means that as a woman coming into it, it’s already more inaccurate on my voice than it is on your voice and you have an accent right so it’s already inaccurate for you too because it’s basically English speaking white men and so that
(50:57) makes the model in and up of itself flawed but secondly because they’re trying to have such a mass learning that they believe in quantity over quality what they also don’t get in that process is to understand your industry they don’t understand real estate, finance entrepreneurship we have our own lingo if you haven’t noticed right yes yeah we really do and so it doesn’t understand that because it doesn’t segment it doesn’t ever look at it so what we started to do was to retrain the AI
(51:29) early on in the last couple of years, we’ve been sending the training back so when you go and get a pers let’s say you wanted to take this podcast of us Francois and you took it to rev.com or one of those places and you even could take it to whisper.ai the openai version and you put this audio file in and say transcribe this and it does it it will be about 60 accurate that’s you still got 40 to go it’s a lot of work to get it all the way cleaned up and ready it’ll be about 60 accurate but what we found is we can
(52:05) up that by a minimum of 20 percent by using our retraining system because what happens is when you do that you take it away it gives you like a Word doc and you take that Word doc away and then you go edit it and you put it in your blog so the AI never sees the results that of you cleaning it up but because we’re a production company at the same time that we’re a hosting company we have software and service and because we have both we have a feedback loop so we started to give it a feedback loop and
(52:37) say Hey you really stink at this get better look what we had to do manually to make this work and it started learning wow now we had to train it to learn like there’s a whole bunch of coding that had to go into teaching it to learn that was not the easy part and so now what we’re looking at is we’re going to be starting to import operate our AI straight into our hosting platform so for the low dollar hosting package that you get you might buy every month for like 50 bucks a month you
(53:05) could go in and you could have your podcast transcribed and it’s going to be closer to 80 to 90 percent depending on your industry depending on your voice I think yours might be a little bit more challenging I got to get some more people with the same accent as you in order to train it to get it up to speed or you have to do hundreds of episodes which you know which we could do right because you’ve got a large set so you can do that as well but it also we’ve taught it to be
(53:32) in a silo in addition so in addition to having this grouping of it learning it’s also learning me so I’ve got 250 episodes in on my podcast it’s really learned me so now when it gives me title options and other things that it does it gets my personality it gets my style it understands what I want and it gives me better options so it’s going to spit out titles suggestions for you and when you reject those titles or edit those titles it’s going to learn and the next time it’s going to give you better Solutions
(54:01) so the more you use it the more participate in the process the better your results will be but it’s going to be so easy to do because it’s right where you’re going to syndicate your show so you don’t have to go into something else put it all in bring it back so that’s our big mission is by the beginning of next year is to have it all completely integrated and the whole learning process in play so we have we work on it and use it behind the scenes um because we’ve been Brute Force
(54:31) testing it but we don’t do it without humans and guided that’s what we call it human guided AI now if you’re not paying for full service from us for our concierge episode Production Service our team is providing that human-guided side of it but if you’re going to use our do-it-yourself system you have to provide the guidance on it and that’s just the difference so Sweat Equity there but again not heavy lifting I don’t want anyone to do any heavy lifting it should take you 10 extra minutes to process an episode but the
(55:00) power of what you’re going to get a really complete title a complete transcription the power is going to be 10xing the results of the time you spent nice I love it and once again it shows how intricate you are in making things systematized so that they’re easy and I love that you said that you’ve created the loops that it learns from itself within the system once again showing that you’re above the crowd Tracy in the diligence that you have and the professionalism that you bring to the table with productized this is
(55:30) absolutely wonderful I love it I’m just gonna yeah because the one thing I don’t want is for you to end up like a cookie cutter right so we always have to be thinking about how do we personalize something how do we brand it how do we make it our own how do we keep that original voice because that’s what makes your show unique that’s why everybody’s tuning in here cool we’re gonna have a talk on this one after right and so so tell us what Legacy would you like to leave from what you’re you’re
(55:57) for either now or generations to come in why so my grandfather was a stone in Brick Mason my dad’s dad and on his gravestone it says hard-working hands at rest and I don’t want to be that kind of person that works hard and doesn’t achieve great results that have residual Legacy to them like that’s my thing and so the values that my grandfather gave to me is valuable that what he gave to my dad and what my dad taught me but also how he instilled that he had a third-grade education and he
(56:34) wanted my dad to go to college and I don’t think he could have been prouder that I went to college and became a business owner I don’t think there’s anything he could have been prouder of so I want that same thing for my daughters I want them to go out in the world and say it does require hard work but that hard work has Ripples and residual value and it’s making a difference in the world that’s what I want to see happen and so for me, our Legacy is is really when I inspire you to change something about your show and
(57:02) you’re able to keep going on your show the amount of people you touch are people I touched that’s the legacy of it and just because I didn’t get paid directly for that doesn’t mean it it’s not valuable it has I’m going to call it it’s a sole value like and I use that s-o-u-l right it has about my soul has more value because of what happened because of the impact that I had the ripples that I created and I think that’s the test of time is if I can create the highest value in my soul then
(57:33) at the end of the day I can go I can go retire on that porch in that rocking chair and feel great about what I accomplished in the world and know that my kids and my grandkids got that covered excellent just touching base your grandpa was Stone Mason and so he worked hard but it was on the uh what is it called Industrial Age but now you’re in the digital age but you still have that same principle and this is something that needs that transparency it’s a principle hard work is a principle it is something
(58:04) that’s not change regarding the economics, the interest rates, the politics that are in charge doesn’t change if you’re working hard but let’s also work smart and if it’s too big of a task hire someone that knows and have a thread that past before and as they thread that pass that path p-a-t-h yeah that path then that makes it easier for you so the community as they were coming together and you mentioned at the beginning people come to you to ask questions if you know the answer you can point them
(58:34) to someone else that can help them out and that’s what the community is all about and we can all and I value when I refer somebody I don’t make a lot of referrals to outside companies unless I know they have a good work ethic like that’s the key criteria for me is they may not have all the answers but are they willing to figure it out and make it work for you and help you get through that’s more valuable to me than it is someone who has the perfect solution the perfect system right because those
(59:03) perfect systems don’t always fit everybody absolutely yes they need to be tweaked so I always like to ask just for fun if you had a superpower what would it be and I love it. Ladies and gentlemen she said with great powers come great responsibilities which is awesome but again it shows who you are how you stand in back of what you say and you do but if there was a superpower what would it be I like the way that you said it do you remember what it was I don’t remember what I wrote downshift the mindset of everyone around me into
(59:35) seeing the possibilities and not the limitations so I do consider that to be my superpower it’s something that has always happened when somebody says well I invented this product and they’ll show it to me inventors used to come up to me at all kinds of events and I look at the product and I could see the path clearly to getting it to Market for me the path of how it makes it or it doesn’t make it is very clear and if we could all just see that that that that that future exists I can’t always see
(1:00:03) every turn along the way that’s not what I can see but I say it has a definite path and if we could see that for ourselves remember back to that road analogy if we can say this is our beautiful destination I am driving and I am going to get to the beach and I can visualize that for myself there is no way we are going to let the roadblocks get in our way it’s just not gonna happen so if that if I could reveal that to everyone and say this is the power of where you’re going don’t forget it you’re going to put in the work you’re
(1:00:37) going to do what’s necessary you’re going to get help along the way you’re going to ask for directions you’re going to make it happen because you are bought into where you’re going awesome hey we’re just hitting the hour it’s amazing how time flies when we’re having fun and so as I said Podetize.com
(1:00:53) is the place to get a hold of you there’s some different things that are offered to people that invite you to explore what Tracy and she has over delivered in showing us that she is professional about what she does you land in her path she’s going to lead you by the hand I’m looking forward to more information with you and for integration also of making a difference a ripple effect as you mentioned that touches the lives of people we don’t even know this is awesome well thank you so much, Tracy.
(1:01:20) and before we go I always say everybody listening to this stop tiptoeing through life Make some noise you have inside of you don’t die with your song Still inside if there’s a desire for it to go out make it come out and seek help in order to focus it so you can gain traction faster and with attraction momentum and through the momentum exponential growth someone’s waiting to hear the message from you. Let your voice be heard and make it happen and podcasting is a fantastic way to do it so Tracy Hazard from Podetize can
(1:01:53) help you do so any last word Tracy before we go so that’s exactly what you said Francois is how you become even more absolutely thank you so much, everybody, have yourself a great week and until next time and make it a great day thanks Tracy thank you
