Tommy Walker is the Host of Inside The Mind, a show that fuses internet generation humor with online marketing strategy. Currently he is doing an experiment with crowd-funding on indiegogo.com to get Season 2 off the ground. Also, he is publishing 20+ Guest Posts in 30 days.
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Resource Mentioned:
- Your Big Idea: Successful Entrepreneurs have One Big Idea. Follow JLD’s FREE training & you’ll discover Your Big Idea in less than an hour!
Success Quote
- “Decide what you believe in, live like you mean it.” – a button.
Business Failure
- Tommy shares with us a super recent failure with a crowd-funding campaign.
Entrepreneurial AHA Moment
- Tommy shares an AHA moment that cleared a lot of things up in my mind… will it do the same for you?
Current Business
- Tommy is being true to his inner voice and is not trying to portray himself in an ungenuine manner. Fire Nation salutes that behavior.
Small Business Resources
- SocialFlow.com: Turn Chaos into Clarity.
Best Business Book
- The Impact Equation by Chris Brogan.
Interview Links
Killer Resources!
1) The Common Path to Uncommon Success: JLD’s 1st traditionally published book! Over 3000 interviews with the world’s most successful Entrepreneurs compiled into a 17-step roadmap to financial freedom and fulfillment!
2) Free Podcast Course: Learn from JLD how to create and launch your podcast!
3) Podcasters’ Paradise: The #1 podcasting community in the world!
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Full Transcript
John Dumas: Hire Fire Nation and thank you for joining me for another episode of EntrepreneurOnFire.com, your daily dose of inspiration. If you enjoy this free podcast, please show your support by leaving a rating and review here at iTunes. I will make sure to give you a shout out on an upcoming showing to thank you!
John Lee Dumas: Okay. Let’s get started. I am simply delighted to introduce my guest today, Tommy Walker. Tommy, are you prepared to ignite?
Tommy Walker: Let’s do it!
John Lee Dumas: Awesome! Tommy is the host of “Inside The Mind,” a show that fuses Internet generation humor with online marketing strategy. Currently, he is doing an experiment with crowdfunding on Indiegogo.com to get Season 2 off the ground. Also, he is publishing 20+ guest posts in just 30 days.
I’ve given Fire Nation a little overview, Tommy, but why don’t you take it from here? Tell us a little bit about you personally. How old you are, where you’re from, and then get a little bit into your business.
Tommy Walker: Sure. So I’m 27 years old. My name is Tommy Walker. I got fired over a pair of pants originally and decided that at that time it was time for me to start working for myself. I had worked in the online marketing industry before that, and decided that it was time to go off and branch off on my own. I’ve been doing some form of online marketing strategy for the last six years, and at the beginning of January this year, I decided to take a little bit of a humorous approach to online marketing and create a show. The show is “Inside The Mind” that basically gives high level expert advice about online marketing strategy. It does it for free, but it does it in a way where – well, in one of the episodes, I say I’m not going to give you clichéd advice like provide value or be engaging because when I do things like that, a T. rex bites my head off. And then literally, a T. rex comes on to the screen and bites my head off and then confetti flies out of the neck hole.
So that’s pretty much it. I know you talk to a lot of online marketing guys, so as far as what I do is concerned, it’s not much different than what all the other online marketing guys do, but the presentation of it and the core of where my work comes from, I feel like is a little bit different, and I hope to really be able to move the space forward in a very positive direction by making the information free and accessible to the masses.
John Lee Dumas: I love that, Tommy. Now I’m trying to wrap my head around this T. rex biting your head off. Is it like King Kong old school graphics where like this weird T. rex comes on and bites your head off, or is it like a legit – like Tommy Walker’s got some serious skills in the video world?
Tommy Walker: [Laughs] So basically, it’s think more Monty Python style animation. We basically took a still image and we kind of cut it up in a few different pieces, key frames and areas, and you’ve got a 2D T. rex coming in and biting the head off. The effects on my show in the first season were actually pretty cheap and kind of cheesy, but got the point across. So yes. I mean it’s more Monty Python style than it is big budget Hollywood. However, with the Indiegogo project that we’re doing right now, I’m hoping to be able to bring a little bit higher production values to the show so we can start doing more cool stuff.
John Lee Dumas: I hear you, but honestly, sometimes less is more. I’m pretty intrigued. I’m going to go check out that T. rex video. I think it’s going to be quite cool. I’m not going to let you get away with one of your first comments, Tommy. Just take about one minute. You got fired over a pair of pants? What’s up with that?
Tommy Walker: [Laughs] Yes. In 2009, I was taking kind of a hiatus from my passion to sell some cell phones at a major retail chain. One day, it was the ice storm of – I mean you’re from Portland so this actually kind of works out. You know the area. Remember the ice storm in 2009? Like how just like whack outs where everywhere and all that?
John Lee Dumas: I remember hearing about it, but those were back in my San Diego days.
Tommy Walker: Oh! So you got lucky! So basically, the power went out for like two weeks, and I had left my uniform, my work uniform, in my apartment or my condo and had locked myself out. I had gone home, I realized I locked myself out. I had gotten into a car accident the day before. I waited in my driveway for my roommate to be able to open the door up. It didn’t happen. I ended up going in to work and had said to the manager on duty like, “Hey, I forgot my uniform. I got whacked out, I got into a car accident, and all these other type of stuff had happened. Is it okay if I borrow some clothes off the floor?” He was like, “Well, we don’t normally do that, but yes, I guess it’s okay. By the way, we have [wheeze].” So I go in, I borrow the uniform off the floor. I buy the sweater at the end of the day. I bring the pants back. I forgot my cell phone in the pair of pants. I came back later on in the day after I had closed out my shift and got my cell phone back. And two weeks later, my manager on duty had come over and said, “Give me your keys, give me your walkie-talkie. You’re fired.” I was like, “Well, why?” And they were like, “Well, because you borrowed pants off the floor.” I was like, “But I didn’t steal anything,” and they were like, “Yes, we know you didn’t steal anything. It just looked shady.”
That was it. That was kind of the whole end of the story. So I had decided after that because it was still at the worst part of the economy downturn, I was like, I could either try to pound the pavement and get another $9 an hour job somewhere or a $12 an hour job, because that’s really all that’s available in this area, or I can start striking out on my own and run my own business, run my own online marketing business. Basically, because I had been off my game for a little while, I had spent the next two weeks just 18 hour cram sessions, like falling asleep on the keyboard, drooling, cramming as much information as I could, and within two weeks I got my first client. Then after that, it just kind of kept snowballing. I got my first client from a mutual friend at a Super Bowl party. So it’s just a matter of seeing the opportunity and taking it.
John Lee Dumas: Wow! Well, I’ll tell you, Tommy, it’s just sometimes the downturns in life can turn out to be blessings. You might still be working at that retail store as a manager or something right now had not something crazy like that happened. So you just never know, you never know exactly what twists and turns are going to turn out to be. So just always try to walk away with the positives. That was quite a little interesting side note story that we launched into, which is very unique with EntrepreneurOnFire. We haven’t even gotten to our success quote yet, so we’re going to push through right now. Tommy, we like to start every show off with a success quote. You’ve already given us a funny story, so let’s just multiply that with your favorite success quote. What do you have for us today?
Tommy Walker: Sure. So it’s “Decide what you believe in. Live like you mean it.” I found that off of a button that was given to me from my aunt in the ‘80s.
John Lee Dumas: I love it. So we’re going to put “unknown” as to who we can attribute that to, but it really speaks volumes as to who you are as an entrepreneur. Can you actually talk about how this quote actually fits into your mentality and how you use this quote in your everyday life?
Tommy Walker: Sure. So I think one of the biggest things that entrepreneurs, and myself personally, have is this vision and this kind of drive, this mission, and I think that there are a lot of entrepreneurs or people who call themselves entrepreneurs who don’t. I think what separates those people from the true entrepreneurs are the ones that do just that. You decide what you believe in and you live like you mean it. You have a mission. You do everything to kind of move yourself towards that mission and basically do that. I mean as far as I’m concerned, any time I take on any sort of project – and we’ll talk about this in just a minute here – it’s about not letting anything stop you to really move the world in the way that you want to move it to. So yes, decide what you believe in and live like you mean it.
John Lee Dumas: I love that, Tommy. You’re absolutely right. We are going to be talking about something that you just alluded to. Here at EntrepreneurOnFire, I really love to bring to Fire Nation today’s most pressing topics. Right now, all the wave is about this crowdfunding. Everybody wants to know about Kickstarter or Indiegogo or Y Combinator or this and that. How can I get money for my startup? People love that right now. It is just quite the wave that’s going through right now. A lot of people don’t know much about it, but they want to know more about it. During our little pre-interview when we were chatting, you went into quite a week that you’ve had, and I was pretty blown away by that week because I thought my week was pretty tough because I’ve done 14 interviews this week. But man, your week doesn’t even compare on a level where it’s just so much more stuff is going on in a ton of different levels. I don’t like to force my interviewees down a road and I don’t want to like tell you what to tell us for a failure, but at this point when I heard of what you went through, I said, “Tommy, we have to hear this as Fire Nation. We have to hear about this challenge, this obstacle, this failure that you just encountered because it’s so recent, it’s so relevant, and we’re going to find it so interesting.” So take us through your story of your last week.
Tommy Walker: Yes. Absolutely. So kind of a little bit of a preamble, for the last six months, I’ve been planning this 20 – well, what turned out to be 20 guest posts in 30 days strategy was originally 50 guest posts in 30 days, but there were about 30 people who said kind of no. No is to be expected, right? Not everybody is going to be onboard with you. So I’m getting ready for the entire thing, I’m getting ready to launch on Kickstarter and I go through the entire approval process. I had my video shot last week, the pitch video. I paid dearly to have that produced. I’m really excited about it. I get the video uploaded on ide what you believe in and live like you mean it. I go home immediately. I starThursday. On Saturday, I’m out to dinner with my family and I’m about to show the video off to one of my family members. I log in to Kickstarter and it says, “Oh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Your project doesn’t meet our guidelines,” and my launch is on Thursday of this next week. Basically, I just go blank, right? So that’s the first problem. Dect reformatting all the creative that I had done to the aspect ratios. Like the images and all that type of stuff, I started reformatting that to Indiegogo. So basically, I…
John Lee Dumas: Okay, Tommy. But before you continue, let’s just back up one second because I’m kind of curious about this and I’m wondering if Fire Nation is as well. So at this dinner, are you like standing up, maybe with like an iPad or something that you’re about to show this video to your family at dinner, and then you go to press the play button? Tell us about that.
Tommy Walker: Yes. Pretty close. I mean I had my phone out. It was my aunt’s and I was just like, “Yes. So here we go.” And I log in to the account and the first thing I see when I click on the project is that – so I’m the first person to see it so it’s not quite as embarrassing as having that PowerPoint presentation ready to go. Like, “Hey, check it out!” And then everybody sees before you do that oh, like failure! And you’re like, oh!
John Lee Dumas: [Laughs]
Tommy Walker: Like that didn’t happen. So thank goodness for that. But it might as well have because the look on my face, like my wife, before I even said anything, she already had put her hand on my shoulder. It was just like, oh dear.
John Lee Dumas: Okay. Well, thanks for that visual because I just didn’t want to gloss over that because again, we’re going for as much transparency as possible.
Tommy Walker: Yes.
John Lee Dumas: So let’s continue moving forward here. You get back. You’re doing what you need to do to make the change. Continue.
Tommy Walker: Yes. So I get home. I start reformatting all the images and going to the master files and start switching around sizes on things and whatnot, and I realized that as I’m doing this, I’m like I have this really great video for the pitch video. I’m really proud of it. I was really impressed with the work that was done by the editor. I’m like I can’t do this without – I can’t. I have 20 or so custom landing pages for all of the different websites that I’m doing all of the guest posts. I was originally planning on just doing like a webcam video being like, “Hey, how’s it going? Thanks for coming to the site,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I realized that I couldn’t do a webcam video and then have like a really high quality video on the other side because it doesn’t match up. So I’m like, okay. I have to now redo that video. And as soon as I say, okay, I got to redo this video, I spent all of Sunday reformatting all the images. Monday, we’ve got a hurricane coming through, right? So I go into my office space, and about an hour before I go into the office, I’m listening on the radio and they’re like, “Yes, the Governor of New Hampshire says that there’s a state of emergency. Stay off the roads after three o’clock,” and I’m like rolling into my office at two.
John Lee Dumas: Oh yes. It’s only the worst hurricane in the last 200 years. Keep going.
Tommy Walker: Right. So it’s like the worst hurricane in the last 200 years. I’m heading into my office. I was born in a hurricane, by the way. So that just kind of like speaks volumes to me. I’m like…
John Lee Dumas: That sounds like a Bob Dylan song, but continue.
Tommy Walker: Right. So I’m going into my office. I’m like, okay, we have an hour to shoot some new little segments. I go into the office and we shoot the segments. It’s fine. I get home. I drive home. The wind’s all kind of like making the leaves move in slow motion across the sky. It was weird. I get home and the wife’s like, “The power’s out. We have to go to my parents’ house.” So we go to the parents’ house. So basically, now I have 20 or so landing pages that I need to change out the Kickstarter logo on and put the Indiegogo buttons on and kind of retool some things a little bit, and now I had no power and no Internet because obviously without power, there is no Internet. I have an unlimited plan on my phone and I’m like the only way that I’m going to be able to do this is to change my unlimited plan to a 5 gig plan and pay $20 more a month and get less data, but then be able to tether my Internet to my laptop and then do all of my landing pages with the laptop on whatever battery life is left over.
John Lee Dumas: And you’ll never be able to go back to that grand [thought of] unlimited?
Tommy Walker: No. Ever. Never. It’s all gone.
John Lee Dumas: [Laughs] Continue.
Tommy Walker: Yes. So I do that. I get all the landing pages done, and that’s fine and that’s cool. You’re airing this a little bit after, but today is launch day. And I go to launch today and I’ve got all of these stuff prepared, right? Everything is like I had to lunge through all of these in the last week to prepare for this launch, and it’s basically I think that just the universe decides. I really believe this too. Any time you try to do something great, the universe throws everything it can at you to try to throw you off because today, about halfway through – actually, about an hour ago. So an hour before we got on this call here, my main computer just died. Done. And I’m like if there is any indication that like I’m either on to something really great or I’m on to doing something really stupid. Like either way. Like there are tons of signs being thrown my way.
John Lee Dumas: Like the butterfly effect. That this is going to somehow destroy the world.
Tommy Walker: Yes. Something. I don’t know. I mean, it’s one thing to have the platform that you’re going to work on tell you no. That’s kind of to be expected. It’s another thing to have a hurricane come and take out your Internet. It’s another thing – like it just keeps building up, right? But the truth is what I did after my computer died was I went to my laptop and plugged my microphone in and I’m on battery power right now. Like that’s it. Here we are.
John Lee Dumas: So Tommy, that was such a crazy week. We could continue to expound on that because there’s so much that goes into it, but obviously, we’re already at the 17 minute mark. So let’s just continue to push on. Take a couple of minutes right now. Kind of explain to Fire Nation what goes Just kind of wrap our heads around it. Give us the two minute – literally a 120 second into a whole crowdfunding campaign. version – of a Kickstarter campaign, or a crowdfunding campaign, so to speak.
Tommy Walker: Sure. To be perfectly honest with you, the major thing that you start with is your rewards tiers. You want to make sure that your rewards are all juicy. Every single one of them has to be something that people would want and everything has to build on itself and make itself look better. Your pitch video is the number one thing that is like – that’s the number two thing, but it’s the first thing that people are going to see. That has to look nice. I recommend going with a professional production company. Then after that, you follow the landing page best practices on the project description. As far as promoting the thing, what I’m doing is the 20 guest posts in 30 days and hoping that that works. Wherever you’re selecting and doing the guest posting on, I think that that has a huge factor into it. That’s leading over to landing pages that are all customized for each particular guest post, and then that’s being funneled over to the crowdfunding page. And then TV interviews, radio interviews, podcasts. You basically do everything you can to get your name out there.
John Lee Dumas: It’s kind of like launching a book in a way.
Tommy Walker: It’s a lot like launching a book. It’s a lot like launching anything. It’s just a matter of like making sure you have the exposure and making sure you’re on all of the stuff that you put out there. It’s completely you’re totally on your game.
John Lee Dumas: Yes. I just interviewed Randy Gage who just launched his book “Risky is the New Safe.” And just hearing him talk about what he has been through in the past month, launching his book in like 15 different countries, 4 different continents. I mean, it is unbelievable what you need to go through to– recently launched a Kickstarter campaign for his book that he hasn’t even released yet, I don’t actually even think really get a book launched the right way. I kind of will even tie this into Seth Godin. So Seth Godin – and then I’m going to tie this into crowdfunding he’s written it yet, called “Icarus” where he said, “Hey, this is the idea for the book. These are my reward tiers. If you pay $4 now, you’ll get this, this and this. If you pay $10, you get this,” and then he had tiers all the way up to $10,000. I think there’s only four possible $10,000, and if you bought one of those $10,000 slots, then you are actually going to have not a chapter but like a segment dedicated to you and your entrepreneurial journey in Seth Godin’s book. So those were immediately bought. So it was just incredible how $40,000 he made just like that. Overall, he made over $200,000 on his Kickstarter campaign for a book that he hasn’t even launched yet. That just goes to show you the potential of what crowdfunding can do for you when you really have made it as a name and when people know, like and trust you.
So really, a lot of exciting things going on in the crowdfunding area. We can continue to talk about that, but we’re going to push forward. We’re really getting squeezed for time here because we have so much good content. Let’s talk about your aha moment, Tommy. Every entrepreneur has an aha moment on some level. The lucky ones have them every single day. Talk to us about that aha moment that you had where a light bulb really went on and you were just like, “Man, this is going to work for me.” Let’s hear that.
Tommy Walker: Sure. So I’ve had kind of two, and the first one was when I was thinking about doing the show and I had read Julien Smith’s “The Flinch.” This was November, December of last year. I’m reading through it and I had trained to be an actor. I had trained to be an actor for about 17 years before I got into the marketing career and I graduated from a film conservatory and all that type of stuff. Like big, big deal stuff.
The aha moment, like I had always been afraid to use my own voice on my blog. I think a lot of people do this. A lot of entrepreneurs specifically do this where it’s like if this person’s style works for them, so I’m going to emulate their style and try to replicate their success, and I had done that for a long time. But after reading The Flinch, I had said I can’t hide from doing basically what became Inside The Mind. I can’t hide from doing this type of silly series, talking about online marketing strategy. In one of my episodes, I actually talked about resistance. The show allows me to do some little boy fantasy type things, like things I’ve always wanted to do as a kid. I was like I want to have a gun arm. I want to have a gun come out of my arm and I want to blow something away just because I can.
John Lee Dumas: That sounds awesome.
Tommy Walker: Yes, and it was. It was awesome to put together, it was awesome to see. Like we felt really cool when we did it. So literally in the episode we have the resistance guy come in. He kind of giggles, and then I sigh and move my arm and my arm separates in three different places and a gun emerges from the area, and we blow them away. And then we talk about what it takes to be in resistance. That actually kind of leads into the second aha moment, which is this is my show, this is my platform. I can do whatever I want. I think a lot of people, especially in online in general, forget about that. We all get really concerned with what am I doing, what am I talking about, what do I say? And totally forget that hey, this is your platform. This is your ability to make your mark in whatever way it is that you want. That was the second aha moment for me and that’s really allowed me to like just take things, to do whatever I wanted to do. And as long as the information was valuable at the end of the day, the delivery just becomes like how do we package this thing?
John Lee Dumas: I love that, Tommy. What I love about it is it really feels like you’re finding your voice, and one quote that I loved, and it comes from a surprising source – and that’s Bill Cosby – and he said, “I don’t know what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure is trying to please everybody.” We need to remember that so much as entrepreneurs, is that if you’re trying to please everybody, if you’re literally going out there and trying to convince the people who just don’t like what you’re doing to like you, then you’re really abandoning your VIP members, those people who just are naturally resonating with you. So it’s so important for us to figure out what works with us, what our voice is, and then go out and be true to our voice because we’re going to attract the true fans, the true VIP members, to our brand that really resonate with that, and that’s what’s going to make a successful business. That tribe. Not trying to please everybody. In fact, I always live by the 20/60/20 rule, and that’s 20% of people are really always going to love and resonate with what you do on some levels, and then 20% are always going to hate what you do and nothing you can do is going to convince them, so don’t waste any energy on that. And then there’s the 60% in the middle that you do want to spend some time conversing with to find out what they want, what they need and how you can potentially make them spill into your 20%.
So I love the fact, Tommy, that you’re being true to yourself, you’re being true to your voice. Let’s use that to move into our next topic, which is your current business. What’s something that’s exciting you right now about Tommy Walker and your business?
Tommy Walker: Well, I’m really excited about finding new talent to work with me on the show. And it’s going to sound really cheesy because I’m really all about the show right now and all about the crowdfunding project. But I’m really excited to find new talent and to really work with somebody who has been dedicating themselves to their craft, which is the video production side, as much as I have dedicated myself to the online marketing side. What I find really exciting about that, I really like working with people who are passionate about what it is that they love and will do what it takes to get that off the ground. This is a guy who is living off of his work. He lives off of his art and I find that just incredibly – I don’t know the word for it, but I find it inspiring and motivating. Yes. That kind of takes that kind of idea. I love that from other people. So that’s the most exciting thing for me, is to actually find other people who are living off of their passion and doing what they loved.
John Lee Dumas: Well, Tommy, on that note, take a minute right now and share us what your vision for the future is.
Tommy Walker: My vision for the future? So one of the things that we want to do with the show is to open up a free membership site where we’ll do expert Q&A type sessions like this right here. I do interviews myself and I want to be able to interview other experts in a variety of different fields. We want to have a ranking and rewards system for people who would do the homework that’s put at the end of every episode. We want to offer discounts on reputable programs. We want to offer bonuses to people who do take action on the stuff that they are – if they’re making their business better, I want to be able to reward them extra than just saying like, “Okay, good job on making your business better.” The major vision for the future on that is I want to open source online marketing because I think that that’s really where the future of marketing is headed in general. At some point, we’re not even going to be saying online marketing. We’re just going to be saying marketing and that’s what it’s going to all mean. I think that a good portion of that information should be made available for free. The byproduct of that is that scammers, charlatans and people who sell half-baked information products to people who don’t really know what they’re looking at, I want to help make that information free enough where people can at least make better judgment calls about service providers that they do work with because I know that I personally have lost a lot of investment money into bad information, and I know that other people have too and I think that if the information is more accessible and more entertaining to learn, that will move that goal one step further.
John Lee Dumas: Awesome stuff, Tommy. I love the word “charlatan.” I don’t know why it’s not used more often.
Tommy Walker: [Laughs]
John Lee Dumas: So listen, Tommy, we’re going to use that, and I’m moving to my favorite part of the show, and that’s the Lightning Round because I get to ask you a series of questions and you can come back at us, Fire Nation, with amazing and mind-blowing answers. Sound like a plan?
Tommy Walker: Sounds good.
John Lee Dumas: What was one thing that was holding you back from becoming an entrepreneur?
Tommy Walker: Myself. My own self, my doubts, my fears and my own belief system or my own confidence that I was able to actually do something on my own. Once I had the choice taken away from not being able to do something to it was a matter of survival, that’s when I started doing it and that’s when everything started to become much better.
John Lee Dumas: I love it. And just for Fire Nation, we will always have doubt and self-doubt. It’s ingrained in all of us. We’re born with it just like we’re born with the fear of heights. So we need to get over it. We need to embrace it on a lot of levels. So thank you for bringing that up, Tommy. What’s the best business advice you ever received?
Tommy Walker: [Laughs] Seth Godin. I sent him an email about Inside The Mind and he said, “Keep it up. Keep making a ruckus.”
John Lee Dumas: From Seth Godin himself. I love that.
Tommy Walker: Yes.
John Lee Dumas: What is something that’s working for you or your business right now?
Tommy Walker: Just doing what I love and doing it the way I want to. Being myself and allowing my voice to really show through my work and being as authentic as possible. I think that’s working better than I ever could have imagined and it’s helping me connect with my readers and my audience and my customers, most importantly, in a way that I’ve never seen happen before.
John Lee Dumas: Wow! I was certain you were going to say listening to EntrepreneurOnFire.
Tommy Walker: [Laughs] Well, and that too. That too.
John Lee Dumas: [Laughs] I’m just kidding. Thanks, buddy! So Tommy, you’re on the cutting edge for technology. What’s an Internet resource that you’re in love with like an Evernote that you can share with us, Fire Nation?
Tommy Walker: SocialFlow.com. I don’t want to give them like too major of a plug because there’s – but no, no, I will. SocialFlow.com. I like them a lot because one of the biggest problems that I think people online have is that they don’t know when the right time to put something out is and what that particular software does is it analyzes your various streams. It analyzes their linguistic data of the people that are following you, and it also analyzes when they’re on. So if you put out something on landing pages, for example, it’s not going to just put it out when the most people are on. It’s going to put it out when the most people are on and talking about landing pages. So it’s optimized publishing and I think that it’s absolutely brilliant and it’s one of my favorite tools.
John Lee Dumas: Wow! Love it! What’s your favorite business book?
Tommy Walker: I just got “Impact Equation” and I love it. I think that Impact Equation really gets down to it. If you’re not familiar with Impact Equation, the actual equation itself is Impact equals “CREATE” – and I don’t have the book on me right now so I can’t actually give what that stands for, but it’s Contrast – yes, I don’t remember. But I think it’s amazing.
John Lee Dumas: Awesome! Well, Chris Brogan is a guest on the show. He is an amazing, amazing person. Amazing entrepreneur. He’s actually just launched his own podcast, which is a very good podcast as well. And he recently spoke here in Portland, Maine at Agents of Change. Did you not go to that?
Tommy Walker: I didn’t. I was invited, but I was actually in New York at the time.
John Lee Dumas: That happens. So listen, Tommy. This is the last question, but it’s my favorite. So take your time, digest it, and then come back at Fire Nation with an amazing answer. If you woke up tomorrow morning in a brand new world identical to earth, but you knew nobody. You still have all the experience and knowledge that you currently have right now, but only $500 in your pocket, a laptop computer with Internet access and your food and shelter is taken care of. What do you do in the next seven days?
Tommy Walker: [Laughs] When you sent these questions over to me, I thought that this was amazing. $500 is actually more than what I started with. So if I had to do this all again tomorrow and knew absolutely no one, I would first sign up for SocialFlow.com. I would then start following people who I would look for in their bios, I would look for the types of things that I would find that I want to connect with with people. I would then use some of that money for Facebook advertising to match my content. I would start a blog too and I would match the content on my blog up with the people who I was trying to influence, and I would start building a platform very much the same way I did in the beginning. $500 is a lot more than what I started with. When I first started actually, I was making $650 a month off of my first client.
John Lee Dumas: Wow, Tommy. That is an inspirational answer. That’s such actionable advice, and you’ve just given us actionable advice this entire interview and we are so much better for it. Give Fire Nation one parting piece of guidance, then give yourself a plug, and then we’ll say goodbye.
Tommy Walker: So don’t ever sacrifice your vision for anybody else. Don’t compromise. I think a lot of the times, people will give up on their selves to kind of tweak it for what other people think that it’s supposed to be. Don’t do that. Stay true to your vision no matter how hard that’s going to be and no matter what’s thrown at you. Yes, if you’re interested in learning more about me or my work, you can find my website at tommyismyname.com or you can go to indiegogo.com/inside-the-mind, and you can see the actual crowdfunding project there.
John Lee Dumas: Awesome! Say your last website one more time.
Tommy Walker: It’s indiegogo.com/inside-the-mind.
John Lee Dumas: So listen, Tommy. You have really spent some great time here at Fire Nation today. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much for all of your guidance, all of your inspiration, all of your messages, all of your lessons learned. We salute you and we’ll catch you on the flipside.
