Search Interviews:

Jeremy Weisz  16:45 

Built that relationship and kind of off and a mistake, essentially.

Arian Radmand  16:50 

Exactly, yeah. And so that’s what a lot of people don’t realize is yes, everybody’s like, very, very zeroed in on, okay, well, how do we create, you know, ROI? How do we measure these things, but there’s also the intangible stuff like that, that really has a big impact that a lot of times people don’t really associate. But I always like to bring that up, because that’s always kind of a good example, to walk through.

Jeremy Weisz  17:13 

And talk about the CRM. So obviously, it’s in a post-purchase, what, how does it integrate with someone’s CRM from that standpoint?

Arian Radmand  17:22 

Yeah. So the good thing is, from an integration standpoint, there’s a number of different ways. And so again, this kind of comes back to our philosophy that we want to meet you wherever you are, and whatever is easiest for you to use, that’s what we’ll do. So there’s a bunch of ways that we can integrate. If we talk about, the e-commerce space, you know, we have integrated apps on things like Shopify, so that if you’re just on that platform, you can just one click install our app, and you can set up flows and be up and running. So that’s very easy. But there’s a number of different ways to integrate with any CRM or marketing automation platform you use. And so some of those ways are obviously, we have an API that you can use, right? So that gives you the most control. If you want to just directly integrate with our API. That’s kind of option one. The second option is so we have a Zapier app, obviously, that integrates with something like you know, 3000 other apps, depending on what CRM or anything you use, so that.

Jeremy Weisz  18:22 

You can check out the interview I did with the Wade, one of the founders. Oh, nice up here on the podcast, too. Yeah. Yeah, it connects with anything, pretty much.

Arian Radmand  18:29 

Oh, for sure. Yeah. So that’s super easy. And then we actually have built a way that you can integrate with us simply by sending us an email. So basically, any platform any marketing automation tool that’s capable of sending us an email, you send it to our operator bot operator at Ignite post.com. But you send us a template email with whatever information you want included in your handwritten note. And we take that internalize it, digest it and turn that into a handwritten note order for you. So normally, you know, between our integrations or API’s Zapier or just that ability to just send us an email whenever you need a note triggered, there’s typically a very easy way, depending on what system you’re using, or kind of what flow you want to set up to get up and running.

Jeremy Weisz  19:17 

It sounds like there’s almost like a direct integration with Shopify. Are there any other direct ones with CRMs? That I mean, people can use Zapier and connect it to. But as Shopify the most popular are there any other direct integrations?

Arian Radmand  19:31 

That’s the most popular one? Believe it or not, the most popular way that people typically integrate with us is through the email functionality that I mentioned. There’s been many times where we’ve started going down the path of kind of like connecting our Zapier app and everything and then they learn that like oh, I can just send you an email when that I need this triggered like forget everything else, like I don’t even care like I don’t want to use like a native integration because that’s just easier for me. So that’s the that’s the honestly the number one way that most folks integrate with us.

Jeremy Weisz  20:02 

Let’s talk about some use cases I can see. If you’re if you’re looking at the video right now you can see we’re at IgnitePOST.com. And there’s industries e-commerce is a big one. Insurance, nonprofit enterprise sales. I’m talking about the B2B space, how do people use it in the enterprise sales space?

Arian Radmand  20:22 

Yeah, so enterprise sales, the most common thing we see is prospecting, reaching out to get your foot in the door, especially for kind of higher ticket items, or to get past gatekeepers. I always like to say, I’ll hold up an example. But they get a lot of stuff sent to them both digitally and physically. But when our notes come in the mail, they look something like this, right? So it’s a very personalized handwritten note that shows up in a, a seven, five by seven envelope. So when that comes to someone’s desk, number one, if there’s a gatekeeper like a secretary or an admin, typically, those are the things that don’t just get tossed, at least you’re gonna get some eyeballs put on it well written. And it’s handwritten. Right? So yeah, so that’s the number one thing is, let’s not get thrown out. That’s the most common thing we see in the enterprise sales space is prospecting. But there’s a lot of other opportunities, right. So the beautiful thing about the services, you can use it almost across the entire sales cycle. So prospecting, for sure, getting your foot through the door to open the conversation. But we also work with a lot of teams to help steward deals through the pipeline. So if a particular deal is stalled, or they haven’t had communication with somebody in a while, sending them a handwritten note to kind of reinvigorate them, that works really well. When they get to a later stage in the sales pipeline. So you know, thinking about, you know, closing a deal, or getting them over that hurdle. That’s another area that we see people use the service a lot. And obviously, whenever you sign up a new account, depending on how long you’ve been talking, or who you’ve been talking to, that’s a very common flow that we see set up as well. So whenever something gets marked as closed one or gets moved over the finish line, automatic kind of triggers set up to just reach out and just kind of start the relationship off on the good foot.

Jeremy Weisz  22:17 

What are some are in creative ways, you’ve seen people use it, and I just want to point out, they have a bunch of templates here on IgnitePOST, and this is specifically in the enterprise one. So they have you can see the different reasons, personalized note, you can see the congratulations. Now there’s thank you notes. There’s a number of them. I love to hear some creative ways. And there’s two episodes feel good checkout. Caleb O’Dowd and Sam Markowitz are both Gary Halbert protegees. And they talked about Gary Halbert when he was training it was it was Caleb to be a rock star direct response copywriter made them hand right all the envelopes, no matter how many there were to send out, get a hand write the addresses on the outside of the envelopes because like you said, if it doesn’t get open, it doesn’t matter what is on the inside that outside. He was talking about being handwritten was so mission-critical. And one of my favorite books is Gary Halbert wrote the boron letters. I had a son bond Halbert on it, it talks all about this. So if you want to kind of geek out on some copywriting advice from some of the top people, you could check out the one with Sam Markowitz and Caleb O’Dowd, which is talking about similar stuff to that. Arian, but what ways of creative ways? I mean, there’s the thank you notes, there’s occasions, there’s just after a follow-up, are there any other just off-the-wall ways you’ve seen people use this?

Arian Radmand  23:46 

Yeah, there’s a couple of like, really cool things today that I like. So one, so we mentioned birthday notes, right? So like sending somebody a happy birthday card, I really feel like it’s a lost art, right? Certainly in business, you almost never get a card. In business, like for your birthday. With our system super easy to kind of set up and schedule those ahead of time, we actually have a lot of folks that will schedule it for the year for like all their either VIP customers are their high-value contacts. So that’s really cool. I like that aspect. But the other really cool thing that I like to see is everybody thinks about sending holiday cards right around the holidays. I think one of the coolest things I’ve seen is to do the same thing and just reach out in the middle of like this summer, right? Like, almost have that like holiday card like hey, just thinking about you just checking in, or hey, just wanted to give you a quick update. But at a time where no one else is thinking of it right. Everybody in December expects to get a bunch of these holiday cards from people, kind of giving an update of what they’ve been up to over the year. But if you send it at a time where you’re just totally unexpected, it’s just that more impactful because you’re not in a crowded mailbox with everybody else. And it really stands out so kind of taking the same concept, but kind of slightly twisting it and just changing up the timing. That’s something that’s really cool and very, very effective.

Jeremy Weisz  25:10 

I love it. One of my favorite interviews was with John Ruhlin who wrote Giftology, he talks about the exact same thing with don’t be in a crowded mailbox, right? And don’t send it during when everyone else sends it. And that’s exactly what you’re talking about here. And it’s people using innovative things. Also, how do people use and integrate QR codes? And we’re looking at here, just looking through Brio here. does use a QR code integrate?

Arian Radmand  25:43 

Yeah, that’s really cool. And this is actually super popular kind of across the board this particular cases in the e-comm space. There’s a number of different ways you can do this. But again, comes back to what we were talking about earlier, that everybody wants to attribute how well things are doing. Because obviously, we want to tie this back to, ROI, and impact and all those fun things. But there’s a lot of different fun ways that you can use something like IgnitePOST and kind of combine it with a QR code. And basically, it all comes down to the experience that you want to give someone. So keep in mind, one of the most innovative ways that I’ve seen people use this is when you get a five by seven, you know, kind of envelope that shows up, it looks like an invitation, it looks like you’ve you’re getting an invitation to somewhere. So one of the really cool things is instead of positioning the QR code as like, hey, scan for this coupon or scan for this offer. One of the ways that we see a lot of folks position it as, hey, we’d like to invite you to do thing X, right, because it looks like an invitation. So inviting you to do something like hey, I put together a curated collection for you have products that I think you would like based on your previous purchases, or, hey, we have an offer, just for some of our VIP users. Take a look at it. Those are some of the most innovative ways. I think in the example that you pulled up. One of the coolest things that we do is we work with a lot of folks that a lot of brands that have subscriptions, so they run either they have a subscription as a portion of their business, or that’s their entire business, right is there kind of like a subscription box. And one of the best use cases that we’ve seen is this ability to really extend how long people are in a subscription. And it typically the flow goes something like, typically people are in a subscription with you for let’s say, six months, and then that’s kind of the average churn point. So what we’ll do is we’ll set up this automation, where at month five, you get this nice handwritten note from the founder that says, hey, Jeremy, thanks so much for being part of our community and one of our best members, here’s 15% off for your next three months, just because you’re awesome, and you’ve been with us for a bit, and I just want to extend this to you. And one because it’s a handwritten note, it comes across as more authentic two, it gets opened, when you send it to them, so they actually put eyeballs on it, and three has a much higher conversion rate. And so you know, by simply setting up something like that, you can instantly extend someone over to the point where they would have churned, which obviously means they stick with you longer, they’re gonna have more brand recall, you’re, you’re gonna have to make more revenue off of them, their customer lifetime value is gonna go up all good things across the board.

Jeremy Weisz  28:23 

I just want to reiterate that, alright, because that’s golden. What you just said, because knowing your term point, and then being proactive on your term point. And so if anyone has a software service, and they know their turn point, it’s something you could implement before the turn point to experiment with like, it’s all a test. Right? So what do you offer? Obviously sending that is the first step. But then what do you offer to help extend and add value to that customer? So I love that thinking of it as a turning point and then being proactive on that. Exactly. Talk about bootstrapping, versus raising money.

Arian Radmand  29:07 

Yeah. I kind of have experience in both right. So my previous company, we raise money, right? So we went the VC route from day one. And it’s been a very different experience. I purposely didn’t go that route with IgnitePOST an that’s with CoachUp. Yes. And so it just kind of puts you on two different paths, right? When you raise money. So again, you start with what’s your ultimate goal with the business? How do you want to build a business? I think it’s super important in both cases. Previously with CoachUp, I sat down with my co-founder, initially, and we made the decision from the get go, that we wanted to raise money and go the venture out. And then with IgnitePOST I did the same thing. I sat down and I said, I don’t want to go that route. But it’s just interesting.

Jeremy Weisz  29:52 

Talk about the differences. CoachUp, I think you raised over $15 million for that, versus this, you made the decision not to.

Arian Radmand  30:02 

Yeah, and it makes different priorities important for you, right? So when you take money, everything is about growth, right? So it’s all about how do we go out and capture the market as quickly as possible and show trajectories and growth. So when you take money, everything is about kind of getting you to your next round of financing. So whether that’s a seed, it’s like, okay, I’ve taken my seed, how do I get to my series A, how do I get to my series B. And it really focuses you, basically, on the metrics that allow you to go from one stage to the other, which may not necessarily always be the best metrics for the business. And there are a lot of times building CoachUp where looking back, we could kind of see that, where if we weren’t on this path, where basically, we needed to optimize the specific metrics, in order to get us to the next round, we probably would have made some different decisions and done things a little bit differently, right, kind of having the luxury of saying, listen, this might not be the best thing, long term, let’s slow down a little bit, and kind of take the longer term approach for this and grow according to the market, instead of trying to kind of force it or try to grow artificially quick, which is, I think, what a lot of founders fall into when they go the VC route. So, with IgnitePOST, I wanted to do the exact opposite, I really wanted to build a company that would allow me to kind of make those jumps and kind of change the trajectory, as needed. And kind of build it in a more like, I guess, organic. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so it kind of gave me that freedom to talk with the market a little bit more and kind of understand, what we’re doing where our value prop lies, and then change things if need be. And then also be okay with switching up how we want to offer the service and how we want to talk about the service, and how we want to package it. So that kind of just both ways can work depending on what your goals are, but important to decide from the start?

Jeremy Weisz  32:03 

Did you have to raise money for it from angels, or friends or family? Or did you sell fund IgnitePOST.

Arian Radmand  32:11 

For IgnitePOST, we definitely raised him, friends, family and fools money, just to kind of fools friends, family and fools. So yeah, so we definitely raised a little bit of that just to kind of help with the capital costs, because there are actual physical hardware capital costs. So we did that. But I was very adamant on growing sustainably. So you know, after that initial capital infusion, we really customer funded. So that was the whole idea is we wanted to grow this business by having customers, not by going out and putting ourselves into more debt or taking out more massive loans or anything like that. So those are things that are available to us. And we can kind of leverage them as need be. But we didn’t want to make that the way the company grew.

Jeremy Weisz  33:01 

Yeah. I want to talk about how you got some of your first customers. It’s funny, because when you say the bootstrap versus raising money, I always think of I don’t know if you’ve seen Silicon Valley Show, but I think of those scenes from Silicon Valley, when you’re raising money. Yeah, it’s hilarious. If you haven’t seen that shot. Not too far off from reality. Yeah, yeah. But how’d you get your first customer? So you invest a lot of time, energy money? How do you get those first customers?

Arian Radmand  33:31 

Yeah, so it’s all doing things that don’t scale? So first of all, we use our own product a lot was gonna say, right, yeah, probably sent handwritten notes. Exactly, yeah. And so surprisingly, if you actually put the product in someone’s hands, and they see that it works on them firsthand, it’s a lot easier to have that conversation. So we still do this a lot, that this is kind of one of our best ways that we still currently grow is just by using our own product and putting it in people’s hands. But especially early on, I was not bashful about hopping on a call with anybody that would just want to talk with me. And also just showing up in person. I did a lot of customer discovery, mostly via either video calls like this, where actually would just talk with people and, you know, physically, like, hold things up and show them what the notes look like, and open them and kind of show them everything. So that was super important. Again, I knew, maybe it wasn’t going to scale going forward. But it gave me a lot of information and insight as to how to speak to different industries, because the industries that we go after have different use cases and different pain points. So it gave me the ability to know what are those pain points, how to speak to them, and kind of how to talk their language. And then that kind of influenced how we talked about our service. And so if you go to our site and kind of you know you’re scrolling through the site before, if you go to the different industries and the different segments, you’ll see that purposely we talk about the service in a different way talk about different use cases, because different things are going to be important based on what industry you’re in.

Jeremy Weisz  35:09 

Yeah, it’s interesting. I’m curious, initially, what industries did you decide? Because I could see so many use cases for this. There’s unlimited use cases for this. That was a challenge. I mean, you could have, I mean, so many things from the wedding industry to even CoachUp and professional athletes and fan clubs. And so where did you start? How did you decide to start on an industry?

Arian Radmand  35:38 

Yeah, so that’s a good question. So when we initially started the business, actually, we were actually going, working with a lot of sales teams. And this was actually prior to the pandemic. And it’s funny, because if we were having this conversation, pre-pandemic, it would be way different than post-pandemic, free of both. Yeah, we’ll dive in and chat about that. So pre, we were working with a lot of sales teams. And basically, they were using us for a bunch of the reasons that we chatted about earlier, right, prospecting, and getting my foot in the door, storing deals along. And then when everybody started working remotely, and nobody was at the office anymore, we saw a lot of those deals evaporate, a lot of the companies didn’t like, basically, they stopped working with us, because they said, Listen, I have no idea where my prospects are anymore. We used to be able to just reach out to them at the office, they’re not at the office anymore. So what we had to do is we had to figure out, okay, if we need to pivot, where are people? Like, where can we go to that this is not an issue. And so that’s actually one of the big reasons why we shifted to working with a lot of e-commerce brands. Because certainly during the pandemic, that was what everybody was doing, they already have the line, and that it’s a soft problem. So that’s really kind of what pivoted us and focused us there. But to your point, the challenge was actually figuring out what we don’t want to do, because like you said, almost any business that has a customer, and wants to develop a relationship with the customer can use our service in some way, shape, or form. So that was kind of step one, figuring out what a good market to target was. And then to, you know, to also to your point, one of the things that we wanted to do is make sure that we aligned the value that we were providing, with IgnitePOST with the value that the business itself was going to see out of using our service. So when you talk about things like weddings, and invitations and things like that, that is a great use case for us. But also, what we realized is essentially, someone’s only going to value our service as much as their time to sit down and like right the cart out. Whereas when we talk about some of these other industries, like nonprofits, or e-commerce brands or sales, you know, the value of our service is going to be the value that we can bring to them. So the example that we talked about before, if we can set up a nice flow for an e-commerce brand, and it results in 30% of their customer staying in a subscription, that much longer. That’s worth a lot more than, you know, somebody that’s just valuing us as like, okay, this is going to just save me some time writing out a few wedding invitations or wedding thank you notes or something. So we use that to shape who we go after a lot to as to what kind of value are we really delivering for the customer?

Jeremy Weisz  38:23 

Yeah, and there’s a nonprofit. So I imagine it could be to the people donating but also big donors, people use it for big donors as well.

Arian Radmand  38:34 

Totally, yeah. And actually, for nonprofits is very interesting, because everybody always thinks of our solution as oh, this would be great for your, like, the big VIP donors. And actually, in reality, it’s kind of the middle segment that has the most value, because the top 1% of donors, typically, if I’m a stewardship officer, I’m on a first-name basis with those folks, right, um, maybe taking them out to lunch or dinner, or maybe sending them some wine or something. So you’re already giving them a lot of attention. But the middle segment, right, and I can use myself as a great example, I went to be you, I donate 500 bucks or so every year to the school. And to me, that’s like, a lot of money. That’s like a decent-sized donation. I never get any handwritten thank you cards or anything from them.

Jeremy Weisz  39:20 

If you’re listening you should be using IgnitePOST.

Arian Radmand  39:24 

Yeah. So, but like, that’s a great example. Segment. Exactly. Yeah. So people that donate like me, $500 up to like $5,000 are probably in that same bucket where they don’t really get the individual attention, but that’s a lot of money. And like, the whole idea is how do we steward these group of folks up the spectrum so that maybe someday they become that one 1% of donors, but at the very least, how do we make sure that we show their appreciation so that they continue to come back year after year? So that’s where we actually see the most activity in the nonprofit That space is in that kind of middle section.

Jeremy Weisz  40:03 

Do you find that? Obviously, people send cold outreach via social media, LinkedIn cold email? Are people using it for cold mail? Are they using it just to reach out to cold people they don’t know? And I’m curious if so, are there certain databases are using? Like, are they going out in zoom info? And then collecting addresses? Because it’s different little different from an email? Like you said, those sales are like, I don’t even know where these people live. So are people using it for cold mail? And then how are they? I wanted some other tools are using it to use ignitePOST?

Arian Radmand  40:37 

Yes, so they are using it for cold mail. But the way they do it is a little bit unique. So unlike direct mail, we generally subscribe to the kind of spray and pray methodology, where a lot of like the Every Door Direct Mail, right where you can say, okay, I’m going to pepper everybody in this particular area code with my mail, so we typically don’t subscribe to recommending that we recommend being a little bit more targeted than just kind of this spray and pray. So the kind of folks that we do work with we work with a lot of you know, home service providers work a lot of like moving companies and things like that, that they want to target cold, like people cold, but they do it in a more strategic way. So using that as an example. So instead of just saying, I’m just going to pepper my entire, you know, service area with direct mail, what they’ll do is they’ll actually look for databases, either from the MLS or some other services that indicate if I’m a moving company, okay, I will look for when homes go under agreement, right? Because when homes go under agreement, that’s public knowledge, and I know, okay, if you just sold your home, what are you probably going to need, you’re probably going to need help moving. So that’s kind of a good indication. And then what they’ll do is they will zero in and target those folks in their service area, who have recently had their homes go under agreement, and specifically reach out in a more personalized way, right, with our handwritten notes, to those specific homes, instead of just peppering me with the entire neighborhood. So we do see that, that that’s kind of a little bit more strategic. And that works really well. But again, it’s using that very targeted approach.

Jeremy Weisz  42:23 

Let’s talk Steph Curry for a second. How did that come about?

Arian Radmand  42:28 

Yeah. So what I realized, so one of the interesting things, when you work with athletes or work with celebrity athletes in general, a lot of people don’t realize that it actually is more important. The relationship, you have kind of behind the scenes with the agent or whoever you’re going to be interfacing with. And so we got connected to, I believe it was octagon that was his agency that was represented, don’t quote me on that I got to go and look it up. But we got connected through there. And one of the things that, like I said, people don’t realize is, a lot of times athletes, they’re not the actual ones doing all the work and all the promotions and everything. So if you see, the celebrity athletes doing all these promotions, and everything, really behind the scenes, what’s happening is there’s kind of a whole strategy and at this point, kind of a strategy team. And so that’s the key is figuring out who are the people behind the scenes that are responsible for endorsements and deals? And how do we get connected to them. So that was kind of the path that we took, I to this day, still have never met Steph Curry. I love him. Great guy, but I personally have never met him. But we interfaced with his agent a lot because that’s who you’re going to be talking to. And if you are pursuing just as kind of a general piece of advice, if any businesses out there are pursuing some type of celebrity endorsement like that, make sure that you have a very good relationship with whoever the person is behind the scenes, who is actually going to be doing the things that you need them to do. That’s a much more critical relationship to have than with the actual athlete themselves.

Jeremy Weisz  44:03 

I want to talk about so the choice to have a spokesperson versus not and then why you went Steph Curry there’s a lot of athletes out there but why the decision to have one versus not and I’m not sure if you have are gonna have an IgnitePOST, who would be the Ignite post spokesperson.

Arian Radmand  44:25 

There’s no plans currently to have an IgnitePOST.

Jeremy Weisz  44:27 

So after brainstorming about that.

Arian Radmand  44:29 

But the thought behind having Steph Curry for CoachUp was actually multi-dimensional. So number one, basketball was our best sport. It was a by far and so we knew we wanted to have somebody in basketball. Number two, when actually when we reached out and started talking to his folks, people knew who Steph Curry was but he wasn’t this to time and you know, maybe it’s like even more now NBA MVP, and like now he’s a household name. He was becoming that we thought that he would get there. But he wasn’t quite there. So we knew that he was kind of on the upward trajectory. So those are two things. And then the last thing is it fit in with the mission of our business right? At CoachUp, the whole idea was that people, you achieve your potential by working hard at it, and that not everybody, almost no one actually is born with just natural talent. And he was a great example of that, right? Unlike someone like LeBron James, right, that everybody looks at, and they’re like, well, he just has a lot of just raw talent. Yeah, he was just born like that. Steph Curry.

Jeremy Weisz  45:34 

You wanted someone like smaller people can relate maybe to but he’s really a household name and good.

Arian Radmand  45:42 

Yeah, and had the whole story because his whole story is, he really had to work for what he got, he really trained a lot. And that’s how he got so good. He didn’t, if you look at him, and he’ll be the first to tell us, he doesn’t have just raw talent and raw ability. He had to cultivate that and work very hard and train to get it. And so that story is really the story that we wanted to position. And that’s why we thought he was a good spokesman for CoachUp.

Jeremy Weisz  46:08 

And so if you were to have a IgnitePOST, spokesperson, what type of and I want to point out, there’s a really interesting episode I did with Roy Krebs, Natural Stacks. And he talked about this very thing where they had people who sent in success stories, and one of them was in the World Series of Poker. And so they ended up striking a deal with this person. And it’s an incredible story. I think it’s my favorite intro, because you’ll see if you ever watch the Roy Krebs, the intro is from what happened in the World Series of Poker, I want him to give it away, because it’s so exciting. But he walks through how they went about getting a spokesperson, essentially. So I’m just curious, with IgnitePOST, what would you look for in a spokesperson?

Arian Radmand  47:02 

Yeah, so I think I would go with somebody that was very into relationships, right, and like relationship marketing, and kind of like, pulling out folk stories, right? Because that’s at the end of the day, as humans, that’s what we remember, we remember stories. And we remember, that’s what gets us to imprint things on our brain. And I think that that gets lost a little bit in this kind of sea of digital noise. And that’s the whole thesis behind IgnitePOST is, how do we enable brands and kind of inject this personality, this kind of relationship-centric era, as we like to say, how do we kind of steward it in? So I would say it would be somebody in that kind of storytelling, more relationship, building relationship, deepening kind of space? Like Oprah, someone like, Oprah would be great. I would love Oprah.

Jeremy Weisz  47:59 

I have one last question. Arian, first of all, thank you, thanks for sharing the story. I want to just encourage people to check out ignitepost.com to learn more. My last question is more just resources. You’re always learning and entrepreneur, and just have done so much. Whether it’s mentors or books, what are some resources or mentors that are important to you?

Arian Radmand  48:29 

Yeah, well, on the book side, though, the one book that I always recommend everybody read if they’re thinking about starting a business is the E Myth by Michael Gerber. And Mike on the podcast, he’s great. Yeah saw that. Yeah. So that’s one of my favorites. I read it a while ago, and every now and then I’ll kind of go back and like, either listen to the audiobook or just kind of skim it again, just kind of thinking about how to build a business and systemize it so that it kind of operates without you. So that’s one and then I also like The Lean Startup, that kind of seems like it took a lot of the actual concepts from E-Myth, and just kind of like put a different spin on it and kind of restructured a little bit. Yeah, yep. Yep. So those are two that I recommend. On the mentor side, actually, I’m a big proponent of having a advisory council that you can lean on. So, for me, I have an advisory council that I’ve built that I talk with on a regular basis. My CEO coach, Steve Rubin, I talked with him probably once a week, and then my other advisors on an as needed basis, probably monthly and then we do kind of quarterly check-ins, board meetings, things like that. But having just other people that know a lot more about you in specific areas that are critical to your business, super important. So that’s kind of what I did is I’ve got folks that are very, very well educated in, you know, operations, in marketing in sales and kind of can lean on them as needed. So I think that’s super important just to have some Somebody that if you pick up the phone and you reach out to them, they’re going to answer and kind of talk you through and they know more about you in those domains.

Jeremy Weisz  50:07 

Yeah. So coaches for all those specialties, whatever they meet, whether it be for the CEO piece for the operations piece, the marketing piece of sales, love it. Arian, thank you, everyone, check out ignitepost.com and learn more, check out more episodes of the podcast. So thank you. Thanks, everyone.

Arian Radmand  50:25 

Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.