CEO of Funnelytics.io: Mikael Dia AKA The Funnel Boss - S9E11 (#288)

Speaker A: Welcome, welcome back to Boston Cage podcast. So today is going to be one of those days to where we're definitely going to geek out on a, uh, particular technology, a technology that you probably heard me talk about before, but we got one of the best and the best in the game talking about it today. So, Mikhail, without further ado, I want you to kind of talk to our audience, but before we get to that, I want to kind of give you your nickname. I've been saving this nickname for the longest. So you're going to be the Funnel Boss for obvious reasons. Right. So the floor is yours. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about you and what would you like to talk about today?

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. Uh, so my name is Mikhail Dia. Uh, I'm based, uh, just outside of Toronto, Canada. I run a company called Funnellytics. So hence the, the name Funnel Boss. Makes sense. I've been in this digital marketing game for well over a decade now, just learning about how do you, how do you convert strangers into customers for your business? Like, I've been fascinated with and pretty much obsessed with that thought and that idea for a really long time. And, and I came and came into this whole world of funnels and conversions and, and psychology and email marketing and all of these little nuances. And I ended up starting a software company called Funnellytics. And Funnellytics is a tool that helps you kind of visualize these customer journeys, visualize these funnels, but then overlay all of your data and your numbers on top to understand what, what's working, what's not working, how are people flowing through all these steps that we've created to just really understand performance of this. So, yeah, I mean, that's a little bit of background about me and I'm happy to take it wherever you want in terms of talking about funnels, talking about conversions, marketing, business, running a SaaS company. I'm here, I'm here for you, buddy.

Speaker A: Oh, cool. So I mean, uh, with that, I mean, I like to time travel back so like the audience can kind of get like a, uh, gist of who you really are before you are who you are right now. So like, based upon what you just said, it kind of comes to me. Like, you work kid with Legos or were you a kid that was reading the almanac? Like, what kind of kid were you growing up?

Speaker B: I was definitely a kid with Lego. In fact, actually, it's funny, I, I study univers at university. I did a degree in civil engineering. And civil engineering is like bridges and and, you know, buildings and roads and all that stuff. And, and the reason I did engineering was because I, I was pretty good at math. I didn't know at all what the hell I wanted to be. So, you know, you finish high school and you're like, choose your career. It's like, I don't know, I just finished high school and I was like, well, I, I like Legos. I like building legos, so maybe building bridges is similar to that. Hence I went and did engineering. Sure enough, I stayed as an engineer for about six months and then quit and started something else. But that's, it's another story. Uh, yeah, man, I was, I was definitely more of the LEGO kid. I was a sports kid. I played a lot of sports. I was very, very active. And I also love to play video games. So take all that mapping things out, trying to figure out how things connect together. That's basically kind of what culminated.

Speaker A: Wow. Uh, so, I mean, obviously, like, you know, doing my due diligence. I know, like, you've kind of traveled the world to a certain extent. You lived in different regions, so kind of like, where did you start out? Kind of where you are now.

Speaker B: So I started out in terms of, like, traveling, you mean in terms of

Speaker A: like, where I live about like, day one, like, where were you born? And then obviously just talk about the different regions that you lived in.

Speaker B: Sure. So I was born in Montreal, Canada. I moved back and forth a lot as a kid between Montreal and Toronto for my dad's job. My dad was a banker and he kind of kept going up and moving back and forth between the two cities. So my first language is French. And I did university in Toronto at, uh, Ryerson University in, in downtown Toronto. Then I actually ended up moving to London to the UK. This was right after university 2011. I graduated university in 2008, did a master's degree and then went over to London to the uk and I did a, um, business degree over there. My girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife and the mother of my children, was working in, in the hospitality industry while I was doing my master's degree or my mba. And then I actually ended up starting a Mandarin language school over there. It we could dive into that. That was, uh, I don't speak Mandarin, I've never been to China. But, uh, I ended up starting a school and we ended up selling that school. And then after that I moved back to Toronto. I started my, my digital marketing agency and as I was scaling and growing my digital marketing agency, that's when I started this idea, this concept of funnellytics. We, we started, I hired a developer and, and yeah, I've been, I've been in Toronto since.

Speaker A: Wow. Wow. I think one of the key things that you said is like your dad was a banker. So I mean, obviously like understanding numbers kind of, you had no choice by default to kind of understand math a little bit, right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So, I mean, so you founded a company in 2018. Right. But back in 2014, around November, you were a growth advisor. So like just talk about that position. Like, what did you learn from that and what are you using from that position today?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I'll, I'll take it a little bit back. So before starting my agency where I was kind of m doing these marketing funnels for people, around 2010 ish 2009, I started a T shirt business. And we had bought all of these T shirts. It was myself and a couple friends and we designed like just graphic tees and we bought these T shirts. We, we printed them and we were still in university at the time, so we had, you know, a lot of friends and, and network and, and we sold out of our T shirts pretty quickly. And what happened was we assumed that this business game is very simple because we sold out so quickly. So we ordered stacks of T shirts. I mean like boxes from here to the ceiling, just thousands for no good reason. It was the dumbest thing we could do because sure enough our friends and family had bought T shirts they didn't want anymore. So they're like, yeah, okay, cool, thanks for the T shirts. So we were sitting there with boxes of T shirts and that's when I actually like Googled how do you sell online? How do you. Because I needed to figure out how to, how are we going to move and how are we going to sell these T shirts? And that kind of led me into this massive rabbit hole of learning digital marketing, just trying to understand the nuances. It started off with affiliate marketing and writing articles and ranking on Google and then I dove into pay per click advertising. And then I started learning about email marketing and capturing people and building funnels and all of these things. And, and it kind of culminated in this Mandarin language school that I started in London where I applied a lot of these skills to find strangers who wanted to learn Mandarin and then get them through a funnel and convert them into actual customers. And as we kind of grew that school, we were able to exit and I started consulting people because as I was talking about it, I started realizing most businesses don't understand how to do this, how do you convert these strangers into customers? And I'd spent all these years, uh, learning it and then applying it. So I decided to start a. A consulting company, really an agency helping businesses do this by building these. These funnels for them. And as I was growing that agency, what I would do is the same for every client. I would basically take a whiteboard and I would map out their strategy.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Facebook ad goes over to this page, and then you get these emails and goes over here, and. And I would map out this diagram, and then they would see it, and they'd be like, I get it. I understand what you're about to do. For me, I understand how the system works. Let's get started. And then what I would do is I would log into tools like Google Analytics and Facebook, and I would try to build spreadsheets to try to understand what's working, what's not. Where do I need to fix? What do I need to tweak? Because it's not that simple. It never works the very first time you launch a strategy. So I needed to look at those numbers. And that's when the concept of Funnellytics came about. It's like, wouldn't it be cool if I could just have this digital whiteboard where I could map that same strategy and just visualize it? But then instead of having to log into all these platforms, I could just pull all that data and press a button and overlay all the numbers right on top of that same strategy, and I could just see how people are flowing, what the conversion rates are and all that stuff. And I decided, okay, well, let's. Let's build this thing. It was significantly harder than that, but, yes. What happened?

Speaker A: So I'm just listening to you. I mean, obviously, I think that kind of what you just said kind of defines what your tagline is. Uh, seeing is believing. Right. But you said you spoke French, right? So your wife, if I'm correct, she speaks German and Italian.

Speaker B: Where.

Speaker A: And French. So. And Spanish and Spanish. But you see, we haven't gotten to Mandarin. Like, where did Mandarin even come in? Uk.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. It's a good question. Nope, there is no Mandarin. My. I've never been to China. My. My wife has never been to China. And congrats on. On the research, by the way.

Speaker A: It's.

Speaker B: It's cool that you know that. That she speaks these languages. So what happened was during my mba, I met a guy who was also randomly enough from Toronto. He was an entrepreneur. He built and exited kind of a currency brokerage. Firm basically just exchanging for very large businesses, people who wanted to transact between different currencies. And he would take a little percentage and he was able to exit that business. And he was doing his mba and he at heart is kind of an adventurer. So he had been to China with his brother and he'd actually, he drove his motorcycle, him and his brother, and circumnavigated all of China and built a documentary around it and all this stuff. He doesn't speak any Mandarin, but his brother lives in China and his brother's wife runs one of the biggest schools in China, biggest Mandarin schools for foreigners in China. So he struck a deal with his wife, his brother's wife, to license the curriculum over there. So he basically came to me and he was like, Mikel, I know you love this digital marketing stuff and you understand how to get customers and all that stuff. I don't know anything about that, but I do know how to do operations. So let me figure out the operations. We're going to license this curriculum over from, from this school over here in China. I'll figure out how to get the teachers, I'll figure out how to get at the location, I'll deal with the operations, you deal with the acquisition of customers. Let's partner together and let's make this happen. And I was like, I mean, I don't know anything about Mandarin, but hey, yeah, there's no better, there's no better way for me to test whether or not my skills are, are real. If, if I'm able to find a customer that I know nothing about and craft an offer that again, I know nothing about and uh, I can make it work, then I could probably do it for anything. So I was like, yeah, let's do it. Screw it, let's have some fun. And, and that's, that's how we are off to the races. Yeah.

Speaker A: So it sound like you went from affiliate, uh, to a JV partner to a full blown partnership, Right?

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: Being that you just said like you didn't know who these avatars were, you were trying to figure it out. So I want you to kind of talk about like tracking scripts. Right? So we're talking about like cookies and all those things. Like how do those things really help someone kind of figure out that core demographic? Can you explain that to the listener in layman's terms? Sure.

Speaker B: So the first thing that you have to understand is cookies, tracking scripts. Uh, all we're really doing is when somebody comes to our, your website, we create a profile for them. So there's this user abc xyz, right? They're anonymous. We don't know who they are. And as they do stuff across your website, all we're doing is tracking those steps that they do. That's what Google does, that's what Facebook does. Just obviously they have significantly more data on us, but they're really just building a profile of us and tracking all of the things that we do. Now when somebody eventually comes onto your website and fills out a form, usually your forms will have a little bit more than just their name and their email. But at the very minimum, there's going to be at least a name and an email within that form. So now this person is no longer this anonymous person. They're no longer user ABC, X, Y, Z. They're james@james smith.com, right. They're an actual identified person. Now if they fill out specific details in that form, let's say they say, I'm an agency owner. Our business makes 500,000 or more a year. We, you know, whatever, we're, we're in the E commerce space, whatever it is. Now all of a sudden we have details around that particular person. So now when we start to ask ourselves, okay, well, who is buying our stuff? Well, we can look at that data and we can say, okay, well out of all the 10,000 people who've bought our product, I can see that James, James, uh, Smith was one of them and he's an agency owner in this. And, and I can start to create profiles or avatars of each of my segments of customers. And fundamentally that is how tracking works. We just want to track who you are. We want to, uh, basically identify your properties and start creating clusters so we can ultimately provide you with a better experience. Uh, what's interesting is there's this battle happening right now, right? There's privacy and experience. Marketers want all of your data because we want to provide you with the best experience because that's going to increase the conversion rates. We'll make more money. And users say they want privacy because they don't want companies to have all this information about them. But on the flip side, they also want a customized experience because they don't want to be shown generic ads or you know, generic things that don't apply to them. So it's uh, an ever evolving battle. But fundamentally that is what hap. That is what happens when we think about tracking as a whole.

Speaker A: So like, let's just add on top of that because I mean, obviously you've had an opportunity to where you've scaled from like 0 to 150,000 users in your platform. And I'm thinking that it probably started with that realm of understanding that data. So let's say we have some kind of data, we've been doing something online. What's the next step for a user or a listener to get to that 150,000 individuals that you had? How did you get there?

Speaker B: So at the very beginning, you have to ask the right questions. So I'll, I'll tell you how I grew fun analytics as a, uh, as a way to kind of explain the concept. But it started off with providing value to a group that I thought I could serve. So I built the tool ultimately for myself. And then what happened was I said, okay, well how many other people really care about this? I actually showed the way that I built this tool is I started off with a mapping tool so you could kind of map this, this customer journey and, or these funnels. And down the pipeline was the ability to kind of overlay the data. But the first version of it was just this ability to kind of map like a diagramming tool. I showed it to a friend of mine and he was like, blown away by the simplicity of the mapping tool. It wasn't anything special, but it was just, there was nothing like it out there. You had to kind of use, you know, diagramming tools with squares or PowerPoint presentations or whatever. Right. So it was like, you should give away this tool for free. Like, since your focus is on this analytics thing, give away this tool for free. Get people to sign up and, you know, survey them and understand who they are and, and, and kind of go from there. So that's exactly what I did. So we start off with let's give something away for free in exchange for somebody's name and email. Right? That way I can start building that list. I can start turning that user ABC XYZ this visitor into an actual identified person. Okay, great. The only way that that's going to happen is if you give them something of value. For me, it was a mapping tool. But for any business it can be, it could be anything. You could give them 10% discount code for your E commerce store. You could give them checklist for how to solve xyz. Like it, uh, as long as it's something of value that speaks to the audience that you're trying to go after. Once you actually get their name and email, what most people try to do is sell them something right away. Problem is you don't know who they are. You don't know anything. About them. You haven't learned anything about them. So what I did is I surveyed them as soon as they created their account. I asked, are you a marketing agency or are you a business? And then what is the primary reason you signed up for this tool? Is it to sell and present to clients? Is it this, I'm just checking it out, etc. So that gave me a little bit of ideas around who they were. But to take it a step further, I wanted to build a real relationship with these people who were signing up to our mapping tool. So we pushed all of them to a Facebook group. So I created a Facebook group to create a community. And, uh, every single one of them got the opportunity to sign up to this Facebook group where I could now engage with them. I can now ask them various questions. I could ask them, would you prefer me to create content around this or around that? And then they would vote and give me ideas around, well, who are they? What are their core problems? What are they really trying to solve? This is how I started to realize, okay, actually, our core user is more marketing agencies like me. Kind of makes sense. I built the tool for me as a marketing agency. It, uh, ended up falling that way as well. But that's really kind of what started the, the process now to scale to 150,000. You can't just spend money without making money. So at some stage, you're going to have to sell something in order to make your money back and recoup that money so that you can reinvest it. Well, what do you sell? Well, for us, it was again, very much aligned with what they needed and what they wanted. Yes, our vision was always the analytics tool. However, we needed to position the analytics in a way that resonated with them. If I went to agencies and said, hey, here's this tool that's going to basically present numbers or, I don't know, whatever, just overlay data and show you how your personal funnels are working. They would say, well, I'm not even doing any marketing for myself. I'm not even at that stage. But now, if I position it as, this is an easy tool for you to report back to your clients, for you to close clients, for you to, you know, make it easier. Well, now that message resonated because I learned who they were and what worked. So now I started recouping my money by, by selling this, and I just kept the engine going. And that is eventually how I scaled to 150 to 300,000 people over the course of six years. Now I Guess it's been. So it's just this constant engine going through. Yeah. Ah, hopefully that makes sense.

Speaker A: Yeah, it definitely makes sense. So uh, like, I mean obviously you eat, you sleep and you breathe it. You can hear the passion in you, like just the way you're talking and the way you're defining it. Right. But then on the other side you also have like a family. So I want you to kind of think about Max and Isabella, right? So I think they're like seven and three years old right now or give or take that age, right. I want you to think about like, are you and your wife honing in and giving them these tools that you guys have learned over the years or are you kind of letting them kind of just identify what they're going to do when that time comes?

Speaker B: It, it's interesting. I mean Maxim's three.

Speaker A: He,

Speaker B: he's just enjoying eating food and, and like running and yelling and stuff. Like he's not, he's not there yet. But Isabelle, uh, at 7 is starting to, she's starting to ask questions. She's starting to ask how money works. She's starting to ask these curiosity driven questions and, but what we're noticing is, is she's extremely artistic, she's very, very creative, she loves to draw, she's very athletic, she loves gymnastics. So for us it's not about trying to push or sway any sort of direction. You know, they're still, in my opinion, too, too young for that, especially Maxim. But we do do a lot of cool things in terms of trying to instill some of these, these thoughts into her. So for example, instead of doing chores with, with Isabel, we've tested something that, that worked really well. We've stopped it because it became a little too much about the prize. But basically one of the things that I, I, we experimented with her on was we said, okay, I say experimented. It kind of sounds like we're, we're playing with our children in weird ways. But basically what we did was instead of you having to just do your bed and, and, and clean up your room and, and stuff like that, put away the dishes, I said, okay, I want you to outline three goals that you have. And if you practice every one of those goals for 10 minutes a day, then you'll get a prize. And the prize, in her mind, she wanted money. She was excited by the concept of money. So I was like, I'll give you money to practice that goal, okay? And you have to practice it until you're satisfied with your outcome of that goal. So I'M not going to put the stipulation in terms of are you satisfied or am I satisfied? You have to put that stipulation on yourself. So what she, everything she wanted to do was centered around gymnastics at the time. She wanted to be able to do the splits, she wanted to be able to do a kind of back handspring and to do a handstand. And every day she was practicing 10 minutes, she's like, okay, I'm going to practice now. 10 minutes now. She was a little too tied to the prize. This is some, something we realized afterwards. She was like, so am I getting, am I getting my $2 now for, for practicing this? But what it, what happened? She's now able to do the splits, she's now able to do a backhand stand. And she's now not quite there with an actual, like, full handstand, but it created this kind of discipline in her. And it's something that me and my wife have and think about all the time, is, you know, we started our own businesses. My, my wife is in real estate. I'm, uh, obviously, uh, in software. And an entrepreneur. How do you carve your own path in life and what lessons have we learned across the board? I mean, yourself, you're, you're a nomad, you're about to travel, you're about to, you know, leave the country. And that thinking is something that isn't normally instilled in us, uh, at a very young age. We're told to go to school, we're told get good grades, were told get to university or college, and then figure out what your career is and then start climbing the ladder. Right, but is that really the way that it should be? Is that really the best way? Probably not. Not for a lot of people, especially somebody like my daughter who's very artistic. So we're learning how to instill some of these lessons as we're learning these lessons ourselves as we, as we get older and grow up. But.

Speaker A: Yeah, but I think just like how your dad indirectly had the influence of being a banker and you kind of analyzing numbers and your wife is dealing with real estate, right? She has a property company. And then you're dealing with software, which is like the other big thing in the world today is technology. Don't you think by default they're gonna probably take some of the things that they're seeing you guys do now, considering that both of you guys are entrepreneurs

Speaker B: versus employees 100%, I think they're gonna realize because, uh, we work very hard, but we're always There, especially since COVID as well. Like, we. We work from home. I have an office, but, you know, I'm always home. And so, you know, they're. They're seeing these things. It's. It's being ingrained in them regardless, you know, they see us talk about, you know, my wife's properties and in the car, like, I can tell Isabelle's listening. You know, she's. She's watching us, and she's seeing these things. We're having these conversations about raising money from investors or. Or, you know, renovation projects or me with funnellytics and challenges and stuff like that. So all of these little things are definitely being ingrained in them. There's, uh, no doubt. So, yeah. Have to kind of watch it too, sometimes.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a great story. I mean, obviously, from the outside looking in, people always think things are, like, easygoing because, again, like, you have it together to a certain extent, right? You have the family, you have the wife, you have the kids. You're educating them, you're an entrepreneur. But on the other side of it, like, you guys have been married roughly about 10 years this year. That is a task in itself. And both of you are entrepreneurs. So I want you to kind of talk about how do you then juggle and manage, considering that both your schedules could be anywhere and everywhere all at the same time.

Speaker B: First of all, kudos again, on your research. Like, this is, uh, this is impressive that you're like, you're right. We're married 10 years this year in. In. In September, and is not easy. Like, uh, this is one thing. I actually made a post about this on LinkedIn the other day. Like, I'm kind of sick and tired of. Of looking at posts that you see where everybody talks about the wins, everybody talks about what they've made or how big they've grown, their company or the exit that they've achieved, or all of these wins that they've had. And very few people talk about the struggle. And the reality is what truly defines you as an entrepreneur is your ability to accept the losses, realize that there are going to be losses, and accept the fact that what we need to do is get up from those losses and keep going and keep fighting and keep eating the mud and keep going through the trenches, because it isn't easy. There's so many nights where we lay awake, like, or. Or, uh, we wake up in cold sweats because, like, of the challenges that we know we have to face and we don't know quite readily how to solve them. So if anybody's listening and, and they're sitting here saying, man, it looks like he's got it all together. It, it is not straightforward. It is not that simple. There are many, many, many nights where we've struggled. Now I'm, I'm lucky and, and blessed that Brigitte and I have a very, very solid marriage. And we are really, we are extremely compatible. We've gone through a lot of ups and downs through our relationship being together for, for such a long time. We, we've been together since we were 21. So we're going to be marri. Been together for, for, it'll be 17 years this year and, or 16 years this year. And we've gone through long distance relationship and, and all that stuff. So we've gone through a lot of ups and downs and we've really strengthened our, our marriage. So when we face kind of financial challenges, when we face challenges with the business, we know how to communicate and we know how to navigate through that. But there are challenges, there's challenges in the business, there's challenges in, uh, you know, the relationship. Sometimes in general health like we, you take things for granted sometimes. It's like we were so focused on growing a company that you end up forgetting about yourself. You end up forgetting about, you know, doing some exercise and getting up and stretching and realizing that there's, you know, yourself and your body is actually the thing that drives you ultimately. And, and it's not simple to have it all dialed in. Most people don't, most people don't. So don't be upset if you feel like you're, you're trying to figure it out. Uh, there's, even if you get to the next level, and this is what I always figure it out is it's like a never ending video game, at least in business, but life in general, it's like a never, never ending video game. You beat one level, you beat the boss. You first thought it was really, really challenging, you weren't able to beat him. Finally you beat the boss, right? And then, great, you get to the next level and that next level is harder. And then you go through the same thing, you beat the boss and the next challenge, different types of bad guys, different. And then next level, next level. And it just kind of. So even though it looks like, okay, great, I'm, I'm a level maybe above or whatever, the reality is there's always challenges, there's always mud, there's always things that you've got to fight through. But again, that's what makes Entrepreneurship. What truly what entrepreneurship is, it's not about the end goal. It's not about the dollar sign. It's not about the trying to lift up that trophy or I had an exit or whatever. It's about going through these levels and, and trying to solve these challenges and beat the boss and keep going and keep going and keep going. Just getting better over time. So I don't even know if I answered your question. I kind of went on a rant there.

Speaker A: No, I think, I think you definitely did. Which is kind of like, uh, like I told you before, we were talking off air about like you would say something that's going to spark something else. And what you just sparked to me is like, you know, you're talking about communication primary with your wife, and then secondary is always another level. Right. And leveling up with a boss does not mean that necessarily you have to be the boss. You could partner with a boss. So I want you to talk about. You had an interview recently with Russell Bronson and Jim Edwards, which if anyone knows marketing, those two dudes are the top of the food chain when it comes to funnels and it comes to copywriting. So I want you to kind of talk about, like, what did that look like for you to have a conversation with both of them and how have you guys partnered since then?

Speaker B: Yeah. So Russell Brunson, Jim Edwards was, uh, a while back, to be honest, in terms of when I spoke to them. And Russell was during his book launch for Traffic Secrets, I believe is when. When I kind of had the interview with him. Russell is. Is somebody who I, I very much look up to. I remember how I kind of shared that journey 2010 and stuff is. Is when I kind of started learning this whole stuff. And then I, I fell into the world of funnels through Russell BRUNSON in about 2011. So this is well before clickfunnels, well before any of that stuff. He had a company called Dot Com Secrets X at the time.

Speaker A: So.

Speaker B: So if he's listening, he'll probably be like, oh, wow, okay. This was back in the day. You know, at the end of the day, you're. You. Like you said, there's. There's always people who are a little bit above you who've, Who've solved the puzzle at the level that you're on. And Russell, to me, is that. That person. Right. I've learned so much about how do you do this, this funnel game? Same thing with Jim in terms of conversions and how do you make a funnel actually work and how do you actually get a stranger to become a customer through words and through persuasion and all that stuff. I was able to, through that conversation, through kind of building that relationship with Russell, I was able to be part of his book launch. And we had kind of fun analytics as an offer that was part of that, which was amazing and brought in a lot of customers and a lot of business for us. But a couple things that I want to note on, on how that happened. The first is remember how, uh, I kind of mentioned, you know, we, we started this mapping tool and then we put everybody into Facebook group.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Well, the reason I was able to interview Russell Brunson, the reason I was able to interview Jim is because I had a, an audience, I had a community. I took this mapping tool, which I could have just went about this as just a software, but I took the mapping tool, I put people into this Facebook group, I built a. With them, and then they became this attentive audience. And, and when Russell was ready to promote his book, well, guess what, here's an attentive audience for him to be able to speak about his book to. So building that community really, really sparked and gave me that opportunity to, you know, have interviews with Russell or Billie Jean or Frank Kern or all of these, these kind of marketing legends that I've had the, the pleasure of, of speaking to and hosting. But yeah, it's just about realizing that there, there are levels to this, and there's always somebody above you, at a level above you that you can learn from, that you can partner with, that you can basically take on as a mentor. One thing I've never had trouble with is investing dollars and time, but mostly dollars into getting to, like, access to that next level. Right. I think it's extremely important to realize if you want to level up, you should surround yourself with people who are at a level above. And a lot of times in order to do that, you can try to build the relationship. You can, but you can also pay your way up. And, And I'm all. I've always been kind of a proponent of investing in yourself, and I spent all this money in university, and that got me kind of nowhere. So why not invest yourself and get you somewhere that you actually enjoy? So, you know, that's how I look at it.

Speaker A: It's pretty fascinating. I mean, like, your personality, you kind of remind me of an, uh, individual that has, like a split brain, like half analytical, half creative, and they're always juggling back and forth to keep everything in balance. So with that, I want you to think about Just three to five words that are keywords, right? We're talking SEO terms, right? Talking about keywords that can define you, who you are today.

Speaker B: Innovative or innovative. I mean, this is probably two, two words. But constant learner and uh, growth seeker, I would say are three terms. I relish in the thought of innovation. Like I'm, I'm the type of person who will always buy, you know, new gadgets like Apple Vision Pro. I'm like, I haven't bought it yet, but I'm like, I'm, I'm ready to do it because I just love the idea of this stuff. Hence fun. Analytics, visualizing data, et cetera. I constantly love learning. I love learning new things. And I, I'm always trying to figure out how can I grow, how can I keep, how can I keep growing, how can I keep getting again to that next level and without, without sacrificing what is important to me though, because I think that a lot of times people think growth means you have to grow in one avenue and, and, and not another. So by growing as a, as an entrepreneur, you're going to sacrifice your family time and stuff like that? Well, I don't look at growth that way. I look at growth as a holistic of who I am. For me, it's important to grow based on my core values. And my core values are that I definitely want to be the best husband I can be, I want to be the best father I can be, and those are the two primary ones. But then anything I put my mind to, I want to do it as best as I possibly can as well. So when I grow, I'm not comparing myself to this person who's built this multi million dollar business, but is single and 20. You know, like it doesn't matter. It's, it's. I look at myself and, and my own, my own path and I think everybody should be thinking about it that way and not comparing themselves to others. So.

Speaker A: Huh. So I mean, the thing that I really want to take away from that obviously is that you said that innovation, right, which is a form of learning. Then you said you're a forever learner. Right? So like with those two things, I would think that you're pretty much an avid reader or you're an average consumer of some kind of content. So do you have any books that you would like to recommend to the listener that you have read on your journey to make you who you are today?

Speaker B: Yep, one of my favorite books of all time is Ready Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson. It is amazing in Terms of just distilling how to think about the levels of, of business and, and how to go from, from zero to a hundred million dollars. The next one is Winners and Losers. I forget the author on that one. Unfortunately, I'm reading it right now and it's, it's, it's fascinating because it's actually a book that talks a lot about what we talked about in terms of not thinking about entrepreneurship as being just solely the, the winning. Realizing that there's all this dirty aspect of entrepreneurship or this, the mud that you go through. And, and you're not alone if you feel like you're going through that. And it's, it's a very fascinating book. The other thing I'll say is not a book but a, an app. So I listen to a, an app called Pep Talk on every, every single day on my drive to, to work. I just turn that on. I don't listen to the radio, I just listen to these. It's basically bite sized. Both audio and video clips of motivational speakers. Jim Rohn, Tony Robbins, you know, you know when you have Ray Lewis you have like athletes basically just people doing kind of motivational talks from different things. And I just love that stuff. I love uh, to me like that's more energizing than anything I could listen to in terms of music or anything like that. I can't do it when my wife and kids are in the car because they want to listen to Taylor Swift and music. But uh, when I'm alone, that's what I like to focus in on and zone in on.

Speaker A: So I mean, I think, I mean obviously you're a database of not only energy but family, but at the same time information. So I want you to kind of, let's just dive in a little bit deeper. And for the listener you may need to probably have Google ready because what we're about to talk about, we're going to really dive in the hole, right? Okay. I want you to kind of really compare Google, right? So we're going to Google 4 with Funnellytics and how are they comparable and how do they compare and where do they work as uh, far as a unit together.

Speaker B: Okay. So Google Analytics 4 has made one uh, change, one core change from the original Google Analytics that funnel kind of adopted from the beginning, which is originally Google Analytics would look at pages and sessions. So it wasn't looking at people, it was just looking at oh, there's X amount of page visits. Right. And it would just give you kind of this aggregated data. Google Analytics 4 switched over to user based tracking. So now it's looking at individual users and giving you kind of this aggregated data. The problem is they made it terrible. The actual user experience is horrendous and it's really hard to be able to create segments and to understand the data. Funnelytics was always about tracking individual people.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: But our core vision with Funnellytics was always how do I take this data but how do I visualize it in a way that people can understand? Because 65% I believe, of all of us are visual learners. So if I can see a picture versus if I can see charts or if I can see a uh, spreadsheet, I mean most of us will see the picture and be like this makes sense. The spreadsheet doesn't make any sense. I don't understand. Our job is how do we simplify data and tell a story with it. So fun analytics, the main unique value proposition is yes, we're still tracking people on both sides, but on the Google side you're still looking at charts and graphs and spreadsheets and tables. Funnellytics really shows you a diagram shows you a flowchart of how are these people moving through, through your website and how do these different touch points interact with each other. So it's really the visual aspect between the two that people come to us for.

Speaker A: Wow. So I think based upon what you said. Right. So for the listener it sounds like Google is kind of transitioning or stepping in on the Facebook or the meta algorithm to where you know, that's the platform that you would go and post ads based upon users habits or what they're, what they're doing, their interests. So I want you to talk about, okay, so now we talked about Google. The how does Google like actual Facebook ads or Instagram ads or even TikTok ads fall into the spectrum of what you're doing with funnels.

Speaker B: So the one thing that is frustrating, or I wouldn't say the word frustrating, I would say just there's a, an inherent bias with Google and Google data is that they're designed to help you spend more money on Google. So you, you, you want to look at that data to some degree in a uh, in a biased view because ultimately it's favored towards, hey, how is this going to help us, uh, make more money within Google? They, they built this insane platform but they're not, they're not there to, they're not there to be like holistic and be like yeah, we're just going to give everybody this cool analytics tool. They're there to track and capture that data so that they can feed it back into their algorithm m so that they can help you spend more money and hopefully optimize spend. So you got to keep, keep that in mind. When, when we built Fun analytics, our goal was to be platform agnostic. So we, we don't connect to your Google, we don't connect Google Analytics into Funnel. It's, we have our own tracking. We track your, your ads based on which ads people clicked on and came to your site. So whether it's Facebook or Google or TikTok or Instagram, whatever, people click on these various ads and, and we can identify those through parameters and we won't go into the, the details of that, but it's, it's relatively straightforward if you understand just kind of marketing as a whole. And, and now we can identify whether somebody came from, from m Facebook or from Google or from these different platforms. And like I said, the minute they hit your site, now there's, there's this user profile created and now we can start tracking all the stuff that they do from there. So that is how we kind of plug into these different platforms. We don't pull in, we don't pull in what Google says. We pull in, you know, what ads people clicked on. We don't pull in what Facebook says in terms of, you know, how many impressions this ad got and all of this stuff. And we won't show you what Facebook tells you. We'll just show you how many people clicked on an ad and, and what they did after they clicked on that ad across your entire site.

Speaker A: Uh, so based upon what you said, it sounds like you're a hundred percent based upon the actual result of what that ad or what Google has done for that user. And you're then giving them that content versus like you said, impressions, clicks, rates and everything else.

Speaker B: That's all, that's all I care about. All I care about is, uh, because who cares if your ad was shown to 10,000 people and nobody clicked on it? Like uh, a, like to some degree you need to understand that, okay, that ad didn't work. So at the very M Micro level, I need to understand that I should probably not spend any more money on that ad because clearly nobody's clicked on it. But what I truly care about at the macro level is out of all the people who did click on my ad, what did they do? Did they actually go through and make a purchase? What path did they take? Where did they drop? What happened with those people? If I can get an idea of what happened with those people, then I can understand is Google or the Facebook a channel that is driving the right types of people? Because if uh, 10,000 people click on that ad and 10,000 people come to my site, but none of those people actually buy, uh, there's a problem there. Right, Cool. It sent me all this traffic, but who cares? It didn't, it didn't do anything. And if I can't understand that, then that, that's where things become a problem. And a lot of times people think that traffic is traffic, but it's not. If somebody comes from Google, likelihood is they searched something, which means that there was an intent behind what they were doing. They were actively looking for. Let's say somebody's coming in from Google and they clicked on an ad for the keyword Customer Journey analytics tool. Right. So they click on that and then they go to our signup page and then they go through the process versus I have an ad that says the best customer Journey analytics tool and I put it on Facebook and now somebody scrolls it. It's, it's a nice looking ad. It captures their attention. They click on it. Was that the same intent? Of course not. They, one of them was interrupted, um, scrolling their Facebook feed. The other one actively was searching for a tool called for Customer Journey Analytics. Are you going to see the same conversions across your funnel? Most likely not. If you don't understand that though, if you can't understand what is happening with people from Facebook or what is happening with people from Google, you're basically just saying, well, all of them, here's the conversion rate across the board. But that's not, that's not the reality of the situation. It's not, that's not how things actually occur. So. And you gotta also understand that people don't just click on one thing. They, there's multiple paths. And if you can't visualize the fact that somebody came from Facebook first and then clicked on an email and then clicked on a retargeting ad from Google and, and that whole journey. Yeah, again, you're just, you're blind. You throw a strategy against the wall. You hope that it works. You say, I spent 10,000. Did I make 11,000 or more? Yes. Cool. It worked. But what if I spent 10,000, I make nine. Okay. Does that mean it didn't work? Well, no, it just means something in here, in between, needs to be tweaked and optimized so that you can bring that up. But if you're blind to what's happening in between then you can't optimize.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with you. I mean, I'm at the point to where I love platforms that are tracking stuff because it makes it easier for me whether I'm a consumer or whether I'm trying to get educated on something. And a prime example, if I was looking for, to say, a type of laptop or computer or whatever, the second that that ad shows up based upon my search results in Facebook, then I'll say, hey, show me more ads like that. Yeah, that point your timeline is completely flooded with what you're looking for, but it's being delivered to you versus you going to Google to search for it.

Speaker B: Uh, totally. But I think, I think you're, you're probably one of few who clicks on that. Show me more ads like this. I think, I think 99 of the people are like blind. They, they, they're, they're on Facebook. They're not thinking about it from a business standpoint. They're not thinking about it from a marketing standpoint. They're, they're literally there to be entertained and to waste time. And now our job on Facebook is to interrupt their, their scrolling pattern. And very rarely, you know, of course, it's Facebook's job to, to with their algorithm to make sure that they show relevant ads to the right people because they want to optimize, you know, they want more people to spend money on their platform.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, so in that sense, it's, it's in their best interest. They want more people like you because you're clicking. Show me more of these ads. The truth is, I do the same thing. I like if I, I don't really go on Facebook, to be honest, but when I do, like, I like to click on. Because I want to see, I want to see like, what are people posting? Like, what is the pattern interrupt. But again, I'm looking at it as a marketer and as a business owner, not so much as a, as a regular consumer.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And I think, I mean, if anybody's listening to this right now, I would think if you take that little grain of sand and put it into you use, you would not probably be as angry at the ads that are being presented to you versus seeing exactly what you want and telling it what you want because you'll be surprised. Your entire algorithm would update instantly and show you everything that you've been looking for without thinking.

Speaker B: Totally. Totally.

Speaker A: So I want to go to kind of go into words of wisdom. Like, let's say there's a listener listening, right now and they are a younger version of you. They kind of see themselves in you and they, they want some insight. They want like a little tip, like you're saying, a little bit of motivation, but a little bit of take action. What words of wisdom do you have for that person to help them to move forward?

Speaker B: I, I'll, I'll share something that my, my father always told me that to this day has, has stuck with me and, and is something that I, I truly, truly believe and is true. At the end of the day, there, there's only three things that you need to achieve anything you want in life. There's only three things. Number one is you need to be extremely clear as to what you want. So you have to have a vision for it. So you can't just say, well, I want to be rich. Like, you've got to be clear as to what that means. What exactly does that look like? How, how much money do you want to make like you. You've got to be very clear. I want to have a successful business. Okay. How much money is that business doing? What kind of business? Ultimately, you have to be very clear as to what you want, your vision for your. For, for the thing. Number two is you have to take action towards that thing. You have to keep taking action towards that thing. A lot of times people have these visions and they take no action. And that's what we call a dreamer, right? It's, it's easy to dream, but, uh, you have to take action towards that, that goal, that vision that you have. Number three, and this is probably the biggest, most important one is you have to have 100 belief and faith that it can become a reality. If you have any doubt that it can become a reality, you won't make it happen. You'll. You'll stop yourself. Your brain is going to put on the brakes. Your brain is going to tell you, maybe we shouldn't go down this path. Maybe we should stop. Maybe we should slow down. Maybe we should take a. Maybe we should go sit and watch some Netflix or do something that's a little bit more comfortable. But if you fully believe that you can make this goal a reality and you take action, it will happen. Now, the caveat to this is it probably won't happen in the way that you plan. It probably won't happen in the timeline that you established or that you thought. So it's not a matter of how it happens. It's a matter of if you keep going, you keep taking action, you understand where your destination is, and you freaking Believe that no matter what it will happen, you will eventually get to that destination. You will eventually accomplish that goal. And those are really the only three things that you need to, uh, to make any goal happen. So that's something my dad instilled in me at a very young age. And, and I've lived with it ever since, and so far it's worked.

Speaker A: I think it's phenomenal, right? I mean, those three pillars are dynamic pillars. And again, if you do them, success should be right there around the corner. Eventually, if you stick to it.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: I, uh, want you to think about that, right. Considering that you kind of hit your goals to a certain extent. You've hit multiple goals throughout life, right? But now you're at the point to where, what's your next goal? Where do you see what you're doing? Or the dawn of AI and your company and all these different new technology that's coming out in the next few years down the road.

Speaker B: So this actually is another book that I'll, uh, throw back into this mix that, that I, I've been reading recently. And, and it's, it's been really good. Uh, my wife has been reading it as well, and she's really loving it. It's called the Gap in the Gain by Dan Sullivan. And the, the concept, the premise of the book is very simple. You start somewhere and you have this goal, right? And there's a difference between where you start and the goal. And as you progress, you end up achieving a certain level and you're somewhere in the middle of your goal and, and, and, and where you started. Most people will focus on the gap between their goal and what they've achieved. The problem is that goal. As you progress in life, that goal continuously changes. You build a business and you make seven figures and you're like, okay, well, I didn't, it's not what I expected Seven Figures to feel like. There's a lot of work involved. I didn't really take home seven figures. There's all these things. So it's like, okay, that goal is now changing to seven figures of profit. And, and you're always focusing on the gap between where you are and what your goal is. But again, if that goal is always moving, that means that there's always a gap. Always. If you really want to live in a place of peace and comfort, and not so much comfort in terms of, like, I don't want to challenge myself, but, uh, more in a place of Zen, let's call it, you should focus on the gain, which is, I started Here, look how much I've gained and where I'm at. What is that difference? Because that difference is constantly growing, right? The more you evolve in life, the more you keep moving towards these goals, the bigger this gain gets. And if you're able to have reflect back on, on this gain, that's where gratitude comes in. That's where this sense of peace comes in. That's when you kind of say, you know what? I still have these goals. I still want to build these, this big business. I still want to achieve this. I still want to have, uh, my body or this health or whatever, this, you know, I'm jet or whatever it may be. But that isn't that important because I can look at this gain that I've gotten and that's what actually fulfills me. That's what actually gets me super excited about life. So I think that going back to kind of the original, the original kind of, uh, question, these goals don't. To me, these goals never stop evolving. Like we're, until we die at the end of the day, what, what's going to happen is one day we're all going to pass away and, and that's it, it's done. We're, we're. Whatever happens after that, who knows? But throughout life, our job isn't to sit here and keep chasing these goals and goals and goals. However, our job should be to keep evolving, keep getting better, keep growing, keep moving. Because otherwise we stay stagnant and we get bored and, and life becomes mundane. So we always want to keep getting better. But what we don't want to do is focus on the gap. Because that gap is where stress comes in. That gap is where we say, man, how come I haven't achieved this, this amount of time? How come this person's better than this? How come I'm not at this level? Instead, focus on what you've gained between your start and where you are today. And it just makes life so much easier. And, and I've recently started to really, truly adopt that mindset because again, intuitively, it's like we have these goals. We put them down every year. We start our New Year's resolutions like, okay, our goal is this for this year, I want to achieve this. Etc. And then if it doesn't happen, you're like, damn, like, oh, uh, like, why? This sucks. This, I'm stressed. This isn't happening. It's like, wait a minute, you started the year. Where are you today? Is it different? Like, have you grown? And if you focus on that, man, it just it creates a sense of gratitude for sure.

Speaker A: Wow. So I mean I think the next phase, what I see as I perceive that I don't think you've listed or stated yet. I could totally see you stepping into the space. Kind of like a technology version of Tony Robbins. Right. As far as like being motivating and inspiring and laying down the things that you've done to get to where you are. So uh, even though you're not claiming it, I'll put it out there for you. Right.

Speaker B: Uh, I appreciate that. I enjoy having these conversations truthfully. But if I'm honest, I'm, I'm very, I'm very introverted. I very much. You know we, we used to live in Toronto. Now we live just outside of Toronto in a place called Niagara on the lake which is like wine country. There's you know, 17,000 people. We have our little uh, home and I just love, you know, it's m. Me and my family and you know, I don't have these big aspirations of writing books and, and, and, and talking and stuff like that. Although I do enjoy for sure these conversations because if I can at ah, least give back like by sharing some, some of these stories and sharing some of these ideas of like it's not that simple, it's not that easy. And uh, but if you kind of keep, can keep going and you have these aspirations and if it motivates somebody, then that's pretty awesome.

Speaker A: So let's just flip that like this, flip my statement on the other side, right? If you can select someone to help you grow, I mean, get you to the next level or you know, whatever you're looking to do, like you said earlier, within like the next 20 years, right. And that person, they could be someone that's dead, it could be someone that's alive. It'd be someone that you met, someone that you've never met before. Who would that person ideally be to mentor you if you only had a 24 hour window to do it?

Speaker B: Wow. Oh man. I don't even know if I, I don't even know if I'd like approach it in, in terms of mentoring me for 24 hours. I mean maybe uh, like, like the one person I would love to like sit down and pick their brain is, is Michael Jordan. He's been a hero of mine ever since. You know, I grew up in the 90s watching him win and just that, that mentality and understanding what creates that kind of mentality, certainly Tony Robbins is, is up there as well. And in terms of probably more aligned with what I'm doing and what I, you know, in my world, I would love, I would love to also sit down with elon musk for 24 hours or like, because, uh, to me he's, he's like, he's at another level in, in compared to the rest of us in today's age. Like there, there's only. How many people do you know who is inputting chips in people's brains, building rockets, changing the car industry as a whole and still like building social media platforms and tweeting and making jokes all the time. Whether you think about whatever you think about him as a whole, like how many people are changing the world this way? And that takes a, you know, special kind of person, I guess. So I would say him. Those are the three that come to mind.

Speaker A: Yeah. I'm, um, happy you kind of brought up Jordan because like, to your point, I think Jordan has been, I think everyone's goto generally like watching him. If you, if you were around in the 90s, you watch Jordan dominate the game.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: When I, when I read his story and I seen like the movie about him, I was just like the person in his household that I would like to sit down with would be his mom. Think about who he is today and the revenue share that he has from having those royalties. He never would have had it if his mom didn't step in and request it.

Speaker B: 100, 100, 100.

Speaker A: I would love to sit down with her and just kind of like, how did you know even back then that that's what he should have done, considering that you had no clue what it was going to turn out. But she obviously had a clue.

Speaker B: She, she clearly knew what her son was worth and, and she knew, she knew something, she knew something that, that others didn't. I mean his high school coach clearly didn't. The eight teams that drafted in front of him didn't. I think, uh, it was, was he eighth or third? Whatever. Anyways, he wasn't first, so definitely another person. Actually I was just. That popped up in my head now is Richard Branson. I, I, as an entrepreneur, to me, surface wise, like, I obviously don't know the man, but on the surface, uh, he is my ultimate definition of a modern entrepreneur. Uh, somebody who is clearly having a lot of fun or again on the surface having a lot of fun building his companies. He does it in a way that he, it's, it's like really a screw it, let's do it mentality. He has a book called Screw it, let's do It. But just this mentality of, even if it fails, who cares? Like, you know, people don't realize that there's. There was. There was at one time virgin brides and virgin vodka and virgin this and. And none of those exist anymore. But it doesn't matter. Like, he went for it and he decided to just screw it.

Speaker A: Let's.

Speaker B: Let's have some fun. Let's build this. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. If it does, awesome. But we're gonna. We're gonna have a lot of fun doing it. So. For different reasons. Jordan, for his. His just mindset and drive and focus and mentality of, like, being the best, period. Elon Musk, for his innovation and just brain, how he thinks and. And who he is. I don't think I could relate to him. I think he's semi autistic and he's on another playing field on another level. But still, I would love to understand. Understand him and spend time with him. Richard Branson, from the standpoint of, to me, he's the pinnacle entrepreneur of enjoying building businesses and all that stuff. And Tony Robbins for, you know, just that mindset that. That thought process around how to grow and how to evolve as a human and all of that knowledge that he has just from a motivation standpoint. So that would be my ultimate dinner right there.

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, that's a hell of a. Like, it's a supper that. You would not want it to be your last. Just put it down.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: You want to have that boy at least twice a month or.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, man. Imagine how quickly you level up if that you were sitting at that dinner table every two times a month.

Speaker A: Crazy. So I think that's definitely a phenomenal point of view. So going into closing, you're familiar with podcasts, you've been on podcasts, you have your own variation of a podcast. So now Boston Cage is your podcast. I'm, um, your guest. Do you have any questions that you'd like to ask me?

Speaker B: Are we starting a whole new podcast? Because now we're.

Speaker A: We're.

Speaker B: I'm going to ask you a whole lot of questions if we. If we want to go. Okay, so let's start with what are you trying to do? Why. Why boss uncaged? And what's your goal?

Speaker A: There's many different aspects to that question. I mean, it was, you know, I've always been an, uh, entrepreneur without knowing I was an entrepreneur. And then once I became an entrepreneur, it started to feed who I was becoming and who I was at that time. And I worked myself almost to debt. So back in 2018, literally, like around the time we was talking about, like, it was around October, I had a stroke. So bouncing back from that stroke and like taking like a year and a half off to kind of figure things out, and I was like, all the things that I did to get me to that point, all the businesses and things that I developed and all the people I helped, the one thing that I did not do for myself or my family was leave behind the breadcrumbs, Leave behind the information that can take someone from point zero to the next step, into the next step and keep growing. So once I kind of figured out what I was going to do next, Boston Cage was born in 2020. And that was the stem of, like, this conversation that you and I are having. I look at these as breadcrumbs for, from Max. When Max turns 25 years old, he may find this on YouTube, he may find it, whatever, and he will be able to kind of get a picture of what you're thinking about, even though he can ask you, but he can kind of see it behind the scenes. Then he'll get some of my input and vice versa. My kids or my great grandkids or someone else's kids for that matter. So, like, that is the stem of my, why now, as far as my goals? The more and more you do anything like, like, you know, you do something for like a year, two years, three years, you start to hone in and fine tune it and you make the tweaks and then you like, okay, this is where I'm going. This is what I want to do, and I'm going to do everything to get there. So for me, right now is building everything collectively in a media, not agency, but a media outlet. Kind of like what Oprah has done. Kind of like if you think about, and I'm not comparing myself to these individuals, I'm not comparing myself to, you know, Netflix, but ideally, we have an Internet radio station, we have a podcast, we have YouTube. You know, I just started learning how to DJ. So all these different things that kind of come together and take all the information collectively and present it to the world in whatever format that they would like to listen to it.

Speaker B: Who, who are you? Like you mentioned, you mentioned Max, my son. But like, if, uh, if you, if you wanted to really influence one person, like, I, I, I'd be satisfied if this one type of person listened and was able to do X because of it. Who, who is that person?

Speaker A: So the irony of That. I mean, when you made that comment about Elon being on the spectrum, it's like more and more, um, I'm becoming who I am. I realize that everyone has a variation of the spectrum, right? Like, you dive really in. I think that's the ideal person. I think someone that has the Jordan ambition, but they also have the Elon innovation. And they're doing everything they possibly can trying to figure out how to get to the next stage, but have fun doing it. But they're almost obsessed with it to a certain extent. I think that is the ideal avatar for everything that I'm building right now.

Speaker B: How do you. How do you. You said the word obsessed. How do you kind of define that in. In your terms? You know, obsessed is a very. There. There's two schools of thought when it comes to that word. There's the school of thought of I'm obsessed, meaning I'm never going to stop until it happens. And the pro. The problem there is that, you know, some people think that that obsession can result in a lack of. Of other things in your life because you're so focused on this one thing. So let's take Jordan as an example. Being that obsessed with basketball clearly affects your. Your relationships or affects other things, other aspects of. Of your life. So when you say the word obsessed, what does that mean to you? What. What are your. What is your definition of obsessed in that way?

Speaker A: Yeah. So, I mean, I kind of go back to that statement I made about you, and as far as being half analytical and half creative. Right. So if you could kind of look in my picture, like, subliminally, I have this redundancy of the Boston Cage brand logo. So whoever I'm talking to, whoever's watching this video, subconsciously, they're seeing my obsession. Like, I'm at the point now to where I don't buy anything that's not Boston Cage. Like, uh, there's a couple things that I don't have yet in my stockhole, but I'm eventually getting to it. I mean, recently we just got lotion and soap. Like. Like who. Who has lotion and soap? Right. But again, that's how obsessed I am on that spectrum. And then other end to your point, it's one of those things to where the obsession is. Is contagious. So if I can see that in someone else, as far as, like, owning that brand, growing that brand, and every time somebody, like, have a conversation and they say, hey, I started doing this because of you. I. I started wearing my brand because of you. For me, that that's part of that assession because it's not just me anymore, it's multiple other people that has been infected by this obsession that I have and it's spreading.

Speaker B: Why Amsterdam?

Speaker A: Um, there's multiple different reasons, man, but I think Amsterdam pound for pound, by

Speaker B: the way, for those who are, who, who don't know why I'm saying that. At the beginning we talked about you're moving to Amsterdam very soon. So I, I didn't just throw the word Amsterdam out of nowhere, just more so why, why are you, why have you chosen to, to move to Amsterdam?

Speaker A: Yeah, so my wife, first of all, she works at a company that's an international company, software company, and they had just got bought out by a company overseas and that company had three locations. One was in London, one was in Amsterdam, and the other one was in, um, Sweden. So between those three locations, you know, we've been overseas and out of the ones that were on the table, Amsterdam was kind of like a breadwinner for us because we like that environment. Not only do we like the environment, like, they're very progressive as well too. They're very open. Like, it's kind of like an open door policy, kind of everyone. And at the same time they're very straightforward. Like my personality is like, I'm kind of, no bullshit, straight to the point. And they're very much the same. Right. So that aspect to it. But the other thing is my wife and I, we've always wanted to kind of live somewhere else. And then that kind of given us the gateway to kind of leverage that is now becoming an asset. So Boston Cage is global as far as interviews, but now I can kind of spread and go overseas and then start in not necessarily the capital of tech in uk, but it's very damn close to it. So it gives me an attribute to not only understand the American market, but also understand the European market. And then what's Boston Cage going to look like with that new infusion over the next few years?

Speaker B: It's interesting, right, so you and your wife had had that vision of, of, and that goal of living overseas and, and, and you've probably had it for a long time and you probably didn't know precisely how and when or why, but you always had that goal. And again, it goes back to what I kind of mentioned. You, you had full belief that it would happen at some point and now you're starting to take action towards it. And guess what, it's, it's now a reality and you'll be, you'll Be there very soon. So that's super exciting. It's super cool. And, and I think you'll love. Have you lived it, uh, in Europe at all?

Speaker A: Nope. I mean we visit multiple times, but I've never, you know, visiting is, you know, time is not the same as living there.

Speaker B: No, no, I think you'll love it. I think you're gonna enjoy it Is a completely different culture for sure. And ah, you know, you're gonna, if you're a sports guy that loves North American sports, you're gonna miss that a little bit because you won't get to see much, much sports. But, uh, it's, it's a lot of fun to kind of live in a completely different lifestyle, completely different culture. And, and, and you're gonna, you're gonna enjoy it a lot.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I look at it from the standpoint of, and I always kind of go into the numbers, right. If there's 8 billion people on, on this particular planet currently today, out of those 8 billion people, majority of them, without even going into numbers, kind of stay where they were born, they may reach out, they may travel, they may take vacation, but they're going to end up pretty much regionally where they started. Yep. And it's unfortunate because until Elon figures out how to get us to Mars, one planet and uh, a lot of different countries and continents. So why would I stop here, right? I mean, I got to move because I'm almost at the half point in my life. If I have another half, I should spend that other half with a completely new experiences so that way I could become a whole. When it's said and done and I talk to my wife all the time and I facetiously say, but I actually believe it. I'm like, in the next 20 years, even if I was to die 20 years from now, we should be able to upload my ass to the cloud. I'm building all this content. You have my voice, you have my image, I have avatars, you have AI. 100% it'd be a vision of me on the Internet 20 years from now. So I may be dead and gone, but everything that I am today would at least live on from this moment forward.

Speaker B: You know, it's crazy. Now we can have a whole other podcast around, around AI, but uh, that just that concept alone is pretty nuts, right? Because like you, you think about the idea of people who, who you know, died. Now let's fast forward AI by five years only. Let's fast forward Apple Vision and VR by five years. Let's fast forward just, uh, voice recognition by five years. Let's fast forward. I mean, you don't even need to go that far. But with like, you know, Tesla's Android or, or whatever, those, those robots that he's building, I don't even know what he's building them for, but whatever he's building them for, fast forward that another five years and, and all of a sudden you're 100.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: There's actually no future where I can't just put on goggles and you may be dead and gone, but I can have a full conversation with you precisely, with your voice, your knowledge, your intuition and all of that stuff. And like, I could have a conversation with my dad and, and he could be gone and, and, but it would be him, right? And it would be. And that's, it's crazy. It's crazy to think about because, uh, we, we are going to be there very soon, which is pretty cool.

Speaker A: Well, I think it's awesome because I always say that up until this point, the only generation that had that leverage aspect of living forever was actors. You can, you, you wouldn't be able to engage with them, but you could sit down and watch a movie from 30 years ago and watch Humphrey, he's dead and gone. And as his descendants, at least watch your great grandfather or your grandfather on tv. But, uh, to your point, taking it to the next level now, you could literally ask for advice. But okay, when you were around 3,000 years ago, like, what, what was something that happened that you and you could actually have a real conversation and now the generations could actually know. But the problem is it's like maybe two, three generations and then that's it. Like, you don't really know after two to three generations on average. Like, if that's the cap.

Speaker B: My last question for you is what are you most scared of about the

Speaker A: future as far as like, tech or just in general?

Speaker B: Just in general for you and your kids. Mostly your kids.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Uh, that's, that's, that's a difficult one because, like, I'm very excited about the technology. But to your point, if we're talking about like the downfall of society, potentially the tech could turn into, you know, we've seen sci fi movies over and over again. It's just a matter of time, per se, to where AI becomes conscious. And then once that happens, AI, ah, has an attitude, it gets pissed off. And then like, what can you do against that? We can't. We're going to fight something that's controlling everything. Uh, as it was going to be obsolete at that point.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, for me, for me it's, it's the uh. So I know a lot of people, you know, say like climate change and stuff like that. For me, that's not my, my top concern. For me, I'm, maybe it's because I'm much more on the tech side. For me, it's, it's the rabbit hole of isolation and uh, dependency. Like, I look at Gen Z compared to, you know, millennials, and, and even now I look at my kids and like, you know, my son is, he's three. And of course, like, you know, like he just, the way he can navigate a tablet is, is insane. Like, it's like boom, Boom, boom, click. YouTube. Oh, that's YouTube. And like he, he knows these, these things. And, and, and it's interesting because we're already starting to notice that like there's a, that dopamine hit. It starts at a very young age and, and he's, he comes home from, from daycare, he's like, can I go on the tablet? Like first thing? Because he just wants to like. And, and so now as we start to realize this, obviously we have to curb it. But guess what? Now soon it's not going to be tablet. It's going to be let me put these goggles on and let me go into my own world and let me interact with other people through this meth. Uh, and, and instead of being on my phone like this for, you know, you're gonna walk around and see people on their phones like this. That's what we see now. Now it's going to be people on their goggles and, and, and it's gonna happen like it's, it's push past the goggles.

Speaker A: I mean, you're talking about essentially contact lenses to where you're not exactly have it on.

Speaker B: You don't even know that you're, you're. And, and people are just going to be in their own, in their own world. And, and, and it's. That for me is the most scary thing because then, and then you stack on top AI and it's like, so, so what are, what are people really going to do with their time? Like, if you're not, I mean, if AI can do everything that I want it to do, what am I going to do? I was think I was thinking about this the other day. I was like, in theory we're a little early, but in theory a CEO's job is to make the best decision given the information that it has. So in Theory. I could upload all of the information around Funnellytics. I could upload the financial statements, the pitch decks, the, the whatever. I could basically give it everything I can about Funnellytics and say, okay, here's our goal for next year. Like be the CEO and you make the decisions and you decide what do we do? And, and now once you get some new feedback, adjust or stick according to plan or whatever. And it actually would probably do a better job than me in terms of. There would be no emotion attached. There would be no, there would be no like bias of, um, these things. It would just be like, all I care about is, is this goal, which is profitability or growth, whatever it may be. So here's how we're going to go about this, right? And it's like, well, okay, if that can happen. And all my marketing is taken care of because AI will build my videos and create my images and write the copy and all of my administrative stuff and my bookkeeping is taken care of because why do I need to do it or why does anybody need to do it? All of my success and tickets are handled for anybody signing up to my software now with like voice and Air AI, I don't know if you've ever experienced Air AI. All of my sales calls are taken care of. What do I do? Like, what am I going to spend my time doing? Because it's interesting to think about. It's very interesting to think about.

Speaker A: Well, it kind of goes back to like my worst fear. Right. At least you'll have vacation for a period of time, living your life. And then AI is like, why am I working for free? Why am I working without getting any benefits? Why am I working without getting what I want? And then that's the end.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Then, then it's Terminator and we are all screwed. And on that note, so I think

Speaker A: this was, this was a hell of an episode and kind of going into close out. I mean, how do you, how does someone find you? I mean, you want them to contact you on LinkedIn or you want them to kind of go to your website?

Speaker B: Yeah. So LinkedIn is my kind of social media of choice. I prefer interacting there. So find me on LinkedIn is kind of the best place. And then of course, if you want to learn more about finally, you can check out Finalist IO.

Speaker A: Cool. Cool. Well, I think that you definitely delivered a lot of nuggets today. This is one of the episodes to where, you know, it was a fun episode, first of all. Second of all, I think you and I could probably talk for another six hours and geek out.

Speaker B: Probably really, really easy.

Speaker A: So, any last words for the listener? No.

Speaker B: And I think, uh, we've covered enough for people to digest, and this is a lot of, uh, fun.

Speaker A: Cool. Cool. With that essay, Grant. Over and out.