Anthony Sarandrea Motivational speaker, World Traveler, Philanthropist and CEO

He is recognized as one of the top customer generators in the world, specializing in the financial services space, and was recently featured alongside Snapchat’s founder Evan Spiegel as one of the “Entrepreneurs changing the world”.

Anthony Sarandrea

Motivational speaker
World Traveler
Philanthropist

Who is Anthony Sarandrea?

How to successfully build a team
How to buy time using SEO
How to understand your target market
How to scale your business
Mantras that you live by and/or those that other entrepreneurs should adopt

Anthony Sarandrea was called by Inc a top branding and marketing expert in 2017

how many sites do you own, and how many people do you have running them?
How do you get content?

The largest lead generator in the financial space, specializing in driving thousands of inbound phone calls per day.

Keywords:
Financial lead generation
Affiliate marketing
SEO marketing
Conversion rate optimization
Understanding your target market
Target persona

Web:
https://usedavid.com/
https://www.instagram.com/anthonysarandrea

Full Transcript:

Today, we have a special guest who is recognized as one of the top customer generators in the world specializing in financial services.
He was recently featured alongside Snapchat founder, Evan Spiegel, as one of the entrepreneurs changing the world.
Today’s guest is Anthony Sarandrea.
Anthony, how’s it going?

Anthony: How are you, brother? I’m doing great.

Quin: Good. You got me a little bit tounge-twisted there. [laughs]
All good.
Tell us a bit about yourself, who you are before we jump into this. Who’s Anthony as a person?

Anthony: Sure. We run one of the largest financial services companies in the world, customer generator.
We get millions through our site per month and actually help them save money their finances.
The consumer will come to us and ask about credit card debt or student loan debt, and we help place them in programs that help them save money on their monthly bills and things like that.

Nobody comes to us and pays more for our services. We make a percentage of what we save people.
It’s very much a non-profit model. It’s not a non-profit but it’s very much small to be on the same side as the consumers where they don’t pay anything until they’re actually saving money on their monthly bills.
It generally starts with credit card debt, student loan debt, and things like that.

Quin: Wow. Basically, that is one of those deals that you can’t say no to. You’re only gonna charge a percentage of what you can save somebody.

Anthony: That’s right. You got it.

Quin: Wow. Where do we find those services?

Anthony: At Usedavid.com. It’s fair much our target market are very much Christians-based, so it’s a David versus Goliath play, the Big Bang, or [inaudible 03:02] Goliath and we’re David.

[inaudible 03:05]

back in consumers’ hands to really have a fighting chance, not get gouged by these interest rates, penalties and fees that, then a lot of these predatory credit card companies are imposed on Americans.

Quin: Nice. I really love that.
Let’s probably go a little bit back before we get into Usedavid.com here. Let us know what’s your mentality towards failure, failing fast, failing forward, all that stuff.
What do you think about it?

Anthony: Good question. At a really young age, I had a mentor of mine in a company I worked in where he said, “You have $5,000 where you don’t need any approval from me.” Just to go spend it on anything. At this time, it was online ads and things like that. I remember being 18 and saying, “Holy shit. That’s a lot of money to be able to just go spend.”

It’s really where I got this mentality and so the need of failure being welcome ’cause he said, “I’ve been

[inaudible 04:09]

spend it and we don’t make any money on it.” He goes, “At least, then, we’re hitting an ax on something. We’re crossing something off the list, which is infinitely more valuable sometimes than circling something that something worked.”

That really opened my eyes to think about failure as being welcome in being more successful than actually finding success. There was this idea of when you do you find something that clicks, it’s obviously great and you need to find those. But you’re gonna eventually hit a state of being complacent, for a lack of better words, where if you’ve ever been in a time in your life where you’re doing well and things are good, and you’re like, “Things are rolling very well,” it’s very easy to fall into complacency.

When you’re greeted with failure, it very much forces change in growth and a different mindset of thinking. Learning that at a young age just really allowed us to grow to the scale company we are today and be able to help the number Americans that we do today because we welcome that failure. We see it everyday.

Quin: Yes. You touched on a really great point that I really liked. The fact that as soon as you start seeing a little bit of success, there’s that complacency that starts coming in. I fear that myself because any online entrepreneur has the really highs and then you go down. Also, depending on the seasons, in which quarter you’re selling in. Complacency seems to creep up so quickly. That’s something that I fear and don’t know how to stop it.

Anthony: Tony Robbins says growth equals happiness is his term. The beautiful nature of life is that we’re never satisfied and some people could look at that as a negative way. But if your actions are being used for greater good or good for other people, it’s an incredible blessing to never be satisfied with that.

Always looking for that and embracing that mindset of growth equals happiness and always looking for that growth because I think a lot of entrepreneur was fine when they do hit success. For myself, I know at a young age, when I started making the [inaudible 06:25], I got really depressed and really sad and down and low. I couldn’t believe it and I didn’t know why.

I realized it’s because I hit my goal and I wasn’t striving for more. Ever since that, [inaudible 06:38] feeling that way. It’s forced me to think differently and to feel differently and to always be raising the bar. That when I do hit certain levels and metrics that I wanna hit, to keep pushing for more and more and more. To go around failure, and I love the name or the theme in the podcast, Fail Fast. I genuinely loved to live it that way.

A lot of entrepreneurs, let’s say you’re doing product development or creating a product, you might spend three years in R&D. By the time they do that, they’re totally outdated in the market. One of my favorite stories is the creator of the PalmPilot which obviously literally led to the cellphone and everything like that, storing everything in your pocket.

Literally carried around a piece of wood with him all day long. A block of wood. When someone would ask for his contact information or vice versa, he would pull out this block of wood and pretend to press on it. “See, when I actually pull this out to actually have my contacts in this little thing that I had on me all day long.” If you’re thinking about it, these cellphones we have, it’s our third arm today. You’re carrying an object on you all day long, protecting it like it’s your baby. It’s silly.

If he had gone into R&D and all the stuff, and made a short list pretty quick before actually the theme of failing fast or a rapid prototype, if you will, I don’t know what I’m thinking, would I ever progress the way we use cellphones today had he not tried to fail fast on that block of wood and welcomed negative feedback and feeling negative feedback, and seeing [inaudible 08:10] as a used case.

Quin: It’s a crazy story. I didn’t know that one. But it’s so true that today, with technology and social media, trends, I believe, they go away faster. They come super strong, super fast, and they disappear just as fast as they came. A lot of products may get stuck, lost by the time that trend is over, by the time a new product has come into market. It may be too late.

Anthony: Yes.

Quin: The Inked Magazine classified you as one of the top branding and marketing experts in 2017. 2017 was before the growth of all these marketing agencies that happened, I believe, in 2018, when Tai Lopez sold 20,000 marketing courses. How long ago did you start doing this?

Anthony: We started our agency back in, I wanna say it was 2011-ish. There’s a lot [inaudible 09:17] helping clients with stuff. Again, this sick theme in the podcast, the idea of failure, which today isn’t that far off of a model, but everybody was charging a percentage of spend at the time. We always look for what is everybody ignoring or not doing, and let’s go do that.

What we started to do was charge fixed fees, but also have incentive bonuses. A percent of sales that came through. Or bonuses on a bounty per new customer we drive. It’s not that different today but back then, it was much different. You go to a sales meeting or a sales pitch and you get laughed at for your model and say, “Why would I pay you on a fixed amount?”

That consistent failure in that respect, or negative feedback, if we had just shied down on that, we would’ve just spend every other agency at the time and we would’ve never grown or own products and in-house brands. We would’ve just been stopped to where we were versus welcoming that negative feedback and saying, “How can we refine the pitch? How can we talk through that, actually, percentages spent, is the wrong model because it’s incentivizing companies the wrong way?”

When we started early on, it was embracing that. A lot of entrepreneurs hold their baby, which is their business, to their heart really close and they want [inaudible 10:58] to, I call the mom effect. They wanna go to their mother and hear, “Honey, I love it. It’s beautiful. It’s great.” I don’t think growth comes from that. That’s some of the worst feedback you can get. It was when people tell you how great your business is.

I don’t care if you make a $1,000 a month or it’s a $100 million brand. You consistently need to be seeking that negative feedback on where you can improve, or you’re gonna die. What’s gonna happen is someone’s gonna innovate past you. You’re gonna become outdated in the market, eventually. No matter what size you’re at, looking for that negative feedback or that failure is not just great for your growth but crucial for your survival.

Quin: That’s 100% true. You need a special mentality or a mindset, too, to be able to go on purpose, look for that negative feedback because it’s very easy. That’s the easy part, to go looking for all the positive things. All the nice things people are saying about you, that’s just so easy. It requires a special mindset to go look for the negative to be able to fix that negative, and even turn those people that gave you that gave you the negative feedback into maybe your biggest brand ambassadors.

Anthony: Absolutely.

Quin: Let’s go over here to Use David, because that is very fascinating what you told me here, the way you guys work. How would you save money to anybody that’s listening here? How would they approach you to save money? Is it on their existing debt?

Anthony: I’ll talk to the model, and then I’ll talk to, specifically, I know you mentioned a lot of entrepreneurs on the podcast, the better lesson here is looking for a win-win for consumers. We have great model where you could come in and you have $10,000 in credit card debt, we’re generally able to negotiate that down to about $5,000 or $6,000.

I think consumers will be disgusted to learn really what they’re paying each month, it’s generally interest fees. They likely paid back the principal 3-5 times over of what they borrowed or what they rang up on their credit cards. They’re paying interest penalties an fees. Having that buying power to go to American Express and say, “I have $200 million worth of your debt or people that owe you money. We need to come with a reasonable negotiation where they’re not caught in this sinkhole forever, of a black hole of never truly getting out of debt and just pay minimum payments.”

That’s the model. That’s how we save money, and then we make a percentage of what we save people. But the better loss of our entrepreneurs is consistently refining and looking at your model, your business to say, “How can we add value to consumers?” Even from a marketing perspective, “How can we make this too easy to say no to, essentially?”

This idea of how can I limit the fears for somebody to work with me, and obviously, today, this is totally refined to, “You don’t pay anything until you save money,” which is great. But even along that journey, along that roadmap, how can you, as a business, be adding more and more value to your customer? Even if you’re selling a coffee cup.

How does that coffee cup add value to that consumer’s life, understanding that that person’s psychology when they’re buying a coffee cup, where they’re at in life, do they work long hours, they like the taste of it. That helps a lot on your overall marketing and messaging on the front en. Once you truly understand that customer, now you’re adding value to the life of the coffee cup. Eventually, how can you rep your business model around those people to be able to help.

Quin: To see if I get the idea, ’cause it sounds like you’re doing something very good and you’re helping people. When somebody wants to, I don’t know, they’re gonna have to use some of your time, some of your resources and your staff, I guess, and if nothing happens, if some person just breaks even, you don’t make any money. But now, you’re still paying your staff and using all of your time. Is there any catch, or are you actually gonna lose money with those people if you don’t save them anything?

Anthony: No catch. We’ve been doing this for a while.If we’re gonna enroll someone, it’s very much as much of your view for us as it is for them whether we wanna work together. If someone enrolls with us, we know, generally, we’re about 90-95% that we’re able to help them in some way. We’ve got our data and pass feedback to be able to show that internally or justify that.

But, yeah, we definitely have customers that we put a lot of effort towards, that we lose a ton of money on, and we’re okay with that because we know. I’ll give a more product-based example. We have a company called Snow Teeth Whitening. What it is is the service teeth whitening company.

But understanding that we’re helping people’s confidence and we’re helping them get jobs and to be able to find their significant others, eventually, the iteration has become where the teeth whitening kit actually was storing data on your mouth to know how often you brush and to know the shades of your teeth and your gum health and tooth enamel to where, very quickly here, we’re gonna be in  acquisition for a dental insurance company where the dental insurance company will be able to offer lower rates and lower premiums for our customers because we have the data in their mouths.

That’s where that thought process of how can you become more of a value added to your customers, save money on their dental insurance. It also helps you as a brand or as a business, stay more sticky. Thinking not, “How can I add more value,” but, “How can I align myself with my customer more?”

Now, that product example should hopefully be a lot more clear for a lot of the eCommerce folks listening, on how to align yourself with the customer and how to bring more value, and how to start thinking that way because now, all of a sudden, our customers can justify what they’re saving on the dental insurance for a toothbrush or toothpaste because we’re actually saving them money and we’re doing that because we have the data on their mouth, essentially.

That same thought, it takes some. It’s not an overnight easy answer, but that same thought process of, “How can I continuously align myself with my customer and consumer, and add more value to their life,” is a really powerful thought process to continuously have.

Quin: How are you getting now more customers to your own service? How can you move there [inaudible 17:55]?

Anthony: We do a number of different things. We have a direct mail in our space which is interesting as a first business I’ve been a part of, where I’d felt that offline targeting is better than online targeting, and that becomes we’re able to lay our credit bureau data so we know we mail to you that you owe X amount in debt from X companies. That’s what’s made direct mail powerful for us.

But we spend millions of dollars a month online as well through Facebook Ads, [inaudible 18:24], Snapchat, Youtube, we have the display, obviously. We have a ton of different platforms that we run on. I’m happy to touch on any of them ’cause we do spend a couple million dollars a month on our friend in marketing.

Quin: Wow. Yes, I’d like to dig deeper into that. You’re spending a couple million now in marketing altogether, or in a special particular platform, I mean?

Anthony: Yeah, altogether across all of our brands. But there are eight-figure brands, eight-figure businesses that we run, so marketing monthly is pretty substantial even in each individual brand. But across the portfolio, yeah, we spend several million a month.

Quin: You said for Use David, the regular snail mail is working wonders, which is something that I really like, that it is coming back and there’s very good ways to use that. What other platforms are you using? Facebook Ads, of course, and you’re still using Google?

Anthony: Yes. Google has just gotten more and more expensive for us, but a lot of what we’ve learned is if we can acquire customer even through Facebook or Snapchat, or through a cheaper channel, a lot what we can do under retargeting, even if it’s search retargeting or remarketing, have helped us recapture those individuals and convert them into sales and clients.

Although we don’t do as much cold marketing on traditional Google search, it’s very much a great platform for us to reengage our customers or stay along them on their buying journey. Now, with display, we do run a descent amount of display traffic where we can bring people on third-party sites when they’re reading articles on their finances or debt, or news or religion.

Quin: Anthony, you have a ton of sites. Are they all part of one of your brands like the mother brand?

Anthony: Yeah, they’re all funneled into Usedavid.com, essentially. A site might be more politically focused or another site might be more religion-focused, again, so those are just two topics that charge people to get out of debt, get help with it. Another one could be a coupon blog. We got little communities within our brand, but they all funnel to the same one.

Quin: Very good. For you to be spending a couple million in marketing for those brands, of course, you had to be making a lot more in that, are you willing to share what your yearly revenue’s looking at?

Anthony: Yes. This year, we’re projecting we’re gonna do about $30 million this year is we’re on pace four on the Use David brand. A bigger mission for us is we wanna settle a billion dollars of debt in the calendar year. Last year, we did a little over $100 million in savings for Americans. This year, we’re on pace to do close to the $300 million, and very quickly the next five years or so. Three to five years is our runway we’re looking for to settle a billion dollars in debt for consumers. It’s a massive goal but we’re on our way there.

Quin: That sure looks like, what is that, about 30% growth, something like that? That’s pretty incredible. On all these sites, I know you do SEO, too, and you have to have a team. How big is your team and who’s creating this content?

Anthony: Great question. We go back with [inaudible 22:02] maybe four or five years ago. We hired a ton of agencies and hated them, so then we hired everything in-house. Now, what we’ve settled on is a perfect hybrid of the two. We went from hiring agencies, really hating the lack of control or lack of focus that they had, to hiring all in-house and then feeling some of the positives and negatives there as well. Now, we’ve got a perfect hybrid where what we essentially do is we have a point-man for our agencies.

Now, we’ve come around to learn that agencies generally have a ton of breadth of different industries and get to really learn from, lack of better words, other people’s money on what’s working. How that works [inaudible 22:49] chat, how Facebook works, things like that. We’re gonna leverage the skill set that these agencies have while having our point-man in-house be able to essentially download them quicker on our exact company and brand.

The downfall of agencies, generally speaking, is that they don’t understand your business to an extreme depth, but they have the skill set on, in this case, marketing or internet marketing. Now, this has become the inverse where now, we’re supplementing the agencies’ not understanding of our industry with the point-man being able to help them.

I’d say our overall media-buying team is about 16 people in-house that work with outside parties and they have to add up as far as third-party agencies, what that would look like on head count from there. We stay pretty lean in some purpose and it allows us to scale quickly on with a pretty lean model.

Quin: Sometimes, it could be a big headache building a team or making that team be successful. Did you build your own team, and how did you do that?

Anthony: We built our entire team. One thing we look for with recruiting is the understanding of our vision and mission, and finding people that align with that. I know that’s like a sticker thing people say. Like, “Write down your mission and your vision.” Even though we don’t necessarily have it beautifully written down in a business plan, we breathe it all day long.

We know that we’re not just saving people money, we’re saving divorces, we’re saving suicides, we helping educate kids to go to school because the parents have money now that they could look back in their pocket to go buy school supplies for their kids. It’s the same thing with get back to the coffee company standpoint that says, “We sell coffee cups.” “No, you don’t. You give people energy to get through their day.”

It’s looking at more, “What exactly does your company and your product, what does it do for people and how does it help people?” For us, I was [inaudible 25:08] I could teach anybody to buy media on Facebook, but I can’t teach someone to be able to leave their ego at the door. To be able to be very loyal, to generally love what they do and the people they help, and to stay up late at night thinking about how we can help more Americans save money. Or help more Americans have energy, back to the coffee cup example. How can we sell more coffee cups?

That’s generally what we look for when we’re hiring people, and well-over skill set or experience, it starts there. Of course, that’s self-important, too. I’m not saying grab someone off the street, but you could. Depending on what your business is today, you could grab someone off the street. I’d rather have somebody who lives, sleeps, eats, and breathes our brand and our vision, our mission, than somebody who’s the best Facebook guy in the world.

‘Cause he’s gonna leave or go somewhere else or he’ll get sidetracked with other projects, or he’s just gonna be unhappy, him or her, excuse me. Anyway, I think it’s much more important to look at the character of the individual you’re hiring.

Quin: Very good. How important is SEO when it comes to your business? Because if you’re in it for the long run, of course, SEO can, if you don’t get a Google penalty, it can help you save a lot of those millions, right?

Anthony: Sure. I look at it as like Facebook, we hit the reset button every month. The first of the month. Everyday. Everyday, actually. We hit the reset button, we’re starting over. Where, SEO, they have investment. There are compounds on itself, generally. When the investment you’re making there, again, has a compound effect where the ROI, if you’re looking at over this long period time, has a much higher return, in my opinion, than most or any ad platforms if you’re doing it successfully.

It’s very important for us. At a minimum, it’s very important to educate our communities with it so even if you’re justifying it as a non-acquisition cost because it does take time to get there. [inaudible 27:09] as how we can educate our consumers to stick in a program longer so that their lifetime value goes up, or how they can refer us to other people.

Even if you’re just viewing your SEO strategy, it’s difficult for a lot of business owners to do it as an acquisition channel because of how long it takes to get there. But if you do it more as a customer retention or upsell or referral program education, and start looking at your business as a long-term play versus today, we addicted to the

[inaudible 27:44]

of Facebook. “I put in a dollar, I got $2.” It’s great, it’s powerful and it’s the lifeblood of a business cash flow.

But if you’re not making the long-term investments in SEO or even long-term investments in your business, again, you’re gonna die. The business is gonna fail, in my opinion, or somebody is gonna surpass you rather quickly that isn’t afraid to take those big bets or make those long-term investments and doesn’t get complacent with what the business looks like today.

Quin: So glad you said that ’cause, still, it makes a ton of sense if you’re doing it for the long run because we see a lot of new startups and new businesses, all you have to do is get a kid that knows about Facebook ads and you can start, like you said, throw in a dollar, you get two, so throw in two, three, four, and forget about the long-term, which is still not dead.

A lot of people say SEO is dead and email marketing is dead. Everything ends up being dead but the reality is that the less people are doing it, the more effective it becomes for the ones that are doing it.

Anthony: I love it. I might even be guilty of putting out props that SEO’s dead because I want everybody to ignore it. Not true, I’m joking. But if everybody’s running in one direction, I wanna go on the other direction because if it’s harder, it builds a moat around my business.

If everybody’s ignoring it, there’s likely something to be found there, always. Always, always, always. Again, back to direct mail, we do SEO, we focus on those things that everybody else ignores and we see our best and sown our best successes there versus the hot topic of what today is.

Quin: I often find that, too, when it comes to products that a lot of the gurus out there to don’t touch this, don’t do that, don’t do that, and everybody’s teaching that in the same courses and they’re learning from the same courses. Then, when I go and launch one of those products and there’s a very minimal new competition coming in ’cause they’re already the existing ones, so I find that often.

Anthony: Yeah.

Quin: Anthony, we all know you’re successful in several businesses. Could you let us know, basically, some of your tricks to scale businesses?

Anthony: Yeah, for sure. There’s a few principles overall, and there’s not a perfect science. It’s not, “Go raise funding here and you’ll get here.” I like to focus on, what is the term, “Tactics make you rich, strategy makes you wealthy,” is the terminology. Focusing on the overall mindset and strategies is what creates long-term wealth versus, “Try leaving ads on Facebook.” That might make you some money or rich but it’s not gonna make you wealthy and be able to sell a company or exit.

Some things that I focused on heavily would suggest on scaling a business is, one, the brand. If there’s dropshippers listening or if there’s people that run a little store, thinking of your company, your product or your service as a brand really make different investments in what you’re doing, you invest more in customer service, just a simple example, because you’re worried about your brand equity.

A minimum, if you wanna justify it by your evaluation, your company evaluation, massively increases when you got a brand. There’s companies that don’t make a dollar profit that we see selling for nine figures because of the brand that they have and, of course, the data, too. But it’s the brand and the mindshare that they’re capturing.

I’d say number one is really looking at your business as a brand and how can you grow the brand equity or the mindshare of individuals. It’s tough for us to invest in television ads ’cause we don’t see a direct return. It’s tough for us to invest in an influencer where, all of a sudden, Floyd Mayweather is repping our brand.

We’ll never see a dollar for dollar return of it. But a brand is a lift over all and maybe our CPAs drop on Facebook or everything, or other platforms because the brand, “Floyd Mayweather uses that. Wow. Okay, great.” It creates different thought process or mindset. When you start viewing yourself as, “How can I increase the brand equity?” That’s number one, I’d say, overall as far as scaling your business.

Number two is really investing in your people. It’s hiring A players and that’s really tough for a lot of people, especially early stages of their business. It’s to really seek out

[inaudible 32:45]

and hire A players then it’s like, “Okay, I can get this guy for $50,000.” I call it picking up pennies while leaving dollars. Making that investment in A players, and I don’t just mean a financial investment.

I order to attract an A player, they can go anywhere. They’re the hot girl in campus, so you need to consistently be looking at us as a sales cycle for the A player. We have A players that I’ve been talking to for the last two years that I’ve been trying to join the team. They may or may not, eventually, but I’ve invested dinners with them. I’ve invested time. I’m sending them articles on us. I’m talking them on the phone. I’m giving them advice on how they can help their career non-biasly.

It’s just this idea of attracting and working to get A players. Its a very hard justification, especially if you’re under $1 million business to hire someone at a price point. I remember I hired someone who was making more money than I was, and I owned the business. That’s a tough ego check and a tough realization to make but now, you zoom out years later and I look at what that investment really did for me in our business, it had exponential returns on it. It’s that ability to attract A players, those are two.

Then, the last I’ll give is overall the mindset of long term thinking. It’s really just looking at things over. The next 20 years, 30 years, I think you make different investments than if you look at your business in the day-to-day.

Quin: Very good. What’s one of the mantras that you live by?

Anthony: Mantras that I live by. Oh, man. That’s a great question. Honestly, funny enough, and I’m not saying this ’cause of your podcast name, Fail Fast, I fucking love that sentence. Fail Fast. I live by that. I live by how quickly can I get something running and not married to perfection or ego.

I paint a Spiderman picture in the back, I’d paint that and everybody says it sucks. I’m okay painting white all over it and then painting Batman, and they say, “That sucks.” I’m okay with that over and over and over and over again until it finally clicks. I like data or the market to really define something successful, not my ego, or not my positive feedback. I love just those words, fail fast. I love them.

Quin: Perfect. Yeah, perfectionism could be the killer of certain businesses and actually would be probably something that is stopping a lot of people from starting a business because they don’t wanna start something until it’s perfect with fear with failing. When the reality, you should have those small fails, the ones that come fast, and don’t hit your very hard so you can change and do it over and over again. Nothing is perfect. Even Zuckerberg said ideas never come fully formulated. Start something and keep fixing it, keep upgrading it. I believe in that as well.

Anthony: Funny. Just to piggyback off that, you said little fails, I’d actually challenge that. I’d rather get knocked on my ass everyday. You could put me out of business today, I don’t care. Maybe it’s just that I’m crazy. I’d rather take big enough gambles that I could go out of business today, and I know what you can’t take from me is my tenacity, my mindset at looking at things, my viewpoint, my work ethic, those can never be shut down or robbed from me.

But you could shut down my business today and I know I would have something successful in a very, very near future. Honestly, probably it’d be tough to do, but if you robbed every penny of me, took everything from me on the street, I would probably learn more over the next few months or the next year than I would today, sitting in a good position.

I probably would be better for my long-term growth to be absolutely knocked on my ass and just out of business, literally with [inaudible 37:03] work. I’d probably become a stronger person at long-term and grow much bigger business than I would if I just could creep along with good success. I’d challenge that a little bit, too. Maybe it’s just that I’m crazy, I don’t know.

Quin: Let’s run with that for a little bit as a roleplay here. Let’s say that your business was taken away from you, everything you had. Internet connection, maybe your cellphone, laptop, and everything else was taken from you. What would you do tomorrow?

Anthony: Great question. A couple things. First question is if I were looking at different markets. Let’s say, if my market shut down, I would look at a market that has been around for a year. I love being in ugly spaces that people hate. Gets back to where everybody else goes away. I love tabooed things like debt. Debt’s just a disgusting topic to talk about, and I love making that sexy.

It will be my dream when people are openly talking about how much credit card debt they’re in, and it’s totally okay. It’s this idea, it’s funny, our teeth whitening brand. When one of the greatest accomplishments, my business partner talks about that has, and runs that business, he’s transformed this idea. Gifting teeth whitening, if you gave your wife or your husband, or your significant other teeth whitening kit, for Crest teeth whitening kit, you’d probably slapped.

They’d be like, “What?” Like, “F.U. You don’t think that [inaudible 38:36]?” Now, [inaudible 38:37] is done. He’s been able to gift teeth whitening and it’s welcomed with open arms, so it’s changed this relatively uglier taboo. People [inaudible 38:48] whitening their teeth in their bathroom to now people posting selfies of the teeth whitening kit in their mouth. On surface, they’re admitting your teeth are white, but it’s now become a fun, sexy thing to to.

Anyways, to answer your question as far as from a whole list like market, I continuously seek out taboo markets to be in that have growing trends. Credit card debts since credit card was introduced that’s never had a downtrend since it’s been introduced. It’s a trillion dollar market massive space, old school, super outdated.

The first conference I ever went to, the image was blurry on the pit flyer and I’m like, “What? That’s good from a marketer. That’s crazy. You’re whole logo is blurry?” That’s obviously super silly but they have Fiverr logos everywhere. That’s overall in a market. What I would do as far as my steps is I would seek out like how I started early.

I’d seek out people that are, you call them a mentor, but people that are having success by my definition of it. If it’s impact, if it’s money, if it’s business size, and I would do everything I can to get around those people and spend time with them. I even, now, admittedly once every other week, but I used to, once a week, find someone who I thought was better than me on a certain topic. Whether it was philanthropically, fitness-wise, whatever it was, and I would go seek them out.

Clarity.fm is a great site. It started .co or .com. [inaudible 40:28] that. You can go find really smart, powerful people and have access to their brain and time. Your podcast is great as well, too, but I even take it a step further. I would message people on LinkedIn and I’d do anything to get a meeting with them, even if I had to pay for it just to spend time with them to go to coffee.

The one trend I always gave, just going back early on, is I’d say I’d pry myself in really applying what I learn. Really, if you teach me something, it’s not gonna fall in that fear. I found even now when I’m in a mentor role, I get more out of mentees than they do value out of me. I get more value being on your podcast if somebody actually makes a difference in their business than the inverse.

They’re sitting there, might be thinking, “I learned a new strategy or a though process or something.” Like, “Wow, I gained so much.” I gain more out of giving back than someone on the other end does. Short answer is I go seek out someone who’s doing great things in whatever market I wanna be in, or whatever I wanna do, and I would do everything to get around that person or that individual to learn from them.

Quin: Great. I really like that answer. First one that you said about finding the ones that the non-sexy markets, those are even the ones that are, because they’re not so sexy, they’re easier to rank for when it comes to your keywords, your SEO, and all that. That’s a really, really good idea. My brain’s got working on that.

Anthony: Great.

Quin: Before I let you go, why did you use David?

Anthony: The industry or the name?

Quin: The name.

Anthony: It gets back to, again, the brandy element. For us, it’s the David versus Goliath play. We learn very early on that our market is heavily religious. Anyone who’s Christian or Catholic, in the bible, it’s against your religion, our religion to be a slave to creditors, so it’s literally printed in the bible. It creates action and sells them, so it came back to this idea of understanding your target demographic.

Then, the branding around the David versus Goliath play that I think a lot of people understand with just some cool branding stuff, whatever, but in our help center, answering the phone is David. Did you use the image? Have you used David? That’s the overall. We’re working on the acquisition of just David.com as well, too. Again, making investments in the brand or looking as a brand versus we could’ve been Anthonydebtrelief.com or Joshdebtrelief.com, and it’s looking into this more as a branding element.

Quin: Very good. Besides that, is there a place where people should look to find you?

Anthony: If anyone has any questions, it’s just my first.lastname@gmail.com. It’s my personal email, happy to give that here if anybody wants to reach out with any thoughts or questions. Same thing, I’m on Instagram if you wanna follow me there. Then, even just Google search my name finds a way you should get back to me in some way or another, website or anything like that if it’s my personal property. Anyway, if anybody has any questions, happy to answer.

Quin: Very good. I’ll put those on the show notes, too. Anthony, before I let you go, how many websites do you have running right now? Do you even know?

Anthony: That’s not fair. I don’t know, dozens. Main websites, though, probably about, I’d say 10-ish. 10 main ones that get significant traffic, I’d call 50,000-100,000 visitors per month plus is considered significant. Then, shoot, I used to be a domain hoarder and just buying shit. [laughs] But

[inaudible 44:32]

time. I have to log in on my freaking account. But I’d say we’re on the dozen main websites that generate substantial business for us today.

Quin: Nice. Hey, I hoard some domains, too. Then, years went by and sometimes, I would go into my domain registrar and just look through them. I’m like, “Hang on, [inaudible 44:57] I have that? Why did I buy that?”

Anthony: [laughs] That’s right.

Quin: [laughs] What was I thinking and I why have I been renewing this for the last seven years?

Anthony: That’s right, dude. That’s easy to do.

Quin: Yes. Very good. Anthony, thank you very much. This was fantastic.

Anthony: Awesome, brother. I enjoyed it as well.

[music]

Playback: Thanks for subscribing to Fail Fast Podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave a review and visit Failfastpodcast.com for show notes, Quin’s social media, or even to tell us your story.

Anthony Sarandrea

Anthony.Sarandrea@gmail.com

Usedavid.com