Listening Louder Than the Market: How Great Founders Actually Pivot with Adam Wexler

0:01John Lee Dumas:Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today we'll be breaking down, listening louder than the market, how great founders actually pivot. And to drive these value bombs, I brought to Adam Wexler and the EO Fire Studios. Adam was the founder of PrizePix, the largest paid fantasy sports platform, a career entrepreneur. He's known for resilience and customer-first innovation. He now focuses on vision, leadership, and new ventures. And today we talk about reading the signals, turning obstacles into leverage, customer obsession in action, and oh, so much more.

0:35John Lee Dumas:And the big thing for sponsoring today's episode goes to Adam and our sponsors. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform, plus award-winning 24-7 support. Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 15-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com, highlevelfire.com. Fire Nation, 50 days will fly right on by. The only question is, will you have something to show for it? I created a free YouTube series called 50 Days to Something, a step-by-step path to build a real product, service, or offer in just 50 focused days.

1:18John Lee Dumas:Start today for free at eofire.com slash YouTube. Adam, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What's up, y 'all? I think the quick and simple answer is that you got to go all in and you really just got to believe in yourself. And even when times are tough, you got to keep at it. But the journey is long, but the journey can be quite rewarding if you're just resilient enough. Fire Nation, listening louder than the market, how great founders actually pivot. And I want to talk about reading the signals, Adam. The market, it's constantly speaking, but founders are often misinterpreting the signals.

2:09John Lee Dumas:So what does it really mean to understand market signals? When the market may be suggesting something, you got to kind of think about swimming in a different direction sometimes. In my In my case, world was talking about, my world was talking about sports betting legalization in 2018. And, you know, as a startup, it was not going to be incredibly friendly to startups. It was a very, you know, it was a very cost intensive pursuit. And there were a lot of kind of barriers to entry. But in our case, you know, there was a big opportunity within daily fantasy sports. You know, daily fantasy sports at the time was synonymous with one particular format being the salary cap format.

2:52But when you actually think about the concept of daily fantasy sports, that can mean a lot of different things. And at the time, I don't think many of those were explored nearly enough. And I think we helped usher in what's now become the biggest category in daily fantasy sports for sure.

3:09John Lee Dumas:So how do you separate noise from opportunity? Because I'm sure when you were diving down this rabbit hole, you were hearing lots of noise. People were in your ear. They were saying this, they were saying that everybody's contradicting each other. How do you separate noise from opportunity? There's definitely a lot of noise out there. And I think, you know, when I, when I get in one, one thing that I'm reminded of is when, when I get into a lot of different calls and meetings you know, you, you might have 30 minutes, 60 minutes talking to someone and, and, you know, you're talking about a lot of stuff that you may have heard before, but all, all you really need out of, out of each of those meetings is that one little nugget that can help carry you and propel you in an entirely new direction.

3:49And so just staying engaged and, you know, just trying to really hone in on, you know, what is that one unique nugget that this one person could offer that nobody else may know about because of their experience and their background, I think is something that I often try to kind of hone in on.

4:08John Lee Dumas:Let's talk about turning obstacles into leverage, because I mean, let's be honest, every single founder hits resistance. I mean, I've interviewed over 5 ,000 entrepreneurs and founders. Every single one of them has hit resistance at some point. So what is your specific framework for turning obstacles into strategic advantages instead of letting them become these roadblocks? Do not view obstacles as dead ends. You know, in my case, probably the most legendary obstacle. And it was a major one that I faced over the last decade was when the pandemic struck and sports around the world turned off. And we're a business that was dependent on sports being played.

4:57And little would you ever believe that sports would go completely awake, would go dark around the world. and um and then so we we had to get very resilient and resourceful and and you know start offering things that we would have never necessarily offered and um you know some of those things included you know a partnership with the american cornhole league and the outlaw golf tour who were still uh you know who got their who got their act together pretty quickly uh and then i we also turned to esports and what became a major part of the prize picks offering. But then I think probably the most, the best answer I can give you is the fact that, you know, sports come roaring back by the summer of 2020.

5:41And we, you know, I basically spotted, I needed to get everybody under one roof. And I spotted a couple locations that had kept the pandemic out. And this is something that would have allowed everybody that I was trying to get under one roof to get comfortable with it in the middle of the pandemic. And that's what led us ultimately to Barbados and some of the core team. We basically moved our office that had previously been in Atlanta, Georgia. We moved it for Q4 of 2020 to Barbados and running it out of a little villa down there that allowed us to, you know, just sink over breakfast, lunch and dinner.

6:21And it definitely set us up for success to step on the pedal in 2021.

6:25John Lee Dumas:Let's talk about customer obsession in action because I mean, customer obsessed, I mean, that's a phrase that gets thrown around a lot, but what does it look like to build products that truly revolve around customer needs instead of internal assumptions, which it seems like a lot of companies do. Yeah. You know, one of the things I love about being an entrepreneur in the B2C space, And I've done B2B before, Enterprise, SaaS, but, you know, I've had two main chapters within B2C. My first one was in the music discovery realm at the beginning of my career. And then this most recent one was in the fantasy sports realm.

7:02And, you know, what's great about B2C is, you know, if you can envision yourself as the initial customer and kind of play both sides of it, that just allows you to really immerse yourself in what should that customer experience look like. and uh and you know going back to what i shared earlier about the fact that daily fantasy sports was this great concept that had kind of come about in the early part of last decade but i just as a consumer really didn't uh like the like like the execution it uh i didn't believe that the salary cap format was something that appealed to uh the mainstream and and i think you needed to really simplify the concept of daily fantasy at the time and uh you know we basically just built we looked at the laws that were getting passed in the middle of the last decade on a state level.

7:48And we just built a game on top of those laws and with those requirements. And we made the easiest to play and easiest to win game that we could think of. And we ended up getting paid for it as well.

8:03John Lee Dumas:Customer obsessed. I mean, Fire Nation, are you customer obsessed in your business? Think about what you're doing that's always putting your customers' needs, wants, desires, benefits first. We're going to be talking about conviction under pressure, adapting across industries, doubling down, or reinventing when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Trying to get a traditional bank loan for your business, it's slow, it's complicated, and it rarely moves at the speed you need. With tighter lending standards and more hoops than ever, you're often left waiting when you need capital now. That's why I want to tell you a about Revenued.

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9:52John Lee Dumas:And their award-winning 24-7 support has your back when you need it most. When you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you also get my exclusive bonus stack, a 30-day free trial, a private 15-minute call with me, JLD, access to my weekly live office hours, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 Days to Something Execution Roadmap, and more. Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. Adam, we're back, and I want to talk about conviction under pressure. Because when investors, competitors, or even your own team start questioning the direction, how do you maintain conviction without becoming stubborn?

10:34You know, as I continue to talk to more and more people about a given topic or a given concept, and until somebody can prove me wrong, and I'm open to being proven wrong, but until somebody can prove me wrong, you know, I'm going to have a growing amount of conviction as somebody, as we're, you know, refining an idea. And, you know, in general, you know, I would have probably been a terrible employee, which is not exactly something that I did as a career-long entrepreneur, you know, because I'm usually going to march to the beat of my own drum and that's proven to be rewarding in my case.

11:17John Lee Dumas:Can you give us an example of one time that you maintained conviction despite other people maybe being in your ear telling you not to, like a real world example? Yeah. In the case of the journey that led to prize picks, back in, let's see, it was at the end of 2015, FanDuel and DraftKings had gone aggressively hard. You know, they were in an arms race. It's a bit reminiscent of what we find going on with Calci and Polymarket in the prediction market space right now. And, you know, by the end of the year, the AGs across all these different states had come in and said what they were doing was illegal gambling.

11:57And basically that meant that the entire fantasy sports ecosystem was on the brink. And, you know, 2016 was incredibly difficult to just kind of hang on for dear life. You know, we we got some, you know, very limited bridge financing through through a handful of investors that bridged us to 2017. And at which point in time, the you know, the middle of 2017, the Supreme Court said they were going to take up this New Jersey sports betting law. And that was that was the development that I needed to say, OK, the dust is about to settle. You've got 20 states that have passed roughly 20 states that have passed fantasy sports legislation.

12:40about another 20 states where you can still operate real money fantasy games off of the skill based gaming laws. And then, you know, the spotlight is going to move more towards the sports betting realm as opposed to the fantasy realm. And the fantasy realm was lightly regulated. And that allowed us to really kind of hop in as a as a startup and with refined concepts, because I had been in the industry for, you know, dating back to spring of 2014. and it was the fall of 2017 where I conceptualized what would become prize picks, surely after iterating on a number of different fantasy sports concepts and games.

13:19And, you know, I think a lot of people in 20, by the end of 2015 and surely in 2016 would have said or did say, you know, what are you doing? Why are you sticking with this industry? And I always thought that there was a light at the end of the tunnel and I'm glad I did.

13:35John Lee Dumas:Let's talk about adapting across industries because you've operated across entirely different industries over your career. So what principles stay constant and what must change when you enter a new market? I was fortunate enough to experience product market fit at a very young age in my career, you know, when I was 22, 23 with my original tech startup, which was in the music discovery realm. It was called Go Rank Them at the time. And we experienced that product market fit, but we just could not really identify a business model, or maybe it just didn't have a business, a good business model for what it's worth.

14:10And we were building that business out of Athens, Georgia, where I went to school. And, you know, I didn't have the financial ability to go move myself to something like the heart of Silicon Valley, where they were willing to bet on concepts that didn't necessarily have business models, but yet, you know, consumers were adopting. And so eventually, you know, I had to part ways or at least, you know, put that concept on ice. And that, you know, ultimately is what led me to the world of B2B and enterprise SaaS. And we basically took the marketing that we were doing for my original startup, and we turned it into a product that big brands could use.

14:54And we productized the process that we were using to basically identify the most relevant influencers and then turn them into our greatest advocates. And so, you know, fortunately, in one case, a failure in the music industry ultimately led to a success in the social media software realm. And that is what kind of gave me the springboard to kind of get back to my roots in B2C and find even greater success in the fantasy sports realm.

15:24John Lee Dumas:Let's talk about doubling down or reinventing because, I mean, one of the hardest leadership decisions is knowing whether to double down, like, let's do this, or we got to pivot, like we got to adjust. So what signals tell you it's time to go all in? And what signals say it's time to reinvent? You know, let's take the pandemic, for example, like we prior to the pandemic, you know, we even at a small scale, having just come out of the B2B realm, I could see that there was significant potential for prize picks, you know, based off of just, you know, our first couple hundred customers. because I was looking at it, I was evaluating it from a B2B lens, and I was looking at these unit economics and saying, man, if you could just add zeros to this, and I know that the TAM, I know that the total addressable market was there for fantasy sports and somebody, and those that would be looking for a simplified version of fantasy sports.

16:21So if you could just add zeros to where we were operating pre-pandemic as we were starting to scale up slowly, but surely, man, this thing could be quite big. But then the pandemic hit and a lot of there, you know, there was a there was a lot of companies that were not prepared for that and were not able to get to the other side. But there was no way when I knew I had product market fit pre-pandemic, all I had to do was make sure that we made it to the other side. And by the end of 2020, we were ready to hit that hit the gas and scale up. And that's exactly what we did. And we never really looked back.

16:55And, you know, we became one of the fastest growing companies in the country. According to Inc., we were the fastest growing sports company in the country. And then, you know, we grew so fast that, you know, undoubtedly it led to some of the competition paying attention and trying to get in our way again. But, you know, we were we were able to push through and and, you know, PrizePix has now become, you know, the third largest sports gaming operator in North America.

17:23John Lee Dumas:Well, first off, congratulations, Adam. I mean, huge, huge wins across the board. And if Fire Nation was to take away one thing from our entire conversation today, what would that one thing be? I've harped on the topic of product market fit a couple of times here. I think when you find product market fit, and I think there's plenty of material online about what exactly that means, but when you find that, I wouldn't give up, especially in this day and age when it's easier to find investors for concepts, maybe than when I was early in my career sitting in Athens, Georgia, and I didn't have access to all the resources or all the ways to get in touch with people.

18:07around the country, around the world, you know, you just got to find the right people that are going to really buy into the concept. And the easiest way to do that, especially when you're operating in B2C, is to find people that would be those customers, those passionate people that would love to use this product. And if they happen to also have the means to help you fuel your endeavor and help you achieve success, you just got to keep uncovering those rocks. and just there's plenty of people out there that you can find if you just look hard enough.

18:39John Lee Dumas:Well, Adam, thank you so much for sharing all these value bombs today. If Fire Nation was to connect with you, wants to learn more about what you have going on or your company, what is your call to action for our listeners today? I'm pretty active across LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. It's pretty easy to find me on the latter two. I'm at the word painter is my handle. But there's a lot cooking on my side these days. I recently left the day-to-day of prize picks. I'm now just on the board, but I have a venture studio cooking and there's a lot more that I'm gonna be sharing publicly in the months to come.

19:18John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with A-Dubs and JLD today. So keep up the heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type Adam in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And Adam, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Adam for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, are you an entrepreneur on fire who's looking to share your amazing message with the world?

19:53John Lee Dumas:If yes, we are now accepting applications for EO Fire. To learn more about becoming a guest, visit eofire.com slash guest and I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform plus award-winning 24-7 support. Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 15-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com. highlevelfire.com. Fire Nation, 50 days will fly right on by.

20:30John Lee Dumas:The only question is, will you have something to show for it? I created a free YouTube series called 50 Days to Something, a step-by-step path to build a real product, service, or offer in just 50 focused days. Start today for free at eofire.com slash YouTube.

20:55Thank you.