The Future of Passion to Profit with Josh Fabian: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot. podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like This Old Marketing. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives and we'll be breaking down the future of passion to profits. To drop these value bombs, I brought Josh Fabian into EO Fire Studios. Josh went from a high school dropout to CEO and is on a mission to change the structure of the passion economy for gamers with Medify. In today's foundation, we talk about how to loosen up. It's okay to be yourself.

0:33Talk like you talk. Don't try to be too professional. Building in public is being open about what you're doing. Be open with the good things and about the bad things. Be open with money in the bank and how capital is being used. Transparency is key, Fire Nation, and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Josh and our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lance, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented.

1:04The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Are you looking to start or grow a successful business? Attend the world's highest rated business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and featuring Robert Kiyosaki and Eric Trump at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Again, request life-changing tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Josh, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:45What's up, Fire Nation? I'm excited to be here. Something that I believe about success that most don't. I would say for me, the biggest thing I believe is that the success you get is often proportional to the sacrifice you've given. and with startups in particular, a big piece of that is it's really hard to have a great social life and great success. It's really great to, or it's really difficult to spend a ton of time with family and friends and all of that and have this great success or watch TV and play games. So for me, success is a condition of sacrifice. I mean, Fire Nation, people want it all.

2:30You just can't have it all. You can't have it all. You really have to sit down at one point in your life and decide what is it you really want. What are the one, two, maybe three things that you really want and go get those things and stop trying to get it all because that's just a house of cards. And today we're going to be talking about the future of passion to profits. That's why I brought Josh here because he's a great person to talk to about this conversation. You heard about him in the introduction. We'll be talking about the gaming world and about his company, Medify, because I want you, Fire Nation, to really be able to understand what it takes to build a company that disrupts the space.

3:12So when you're building your company, you're also a disruptor, not just a copier, not just fitting in with the crowd, but disrupting. So what exactly is the gaming world, first and foremost, Josh, for people that may not be that familiar with it? And how is your company, Medify, disrupting the space? Yeah. So when we're talking about the world of gaming, there's a ton of expert performers that are streaming on Twitch. and people are watching them play and learning from them and engaging with them as fans. But they're also on YouTube. They're also on Patreon. And that's primarily how they're making money today.

3:52The problem, however, is that those in the middle, right, the middle class of these platforms tend to drown. I know because I was a member of that middle class for quite a while. I was top 20 in the world in a game called Clash Royale. I was streaming on Twitch every day and I badly, badly wanted to make a living doing this. But I failed. And I failed not because of my ability in the game or my talent. I failed because despite my audience, despite all of that, despite having 400 to 500, sometimes 1 to 2 ,000 people watching me any time I streamed, I wasn't making money. Because the number of people you need engaging with you on platforms like YouTube and Twitch which is so, so high that everyone's struggling.

4:40And with Medify, we're helping give an additional option. That option is enabling them to do what they love by teaching, by working one-on-one with their audience instead of trying to stream and become a celebrity. And so far, it's working. You know, so far we've enabled more than 600 coaches to make money engaging with their audience. Well, let's get specific about that. How exactly is Medify helping gamers make a living doing what they're best at? Like, let's get real specific with some examples. Yeah. So today it's one-on-one coaching and asynchronous coaching. Asynchronous in the sense that a student will upload recorded footage of their gameplay.

5:26and then the coach can leave feedback in the timestamp level saying, at this exact second, you should have done this or you should have thought about this. So for us, it is through education where a student will pay a coach to teach them how to play a video game or a skill-based game, like poker even, at an hourly or game level. See, Fire Nation, this is something that I really think is fascinating because Josh knew the gaming world inside out. He was a huge success. He was one of the top people in his game and he still couldn't find a way to make money. So he said, there's a problem here. If one of the top people in this game with hundreds, if not thousands of people watching him every single time he plays, if I can't make enough money, something's wrong with this.

6:12How can I fix this? How can I disrupt this space? And I kind of want to dive deeper into this last thing you were talking about because gamers, they can make money gaming. But what kind of living can a gamer make being a coach? I mean, it makes so much sense to me with like the timestamps. They can go back, they can study. I mean, there's actually a few things right now. Maybe we can go down this road later because I'm pretty interested about it. You know, in the NFT world where they're coming up with all these games and, you know, you can make money by staking and by earning and by playing and by winning.

6:42And I'm just like, I don't want to sit down and try to figure this game out just like from scratch. But I can literally see myself hiring a coach for sure to get pretty good pretty fast. In fact, I did this a little while ago, maybe a year ago when I got into Settlers of Catan, which is just a board game, but it's an app as well on the phone. And I just want to watch a bunch of YouTube video tutorials. They weren't personally coaching me, but it helps so much. And I can just see how a coach would take that to the next level. So what kind of skill set do you need to be able to add a revenue when it comes to coaching in the gamer space and kind of talk us through this?

7:18Yeah, for us, we look for coaches that are among the best in the world at what they do. And a natural question that comes from that is, well, Josh, being the best player doesn't necessarily make you the best teacher. But that's where our platform comes in, because we're helping to lower the barrier to entry and really bridge the chasm that is the gap between great player, great teacher. And we're doing that with the research around how people learn. You know, we know that mastery is central to the human condition. You know, these are these are things that are going to endure for as long as people exist.

7:54as long as you believe that there's an opportunity for us to come in and help these expert performers understand how to operate more like a teacher and we're doing that through things like post-session summaries where after a session happens we ask questions to kind of bridge that gap those three questions are you know the first question is what did the student do well in this session because we know that expert performance starts from a place of passion and we want to encourage that by reading with a positive the second question that the coach answers is what should the student work on on their own time where we encourage deliberate practice the bedrock of progression and then the third question is what do you want to work on in the next session with a student where we encourage retention but we also reduce anxiety because we know that increased anxiety leads to decreased comprehensive learning environments and all of that to say we look for expert performers because they have one an audience that supports them and cares about them and follows them, but also they know the game better than the creator, but the game knows the game.

8:52And those are the prerequisites that we have today. And we're very dedicated to keeping that curation on a platform right now. In the future, we may open it up to more people, but we're starting upstream. So I think this is fascinating, Fire Nation. Again, it's going back to identifying what you know is wrong with an industry, with a vertical with a niche and saying, how can I come in and make this better, make this more sticky, make evangelists out of what I'm creating, have people actually talk and share and spread the word about what it is that I'm doing, have people have success and be vested and invested in their success.

9:31Like there's so many products and services that are out there that are looking for that one time sale. Like if I can just get this person to buy one time, like that I can just go find someone else to buy and they don't have this buy-in to their customers, their clients, their consumers of their content, whoever that individual is to their success. And you can see how Josh is making that such a priority. So we're going to be talking about some interesting things on this topic when we get back Fire Nation from thanking our sponsors. Picture this, you're at a party and someone asks you what you do as a marketer.

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12:05One of the most impactful things I've done on my entrepreneurial journey is publish a book. It's a way to package up my knowledge and experience and share it with a worldwide audience in a meaningful way. It also serves as an evergreen marketing tool to help grow my business for years to come. I believe that everyone has a book inside of them. So if you're ready to publish a book with maximum impact, then I've got exciting news. I'm launching a brand new mentorship program called Author 100, where you have the opportunity to work with me one-on-one for 100 days. Author 100 will include weekly one-on-one calls and daily guidance from me to help you every step of the way from drafting to writing to publishing and even marketing your book.

12:48Over the past 12 years, I've self-published five books, including one of the top five publishing campaigns of all time on Kickstarter, the Freedom Journal. I've also traditionally published with HarperCollins, so I know a lot about the book publishing world and where most authors go wrong. I created Author 100 to share my experience and the lessons I've learned along the way, and I can't wait to share it with you. If you're interested in learning more, head over to author100.com and sign up for a free call with me. That's author100.com. So Josh, one thing that I do find fascinating is that you are openly dedicated to a philosophy that's known as building in public.

13:30What does this mean? And how have you incorporated this philosophy into Medify? Yeah, building in public is something that we were doing before it became this this little clever title you know and sometimes I feel bad using this term building in public and the only reason is because the open source community has been building in public for decades and you know today we have the crypto community they're building in public but there's now the sector of private companies private startups that are building in public and what that really means is we're pretty open about what we're doing. We're open about the good things, but also the bad things.

14:14And we're open about how much money we have in the bank and how we're using it, how we're deploying that capital. And the biggest reason that it's important to me is because the reality is regular people don't trust businesses anymore. They don't trust the people in the ivory towers because they've been not treating them well for a long time. And with what we're doing at Medify, we're asking regular people to trust us to power their business, to be the backbone of their business. In order to get them to trust us, I think we need to be incredibly transparent. And that's what building in public is to me, is that transparency where I'm saying, hey, if you're going to take this ride with us, then I want you to see how the message is made, if you care.

15:00So you did mention what's happening in cryptocurrency and the NFT world, as I mentioned earlier on in the interview as well. what are you seeing in that space? Are you looking to incorporate anything in that space? Again, like it's just seeming like every day there's, you know, five, 10, 20 NFT projects coming out. They're all promising to quote unquote, build a game on their roadmap and that this game is going to help them earn tokens or the user, the player to earn tokens that at some point could technically be worth money or whatever it might be like. What are you seeing in that universe right now?

15:34I'm seeing a lot of innovation and of course there's hype right there's a lot of a lot of things happening in that community that are predicated on hype and hype alone that I don't think will last long term but I think there's a lot of things that are happening where they're bringing a new age of weird and original to the internet that I think we've lost you know the internet I grew up on has kind of died the internet the internet of new grounds of MySpace profiles where the music would play and we all learned CSS because of it. That was the internet I grew up with and the internet I fell in love with.

16:13And then it became very corporate and it became very sterile. And now with crypto, we're seeing this resurgence of the weird. We're seeing novel solutions to common struggles that people haven't thought about. I think Axie Infinity is a fantastic example where it's enabling people to make money in the third world in a meaningful way. So I'm really proud of what's happening in that community. Before you go on, Josh, a little bit, because I'm curious about what you're about to say, but can you just for the audience take like a minute and describe what exactly Axie Infinity is and the ways that people are literally, especially in third world countries, making life-changing money?

16:56Yeah, I think the best way that I would describe Axie Infinity is it's Pokemon. where you can make money simply playing it. Because every Pokemon, every Axie really, has an intrinsic value that goes up as the engagement and adoption of Axie Infinity goes on. And as a result, we have people who, in the third world in particular, are playing Axie Infinity because it's making them money, because it actually is more profitable for them to play that than to work in a call center. And that is something that's really special because it's a game that people can engage with and they can play, but it's, in my opinion, becoming a very novel equalizer in this new age of web.

17:49And I think that right now it's one of the most expensive collectible NFTs in the market. So I think it's very interesting because they're bringing video game mechanics and they're combining them with this play to earn economy. So I think it's very, very interesting, especially with the pandemic happening, which has decimated the third world where many of them have to work, especially in the Philippines. They have to go into Manila. They've got to work in these stores and they can't do that when there's a lockdown happening. So you dropped out of high school at the age of 16 years old. When you did that, What were your plans at that time?

18:29And then let's talk about the evolvements to what you're doing now. Tell us the journey. Yeah, I wish I could say I had a plan. I did not have even a little bit of a plan. I was young, a little dumb, with a big chip on my shoulder. And truth be told, I was just a little angry at the world at the time. I was adopted into an all-white family. I was the only person of color in my school district. It wasn't the easiest time. And a lot of people don't talk about the trauma of adoption, of how that affects an individual mentally and how it affects the relationships that they then are able to have with others with that fear of being given up again.

19:18So I made a lot of decisions then that were rooted in a lot of anger. So I didn't have plans so much as I wanted independence. I wanted to be away from a scenario where somebody could hurt me again. But it was a mess. I didn't know where my life was going. And I certainly never thought that I would be here as a CEO of a high-growth startup with employees that are so, so much smarter than I am, believing and sharing my vision. So speaking of that vision, what is your vision for the future of Medify? Yeah, one million jobs in gaming. That's our vision. Enabling a new class of employment. The future of work, in my opinion, is digital first.

20:08And I think that when we look at the next generation, when I look at my kids and their friends, I mean, they're truly digital native. the what work looks like when they're adults is going to be so fundamentally different than what it looks like for us today and when i think about that i i think and i hope that companies like medify companies like um you know uh sky navis uh who makes x infinity um companies like cameo all of us are pushing this change where people are enabled to work on the things they care about the things that make them feel alive, and not working with things that they have to work on because it keeps them alive.

20:47I think that level of just passion and how we spend our life is where I hope the future of work is going. And that's my vision of what we're building, is really enabling the old guard to pass on the knowledge to the next generation with dignity. So Josh, you talked about a lot of really interesting topics about the future, about honestly areas that I'm really excited about right now. give us one takeaway that you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from the entire conversation that we had here today. Give us a call to action about how we connect with you, your company, anything you want Fire Nation to know about, and then we'll say goodbye.

21:27I'll give a couple bullets if I can do that. The first bullet is a stay weird and original. It's so important. It's such a breath of fresh air, and it's what people want. and I think to resist being comfortable so often innovation happens because the last generation got very comfortable and then the next generation came along and they decided maybe we won't be so comfortable and we'll change things up so I think that those would be my bullets and then I think the last piece that I would say is loosen up, it's okay to be yourself talk like you talk Don't try to be too professional. And I think that when you look at our investor updates in public, when you look at my Twitter, I talk to my audience like I talk to my friends.

22:16And that resonates in a way that it would not have 10 years ago. And that's just a shift that we're having culturally. People are tired of the corporate speak. So I think that advice will take you far when you're building your own brands. I love that advice because I get the question a lot. Like, John, if you could talk to your 20-year-old self or your 15-year-old self, what would you say? and I always say the same thing which is chill out I would tell myself to chill out to just relax we always think that we need to be on the precipice of something so serious and so grown up and so real and sometimes you just get too old and you're like what was I dealing with all that time I could have just been chilling out and man come on now how do you want Fire Nation Josh to connect with you anything else you want to say and then we'll say goodbye I'm on Twitter at Josh Fabian and of course, please check out Medify.

23:08We have coaches for everything from Super Smash Brothers to League of Legends to poker to daily fantasy sports. So give us a look. What about Splinterlands? Do you have a coach for that? I think we do actually. We just onboarded one yesterday. I actually just invested in that project and again, I downloaded their app now and I'm just like, I have no idea because I've never played those card games in my life. So I'm just like, so if you think about it, shoot me the info about how I can connect with that person. I will literally pay him on your platform to coach me because I'm literally serious about it.

23:47So you'll get a client right there for Splinterlands because it's something that I'm really interested in right now. And Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with JF and JLD today. So please keep up the heat and head over to eofire.com. type Josh in the search bar and his show notes page will pop right up. Josh, thank you for sharing your truth, knowledge, value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks for having me, John. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lance, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

24:25AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Are you looking to start or grow a successful business? Attend the world's highest rated business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and featuring Robert Kiyosaki and Eric Trump at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Again, request life-changing tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire.

25:02Thank you.