“Life is too short not to take risks” – Audio Interview with Grumo

Cesar Romero was in search of new entrepreneurs to interview for his website Moomkin.com when he ran into Grumo through my WordPress course.
Not only he ran into the course, he bought it and watched the whole thing.. including the infamous “WordPress Song“.
Cesar was so flabbergasted after that he knew he had to interview me. And so he did.

Here is the full the audio interview:

[audio:https://grumomedia.com/files/grumomedia-moonkin_interview.mp3]
(You can download the full mp3 file here. Full transcription is after the written interview.)

Here is the written interview:

1. Your Company Profile.

Grumo Media produces fun, concise, and effective explanatory videos for startups and recently some big companies too!
Clients include Walmart, Microsoft, Ashton Kutcher, Hipmunk.com, inDinero.com, Olo.com, Buy4.com, PadMapper.com, and many more.
Grumo’s magic consists on taking any concept, however complex it may be, and make it easy to understand for the masses.
Check Grumo’s videos at https://grumomedia.com
Follow Grumo onTwitter at http://twitter.com/grumomedia

2. Do you think the education you’ve invested in helped you on the road to success?

The best education I have ever got was working as a door to door salesman when I was 20 years old.
I lasted only 4 months but got to talk to about 12 thousand different people, knocked on literally thousands of doors, learned to deal with rejection and the value of persistence.
Being persistent and welcoming rejection are the best two lessons any entrepreneur can learn.
A typical door to door salesman gets 90% rejection. On a typical day 90 people will slam their door on your face but 10 will buy whatever you are selling.
Learning the power of numbers is the key to learning to overcome the fear of rejection.
They way I learned to deal with it was thinking that every rejection was taking me one step closer to the next sale.
When you think that way you learn to embrace rejection because you know you need it in order to succeed.
For more on this approach you can read an article I wrote on the subject of success here -> https://grumomedia.com/two-simple-and-effective-ways-to-accelerate-success/

3. What was the “break point” or an AHA moment in your career that made you decide to start what you’re currently doing & how did you come up with that Idea?

There was no AHA moment. Some people have AHA moments. My AHA moment has been a process that has taken an entire lifetime.
A few lucky ones know what they what to do with their lives from the beginning, an even fewer lucky ones become actually good enough at what they love that they can make a career out of it.
I belong to the 99% of the population sector that never had a clear idea of what to do with their life.

I guess the only thing that separates me from some of my fellow group of clueless people is that I’ve been always determined to do three things; 1. Always do whatever I want. 2. Never stop trying new things 3. Never settle doing something I am not completely happy doing.
Because, like most people, I was never sure what to do so I have ended up doing many things, from door-to-door salesman, to laser cutting machine programmer, to music video director, to mechanical designer, 3D animator to shooting comedy porn in Mallorca (don’t ask about this one), web developer, inventor, and more recently entrepreneur.

I must say the most fun has been the latter one, being an entrepreneur, building a company from zero, with no resources to a profitable business is the most fulfilling of all my attempts at figuring out what to do.
I think I am going to stick with that one for a while 😉

4. As a young professional, what were some of the mistakes that you made and what did you learn?

Luckily I love mistakes because I look at them as learning opportunities and because like anyone that has taken many risks I’ve made many.
The biggest mistake I made for many years was not believing on myself enough to have taken even more risks at a younger age.

Because I was very shy and afraid of trying things I think I missed out on many opportunities to learn and accumulate more experience earlier.
The other big mistake I made was spending 1.5 years building a product I was not passionate about.

It was an online project management service that I programmed from scratch and went nowhere, got zero customers, made me broke.
The lesson learned is never, never choose to do something you are not really passionate about and if you do make sure not to spend 1.5 years doing it.
Because even if it is successful, do you really want to be dedicating your life and soul to something you don’t really believe in?
In a sense I am very happy that first startup was an utter failure because it lead way to me starting Grumo Media.

5. What is one accomplishment that you are extremely proud of?

Definitely building a successful company in less than a year.
After my previous failures seeing money in the bank from real world happy customers was the most amazing thing in the world.

6. What advice can you offer to your readers?

Life is too short not to take risks and follow your passion.
And if you don’t know what your passion is, I’ve been there and wrote an article about how I went about finding my true passion here -> https://grumomedia.com/5-steps-that-will-help-you-discover-your-true-passion/
Find it whatever it is, whatever it takes and hopefully you won’t have any of these 5 regrets -> https://grumomedia.com/the-top-5-regrets-people-make-on-their-deathbed/

7. What do you do for fun & where do you get your Inspiration from?

Fun and work are one thing for me. So for fun I work so when I die I may regret having worked too much but at least I will be able to say I had fun doing it.
My inspiration comes from observing, reading, talking to friends, and thinking. I do a lot of thinking and day dreaming.

I am continuously thinking of new ideas for startups, products, inventions. Unfortunately some much thinking gets me in trouble sometimes, specially with my wife. She will be talking to me and 5 seconds later I get this lost gaze in my eyes.. I am not listening to her anymore, I am back in my own world of thoughts solving the problems of the world. It is hard to unplug from it some times, oops!

8. What is your favorite gadget(s), software(s), website(s) that makes your life easier and more productive?

Favourite Gadgets: iPhone, MacBookPro, iPad (Apple fanboy yes)
Software: Chrome, TextMate (coding), After Effects (animating), Final Cut(Editing), OmniGraffle (diagramming), Audacity (Audio), ScreenFlow (screen recording), Transmit (FTP client)
Web Aps: Gmail, Google Reader, Google Docs, HootSuite (social media dashboard), Summify (daily news summaries)
Websites: Mixergy.com (for great interviews with entrepreneurs), KhanAcademy.org (for online education), Ted.com (for inspirational talks), VideoCopilot.net (for After Effects tutorials)
Shows: MythBusters, Dexter, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfield

9. Who would you like to see featured here and why?

W. Brett Wilson (Dragon’s Den), Andrew Warner (Mixergy), Andrew Kramer (VideoCopilot), Ben Kaufman (Quirky), Richard Branson (Virgin), Dean Kamen (SegWay), My Dad (Miguel co-creator)

10. Ways to Connect with you:

email: miguel@grumomedia.com
twitter: @grumomigs
Website: https://grumomedia.com

Audio Interview transcription

Transcription by SpeechPad:

Cesar: Hello, everyone. This is Cesar Romero with moomkin.com, the Success Incubator where we feature successful entrepreneurs and we try to capitalize on their success and, hopefully, we can spark that passion in our readers. My guest for today is Miguel Hernandez, who’s the founder of Grumo Media and, Miguel, how are you doing today?

Miguel: Very good. It’s an honor to be here, interviewed by you for Moomkin.

Cesar: Awesome. I want to start with just give a little bit of background about your company, Grumo Media, and what exactly does your company do?

Miguel: Well, Grumo Media is a company that specializes in creating demo videos for start-ups. Basically, one minute, one minute and a half videos explaining what your company does in the most concise, fun way. So, basically, when you go to a website and you see one of those videos telling you what the company does, that’s what we do and we basically use just animation, a little bit of voice-over and music and make it very fun for people to learn what you’re company’s doing and, hopefully, after watching the video and being all pumped up, buying or getting whatever service that you’re promoting.

So that’s basically what we do and we’ve been doing that for a year and we’re with a lot of small companies, big companies, big companies like Microsoft, from Wal-Mart, big personalities like Ashton Kutcher, smaller companies that you’ve never heard of, I’m not going to say them. So we work with anybody, not just because they’re big or small, usually because we’re passionate about their product and we want to help them be successful with a nice little video. So that’s what we do.

Cesar: Okay. Now, I’m sure, a lot of people might be asking right now, “How do you get to meet Ashton Kutcher?”.

Miguel: That is a very good question. It’s a combination of luck, pure luck, and effort. So, I started in October 2010. My first video was for a local start-up here in Vancouver and these guys wanted to build a movie. At that time, I was unemployed and I was looking for something to do. I had many years of experience doing animation, not this type of animation, but more like 3-D animations like for industrial machinery and stuff like that, boring animation.

But they went, “Miguel, can you do a video for us?” So I did a video for them. The company is called summify.com. Now they’re quite big and basically, they send you summaries of whatever is on your network via e-mail, but anyways, they liked the video. They paid me peanuts for it. My first video, you know, I didn’t even know if I could do this but it turned out very well. They were very happy with it. Next thing I thought was like . . . you know what?

Before that, just to give you a little more background on the story, I spend a year and a half developing a product that went nowhere, basically, an on-line project management software which was a big failure for many different reasons, so I was broke and I’m like, “If I’m going to do another company, I want to make damn sure that there is a chance for it to succeed.” So before I spent a lot of time on resources, doing videos for companies, I want to know if there’s actually a possibility or a market for me to make a living doing this.

So the second video that I did, and this is a long way to go to Ashton Kutcher, but you’ll find out how it all ties together, the second video I’m like, “You know what? I’m going to do a free video for a company that has a lot of exposure and that I’m passionate about.” Why? Because if it happens that these guys really like my video, well they’re very well-connected, they may do some advertising on my behalf.

That’s why I picked a company called hipmunk.com, which is a flight search engine on-line and it’s really cool and I really liked the founders because the founders were the founders of reddit.com. Anyways, sent the video to their support after spending two weeks development, doing the video for free and it turns out they really liked it. So that strategy worked really well. Suddenly they introduced me to lots of silly [inaudible 04:39] start-ups and suddenly I have more work than I can imagine. So that validated my idea; there was a market for my videos. People like my videos. Let’s create a business.

So then I create another video which was for a company called Anybots and that did very well and the third video was for a company called PadMapper.com, which is an apartment search listing website and it just happened, and this is the luck that I’m talking about, that Ashton Kutcher was already very interested in this company and saw the video and he thought, “Wow, what a cool video!” and he tweeted it to his 6 million+ followers.

Cesar: Wow.

Miguel: Because he genuinely thought that was a cool video. So that was very lucky but I said, “He would not have tweeted that video if it was a piece of shit,” right?

Cesar: Right. Exactly.

Miguel: Because why would he do that? So the hard work and the fact that the video was good helped Ashton Kutcher make that decision, right? And that paid off and then the story goes that I got a lot of exposure, which really helped bring in more customers and then I eventually met him in South by Southwest in Austin, Texas because as soon as he tweeted it, I said, “Wow. I’ve got to meet this guy to say thank you.”

Cesar: Exactly.

Miguel: Eventually through Alexis Ohanian, who was the cofounder of Hipmunk, he got me in touch with him and I sent him a [inaudible 06:16] and I said, “Hey, Ashton, thanks so much. If you ever want a video for you or whatever cause, let me know,” and he replied 10 minutes later, the very Ashton Kutcher said, “You know what? Yes. I’m doing this campaign to stop child sex slavery. It’s called the Real Men campaign and we would like to have an animation component to it.” For whoever is unfamiliar with his campaign, it’s basically Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, they have a foundation and they’re working together to stop child sex slavery across the world.

It’s a big issue and in the campaign they had a lot of famous people like Justin Timberlake and Sean Penn and a bunch of other people but then they wanted an animation component to explain how the campaign worked and Ashton thought, “You know what? It would be a good idea if you help us do a video explaining this.”, and that’s what I did. So I did a video for them and they really liked it and anyways, that’s the whole process for me from getting from zero to, after the third video, getting to meet Ashton Kutcher.

But, obviously, a combination of luck, a combination of strategy, a combination of hard work and that’s how things happen, right? But that’s the formula. Some people say, “Can you tell me how can you do that?” It’s like, there’s no, I mean, really, at the end of the day, while it’s nice that a personality like Ashton Kutcher tweets about you, but first of all, you have to make sure that you’re producing great content and, maybe, if you’re producing great content, people will notice, maybe not Ashton Kutcher, but somebody that has a lot of influence.

Cesar: Would you agree that the most important thing for any product, not only start-ups, would be to engage with their audience via text, images or video in order for the audience to feel like they identify with whatever product they’re trying to sell? Would you say that that would be like the most important thing?

Miguel: Yeah, well, there’s now a trend in doing that and the reason why is because we are drawn to anything that is an experience that, you know, we like stories and there’s this perception of corporations and it’s true of being just boring entities, right? You look outside and everything’s so proper and perfect. You’re missing the emotional connection and that turns off people. It makes your company look very big and important, but you’re not connecting with the people.

So what video allows you to do is it’s a very direct way of being able to connect with people, but not every type of video because there have been corporate videos forever and what’s funny is they’re still boring. After the fifth second you’re like, “Oh my God, this is . . . I don’t want to listen to this because this is a boring person speaking about boring stuff,” and it just defeats the whole purpose of what I’m making too because it’s boring video.

So if you leverage video in the right way and this is what we try to do at Grumo Media, now you’re going to get, you have a chance to connect emotionally with people better than ever before and that’s going to help your business. It’s going to make people love your product. So, yeah, definitely video is the way to go and you’re going to keep seeing that more and more. I always say, “Every website needs a video,” and it’s true. It’s like a no-brainer. Are you going to read stuff or are you going to watch stuff?

Cesar: Right, right. I think there’s more people that watch than read.

Miguel: Yeah, especially today. At the beginning of the Internet, Internet connections were very slow. There was no way you could watch video but now the average Internet connection is fast enough that you can stream video at high quality, even high definition, make it a full screen and be able to watch anything you want. So that’s not an excuse anymore not to use video.

Cesar: Right. Let me ask you this. Do you think that the education that you’ve invested has helped you in the road to success?

Miguel: To a certain degree, yes. The best education that I ever got is not in school and you’ll find that out with many people. The best education is when you go out in the real world and have real world experiences. In terms of education, my education is a little bit all over the place but I went to technical school and I studied mechanical design. It has nothing to do with what I’m doing today but you’ll find that a lot of people, that’s the thing, the process of finding out what you like to do might take you through many interesting paths and every path is an opportunity to have an experience and learn from it.

But from that education, what I learned, mechanical design is a very square-headed type of career and maybe the discipline that I learned from having to study very hard and meeting deadlines and stuff like that, it’s something that transferred to what I’m doing today and it was useful, but the actual theory is not very useful for what I’m doing today.

So to answer that question, not really. My former education was not very useful for what I’m doing today but the real education that really helped me was outside, was trying to different types of jobs. The main job that really helped me was when we came to Canada in 1996, because I’m originally from Spain, I came with my father and my family here and, basically, didn’t have anything. So the first thing I did was door-to-door salesman.

That’s the most horrible job you could ever imagine and I don’t recommend it to anybody, if you want to say it, because it’s just a job where you get rejection. Basically, you walk a lot to get rejected. And why would you do that? Why would you go everyday and spend nine hours getting 90% rejection? Well, because for a salesman, that is learning how to do this, they don’t think about 90% rejection. They think about 10% success.

Now, when you think that way then the lessons that I learned from that, off being able to cope with failure and rejection are probably the most important lesson I could ever learn and anybody could ever learn in order to have a successful business because creating a company is just a lot of failure before you can actually see a dollar in the bank account.

So it’s a hard road of rejection, of failures, but if you’re passionate you know that, statistically, it’s almost the same with everything in life from door-to-door to online dating, everything, because I apply this rule to everything. I call it the one in ten rule. For every ten tries, I can guarantee you, one time you’ll succeed, and if you don’t, then move on. But it’s almost impossible to fail ten times in a row. I mean, you have to be really bad, which means you’re doing the wrong thing.

Cesar: Right, right. You’ve got to try and see if it works, if it doesn’t work then move on to the next thing.

Miguel: Exactly. Learn to love rejection.

Cesar: Right. No, it seems like that’s a pattern in every entrepreneur that we interview. They fail but they don’t give up. They fail and they learn from their failure and they move on to the next thing, but they capitalize on the previous failure. So I think it’s important to fail and to learn at the same time. Don’t give up.

Miguel: It’s just the way that you look at it and that way of looking at it is what makes the biggest difference. If you look at rejections as something personal like, “This is horrible. I lost,” nobody wants to lose, then you’re going to accumulate that negative energy and it’s not going to allow you to move forward because it’s just reinforcing, “Obviously, I’m a piece of crap. Nobody likes what I’m doing, blah, blah, blah,” so it’s not going to go anywhere. That type of thought process doesn’t help.

As opposed to thinking, “Great, I failed. What did I learn? I’m a step closer to succeeding.”, because that is 100% true as well. It’s like the half glass empty, half glass full theory. It’s the same thing. So once you learn to trick your brain, because by nature we tend to be quite negative individuals, so you have to learn the mental tricks to look at things on the positive side, “OK. I failed. Great. I’m a step closer to succeeding.”, guaranteed. Eventually it’s going to work.

Cesar: Right. It should become an everyday practice, you know?

Miguel: Oh yeah.

Cesar: Stay positive.

Miguel: Oh yeah, it is. A lot of these things sound very cheesy and self-help, but it’s true. Think about how you’re thinking right now. Are you thinking about positively or are you thinking negatively? Negatively? Okay. Well you caught yourself doing something that’s not going to take you anywhere, therefore, you have the option to choose to not think that way and that happens every second.

If you look at anybody’s mind, I say 80-90% of the time, they’re not thinking of something negative but they have the opportunity to realize that and change it. Well, forget that. This thought process is not taking me anywhere. I have the option to concentrate on something positive because there’s always something positive around you.

You’re alive. Number one, you’re very lucky to be alive. You have a family. You have to eat. Concentrate on the basic things and just that thinking process is a positive one, it’s going to give you energy to start trying to do whatever you’re trying to do, right? So, there you go. I’m feeling like Tony Robbins here. You know Tony Robbins, right?

Cesar: Yeah.

Miguel: Man, this guy, I tell you, he’s like the ultimate car salesman. “Watch my radio, you’re going to be amazing! In two days, I’ll solve all your problems!” He’s obviously over the top but he knows it. But at the end of the day, yeah, it kind of helps to be able to realize that you are really in control of how you think.

Cesar: You know what? There’s one thing that I’ve realized. Besides staying positive, being positive everyday, there’s another key element and I think you need to surround yourself with positive people too because if you have friends that all they do is drag you down and they’re all negative, I think that also affects the way that you see things too.

Miguel: Yeah. I agree 100%.

Cesar: And I have personally experienced that and I think staying positive and also looking for like-minded people, that’s key.

Miguel: No, I’ve heard that many, many times and it’s true. The way I feel with the . . . if you think in terms of energy, negative people draw energy from you and that energy you need to be able to do whatever you want to succeed, so obviously it’s not helping you. Whereas people who think alike or even have a more positive outlook on things, they give you energy. That’s the energy you’re looking for.

So when you’re surrounded by people that have low energy or they’re negative energy, it’s like dragging a weight and I’ve felt that. I’ve had relationships before where, I used to have an ex-girlfriend. She was very, very depressive and I said, “You know what? Everyday I try to bring you up and make you happy and you just go back to the routine of being unhappy and there’s no way I can move forward with a partner that is drawing so much energy from me.

So, it’s not that I don’t like you. It’s that you’re stealing the energy that I need to do the stuff that I want to.” So it’s so important to surround with people that are at the same level or, obviously, even higher level because that energy is like, “Wow. Yeah. That’s what I need.” So, it makes a lot of sense.

Cesar: Now, let me ask you this. What was like the break point or the “aha” moment that you had, like an “Aha!” moment in your career that made you decide to start Grumo Media? I mean, was there like an “aha” moment?

Miguel: No, there was no “aha” moment. I know you asked me this on the printed interview. Yes, there is no “aha” moment. There’s, I don’t want to define people in just two categories, but some people like, for example, my father, he was born and next day after he was born, he knew he wanted to be an electrical engineer.

Cesar: Oh, wow. He’s a lucky one.

Miguel: Yeah. That is 1% of the population. Or people that they do actually have “aha” moments like maybe they’re 15 or, I don’t know, anytime in their life and they’re like, “Wow! This is what I want to do!”, and a lot of people are waiting for that “aha” moment and most of the time they die without that “aha” moment because the reality is, most of the time, you don’t get “aha” moments. Maybe you can have a “ha” moment but it only lasts two days and that’s not really what I want to do, right?

I think the real “aha” moment, it is a process and it takes many years of trial and error and eventually you will realize that, “You know what? I think I like this more.” Some people don’t like anything but I think everybody likes something. In my case, I like too many things so my problem is deciding which one to follow. So I’ve got to try many things before I find something that I like and that can make me a living because those are two different things.

Cesar: Right. Exactly.

Miguel: So you can like something but you’re really bad at it and never make a living at it, or you can make a living at something you hate and what you like, you never make a living on. So, it’s tricky. In my case, the “aha” moment was try many different things. I knew I liked, mechanical things, I knew I liked film-making. And, eventually, I never thought about starting a company. I thought that was for big people with lots of money. It never entered my thought process that you, as an individual, could start a company.

I’m like, “Why would you do that?”, and then I started, this one, [inaudible 21:26], reading about people my age and even younger starting companies, selling them for millions, or not, or just making a decent living with it and I started reading a lot about that and then I’m like, “Man, this is something I may want to do because I don’t like to work for people. I don’t like the 9 to 5 jobs. I don’t like how corporate culture works. I’m a free spirit. I want to do my own stuff.”

So, and then I was reading that this was possible. So this opened like a whole new world to me. It’s like, “Really? This is possible? If these people have done it and I guess you could say, an “aha” moment, if these people that have done it and I don’t think they’re much smarter than me, then I can do it. So let’s get to work.”

Cesar: That was the “aha” moment.

Miguel: That was one of the “aha” moments. Like, “Okay, yeah. I can do it. I’m going to read what it takes to do it,” and, obviously, I found a lot of these things like it’s very hard. You have to be passionate. You’re going to fail many times. Be ready for, you just have to be a little bit insane to want do it. I’m like, “I’m insane enough to do this.” I don’t care about security. I’ve lived for years eating just cookies and bananas. I don’t want to drive a big car. All I want to do is something that is meaningful for me and hopefully useful for other people and with that mentality, start to work everyday and bing, bang, boom, there you go.

Cesar: There you go.

Miguel: Grumo Media.

Cesar: Grumo Media. Okay. Now, let me ask you, what was the biggest mistake that you’ve made and what did you learn from it, throughout your career?

Miguel: All right. So biggest mistake, I guess it’s hard to say if that was my mistake or it just was the circumstances of how you are, was not believing in myself enough to take enough risks early enough. So what I mean by that, in order to succeed at anything you have to step out of your comfort zone and that takes a lot of confidence and you need that risk-taking mentality. And because my personality has always been very shy, I mean, I was very friendly and outgoing but very afraid of trying things.

But I was very aware of that, at least I was very aware that by not trying things, I was missing out, but I never did it. I never tried things enough. So when I really started trying things, was maybe in my late 20’s, whereas I could have started doing that when I was 16 or 14 and I’m like, “Well, it’s over 10 years that I could have really tried so many other things that I missed out,” and then you realize life is too short and I’m like, “That’s a big mistake.” So whoever listens to this, however old you are, you have to realize that, and it’s hard for people to realize that it’s true, you’re going to die.

Cesar: No, I mean, that’s true. We’re all going. We’re going to die one day.

Miguel: That’s like the number one guarantee. The number one guaranteeing of dying is that you’re alive.

Cesar: Right.

Miguel: The worst disease that you can have is being alive because that’s the one that’s going to kill you for sure. With that in mind, it’s like, my biggest mistake was not having the guts to do that, not having the confidence, and missing out on a lot of opportunities. So that would be like a personal mistake. As a career mistake, you can look at it as a mistake or as a learning opportunity, but now I can look at it as both, was before I started Grumo Media, I spent a year and a half developing this application that went nowhere and made me broke. If knew what I know now, I would never have done that, and most people would have given up.

Because this was the problem: at that time, my thought process was like, “Real entrepreneurs never give up,” and I was like, “Okay. I’m not going to give up. This is not going to go anywhere. I’m now going to spend 10 hours a day for as long as it takes to get this thing going.” And that’s a mistake. It’s a big mistake that nobody should make. The important thing is not giving up, it’s knowing when you have to give up.

Because not giving up working on something that is not going to go anywhere and you’re not really passionate about, is torture. So, and I was torturing myself because I was just thinking, “Real entrepreneurs never give up,” so I was like, “Wow. I’m going to be the toughest of all. I’m just going to plow through this thing. It doesn’t matter.” I used to tell my girlfriend, “I don’t care if I’m on the street. I’m happy doing this with my laptop under a bridge. I’m going to succeed.”

Cesar: You were not passionate about it, right?

Miguel: Well, I was passionate about the concept of being a real entrepreneur but not about the product, so this is another lesson. You have to be just not passionate about doing stuff, you have to be passionate about the actual thing. Who’s passionate about project management? Not many people, including myself. I had a big idea and dreams and this is another lesson, you can dream very big but you have to understand what are your limitations as an individual. You can not take on a huge market individually unless you have a lot of resources and connections and that’s the most important thing. Learn to pick a market where you can make a dent, make a difference, be competitive without having to spend resources that you don’t have.

So, in my case, going after a market that was saturated with just by myself, it was basically suicide and that’s what happened. Now, my lesson is, and that’s why before the second time around I said, “You know what? There’s no way I’m going to spend a year and a half doing videos to figure out if this is what’s going to work.” So what I did is I did a spec video, which took me two weeks, which validated that there was an opportunity. I looked at the market, there was not a lot of competition. Well, let’s give it a try. That is the right approach, not the first thing. So the first try was a big mistake. There you go.

Cesar: So you would say that the right approach to any idea would be personal, of course, having an idea and then second, making sure to validate the idea to make sure that there’s a market.

Miguel: Yeah, a market, make sure you’re passionate. Luckily, now there’s space to figure out there’s a market. I’m not going to go into details but there’s lots of places, basically. You can set up a landing page for whatever you want to sell, drive some traffic, spend just $100 on AdWords, drive some traffic to it. See what the conversion rate is. Do you really even have to have a product? All you really need to do is have a landing page that I’m going to do x and y and have a place where you can collect e-mail addresses from people that are interested in that.

If you convert more than 1% of those people, there maybe a business for it. Not only that, but just, before you do all of this, with Google AdWords you can figure it out if there’s enough traffic of people looking for those key words. So if you’re selling stuff for like, soccer balls, I don’t know, you can go to Google right now, use the key word tool, type “soccer balls” and Google will tell you how many people in the world every month are looking for that. So if there’s millions of people looking for soccer balls right now, you know the market is big.

Now, the next step, how can you get a chunk of those searches? Center your landing page and convert them. So, if there’s enough traffic, if you can validate the market is big enough and then you can convert enough people, they give you their e-mail, without having done anything, building any soccer balls or whatever, and you can see that there’s at least more than 1%, then you know there’s a scalable business. You know there’s an opportunity there and you only spent $100. There you go.

Cesar: Exactly and I think I don’t want to do marketing here but I just have to say this, in your WordPress course, you mention that. You mention that strategy of how to get traffic to the blog or to a website and I highly recommend the WordPress course to anybody that doesn’t have any idea how to use WordPress, doesn’t have an idea how to create a website because nowadays, creating a website is not rocket science. Anybody can create a website. I think that the true science behind it is how to create great content that people feel engaged and how to drive traffic to it.

Miguel: Yeah, and to me, like I said, a lot of people don’t take that step. They have a lot of great content in their mind and their experiences to share with people but they don’t share it because they’re afraid of the technical barriers and the reality is that those technical barriers, if you have a laptop and you know how to type, you can have a website in less than one hour, really. It’s sad that people are like, “Oh, it’s just not for me.” It’s not hard. It was hard when the Internet started. You needed to know how to code and program.

Today, you can have a blog. You don’t even need to use WordPress, you can use any other platform, but if you want to actually have a business website, yeah, learning a little bit about how to install your own installation is helpful. But if you don’t even have the time for that, you can go and make it even simpler for you, just use blogger or Tumblr and you have a blog in two seconds. And then you start posting content and you see that there’s traffic coming in, maybe there’s a business opportunity that you can also go on and create your own site and it’s so easy. So there you go.

Cesar: It’s definitely something to look into. Miguel, what do you do for fun? Where do you get your inspiration from?

Miguel: Well, I read a lot. That’s one of the things that I’m plugged into many different feeds from blogs so I use Google reader. I have, probably over 100 feeds. There are too many, to be honest. There’s no way I can read that.

Cesar: How do you keep up?

Miguel: It’s not fair. You can’t. If you look at, realistically, there’s only so many hours during the day but I use a combination of you just skim through the headlines that I think are interesting and the other one I use a tool called “Summify,” which are the guys I did the video for. It’s so funny that the guys I did the video for, it’s the tool that I use now to be able to, basically, it skims through all my feeds, all my information sources and it sends me an e-mail everyday with the ten top news, so I don’t have to do that work myself.

Now, how does Summify know that those are the top ten news I’m going to know? Well, the guy that did it, they’re [inaudible 33:01] geniuses that I met and they’ve won, like, world-wide math contests. They created this algorithm that analyzes your likes, your behavior. It’s scary what they do. But basically, with that, they can guarantee that those ten headlines they sent you by e-mail most likely, 80% of them, are going to be very interesting and they are and now they’re getting really good at it. So that’s a way of, for me, to get relevant news and also finding inspiration because the people that I am usually connected with are subscribed to people in the animation world or video marketing world or start-up world and that’s where I get a lot of ideas from. So that’s one of my main sources of inspiration.

Cesar: Okay. So you like to read and pretty much always reading blogs and talking to friends and thinking.

Miguel: Oh, yeah, that’s another thing. The people that have an invention or an entrepreneurial bug on their brain, they cannot stop thinking about new ideas. So that’s what I do a lot. Sometimes I think I think too much and it can get you trouble because you’re talking to somebody and next thing you know, they are talking to not you, the shell of you because you are thinking of something.

Cesar: Your eyes are, like, gone.

Miguel: Yeah, you’ve got a weird, what do they call that? You’ve got a 100 mile look or something? So, yeah, I love thinking. This might sound weird but that’s where you can go and just there’s no limits of what you can imagine. Maybe you cannot execute on 90% of the stuff that you wish or you come up with, but it’s a great place in your mind where you can experiment with ideas. And I love to do that and what I do is I keep an Excel sheet with any idea that I come up with. I write it down, then I look at what name would I give it.

I love to pick names. Picking names is hard but it’s also kind of like a beautiful art because it’s so hard to find the right name for your product and then I give it a description. I think about a tagline. I basically think of what kind of Grumo video I would do for this type of company and I just keep a log of these ideas and I keep coming back and adding or seeing which one I could execute.

Most of them are too big of an idea for me and my resources to implement, so I would probably have to raise money to implement them, but the whole thinking process . . . your brain is a muscle, right? You’ve got to keep it active thinking of things all the time but, again, you have to find a balance. For me sometimes, it’s just I spend too much time thinking, not listening to what people are telling me, specifically my wife.

Cesar: I’m sure she gets mad.

Miguel: It’s uncanny. I’d say that 50% of the time that she talks to me, and it’s not because I don’t care, it’s because I’m doing this. She’s telling me about her day, “Oh, I had a horrible day. This coworker’s bothering me a lot,” and I’m like, “Oh, that sounds great.” After that, I just hear, “bwrrr bwrrr,” and it’s like, “Miguel, what are you . . .?” “Oh, sorry.” “Can you repeat what I told you?” “Ah, something about . . . “. She’s like, “You’re never listening to me.”

Cesar: That’s awesome. I have one final question here so we can wrap things up. What’s the most important advice that you can give to our audience, our readers?

Miguel: You’ve got to take risks in life. So if you think of yourself and your comfort zone, a circle around you, like a circle, let’s say, three feet around you, that’s where you’re very happy with, right? Because you know it, you know it, it’s your 9 to 5 job. It’s your friends, it’s your whatever. All of the opportunity that is going to allow you to succeed or be happy, most of the time, is outside that circle, which means that you’re going to have to step out of that comfort zone, which means you’re going to have to take a risk.

So the moment that you see yourself not taking enough risks, you know you’re not moving forward. So learn to take and embrace that feeling. You’ll get that adrenaline rush when you know you’re taking a risk because there’s a possibility of failure and the number one thing that’s going to stop you from taking risks is that fear, any kind of fear, but the fear of failure.

So, take risks. Most of the time you’re not going to die by taking the risk. You’re not like back when we were, like, animals and if you take a risk you get eaten by a dinosaur. Most of the time if you take a risk, it’s going to be a great learning experience and it could be, possibly, the only way that you can step out of that comfort zone and actually end up doing what you really want to do. And remember, life is too short, so you’d better start taking risks yesterday.

Cesar: Well, Miguel, thank you very much for this and I think that’s true. You have to take risks, not being afraid of trying things because that’s how you will find out who you truly are and what your passion is about.

Miguel: Yeah. I just want to make sure, when I say “take risks,” you also have to be smart, you know?

Cesar: Right.

Miguel: Don’t drive at 150 miles per hour because you want to be like Mario Andretti, “Oh maybe this Formula 1 is what’s for me. Aahh,” boom and then you die. That’s not a smart risk. So take risks but in little steps, not huge risks. You’re not going to fly if you jump from a building, right? That’s a big risk, but if you do something very small as, you know, quitting your job is a big risk. Before you quit your job, make sure you do what we’ve spoken about.

So don’t spend a lot of money trying to figure out if there’s an opportunity out there that you can follow and then make sure that you’re making some income on the side and then if you’re making enough income, then you can start thinking about quitting your job, but don’t just make drastic, crazy decisions. Just do it as step by step and then that will allow you to increase that, you know, step out of that comfort zone circle. There you go.

Cesar: That’s awesome. Thank you very much for this interview. Miguel Hernandez from Grumo Media. People can get in contact with you through grumomedia.com.

Miguel: Yes.

Cesar: Or via e-mail at miguel@grumomedia.com.

Miguel: Yes, that’s right.

Cesar: And thank you very much!

Miguel: Thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure. Hopefully people find this interview awesome, and they feel inspired to do cool stuff.

Cesar: They will.