Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 24 – David Mammano

Peter Winick

Peter Winick and David Mammano

If you put product development first and market research second, you may wind up with a great product that no one wants to buy. That’s no way to succeed!

Content expert David Mammano, host of Avanti Entrepreneur Show and CEO of Avanti Entrepreneur Network, joins Peter for a conversation about the journey of an entrepreneur in the content space. David talks about his experiences letting the market determine which ideas are worth investment, and how it’s important to license content if you want to drive business growth.

If you’ve ever tried to do product development first and market research second, you may wind up with a great product that no one wants to buy. Content expert, David Mammano, joins Peter for a conversation about the journey of an entrepreneur in the content space. David talks about letting the market determine which ideas are worth investing in and licensing content to drive business growth.

If you need a strategy to bring your thought leadership to market, Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you! Contact us for more information. In addition, we can help you implement marketing, research, and sales. Let us help you so you can devote yourself to what you do best.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And thank you for joining us today on the podcast, Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is David Molano. David is a serial entrepreneur. He is a tech speaker. He’s an adjunct professor. He’s a graduate of M.I.T. entrepreneurial master’s program and author a speaker and obviously deeply involved in the content and thought leadership world. So welcome aboard. David, thank you for joining us today.

David Mammano Thank you. Early. Appreciate it.

Peter Winick Great. So as you know, our focus here is really on the business side of thought leadership. And you’ve done many different things in terms of the monetization and the attempt to monetization content in different ways. Can you give me just sort of an overview on what you’re seeing now and some maybe some new and interesting things that you’re doing today?

David Mammano Sure. Well, I’ve been a couch guy since I started my company. You know, I’ve my company has been through many iterations since nineteen ninety five when I first launched. But I’m proud to say I of the same employee identification number. So but a lot of bumps and bruises along the way and continue to get them that that’s part of the journey. So you know, my first venture was a printed magazine called Next Step magazine. It was for high school students and we helped them with college career and life planning. And I always hung my hat on striving to have the best content in the business. There was, you know, four other magazines in the space at the time. I personally thought they were rags, a lot of a lot of ads, a lot of fluffy editorial. And I thought, you know, here is my chance to, you know, have a unique advantage and just really produce award winning content. And sure enough, we did. We went we went a lot of awards. We were in D.C. beating The Wall Street Journal, you know, high school edition and Scholastic that I was it was great. I’ve always been a contact guy before. You know, we had like thousands of articles on our Web site. So we were coming up pretty high and Google without even spending any money. And I was back in the early to mid 2000. So I’d like to say we were ahead of the curve, but it just kind of happened, you know?

Peter Winick But it sounds like the key differentiator. There wasn’t your technology, wasn’t your budget, wasn’t the snappy, you know, Web site domain, but quality content.

David Mammano Exactly. Was that it was the compound effect of quality content just building and building and building on top of each other. And it was a great business up until about 2014 when I finally retired, the printed digital revolution finally kick my button said teens in print are no longer cutting edge technology. And as many newspapers and magazines have shown that that model, is it just never the same when you transfer it online? So we really transformed the business into more of a online college planning curriculum. We’ve been changing the name of the company to next step college prep dot com and we license that. We license the curriculum to a lot of underserved organizations. So charter schools, boys and Girls Clubs, YMCA is independent counselors.

Peter Winick So let me let me pleasure. There’s a business model. Evolution is print, which is advertising supported as well as potentially subscription based. Right. Correct. And that moves digital money in digital is not goods. So you start to move to a licensing model. So I’m just. Because you’re going pretty quickly because you’re an entrepreneur. But OK, so we’ve got subscription based advertising supported, no licensing. Tell me about what it takes to be successful in the licensing business.

David Mammano So what you have to do is really, you know, produce content and that and not just articles, obviously videos, resources. In my case, it was a workbook. Worksheets know handouts because it was a curriculum. So just kind of a I’ll say a multimedia onslaught of great content resources that it would be crazy for an organization or a person to do on their own if it already existed. So. So what we do is we just say, hey, we want to make your life easy. We have something that you can hit the ground running with. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. And we make it really affordable so that you can do your job quickly and really well.

Peter Winick Got it. Specialized and niche. Right. So tell me about the more so it’s cheaper. So just from an economic perspective, cheaper to lease it from you, licensed it from you and to build it on my own. But tell me about the level of specificity of the market you’re serving. This isn’t some generic content that’s going to knock People magazine off the off the shelf or something.

David Mammano Yeah. It’s actually superintend. I mean, it’s not only college planning, but it’s college planning for underserved students. So like I said, boys and girls clubs, charter schools, YMCA. And the reason that model happened was we were trying to go to all high schools, but a lot of will say the suburban schools that have a lot more resources and kids going to college, naturally, they would they would give us the Heisman. We’re like, not our asset. We got it got our own program. We’re good. But meanwhile, I’d call a charter school and they’d be like, oh, my God, this is perfect. We need this. And like open arms hugging us. I’m like, all right, let me just go with this path.

Peter Winick OK. So another thing I heard is I’m sort of putting on my decoder ring here is listen to the market. So you tried two markets. One gave you the highest one. I’m assuming you meant the arm block, not the trophy.

David Mammano They are black. I’m sorry.

Peter Winick So you got either arm blocked or welcomed with open arms and it went a part of the market welcomes you with open arms. That’s where you need to go, assuming that the money makes sense. OK. So that’s the licensing side. That’s awesome. Keep going.

David Mammano Yeah. And you know, I want it for your listeners. I want to kind of expand on something you just said. Just it just, you know, just go with where the market is telling you to go. And so a friend of mine, Dr. Anita Kwabena, is the president of High Point University Government. He took over when it was like going out of business. They call it the sheep college. I mean, it was like deserted. And you took it over and he literally raised like seven million dollars, bought all this land, quadrupled the size of the campus. Right. And so the maintenance people came home, construction people kind of I said, you know, hey, where we can put the walkways, the paths, you know, and he goes for the first year, nowhere. That’s a sea, naturally, where the students walk because we can see their path. And after a while. And that’s where we’ll put the walkways. I think it’s a very good business lesson, too. You can try, try, try to tell people what they want. But when you just kind of like listen to them and see where it goes, that’s your business model.

Peter Winick So I want to confirm what you said. A thousand percent oftentimes, particularly in the content space. Right. So we are not in a business that forces you to do a lot of product development prior to shipment. And I think the mistake that I’ve seen a lot of authors and thought leaders and speakers make and when I say mistake, meaning wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars is coming up with the, quote, brilliant idea in isolation in the laboratory or surrounded by their, you know, peers and friends and whatnot, and then go immediately into development mode in a very linear. Then go into marketing and sales mode and then you find out the depressing reality when you’re in marketing and sales mode after something is built that, oh, if it came in pink. Oh, if you know, you get a lot of these. Oh, ifs or not for me, but that you could have if you changed your process and said, wait a minute, let me talk to the market before I make those huge investment. So I have to put some thinking in and say I’m thinking of developing an assessment tool that assesses the following or building a video based training system that trains the following people to do the following things. Have those conversations. The market will tell you what it wants. And it’s got to vote with their dollars, not with what you think it does matter what you think, matters what the market.

David Mammano So I concur. Yeah. And it’s I always it’s not always research. I’ve done research before. People tell me what I want to hear and I launch it and it fails. It’s almost like you got to follow their dollars. Are they willing to spend money on it? Are they? Are they willing to actually partake in the business model?

Peter Winick Well, and that’s a great point because there’s a difference between research people telling you. Yeah, I would love to buy a flying car. And then the follow up question will be great. We’ll have those ready in two years. Can I take a deposit? Right. And I think that’s really the differentiator here. If you look, for example, at what Tesla has done, lots of people said, yeah, yeah, that’s really cool. Four hundred thousand people have put a thousand dollars up to buy a model three. That’s pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. So they know. They know it’s going to work. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Cool. OK. So we’ve got the licensing. What do you keep going in terms of that? Because you’re touching on so many different, you know.

David Mammano Well, you know, I kind of threw a monkey wrench in the whole journey. So that business, how it became much smaller. It’s just it’s you know, it became, you know, three people instead of 20. And, you know, once we built we built it, there wasn’t much to do anymore. We certainly update it, but then just sell it. And so that’s kind of its own flywheel turning. But that I was left with a lot of time. And about two years ago, someone called me a twenty five year old kid and he asked me to coach him to start a business. I said, sure. You know, so he said it was really good at it. And I ended up creating an online curriculum to start and grow a business. So I’ll start now instead of creating content for teenagers. I’m creating content for entrepreneurs. And I’m loving it because I never. I never was a high school guidance counselor. Right. But I have been an appropriate nurse and I’m actually writing content with what’s in my blood. And I’m loving it. So I end up having events for entrepreneurs. I end up creating two Web sites for entrepreneurs. You know, one just my own Web site. And then another one for a company now called a Vontae Atorino or network. And a Vontae means next step in Italian. So it’s kind of a nice synergy. And so, you know, coaching online course events, a lot of content and coaching services for entrepreneurs. And once again, kind of like trusting the path, letting go a little bit and see where it goes. We’re talking a little bit before about what’s what has really bubbled up for me with my new company called Vontae in the fall. So maybe about six, seven months ago now, I was talking to a young business owner and she just bought the business from her father. And she had a ton of questions for me. She was having, you know, those new business owner anxiety attacks. And she asked me about sales and marketing, etc. And I was able to help her. Then at the end, she was like, Oh, my God, David, you’re so smart. I’m like, you’re sweet, but I’m not. I would just make many mistakes where now I can help you. And then she said, I wish there was a group I could talk to, guys like you, gals like you every month. And I told her, I go, well, there’s visited, there’s OEO, there’s YPO. There are a lot of groups. And she said she couldn’t afford those. And I was like, no, good point. There’s probably a lot of younger or I’ll say beginning Middle East male middle stage entrepreneurs. I care what age you are, they can’t afford vestige me here in Rochester, Vicious, 15 grand a year. I’m sure New York wants more. And so I said, you know what, Sara? I’m going to go online. I’m a social network linked in Facebook. And I’m going to going to ask my network if they are interested in learning more about kind of a vestige light. And so ninety four people commented that they thought it was a great idea. And so coffee meetings and real meetings, the next two weeks, three weeks, sign up. Forty five people, 500 bucks a year and everything is free. I didn’t spent any money and marketing the group. I got a company that has a lot of conference rooms to donate space. So there’s no cost for me. I have forty five people that we meet monthly and it’s really kind of a confidential mastermind thing. Take peer group is probably the best way to describe it.

Peter Winick It’s also a paid R&D lab for you because I mean there’s not a ton of money in it for you. Forty five people at 500 bucks. But it’s a it’s better that the money is coming towards you during this sort of initial R&D phase as opposed to you investing and failing. Right. So, you know, you’re onto something if you’ve got forty five people that can all be wrong, throwing up some money saying that sounds like an interesting idea. Tell me more. And not only are they giving their money, which is important, but I find today time is almost as if not more important for some subset of the market than money. Right. So I’ve heard 500 bucks, but spending two hours a month with you, that’s a challenge, right? Right. I’ve got to really say, what is the value I’m going to extract from that two hours because I’ve got lots of things to do and I’m busy, all these other sort of thing. So I love that you got Real-Time Market Validation, rapid prototyping and going after a niche in the market. And any. Now, how long has this been going on? A couple of months, these groups? Well, it’s been I think we’re about to have our eighth meeting now. It’s almost a year or so. So what, if anything, has bubbled up in terms of future product offering, you know, product roadmap based on the needs of the market.

David Mammano So great question. So a couple of things bubbled up. And once again, I didn’t even predict this. You know, we were laughing before we saw a recording that I like to think. I have all these great ideas. And, you know, at the end, a lot of them fail. This one I didn’t even plan. It just happened. I got, you know, forty-five people actually I met. I have almost 50 people now. And so I actually because I’m a coach. Some people have, I’ll say, upgraded and purchased my coaching. Right. So I’ve got some clients out of it. And I’m like, oh, this is a model. This is a model for coaches or any businessperson that wants to surround themselves with other business owners, because maybe they can’t have an upsell product for them. Could be a CPA financial advisor. Different thing. So now what I’m doing is I’m packaging it up to license it so people can start chapters in different communities. So there could be you know, there’s a day, Belmondo in Buffalo and Cleveland and Dubai. If what they could do is get into Vontae chapter and they could be the chapter chair. And I had this whole suite of services to help them run their chapter, get them leads, coach them, materials, curriculum, etc. content, everything to help.

Peter Winick And then there’s power to write me pleasure projects. So there’s two things happening. Similar. Lear is simultaneously there one. People are asking for more of you. Now, that’s a limited resource. There’s only so much of you, etc.. But geez, you know, 10, 20 percent of the group of 45 or 50 one some coaching and you have the bandwidth. And that makes no sense for you. Great. But simultaneously, the scalable side of this is the franchise is a legal term, but basically developing the templates and the framework by which others can replicate and form some sort of a business opportunity relationship with you around that.

David Mammano Absolutely. Absolutely. And that was a nice little surprise. I don’t even mean to do it. And I don’t think anybody should. I don’t think you should start to, like overtly say, hey, can you draw on my peer group because I want to sell you my coaching services. It’s kind of I’ll say the Trojan horse. Right. So you’re sure you know 50 people in your group that they’re bound as someone were gonna say, oh, hey, vote know John. Oh, Maria. You’re a coach. I need coaching services. So. So I think it’s a nice, nice way, a nice alternative than cold calling or just doing. The traditional networking is being a resource for people. And as you know, part of being a great resource to two people is provided them great content to help them learn, grow.

Peter Winick So let me let me go back a couple steps, because I made a note and I didn’t ask you the question. So when this idea came into your head, you threw this out to your network online. Right. You said you put it out there and LinkedIn, Facebook and whatever. And immediately a whole bunch of people said, yeah, I’m in. Right. And then validated that with know signing up and paying and all that sort of stuff. Let’s go backwards a little bit, because if you don’t have a network and everybody’s got some level of a network, but if you don’t have a solid network that you’ve built and fostered over the years, that wouldn’t have worked. So can you can you just touch on for me the caliber and the quality and how much time, energy and effort you put into developing and nurturing your network regardless of what you’re doing? Right. So I would imagine some of your network to you is print Dave and then licensing Dave and now sort of these group entrepreneur, a group based Dave. But tell me about the importance of building those networks and the relationships.

David Mammano Well, it’s very important. I mean, you know, I am Mr. Rochester, born and bred here. Member of Chamber of Commerce and Rotary and Small Business Council cetera. And so I I’m very involved. And so I think I’ve built my credibility up front where people know that I’m a good guy, I have integrity. I’m sincere about helping people on some fly by night shyster. I’m here, you know? And they know where I live. I mean, I live and work in this suburb outside of Rochester. And so I went to high school here. I went to college in Buffalo. So I’m rooted in this community. And I think that helped me hit the ground running. Now, if you are just starting out in the business world, in your community, not really known yet. Well, I think the first steps would be to join these types of organizations, join your local city Rotary, join the Chamber of Commerce, get involved. You know, they say networking. But I think it’s more than networking becoming a resource for people. You meet somebody, you exchange cars, like actually follow up, actually try to connect them with other people so that you’re now viewed as somebody that, oh, my God, this guy helps me. I like him. What can I do for him at the compound effect of that is going to build.

Peter Winick And the difference today is that the geographic centricity is as critical, right? So you’re born and bred there. That’s amazing. People know you, you walk on the street, you go to, you know, whatever. Out to dinner or something with your families. You got to recognize folks. That’s awesome. You know, layer on top of that now social and it’s limitless. But I think you have to have that mindset of it’s not me, me, me, it’s not shyster. What can I do in this LinkedIn group to add value? What can I do when I connect with someone on LinkedIn? That’s not just self-serving, but you have to have sort of an authenticity about you, which you can’t fake it. And in a spirit of generosity and connecting and doing all those things, and even though you’re not doing it for a return. Right, there are dividends that that that pay. And I like your advice to someone just starting out there. That’s awesome. So you give me a short time. So we’ve got new opportunities coming off of visa of groups, which is which is really cool. Let me go backwards a bit or pause for a moment and say, David, out there right now, is a young David movement or somebody, you know, twenty five years old. And you’ve been around the block? I’ve been around the block. We get to earn our stripes and scars and all that. They want to be moving into the content space, into the vault leadership space, into some of the things that you’ve done and are doing. Give them some general advice.

David Mammano So what I would say is find out what platform that you love that you like doing anyway. And Kenny own it in your community. You know, a thousand-mile journey begins with one step. So, you know, there’s a lot of people on Facebook that I think are trying to be the next Tony Robbins. And it’s like, you know, who are you? I don’t know you. Tony started out of his house 30 years ago and built an empire. Step by step. And so my feeling is, start in your community. Start local. Pick a platform that you like. You like to write. Great. Start a blog. Do you like video? Have a YouTube show. You want to write a book? Do you like speaking a little combination thereof? A podcast? Look at you, Peter. I mean, do you like do you want to do a podcast? Great content. So what can you offer your community in lines of great content? How can you help them objectively be better at who they are? Bring them to the next level. I think that’s how you get the ball rolling.

Peter Winick So, I mean, you touched on something here that was critical is oftentimes people say, but I’m not a dot. I’m not a good writer. I’m not a good this. I’m not a good that. I love the idea and the recommendation that you made to try to help out. Right. You know, hey, if you love to write blogs, long form, whatever. If that’s not your cup of tea video, there is no excuse now. Between the multiple modalities that are available at almost zero cost to everybody to find your lane and experiment and find one that works for you. And one that you like. I mean, you you’ve done many right? You’ve done speaking. You’ve been an author. You teach, you coach, but you’ve probably done several others that you don’t like and therefore you don’t do them anymore. So experimenting and not being afraid to try things and see what works and what doesn’t.

David Mammano Yeah. And see what’s relevant. You know, I don’t do a print magazine anymore because, you know, the market breaks my heart. But the market doesn’t want it anymore. And, you know, the market right now loves podcasts. And, you know, you and I, Peter, we have we have a great faces for podcasts. Right. So they don’t adjust your dials at home. This is as good as it gets.

But you know that I love my podcasts. I’ve been doing it every week for almost two years. And, you know, I’ve got twenty-five thousand downloads now per week. And I’m in 78 countries and I’m killing it because I love it. I love it. Love it. And you know and I know that you’re doing you’re getting started here. And I think I wanted my number. Twenty five, thirty five. Something like that. But you’re already you’re already cranking, you know. And that’s just the consistency though, you know. Do you know that the average podcaster lasts nine episodes and then they go away forever? So I think what’s really important with content is the consistency, as I told you in the beginning, with next step. We also knew we had literally like thousands and thousands of articles on our site and just built up because we did it for years and years and years.

Peter Winick And the consistency pieces is important because I remember when I started blogging years, years and years ago, a friend said to me some similar thing, you know. Don’t stop until you hit one hundred. Don’t even look at the numbers until you hit one hundred. And that’s really, really hard to do, because we live in this world of you know, I can tell you at any time in the day how many calories I took in and how many steps I talked with, like write 100 blogs and not even, you know, hold your breath and pray. But that’s sort of what you have to do. And being consistent and committed, I mean, there’s nothing worse than when you go to either a blog or a podcast or something. And see the last post was on, you know, April 11th of 2013.

David Mammano Now you look like I’m done. You move on. Yeah. You know, you don’t check their box and you move on. And some people do it even though they don’t read it just for credibility or all. You get blog yesterday. OK. The real thing. You’ve got a call. Let me. Let me move on. He’s got the credibility factor checked.

Peter Winick Well, this has been great. You’ve gone from print to digital to licensing to community development to speaking peer groups. This this is really, really been chock full of interesting information. And right from the heart and battle scars and everything. Tell folks where they can find you. What do we do? Where do I find you? be–i in Rochester. Or maybe I’m somebody in Cleveland or Dubai that wants to open it up on day group. Or what else might they want to fight you for? Where did they get you?

David Mammano Well, the best the best place to reach me is I was pretty good with email. So David at David my motto dot com. I’m a am. I’m Yes, a Web site. David Mommano dot com. And we also have our main Web site, which is a Vontae Acha producer group, dot com. So you can go there as well.

Peter Winick Awesome. Well, I appreciate your time today. And thank you. Folks will reach out to you. And this has been great. Thank you so much for coming on board today. Thank you. Great job. I look forward to hearing your 100th episode. To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our Web site at Thought Leadership Leverage dot com to reach me directly. Feel free to e-mail me at Peter at Thought Leadership Leverage dot com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on ITunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.