Chris Krimitsos - Start Ugly

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If you're stuck in your creative journey, you are about to get "un-stuck" as Jim & Chris talk to the incredibly unique solopreneur Chris Krimitsos, the author of "Start Ugly."

Many talk about “Culture” and “Community” as it relates to their companies or events – but there are few people on the planet who have truly woven both of these key elements into their business like Chris has done with Podfest.

Chris Krimitsos will inspire you to clear your path and start ugly today!

This Full video episode available for free at: https://rebrand.ly/DealcastersChrisK

All of the products discussed in this podcast can be found here: https://rebrand.ly/StartUglyList

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Full Episode Transcript:

Chris Krimitsos - Start Ugly

Are you stuck in your creative journey today? We talked to the incredible unique solopreneur Chris Krimitsos. Chris the author of startup, many talk about culture and community as it relates to their companies or events. But there are few people on the planet who have truly woven both of these key elements into their business.

Like Chris has done with PodFest. Chris will inspire you to clear your path and start ugly today. What's up. How's it going guys? Thank you for that intro. I love the intro to your show is amazing. Thanks, man. Yeah. Yeah. Those things are fun to make. They really are. It's exciting. It's exciting. I can't believe that we have you.

You're fresh off pod master masterclass right last week. And I always think to myself after seeing you on the screen so many times during pod Fest and the virtual stuff that you're doing and the masterclass I'm thinking to myself, do you just go to sleep for four days? I did this weekend. I slept in the afternoons.

I I barely recovered, but yeah, it does take a lot out. What happens is you wake up still with adrenaline the next morning, and then you pass out in the afternoon after you go. As the last stretch was a five day stretch and then you've you recover over a couple of days, for sure.

It's unbelievable. And so for those of you, and you don't know yet what pod Fest is, you cannot change your channel, go to another anything, because you're now talking to the person. If you've ever thought about doing a podcast, if you've ever thought about starting a YouTube channel, you've ever thought about doing anything from a content creator standpoint.

This is the man who can get your mind junk cleared. If you pick up this book, I'll start ugly and really get you on your path and get all of that stuff past you. Because I think Chris I've used start ugly thing. I put this book. Behind me in my office. I do, zoom calls and everything. And like we all do, and I put it behind me.

And the one of the reasons why is that I'm always referring to it so I can just point to it. But also it's like this post-it note for ugly. It just shouts at people and they're like, Does that say ugly behind you? So it's a nice little conversational thing as well. And it looks like you actually put a sticky note on it, right?

Yeah. My favorite story about the sticky note graphic was my friend has his mom saw the book on the table and she goes, why would you put a post-it note to deface your friend's book? And she got really upset with them and he couldn't stop laughing cause she didn't realize it was part of the book cover and she was admonishing her son.

Like how could you do this to Chris's book? Start off by talking about this premise. I'm very familiar with it. I use it all the time and I knew that on me. And if you say start ugly, a lot of people think we'll just go without doing anything. And that's not really what you're talking about.

You're talking about doing it the right way and just clearing some stuff out of the way before doing it. So if you would just maybe unpack the the startup. Yeah. So start ugly. It's very simple. It's not, it's no matter how we all start at anything. If you look back on it, you're like, wow, that was a start ugly.

Even if you had it buttoned up. So the premise is not start ugly, stay ugly. It start ugly and perfectly execute from the beginning. But most overachievers use the word perfectionism to get started and most not necessarily underachievers, but people that are afraid of getting started. They'll say they're not ready yet.

So you have those two extremes, but underlying both of those is fear. So it's the F being afraid of what's on the other side of it. So start ugly just says, Hey, do some research, put a timeline, announced that you're going to do something and get started. And really the cool part about the book is unlike most business books, it's a parable, it's a short story about someone experiencing that they're stuck, which is basically all of us at some point or another, and they have to find their start ugly moment.

In that moment. It's a big crescendo bye in the book. So it's a really interesting case study. Amazon has been very supportive of the book. We've sold quite a few times and it's a, we purposely made it a 30 fiercely know like myself, 45 minutes, tops read and you feel accomplished. You understand the point.

And I took the. We give podcasters this advice all the time. They ask us how long should our podcast be. And we always say, as long as the content is good. So the book is 99 pages and most of it's graphics to be quite Frank with you, there's a lot of graphics in it intentionally. So we designed the graphics to integrate with the word.

So I'm a big fan of the. Physical copy, because it's good to have around staring back at you. I like, I know you say you ha I have mine. I carry mine wherever where people think, Oh, you're promoting a book. I go no, exactly what you said. And I say it all the time. I put it like right here. And when I give myself excuses, why I can't get started, I'm like, okay, my advice, I'm the start ugly guy.

I got to get started. And I always learned from starting. Cause then you learn, okay. I didn't know that to do these three things and you could get gone thinking is I'm the biggest time stealer that we all have? We think too much, therefore we don't get started enough. Yes. Perfectionism, like you said, is just a, it's a major crossroad for a lot of people, myself included.

And of course, we all go back to that. First time we got in front of a camera, we got in front of a mic and we're all cringing me. You know what? No one else remembers that stuff. Yeah. I like to go back and listen to that stuff because I like to feel good about how far. That I've come. And I think it's important for people that helps with that perfectionism thing.

Nobody remembers that time in high school when you embarrass yourself and did whatever you did, it's really about living in, in the now and getting things accomplished going forward. So it's a great story. And I like the example you use to at the beginning of the book where you have the, basically the lumber company and how the evolution of.

Of the guy for getting where he had come from. And I think that so powerful that we always forget, like we, and even you have some examples later in the book of companies like Sears and circuit city and how they've, they didn't adapt to change. Heck we could even talk about blockbuster, great companies that had a great idea, but they forget that we have to always be trying things by starting ugly.

I loved how you. Pointed all that stuff out. And it really made a lot of sense. So let's tie in the Sears example to Amazon. This is like such a, so I didn't use blockbuster because we all know the case study. So I was like, let me pick some different ones. So when I did research with Sears, they started in 1896, somewhere around there.

And they were the first catalog company, or at least the first that would cater to people. And what they did was they catered to African-American households that wanted to buy really nice goods watches and different things, but they couldn't go into stores to buy them. So they were able to cater to a and be revolutionary in that African-American households could buy goods through the catalog.

And then they were able to transition from a catalog company to a big box. They were the first big box retailer. I know a lot of people know Walmart Kmart, but it was Sears was the first, but then they were also the first to do private labels, diehard battery. You go craftsman tools like these things.

Sears is pioneer from the beginning. And the craziest thing I know, we all know this. Most of us know this anyways in the nineties, when Walmart beat Cedars. That was the moment for Sears to go back and be an online catalog company and beat everybody. But unfortunately they didn't have the vision Jeff Bezos and Amazon did.

And all these big companies gave that territory over to Amazon. And Amazon was focused on being a catalog company to everybody. And if you guys recall the case study with Amazon is very simple. Amazon chose books, and that was it actually a very pivotal choice because at the time books were something, everybody searched, they were decentralized, not every bookstore had every book and something where Jeff could have created a centralized repository of books.

And if he didn't choose books, I don't know if Amazon would be here today. So that was a very crucial decision in the company's founding. Now we all know what people don't realize is they know Amazon is of course it's the biggest company. No, they weren't. They were a little company where a guy had a little, a lot of people.

I've seen the picture of Jeff in a crappy little office with Amazon, almost spray painted on a sign behind him. And now they're this behemoth that just keeps growing and it's because. They haven't forgotten the start ugly philosophy. And if anyone does, if I do a lot of stuff on Amazon there's links that are still broken, that they're fixing in real time, Amazon is the ultimate start ugly company, and they're starting ugly across spectrums that most people have no clue about.

So it's interesting to watch. How quickly that philosophy has allowed them to become the largest corporation in the world. Yeah. And even some of the things they're doing now and it started with I can't say her name because she's in my room here and what that's doing for voice, which when you think about podcasting is voice.

And so now they're even putting podcasts in Amazon music. And I think dad is a major step. It goes back to, Hey, w why not? We've already got. All this data on people. We know what they like, things of that nature. I What are your thoughts on that? Chris? I have a partner that's on the cutting edge of what we call ambient voice technology.

And that's a, what? Alexa, Google mini, all that stuff is Siri. My first thought is a poor Apple, had the advantage and anything else? Steve jobs passed away. They shelved Siri has not really improved since it came out, but bayzos put it out. Understood the vision to let's experiment. I have a friend that's one of the first hundred developers on Alexa.

He actually created the official hurricane tracker for Alexa cause we're in Florida and he and I are partnering up creating ambient voice technologies for podcasts or so it's an area that I play around with quite a bit. Amazon is already a player, which is really surprising to me. I do know that Amazon's a big player.

We all know Amazon's a player, but for Amazon's downloads to start showing up on people's players, as quickly as it has really surprised me. I would think it would take maybe a couple of months, but they're going to be very dominant very quickly. I believe. Cause I'm watching. I get to see 'em because of what I do.

I get to see people's downloads a lot and I always, if I'm consulting, I want to see what's going on and Amazon's registering the way now Spotify is registering almost across the board, depending on where you're at, but now Amazon shown up overnight as one of the top download producers for these podcasts.

Or so if that's what it like right out the gate one or two things are I got to look at one, it could be that these are the early adopters there's that got onto Amazon. And there wasn't enough inventory just yet. I don't think that's the case. I think Amazon knows how to integrate things and over time they'll integrate it.

However, I do think there's a first mover advantage and then the invoice. So let's talk about these devices in our homes. What people don't realize is they're getting smarter every day. So I talked to my Devices. And I ask them questions and I engage them. And were they pretty dumb six months or a year ago?

Absolutely comparatively. But as they progress, they get smarter and they anticipate. Eventually Jim and Christie's things will be prompting us before we prompt them. And then for podcasting, I don't see people listening to podcasts like in the house, unless it's a news flash weather. I just don't see us listening to an hour.

Cause you're not gonna listen to an APS episode. It's I can see music, but I can't see We're going to listen to Joe Rogan together and you got your little girls, like I got two daughters, your wife's in the other room. Maybe she's not a fan of Rogan. She wants to listen to a meditation thing. So there's certain things that those things will be good at.

However, there it's integrating now with our, like what you said with the podcast. So the question is, and you're asking the right question. How does that play out? What, what does that integration, that hybrid model look like? So one of the things we think is going to happen. So let's say the two of you have.

This cast on Alexa and I talked to her and I said, Hey, I want to see this exact show Dealcasters. But I also want to ask you guys a personal question that has nothing to do with the show, but it's your expertise. So I'll say, Alexa, can you send a question into Chris and Jim? I want to ask about the product, blah, blah, blah.

You're then are going to receive that question. So every day you can say, Hey, any questions for us? And you're going to answer it to Alexa. This is something we're developing. So then that answer is catalog for the next thousand questions that are the same. So you never have to answer it again. Now that's level one level two is if you guys become really famous and people are seeking you, which could happen, honestly, because of the way everything happens.

You can charge now for that for that premium service of asking the Dealcasters premium questions. So then you could charge a $5 Patrion fee. Let's call it or Alexa fee. For me to then have direct communication with you on a monthly basis, you might have a thousand people paying you. So that's where we see that evolving that to tell you any further than that.

I don't know. And I don't like predicting, like when COVID happened, everybody predicted that we're going to go into a huge recession. That didn't happen. So I always say whatever people predict, I usually say the opposite is going to happen. People got hurt all that. Yes, economically, but people are buying more stuff than they ever have.

And obviously Amazon's doing great. Some companies not. So you gotta be careful and prediction. So right now I can only see that far out. I don't know what that next frontier is. Cause it might, it all depends on human beings, that's actually a great a great point an idea, because as it is if you think about chatbots, a lot of.

Chatbot stuff is about frequently asked questions that if you ask the body can answer it. So that makes a heck of a lot of sense to allow this highly intelligent AI, to be able to do the same thing for you. And I think that's actually pretty exciting. I guess we're going to have to, we'll be getting an invoice for this for this advice you gave.

So I think the deal with that for us on deals, there's a lot, listen to the, I don't think we'll be searching with our fingers pretty soon. So I do think it's going to be talking to the devices because think about how much more intuitive it's Hey can you get ahold of Chris and Jim? Or can you ask him XYZ?

So then your bot, your voice bot will answer me back in your voice. So we all know about deep fakes, but basically just means that these robots could mimic our tone and our voice. So I can see Gary V having Gary Vaynerchuk was, if you don't know, he's a very famous entrepreneur, but I could see that I could see people paying for premium access to Gary and he gets, pray, ask thousands of questions.

So he could funnel that into some kind of tribe. And then who knows, maybe it's not a pay. Maybe it's Hey, I'll let you into my tribe. If you do these five things on social for me. But that's, what's about to open up and I don't I'm getting on the forefront with my partner, Steve, on this we're joint venturing, and we're going to figure it out together.

We'll see. I don't, I think in three years we'll have a more better picture. In the meantime, I think we're all going to be experimenting, trying to figure it out. Any any thoughts in general? I feel like. Casting the net wider for podcasts in general, outside of the the voice activation thing has got to be great for the podcasting space.

There's so many opportunities right now. You could have niche contents. My wife has a, you saw it up there, the women's meditation network and it's for women meditation's for women only. And then she has sleep meditation for women. Those two on the bottom there. Yeah. She just got this going today.

We got approved. So I was so excited for her. The cool part about that is these are meditations and all she did was cast a wide net, but saying, Hey, it's only for women. So how cool of all the thousands of meditations? There's none that say we're for women only, which gave her a really leg up. And in her niche, it's a wide niche, but she gets, I don't want to give out a numbers, but.

Six bigger downloads a month number. Like she gets a lot of women all over the world downloading her meditation sites. Awesome. Now, Chris, do you do you use any of the specific devices? From Amazon. Are you...