1: Chase Bowers, founder of Dropified, the fastest growing business in Alabama and #55 on the 2019 Inc 5000

[00:00] Welcome to First Customers, a hyper-tribal podcast. I'm your host, Paris Vega. Let's get started. Our guest today is Chase Bowers. Chase is the founder of Dropified, the platform for managing your dropshipping business. Dropified is the fastest growing company in Alabama with a three-year growth rate of 4,971%. They are number 55 overall on the 2019 Inc. 5000 list and in 2018 generated $5.1 million in revenue. Welcome to the show, Chase. Thanks for having me, Paris. [00:48] So start us off by telling us how Dropified got started. Yeah. Have you ever made a series of decisions that changed your life forever? And this is actually a question you preach. Yes. Yeah, I think it's true. We all have. Oh, yeah. I mean, whether it's who you marry, children, a person you've met, or you go to school or college. And yeah, so we all have. [01:19] And that's definitely the story of Dropified. And Dropified was literally life-changing for me and hopefully for others as well that have used it. So just to dive into it, in 2015, to fast forward to the end of the story, end of the beginning of the story, we launched the beta of Dropified. Now, before that, there was a series of a couple of events that led to that moment. The first being deciding to be an entrepreneur. And I decided that a couple of years earlier. And that led to what happened in 2015, which was attending a marketing event in Las Vegas by a guy named Chris Record. It was a... I had followed Chris. He had a Facebook ads training course. [02:18] And he was kind of like a marketing guru type person. And I'd learned a lot from him with the Facebook ads. So I decided to attend his event. And my wife, Ashley, came with me. And we went to the event. And it was a good event. It was mostly entrepreneurs there, people wanting to learn more about Facebook ads and marketing. But at the end of the event, he sold a mastermind. And a mastermind was pretty pricey for me. It was $10,000 to attend this mastermind. [02:52] The plan was, or the offer was, you were going to meet for four times over the period of a year, once per quarter. And, you know, you would learn from Chris. And you get to connect with other entrepreneurs. But it was $10,000. And my wife, Ashley, you know, she was there at the event, which was kind of surprising. But it was kind of a good thing because we were able to talk about it. And I felt, I was like, man, I feel like I should really do this. I don't know if it's just because he pitched it really well. But I felt I got a piece about it. And we talked about it. [03:21] And I was like, I think doing this could really just at least take me to the next step. I could meet some people. Internet marketing world is kind of a lonely place. You're just by yourself a lot of times. You can just connect with others. What year was this? This was 2015, the summer of 2015. Okay. And at that time, you were doing what for your business? At that time, I was... [03:43] To be able to pay $10,000. No, no, that's great. It's a great question. I had built a business doing marketing, digital marketing consulting. So I would work with agencies and had cash flow coming in from that. And we had saved a little bit. We didn't have a huge savings. So this $10,000 would have eaten pretty much most of our savings, if not all of it. And so we talked about it. And ultimately, she said, and we both decided, yes, this is something we wanted to do. [04:11] Just roll the dice. That's right. Go all in. I know. And you never know when you're doing these things. It could be a scam or whatever. But it ended up being one of the most... Or the setting for what would become Dropified. Wow. So the first event, the first session was right after the event. [04:32] So we got there. I met a few people, learned a few things. But it was just kind of connecting and learning a couple Facebook ad techniques. The next session is where it really happened. And where I ultimately got the idea for Dropified. So we were at the second session. It was a couple months later in the fall of 2015. We were in Sacramento, California. We were in, I think it was just like a hotel room or something like that. There was 20 or 30 people there. [05:03] Chris Record was there teaching. He had tables set up. There were different entrepreneurs around tables. So during one of the breaks, a guy named Lawrence, who has an interesting story of himself. He had recently got out of prison. And he was like, I want to turn my life around and do something legitimate as far as work. And just, I want to be an entrepreneur. And plus, getting out of prison, it's hard to get a job. So you almost have to... One of the options is you can work for yourself. [05:31] So he began to share what he was doing, which is pretty incredible. So he was sharing his story. It's like, I started, I was looking for something to do. And I found this dropshipping training course. These guys were showing how you could set up your own business. And you basically, he explained the whole dropshipping thing. And if you're not familiar with dropshipping, you can sell products, other people's products. And you don't have to carry any inventory. So as opposed to, like, if you started your own retail store, you're having to buy hundreds of thousand dollars of inventory, ship it to a warehouse or your store, and then sell it from there. So dropshipping, the manufacturer or distributor will directly ship the products from their place to your customer. [06:17] So it's a great way to start a business and not have a lot of expenses up front. So he was explaining this whole model, which was a tweak on the traditional dropshipping. And his big thing was, like, I did this training. I implemented it. And, like, the first 15 days, 15 to 30 days, I had already made $30,000. And we were like, man, that's crazy. You know, tell us exactly what you're doing. And he went on to explain it. And, you know, he's like, I know there's this site where these Chinese manufacturers are. They have millions of products there. [06:52] And you can – they're at wholesale prices. And you take the products and, you know, pick out the products you want to sell and you mark them up. You literally are just taking the picture of the product and putting it on your website. And you write a better description than what they – you know, what was written kind of by the Chinese manufacturers. And you market it. And the big difference was Facebook advertising, especially at the time, was just getting – you know, just ramping up. It was still kind of on the newer front. Not everybody in the world was doing it yet. So you could really cash in on Facebook advertising. And that's where you could get really targeted. [07:28] So you could take, like, a shoe and that had, like, a picture of a pit bull on the side of it. And you could target people who love pit bulls. And you had your markup. And you literally have no inventory. And you're selling a picture of a product. And when somebody purchases, you go directly to the manufacturer. And you can have them ship it directly to your customer. And really the only expenses you have are the cost of just setting up your store and your marketing expenses and just your time. So he began to share this. And it's like, man, I should do this business. [08:00] I think I can do all of that. But as he began to share, I could see all these little things that were more manual. There were copying and pasting. It took, like, 15 minutes just to get one product onto your store. And when you fulfill orders, it, you know, took a lot of time. And even doing product research, it was like he had an Excel spreadsheet. And he was just copying and pasting, like, the link and the title of the product, trying to get the picture somehow in there. And it was just a lot of moving parts, manual parts. And that's where I was like, man, I can do this for myself. But I can automate in, like, 90% of what he's doing here and make this so much easier to run and scalable. [08:44] And that's ultimately what I did. And I reached out to a developer I'd been working with. And I said, hey, I want to do one part of this business just to test it out. Can you make a Chrome extension that connects with a Shopify API? And I want to click a button on the product page that I'm on and send that product directly to my Shopify store with no copying and pasting. I want to send the product title, the description, the images, the variants, which are, like, the colors and sizes. And the next day, literally, had the first version of what would become, like, Shopify. That's awesome. Yeah. Which was a Chrome extension. [09:31] And you click the button. And 10 seconds later, your product was on your page. So from 15 minutes down to 10 seconds. Yes. Cut down the time. Yeah. And I showed this to the – because at the time, this was just for me. I wasn't making this into a product. Right. I was just saving myself some time. [09:47] So I showed it to a couple of the people in the masterminds. Like, hey, would you guys want to use this? And they're like, oh, my gosh. We've got to have this. And then it takes me so long to do this. And they were just raving about it. So you were just solving your own problem at first, just scratching your own itch. Yeah. Other people saw it. Exactly. [10:03] And they were what really encouraged me to actually move forward with making it more into something other people can use. Because at that point, you weren't planning on building some business off of it or anything like that. You were just making it more efficient. Yeah. And I was – the only business I was – So you could sell stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Building was just the dropship, like literally doing the dropshipping business and having a more scalable way to do that. And I just didn't want to be copying and pasting and all of that stuff and using spreadsheets. Let the computers do what they can do automatically. [10:38] Yeah. Exactly. But you could focus on the things that really move the business, which is marketing and selecting products rather than all the just stuff that just takes time for the sake of taking time. So just to end that portion, I – a month later, after just talking with people, I had a fully – I had more of a fully developed web application. And people could sign up to it. And that's where I had to decide, okay, I have something now. How do I get my customers? How do I get my customers? [11:44] I've worked – since then, you know, I've worked with and listened to and just talked to lots of entrepreneurs. And it's interesting how people get their first customers. And I feel like for a lot of people, my way will – or the way that we went about it with Dropified is unique. And some people maybe they've done this before or have used this before. But what we did was able to create cash flow up front with very minimal investment, which to me is like the holy grail of running a business. The smallest amount of expenses and then immediate profit in return. And that's what happened with Dropified. And the way that we did this was really just being – I had to be really creative. I was doing this on the side. I was doing this – wasn't even trying to do this as a business to begin with. [12:40] But I ultimately saw the potential pretty quickly that this could be something huge. It could be something really big. Just from the encouragement I was getting from the people in the mastermind. And so what I did, it was another decision where I – Chris Record, the guy that was running the mastermind, he happened to be an affiliate as well. And if you're not familiar with the affiliate business, he built up a list of people that followed him, listened to him for advice. He had this really big email list, and he would come across products or training courses, and he would promote those. So this is different from just being like an Amazon affiliate or something like that. This is a little more than that, right? Yeah. Yeah. [13:30] You recommend things to people who listen to you. It was kind of like an influencer. Exactly. Yeah. Now, that's exactly what it was, an influencer. And he was promoting a training course that was literally – if I couldn't have picked a better fit for my customer, and it was like how to build a dropshipping business, which is like, okay. Yeah. This is the perfect fit. So I reached out to him, and I said, hey, for everybody that buys your course through your link, which is kind of the way it works in the affiliate world, if somebody purchases through him, he gets compensated for that. If they purchase through your link, then how about we just give away Dropified, a light version of Dropified for free. [14:19] They get to use it. It's built exactly for what their problems are going to be. They're going to be doing this exact business model that I built this platform for. So ultimately, he was like, yeah, no, that would be awesome. We can just give it away for free. Gives me users. So at the end of the promotion, he promoted it. He did really well. He's a pretty – really great affiliate. Did very well. [14:46] I had over – around 1,000 to 1,200 users, maybe more. I can't remember. Those are all free users. All free users. That's like basically you're getting free user testing as well. Exactly. Feedback. And what I noticed early on was – And there's no extra cost for you to add more users. So it wasn't like it was a burden to add that many people. Yeah. [15:07] Yeah. It was a great scenario. Yeah. So free users. And I really just communicated with the users. I want to know what you're going through. What problems do we need to solve for you? And I did that for a couple weeks. And then I decided right now would be a great time just to test. I could earn some cash flow. [15:32] I could test whether this is something people really want to pay for because who wouldn't do it for free? I mean there's a difference between giving something for free and somebody actually paying for it. Did you guys improve the software during that free period? Yeah. Yeah. We were constantly improving it because one, I was still using it. I was running my own dropshipping business on the side as well. So I was just doing it. And then I was listening to people's feedback to what they needed. So that gave you some time to harden it a little bit, make it a little stronger before you got to that pre-sale. [16:01] That's right. Actually offering it. Yeah. And so at the time of the pre-sale, we had really two main features. Again, this wasn't like what it would end up being now and later on. We had two main features. But it was one, we could send the products to Shopify, what we talked about earlier, from 15 minutes down to 10 seconds. And we had a web application where you can manage all of that. The second thing was, I mentioned this earlier too, the product research portion of it. So what we did, instead of people having to use spreadsheets, they can now say almost like Pinterest. [16:37] Everybody knows Pinterest. You browse the web. You find something you want to save for later. You save it to a board. You create a board around a topic and you save it to that board. We did the same thing with Dropified with like product boards. You could be researching products that you would want to sell for cat products. You can create a board around that, dog products, anything that you wanted to do. And you literally click a button and it goes to that board. And it's all organized there for you. [17:01] All the links, all the pricing, everything is there for you. So we had those two core features. And here's the offer. I still have like, it's crazy. I still have this text that I think I typed it up on TextEdit. As a part of this thing that Chris Record had, as part of the offer that he made, everybody got put into a Slack group that was built around, you know, running your dropshipping business. Okay. So that was through his affiliates. Yeah. So I had this built-in audience there as well. [17:31] Of course, I had their email address if they logged on to Dropified. I also had a Slack group. It was just great for real-time communication and getting feedback. So you had a thousand or so people in the Slack group. Yeah. And I had my own channel in there where I could, you know, make announcements. And about new features and get feedback from there. So what I did in my channel, I posted just a couple paragraphs. It was an offer. And what I offered was a lifetime license of Dropified. [18:01] So they could buy it one time up front. And I think it was like $297. And they would get, every time I added a feature, they would get access to that feature going forward. It's, you know, unlimited into the future. And they would never, they would only have to pay one time up front. Whereas, you know, I was in the future. I'd let them know I'm going to have plans to make this monthly or yearly or raise the price, which we did. But they could kind of support it early on, be VIP, almost like a founder's license. And that was the offer. And it was a pretty simple offer. [18:40] It wasn't like I had an over-the-top salesman approach. I was like, here's my plans. Here's what I plan on doing with it. You can kind of get in on the front end, save a bunch of money and kind of support it. So I offered only 50 licenses of this. And again, this was still like a couple weeks after I got the 1,200 users. And I put it out there on a Friday. And literally on that Saturday, I had sold out. So just like that, I was like, holy cow. And I raised $15,000. [19:08] Wow. And I was like, man, this is crazy. I think there's something to this. Yeah. So a couple of days went by and people were like, like on Monday, people were like, man, I came back from the weekend and got on my computer and I saw this offer and you did it and I missed it. It's like, is there any way I can have it? I was like, well, I only did 50 licenses. I said, I'll tell you what, I'll do another 50. Because I literally had a bunch of people doing this and you kind of hate to, you don't want to make people mad either. But I didn't want to like just open this up forever because that wasn't the purpose of it. [19:43] So I did it one more time and the same thing happened. It sold out. So I raised $30,000. I had probably like under $1,000 at this point invested into it from just working with my developer. Ultimately, you know, I had a profitable business at that point. And so that's how I got my first users, kind of my beta users, my lifetime users. But it ultimately gets a little better from there. So let's fast forward to 2016. Okay. During that period of time, I, again, I'm adding more features. [20:19] We added some really cool stuff. I won't dive into it. Order fulfillment type things and really made it a robust feature set. The second thing that happened was I hired an affiliate manager to help me recruit people, recruit affiliates to promote Dropified. I decided to do an affiliate launch. It's a one-week launch. We have, so there's a time limit, which creates urgency. We have a one-time price again. So you get it for lifetime again, which is a killer deal. And we, yeah. [20:55] And we broke it up into three pieces. Dropified Pro, Dropified Elite, Dropified Unlimited. So we just took all the major product features and just sectioned them out. So how long is it between two things? Between when you first brought on those free users, you said it was like a few weeks. And then you did the pre-sale for the lifetime users and earned $30,000. Yep. And then were there no new customers between that point and this next push? I froze it at that point. What's that time frame? [21:32] Is that a year or is that? So we're in spring of 2016. So that's, I would roughly say five to six months-ish. Okay. November's, yeah. About, maybe even, yeah, about six months. That seems like it would be hard to be that disciplined to not keep selling it at that point after you've proven that people want it. Yeah. Those two pre-sales, those lifetime memberships, and then just to not sell anything at all. I know. [21:58] When it's hot. No, for sure. No, it, I may have sold like one or two if somebody reached out, but I had no like big offers. Like maybe somebody private messaged me or something. I was like, sure, you know, get in. I can't remember exactly. But I had no big promotions. No advertising, nothing going on. No. We were really focused on improving the product. [22:19] We took that $30,000, invested it into the product. Because I still, I remember at this time, I'm doing it on the side. So a key point here, I still had cash flow coming in. Right. So I wasn't relying on that money. But we put a lot into this launch. It was the first so-called product launch that I had ever done before. And this is the 2016 launch with the affiliate manager. That's right. Okay. [22:44] And so there were months leading up to, we had to create videos. You create all this hype. You have emails that go out. Okay. And what if people come in? How are you going to handle customer support? You have to think through all of these different things. And was that upfront cost there? Was that a big chunk of that $30,000? Was that new money you're having to invest at that point to get all the marketing hype and everything ready for that second launch? [23:07] Most of it was just time invested. Okay. Really. Because I had a background of doing videos. So I did the videos myself. I had a background of doing the web stuff. So I did the web stuff myself. I did all the copywriting. I wasn't a copywriter by trade, but I knew the problems that my product were solving. So I just kind of went with that. [23:30] So a lot of it was just bootstrapped. Use some of the money. And a lot of it was just time. We knew that the bigger payoff would come after the launch. And so even the affiliate manager, their entire compensation was based on the sales coming in from the launch. So I didn't have to pay them anything upfront. And usually when you have that relationship, they have to believe in your product in order to do that. Because it's an investment for them as well. Exactly. So fast forward to the spring. [24:02] We launched this thing. We have built up a series of affiliates. We launched it on a network called JVZoo. There are several affiliate networks that you can use. That was the one that we used at the time. JVZoo, you basically put your product on there. And it has an easy way for people to generate affiliate links for you. So each person that promotes could have their own link with their own ID. So any traffic that they send from where they promote it gets compensated for that. It tracks it and they earn commissions. [24:37] And we were offering 50% commissions on this thing. So I think the total price of if they purchased everything, if a customer purchased the entire funnel, as we would call it, all three products, they would have probably spent around $600. Okay. The way we broke it up. So they can make $300 for every sale. Yeah. And then we had an affiliate contest as well that we put in there. So if you reach a certain number of sales, and then if you're first place on the leaderboard at the end of it, you get bonuses. Bonuses. Bonuses on top of that. [25:11] So there was incentives for, especially people who are in, like, that's what they do as their business. They love that kind of stuff. They love those bonuses. So we did this launch and it was a week launch. So after, I don't know exactly where we were at the end of the launch. I can't remember. It was, I don't know, $500,000, $600,000, $700,000 that we did in sales, which, you know, blew my mind. That's crazy, you know. Even the $15,000, $30,000, what we did on the pre-launch was crazy. So to go from, you know, where we were to having that amount of money coming in and to validating that offer, I was like, man, this is something people want. [25:57] It's definitely a need. I can turn this into a real business. Right. Go back to that real quick, that moment. So you launched through the affiliates. Go a little deeper into that one moment. Yeah. Of, like, maybe that day or so around. Like, what was that like? Yeah. [26:16] So launch day. This, you were very, I was very nervous. We were, you know, you don't even know if anybody's going to come to the thing. Yeah. You put all this time and effort. You're like, oh, somebody just buys it. And when you first turn it on, it kind of starts to trickle because you're relying on other people to promote for you. You're putting your product in the hands of other people to generate. You're not doing any paid ads yourself. You can, but we didn't. [26:44] And you've never done anything like that before. No. You've never had, like, a sales team or anything like that. No. Yeah. Yeah. At all. Yeah. This is brand new. More of a freelance consultant for a while. [26:54] Yeah. And yeah. I knew how to run ads. And this was like a completely different model for me. And so what happens, what happened with us? The sales started to trickle in. Nothing really, you know, we're like, okay, it's doing okay. Then where it really, you start to get the surges of traffic are when people start doing their email promotions or you'll get a big affiliate. What I mean by a big affiliate is somebody that has a lot of followers, a big influencer. They have hundreds of thousands of people on their email list. [27:26] They'll send out an email and, you know, they'll promote why they think this is a great software. So that's where we started seeing these surges and started to build momentum. I think we finished the day. I think we may have been the top product of the day at one point. On JVZoo. On JVZoo. I don't even know if we finished the top of the list that day because it's a game of how all that works, which doesn't mean anything. They have a lot of products on there. Yeah. And I mean, if you sell a product for $9, it's going to get a lot more sales than if you were. [27:59] Oh, gotcha. You know, have one that's higher priced like we were. And we came in. We started at $57 and we created we did this timer urgency thing like the first day it's 57. But if you don't buy on that day, it goes up to 97. So we had some urgency built in a little timer on there that kind of counts down just to get people to buy then to get rid of the hesitation, the procrastination that we all do when we come to a page. Yeah. And what was the end of that first day? How much did you rate or how much did you sold? To be honest, I don't remember. [28:34] It wasn't like crazy amounts. Maybe I don't even know if we hit it. Maybe we hit around $100,000 or a little over $100,000 the first day, which I mean, I guess it's still a crazy number. Yeah. It's always weird when you look back because, yes, I was blown away at that time. But you had such a successful pre-sale, though, your expectations are pretty high for this thing now that you're actually selling it with multiple packages and a full funnel where you have different ways to upsell people. So you're looking to the moon for this thing to just explode. Your mindset is crazy because you get the initial feedback. You talk to other people who have done huge launches. And the goal was to do like a seven-figure launch. [29:17] Could we make a million dollars on this thing? Ultimately, on the launch itself, like that week, I don't think we hit a million dollars. But by the end of the year, we ultimately hit over a million dollars in sales. It's like $1.3 million. And that was like half the year, basically. Okay, the first six months, basically. Yeah, when we launched it. That's awesome. So, yeah. The other thing we did on the back end of that, so after the week is over, you put all this effort and then it's just a week and you're like, man, I create all these videos and it's a week and we did awesome. [29:54] And that's part of the magic of the launch is there's urgency to buy during that because you have a special offer. So the other way you can continue that is to do webinars. They call them back end webinars. So at the back end of your launch, you have specific affiliates that you can do the same type of offer or a similar offer. Maybe you raise the price a little bit or you keep the price. But you go on a webinar and you just sell and offer through a webinar. You show the value of what your product is and you're working with affiliates. So they still get commissioned. So they have incentive to bring you on to their webinar. And then you can offer something of value. [30:35] Okay. So do they, would the customers pay to view the webinar? And you're trying to upsell them during the webinar? No, the webinar is completely free. Okay. So it's a free webinar. Usually it's like, learn how to, like the topic might be, learn how to automate your drop shipping, how to run and start an automated drop shipping business. So you're giving away some free value, some direct advice to those ideal customers. And then, hey, by the way, we have the software that solves half these problems. Exactly. [31:08] That's exactly it. Okay. So that's the story of how we got our first customers and our first, yeah, our first money coming in from those customers. And I started this podcast asking you a question, how, or have you ever had a series of decisions you made that changed your life forever? And you can kind of see on the surface, just the story I told, those decisions did change my life forever and impacted our customers and all of that. The, but just to go a little deeper on that, to throw the old life lesson in there, you know, it's really, everybody, everybody hears the story and sees that and they're like, wow, it's, you know. Some big numbers. Yeah. Big numbers. Big numbers. [32:04] And it happened, you know, it just happened so fast and that's definitely not the story. It doesn't always happen like that. And if I did it again, it may not happen again like that. But the series of decisions that were made to go to the mastermind, to offer this to the, to Chris records audience for, you know, giving it away for free to do an affiliate launch. You know, those are a series of decisions that had impact, but really the impact goes way before that, you know, it goes years before that, five, six, seven years. And it's really about, I like to call it living with intention, kind of knowing where you want to go. I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I knew I wanted to do that years ahead of until it actually, before it actually came to fruition. [32:52] And it started with when everybody else is going out or coming home and relaxing, just dedicating time to learn, to build my skillset, to build leadership skills, to learn business, to learn whatever it was I wanted to pursue. And it was being very, and I love the word living with intention. And that's almost, it's like my motto right now is living with intention. And it's, it's really just getting clear on where you want to end up in doing the things every day, being intentional about doing those things to reach that point. And that's, and that's really the decisions that, uh, that changed my life forever. Um, was, you know, being, yeah, knowing that I wanted to do that and putting in the extra time, sacrificing the, the, the time and, and, um, yeah, yeah. [33:49] So I, uh, I wanted to just share that story, but also end with that, that it seems sometimes when you hear these stories, it seems so easy. It seems like a fairy tale that all of us can live with intention. All of us can have goals, know where we want to go and create the, you know, know the path and be dedicated to that path to get there. Talk really quick about related to what you just said about living with intention. And it's like, you put yourself in a state of mind and a position to be able to take advantage of this opportunity when it came up because you already kind of running your own business as a consultant and you were able to be flexible with your time and put it where you needed to put it to make sure this thing happened. Um, were there any moments, especially in that launch or getting ready for the launch? [34:42] Um, or maybe even, um, right before the presale or during that six month period where you weren't making any sales, was there any moments of doubt or, you know what I mean? Some of the darker side, cause it did happen pretty fast. So maybe there wasn't time for those kinds of self doubt or questioning of your, of what you were doing. Yeah, that's good. And yeah, to piggyback on what you were saying, um, and there's some really cool quotes and I don't have them, but, uh, about preparation because you know, like it really is if, what if I went to that mastermind and I wasn't prepared or, you know, I think about that a lot. Like what if I had those same decisions and I even made those same decisions and I hadn't done the things beforehand that I had done? Like I hadn't learned Facebook advertising. I hadn't learned marketing or. Right. [35:38] Cause the whole reason you were at that place to even be there to take part in that mastermind and to invest that 10,000 was because you were in a habit of investing in yourself. Yeah. I think that was something as somebody watching from the sidelines, when you were going through this process, noticed the difference between you and other people. And even myself at the time is you were intentionally doing things to invest in yourself, reading business books and do go into conferences and things like that. And, um, I think that's a big, a big point. And that was a big lesson for me just watching you go through this thing. Yeah. And it's so, it's so key. And yeah, if I had not done any of those things and I had those same opportunities, I may have turned out completely different. I may not have even had an idea for drop a five. [36:22] If I had not, you know, worked with the developers, if I'd not tried things before, maybe I didn't have a developer that could even do that. Maybe I just got stuck in that process. Cause you'd tried a few other even software products before then. Right. Yeah. And they, yeah, nothing really, okay. Yeah. Nothing really happened with those. I didn't, I didn't even know how to promote them at the time. I was, you know, I was just building things, um, that I, you know, that were solving problems that I had. [36:48] Um, and I, you know, and I wanted to do something with them, but it's, uh, but I look at it all as a process, um, of like, if you are living with intention, um, like you just, you have to understand that it's usually, it just doesn't happen overnight. It takes years and years. But the, the, the, the motivating thing about it is you, you, as you get close and it's really hard to explain this, or I feel like it is to get the aha moment, or at least for me is, um, when you live with intention and you know where you want to end up, the progress is really the magic, the progress of getting closer to that. It's not, you know, sitting down in a brainstorming session and coming up with an idea like that, you know, right after you just came up with your goal to make a million dollars or her. [37:40] I mean, it's the process of, of getting closer and closer and closer to that. Some people, the reason I say that is when you have a goal and you really want that goal. And then you, the first time you fall, the first time you stumble, you're like, you're just so defeated. But those are the opportunities, um, where you, it's all, it's about your mindset. If you look at it in a different way of like, you're, you're just making consistent progress towards your goal and you're getting closer and closer. And if you look back from where you were, uh, like at a year ago, um, hopefully you can look back and you've been disciplined and you're like, man, I'm so much further. You know, I'm not at the ultimate goal, but I can look back and see I've come a long way in this journey. [38:24] And if you keep doing that eventually, I mean, I can't say a hundred percent, eventually you're going to hit your goal, but you have, you put, you set yourself up for the opportunities like I had with the mastermind and somebody sharing an idea and being able to just jump on that idea and run with it. Yeah. I think that's one of the most interesting takeaways is if you put yourself into that mindset of being in a lifestyle of intentionally moving towards your goal and learning from the mistakes and the failures and everything, because you'd had several, what you could say, quote unquote failures, things that you had tried, hadn't worked out. For sure. Um, and, but you were learning from each one and it's almost like you make some version of success inevitable. I mean, it's nothing's guaranteed in life. [39:11] We could all die in a car wreck, you know, but if you're in that almost like a scientific approach where you have an idea, you try something, it works or not, either way you take the lessons from it and try to do it better the next time. Just keep iterating through that process. Exactly. And I think that's it. You, you know, where you want to go, you invest, you dive into those areas that you want, that you need, you kind of, you have to be self-aware. It's like, where do I need to improve? Okay. I'll do those things. Uh, okay. Now I have an idea. [39:40] Let's practice it a little bit of what I've learned. I've okay. I'm still weak in these areas. Let's learn some more. And then it's just that process ongoing of learning and improving, practicing, like taking some chances. And you can do things the smart way or different ways, reduce risk if you need to. Um, yeah. So when I was, when I was working at the university of Alabama, I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. So for those two years there, I began to prepare to be an entrepreneur. I built up a little cashflow business. [40:13] I negotiated my first job as a consultant coming out of there. So I technically worked for myself, even though I was working four days a week for somebody else. I owned my own business. Um, then I could split that, split that into working for two agencies. And then I, I started working with, uh, one agency, um, just for three days a week there in the majority of my cashflow. So, so I had two days to work on my own business, uh, ideas. And so you can take these progress, these small little steps, incremental steps and, uh, and to set you up for success for when that moment really does arrive that can take you to like a, a higher level of success. Chase, you've shared some awesome truth with us today. Thank you for coming by recording on the show. [41:09] Uh, I think that there's some real practical lessons that people, that other entrepreneurs can apply to other people who dream about being an entrepreneur, uh, can learn from and apply to their business and their goals. Um, yeah. Any other takeaways you want to put out into the world? Uh, do we need to follow you on social media? No. Support Dropified. You guys can go to Dropified.com. Yeah. Right. Yep. [41:38] Dropified.com. And you guys are on all the different social media platforms. Yeah. You can probably, yeah. Just type in Dropified at Dropified on most of them and we will come up. Um, and something, oh, I was going to say. Yeah. So for, for those of you who don't know, Paris and I, we've known each other for a while. Yeah. So we should next podcast. [41:59] We do 20 years. We could probably have a really funny, fun podcast of just our life stories. We have some, some wild adventures back in the day. Yeah. We, uh, traveled to when we were 16, we traveled to a state. This was before phones and navigation. We put the old map. Before phones. Well, before smartphones, I should say. Before phones. [42:22] We're not that old. Okay. Back in 1728. Uh, yeah. Uh, just out of our high senior, kind of our senior. So we were like 17 or 18. Yeah. We, uh, hopped in a couple of cars with some friends of ours and drove to a music festival. We're from Alabama. We drove to Illinois. [42:43] Yeah. And, uh. Cornerstone. Cornerstone. Yep. In 2001. Yeah. 2001 Cornerstone. I think so. And broke down on the way there. [42:54] We, uh, ran out of gas money while we were there. So we had no way back. So, Paris and our friend Sean performed tricks. And we wrestled people for money. Yeah. There's this game called Star Wars where you lock your hands and point your finger at each other. This was the beginning of our entrepreneurial endeavors. And Chase showed his true colors by being the one who kind of orchestrated the whole thing. And while me and Sean were the ones out there fighting people and Sean was doing backflips. I think you got in the ring though and did some Star Wars wrestling on people. [43:27] I did. I did. But yeah, we should, we'll definitely have to have a different show on all of, all of that. But, uh, no, I really appreciate you having me on and hopefully brought some, some value and at least you just shared the story and inspired some, some people to live intentionally. Awesome. Thanks, Chase. Thanks.