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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian Lofermento, and I am so very excited for today's episode and, in particular, today's guest, because this is someone who has truly an incredible entrepreneurial journey.
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I'm looking forward to hearing his story from him firsthand, as well as how all of those little steps that I'm going to tell you.
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They're're not gonna make sense when I tell you all about his background, but I can't wait to hear how all of those steps made it into what has culminated into an incredible business that revolves around the world of content.
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I feel like we throw around the content word way too much in entrepreneurship and, as someone who's been in the content world for a very long time, this is someone who's digitizing content, packaging content in completely new ways.
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I'm excited to hear all about it.
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So let me tell you about today's guest.
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His name is Addison Chan.
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Addison has a really interesting background.
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Like I said, addison has sold motivational speaking courses, he's been a private investigator, he's been a tech guy, he's been a cruising sailor, he's been a Facebook content creator and an author.
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Yes, how the heck do all of those things fit in If you look at his career path.
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You might think that this guy has no idea what he wants to do when he grows up, but the reality is that each position he's had has naturally evolved into the next.
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I'm so excited to hear that part of his story and what he's doing now with Land and Sea Software is just an extension of the career trajectory that he's been on.
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In fact, he doesn't think that he could be doing what he's doing now had he not followed the path that he's taken, because, in Addison's words, we are the sum of our experiences, and for all of us in our own entrepreneurial journeys it doesn't quite make sense until we look in the rearview mirror.
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So we're all going to get so many insights, not only from Addison's subject matter expertise today, but also his own personal entrepreneurial journey.
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So I'm excited about this one.
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I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Addison Chan.
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All right, addison, I am so very excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first.
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Welcome to the show.
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Thank you, brian, nice to be here.
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Yes, I am so excited you heard the teaser.
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Honestly, addison, I always ask guests to take us beyond the bio.
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In your case, I want some stories from you, because this stuff doesn't make sense on the surface level.
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Take us beyond that bio.
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Walk us through your story leading up to this point.
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Well, you know it's been a, it's a, it's an interesting journey.
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And when I was listening to you read that bio I said this guy's completely schizophrenic.
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I mean I wouldn't even have them in my room.
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But you know the all the pieces do link together.
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You know we started with motivational speaking and that you know motivational speaking is really a sales job.
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You know you have to be able to present yourself to people, and in order to do that and to be successful at it, you had to have a way of managing all of those contacts.
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And this was long before, you know, all of the Salesforce type tools were available to manage prospects.
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And so I started playing around with databases and developing software from that.
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And you know that's when I really got the idea that you know there's more to this personal computer stuff than just typing in, typing out speeches and writing documents.
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There's some real power here behind the data.
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And so you know that motivational speaking led to and this is a bit of a leap led to my becoming a private investigator, because one of the organizations that I spoke for was in the security business and they liked what I did.
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They liked what I you know the messages I delivered so they hired me as a general manager to do the same thing for their staff motivating and, you know, keeping them doing the things that they were doing.
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And in that particular business, you know the it was evolving and technology was starting to take a much larger role and we found that we were actually losing a lot of business to more automated ways of maintaining security.
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And so I put my my amateur computer science engineer hat on and I developed a way of helping retailers, who were our major clients, do fraud detection.
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Most of the fraud detection systems that were available at that time required major investments, large computers and the.
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It was really out of the reach of a lot of the smaller or the medium-sized retailers, and so I put my hat on again and developed a system that created this, that allowed retailers to do fraud detection on personal PCs.
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You know we were doing data warehousing.
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I guess before data warehousing was a thing I remember.
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You know spending $4,000 of.
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You know the last few dollars I had in my bank account buying a 400-gigabyte hard drive, which today is next to nothing you can put that on an iPhone almost, but back in those days it was a thing that was almost the size of my desk and it allowed us to do some data mining that just wasn't possible in other systems.
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And so, you know, that system actually took off.
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I realized very quickly that the software that we developed was much more profitable than doing the security services themselves.
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And so we branched off and became, from a security company we became a technology company.
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And then, you know, we were acquired by some, by a very large software company, in fact the largest software company in the world, sap.
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And you know, the rest is kind of history.
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I checked out, you know, I had a few dollars in the bank and I could enjoy, you know, the fruits of my labor, as it were.
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And so I bought a sailboat, sold my house, waited for my kids to graduate from university, and my wife and I took off and headed.
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We were going to sail around the world.
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I mean, the boat is equipped for that, it's still equipped for that, but you know it's a hard work sailing.
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And so when we got down into the Caribbean, we landed in Cuba and fell in love with the place.
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You know there's, if you want to talk about entrepreneurs, cuba is the place to go for entrepreneurship, because you know they've had all kinds of people there that all kinds of setbacks, the government to put up barriers, foreign governments have put up barriers, and yet these guys thrive.
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They look, always look for the positive, and they can create something out of nothing in a way that I've never seen anywhere before.
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And so we fell in love with the place.
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And you know, our cruising style isn't to go, you know, to the American Express 21 countries in 17 days.
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We tend to move in, and so we circumnavigated Cuba a couple of times and during all my journeys I took notes I'm a hardcore note note journal keeper and I turned all that information into a cruising guide and it was one of the first new cruising guides for for Cuba that in many, many years because, as, as some of you may know, it's it's hard to get to, and so, from from, I wrote the cruising guide.
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It was and I put this in air quotes a best seller because it was the only one really out there that could be sold, and I asked my publisher to develop a uh, an electronic version, a digital version, because a lot of the people that go to Cuba go from Central America and from the Eastern Caribbean, where there was no way to get a physical book.
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There's no Amazon in these places, so there's no way to get a book to them.
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And I said you know, we're losing a big chunk of business there.
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And you know, my publisher came back and said well, you know, we can do a Kindle version or we can do a PDF version.
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Came back and said well, you know, we can do a Kindle version or we can do a PDF version.
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And I looked at those and they just they didn't quite meet what I expected a digital product to do.
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And then, on top of all of that, in order to sell on those platforms and to keep your content proprietary, you had to put in all kinds of digital rights management software, which made it just prohibitively expensive.
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For you know, for a small guy like me, you know one book.
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So I said you know, this is a problem that should be solvable.
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And I put my software engineering hat back on again and hired some young engineers.
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Because the one thing I did learn about the software business if you want to do anything in software, hire a guy that's fresh out of school, that's fresh with all the latest ideas, and put him to work.
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And so I found a fellow that has become my business partner and he and I worked together very closely and developed that very first version of.
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You know we called it the Cuba Land and Sea app, which was much you know the title of my, of my book and my Facebook page and my publisher saw it and said, hey, this is pretty cool, I think we would like to do that.
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And so, you know, waterway guide, who was my publisher at the time, has become my, you know, became my, our launch customer, and that was about four years ago.
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My, you know, became our launch customer, and that was about four years ago.
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And you know, we haven't really looked back since.
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We've been developing the platform and adding features to it and you know, what started out to be a way of publishing a single book has turned out to be something quite a bit more than that.
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And you know, along the way we've learned that there's much more to, you know, much more to publishing digital content than just a book, and so we're starting to adapt to all kinds of different ways of distributing content.
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For, you know, even folks like yourself, podcasters you know the we can actually provide you with a branded presence on the app stores Google Play Store, apple App Store and, with a touch of a button, all of your content is now available in a you know, a mobile friendly format that is fully customized.
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You know, if you were going to do that in, you know, even a few years ago, even today, if you were to do that, it would cost you tens.
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If you were going to do that in, you know, even a few years ago, even today, if you were to do that, it would cost you 10s of 1000s of dollars to do it right.
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And you know, we've turned our one book platform you know that vanity project that I pulled out four years, five years ago now, the and turned it into a content distribution platform that's available to anybody and for a relatively small amount hundreds instead of thousands of dollars you can have your own presence.
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So all of that to say, here we are.
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I love that overview, addison, for so many reasons.
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I want to call two of them out in particular for listeners, and the first one is that so many businesses as someone who interviews entrepreneurs every single day of my life so many businesses start out by serving a past or current version of ourselves.
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And, addison, that's right there in your own journey.
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Is you decided, hey, there's a need here?
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I'm going to scratch my own itch because you're right, guidebooks, all of these books, they don't.
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They do not do it justice on Kindle, and I promise you I'm like the Kindle's biggest fan in the world.
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I only read books on Kindle.
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Yeah, it's cool to hear that's the same for you as well, but it doesn't do justice, it's not engaging.
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You can't click things, the images are absolutely still terrible on the Kindle display screen, and so I love that part of your journey that you scratch your own itch.
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But then, secondly, addison, I want to give you huge kudos because it's easy to hear about in a story, but it is a big leap and there's a lot of execution involved in the fact that you not only solve this problem for yourself, but you realize there's value here and I want to provide that value to others, and I want to build a business that also provides this to other companies, trade associations, conferences, all these different use applications, which Addison, by the way.
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Yes, we need to talk within the world of podcasting, because to have a customized app like that you're right, I know, as a podcaster, it would cost so much money for us to do that, but it would be of service to me and of service to our audience to have that hub where they can more deeply engage with our content.
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So the problems and the needs are very clear and I love the fact that you've brought a solution to the marketplace.
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Speaking of which, one thing that I really love about the research that I did ahead of today's conversation is you shared it with me beforehand about one of your two business philosophies of invest in yourself.
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Talk to us about how important that's been in your journey, because I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs don't understand how to play around with that term of investing.
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We want to.
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We invest a lot as entrepreneurs.
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We invest time, resources, money, all of these things, but your approach to it is really important when it comes to giving value and doing things right in a way that serves you and serves others.
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Please give us insights into that, addison.
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Well, so the I mean the lifeblood of business is cash right, and so the you know, one of the typical entrepreneurial startups is to go out and raise a bunch of venture capital, find some angel investors, and then you surf that wave of other people's money and hope you make it to the beach before the thing falls over top of you.
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I've been down that road, I've done it and I can tell you, if you're doing it right now, god love you.
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It's a tough way to make a living.
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It looks good at first when you get that term sheet, but that term sheet turns into a shackle real quick, and so the way to avoid some of that is to invest the things that you already have.
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You can invest your own money.
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I mean, I've second mortgaged my house.
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I've done all those things along the way.
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I'm at that stage in my life now where I'm not going to do that.
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I don't need to do that and I won't do that.
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But what I can do is I can put myself into it.
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And you know, in business, you know everybody thinks that business revolves around contracts.
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We hear a lot of talk about relationships and the warm touchy-feely kind of stuff, but at the end of the day, everybody wants to have some kind of an agreement, something that's hard, fast on a piece of paper with a signature on it, and there's a time and there's a place for all of that.
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But if you're starting out new and you don't really have a track record behind you and you know we're the new kids on the block from a content distribution, content publishing point of view, nobody's ever heard of us before you go to our website and it's something that you know we threw together with a few for a few hundred dollars, just to say that we have a link.
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You know, in fact, a lot of times just, but when I work with a client, the contract is secondary and I tell them up front that I'm here to make some money.
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But long before we get to that stage, we invest a lot of ourselves in preparing not just a demo, something that's canned, and we change a couple of logos around.
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We actually build out a solution for them using our platform.
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We kind of, you know, consume our own product in order to sell our product and you know, sometimes it's a dry hole.
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You do the work and nothing comes out of it.
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But you know what it works more often than not.
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And you know I go back to my last business, the fraud detection business.
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We use that same model.
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I applied that same philosophy, I would go to a major retailer like Staples was my launch customer in Canada and the and I.
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We lived with those guys for better part of three years and not only did they become our first customer, they actually became our test bed and they provided us with insights that I never would have gotten had I sat and tried to draw this thing out, you know, as a business plan and so by investing ourselves, running the risk of maybe getting shafted, you know, maybe coming out on the short end of the stick, we won, and we won big time.
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And we're applying that same model now, which is why we're going to customers.
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Like you know, our latest is the Rat Guides in the UK.
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They're the largest publisher of independent, the largest independent publisher of travel guides in the world.
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They have 200 titles, a lot of it written by, you know, guys like you and me that have gone on their travels, recorded their journals and then have gone back and filled in all the gaps to provide a very comprehensive package of information for a more adventurous type traveler Like we're digitizing things like Greenland, and you know we're going to be working on Afghanistan soon and we've done Malawi in Africa, but we've done a lot of that work on spec.
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This was long before we had an agreement in place because they needed to see it and a demo.
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It's cute, it gets some attraction, it gets some, you know it.
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It's cute, it gets some attraction, it gets some some.
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Uh, um uh, you know it.
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It picks the curiosity.
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But until you actually say you know, until you answer that one question, what's in it for me from the customer's point of view?
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You know, how can I use this thing to actually make money and can it fit into my organization without disrupting my organization, even though people that are looking for digital footprints understand that some disruption is required, until you make it obvious that that pain is worth their effort, they ain't going to do it.
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And so that's what I mean when I say invest yourself, put yourself out front, the assets that you have, which is your drive, your passion for what you're doing, and give it away, and the people that you want to do business with will pay you for that.
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Yeah, addison, I'll tell you what.
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It doesn't happen to me very often here on the air, but you're bringing me all the way back to 2012, when I had started my SEO and marketing agency.
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I was still living in Boston at the time, and Addison, my business partner, and I, we had no idea how to get clients, and so search engine optimization was kind of like this dark arts that nobody really knew about, and so what we decided was we were going to put together this is far before the days of AI being accessible to us.
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We would, literally by hand, create these SEO plans for businesses that we really wanted to work with, and these were in-depth 30-page PDFs saying here's exactly what we would do to your website.
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We would just email them it for free to start that conversation, and I remember we, as two 22-year-olds, we were like, what if they just take this and do it themselves?
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And the answer is well then they did, and we still provided value in some way.
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One day, we're going to get business from doing this, and that became the leading way of us initiating conversations and sitting down, and, sure enough, quite a high percentage of them said why don't you guys implement this plan for us?
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And, of course, we love that.
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And so, addison, you already know this leads me straight into your second business philosophy.
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I love the way you articulate this.
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I'm so excited for you to introduce this to listeners, which is I'll work for free, but I won't work for cheap.
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Addison, talk to us about that approach.
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Well.
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So I mean, it's really just a follow on to the whole philosophy of investing in yourself.
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You know, nobody's going to pay you more than you think you're worth.
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I mean, I've never had anybody come to me and say, oh, you know, you're such a great guy would be more.
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You have to drag that, drag those, those sales out of them screaming and kicking, even after you discover, even after you've developed, you know, that prototype, that, that, that relationship, the, and so I'll do what I need to do to convince you, to get you to the point where you say, yes, what you have is what we need.
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And I want you as a partner, not just as some guy selling a piece of software, because there's a lot of guys out there selling pieces of software and you know they're here today, they're gone tomorrow.
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It takes me a little bit longer to develop that position, to develop that relationship to the point where you know you and I can have that conversation of well, tell me what's bothering you, brian, and you know we'll figure out a way to fix it for you.
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You know, to the extent that we can.
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But by the time I get to that level, I'm not doing that for free anymore, right.
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You know, once we've established that there is a relationship there, then there's value, and that value is, you know, there's a price for that, and so I you won't find me going in and doing a discount deal, you know, if you do this, I'll give you 10% off or 15, whatever that number is, because that's a loser's game.
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You're yourself to the bottom, and so what we do is we go in, we do it for free, we do well, we don't do it for free, we do for nothing.
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There's a difference and and, but at some point, when we've earned our way in the door, then you pay and, and you and we both go into that initial.
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You know that, that, that mating ritual, knowing that ultimately it's gonna turn into a business relationship and money has to change hands.
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I make that abundantly clear from upfront.
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So there's no, you know, bait and switch here.
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I just tell people that we'll do what's necessary to make sure that you're comfortable with spending money with us.
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Yeah, I love those insights, Addison.
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I'm so appreciative of that because this is I always say success leaves clues, and this is really revealing behind the scenes of why you've been so successful at all of your ventures.
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I'm just going to lump them all into.
00:21:22.401 --> 00:21:26.451
This is because of that mindset and that commitment to value that goes behind it.
00:21:26.451 --> 00:21:37.559
And also I'm going to add this word in here it's a little bit of faith, addison, and I love the fact that you have that faith to say no if I provide value in the marketplace, money is a natural byproduct of that.
00:21:37.559 --> 00:21:40.849
I think that's such an important mindset for all of us to have as entrepreneurs.
00:21:41.191 --> 00:21:52.852
I want to ask you this question, addison, because, leading up to today's conversation, I looked at your entire journey and it's actually even added onto it more, hearing you speak here today about you talk about doing data warehousing.
00:21:52.912 --> 00:22:03.570
Before data warehousing was a thing, and when I look at your business now you know digitizing content to actually create an experience to add onto our existing ecosystems.
00:22:03.912 --> 00:22:16.965
What I really see, addison, is that not only have you evolved with the times, but you've stayed ahead of the trends, because I would argue that AI is really jeopardizing content in the most traditional ways we view it.
00:22:16.965 --> 00:22:23.512
Historically, you could create great content and you could succeed on Amazon, kdp, kindle, direct Publishing.
00:22:23.512 --> 00:22:27.488
You could succeed on social media, but now anybody can do all of these things.
00:22:27.488 --> 00:22:40.365
What you're creating is an experience an experience for the person creating the content, that they can make it more dynamic and they can own that part of their ecosystem, and a heck of a lot more engaging for the people who are consuming that content.
00:22:40.365 --> 00:22:45.506
So, addison, is this something intentional from you that you say I want to stay ahead of the curves?
00:22:45.506 --> 00:22:46.808
Where do you see it?
00:22:46.808 --> 00:22:51.548
With the advent of AI, I imagine that you feel really good about where you are in the marketplace.
00:22:51.548 --> 00:22:54.473
Talk to me about that staying ahead of the curves mindset.
00:22:55.240 --> 00:22:56.804
Well, so you know it's.
00:22:56.804 --> 00:23:00.803
I don't know if it's really staying ahead of the curve as much as it's.
00:23:00.803 --> 00:23:03.451
You know working with the curve.
00:23:03.451 --> 00:23:21.271
You know the term that we use often is curated content, because you know, if you think about the guidebook area and we've expanded into other things but if you take guidebooks, for example, everything that's in a guidebook, almost everything there will be some little gems that you know.
00:23:21.271 --> 00:23:25.997
I can point you to some places in the Bahamas and Cuba that does not appear in any guidebook.
00:23:26.017 --> 00:23:26.416
And guess what?
00:23:26.416 --> 00:23:30.751
I won't put it into a guidebook because I want it to stay secret and proprietary.
00:23:30.751 --> 00:23:32.950
But most everything in a guidebook can be found on Google.
00:23:32.950 --> 00:23:36.930
It's I wanted to get stay secret and proprietary, but the most everything in a guidebook can be found on Google.
00:23:36.930 --> 00:23:41.961
They can be found in Bing, in some search engine, some social media chat group.
00:23:41.961 --> 00:23:50.722
There's all kinds of freebie crowdsourcing type things out there and AI will take all that stuff, package it up and make it look like a pretty nice, pretty nice product.
00:23:50.722 --> 00:23:54.594
Take all that stuff, package it up and make it look like a pretty nice, pretty nice product.
00:23:54.594 --> 00:23:55.015
What do you?
00:23:55.015 --> 00:23:56.141
But how do you know?
00:23:56.141 --> 00:23:59.351
It's right, that's the million dollar question.
00:23:59.391 --> 00:24:02.180
You don't buy a guidebook for something to read for the fun of it.
00:24:02.180 --> 00:24:06.923
You buy it for hardcore information that, in the case of a cruising sailor, you bet.
00:24:06.923 --> 00:24:09.410
You bet your life on that.
00:24:09.410 --> 00:24:26.424
That you know Joe Schmoe whatever he wrote in that little crowdsource blurb knows what he's talking about, because I've read a lot of crowdsourcing material and I kind of scratched my head and said how the heck did that guy survive that, like why is he even telling people that that's the right thing to do?
00:24:26.424 --> 00:24:56.506
And yet, without some voice of reason, some arbiter of the truth, you really, if you're looking for information, you don't know if it's real information of what we do.
00:24:56.526 --> 00:25:02.925
It's providing that knowledge stream that's been curated, that you know, that allows our customers, our clients, to go to their customer and say you can trust us.
00:25:02.925 --> 00:25:20.515
Here are all the things that we can give you for you to make a decision, and this is what we've done to verify the information so that you know you may go find 15 different opinions on on crowdsources and from Google searches and so on.
00:25:20.515 --> 00:25:25.240
Use that as your background, come to us to help you make the decision.
00:25:25.240 --> 00:25:27.224
And that's where we are.
00:25:27.224 --> 00:25:29.391
That's how we're staying ahead of the curve.
00:25:29.391 --> 00:25:30.031
Staying.
00:25:30.031 --> 00:25:31.883
We'll use AI.
00:25:31.883 --> 00:25:34.130
Ai is in our distant future.
00:25:34.130 --> 00:25:41.988
We will incorporate certain aspects of AI to automate some of that background searching.
00:25:41.988 --> 00:25:53.191
But at the end of the day, it's a relationship, it's you and me and the author of that guide that says this is what you should do in this particular situation and that's what we're facilitating.
00:25:53.685 --> 00:25:54.549
Yeah, I love that.
00:25:54.549 --> 00:25:55.667
Addison, I'll tell you what.
00:25:55.667 --> 00:26:03.476
Here on the air, hearing the way that you are talking about the powers of what you and your team can build, I'm seeing a million use cases.
00:26:03.476 --> 00:26:13.424
You and I already tossed out the idea for podcasters Having our own entrepreneur to entrepreneur app that houses our audio content, our video content, our blog posts.
00:26:13.424 --> 00:26:19.330
What a really cool way for people to engage with that content inside of an ecosystem that we own.
00:26:19.330 --> 00:26:20.653
I think that that's really powerful.
00:26:20.713 --> 00:26:23.147
But, addison, I'll be honest, I'm even going beyond that.
00:26:23.147 --> 00:26:25.574
I'm thinking for a service-based agency.
00:26:25.574 --> 00:26:36.017
I've owned an agency in a prior life and I'm thinking how cool would it be to have all of a client's onboarding materials and upsell opportunities and all of this content living inside of there.
00:26:36.017 --> 00:26:42.875
I can see these possibilities because I've obviously seen your website and seen pictures and images of how your apps look and how they function.
00:26:42.875 --> 00:26:51.325
But for listeners who haven't been to your website just yet, explain what that ecosystem looks like for a business owner, especially for all of their content.
00:26:51.325 --> 00:26:54.454
What does it look like to live inside of their own app?
00:26:54.454 --> 00:26:57.424
What's the advantage to that style of delivery?
00:26:58.425 --> 00:27:11.652
well, well, I mean first of all, the uh, having if, if you have an app, um, that is on the google play store and on the, you know, on the apple app store.
00:27:11.652 --> 00:27:19.196
I mean, organically, you, you've exposed yourself to millions, literally millions of potential customers around the world.
00:27:19.196 --> 00:27:21.153
Now you have to make your content stand out.
00:27:21.153 --> 00:27:27.778
But you know and I say this with all due respect people's attention spans are short these days.
00:27:27.778 --> 00:27:35.911
They are not going to spend time going through web pages, they're not going to dig through a ton of stuff to find what they're looking for.
00:27:35.911 --> 00:27:38.034
They want it here, they want it here, they want it now.
00:27:38.034 --> 00:27:41.398
And so a link to an app click.
00:27:41.398 --> 00:27:47.438
The answer to the question is one more click away.
00:27:47.438 --> 00:27:57.488
People will do that.
00:27:57.508 --> 00:28:04.715
Once you have that person on into your ecosystem through that app, then you open the door to all kinds of other communications channels that that were previously more tenuous.
00:28:04.715 --> 00:28:17.394
You know, if you want to do an SMS campaign today, you have to sign 10 million disclaimers and go through all of these verification processes and then all the guy does is go, click, turn it off the and you're gone.
