Welcome to this episode of The High Profit Event Show, hosted by Rudy Rodriguez. Today, we're excited to have VJ Anma, the founder of Redwoods Crypto, as our distinguished guest. VJ is a renowned figure in the cryptocurrency space, known for his expertise in crypto investing and education. With a rich background that includes investing in Bitcoin since 2013, holding a master's degree in computer science, partnering in a crypto fund, and running a crypto education company, VJ brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to our discussion. His notable accomplishment includes building and selling a crypto tech software to Ernst & Young, highlighting his significant impact on the crypto industry.

In this episode, we dive into VJ's journey of running profitable crypto summits and events. He shares his philosophy of providing value by understanding and solving customer pain points. This approach led to the success of a recent Redwoods Crypto Education event in Miami, Florida, where VJ employed a strategy of small-scale experiments to gauge interest before fully committing to the event. This method of engaging with the community and tailoring the event based on feedback underscores the importance of customer-centric planning in the event industry.

Furthermore, VJ elaborates on the promotional strategies and the team dynamics that contributed to the event's success. The use of a mastermind community, strategic partnerships, and attending relevant events were key in building awareness and attracting the right audience. The conversation also touches on the logistical aspects of event planning, including the significance of having a competent team and the lessons learned from their first major event.

VJ's passion for education extends beyond just events. He discusses his vision for the Redwoods mastermind group, aiming to create a supportive community in the fast-paced and often volatile crypto market. This initiative reflects his broader mission to elevate collective human consciousness through transformative relationships and education in groundbreaking technologies like blockchain.

Listeners will gain invaluable insights into the complexities of hosting high-profit events in the niche field of crypto education, as well as the broader implications of blockchain technology on society. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the intersection of technology, education, and event management.

Don't forget to check out Redwoods Crypto for educational resources and the Genesis Fund for investment opportunities. VJ's commitment to providing a hype-free, intelligent investment perspective in the crypto space is truly inspiring. Whether you're a seasoned crypto enthusiast or new to the blockchain world, this episode offers a wealth of knowledge and inspiration for navigating the crypto landscape.

Want to connect with VJ?

Website: https://redwoodscrypto.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijaianma/?originalSubdomain=pr

Twitter: https://twitter.com/vjanma?lang=en

Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/people/Vijai-Anma/100073067830698/

If you'd like to be a guest on the High Profit Event Show, click HERE

Hi, welcome to The High Profit Event Show. On today's episode, we have a very special guest with us today, Mr. VJ. Welcome, sir.

Thank you. Thank you for having me on your show.

Absolutely, man. You're a rockstar guest, especially in the field of crypto investing and crypto education. It's such a privilege to have you on the show, getting to learn from your experience in running profitable crypto summits and events. A few points that I want to highlight for our audience to lean in, reasonably lean in to tune into what we have to say here today. One VJ is a crypto expert. So I know he's been investing in Bitcoin since I think 2013. He also has a master's in computer science, and he actually is a partner in a crypto fund as well. He also runs a crypto education company. He also sold, built and sold a crypto tech software to Ernst & Young. So you have a lot of experience in the field of both cryptocurrencies as well as summits and events, which is a really unique combination, which I think are both very popular right now. So we're very excited for this interview.

I'm excited to share. Also to be able to kind of highlight some of the mistakes that we have made and want to get these learnings to as many people as possible. So thank you for having me on the show.

Awesome, VJ. Thank you so much. The first question I'd love to ask of you is, you recently did an event a few months back for Redwoods Crypto Education event in Miami, Florida, and for the Miami area. But why did you decide to do that event? What had you say we're doing an event?

I've always believed in providing people what they want, like finding out what people want and being able to help them and serve them. So that's a fundamental operating philosophy across all the companies. When the companies that I have started, I've always found out what is the customer pain point and being able to solve that. So when we decided to do a summit, initially, I always talk about doing different experiments. You do a $1, $10, $100, $1,000 experiment, meaning that you first do a $1 experiment to validate the idea before you do a $10 experiment. You do a $10 experiment before you do $100, etc. What I mean by that is how do we know that this is something that people would be interested in? So one of the things that we did earlier on, is before we even said, okay, we're going to do an event, and decide the dates and book hotels and all the other activities that are required to host a successful event. We asked our community of people, we said, hey, would this be of interest to you? In fact, we had a few of our members talk about it last year about doing something, being able to be in the same room, and there is some magic, something magical happens. You have a very high bandwidth communication when you're in the same room with each other. So we reached out to all the people and then said, hey, like now we are thinking about this, would this be of interest to you? That's like a $1 experiment, what it costs us is nothing other than asking people and listening for their feedback. Once we did that, then we did a $10, $100 experiment, to make sure that it's not only attractive for members in our community, and to be able to serve others also.

Then we went and asked them, he said, hey, like now if we do host an event, what kind of things would you like to learn about or hear from the event? Then we listened to people and what they had to say. So the entire event was more of a pull methodology, meaning that we found out from the market, from our audience, from our customers, what is it they want, and we provided them exactly what they wanted.

That's awesome, man. I love that the thinking process there is running smaller experiments before bigger experiments, and then asking your audience, what is it they want? Do you want an event? Yes or no? Okay, yes. If you were to come to an event, what were the subjects that people want us to cover? It's so simple, but oftentimes overlooked. I find, and probably the most valuable thing we could ever do, is survey our audience. Thanks for sharing that. You were already kind of touching on it a little bit, excuse me, around promotion and presale. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you did to promote your event?

First is we have a community of people. We run a mastermind. So we want to have an event that kind of honors our existing members and be able to connect with them individually on a one-on-one basis. So that was our intention. So the first one is, once we decided, we found out the location, things that work in our community. Once we decided on that, then we went and said, hey, we have this event, and let us know if you are interested in it because people would say one thing, but act differently, especially people in a very tight knit group of people. Sometimes when put on the spot, people would say that they will buy a particular product when you ask them. However, their behavior would be completely different. So the second stage, once we found out what we wanted, is we said, hey, if you want to register for this, here is a registration link. Here is how you can make your hotel room arrangements. That also gave us an indication for matching what people say with all their behavior of what they are actually doing. Then once we did that, then we had a wider community of audience, wherein we reached out to people and made them aware of our event. There was also another event which was in the area of finances, not related to crypto specifically, but there was an event which was related to the area of finances. We attended that event, and we just talked to people one-on-one about building awareness for the event. Then it just spread through the various social media channels.

I think you're highlighting a really important point here in that finance event you attended. The attendees there were people who were your ideal attendees for your event, which is also a derivative of finance. It's a niche. Crypto is a niche of finance. I found it quite brilliant how you strategically promoted through that event and because you went to where your people already are. Where they're already consuming the thing that you're offering, they're already consumers of education. They've already expressed an interest in finance and an interest in crypto. So it's a very rational next step for them to attend your event. I thought that was pretty awesome.

Great. That is one of the philosophies is to be able to go to a group that is already talking about and discussing the things that are in the similar area, finding affiliate partners. We have another business, and we grew the entire business through affiliates. It's finding a group of people, a community of people that are interested in your particular topic and then incentivizing them to be able to promote your event.

That's brilliant. As simple as it is, that's very brilliant. I think it is definitely valuable for the audience here, especially audience members who are wanting to do an event in the crypto education space. It's like, how do you promote? You find people who already have interest in what you're offering. Awesome, man and then came time for the event itself. One of the things that impressed me about the event is, one, you had a really great lineup of speakers and VJ, one of the things I thought you did brilliantly is that you put a great team together, man. You put a really good team of people in the room, and you put people in the right place, and you let them do their job. It seemed like the event from the outside, from my perspective, seemed like the event ran quite smoothly as a result. Can you share with us a little bit about that, how you built the team and how the event went?

Rudy, obviously, thank you. You are part of the team for helping us make sure we deliver a high quality event. At this point for any business, the main, Tony Robbins, who is one of both of our mentors, talks about how the chokehold of any business is the psychology of the business owner. We always try to add at least one new member to the management team every year. So we have another person, Dominic, who was also on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. He has done events before. So he knew the in and out of events of how to be able to manage all the back end side of things, like registering with the hotels and taking care of the logistics side of it. So it's being able to rely and trust on the team, identifying the right people. People have been there, done that before. Putting together an event is such a complex process. It might sound really simple, oh, it's just put together an event, but there are so many moving pieces. We needed to have experts in each of those pieces and Rudy, you being one of the experts, especially on being able to help us and monitor, track some of the metrics from the sales and the effectiveness side of things, that is really crucial. We hadn't really thought about that and designing the flow of the event. What happens first? What happens second? How do you create an experience for people that is ultimately in their best interest?

All of this requires multiple minds, putting all of our collective minds together and delivering a great experience for our members who are attending the event.

Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you for including me as part of that team. But it wasn't just me. You had Dominic on the team. I know you had Justin, your CEO. You had other members behind the scenes who were setting chairs and building collateral and managing payments and for your first event that you did in that particular company, I was really impressed by how smooth things ran. You, as the leader, really, you just were calm, cool, and collected because you put people in the right place to do the job, the right job. It seemed to work out pretty well.

I didn't have much to do before the event because the team took care of most of it. It was a great experience to do it together as a team. Interestingly enough, it was the first time that a lot of us connected in person because it was in the middle of the entire pandemic and some of the team members hadn't met each other in person. So it was a great opportunity for us to connect as a team and to be able to connect with our members and be able to have a connection in person, which is very different from being on Zoom.

Absolutely and coming back to the delivery of the event, you did a three-day event, to be clear, for the audience. You had an opportunity for people to join your high-end mastermind program. You had some pretty high caliber people join that program. It's a great program. You have an amazing group and you're expanding and growing it. Can you just maybe chat a little bit about that, the program and this kind of your mindset when it came to bringing people into your program through your event?

So to rewind back maybe about a year or so, originally the intention was to have a mastermind group of people where we are able to learn from each other. So the company is branded as Redwoods and similar to Redwoods that have very shallow roots. The Redwoods are the tallest and the longest living trees on earth, but their roots only go 12 to 15 feet deep. So the Redwood trees do not stand by their own strength of their roots, but because the roots are intertwined with the other Redwood trees around. So the entire kind of mastermind program came from when I was meditating one morning, just came through that I should be doing a mastermind program because this crypto field, it's a fast moving field. There is a lot of fraud and scam which is available in the space, unfortunately. At the same time, it is a pretty significant technology that has a huge impact over the next few years, few decades. So how do we navigate the space and now we navigate a space that is fast moving, where what you learned yesterday is not relevant today. In fact, it's actually detrimental to what you learned yesterday. So that was some of the thinking process behind it and we decided to do a community of people where we are able to learn from each other and support each other on this journey of educating ourselves in the crypto space.

Even though I've been in the space for some time, I still consider myself a beginner and there is so much to learn in the space. That was the original kind of seed for why we started Redwoods was more driven from a place where in which we can give people unbiased, hype-free or devoid of hype, just the real facts and do it from a perspective of an intelligent investor, not driven by the meme coins and all the hype cycle that is happening in the space. That was our core belief and fundamental philosophy behind it. At this point in time, we've been around, we have been through ups and downs of the cycle, always there to support our community. So when we reached out to expand our community, there was a lot of social proof, like people have some of the existing members who were part of the summit. It's not only from our perspective. Others were able to share their experience. That was hugely helpful is getting, we did a success panel. Rudy, thanks for your input and guidance around that, where we showcase people that have been through the program, the results they've gotten. That was also a big factor that helped through the entire process.

Awesome. Thanks for highlighting that. Appreciate that. You do have a great track record with your existing students. I think that one of the things that oftentimes gets overlooked is the social proof aspect of making an offer and having an event. There's six, I've learned from the book, Influence, that there's six reasons why people are motivated to take action or influence. One of the major ones is social proof. That's one of the biggest things that happens in an event. You have all these people coming in from all these different places, and they're all saying, despite the fact that they're at your event, they're saying that you're a credible resource, you're an authority. That's why they're there. Then the fact that you have existing members in your high-end program, and they tell their stories and they tell their testimonials. It's the shortcut for people to make a decision. They're like, well, I don't have to go do all the 10 plus hours of research if I just know that people that I know I can trust also have done this path. Clearly there's something to this. So I just saw that as a great little opportunity to highlight that point of social proof and how powerful that is and that was at your event.

Great. Social proof matters a lot.

So VJ, we kind of got through the core part of our interview here, and now this is kind of more the fun, a little bit of rapid fire popcorn, kind of questions. So I'd love to ask you a few questions and just kind of share whatever comes to mind. It doesn't have to be long answers, just whatever is there for you. What would you say are maybe three of the mistakes, like a few of the mistakes that you've made with your event that now knowing what you know, you'd do it differently.

A couple of things come to mind. One of the things we did was it was a three-day event. It took a longer period of time. We want to experiment with maybe doing a shorter period of time. We had a lot of people show up, but didn't stay for the entire three days from beginning to end. People are coming in and out. So one of the things, I wouldn't call it a mistake, but more of an experiment is to see, hey, can it be as effective if you do it as a shorter event? If you do like a day or a half a day, would we be able to have the same kind of impact and be effective at the same level? So that is something that we kind of are talking about internally. Then there are certain aspects, which were more things that could have been done better. So we had a name tag printed for everyone. The name tag was just printed on one side, not the other. So if the name tag got flipped, people don't know who the person is. So something as simple as, oh, like now we just print the name tag on both sides. So regardless of which way that name tag flips, people will still be able to see the name. So those kinds of minor tweaks are what we are improving. That gets better and better as we do more and more events and the team itself gets an experience and we can have more of a loyal machine.

So the majority of the team have never done a live event before. So considering that, like now we have gained a huge amount of knowledge and experience with the first one. Then we're going to use the learnings from that to make the next one better.

Awesome. Thanks for sharing that. And what would be like a good book or resource you would recommend to someone who's preparing to do a live event?

I don't know if I have a book recommendation specifically for the live events as such. However, I do have a book recommendation, which is more around how do you validate any kind of concept or product project within your organization? It is Lean Startup by Eric Ries. There are like a bunch of different books around how do you find out what customers actually want? So that book talks more about it. There is also another book. I forgot the name of the author. I think it's called The Pull Method. The idea is also very similar if you try and get information from users. Rather than saying, ok, like now we're going to do an event. This is what it is. You ask for information. You get it out of your customers asking, hey, do you want an event? If you have an event, what kind of an event would it be? Would it be a long event, short event? Like who would you like to hear from? What would you like to learn from? So all of that is information that is more pull rather than push. So those are the two books that I would recommend.

Great recommendations. I'm adding those to my list. Absolutely. I made a note of that. We'll put those in the show notes as well for our audience. VJ, what's the best way for listeners to learn more about you and what you do? Where can we send them to learn about you?

So run the hedge fund, Genesis. Genesis.bc is the URL. People can visit it to learn more about the fund. If people are interested, learn more about learning how blockchain works and the opportunities in the blockchain, how people can apply it in their own business, then Redwoods is more of an educational company. Redwoodscrypto.com is the URL for that. Those are places where people can learn more about what we do.

Okay, great. We'll make sure to add those links in the show notes as well for our audience. So I think I know the answer to this question, but I want to ask you so the audience can hear it too. What is the next summit that you want to climb or challenge that you're taking on? And it could be literal here.

Thanks, Rudy. I have a list of goals that I want to accomplish. One of the goals this year is to summit Mount Kilimanjaro. In the background there, I have my vision board with a picture of Kilimanjaro. So that's the next one from a physical side of things is to be able to ultimately climb all the seven highest peaks in all the different continents. I'm going to start with the easiest one, which is Mount Kilimanjaro and being able to hike that. That's more on a physical challenge summit that I want to climb. On a professional level, I want to be able to expand our fund more. We want to be able to help more people and educate them around this groundbreaking technology of blockchain and be able to prepare people so that we can not only learn about this technology, but also at the same time, be able to invest in it and be able to create a financial abundance for ourselves and our family.

Awesome. Thanks for sharing that. When it's all said and done, what legacy do you want to leave? What do you want to be remembered for?

I want to be remembered more for the impact. My mission is to elevate consciousness, elevate collective human consciousness and for me, it's more personal. It's not about going and telling others, oh, no, you need to do this, this and this. For me, what it means is I am elevating my own consciousness. If I elevate my consciousness, then the collective consciousness of the entire humanity improves maybe by a tiny, tiny little. I want to show up both in my personal relationship and professional relationships, where I am acting from a place of these higher vibrations. Like love and joy, and not the lower vibrations. Ultimately, it's about having relationships that are transformational. When I have our relationship, Rudy, you and I, we have had a transformational relationship where just because you being in my life has transformed my life, and I hope vice versa. So I'm more interested in those kinds of relationships that are more transformational, where both people are transformed by the relationship and not transactional, where it's like, no, I give you X, you give me Y. So that is what I would like my legacy to be, to elevate consciousness and to have relationships that are transformational.

That's awesome, man. I like that, taking notes on that. I'm going to add that to my own list of things I want to be remembered for. Well, VJ, this has been a really great interview, man. I appreciate how even in this conversation, I can sense that you bring just a unique level of consciousness and thoughtfulness to what you say and how you say it. Your purpose here, I can tell that you're really here to serve as many people as possible through education and through your fund with this emerging technology of blockchain that I agree that already has and will continue to change the world in a massive way. If someone's still listening to this, I highly recommend, and if you have an interest in crypto blockchain, which is probably most people, definitely check out Redwoods Crypto if you want to increase your level of education. If you are a qualified investor and you're looking to invest, potentially invest with a partner in a fund that is an expert in the field, definitely check out The Genesis Fund. I will include both those links in the show notes for this episode. And if you found value, give us a five-star rating, subscribe if you haven't already, and share this episode with someone who you think you would make a difference for. VJ, before we wrap up, any closing comments?

Rudy, thank you so much for having me on the show. I had a blast. I would love to come on again and share some of the other stories to add more value to your community. Thank you so much for having me and asking all these insightful questions that pulled information from me for the event that we did. Hopefully that's helpful for others who are thinking of doing live events as well.

Most definitely. Thanks for being on with us, Vijay. It was a great interview. Thank you. Thank you.