Maxwell Nee: ScoreApp

[00:00:33] Jason S. Bradshaw: You're not actually trading your time for free. You're trading your time for the learnings that come from being around an entrepreneur.

INTRO CARD

[00:00:56] Jason S. Bradshaw: Now, today's guest is a multi award winning entrepreneur, a bodybuilder and a dancer. He's been featured on TV, radio and in business publications like Forbes, Singapore's Business Times and the Australian Business Review. Maxwell Nee is an Investor and Chief Revenue Officer at ScoreApp, a quiz marketing platform with over 7, 000 paying clients.

[00:01:21] Maxwell Nee: Thank you so much for having me, Jason. I really appreciate it.

[00:01:42] Maxwell Nee: Yeah, so I used to work in corporate. I used to work at the Commonwealth Bank as a corporate analyst. I loved my job at the time. Three promotions in five years. Showed up, gave work like 200 percent every day and then all of a sudden just realized it wasn't for me. Really hit a wall and like in my gut that I just couldn't walk into the office anymore. So I quit and then I moved overseas because I needed a sea change and eventually founded a digital marketing agency. So I sold services in my first business, and then I learned how to productize those services into our courses. Then I started selling courses. Managed to get that business to about 2 million bucks a year with my business partners. It was a crazy, fun, wild ride. First time working remotely, working from a laptop on a beach, all that stuff that you think could never happen to you type of thing. And then, at the same time I exited that business. And an opportunity to invest in ScoreApp came along which then I jumped in immediately and I've invested, follow up invested three times.

[00:03:23] Maxwell Nee: Yeah.

[00:03:36] I quit abruptly. So most people would have had $50K, $100K savings, when they move overseas, I didn't. I had a $10K credit card, because I wasn't planning for it. But I just, something was telling me I got to get out of here. Got to reset my life.

[00:04:37] Maxwell Nee: So what I learned is that there's three ways to go through a learning curve. I went through the hardest and most unintelligent way, which is the worst way is what I did, which is you self fund the learning curve, right? So you're not earning any money. You've got to self fund yourself and you've got to self fund your learning. So I wasn't just earning zero, I was also investing from this 10 grand credit card into whatever I thought would help me. Then in the middle, there is you still got to self fund yourself, but you might work with an entrepreneur for free, and anyone can do this and I really recommend this. Some people, it might shook their ego a little bit, but looking back at it, if I had just approached, gone to a co working space, found the most impressive entrepreneur I could find and said, Hey, look, Jason, I like what you're doing. I'm a new entrepreneur. Can I be your executive assistant for free? And that would have just cut my learning curve in half, and I would have, I'd be a lot further along now. I do that now, I love asking friends, Hey, look, can I just do this? Can I do this for free? And they say, why? And then I say I want to learn the skillset. Can I just shadow you? I do that with my business partners now, like all the time. They must find it annoying.

[00:06:14] Interesting you say that and perhaps not surprising for me because I know Daniel Priestley just recently on Diary of a CEO podcast was asked for some advice around how to become an entrepreneur. And he was echoing what you said to, spend time with entrepreneurs. People that are at least three or four steps ahead of you so that you can learn and even if it's for free you're not actually trading your time for free. You're trading your time for the learnings that come from being around an entrepreneur. So really great advice there. And I would think perhaps a bit of a reinforcement that just quitting and jumping on a plane while obviously you were successful, there's a different ways to go about it.

[00:06:53] Jason S. Bradshaw: You mentioned that you're an investor in ScoreApp and you've been involved in a number of investment rounds with ScoreApp. What is ScoreApp and what made you invest?

[00:08:16] Jason S. Bradshaw: I'm familiar with ScoreApp and some recent acquisition you did. I was familiar with your competitor as well. But, a key that you talked about there was really about providing as I take away from it at least was about ScoreApp is about providing value through that lead generation process. So the client doesn't feel that their just giving you their name and number and then someone's going to come and give them a nice salesy call, but rather there's a value exchange that of course, from a business point of view, it's designed to lead to a sale, hopefully, but the customer gets something.

[00:09:18] Jason S. Bradshaw: What are a couple of powerful strategies that businesses could use to increase the amount of leads they get? Because at the end of the day, without leads, the business is not going to grow, right?

[00:10:13] Maxwell Nee: And then, not just that, the attention span is very different when you're listening to podcasts. The attention span is, you're in learning, self development mode. You're not in sit on the couch, numb your brain, watch Netflix mode. So there's intent when you're reaching people through podcasts .And not just that I did on average call it 20 podcasts towards the end of last year, talking about ScoreApp. And very conservatively, let's say each one generated a thousand listens that were the ideal client. 20, 000 listens, that took me 20 hours, maybe 24 hours, including the time to book it and get all set up. Look, so that's 20, 000 views of me and this and what we do and 20, 000 clicks to our link. If you were to fill out Madison Square Garden in New York, the seating arrangement in there to be Justin Bieber, to be Kevin Hart, to be performing in there is only 19, 000 people. You know what I mean? And what does it take to book that? To get that type of attention and to spend that money to get people in there when you could be doing something like this at no cost, extremely high leverage, no cost.

[00:11:30] Maxwell Nee: Yeah. So I think that there's a few things. Usually entrepreneurs, when they're really good at what they do , they're not good at talking about themselves and what they do. So they might see this as like self promotion and no one likes that, especially culturally in Australia. No one likes that. But it's not that. I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about ScoreApp. I'm talking about ideas. I'm talking about things that could help people. So there's just like a little pivot that a lot of people get stuck with that have people be shy. And, I used to be scared of public speaking, like everyone, I think the numbers show that people are more scared of public speaking than they are of dying, right?

[00:12:17] Jason S. Bradshaw: And I would think too, certainly from my personal experience, and I wonder if you agree, that it's about getting started. Like maybe even the first dozen interviews that you do on a podcast are less than great, but you have to start somewhere. And the more that you do, the better that you get at the art of being interviewed or interviewing, right?

[00:13:21] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think it's easy for us to get in the way of ourselves. I've already published a book. I should have by now published my second book. In fact, if you spoke to my publisher, he would be telling you that he's been asking for my manuscript for a couple of years. So it's easy for us to put excuses in there, but I like how you've reframed the goal. It's not about publishing one book where in your case, it's publishing multiple books. So you have to get along because you can't get to 10 without doing your first one. Great insights for us there.

[00:14:08] Maxwell Nee: Yeah. So there's so many benefits, right? But yes, it allows you to collect really data rich leads from your clients. That's really important because personalization, segmentation is everything. If I was to log onto amazon.com, and you were to log onto amazon.com, we would both see completely different websites because Amazon's got 10 years of my purchase history, 10 years of yours and it knows that to get the most out of me and to optimize my experience, I only want to see the things that I want to see. So you have the opportunity to do that. You also have the opportunity to allow your clients to tell you exactly what they want. So it's not just about you do a quiz, you get a score and then it's okay, you scored 72 percent out of a hundred. Let me help you get to a hundred. From a business coach, from a consultant or whatever, what would you love to see? Oh, I would love to see a bit more hand holding. I would love to see you know, so you could actually just pull out of your clients heads exactly what they want. It's a bit like a focus group, you know how big advertising companies would do focus groups to put like a microwave in front of them in the 70s? And I'd say do you like this? Do you like the color? They collect that data. You can do that using this app and it's free.

[00:15:24] Maxwell Nee: The base version is free. So you get started for free.

[00:15:52] Jason S. Bradshaw: So you've mentioned coaches and consultants a couple of times in your examples, but would think that you could use this type of tool for almost any product that you're selling.

[00:16:41] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yep.

[00:16:44] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, it makes sense that it doesn't have to be like this massive big bang approach. It can be that 1 percent better every day.

[00:17:01] Maxwell Nee: Yes, it gives people uncharted territory if you have a product that's very intangible. For example, if you sell like personal branding- there's a testimony on the website, a woman called Hannah Power, she's a personal branding consultant, and she provided a score to evaluate your personal branding based on some questions. And it was a total game changer, like she generated 800 leads of people that were very interested in what she had to offer that she had no idea. And, you can't go around saying people your personal brands crap, so you should work with me. But the scorecard can point out those gaps objectively. Right? And then we also had another one, also super intangible, which is emotional trauma healing. You can't walk around the street. People don't put stickers on their heads saying, hey, I need emotional trauma healing. They have to self identify themselves, right?

[00:17:59] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. And surface up to your customers the real root of their problem or the real gap to what they're trying to achieve in a way that feels more organic than someone just perhaps hosting an event and saying, these are the three reasons you're failing.

[00:18:31] Maxwell Nee: You can imagine whenever you go doctor, you say, hey, Doctor, I'm sick. What's wrong? I don't know. Okay. Let me help you diagnose that. Are you coughing? Do your eyes hurt? Have you been sleeping? Are you sneezing? Are you feeling tired? then based on them ticking those boxes, they cut and slice, they filter the symptoms and laser into the problem and then the solution that solves the specific problem to you. Anyone can use it for that to accelerate, template and empower the sales process as well.

[00:19:19] Jason S. Bradshaw: I know that because it's public diligence on your website, ScoreApp has managed to secure itself some pretty big names when it comes to customers, especially in the online space. Ali Abdel and others who, have these massive brands, personal brands that they've created and from that launch products and services.

[00:19:48] Maxwell Nee: It's a bit of both. So, first of all, they had a need. If you go to our website, we've just refreshed it. It says, something like attract, convert and collect data from your audience. So anyone that has an audience, anyone that has a following and email lists, a YouTube following Instagram, Facebook, podast following, it turns those into leads people will be able to contact. So influencers in particular, have a huge gap. They've got a lot of followers, but they don't know anything about them. They don't know if they're mostly male and mostly female. They don't know if they're actually interested or they just watch them for comedic purposes. They don't know. So we help them to know. As well as, lot of it is just genuine old school relationship building. Jay Shetty used to be one of the examples on the website. Dan's known Jay Shetty for more than 10 years. I know that we're talking about the digital world and things that are sexy and fast, and automated, but the analog world is still just as powerful, if not,

[00:20:48] Maxwell Nee: more powerful. Yeah.

[00:21:00] Jason S. Bradshaw: Now how do the audience understand- do we need to go off to ScoreApp university to learn how to use it? Is it something that only the IT experts can use, or is it something that a small business owner that's pretty humble when it comes to using technology could sign up and use easily and start getting, as you say, on your website, start attracting, engaging and converting the audience?

[00:22:06] Jason S. Bradshaw: Fantastic. And certainly appreciate you and the team providing those. I know that you also provide a whole pile of templates and other resources to help people launch and be successful on the platform. Before we wrap up, I've just got a couple of questions for you. The first one is perhaps a little bit controversial, but why would someone not use ScoreApp to grow their business?

[00:22:39] Jason S. Bradshaw: And it's perfectly okay. And I am putting you on the spot. I didn't give you any warning on this question. I'm hoping, or at least I'm thinking, and just for the audience sake, I'm not an affiliate of ScoreApp. Other than being loosely aware of the platform and some of the deals that have happened, I have no insider knowledge, but when I go to the site and when I've had a look at the app, I've tested, how to play, I can think of times when I was in, a corporate gig, C suite corporate role where I'd be challenging my marketing team to be using something like this in the business because it's not traditional, but it can deliver from a major corporate perspective. It's not traditional, but if a customer's looking to buy a car, they could go through the ScoreApp platform and get a recommendation for what's going to suit their lifestyle. If I'm a business coach, I can see how using this can help define, the next logical step for a customer. So now I a bit tongue in cheek, but I can't think of a reason where it wouldn't be worth exploring this.

[00:24:05] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, and certainly my audience will know that I'm a big believer that you don't have to ask your customers a whole pile of questions. Just three questions will really make a difference in terms of how you can serve and deliver value to your customers and ScoreApp is a way that you can start.

[00:24:27] Jason S. Bradshaw: Now, Maxwell, we don't have time today to get into your life as a bodybuilder or a dancer. So we'll leave that for another time. But before we do let you go today, what's one thing you think the audience should do as soon as they finish watching today or listening to this podcast?

[00:25:22] Jason S. Bradshaw: Fantastic advice. Change your environment to help declutter your mind and allow you to move forward to break through whatever that challenge is. Maxwell, it's been absolutely great having you on the show. I'll be sure to leave details in the show notes on how people can get a copy of the book from ScoreApp.

[00:25:42] Maxwell Nee: Perfect. My pleasure. Thanks, Jason.