The Transcript

The Power of Not Being Stubborn

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM. You’re listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs. DCI features an in-depth, ongoing instructional academy, plus a live education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information, go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce. That’s Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce.

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show where digital entrepreneurs share their stories and the lessons they’ve learned so that we can all be better in our online pursuits. I’m your host, Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital. This is episode number 33. This episode of The Digital Entrepreneur is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform. I will tell you more about this complete solution for digital marketing and sales later, but you can check it out and take a free spin for yourself at Rainmaker.FM/Platform. That’s Rainmaker.FM/Platform.

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by someone who has built his professional life around making sports analytics more accessible. After reading an academic paper on Google’s technology, he got inspired to apply his Stanford PhD to ranking sports teams. His friends liked the resulting NFL rankings that he produced and encouraged him to do more.

In 2012, his story predicting Alabama’s win over Notre Dame in the college football title game actually appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. A study by FiveThirtyEight found that his 2015 NCAA Tournament predictions were the most accurate of anyone. Frankly, if you crave the thrill of winning your March Madness pool or if you’re looking for an edge against the spread in football, there is no excuse to not be a member of his site, The Power Rank. He is Ed Feng and he is a digital entrepreneur.

Ed, welcome to The Digital Entrepreneur. How you doing, man?

Ed Feng: I’m great. Thank you so much for having me on.

Jerod Morris: Of course. It was great seeing you at Digital Commerce Summit a couple weeks ago.

Ed Feng: Yeah, absolutely. You too. It was a great event, as always. You always learn so much, not only from the talks, but just chatting with other people. Even though it is so hard to get time from you and Brian because everyone wants to talk to you guys.
Jerod Morris: What I thought was really interesting is you have a group of folks that you’ve kind of become a little team almost, where you come to all these events and get together, and that’s really neat to see.

Ed Feng: Yeah, it’s been really awesome. That’s all Sonia Thompson. She got together a Facebook group. It’s supposed to be like a mastermind group. It hasn’t quite worked out that way, but we keep in touch and we try to help each other out as much as we can. I’ve gotten some WordPress templates from other people in the group. It’s been great.

Jerod Morris: Speaking of which, you and I had a good talk about a potential mastermind that we should follow-up on here soon, because I think that would be a good idea. Did you have a big takeaway from Digital Commerce Summit? Anything that stood out?

Why He’s So Committed to ‘Doing Remarkable Things’

Ed Feng: A couple things, two things. I really liked the talk about long copy — Joanna Wiebe — and I’ve been thinking about that in a different context in terms of what it takes to stand out in a digital world right now. Everyone’s doing 1,000-word blog posts, and I think you got to do something remarkable. One of the ways to be remarkable is to do something longer and more in-depth. I try to do things on my own site like that. I’ve really been intrigued by a site called Wait But Why which is — the growth has just been phenomenal, and all he does is 2,000, 3,000-word posts. It helps if Elon Musk tweets you out.

Jerod Morris: That’ll help.

Ed Feng: Yeah. But there are a ton of examples in the sports world too, which is where my company is doing more remarkable things, and that’s the way to stand out and get shared. I thought that all related to what she was talking about with longer copy, even though it was not quite the same thing. If that makes sense.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, I love that idea. I love that. We’ll dive into that a little bit more because I want to get into what you’re doing now and what your business is. But I want to start with where I start with everybody who comes on The Digital Entrepreneur, and that is with this question. I’ve always believed that the number one benefit of digital entrepreneurship is freedom. That was actually a theme that people talked about a lot at Digital Commerce Summit, the freedom to choose your projects, the freedom to chart your course and, ultimately, the freedom to change your life and your family’s life for the better. What is the biggest benefit that you have derived from being a digital entrepreneur?

Ed Feng: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more with that. I really enjoy the freedom. I can’t imagine not having my own site, doing my own thing. As much of a pain that is sometimes — to do all your own marketing and do all your own books. There’s a lot of work in running a business. But I can’t imagine just writing for big sports site anymore. You lose that freedom.

I think the freedom is absolutely crucial, and I’ve been really lucky that I’m at the point in my business where I can take advantage of that freedom a little bit more. Things are going pretty well and I’ve started to get a little bit more involved with my kid’s school. I teach math there, and that’s something I’m starting to get more passionate about. The freedom and the time to do that — even during a really busy football season — has been fantastic.

Jerod Morris: You have a couple of kids, right?

Ed Feng: I’ve got two. They’re five and seven.

Jerod Morris: Very nice. Let’s go back. Before we talk about what you do now, let’s go back. Take me back before you became a digital entrepreneur. What were you doing and what was missing that led you to want to make a change?

Ed Feng: Yeah, so I got my PhD from Stanford and I always thought I was going to be professor. I was doing jury and simulations. I was trying to understand how polymers moved and polymeric materials. Then I just got a little burned out in that course. Made a lot of mistakes myself, but also wasn’t interested in writing papers that not a lot of people were going to read. I was looking to do something else. It turns out my background in applied math was a perfect way to get into sports. I wrote a paper about Google’s PageRank — for those of you that don’t remember, that was Google’s first breakthrough. They looked at the web and said, “Well, let’s look at the link structure, links that point from one website to another, and let’s rank sites based on that.”

There’s this beautiful, elegant mathematics that is actually very similar to what I did in my PhD research. I’ve always been a sports fan. I came and I looked at that and I was like, “I want to apply this to sports.” You have to do some work because the straight application of PageRank doesn’t work at all for sports, but if your start accounting for margin of victory, you can start ranking teams really well. And if you’re interested in college football, if you’re interested in your March Madness pool, these are calculations that you’re interested in.

How Not Being Stubborn Was the Key to Turning a Hobby Into a Thriving Business

Jerod Morris: Talk to me a little bit about how you structure your business, because obviously you and I, we’re both sports fans, so we can throw out some of these terms and we get them. Obviously there’s a big part of The Digital Entrepreneur audience that’s maybe not as big into sports, but there’s still a ton that folks can learn from what you’re doing because the fundamentals of digital entrepreneurship are the same for you just as they’re the same for other people. You’re building this business around — as I mentioned in the intro — around analytics and making analytics accessible and helping people make predictions. How have you built a business around that?

Ed Feng: Yeah, I think this is an interesting story about not being stubborn, because when I first started out, I saw that gamblers were interested in what I was doing and that didn’t seem like what I wanted to do. I thought about taking more of media outlet-type of approach. I changed my mind pretty early and now the people I serve are people who need quantitative predictions, and those are gamblers. Those are anyone in an NFL pick against the spread pool. Anyone — if you’ve ever filled out a March Madness bracket, you’re potentially someone that might be interested in what I do on my site.

So those are the people I serve. I’m proud to serve them, and I am a full believer in the Copyblogger way. Build an email list. I believe in the power of direct response copywriting. I fully believe that we should be teaching every high school student in America that skill, because our world would be a much better place if that were the case.

I focus on building my email list. I monetize based on memberships. If you’re really in that pool and you’re getting crushed in your NFL pool, you can come to my site and get my predictions for every NFL game, every college game. The NFL, in particular, has been particularly good so far. I think through week 8 we’re about 58 percent against the spread, which, unfortunately, is an unsustainably good rate, but something that could help you out in a pool.

Jerod Morris: Just shows you how difficult it is to succeed when you say 58 percent is unsustainable. That shows you the difficulty of it. In terms of the revenue model then, people pay to have a membership, they get access to your premium picks, and you also have a free email list, so you have your free content there. Is it a membership in a community in a forum? Is it just access to the picks? What do people get with memberships?

Ed Feng: With membership you get access to my best predictions. These are the picks I was telling you about. I don’t really want to call them picks, because that’s a term that’s used for — some shady people on the internet that will give you games to bet on against the market. I’m trying to take a little bit more of a … I give you the results of my best computer model. If you go to my site. For free, I’ll give you access to parts of it which aren’t as accurate as looking at all the different methods that I have for predicting games. If you’re serious about your pool, if you’re serious about March Madness, you pay for membership to my site and you get my best stuff.

I’m also really interested in data visualization, so I’ve, over the course of the years, developed these data visuals that allow me to look at match-ups in games. Jerod, you as a basketball fan will appreciate this. For basketball you can look at, “How does a team’s offensive rebounding match-up against how the opponent defensive rebounds or boxes people out?” You can get a quick look at match-ups, see if that’s something that’s going to affect your outlook on the game and who’s going to win.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Let’s talk about your experience now in your business with The Power Rank. Tell me about the milestone or the moment in your career so far as a digital entrepreneur that you’re the most proud of.

Ed Feng: I honestly don’t know if it’s one moment. Getting my first content in Sports Illustrated was a very important first step, and that was three or four years ago right now. I really think it’s about the journey. That’s kind of cliché. Just getting better every year. I’ve seen consistent growth in my business. The trajectory is in the right direction, which is how I know I’m doing the right thing. I remember three or four years ago I was hoping for a tipping point. For me, there really wasn’t a tipping point. I think every year, more people find out about my site, more people like what I’m doing and sign up for the lists. I think that’s the experience for a lot of people.

Jerod Morris: It wasn’t just some hockey stick of growth? You’ve just steadily grown year over year, one brick after another?

Ed Feng: Yeah. I think of it as a marathon and I try to put in my work every day and every mile, and that’s worked for me.

Jerod Morris: All right, well let’s take a quick break and when we come back, I’m going to ask Ed about his most humbling moment as a digital entrepreneur.

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Now back to my interview with Ed Feng. All right. Ed, tell me about the most humbling moment that you’ve had in your career so far as a digital entrepreneur, and most importantly, what did you learn from it?

The Important Advice from Sonia Simone … That Ed Ignored (and Later Regretted)

Ed Feng: Yeah, absolutely. I actually have two examples here. First was when I was just starting out the...