hey before we get into the show I want to make a very special announcement about a live in-person event that I'm hosting June 25th through 27th in Sevierville Tennessee in East Tennessee in the Smoky Mountains it's only limited to five people so I only have a couple of spots left but I wanted you as my listeners to get access to this I want to give you the option to attend a mastermind intensive this is going to be a three-day opportunity for you to unlock your potential with this Mastermind intensive so what is this about it's a three-day Mastermind intensive that's focused on the power of a true Mastermind experience Sunday night we're going to get there around three o'clock and we're going to be focused on setting the foundation for the Deep work that we're going to do over the next two days you're going to get to meet each participant we're gonna have some down time we're some fun we're gonna have a private Chef on site cooking amazing food we're gonna have top shelf cigars and some Bourbon and some rum if you're into that sort of thing and then on Monday we're going to spend the entire day a focus on each unique challenge of each participant the issues the opportunities whatever they're dealing with in their business whatever you're dealing with we're going to give you an opportunity to have an extended 90 minute Hot Seat session on Tuesday then we're going to take those 90-day or those 90-minute hot sessions and we're going to Heart seat sessions we're going to turn those into a 90-day action plan so all day Tuesday we're going to be working with each participant as a group to write out a 90-day action plan to get your business to the next level what this opportunity is going to give you is to give you real intimate supportive environment to tackle unique challenges that are holding you back from achieving your purpose in life from achieving success you're going to get actionable advice feedback support it's a real Mastermind it's not just this conference you go to with a talking head it's a group of guys are going to be working together to help you achieve everything you want to achieve this is going to be taking place in the breathtaking Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee in my cabin my personal cabin called million dollar view right on the edge of a mountain where we can see Mount LeConte from the back porch it's absolutely beautiful you're not going to want to miss this so if you are interested all you got to do is go to the real jasonduncan.com intensive the realjasondunkin.com intensive or on the homepage there's a banner at the top that has the announcement you just click on it go straight to it limited to five people we only have a couple of slots left so go check it out I hope that you can make it now let's get into the show hi I'm Ron story Jr and you're listening to the root of all success with the real Jason Duncan and today I enjoyed our our interview I was able to talk about how I went from a poor kid in East St Louis Illinois struggling selling cans door-to-door collecting my neighbor's cans to living All Around the World in five different countries and building a successful software startup even though I don't know how to code one piece of software so if you're interested in doing that or just finding your own two path to success check out this episode thanks again welcome to the root of all success with the real Jason Duncan a podcast that explores how the world's most powerful entrepreneurs unlocked success and how their stories can help you do the same a successful educator turned entrepreneur Jason has built multi-million dollar businesses that have been featured in Inc magazine and Entrepreneur magazine his life's Mission now is helping entrepreneurs live what he calls hashtag the exit lifestyle introducing tedx speaker mastermind leader author entrepreneur Cigar Aficionado motorcycle Enthusiast and host of the root of all success the real Jason Duncan the real Jason Duncan hey welcome back to another episode I am the real Jason Duncan you can call me JD I've got Ron story Jr on the show today and this guy has been a full-time entrepreneur for over 20 years got to start in the financial business and then decided to get into the software business and now he's got a company called pitchdb that we're going to talk about at length on the show today and what it can do for you to get you in front of more people but but that's not really the point of the show the point of the show is how he built it why he built it where you know he lives in in South America and how he as an American lives there successfully and why he chose to move to one of the scariest most dangerous places on Earth to begin his living abroad he faced his fears and then we'll see what happens from that so he's written a book called the first hundred miles we'll talk a little bit about that in the show he was born and raised in East St Louis lives right now full-time in Medellin Colombia with his partner and some kids I can't remember off top of my head we talk about the kids on the show but he has his kids there and and what he's doing now with pitch DB is absolutely fascinating and I've really enjoyed this conversation that I had with Ron so now let me tune you into the show please help me welcome Ron story Jr to the root of all success Hey Ron welcome to the root of all success my man Jason thanks for having me I appreciate it well I'm always excited to talk to other people in the podcast industry and uh that you are indeed that guy so we're going to be talking a lot about podcasting today we'll get into that in just a minute but but uh but you're you're in St Louis today recording this from uh I think you said pre-show you visiting your mom but you live in Medellin Colombia so how did you get to Columbia from East St Louis Illinois what happened man you know they have these things called Flights I just hopped on a plane and never came back
no let me stop being a knucklehead no um a few years ago I decided yo I want to see if there's um other places in the world that I would love to live I had spent most of my life in Central Illinois and Central United States and one of my buddies was teaching down in Honduras and I went down to visit and I'm like yo I should just keep traveling so five countries living later
is my sixth location the sixth country I've lived in and I've been there for the last four years permanently wow so how's life down there compared to um you know living in in the United States obviously there's different cultures that type of thing but like how are you able to do business I mean tell me a little bit about that I mean it's it's exactly the same in some ways it's a lot easier right so um you know Medellin is a very modern city seven million people um I mean it's very modern infrastructure I mean it's it's a great city to live in it's like living in Chicago right um but the only difference is that you know everybody speaks Spanish so you have to in order to live there effectively you probably need to know some Spanish or you'll just end up overpaying for everything or people just be taking advantage of you even though that's not the nature of everybody you'll run into those people that notice that you don't have um a strong Spanish background and they will um try to extract their their pound of Flesh from you but it's a great place if it was bad I would I would come home how long did it take you to pick up Spanish I still don't have it I mean I'm getting better
that's awesome my Spanish is terrible right but um the great thing is that my my partner she only speaks Spanish um our kids are in bilingual schools and you know I only talk to them in English they talk to to me in English they talk to their mom in Spanish you know so you know we we've we figured out a system but my Spanish is horrible I mean it's getting better but uh yeah it's not I wouldn't be giving any speeches I wouldn't do a podcast in Spanish I promise you that one well I've been to Honduras I've never been I've never been to Columbia we used to do when when I was in the ministry we had our church sponsored um a Ministry in Honduras into gusagapa and we would go down there every summer and I guess I went for three or four years in a row and uh of course to gusagopa Honduras as you probably know better than me was at the time not one of the greatest cities in the world but today like one of the most dangerous cities in the world and so I don't think I haven't been involved in that in Cali how long has that been 15 years more more or more but uh I've been there in a long time but but I really like the people when I was there that the people were so genuine the culture was was really family oriented so I can only imagine you've you've enjoyed that part of it significantly yeah when I was in Honduras I was in uh SPS San Pedro Sula which at the time was ranked the most dangerous um city in the world that wasn't a war zone right and I'll tell you the logic it's interesting why how I ended up choosing that place well I was afraid of traveling and I had seen this movie called hostel where they were like you stay in this Hospital somebody's gonna kidnap you and cut your Achilles tendon and all of this and I'm like wait if I could go to the most dangerous place on Earth the rest of my traveling will be easy so if I could just go there and just get rid of all the fear you know I only lasted like two weeks before I left I was like dude this is too much but that was my introduction to traveling and it just alleviated all the fears because I knew that was probably the worst it could get right in my mind at least it may not have been true but that that was the mentality that I had and I think that that kind of plays into what your podcast is about which is you know how do you define success I think success is defined through trial and error right I think you you try things you you test out a hypothesis and then you learn from it and then you keep going right so that was my um hypothesis with me wanting to be a successful uh World traveler was that I needed to test to see if I could survive in a bad environment if I could then I know it would be okay and an average or great environment so so what year did you go to San uh Pedro Sula when did you do that 2014. okay so we're a little less than 10 years ago now so nine years ago and you said you were there you did that on purpose to see hey if I can survive here I'm gonna be fine in the rest of my travels I I think um I think there's an interesting correlation that I that I might want to explore with you on the show is that as entrepreneurs we deal with some of the same stuff to face our fears sometimes we have to face what's negative you know all of us have experienced as entrepreneurs if you're worth anything you've experienced near bankruptcy if not bankruptcy you've experienced no no money you know threats to lawsuits I mean these things happen yet those who survive and push beyond that are going to thrive and so you are a walking example of the concept of facing your fears early and on purpose so that you could Thrive I think how do you see that Ron I mean do you see what I'm trying to get out there from business versus life 100 I mean I didn't grow up in the in the nicest place on Earth I grew up in East St Louis Illinois which you know even today St Louis is the murder capital of the United States right so you know I grew up in a tough place already so I I wasn't foreign to the idea of going to another tough place because that's what I was used to but I I understood that that was what made me an entrepreneur so when everyone else was talking about losing everything I didn't have anything to lose to begin with when I first started my first business I was already broke so like oh I've got to go broke I'm already broke what do you mean like that you know so the bottom is where I came from so understanding that and I think that that's what a lot of people are afraid of they're afraid of going to the bottom but Tim Ferriss had a great quote in his book four hour work week and he said create the environment that you're afraid of live in it so that you'll know how you'll react in it when you're put in that situation most of the time it's not that bad right our circumstances really aren't that bad it's just our egos and what we expect of ourselves that's what usually is racking our brain and punishing us and putting that stress on us but once I realized look I've been broke before I grew up broke so me going back to being broke wasn't going to hurt because I'm smarter than what I was at the beginning and I can get out of it which I had done already well I wasn't going to mention anything about East St Louis but since you brought it up you know I was thinking that well as you as we were talking about that it's like East St Louis San Pedro uh like is there a difference it's the language is maybe the difference but yeah for for people that don't know like for people who don't know I'm from Nashville so we're only about six hours from East St Louis St Louis area and I've been to St Louis before and I've also been to East St Louis and and I'm I don't know from firsthand experience how dangerous it is but I have heard the stories and I know I know about it and it's really it's a shame exactly I mean you're from there obviously you've got a deeper connection than I do but to but to know that you I grew up poor what would be what's going broke later going to do to me like I already experienced it I love I love that perspective so when you when you move there you you only stayed there a couple weeks and you started traveling around when did you when did you start the podcast because podcasting was kind of a big thing that you're you're involved in you've written a book I want to talk about your book but when did you start your businesses was it that it had to have been before that so did you just take the business on the road or did you go there to start something different no no no so I'll give you my background so I started off as a financial advisor while I was in college so I was selling insurance and Investments um since May of 2000 so I used to do that for a company called Northwestern Mutual and I did that for four years um in 2004 I ended up with eight Allstate agencies out in Norfolk Virginia um and then in 2007 I turned that into managing 300 offices for Farmers Insurance um to get that kind of gives you the background of where I was able to accumulate some money to be able to kind of have some I guess today they would call it fire like financially independent retired early like I had accumulated enough money before that to be able to have some Independence to be able to make some decisions so in um 2012 I started to get involved in the software world as a sales consultant for local Venture Capital firms here in St Louis I was Consulting with their portfolio companies helping them to build um uh Sales Systems inside of those companies so I I came to the conclusion that hey if I keep doing this and they'll just give me a consulting fee and they're going on exit at these high multiples and they're selling the companies I don't have any Equity I'm an idiot so I found a company that was failing in 2018 I bought that company which is now pitchdb and that's what I run see that my understanding you you bought the company that was not doing well and you turned you turned it around pitch DB yep yep exactly I bought a company out of Austin Texas that was a data accumulation company and my thoughts were look this is like people are selling unlimited data for 99 you can get unlimited people's email addresses for 99 bucks right I don't want to do that I want to be able to add I can educate the data up and make it more valuable I can sell them for a dollar a piece so I turned that data company into a niche data company that only provided podcast contact information huh that's really really interesting so so your pitch DB company is is is just people like me who run podcasts is contact information to get to people like me yeah it's podcast speaking gigs and press opportunities because they all go together right it's just a different platform if you're on a podcast you're on the audio platform if you're doing a speaking year you're doing a live platform and if you're impressed you're in a written platform but it's all exposure it's just different platforms for you to get that exposure so let me ask you about how that works so if I if I want to get access to or use your software and your platform to get access to so and so and I say hey I've been trying to get in touch with so-so you say hey I've got their phone number I got their email address I can get you whatever you need it costs X number of dollars to get to it I'm sure it works a little bit differently than I explained but is that the idea no it works exactly as you explained people pay for credits so you can buy credits A La Carte or you can pay monthly but a credit cost about a dollar so if you wanted to reach out to 50 podcasts that you had put on a list it would cost you 50 bucks basically to reach out to those 50 podcasts you would probably get booked on 10 of them right so our our Universal um average for podcast bookings is one out of every five pitches that are sent results in a conversation with the host for booking um so yeah that's what we do so how do you you don't have to give away your secret sauce but how are you getting how do you get this I mean you just have a team of researchers that just go look people up and then you start just collecting the data and putting the database that's it so so the podcasts are a little bit easier because apple and Spotify and all these companies they have apis that you can connect to in order to gather that data they don't like you doing that but if you can Circle circumvent their systems you can get access to that data live um but as far as speaking games media Outlets writers contributors to Forbes and Fortune and all of that that stuff is manually gotten by my team so we manually go out and find speeching gigs we manually scrape you know websites for Forbes and all these other places looking for their employees whether it's on LinkedIn or whatever so that's a lot of it is done manually so we're building that we're building the first database of its kind wow listen that's impressive man that that's really really interesting so so let me let me ask you I'll kind of turn this into more of a personal question because I I am obviously a podcaster speaker author so if I said to my Podcast manager Jade I said hey Jade I want you to get me on these 10 podcasts or find 10 podcasts that you think I would fit so she could use your service to say go in and buy credits or something and then find those contacts and then just email them cold and say Hey you know the real Jason duck wants to be on your show are you interested in having him on the show is that is that pretty much how it works yeah so we don't even give you the email address like we don't just say take the email address and figure it out you just connect your account and you send the email directly from your Gmail or Microsoft account from inside of our software directly to you right so you know that's how it works we have the emails inside you just connect your email account drop in a template our templates were written by a journalist that writes for 100 different magazines means so we know that they work and you know this person has been pitching people for years as a professional so he wrote all of our templates and that's what we use so you're getting a professional pitch inside of a professional system yeah okay okay now it's becoming more clear all right I see it now so so we so we sign up for the service and then I say these are the ones I want to go on I go in and say click you know I just I'm essentially just clicking and it automatically sends emails to these people trying to get me on their shows and and they reach back out and we set something up so there's some leeway for you to be able to go in and change and say what you want to say but we give you the pitch and it's your approval so we don't blindly send on your behalf but we'll give you the pitch what we think you should say because we don't want the liability of sending something you're like oh I don't want you to say that no no you approve it first you put it in there you you have some you have to put the eggs and the milk in the cake mix but we'll give you the flour with the sugar and the yeast and everything kind of like Duncan Hines all right I I so I dig it so now you started that in 2018 is that right yep I bought that company January 7th of 2018 and it went live November the 11th of 2019. let's take a quick break to thank our amazing sponsors for making this podcast possible
40 years ago you weren't in business unless you had your business in the Yellow Pages you remember those things and 30 years ago you weren't in business unless you had a door-to-door Salesman 20 years ago you weren't in business unless you had a website and today you're not in business unless you're doing social media content am I right social media content social media content in the form of like micro content which is 30 to 60 second spots on Instagram reels or Tick Tock or YouTube shorts that's the way business is done as a matter of fact that may be how you found out about this podcast or me as a business coach this medium that we're using today to communicate what we do is vitally important and just recording yourself isn't enough you've got to do it right and my friends over at story do it right and one of the problems with doing it wrong is that you sit around thinking well what the heck am I going to record what am I going to say how am I going to say it like I don't know what to talk about Well story takes all of that away from you stop wasting time trying to come up with content because story will send you a video prompt on what to record you can pick the categories you want to record in whether it's real estate entrepreneurship Finance relationship leadership life insurance it could be anything don't waste time on that and by the way if you're not confident in talking on video or if the video editing portion takes up way too much of your time story will edit the videos to perform well on social media they add the subtitles the pop-ups the zoom Cuts they remove all the filler words like uh and um and uh they remove the awkward pauses and then they take that video and post it for you they write the captions they add the relevant hashtags and they post it on the platforms that you care about the most it's exactly what you need to be in business today and to be successful at it so if you want to learn how to do social media the way the influencers do you need to go to the real jasonduncan.com story and that story with two eyes why because they're awesome go to the real jasondunkin.com story that's s-t-o-r-y-y for ten percent off your first three months to try story out you're gonna thank me later I love talking about this sponsor because it's oftentimes a lot of people talk about sponsors on their shows they have sponsors and they either don't use them or they might have used them once and they're not really in love with it they just take their money it certainly is nothing wrong with that but this sponsor this one of my sponsors of the podcast is story s-t-o-r-y-y two wise why because they're awesome if you've ever wondered how these influencers do their Instagram reels and their tick tocks and her YouTube shorts to look so amazing where they've got the zoom cuts and the pop-ups and the on-screen illustrations whether it's cartoons or actual images or videos that get responses that people go oh I want to talk to that if you want to know how people do that that is exactly what story does they take your videos and they make you look like an influencer they make you become an influencer and they will post it for you they'll write the captions they'll add the relevant hashtags they put it on the platforms that you care about the most and after that content's posted they take it even one step further to boost it to your past clients your leads or anyone that you want to Target and they even have someone log into your social media profile to engage with other people's posts to drive engagement on your profile story truly takes the headache away from doing social media content from start to finish and they have a mission to help people nurture and cultivate their relationships by sharing your message digitally and they even have an app that makes it easy to upload your content and track everywhere your video is at and I've been using them for a long time and I told them I said look guys I love what you're doing I want to recommend you to everybody you need to be a sponsor of my podcast and so they're a co-sponsor of this podcast and they're also the exclusive sponsor of my live webinar series entrepreneur Master Series because they're that good I tell everybody about them so go to the real jasonduncan.com story to learn more and that's the real Jason duncan.com store s-t-o-r-y-y why are there two wise because they're awesome you'll get 10 off your first three months if you go to that link the real jasonduncan.com story thanks for listening to our sponsors now back to the show wow so it took you a while to get this thing turned turned around the right way huh yeah because we were doing it manually we started to do it manually in order to to um like fund the new development and all of that and to find out how the system should work so we basically built the system that we were that we would want to use ourself right so it's if anybody ever logs in they'll see it's like dude a sales person built this because it has all these graphs that tracks how many pictures you've sent and how many people have opened them and what's your booking ratio all of this stuff that sales people care about like me because that's what I wanted to see um instead of you know things that a podcaster probably would care about they probably wouldn't care about what their closing ratio was for pitching podcast but that's important are people like me yeah well so that's cool man so you so you went live November 2019 and uh you probably hit that about as good as a podcasting company could ever hit in the history of the world because we want to know what happened in March of 2020 man the world went we're all home doing this we're all doing on we're on zoom we're on Riverside like I'm on recording this we're doing podcasts so did it did it blow up pretty quickly tell me about how the success I actually went the other way it's interesting so we talk about persistence and why you have to keep going and learning and testing experiments the original pitch DB did not include podcast it was just for speaking gigs right so it was for people to get booked for live speaking gigs so had all these Partnerships with these speaking organizations and you know they would sell it we were selling it to their members about them getting speaking gigs and then as you said March 2020 came along and we're like well hey no more speaking games we gotta figure out something so I was like uh podcast that's the speaker gig from the house let's figure out how we can add these deck on podcasted here so we started focusing primarily on podcasting at that point because there were no live speaking gigs but podcasting was taking off but it wasn't we weren't ready for that right and everybody was oh man I don't have any money to pay for this and you know and I'm like dude come on let's let's we just got to figure out a way to do it so but we survived I mean you know we're over 2 000 people that use it now um so it's I don't have any complaints I mean we're growing every day and it's a good thing that's that's great right so so again this goes back to Facebook in your fears while you didn't choose that that your platform was aiming at something that just went extinct it went extinct for a while you you said okay we're going to aim at Live Events in November and we're great we've been working on this for two years let's go and then covet like the governments of the world tell us that we're going to die if we breed somebody else's air and we can't go out in public and So speaking gigs are over and you're like okay I'm facing another fear a fear of not having any income this is not working but you pivot you learn okay if I go to Virtual which is podcast so if you had to put a percentage on podcast appearances versus speaking gigs or or published media what's the percentages of your your clients that are using the or getting access yeah so so right now 60 of our searches are all about podcasts now right another I would say 25 are about speaking gigs and maybe five to ten percent whatever's left over is a mixture of press and stuff like that where somebody's trying to get in in the local newspaper or um in a magazine or something like that so what's cool so uh do you have a standard fee for access to this on a monthly basis or is it credit based how does your financial model work yeah so so it's credit based anybody who's listening right now you can go and sign up for free and get a free account so that you can look around and start building your list and when you're ready to pitch you can either buy uh a la carte credits that never expire or you can subscribe on a monthly basis and you get a discount if you subscribe on a monthly basis of course um but yeah that's how it works nice nice so uh this has been a successful Venture for you is this is this going the direction that you want it to go yeah I mean so here's my mentality with anything that I I look at so if I look at the capital that was invested in building this and and purchasing the original database how would that Capital have performed if I put it into the market or into an alternative investment and right now this is outperforming anything that I would have done on the outside why because it pays a dividend plus it builds Equity right so if I would have just put it into the stock market depending on the stocks the stocks that are taking off they're not paying dividends I get a monthly dividend off of this called a paycheck right but every user that we put on bills the equity at a multiple that is way higher than if I had a traditional business so no this is the the smartest thing that I've done so what do you think your key to success has been like if you had to go back and pull out like everything around story Junior has been able to accomplish in life this one thing helped me unlock success more than anything else what is it for you yeah it's always being curious and not just being curious I think a lot of people say oh man I'm curious yeah but you can have questions but if you never try to seek the answers to those questions you're an idiot right so you're really not curious unless you seek the answers right so I've always been a curious person that would go find the answers not just oh I have a question no I'm gonna go ask that question now and the faster I can have a question find the answer have a question find the answer I've been able to iterate my life not just iterate the software but iterate my life to to be where I'm at today so always be curious I love it be curious but find the answer you got to find the answers though you can't just have this head full of questions like man I always wanted to ask somebody that no ask them ask somebody right you just never know you know I mean I've been able to connect with some of the top people in the world just by asking hey do you know this guy yeah I know him I could you could what you can introduce me cool let's do it right so it's just just be curious and seek the answer with that Curiosity all right so how do you find how do you define success personally so my personal definition of success is am I pursuing something that I believe is worthwhile and am I willing to pursue that for the rest of my life right so I don't look at success as a destination like people say so since this is the journey not the destination I agree with that right but I think complete success is when you're on the journey that you chose right so I don't just measure it I will use a great example such as Oprah Winfrey most people think Oprah Winfrey is really successful because she's had a great show but maybe she her real thing that she wanted to be was a mother well she don't have any kids so she sucks at that right so success isn't just about how much money you make in business it's about how your friends see you how your family I care about what my kids think more than anything right so you know am I a good partner am I a good father to my kids am I you know so success is all accomplishing all accomplishing for me but for other people I don't know how they Define it but how am I outside of business because the business can go away tomorrow if I get in a car wreck Somebody's gotta wipe my butt right and if they don't love me enough to do that who cares how much money I made because they're just going to take the money and leave me with poopy pants right so I think of success all together not just uh how much money I make because they can take that while I'm in the bed so so on that definition so pursuing something worthwhile and you're you're content to continue to do that the rest of your life if that is your definition of success do you using that definition do you consider yourself to be a successful person in the words of Stone Cold Steve Austin Austin hell yeah of course I live where I want to live I work in the business that I want to work in I I have the partner that I chose I'm taking care of my kids I mean I'm a very successful person um hopefully I'm somebody that other people want to be considering where I came from um you know I don't just look at where I'm going I look at where I've come from and to come off of 2029 friendly and East St Louis and to be able to say that I live in six other countries and you know I run a great company if you don't aspire to be that that's okay pick someone bigger but somebody this I live their dream right now well that's awesome and so what like what's next are you just are you settling at settling down like putting Roots down in Medellin or or what's what's next yeah so I've been in many of you for four years so I mean we we may go somewhere else it just depends on you know if we want to um hire a teacher to come along with us to because we have a first grader right so we have to make sure that he can be educated if we were to go and start traveling or find another city where we can get them installed in the school so um but right now I'm in Medellin this is where I'll be um for the foreseeable future as far as business-wise I'll always be looking for great companies to buy um you know I did another great um partial acquisition recently um to add another company to the portfolio in the last two months so yeah I mean this is this is what I do I want to buy companies that fit my vision and um grow them so you've got pitchdb you've got a background in um background and software that's software but you got a background in Insurance and financial investments um is there anything that you're looking for in terms of the type of company or is it cash flow and revenue or what are you looking for yes I I love I love anything that's software based and the reason being is that the multiples are great if you can find a growth mechanism you can have great multiples on the exit but it provides you with high margin cash flow in the in the meantime while you're building that so um you know there are a lot of great Founders out there that could code but they couldn't sell and I think that that's where the match is made in heaven a lot of them are just tired of babysitting this this project that isn't working and they have product Market they may not have product Market fit or product founder fit sometimes you have to have the right person that started that company for it to take off right so to always give you a great example I'm I'm not in the I'm not like Arnold Schwarzenegger right so if I were to start a gym tomorrow it wouldn't be the right fit because I'm not a bodybuilder but someone who like Alex hermosi who has who's always flexing and has these big calves he's the right person to do a gym right so um I think you have to have product founder fit and that that makes all the difference so there's a lot of people who have developed software that aren't the right fit to take that company and I may be I like it I like the idea now just a couple of technical questions I want to ask you about moving to Colombia so as a U.S citizen um I assume passport U.S did have you have you got citizenship in other countries you got passports in other countries how does that work because and the reason let me tell you why I'm asking Ron is a lot of people who listen to the show are entrepreneurs who also like the idea of what you're accomplishing they want to go to live in Costa Rica they want to live in South America somewhere they might want to live in Europe for a while but they don't know the technicality like how does that work you just take a passport you get a Visa how does that work tell give me give me a couple minutes on that yeah so there's almost a hundred countries that as a U.S citizen you can go to just on your passport for 180 days right out of the calendar year right so if you if someone were to leave now in June they could stay until January of this year and then January is going to start over so they can stay another six months right so you get six months per calendar year in about 100 countries it may be less than that but somewhere around 100 countries you can go without net needing to apply for a Visa right while you're there they'll have different types of visas in in Medellin they have a thing called the digital Nomad Visa where not only will they give you the six months which is normal with your passport but you can get another two years just to come there and to live in the work because that's what they're trying to push in Columbia now so different countries have different types of visas that allow people to come in but about 100 countries that you would want to go to have you can just come in with the U.S passport and be fine so living in another country as an entrepreneur is really not as hard as people like me might think that it is that's what you're telling me no I mean you got to think we live in a modern society right like imagine your parents saying man it was really hard living in 2010. most countries outside of the U.S they're probably at about 2010 as far as their level of modern modernity I guess that's the word they're they're I guess how do you say it yeah it's a hard work man but they're about as modern as 2010 right so was it really difficult back in 2010 no because we get 2010 with the iPhone they didn't have the iPhone in 2000 like the iPhone 15 in 2010 or whatever right so um you have Uber you have ubereats you have everything that you would imagine in the U.S I mean KFC all the same restaurants even better restaurants than what I could get here you know in medellini they have a 4D movie theater right where the seeds move it blows air it shakes it does all of that and it's three dollars right IMAX is three dollars for a movie ticket in Medellin three dollars filet mignon dry age filet mignon is seven dollars a pound right for dry age for letting me know seven dollars a pound right dry aged rib eyes like five bucks a pound where are you getting that it's forty dollars a pound in St Louis probably 60 to 70 bucks a pound in New York so imagine being able to start a company hire great people because most of my employees are there and cut your cost of living like you wouldn't imagine I mean it's the you know people have like what's the one thing called fire like I mentioned Financial independent retire early but then there's like Fast Fire this is like extreme fire this is like forest fire right you can go even faster because on 200 Grand saved you can produce four thousand dollars a month right and be okay wow well here's a question I've always thought about because I know I have virtual assistants in the Philippines and the cost of their you know their cost per hours between two and five or six bucks an hour as compared to having somebody do the same thing here is going to be 20 to 25 30 sometimes dollars an hour to get the same things done maybe more so I've all I know that in the Central America and South America there's a lot of argentinians who do VA work a lot of people in Brazil do VA work a lot of central Americans do VA work here for for Americans and the reason is the labor cost and the cost of living is so low and it makes sense to use that so I get that and I and what you're explaining 100 get but here's my question and I think a lot of people wonder this all right you still got to fly back home and you get on an airplane that's got to come to the United States and go back is the flight originating from Colombia to the U.S as cheap in in differential as the filet mignon is or is it still the traditional price that I would have to pay if I booked a ticket leave leaving St Louis to go to Columbia yeah so living in Medellin I'm three hours from Miami like three and a half hours from Miami I can do round trip to Miami if I buy it two weeks ahead of time for 200 bucks so it is cheaper so when they originate the flight in another country that you're getting a huge discount yeah because there aren't all the TSA fees right so a lot of like 60 of your ticket cost to the US is TSA and airport landing fees right so um a lot of airlines now will outline that and say look we're only taking this part this is what TSA is this is what this is blah blah blah so um yeah but I mean they have constant flights that are just going to Miami or Orlando all the time so they they're running the same routes four times a day on every Airline so I mean a 200 ticket on you know Avianca or Copa isn't unusual to go to Miami and back round trip and then yeah wow that's that's I flew to Vegas I'll give you an example I bought my ticket to come here the day before right and a one-way ticket from Medellin to St Louis was about 350 bucks the night before less than 24 hours before the fact that's crazy I I was I was about to say I flew to I flew to Vegas from Nashville non-stop Southwest flight in May of 2022 so a little over a year ago eleven hundred dollars
it was the middle of the week it was crazy and so so like I I couldn't believe I paid eleven hundred dollars for a Southwest I think it's like a four hour flight from Nashville to Vegas and back it was 1100 bucks and it was and here's here's my thing of course it was at the end like the mask mandate lifted the day the week before and that's actually why I was what I was waiting on I was like I'm not wearing a mask on an airplane so I gotta wait for this to be done so I could fly well today that flight my dad was asking me the other day because he he has a friend that he wants to go uh they're going to go to uh to Vegas for for something specific and he said how much he doesn't fly he never flies he's like how much is a flight to Vegas and my last time buying a flight to Vegas my memory was it's 1100 bucks and he goes oh my gosh well I don't guess I'm going well then I pulled it up and it's only only 500 bucks now that's still expensive but 500 bucks versus 1100 anyway I digress I've just I've always been Ron I've always been curious about people who like you you know if you live in Argentina you live in Colombia live in these other countries where things are cheap is the flights you answered the question so let me even within the country it's pretty cheap so I live in the mountains of Medellin we're like 7 000 feet above sea level so there's no beach anywhere around us but it's 75 degrees 365 days a year it 75 degrees every single day right so it's the best place to if you want to play golf all the time right but if we want to go to the beach a round trip ticket to the beach the night before is about 90 round trip if I wanted to fly to Cartagena and I planned it a month ahead of time I get a round trip ticket for forty dollars right and that's including a bag so you know when I take me and the kids and my girl and we go we go for vacation we just planted a three weeks ahead of time and we got three people including the nanny on the flight four or four people for less than 200 bucks on a round-trip flight man well you keep coming back home to see your mama I'm pretty sure she loves that
because that's why you're here so thank you for being on the show let me ask you let me ask you a couple questions before we finish up today so I like to ask this question of all my guests you know looking at all of your experience as an entrepreneur World traveler live in a different countries if you you if you want to talk to the entrepreneur listen to the show he or she is looking at hey how do I become successful what piece of advice would Ron story Jr give that person what would you say so the first thing is Define what what you mean by success because Jason's definition of success is probably not the same as mine right and the only definition of success that matters is yours right Define what you want that dream life to look like and then work backwards on how to get there right so when I was like my early 20s a guy told me he says Ron think about what you want to have on your on your headstone when you're dead and then draw your life backwards from there now have there been some detours along the way sure but the principles and what I want to be known for the things that I the values that I have those haven't changed right just my vehicles of achieving those outcomes have changed so Define what you want your success to look like that's the only thing you have to do once you've done that it's easy to know where you're going You're not wandering around bouncing from one thing to another because you're principle based at that time tell us a little bit about your book the first 100 miles yeah so the first hundred miles is based on the concept that if you could learn to solve problems for people within your first Circle you can get referrals out to other people and within your neighborhood or within your city there's probably enough business to make you a multi-millionaire right but a lot of times we think that we need to be famous and we need to be on Good Morning America and all of these things those are vanity metrics right so you know a lot of people don't know me um overall as a business person but within the podcasting and cold email space I'm known people know me for that because that's where I want to be known at right so you can find um a lot of opportunity within probably 100 miles of where you are and I I say that I use 100 miles because every business isn't online right so if you if you strive to be the best floral business in your city and you just start killing killing it with florals and flowers and customer service eventually you will be the go-to florist and you will eat up everybody you can go buy up your competition right so you don't have to be a software company to to believe that so just be the best and you'll be surprised that you could dominate without having to leave 100 miles and that's weird coming from a guy who's gone 4 000 miles away from his house to give that part of advice but I I I've learned that that's true most of my business is built on referrals well that's a good so now I get it and that that's a very good perspective so thank you for writing the book and thank you for the encouragement that you've given the listeners today um I want to go back to pitchdb and give you the opportunity to talk to people because I know there's a lot of people that want to get on stage they want to get in published media and they want to get on podcasts and now that I've learned about Pitch TV like I want to sign up I want to be a part of this because I think what you I think what you're offering is really great I want to be on podcasts and I'm on I'm on probably an average of two shows a week as a guest and then I record three or four shows a week by myself as as the host so I would love to do this so you've got a we've got an affiliate a link that people can go and sign up uh it's pitchdb.com the real Jason Duncan pitchdb.com the real Jason easy to remember everybody that follows me knows my brand name so tell everybody about the pricing and the options because it's not expensive at all it's actually a lot cheaper than I thought it was going to be and you know I might encourage you as a business coach to raise your prices but but it's really inexpensive so tell other people about how they can sign up and how much it costs and what they get yep so traditionally if you were to go to pitchdb.com you would see that pitchdb starts at 97 a month so there's a 97 a month plan a 197 plan and then a 497 plan right and that's depending on how many pitches a person wants to send out but because of Jason being who Jason is we decided to do a an appsumo style plan if you know about appsumo you can get a lifetime deal right and the lifetime deals are usually sufficient for the average person to use it whenever they need it but for the power user you can upgrade to a larger amount but the lifetime deal will give you access to contact 10 press opportunities whether it's podcast media uh speaking gigs or whatever every month for 97 right so for ninety seven dollars you can reach out to 10 podcasters and we're averaging one booking per five pitches so you'll probably be booked on one and two podcasts for paying us ninety seven dollars one time you pay once every month we give you 10 new pitches right and you can just keep reaching out to those 10 people should take you 10 minutes a month to pitch 10 podcasts you just sit back and wait on the responses here's the great thing about it when you first start you're gonna suck I'm gonna tell you why that's important you're gonna be really bad at it but as you get better at getting on podcast the podcast host will start looking you up and they'll see oh he's been on 40 podcasts come on over right I think Jason and I met because he heard me on another podcast right so a lot of times that's how it works it comes down to um you know having some exposure and then people can vet vet that exposure for you um so you'll get better over time but for ninety seven dollars you can start getting on one to two podcasts a month and learning to practice your message and get more exposure for your business well I I love it so if you guys are interested anybody listening this is wanting to be on a stage on a microphone at a podcast or you want to get print media go to pitchdb.com it's p-i-t-c-hdb.com the real Jason Duncan and you'll get the opportunity to sign up just like Ron talked about for Lifetime access for as little as 77 bucks but you could do the 97 plan what he just talked about which gets you 10 pitches per month no monthly fees everything that you need to get on two two to ten podcasts per month um and and you can watch your personal brand grow I can tell you from experience that people's Brands grow through podcasting and you can either be the host or you can be the guest and both of these works and if you can do both even better Ron it's such a pleasure to know you and meet you and if you ever come to Nashville on your way to see your mama in St Louis uh we need to get together and hang out because I think you'd be a fun dude to hang out with so thank you for being on the show man it's an honor to know you and I wish you continued success in Medellin and uh way to go man you're doing great well thanks for having me I appreciate the opportunity to share with your with your audience well there you have it another successful entrepreneur and his journey to success and as he defines success about making sure that you are doing something pursuing something worthwhile and and are comfortable with doing that for the rest of your life so we got to ask yourself is that what you're pursuing and I hope that you are and I think his story about facing his fears and moving to San Pedro Sula right out of the gate to face the most dangerous place on Earth is a really a good story for us as entrepreneurs to do the same thing to face our fears as entrepreneurs to look down the barrel of what scares you most and know that you're going to be okay and know that you're going to turn out all right just like he has so I hope that you've taken some uh Solace and some encouragement from Ron's story today isn't that funny Ron story Jr told Ron Stewart so uh I want you to go to pitchdb.com the real Jason Duncan and sign up for that account it's 97 bucks lifetime access to get you in front of every podcast that you want to get in front of every social uh every uh print media and get you on stages so go to the real uh pitchdb.com the real Jason Duncan and if you want to follow Ron directly on anything on social media he's at Ron's story Jr for junior Ron's story Jr on Twitter on Instagram and on Facebook and his website is ronstoryjr.com so big thanks to Ron for coming to us on the show today thank you for tuning in I will talk to you again next time when we have another entrepreneur talking about his journey to success until then I am the real Jason Duncan Jesus is King
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