Summary: Greg: Dan Faggella is a national Brazilian jiu-jitsu champion and also, a very talented online and offline entrepreneur. Dan his took his passion for martial arts and turned into an online niche with sales exceeding $40,000 per month. Dan is also the founder of CLVboost, an agency dedicated to helping startups and early-stage companies maximize their back-end conversions and e-mail marketing campaigns. It is with great pleasure that I say welcome to the call, Dan. Dan: Greg, I'm really happy to be here. This is great. Greg: Excellent. You've got quite a wide skill-set. And starting from, I guess, a different background through a lot of Internet marketers. If we dive in there, Dan, you've really got an interesting story with getting started as a martial arts instructor in the Brazilian jiu-jitsu space. And then, morphing into the online space. Can you share with us a little bit about sort of how that came about with you getting started with your first product, etc? Dan: Yeah, for sure. So, in terms of my initial transition to online marketing, you sort of put it right. I don't necessarily know if I had the same sort of start to IM [SP] that a lot of other folks do where they get introduced to ClickBank or something like that. For me, really, I started a martial arts gym in a very small town here in Rhode Island of about 8,000 people, a really tiny place. And I was building this gym because martial arts is really my passion; I was a competitor and a teacher and everything else. And I still am a teacher in a lot of respects. And when I went to graduate school in Pennsylvania, I went to University of Pennsylvania, so I realized Ivy League grad school was going to be really expensive. And at the same time, I was going to be driving back and forth from Pennsylvania to Rhode Island kind of eight hours back and forth. Pretty frantically; I was the only guy doing sales, the only guy doing marketing. So, all of a sudden, I was living on my own paying rent with just sort of teaching classes and private lessons. And I realized, "Man, I'm in such a small place. If I run out of leads, I could actually run out of them." When you're in a big metropolitan area, you really can't necessarily run out of people in New York City. It's really hard unless have just the most unheard of thing ever. But mixed martial arts in my town is pretty unheard of. And it actually was relatively difficult to scale. So, I had to learn e-mail marketing and really maximizing my ROI from e-mail and keeping any and all leads that I had on rotation; making sure I could get them in for appointments. Triggering phone calls, triggering specific messages. Rotating broadcast offers to really get people in the door. And it's really from there, actually...I had sort of a pretty rough incident at the academy where we actually had a little bit of a roof collapse in our martial arts gym because our building was really old. And it made me realize, "Man, I should probably have another income stream to pay off this grad school stuff than just this physical gym." So, we got close to about 100 students at one point there and I had actually sold it to the fellow that owns the place. But before then, I had taken a bunch of seminars that I had taught in a whole bunch of areas, topics around beating bigger opponents. And had used the same really calibrated, really focused dead set e-mail marketing online. And I realized there's a much bigger audience outside of my tiny town and that business really took off online. Greg: Yeah, gotcha. So, you took things that you were already teaching and then just start recording them on video and [inaudible 00:03:24] and selling them as individual products? Dan: Yeah, that's exactly it. So, to be honest, Greg, some people... They'll buy practically a movie set with a back drop and a blue light sort of in the background, a lot of fanciness. I had a camcorder that still had a little tape in it, actually, it was great.
