#010 "Oliver Cantin - Why Problems are Profit in Disguise"

The Brandon Zhang Show

Today, I will be talking with Oliver Cantin, the owner of two successful online agencies within marketing and health coaching. Oliver has over 13,000 followers on Twitter and has over 15 years of experience in sales and marketing. On the episode, we discuss Oliver’s journey and failures as he ventured into online business, the one key skill that everyone needs to learn, and why you should prioritize one stream of income first.

Links:

1. Oliver’s Twitter
2. My Twitter
3. My Website

Show Notes:

When I say that I work for an agency, we actually do not focus on branding or social media posts, we are creating funnels to compel people to take a desired action.

I first learned about online business through the lens of tech startups, this is going back around ten, fifteen years. I wasn’t a coder but I figured I could be a co-founder of a start-up but I always felt that I needed an idea that would disrupt anything, which is not true.

I think the biggest mistake that people make is that everyone wants to be a social media marketing agency, but if you google that you will find hundreds in your area, they are highly commoditized and they do not focus on a specific problem.

The people that are most successful in business in general they are not successful because of their credentials, they are successful because of their drive, their successful because they can relentlessly find problems to solve.

Problems are profit in disguise, learn to love problems.

Sometimes I see people that are reading 10 copywriting books or taking 10 courses on how to buy ads, but at the end of the day, they are not doing anything.

In reality, few things are actually saturated.

It is all about perspective, one person may go to the food court and say, “this is saturated.” Someone else may go to the same food court and say, “there is so much opportunity here.”

Often people want to learn from people that are 6 months ahead, a year ahead of you when creating an info product or learning how to do coaching. If I speak with Tony Robbins about a coaching business, he is so far ahead that I do not know if he remembers everything he did twenty or thirty years ago.

There is also an element of personality when it comes to saturation. If I launch a Facebook ads course, there will some people that will want to learn from me because of my story and my content, and there will be others who want to learn from someone else, and that is totally ok!

I would not pursue multiple streams of income until my first stream becomes a river.

I like Twitter as a platform because the viewers are logged in, this is different from Youtube where a lot of your viewers are guests and it can be hard to capture their attention and views may provide an inflated story or metric.

Ask yourself what are your lead indicators, and find the ones that drive the most results.

Treat twitter as a two way communication mechanism.

I work from home now and my water cooler is Telegram group chats and my Happy Hour is Zoom calls.