Maayan Gordon, Tik Tok Influencer | 1.7 Million Tik Tok Followers

The only podcast you need for your business, let's do this. Welcome to the sales versus marketing podcast, I'm your host, Scott. Join me as we explore and demystify the latest trends, technologies and strategies used to achieve massive growth in 10x businesses. I'll be sitting down with sales, marketing and business leaders, dissect what's worked for them, dispel myths and deliver actionable insights that you can use to ensure repeatable, sustainable and predictable revenue in your business. Welcome to the sales versus marketing podcast where we talk all sales, marketing and business. Today, I am sitting down with Mayan Gordon, who is a tick-tock influencer with over 1.7 million followers. She has built several businesses, an entrepreneur by heart, and this is her latest venture on building business, social media, and the importance of putting yourself out there and understanding how to leverage emerging technology and social platforms to really bring your brand as a person and your business to the next level. So Mayan, thank you so much for joining me today. Just tell us a little bit about yourself and then we'll speak a little bit more about what you're doing with GlassWorld and Tick-tock. My name is Mayan Gordon, thank you so much for having me on the podcast, really excited to be here. And I've got a really very non-linear story about who I am. I grew up in an orthodox Jewish family, so we kept kosher, had a lot of very different experiences as a child from growing up orthodox Jewish, but then as I moved into really competitive basketball growing up in 12 and 13 early teens, that really conflicted with kind of keeping the Sabbath the way that we had been. And so my parents really allowed me the freedom to pursue my basketball dreams and goals. And from that, I kind of stopped being as much orthodox and keeping to the kind of Jewish laws as they're called. And from there, I also had a really diverse schooling experience starting out in a private Jewish school, then going to a mostly black public school that was much, much larger and then back to a mostly white private high school. And so I've kind of, you know, my whole life been trying to figure out all these different experiences and really how they fit into my life and how they affect me and using them as well to kind of figure out who I am. And then in the past 10 years after high school, I did a year and a half of college before I dropped out and kind of realized that I had entrepreneurship in my soul and in my blood and pursued that to its fullest from poppy writing to serving my own business and creating my own product and a small but growing industry, which was the smoking industry. I live in Seattle, Washington, which is a weath legal state. So that it always been something I've been really interested in as a youngster growing up. I think drugs are something that most young kids are at least interested in. And so I did that for a while poppy writing my own product, switch to graphic design, which I did for a little bit, which led me into the glass blowing, which is the thing I've been doing the longest now besides kind of internet marketing as a whole. And I've been doing that for four and a half years. Can I ask you something? How does cannabis parlay into glass blowing? So pipes. Oh, I understand. Okay, okay. So everything besides a joint. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. This is with, yeah, various different glass. Okay. I got it. Cool. And for those, just to give a little background on that, it used to be that all that existed were like basic, they call them spoon pipes. And it's just like a basic glass pipe and they would sell anywhere from 20 to 60 dollars. But in the past 10 years, the industry has evolved to where there's these really, really, really fancy art style bongs that sell from 10,000 up to a million dollars is kind of what the highest price one is at the moment. But it's completely evolved this industry and being in an industry that's been evolving has really been an asset to me to learning a lot about businesses and how technological and perfecting industries and kind of looking at this little micro industry to understand more macro. Mm-hmm. Very interesting. And how did you become proficient at glass blowing? Because I can't imagine that's something that you just pick up and it looks, so I've looked at glass world, your account and all the stuff you do. First of all, it's like beautiful and we'll talk about that in a second. And I think that the work you do is incredibly impressive. But how do you like get, is that a family trait, or you just picked it up, it's something that you wanted to do? Yeah. So, I realized that I had some artistic ability, not with drawing or painting or anything kind of that you hold something in your hand, because I tried those out and sucked at them. But I was really good at ceramics. Again, I went to this really privileged high school that had a fantastic ceramic studio and full ceramics program and I think they got like one of the teachers from the University of Washington to come teach there. And I was really good at ceramics and I really loved it. I didn't necessarily think glass blowing would be the same because you're using completely different techniques and you're not directly touching the glass with your hands like you are in ceramics. But I thought that it might something I was good at because I was good at ceramics. And I got into it because of the graphic design work that I was doing. I was doing it for all sorts of random businesses, like whoever won a pizza, an auto mechanic, all these random things, a long care service. And one of them happened to be a glass artist, just a year and a half into my doing graphic design and logos and stickers. All his friends were glass blowers because when you're an artist such as a glass blower, it's so involved with the amount of work you have to commit. In time, you have to commit to making the art alone. And it ends up that all your friends and people you can get with are also involved in the art business and that's usually on the artist level. So he got these stickers, loved them, referred me to all his friends and I just kind of started making stickers more exclusively for glass artists. And a lot of them didn't have, let's say, the $100 or $200 cash to spend on stickers. But they did have a bunch of glass pieces that were finished that they were trying to sell. And to them, that was a really great feel for them to trade those, let's say, $300 worth of pipes to me for the $100 with the stickers because it only cost them $20 in materials. And same with me, it was much better to get $300 worth of glass than it was $100 cash in stickers because I could sell the glass for like $200 really quickly because I was selling it under price. So it was a great view. It was still more than I would get for the stickers. You were just really good at marketing and branding and selling. Yeah. Yeah. Of my life, completely living off of Craigslist trades that I did, starting with something small and then just trading it up because I had graphic design and web design skills, I could trade my time for things that I could then either trade for more valuable things or just sell. So I got a lot of really interesting stories from that period of time in my life. But I've always been good at trading. I think probably because my parents never gave me any money growing up, there was no allowance. I could work for a very, very measly amount of money. But to me, I was like, I'm not going to mow the whole yard for a dollar. That was kind of the deal type of thing. And so I kind of figured out other ways. And my parents were not happy about this at all. But I figured out, oh, I could trade my toys to other kids for either snacks or snacks. You hustled. Yeah. I hustled from a very, because being, you know, orthodox, I was really deprived of a lot of things that I wanted as a kid. So like, yeah, because I wanted, I couldn't eat because they weren't close. And so, you know, I go to school and I, you know, and also my parents were relatively poor. I'm the oldest of four. So not because they weren't skills just, they were 20 when they had me. So, you know, they had to play out in the workforce. And my parents do very well now. My mother's the head of neurobiology at the University of Washington. And my dad's also a PhD teacher at the UW. But at the time, it was, they were a young family, yeah. Young family. And they were kind of really investing into me, yeah, in terms of, you know, buying as many books as they could for me, buying as many kind of, you know, educational tools and things like that. So, you know, junk food wasn't something that they were going to, you know, spend money on. Yeah. So I would go to school and I would trade, like, you know, some of my toys for, you know, fruit roll ups or sometimes for money, because I was always fascinated with money at a young age. And, but that was really kind of shamed in my family. And there was a lot of, you know, I got really in trouble for doing that. I grew up with this very anti-money mentality from other people, knowing that other people don't like when you like money. That's kind of what I learned at a young age. And, you know, it's been definitely a process of kind of changing my mindset around that to realize that's how some people think, but that's, but that it's okay to think the way I think, which is that money is great. It's an amazing tool. 100%. Yeah. So much for you. I think it's, I think it's incorrectly demonized if you don't understand what it can do for you and for others. If it's just looked, if it's not looked at as a tool and it's like a, like, almost like a collection or item or whatnot, that's, that's negative. But like you're saying, like, to be an entrepreneur, especially, you can't demonize money because you need money to, to, to live, to grow, to build whatever passion project you're working on. So I 100% agree. But I think that it is, it is incorrectly demonized because it's not, it's not used for the right purposes more often than not, but as an entrepreneur, you totally, you totally understand. And the hustle is awesome. I love it. That's great. That's really, really good. So you were like, you know, you're entrepreneurial, like very much by nature. Yeah. Very much by nature, but didn't realize it until I was probably 1920 years old. I really, until I dropped out of college was a thousand certain that I was going to be a veterinarian. That was my path. I was like, I'm going to go to college. I'm going to do great in college. I'm great at school. And then I'm going to go to that school. And then I'm going to, you know, get a great job, making money, and I love it. And I think that's because I really didn't understand how many options there were. And you know, I'm kind of also this age where when my parents were raising me when I was really young, there weren't all these options. The internet wasn't at school. The way it is now to really give you opportunity. And I don't think they were at all prepared to really navigate those changes. I mean, how could they have been prepared to realize, oh, wow, this internet thing is completely changing the entire world, you know, our daughter needs to adapt to that in some way or that that's going to give her some advantage. And they inherently must have because they sent me to a high school that was very kind of technologically advanced to go in this school's lakeside school in Seattle, if you're curious. And entire schools run on laptops. So when you go get into the school, you have to buy a laptop because all your homework is submitted online, like everything's done online and shared, you know, through your projects, they have different project management systems and all these different things that really a high level business would have to, you know, organize it to help us kind of have a school run. That's really good for a high school to have. That's very impressive. Yeah. And I would say that's one of the, you know, things that really led me to be able to pursue entrepreneurship on a whole, but especially in kind of the digital marketing and advertising realm was having that leg up on the basics of, okay, here's how the internet works. Here's how people search the internet. Here's how SEO works. Here's how AdWords works. Here's how all these different things work because I had four years of high school time where I wasn't, you know, I didn't have a big group of friends I was spending a lot of time with. I played basketball. That's kind of where I got my social fun social engagement at home. It's kind of, you know, mess around on the laptop and search the internet and like, pride programs. I always had a lot of different software programs like, you know, pop and things like that. So now, okay, so now you've, you were sort of, let's, let's fast forward to where you're like, you're, you're, you were brokering all these glasswares and you were making mad money off that. When did you actually start what you're doing kind of now? So glass world, I'm assuming started just, you were just doing your own glass work and then eventually you took it online because you understood that that's how you sell. So you, you were, now you're doing your own thing and you're building out your own product. And so I've always been online actually. Yeah. I didn't jump online when I started glass. I actually created my first Instagram account with our first being product that we created, which was about eight years ago and that was diffuser. And I created an account for this because I knew that I needed to convince people with as many tools as possible that this product had value because we, it was a new product you know, when it ever heard of, like we may have the words for the product. Like, and so when we call shots, because we did a lot of B2B with that, it was like 50% B2B and then 50% retail off of like Amazon in our way. So when we would call, hold call shots, we'd say, we've got this awesome product, diffuser piece. Are you guys interested in trying it out and they go, what are diffuser? And so instead of just telling them, we wanted to say, okay, here's what they are and here's our, our Instagram to go check it out and here's our website to go check it out. And so it was kind of like a portfolio of being able to show these stuff, what the product was. And at the same time being able to damage their customers already had interest and we're showing interest by commenting on our posts and messaging us because of the shots, they much, much more care about their current customers than they do about new customers. It's much easier for in retail in general for you to get a sale from a customer you already have than it is to get an entirely. It's a much, it's a much cheaper sale. The customer cost of acquisition is much lower, yeah. Absolutely. Just in terms of time, even if your cost was zero across both, it's going to be a much quicker transaction where you've already been able to get. Now, okay. So is it just the environment that you grew up in where you understood the power of social media, social proof, social selling, even as a brand? Is that just because you were raising like a technical environment? Like why do you think that you have such a, because I know so many businesses are still not, like we're going to go into TikTok, which is, which is still obscure for people that are in marketing, digital marketing, where you have to understand that businesses are still not even tuned into using Instagram or having a strong social presence across what we consider like old or latent like social platforms. So how did you, how did you, how did you sort of tap into that niche and how did you find it was so powerful? Was it conversions? Was it just like the environment grew up in with your, your high school? Yeah. So definitely a huge part of it was I would say environment, not necessarily in a technological sense, but the high school I went to really taught us how to think more than it gave us information. And so the high school really taught me how to look at all the information I was getting and analyze where it was coming from, what, you know, what biases all information has based on who's giving it and the context and which is given. And I was just always fascinated by this puzzle, like everything that exists in our world is really just this fascinating puzzle. If you, if you look at it on that level of, wow, even everything someone saying to me, I can break it down and really figure out more information than even they're telling me their words. And so it just created this mindset in me that I wanted to learn and wanted to seek out information. And then in combination with being gifted with this amazing tool of the lab pot and really just the freedom of those two together on my own time, I just explored on the internet. And I think I'm really fortunate that that happened for me when I was a teenager because teenagers inherently have so much more free time than adults do. Like when you have a job, you're, you're priority shift. When you have a family, you're priority shift, a family that you're taking care of, obviously you still have to be when you're in high school. So being able to kind of have the freedom to explore my interests when I had the most time probably in my life other than when I reached a higher level of success, kind of if I look at myself back that amount of time, I think was really lucky for me and a lot of people don't necessarily have that advantage that I had. But if you are interested in developing kind of that curiosity, I think it's, I think curiosity is absolutely something that can be developed, it's not something that you just have or you don't have. The more you foster it, the more it grows. And if you're interested in becoming more interested in social media, in technology, all you have to do is really spend some time with it away from all the other pressures, away from everything else that exists in your life, you have to go, I'm going to just get to know and explore and play around with this technology. And when you give yourself the freedom to really interact with a piece of technology, you'll start to realize both on an intellectual and emotional level that it is helping you. And it is actually doing things that you want it to do for you. And that, and once you make that connection, then you don't have to motivate yourself, like it's self-motivating to things that are good for yourself. 100%. Yeah. Having developed that at a young agency, wow, technology is powerful for me to accomplish things that I want was really valuable and it's in my mind now forever that technology. Even if it's difficult to learn it first, or even if I don't feel like I want to learn it at first, if I can get over that home, that there's going to be this kind of amazing prize on the other side. I think that's why if we look at where you're at right now, and somebody would look at you from like, you know, 30,000 feet, you look extremely successful with all your following, your social media presence, but that attitude is something that I've seen in anybody that is wildly successful, that absolute curiosity to just figure things out. And even before we started like this session, like the first thing you did, you were asking me like a couple of questions about like what I was doing with like my podcast, and like I recognize it because I like doing that as well. And that's honestly why I enjoy these podcasts because you have a platform to talk about your life, your story, everything that you've done. But if you don't think I learned something every single time I speak to somebody, you're kidding yourself. Like this is incredible for me as well. And like the things that I can take away just by having like a platform to interview like the most interesting people in the world is I love it. So yeah, I think that congratulations on being self aware enough to recognize that that is an incredibly powerful thing as an individual, regardless of whether or not you're like an entrepreneur or you're working in an organization like that curiosity, well, you'll never let yourself down as long as you're learning something. Yeah. And what I've kind of realized just that one more thing on that curiosity level for people who are like, okay, I'm curious about bugs, like I think that's a great, I'm curious about insights. How the hell is that going to help me in my life? So if you really just pursue that interest, I think it helps in so many ways. And you become more interesting for people now that you have all these interesting facts to talk about bugs, even people who don't like bugs, they'll still think it's very interesting that you know these random specific things and people will pay more attention to you. And then to the ideas you get in one vector of your life, to not be like, your brain is not this prison where ideas are kept, I think that it's really great to just pursue your curiosity on any level, even if it's something that doesn't feel like it's completely relevant to your life, because when you get new ideas, those ideas apply across all the aspects of your life. So even if you're studying bugs and you're like, how do bugs apply to anything else in my life, there might be something that you learn that you don't realize while you're learning it, that it applies in another aspect. It's kind of one of those aha moments that we all experienced where you're doing something in your day-to-day life. And then this crazy idea from something you learned a month ago or two weeks ago pops into your head and you're like, whoa, I never knew that that would be useful for like this thing I'm doing right now. And I think that happens more and more, just the more you follow those curiosities and passions and focus on learning for the enjoyment of learning and that mystery, also like that mystery is a wonderful thing when you learn something new to think about how is this going to help me in the ways that I can possibly predict? 100%. Okay. So that's, this is all powerful, like little knowledge bites that I'm going to use later on. These are really good. Right. I'm down. Yeah, I know. Okay. So we've gone through, where you sort of became proficient on social, you're using that to some success. Now is it too quick to jump into when you started using TikTok? Is there other? Yeah. Okay. And then one thing I want to say about TikTok is on my Glass Blowing page, not all that work is done by me. So I do something called digital arbitrage where I download videos from Instagram using like a repost app. There's a million of them looking into that. And then I use an editor app called Splice, which is really great. If you have iPhone or recommended Android, you have to find something else. But there's lots of great editor hops out there. And what it allows me to do is change the format so that it's full screen because most Instagram videos are either completely square or somewhat rectangular but not full screen vertical. And then I cut out all the boring parts. That's probably like the most important part of the edit is I cut out any time where there's like no action happening. And then I'll speed up anything that's slow because a lot of times if you're trying to get something down into it's 10 to 15 second window, you have to speed things up. And so I do all this editing. I re-upload it into the app and then I select the music and I post it with HAD to the artist. Yeah. That's I would say maybe like 60 to 80% of the posting that I do on TikTok and then another 5 to 10% is my own active glass blowing and then 15 to 10% is like lifestyle. You know TikTok stuff. Yeah. Yeah. No, but I think that's also important because you're you if for content creators that are that are looking at TikTok and are don't understand what they can do. There's so many ways to create content that let's not just for exactly like that digital arbitrage, content curation, chopping and editing up clips, whatever it may be like there's so many ways that even if you're not great at creating content, there's ways to create useful content that isn't like ripping people off. It's not copying. It's that you're creating something that there was nothing and now you're not only creating stuff for your own page because you're an artist in the sense that you know what looks good, how to how to edit it, how to put it together, but you're also driving incredible amounts of traffic and awareness, especially now for somebody who probably has like a couple hundred people that have ever cared about glass blowing following them originally. So there's a lot of ways to create content and I don't think that I think well, I don't think that should stop you, but I think that it stops a lot of people unfortunately because they don't know what to do. I think one really good example of a type of content that anyone can do very easily is voice over content, literally take the don't change it, but do a voice over in your own style, make it fun. Yeah. Your personality has been a voice of people really love that and it's so easy to do. So that's something any business can do. And I think that what you should take away from creating all this content and being personal and doing voice over work or digital arbitrage or even just your own self, you're putting yourself out there, which is the most important thing, right? So that's people have ad blindness and they don't always like being sold to by a company, but if you put a little bit of yourself into that, it's much easier to feel like they have a real connection with the person who's creating the ads or creating the content or running the company because it's somebody. It's not just ominous, ominous company. It's a person. Yeah, exactly. So okay, so cool. So you got on, so how did you, first of all, how did you discover TikTok? Why did you think that was a good outlet? Yeah, so I've followed Gary Vee for probably four or five years now. I've listened to his entire series of stuff because one advantage I had also while I'm being blast-blowing, I have hours on hours on hours to listen to podcasts, the music. So I have a really well-developed sense of both music and then I have a lot of information just kind of knowledge-wise from listening to a variety of podcasts. And so his was one of the ones I listened to as well as his, I can't remember which book, but he's got one of his books on podcasts. His most famous one, the third one. Press it. Pressing it? Yeah. Yeah. I've kind of since I went through all of this content, been just kind of keeping up to see what he's up to, type of deal. And he kept while I was looking to see, okay, what's the up to this week for, you know, spoken through, okay, a couple more motivational posts that he's like for this, because you get through all the motivational stuff. And he does have actually really interesting, very in-depth business videos on his YouTube and then through his IPHTV. And so I kind of would keep my eye open for those. And I just kept hearing him and seeing him post about TikTok. And I was like, if he keeps posting about it in this way. And I really resonate with a lot of the kind of business theories and applications that he believes in. And so I thought, okay, he must see something that I don't see yet, because I see everything he said. Like when I was listening to Gary B, it wasn't new information I was getting. It was reaffirming all the information I already had. And so I was like, what is up with TikTok? So I jumped on it. I started just posting last-blowing videos. I started out with the marijuana-related smoking pieces, but they were so easy that you couldn't tell. Like no one who, unless you made the piece or you've seen that piece before, you wouldn't know that it's a bong or a pipe, because it looks like a crazy dragon or like a piece in turtle or whatever. And it got slags and he can found right away, like within 30 minutes or an hour. And this was when I had maybe a couple hundred followers. So it made me realize why this app has very different technology behind it, because none of the other apps can do that. Like the app's not flagging anything. People are flagging anything. And then there's people who work at the app who are coming to verify whether or not. And so I started being just really fascinated, because I've always been curious about technology. I was like, oh, this app's really different. Yeah, so I was curious, and I was trying to think about how that was possible. How would the app be able to do that? And what I really came up with, I was like, you know, it must be AI software, the way that YouTube has AI that can kind of read video content on some level. And I was like, wow, that's amazing that this integrated part of the app. So I had to switch up my strategy. I was like, okay, so it's really smart. It's not, it's going to detect all my piper related videos. So what can I post that's still going to be really interesting visually, but not going to get flagged? And the first thing kind of was soft glass. So there's two different types of glass blowing. One is borosilicate, which I guess you'd call hard glass, which is what I do. And the glass cools really quickly, so you have to do all the work directly in the flame. With soft glass, it cools down much more quickly. So you can stick it in the furnace, pull it out, and then do all these beautiful kind of cool. It's a cool slower, it cool slower than the, yeah, vehicle, yeah. And as it cools slower, it hardens slower too. So it's still viable. And so I started posting those videos and they were doing pretty well, you know, getting like a couple thousand views, which for having, you know, not many followers and being two weeks in on the platform was, I was very intrigued by that. But then I posted a video to send that started getting millions of views and it was going viral and crazy. And of course that, you know, was one really exciting because I've never had any video on any platform that did probably more than 100,000 views. But for it to be getting millions in climbing was very exciting to the comments were very interesting. I've seen to this kind of sub culture called visco girls on TikTok where a visco girl is someone who wears a lot of scrunchies, she has a ponytail and she cares about the environment. It's just like this kind of like, like how goth is a type of person or a or boy is like a type of person. So it's just kind of this category of a person that is really popular on TikTok. And they all have like hash, there's hashtags for it and there's videos for it. And because the video was this giant turtle, it was super realistic. People were like, no, they're murdering a turtle. But then the other half of the people were like, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's blast blowing. Don't worry. And so there was this back and forth in the comments of people being confused about like what was really happening in the video. I was fascinated by the level that the video could get so many views. And then on this culture level of what people were talking about and just how many comments. I mean, on Instagram videos, even when the video does really well, you're talking about you know, three, four, five hundred comments for an account that has, let's say, a hundred thousand or less. When you're talking about a TikTok video that does well, even with an account that has 10,000 followers yet, you know, 5,000, 10,000, 30,000, 50,000, 100,000 comments. The engagement is crazy disproportional to be, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So since that happened, I just kind of started slowly putting more energy and focus onto it because I've always been someone who's followed opportunity. And I saw, wow, there's a lot of opportunity for me to grow and reach a new audience here. And so I've been doing that. And then I kind of a month in, I realized, Gary's also talking about LinkedIn a lot. If TikTok worked out so well. Is advice and look how well it worked for me. I better hop on LinkedIn. And since then, I've just been really posting, you know, the 10 years worth of information and knowledge that I've learned doing business as well as the active kind of learning I'm doing with TikTok and interacting with all these new people that I'm getting to meet through LinkedIn. So it's like almost a self perpetuating process once you really start promoting cross platform, I feel, because you always have something new to talk about. You always have something new to leverage and promote. You always have new information that's valuable to you and to other people. So it's just been great. I've been on LinkedIn for the past. I want to say four months now. And it's just been climbing just as well as TikTok as numbers are not the same. But I'd say the growth is still the same. I'd say so LinkedIn, I'm really double down on LinkedIn because I find that that's where I'm comfortable at and like that's what I can speak to all the time. TikTok, I'm trying. I'm playing around with it. I think that a lot of, for me, I speak a lot about, oh, you have to create content and it's like pot calling the kettle black. I still have to myself focus on making more content and figuring out what resides, like really people care about. But I think that the fact that you're doing cross platform, you're doing it successfully. You've, I think, discovered something that a lot of people have trouble with as well. Even people that want to go cross platform sometimes have trouble understanding which content is optimized for each platform. And I've seen your stuff on LinkedIn. And I think that the way that you build your LinkedIn brand is obviously there's still some crossover, but it's still very strong. So congratulations on that. And I think you're doing it very well. And I'm very impressed because I don't see a lot of people, again, like on TikTok, who care to build out their brand on other channels, they seem to just double down on one. That's fine. And it's literally the same thing that I've seen with YouTubers where they just build out one channel. And like, listen, some of them make millions of dollars. And I also guess maybe they don't care, but still, like imagine YouTube went down yesterday or TikTok went down or tomorrow, or excuse me, what, you know, what would you do, right? So. Exactly. And for me, I think that that's something I was always really hyper aware of because I was in this category, which was, you know, the smoking industry category that we all, everyone already knew that none of the platforms liked us, like it's all smoking culture, it's never been okay. It's only much more than simply been accepted, you know, because of legalization and different states. On a whole, the industry understands like, look, the platforms won't promote us if they recognize that we're related to like kind of marijuana content at all that they're going to limit, limit our reach. And so I always, why I have two Instagram accounts is I was always, there were times when, you know, you get shadow banned on Instagram and now your stuff's not getting seen for two full weeks by almost anyone. And so I really started a second account on Instagram to mitigate that, that circumstance. Yeah. And then, you know, cross platform was kind of the same thing as my, as my Instagram sales started to dip, I started to realize, okay, whether or not they pick back up, like this is something that happens in business. And I have to be kind of someone who's more planning and preparing for that and building it into my business structure than someone who's reacting to it. So, no, 100%. So have you noticed, like when you've gone cross platform to LinkedIn, are you trying to build other audiences across different platforms, are you going to go to YouTube? Are you trying to, I don't know, do like live streaming on, I don't even know, is it possible to do something on Twitch, like do you see value in other platforms right now outside of the ones that you're sort of absolutely again, I'm kind of a strange bird where I follow opportunity, even if it doesn't like really make sense, if I could smell the opportunity in the air, I'll follow it because if I don't seize on that opportunity, I'll learn something incredible from it. And that to me is just as big an opportunity as like success. And so for me, what I'm really trying to do right now is make my, as approachable, as available, as marketable to any opportunity that comes my way within kind of my skill set that I'm really good at, so that I would be very successful at it. So for example, yesterday I did have some, and these opportunities they pop up out of nowhere all the time, which is what I've really learned is the opportunities that are out there that you're unaware of have a huge impact on your life, but if you're not patient for them to kind of find their way to you, then it's like they never existed. And so yesterday I had someone read that me who works with, I remember, I think it's called Big O Live, it's a streaming app, and they're interested in paying me monthly to do a certain number of hours streaming on that platform. So the way I think about it is cool, that's really nice to get the money in, but I want to do streaming on a platform anyways, now's an opportunity for me to start a new audience on LinkedIn to this platform, build a unique community around that, and at the same time to getting paid for it. So it's not something I would have jumped into without the paid opportunity because I do feel that I'm getting so much value out of LinkedIn right now that I'm also kind of really doubling down on it and making sure that I'm maximizing the opportunity and value out of that platform, but if someone wants to start paying me to take a chance on another opportunity, how could I pass that up? No, I agree, and it's just another, like you said, a learning experience. So maybe your audience fits with live, maybe they don't, you'll find out, and you'll learn. Yeah. Something really valuable about a lot, I'll be able to analyze, I see, why didn't this work for this platform, was it the crossover audience, was it some way that I was trying to market or push the crossover? So I think I learned a lot more from my failures than I view my successes, but obviously success is really fun and wonderful too. You have to always mitigate those things, but I think a healthy amount of failure mixed in with success is always something that's going to propel you forward faster. I think I agree. I think that if you just have success, when you do fail, you won't know what to do with yourself. So having those micro, very like hopefully not major failures, but micro failures and learning experiences along the way, I think it's very important. So if you were going to speak to somebody who is looking at all these social, it could be a business, it could be an individual who's trying to make themselves more marketable, there's so many options now. How do you, and there's no right or wrong answer to this, because I'd have to think about this myself, so maybe we can just talk through it. But what do you think would be the best way to sort of approach looking at new building out of brand for yourself? Do you go to LinkedIn, do you go to TikTok, do you go to Instagram? Where do you start, or do you just start on all of them slowly? No, I think that there are so many platforms now that it makes sense to do a little bit of research beforehand before just kind of prying them all out. There is, you can thin yourself out very easily, and the platforms inherently work better when you put more effort, like every single platform works better when you put more into it. So really, three or less platforms, if you're starting from scratch is always the way to go. I really kind of suggest starting with one, building the, you know, posting habits into your lifestyle with one, and then working on adding the next in the next, I think that's for me the most effective way. But if you're just starting out and you don't even know which one to try first, I would say research. So think about who is your target customer, and then think about which platforms that they're on. Or if you don't know, like, even if you think you know, still do research, like just where do dog, what are the best social media apps for dog owners? And a cool thing about that is you'll probably have, you know, lots of articles that say Facebook or LinkedIn or this or that, but you might discover this much smaller social app that no one's talking about because they're not in the dog space, and it's not this giant thing, but is amazing for your business, and you could brush it on because it's so targeted to your specific. And there's honestly, there's so many social apps and sites out there, you guys that I think businesses, especially smaller businesses, could really be tapping into to build a really valuable following on that platform. And then again, if you can build a valuable following on one platform and then transfer it over to another platform, you get this giant kickstart on that platform that allows you to build momentum in a way that, I mean, that's often the kind of thing that stops people as they just can't build that beginner momentum for really valuable for them to put in the time to it. So if you can get that on any one platform, you can almost always get going faster on the next platform from help, you know, be a that first one. And that's that's really what you're doing now. Like I see it. I see that you've like parlayed like the success on TikTok, and now you have some momentum on LinkedIn that people that have been on LinkedIn for years don't have the same success that you're having because you sort of follow, you know, your own strategy, which is obviously smart. But not even I think a lot of times when they think people think cross-platform, they think that the audience is jumping over. It's not the audience that's jumping over it's the content, it's repurposing or refiguring out how to leverage the content. So I'm not posting my glass blowing videos typically on LinkedIn unless I'm like trying to grab attention real quick with a very long-wordy post. But most of the time I'm using information about what happened on the TikTok to post about on LinkedIn. So you can do that across any, I mean, whoever is listening to this and has an Instagram account is also on LinkedIn, you can post about the interesting things that happen on your Instagram account on LinkedIn and people will find it very fascinating and it could be small things like hey, this customer messaged me today and said that they really loved my product. Yeah. And then talk about that, talk about who that customer is, talk about that interaction or whatever value you can provide from that little tiny piece is a big piece of value on another. Because now you're doing a sales or marketing training on LinkedIn from an actual interaction with the customer that you had. Yeah, so that's very good. It's so easy to create content if you just sort of open your mind to all the potential opportunities. And I think that when you become proficient at creating content like you mentioned for one platform, then you start to understand the different ways you can create content the posting cadence, just getting into the feel of social, so to speak. Yeah. So I want to wrap up with like a couple like questions just to provide inside of people that are maybe younger in their career. But before I go into these sort of like wrap up questions, is there anything that about your origin story that I didn't that I didn't speak to? No, I mean, I think there's, you know, there's like so many more details and crazy stories that go in with it. But I think it's really just, I like people to see that you don't have to have a particular background. I have a really very diverse background and no particular piece of it was like the secret sauce that made me who I am, you know, really the secret sauce was figuring out who I am and really self-awareness and paying attention to what made me happy, what I was good at, what things kind of put a halt on my motivation. I think motivations are really interesting things I had time to do to think about where your motivation comes from and what fuels your motivation, which I think are two different things. I think where your motivation comes from is different from what fuels your motivation and figuring out each of those aspects is really just a big, I think, part of success. Self-awareness is incredibly important and you're right because you can be motivated to start something, but what's going to, if I'm understanding correctly, so I don't want to put words in your mouth, but the fuel, fueling of motivation is the drive long past, long past it loses its fun or its excitement, I'm assuming, so what's keeping it going long-term? Yeah, absolutely. And even on the level of beyond the idea itself, what fuels you, like in general, when energy, where do you get it from? Because I think a lot of times we can run out of the fuel that comes from the why of our business, like all of our fuels have its paint size, but we have unlimited tanks. I think that's a really good way to kind of, for people, that's a great analogy, yeah, I like that a lot. And you can really always find more tanks to fuel you, based on the things that are happening in your life. So for me, over the past couple years, that's really been finding the tank of nature, kind of realizing that any time I can put myself in a natural environment, that I can really get energy and fuel from that for whatever it is I'm doing or trying to accomplish, even so much as focusing harder on, that I can gain fuel from the beautiful leaves and the air outside from that, or let's say another one would be from routine, that I can actually gain fuel from having routine in certain parts of my life. But creating routine can be a system that fuels me, even around something that normally I would find graining, so like brushing my teeth or, you know, taking out my contacts at night are not things that fuel me, but the routine of that fuels me. I like that, that's really, that's really powerful because I've never heard a phrase like that before, but you find a system that supports the supports a good end the bad and you'll be successful in both, as long as you find that system that works for you. And that, yeah. Absolutely. No, I like the way you put it too, I like the way to feel that unlimited tanks, limited fuel, find that process that sort of helps continue in finding new tanks, so to speak. I don't have really any other questions about who you are, what you've done, I just want to ask to sort of put some context again for people that are sort of earlier on. This is a question I always ask, if you could tell your 20-year-old self or pick an age when you were younger, one thing, what would it be? One thing, so it would definitely be something centered around my self-esteem, or like who I am, at that point in my life I really struggled, I think, with, you know, not being the person that I wanted to be and not feeling like I would ever, or could ever be that person. So it would be something along the lines of just focus on today and we'll get who you want to be today, and I'm going to do that, you will be more than you ever imagined. And I love that you said that because what I, I like asking one of two questions. I like asking, what would you tell your 20-year-old self? I also like asking, if you, if I was to meet you in high school, would you be the same person as you are? You'd answer as always, no, but I like to frame that because there's a variety of people that listen to this podcast in particular and some of them are obviously more mature in their career, but some of them are where you were at when you were 17, 18, 19, 20, just getting started in their careers, trying to understand where to go, what to do, what skills they should learn, and I think that highlighting the fact that you are definitely much more different, like as a person, you're like almost like a completely, a complete stranger compared to who you were when you were in a good way. I think that that provides a lot of fuel or tanks or inspiration, whatever you want to call it, the people that are much younger. So that's, that's really what I wanted to get out of that. But that's very, that's, thank you. And then lastly, where do you go to, you spoke about podcasts, spoke with Gary Vee, a book of mentor, a resource, where do you go to learn? Yeah, so I really go to the internet, just in all search, just things I'm interested in. And then again, because I have a developed sense about being able to immediately tell what garbage content is and what's not, I can kind of look through the pages and find something really interesting or something really valuable. Yeah, I mean, just research and learning have been always my, my best tools for accomplishing anything. Sorry, I kind of forgot what your question was. And I don't know, it's all good. No, no, well, that's, first of all, that's, that's good. Like that's, that's, that's, it's a very important takeaway, so it's not bad. No, I was like, I was just, it can sort of, you know, segue into what the question was, I was like learning resources, like, like things where people should go. So is it like a podcast that you love that you found super valuable? That kind of thing. Yes, no, I do have, there's, there's two, two kind of literature things I want to recommend. So one is the four agreements, I don't remember who wrote it, but it's, it's very widely known. And it really talks about kind of how you interact with the world, it's, it's much more a mindset style book, more than, it's directly to like business things. And then the second one would be a podcast called Business Wars. And I learned such an incredible amount of information that applies across everything that I know and learn from that podcast, because it's really a story style podcast where they take you from the beginning to kind of now of two big businesses that have been competing over time. So Pepsi and Cola, you know, like HBO, like these different kind of big long battles in history but have been completely business battles. But they really tie in like all the characters and how the, you know, the owner or the person who was running it has these really major effects. And it really opened up my mind to understanding how big businesses run things, how big businesses evolve over time and kind of the decisions that had the most impact for those businesses. Because they do it across really every industry from, you know, tech to food to a county. Like literally everything they just speak about like these like massive, that's very cool. I've actually listened to Business Wars before, I like it a lot. It's a, yeah, that's a really good podcast that no one's ever recommended that before. They usually recommend something by Gary Vee or something like that or something sort of like niche like marketing or sales podcast, but that's a really good one. But I think it covers that just like it's like it's agnostic of a business unit in particular. It's agnostic of an industry just covers like the whole range of things that can happen. Which can be totally applicable to literally anything you do. I really like about that podcast in particular versus like other podcasts that I've listened to is, so they have a near-rater that's telling things like this happen this happened. But then they cut a large, large amount of it is conversations. So they create conversations that you know, it's not the actual words that they were using, but they create conversations so that you can feel like you were in the room listening in a part of these moments that were happening. And I think that's very cool. Yeah. Yeah. And like it made me remember everything that's into it in the podcast versus like other podcasts I know that I listened to, like if I had to tell you what they were specifically said, I forget. Yeah. That's it. That's an even, that's another takeaway and you're not going to go into that. But the ability to tell a story properly is incredibly important and anything you do. So great point. Okay. If people want to get in touch with you or contact you, how did they do it? Yeah. LinkedIn right now is probably the best kind of platform to get in touch with me. If you want to find me, my name is M-A-A-Y-A-N. Last name, G-O-R-B-O-N. And you can also find me on Instagram. I answer Instagram messages very regularly. My business, the Instagram is Monkey Boy art. And then my last related Instagram is Monkey Boy Blast. And then on TikTok, you can find my last bullying videos at World of Blast. That's all we have for today. Thank you so much, my end for joining me. If you haven't already, please like, share, subscribe to the sales versus marketing podcast where we speak with sales marketing and business leaders. You can download this podcast wherever you can download podcasts, including iTunes, Spotify, IHeart, A-Cast, as well as you can watch this podcast on YouTube. As always, have an amazing week, have a productive week and we will speak again soon. Bye now. Thanks for listening to the sales versus marketing podcast, brought to you by R-O-I-Overload. Delivering strategy, technology and insights to both sales and marketing leaders and teams globally.