How Did a 21-Year Old Become an Amazon Best Seller and Marketing Expert - Carson Spitzke

Unlock the secrets to explosive business growth with growth marketing guru Carson Spitzke, founder of Spitz Solutions, in a candid conversation that transforms his competitive athlete's spirit into entrepreneurial gold. Journey with us as Carson lays out the roadmap for becoming an Amazon bestseller, highlighting how strategic moves with minimal effort lead to outsized success. From the ice rink to the marketplace, his story is an adrenaline rush of smart marketing tactics, and he generously shares these insights to help you replicate his winning formula in your own ventures.

Weathering hurricanes and market volatility, this episode is a treasure trove of resilience, showcasing why embracing failure is not just important but necessary. We dissect the complexities of decision-making, proving that data trumps emotion every time. Austin Carson adds a layer of intensity, discussing the mindset that sets successful entrepreneurs apart. His candid reflection on the freedom entrepreneurship affords over traditional employment is both refreshing and invigorating. Eager to learn from someone who's navigated the highs and lows of running a business? Austin extends an invitation to connect, promising a glimpse into the unyielding determination behind entrepreneurial success.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:41

Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you are capable of more, then join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your host serial entrepreneurs David Shomer and Ken Wilson.

Speaker 2: 1:06

Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast. On today's episode, we have the privilege to interview Carson Spitzke. Carson is the founder of Spitz Solutions. Carson has worked with brands like TEDx and various publicly traded companies and is also an Amazon bestseller at the age of 21. Very excited to have Carson on the show today. Welcome, carson. Yeah, thanks for having me. Guys Both of you, david and Ken, appreciate it Absolutely. So, to start things off, can you share with the audience a little bit about yourself and your path to becoming a growth marketing expert?

Speaker 3: 1:37

Yeah, sure. So my entire background. I think this is pretty common, but I was an athlete when I started, right, I was 16, 17, 18 playing hockey. I was okay, right. I played against people who are in the NHL now, but I'm not going to pretend I was a superstar At that same time. I was okay in school, like I skipped a grade, graduated 18 months early and went into COVID, right. And during that time, when we were going into COVID here, I ended up quitting hockey because no season, right.

Speaker 3: 2:04

And I kind of figured out well, I kind of suck at working in nine to five Like I hadn't gotten fired, but I wasn't exactly a model employee. I was never going to get promoted anytime soon. So I figured, well, how can I use my skill sets, how can I use my drive, ambition, my competitiveness, into something that makes me money in that sense, and that's kind of all I cared about at the time, which is fine. Obviously, as anyone my age does, I'm on social media, fair amounts. I fell down a rabbit hole of make money online through various business opportunities, whether it was through, like social media, marketing or stock trading or e-commerce, right. I kind of figured out well, I need to pick one of these or figure out skills so that I can grow a business. And as I'm going through deciding what skills do I need? How do I want to learn what I want to learn from, I realized that what caught my attention was someone who had a good social media following. They were producing content to nurture and educate me.

Speaker 3: 2:54

But what made me pull the trigger on any type of buying purchase was the social proof that they had. Like, for example, if they had a wall of 100 testimonials, yeah, I was likely going to buy it. If they had as seen on Forbes or USA Today, I was likely to buy it. If they had amazing reviews from a lot of people, I was pretty likely to buy it.

Speaker 3: 3:11

So, as I was struggling to figure out, what should my service be, how should I, like you know, help business owners solve a problem? I figured well, a lot of businesses that I speak with don't actually have a lot of social proof or kind of suck at it. Let's see if I can help them by getting on major publications. And then I grew that business out for about two to three years for the time being, and we've hit a lot of peaks, we've hit a lot of valleys right, I can expand on this. But we have kind of blown up through various industry cataclysms Cataclysms is that the right word Like catastrophes, that sort of thing Also. At the same time we've grown it fairly heavily off of like just cold email, just partnerships through cold email at the same time. So I mean it's been an interesting journey and I mean I've learned a lot, because going from zero to high levels, back down to zero, doing it again and then going back down to zero, you make a fair bit of mistakes for sure.

Speaker 4: 3:59

So thanks for sharing that, carson, and excited to kind of dig into your journey and get into these questions In your profile. Amazon bestseller. Can you share with the audience a little bit about that Like was it a book? Like what kind of book? How'd you write it? What's that process look like? And congrats, by the way, on that accomplishment.

Speaker 3: 4:17

No, I appreciate it, but at the end of the day, it was all marketing there wasn't really. I guess the way anyone gets a bestseller is they either buy their own copies or they run various marketing advertising campaigns for their books. I co-wrote it with one of my friends, aiden Soa. We wrote one on PR which kind of just documented our processes for PR, and then we won one on lead generation which documents more how we use cold email to get leads, and really all we did for that is we basically just ran ads to people who would be likely to buy our book, people who were engaging with targeted accounts on Instagram or Facebook that were making content similar to our book. We priced it super low and put it in kind of a category that's easy to rank number one on and then we'll be gone. I'm not going to pretend that I'm some kind of popular, amazing influencer. It is very doable for anyone to do, but at the same time, like it does require work, does require skill.

Speaker 4: 5:06

So you ran Amazon ads and as well as you researched it enough and put it into a category that you knew wasn't as competitive and you had a better shot at ranking. So those are great strategies.

Speaker 3: 5:17

Yeah, and there's more Instagram ads. But yeah, exact same thing, kind of like not gaming the system, but taking it to our advantage, in a sense, making it as easy as possible to succeed. I always view everything in business as leverage and what's going to get you to go the quickest with the least amount of input so that when you put in 100% input, you can go way further.

Speaker 2: 5:35

That makes a lot of sense. In your discussion of becoming an Amazon bestseller, you talked about cold email, and so can you talk about cold email as it relates to promoting your book, as well as say something like finding a mentor.

Speaker 3: 5:49

I'll talk about the mentorship side, because that's kind of the one that's more applicable. I would say, everything that I look at it's less about how you cold email someone for having them become a mentor and more so showing someone who's at a high level, who you want to work under, that you're someone capable of taking feedback, you're capable of having kind of like that potential and someone that can win with their advice. Right, too common I'll see people that go up to a mentor or people that have come up to me they'll ask for advice and then they won't implement that advice and then, even worse, they won't tell the mentor how that thing went that they asked them about. Oh, I've seen success with four cold email finding something that'll make that person or potential mentor to reply. Like, for example, great idea you could do is you could invite a potential mentor onto a podcast. Another easy thing is engaging with them on social media, like commenting, liking their posts and then messaging them, striking up a normal conversation as a human and then kind of, as time goes on, progressing that relationship, getting their advice on things that only they can solve and then actually taking action to solve them.

Speaker 3: 6:52

Cold email is just a channel that I use to get in front of the right people kind of whenever. Because, much how I imagine you guys likely run ads for you guys as e-commerce brands, I look at cold email as the B2B version of in all reality. You can spin up as many email accounts, as many domains, as many leads as you want for relatively cheap costs and then just send out any message to anyone At the same time. Ads or brand, you do need to have a relationship with your audience to some extent to make them convert.

Speaker 4: 7:19

So, carson, can you describe to the audience what your process for integrating PR into marketing and sales?

Speaker 3: 7:25

Yeah. So there's a couple different things I would look at with PR, marketing and sales. In the first place, the first thing you have to do whenever you get a press hit and we should discuss how to get PR on the first place in a second. But once you get a press hit, the easiest thing that I would do is just put on your socials, share it to your email list, put it within your sales and marketing processes, like, for example, one thing we see a lot with business to business brands. If someone books in that first initial call, send them over resources like 10 to 20 minute video sales that are kind of describing you, going through what's relevant, what's not. Maybe you can even include potential investment levels. Maybe you can include reasons why they shouldn't do it, reasons why they should do it right. That always helps. And then putting as much social proof so that it captivates the person to take the next step. So putting it, putting like as see featured in on your landing page, putting the articles on your site. That does increase conversions and that does make the sales cycle take less time. We'll have more deal size and then ultimately get you more sales. But the other thing I look at as well as how do you use it to get in front of and that's second portion when you post out your PR on socials, for example, you can just create ad campaigns and then you can put in your lookalike audience, basically the exact people you want to get in front of. And I use one strategy it's coined by Dennis you, who's rather well known for Facebook ads and ads all around. It's called the dollar a day strategy, where you use like 10 or 20 different pieces and kind of test out different creatives before you scale them up into 30, 50, 100, 200 dollar per day campaigns.

Speaker 3: 8:54

The only other thing that I would say that's worth including this is just worth including in general for Mark have some kind of identity resolution software so that when you have someone reading your articles going your website, you could identify their exact email contact info and, if they're B2B, contact them right away. And all identity resolution softwares are. They're just exactly what I explained it as if someone hits your site, hits your press release or your article, you can see exactly who they are, what they did on the site and all the information about them and then you can put that in your marketing campaign. Is there any software that you like to use for that we currently use. They rebranded. It was called CDP resolution. It's called deliver dot AI right now like it's the liver, but instead of the second. There's just no weed there. That's what we're using right now for our clients.

Speaker 2: 9:41

How can brands position themselves as a trusted authority?

Speaker 3: 9:45

I would say it goes, as much social proof as possible. And then the second thing is really just know your target audience as best as you can Like. For example, if you're starting out, you're going to have to understand your first sales going to be your hardest sale. Your tenth sale is going to be way harder than your hundredth sale. So I would recommend, if you're starting out, learn the problems of your audience as much as you can. Then figure out how you can integrate that into your skill set or find an audience that has a problem in which you can integrate it with your skill set. Right.

Speaker 3: 10:12

And if you're doing something where you're asking, like you can do this over cold email, you can just do hey, I'm a college kid, can I ask you a couple of questions over email? Here I'm trying to do some market research. Figure out what would make sense for me to have a solution to help. I don't know e-commerce brands right, and not everyone would reply, but out of the people who replied, they're more likely to be transparent on the problems you have or they have and you can go through and figure out okay, if I built this problem, would they pay 5k, would they pay 2k, would they pay 10k for something like that, and what's nice about that is getting product market fit.

Speaker 3: 10:42

That's the hardest thing for any business and once you have that, if you build out a solution, you can go back to that person. You could say, hey, I actually built this solution out for you specifically. You can sell it directly to them if the problem is going to solve enough pain right away, or you can just put them on a free trial or revenue share or something like that. Obviously, as you have a growing, established business, rev share profit shares going to cause you a lot of hassle, but when you're starting off, there's nothing better than doing something that's like a revenue share type thing where you're only getting paid for what you kill, right? So if you don't perform, there is minimal downside for the brand and all the upside for both of you guys. And then, as you perform, you can document the case study. You use that case site to sign something else, and then I'm actually I'm actually just forgetting we should cut this out, but I'm kind of forgetting the other portion of that question here to become a trusted authority Right before we hit record.

Speaker 4: 11:29

we were chatting and about your journey You'd mentioned yep, you know you've made some mistakes. We like to call them lessons learned. Dave and I shared with you. We really like to be transparent on this podcast and share with our audience. I think being successful is just if you see someone that's successful, that just means that they've made way more mistakes than anyone else, and then they just fall one forward, and so can you share with the audience some lessons or learn that you've had along the way and what you've done to kind of pivot and regroup and be successful.

Speaker 3: 11:56

I completely agree with you. It's all about mistakes made, how quickly you make those mistakes, like I was doing. I was doing some research and I heard someone say on another podcast that the reason why Israeli entrepreneurs have such a higher per capital rate of billion dollar companies is because they embrace the idea of failing, and here in North America we just truly don't. So I would say kind of the biggest failure I've had was entering into the wrong industries, not finding an industry that had a problem like a solve, and later down the line, like just for context, we went from about 10K per month up to about 100K per month in two months when we switched to Web three and crypto back in 2021. As you guys can remember, around that time, ftac blew up. It financially exploded, and I guess my one advice is if you're working in a volatile industry, work with players that aren't going to go out of business. Because we were working with seven figure, eight figure brands and the way they hedge themselves and, by proxy, how I hedged myself, means that when they went out of business or had to lose 80% of their expenses so that they can even stay alive, my deals were cut right. So overnight I ended up losing about 50, 60k in revenue. That was coming in.

Speaker 3: 13:06

Two days after this, just kind of an aside, I was in Florida, I got hit by a hurricane and I was under 19 on my own, had no clue what to do, so that's kind of a story in and of itself. I'll say that I guess you always have to do way more than you think is needed. Everything is a numbers game and far too common from what I see with my peers, I'm starting to break out of this myself. I'm not going to pretend I don't still do this is not using data to make your decisions. Everyone just uses emotion.

Speaker 3: 13:32

Oh, I think this is better. I think this is better. Well, data says it's other ones. Right, and kind of having a great understanding of how you're tracking your data can actually drive you to make the proper decisions instead of spinning your wheels and kind of preventing you from growing. The only other thing that I would really mention is just kind of hedging your bets. Right. For me, I would kind of rely on one client source, being cold email for way too long, and what that would end up doing is every time I had an issue with it, I'd be out of commission Like we wouldn't get any new leads, new sales would dry up over time and it kind of suck right. So if you can hedge your bets across maybe multiple different industries, multiple different client channel sources and everything like that, you do want to build out of business Like an investor. You want to build as safe while also getting you the best return for your time and effort as you do.

Speaker 4: 14:19

Okay, yeah, just as a follow up, thanks for sharing those lessons. Learn mistakes, whatever you like to call them. It's really good to share those, own them, like you mentioned. Own them and then kind of pivot and regroup. And so, before we're kicking over to David, you want to share anything about. You had mentioned getting caught in a hurricane in Florida at 19 and like can you share what that experience is like and how you made it out of there?

Speaker 3: 14:44

That was a very chaotic experience and I don't know if you guys will notice, I have a big hairline. I'm pretty sure I lost half my hairline from that like two week experience. But the entire situation I was living with a friend. I don't only have like three conversations with him online. I asked him hey, can I just live with you for a month? Right? So we were in Tampa, our AC kept on going out and it was 90 degrees Fahrenheit. I am not used to that kind of weather. So I was sitting there taking like 10, 15, maybe 20 sales calls a day because, like, we were booking a lot of people in and I was like sweating so hard. People who were actually turned for me is kind of funny. When the hurricane hit, I was think it was 20, maybe I was 19. I don't know. Either way, I was under 21, in a different country because I'm Canadian. When that hurricane hit, my roommate packed up, he left. We were in Tampa. He went down to Fort Myers was directly where that hurricane struck. I don't know how he's alive, to be honest with you, but that's the side.

Speaker 3: 15:35

I ended up going to Orlando and I was staying. I was staying in a hotel, only hotel and a 10 mile radius to have the power go out. And I'm trying to find, okay, how can I get a different hotel Because I can't stay here. I had to go to 20 different hotels to find one hotel that would let me check in alone without a reservation, under 20. And I kind of figured I was going to hold off in Florida for like four or five months. I figured this is stupid. I'm so tired, I'm going, I'm done. I went home to minus 30 degree weather, so you went from 90 to minus 30.

Speaker 4: 16:06

So no, that's cool. It's always good to kind of hear stories like that at resonates with a lot of people.

Speaker 3: 16:12

So there's my trauma dump for today. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 16:15

So what are the key components of a compelling story that not only captures attention but also drives action from an audience?

Speaker 3: 16:23

I would say it's more market research, right, and kind of understanding what makes someone tick. Because you can look at this in two ways. You can look at this from a very copywriting driven perspective, where you want to find problems. You want to find how the problem is currently being addressed by your clients and by other marketers. You want to figure out, in a sense, a unique way to frame that problem, a unique way to frame your solution and get as on point as you can with the points that they're struggling with. That's, if you want to use something that's more problem based. It is always a good idea to mix in things about you or your brand.

Speaker 3: 16:56

We do see a lot of success where people who have kind of lived exactly what they're doing for a service or product Like one of our clients, he's a financial advisor. There's a movement it's the fire movement like financially independent, retire early. He actually was able to make it so where he was able to retire on paper at the age of 35. And all he does is financial advisor. He just grows out his business helping people do the same and we put out like a super small article detailing exactly how he helps. Like tech executives, tech VPs do that for themselves in Silicon Valley. That one super small article that he put out, he set it out to his email list. He got six sales calls close for them and clients right away. And that's an example of something where if you have product market fit and if you have a message that resonates and sparks pain and drives someone to take that next step, they will take that next step. It's up to you and your marketing process and sales processes to turn them into business and keep them as business.

Speaker 4: 17:51

Yeah, I like that Peace. You mentioned, carson, about product market fit. You know sometimes it's there and sometimes it's crickets. If you have crickets it's not there, I'm gonna move on to recur. So, carson, can you tell us about spit solutions and what clients are a good fit?

Speaker 3: 18:06

Yeah. So spit solutions public relations firm, like everything we look to do our specialty at the current time, like we kind of, I look at it as problem events rather than like specific industries, because we use cold email to pitch our clients to journalists to get them featured. So it doesn't necessarily depend on me knowing someone for 30 to 40 years. Our success level is going to be the same. So I look at it more from the perspective of if you're spending a decent chunk of your marketing on ads or SEO or something like that, it's economically going to make sense to do some PR to amplify those conversion rates and build trust.

Speaker 3: 18:42

At the same time, I look at it from the perspective of if you're raising capital or looking to sell your business, you can do PR to have investors all over you, because the easiest way to look credible to someone else is from a third party. And I guess the only other thing that I count as a meaningful catalyst is someone that has issues standing out from their headers. And what I mean by that is if you're in an industry like, let's say, you're an SEO agency, for example there's a million SEO agencies out there you need something to differentiate you and to make sure that if someone that you reach out to or that you advertise to or that you email they see your stuff, they're not going to go and think, oh, I should compare it to another people because maybe I can find someone better, you want them to think this is my guy, they're going to be the best. I don't even know if I can find someone better, I'm just going to go talk to them see what they do.

Speaker 4: 19:31

Carson and David, are there anything that, any questions or any topics we didn't cover that we want to cover before we head into the fire around? I know I like to get to it. So, carson, we're all the guests we have on the show. We run them through the ringer. It's called the fire round. Are you ready? Yep, all right. What's your favorite book?

Speaker 3: 19:47

I'd say the Harry Potter series. It's storytelling.

Speaker 4: 19:50

Nice what are your hobbies?

Speaker 3: 19:52

Playing hockey, working out, walking my dogs and sitting in front of my PC for 15 hours a day trying to build something.

Speaker 4: 19:58

Austin, what is one thing that you do not miss about working for the man?

Speaker 3: 20:02

The fact that you had zero control over your day to day and the fact that everything felt draining.

Speaker 4: 20:09

Okay, last one what do you think sets apart successful entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail or never get started?

Speaker 3: 20:15

Super cliche, but mindset. And you don't even have to have like an amazing mindset, you just have to have the mindset of I'm going to do what it takes every single day, no matter what. The other thing is volume, because the more mistakes you can make faster, the more data you're going to have to make changes. And then I guess the only other thing I would add to that is every person I've met who's crazy successful or someone that I look up to. Maybe I'm looking up to the wrong people. They either have an irrational sense of self-confidence or they're a little bit crazy, so it doesn't hurt either.

Speaker 2: 20:48

Austin Carson, I want to thank you for being a guest on the Firing man podcast. If people are interested in getting in touch with you or working with Spit Solutions, what would be the best way?

Speaker 3: 20:56

Easiest thing would be spit solutionscom or looking at my name card, since Spitzky on LinkedIn.

Speaker 2: 21:02

Those are the two places I'm actually active online Awesome, awesome, and we'll post links to all those in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time today and looking forward to staying in touch. Thanks for having me guys Appreciate it.