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Show Notes
Today, we welcome Philip Portman, a serial entrepreneur and the founder/CEO of Textdrip. With his extensive experience in starting successful businesses, he understands the importance of maintaining a healthy work-life balance and leveraging technology to achieve that. In addition to his entrepreneurial ventures, Phil is also the host of the Success Is _ Podcast, where he interviews successful people from diverse backgrounds and industries, providing valuable insights into what it takes to succeed in business and life.
Listen in as we hear Phil’s journey as an entrepreneur, his views on the role of technology in promoting wellness, and his tips for achieving success without sacrificing your health.
In this episode, you will hear:
- Defining what success means to you with distinct goals for achieving it.
- Establishing healthy habits to live the life you dream of.
- Living beyond the limiting beliefs with proper arrogance.
- Finding a bigger purpose than just a monetary purpose.
- The guidelines around business texting and how Textdrip can help companies deliver their messages properly to the right people.
- How text campaigns can level up your business.
- Leveraging habit stacking to improve your success.
Phil is a serial entrepreneur who has started several multimillion-dollar companies from the ground up. He is also the host of “Success is” Podcast, where he interviews successful people from a variety of backgrounds including the finance industry, business education, the movie industry, authors, and more.
Connect with Philip Portman:
Website: https://philportman.com/
Website: https://textdrip.com/
Success Is _ Podcast: https://philportman.com/index.php/phil-podcast/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXGujqMa-F2hKdS_BmWHZiA
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/successispodcast
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/phil.portman/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philportman/
Connect with R Blank and Stephanie Warner: For more Healthier Tech Podcast episodes and to download our Healthier Tech Quick Start Guide, visit https://www.healthiertech.co and follow https://instagram.com/healthiertech
Additional Links:
- Shield Your Body website: https://ShieldYourBody.com
- Shield Your Body Youtube Channel: https://youtube.com/shieldyourbody
- Host R Blank on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rblank9/
- Shield Your Body on Instagram:https://instagram.com/shieldyourbody
Transcript
Philip Portman 0:00
You could have the best laid plans and you could have the best strategy, good habits. But if you don’t have that driving force that when faced with opposition says, absolutely we can do that we’re going to figure out a solution, then you’re going to fail every single time, because you will face obstacles over and over and over and over again. And you got to have this belief to say, doesn’t matter. I’m gonna figure it out.
Announcer 0:25
Welcome to the healthier tech podcast, the show about building a healthier relationship with modern technology. Now, here are your hosts R blank and Stephanie Warner.
R Blank 0:38
Well, Steph, this, this interview with Philip Portman. Well, you know, we covered a lot of ground he brings a tonne of energy. I guess the one hook I tried to give listeners Is it is it is the most pleasant expression of extreme arrogance that that had no. And, and I think it just comes across. It’s almost infectious.
Stephanie Warner 1:03
Yeah, yeah, I absolutely love his story. And for our listeners, when our says, extreme arrogance, it is a wonderful expression of that as as he said, and I can’t wait for you guys to hear it. Because it’s going to be it’s a little different than what you may think. And Phil brought so much really great energy and information. It was hard not to pull on all the strings of where we could have gone with this conversation, so I can’t wait for everyone to hear it.
R Blank 1:28
Let’s get into it. Let’s do it. Today, we welcome Philip Portman, a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of tech strip, a business texting platform for insurance, mortgage, real estate and solar sales. With his extensive experience in starting successful businesses, he understands the importance of maintaining a healthy work life balance, and leveraging technology to achieve that. In addition to his entrepreneurial ventures, Phil is also the host of success is podcast, where he interviews successful people from diverse backgrounds and industries, providing valuable insights into what it takes to succeed in business and life. Let’s dive in and hear Phil’s journey as an entrepreneur, his views on the role of technology and promoting wellness, and his tips for achieving success without sacrificing your health. Welcome to the healthier tech podcast. Phil,
Philip Portman 2:20
thank you for having me.
R Blank 2:23
Oh, it’s thank you for making the time and if for those of you listening, but you might want to check out the the our YouTube because apparently Phil is broadcasting from the International Space Station’s right. So your podcast is called success is you’re obviously very focused on obviously not only success for yourself, but just the notion of success. How do you define success?
Philip Portman 2:50
Yeah, so I think in the the purpose of the podcast was early on in life, I thought success was money. And then I got money. And I was like, well, that ain’t it. You know, what else is there? Right? And it’s so it’s kind of to explore other people’s idea of success. I think everyone has their own version. And if you don’t, it starts with that, like defining what does success mean for you in life? And I don’t think a lot of people just sit down and write that out. And just figure that out, like, what do I really want in life? Do you want money? Well, maybe, but what are the sacrifices that you’re going to take to get there? And does it compromise against what you would like, because there’s nothing wrong with having middle income, but being able to spend time with your family, right, or enjoy life and the things that you have. And so finding that balance in life is is really important. For me, success is freedom, the freedom to spend time with my family, do the things I love travel. And that’s really what success for me and as a whole is. And so, on the podcast we explore that with with different people and kind of talk about what success means. But in general, I think the starting point is really define what it means for you.
R Blank 4:08
Do you and this your answer just made me think of something last year, I think it was last year, maybe it was the year before I actually sat down and wrote up a personal mission statement. Now I’ve written mission statements for my companies, but I’d never thought to sit down and write one for myself. Do you? Do you have one of those? No, that’s
Philip Portman 4:29
good idea. Yeah, so three things that I generally focus on. One is having clearly defined goals and my goals, break them down into nine different buckets. Things like career goals, financial goals, family goals, artistic goals. I think a lot of times when people write out their goals, they’re just one category, right? Like how can I make money or how can I grow in my career in my business and the problem with As you may achieve that thing, but at the sacrificing of other things, and balance is really important. So I weigh all my goals equally, and I want to have artistic goals so that I’m not just becoming a soulless corporate monster, right?
R Blank 5:16
Not just a soul is just that’s just an equal weighted goal in your in your.
Philip Portman 5:26
And spending time with my family, you know, early on in my career, I was travelling, living out of a hotel FaceTiming with my kids and missing all the important moments, I said, Well, I don’t want to this isn’t a life, you know, I don’t want to live like this. And so for me, it’s important having those, you know, all those different goals. So I write out my goals, and I work five years, then back to where I want to want to be in five years and, and work on my goals that way. The second thing that I focus on is healthy habits. That kind of leads into the goals. Both establishing healthy habits and getting rid of the bad habits or being very conscious of any of the bad habits. Like I know, you guys have talked about this before, but the social media component, right? I have all notifications turned off on my phone. And although we have to use social media for business, I have predetermined times on when I access social media, because I don’t want that to control my life. Right. So not only developing good habits, but being conscious of potentially bad habits. And then since we’re on my kind of my three keys to success, the last one is arrogant confidence.
Stephanie Warner 6:41
I like that I think
R Blank 6:43
my nervous system.
Stephanie Warner 6:44
I think our host might also add to that one. Can you actually talk a little more about that? Because I think that can I actually do think that’s really a key thing. And when we hear that word arrogant, that can seem negative, but I don’t think at all i it especially as an entrepreneur, and somebody who is very key and focused on the goals that you want in life, I think. I think it requires a bit of arrogance. Can you expand a little bit on that? So it doesn’t seem arrogant? Doesn’t seem so like a negative word?
Philip Portman 7:19
Yeah, absolutely. So somebody asked me, they said, Wow, you know, you’re in the tech space tech entrepreneur, you know, you must have gone to college for something amazing. That No, I didn’t go to college. Oh, man, you must be really smart. No. No, I’m just, you know, I’m just a really, I guess, arrogant guy. But I use that word, because we get told a lot in life what we can’t do, right. And a lot of us have limiting beliefs. And you have this even this voice in your head saying how you can’t do that. Right. But Steve Jobs said this, everything in this world was built by ordinary people like you and I, the differences they had the confidence to go out and say, No, I could do that. Right. So in your head, this person that you want to be needs to push beyond the the limiting beliefs beyond the imposter syndrome? And say, No, I can do that. And to you, it would seem arrogant that Phil that’s doing that Phil Portman that’s doing that is far more arrogant than the normal Phil that you talk to an agenda on regular basis. But that’s the Phil that is saying no, I can expand internationally. No, I can hang with the best of them, you know, and be at this position. With zero college education coming from a poor family of seven. I can pull this all off, that takes a high level of confidence. And if you you could have the best laid plans and you could have the best strategy, good habits. But if you don’t have that driving force that when faced with opposition says absolutely we can do that we’re going to figure out a solution, then you’re going to fail every single time because you will face obstacles over and over and over and over again. And you gotta have this belief to say doesn’t matter. I’m gonna figure it out.
R Blank 9:16
So I want I love this conversation. I also want to make sure we get to talking about tech strip before we pivot. You’ve been doing your podcast now for about two years. Is that Is that right? That’s about right. Yep. Have you had anyone on who defined success as money?
Philip Portman 9:35
So I do a pre interview
Stephanie Warner 9:43
get started to your answer. The answer
R Blank 9:45
is I would have had
Philip Portman 9:52
we’ve had people that say money is very helpful with achieving some of their goals and their and the things that they want. For sure. You know the pursuit bit of money alone is, you’re never going to catch it. It’s very fleeting, you know, people that strive just for the money, you can never have enough. You’re just gonna be constantly chasing that. There’s nothing wrong with making money. But you need to find a bigger purpose in life than just that. Yeah.
Stephanie Warner 10:20
Yeah, I feel like that would be a limiting conversation. Like, just money. Yeah, I mean,
R Blank 10:25
money money. With that. Yeah, it’s a tool. It’s like, I want all the hammers like, Okay, well, would you really only need one or maybe three. But you don’t need, like hammers aren’t your life goal? Okay, so I thought let’s, let’s let’s segue here. So other than your outstanding level of arrogance, how did you get from, from not going to college, to being a serial entrepreneur?
Philip Portman 10:54
Absolutely. Great question. So I, for starters, I since I was a kid, I was saying, hey, I want to be a millionaire. Which was interesting, because I was one of seven single mother working odd jobs very, very far from being handed that type of life.
R Blank 11:12
Was that awesome? Was that in Michigan? Or
Philip Portman 11:14
in Michigan? Yep. Yeah, here, here in Michigan. And so for me to say I want to be a millionaire. I was kind of laughed at at the time. Like, that’s, that’s probably never gonna happen. But I had this goal on this dream, and I was gonna figure it out. I went to college, and very quickly realised that that was not the role for me. I remember having a professor who, who, flat out told me you will never be, you know, a millionaire in life. That’s just not what happened. I’ll guarantee that. And I said, Well, now what,
R Blank 11:46
uh, we don’t curse. But
Philip Portman 11:53
yeah, so I left college and started in the corporate world, moved up really quickly in the corporate world, and was living out of a hotel FaceTiming my kids and and said, This is not the direction I want to go. Nor did it fit in with the goals that I’d written for my life. I said, I want to be an entrepreneur. When did you start writing those goals? So I started writing the goals. Geez, probably 20 years ago, I’d say. And what, how I started was I wrote down 100 things that I wanted to achieve in life. And it was my bucket list. And it was things that there’s some things like I wanted a nice house, I wanted a family. I wanted kids, I wanted to travel. But there’s other things like I wanted to create things, I wanted to solve problems. One of the things that I wrote down is I wanted to be an inventor, and not like, you know, Thomas Edison, but I wanted to make things I want to really make a difference. And so when I had entered the corporate world, those things didn’t align with the goals that I had written for myself in life. And so I said, well, this doesn’t make sense. This isn’t what I want to do. And so when I left the corporate world and moved down to myself, carrying my box of belongings to my vehicle, I said, this will be the last time that I will ever work for somebody else again. And I don’t know who I was talking to or who I was saying that. But there was something powerful with actually saying that statement to the universe or myself or whatever it was, because later on when I was massively in credit card debt, stressing out going, what am I doing right now I ruined my life and my family and all that. And I pulled back to that thing that said, No, I’m not going back to that. I’m going to figure that out. And that’s where that arrogant confidence comes in. I’m gonna get this I’m gonna figure this out. And I did the real estate thing. I started flipping houses and some rentals and I said, You know what, evicting people out of houses. That’s not really for me. Started a restaurant delivery company, we franchised it operate in six states sold that company took the tech side of my business and grew it and into primarily communication, artificial intelligence. And automation is what we specialise in.
Stephanie Warner 14:10
Oh, well, it’s just gonna actually asked how you got how you went from there to tech strip?
Philip Portman 14:17
Yeah, so I sold the company, the previous food delivery company, I’d sold that. And I was at a position again, like, well, what am I gonna do now? And I told my employee have the option to either go with this other company that I’m selling, or you can stick with me. I have no idea what I’m going to do, but I’ll continue to pay. Yeah, and all that stuff. You just hang out with me. Because good employees are really hard to come by. Most of my employees at the time said Yeah, I don’t know. We’re gonna stick with the stability and go with this thing. But there was a handful of employees that came with me and said, yeah, we’ll figure it out. Phil will stick with you. And so I just got to the whiteboard and said, you know, what do I want to do? What am I going to work on? So Well, I know I want to make the next million dollar company. But what does that mean? And I think a lot of people look at a million dollar company and they say, well, I need to get a million customers. That’s not true, you can get 1000 customers paying you $1,000. And that’s a million dollars, right? So I started looking for organisations that had problems and had at least 1000 employees in them. And I found when I first started in real estate, and then I moved to health insurance and found a company and built a very tailored specific product to them. And it worked, they loved it. And added in the stuff that I had done over the years, specifically around customer service. I find it interesting how many tech companies are awful at customer service, there’s no way to even get a hold of them. We said we’re gonna do stuff differently, you can get a hold of us and under 30 seconds, you can get a customer service rep available. And under 30 seconds, we’re going to do live demos with you. We’re going to show you how to use our software, how we’re going to do everything and very hands on approach very cost heavy up front. But me as a customer, I would really enjoy this. So yeah, in this space, we had a lot of competition, a lot of reasons why it wouldn’t work. But there was a lot of things that those companies weren’t doing well, specifically the customer service component. It related, related very well to our customers and took off and we saw 1200 plus percent year over year growth as a result of these these practices that we implemented.
R Blank 16:38
Wow. That’s that’s and so just stepping back one second, Ken, this is probably a good time for you to tell our listeners what is texture.
Philip Portman 16:49
Yes to text drip is a business texting platform. And we focus specifically on deliverability. There’s been some large changes in the industry around business texting. And prior to 2021. There was no easy way for a business to tax through a me rephrase that there was no defined way for a business to tax through a local 10 digit phone number. They were supposed to use 800 numbers or short codes. Well, a lot of local real estate agents, insurance agents and things like that they want to text from a local number. Well, the cell phone companies didn’t have a process where they finally rolled out a process called 10 DLC that outlines how business texting is supposed to be done. We are experts in that. And we follow those guidelines, as well as having a beautiful software that just works and functions the way that you’d like it to work. I’ve got beautiful mobile apps. And so it’s it’s crazy, because how important it is for your messages to get delivered to who you want it to get delivered to. I know that’s a novel concept. But we’ve made that the centrepiece we said we want to be the absolute best at getting text messages delivered to who is trying to get to four businesses. And the result has been astounding. So we ended up getting an accompany people find out about us, and we spread like wildfire inside the company, because we work because our software is effective. And if you have any question, you can connect with customer service immediately.
R Blank 18:17
And so in addition to deliverability, you offer automation, or Yeah, yeah. Okay, so absolutely. I’m a real estate agent. And I can kind of just set up like when, when cold leads come in or warm leads come in, I can put them into different kinds of funnels and what you use AI also to kind of help suggest responses. So you can just quickly do that.
Philip Portman 18:41
Yep. So most CRMs are built around email. That’s been the so if somebody goes on your website, they say, Hey, I want more information. They start getting put on an email drip campaign. When an email has I mean, if you guys do email campaigns for less than 10% open rate if you’re if you’re good at it. No.
R Blank 19:04
Great, yeah, I would I would be firing someone if that were open. Right. But I hear your point. I mean, it’s certainly not it’s certainly not 100% not
Stephanie Warner 19:11
what it used to be.
Philip Portman 19:12
Yeah. Right now, how many unread emails do you have on it?
R Blank 19:16
I don’t use email.
Philip Portman 19:20
A lot. It’s like probably 50,000 probably unread emails. I’m terrible at reading emails, text messages, though. How many unread text messages do you have in your phone? Yeah, because everyone reads them. It’s like over a 98% open rate on text messages compared to email. So the CRM that built it email centric strategy kind of tacked on text messaging as an afterthought. Yeah, in this day and age, it doesn’t really work as an afterthought because you have to be an expert in it. We centralised text drip around the text messaging component because it has the best response rate. You’re getting the best, you know deliverability All that stuff around text messaging, so when somebody goes on your website request information, instead of being put on an email drip campaign, they get put on a text message campaign. And the results are, are fantastic.
R Blank 20:11
So one of the questions I have, as a business owner, myself, and as a former tech guy myself, when seeing a tool like tech strip, the question that I have is, does this does? Does this use of technology, use of technology make my life easier? And or save me time? Or does it open up new opportunities? Do you kind of like is, is this? Is this taking something I’m already doing and making it faster? Or easier? Or better? Or is it opening up new opportunities that I then have to expend effort on?
Philip Portman 20:47
You’re definitely gonna get more business out of it? Right? You, you know, it’s the 8020 rule, right? The 20%, that gives you the 80% results. If you spend the same amount of time that you’re spending on your email campaigns on text messaging campaigns, we know you’re gonna get higher results, not that you don’t get results from email, you absolutely can, you can also get, you know, results from just cold dialling people on a phone, but your text messaging has the highest rate of return. So if you took all of your efforts and just focused on the text message, you’re going to get better results, you can get better response rates and all of that, right? Yes, inside that we have an automation, right, you get put on a drip campaign, there’s, you can quick response, our interface is really designed to make you productive. But there’s three things I think that limit a business owner, and those are organisation automation and delegation. Right? If you’re a business owner, or self employed individual with post it notes all over your monitor, and you’re missing appointments and your scheduling is off, you are gonna hit a limit on what you can achieve in business. Because you’re disorganised right, the automation is the component that we handle. And by taking components of your business and creating an automated communication strategy or automation strategy, in general, just freeze up your workload. And in most cases, it’s like 300x, that you’re that you’re increasing your performance from just by creating a good automation system. And the last one is delegation. So if things become more than you can handle having a workforce that can take over some of that communication, that set up and that sort of thing, is going to help you create a business that expand. But if you don’t get to that, you’ll always be just a one man show. And there’s only so many hours in a day. So those are kind of the three components that I would tell anybody that’s limiting their growth to look at.
R Blank 22:40
So that that gets kind of ties back to something you were starting on earlier about these, these habits, right? Because Because like you say, there’s only so many hours in a day you have these goals. And you’ve defined these habits, do you do you? Do you find that you’re that you’re constantly kind of iterating on these habits, like you’re looking what are these habits doing for me? Let me think of a new one. Let me get rid of this one. How do you kind of monitor yourself to avoid falling into bad habits? I guess I’m asking your your habit management, right? Because Because your habits are a big part of your personal methodology. Like are they set in stone? Or do they evolve? And what’s that kind of process?
Philip Portman 23:23
Yeah. For anybody listening, if you haven’t read the book, atomic habits. Read it. It’s a phenomenal book referenced by a lot of people. It’s a great book. Yes, absolutely something I continually look at monitor last year, I broke my leg. So I was kind of hung out for a while and, and had developed really bad habits in that. And that because unfortunately, couldn’t do anything. And so I had to reestablish some of those habits. I’m a big fan of habit stacking, where you you take something that is existing that you already have in place, and you add a habit in there. And this is an important function for people that want to be hyper productive. We’ve all looked at somebody and said, This person has written a book, they’re running marathons, they’re running a business, they’re travelling with their kids, like how are they doing all this stuff? I bet if you broke down and looked at their habits, you’d find that they’ve got some really healthy habits.
R Blank 24:20
So can you give an example of habit stacking?
Philip Portman 24:23
Yeah, absolutely. So I hate cardio like I have to force myself to do cardio right. But I know it’s important I want to stay healthy I forced myself but I’m not I’m not gonna get up and go run in you know, early in the morning like that’s just not for me. Right?
R Blank 24:38
Especially not in sub freezing temperatures half the year.
Philip Portman 24:42
They absolutely more than half the year I’d say. So you know I said exercise bike, I can do exercise bike. So what I did is I put my exercise bike in my bedroom, in between my bed and my shower. Now I shower every morning thank god yeah So a perfect habit, the stack right in front of the shower is my exercise bike. So I don’t have a choice but to stop at that exercise bike before I get into the shower. And then to add one on to that, I want to get a little bit of everything in between. So I’m exercise bike, there’s a little thing for a tablet. So I pop my Kindle e reader there and I do my reading at the same time while doing my exercise bike before I shower every day.
Stephanie Warner 25:27
Oh, that’s that’s, that’s, that’s a really good example of habit stacking.
R Blank 25:32
I can’t really I can’t I can’t read while doing cardio. I’ll listen to podcasts. Or Or I guess I’ll admit it, I watch, you know, easy to watch TV. But there’s no way I’m getting my reading in on a cardio machine. Yeah,
Philip Portman 25:46
if you can’t audiobooks are fine. Or if you just listen to music either way. But just having that habit of riding the bike right before, that’s what habit stacking is, you already have something that you’re doing just pile something else on top of it, that makes it easy. And that the habit is more important than the result, especially in the beginning. And what I mean by that is literally sitting on your bike, putting your exercise shoes on and sitting on your bike is creating the habit. If you’re like me, you, you say, Well, you know what, I’m gonna get healthy. And so you all of a sudden get on that thing. No, I’m gonna exercise for an hour. And what happens? You burn yourself out, you end up getting sick, and then yet, then you don’t exercise anymore.
R Blank 26:29
Right? Yeah, no, I, I’ve, I always for myself, and when when I’m talking to other people who are asking about it, I say just pick the thing, the level of the thing that you can do every day, and or five days a week, or whatever your goals are, pick the thing that you can actually know that you’re going to get done. And then build from there.
Stephanie Warner 26:50
Yeah, started there’s no shame in starting small, you know, if it’s five minutes on the bike, that’s okay. Just get just start doing it doing it daily. But you kind of talked about this a little bit. Briefly, before in the interview, can you share any more of your personal behaviours or practices? And as it comes to your tech use in particular?
Philip Portman 27:12
Yeah, great question. So my phone is constantly the notifications are constantly turned off on it. Yes, you make me your emergency contact is never on. It I don’t want to be bombarded with with notifications. And if you’re not managing your life, for the events, the things that happen to do it, something else is something else is managing it. And if you don’t manage your phone, your social media the time on it, it’s going to manage you like it’s literally designed to get your attention constantly. And this is an addiction, no different than alcoholism or drug use, or smoking or whatever. It’s a really bad addiction. And people don’t realise it. Because you’re getting that what Pavlov’s dog thing where you start salivating every time he hears the bell, you’re getting that same thing. Every time that things painting, you’re like, Oh, God, somebody’s liked my poster, whatever. That’s a really bad habit. And you will have a tough time building successful and healthy habits if you’re constantly being drawn to this addiction over time. So the thing I would say is if you if you have to delete them, the apps completely off off your phone. Unless I’m travelling, and I have to like for business and I have to post them, I typically only access my social media from my computer, because I have to dedicate a time I have to sit down and do it. If I’m travelling, I will have it on my phone. But I don’t want to be constantly bombarded with phone calls, text messages, and all the other notifications from my phone. So I I turn them off completely. I also monitor and have plugged into my calendar when I’m going to access social media, when I’m going to watch TV with my family and things like that. And when I’m going to do leisure activities, because if you don’t manage time or money or any of those components, they will find a way to lose sight right?
R Blank 29:11
Yeah, no, that those are those are great. I really, not only do I agree with my phone as always, and Do Not Disturb mode, but I’ve never heard anyone say Do not make me your emergency contact. I’m gonna I’m gonna totally steal that line. So for anyone you know, who’s who’s thinking about a startup or working on a startup or business idea, what’s a tip that you’d have? Or a piece of advice that you would give them to kind of? Well, I guess you can you can answer in general I was gonna say to be most effective for driving sales. But what would be a piece of advice that you would you would give those listeners?
Philip Portman 29:52
Yeah, the first one is don’t be afraid to enter a space that already has existing competition. Hmm. I think a lot of people are always looking for like this new brand new idea, you know, whatever. And I found something interesting, I would enter a space texture, for example, there’s a perfect example of it. I didn’t even create the name texture if it already existed. There was already other companies using the name tech strip. We entered it as texture dot CEO because somebody else had texture.com In the beginning, so not only were other people already text messaging, other people were already using the name multiple or companies were using the name texture. I said, I don’t care. It sounds cool. I want to stick with it. Right? Who wouldn’t do that? I mean, that’s crazy, right? Well, we entered it. And we were, you know, probably, you know, page four early on. And then we slowly moved up and Google, and we pushed the people out of page one, out of page two, out of page three, and then they all went out of business, we bought all their domains, and now we own textbook.com, and all everything else related to tech strip. Right. So don’t be afraid to enter the space, because the name isn’t what’s important. The technology isn’t what’s important. It’s all of it. It’s the customer service. It’s the people, it’s what you do around the business, it’s all of it that makes your company’s not one component. So don’t be afraid about entering a space where somebody else already exists. The second thing I would say is value first, always do value first, that’s the most important thing. If you don’t have value in what you’re offering, then nothing else matters. But if you find value, upfront, you can provide value to people, the money will always come, you’re not going to have problem with that. early on. When I was making the software. I had beta testers and we’re doing it for free. They were asking me to start charging them for it. As I got something here figured out. Right, when they’re asking me actively to figure it out.
Stephanie Warner 31:52
Yeah, I think that’s when you can move out of beta. Right?
R Blank 31:57
When they’re beating down your door to be charged.
Philip Portman 32:01
Yeah. And then the last thing I want to say is never stop innovating. Don’t worry about what your competition is doing. Right? Look at Apple, you never see Apple comparing themselves to Android saying, Oh, we got a better this or better that? No, they’re always comparing themselves to the previous version of Apple. Right? Don’t worry about what your competition is doing. Because if you’re watching them, you’re going to fall behind that worry about yourself and making better, better company better system and constantly improving, constantly tweaking, then all of a sudden, when you look over your competition, they’re so far behind you. You’re like what happened? Because you’re focusing on yourself, you’re focusing on your company, how can we get better? How can we get better? How can we get better? And those are the things I would say to look at if you’re if you’re starting a new company.
R Blank 32:46
That’s I appreciate that. I really appreciate well, your insight and and and the enthusiasm with which you delivered it, I think made it even more special. Thank you for that. So Phil, this has been fantastic. Super high energy interview. I really appreciate appreciate you taking the time to come join us but I just appreciate the energy that that you brought to the healthier tech podcast today. Where is it that you would like our listeners to connect with you?
Philip Portman 33:15
Absolutely. So you contact me on social medias look up Phil Portman or Phil portman.com with one L pH il por tmn.com. You can also find me look for the success is podcast with Phil Bartman. And in catch into our episodes where we interview some interesting people from hedge fund managers, entrepreneurs, authors, we had a stuntwoman really, really interesting people in here what their version of success is and how they achieved it in life.
R Blank 33:45
That’s cool. Yeah. I’ve been listening to a couple of your episodes before before this interview. And yeah, so I really, I really liked the theme. And I liked the way that you drive the conversation. So I will have links to all of those in the show notes. So again, Phil, thank you so much for taking the time today to come join us on the healthier tech podcast.
Stephanie Warner 34:06
Yeah, thanks for being here. It’s been wonderful.
Announcer 34:09
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai
