Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
Today's interview is with John Ferrara.
John is the founder and CEO of Nimble, a social CRM service for small businesses.
He's a serial entrepreneur and a pioneer in the customer relationship management industry.
He co founded Goldmine, one of the first contact management apps, in 1989, which grew into a very successful venture that he eventually sold for $125 million.
John has an amazing story to tell, so it's definitely worth sticking around for this episode.
So with that, let's bring on John.
John, welcome to the show.
Jon Ferrara (01:07.410)
Thank you so much, Amara.
I really appreciate the opportunity to connect with you today and to share some experience that hopefully will help your audience reach their dreams and grow their business.
Omer (01:19.490)
So I've told the audience just a little bit about you.
Can you tell us in your own words a little bit more about you personally and and then give us an overview about your product and business?
Jon Ferrara (01:28.290)
You bet.
I think I have a unique blend of technology and sales and marketing that really comes from the roots of how I grew up.
I was inspired by both my father as well as my uncle, and they couldn't be more similar or more different.
My uncle went to MIT and helped create radar and microwave in the 40s and was an entrepreneur and was president IEEE and was involved heavily in the aerospace industry.
My dad was an immigrant from Sicily and I think that immigrants have a unique entrepreneurial spirit that they just bring with them.
But he, after World War II, started in the car business and had his own car dealerships.
And I grew up on those car dealerships and I also grew up with the Apollo industry.
And it's through that combination of the space era of the 60s, technology emerging with microcomputers and my unique sales and marketing background.
It is what enabled me to become the entrepreneur that I am.
And the entrepreneur that I am is a person that on a regular basis develops applications and tools to serve others, to help them build their business and reach their dreams by connecting and nurturing and building relationships that matter in into mutually beneficial business outcomes.
I started that with a company called Goldmine.
I'm continuing that journey with a company called Nimble.
Omer (03:03.370)
Now, before we dive into more details, we like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
What is your favorite success quote?
Jon Ferrara (03:13.050)
My Favorite success quote is on a daily basis, if you're focused on serving others, on helping other people grow you, you can do nothing else but grow yourself personally or your business.
I believe that sales has a unique negative connotation somewhere along the line of lawyers.
And I believe that sales is not really about bagging and tagging, but more about serving others by identifying people that you can help grow.
And I think that Zig Ziglar taught that through many of his teachings.
And.
And I truly believe that coming at any business relationship with a pay it forward mentality, where you're helping and serving that person and helping them grow, you will grow yourself.
Omer (04:05.100)
Can you give me an example of how that quote has helped you in your life?
Jon Ferrara (04:10.060)
Well, I think that the whole purpose of building Goldmine was that I couldn't manage all the disparate graduates, contacts, conversations, business opportunities for myself or for my team, and eventually built a product that would serve not just myself, but serve others.
And so what I did to grow that company is I began to teach other people how they can grow their business by connecting to people that matter.
And it just turned out that Goldmine helped do that extremely well and easily.
And we're basically doing the exact same thing here with Nimble.
So I think the biggest reward that I ever get as an entrepreneur is when somebody stops me on the street and says to me, john, you helped me grow my business.
You helped me reach my dreams.
Thank you.
And for me, that is the hugest reward that I could ever get for any endeavor that I do.
And that happens regularly, and I cherish it.
Omer (05:15.580)
Wow.
Okay, John, let's take a journey together back to your early days and explore how you got started.
You already talked a little bit about this, but tell me a little bit more.
More about where the idea for Goldmine came from.
Jon Ferrara (05:27.720)
Well, so I worked my way through college at a computer store selling computers, and I was pretty dang good at it, but I didn't want to be a salesperson.
I think that we all sort of separate from our fathers and we want to be different.
And I studied computer science and I wanted to apply my trade when I graduated from college and I got a job at Hughes Space and Communications, and I worked there for two years.
I worked there long enough to learn that I'm not a Aerosp guy, that I really do have a strong desire in entrepreneurship and sales and marketing.
One of the companies that we used as part of our implementation for some of the things we were doing at Hughes, a company called Banyan, I went and Got a job at that startup company.
It was a network operating system company and they built network operating systems for enterprises.
During that role in a field sales office that I saw that salespeople don't work in a vacuum.
They work as part of a larger team.
And everybody in the team touches the customer.
And we didn't have a tool that enabled us to do that.
Now you have to remember that this was right about when networks were just starting.
File record locking was a new technology that enabled network business software to be created.
But there really weren't many network business applications.
There was a thing called WordPerfect office which was network scheduling and email.
But it didn't tie back to who you were.
Network scheduling and emailing about the contact and and so I would get leads from corporate on sheets of paper.
I'd cold call them and make notes on them.
I would then make my calendar, my to DOS and my leather based daytimer.
And then I'd share and communicate with my team with Pink While youe Out slips.
And we did our sales forecast on spreadsheets.
And I said this is absolutely idiotic.
And because I grew up in the microcomputer industry, because I had six computers in my bedroom when I was in college, because I knew pretty much every single business application known to mankind at that moment, I knew there didn't exist an application that would enable a team, not just salespeople, but everybody in the company, to be on one page with the customer, to manage the customer life cycle of relationship management, sales and marketing automation, collaboration and network schedule and email.
So at 29 years old, I was too young and dumb to know any better.
I quit my job and started Goldmine with a college buddy of mine.
And we grew that company on $5,000 investment.
Never took a dime, a venture or any bank loans into a company that after 10 years we were doing about $70 million in revenue a year and we had about 5 million customers.
And it was a global phenomenon.
And some people say we pioneered what we know of today as CRM.
Omer (08:07.260)
So what did you do when you had that idea?
Did you go and validate that?
Did you start building a product?
Walk me through the specific steps you took to start turning that idea into a product.
Jon Ferrara (08:18.140)
You bet.
So what happened is when my co founder at Goldmine and I started the business, we started it when he had a network based accounting program that he had written and we started to sell that.
And as we started to sell it, the age old problem that I had at Banyan of relationship management hit me in the head again, because there we were.
I was contacting resellers and customers and, and trying to grow the business and I couldn't manage all the conversations and contacts, let alone work my team member Alon about that.
And so I, I designed the original screens of what I needed.
I told him exactly what I wanted it to do.
He wrote it, I started to use it with him.
And then when we would go to trade shows to show our accounting program, all people wanted to see was our relationship management program.
Back then we called it Sales Pro.
And we had to make a determination to pivot and give up the accounting revenue and, and focus on what became Goldmine.
And that pivot enabled us to be narrowly focused on that one application.
And in order to scale that, because there's only eight hours in the day and I could only talk to so many people and selling it, I went after the influencer of my customer and I went after Novell resellers.
Novell was a network operating systems for small, medium sized businesses.
And I cold called every top novel reseller in the country.
And I got them to use it because, because people sell what they know and they know what they use.
They started to use it internally.
Then they started to recommend it to their customer base because they sold the network to that customer that tied together their computers and their printers and hard drives.
I had an application that ran on top of that network that enabled that business to more effectively manage relationships and turn relationships into revenue.
And that's what basically bootstrapped our initial revenue of Goldmine.
And then we added fuel to the fire by doing guerrilla marketing and guerrilla PR where we got involved with people writing stories about small businesses and relationship management.
And we gave them ideas for stories where they could write about the category to teach other businesses how they could use relationship management and technology to grow their businesses.
And eventually Goldmine got more press and more awards than all the other products in the category combined.
And it's through being first to market, through being identifying a channel of influencers and building that network that they then scaled the business and then using gorilla PR to spread the story.
That's what created the viral loop that essentially allowed us to dominate the marketplace.
Omer (10:57.710)
How long did it take you to get your first thousand customers?
Jon Ferrara (11:02.030)
I don't have an exact number on the first thousand, but I could tell you we started in 1989 and we bumped along for a couple years, bumping out of the accounting program into Goldmine and then initially building that initial base of influencers.
It really wasn't until we got PC managers and editor's choice in 1992 that we really started to get awareness out there.
And then it was a Bumpy Road into 93 and 94 because Windows 3.1 came out and that was really the first Windows that was business ready.
But we didn't have a Windows program.
Goldmine was written in basically dbase and Clipper, which was a DOS based environment.
And there was no Windows environment for that.
And so we had to completely rewrite the program in C. It took a little while to get that done.
So it was an interesting transition during that time.
Omer (12:09.520)
Looking back at those early days, what do you think was one of the biggest mistakes that you made?
Jon Ferrara (12:15.040)
You know, I think that as a business owner, you have to recognize when a business is ready to scale.
And I think one of the smart things we did as a business is we operated a lean startup.
We didn't take any money from anybody.
We used our own chutzpah to grow the business organically, which gave us control and allowed us to grow the business intelligently.
In the early years.
I think there comes a point where a business is really ready, where you built a product that's scalable and sticky and you're ready to put the foot on the gas.
And we never took a dime of money from anybody, which never gave us the ability to truly hit the gas hard.
And I think that if we had done that, that today Goldmine would be the sales force of the industry.
But in looking back at it, Omer, I actually, I'm absolutely okay with what I did as an entrepreneur, having sold Goldmine 10 years after I started it in 1999 and taking time out to raise three babies.
Because what I discovered is that the most precious thing you have in life is time.
And if you spend that time being present with other human beings that you care about, that you can grow your soul and truly change the world.
And I think it's more valuable those lessons I learned in that period of time than any lesson I learned as an entrepreneur.
Omer (13:56.510)
So you had Goldmine in the market for a few years and you're growing with customers and you want to keep growing.
What were some of the strategies that you used to get even more customers?
Was it just more guerrilla marketing or were you using other strategies and tactics to acquire customers?
Jon Ferrara (14:14.590)
I think that the key things that we did as a business is we listened to our customers and, and we iterated the product and continued to delight them with a product that was innovative, easy and powerful.
The other thing that we did was we built Relationships with a channel that enabled that channel to service our customers.
Because the small medium sized business marketplace is a huge marketplace.
There's 225 million global businesses today.
Would you believe less than 1% use any kind of CRM that most people CRM today is their inbox or a spreadsheet and that that market is still untapped.
And so we did a pretty good job of tapping that marketplace.
And the way we did it, the way we scaled it, is we used these other influencers and channel people.
And then the other thing that we did really well is tell stories and get other people to tell those stor because there's no way that you could spend enough advertising to scale to the size of the business marketplace of the small medium sized business market.
And what you need to do is you need to inspire and educate your constituency about the areas of promise your product and get them to begin to tell those stories.
And it's through that sort of content sharing where we were more focused on educating them about how they can grow their business as opposed to telling them how great goldmine was.
We taught them how they could be great.
Because I believe businesses buy a better version of themselves.
They don't necessarily buy great products.
And through us telling them the stories about how they can grow, they then saw themselves growing in that way.
They then discovered that goldmine actually was the tool that helped them to do that.
And the story I love to tell about that is if you teach people to fish, they'll figure out yourself.
Fishing poles and through that scaling of storytelling where our customers became our biggest evangelists and they were our best salespeople and they even supported the other customers.
This is how we scaled it to 5 million customers.
Omer (16:29.740)
So let's talk a little bit about money.
How did you go about starting to generate revenue and what were some of the lessons you learned from that?
Jon Ferrara (16:38.700)
Well, I think that early on we were focused on generating revenue from our earliest customers and learning from those customers about what their needs were and making sure that our product was meeting their needs.
We didn't give the product away to even our channel partners.
We set a small bar for them to step over that basically made them value the product and essentially just kept iterating the product and scaling the channel and growing the business that way.
I think back then we saw that the guerrilla PR needed to be added to with additional marketing.
So we started to go and put advertisements in airline ads.
We started to do some direct mail, we started to touch the customer from other places.
So in the early stages of the business.
You can connect with influencers, get them to tell your story, and connect with press and publications and help get them to tell your story.
But eventually you need to touch the customer from multiple directions.
And so we learned that it takes multiple touches for somebody to make a buying decision.
And so we touched them through their peers, we touched them through their influencers, we touched them through publications.
And then we started to touch them in the places that they traveled and the publications that they read.
And through that frequent touch, our brand became a global brand.
Omer (18:19.520)
So tell me about one of the biggest challenges that you faced in growing that business and how you overcome that challenge.
Jon Ferrara (18:26.640)
Well, what I'd like to do is switch the timeframe a little bit to Nimble because it's really the continuation of the story that we started with Goldmine in that relationships fuel businesses.
And I think that the more digital we get, the more human we need to be.
And that it's really not about B2C or B2B, business to business or business to consumer.
It's really about people to people and human to human, because people buy from people they like and they like people who know them.
And you can't know somebody without preparing for a meeting.
Today you Google somebody before a meeting.
In the old days, you went in their office and got to know them by looking at their walls and the books they read and and shared things you had in common in order to develop the intimacy and trust you need to get them to open up to you about their business issues, which as a professional you can then solve.
Today, more and more we're doing that electronically, but it's just hard to do in six different tabs in your browsers and three different apps in your desktops.
And 60% of a salesperson's time is spent doing non sales activity, Googling somebody, looking them up, and logging what you know in your contact tool, your CRM, and then going engaging with them in email and social and logging that in your CRM.
This is why we built Nimble, because what Nimble does is it automagically builds records for you, it goes and builds the profiles, keeps that data up to date on a daily basis, automatically logs any conversation.
You and your team have them, public or private, direct or indirect, on email or social, and then we mine those signals to help you identify people that matter by looking at the fingerprint or DNA of people you typically connect with successfully and then service more people like at, so that it makes it easy to turn connections into conversations and relationships into revenue.
And so Nimble is a next generation intelligent relationship manager that enables you to build a cloud based solution that helps you to nurture your brand and grow your business.
And we call it the Nimble Way.
Omer (20:35.250)
Okay, I want to talk more about Nimble, but before we do that, I just want to wrap up on Goldmine.
You eventually decided to sell the company and you'd grown it from a $5,000 investment to $70 million.
How many employees did you have when you sold the company?
Jon Ferrara (20:51.810)
About 250.
Omer (20:53.730)
And can you disclose how much you sold it for?
Jon Ferrara (20:56.130)
Sure.
We sold it for about $125 million in cash and consideration.
Omer (21:04.660)
Congratulations for that.
Jon Ferrara (21:05.860)
Thank you.
Omer (21:08.020)
So we started this conversation by going back to where the idea for Goldmine came from and we took a journey together and how you turned that idea into successful product.
Now, after you sold Goldmine, I know that you had to deal with a big personal challenge in your life.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Jon Ferrara (21:24.100)
Sure.
So I think that as an entrepreneur, it's difficult to have a balance of work and personal life and to build something as big as Goldmine was.
It really took a lot for my co founder and I to build that from scratch and grow it over time.
After 10 years of running the company, I felt like I achieved the key things that I wanted to achieve and we made a decision to sell the company.
A year after selling the company, I discovered that I had a tumor in my head and it really forced me in dealing with that illness over time to take a hard look at what's important in life because I thought I was going to sell the company and just take a little bit of time off and go back and start something else.
And what I discovered was that you don't really know about tomorrow and that you only can control what is going on today.
And that being present with people that matter is critically important.
And so I decided to take time out to do something that many fathers don't really get chance to do is to be a present father and husband and raised three babies.
And I'll tell you what I think I said this earlier in the interview is I learned more about in that period of time than I did in the 40 years previous.
And it is what has enabled me to be the entrepreneur that I am today.
Omer (23:08.480)
And so how many years was it before you then decided to launch Nimble?
Jon Ferrara (23:17.780)
It was eight years later that I launched Nimble.
What caused me to want to get back into the entrepreneurial trenches is I began to hear notes in my head not dissimilar to what happened When I started Goldmine with Goldmine, I saw that there were issues with managing and nurturing relationships as a team.
And so we built the first product that integrated contact management, network scheduling, email sales and market animation and collaboration into a team tool.
And I began to use social and saw that it was going to change the ways that customers make buying decisions, the ways that companies are going to need to engage with them.
I saw the emergence of social business, social selling and the need for businesses to incorporate social intelligence and social engagement into their processes.
And I began to look at the tools that people use for managing relationships.
And I was shocked to see that CRM systems weren't about relationships.
They were really more management tools to keep the finger on the pulse of the business and the hand around the neck of the salesperson.
That really was a tool for management and reporting and that the contact tools that people were using, Outlook, Address book and Google contacts weren't much better because they didn't simply do the core basic of contact management management which is integrate contact calendar communication, let alone the social signals and engagement.
So I essentially decided that there was an opportunity in the marketplace to build a next generation relationship manager that had social intelligence that would enable an individual or a small team to do the core things they need to attract, to retain customers in a social way.
Omer (25:05.890)
How did you get started this time with Nimble?
Jon Ferrara (25:10.050)
This time what I did was I funded it myself.
I got together with a couple of people who could help me to translate the vision into reality and we began to iterate the idea in order to basically build the brand, the Nimble brand and really to rebuild my brand I had to start from scratch or imagine being out of the technology business for eight years.
You're in the technology business, I mean essentially it moves fast and people move on without you.
So nobody knew who John Ferrari was.
They didn't really remember much about what Goldmine was.
And so I had to go and rebuild my own brand and then build the nimble brand.
And the way that I did that is I went out and identified the key thought leaders in around the areas of promise of my future product, Nimble and essentially developed relationships with them where I paid those relationships forward over time by understanding what their passions and dreams were and helping them do that by sharing their content and sharing my ideas about Goldmine, Nimble and the vision that we had for the product.
And they then gave us feedback on Nimble and the positioning, the messaging.
We went and built the product, went back to them and showed them product and got their feedback eventually, they became users of the platform as well as evangelists of it.
And it's through that engagement that essentially the Nimble brand was established into a global brand today, where we have tens of thousands of registered users and we're generating nearly 70,000 unique visitors per month on our website, all without any marketing and converting those into customers without salespeople, where our marketers, our salespeople are actually our customers.
Omer (27:09.980)
So what did you do this time to market and grow the product?
Jon Ferrara (27:13.500)
Well, it's not different than what we did at Goldmine was identify the key influencers of our core constituency in and around the areas of promise of the product and to develop relationships with them to get them to become users.
And eventually they then became the recommenders and evangelists.
And that's essentially how we built our initial base of customers and began to scale the business.
So today, everybody's talking about how content is required in order for you to inspire and educate your customers.
They don't want to look at your marketing materials.
They don't want to talk to your salespeople.
They want to talk amongst themselves about what they're going to buy and then engage with customers in an authentic and relevant way.
And what we did is we actually used Nimble to build those relationships with those key influencers and then nurture relationships with those core customers in order to scale them into our evangelists and sales and marketing people.
So, just like what we did with Goldmine was we built it to help us with our own problem, and then we began to teach other people the gold mine way, and they then became evangelists and salespeople for us.
We're doing the exact same thing with Nimble because I think that the problem of building your brand and growing your professional network, to turn that network into a business opportunity that results in a mutually beneficial business outcome, is an idle problem that will never go away.
And so if you can help business people grow by building their network and growing their revenue through that network, you can grow a business in any era.
And so that's what we're doing with Nimble today, is nurturing our network and growing our business and teaching other people the nimble way.
Omer (29:12.110)
What's the one thing in your business that you're most excited about right now?
Jon Ferrara (29:16.190)
I think the thing I'm most excited about right now is the Nimble Everywhere strategy.
I think that if you are familiar with contact management or CRM, you recognize that it's a burden.
It's something that you have to go to to log what you know, what you did and what you think you should do and that we are freeing people up from that burden because we automagically build a web based relationship manager that automatically creates records on the people you're connecting with, maps their background, keeps it up to date, logs the conversation, and then mines those for signals to help you identify people that matter and create relationships that result in revenue.
Now, our users today are spending nearly two hours per visit in our web based platform.
We've taken that technology and we plugged it in everywhere they work.
So we have a nimble app for Outlook, Office365gmail, Hootsuite, and soon we'll be plugging that actually into their CRMs with a plugin for Salesforce.
But the thing I'm most excited about is not the specific applications we're integrating to, because each of those takes biz, dev and technology time.
We plug Nimble into the browser.
So there is an app for Chrome, Safari and Firefox that enables you to nimble anyone, anywhere, turning nimble into a verb.
So instead of googling somebody before a meeting, you can nimble them, highlighting any name being on any record.
If you're in a Twitter record, a LinkedIn record, a Facebook record, or anywhere in any app in your browser, you could use Nimble to build a complete record, map their profiles and record all the history that you need in order to build these relationships.
And yesterday we just launched our iOS version of that.
And so you can go and download on your iPhone and soon, in a couple weeks on your Android, the nimble smart contacts app that provides relationship intelligence on any person or company you're engaging with to prepare you for that engagement and help you to turn that connection into a conversation and that relationship into revenue.
Omer (31:36.200)
Other browser add ons already available?
Jon Ferrara (31:39.320)
Yes, it's available today.
If you go to Nimble.com, you can download and plug in that app in your Chrome browser or your Safari or Firefox browser and start using it everywhere you go.
And the thing I dig about it is inevitably you're in some app or you're in LinkedIn and you're looking at a record.
You can hit the nimble button and Nimble will automatically grab that person's record, put them into Nimble, map their Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Foursquare, Google, bring in all the data about their background and give you a rich dossier that prepares you like the President of the United States would be prepared for a meeting, in a simple, elegant format that you could use everywhere, including your Mobile.
Omer (32:27.200)
I love that.
That's a great strategy.
All right, John, now it's time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions, and I'd like you just to answer them as quickly as possible.
Are you ready to do that?
Jon Ferrara (32:38.230)
Fire away.
Omer (32:39.110)
Okay, let's do it.
What's the best piece of business advice you ever received?
Jon Ferrara (32:44.390)
The best piece of business advice I ever received was a book I read called Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill.
And the key thing that they taught you in that book is passion and plan.
That ultimately for you to achieve success in your life, what you need to do is you need to focus on your passion, develop a plan, and make it a daily habit every day.
And if you do that, you will achieve your dreams.
And it's a book I highly recommend to any entrepreneur.
Omer (33:13.440)
Other than Think and Grow Rich, is there any other book that you would recommend to our audience?
Jon Ferrara (33:17.040)
Well, there's a book that I really loved when I was building the Goldmine brand called Positioning.
And what it enables you to do is understand how to build a brand and position it effectively.
And then there's one more book that I absolutely love that just came out this week called the New Rules of Sales and Service by David Meerman Scott.
He's a dear friend of mine and inspiration to me creating Nimble.
He wrote a book called the New Rules of PR and Marketing.
This is basically a book that documented the way that I built Goldmine.
It's not dissimilar to the way that I built Nimble.
And his new book, New Rules of Sales and Service, results from a series of interviews that we did where he derived our key ideas about the new ways of social selling and social service.
And it's all in that book.
And it's an amazing book from Wiley.
Omer (34:07.480)
What's one attribute or characteristic of a successful entrepreneur in your mind?
Jon Ferrara (34:12.840)
Well, you know, I think one of the key things of being an entrepreneur is being able to get past defeats.
Because ultimately, it is a lonely, hard road to go out there and continually focus on building your dream.
And I think it was Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, who said that an entrepreneur is somebody who's willing to jump off a cliff and build the airplane on the way down.
And if you're not willing to do that, you really should reconsider getting into the entrepreneurship game.
Omer (34:47.420)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Jon Ferrara (34:53.039)
I think that besides Nimble, the thing I love to do is inspire and educate other people.
I believe that that is the new way of sales and marketing is to do what I call the five E's of social business.
Educate, enchant, engage, embrace and empower your customer.
And you do that by giving your knowledge away.
If you can be the source of knowledge and information for your customer, when they do make a buying decision, they absolutely will think of you because you're the trusted expert that I've taught them along the way.
And so Mae west said, out of sight is out of mind.
Out of mind is out of money, honey.
And the way that I stay top of mind with people on a regular basis is I share content that inspires and educates them.
And the tool I use to do that with is a product called Buffer App.
And it allows me to easily clip content from different sites and share that on my various identities.
When I share that content, it then generates clicks from people who are passionate about the content I'm sharing with them.
And what they do is they bite on that content.
And I reel them in with Nimble.
That circles back to what I said earlier, that if you teach people to fish, they'll figure out yourself.
Fishing poles.
So every day I'm out on the social river sharing content out of my social boat, and I'm dropping these fishing lures in the river.
And as people swim by, if you're passionate about entrepreneurship, growing your business startup, sales, marketing, customer service, social selling, social business, you will bite on our content.
We will then use Nimble to identify people that matter, reel them in, layer intelligence on top of that, map profiles, segment them, and then reach out and nurture them and engage them the nimble way.
Omer (36:43.610)
If you sold Nimble and had to start over, what problem or market would you tackle?
Hmm.
Jon Ferrara (36:49.610)
You know, I'm really big on teaching Omer.
I really believe that the more people that you can help grow, the more you will grow.
And I've often contemplated ways that I could do that.
And I think I might want to write a book and get on the speaking circuit and start to teach people how to grow on a wider, more global basis.
Omer (37:16.610)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Jon Ferrara (37:22.930)
That I'm passionate about photography.
When I sold Goldmine, my wife kicked me out of the house after about two months.
It's tough to get a driven entrepreneur into our house that your wife's been running for 10 years.
And she said, go figure out something to do.
And so basically, I went back to college and got a degree in photography, and I began to shoot professional Sports.
I shot USC football for 10 years from the Age of Carson Palmer all the way to Sanchez and also picked up mountain biking.
It was an avid mountain biker and backpacking and assisted my sons to both become Eagle Scouts and was an active assistant Scoutmaster.
So if you want to know more about me, follow me on Twitter.
John jonferra I believe in order to connect with others that it has to go beyond business, because people connect with people they like, and they like people who know them.
And.
And you can get to know me through following me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.
I roll up my sleeves and I open my soul and I share my heart with people in order for them to more effectively know who I am and connect with me.
And hopefully through that connection, I can inspire them to grow and achieve their dreams.
Omer (38:53.200)
So what is one of your most important passions outside of photography and your work?
Jon Ferrara (38:58.290)
You know, my biggest passion, Amur, is connecting with other people.
I believe that we're on this planet to grow our souls and help other people grow theirs.
And we do that by being present with other people.
And if you are present with somebody where you're listening to their passion and you're sharing yours through that vibration, you can help change the world.
And I believe that's all we leave off this earth is the vibrations of the connections that we make with other human beings.
So whenever I can, I connect with other people and.
And I embarrass my kids when I do that.
And my dad did the same thing.
You know, he talked to anybody in the market or wherever, and I just look at him, I go, dad, dad.
You know, and.
But, you know, when.
When you can look in somebody else's eyes and connect to them and, And.
And.
And create and leave some lasting impression that's positive, where you either inspire them or just, you know, just for a moment connect with them.
I think it's so important because we all go through our lives without truly being present, without truly being connected to the person that we're talking to or being with.
How many times have you been to the supermarket where you didn't even notice a person checking you out, that you're basically on your cell phone or involved in something that whatever you're doing and ultimately that person is serving you.
So they deserve a moment of your time where you connect to them, you acknowledge them, you smile.
And so I'm a passionate connector with other human beings.
Omer (40:36.230)
All right, those were great answers.
Thanks, John.
It's time for us to wrap up on this episode now.
John, I want to thank you for joining me today and talking about Goldmine and Nimble.
And I really appreciate you sharing your experiences and insights with our audience and for letting us get to know you a little better.
Personally, I think you have an amazing story.
If folks want to find out more about Nimble or they want to get in contact with you, what's the best way for them to.
Jon Ferrara (41:02.100)
Well, the easiest thing to do is just go to nimble.com n I m-b l e.com and, and, and, and they can connect with us on Twitter at Nimble.
They can connect with me on Twitter @OnJo N Ferrara.
And I encourage them to go out there and be aware of the power of their personal brand and their professional network, because ultimately, I believe that people's professional network, people's professional net worth is equal to the sum of their personal brand plus their professional network.
And they should be building their personal brand and nurturing their professional network on a daily basis.
And I encourage them to try Nimble to do that because we have built a product and a process called the Nimble Way that'll help them do that in an easy and fun way.
