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Travis Makes Money
INTERVIEW | Make Money by Building Products People Actually Want with Adrian Salamunovic
00:22:55
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- [00:00]
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Podcast Host - Travis
You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by GoHighLevel.com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet. Just go to gohighlevel.com travis.
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What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Travis Makes Money podcast where it's a mission to help you make more money. Today on the show, I am talking to a new friend, Adrian Salamunovic. He is a serial entrepreneur, investor and advisor who's built and exited multiple companies, including Canvas Pop, which sold for more than $30 million. Since then, he's focus on making money work intelligently through real estate, safer long term investments, angel investing, and advising other founders. He's passionate about helping entrepreneurs think not just about making money, but keeping it and then growing it after their exit. He's also working on a new company now called Dexacam, which is a new app designed to help millions of people transform their bodies and get in the best shape of their life. Adrian, what's up, dude? Welcome to the show.
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Guest - Adrian Salamunovic
Hey, thanks for having me, Travis. Appreciate it.
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Podcast Host - Travis
So, serial entrepreneur, let's go back to the very first time you, you felt this itch. What was the first dollar you ever made? That was through entrepreneurship.
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Guest - Adrian Salamunovic
I've been an entrepreneur since, since high school, so I've never had a job. When I was super young, I was developing websites in high school, was in the web world super early. Sold my first company at 21 years of age. It was a web development shop. Sold it on graduation from college, went on to do advisory consulting work, Helped develop launch a company called myf, where I was hired as a consultant. That company sold for $240 million. A few years later. I said, well, I was part of the launch team on that. I said, well, I probably could have built it myself. So that really inspired me to say, keep building companies, man. I have a long history. I mean, I started a company called DNA11 that made, believe it or not, personalized art from people's DNA. It started off as a side hustle and grew to a million dollars. In revenue in its first year with just organically that turned into Canvas Pop. Canvas pop bootstrapped it for a decade and sold it for actually closer to $35 million. And here we are today, you know, and now I'm working on some new startups, so.
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Podcast Host - Travis
Yeah, yeah. So obviously enthralled in the entrepreneurship world and community for quite some time now. What do you view as like your core skill set, Adrian? What, what, what do you, what do you think you really bring to the table in these types of ventures?
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Guest - Adrian Salamunovic
Well, I love the intersection of personalization and consumers and then digital. You know, if you can combine those in some way, I get really excited. That's what I, I'm personally intrigued by is the intersection of those, of those three things. But what I'm really, really good at is I think the 0 to 10 million, getting that buzz out the gate, landing partnerships, doing branding, all the strategic stuff. If you think of, I think of myself sort of like, like a jet thruster on a, on a rocket ship. Right. You've got the different ones that come off at different times. I'm sort of from the ground right up to the beginning of the stratosphere and then I, I jet off. So I'm, I'm handed off to somebody else. That's right, yeah.
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Podcast Host - Travis
You think you just get bored?
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Guest - Adrian Salamunovic
I think it's, yeah. I mean I definitely have a bit of ADD. I mean bored. It can take me up to 10 years to get bored of things. But I think the, the beginning stages of companies is when I get most excited. When something's a concept or idea, it needs to be validated. You're talking to customers, you're to get product market fit and getting the buzz going. I think that's the most exciting phase for me. I could do that all day.
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Podcast Host - Travis
Is product to you something that you, you thrive in? It seems like you spend a lot of time thinking about product versus like marketing versus sales, things like that.
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Guest - Adrian Salamunovic
I think they're all today intertwined. So product and marketing are almost one and the same. So one of the way I tend to think of product is if you create a remarkable product that's inherently viral or inherently addictive or designed from the start to be interesting, then your job to sell, it's going to be a lot easier. And so today, for example, with apps, the best apps are almost hook worthy by design. Right? The app itself is viral by design. So by the time people start using it, it grows, it's baked into the product. So I don't look at product and marketing. As two separate things anymore. I do really do see that they're deeply intertwined, especially if you think of the most successful products today, at least in the consumer space.
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Podcast Host - Travis
Yeah, absolutely. There's just, it's. I feel like I think this comes from Naval Ravikant, but he says something about how this episode of the show
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- [06:31]
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Podcast Host - Travis
marketing, is greater than sales. Essentially like if you're not good at product, you rely on marketing. If you're not good at marketing, you rely on sales. And it took me a while to learn that lesson, to be honest with you, because I was a door to door sales guy for so long and I was just like, that was. I preached sales and that was like my mantra, you know what I mean? But then the more you start getting into business, the more you start, like, there's difference, I think, between being a salesperson and being an entrepreneur, even though there's a lot of things that coincide. And one of them that I did not expect to have to learn was the product side to build something that truly is just so good that people have to talk about it or have to share it or have to do something. How do you there. I feel like there's a long road between an idea and a product that people want. How do you take that journey from. Just like I have this idea, I think that this product could help solve this problem. How do you actually craft it over the course of time with a user base and an audience and get feedback from them? And how do you know, like, this is positive feedback that we should take versus this is feedback that we should leave here? It doesn't actually fit the mission. How do you make those decisions and design a great product?
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Guest - Adrian Salamunovic
Well, I think some the best products, at least for me, are ones that scratch your own itch, right? And so it's not always the case, but at least in my case, if it's a product that you want to see exist, even if it's just for yourself, selfishly at the start, you're going to be much more invested into and passionate about seeing that product come to life. So I would say that every product that I. Almost every company I've been involved with was something that I needed or used myself and wanted to. I asked myself one simple question. Is there a better way, right? Or what if? And with those two words, you begin the journey of reimagining how you can make this product better. Right? And everything's a remix, if you think about it. I mean, every podcast has been done, every app has been done. It's always a remix from a previous version. And so I think you start off by saying, what do I wish existed? How would I exist it to be different and better? And then the third thing you do, and this is so I can't emphasize this enough, is talk to people. You know, it's good to have it in your mind and it's for yourself. But by talking to people and getting that feedback early on, you're gonna find some hidden gems, some interesting insights, whether it's on pricing, positioning, or something that you didn't think of that could be extremely valuable. And then the fourth stage is pre sell it. Like so many people Wait to have the perfect product and if I build it, they will come. But when in many, many cases for most products, you can actually start to assign land customers, whether it's business to business or business to consumer. You can start to get pre signups, you can start to, you can go on Kickstarter and get people to pre purchase your product. There's a million different examples is because nothing votes more for a product's value than when people hand you their credit card. Right. Or hand you some cash. So I think, I think if you do those four things in that order, you are 10 times more likely to have a successful product out the gate.
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Podcast Host - Travis
Yeah, the personal experience thing I think is really valuable there because it's not just a matter of you will stick in this longer because you want to see it happen, but it's also that you have more insights into the customer journey yourself because you are also a customer of it. There's a lower volume of things that you have to learn about that person if you are that person, because you tend to know exactly what your problems are. So from the 0 to 10 million mark, obviously this is a stage that a lot of people never make it out of. What do you think is required in order to have a successful product launch?
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Guest - Adrian Salamunovic
Well, if you think the launch is really important is getting product market fit as soon as possible. But if we rewind from that, it's the as soon as possible part. Right. Velocity is so important. Now the good news is with AI today and with, you know, you could do things much, much faster than you could previously, but I think speed is your friend. But, but there's so much talk about vibe coding apps and launching AI slop and this and that, that actually the secret weapon now moving forward is going to be craftsmanship and caring and the human component of developing products. So I think the more fine tuned products that are more humanized, you know, across every category are actually going to do better than apps that are quickly or sloppily launched using AI or just entirely developed with AI. So I think those two things are really important. Putting passion and craft into whatever you're doing, whether it's a podcast, an app, a website, whatever it is, and then just speed. Right. So that balance between speed and quality. But then I will say this, I think it's very important to the founders out there who are just starting is to have the marathon or maybe ultra marathon mentality when you're launching a business. Travis, you know this overnight successes take 10 years. Right. And I think people were very aware of that they might not start. But that's just the truth. Almost every company that I've been involved with or even exited took almost a decade. Right? So it's an ultra marathon and you just gotta go one step at a time through that journey.
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Podcast Host - Travis
How important for you have relationships, whether it's mentors, partners, building a strong network of people, how important has that been for you?
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Guest - Adrian Salamunovic
For me, it's critical. And I can't overemphasize this enough for young entrepreneurs is like we all know the saying you're the sum of the five people you hang out with. And that is absolutely true. And in business is an unfair advantage when you're able to surround yourself with men and women who are going through the same journey as you and more importantly, people who are maybe five years, maybe up to even a decade ahead of you because you can learn so much faster. Right? When I was in my 20s, I lived in Ottawa, Canada and we had a group called Fresh Founders. The group's still around, but the original group, Fresh Founders, was a bunch of nerds living in Ottawa, Canada. We were nowhere on the map. But this group of young founders who were all building these scrappy startups out of that group, several multibillion dollar companies came out of that group and we were all living in our little condos, ramen noodle style startups, you know, it was Toby Luque, now CEO of Shopify, Harley Fichkelstein, president of Shopify. We had a whole bunch of other founders. My friend Aidan, who started Fellow app and sold his previous company as SurveyMonkey. Solen angel, who's an incredible entrepreneur out of Miami who built one of the first AI companies in the fintech space. Just a rockstar group of friends. So you know, in that group you can't help but to be successful because that's who you're comparing yourself against and who you're able to lean on when you need help, advice, introductions to investors or whatever. So to me it's been, I can't overemphasize how critical being part of a group like Fresh Founders was. And I hope that everybody out there and anybody can. There's a ton of groups out there like Hampton EO ypo. I'm part of a group called Limitless CEO. You can plug into these networks for a few thousand dollars, right? A year maybe. You know, some of them are a few thousand, some are ten thousand. But the amount of instant value that you can get from being part of these communities is incredible.
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Podcast Host - Travis
Yeah, no kidding. It's just like it sort of just rewires what you think is possible to some degree and then makes you feel a little bit more like normal, I suppose. You know, like if you're that type of a personality, you're just not normal. By definition, you're not normal. That's only like what, 7% of the population that owns a business or something like that.
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Guest - Adrian Salamunovic
Action. Simon Williams audition for Wonder Man.
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Podcast Host - Travis
I'm gonna need you to sign this. Assuming you don't have, have superpowers.
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Guest - Adrian Salamunovic
If anyone found out, my lips are sealed.
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Podcast Host - Travis
Like you're just, you're, you're, you're by definition a little bit different. You're going to think a little bit differently. You, you act a little bit differently, you talk a little bit differently. And if you only are surrounded by people who don't understand that, then you can almost start this negative self talk can start happening where you're just kind of like, maybe I should accept that this is not, you know, what I should want. Or maybe, maybe they're right. Maybe I am just greedy and maybe I shouldn't want these things. You start like talking yourself out of your dreams and your goals versus getting around people like that. You know, where you're in a group with the co founders of Shopify, it's like, okay, well you know, I think this is going to be doable for me. It's just like the level of conversation is different. The stories that are told are different, the mindset that's shared is different, the work ethic is different, everything's different. And it makes you feel like, oh, okay, there are other people out there that are crazies. Like I am.
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Guest - Adrian Salamunovic
Yeah, a hundred, a hundred percent. It normalizes the insanity of starting your own business. Statistically, you know, it's, it's a Crazy thing to do to start a company, but I think it's crazy not to start a company. And especially today, like, the odds might be against you, but at least you're in control of your destiny. You're able to enjoy it most of the time. And in fact, I'd argue there's ways to enjoy it the entire time. You just have to learn from others that are ahead of you. And it doesn't have to be super painful or super risky. And I wouldn't have it any other way. And I'm sure you're the same way. It's like, nothing's more fun than building things and building companies.
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Podcast Host - Travis
What have been a couple of the key failures that have come along the way in your journey? It's funny because I used to, when I first started the show, I used to ask people, was there a time that you failed? I was like, then I started doing this a lot more and realized that the answer's always yes. There's. There's no, there's no def. There's no version of somebody who I've interviewed has been like really successful that has not been riddled with a bunch of failures along the way. What are a couple of failures? I think that that might have popped up in your journey. And what did you take away from that?
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Guest - Adrian Salamunovic
I mean, tons. Tons. I mean, I fail every day at something, right. And it's. And, and you learn from it. But I think, I think, like, when I think back, there's been a lot like, a lot like. And I could talk about a couple of them, which I don't mind. I think it's important to be transparent and talk about things. I think we developed one of the world's first GIF keyboards. Animated GIF keyboards. When Apple first introduced third party keyboards, we were one of the first to develop this thing called POP Key. It was a gift keyboard. We got to a million daily active users. It's no joke. We were doing partnerships with Red Bull and Nike and Mercedes. It was crazy. And we were trying to do too many things at once. We had too many ventures running and not the right systems. And that company shut down like a couple years later. Right. And it could have been acquired for a lot of money. There was some opportunities there. So I think of that, like, as a learning experience though now that I'm developing my new app called dexacam, I can leverage a lot of the experience I had nearly a decade ago trying to launch one of these apps and use the lessons learned today. So it's worth. Do I Consider that a failure. Yes. But you can only learn some of these things from being in the trenches and going through the process. And so I don't really look at it as a waste of time or money. Yeah, it's part of the journey.
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Podcast Host - Travis
Right? It was like, is it, is the technical definition of it a failure? Like, I, I suppose I think that's a little bit of semantics and not necessarily the true working definition because it's not actually a failure in life. It's just like a thing that happened that you learn from and then you go to the next thing. You know what I mean? It's that it's only a failure if you quit. You know what I mean? If it's, it's only a failure if it takes you out of the game. But if you stay in the game, then it's just a massive lesson that you learned that tends to stick with you for a long period of time. And I assume it's probably been really instrumental now that you're getting back into building another app like this. So you obviously have this massive exit from Canvas Pop and now you're working on Dexacam. So tell me a little bit about Dexacam and what you guys got going on with that.
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Guest - Adrian Salamunovic
Well, yeah, I'm super excited about Dexacam because there's no failure for it in the sense that as we talked about earlier, I built Dexacam for myself and for my own personal fitness journey. So what is Dexacam? Well, Dexacam allows you to take a picture of yourself and understand your baseline metrics, your body fat, your muscle density, your fitness score, all sorts of data from one single photo. But the part that makes it super powerful and interesting is that it shows you what your future body could look like if you're a peak fitness. And so the idea behind it is visualization. Right. Once you see yourself at peak fitness, it's using AI, but it's science based AI. Once you see yourself in the best shape of your life as an image, you lock in and you can't unsee that. And I believe that that's the beginning of any great fitness journey, any great business is first being able to see clarity into what you're trying to achieve. And from there, everything else falls into place. And so it's a body fitness tracking app, body visualization app. I think it's gonna be massively disruptive in the space, replacing scales 98% as accurate as an actual DEXA scan at half the price and in your pocket. So I'm super excited about it and look, the mission is to help millions of people get in the best shape of their life. I'm happy if a hundred people use it and change their lives. So I'm just super excited about that particular app.
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Podcast Host - Travis
Yeah, well, that's maybe the difference between building out of necessity versus building out of prosperity. You know, it's like, well, you got, you already had like a really solid exit. You don't have to build this company to make money. You know what I'm saying? So you just get to build whatever it is that you really want to build that you genuinely view as like, I wish this existed. I now have the time and the resources and the knowledge available to be able to build this thing that I wish existed, existed. So I'm going to do it. And hopefully other people also find it valuable.
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Guest - Adrian Salamunovic
Totally. And I think mission based companies, if you think about some of your favorite companies, favorite products as we talked about earlier, started by passionate founders who wanted to solve a problem. And that's their North Star. Right. They have something that's deeply entrenched in them they want to help fix and they're committed to doing it whether it takes 5 years, 10 years, or a lifetime. And by surrendering a little bit and leaning away from how am I gonna make more money? You're able to be more focused on the outcome on the customer. And if it makes, look, at the end of the day, you know this and I know this. What is value? You know, value is when you deliver value to people, you will make money. It's like whether you want to or not. Almost right? So start with the problem that you're solving. Deliver enormous value at 2x3x10x better than the competitor and you'll succeed. I mean, it's almost unavoidable.
- [22:43]
Podcast Host - Travis
Adrian, I appreciate you being willing to come on and share a little bit more with us today. Where can people go to get more from you and what you guys are working on?
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Guest - Adrian Salamunovic
Yeah. Please connect with me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from founders around the world. I'm a founders founder and if you want to check out my new app, it's called dexacam, you can go to dexacam.com, pre sign up or download it when it's ready. It's coming soon. Super excited to launch that. And Travis, thanks for having me on this. I love talking about this stuff.
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Podcast Host - Travis
Dexacam.com Go check out Dexcam, all the things that they're working on over there. And then he's at King Underscore of underscore. Canvas over on Instagram as well. So go check out Adrian some of the things that he's working on over there as well. Adrian, I appreciate you taking the time. I know you're a busy guy. I don't take it for granted. Everybody else tuning in. Remember, money only solves your money problems, but it's a little bit easier to solve the rest of your problems when you got some money in the bank. So let's solve that one first here on the Travis Makes Money podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you guys next time. Peace.
- [23:38]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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