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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 welcome back to the show. Today is part four of a series we've been doing over the last few days. If this is the first episode you're tuning into in the series, be sure to go back a couple of days just so you have additional context around what we're going to be talking about in this episode of the show. So without further ado, here's part four. Don't follow up every day if I'm a big believer in follow up, but just have a cadence for yourself. So for me it's like I send one message. If it gets ignored, I'll wait 48 hours and then I'll go send another message and then I'll wait 72 hours and I'll send another message and then I'll wait a week and I'll send another message and I'll wait two weeks and send another message and I'll wait a month and then three months. And so like my distance between reach outs and follow ups gets, gets higher and higher on a, you know, the, the, the more I don't hear back from that person, the last thing I want to do is just piss somebody off by dming them every single day when they clearly don't want to do anything with me. Especially if they're like seeing the messages. You know what I mean? Just have some level of of professional persistence. Professional persistence wins over time. Pushy persistence wins a little bit, but will piss people off more than it wins. So it might get you some short term results, but long term some of those people are just going to be like, oh my God dude, that's dude. So annoy out of my inbox. I'm not going to do anything with you ever just because of how annoying you are. So there's a difference between professional persistence and pushy persistence. Don't be the pushy One, be the professional one. Don't take more time than you asked for. If you asked for 15 minutes, stick to 15 minutes unless they tell you that they are want to do more. So a really easy way to do this is when you first jump on just like, hey, do you have a hard out? What, what's your hard out? So if we go a couple minutes over, I just want to make sure that's okay with you. And then if it's like, oh my, I, I actually don't have anything for, for, for you know, 30 minutes after this. So we're, we're good then it might be okay minute or two afterwards. But if you ask them for 15 minutes, stay to 15 minutes and just again be professional. You, you want as low of a latency between you, their experience with you and their experience going on set to film a news segment for a PR piece that they did on their book launch campaign as an example. In those, in those scenarios, it's like we're starting at the start time, we're ending at the end time. And I'm not wasting your time or, or just being unprofessional in this environment. So be professional, don't take more time than you asked for. Don. Don't record or publish the conversation without permission. Now obviously in, in my opinion, you're just, that's kind of the implied thing that you're asking for up front. But then when they jump on, just you know, if you, if you're not on like Zoom will announce that it's recording, but other recording softwares don't do that. And then especially if you're not on Zoom or one of those things, it's like a phone call and you're going to be recording it, you know, with just like a recording device on the side. Just make sure that you are getting permission to record and, or publish the conversation. Don't do that without their permission. And then do not turn the conversation into a pitch. Please, for the love of God man, don't. This is not a sales call. This is not your opportunity to get them to hire you for your services or your coaching program or whatever it is. This is not an opportunity for you to subscribe them to your email list. This is one of my pet peeves. I can't stand when I like, I go on somebody's show and then all of a sudden I'm just added to their like regular weekly broadcast campaigns. Like I never subscribed to that. I never opted into that communication. You just auto subscribe to me because you Got an email and you saw as valuable. It's like emails are only valuable if the person opted into being talked to. So always ask for permission on those things. And in my opinion, it's not the right. Like that's not what you asked for. So don't make it about something that you didn't ask for. If they ask you questions about it, fine, Answer their questions. Like if like you, you stop with the conversation and they're like, so tell me more about what you do. You know, what are you, what are you up to in the world? It's like, okay, well now you have an opportunity. I can be like, okay, well yeah, actually I, whatever. I run a marketing agency or I have an e. Comm business. You know, I'm, I'm working full time right now just trying to figure out what I want to do on the entrepreneurial side because I really want to be an entrepreneur. You know, Then you can say a little bit more, but don't take the time to talk about yourself. I jumped on an interview one time. Dude talked about himself for 15 minutes. Pause for dramatic effect. 15 minutes he talked about himself until we finally got an interview. Like he told me his whole life story. It was like, I did not opt in. Chime is changing the way that people bank. They offer the most rewarding fee free banking that's built just for you. Not the 1%. Chime members can benefit from up to $1,150 in annual rewards fee free. It's rated five stars by USA Today for customer service because you get real humans 24, 7. You're not just switching banks. You're upgrading to America's number one choice for banking with a Chime checking account. Plus you can get up to 5% cash back on a Chime card in your category of choice like gas or groceries, you get savings that grow even faster with 3.75% APY, which is nine times higher than the national average average. Plus you get premium travel perks like airport lounge access and 24. 7 travel concierge included with your Chime card. You can even get up to $500 of your pay. When you save with my pay. They also have Spotme which lets you overdraft up to $200 fee free. I know my younger self would have benefited from this. Chime is not just smarter banking. It is the most rewarding way to bank. So join the millions who are already banking fee free today. Head to chime.com travis that's chime.com only takes a few minutes to sign up right now.
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I didn't ask to interview you, you asked to interview me. So don't take half of the time that we have allotted for this interview and then inevitably he went over the recording time that we initially agreed up, took the first 15 minutes to talk about himself and his story. Don't do stuff like that, okay? Be have a base level of self awareness. People like you're already, you're already asking. You're already ask like the ask is already in your favor. It does not do this person much benefit to say yes to you and it does you a lot of benefit for them to say yes to you. So don't just add more things in there. Even if they are, even if they appease the asks, they are not going to leave with a positive experience which is the entire reason to do this is like yes, it's for the learning, yes for the proxy like all those things. But the, the you want there to be. You want this to be the the opening of a relationship potentially. And again, not all of these are going to end that way. I've done over a thousand interviews. Probably, probably 20% of those people are people who I can now call friends of mine and but that's 200 really high quality people that I can call friends of mine now that like I can te right now and they will respond, I can FaceTime them and they will answer. So it's not going to happen on all of them. Don't force it if it doesn't feel natural and don't ask for anything that you did that you were not completely upfront about in the initial reach out or they're going to leave feeling bad about it again. Even if they say yes during that time, they're just going to be like ugh, that was not a good experience. I'm not going to do that again. I'm definitely not going to send them any of the people in my network. I know how they treat people. I know how they treat relationships and they don't treat it with a level of respect that I Want them to treat it with. So I'm not going to open up my Rolodex to them. So have, have a little bit of self awareness here. Okay. And then, and like we talked about earlier, just make sure you keep track of some of these things. So day one, I sent five DMS to these five people. Did they respond yes or no? If did they say yes, did they say no? So you have like, did they ignore? Did they say yes? Did they say no? Then if they're ignoring, then go through that follow up sequence that I talked about earlier, which is like 48 hours after the first message, 72 hours after the second message, a week after that one, and then two weeks, then a month, then three months and just follow that cad for, for all these people. And then at the end of the week just take stock about what happened. What message did I send that got the best response? What video did I send, got the best response? Was it, was it me in my kitchen? Was it me on a walk? Was it me in my podcast studio? Was it, was it me with my kids running around in the background? Like what, what exact. What got the most types of responses here? Which type of person is most likely to say yes? So far, like I've done, you know, at the end of your first week you will have done 35 messages. So is there a certain type of person in a certain niche that said yes more than the other people? If so, that's an indicator. You should probably craft your next week of reach outs to that same group of people because now you have more credibility within that space. So it's more valuable to go to a group of people like we talked about earlier. Let's just continue with this example. Like YouTubers, right? So if you are reaching out to 150 people and you're reaching out to like generic business people, and you're reaching out to home service businesses, and you're reaching out to real estate agents, and you're reaching out to coaches, and you're reaching out to YouTubers and you're reaching out to investors. And like the problem is, is that these, all these worlds exist on their own. They're all their own silos of people, they're all their own individual networks. And so what happens is if you get one person who is a real estate agent to say yes, and then you get one person who's a YouTuber to say yes, and you get one person who's an author to say yes, none of those people know each other, so you can't leverage the credibility of having that previous person with that next group of people because they don't know who that person is. So good indic indicator. A good way to find this is basically just after you reach out to after someone says yes on Instagram, go to their Instagram and see all the people that they follow and then see if any of the people that they follow are people who are on your list. And if they are on your list, then prioritize those reach outs because it'll be easier to get those people if you reach out to them and say hey, so and so that you follow. And you're not going to say that you follow, but so and so already said yes. But you in your mind know that they follow that person. So you know that there's a level of credibility that you bring to the table now because somebody who they already follow already already said yes to doing this. So it makes it more likely that they will say yes. So pay attention to the types of people that are saying yes and then do more of those ones because it'll just be easier to get the next yeses because you have that level of credibility with more of those types of people. Ask yourself what question that you're asking is producing the best answers? What advice are you getting that continues to repeat? And then what action did I take because of this conversation? Is there a material change that's happened in my life or in my mindset as a result of doing these interview? And then at the end of it, you're going to ask yourself all those questions again. And then by doing this, I promise you at the end of this, you will feel wildly more confident about your ability to interact in any social situation, even if it's in person. You'll feel wildly more connected to the work that you're doing. You will feel infinitely more knowledgeable about that thing. You're like the, the, the volume of things that this will help you feel better about or help you feel more conf is really, really high. And then just doing anything for 30 days in a row will already increase your confidence. So just that's why I say like focus less on the result. And, and you know, the, the response rate and obviously you want to adjust that along the way. You want to be successful, you want to interview more people. I understand that what I'm saying is like control your inputs and then adjust the inputs along the way to get the outputs that you want. But the main thing that you should be focusing on is the inputs because the inputs are a hundred percent within your, within your Control. You can't control how many people are going to say yes at first, but you can control how many people you reach out to. So five DMS a day, that is the challenge here. Send five DMS a day and ask those people for a quick interview and then go at it from there. Okay. I'm sure you have a volume of things that you're telling yourself of, of why this can't be done. So don't allow these limiting beliefs to prevent you from taking the first step, you know? Well, I don't know any successful people. That's all right. Again, go on Instagram, search the hashtags that are relevant for the thing that you do. Find the people who are doing well in that space. Look at their bio, look at their website, add them to the list. It's really not that complic. Why would they say yes? Well, some people aren't going to say yes. And that's the point of sending, of getting in the practice, sending the messages, because some, a lot of people are not going to say yes, especially when you're first getting started. But some people will say yes. I prom. I guarantee you somebody will say yes. Somebody who you didn't think would say yes will say yes. Somebody who you thought would say yes might say no or ignore the message. You don't know what's going to happen until you just start throwing some stuff out there, you know, I'm afraid of bothering people. Well, respectful ask is not harassment. In fact, a lot of those people, they know that that's part of process because the successful people have also done this thing. It may not be in the context of reaching out for interviews, but they've definitely done some version, especially the beginning of their journey, where they awkwardly put themselves in weird situations and had to go in for an ask and, and eventually figured out how to get over it. Like, people like that will respect your, your desire to continue to reach out. So why would they say yes? They may not. Some of them may. Some people just like helping people. You just don't know until you start reaching out, you're not going to be bothering them. And then if you're telling yourself, you know, oh, I'm not, I'm not impressive enough. I haven't done XYZ yet, I haven't published my book yet. I haven't done this. I haven't built this business yet. The challenge is not for people who are this, like this challenge is not for people who are already impressive because they already have all the confidence that they need okay, to Continue out to continue to go out and do bigger and bigger things. It's how you become more capable. It's how you, it's, it's how you can get to the desired outcome that you want. It's, it's how you get more connected. It's how you get more confidence, how you get more comfortable in big conversations with high quality people. It's by doing the reps. And the beautiful thing about today's world is that you don't have to already start with a bunch of knowledge. There's no gatekeeper. You don't have to, you don't have to get hired at a radio station and work there for 15 years before you get a chance to host a show. You can host a social media show today by just reaching out to somebody and asking them for some of their time. Time. So stop telling yourself that you're not impressive enough, that people aren't going to say yes, that you're afraid of bothering people of, you know, that the odd that the call is going to be awkward. Well, what if, what if the interview is awkward? Well, it might be. That's fine. You got to, you got to work through that. My first probably 30 interviews, I sucked. I had no idea what I was doing. I literally just read questions off of a script. That was the entire, that was the extent of my interview process. But now I don't even think about it. Now it's second nature. Why? Because I've done over a thousand interviews, so the first few might feel awk. That's the whole damn point. It should feel awkward a little bit because you're not going to be good at it. That's the whole point of trying to do this. And also why I recommend like starting with the lower time allotments, like 10, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 5 minutes, whatever it is. I got my five scripted questions. However long it takes us to get through these five questions, that's how long we're going to talk. Most people, it comes out to 10 to 15 minutes. Is that a problem for you? You know, it's just, it's, it's the reps of getting more comfortable in those types of conversations with those types of people. And if you zoom out from everything that we've talked about, here's some of the things that I think could happen from this. You can build communication confidence, which is absolutely gonna happen. You learn from the people who've already done what you want to do and you learn the exact things that are actually applicable to the situation that you're in. Because it's essentially like a 20 minute free coaching call disguised as an interview. So it's not even just the information, it's the immediate application of the information that makes it more valuable. You get referrals, people will open up their Rolode to you. You discover more opportunities. You become less intimidated by successful people. You, you not only learn how to communicate with people in general, but you learn how to communicate better with successful people, which is a completely different skill. You build a network before you need it. That's the whole idea of this, is that, you know, it's dig your well, dig the well before you're thirsty type of mentality. You become a better, more active listener. You create a personal board of advisors. You create better friendships. If you are going to cut it, record it and clip it and turn it into social content, then you ton of social media content from this. There's so many things that you can gain from this. So do not allow any of the things that we just talked about to prevent you from taking the first step. Okay? And again, I understand this might feel impossible to you, and, and I've done a bunch of podcast coaching now at this point, and when we get to the guest conversation, the question that I get more often than anything else is like, well, I, I think I'm, I think I'm gonna run out of guests. Like, that's their concern. And then we start doing it and they're like, oh my gosh, there's no shortage of people that want to talk, that want to get their message out into the world. That has actually become the easiest part about what I do is getting good guests. So don't worry about any of those things. You're never going to be able to get to where you're going if you're not willing to take the first step. So 30 DMs, 30 days, or, excuse me, 5 DMs a day. 30 days. 5 DMs, 30 days, 150 total DMs. And you're going to send those out to all the people that, that, that are on your list. So please let me know if you end up taking this challenge. Let me know what you ended up doing, what the results are. Keep me updated. I'd love to hear from any of you. Travisraffshapel.com is my email. Ravishapple is my Instagram. You have my permission to reach out to me. I will say yes to any of you who reach out to me to do an interview. I'll guarantee you that right now, if you're listening to this episode of the show. Reference this episode, say you're taking the challenge, and let me know that this is something that you're going to be doing. So. So anyway, that is it for this episode of the show. I know we had to do this in multiple parts because we went a little bit longer on this one than we thought originally, but let me know what ends up happening happening from it for you, and I'll be eager to see the results that happen in your life because of this. Anyway, that's it for this episode of the show. Thanks so much for tuning in. Catch you guys on the next one. Peace.
Episode: SOLO | Make Money by Having the Conversations You've Been Avoiding, part 4
Host: Travis Chappell
Release Date: May 20, 2026
Part four of Travis Chappell's series encourages listeners to step outside their comfort zones and start reaching out to people they've been hesitant to contact—whether for networking, interviews, or just building valuable connections. Travis focuses on the actionable steps, mindsets, and etiquette required to successfully reach out to potential guests, mentors, or collaborators, laying out tangible strategies and addressing the most common fears and limiting beliefs that block people from making these crucial connections.
(00:31–02:07)
"Professional persistence wins over time. Pushy persistence wins a little bit, but will piss people off more than it wins. ... Don't be the pushy one; be the professional one."
(01:04, Travis Chappell)
(02:07–03:35)
"Hey, do you have a hard out? What's your hard out? So if we go a couple minutes over, I just want to make sure that's okay with you."
(02:36)
"Please, for the love of God man, don't. This is not a sales call. This is not your opportunity to get them to hire you... This is one of my pet peeves."
(03:21)
(03:36–05:50, 06:32–08:56)
"You're already asking. The ask is already in your favor. It does not do this person much benefit to say yes to you and it does you a lot of benefit for them to say yes to you."
(06:40)
(08:57–12:11)
Keep Records:
Leverage Social Proof:
Key Insight:
"After you reach out... go to their Instagram and see all the people that they follow...if they're on your list, then prioritize those reach outs because it'll be easier to get those people..."
(10:12)
(12:12–13:53)
(13:54–19:40)
"My first probably 30 interviews, I sucked. I had no idea what I was doing...But now I don't even think about it. Now it's second nature. Why? Because I've done over a thousand interviews."
(18:07)
(19:41–22:55)
"You build a network before you need it. That's the whole idea of this... dig your well before you're thirsty."
(21:14)
(22:56–25:40)
"You have my permission to reach out to me. I will say yes to any of you who reach out to me to do an interview. I'll guarantee you that right now, if you're listening to this episode of the show."
(24:35)
"Professional persistence wins over time. Pushy persistence wins a little bit, but will piss people off more than it wins." (01:04)
"Be have a base level of self-awareness...do not take more time than you asked for." (06:40)
"My first probably 30 interviews, I sucked. ... But now I don't even think about it. ... That's the whole damn point." (18:07)
"5 DMs, 30 days, 150 total DMs. And you're going to send those out to all the people that are on your list." (23:36)
"You're never going to be able to get to where you're going if you're not willing to take the first step." (23:58)
Travis calls listeners to action: stop letting fear or limiting beliefs keep you from reaching out. Build real skills and relationships by committing to just five friendly DMs per day for a month, with professionalism and respect. The compounding effects—knowledge, network, confidence, opportunity—are worth it. Travis even guarantees he'll say yes if you reach out referencing this challenge.
Ready to level up? Take the 30-day DM challenge and start having the conversations you've been avoiding.