What does it take to build and nurture a network of influencers?

Dino Dogan is the CEO of Triberr, a social network for content creators that sends millions of monthly visitors to its members.

Dino is also a professional speaker. He has been the subject of stories in publications such as Forbes, Yahoo!News, The Huffington Post, and many more.

Dino has also spoken and consulted for a variety of companies and audiences such as IBM, Rutgers University, Vocus, New Media Expo, 140conf, and many others.

 

 

If you’re looking for ways to enhance consumer trust or brand recognition, read on to find out how Influencer marketing can help your business grow.

Say hi to Dino at dinodogan.com.

Read Raw Transcript Now:

Success Harbor: Hi Everyone. Hi Everyone. This is George Meszaros with Success Harbor and I have Dino Dogan with me. Dino is the CEO and co-founder of Triberr, the social network for content creators that send millions of monthly visitors to its members. Dino has been featured in Forbes, Yahoo News and other alias publications. Dino is also a professional speaker. Welcome.

Dino Dogan: I’ve always been featured in Z-list publications.

Success Harbor: Okay.

Dino Dogan: How you doing George?

Success Harbor: Good, good, good.

Dino Dogan: Thank you for having me on the show man

Success Harbor: It’s great to have you. I really appreciate it. Thanks for being here Dino. You are the co-founder of Triberr. Tell our audience how Triberr works. Why would somebody use it especially bloggers. Why would they use Triberr.

Dino Dogan: There are so many ways to skin that cat but I’ll tell you how Triberr came about. So I started blogging in 2008, 2009 and I came from a network engineering background. Like, I was a geek’s geek. I used to teach computer geeks how to become bigger computer geeks. Right. And I got into the whole blogging and content thing. I got into podcasting before podcasting was cool. I was doing you know YouTube videos and what not and nobody was watching or reading or listening. Right. Does it sound like a common problem?

Success Harbor: Yeah, it is, it is.

Dino Dogan: Okay, okay, okay. So I get this content, how do I get people to see my content and of course if you ask Google, hey Google how do I bring people to my content? Google, not surprisingly gives you the answer that Google is the answer. But I didn’t know any better. I’m like okay Google says Google is the answer. In other words that’s SCO right. So okay, I’ll learn SCO. So you know, being, having a technical background, the SCO came really easy to me and I just got into it deep and I was doing some funky stuff back then. I had this thing called bookmarking daemon that would take your blog posts and index it across like three thousand book marking sites. So like back then it was like Dig and you know and Reddit was there as well back then. StumbleUpon. You know like thousands of these sites. The idea being when Google crawls your content, they’ll find it when it’s indexed across these sites because they’re going to those sites and asking those sites, hey, you have anything new that you’re linking to. And they say, yes I do. Dino’s blog.

Success Harbor: And did it work back then? Did that work, that strategy?

Dino Dogan: Well yes and no. It kind of sort of worked. When it worked, it brought in the wrong kind of crowd. Right.

Success Harbor: Yeah

Dino Dogan: So it kind of worked for indexing. It kind of worked for ranking. That kind of strategy doesn’t work for ranking anymore by the way. But at the same time, I just naturally fell into this tribe of about fifteen bloggers and every day we were publishing content and I would go to their blogs and read it and share it and comment on it and they would come to my blog and read it and share it and comment on it, and that’s the part that worked. Like that’s the piece that actually helped me build a community, build an audience, build relationships with people in the industry who were just genius right and it was completely unintentional right so I’m thinking to myself, my co-founder Dane Cristo right. He’s like you know I want to start blogging too and then we sort of sat down and looked at each other and went like, hmmm, so you know how do we bring Dan into this existing tribe? Like how do we get this tribe now to look at Dan’s content? Right. It was really hard and besides if we can like, if fifteen bloggers in a tribe is good, then like forty bloggers in a tribe is better right?

Success Harbor: Yeah

Dino Dogan: So we were like is there a way for us to pool all this content into one stream essentially right so I don’t have to go to fifty blogs everyday right. I just pool everything in and it allows me to read the content right there, share it from that stream right there and then comment on it if I want to and stuff like that and when I share other people’s content, they actually see my content as well and they do the same thing for me. So it’s this reciprocal sharing of quality content and we looked for a platform or a tool that would do that and it didn’t exist so we built one. We called it Triberr.

Success Harbor: Yeah I mean it makes perfect sense. I’ve interviewed many successful bloggers and they all talk about this network or this tribe as you, as the language that you’re using for Triberr and you know it makes perfect sense because they’re all talking about you know, I had, when I started out I had like fifteen, twenty other bloggers that we’d talk with all the time and we read each other, then we’d comment and so on and so forth. So Triberr is basically the tool to enable that or simplify that or centralize that in a way right?

Dino Dogan: Exactly. Exactly. All of that, yes.

Success Harbor: So it’s. You know the challenge for bloggers is to get eyeballs on the content and what really kind of pissed me off is this “content is king” type of mantra

Dino Dogan: Yeah

Success Harbor: That you hear all over the place and it’s, you know. You go to some of these busy, very popular sites online and you see the crap content you would see at any other blog that nobody reads right so how do we get beyond that? I do think that you need to have great content and you need to have unique content but that is just maybe ten percent of the equation, maybe twenty percent.

Dino Dogan: Yeah

Success Harbor: So what if content isn’t king?

Dino Dogan: Yeah right. Let me, let’s back up a little bit because I think you’ve hit on a very interesting point right. All these big sites are talking about how content is king. It’s a trope. It’s a meme. Content is king. Right. Why are they saying that? And the reason they’re saying that is because their sites, their content was born into a different world than our content right. Sometime in 2009, there was a change in the online culture. It went from a linking culture to a sharing culture. You know Twitter and Facebook became persuasive, became ubiquitous. Think about when was the last time you linked to someone?

Success Harbor: Yeah

Dino Dogan: Versus the last time you shared something? Right

Success Harbor: Well yeah. All the time.

Dino Dogan: So the culturing of the Internet changed in 2009. When Windows 95 came out in 1995 right and you know up until maybe mid-2000’s, if you published your content any time during that time frame, 1995 to like 2005, 6, 7, 8 right, if you published it in that time frame you were essentially, there was a deficit of content online and excess of readers right. Between

Success Harbor: Yeah

Dino Dogan: 1995, we went from sixteen million people online to nearly two billion in 2009 so the Internet population exploded, right. And it exploded during this time where if you published a fart, people would hear it. You know.

Success Harbor: Yeah

Dino Dogan: In 2009, it’s a different kind of world. The Internet expansion in terms of population has slowed down dramatically right. By 2009, America has unboarded online right and that’s really who we’re going after right. You and I who are producing content in America. Like China has its own thing and you know there’s other countries but in terms of where money is coming from, it’s coming from America so it’s really who’s buying online? Americans. I’m generalizing.

Success Harbor: Yeah

Dino Dogan: But it’s Americans.

Success Harbor: Yep

Dino Dogan: So by 2009, Americans have unboarded online. They’re on the Internet right so population growth has slowed down dramatically meanwhile there’s this explosion of content post-2005,6,7,8. Right? So and check this out. It’s no coincidence right. Huffington Post, Mashable, Techcrunch, Jezebel, Gaucker, Life Hacker, Twitter, Facebook, all of these sites were born in the mid, in the early to mid-2000’s, all of them. They were born during the explosion of iBoz and deficit of content. And today’s a different world. So when they say content is king, they’re speaking their reality right. They’ve experienced that and it was true when it was relevant to them but the world has changed and that trope doesn’t hold water anymore. Sorry about that.

Success Harbor: No that’s good. So

Dino Dogan: I went on a rant there.

Success Harbor: So it seems that sites that have been online for five or more years are at a huge advantage. They get tons of traffic and you know I actually interviewed some bloggers that you know they’ve been blogging for like ten years and they had no idea what they were doing and you know they didn’t do anything special and yet they, today have blogs that have millions of visitors because it’s a seniority thing. You know it’s hard to believe that the Internet has such a thing but it’s almost you know, based on seniority today.

Dino Dogan: Seniority yeah

Success Harbor: So what we need to do today? If you’re a new blogger today and you don’t have a million dollar budget to advertise and do the other stuff, what do you need to do to get noticed?

Dino Dogan: Yeah so obviously you know, content is, great content is a price of entry right. The content has to be good. Right that’s a given. Right? And then you know nobody cares about you until you show them that you care about them right. So you need to build a tribe. You need to you know connect with other bloggers. Don’t try to connect with like top bloggers or influencers or whatever right. Just connect with bloggers who are more junior than yourself. Connect with bloggers who are on the same level as you and you guys build a posse and elevate one another right. So build relationships across those types of bloggers, content creators, whatever they are, right. Build those relationships, help each other, cross-promote each other, share in each other’s’ audience and then you know you, you know. It used to be like, imagine you were a writer fifty years ago, all you had to do was write a book right. And then a big publishing house would figure out how to distribute it. A big publishing house would figure out how to promote it. You didn’t have to worry about any of that stuff. But today if you publish a piece of content, you have to figure out how to distribute it. You have to figure out how to promote it. So in addition to being a kick-ass content creator, you also have to become a master promoter and a marketer, which is a really, wide range of skills. It’s almost unfair to expect people to do all that but that’s exactly what we have to do.

Success Harbor: Okay so let’s talk about connecting and let’s talk about using Triberr for that purpose. Let’s say you start out blogging and you have maybe thirty really good posts on there so you don’t really want to compare yourself to somebody that’s been blogging for you know ten years and you don’t really want to network with somebody like that so how do you use Triberr to find the right fit for your own blog? What are you looking for?

Dino Dogan: So I’ll give you an example. Oh well you know in terms of how to build a Triberr, what kind of tribe you’re looking for, here’s a simple rule. If you connect with a tribe whose content you love to read and love to share, you’re going to have a great time. It’s simple as that. Right. But beyond that in terms of tribe building strategies, you can build a niche tribe. So if you blog about dogs then you can build a dog tribe, or maybe it’s a little broader right. Maybe it’s a pet tribe so they’re some cat bloggers and ferret bloggers right. Maybe it’s a location specific tribe. I lived in Tuscan, Arizona for a while and I had a Tuscan tribe of bloggers and one of them was like reviewing restaurants. Another one was a real estate blogger. I was doing business-y, marketing, social media stuff blogging. A fourth guy was doing IT, Information Technology at a IT company in a blog. Right and so it goes on and on. So our common thread was location. Right. So there’s all kind of different tribe building strategies but if you just stick to that mantra like you know, tribe up with people whose content you love to read and love to share and you’re going to do great.

Success Harbor: Okay. How many tribes are there on Triberr today approximately?

Dino Dogan: I have no idea. About six months ago there were about one hundred thousand, close to one hundred thousand tribes so there’s probably more of that now.

Success Harbor: Okay so one hundred thousand plus. So let’s talk about how long it took you to go from idea to validation.

Dino Dogan: Three weeks

Success Harbor: To product with Triberr.

Dino Dogan: Three weeks.

Success Harbor: So three weeks you and your co-founder came up with the idea and then the validation only took that long and the product, all of it in three weeks?

Dino Dogan: Yeah pretty much. So Dan Cristo is the speed daemon of implementation. We got together. I had this idea for Triberr for what was to become Triberr on Wednesday. We got together on Saturday. On Monday, him and I were in a Tribe together right and we were cross-promoting each other and sharing each other’s content. Three weeks later we launched in beta and invited a few hundred people to start using it. So it was very fast

Success Harbor: Was it on purpose fast or it just happened to be that fast? Did you, I’m going to have three weeks and I’m going to make this happen or we’re not interested or how? It sounds like an awful fast process.

Dino Dogan: It wasn’t that thought out right. And neither of us. So Dan has built platforms before. Like he had flutters which was essentially video Twitter. It was Vine before Vine. This was like 2009, 2010 right. So Dan had experience in building platforms but you know he had no experience in terms of content or in terms of blogging or in terms of like marketing or content promotion and stuff like that. That was my back but we had no idea what we’re, we still have no idea what we’re doing. So it’s you know, it was just, that’s how long it took to build something that resembled something and make it work and once we did that we just started inviting people.

Success Harbor: And at one point, once you had a product, what point did you think that you were unto something. Like wow this is taking off. There‘s adoption. People are excited about it. How long did it take?

Dino Dogan: You know we were pretty fanatical about our product from the get-go. Like you know because we knew that we were essentially you know trying to automate or semi-automate this thing that we were already doing, that a lot of people were already doing in a very, very manual fashion. Right. Because you have G-plus communities of bloggers who like cross promote each other, Facebook groups that cross-promote each other right but there’s no platform that’s built for cross-promotion so you know, in terms of knowing that there was a market fit, we knew that that existed and we were pretty fanatical about it from day one.

Success Harbor: Did you already know how and when you would monetize Triberr?

Dino Dogan: No. We monetized it very quickly. We monetized it about a month into its existence. Maybe it took us another three weeks or so to monetize Triberr. We were selling virtual currency bones. That’s what we called it. So it was like BitCoin, except that it was just for Triberr. And so we monetized it very quickly, like we made our first $10 in like our first month of our launch and then we had to refund it.

Success Harbor: So about how did it make somebody who was actually willing to pay, that first $10. How did it make you feel?

Dino Dogan: Oh my God dude! I remember exactly where I was. I was in Tucson, by the pool and then I see a PayPal thing come through and it says somebody purchased something and immediately I reached for my phone to call Dan and my phone is ringing and Dan is calling me.

Success Harbor: Yeah it’s funny because I remember, I talked to a lot of business men and so many of them remember that first sale.

Success Harbor: So many of them remembered a first

Dino Dogan: Yeah.

Success Harbor: Even if it was like two cents at an AdSense account or whatever.

Dino Dogan: Yeah, yeah. You know and we actually had to refund that sale. The lady was like, “Oh, I didn’t realize he would charge me.” And we were like, “You know what? We’re happy to refund it. It just means that we’ve built a smooth process for smooth payment process. So we’re happy to refund you.” And then, you know, next week we had like three or four sales. And then next month, we had like a bunch and whatnot. And that’s how we monetized it initially. But then we decommissioned bones, went to a premium model, and now we have essentially brands paying bloggers to blog, you know, for the brand essentially. To be brand ambassadors. So we

Success Harbor: Is that the campaign part of it?

Dino Dogan: Yeah. That’s the campaign part. Yup.

Success Harbor: So you just introduced it fairly recently?

Dino Dogan: We started it little over a year ago in beta, closed beta. And then we ran with a few clients. And one was them was Almay, which was the makeup product. Tom Shoes. We had few brands that used it while it was in beta. And then in January, we essentially. Now anyone can start a campaign. So we kind of released into the wild but it’s been kind of a soft launch because we were not promoting it very heavily because we’re still sort of getting our bearings in terms of scaling out, you know, everything really. The bandwidth, the servers, the personnel. You know, the whole process of. We do influence marketing completely different from everybody else. There’s a lot of

Success Harbor: How’s it different. Tommy?

Dino Dogan: It’s different in a few different, in few ways, right? So, typically, what brands and agencies consider influence marketing is, George, here’s some product. Could you please review it on your blog or something like that? And it’s nonsense, right? That’s what. That’s what brand to blogger relationship looks like when brands make up that relationship, right? When they decide what kind of relationship they’re going to have with the blogger. That’s what it looks like. So, we didn’t want that. You want to hire our bloggers, pay them. Okay? That’s number one, how it’s different. And then, you know our minimum payout is double the industry standard. And the reason we can charge brands double the industry standard is because of collective bargaining power, right? So, you know, this is. Essentially, this is Groupon in reverse. When a brand hires an influencer, that influencer works by him or herself, in a vacuum, completely cut off from all other influencers if there are any. So, they work by their lonesome, right? With Triberr, you come into a campaign with, let’s say fifty other bloggers, you guys are working together. It’s a collaborative campaign. So every time you publish a piece of content the other forty-nine bloggers spread it out. Create this first ripple, right? And you do the same thing for them, right? So essentially, the fifty bloggers collectively raise each other’s value. So, brands are happy to pay that kind of money if it means they’re going to reach a greater number of people and have a more effective campaign. And then, we provide a full life cycle campaign right. Most platforms that call themselves influence marketing platforms is just a database of people who blog, right? And there’s value there but. George, you’ve received those emails, right? Hey, George, you know, I have this product or thing that you, I would like for you to write about. Would you please blah blah blah, right? You’ve received those emails?

Success Harbor: Oh, yeah.

Dino Dogan: The success rate, the response rate for those emails is less than five percent. If you email a hundred people like that, less than five of them will actually reply back and three of those replies are going to be like, dude, leave me alone. How did you find my address? Take me off your list. Right? So, what we’ve done with Triberr is instead of brands pitching bloggers, we let bloggers pitch brands. So, a brand sets up a campaign page a la Kickstarter. All the details about the campaign are on that page. You know, the payout, the duration, the milestones, POV, the goal and so on. And then the influencer, the blogger, the podcaster, YouTuber or whoever, right? Actually raise their hand and says “Hey, this campaign suits me. I would like to be part of that campaign.” They apply to join. They fill out a little form. And boom, Bob’s your uncle. The brand goes over the applicants, they choose the one they want and they launch the campaign. So, it’s. It’s different on so many levels.

Success Harbor: Let’s talk about marketing Triberr. What has, what stands out in terms of effectiveness, in terms of promoting Triberr and getting the word out about it?

Dino Dogan: Our members. That’s. We

Success Harbor: Word of mouth?

Dino Dogan: Yeah. That’s been. We have zero marketing budget. There’s no marketing budget, you know? We don’t spend any money on marketing. It’s our members joining Triberr, finding it useful and then deciding to build their own tribe, which I think everyone should be a chief, everyone should have their own tribe. They decide to build their own tribe. And the way they do it is they usually write a blog post about and says, hey. You, those of you in my audience who have a blog, let’s meet on Triberr. Here’s what it is. You know, and they sort of lay it all out. And that’s been you know, that’s been, the most effective method of bringing in new members.

Success Harbor: So it was a good sign when word-of-mouth is really working for a company. It’s a good sign isn’t it?

Dino Dogan: I agree. Absolutely.

Success Harbor: So let’s talk about. Maybe if you can share one or two of the greatest challenges of Triberr as a business

Dino Dogan: Oh my

Success Harbor: That you were faced with. You mentioned technology earlier. What is it? What are some of the biggest challenges you’re dealing with on a daily basis?

Dino Dogan: Yeah. Well, the big overarching challenge is we have this big vision. We have this notion of what we want Triberr to be but we can’t get there today. It’s like how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. And that is so incredibly painful. Like I wish I had bazillion of dollars to dump and like build a Triberr that’s in my head but we just can’t do that. So we have to build it bit by bit and that’s been very painful. And then the other and it’s really kind of a flip side of the same issue is we’ve had to kill so many of our babies. We’ve launched products inside Triberr, features inside Triberr like headline testing area. It’s essentially Hot or Not for your headlines. So you put in two headlines and people can invite and comment on the headline right.

Success Harbor: Do people ask for it or did you just think it was a good idea?

Dino Dogan: I thought it was a good idea because that’s what I do. My friends on Skype. I’m always hitting them and asking them to vote on a headline right. So again, scratching my own itch but it was a super popular feature that we had to discontinue because we just can’t support it. We couldn’t continue to support it. It wasn’t like monetized so it wasn’t bringing in money directly so we had to discontinue it. Reblog. Reblog is the future of Triberr and we had a completely different implementation from anyone else. So Reblog is essentially re-tweet for your blog article. Right? And the way we were different is that when you publish an article on your blog, I can reblog it to my blog and it takes obviously the headline, the entire content so the user doesn’t have to click more times than necessary. Readership obviously. Right. You wrote the article, you should be able to get the credit. And this will be the truly unique part, the comments. The comment section was syndicated as well. My instance of your article, it appears on your article and vice versa. And your article could appear across fifty other blogs with a single click. So it’s like mass syndication for your article but we had to discontinue it because we can’t support it, but we will bring it back.

Success Harbor: Okay

Dino Dogan: Both of those

Success Harbor: Okay. I have some general entrepreneurial questions for you. Dino, first one is how do you, how to deal with the roller coaster ride of entrepreneurship? Is it easier for you now than it was you know let’s say five years ago? How do you deal with the ups and downs? What advice do you have for others in our audience.

Dino Dogan: Man. That’s a great question to which I don’t know that I have the right answer or that I’m qualified to answer it. You know, I grew up in Bosnia. I grew up during the war in the 90’s. I left Bosnia in mid-90’s and came to the United States so, and I used to dodge sniper bullets running across the bridge trying to get some water, clean water right because we didn’t have any running water and whatnot right. So whenever times get hard, in terms of my entrepreneurial journey if you will, I remind myself where I came from and things aren’t that bad.

Success Harbor: Yeah. Things look good right?

Dino Dogan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Comparatively speaking, I’m alright.

Success Harbor: Yeah that’s a great point. You know the average consensus is about fifty percent of businesses fail within the first few years of being in business.

Dino Dogan: Yeah

Success Harbor: Why do you think so many businesses fail?

Dino Dogan: Well, so speaking from personal experience because I’ve had a failed business prior to Triberr. I had these DVD kiosks before Netflix was a clear winner and I had probably dumped about fifty grand of my own money, savings, into this business that I never recouped and it took about two years to fail so talk about you know opportunity cost in agreement to actual money cost. You know, you have to be crazy and optimistic and hopeful if you’re going to be an entrepreneur in business and that automatically sets you up for failure. Right because you don’t see all the angles. You don’t know what you don’t know. You’re, hope becomes part of your strategy right?

Success Harbor: Yep

Dino Dogan: And that just doesn’t work man. It just doesn’t work so that’s part of it I guess. Right.

Success Harbor: Yeah

Dino Dogan: But there are so many variables

Success Harbor: Yeah I mean you could write books on it because you know sometimes, you know something sticks out you know like that one thing you know but I mean there are, you could probably come up with one hundred different reasons businesses fail.

Dino Dogan: Yeah for sure

Success Harbor: So what was the best advice you’ve ever received in your life?

Dino Dogan: All advice is a model airplane. That is the best advice I ever received. All advice is a model airplane, that’s all it is. And what that means is when somebody gives you an advice they’re essentially giving you a model airplane. They have built this giant people carrying airplane that’s their business right. It’s like Boeing 747 right, that they’ve built and then they’re telling you how they’ve done it, but they can’t transfer all their experience unto you so all they’re really doing is giving you this toy airplane. And now you’re supposed to build a toy. No your own Boeing 747 out of this toy airplane. And that’s hard man so you know, all advice is taken with a grain of salt. You don’t have their experience. You don’t have their circumstances. Timing and luck have a lot to do with success and I could write a dissertation. In fact, I have written a dissertation about this stuff. Timing and luck have a lot to do with it. So

Success Harbor: Yeah

Dino Dogan: So yeah, all advice is, just take it with a grain of salt

Success Harbor: What is the most important thing for an entrepreneur to do during the first twelve months of being in business? What should an entrepreneur focus on?

Dino Dogan: That’s a great question. That’s a great question and it’s one I don’t think I’m even qualified to answer but I’ll try. I think and I hate that I’m going to answer it this way because this is not what I did. I think you have to focus on the money right. It’s like where is, how am I going to pay my mortgage right. With startups and you know entrepreneurships and startups are often the bundled together but like startups, a monetization strategy for startups is to raise money. Like that’s how people who work at that company get paid. Right. Like, that Yo app that everybody was talking about last week raised a million dollars right. The app is not monetized right. They have no money they were going to make money with that app. The investor or the founder of the company. But he monetized it for himself by raising money.

Success Harbor: Yeah

Dino Dogan: You know what I mean.

Success Harbor: Yeah

Dino Dogan: SO you’ve got to pay mortgage somehow so figure out how you’re going to pay mortgage. Maybe that means you’re going to end up raising money. Maybe that means you’re going to focus on the parts of your business that are actually making you money and that’s super hard man because the parts of my business that I like to focus on are not making me money.

Success Harbor: Yeah I mean that’s the ultimate validation right? Are you willing to pay me for what I have.

Dino Dogan: Yeah, absolutely.

Success Harbor: So, I only have, I know we ran over the thirty minutes. I only have two more questions. Do you have time for two more questions?

Dino Dogan: Absolutely

Success Harbor: What do you think is the biggest time waster for entrepreneurs?

Dino Dogan: That’s a great question again. Wow. Great questions, George.

Success Harbor: I’m glad that you have to think about the answers because that means there’s value there you know.

Dino Dogan: Absolutely. So there’s few different angles we could take on this. I’ll tell you one of the biggest time wasters that caught me off guard. You know I grew up doing martial arts. I spent, I try to run as much as possible and I still do a martial arts a little bit here and there just to stay in shape but since I started Triberr, that’s sort of my help and my fitness regimen or whatever. That’s really been suffering right so what I’m really trying to say is that if you don’t take care of yourself, you’re going to end up sick, lethargic. You’re going to get sidetracked by you know, you get sick for three weeks and you can’t do anything. Well that’s a huge waste of time right. So I think I’m happy with that answer.

Success Harbor: Okay

Dino Dogan: Just take care of yourself you know.

Success Harbor: Okay, that sounds great. Now if you could train someone to be a successful entrepreneur what would be the first thing that you would teach that person. The sentence would be, start with this, right. Somebody comes to you, do you know you’re successful with Triberr, you’re building a great business. What would you teach that person if they’re just an employee now. They’ve never had a business. What is the one thing they need to focus on?

Dino Dogan: That’s easy. They need to learn how to learn. Easy. When we go to school, we’re not taught how to learn. We’re taught things but we’re not taught how to learn, right. So if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, if you’re going to be a person, if you’re going to be a human being on this planet, right, at some point it behooves you to learn how to learn. Right. And I’ll give you a great, great thing that has helped me tremendously and I’ve listened to it a bunch of times. Brian Traci. He’s like a self-help guide, motivational business, guy whatever. He’s like an old school type of speaker and whatever. Do you know Brian Tracee?

Success Harbor: Yes, yes of course

Dino Dogan: Okay, okay. And he has this program called Accelerated Learning Techniques. Don’t be fooled by the accelerated. It’s really you know learning techniques and if you, like, I’ve read some of his other stuff and it’s fine. It’s a little derivative. It’s you know what every other guru is talking about right. But for accelerated learning techniques he partnered up with this guy from I want to say Cambridge or Harvard or one of those big universities right, who studies learning. He’s a learning researcher so they partnered and they produced this like six or seven CD set. This is probably ten years ago they did this. And it just, it has helped me tremendously in learning how to learn so I think that’s a really good start for people. It’s well-worth the seventy or eighty bucks that it costs to pick up or whatever. I’ve listened to it like four or five times over the course of ten years or so.

Success Harbor: Accelerated Learning. Brian Tracy. I’ll check it out.

Dino Dogan: Accelerated Learning Techniques, Brian Tracy.

Dino Dogan: Yeah

Success Harbor: Awesome. Well Dino I really appreciate you coming on Success Harbor today to share your story talk about how you’re building Triberr. How can people connect with you or find out more about you?

Dino Dogan: Dinodogan.com. D-I-N-O-D-O-G-A-N.com

Success Harbor: So everybody out there go to dinodogan.com and say hi to Dino. Thank you very much.

Dino Dogan: Thank you George