Ask Tammy Camp if she’s a marketer and she will tell you no VERY FAST.

But when you find out that she’s produced over a billion dollars back in the day…

…as an affiliate marketer,

You might not believe her when she tells you she aint a marketer.

That’s because what she does is called distribution.

She’s a growth and distribution expert.

If you worked with 500 startups at a time,

I think you would qualify as a distribution expert as well.

Tammy and her team will be running the Weapons of Mass Distribution conference coming up here soon…

Pure distribution.

No marketing.

You might think that this means no lifestyle type biz for Tammy…

Nope.

Let her tell you all about her past lifestyle business success,

And her new J-O-B and the even better lifestyle it provides her.

From business growth hacking,

To developing a BIG scale mindset (a must),

To dozens of real world examples and tips on how you can get started in distribution too,

Tammy has an impressive resume and loads of golden insider-knowledge

Listen in and learn about this exciting business model.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

• How reinventing the wheel doesn’t always work for business growth (copying proven models does.. see how she borrowed from PayPal’s methods)
• the scale mindset that is necessary for massive growth (she didn’t want 200 onboard, they got 4 million instead)
• The main difference between silicon valley startup companies and digital marketers getting started online
• The AARRR philosophy edge that makes distribution different than marketing
• how the AARRR strategy will make you win by thinking bigger
• the importance of knowing where you need to focus on (you gotta put in your 10k hours somewhere)
• An idea sex tip that will help you earn millions of dollars given by Elon Musk’s ex-wife
• How Mark Zuckerburg was able to propel his idea into a world changing platform (his ability to learn was a HUGE factor in Facebook’s growth)
• Why you need to be able to learn on the go
• The 3 things that you must know in order to create a successful company (learn to be a jack of all trades, excelling with at least 2 of them.
• that you do no need to be a tech guru or even a tech person at all to build a successful SaaS company (if you have business and process down, you might have what it takes)
• how easy it is to get your dream career going in Silicon Valley (this is the same for both coders and marketers alike)
• why working for a company does not in any way mean you can’t live a lifestyle business-type life (FREEDOM is still there for you if you can get your stuff done!)

Mentioned:

• Weapons of Mass Distribution
• Stellar – first head of growth at this payments protocol Co.
• Digital Marketer
• Perry Marshall
• singularity university
• Travis – CEO of Uber
• HustleCon – The startup event for non-techies
• Sean Ellis – Growth Hacking – (creator of Dropbox referral program)

Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO

Raw transcript:

Download PDF transcript here.

It’s John McIntire here, the autoresponder guy here. I’m with Tammy Camp. Now Tammy, we met on Facebook, of all places, in group for internet marketers. But as you’ll find out in a minute, Tammy is definitely not a marketer. She doesn’t do marketing at all. What she actually does instead is she works with 500 Startups, she’s on the Growth and Distribution Team, and they’ve got a conference coming up that’s not on marketing but on distribution; it’s called, “The Weapons of Mass Distribution”. So she doesn’t want to call anything marketing, but it’ll be a little bit similar to what we usually talk about, but from a different angle. So I thought it’d be interesting to get Tammy’s perspective because from way way outside the internet marketing zone, in the world of San Francisco startups, from AWS. She’s in the AWS headquarters, I think, right now. So this is like being smack dab being in the center of startup lands, and I thought we’d have an interesting discussion. Let’s find out what she has to say. Tammy, how you doing?

Tammy Camp: Hi John, thanks for having me.

John McIntyre: No worries, thanks for coming on the show. So, before we get into what you actually do and some of what the startups do for email and distribution, could you give me a list or a bit of background on who you are and what you do?

Tammy Camp: Sure. So I actually started in 2001 as an affiliate marketer. Back in the day, I think I’ve generated over a billion dollars’ worth of affiliated revenues. And after that—

John McIntyre: Did you say ‘billion’?

Tammy Camp: Yeah, billion. I was a super, super affiliate for many, many years. So that’s how I got my start in Growth and in Distribution. And I moved to San Francisco because I wanted to be in Silicon Valley. Since then, I’ve been at Walmart labs; I built their product API that they’re using today. Also, I was the first head of growth at Stellar, which is payments protocol, and we grew from zero to four million users in four months.

John McIntyre: Wow.

Tammy Camp: And now, I am at 500 Startups, and I’m a distribution hacker in residence, and basically what that means is that I—it’s basically an

entrepreneur in residence. I’m building my own things, and at the same time, I’m helping all their batch companies, because 500 Startups is an accelerator and a venture firm. Actually, one of the most active venture firms in the world. We’ve invested in over a thousand companies, and we have about a hundred fifty million dollars under management, but they have the funds and then they also have an accelerator program. There’s about thirty companies in each accelerator program that we have about once every quarter. I’ve actually been the distribution hacker in residence there to help those companies with their growth and distribution.

John McIntyre: Wow, okay. So sounds like you’ve…We spoke a couple of weeks ago about doing some work together but what I thought was that you were just into startups and you always sort of lean that way, but you said you started in the affiliate world.

Tammy Camp: Uh huh.

John McIntyre: That’s a very interesting start.

Tammy Camp: Yeah, you know, gotta start somewhere. I didn’t even know anything about…when I first started, I didn’t know what marketing or anything was. Somebody showed me how to buy ads one time and then I just started making money and then I started making more money and then doubling down, so I didn’t actually realize, I didn’t set out to be like an entrepreneur, I just ended up in that situation.

John McIntyre: Right. So what happened? Because a lot of people who might listen to this are gonna be in a position where they’ve got a job, and they’re not an entrepreneur and they’re not working for an exciting company like 500 Startups, and to them, what they want to do, is they want to quit their jobs and somehow make a couple thousand bucks a month so they can travel, and that’s only some people. So what would you say to someone who’s…there seems to be this transition, people have a job they don’t like, and maybe they go off and they do their own thing, make a little of money, and as that scales up, they start to think, “You know, life isn’t just about making money and living on a beach in Thailand or whatever that happens to be, there’s actually more than that.” So what’s driven you to go from your being an affiliate, and I imagine having a lot of freedom where you can live and travel and do all sorts of stuff, to go on live

in San Francisco and get more what sounds like a job, but a very entrepreneurial one, and a new routine?

Tammy Camp: Yeah, I think I have just as much freedom as I did when I was working a lifestyle…when I ran a lifestyle business. I’m very much still travelling the world. I just got back from Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, but instead I have my trip paid for, I get to go talk to exciting new companies, and kind of plan my trip. Next month I’m going to Dubai and Jordan and Oman, so I’m still getting to travel everywhere I’ve always wanted to go because everybody in the organization travels all the time, I mean you just volunteer for the trips that you want to go to. And I have freedom. So as long as you get your work done, and it’s always exciting, and you can just do it from anywhere in the world, so I think the concept of you being stuck in a cubicle at a startup is not correct. You know, you’re just working from a coffee shop to working from AWS Law. Working from home, working from your hotel room in the city, I feel like it’s the same.

John McIntyre: Yeah, okay, okay. It’s a bit like—

Tammy Camp: And we get unlimited paid vacations too, so.

John McIntyre: Wow. So what does the limit go with that? Obviously you can’t take eleven months off a year. [laughter]

Tammy Camp: No, I mean, obviously you’d have to be qualified to do this job and execute. If you don’t, then you probably wouldn’t have the opportunity to do something like this, so you have that freedom but you have to be responsible as well. And I don’t know about you, but if I have over a week vacation, I am not doing anything, I just get so antsy. I have to have something to stimulate my brain.

John McIntyre: Yeah, I feel you on that. So, let’s talk about this distribution vs. marketing, because there’s a lot of people online who are going to do what we call marketing and they do paid ads and build a sales form, you know, that sort of thing. And you just told me that you built four million users in four months.

Tammy Camp: Right.

John McIntyre: That’s a lot of users.

Tammy Camp: Yeah, so I think— there’s different approaches, so how we look at things at 500, we look at things in five channels called The AARRR, the pirate.

John McIntyre: [laughter] I remember this.

Tammy Camp: So pirates [creatics 7:00] Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue. So we look at all of these things. You have to have all these things dialed in to have a successful product, right? So Acquisition is just like one part of it, so obviously Acquisition can be like a lot of paid channels. We do the same, do adverts, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, marketing. But then when you start thinking of the other four, I feel like it starts getting more technical. Has anybody in the internet marketing world talked about churn?

John McIntyre: People have…Are we talking about software products or any sort of membership platform? That’s a big topic that comes up.

Tammy Camp: I’ve actually haven’t heard anyone talk about it. Is there like a churn master? Is there like a mastermind group for churn? There must be, right?

John McIntyre: Well, I’m sure if you go talk to… the thing that’s going around a lot, if you look at digital marketer, I think that a good example right now is Perry Marshall, and he teaches this and the whole basics of his sales front where like you, the whole idea is to lower your acquisition cost as small as possible and increase your customer lifetime value as high as possible. So business is really just filling with just those two numbers. Get your CAC down, get your lifetime value up, right? So then it’s a matter of, alright, some things you convert and anytime you can optimize your own version; you’re dropping down your CAC anytime you add more products or more expensive products or decrease the churn, all those things, that increases the lifetime value. So the whole context of that, when someone has a membership community or a software app, there’ll be experts out there like the Software Sasquatch or the Membership Zeitgeist, those guys probably talk about CHURN, but I’ve never heard of a guy being the churn guy or girl.

Tammy Camp: Maybe there doesn’t need to be a churn—

John McIntyre: It’s a big issue though, especially for startups.

Tammy Camp: I actually saw it happen ‘cause the very forum that we met in, Ryan’s mastermind, I think he had like a one dollar promotion and it went all the way up too…I was watching the group went up to 820 members during that promotion, and just this week, I saw it go down to 711.

John McIntyre: Huh.

Tammy Camp: So if you think about it, that’s like 10%, and that’s actually very high, that’s a very high churn rate where we are. It’s like, anything more than 2%, you have an issue that you need to address.

John McIntyre: 2% per month?

Tammy Camp: Yeah. 2% per month is the standard.

John McIntyre: So I think it’s interesting. I’ve been thinking about this a lot and the reason why you take startup where there’s a monthly fee, there’s sort of valuable…because I was signed up to AOL, which is an email software platform. When I signed up maybe four years ago, I was just getting started, and I used them until about six or seven months ago. So you see, if you calculated it, that’s about 30-50 dollars a month over four years, and then it ends up being fifteen hundred bucks or two grand, depending on you know how you calculate it. And so it’s pretty incredible. But the reason why I was with them was because I like all the little sales bundles that I have and the different pieces. It’s really annoying to go and try to move from that platform.

Tammy Camp: Oh yeah, absolutely.

John McIntyre: I just cancel everything I’ve had set up.

Tammy Camp: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they’ve done their job. [laughter] They kept you in the software product, right?

John McIntyre: Right, right. So sounds like part of the problem here is, like with the membership community, for example, is most people I know, people often sign up and stay for three months on average. You have some people who stay for a year or longer, but the average person will stay signed up for three or four months to something like Ryan’s thing, there’s a lot of these different groups. And the reason why is the only stickiness is that you’ve got a couple training programs and a forum. And there’s nothing to really stop anyone

from cancelling. If you cancel, you don’t lose your data. You lose access, but you don’t lose the last three years’ worth of customer data and CRM sales form or platforms, so.

Tammy Camp: Well, you never lose that data for any of those platforms. That’s a migration problem.

John McIntyre: That’s true, that’s true. You don’t even have to migrate. If you’re using an educational, like that facebook group, for example, you don’t really have to migrate from that to another group. It’s sort of like, you don’t need to have that sort of thing. You can cancel it and business, or your life, would go on. There’s nothing to migrate.

Tammy Camp: Oh, sure. Yes, exactly. Sure.

John McIntyre: So one thing I’m interested in, a lot of people would be interested in, is this idea of forty thousand people, or four million people in four months. How does that happen?

Tammy Camp: That’s purely on referral. It was a payments protocol and enabled people to send money simply for free in any currency, and so applications would go on top of it. Protocol mean like SMTP. SMTP is the protocol that email runs off of, right?

John McIntyre: Right.

Tammy Camp: It’s free, no one owns it, and we’re basically building the same thing, you know, it’s still in existence, but for financial services, for remittances and money transfers and stuff. So basically what we built at that education program into the mandate of what we’re doing and we just looked at PayPal because Keith—it was actually started and funded by Stripe, which was the payment processing company, and then Patrick calls in Keith Rabois, which is in the PayPal mafia, were on the board, and they pointed us to the direction of looking at PayPal. Now, when PayPal started, it was back in the day where people were very scared to move money on the internet, and they were finding a hard time getting users. And what they did was give away ten dollars to people. They funded everybody’s account ten dollars. And that’s basically what we did. We funded everyone’s wallet with ten dollars’ worth of Stellar, which is the currency that is native to that protocol.

John McIntyre: What’s 10 dollars with Stellar worth?

Tammy Camp: Ten dollars.

John McIntyre: Ten dollars like US?

Tammy Camp: Yeah, ten dollars—

John McIntyre: That’s forty million dollars. That’s a lot of money.

Tammy Camp: So yeah, we gave it away. I think you can still get it now in the giveaways.

John McIntyre: I’m going to get my ten dollars. Where’s the site? Stellar?

Tammy Camp: Yeah, stellar.org. Dot O-R-G. So yeah, giving away free money works. [laughter]

John McIntyre: Okay, okay. So how’s this different from PayPal?

Tammy Camp: So Paypal is an application or service that’s on top of the existing payment system. You know, ACH and Swift and Fedwire, right? We’re building a Swift 2.0, right? So all of those, ACH, Swift, and Fedwire, have been built over the last thirty years, so a lot of that actually predates the internet. If you think about mobile phones, the penetration of five years has been crazy. So, I’m having all our financial services built off of technology that predates the internet. You know, obviously it needs an upgrade, so this is our solution for that.

John McIntyre: Okay, okay. So when that happens, right, because a lot of people would be, because people usually think when they’re quitting their jobs or building their business, they’re thinking “Well, I’m gonna go and get a thousand sales. Make a couple hundred thousand dollars,” and here, the way you are and the way people in Silicon Valley think about scale, you’re not thinking all, “Let’s get a couple hundred users,” it’s, “let’s go get four million users.”

Tammy Camp: No, we were thinking, “Let’s go sign up the world.”

John McIntyre: [laughter]

Tammy Camp: No, that’s actually what the mission is. It’s to sign up the entire world to be on that protocol. Just like SMTP. Think about email.

John McIntyre: Yeah?

Tammy Camp: SMTP is a protocol that powers email, right? We want it to be as ubiquitous as email.

John McIntyre: Okay, okay.

Tammy Camp: Right?

John McIntyre: [laughter]

Tammy Camp: Why, you’re looking at me like—

John McIntyre: Well, it’s funny, I’m asking so many questions and all you’re gonna say, “We’re gonna build this thing, we’re gonna get everyone in the world,” and alright, cool. Like I don’t even know what to say to that. I think it’s awesome. This reminds me of Singularity University.

Tammy Camp: Yeah.

John McIntyre: Which you’ve been to. Is this one of those projects that stems from Singularity University?

Tammy Camp: It’s an area that I grew to love because I went to Singularity University.

John McIntyre: Interesting, interesting. So sounds like this idea when people think about, you know, “Let’s go think big, let’s go get every single person on the planet to use our product” that sounds like, you know, people can talk about marketing strategies and how optimized your facebook app and landing page, and all that stuff, but one thing I find funny: people first get into that, when people are first learning marketing, they often think that marketing is the most important thing, but [inaudible 15:56]

Tammy Camp: I’ve heard of it, right? And actually engineers…it’s the reverse problem here in Silicon Valley. We have these amazing engineers and developers and they’re like, “Oh, this is the most amazing product,” right? But then they don’t have marketing for it and it fails.

John McIntyre: Yeah.

Tammy Camp: Right? ‘Cause they’re like, “Oh, it’s so awesome that I don’t have to market it. They’ll just come,” right?

John McIntyre: “No, we don’t do marketing. We only do growth hacking and distribution.”

Tammy Camp: [laughter]

John McIntyre: Or [laughter] you saying, “No, I’m not a marketer. I don’t even do marketing. But this product is so good that it will distribute itself.”

Tammy Camp: I think we think of it in, again, going back to AARRR, [laughter] you know, we tend to think in that mindset. An app scale. If we can’t get several million users, then the market’s not big enough, right?

John McIntyre: Right. What would be your advice to someone who doesn’t think like this? Like someone who’s not thinking like this, they’re currently thinking, “I just want to quit my job,” or, “I just want to build this business and spend more time with my family.”

Tammy Camp: Well that’s respectable, right? I started out that way, so I’ve actually been in that situation. So, absolutely, there’s nothing wrong with it.

John McIntyre: What would be your advice to someone though, there’s a lot of people like you who want to think bigger? Isn’t it like that, follow your passion; everyone’s looking for that. Everyone’s looking for meaning in life right now, in one way.

Tammy Camp: Really? Or is it just you, John?

John McIntyre: [laughter] I’m totally projecting, yeah.

Tammy Camp: I think you are projecting.

John McIntyre: [laughter]

Tammy Camp: You are! You’re totally projecting. You’re travelling the world; you’re like, “what is the meaning of life?” You’re applying to Singularity. You’re like, “Okay, I want to think bigger.” So this question is for you.

John McIntyre: [laughter] It’s for me. That’s what this podcast is for.

Tammy Camp: Yeah, okay.

John McIntyre: That’s the reason to chat to some of the cool people who are out there.

Tammy Camp: Yeah, great angle.[laughter]

John McIntyre: So what then? You still haven’t answered the question. What’s the advice, then?

Tammy Camp: Yeah, I was like, “What was the question?” before I started giving you a hard time. What’s the process into thinking bigger?

John McIntyre: Well, the question was, “What’s your advice to someone who wants to think bigger?”

Tammy Camp: That doesn’t want to move here? Cause there’s a whole different vibe here. It’s like the streets are cut with—

John McIntyre: What’s your…Yeah, if you were to give a lecture on—

Tammy Camp: Well, what I did, I’ll tell you what I did.

John McIntyre: Okay.

Tammy Camp: I was very attracted to it, right? So I moved here from a perfectly great lifestyle in Florida. I moved here and I just immersed myself in everything. So I went to Singularity University; I did a graduate studies program, it was this three month course. That was on NASA Ames on Mountview. So I stayed there, and we just did lecture after lecture after lecture about innovation and education, global hub space, poverty, energy, education, and security, so it was like seven challenge areas. And they just brought in everyone—it was like one TedTalk after another of the people that were the top of their fields in those categories. It was just entertaining. So I feel like if it’s just taking their time to learn. It is all about time, right? Enjoying your thousand hour, your ten thousand hours.

John McIntyre: Right. And part of it too is doing the ten thousand hours on the right stuff, because you got a thousand hours on optimizing your Facebook landing page—

Tammy Camp: Yeah

John McIntyre: But this is talking about learning something entirely different.

Tammy Camp: Yeah.

John McIntyre: You know what, I was on Quora the other day, reading a—it was a post from Eli Musk’s—I think ex-wife—Justine Musk

Tammy Camp: Yes.

John McIntyre: Someone asked a question, and you know, about becoming a billionaire. And she mentioned something where it’s, it was a good idea, and she basically said that if you want to be really good at one thing, which might be business, for example, not facebook ads. Let’s just say good at business. And then get really good, so you spend ten thousand hours on business, and then do your ten thousand hours with engineering, and then you combine those two things together and you have idea sex. I like that phrase.

Tammy Camp: Oh, that’s great.

John McIntyre: And so that sounds like that’s what happens, right? If someone was to go to Singularity University and didn’t have any skills yet, might not go anywhere. Whereas someone good at marketing, good at programming, good at something like that, and they mix that with some of the big grand challenges that are out there right now, like the fact that all the systems that our finances run on were built fifty years ago, then to actually start to combine stuff and come up with these solutions.

Tammy Camp: Yeah, yeah. There is some truth to that, because if you think about all the people, the billionaires that have been minted here, they’re all both technical and very good at business. Look at Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber, he’s both technical and just a bad ass in business. You know, look at Mark Zuckerberg. He started out as a programmer, but his ability to learn—it’s all about your ability to learn—so he was able to learn business, and learn it at a very high level and have those right people around him. And Drew Houston, the CEO of and founder of Dropbox. Same thing. He was an engineer; he was a very fast learner and could actually learn how to play the game. You have to have complementary skill sets.

John McIntyre: Right, right.

Tammy Camp: Be multifaceted, right?

John McIntyre: Right.

Tammy Camp: You can’t just be good thing. You can’t just be good at one thing, you have to be good at multiple things. And that’s how it is with products too. The product has to be good, all the marketing channels and growth channels need to be good.

John McIntyre: Yeah.

Tammy Camp: And then it needs to solve a problem, right?

John McIntyre: Right.

Tammy Camp: Those three things make for a good company here.

John McIntyre: Right. One thing I wanted before was to ask different people this. There’s a lot of typical stories: Mark Zuckerberg, he’s cranking out programs at fourteen years old. And then you’ve got guys like, they probably get their start on the internet. I’ll be more like this, right? I mean, I’m not really a coder. I can build a site, and do some stuff with CSS, but I’m not building any apps, for example.

Tammy Camp: Right.

John McIntyre: And so, I know you’ve got a lot of friends like this, right? We all have some degree, maybe in science and stuff, but our real skill is in marketing and copy writing and coming up of angles and the sales-y side of it. So what I’ve wondered is, “How much room is there?” because it sounds like it’s a lot. Is it possible? Sounds like the usual thing is that someone comes in, they’re a coder and they learn how to do business.

Tammy Camp: Hmm.

John McIntyre: Not the other way around.

Tammy Camp: That’s not true either. There’s been business people that have made it without wanting to learn it all as well. Let me think. So the Wildfire crew, they exited for Google for five hundred million, they didn’t know how to code. Is that what you’re asking?

John McIntyre: Yeah, yeah. That’s interesting.

Tammy Camp: There are some, yeah. There’s loads of them here. Absolutely. I’m like trying to think off the top of my head, “What are the billion dollar companies that…”

John McIntyre: I didn’t know

Tammy Camp: I have to take a look at it, actually.

John McIntyre: There’s actually a conference, the [vessel 23:05] the the other day, called, “Hustle Con”.

Tammy Camp: Yeah, exactly.

John McIntyre: That’s exactly what this is for: guys who can’t code, but want to build a big business. “Start-up Tactics for Non-Techies” is the tagline.

Tammy Camp: Yeah, so actually. That’s true. There’s billionaires, startups, retail necks you’ve probably never heard of. It’s like SaaS, the same thing, right? A lot of these blue apron marketplace or subscription mail service have a five hundred million dollar valuation. Yeah, they’re there.

John McIntyre: Yeah, yeah.

Tammy Camp: Thumbtack is a service listings marketplace; they just raised over a hundred billion dollars. I don’t think a lot of those guys are technical. They were just very good at process.

John McIntyre: Interesting, interesting. And so, what happens if someone just shows up, they do what you did, right? They’re just gonna go, “Screw it, I’m gonna go to Silicon Valley. I’m gonna go to San Francisco and grab an apartment and figure something up.” What would be the process for that happening?

Tammy Camp: [laughter] The process for it happening?

John McIntyre: Well, you know what I mean, right? If someone said, and I think you’re pretty right because I’m just asking because I’m bursting right through this , and so if I was to pack up and stop doing what I’m doing right now, just screw it.

Tammy Camp: That’s exactly what you do. You pack it up, you get an apartment, you move here, and then you start going to events and you start socializing, you start meeting people and you start telling people what you’re passionate about. And then they think of you when they find a match. I mean, it’s a small community, there’s only seven hundred thousand people that live in San Francisco, it’s so small.

John McIntyre: Doesn’t really seem like a small place. Only seven hundred thousand? Or do you mean seven hundred thousand—

Tammy Camp: In San Francisco. No, the population of San Francisco is seven hundred thousand people.

John McIntyre: That’s tiny! Okay, and then so the tech community—

Tammy Camp: It’s like this at large, at large the San Francisco bay area is bigger, so it’s like 4 million, and that includes San Jose—well, actually, I don’t know. But it’s small. It’s smaller than you think. Everybody knows everyone here. It’s a very small—

John McIntyre: So if you go to San Francisco and you start going to the, I guess, different meet ups, cause it’s a small community, you’ll be bumping into the same people everywhere.

Tammy Camp: Yeah.

John McIntyre: And at the time, they’re going to remember you and opportunities

Tammy Camp: Yeah. Everybody needs people like…It’s so difficult to find people to work here, you know?

John McIntyre: Really?

Tammy Camp: Absolutely.

John McIntyre: I thought the tech bubble was five years ago and all the billionaires have been made.

Tammy Camp: No. [laughter] All the billionaires have not been made. But yeah, it’s really tough to find good people here.

John McIntyre: Huh.

Tammy Camp: Because everybody’s like, if you’re good, you’re snagged up very quickly.

John McIntyre: What about good coders, programmers vs. good marketers? Or like copy writers.

Tammy Camp: Oh, both. Both, yeah. Copy writers are…there are so many people that need copy writers right now. So many people that are looking for copy writing people right now, yeah.

John McIntyre: It would be fun.

Tammy Camp: So yeah.

John McIntyre: That’s what I thought about, yeah? Because it’s such a different life to go in, the whole life like working at home and travelling around, next month I’m going to Columbia, that’ll be cool, it’d be great to be in Columbia and do salsa dancing and much of the stuff like that.

But there’s something like…you do it on your own, you kinda hang around, you’re not really involved with this grand mission. You’re not really on a team where you’re fighting for something. And so there’s sometimes, and I know a lot of people will get this, sense of, well it’s fun and everything, sometimes you miss that camaraderie of Silicon…jobs are not really the right thing—working for something that’s bigger than just you, or bigger than just travelling around.

Tammy Camp: Right, sure. Yeah.

John McIntyre: It’s interesting.

Tammy Camp: Yeah.

John McIntyre: So we’ll finish up in a second, we’re coming right on time. What are you trying to get to? What’s your main reason why?

Tammy Camp: You know, there’s no reason. Well, it’s all about the journey, not the destination, man.

John McIntyre: Are you trying to be a billionaire or are you just hanging around and be where it’s happening and be part of something?

Tammy Camp: No. No, you know what it is. I just want to solve problems. I want to solve problems in effective ways, and the company I’m working on now, no one’s solving a problem that I have, it’s a personal problem, and I think a lot of people have this problem, so I just want to solve it. See where it goes, you know? We’re problem solvers here, yeah.

John McIntyre: Very cool, cool. Alright then, let’s wrap around here. Before we go though, someone wants to learn more about 500 Startups or maybe…

Tammy Camp: Oh, WMD. That’s right. Our conference is coming up next week for 500 Startups. It’s called “Weapons of Mass Distribution” and if you go to my twitter, @tammycamp, you’ll find a code to get 75% off-no, seventy five dollars off the ticket. I think you just use TammyVIP at checkout, and it should take it right off your ticket.

John McIntyre: Alright, nice. And what are they gonna learn?

Tammy Camp: Oh, they’ll learn from the best, the best growth actors.

John McIntyre: [inaudible 28:01]

Tammy Camp: You know what, there’s a lot more people that are better than me! Like Sean Ellis, he’s the guy that actually coined the term growth hacking. He was the first person who did marketing for Dropbox. He actually came up with that referral program, give 20 get 20, in like, free storage, and that’s how Dropbox became so popular. So that was by Sean Ellis, he’ll be there. And actually, James Currier, he was the growth person at PayPal, way back in the day, so he’ll be there talking. So a lot of the big, big names that have grown these billion dollar companies are speaking at the conference.

John McIntyre: Yeah. Very cool, cool. I’ll put links to that in the show, it’s at themcmethod.com. We’ll see if some people can get there and grow. Weapons of Mass Distribution. Not marketing, distribution. Tammy, thanks for coming on the show.

Tammy Camp: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

The post Episode #107 – Tammy Camp on Being An Elite Distributor… NOT a Marketer appeared first on McMethod.