Editor:
Today we are delighted to have Justin Burns with us, a visionary entrepreneur and the founder of Miestro, a platform dedicated to empowering coaches and trainers to effectively share and monetize their knowledge As a spiritual ascender healer and light worker, Justin seamlessly blends his profound spiritual insights and practical business acumen. So I think we should dive right in. Justin, great to meet you.
Justin Burns:
Glad to be here. Appreciate you.
Editor:
Well, maybe we could start by asking you to share what inspired you to create Miestro and its mission.
Justin Burns:
Yeah, so Miestro came from back in about 2008, I started this online journey, meeting a really good friend of mine, actually interesting that we’re still good friends today, and I met him while I was working at a cell phone shop in Chicago, Illinois. And I wondered what this guy did. He would come in at all times of day. I was like, what does this guy do? Does he work a job? He’s always dressed down. So I just one day asked him, “What do you do?” And he said, “I sell digital products online.” And I’ll never forget, it was the first time ever I had heard about this. Now imagine hearing about this in 2008. It completely blew my mind. So fast-forward, I became more interested. He would come in, I said, “How do I learn about this, whatever, selling digital products or whatever?” And he’s like, “Well, there’s actually, if you say that, we’re doing a seminar next week.”
And I was like, “What’s a seminar?” This is how naive I was. So I come to this event, I didn’t know what to expect, and I remember a statement that really caught my eye. He said, the guy, it wasn’t him speaking, it was another speaker, and the guy said, I forgot the guy’s name, he said, “In the future, not too distant from now, people are going to buy your product all over the world. They’re going to be able to …” Right now, it was some challenges in that space. It was like 1ShoppingCart. I don’t know if you remember the one shopping cart, that’s how old school I am. You didn’t have five, no, you didn’t have hundreds to choose from. You had really one, which was 1ShoppingCart. Everybody used it. And so I was like, wow.
It was like “People from London and Spain and Germany and Africa and Australia, everywhere. They’re going to be able to buy your product.”
And it was like for that moment, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. And it was at that moment that I was like, it was like the sky’s part of it, the heavens came down. I was like, “This is the thing. This is the thing I want to spend the next decade.” So fast-forward, many failed in trials, so many blood, sweat, and tears, three or four years of not making any money. And then I was able to crack the code and I became a digital entrepreneur selling courses, and I was able to have 30,000 customers. And then that led to now where I wanted to create a tool. I wanted to do something long-term that would actually impact people. And so we’ve been building, that’s how Miestro came along, and we’ve been involved in it since 2017.
Editor:
Wow-
Justin Burns:
It’s been-
Editor:
That is a journey. That is a real journey. I mean, Justin, one of the things you mentioned there is the fact that when you got started, technology wasn’t as advanced as it is now. So you started with a piece of software called 1ShoppingCart, which for anybody who’s reading this or listening to this might think it’s a shopping cart, but it was quite primitive in many ways, isn’t it? So my next question I guess is for those people that are putting off getting started on their journey with digital products, what would you say to them? Was it hard back when you started or was it harder now? Because other people tend to think it’s harder now.
Justin Burns:
Well, that’s a good point, but there’s different challenges. It’s not that it’s harder now, it’s just there’s a different challenge. So let me give you back in those days, like 2008, the challenge was you had all type of tech challenges. Every tech challenge you could think of. To get signed up to … I’ll give you a couple examples. In order to build a landing page, there was nothing called a drag and drop builder where you drag something from one column to the next. That didn’t exist. You had to either learn some HTML or hire a developer, which was freaking ridiculous amounts of money. So that was the challenge.
Or if you wanted to connect something, you needed to have a rocket science degree in order to connect it because it was so hard. And even shining up. Nowadays strike like two seconds, five minutes, you have an account, boom, you’re selling. You had to pretty much sign over your firstborn child to get a payment processor back in those days.
So it was so many challenges. Now I believe the challenge has shifted where now technology is different like Miestro or other platforms that make it easy to sell online. It’s super, super challenging. But now the challenge nowadays becomes, it’s now attention. Attention is the challenge because back in those days, attention wasn’t the challenge because there was only a few people who you could say was a guru or whatever they called them. It was like, oh, the gurus existed.
So the funny part about it is now you have attention because everybody and their mother now can just literally take this phone and start selling a digital product. Or they have now Zoom. Now remember technology, here’s another example, the technology. I was just telling my team because they’re new to online, I was like, listen, we used to have to sell. Zoom didn’t exist. I mean Zoom did not exist. Back in those days, 2008, we tried to do a webinar. There is a 100% chance that the thing is going to buffer halfway and it’s going to crash. That was the thing about webinars, they crashed. So now you could do a whole Zoom call for four or five hours and it completely goes through. So now I think the biggest challenge is you have to know how to capture attention and there’s ways to do that.
Editor:
Yeah, it’s really interesting, isn’t it? I mean, you seem to be the perfect embodiment, Justin, as well as someone who’s taken this digital lifestyle. Because you mentioned before you’re in Chicago, Illinois. Where do we find you today?
Justin Burns:
I’m in Pattaya, Thailand.
Editor:
So that’s quite a difference, isn’t it, in many ways?
Justin Burns:
Yeah. And initially enough about a year and a half ago because you mentioned about spirituality. So I’m a very spiritual guy.
I never hide that. I have another spiritual company as well. Great part about digital is you can take what you’re passionate about and turn it into a digital business. So about a year and a half ago I had a spiritual awakening and I decided just one day, why am I here? I had moved from where I was born in Chicago, moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and I was there just like this building, but I wasn’t fulfilled…
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