 Welcome to school of hustle the show where we find inspiration from entrepreneurs who are making their own way and today is our first episode and we're so lucky to have Joshua March with us. It's beyond the show. You probably know him as the founder of Congress social and the author of the book message me. But what you might not know is that Josh started from some very humble beginnings. I would love for you to tell everybody what your first job was my first job was washing pots. My local hotel. Very glorious job scrubbing pans and after about 6 months or so they promoted me up to become a waiter which is very exciting. How did you go from a pot washer to a waiter in 6 months that's a pretty fast promotion. It was a pretty fast promotion. I'd love to say it was because of my dash and good looks. But I think they just had a wreck and they really needed someone. And one thing I do know is that there is no greater hustle that when you're running food and trying to make everybody happy at the table. What is one story that you have that you just can't shake from the experience. My main funny story from being a waiter when I was like 1516 and I was serving an elderly lady. Let's say like took a bit of a liking to me and every time I left the table should like slap me on the house. She gave a good tip. I have a personal story about Josh. It's so funny because we just recently got back in touch and realize we met 6 years ago when I moved to New York City with no job of the time and I was freelancing for a PR firm and Josh was my first client. And I actually attended the converse social Christmas party in 2012 in a center outfit. I think that was on a different occasion. But that that did happen to I have a photo of us from the party and you have the hair going and yeah it was a long time ago is amazing. I was just just coming to New York at the time. I think I was kind of still halfway between London and New York flying backwards and yeah we hired under 11 to help us establish ourselves in the city and you have to do that. If you could go back in time and give yourself one piece of advice to that young man in 2012 was new in New York in this big city. What would advice would you give him. I think the advice that I would give to myself as a younger entrepreneur in general. Yeah it's really to kind of like not believe in my own confidence. We all have such bias and I think most people especially people who become entrepreneurs tend to have a lot of overconfidence. That was certainly true for me. I was I was extremely overconfident on arrogance when I was when I was younger. I think what I've learned is that even if I'm super confident in something I've got to assume that I don't know the answer. I've really got to like learn from people find find experts in the industry or more experienced people in my own company and really listen and learn as much as possible and not just assume that I know everything and I think I used to assume that you have a thing. Yeah I one thing I have found like even for me is like you feel like you want to show what you learn I want to prove look I know all this stuff I know all this stuff but to listen and be humble is really where you can find that for growth. Yeah it's actually much harder. Well Joshua came scooting on to the set right now. What is one piece of advice that you would give him. You know I wanted to be a lot of different things when I was a kid initially I wanted to be in the SES which is the Navy Seal equivalent in the UK. And then as I got a bit bigger I realized I wasn't for me and I want to be a lawyer for a long time. I wasn't really thinking about business or entrepreneurship. It kind of came a bit later. It just wasn't in my kind of field of view at the time. So I think if I was speaking to myself as a kid I would say whatever you think you want to be doing right now is going to change completely. So don't even worry about what your eventual career is going to be. Right. Just work hard be really curious keep learning find like really amazing ambitious people and become great friends with them and the rest will kind of fall into place and don't spend any time kind of stressing about what you're going to be when you're 30. For you to tell me about a moment that you had where you said this is my made it moment. I'm the kind of person is always looking to the next horizon and you know thinking about the next achievement how to make the business bigger or grow faster or build something else. I did have a moment a couple of years ago where I didn't make me feel pretty proud which was when there's really severe floods in the UK and the UK government decided to put together a panel of top that leading English tech entrepreneurs and they invited me to come in to number 10 which is the equivalent of the White House in the UK and brainstorm about how the tech industry could help. I ended up pulling together and leading a group which included Google a lot of leading tech firms and we had a big like hack session to come up with innovative tech solutions that could help people that have been impacted by the flooding. So that was really meaningful and the government gave me a number 10 mug which I still have on my bookshelf here in New York. I wish maybe feel very proud. Who do you look up to as your greatest symbol of success. Yeah it's a difficult question right because there are so many different people who achieved such really incredible things in the world and I also firmly believe that no one is perfect but I do have a tremendous amount of respect for Elon Musk. I think like a lot of tech entrepreneurs. Fundamentally I believe that technology has the power to really make the world a much better place and to push the world forward significantly. And I think the things that he's doing with Tesla and SpaceX are doing just that. You know they're really helping take humanity to the next level. And I have a lot of respect for that. I want to switch gears and talk about you and your company. How did you come up with the idea around Congress social. So I got into the social media space very early on when Facebook first started launching third party apps back in 2007. I thought it was a really exciting opportunity and I started building Facebook apps and ended up building a company called I platform that was one of the first ever Facebook app development agencies. But you know Facebook apps were kind of a bit of a fad if you remember like throwing sheep at people back then. But it was an exciting time. You could poke people. It was that kind of era. While I knew that the Facebook apps were kind of a fad I really believe that there was this huge change happening in how people communicated with each other. And I really believed that all communication was going to move away from kind of traditional channels and into smartphones into social media into messaging. And that as that happened it was really going to transform our businesses would have to communicate with their customers. And so Congress social was really born out of that vision initially that we wanted to help businesses communicate to their customers to all of these new channels. As we started getting into that industry and understanding where should we focus our time. I got really excited by the potential for customer service. I thought that was an area where none of the other startups or businesses were really spending their paying any attention to. I thought it was such such an important thing right how companies deliver customer service. We decided to set out with a vision of helping companies bridge the gap between the rapidly shifting worlds of social media and messaging on the one hand and the needs of large scale contact centers and run really high velocity customer service on the other hand. And that's what we kind of set out to do and did very successfully. And then over the last year and a half the market started to evolve again which has been really exciting with it's really dramatic rise of private messaging. For our customers now they're having twice as many conversations through private messaging as they are through public social media and also the rise of automation and AI which is a really exciting thing that's really starting to really change the customer service industry. I would love to know where the name Converse Social came from. Yeah it's a great story actually. When we started the business it was originally a product of my platform and we didn't really have a name for it. We were kind of banding around different names. And I remember I was sitting in one of our first offices with my business partner and we were we were trying to figure out how can we come up with a name and I'd come up with like social response. We didn't really like it. It's kind of a little bit. And we were like so we're like how we're brainstorming ideas. We're like oh well let's just like flick through our old domain names. Both of us have been in the tech space for a while. Yeah we're the kind of people who always like you know we think of something a cool word or a good name and we just like buy the dot com if it's available. We've had like pages and pages of these like old domain names some of which we've had for years. And we're flicking through them and my business partner was like oh ConverseSocial.com. Like I've had that one for like five years. We're like ConverseSocial. Like this is perfect. And like we just decided at that moment like that was going to be the name of the business. That's amazing. Yeah. You work in a fast moving space. How do you stay on top of the trust? Yeah. You know I think the most important thing is spending time in person on the phone with our clients all over the world doing exciting things in the industry. I think those real-life conversations are some of the most important ways of doing it. Also of course I follow a lot of people on Twitter. I've already spent too much time on Twitter but I follow a lot of really great thought leaders and influencers in the industry. And they do spend quite a lot of time looking at what they're saying looking at what they're talking about reading blogs. And I think that's that's one of the best ways to stay on top of everything today. Every 30 seconds there's a new trend. What is the one that you're most excited about right now. The big thing for us at ConverseSocial and for me that we're super excited about is the opening up of these big messaging platforms for businesses. So internationally what's after about to release business accounts. And everyone in the UK, Europe, South America is just crazy about WhatsApp. It's completely replaced everything else. Every business out there that we speak to is like desperate for it. So I think that's really going to change the game for I think for Facebook actually it's a business but also for every business in terms of how they communicate with their customers. Here in the US we have a very similar thing happening with Apple. So everyone uses iMessage on their iPhone and Apple have developed a full business messaging platform on top of iMessage which they're gradually releasing at the moment. And I think that's going to really become one of the dominant channels for how people interact with businesses over the next couple of years. And I imagine that ConverseSocial is at the forefront of these changes. Absolutely. We spend a lot of time and I spend a lot of time working with all of these big companies, building partnerships, making sure that we're leading the field in terms of the industry for helping our clients get onto these platforms. You know it's amazing to see what you have done in the last six years in this very big city. But if you could go back in time, what piece of advice did you give yourself when you started? Yeah, well there's definitely not one thing. I think it's really essential especially for people in the technology industry to be constantly learning. As you said earlier the world is changing so quickly. And so for me as well as staying on top of the trends I also try and get into the technical details. You know I try and read papers on the latest like AI developments, deep learning. I think it's really important to stay on top of that. And I spend quite a lot of my time at the moment really getting into those most technical details. You really want to leap your competition. You don't want to kind of swim in that same ocean. You want to always be learning so that you make that jump. Yeah, 100% and I think that as a leader even though I'm not there like programming anymore, you know I think it's really important that I understand the details of what we're doing. Especially with new innovation. Absolutely. You always have to be innovating. So we asked our tribe in social what questions they had for you. And I have a question from Evan and Evan wants to know that competition can be exciting but intimidating. How do you stay on top of your competition? It's a difficult point. You know I think that when you're in the battle against a competitor to win a deal or to get your product to be the best product. You've really got to fight tooth and nail to do whatever you can and really commit to winning as much as possible. I think when you then do win or lose it's really important to be gracious in that. There's no point I have a rubbing it in someone's face or getting too upset. If you lose you just got to use that as a learning opportunity. And one thing I would add to that is maybe you lost right now but that doesn't mean that that's going to be the case moving forward and you might find yourself working with that client down the road. 100% right. Yeah I think competitors sometimes we've won and the competitor has been really upset and they've acted kind of pissy towards the client for like choosing us and it really damages the relationship and we are in a business of relationships at the end of the day. 100% and relationships that last a long time. Yeah and so you've got to you've got to treat all of these competitive situations with you know you might win this client again years later the person you're competing against make one work for you a couple years later so your relationships are really important. Now we are going to play a game. Okay. And this is a surprise for Josh. We are going to play a game called Hustle Time. Hustle Time alright. I need help from Jonathan. Jonathan will you please bring in the cards. Slightly nervous now the idea of Hustle Time is that we've had a lot of conversation around being an entrepreneur in the spirit of the craft but now we want to get personal right. I think we all want to get personal with Joshua. So we are going to set a timer for 60 seconds and we're going to see how many questions you can get through. You can linger on a question but it will cut into your final score. Okay. Now I want you to feel that the cards are fair would you like to cut the cards or shuffle the cards. I'll cut the cards. Okay. Jonathan could you please help us by setting a 60 second timer. The timer is set. Would you rather fly or talk to animals? Fly. Fictional place you'd like to visit? Mars Colony. Which Hogwarts house would you be sorted into? Riffindor. Would you rather never get angry or never be envious? Never be envious. You have to lose access forever. Do you pick search engines or social media? Access engines. Music or podcasts? Podcasts. Would you rather never be able to teach mentor again or never be able to learn? Never be able to teach. No cheese ever again or no sugar ever again? No sugar. Early bird or night owl? Early bird. Last person you texted? My girlfriend. Favorite breakfast food? Eggs, scrambled eggs. Song that is currently stuck in your head? There's a new artist called Rationale who I really love. I can't remember the song. Finish this sentence. What night dance I look like? Funny monkey. Favorite Disney movie? Lion King. I guess her. Favorite Disney movie? The Lion King. Now for the moment of truth. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. Nicely done. Thank you. It was a team effort. Team effort. I was trying to read really fast. Yeah, you did great. Thank you so much for being here and for inspiring all of us out there who have that hustle and want to make that hustle a reality. We really appreciate it. You're very accomplished and I know that you are always up for a challenge. We have another one for you. Okay. We have a new employee at GoDaddy who is an Instagram celebrity. Jonathan, please bring out our newest employee. So Josh, this is Noodle. Hi, Noodle. Noodle has 50,000 followers on Instagram and while he has an impressive resume, Noodle does not have the best work ethic. I would love for you to give Noodle some advice today. Well, when it comes to work ethic, my big thing is always around discipline instead of motivation. I think a lot of people try and wait until they're motivated to do something and I think to be successful, you've just got to kind of ignore motivation and you've got to say, if I decide I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it whether I feel like it or not. Going to the gym, working laid, working extra hard. So Noodle, I think if you follow that advice you'll be just fine. You know, I always say it's not going to fun, it's going to work for the discipline. But then I always have fun anyway so it ends up working out. So you hear that Noodle? Again, thank you so much for coming. If there are any other questions that you have for Joshua March, CEO and founder of Converse Social and author of Message Me and former pot washer, please ask us in social and we'll get back to you. Hi, I'm Shannon Truax. Hit to subscribe and all of your entrepreneurial goals will come true. That is if your goals are to see more of Noodle and watch more episodes of School of Hustle.