 Hello everyone and welcome back. Hope you had a good lunch. Max Ivy is known worldwide as a blind blogger. He is a totally blind man from Houston, Texas who has transformed itself from a morbidly obese failed carnival owner to a respected a music equipment broker in the best health of his life. He had to learn so much including hand-cooting his first website in HTML, recruiting clients, setting fees, recording videos, using social media networks, building an email list, etc. People told him how inspiring his story was and encouraged him to share more about what it's like to be an entrepreneur who happens to be blind. That led to a second website, three self-help books, and a podcast called what's your excuse show. This grew out of the fact that many people have said that if Max can do it then what's my excuse. Max loves to help others achieve their own goals and dreams. And if you have any questions for him, no matter how delicate, just ask. He'll answer with the honesty, humor, and grace he is known for. Please welcome Max Ivy. I feel like the elephant in the room sometimes. I'm just gonna stand here. Is that okay with y'all? All right, good. My name is Max Ivy and I am known around the world as the blind blogger. And I want you to ask yourself why would I be known as the blind blogger? Because whether you know it or not, there are lots of visually impaired people out there with blogs, podcasts, online businesses, and authors. For the reason I have the name is because I was out there putting my work online, sharing my butt off, going to forums, social media sites, sharing with friends and family, leaving comments. Even though I knew that my work wasn't the best, that I'm not the most talented blind author, I'm not the most prolific, I'm not even the most consistent. But I am the one that when it came time to start a second website to share these stories, people online said, Max, we've been calling you the blind blogger for two years. It's about time you accepted it and went on about it. So that's and the reason I share that is because I believe that there are people out of here in the room or who watch this later who have said they want to start a website or a blog, but they haven't even filed for the domain. Or they have the domain, but the website is still in that part where you edit it, but it doesn't go live. Or you you have your site go live yet, but you haven't published that first. But a content. And those of you who have content, you're not as consistent as you would like to be. For most people, the reason for that is because they are afraid that their stuff isn't good enough. The people don't want to hear what they have to say. Their website isn't pretty enough, functional enough, that people are going to be disappointed if they come to their website and see what they're up to. And most people, instead of just going ahead and accepting that pretty good today is better than perfect tomorrow, next week, next month for that mythical day of someday. Most people, that's what they do. They wait, they stall. They think if I just learn one more thing, or if I just meet one more person, or if I buy that next theme or something, I'll be good enough, it'll be time to publish. And so my goal here today is hopefully to encourage anybody that's in one of those stages to just press send to finally decide that I'm gonna put my work out there. I'm gonna share my story in my own voice and let the rest of it take care of it, take care of itself. And for those of y'all who don't know, I just finally got over my cold this morning. So I'm doing my best up here y'all. Last night, I couldn't even talk to the taxi driver. But to emphasize my point, I want to share a story about my first website. It was called the Midway Marketplace. Well, it's still Midway Marketplace. It's not my primary focus anymore. Because now I'm more into blogging and podcast. But in 2007, I decided I was no owner going to halfway it. I was gonna see if I couldn't turn selling other people's use the movement equipment into a full time profession. Man was that a mistake. I had no idea how much I didn't know. I really was a babe in the woods. I had no idea what HTML PHP or Java were. And I only had a very loose idea of what a website was or how I would start one. This was before Facebook, before Wi Fi. And really before people even knew what WordPress was. And at that time, I knew I knew the website because everybody said I had to have one. But I didn't know how to build one. So first, I did what you would do. I asked people I know if one of them knew how to build a website. And nobody did. But I have a brother Michael in Florida. He's one of these people he has an extra gene so he can figure out technical stuff and make it make sense. He's blessed that way. I'm not. He figured out how to build a simple website with three pages, a homepage and an about me page and a page for equipment listings. And he found the form plug-in. I don't think they called plug-ins then I think they were called strips from source for that would allow me to add new listings to the website without knowing anything about how it all works. But then Michael got a good paying job. He didn't have time for me no more. I didn't have the money to hire a webmaster. And I wouldn't have had the courage or the faith to turn the keys to my car over somebody to somebody I didn't even know. So even if I'd had the money, I wouldn't have done it. I had to figure out a way to maintain and even build my site because I wasn't happy with the way it was. I wanted it to grow. I'm funny that way. I'm always looking at the future and the possibilities and what we can do to improve things. So Michael told me go online and start visiting some of the forums and I did that. And eventually people in the forum said, Mike, would you please stop asking all these stupid questions and go over to W3C or you can go through the tutorials. And after you go through the tutorials, then you can come back and ask those questions and then you'll know a little something. So I went over there and I did the basics, the homepage, links, embedding photos, putting email link. And felt like I was doing pretty good until it got to picking my colors. Because when you pick colors, and I'm sure most of y'all know this, but I don't know if people watching know this, you have two choices. You can go with the Hexode, Dexamist, whatever that word is, numbers, or you can go with the names. And since I had no way to know what number, what color, and I remember 24 colors in my coloring box back when I could see them, I decided I go with names. So I picked yellow for the background because when I could still see the stuffed animals on the background, they were also better on yellow than they did on white. I picked blue for the text, red for the links, and orange for the previously clicked links. Well, imagine my surprise when I found out from some of my website visitors that the yellow was an ice creaming yellow, the red was brick, the blue was navy, and the orange was something fluorescent like out of a neon sign from a bar. This site was very bright. It was so bright that Ray Charles and Steve you wonder could have had an argument over it. It was bad. It was bad. And my new friend Carrie went on archive.org and she found it. She found a slide. Yeah, let me let me set this up for him. Yeah, let me, hey, she found a slide. Now she's going to put it up there because we talked about this before and I believe in doing stuff that this fortuitous. But look, don't look directly into the image. Okay. You might want to put your sunglasses on because this is bad. Go for it, Carrie. All right. Yeah, while she's putting it up here, I want to tell you as bad as the website was, I was still able to sell amusement equipment because what I did was I got to the point where this is the best I can do right now. Let's focus on stuff I can change. And that meant recruiting new listing. Tell me people about the listings I had, sending people to the website pages where they could see the rides and buy the rides. And in the first year, I sold a simulator to a guy in Australia that sold for $50,000. In the second year, I sold a carousel for a mall in Georgia that was $125,000. The website work because I didn't let the fact that I knew it was bad. This isn't a case where Yeah, go for it. Put it up there. Put it up there. This is good. This is what happens when you turn a blind guy with a color palette. And I really don't have a better story than this to show you what what I'm talking about here with you. Just because you don't think you're good enough yet doesn't mean you should hide your story. And those people who have yet to press send yet to publish their first post, I wanted to look at that picture and think that website as bad as that was, that's $1,000 of amusement equipment. And trust me, when I tell you this, selling used carnival rides is probably the hardest job in this world on whether it's online or in person. It's not easy. In addition, I was a blind guy doing it. And I was the new guy in the business. And my business model was different than everybody else's because I was new. I was working on a commission sales basis. Everybody else had advertisers and their websites were completely free. Just try telling people they have to pay you for something they're getting for free. You do that. That's, that's never easy. But I did it because, like I said, I focused on what could I do? And eventually, what would happen is people would go, I've had my way I've had my ride on so into the site for a year, haven't had the first bite haven't sold it. We say we'll let you give it a try. And when I would sell stuff, especially old hard to play stuff, my reputation started to grow as somebody who could, you know, find a home for the misfit rides is my brother like to call him. Yeah, in the day in the in the early days, most of the stuff I got was only because they had tried other places and failed. And don't you know, I was very happy when I would succeed and they did. One of my favorite memories of all was when I sold a carousel, the one I mentioned in Georgia, it had been on the list for a company in Italy that had offices in Milan, Nashville and Sydney. They had been trying to sell it for a year. And they're still mad at me for selling that ride. So that was, that was, that was what 2008 we found out, which would have been the year after I got started. Later on, I would meet a great guy from Switzerland named Ashley Fox, who would go max, I'm going to introduce you to word crowds. I'm going to help you move your website over and we're going to make it much more traditional. It's going to be easier to use, but you're still going to be able to maintain it. Which was one of the conditions I have had with every webmaster I've ever worked with is, whatever we do on my site, it has to be something that you can teach me how to do, give them my limited skills and the fact I'm going to be doing it with streaming. And so far that has worked. There are some things that took a little more, a little more work than others to figure out how to explain them to me. But we did eventually get it. And of course, one of the worst parts was I had created so many pages, like something like a couple of hundred pages under different categories that just migrating all that stuff from HTML to WordPress was, was a big chore. I wouldn't recommend it as bad as it is to go from blogger to WordPress. I would never want to go from HTML to WordPress. It was especially not a big, I don't know if I can quite call my site e-commerce site, but I guess that would be where it would fall. But yeah, that's, that's proof there. If you work on what you can do something about, you focus on, on spreading the word, getting your name out there, you can be successful. Now I'm not saying you should put out a crappy website. I was saying that you, you know, but there comes a time when if you don't know it, somebody in your community should say, Hey, you've been talking about this long enough. It's pretty good. Yeah, it can be better, but you'll learn as you go. And for the most part, people out there online, they like to watch people's progress. They like to be able to relate to you. And one of the ways they can relate to you is they see you in the beginning. They see you when things aren't, aren't great. They watch you get better. They watch you learn various things and they become fans and followers of you. I mean, in my case, when I built the email list by giving people free text links that managed to grow an email list of over 3,000 people worldwide, people that was like a big deal to them. To me, it was not a big deal. To me, it was just another day of showing up and working my butt off to try to build a business. And quite often, that's the way I think of things. I don't really think of them as being as difficult as they are because to me, it's just the next problem in front of me. Now, I do have a couple of other examples of when this has worked for me as far as not being perfect and maybe thinking it wasn't ready, but having to be a good outcome. When I decided to become the blind blogger, which I fought for two years because people told me I was inspirational and I told them, no, you're talking about somebody else. They said, Max, there are too many people out there in the world who don't have any physical disabilities. They don't have a reason why they're not doing something, but they're still sweet walking through the day. They are still not challenging themselves and they don't have an excuse. You have a perfect excuse to stay home, watch TV and eat Cheetos if that's what you wanted to do, but you don't. And that's what makes your story important and you have to share it. So when I decided to finally become the blind blogger, something I fought and something a few blind people got mad at me for being willing to accept that name from people online who told me that was my name, I wrote a post called, I think I'm ready to be an inspiration. Now, I run two websites, one of them sells amusement equipment, one of them is motivational, coaching, writing books. Somehow, I got a picture of a really pretty part train engine confused with my profile photo. So my very first post says I think I'm ready to be an inspiration. And what comes up at the top of the post with a picture of this huge part train engine. Thankfully, it was a gorgeous part train and not on a hunk of junk apart train. But because you know, if I'm going to mess it up, I could have messed it up a lot worse. The funny thing was just to show how people will relate to you if you give them a chance by putting your stuff out there. Half the people who saw that post said, Max, did you know there was a train picture? The other half though said, Max, what an inspired idea. Most of us remember the little engine that could work. What a great idea to put that picture of a train up there in a post title. I think I'm ready to be an inspiration. This happened because most people out there online, if you give them a chance, they want to like they want to be educated or inspired or motivated by. They want you to say something that helps them in some way or say it in a way nobody else has said it before. And in my case, people thought that train was on purpose. I had to admit that it was on accident, but I didn't take the picture down. If you go to the blind blogger.net, you look for that post, you'll still see that picture up there. Because I think it's important to remind people that our mistakes, especially happy accidents like that, they're just as much a part of who we are is when we get it right. 99% they really are. Another time this happened to me was when I decided to record my first video for the website. Now I record in my room in an older house in Conroe, Texas. And I have light perception, but I have a very narrow field of vision, which means I can't see the light on or off unless I'm looking at the light picture. I sat down to record the video and didn't think to look to see if the lights were on or off. So I recorded this video in the dark. Yes, I did. Yes, I did. And once again, half the people who saw it said, Max, did you know you were sitting in the dark? The title of the video was leading you out of the darkness. The other half of the people, the other half of the people said, Max, what a brilliant metaphor to which I said, thank you. But that was all a happy accident. I didn't do it on purpose. It just happened to work out that way. But there again, what if I had decided to keep those posts back? What if somebody had told me, Mike, you messed it up and I took it down and fixed it? That would have wronged people with the message. And at least for me, my message is that it's better to go ahead and take action, no matter how small, no matter how successful or unsuccessful, because that's how we get from here to there. And I do my best to make an example of that, even when I mess up, even when I end up in what we used to call in the carnival business of jackpot, which is a bad but funny situation that you later retell for the entertainment of others, just in case you all needed an explanation of what the word jackpot meant. And so sometimes I get myself into situations, but I usually will find a lesson out of them. Since I imagine most of you all haven't read my posts last week, I was speaking another event and Amtrak lost my suitcase. But instead of being disappointed by that, in fact, it had my brand new suit in it and all my grooming products and my laptop and pretty much everything else that I own was in that suitcase. I went to the conference, I went to all the events, I met everybody I shook hands, I had conversations, I participated in the contest, I won a free microphone. I gave my talk in five day old blue jeans and a conference T-shirt and I was standing up there and something from George Dio Amani, which I just recently learned who the heck that is. But because I decided that I was going to show up, I was going to do my best, I was going to give these people a lesson, a message by the way I behaved in a bad situation, I managed to continue to embrace this whole thing about not making excuses or it might contradict them what is my excuse. And those are the kind of things that I share with people a few years ago, I was promoting the web marketplace and I was thinking, I live in a suburb with no good transportation, I would really like to go meet people face to face but that didn't happen. So what can I do about it? Next thing I know a guy named Brian the Hammer Jackson is looking for people to come on his show on what he calls Small Business Friday, he's looking for business owners that want to come on and talk about what they do. And so I put my application in and they picked me. I'm waiting there Friday morning with my old flip phone from Sprint, standing out in my garage where it's cold because I don't want to get interrupted by somebody else while I'm talking to him. And yeah, it does get cold and used to in January, okay? And it comes time for me to go on. My phone dropped a call while he's trying to call me back. I'm trying to call him back. We both got voicemail. He finally gets on the phone with me again. He goes, Oh, what are you blind or something? And I said, well, yes, I am. At which point we had about a minute and a half of silence, which for any of y'all who do podcasts is death. And then eventually I laughed about it. And then eventually he laughed about it. We had about another five or so minute conversation after that. He was so impressed by the way I handled it. He asked me to come back the next week. And I ended up coming on his show every week for about six months before I started doing other people's podcasts and radio shows to the point now where people think of me as an expert in using podcasts and radio shows to promote their brand. And some people have even started hiring me to do that. That all started because I didn't want to be, I was stuck in my house and needed a way to get to people. And it was proof that even a bad show, even a bad talk and the people who have spoke here before me this weekend, some of y'all know that. You walked off the stage and you're like, why was I here? You know, I hardly ever had that feeling, but I've heard about it. And people in the audience though, a lot of them are looking for you to say something they can use. They want you to do well for the most part. That's one of the great things about the blogosphere in my opinion. Because there are so many helpful, supportive and encouraging people online, whether it be blogs, podcasts, videos. There's generally a community that we have where once you learn something, you're open to teaching it to people who haven't learned it yet. You know, so that's one of the things I really love about the blogosphere. And I've been, I've been very blessed to meet many people who have become part of my story because being open to meeting them online. But, you know, that was six years ago now, my first radio show. And two years ago, I talked to a woman into doing a radio show and she is now going from being a woman who was afraid to share her writing in her home country to somebody who is now doing interviews. So I really enjoy helping other people that said in my bio. This week, I got here to work out. I had the worst cold I've had in years. I wasn't sure I didn't be able to get up here and talk to you also. I'm very glad that that worked out. But if I had to come up here and squeak at you, I was going to do it. I really was. Now, I was, I was going to, I was going to put my book up here, but now I set it down. I'm not sure which way would be up. And I'm afraid that if I walk over there and get it, I'm going to end up in somebody's lap. But the book is called the blind bloggers New York City adventures and how you can make your dreams come true. And it's another case where if I had went off of what I felt about myself at the time, I wouldn't have done because when I went to their website, it's a what is the competition where they pick 24 people a year out of thousands of people to based on their writing to go on an Amtrak trip somewhere in the US and hopefully spark their writing dishes so they can create a book, a play, collection of poems, short stories, whatever. When I've found out about it, I went to the website and I looked at their website and I read some of the bios of the previous winners and I started seeing plays nominated for awards, best selling books. People with publishing deals with traditional publishing companies instead of self published. Before long, I was starting to think, you know, Max, this is like that old Sesame Street song which one of these is not like the other and I'm the fourth guy in that square. And I almost talked myself out of it until I got to the point where I read a woman's blog, a woman's comment and she said that if I thought, no, if you were taking people who weren't already successful and established, I would apply and that made me feel really sad for her and it made me think, I don't want to be that person. I don't want anybody to be that person that they'd be afraid to submit their work and take their chances, even if they feel like they're not worth it. So I filled out the application. I submitted it along with part of my first book and they selected me out of thousands of people without even thinking we're going to send a blind guy to New York City by himself. I think if they had known that in advance, they might have thought different before it was over with, we'll never know. But I've had a great time every time I've been here in New York City. The point there though is if you wait until you feel like you're worthy, you're never going to do it. The website's never going to go live. Your first post is never going to be out there. You know, I have made a living on taking chances on putting myself out there. Maybe when I wasn't ready, many times I wasn't. But a lot of times I thought to myself, how will I know? A lot of times I, my, my daddy used to tell me all the time he would say, Max, if you don't ask, they can't say yes. And I'll try to live that. In some cases, I would have been better if after they said yes, I said no. But, you know, we don't always make the best decisions in the moment. But I tell you, the worst decision is to not put your work out there online. It may not be great. It probably isn't. As a matter of fact, I've never met a webmaster who was happy with their website. I've never met one yet who didn't, who, if you asked him and seriously, they wouldn't tell you that I need a new theme. This one doesn't do ex-forming or my content is horrible or nobody really wants to read what I have to share. I wouldn't be a bit surprised because I've never met a webmaster. Webmaster was happy. I've never met an author that was happy. Every time an author sends a book off to be published or submits it to an online site like Amazon or Smashwords or Barnes and Noble, they all have that moment where they're scared to death. Nobody's going to like their book that nobody's going to want to read it and the people will even say what business do you have writing a book and those peers never go away. No matter how many times you publish a blog post, a recorded video, no matter how many times you no matter how many times you publish, it never goes away. A year, about three years ago, I started my podcast, What's Your Excuses. I was encouraged to do it by a guy named Frederick By, who's a real good friend of mine. He said, Max, come on the show. I'll be your co-host. You won't have to worry about any of the tech. We'll be fine. So I did that. And for a year later, he calls me up and goes, Max, I can't be there today. I want you to do the show by yourself. So at the last minute, I'm like, how do I do the show? How do I record the show? And so in the space of about four hours, I signed up for Zoom, tested Zoom, used Zoom to record an interview with a guy named Michael Schwartz, who's a filmmaker from California that's losing his vision. Put out a great podcast, even though neither one of us was sure it was in focus. Got a lot of great comments on it because of the content, because of the interviews.