E212 – Justin Nguyen – Founder GetChoGrindUp, co-host of Young and D.U.M.B.

Junaid Ahmed 0:08
In the last episode, I had the wonderful opportunities to speak with the CEO, the expert of choice, Maryland King just kind and choose an abundance of knowledge, personal branding, being intentional in our messaging and creating content that not only serves us, but also our audience. But for now, let's take a listen to Justin, when

we have Justin here from get your grind up calm. He's just one awesome individual been following his story on LinkedIn. And he's done some really awesome work. So Justin, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Justin Nguyen 0:51
Yeah, so like you said, I am the CEO of get your grind up. And a co host of the young and dumb podcast. Basically, just my story in a nutshell is I was a college student who didn't really know what I was doing in life. So what I set out to do is with my friend, we wanted to talk to some of the best minds, the best young minds in the world and kind of figure out our life from there. So that's what we're doing right now. We're trying to help out the youth with everyone else who is struggling to really find out who they are. And what's their story.

Junaid Ahmed 1:23
That's really amazing. I've got to hear some of your episodes earlier this year. And you had reached out to me and when we connected and you're like, you know, what's your story, and we had a really good chat few months ago, and I was like, you know, you got to bring bring you onto the podcast and talk a little bit about a little bit and a lot of it about everything that you're up to. Right. So what's one of the hobbies that you wish you had? Like?

Justin Nguyen 1:52
Do you mean you mean, like, professional hobby, or something that I'm working on right now,

Junaid Ahmed 1:56
hobby could be anything, you know, it could be like writing a book could be, you know, doing a podcast could be beekeeping, could be cycling, could be knitting can be anything. Gotcha.

Justin Nguyen 2:07
Yeah, I mean, I wish I guess I wish I was able to read more. So recently, I don't know if you've seen my, I think last few videos on LinkedIn. They're kind of based around reading. And I've been trying to read for like the past, I want to say like six months or so, like really trying like put read, put down a book, try to read the pages, but it just wouldn't work for me. So what Yeah, what I've started to kind of realize is a more of an audio person because I can listen to podcasts for days of slowly but I can't read for days. And I have like an hour commute to school 30 minutes to an hour depending on traffic. Yeah, so doing lately is just downloading audio books and reading but through my ears rather than through my eyes. Yeah,

Junaid Ahmed 2:51
no, that totally makes sense. I'm the same way wanted to read it a lot of books. And I was like, Ah, you know, it's great that you can pick a book in so reading, but it comes down to how fast can I read an audio book, you know, these guys are professionals. They read books for a living. So it's it's definitely helped me audible and have gone through many books. There's actually books I started that I need to finish up. But I think somebody was telling me that the main meat of the book is in in the first 50% of it, or first 45% of it, it definitely increases your mind. You're constantly growing your mind

Justin Nguyen 3:30
Most definitely. Like, just for instance, I i've been probably on and off reading, like I said, the past six months. And I think I've finished two books. But over the past week, I finished a book in a week just through the audio book, just because it's more interesting to me. I can hear the passion behind us author's voice who was reading it, and it's just more fun.

Junaid Ahmed 3:51
No, absolutely. And depending on the type of book you might be reading, especially if you're listening to fiction books, or nonfiction rather have a really good performance set up around it. The exact books are really amazing, because people, you know, put in time and do the research and we just get them, you know, spoon fed. And even though like you said, you know, took you a lot longer to finish two books. And one week, you were able to finish one book, which is really amazing. There was there's this

website that's been I've been seeing on both Instagram and Facebook, and I can't remember the name, but they, they have basically summaries of books, and they have interviews from these authors that have written these books. So you can basically consume all of this content for like, seven bucks a month or something. And I was like, Okay, this looks interesting. And one of the things that they were saying, you know, CEOs read about about 50 bucks a year. I'm like, how you able to do that, you know, you got sounds like, you know, you got to do at least a book a week, and, you know, you can get to 50 books easily. You're probably gonna, you know, take two weeks off for a week.

Justin Nguyen 5:10
Exactly. Now, I know what you mean.

Junaid Ahmed 5:12
Yeah, so, it's really awesome. So what kind of books are you focusing on listening to?

Justin Nguyen 5:19
Um, so right now, I'm trying to listen to a lot of the the staple books. So think like, four hour work week, How to Win Friends and Influence People basically trying to cover the basics that everyone tells you to listen to, because I haven't yet I haven't had a chance to read them yet. So I want to cover the basics before expanding out into something, I guess, more niche or anything like that. But yeah, the first book that I did listen to is the third door and I recommend it to anyone. It's really amazing book, write it down to third door,

Junaid Ahmed 5:53
and I'm sure you've heard read, crushing it by Gary van der Chuck. Yep. Yep. Right. That book is so powerful to talk about hobbies. And talking about getting the podcast out there. What are the different ways that you're promoting your podcast, because being part of the anchor community, which is, you know, which is, which is how I got started with podcasting, and, and the ease of use of the application and those looking at some of the other things people are doing, they're like, Yeah, get your podcast on every platform that you can think of. So what have you What have you done so far? So

Justin Nguyen 6:35
for like podcast promotion, what we've been doing is we've been taking our podcast or main piece and slowly cutting it up into little micro pieces of content. So from each, I guess, Episode, yeah, you're creating five pieces of content from it. And these five pieces come in the form of one quote. So take a quote, and then we'll put it on you there, we'll put it on both our Instagram story as well as our regular post on Instagram. Okay, we'll also take a 15 seconds or 15 seconds to 32nd clip that and it will that on to our story using headliner. Nice. And then we also started we're going to actually start today where we take a minute clip and post it as a regular Instagram post. Nice. So through that, that's, I think, five pieces of content right there. Yeah, yeah, we also send that to our guests who are on our show. And since most of our guests have good amount of social media following Yeah, they have that swipe up feature on Instagram. So when you're able to do that, then it's easier to convert people to listening to our show.

Junaid Ahmed 7:43
That's awesome. That's absolutely something I need to be doing. I mean, I haven't have just been just posting it on the regular platforms. And think recently, what I did is I found a way to create a blog post out of it each of the episodes so I can easily just import and whatever text I have of the episode becomes part of the blog. So that's been pretty good. I've got to do more of it. I've think I've tested with a couple of them. And there's some tools like otter which will convert audio to text. So and I was fascinated to find out that 12 minute of audio is about, you know, thousand to 1200 words per minute.

Wow, that's pretty amazing.

Justin Nguyen 8:34
It's crazy. Yeah. And I mean, we, we also have our blog too. So for every episode that you create, we also have what we like to call their dumb profile.

Junaid Ahmed 8:46
young and dumb were dumb stands for a dedicated upcoming motivated and bold so we get that type of profile. So then people can learn a little bit about them. And then if they want to learn more, they can listen to the episode two. Fantastic. Um, the other thing that I seen people to and talk a lot about is putting each and every episode on YouTube, just like, okay, so they're using headliner again, very, to overlay an audio profile or audio way format, and then it

and then they're putting it on YouTube. Sounds like okay, that's pretty interesting. And this one guy, he gets button 91 listens. per episode, or that is average. It's like, okay, that's, that's pretty good. I mean, I'm only at like, 50 something.

Justin Nguyen 9:36
I mean, we're like, we're nowhere crazy either were about like a 110 listen. Okay, per episode. Nice. We have like, we haven't really been taking the marketing side series. So ever since we read basically,

Junaid Ahmed 9:53
we've kind of uptick.

Justin Nguyen 9:54
Yeah, yeah, we've seen the uptake, listen, so we're just hammering that side of things. Because before we that we didn't create content, and that was kind of our previous Yeah, concern or like, drawback was we were serious. So now that we are creating more content, and we're seeing the, the, the results from it.

Junaid Ahmed 10:13
Nice. So did did the podcasting part start as a hobby for you? Or did you think that this was going to, you know, take you where you wanted to go?

Justin Nguyen 10:26
Basically, they kind of came out of a need. So have you ever listened to Lewis house podcasts?

Junaid Ahmed 10:34
I think I have.

Justin Nguyen 10:35
So Lewis house has a podcast, usually in the top 100. And it's called the School of greatness and Lewis house, very influential figure, he gets to have guests on like Gary van der Chuck, Tony Robbins, Serena Williams, basically like the untouchables of the world. And when I was listening to his podcast, I thought it was a great podcast, he gets good information. But these lives aren't really something that I can necessarily relate to. Yeah, so what I wanted to do is find someone who was like me, someone who was in college or around my age, didn't really know what they wanted to do. And then they found out that they really liked white 100% into it. And there's nine success from it. So I got onto a snapchat phone call out of all things with my friend Gary. Yeah, was in England at the time studying abroad. And we're like, dude, let's start a podcast. And he's like, Well, I know zero about starting a podcast, let's do it. So that's basically the origin story of young and dumb, we sat down, figured out a name for it. And, yeah, two or three months, we got it all laid out, and then the started the podcast,

Junaid Ahmed 11:44
that's, that's really awesome. You know, it always takes one other person to get it going, right?

You can, you can do it alone. It's not easy to do it alone. But when, when you have another person intentionally, now you've got a team going on, right? So it gets a lot easier. I started I tried to start a podcast with two of my cousins about seven years ago, basically, in 2012, and 656 years ago. And I was like, let's do this. You know, we already had a group chat setup. I mean, we still do right on Hangouts. And we basically talk tech and life in general. And now that we're all parents and kids, you know, we talked a lot about parenting and those things. So it's really interesting. So we're liking let's do a podcast, but since we were in different time zones, and, you know, when you're,

when you're settled, and you have kids or not, it's it's hard to move. But we, we managed to get some episodes out, and then everything changed and then had to move. So it's like, all right, you know, I'm going to so this year I was like, Okay, this is it, I've got to do something different. It can't be sitting on my laurels and you know, having all this knowledge and not sharing it with the world. And then Gary winners, Chuck you know Gary's book, crush it and crushing it just totally help you propel and get to, you know, get to take massive action, essentially, the other thing that I noticed, sorry, was, the more I posted, the more views I would get, like, the more frequency of posting got me more views or got me more traction was like, less interesting.

Justin Nguyen 13:36
Yeah, definitely. Like, so if you think about it, right? If 50 people, well, let's just say if you're 50 people are subscribed to you, you post one time a week, you'll probably at least get 50 views a week. Yeah, well, let's say those same 50 people are still subscribed to you, but you post week, then you're going to at least 100 views. So it shouldn't just

look at it like that, then you can you can realize that, oh, the more that I post, the more views I will technically see. But then you have to find the balance of how much irrelevant information are you posting? Are you like, are you keeping them? Are you keeping them interested into it? Or are you just content for content purpose.

Junaid Ahmed 14:25
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Right. Right. That's some that's the balance that a lot of people have to find. Because some people that I know they're like, Oh, yeah, I I post every single day and I'm like, Okay, that's good. And I take a look at content and it's kind of like three days out of the five days are the same content just rewarded in a different way and it's never going to be helpful to your audience it's it's not that's that's very true. And I struggle with that and I was like, okay, because when I first started it was all about beekeeping and I'm talking about be king keeping it I'm talking about okay I'm waiting for the BS that's all I could talk about bs right I kept the user here so when the user here and then like are the bees are here and we set up the set of the highs instead of all this stuff. And then you know, so it's more like a weekly thing because you're reporting but then what I said okay, you know what, I can educate people about beekeeping. So I dug up some of the information that I learned. And I was like, All right, I'm gonna talk about this stuff, and go deep into each of those areas of beekeeping knowledge. And so that was that helped me get through the week, you know, having at least three, three episodes a week, but

it all comes down to how much time do I have host production, right, I got analysis, you know, if I'm at work, well, I gotta do work. I can be sitting in editing my podcast and uploading it. So there's a lot of different things involved. I mean, you got to have,

Justin Nguyen 16:49
like you said, you know, you gotta have the balance.

Yeah, I mean, for me, like, it really comes down to what you really want it to be like it. If you want your podcast to be a top 100 podcasts, then your actions need to match that. But if you're doing something where you just want it to be a hobby, that actions can match that too, and whatever. Yeah, like when I first started the podcast, I expected it to just grow automatically. I didn't put much effort into it. And I was like, Okay, this thing is just going to go. But what I realized is my actions weren't really matching up with what I wanted the podcast to do.

Junaid Ahmed 17:29
Good point.

Justin Nguyen 17:30
Yeah. And I thank you. And I would get like down on myself, I'd be like, why isn't this podcast growing? And we're not seeing it grow the way that we wanted to go, what the heck is going on. And what I realized was, we really weren't putting effort behind it. We would literally record the episode chop it up a little bit like takeouts pauses and all that stuff. Yeah. And then just throw it up there. There's really no marketing behind it. We post one picture. And when you take a step back, and you look at it, you're like, wow, what can you expect to happen when you're only posting one picture about exactly what are you going to episode? Why are people going to come to your page and listen to a 40 minute episode with you talking to another person, right? You have to give them that reason. And that reason comes from that hard effort that you're putting into it.

Junaid Ahmed 18:15
Yeah, no, that's so that's so. So true. Because

I was it was a list wasn't

just had to start in my head. And

it's almost like one year when you plant the seed need to continuously, you know, water, it gotta make sure the surrounding everything is, you know, in promotion of deceit to grow. And if you're not, if you're only watering once a week, what seeds seeds Niagara going to grow to the, to the way that you know, that you expected to, but that's just really good point. You got to got to have the podcast of effort around it. Oh, yeah, I remember. So I got contacted by this lady on LinkedIn and

her

or maybe I connected with her author when her name is when Charles and

so when they connected and immediately got this message from them. Hi, Jeanette, can I interview you?

And then can I schedule you to ask when. So basically, they're promoting their own self, they're sitting, okay, our podcast is an all of these places. And the other thing they have was, you know, do not take out silent spots like interesting. That is so interesting. They're like, rules are, you know, babies or pets are not allowed to make noise or kids during our conversation. And if people want to listen to their interview before it's out on Tuesday and Thursday, they must tell when. And the other thing was like. Also, it's the worst on our editor to take out silences. So don't do monkey business. Like that's very, very interesting because I'm taking ourselves as for my talks, especially when I'm talking about a subject all the time, but when it's in the conversation, fashion den. Yeah, it makes sense. You know you and wouldn't want to take out the silences because

when you're talking, we have silences and you have arms and ahhs as a natural progression of conversation.

Justin Nguyen 20:34
Yeah, most definitely. Like for me, we don't even edit out the arms and ahhs and the so we don't do that. The only thing that we really edit out is you and This usually happens in one spot. When we ask our deep thinking questions. They get a little stuck at some time for like a minute or so. So we'll edit that pause from let's say, 45 seconds down to 10 seconds or something like so. You still feel the effect of the cause. Yeah, but at the same time, like, I don't think anyone wants to wait. Yes.

Junaid Ahmed 21:13
wait that long. That's right now that's true. That's true. I've done that too. Now. That's absolutely absolutely right. I think that's okay to do because, because then the audience will be like, Wait, did did this distinct stop? Or, you know, do I need to press

Justin Nguyen 21:29
exactly

skip forward? What? What's going on?

Yeah, but at the same time, there's like that. I think it depends on the type of show that you run as well. So the show is very raw, like, we want the real story, word interview type of show. So there's no real point to edit. Because then you can be changing the narrative if you edit to exactly but for sure, yeah, for shows like,

have you ever heard of business wars?

Junaid Ahmed 21:57
Probably.

Justin Nguyen 21:58
So business wars is an amazing show. I think it's very well done. Basically, what they do is they take big time, big corporate rivalries, and then they talk through the whole rivalry. So just for instance, Nike verse, Adidas, or, you know, reverse Xbox, etc, etc. and their show is highly edited. Like they have music behind it. There's no there's no buts. None of that. It seems like an actual TV show. TV show that's just playing through your ears. So yeah, those types of shows. There's a reason that there's editing to it. But show Yeah, here's in mind that helps to be a little bit more raw, obviously, yeah, at it. But yeah. I think the rawness adds to the interview environment,

Junaid Ahmed 22:43
though. That's so true. And I've listened to those, you know, those types of shows where they're highly edited, you know, you've got music, you've got all of this entertainment value around it. And it sounds really awesome. And then I wonder, well, they must be getting a lot of listens, because it's so engaging.

Justin Nguyen 23:04
Yeah, I mean, the editing side can really help your podcast if you know how to do it, right. But I think I heard some more if you do it wrong, than if you do it, right. Because just for instance, like our podcasts, if we are trying to add like little zingers or little sound bites here and there, I think it defeats the purpose of what we're trying to do. Because our our narrative is to provide the real in depth journey of someone who's in their grind right now that there's, it gets played out. If we're editing out all the pauses are for portraying everyone as this perfect person, because we all know that everyone is not perfect. Everyone says, For the most part everyone is everyone says. So everyone messes up. Everyone stumbles every once in a while that I'm in nature.

Junaid Ahmed 23:57
It is it's absolutely true. And so one of so most of the times when I do edit, it's when I'm passing out information right on a specific topic, like talking about talking about building a beehive or talking about the different species of bees. So and those type of episodes, I'll take out the arms and ahhs because they're you know, they're on the train of thought, and they're listening to or trying to capture. But yeah, that's absolutely true. You know, we've got to keep the wrongness of a conversation because

it really adds the dramatic effect.

one episode of

one podcast that I heard and they were actually featured by anchor was they did it they did the recording in a park they went to Central Park, the two microphones set up and you could hear the ambience and and in the beginning, they were just talking about some guys sitting on a bench.

This is pretty interesting. You do you feel you feel where you're,

there's another podcast, can't remember his name. But he

basically talked about

getting into getting this prank call and not a prank call. But this scam call of from this Indian company. And they, you know, he recorded the conversation. And then they visited India and so you could hear all the, you know, getting on a plane, the plane taking off, then they're in the rickshaw and then you driving through town and, you know, whatever environment they were in, you could share it through the sounds like that give a really good effect. And that thing was like to two hours long. Great. And I listened to the whole thing because it's so engaging and entertaining. So yeah, definitely comes down to what type of show are we trying to put on?

Justin Nguyen 26:08
Yeah, most often, like another podcast that's just like, what you described is it's called hashtag millennial. And okay, basically, it was this girl who literally documented her whole journey of being in college, like the instant of crying because she didn't get into internships into like, walking across stage. And she literally recorded what she did, walking across stage, everything. Wow. So she literally documented her whole journey, like in a vlog style, but just audio from it. And like, it's conversation with her and her mom and everything like that. So that's what I mean. It depends on the type of message that you're trying to set.

Junaid Ahmed 26:49
Nice. That's awesome. I mean, I'm still trying to figure out what hacks and Hobbes's mean we I like talking about hobbies because I have hundreds of them and and you every year I'll pick on one hobby and I'm you know, going all at it. Last year was all cycling this year's beekeeping and next year it's going to be beekeeping because I'm going to be hosting the honey and there's always new new things popping up in the one focus I have right now is all about video and creating video and looking to, you know, teach people on how to use their smartphones properly for video production. And you probably seen my videos I've been a little slow

because it all comes down to again. How much time do I have? I've got to take care of the kids. I got you though. There's a there's no infinite time. It's so hard.

Justin Nguyen 27:48
Yeah, no, definitely. It's tough. Even for myself. I've been missing one or two. I think I've missed one day for the 30 days of videos. Yeah, what it really comes down to is accountability. Like it. Yes, we all I think we all know that. It does take time to create a one minute video but make that much time like we can find the time if we really want to find it. Oh yeah, absolutely have to be self aware and say okay, we didn't find time to do it today. How can we fix that for tomorrow so that we do that so you have to use as a lesson rather than just learning or looking at it as a failure

Junaid Ahmed 28:27
Good Good point. That is Thank you very much. Cuz I was like today I'm going to sit down I'm going to record 10 videos and edit them and I'm going to back post them

Yeah, but I know I know it's not going to happen

please I can maybe get five videos out but that's a really good point. Thank you for that Justin well it was really awesome talking to you aware and we you know, working people get to your information thing I mentioned earlier, get your greatest calm. But is there any other place?

Justin Nguyen 29:06
Yes. So if you on all major social media, so Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, everything is at get chill, grind up. So Je te ch o g ri n d. And then if you want to visit our website, it's ghetto. grind up calm. So from from there, you can find everything from our podcast to all of our guests to our webinars and everything like that. So basically, yeah, just check out our Instagram page. From there you'll find the links to everything else.

Junaid Ahmed 29:38
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Justin for taking the time out of your day and talking to us. I know it's a busy student life because getting it to work.

Justin Nguyen 29:51
It's busy work. But when you when you optimize, it's becoming easier. So Oh, yeah, I found ways to make my schedule the most efficient I thing to to to complete all my work.

Junaid Ahmed 30:03
That's fantastic. Well, thank you so much. Justin will talk to you soon.

Justin Nguyen 30:07
Yeah, thank you for having me on.

Junaid Ahmed 30:13
In the next episode, we get to speak with David Calvert. He's always thinking, looking, listening and writing, we get to talk about some really awesome stories and upbringings. He's an author a LinkedIn local host, a host for his own podcast car thoughts with David tune in again tomorrow to listen to his episode.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai