SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
747: This This Six Figure Poker Player Quit to Launch Agency
10 Aug 2017
Chapter 1: How did Derric Haynie transition from poker to social media?
of his agency he launched a couple years ago after his poker career now up to about 14 customers paying on average 2k per month on on average three month retainers last month did 15 grand in revenue uh last year their total revenue was about 70 grand his goal is to build this to about 100 grand per month by december of this year if not he'll have to make some of those tough changes they're currently at seven people based out there in san diego
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million.
Chapter 2: What challenges did Derric face in the early days of his agency?
He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. This is episode 747. Coming up tomorrow morning, Tomer Levy joins us.
Chapter 3: How did Derric secure funding for his agency?
He breaks down how to use an open source project as lead generation ethically for his now $3 million annual recurring company business. It's grown very fast, all on the back of an open source project. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Derek Haney. He's the CEO of Volpine Interactive, a social media marketing agency that helps build contagious brands and passionate fans.
Chapter 4: What is the target revenue for Vulpine Interactive?
I met him several weeks ago in LA. We were at Sean Ellis's growth hacking event. He's got an interesting story that goes from poker to social media. Additionally, he's regularly seen speaking and blogging about growth and digital marketing in San Diego, San Francisco, and across the world. Derek, are you ready to take us to the top?
Chapter 5: What types of clients does Vulpine Interactive typically work with?
All right, why not stick with poker? Why do social media? Poker seems like you make way more money.
So, yeah, that's kind of true. Technically, that is true right now based on where our agency is, but our agency will grow into a great company that can exist on its own, whereas poker is me personally trading time for money.
Chapter 6: How does Vulpine Interactive approach content creation for clients?
At the peak of online poker, I'd say around 2009, 2010. How old were you then? What's that?
How old were you at that point?
Uh, 24.
Chapter 7: What lessons did Derric learn from his experience in poker?
So seven years ago, I was, I'm 31 now, 31, 24. Yeah.
I was just about to get married. Uh, holy crap.
Um, I was making mid six figures and working three hours a day doing poker.
Chapter 8: What advice does Derric have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
It was awesome. Yeah.
What was your biggest hand you ever won?
Well, we have to talk about the difference between a cash game and a tournament. In cash, 40K pots happened a couple of times. That was crazy. In tournaments, I had a few 100K days. In the mid-100K range, I don't think I actually crested 200K in a day, but I almost got there once.
And why are you so good at poker? What makes a good poker player?
Unlike a lot of my colleagues in poker, I had a lot of great mentors. I would have flopped multiple times. There were close moments, but I had... people that were better than me, pull me through and coach me. That was super important. But my coaches and a lot of the people that are better than me at poker are just naturally 140 IQ plus people. They're just geniuses.
And I realized really quick that I was smart, but not as smart as them. And I started to kind of feel my own personal like, I mean, we're talking about, like, basically world-class chess is what I like to think about it as. There's a lot of similarities with enumeration and combinatorics.
The difference is that chess, you know all of the pieces and positions, and in poker, there's hidden information, which brings in variables. And there's also variable outcomes because, you know, the cards are basically dealt at random. I realized that I was never going to be like that grand master of chess.
And there's a big problem with that because the best player at the poker table is the one that makes all the money. The second, so it's like, it's a logarithmic scale. It's like the best player makes, you know, twice as much as the second best player who makes twice as much as the third best player. And then everybody else doesn't make anything. They're all losers.
And so you could be one, the cliche poker statement is, you know, it doesn't matter how good you are if, you know, if you're, surrounded by eight people that are better than you, then you're gonna lose. And the fact is, is actually, if you're surrounded by two or three people at the poker table that are better than you, you're not gonna make nearly as much money.
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