Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

You’ll find Part 1 here.

This is part 2 of my interview with Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com. In this segment, I talk with Andrew about how he researches his guests, the two types of interviews he does and how he presses his guests to give complete answers to questions without being rude or pushy.

We also talk about a famous interviewer and how Andrew formats his interviews after biographies.

4 ways to watch/listen/read:

1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
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Related Links:

- Mixergy.com

Transcript:

Tim Bourquin: Let’s talk about the preparation and research that you do before an interview. Doing them every day, again, that’s another step that you have to take. What kind of research do you do on your guest?

Andrew Warner: There are two kinds of interviews that I do. I like to do biographical interviews and I also like to do educational interviews. Biographical interviews I use an outline that’s very similar with my favorite biography, the favorite books that I like to read. What they always do is they start off with, “Ted Turner walked down Manhattan, looked at the big building that now had CNN on it and with pride looked back at a career where you built up TBS, where you became a billionaire, when you did this and that and that.” That’s always the first chapter, and the reason they do it as the chapter is to say to the reader, “Look, this is why the person you are about to spend 400, 500, 600, 800 pages with is important. This is what he did that makes him so worthy of the pages that I’m writing here and makes him so worthy of your time to study him.” I do that too.

The first thing I do in a biographical interview is I say, “So how much money did you sell your company for?” or “How many readers did you get?” or when I interviewed the founder of Charity: Water, I wanted to know how many people did he impact with that charity? So right up front I say, Pow! Bang! Bang! That’s why this person is so good and worthy of your time. Then the next thing that I as an interviewer and my audience is going to be thinking is, “How did he get there?” So I do the same thing that chapter 2 in most biographies do. You could go and pick up any biography on your bookcase and have the same format. Chapter 2 is “Where did you start out?”

Now usually, in biographies they ask about family, about the mother, what the mother do, and start giving you the answers to those questions. For me it’s sometimes, “Did you have a lemonade stand? Did you have an internet company that you launched when you were a kid?” Very often what I find is people don’t have lemonade stands anymore as kids but they do have eBay businesses or they created digital games. To me that’s interesting to hear that they had experience programming or they had experience building companies. It’s not just day one they launch and everything works out beautifully. It might seem that way to the world but really when you dig in you find out, no, they had all this preparation years and years of failure, but they didn’t consider it failure because they were just kids. Then they built up their first business. I ask about the first business, the second, and so on.

Anyway, that’s the outline that I use for the biographical interview. To prepare for that is pretty easy. I’d go on LinkedIn, or I go on the bio of their website, or I look for some press, and I see step-by-step what did they do in their careers, and I also accept that there are certain things I’m not going to know online. I’m not going to be able to find out what their first business was, and I come to the interview with curiosity about that, and that comes out in the interview. I sometimes will, if I’m a little suspicious about what a person is saying in his biography, in fact I always am, I’ll go back and I’ll look for old articles from the time that we’re going to be discussing. So if he says that he founded Microsoft, I’m going to go back to the years when Microsoft launched and look for articles about Microsoft and see is there a reference to a third founder of Microsoft, for example, and that will help me come up with questions. So that’s one outline.

The other outline that I use is the educational interview. There I might want to say, “How can you launch a successful internet company?” for example. I did an interview yesterday with David Cohen, a guy who runs TechStars, a seed investment firm and who wrote a book recently called — what is the book called? More Faster Now — ah, I can’t remember the name, but it’s a really good book, and he was teaching what he teaches entrepreneurs that he backs. Well, what I did there was I said, “Okay. What are the big ideas that he has in that book?” Well, he actually did the work for me. He took all his big messages to founders, and he broke them down into what he called Seven Themes. I wrote out all Seven Themes.

I said, “Okay. Now I know what the Seven Themes are.” It’s not interesting to hear that an idea isn’t enough. That’s one of the themes. It’s interesting to hear a story that shows why an idea isn’t enough. So I’ll look for that story to prod him if I find an interesting story or maybe before the interview I’ll have a quick conversation. I’ll say, “Listen, I need a good story to explain this one point. Do you have one? Let’s talk about that a little bit. All right. But let’s not talk too much so we can keep it fresh.” That’s how I prepare for those kinds of interviews.

Tim Bourquin: Do you send them questions prior to the interview?

Andrew Warner: Some people had sent me questions prior to the interview, and I’ll be honest with you, I never look at them. I got too much going on in my life, and who wants to do homework by reading questions? What I really want to know is as a person who’s going to be interviewed is where is this going? What is this about? So before our interview, I asked you that, and you said, “Look, what I want to know is how do you get interviewees, how do you draw them out, how do you get sponsorship, we talked a little bit about traffic. That’s the big idea that I know we’re going to be talking about, and I can prepare for, and maybe I can add, “Hey, Tim, we should talk about getting traffic.”

That’s what most guests want. They don’t want a list of questions, and you don’t want to prepare a list of questions and be obligated like a robot to go through them step-by-step. I just want to have a natural conversation. So instead of writing out the questions and doing homework yourself and send it to them, what I think helps is to say, “This is going to be an interview about your business biography; how you got here and what you’ve built to get here, or this is going to be an interview teaching how to raise funding, and I’ll be using the seven techniques that you talked about in your book.” That’s all they want. That’s all you should give them, and I think that helps a lot.

Having said that, here’s what helps my interviews do really well. I always write out that first question. I’m not married to it, but that first question will get the audience interested, that first question if it’s done right, will get my guest to feel confident, puff out his chest, and say, “Yes, I do deserve to be interviewed. I do have a life that’s worth talking about, and I answered that first question so well, that now I know the rest of the interview. I can knock this out of the park for Andrew.” So that’s my advice for people who are doing interviews.

One more thing, David Cohen’s book which he co-authored with Brad Feld is Do More Faster. I just looked it up.

Tim Bourquin: Got it, Do More Faster. Okay. I knew it was something about faster in there for sure. Well, you’re known for asking the tough questions and not just the tough questions. You don’t let somebody gloss over the answer. If you want an answer to something and they kind of give you the CNBC 30-second PR formatted answer, you don’t let that slip. You say — you ask the question again and again. And one of your favorite questions is, “How much money are you making?” which I think is hilarious because not a lot of people ask it. It’s not the most comfortable question. How do you get people to open up, and what’s the balance between pushing them to answer the question really legitimately and not the PR formatted junk, but the real true answer without feeling like, you know, you’re got to piss the guest off?

Andrew Warner: I’ve got a little mute button here on the mic. When I started I had that mute button too, and when I asked the question that I was embarrassed to ask, it was just a ballsy question, I would — we weren’t doing video back then. I would ask the question and then I’d hit the mute button so that I wouldn’t go back and say, “Oh, but you don’t have to answer. It’s okay.” I just would ask it and then hit the mute button and shut up. If you do that, people will very often just give you the answer. We’re just kind of trained that way somehow. You know, when you walk into a used car sale, in fact to any car salesman’s office, and he asks you, “What do you want to pay?” he shuts up. When a good negotiator says, “What do you think is a fair price?” they just shut up. They don’t negotiate with themselves by saying, “Well, because $18,000 is a good price. I gave someone else $17,000 before, and I’m willing to go to $16,000 but no lower than $15,000.” No. They say, “What do you think is a good price?” and then they shut up. The same thing with me. I just had to train myself to do that and shut up.

Having said that, by asking people over and over now how much money do they make, people now will send me their finances before the interviews. People now before the interviews will tell me, “I’m willing to have this kind of conversation with you, and I know I’m coming on, and I’m going to be talking about this.” So it becomes an accepted part of my work. But I also don’t — I don’t become a jerk about it. I’m not doing gotcha journalism. I’m not trying to show that this guy is a fool. I really come in there with a sincere need to learn and a sincere reverence for my guest. I’m doing these interviews of people who I admire because I don’t want to sit on the sidelines and read about them in Forbes Magazine or Fortune Magazine. I want to go in there and jump into the conversation. I don’t want to just read Seth Godin’s book and say, “Ooh, that’s a good marketing idea. That’s terrific.” I want to say, “Hey, Seth, this doesn’t seem to make sense when I compare it to what Ted Turner did or what Sam Walton did.” I want to go in and that question and sincerely get the answer and really dig into life. So people understand that I have that sincerity.

Tim Bourquin: I guess the tendency for a lot of people is the bigger the guest, the more you want to treat them with kid gloves, but you can’t do it, right? You should be interviewing them the same way you’re interviewing the guy that maybe just sold this company but nobody’s ever heard of. Would you agree with that?

Andrew Warner: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Now, I think that we’re going to say this to people, and you’d be a great advice in your interviews and on your site. But they’re still going to make mistakes. The best thing I think to do is to just keep setting up new interviews. Don’t give yourself when you make a mistake and you realize, “Oh, Tim, just said I shouldn’t be doing this. I shouldn’t treat this guy with kid gloves and I did. I wussed out here.” What you need to do is just set one interview and then set another one. Before you even do that first interview, set another one right after that, and then before you do the second interview set up a third one. So just keep yourself going and going and going and going and going.

If you watch the — my favorite interviewer, he’s Charlie Rose. Everybody admires Charlie Rose in the business. He’s terrific, right? But in the early days they’ll tell you he barreled on with his questions. He was so long-winded but he was on PBS. Who knows what’s on PBS? Who was watching him even back then? So people didn’t really see all these mistakes. He got some time to learn and before that, he was interviewing man on the street interviews, and nobody saw the dopey questions he was asking then. But he just kept getting better and better and better. He was so bad at one point with his long-winded questions, that Saturday Night Live did a piece on him where they were making fun of his long-winded questions and a guest said, “Get the question out already.”

Today you watch him and one of his best questions is or one of — it’s not even a question so much, but someone will make a statement and he’ll say, “Because…” one word and he’d draw them out. He didn’t just get that way overnight. He got that way by interviewing man on the street, by doing long-winded questions that got him laughed at by Saturday Night Live, by being on PBS before people were watching him on PBS and eventually got better and better. So my ultimate, ultimate piece of advice here, just do it a lot. Do it a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot.

Tim Bourquin: Now, I like Charlie Rose as well, except I tend to feel that Charlie Rose interrupts his guests quite a bit, and I’m wondering when do you feel like interrupting is the right way if your guest is just getting off track?

Andrew Warner: I have a hard time because I’m using Skype video and it’s like a CB radio. It’s like “Breaker, breaker. I have a question for you. Over.” And this person has to answer the question and then I’d say, “Oh,” and I have a follow-up question. And if I try to interrupt, there’s a whole lot of “Oh, what did you say? Oh.” There was a lag. It’s really frustrating. I’d much rather do it live, and I think even the rhythm here that we’re having in this conversation is better because it’s on the phone, and there isn’t the lag. If I didn’t have the lag, I would do a lot more interrupting. And the way that I would interrupt and the way that I do it even now is to say, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I got to just dig into what you said” or “I’m sorry to interrupt, but what you said is just too fascinating. We got to go back to what you said before” or I say, “Look, this is my passion, to study business. You just glossed over the first 10 years of your career. I got to go back and find out. How did you get that first customer?”

Most people will understand if you say, “I’m interrupting not because I’m a jerk, but I’m interrupting because I’m so fascinated by what you said that I can’t let it go.” They’ll understand. So that’s the big thing that I do. Then I also often because of the lag I have to keep explaining to guests, “There’s going to be a lag. It’s going to sound like you’re interrupting me and I’m interrupting you. We just have to accept that the technology is like that today.” You know what? When I watched MTV for the first time years ago, some people in the audience might remember, MTV now is just so professional. Everything is terrific. They used to have their version of the farewell. They had a big screen that came on that would say, “Sorry. We’re having technical difficulties. We can’t make this work right now.” There was no MTV because they had technical difficulties. Can you imagine that today? Of course not.

Well, we’re in the world of MTV in the early days here with interviews. But MTV stuck around. They got out there first. They built up their audience, their reputation, their brand, their experience. Look at where they are today. Same thing now. I’m getting in here when the technology is a little bit weird, when it’s not all perfect, when the audience doesn’t fully get what podcasting is. But I just keep building and building and building and building along with the industry.

Tim Bourquin: When you do have technical difficulties, I like that you don’t sit there and apologize for five minutes and then restart. You just dive right back into it.

Andrew Warner: I’m getting better and better at that, yeah, and then I just piece it back together. One of my issues is that I refuse to do heavy editing on my interviews because editing takes forever, and then it’s not a passion inspiring job. You sit there and you edit and you start to think, “Well, if I edited that, do I need to edit this?” And now my life is editing. Who gets up in the morning going, “Yay! I get to edit.” Maybe some people, not me. I say, “Yay! I get to ask great questions, and I get to have good feedback from the audience, and I get to watch my tribe grow.” So I just say, “Look, I’m going to end the interview.” I’m going to say, “We’re having technical difficulties. I have to deal with it” or if the interview broke off when we come back I say, “Ah, we lost the connection. These guys here are having terrible internet. But the question that I ask is –,” and I go into that.

Tim Bourquin: That brings up and it wasn’t on my list of questions, but you bring up a point about outsourcing that triggered my mind. I would love to outsource the editing of my interviews, but I just feel like nobody else would know what’s the important stuff and what’s not. So I end up doing it myself as well. What are your thoughts there?

Andrew Warner: I can’t even tell what’s the important stuff and what’s not. It’s really tough. I think that for me, when I listen to your interviews, I want more. If I’m listening — I think your interviews usually go — is it 20 minutes or so, half hour?

Tim Bourquin: Yeah, 20 minutes to half hour. I mean this one is going to go longer. Maybe I’ll break it up into two, but I kind of find like 20 minutes is my sweet spot.

Andrew Warner: I think the opposite.

creating content, online entrepreneurs Andrew Warner, Mixergy