This week Mike is excited to welcome Travis Steffen to #mikedup for an awesome conversation about entrepreneurship and growing your business. Travis is a serial entrepreneur with 8 successful exits to date across a variety of industries. He's gotten companies onto the Inc 500, is a published business author, and has written for or been featured in many of the top business publications on earth. Travis is also a doctoral candidate in marketing, and serves as a growth mentor for Silicon Valley's top accelerators.  Prior to entrepreneurship, Travis was a collegiate football player and professional MMA style fighter. In addition to his athletic prowess Travis has also been a professional online poker player. This combination of competitiveness paired with intellectual curiosity and rigor make Travis unique amongst founders giving him a winning combination of both competitive drive and cutting edge innovation. Travis shares his journey into entrepreneurship while addressing a number of pitfalls and lessons that he learned along the way. Listeners will discover some of the science behind rapidly growing your business and how diversifying your knowledge base and realms of curiosity can serve founders along their own journey. Travis identifies some of the key marketing strategies and “viral engines” that are implemented by both new ventures and fortune 500 companies alike. In addition Mike and Travis break down some of the misconceptions about viral marketing while establishing how the relationship between status and brands works in today's rapidly evolving world. By breaking down many of the key lessons that he has learned during his extraordinarily successful career Travis hopes to encourage entrepreneurs to find the courage to try new things while teaching them to be honest about what their product or service actually does and who it serves. By reflecting on a number of key principles that are also outlined in his book, Viral Hero: How To Build Viral Products, Turn Customers Into Marketers, And Achieve Superhuman Growth, Travis hopes to empower founders, small business owners, and everyday entrepreneurs with the tools necessary to succeed in world that is often filled with snake oil sales people, false gurus, and anti-education attitudes.   Connect with Travis:  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/travissteffen/?hl=en Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tsteffen/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TravisSteffen Book: Amazon Website: https://www.growthteam.co/   Connect with Mike: https://linktr.ee/mikedicioccio   Produced by Social Chameleon: https://www.socialchameleon.us   Interview Recorded via Riverside.fm: https://riverside.fm/homepage?utm_campaign=campaign_1&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=rewardful&via=mike-dicioccio   Mike’D Up! Merch: https://mikedupmerch.com