He is a father of 3, entrepreneur, blogger, speaker, and digital marketing consultant. However, Dustin’s career started with acting.
Read about his journey from graduating from an acting conservatory to becoming a social media marketing expert, who turned to be a successful WordPress entrepreneur.
The first step to becoming an entrepreneur
Dustin likes to think of his beginnings as an actor as like being an entrepreneur. “As an actor, you are your own brand, your own business trying to get the next client, the next role. You like to work for yourself, go out, and make things happen.”
Lao Tzu once said: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Once you take that first step in life, an unexpected sequence of events can occur. For Dustin, it all started after graduation. He was approached by a business opportunity that ignited the spirit of becoming a business owner. Working at his own time was very appealing to him. From that moment, one thing led to another.
In 2009, Dustin went to the conference with Michael Hyatt to learn about blogging and social media. Then, working for a church as a youth pastor wanting to reach his teenage audience, he started diving into social media more. As a result, he started blogging about what he was learning, and people started asking for his business advice.
Social Warfare Plugin
Fast forward, Dustin started seriously blogging in 2011 and was also named (twice) by the leading online Social Media Publication, Social Media Examiner as one of their Top 10 Social Media Blogs.
It was the year 2014, he was invited to Social Media Marketing World conference, quit his job, went full time with consulting, and launched the Social Warfare plugin, along with a couple of friends. Quite a year!
“As a WordPress designer, I hated the look of social sharing buttons. All social sharing plugins out there were garbage, they killed page load time. They didn’t do anything intelligent, and they were mostly ugly and junky, so I had this idea to design my own social share buttons.”
Long story short, they developed a social sharing plugin called Social Warfare. They had 300 beta testers and launched the product in 2014. That was Dustin’s first product. It might seem to be a fast and easy success, but it wasn’t.
“For three years, we were developing relationships and building these networks on Google+. Not doing much of anything. During that time, I was struggling to feed my family. It was a long road, but we managed to launch successfully, because of the relationship we built and the investment we made into our friends. And because we cared about the problem we were solving.”
The recipe for success?
Becoming a successful entrepreneur does not happen overnight. The truth is, behind every success is continuing failure. For Dustin, every failure is a learning opportunity.
“I had many personal failures, business ideas, attempts of products that did not turn well. To be an entrepreneur, you have to have the ability and the stamina, and the thick skin to face failure after failure and use it to make either your vision more clear or your product better. In some cases, you have to abandon the product, because it’s just not a good idea.
I had to abandon several products because the timing was wrong, or the product was not great. September last year, I had a product. It was a WordPress plugin, and it was ready to launch. I spent three years trying to get this thing to build and find the right partner to build it with. Finally, it was almost ready, and by the time it was almost ready, the market had changed so much. We missed the opportunity.”
As they say, failure is only a detour…
Social Remix, the app for content creators that saves hours of work
Besides actively blogging and consulting multiple clients, Dustin is currently working on something very exciting! At the time of our interview in June, Dustin and the team started developing it. It’s called Social Remix, a standalone web app that integrates with WordPress.
In fact, hear what Dustin himself says about it:
“What I can say is that it’s gonna make content creators’ lives so much easier. It will save them hundreds of hours, creating remixes of their own content. If you go to socialremix.co right now, you can see, the very first version of the product is free to use. It allows you to create multiple social media posts within a minute.
This very simple tool that I created gives you the ability to create what we call campaigns. All the campaign is ten text inputs. It tells you what to do: type the title, description, the question that the article answers, paste the quote..you go through it all.
It takes you a minute. You already know the article, the information. You hit generate button and instantly you have 30 different social media posts that it generates for you that you can copy and paste. As a result, you have 30 days worth of promotional content.”
Isn’t that a great idea? We love it and we hope you’ll love it too! If you are a content creator, give it a try and let us or Dustin know how he is doing!
Dustin’s journey with Ninja Forms
Like many WordPress users, Dustin started with Contact Form 7. Then somehow, many years ago came across Ninja Forms. “I think just the simplicity attracted me to it, and the fact that the visual experience is great. When the add-ons started to come out, they helped my life.
Ninja Forms has been my primary tool for opt-ins. Most of my success came from the free stuff I gave away. When I wanted to give away free stuff, Ninja Forms made it easy for me to make a new form when I had another new thing to give away.
What I loved about it is that integrates with whatever email marketing system I am using. When I got to the point when I had 20 different opt-in forms over the place, it made my life extremely easy. So yeah Ninja Forms have always been great!”
Can you create a minimal version of Twitter with Ninja Forms? Yes, you can!
Dustin had an idea. How cool it would be to own Twitter that you can control. As a result, the idea of Post Things was born. While he was making a private blog for himself, he wanted it to look like a Twitter, as he loves the esthetic and the simplicity of it. So he created a minimal WordPress theme, a tweet theme just for himself.
One day, Dustin noticed in one of our emails the Front-End Posting and wondered what he can use it for. Immediately, it hit him.
“I could use the Front-End Posting to essentially allow people to post as if we were on Twitter. It got my gears turning. Could I create my own Twitter just using this add-on?
Sure enough within two hours, I have built my own version of Twitter! Missing a whole lot of features, but the core functionality was there. Originally, I had it that you did not have to even sign up. Someone could just land on the site and post things. And that was where the name came from.
This is just something fun for me to work on and play social network overlord for a while, but the concept is actually something I am still thinking of using for the Social Remix.
When I do eventually create a community for this product when is ready to launch, this might be an easy way to just implement community on the subdomain and have your own sort of Twitter for our users chatting between each other and replying.”
We think what he did was really cool, and we wanted to share that with you. If you want to see how this mini version of Twitter looks like, check it here.
Want to learn more about Social Media, Blogging, and Design?
Dustin learned how to make a living from doing things he loves. Let him teach you the same! Take his course Visual Content Mastery, where he teaches non-designers how to create eye-catching and highly effective visual content for social media and blogs.
You can also connect with him on Twitter @DustinWStout or visit his website, where he runs his successful blog with insider tips on Social Media, Content Marketing, Blogging, and Design.
If you are a content creator, make sure to try his new product called Social Remix too! It’s free to use, and helps you save hours by turning one blog post into 30 social posts in seconds! Pretty cool, right?
Thank you, Dustin, for finding the time in your busy schedule for this interview, and we wish you the best of luck in your personal, and professional life as an entrepreneur!
