EO Fire 1339

Never give equity in your company to someone who has skills that you can simply hire and fire.

Hey Fire Nation and welcome to EO Fire, where I chat with inspiring entrepreneurs 7 days a week.

If you're ready to set and accomplish your number one goal in 100 days, text journal to 33444 and ignite.

Boom! Shake the room Fire Nation, JLD here and I am fired up. To bring you our featured guest today, Janna Francis, Janna, are you prepared to ignite?

I am so ready. Yes!

Janna is the founder of the Daily Deal website Steels.com. Founded in 2008, she turned her idea into a multi-million dollar enterprise without loans or investors.

She's an entrepreneur of the year finalist in Utah, a mom of three and known for using social media to create genuine relationships with her fans.

Janna, take a minute, fill in some gaps from that in-john. Give us just a little glimpse in your personal life.

Sure. So I started the business in 2008. So we're actually ironically, this Thursday is the eight-year anniversary starting the business.

And I started the business with nothing but $5,000, a dream and a desktop computer.

And it's kind of crazy to look back and see how far we've come in these eight years.

I'm very reflective this week because of that impending anniversary. We're doing lots of celebrations on our website for what we call Birthday Week.

It's fun to celebrate that with our customers alike.

And that's why I love doing what I do because I get to talk to people like you, Janna, who have literally started just less than even a decade ago with just a laptop and an idea and what you've grown into now is so exciting.

All while being, by the way, Fire Nation, a mom of three. So really cool stuff on a lot of levels. Now I do have to say, even though 2008 was eight years ago, I can't imagine that Steels.com was available as a URL.

Can you quickly tell us how you acquired that domain?

Yes. So when I first started the company, I started with just babysteels.com.

So I'll talk about the idea behind why I created it. But when I started with just baby Steels, I did not have Steels.com.

Exactly right. It was taken at the time. But it wasn't necessarily being used. It was just maybe like an affiliate. It was just like a little affiliate site. There really wasn't any business behind it of any kind. But it was taken.

So at the night before I launched babysteels.com, I thought to myself, you know, we're going to start getting a lot of attention around once we get started, people will start thinking, oh, well, baby Steels is cool.

So I'll start one for crafting or whatever. And so I ended up buying hundreds of domains that Steels. Yes. The night before I launched. And we continue to buy domains to this day. We have about 340, I think at this point.

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