Today's Guest

Maayan Gordon has 10+ years in digital marketing, founded four successful businesses, 1+ billion video views, and 2+ million followers on social media. Maayan shares how she went from starving and homeless to creating multiple successful businesses. She also talked about her struggles with mental health challenges and how she was able to work through those issues to become a more resilient businesswoman.

Episode Transcript

(Please excuse grammatical errors due to transcription)

Gordon Henry:             Hey, hey, this is Gordon Henry at Winning on Main Street and this week we're fortunate to meet Maayan Gordon. Welcome to the show, Maayan.

Maayan Gordon:          Thanks for having me.

Gordon Henry:             So quick intro on Maayan. Maayan is a famous TikTok glassblower who has overcome tremendous adversity in her life from mental health challenges during her childhood to a gas explosion and homelessness when she was 19.

                                   She's used her drive and entrepreneurial skills to start several companies. Today she owns and operates the glass blowing studio called Monkey Boy Art. We'll get into all that. She has over two million followers on TikTok and offers consulting services to companies to help them on social media and other areas.

                                   What should listeners get out of this episode? There are many routes to success. Mayan story is unique and by her own account her life has been an incredible journey that's taken her to the highest of highs, lowest of lows from struggling with mental health to living the life of her dream. She wants to share her story with you. So Maayan, let's get into it.

Maayan Gordon:          Absolutely.

Gordon Henry:             Let's start with your personal development growing up and then we'll get into your business career. What was your household like, your family? Where did you live? What was school like for you? Take us through kind of your early years.

Maayan Gordon:          Yeah, so I grew up in Seattle, Washington. I was actually born in Providence, Rhode Island, but my family moved cross country when I was two years old. So I have zero memories from my east coast days. Grew up in Seattle, Washington until I was 18 and then went to college down in Southern California for a little bit.

                                   I'm the oldest of four kids. So my parents had me when they were fairly young. My mom was 20, my dad was 21 when they had me. Grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family, so that was certainly very unique. It was really focused on, I would say, family, community, and education. Those were kind of like the three pillars in my life.

                                   I went to a private Jewish school until I was in sixth grade, so that was a school that was very, very small. We had one class per grade, so I was hanging out with the exact same kids all the time. Really, I would describe it as a sheltered life. So I thought the whole world was my very, very small world and I just wasn't aware of so many things that existed in life outside of that very small little Jewish community.

                                   And my mom is a neurobiologist and my dad's a PhD midwife. So both of my parents are in science, but also both have very unique jobs and had unique kind of career paths for the time. I'm 31 for people who are confused. Am I 19? Am I 40? I'm [inaudible 00:03:35].

Gordon Henry:             You do look young. You do look young for your age, yeah.

Maayan Gordon:          Yeah, I look really young.

                                   And so for them growing up there really wasn't the internet. The internet wasn't a viable option for facilitating business or any type of personal or professional growth.

                                   When I was growing up, high school, the internet really started kicking in and kind of gaining momentum in terms of not only social media but how it was used for businesses. And I was fortunate enough because my parents were heavily focused on education to get some really early like HTML website building classes.

                                   I learned how to use Photoshop when Photoshop was new on the scene and this really exciting complicated tool. So I got a taste of using laptops, using the internet very early and using it for a productive purpose. Not just entertainment, but using it to write essays and submit my homework.

                                   So I went to a high school kind of after these Jewish private schools. I started playing basketball. That kind of broke me out of being super orthodox because all our games were on Saturday. And just also as I got into my teen years, I was very rebellious against any type of rules and any type of religious orthodox gets heavy with, you can't do this, you can't do this, you got to do this. So I rebelled pretty hard in high school, started playing sports, started trying to break out of that bubble that I was in.

                                   And the high school I went to was really, really incredible, Lakeside school in Seattle. It's where-

Gordon Henry:             Sure.

Maayan Gordon:          ... Bill Gates and Paul Allen and many other very accomplished alumni have gone. And it gave me some incredibly valuable skillsets including how to write really, really well, how to analyze information and where the information was coming from and looking at information bias. And I would say the third one was understanding really how methodologies help you in business.

                                   Yes, I learned specific ones, but how just the concept of having a method to run something through was guaranteed to make whatever I was doing more successful. And those were things that I really have taken with me and have been really valuable for me on my career path as well as the personal side. Having a system to work through whatever it is you're working through, I think is one of the most valuable things that any of us can do.

Gordon Henry:             Well thank you. That's a great summary. And all that sounds pretty sort of linear in the sense of you had a strong family, you got into sports, you rebelled a little bit, went to this great high school, but it wasn't all smooth, right? It wasn't all easygoing?

Maayan Gordon:          Right.

Gordon Henry:             You ran into some problems along the way as a kid, right?

Maayan Gordon:          Yeah.

Gordon Henry:             Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Maayan Gordon:          Yeah. And honestly I didn't really realize this until probably two to three years ago. So because I grew up with a family where my parents were happily married, we certainly weren't high income, but we weren't low income. I'd say we were lower middle class in terms of finances and there was just nothing from the outside where you'd go, oh, I'm having a hard life or should be having a hard time.

                                   So that was, as people ask me about my life after I left home, that's kind of what I always say. Had a great childhood. That was the summary. Had a great childhood. And it wasn't until I really kind of dove past a lot of personal layers and started sharing more of my story in a way where I was really looking at the individual components of my life and my story. And as also I was focusing more and more on learning and educating around mental health and emotional health that I realized even though on the outside it was a perfect, let's say, childhood internally I suffered consistently the entire childhood.

                                   And I think this is probably a much, much more common experience than we talk about in society. But simply the fact that I couldn't choose my own direction made me very anxious all the time inside because it created this disconnect between who I saw myself as and who I had to portray myself as being in every scenario. So in school you have to be a certain way to get good grades, to have the teachers like you, to have kids like you socially. You have to act and behave in a certain manner.

                                   And so same thing with my parents. Even though I felt very supported by my parents, I felt that my parents loved me. I knew that I never questioned whether or not my parents really, really loved me, but they also wanted me to be this way. And I felt deep at my core I was this way, or at least I wanted to try doing things that I wasn't allowed to do that were completely off limits. And I felt that part of who I was, was wanting to explore those things.

                                   And so it created this disconnect where I had to maintain multiple identities. The self that I really felt I was but had no opportunity to explore and learn about and the self that society and all of the societal elements, my family unit, my school unit, my friend unit expected and wanted me to be. And so that created a lot of, I would say, emotional turmoil.

Gordon Henry:             So what led up to you at some point had this gas explosion that was a tremendous thing in your life? Obviously bad, not a positive thing that caused a lot of changes in your life, right?

Maayan Gordon:          Yeah. So actually one of the things that I try and do now is not label things as good or bad in terms of incidences. Because yes, was it horrible to go through? Yes. Was it also one of the best things that ever happened to me because of what resulted from it? Yes. So I think things can be both wonderful and horrible at the same time. Things aren't generally bad or good.

                                   So for me, I went to college because I thought it was the only option to get a job that was going to pay me to live a comfortable life. That was kind of the messaging from adults and my parents is get a degree so you can get a job that pays you enough to not be in poverty. So I went to college, was really, really disappointed in the academic stimulation, but dropped out because I had started copywriting and finding that I could make more money than with a degree in a starting position for what I was going for.

                                   So a starting vet tech probably was going to make $15 an hour. I was making $20 to $30 an hour freelance copywriting without a degree just cause I was good at it. And so I decided to go on this off the tracks and just explore and see what the opportunities were. And I had this kind of stable career path for the time being of writing.

                                   So I dropped out of college, moved in with my boyfriend at the time, who's currently my husband. Things were going great. I thought I'd figured out life. I'd figured out all these secrets. I could work from home. So this was way before work from home was a thing, but I was working from home. We were young, I was 18, 19. And we were smoking a lot of weed because we grew up in Seattle, Washington and that's a big part of the youth culture there.

                                   Me and my husband both started when we were in high school. So just kind of continued into college and our adult years. And in Seattle, Washington, they had just discovered that you could basically make marijuana concentrate. So you could take a bunch of marijuana flower and leaf, you could run some butane through it, kind of the butane you'd fill your lighter up with and then you could evaporate the butane and you're left with concentrated THC.

                                   So we were all doing this kind of at our friend's house and in our backyards. And over time when we did it in our backyard, because butane is a heavier than air gas, it would back draft into our house even though we were doing it outside. And it would just sit there because it doesn't evaporate. It doesn't go anywhere. Once it's inside of a room, there's just no nowhere for it to go.

                                   You can't smell it, you can't see it, you can't taste it in the air. And so over the course of several months it kind of built up and one day we were cooking in our kitchen and just, boom, the whole place. We heard this loud bang. We looked and we were several feet back from where we were standing.

                                   It was honestly one of the most confusing situations that I've ever been in because it happened so fast. You can't see it happening. It's not like in the movies where it's this big fireball that you can observe. It's just instantaneous, it's loud, it's concussive, and then it's done. And nothing caught on fire in the flash of when it happened.

                                   So again, horrible experience. But the great thing that came out of it was it really shattered my ego to an extent. And so when I say ego, I don't mean the egotistical part of me, I mean a sense of identity. So our ego is our identity. The concept of Maayan was shattered and it allowed me to look at how shoddily I had built it in the first.

Gordon Henry:             So now you've gone from a stable, maybe not prosperous, but a stable family in the Seattle area, a prestigious high school, Lakeside. You go off to college. You go through some changes while you're in college, as many kids do. You end up dropping out. You're now living with your boyfriend now husband. You have this explosion that results from cooking marijuana, however you want to describe that. And you're living in an RV down in Los Angeles with a couple of dogs.

                                   Sounds from an outsider's perspective like that would be a pretty low period for you. Maybe you saw it as transitional. But how do you then move from that to future entrepreneur? What was the business that you got started? How did you get started in entrepreneurship?

Maayan Gordon:          The first business was a product we made called diffuser beads. And they were basically Airsoft BBs that we bought in bulk and repackaged to sell directly to smoke shops and stoners to put in their bongs. So we took kind of the area that we knew a lot about. We were like, "We know a lot about marijuana's. Let's go there." And again, it was a really booming. Still is. But back then, 2011, 2012, the cannabis scene was really starting to become more of a business industry. It was a ripe industry for selling products into.

                                   So I've always had really good intuition around opportunity and arbitrage. And so all throughout my career using arbitrage and leverage has really helped me in a significant way. So we were in southern California in LA, luckily very resource rich. It was easy for us to see, what are all the manufacturers that are around here?

                                   So we just honestly looked at who manufactures stuff, because we knew if we got it from a manufacturer the pricing would be as low as we could get it. And then we could mark it up and sell it either wholesale or direct to customer. So we just looked around until we found this company that we could buy these 250,000 bead bags for a hundred dollars for these Airsoft BBs.

                                   And then we found another company locally that made bottles and cans and jars. And so we used all the rest of our money. We were able to buy 30 little plastic jars. Went to Office Depot, bought address labels, and used those as our product labels. And just typed them up and printed them out at the [inaudible 00:15:54].

Gordon Henry:             How did you sell them? How did you sell the stuff?

Maayan Gordon:          So at first we walked in person into stores. So because we didn't have money left for a box, we got a free flat rate shipping box from the post office. We put the 36 jars in there and we walked I think to five different smoke shops before one of them purchased all the jars.

Gordon Henry:             Okay. So you're basically going door to door-

Maayan Gordon:          Door to door, to start.

Gordon Henry:             ... old fashioned selling it that way?

Maayan Gordon:          Yeah.

Gordon Henry:             Okay. And at some point then, do you expand and build a new business? Because I want to hear about the glass blowing. You get into the glass blowing, right?

Maayan Gordon:          Yep. So I'll kind of quickly through that business. Once we saw that the proof of concept worked, then I built a WordPress website because that was something I knew how to do. I listed on Amazon. Also, knew how to do that. And then I started in Instagram and realized, because we did cold calling every single day to smoke shops and with just the website, because it was a new product people had never heard of, they were a little too skeptical to make the purchase.

                                   But with the website and the Instagram together, people were willing to order on the phone call, give us their card info and have it shipped out, because one, the website made us look legit. Two, the Instagram provided a great kind of visual feed.

                                   And this was back when WordPress couldn't host a picture gallery very well. It would take a long time to load. And so Instagram was an incredible way to have a photo gallery and people could comment and say, "These are really cool." And so there was social proof that their customers who shop at their shop already wanted our product.

Gordon Henry:             Okay.

Maayan Gordon:          That went really well until it went so well that we were spending our entire day filling jars with beads. Because the thing was these big packages had a bunch of little garbage plastic pieces in them that we had to sort through. And so I hated filling jars with beads. It was very boring.

                                   So once it was successful, cause I didn't have any business education, I didn't know how to hire people or scale past my own kind of work. I said, "I'm done with this. I'm going to start a new business that's more fun."

                                   So second business was sticker printing, graphic design, and t-shirts. Insane thing happened. Went really well. I was able to use social media to generate sales and have it kick off. But then it was doing really well and all I was doing was cutting stickers and peeling the vinyl away from T-shirt designs. And that got really boring and I hated doing that.

                                   So third business was glass blowing. I really didn't think I was going to do it as a business, but the first time I took a lesson I fell in love with it. And also in the sticker business, I'd been doing a lot of barter. So I would trade custom stickers for glass art pieces. And then I would turn around and I would sell the art pieces.

                                   I was doing a wholesale to wholesale trade. So I would sell a hundred pack of stickers for let's say $50, and I would get a $100 worth of retail in glass. So then I could turn around, sell the glass really quickly for $70 because now it was discounted to the public, but still more than I would've gotten for the stickers wholesale. So that took off really, really well.

                                   We started crushing it on Instagram. First three years were just on Instagram. I ran auctions off Instagram. I create all of these really cool marketing dynamics to have our customers come back and buy pieces again and again. And that business really I think taught me a ton about marketing, sales, and a lot of things that helped on the retail side, not just the social media side.

                                   But then 2018 hit. Instagram switched up as all platforms do. They mature and then they stopped giving you free organic reach and they want you to pay to boost posts. And so that happened to us on Instagram. We went from tens of thousands of new people seeing us every month to a couple hundred at max. And so our revenue dropped by 50% in I want to say like two months. So really, really quickly our revenue dropped.

Gordon Henry:             All because of an algorithm change at Instagram?

Maayan Gordon:          Yep, exactly.

Gordon Henry:             Yeah, yeah.

Maayan Gordon:          And because again, being young, I kind of had this attitude of once I figure stuff out I've got it figured out forever. And again, the world changed more slowly back then. So I think I hadn't caught up to the fact or realized that because of the internet and the speed at which technology exponentially increases, that was going to happen with business in general.

Gordon Henry:             Sure. Sure.

Maayan Gordon:          Business was going to start changing faster and faster.

Gordon Henry:             So what happens? The algorithm changes, your business drops, big adversity there. What happens? What do you do to deal with that?

Maayan Gordon:          Yeah, I find new platforms. I go, "Okay, this space is not going to facilitate growth. What's a new space that I can find that is going to be more conducive to that?" And TikTok and LinkedIn were two platforms that I tested out that took off really well for me. So TikTok, I had a video get millions of views overnight within the first two weeks of posting. I hadn't even figured out how the platform really had worked and all of a sudden I was getting thousands of comments.

Gordon Henry:             That sounds to me like incredible overnight success. What did you do to make yourself a TikTok star overnight?

Maayan Gordon:          Yeah, so really it was the eight years of being on Instagram first that allowed me to have that overnight success on TikTok. So it was looking at which aspects of photo and video from a visual perspective were engaging to people. So really looking at which colors, like was there a certain color that made a post perform better? Pink and purple and orange are big in terms of that. But all of these little dynamics and then layering them on top of each other.

Gordon Henry:             And these were glass blowing videos?

Maayan Gordon:          These were glass blowing videos, yes.

Gordon Henry:             Okay.

Maayan Gordon:          So I think that was helpful because glass is really hard to photograph and video. And so it forced me into that mindset. How do I just make this look as good on film as it does in real life?

Gordon Henry:             Okay.

Maayan Gordon:          And that made me aware that our content oftentimes is bad simply because, or not bad, but it's not as good as our experience in real life simply because of the visual quality.

Gordon Henry:             Okay. So the glass blowing was the big thing that kind of made you a star really, right?

Maayan Gordon:          Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Gordon Henry:             And that sounds like that all happened around four years ago. Is that business still exist today?

Maayan Gordon:          So I don't run the glassblowing business anymore. We're actually going to be relaunching as an art studio or an art gallery next("...") Well, 2024 after our trip. So art is always a business I'm going to be operating in, but the way that that business was built was not designed to be scalable because I didn't have any business education at that point. Whereas now I have a ton of business education to be able to design it in a way where it's going to be, I mean, more successful in every area, from scalability to customer engagement to employees to community impact.

Gordon Henry:             Okay. Well, the glass blowing though and the success with TikTok and maybe some of the other platforms led you to where you are, I think, right this minute, which is you were invited, I guess, by Hootsuite, the company to do this main Street America tour. Can you tell us a little bit about how that evolved?

Maayan Gordon:          Yeah, so that was all my idea.

Gordon Henry:             Okay.

Maayan Gordon:          I come up with these ideas and then I just make them happen.

Gordon Henry:             Okay.

Maayan Gordon:          So basically I started rethinking about how I am connected to business, like what motivates me about business, and for me it's really the people aspect and the community aspect. And so one was making the shift.

                                   While that was happening, me and my husband are getting to the point where we want to have kids soon, but we also have always wanted to travel the country. So came to the point where we're like, "Let's just decide to go on this trip" because we don't want to really do it when we have kids. It's going to be too much energy. So we picked the date and we gave ourselves a year. We kind of picked a date a year from where we were and said, "At least we'll have a year to plan, and we're just going to go do it."

                                   So was planning it, was planning it. As it's getting closer and closer to the date, I'm getting excited. So now I'm telling people that. "Hey, man, how's it going?" I go, "Great." "What's going on in your life right now?" "Well, I'm really excited. We're planning for this big RV trip we're going to be doing. We're going to sell our house. We're going to go travel around the country."

Gordon Henry:             Okay.

Maayan Gordon:          One of the people I talked to said, "That's really cool. I have a friend who did something similar. You should talk to them. Maybe they'll have some tips or info for you. And they got their trip sponsored." I went, "Oh." I hadn't thought about it as an option until that point. So had a conversation. After the conversation, I was firmly convinced in my mind that I could land a sponsorship and that it would be a win-win-win situation where everyone who was participating would get more out of it than they're putting into it.

                                   So I started telling people, and on social media was like posting, "Hey, were looking for a sponsor." But really how the Hootsuite sponsorship came to be was I was just scrolling on LinkedIn and I saw a post from Maggie who's the CMO of Hootsuite, and I commented on it. I sent her a connection request and I think it was just like, "Hey, I think you're a dope person. Your content's really cool". She connected with me, said, "Hey, thanks. I think your content's really cool. We're about to launch a LinkedIn live marketing series. Could we interview you for our first episode of that?" I was like, "Sure, no problem."

                                   Go on the interview, goes really well. Afterwards, a bunch of people from Hoot Suite reach out and connect with me and I send them messages saying, "Hey, thanks for watching. Let me know if there's anything I can do for you". And it really wasn't until halfway going through these messages that the idea popped into me. I was like, oh yeah, I'm looking for a sponsor. Maybe they would be a good sponsor since, similar to you guys, they're a software based platform that serves small businesses. There could be a lot of alignment there.

Gordon Henry:             What is the tour doing? What are you doing on the tour to help small businesses? When you get to a town and you're working with the small businesses, what do you actually do to help them?

Maayan Gordon:          So one is making purchases from them, so supporting them financially. Two is creating content and posting that content to my social media platforms. So again, I've got more than two million followers on TikTok. I've got 30,000 on Instagram and on LinkedIn. So bringing extra awareness to their business, I would say three, is empowering them. As a small business owner, it can be really lonely. Sometimes it can feel really stressful. It can feel like things are not going really well. So to have someone else say, "Hey, you're doing a great job. We see you. We think what you're doing is amazing", is really helpful.

                                   Four is specific help on their social media. So we do content ideas cause we give them a bunch of content ideas. We do content strategy, we do execution strategy, we do that kind of off the cuff, but also we'll schedule social media workshops. So here in Tuscaloosa we are doing one at a plant collective, like a nursery, and we're doing one with a coffee shop where sitting down with whoever runs their social media, sometimes the owner as well, we're saying, okay, let's go through your social media strategy and let's work on making it better.

Gordon Henry:             So we just have a few minutes left. Maa.

                                   Yan, I just wanted to ask you first, when does the trip end and what are your expectations for your future after the trip ends?

Maayan Gordon:          Yeah, so the trip ends at the end of 2023, so we've still got almost a little more than a year left on the trip. We've got the entire east coast. We've already done all the west side of the United States up until here and after the tour, me and my husband are looking to settle down into our forever home area. So part of the benefit of getting to do this trip is we get to see all the places we might want to live in the United States and experience those communities. So pick where we want to live and really become valuable members of that community.

                                   Again, I want to start up in art gallery. I think other things that we're going to be doing are continuing this main street, everything we've done with the Main Street tour online. So we'll continue shouting out small businesses. We just spent, I want to say five, six months building a website that's going to facilitate basically positive small business news stories. So being not only a news source for small businesses, but also having a ton of resources. So digitizing all of the stuff that we're doing on the tour that we're continually adding value to small businesses.

Gordon Henry:             Fantastic. What would you say to people who are beginning their journey in terms of what were some of the main lessons that you've learned that maybe have helped you along the way?

Maayan Gordon:          Yeah, I would say one of the main lessons I've learned is that emotions are an incredibly good thing, even the really negative emotions if you start to look at them through information. So if you start looking at emotions as information, then you can learn a lot from every emotional experience that you have. And it might sound weird, but the emotional experiences you have, have the smartest kind of data and intellectual insights hidden in them. And so every time I took time and energy and effort to focus on emotionally what was happening inside, there was always something that had to do with my business from it. So every time I figured out, man, I feel this negative way, here's how I deal with it. Oh my God, that's impacting how I message customers or that's impacting my motivation doing this particular activity. So don't separate your personal self from your business self, right? If they can work together and not be in opposition of each other, that's the most phenomenal, I think set up for success.

Gordon Henry:             Yeah, that's terrific. Well, I want to thank you so much for joining us. It's really been an interesting journey for you and sounds like you've gotten to a great place and for sharing your story with us. Thank you so much. How should people get in touch with you if they want to reach out to Maayan Gordon and kind of connect with you?

Maayan Gordon:          Yeah, so the best way if you want to reach out to me would be through LinkedIn. So you can just Google or search my name. I should be the first one that pops up there, or only one, hopefully. And then the other way is through my website. So it's just Maayan Gordon, my first name, last name, media.com is another great thing.

Gordon Henry:             Fantastic. Well, thanks for coming on the show, Maayan, great to have you here. And I want to thank our producer Tim Alleman, our coordinators Diette Barnett and Daniel Huddleston. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please tell your colleagues, friends and family to subscribe. Really appreciate it. Please leave us a five star review helps us in the rankings. Until next time, make it a great week.

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