Welcome to invest in yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. Join the podcast mogul Phil Better as he interviews successful entrepreneurs that makes your living in the digital world. Now let's join your host, Phil Better, and your special guest today on invest in yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Invest in Yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. I am, of course, your host with the most feel better. And today, I'm excited to have the founder of SMASH Go, a digital transformation coach and consultants company that Working with that works with businesses to embrace the online world and create a more profitable, scalable business. Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Nick Cree, Nick, welcome to the show.

Well, thank you for having me. It's good to be here early in the morning. We're in, down under Australia. Well, I think we're not quite down under. We're we're the other way around. It's just that, you know, we flip it on its head.

Yeah. You guys change you flip everything, the Aussies and Tasmanians and all you guys down there, you guys flip everything, business on its head and do things differently, which I love because Shane, it's outside of the box thinking, and so I'm so happy to have you here to share your knowledge, share your wisdom with my audience. So, again, thank you so much for being here.

Fantastic to hear. Actually, it's funny you should say that as well because I was talking to a friend of mine, just yesterday, and he said, oh, how come is it that, everyone goes to the US to, you know, get all their information. I said, oh, I'm not so sure that's right. I said, I think they like Aussies over in the US. And he said, yeah. That's really weird. I wonder why that is. And I said, well, it's probably because we get all the information from, the US to start with.

We turn it over, flip it on its head. We mold things, change things, and then we give it back to you guys. And you think it's from you.

K. Exactly. That's what I love about it. Because you guys see things, Everything from a different perspective because of where you got you are in the world and that. So I'm very excited. I want you just to do a quick introduction. Tell us a little bit about yourself, and SmashGo?

Well, yes. My name is Nick Cree. In fact, I was born on a little tiny island called Norfolk Island, which has got the reputation of of being Australia's worst prison. And I did like to tell people I was I was born in the worst prison in Australia. You know, that's That gives that sort of context of a real badass sort of story to, to start life with. But I have to say, with the time when I was born there, it was only captive for newlyweds and nearly dead. So it was a holiday tourist destination. But,

But I won't bore you about sort of

my journey from then until now, but, I started in the online world. Jeez. When was it? 1979? That was the first time I ever touched a computer, And, my first line of code was written on an old Sinclair Zed X 80 4 computer, so, look that one up. It'll be in the, Internet archive, somebody

I actually kind of know that because my dad worked with us.

Yeah. Well, thanks very much.

You're welcome. What can I do? Helping everyone out while I can.

Yeah. Well, look, I really got my start in the, digital world when I had a mortgage working company. I set it up and I thought I need a website. And this is back in, oh, geez, when is it? 2001? So, you know, the webs web world was still reasonably new. I knew nothing about it, and, oh, there we go. We had an American firm come out to, New Zealand. I was living in New Zealand at the time, They sold me a website package which cost me $10. So this is $10 back in 2001, and, it didn't even have a website.

I opened it up thinking, oh, great. I've got a website, but no. There's nothing. It was just a platform for me to create my website. So, and I had to learn how to do CSS code and HTML code. So that was just a, entry by fire into, all of that. And, and and my only experience of, websites, like, being in the mortgage banking industry, it was banks. And, you know, if you've seen bank websites, they are incredibly boring.

They've just got graphs on them and all sorts of stuff that nobody But economists and the banks themselves are interested in. So I thought I'm not building that there. And then I went to a, a seminar in the States, in San Francisco. And it was run by, Jay Abraham, who's a, you know, sort of a marketer over there. Well, well known market. We're certainly well known here. And, I ended up coming back to New Zealand, and I built a long, sales letter on a web page. That was my homepage.