Ninety Percent Mental: Sifu Edward & Sifu Julliana Armstrong Sit Down With Paul Counts

Adapted from the recorded conversation; the guest's words are verbatim. The questions are reconstructed and voiced by Sifu Edward and Sifu Julliana Armstrong.

🎥 Video podcast coming soon. The complete interview will play here once published. The full conversation is transcribed below, and the audio edition will be available on sifuarmstrong.tv.

In a new Sifu Armstrong interview, the digital marketing veteran and movie producer argues that surviving two decades of a shifting industry has almost nothing to do with talent and everything to do with what happens between your ears.

Paul Counts started his first business at thirteen, emailing school athletic directors from a Hotmail account about custom t-shirts. Twenty-one years later, in conversation with Sifu Edward and Sifu Julliana Armstrong for the Warrior Intelligence Series, he traces the entire arc of that career back to one governing idea he returns to again and again.

“This business, just like any business, is 90% mental,” Counts said. He points to the arithmetic underneath any marketing campaign as the reason: if a strong conversion rate means one out of every ninety-nine people buy, then the job is absorbing ninety-eight rejections to reach a single yes. The people who quit, in his experience, aren’t the ones who lack skill. They’re the ones who lose that inner argument before the numbers have a chance to work in their favor.

That mental discipline, Counts said, is inseparable from a second habit he’s practiced since he was a broke college student working an 80-hour-a-week job and building his business on stolen minutes. “Make small, consistent steps of action,” he said. “Shut down all those excuses. There’s no better time to start than right now, because there’s never going to be the perfect time.” He still remembers the specifics of his own early wins (his first shirt order by email, his first ClickBank sale, his first PayPal sale), and insists that celebrating a first fifty dollars is what fuels the discipline to chase a bigger one.

Counts is equally direct about the industry’s biggest structural risk: depending on any single platform to reach an audience. Facebook, he said, “could shut you down on any point,” which is why he built Marketing Counts around one core asset instead, an email list a business actually owns rather than rents. It’s a lesson, he said, that cost him millions of dollars in the years before he learned it.

The same stubbornness carried him into an unrelated arena entirely, producing two feature films despite being told repeatedly it couldn’t be done on his budget or timeline. “It took a lot of stick-to-itiveness,” he said of finishing the first shoot in under two weeks with a SAG cast and major-city locations, despite predictions that neither would be possible.

After two decades of building a business, Counts said the thing he’s proudest of has nothing to do with revenue. “I never really missed any major moments of my kids' lives,” he said. A line the Armstrongs took as proof that the real prize was never the number on the account, but the freedom the number was supposed to buy in the first place.

It’s a philosophy that lines up closely with what the Armstrongs teach every new student who steps onto the mat: win the fight in your own head first, take the small rep today instead of waiting to feel ready, and never forget what the discipline was actually for.

In This Conversation

“This business, just like any business, is 90% mental”
Starting an email marketing business at thirteen years old
Why owning your list matters more than any single platform
Producing two feature films on “stick-to-itiveness” alone
Celebrating the first fifty dollars, and why the perfect time never comes
What Counts is proudest of after twenty-one years in business

The Full Conversation

Sifu Edward Armstrong: Paul Counts has been building online for twenty-one years. He started at thirteen, selling t-shirts by email from his parents' house in a town of 300 people. But the line that made me want him on this show is one every competitor and every operator already knows in their bones: this business is 90% mental. When someone who's survived two decades of a brutally shifting industry tells you the real fight is in your head, it's worth stopping to listen.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: And he lives the training truth I preach constantly: small, consistent steps, celebrate the little wins, and never wait for the perfect time. He built a full-time business while working an 80-hour job, in college, and newly married, on fifteen minutes here and half an hour there. That's not talent. That's the discipline of showing up, and I wanted to talk to it.

Our guest is Paul Counts, internet entrepreneur, movie producer, and co-founder of Marketing Counts. Paul, welcome.

Paul Counts: Hey, thank you. So glad to be here.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: Take us to the beginning, because you started remarkably young, and it wasn't even the plan.

Paul Counts: Yeah, I've been doing it for over 21 years now, started in my parents' house at the age of 13. I started with email marketing, of all things, for people trying to buy custom screen-print t-shirts. I was hired as a junior sales rep to sell shirts to my local school, and me being the entrepreneur I am, I decided, "There's a lot more schools out there." A family friend gave me a manual with all the athletic directors in the state and their email addresses, so I started emailing them from a Hotmail address. Back then you couldn't send an attachment larger than 500 kilobytes, so I couldn't send proofs. I told the owner, "We need a website so we can have a proper email." And he said, "Hey, you got the website you wanted, now you learn to market it." So I started researching backlinking, doing SEO way back when, press release marketing. He came back and said, "You're really good at this, let me refer you to a few friends," and that's when it took off.

And it was never the plan. It really just fell in my lap as a kid. I actually wanted a career in sports. A sports journalist and broadcaster, and I was eyeing coaching at the collegiate level. My brothers were lifeguards or drove a wheat truck in the summer, and I ended up doing marketing. It was never my plan, but one thing led to another, and here we are 20-some years later.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: People assume it's gotten harder over the years. You've lived the whole arc is it harder now, or was it harder then?

Paul Counts: There are two schools of thought. It was harder back then in some ways: there wasn't as much training, as many resources, as much knowledge. It was the school of hard knocks. I ran a dial-up line back to my room in a town of 300 people. You had to build webpages with HTML and CSS by hand. Now we have amazing page builders: a nice landing page without knowing any coding, graphics on the fly, outsource through Fiverr on the fly. But on the flip side, there was a lot less competition back then. Now there's a tonne of competition, so you have to really have your marketing dialled in (your messaging, your foundation), because there's so much noise. The internet has changed to the point where it's unrecognisable. It was Myspace years ago, now Facebook, now Instagram. Every few months there's something different, and if you're not relevant, you're going to get left behind. Colleges even offer digital marketing degrees now, which was never a thing when I started.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: You said something that's my entire world, that this is 90% mental. Tell me about that, because I think most people massively underestimate it.

Paul Counts: It was not easy. It was very difficult. Probably the biggest challenge is it's really 90% mental. This business, just like any business, is 90% mental. If you're trying to build a webpage and get it correct, it takes a lot of hard work, and you're going to have a lot of failures, a lot of times it doesn't go right. If you have a decent conversion rate, maybe one out of every 99 people buys, so you've got a pretty high failure rate, and that's hard for a lot of people to swallow. So a lot of it is having a positive mental attitude. Then there are technology hiccups, inevitable. Search algorithms change, and every new year the major platforms (Facebook, PayPal, Google, Amazon), bring privacy policy and terms changes that literally set you back. And you have to diversify. I know people who put all their eggs in Facebook for traffic, and that's a bad plan, because Facebook could shut you down at any point. I've focused over the years on one core element: building my list, my email following.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: "90% mental," yes, a thousand times yes. People see the technique, the medal, the sales number, and they think the game is physical. It isn't. When one in ninety-nine says yes, you are absorbing ninety-eight "no"s to get one "yes," and the person who cracks isn't the one who lacks skill. It's the one who lost the mental battle. The scoreboard is physical. The fight is always in the mind. And you build the armour the same way you build a list: one rep, one day at a time.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: And I'll add the operator's half of what you said, Paul. Build your list, own your asset, and never let one platform hold your whole livelihood. That's the same lesson I learned leaving a franchise. Own the ground you stand on.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: Tell our operators what Marketing Counts does, and the three pillars you teach.

Paul Counts: You can find us at marketingcounts.com. We help businesses grow: scale their traffic through Google ads, Facebook ads, retargeting, LinkedIn, and SEO. We have clients that see a 650% increase in organic traffic, generate thousands of new leads. We serve everyone from churches to biotech companies that just went public, to State Farm insurance agents. To us, marketing is marketing. And what separates us is we don't just do the work. We educate them. So if they don't work with us, they feel armed and equipped to go hire the right company. We've even done podcast episodes on the myths digital agencies use to sucker you in.

At Marketing Counts we teach the three pillars of your internet business: your foundation, your traffic, and your engagement strategy. The foundation is your website, how you generate leads, how you get people into your purchase process. By far the biggest mistake that cost me (I could safely say millions of dollars) was that I didn't start building my foundation, my email list, for over eight years. Because you own your email list. That's an asset that you own. You do not own the fans on your Facebook page; at any point Facebook could shut you down. So whatever niche you go into, build that foundation, capture people's information, come up with something of value to give away. Email marketing is still going to be relevant no matter what year you're listening to this, because you own your list.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: You also produced two feature films, a whole different arena. What did that take?

Paul Counts: The movies were very interesting. I was brand new at it. We went SAG here in the US (the Screen Actors Guild), so we had access to successful actors people recognise. We filmed on the red cameras, completed the whole thing in under two weeks. People in the industry said, "You can never make a movie, you wouldn't have cool locations," and we were filming in downtown major cities with all sorts of great shots. Then we ran into some legal issues, which is a learning process, but it led to another connection and another film with an amazing storyline we may bring to market. It took a lot of stick-to-itiveness to get to that point. We even have a training, Digital Marketing Basics, streaming on Amazon Prime.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: "It took a lot of stick-to-itiveness." I love that word, because it's the unglamorous engine behind every impressive thing. Everyone told you it couldn't be done, and you did it in under two weeks, not because it was easy, but because you refused to stop. That's the same muscle whether you're shooting a film, launching a product, or stepping onto a competition floor. Talent gets the headline. Stick-to-itiveness gets the finish line.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: Of everything you've built, what are you most proud of?

Paul Counts: I think it's the 21-plus years. And the other part is I never really missed any major moments of my kids' lives. That was a big part for me. My parents have been very supportive: my entrepreneurial spirit started in second grade, I used to sell pencils to kids who came to class unprepared, and my mom would buy pencils for me to sell. They always supported the crazy things I did. And the thing is, you just have to keep pushing. If you have the passion, even though people might laugh at you or think you're silly, you keep at it. Consistency counts. If you're consistently making a step of action toward your business every single day, you're going to see results that pay off. Even this interview. Someone might say, "Are you getting paid for this?" No, not directly. But it's laying groundwork. Somebody's going to read about Paul Counts and come to marketingcounts.com in the future because something resonated. You're going to have people question every step, and you just have to keep sticking to it.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: "I never missed any major moments of my kids' lives." Twenty-one years of success, and that's what he leads with. That's a warrior who knows what he's actually fighting for. The trophies and the revenue are real, but they're not the prize. The freedom to be there for the people you love is the prize. Never lose sight of that.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: What would you say to someone standing at the very start, paralysed?

Paul Counts: The first thing I tell people is: just start. You have to start somewhere, and you can get paralysed by not starting. A lot of people trying to get into internet marketing think, "I'll just sell internet marketing products", and that's so wrong, it's a saturated market. Follow whatever you're passionate about. But honestly, it doesn't even have to be a passion project. It could be something that makes you money. My soapbox is: I don't care what I'm selling, as long as I can look my parents and my grandma in the eye and tell them what I sell online. The guy who developed the toilet bowl handle isn't passionate about toilet bowl handles. He's passionate because it makes his family a lot of money. So just get started, and every single day make a small step of action.

When I really launched my business full-time, I was going to college, newly married, and working the only job I ever held. A job in sports I thought was my dream, working me to death 60 to 80 hours a week. I still managed to start my business, because I was consistent with the time I put toward it. Even if it was a half hour here, 15 minutes there. I was doing all that with the same 168 hours everybody else has in a day. Make small, consistent steps of action. Shut down all those excuses. There's no better time to start than right now, because there's never going to be the perfect time. If you wait for the perfect time, you're never going to start. And celebrate the small victories, celebrate that first $50, that first sale. I still remember selling that first shirt order via email, my first ClickBank sale, my first PayPal sale. I still get giddy when I launch a product and make my first sale, even to this day. Those small victories, as you celebrate them, lead to bigger wins.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: "Celebrate that first $50." That is exactly how we hand out belts. You don't wait until someone's a black belt to tell them they've done well. You honour every stripe, because the small win is what fuels the next one. And "no perfect time," the white belt who waits until they're ready never steps on the mat. You start scared, on fifteen minutes a day, with everything against you. That's not the exception. That's how it's always done.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: What's next for you, Paul, and where do people find you?

Paul Counts: The next thing is taking Marketing Counts to the next level: expanding the team, the reach, the podcast. One core way is our Marketing Counts Club, a monthly membership where people can ask us questions twice a month and get live answers from me and my business partner. That club lets us scale and reach as many entrepreneurs as we can under one roof. And we're focusing on a couple of new live events. You can visit us at marketingcounts.com. Counts is C-O-U-N-T-S, just like it sounds.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: Paul, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it.

Paul Counts: Thank you.

Sifu Julliana's closing word: Paul handed us the truest sentence about any hard pursuit: it's 90% mental. When one in ninety-nine says yes, the person who wins isn't the most talented, it's the one who wins the battle in their own head first. And he showed the whole method: small consistent steps on fifteen minutes a day, celebrate every little victory, and never wait for a perfect time that will never come. The scoreboard is physical. The fight is always in the mind. Win there first, and the body follows.

Sifu Edward's closing word: Twenty-one years, and Paul leads with never missing his kids' moments. That's a man who knows what the fight was for. Build your foundation, own your list, never let one platform hold your livelihood, and take one small step every single day. The perfect time is a myth. The list is an asset. The mind is the battlefield. Start scared, start small, and don't stop. We don't entertain warriors. We create them.

Paul Counts, internet entrepreneur of 21+ years, movie producer, and co-founder of Marketing Counts (marketingcounts.com) with Shreya Banerjee; host of the Marketing Counts Podcast.

ILLUSTRATIVE RESULTS. Any revenue, enrollment, margin or retention figure in this conversation is either a documented result from one of our own operations, a figure the guest reports about their own business, or an illustrative example, never a projection of your results.

Nothing here is financial, legal or tax advice.

Stay in the Fight

This conversation is part of the Sifu Armstrong Warrior Intelligence Series: interviews with world-class performers, builders, and thinkers, filtered through the lens of the warrior's path.

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