The Sky Parted: Sifu Edward & Sifu Julliana Armstrong Sit Down With Miestro's Justin Burns

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 founder of Miestro traces a moment in 2008 that redirected his whole life, and explains why capturing attention, not mastering software, is today’s real challenge.

Justin Burns discovered the entire idea of selling digital products by accident, watching a customer at the Chicago cell phone shop where he worked come in at odd hours, dressed down, clearly not answering to anyone. That conversation led him to a seminar, and the seminar changed everything, as Burns told Sifu Edward and Sifu Julliana Armstrong in the latest Warrior Intelligence Series conversation.

The moment came from a stranger’s line about a coming shift in commerce. People anywhere on earth would soon be able to buy a product instantly. “It was like for that moment, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. And it was at that moment that I was like, it was like the sky’s part of it, the heavens came down,” Burns said, describing the certainty that followed. What came next wasn’t overnight success. He counts “three or four years of not making any money” before cracking the model that eventually built a 30,000-customer course business and, later, Miestro itself.

Burns is direct about how the actual challenge of the work has shifted since those early days. Building a landing page in 2008 meant hand-coding HTML or hiring an expensive developer; today it takes minutes. But that ease created a different bottleneck entirely. “So now I think the biggest challenge is you have to know how to capture attention and there’s ways to do that,” Burns said, pointing out that anyone with a phone can now sell a digital product, which means standing out, not building the tool, is the real work.

He’s also open about carrying a spiritual dimension alongside the business one, describing himself as someone who chased purpose as hard as profit. “Great part about digital is you can take what you’re passionate about and turn it into a digital business,” Burns said, describing the spiritual awakening that eventually relocated him from Atlanta to Pattaya, Thailand.

The clip published here is drawn from the newsletter excerpt of the conversation (the fuller exchange lives on the audio side of the platform), but even in this shorter form, Burns’s throughline lands clearly: purpose finds you once, and building on it takes years nobody sees.

In This Conversation

The 2008 seminar moment that redirected his entire career
Years of failure before cracking the code on digital course sales
Why attention, not technology, is today’s real bottleneck
Turning a personal spiritual awakening into a second business
What this excerpt covers, and where the fuller conversation lives

The Full Conversation

Sifu Edward Armstrong: Everything we build is about transmission, taking what one person knows and giving it a vehicle to reach and change others. That's the whole purpose of our Academy Commander model. So when I found a man who built an entire platform to help coaches and teachers share and monetize their knowledge (and who came to it through years of blood, sweat, and failure before the breakthrough), I wanted our operators to hear him.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: And what drew me in is that he's openly a spiritual man, someone who chased the why am I here question as hard as he chased the business. That's the warrior's inner path, and I wanted to hear how the two fit together for him.

Our guest is Justin Burns, founder of Miestro, a platform built to empower coaches and trainers to share and monetize their knowledge, and a self-described spiritual ascender and light worker. Justin, great to meet you.

Justin Burns: Glad to be here. Appreciate you.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: Start at the spark. What inspired you to create Miestro, and what's the mission?

Justin Burns: Yeah, so Miestro came from back in about 2008, I started this online journey, meeting a really good friend of mine, actually interesting that we're still good friends today, and I met him while I was working at a cell phone shop in Chicago, Illinois. And I wondered what this guy did. He would come in at all times of day. I was like, what does this guy do? Does he work a job? He's always dressed down. So I just one day asked him, "What do you do?" And he said, "I sell digital products online." And I'll never forget, it was the first time ever I had heard about this. Now imagine hearing about this in 2008. It completely blew my mind. So fast-forward, I became more interested. He would come in, I said, "How do I learn about this, whatever, selling digital products or whatever?" And he's like, "Well, there's actually, if you say that, we're doing a seminar next week."

And I was like, "What's a seminar?" This is how naive I was. So I come to this event, I didn't know what to expect, and I remember a statement that really caught my eye. He said, the guy, it wasn't him speaking, it was another speaker, and the guy said, I forgot the guy's name, he said, "In the future, not too distant from now, people are going to buy your product all over the world. They're going to be able to ..." Right now, it was some challenges in that space. It was like 1ShoppingCart. I don't know if you remember the one shopping cart, that's how old school I am. You didn't have five, no, you didn't have hundreds to choose from. You had really one, which was 1ShoppingCart. Everybody used it. And so I was like, wow.

It was like "People from London and Spain and Germany and Africa and Australia, everywhere. They're going to be able to buy your product." And it was like for that moment, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. And it was at that moment that I was like, it was like the sky's part of it, the heavens came down. I was like, "This is the thing. This is the thing I want to spend the next decade." So fast-forward, many failed in trials, so many blood, sweat, and tears, three or four years of not making any money. And then I was able to crack the code and I became a digital entrepreneur selling courses, and I was able to have 30,000 customers. And then that led to now where I wanted to create a tool. I wanted to do something long-term that would actually impact people. And so we've been building, that's how Miestro came along, and we've been involved in it since 2017.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: So many people put off ever starting because they think it's too late, or too hard now. You began when the technology was primitive, a piece of software like 1ShoppingCart. Was it harder back then, or is it harder now?

Justin Burns: Well, that's a good point, but there's different challenges. It's not that it's harder now, it's just there's a different challenge. So let me give you back in those days, like 2008, the challenge was you had all type of tech challenges. Every tech challenge you could think of. To get signed up to ... I'll give you a couple examples. In order to build a landing page, there was nothing called a drag and drop builder where you drag something from one column to the next. That didn't exist. You had to either learn some HTML or hire a developer, which was freaking ridiculous amounts of money. So that was the challenge.

Or if you wanted to connect something, you needed to have a rocket science degree in order to connect it because it was so hard. And even shining up. Nowadays strike like two seconds, five minutes, you have an account, boom, you're selling. You had to pretty much sign over your firstborn child to get a payment processor back in those days.

So it was so many challenges. Now I believe the challenge has shifted where now technology is different like Miestro or other platforms that make it easy to sell online. It's super, super challenging. But now the challenge nowadays becomes, it's now attention. Attention is the challenge because back in those days, attention wasn't the challenge because there was only a few people who you could say was a guru or whatever they called them. It was like, oh, the gurus existed.

So the funny part about it is now you have attention because everybody and their mother now can just literally take this phone and start selling a digital product. Or they have now Zoom. Now remember technology, here's another example, the technology. I was just telling my team because they're new to online, I was like, listen, we used to have to sell. Zoom didn't exist. I mean Zoom did not exist. Back in those days, 2008, we tried to do a webinar. There is a 100% chance that the thing is going to buffer halfway and it's going to crash. That was the thing about webinars, they crashed. So now you could do a whole Zoom call for four or five hours and it completely goes through. So now I think the biggest challenge is you have to know how to capture attention and there's ways to do that.

Sifu Edward Armstrong: You're the embodiment of the life you teach. You started in Chicago, and now you live the digital lifestyle you built. Where do we find you today?

Justin Burns: I'm in Pattaya, Thailand.

Sifu Julliana Armstrong: That's quite a distance from a cell phone shop in Chicago, in every sense.

Justin Burns: Yeah. And initially enough about a year and a half ago because you mentioned about spirituality. So I'm a very spiritual guy. I never hide that. I have another spiritual company as well. Great part about digital is you can take what you're passionate about and turn it into a digital business. So about a year and a half ago I had a spiritual awakening and I decided just one day, why am I here? I had moved from where I was born in Chicago, moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and I was there just like this building, but I wasn't fulfilled…

Sifu Julliana's closing word: What stays with me is the moment Justin described the sky parting, that flash of certainty about what your life is for. Every athlete has felt a version of it, and it's worth more than any technique, because it's the thing that carries you through the years of blood and sweat before the breakthrough. He chased his purpose as hard as his business, and I respect that deeply.

Sifu Edward's closing word: Justin is right that the tools got easy and attention got hard. That's exactly our world too. Anyone can pick up a saber and film it; almost no one earns the right to be followed. The tools never made the master. Purpose, practice, and the courage to serve people did. We don't entertain warriors. We create them.

Justin Burns, founder of Miestro, the platform for coaches and trainers to share and monetize their knowledge; digital entrepreneur and self-described spiritual ascender. (This written feature covers the published excerpt of the conversation. Hear the full interview on sifuarmstrong.tv.)

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.

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