Mark Metry teaches us the right attitude to become successful in AR and VR

Hello Mark, it’s great to host you again on this blog. Can you tell us again what VU Dream was originally about?

VU Dream originally started out as a global distributor of VR headsets with an insightful and active content marketing plan. The post I wrote for you was about the future of the VR revolution and how it relates to education, both in the classroom setting and the everyday person’s life.

Later on, you said that things were not going well… what were the issues?

VU Dream was selling a decent amount of headsets but it wasn’t sustainable. We can’t compete with Amazon, that’s crushing the entire buying and selling game on the internet. Additionally, at that time VU Dream had a much smaller following on our blog of around 30,000 people than our hundreds of thousands today.

What were the roots of these issues?

Aside from a small business trying to compete with a retail giant all of the other issues came down to my abilities and skills.

I was still new at the game, and even today I consider myself a beginner. The key is to work harder and smarter. Which comes from consistent effort and the belief that quantity breeds quality. I wasn’t good enough and I’m working on this every day. At the end of the day, the real roots of the problem were lack of discipline and hard work.

How have you recovered? How did you make VU Dream successful?

As our marketing efforts picked up we started seeing results. I was contacted by several other founders and business owners in the industry about how I did what I did. Aside from working harder, using better tools and getting help from people, I finally started focusing on “how can I help people based on my set of skills?”. I came to the realization that the online marketing/advertising industry is so segmented and at times broken. Many virtual and augmented reality companies are spending time and money on research & development as they should.

However, in order for your product to achieve real success some amount of effort is required in the marketing and branding department. I’m good at marketing based on my past experience, I’m not a virtual reality genius coder or anything like that. I took my skills and applied them to where people needed help.

Has it been hard to pivot? And how did you understand what was the right path to choose?

Pivoting has been the easiest thing I’ve ever done. I think the difficulty is completely subjective based on your life’s purpose.

The right path smacked me right in the face thankfully. I find that often times in life if we are stressed and anxious our minds are closed off to opportunities that might be right in front of our face.

I think that’s a complicated question but ultimately it comes down to your set of experiences that have positioned you in a way that gives you a natural advantage to others and interacting with things that are trending 24/7 in the world that need help. I understood it was the right path to choose because if you don’t make decisions you’ll never know the alternative either way. There is no right path, only your path. Your mental, emotional and physical well being is tightly coupled to wealth.

What is VU Dream nowadays? What are the goals that it has accomplished?

VU Dream is a unique marketing, branding and advertising agency for Virtual and augmented reality teams that don’t want to waste money. Overall our site has clocked in millions of visitors and we have clients in many cities around the world. It’s a boutique and agile studio that does a few things very well. I’m planning on putting my head down and working with my team on building it up as an empire in the coming years.

We’ve also just started a VR/AR podcast called Let’s Mix Reality and we are aiming to be one of the greatest virtuality podcasts in the world.

And how is Mark Metry today? What has this experience taught him?

The story of VU Dream is very much parallel to my own journey as a human. If you want your business to grow in any field, start by looking at yourself.

Thankfully, I’m doing great, even with tons of failures. I’ve learned that business doesn’t care about your feelings or excuses. The only thing that matters is what you do today to advance yourself and business consistently. Running VU Dream has also shown me how early we are in the futurism revolution process and we are in an extremely great position to establish ourselves as a media empire. It’s not too late. We’re just getting started folks.

Has present time VR a profitability problem? I mean, is it hard to make money in this field?

Certainly in the short term as any growing industry, but long-term absolutely not. The key to making money is to be self-aware and not try to do everything yourself. If your goal is to make money before getting into the virtual reality industry….wrong move. If you’re joining the immersive technologies field to make money you’re better off not joining at all.

You should check out this article by Charlie Fink on Forbes “How Are People Making Money In VR… Or When Will They?”

What are the practical pieces of advice that you can give my readers about how to make VR profitable?

It’s never been more affordable to start any kind of business. I think this question is very much related to what your intentions and goals are.

1. Be Agile
2. Always Adapt
3. Invest your Time
4. Dedicate a portion of your work to marketing or hire an outside agency that know’s what they’re doing.
5. Don’t assume people will care just because you think you made something “cool.”

What is your recipe for success?

You can achieve anything in life by following these 3 steps. Take Responsibility, take action, and find a way. If you thought was vague and unhelpful, well that’s kind of the point. I host a podcast called Humans 2.0 (Tony’s been on as a guest!) and I interview successful & impactful people in the world. All of them mimic a similar hero’s journey. Embrace the obstacles in your life and understand that life isn’t actually about you. It’s okay to have a moment to breath but you must realize there are many people out there who need your help.

Additionally, you need to embrace constant learning in life, but specifically about virtual reality. There are really no key people with notoriety and with effort and resilience you can make a dent and establish yourself in the industry.

Anything else you would like to add to my readers?

Hi, readers of The Ghost Howls! I would like to close off with a BIG thanks to Tony for featuring me on his blog and to YOU the reader!

I would love to hear from you 🙂 Add me on Social media and if you’re interested in self-development and technology you should listen to my podcast, Humans 2.0!