How the Once Shy Ethan Donati Built a Public Speaking Career and Helps Others Do the Same

If one is supposed to make lemonade from the lemons life so generously hands out, Ethan Donati has made lemonade-making into an art form.

It might not be the first thing that comes to mind when someone hears him talk, but there was a time when Ethan Donati’s public performance skills weren’t even in the realm of the possible. The young entrepreneur who’s built a successful business with Million Dollar Funnel and now focuses on presentation-related marketing was once probably the shyest guy in the room. Regardless of the room he was in.

While being shy doesn’t necessarily make one prone to causing problems, it certainly can cause problematic reactions in others. It’s a sad state of affairs when an institution that’s supposed to be a safe place for kids, a kindergarten, decides that a child is simply too shy to attend. But that’s just one of the earliest episodes in Ethan’s life that showed him how the world treats the quiet.

The First Business Venture

It took a while for Donati to get to the point where he’s standing in front of a TEDx crowd, unrecognizable to people who only know him as an anxious person. His first venture that verged on being a business was at the age of 16 when he created and managed a blog and an NBA fan page on Facebook.

The lessons he learned there were, of course, about monetization. Followers and buyers are nothing alike, or as Donati would put it, “Likes, comments, and followers are all vanity metrics; being popular and profitable are two different things.”

While he was honing his marketing and sales skills, he still felt something was lacking. He was getting pretty good at what he was doing. The success he was finding doing business remotely wasn’t nearly as satisfying as he believed it would be, however.

At least a part of Donati’s early motivation was to do something online that would allow him to have a career but avoid interacting with other people. He decided to play into the hand life gave him and to steer clear of social interactions. The only trouble was that it wasn’t working.

The Next Big Thing

The idea he had for moving his business forward was nearly revolutionary for someone who suffered the same predicament he did: to offer a full suite service consultancy business that includes the very thing he dreaded for so long. Donati decided to start giving public talks and to help others do it, too.

Today, when asked, he’d say that his business specializes in running ads and campaigns for individuals and businesses that include some kind of public speaking in their marketing model. It could be presentations, webinars, or seminars.

Donati concluded that every successful marketer who wants to do public speaking needs to understand funnels, presentations, and how they convert. To make things even better and more predictable, he uses neuromarketing to gauge the success of campaigns before he runs them.

So, for anyone who’s wondering how a shy guy with a desire to live a different life got to be a prolific public speaker, the answer seems to give itself. He found something he was good at, and it just so happened that that something was the thing he feared the most, and it all came down to conquering that fear. To find out more about Donati, follow him on his website and Instagram.

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