Daytime to Dysko, with Daniel Goddard – Episode 489 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Daniel Goddard, CEO of the AI networking app, Dysko and an actor with over 30 years of experience examines the parallels between entertainment and entrepreneurship, recounts the crazy reaction when daytime TV messed with his fan base, pinpoints the business that oversees ALL business, recalls disappointing a date in bed (for a really noble reason), and shares his first-of-its-kind product and the lesson he learned from it, and how his new app is coming to the rescue at universities and conventions across the country.

About Daniel:

Daniel Goddard’s journey is a testament to resilience, perseverance, and the ability to thrive in the face of constant rejection and judgment—experiences that are all too familiar to anyone breaking into the entertainment industry or launching their own business. With over three decades of success as an actor, fitness expert, and entrepreneur, Daniel knows what it takes to navigate these challenges while staying focused on long-term goals.

In the entertainment world, Daniel faced the relentless pressures of auditions, rejection, and public scrutiny before landing iconic roles like Dar in Beastmaster and Kane Ashby in The Young and the Restless (where he starred in over 1,000 episodes and was voted Sexiest Man in Daytime TV by TV Guide). These experiences taught him how to turn setbacks into stepping stones, build a personal brand that stands out, and maintain confidence even in the face of rejection. His ability to connect with audiences and stay authentic became key to his success, building a massive fan base that continues to follow him today.

As an entrepreneur and the founder of both Dysko and UnderTheIn.com, Daniel applied the same principles of resilience and adaptability to the business world. He understands the vulnerability and judgment that come with starting your own company, pitching ideas, and building something from the ground up. His success demonstrates that with the right mindset, strategic planning, and ability to learn from setbacks, it’s possible to not only survive but thrive.

Daniel’s invaluable advice lies in his ability to reframe rejection as opportunity, stay motivated during tough times, and build meaningful connections in competitive spaces. Whether breaking into entertainment or launching a digital marketing or branding business, Daniel offers practical strategies and inspirational stories to help anyone push past judgment, stay true to their vision, and achieve their goals.

Learn more at UnderTheIn.com and Dysko.co.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Stephanie Maas
Well it is super nice to meet you.

Daniel Goddard
It’s lovely to meet you. It’s lovely to meet you.

Stephanie Maas
I know your background, and what I kind of want to focus on, that I think is really interesting and neat, is how you went from this career and background that was very much in the entertainment side of business, and now you’re in this entrepreneurial side.

Daniel Goddard
Life is a sequence of experiences that are basically sort of a extrapolation of transitions from the time you’re born. Everything’s a transition. What happens is we go on a path. We make decisions when we’re young. We think this is what makes us happy, or we do what we think will make us our parents happy. In my situation, I ended up going to universities study Business and Economics in Australia and Sydney. I had six months left on my degree, and I dropped out. I dropped out because I’d reached a place in my life where I realized that you get one life. If you’re not making yourself happy, what is the life you’re living? So to the great detriment of my father in particular, who was a man who grew up very poor, didn’t have a college degree, he’s I want my son to have everything I never had. I dropped out, and I actually decided to pivot into acting. I’d always dabbled in it as a kid with school plays, etc, my mom was more encouraging because she understood in her life she wanted to do law, but she couldn’t do it because her parents couldn’t afford to support her, so she had to do a degree, which is basically a Bachelor of Arts, which allowed her to work part time and go to school part time, but law was a full time degree. So I think my mother was more sympathetic to the understanding of you have dreams and ambitions in life and things like that kind of supersede, you know, expectations. It was a big deal. But I think what happens as you move forward and you you take on the path of hopefully choosing where you think you’re meant to be, you understand that everything is business. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a model, an actor, an entrepreneur, whatever, everything follows the path of expectations, in a sense that behaviors you do determine your outcome and your success. So if you want to be a model or an actor, you have to be a business person first. You can’t just say, I look a certain way, or I believe I’ve got this role now, therefore I can be a drama queen. So for me, the hardest shift I had was moving from acting into entrepreneurial side, where I was no longer perceived as a person who was an actor and I was now perceived as a business person. Took five years, basically, to start being taken seriously, but all of it is part of the journey of life, as long as you follow a certain set of paradigms, which is, always be objective, always be gracious, always be respectful, and work your butt off as hard as you can, I think those transitions can be easier, but They’ll never be completely without pain. You look at anyone who succeed in anything in life, pain is what makes you stronger. Pain is what makes you more successful. Because anyone who lives in a space of pleasure, comfort never grows.

Stephanie Maas
I love the way that you liken business to everything. And I would imagine, again, coming from this entertainment side of the house that had to set you up for tremendous success, knowing, hey, again, you have to have talent. You’ve got to have skill, but approaching it with a business mindset that alone sets you apart from your competition, your peers, so forth and so on, and then also the rejection you had to face. But how did those help you set you apart?

Daniel Goddard
Sure, I think the first thing that we have to have in all aspects of our life, no matter what we do, is there’s never a sense of entitlement rejection. It permeates every aspect of our life, from the time we’re little, whether we go to kindergarten the first day we want to be friends with someone, and they ignore us and they laugh at us, we’re rejected. Moving that through our teenage years, into our first career journey, there’s always going to be rejection that said in acting and modeling, for the rejection is greater, I think, than most others, because you’re being objectified. It’s got nothing to do with your internal block, your internal characteristics, although you could argue, you know, there are some people that have that they had that it factor that’s an internal thing, that’s not an external thing. That’s endogenous, not exogenous. You’ll find generally, it’s the person who had has more substance. You know, they went through a harder childhood. They went through. Harder obstacle, or whatever it was that builds character. When it comes to acting, it’s a different kettle of fish, because it’s not just how you look. I’ve had auditions in the past where I’d say the character breakdown, you really go, it’s me, looks like me, sounds like me. So you think all you need to do now is get the dialog right, and then you’ll see who they cast. And they cast someone looks nothing like it. And you’ll think, what happened? I don’t understand it. It’s me. It must be me. There’s something wrong with me, but it’s not. The more you do it, the more you start to start to understand is that the people in positions of power, I would say, eight times out of 10, have no idea what they want until it walks in the room. They just don’t know, because you’re dealing with too many X factors. Of you don’t know where styles and trends are going. You don’t know what the audience wants. So generally, you’re just kind of like, you know, throwing stuff at the walls to see what sticks. You’ll see so many artists who will get released, and then they don’t get a fan base, and then every now and then, you’ll get a few that break out. And generally they’re the ones that don’t, don’t conform to the ideology of this is what you’re meant to be when you stepped into that role, and they make it their own. Like my soap career, I did like 1100 episodes or so when I first started that the character was a blank slate, and you had writers writing a character that they thought was going to be this character over here, I read that character and I interpret to be a character that’s going to be over here. I can’t go in the room and say, Hey guys, I’ve got an idea it should be like this, like I could never write a soap opera. I can never produce that amount of content. But what I can do is take the content I’m given and interpret it in a way that I believe will make that content and myself mesh in a way that I believe it can be delivered to an audience that will make them have a more entertaining experience. It’s like being a bull in a china shop, but not breaking the China, but letting them know that there is something different about you that makes you interesting to see. Oh, my God, he’s going to break the China all of a sudden. No, he didn’t, because you’re a professional. And I think if you tally all these things up, you end up forging your own career. And once you do that, then it’s another fine line between not letting it go to your head and thinking you now have the power, because you never have the power. So you have to, at all times, be grateful for what you have. You can never outshine the master. You can never bite the hand that feeds you. It’s a dance. You will never be leading the dance. As an entertainer, as an entrepreneur, you have the capacity to lead the dance.

Stephanie Maas
So when did it stop being so personal, and when did that business mindset come through to say, Hey, this is business. I got to learn to play the game. I got to learn to dance the dance, and walk that fine line.

Daniel Goddard
It probably happened around my character on young and the restless in 2011 was killed off by the head writer, and I couldn’t understand it at this point in my life. I was a business person first, and to me, everything was good business. It’s either good business or it’s bad business. And the head writer at the time decided they wanted to kill off my character because my character was popular, and they thought it’d be this big story moment, it would be a burst in the ratings and whatever. I was completely gobsmacked, because they went against the grain of what I believe to be true. If you are an executive and you work for a multi billion dollar company, you have the best interest of that company, which means that you want to make that company as much money as possible. I’d always kind of thought that I was in the hands of people that knew what they were doing. So when I was killed off, I went they don’t know what they’re doing because the fans instantly went ballistic. They rented an airplane, flew it above CBS, where the banner saying, Bring Daniel Goddard back as Kane. So at that point, I got a call from Sony, and the head writer ended up being fired, not because of me, but just it was a combination of moments that took place. So I think for me at that point, it was concreted in my mind that you can have multi tiered businesses, but at the end of the day, the business that oversees all the business generally, has one thing on mind, which is the stock price the shareholder respect and value for that company. So as long as you stay within your lane, and you keep your head down, hopefully the incompetence along the way that tries to derail you will be corrected by the system, because the system will always want to drive towards, you know, economic success. So does that mean I was, I was killed off in the first time around, because I thought I could reinvent the wheel and change things and move the character in the direction I wanted. Possibly. Was it because it was a successful character, and they thought that it, by killing me off, would push the ratings up for a certain amount of time, and advertising for that period would do well, possibly. But for me, it was just a learning curve where I really just saw with just clarity, the way the machine operates and the way that we are just cogs in the machine. And once you accept it, it’s not personal, then you can put that to rest, and then say, how do I be the most efficient cog in the machine? And then the next question is. Is, if this machine is not as efficient as I choose, or would want to be part of, how do I either create the machine or become part of the machine that is going to be the efficient machine that I can be that cog in.

Stephanie Maas
Super powerful. So let’s take that. What got you to the point, and what was the process of you saying, Okay, I now want to lead the dance?

Daniel Goddard
I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart, because to me, acting was not some form of, like, emotional escape or some form of deep seeking process where I had to discover myself. I mean, I did all that work. I’ve read all the books. Greatest book ever written, though, by the way, is Og Mandino, the greatest salesman, the salesman in the world. I’ll tell you about that book. I was reading that book, and to read it properly. It takes like 200 something days, because, you know, you have to read every scrolling, new to night, right? I just met a new girl. We had ended up after this date going back to her place. Very first time she makes dinner, we have dinner, we get into bed. I didn’t have the book with me, and I basically said to her, I said, Listen, I’m sorry. I gotta go. I gotta go. I thought to myself, I’m going to explain why I have to go, because I don’t want to give her anything. I don’t want to give her a complex going, well, I did all this. I did all that. We had such a great time. I made this what I do wrong? I thought, you need to know why. And I said, here’s why I got to go. It’s a book. You have to read it three times a day. I don’t have it with me. I have to go and read the book. I was fortunate enough to have her go. I totally understand that. I respect that. That was great. I think being an entrepreneur allowed me to have more control over the business process. But once again, you’re dealing with rejection in 2021 I created a product called SeePay. SeePay was the world’s first visual payment system. Basically, you hold up your phone, I can look at you through my camera, and then, if you have SeePay, right above where you’re standing, an avatar appears on the phone. Generally, you use your face, because the goal is to correlate the avatar to the person. You would touch the avatar. And then I could send you money. So I could send you money with Apple, Pay, Google, pay, direct deposit, credit card, whatever. Soft launched March 2021, now I thought, I’ve now created technology. It’s never been done. Everyone’s using Venmo. Everyone’s using cash app. The biggest problem I had with payments is, I would say, for example, you know, meet you Stephanie, and your last name is spell M, double A S, right? Let’s say, for example, I thought it was m, a s, s, or I’m typing it in, I type, I spell it wrong. Send the money the wrong, Stephanie Maas, and I can’t get the money back. So I’m like, I’ve created a system now where I can hold up my phone, see you pay you, I know you get the money. There’s no error. I built it, launched it within three weeks. It did $80,000 in transactions. Didn’t put a cent or a second into marketing. So I want to be purely organic. And I get this meeting with this mega investor, one of the people that basically was early into Google. The guy in the room says to me, after I did the pitch I showed in the product, we demoed it. So why would someone use it? And the first thing I thought was, am I being tested? So I’m thinking, How do you respond to that in a way where you pass the test, you don’t seem conceited, you don’t seem obnoxious or condescending or any of these things, and because no one wants to work with someone like that. So I said to the guy, that’s a great question. I said, Do you use Venmo? He goes, Yeah, I use Venmo every day. I said, Okay, let’s, let’s pretend right now we’re going back in time 10 years, and I’m walking in right now, and I’m not, I’m not showing you SeePay. I’m showing you Venmo. What are you using before Venmo to transfer money, Ach, direct deposit, debit transactions, right? I’ve created this peer to peer payment app where I can enter your name just send you money. What would you say? Didn’t he didn’t really say anything. Days like, Okay, I said, See, we know, based upon what I pitched you, that if you travel forward in time 10 years, that you would be using it. He thought about it, and then he said to me, but why would anybody use SeePay when they can use Venmo? And at that point, I realized it wasn’t a test. It’s like a boxer, and they fight their way out of the streets, and they get to the top, and next thing you know, they got the money. They got the cars. They never have to worry about money again. They eat the lobster every day. They don’t do the training. They lose their title, and that’s what happens to entrepreneurs, they lose that hunger and that drive and that entrepreneurial spirit. And I realized at that point, this is almost the same thing as entertainment, where you’re dealing with people that just because they’ve sold the company, just because they have the position, that doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about. So how do you overcome that rejection? And that’s when you have to say to yourself, what is it I want in life? Do I want to be the happy guy that sits on a farm somewhere and just just enjoys his day and one day that’s my life? Or do you want to be the person that’s prepared to say, Okay, now I understand the rules of engagement. Let’s play you still. Can’t control the machine. You still can’t dictate what machines going to purchase, but what you can do is weather the storm and commit to something because at the end of the day, that’s who you are, and that’s all you want to do. So you have to find a way to push forward through the through the storm. But that, to me, was a phenomenal learning curve. So it just turned out that that was not the guy, that was not the time, and it allowed me then to start to move to other entrepreneurial endeavors, which I believe now is the time for those to come into fruition.

Stephanie Maas
Wow.

Daniel Goddard
So I ended up launching in 2020 a digital marketing company. It’s called under the in short for under the influence, I took my understanding of branding and everything is a brand. You’re a brand. Young and the Restless is a brand. Anything that is consumed is a brand. I think the difficult thing for social media. Social media has made everybody think it’s easy to be a brand. It’s like everyone on Instagram is a model. No, you’re not. The number one thing you have to do is remove subjective delusion from your mindset. I went into marketing, and my first client was a girl who had a home fitness workout, and she said, I want to kind of launch my thing, and I don’t know what to do. And I said to me, tell me what it is you do. Tell me what you do. She goes, Well, I go to people’s backyards and we do workouts. I said, So what’s the workout? Who’s your demographic? Well, it’s predominantly women with young kids who want to get back in shape, and they want to go like, you know, get tight, and they want to do this, and they want to have, like, cute butts. I said, Okay, so it’s backyard booty club. Backyard booty club. So next thing, you know, I go, I film all her stuff, I cut it together. I’m just doing this myself at this time, creating her social doing this. And then from there I went, Okay, that made sense. It’s got to first of all, have an interesting sort of Title, an interesting brand. Then it’s got to have a message that makes me want to check it out. Then it’s got to have a product that I think is actually has some substance or has some value to it. So we moved through a bunch of different brands, created a bunch of different brands, launched the brands. They do well, get more clients, etc. And I realized I’m decent at this. My business partner and I got to this point where we talk about how when we were doing so, when I was doing soap opera, you would go to fan events. So you go to appearances or conventions, and you would meet all these people that would say they’re getting lined to do a photo in a meet and greet, and you’d sign autograph and have a chat and take a photo. And the amount of people that I met that said the girl I’m with, or the guy I’m with, or the group of girls, or whatever it was, would say, because of your character and your show. We met, we have things to talk about. We talk about this, we talk about that, and I we never knew how much we had in common once we started talking we love the same teens, the same movies, the same hobbies. So it got me thinking, How many people do we walk by every day that we just pass that have so much in common with us that we would never know. We’d never know there must be someone right now on the other side of the planet, whether it be in Finland, Tokyo, Botswana, it doesn’t matter that has the same things in common that I do. So I’m like, how do you find those people? And then how do you streamline the process so that you can universally pass it out to people, so that people no longer have to be a stranger again, we came up with the idea of Dysko, and Dysko basically is where my heart and soul lies at the moment. And Dysko is an AI networking application. It allows people to create a profile, choose from 100 social tags that are preset and 100 work tags. You can also add your own tags if you want, but generally we have it like 100 every job, every occupation, every hobby, whatever you choose. Just click, click, click, click, click, click, click. You make your profile. Then when you walk out of the house and walk around, you can set your radius to be half a mile, point two mile, up to 10 miles, if anyone enters that geo fence radius. As you walk, it follows you around. You match. The app notifies you that person’s in your area. It’ll say you have say 10 tags in common, five tags in common, 20 tags in common. You then see the person’s profile. You see the tags you have in common. You tack the tags that you want to talk that person about and send an AI message. And the AI message will be an icebreaker for Hey, we’re in this proximity. We have all these things in common. It’s good to meet you. So it initially began in the idea with the idea of bringing just strangers together, but then we started approaching universities, because I have a son in college at the moment. I have another son who’s 16, and one of the things that we notice is that kids are leaving going to colleges, and the first year is hell. They don’t know anybody they they are struggling to get this social life kicked off and going, which they’ve heard about in the college experience. But they’ve got to get their grades, whatever. So I’m like, they must, I say them all the time. There must be kids walking around that have the same thing in common with you. He goes, Dad, you don’t understand. You can’t even go up to them and like, they’re in a group and put your head in be like, Hey guys, what are you talking about? There’s look at you and you realize these kids have lost that in place, in person, skill set that we had going to school. And they hide behind their phone and their screen. And so I’m like, how do we create this technology that make the human experience greater. And then we went to these colleges, from Syracuse to Kentucky University to Southern University, and we pitched them. We would say them, what are you finding? Is the most prominent obstacle that new students are facing? And they’ll tell you, well, they don’t find friends easily. They don’t communicate with their professors correctly. Then Okay, so what if I told you that we have a piece of technology that can help a student and faculty streamline the way that they connect about things that actually need to connect about. Now I’m listening. Southern University was really interesting because it’s an HBCU school. It’s the largest one in the country, and Southern University said to us, the biggest problem we have is that a lot of the kids who come here come from very small, rural towns. It’s not that they don’t make friends easily. They have this culture shock, and when they get to the big city in the school, they shut down, and most of them shut down to the point where their grades start to fall apart, and then they drop out. We said, Okay, so here’s our solution. Disco will allow a kid, before he gets to college, on the very first day, to place his Dysko profile at the school. We call it Dysko billboards. So you can place your profile on campus. Every kid can do it. So let’s say I know I’m going to go to that school in September, and we’re now in June, I can just place it there, and every kid who’s going to go to that school can instantly start connecting with other kids before they get there, make friends. So on day one, they’ve already got their friends. The professors can put their profile as a Dysko billboard there and use all the hashtags of what they’re starting. It could be like, you know, Professor Smith’s econ 101, class. It doesn’t matter. So you know, if I’m going to go in these classes here, all the tags that I should be following, you can then streamline the whole process, create study groups, but if anything, then the first day you walk on campus, I can look around me and see all the people that match with me. And as a dad with kids going through this, this meant a lot to me, but then to hear from the colleges that this will change the college experience with the kids. We knew we were on the right path. The next thing we’re going, Okay, how do you use it for a business application? So we pitched HPE Hewlett Packard enterprises, and they said to us that convention spaces for them took, say, 120 people to fly there, you know, the carbon footprint and all the sustainability stuff. But outside of that, they would go there and say, we have a list of 10 deals we want to try and close. If we have one of these meetings set up where we think post convention, we can close it. It’s successful. And we said, so here’s what our technology does. Anyone can be anywhere in the world and attend a convention without having to be there. So you place your profile there, you have all the hashtags that define you. So now you don’t have to go to the convention. I could be on the beach in Hawaii with my kids, or I can attend 10 conventions in a day. Place my Dysko billboard profile at any convention I want. And when people are either there walking around in person, we Match AI takes over, or everyone can just drop in and start connecting and doing it that way. The response to that has been very, very strong. So all of the rejection allowed me to start saying I wasn’t meant to do that. I was meant to do this. And I think as long as what you’re doing has a social conscious, and the goal is to create a creative society where we grow, as long as you adhere to that understanding and you realize that you’re on a path of creation, and you have a greater purpose for that creation that will basically allow people to have a greater experience. It’ll bear the fruit. So for me now, Dysko and what it does that’s kind of where my journeys led me. At the moment, I’m extremely excited to see where it goes from here. Fingers crossed, incredible.

Stephanie Maas
Yeah, I’ve got older kids, and most of my nieces and nephews are at either going to college or and just that side of it, that humanitarian side of it…

Daniel Goddard
And think about dating too. Like it’s my goal to put Tinder out of business. Because right now you go on like I hear, I hear from, ironically, the same girl who did the fitness one. When I was talking to her about this, I said she was single. And I said, So do you use dating app? She goes, yeah. I said, which one? She goes, all of them. I said, What do you mean all of them? She goes, Well, that’s what you do. Oh, and I said, So what’s that experience like? She goes, Well, you see the same people on every app because everyone’s doing the same thing. I said, So what’s the number one problem? She goes, you don’t find people on the level of depth you want, because it’s like, I like pets. You like pets. I don’t smoke. I don’t smoke. We allow you to have specificity with who you are and what you do. You could have hashtag underwater basket weaving, right? We give you that specificity. You could have hashtag Tom. Brady sucks. Tom Brady is the goat. So you can really narrow it down, so you realize there is a need for people to create their own systems in order to match and connect. And we give people that. So I think we have three lanes between schools, conventions and dating. And ironically, we had a had a meeting with a very large VC company, and they said, You need to stay in one lane. And this harken back to SeePay. I’m like, oh my god, I can’t believe these people saying this to me. And my response to them was, I said, I absolutely, absolutely agreed. I said, What Lane Do you think we should be in? And they stopped because I gave them three scenarios, yeah. And they go the convention space. I said, You know what? I said, I completely understand why you said that. But let me ask you this question, if we launched the app and people who are not convention space, people start using it, and people start using it for dating, would you mind then if we became a two lane company, not just a one lane company, and they said, Yeah, you can do that. So once again, they don’t know, theaters, going past experience states, the man who chases two rabbits catches neither.

Stephanie Maas
Yes.

Daniel Goddard
And that’s what their point is. You can’t be like, Oh, we’re over here. Oh, we’re over here. So I’m like, No, we’re very focused on one lane. But when you drive along in a highway and it’s two lanes, and it opens up to four, you’re allowed to change lanes. You don’t have to stay in the two you’re in. And they got that. So I think, if anything, it’s more of a test to see if you’re going to, like, go off the deep end and, like, start like, chasing rabbits, or you’re going to stay focused,

Stephanie Maas
Super cool. Can’t wait to see that launch. You’ve been so generous with your time.

Daniel Goddard
I just I appreciate your time very much, and I appreciate your listeners listening. For me, I just reached that point where I sort of found peace in so many different aspects of my life, where before it was just turmoil. And I would just want listeners to who are out of crossroads in their life, or even if they haven’t reached a crossroad, they’re in the big, open wide parking lot, and they don’t know what direction to get out of the parking lot. You know, just to realize that as long as you have a passion, it doesn’t matter if it’s repairing old shoes or or trimming the roses in a garden, as long as you have a passion for something, you’re so far in front of everybody else, because most people are just automatons who are just like just robotically grinding their way through life up until they die, and the goal in life is to do more than that.

Stephanie Maas
That is awesome. Thank you so much.

Daniel Goddard
My pleasure, Steph, take care. Love to talk to you. I wish you all the best.