The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan

Tony Robbins advises billion-dollar CEOs, celebrities, even heads of state, but today, he's going to show you how to become a master of money. The New York Times-bestselling author has once again topped the charts with his latest book Unshakeable, and to date, the world-renowned speaker has inspired tens of millions of people all over the globe. Successful people from Bill Clinton to Oprah have sung his praises, and he's had sit downs with the likes of Nelson Mandela. What you might not know, however, is that before it all, Tony was a penniless kid growing up in Azusa, California. After leaving home at 17, Robbins decided to skip college so he could start working, which at first meant sweeping the floors as a janitor. But he constantly strove to continue learning and feed his voracious curiosity. Every millionaire finds their start somewhere, and for Robbins it was in the pages of endless books that he found himself glued to. He was determined to be a millionaire, and he wasn't going to let a lack of formal education be a barrier, eventually working his way to the top. Today, he's the one writing the books, sharing all the wisdom he's collected over all those years. And his latest topic of obsession is finance—how to master money and become truly free from worries about wealth. Robbins has decades of experience in business and investing himself, but in recent years, he's been questioning the world's greatest financial minds to get to the bottom of that question. Many of the answers are in his new book, but fortunately for Foundr fans, Tony Robbins joins us today to share some of his most important lessons. In this episode you will learn: The secret to living well, no matter how much money you have How to spot a million-dollar opportunity The simple strategy that has led Robbins, and millions of his followers, to financial freedom Financial advice specifically targeted at startup founders Hidden principles of finance Robbins has discovered in his research & much more!

In 2012, Gretta Rose van Riel, like most aspiring entrepreneurs, found herself spending all of her free time building a business. It was nothing more than a passion project at the time, something to do in her spare time when she wasn't working at her day job. Despite the fact that she had no real plans to become a full-time entrepreneur with her own business, it wasn't long before that passion project grew into something bigger. She soon knew that this was something she just had to devote all of her time and energy to. "Basically, I had an idea that resonated with me so strongly, I just knew that it was something that I had to pursue," van Riel says. The result was a multimillion-dollar ecommerce business called SkinnyMe Tea, the world's first teatox using the natural benefits of tea to help you achieve your health, fitness, and nutrition goals. That alone is impressive enough, but what really separates van Riel from the rest of the pack is that she didn't just build one multimillion-dollar business, she's built many. In five years, Van Riel has transformed herself from just another employee to serial entrepreneur, with multiple ecommerce businesses under her belt. She's effectively cracked the code on how to successfully build a business online, including coming up with the perfect idea, the best way to market it, and how to rapidly scale. In this week's episode you will learn: How to build an incredibly loyal customer base through social media The easiest way to hack into the power of influencer marketing to build your brand Gretta's method to developing the perfect product from idea, to validation, to selling Why Instagram should be your number one channel for customers and sales The foolproof marketing formula guaranteed to double your revenue & much more!

In this very special episode of the Foundr Podcast, we answer all the questions you've ever had about building an ecommerce business and more! The first installment in what we're calling the Foundr Incubator series, we recorded a live coaching session between one ambitious Foundr community member and the head of a billion-dollar company. We organized a call with Jake McKeon, the up-and-coming founder of multiple ecommerce businesses, to receive one-on-one coaching from Tom Bilyeu, co-founder of unicorn startup Quest Nutrition. Like so many other entrepreneurs out there, McKeon was doing well, but looking to grow and not sure how. That's where Bilyeu, with his years of experience and wisdom, stepped in. The result is a fascinating and honest conversation in which Jake asks just about every question an entrepreneur might have about how to grow, how to market yourself, and generally how to take an online business to the next level. Tom doesn't hold back and answers all of these questions and more, sharing his insights on what it takes to create a successful ecommerce business and a thriving community around your brand. This is an episode you definitely do not want to miss, with so much gold being shared that you can't help but feel empowered and inspired after listening. In this interview you will learn: How to stay relevant in your market and stay ahead of the competition Why you need influencers on your side and how to find them The metrics you need to focus on to grow your sales Where to find A-players when you're growing your team The three things you need to focus on to build a successful e-commerce business & much more!

Sean Ellis is not just another marketer. In fact, he's something entirely different. He's the world's first growth hacker. Originally selling advertising in the print industry in Budapest, Ellis found his calling when a friend began building a new company on this relatively new thing called the internet. Despite not knowing that much about it, Ellis immediately recognized the opportunities that online marketing presented. "Nobody knew much about the internet at the time. But because I was selling advertising, I really liked the idea of being able to target specific ad messages to specific people," Ellis says. In the years that followed, Ellis continued to stay ahead of the curve. While the rest of the world was still trying to grow their startups the traditional way, by pounding the pavement and paying for advertising with little understanding of the results they were getting, Ellis was already breaking the rules and experimenting with every possibility that the internet offered. Instead of just focusing on marketing as something separate from the product that was being built, Ellis wanted to experiment and see if he could combine both product and marketing together. The result was a method he called "growth hacking," a term he coined in 2010 that would come to revolutionize how startups looked at marketing, and eventually become the name of his company Growth Hackers. He tested his methodology over the years and played a key role in successfully growing companies like Dropbox, Lookout, and Xobni, eventually becoming the go-to guy in all of Silicon Valley for startups looking to grow as fast as possible. Today, you'll be hard pressed to find anyone with more experience, knowledge, or passion about the power of growth hacking. In this week's episode, you'll learn: The definition of growth hacking Ellis's early experiments with growth hacking and how they still work today A behind-the-scenes look at what powered the rise of companies like Dropbox and Lookout The framework Ellis uses for growing any business How to identify the right strategies for you to become a fast-growth startup & much more!

At 20 years old, Daniel DiPiazza was comfortable. He wasn't making millions of dollars at his hourly wage job, but he wasn't struggling for money either. Like a lot of people in their early 20s, he just didn't know what he wanted to do. While the life he led was fine, it was a never ending cycle of making enough money to pay the bills, and that was about it. It wasn't exciting, more than anything it was dissatisfying, and after a few years, DiPiazza found himself restless and wanting more out of life. "It got to this point where I showed up at work one day and I was intensely irritated. It wasn't anything specifically that happened that day, it was just a culmination of a few years of doing things that were just ... very annoying. I made a decision that day that I was going to make a change," DiPiazza says. From that point on, it was like a switch had been flipped inside him. Instead of looking at all the things that held him back, DiPiazza began looking for opportunities. If no one was going to give him a job doing what he wanted, the next logical step was to simply find a way to give himself a job where he could follow his passion. It started simply enough, with a little freelancing on the side helping college students prepare for their exams, which soon grew into a self-perpetuating machine that eventually led to owning his own company, Rich20Something. Today DiPiazza is a bestselling author and uses his own experience to inspire others in his generation, teaching them how they too can build their own businesses and start carving that bit of financial freedom and independence for themselves. Not bad for a kid who had no idea what he was doing in his early 20s. In this episode you will learn: The best content marketing tactics to use to promote yourself How to never run out of clients as a freelancer Where to go to start skilling yourself up as an entrepreneur How to come up with and validate your business ideas with a few simple steps Strategies to build up your personal brand and influence & much more!

One of the best ways for an entrepreneur to come up with a great business idea is by scratching their own itch. If something's giving you trouble, it's likely that other people out there are feeling the same way. That's how it all started for Mike McDerment, back when he created FreshBooks. At the time, McDerment wasn't looking to create a new business, or invent some sort of revolutionary product to sell. He was just trying to solve his own problem—he was tired of using Microsoft Excel as a way to create and send invoices to clients. It originally started off as simple digital product to make his own life easier, but it wasn't long before others started taking an interest in McDerment's new tool. Instead of selling a complete software package, the common approach at the time, McDerment decided to try out a new business model that was relatively unheard of at the time. "The truth is, we were SaaS before there was SaaS. We were cloud before there was cloud," he says. While most people were selling software as licenses, McDerment was determined to build a product that would guarantee a predictable, recurring revenue. It was a new idea, and one that many consultants and others in their space advised against. And it's true that things didn't look great for McDerment and his co-founders after two years of developing and selling the product. "We had only 10 paying customers paying about 10 dollars a month each. To be making a hundred dollars month after that many human years of effort is by all accounts a failure. And we stuck with it because we really loved what we were doing and our customers were telling us that it was great. It was a little more colorful in the early days," McDerment says. Refusing to give up, McDerment and his co-founders pushed on, and in the years since, they've served more than 10 million customers, and grown into a company with over 250 employees. Today, FreshBooks is one of the most widely used and preferred methods of accounting and invoicing for small businesses everywhere, and it all began with a simple idea, the passion to never give up, and some interesting strategies for growth. In this episode you will learn: Why you shouldn't necessarily follow best practices How to grow and adapt as a leader Why the best leaders never need to have all the answers The importance of instilling the right values within your team and company culture What "guardrails" you need in order to have your company grow as fast as possible & much more!

Many of us have a secret desire to make a living by following our passions, but not all of us have a passion quite like Vanessa Van Edwards'. Back in college, she loved reading academic and scientific journals. She tore through them. That might lead you to believe that she wanted to become an academic or work in a lab somewhere, but Van Edwards also had the soul of an entrepreneur. Even as a young adult, she had several successful businesses under her belt. Listening to that entrepreneurial spirit within her, she wondered if there was a way to link up her two loves—business and science. "All these researchers spend years and years doing this research, and they publish 20-page papers and they get read by, if they're lucky, a hundred people. And I wondered, is there a way to make a business out of this science research? Is there a way to turn science into business?" Van Edwards says. In 2012, she started the Science of People, a human behavior research lab dedicated to understanding the science behind what makes people tick. Whether it's unraveling the building blocks of a charismatic personality, decoding body language, or just delving deeper into the psychology of relationships, she built a business around her passion for science, with a focus on translating dense academic language into something that everyone can understand. In her writing, including her latest book, Van Edwards takes the latest research and uses it to explain how to read faster, make excellent small talk, and easily capture the attention of an entire room of people with nothing but your words. In this episode you will learn: How to use content marketing as a way to validate your business idea What qualities make a person a charismatic How to connect with influencers and get the "yes" you want Hacks to improve your networking, communication, and leadership Tricks to dealing with difficult people and how to spot them a mile away & much more!

When Jim Kwik was in kindergarten, he suffered a terrible fall that resulted in head trauma and a brain injury. This would come to define the rest of Kwik's early life as he grew up suffering from learning difficulties. He constantly struggled to keep up with the rest of his peers and never quite found the ability to focus enough and learn fast enough, all of which was exacerbated by the fact that he didn't even have a fully functioning memory. "I was the boy with the broken brain," Kwik says. And yet, today Kwik is considered an expert on memory, learning, and the brain. He teaches thousands of people how they can hack their brains, just like he has with his own, in order to drastically expand their potential to learn and process new information. Kwik can count some of the most influential people in the world as his students, including Elon Musk, Warren Buffet, Richard Branson, and Oprah Winfrey, just to name a few. "Every single person can also do it, you just weren't taught how. If anything, you were taught a lie, a lie that your intelligence, your potential, your memory, is fixed like your shoe size. And we know from just the past couple of decades of research in the brain sciences that's just not true," Kwik says. So how did the boy with the broken brain become the master of memory? While most people spend their lives being told what to learn, Kwik has spent the majority of his life finding out everything he can about how to learn. Kwik has devoted countless hours over years of study into how exactly the human brain works and all the different ways you can teach yourself to not only have a better memory, but to read faster, learn faster, and in general turn your brain into a superpower. In this week's episode, you will learn: Why the power of your mind is the most important weapon as an entrepreneur How to stop being a passive learner and start being an active learner How to unlock your brain's vast potential for memory How the most influential people in the world use their brains & much more!

At 18, Gerard Adams dropped out of college after one semester. That semester was all it took to confirm what Adams knew all along. Like all entrepreneurs, he just wasn't built to follow the rules. The idea of getting a degree, to eventually get a job, to eventually retire, wasn't going to be the life for him. "That's when I made the decision to ... really put the pressure on myself to learn how to build businesses on my own," Adams says. While most people would go out and look for mentors by joining a community of some sort, Adams brought the community to him. In order to pursue his interest in investing and stocks, Adams built an online community for stock traders and investors, growing it to more than 10,000 active voices, and allowing him to learn from the best of the best. From there, he had his share of wins and losses, from getting a job where he helped build a company to 18,000 shareholders, to having the product demonstration fail in a live demonstration. He then built his own marketing agency and started generating hundreds of thousands of dollars, which he then invested heavily into the stock market, only for the 2008 recession to hit. No matter what, though, Adams was always learning. Taking everything that he learned from his experiences, together with his co-founder, Adams built Elite Daily, a news site for millennials, a place where Generation Y could be given a voice to talk about everything from economics to health. Over the next three-and-a-half years, they grew their Wordpress site to a company with more than 200 employees, with 80 million unique visitors to the site per month, and 80 to 100 articles a day. The eventually sold Elite Daily to the Daily Mail for $50 million. That was two years ago, and since then Adams has invested in multiple startups and mentored many young entrepreneurs by sharing his years of experience. In this week's episode you will learn: The blessing and the curse of raising capital and what it means Adams' amazing story of going from college dropout to the voice of a generation What it takes to build a media company that reaches millions How to judge a company through brand equity versus revenue The true cost of being a founder and what it means to be a leader who inspires & so much more! This podcast episode was brought to you by FreshBooks. When it comes to finding the perfect service to help you manage and track your invoices, time, and expenses, you can’t overlook FreshBooks. Designed for small businesses and entrepreneurs who don’t need full-blown, double-entry programming, but still want to keep their finances in check, you can’t go back once you start using it!

At 23, Katelyn Gleason faced, like many people in their early 20s, an existential crisis. She just didn't know what she wanted to do. "I started thinking about jobs. I was like 'God if I'm going to have to do this for the rest of my life it better be something I really care about, that can be my life's work, that I can really invest all of my time and all my energy into,'" Gleason says. Her first step was to start reading the biographies of some of the greatest individuals in human history—Marie Curie, Jane Austen, Abraham Lincoln, anything she could get her hands on. Gleason's goal was to learn as much as she could about these great people and how they managed to leave such a large legacy and imprint on humankind today. It wasn't long before Gleason found herself immersed in the world of healthcare, technology, and startups. It was there she found her purpose. Gleason noticed a problem in the medical industry that no one seemed to be talking about or trying to solve. Doctors and patients alike were getting bogged down with paperwork that was often confusing, and as a result, many were dealing with huge costs simply by filling out the wrong forms. The next nine months were spent at her kitchen table, furiously working on a solution to this problem. That solution would end up becoming Eligible, a medical billing startup designed to make it as simple as possible for doctors and insurance companies to work together and save everyone money, patients, doctors, insurance companies alike. As a two-time alumni of Y-Combinator, Gleason led Eligible from quietly testing and validating its product to becoming an explosive fast-growth company. Today, Eligible processes 14 million transactions per month, with a projected 50 million transactions by the end of the year, and has raised more than $25 million in funding. In this week's episode you will learn: Every step you need to take as the founder of a startup, from validating to raising capital How to gain proof of concept as quickly as possible Where to find co-founders to complement your own skills and talents What strategies you can use to build a fast-growth company How to manage the people around you and keep them focused on your goal & much more!

If it seems like entrepreneurs are getting younger every year, it's because they are. More millennials are turning toward entrepreneurship as a fulfilling career choice, passing on the traditional route of finding employment with some company. As the co-founder of DoorDash, Andy Fang is no different, part of the new school of entrepreneurs getting into the startup world while still in college. In 2013, Fang and his three co-founders were still students in Stanford when they had an idea—to create an on-demand delivery service in their area for restaurants that didn't have their own. It wasn't long after that DoorDash found itself backed by Y Combinator, and has since expanded to several major cities within the US and Canada, recently raising $127 million in funding. Not bad for a student entrepreneur who was once the only delivery driver the company had. DoorDash is but one of many startups in an ever-growing food delivery market. In order to stay one step ahead of the competition at all times, Fang has had to learn how to adapt quickly to challenges thrown his way, and how to prioritize growth at all times. In this week's episode you'll learn: How to put together a team of co-founders based on mutual trust and respect The key to adapting quickly and executing even faster Why it's so important to have a clear vision and the guts to stick to it The logistics behind running a food-based startup Challenges and solutions when it comes to expanding and entering new markets & much more!

Jordan Harbinger is one of the most influential people in entrepreneurship today, thanks to his popular podcast The Art of Charm. His show recently hit its 10th anniversary, and Harbinger has interviewed some of the greatest minds and personalities in the startup space and more. Starting off as a law school graduate who landed a job as a financial attorney on Wall Street, it didn't take long for Harbinger to become quickly disillusioned with the life that being a big shot attorney offered. Within a year, he left his job to work full-time the Art of Charm podcast, but not before taking with him some key lessons from his stint on Wall Street. During that time, Harbinger learned of "the third path" to success that no one seemed to talk about. The one that wasn't about working long hours, or even being the smartest person in the room, but instead was all about networking. He found that the key to success was all about sharpening your social skills in order to develop the key relationships you need in order to succeed. That lesson turned Harbinger's life around and opened up a whole world of possibilities that he never thought possible. In this week's episode: How to develop and master the social skills you need to succeed The competitive advantage behind networking and building relationships Why podcasting changed the game and how you can harness its power How to become a highly influential person The secret to creating a successful podcast & much more!

The inspiring story behind Simple Green Smoothies started on a playground, with two mothers watching their kids play together. At the time, Jen Hansard and Jadah Sellner were both first-time mothers, and they shared a desire to get back into the workforce. But they decided they were going to do it on their own terms and by following their passions. In 2007, they officially made the jump from being playdate partners to professional collaborators when they began working together on a parenting blog. Not long after they were working on more projects together, with Simple Green Smoothies being one of them. What initially started off as a side-hustle turned into a full-fledged business, getting some serious traction after they discovered Instagram in 2012. Through a mixture of follower challenges, influencer marketing, and a whole ton of heart, they started building a multimillion-dollar business. Their key tactic? Focusing on community, first and foremost. “We listen to our community, we poll them all the time asking, 'What do you want from us?' 'What do you need?' 'What’s your biggest struggle right now?'," Hansard says. “Find ways to really nurture that tribe and get to know them, just like you would in a real romantic relationship, so that you can serve them to the best of your ability," Sellner says. From being stay-at-home mothers working multiple jobs in order to keep their families afloat, to being the co-founders of a multimillion-dollar business with thousands of customers, the story of Simple Green Smoothies is a must-listen for any entrepreneur. In this week's episode you will learn: Why it's all about building a community first How to reach out to influencers to help promote your product What social media platform you should use and how to figure out what works for you How to generate new leads by providing a free experience Why you need to focus on one core message when you're just starting out & so much more! This podcast episode was brought to you by SiteGround. Thinking about building your own website? Get started with the best web-hosting service around with SiteGround, with their 24/7 support, unbreakable security, and dedication to providing the best experience possible for you and your audience. You can't go wrong with SiteGround.

Back in 2010, Girish Mathrubootham was a pretty successful tech guy, having risen up the ranks of a company to VP of Product Management. But that didn't mean he was immune to bad customer service. After spending months and months going back and forth with a company on an insurance claim, in the end, all that was achieved was Mathrubootham feeling helpless and frustrated. He took to a popular online forum to air his frustrations, and that was when he got his first taste of what it means to harness social power. His post went viral, with others airing their own frustrations at the same company, to the point where the president of the company stepped in to personally apologize to Mathrubootham. He began to understand just how antiquated the systems for customer service were, and just how important social media had become in giving a voice to customers who previously had nowhere else to go. He realized that modern companies needed a help desk that not only tracked complaints through traditional channels like email and phone, but also those that came through on social media channels. The result was Freshdesk, a company that now employs more than 950 people around the world, and has raised more than $150 million in capital from top VC firms. One more super-impressive thing about the story of Freshdesk—it started out as a tiny company based in India, and Mathrubootham had to overcome the challenge of gaining a foothold in the US. That seven-year journey had its own share of setbacks, but Mathrubootham has managed to rise above each one that the cutthroat tech world has thrown his way, through a mixture of knowing exactly the right kind of person to hire and his own tenacity and savvy for PR. In this week's episode you will learn: What it means to truly harness social power What to look out for when you're studying your competitors How to turn an attack into the best PR move you'll ever make The key to raising millions of dollars from the top VR firms in Silicon Valley Why you need to hire based on potential and not on academic credentials & much more!

For as long as he can remember, Tenko Nikolov has been obsessed with computers. From his very first computer at the age of 7, he fell in love with the simple green and black screen and was fascinated with all that this technology could offer. Of course, he also got into some trouble, even accidentally hacking into a large US corporation's network with a friend at the age of 13. After a few days of fun messing with their systems and bragging to their friends, the duo eventually sent an email to the company letting them know what they did and how they did it. The next few days were agonizing as they waited for a response, petrified that an FBI agent would be showing up to his doorstep in Bulgaria. To his surprise, however, the company reached out, thanked them for finding a security loophole and even asked them how much they'd like to be paid for finding it in the first place. “I realized that I can actually be paid for the thing that I love to do most," Nikolov says. Instead of asking for payment, Nikolov asked for his own server that he could play around with. After getting his first taste of entrepreneurship, he began seeing how far he could push the limits of computer technology. Looking back at it now, Nikolov pinpoints this as the exact moment that led him to develop SiteGround, a web-hosting server and provider. But what makes SiteGround stand out from the thousands of competitors out there, is Nikolov's dedication to innovating. In this week's episode you will learn: How to build a product that not only learns from its customers, but also continuously improves When to give up on perfection and focus instead on shipping How to survive as a bootstrapped company for 13 years straight How to read the trends and stay one step ahead of your competitors What it takes to go from a company that nobody's ever heard of to a major player in your industry & much more! This podcast episode was brought to you by FreshBooks. When it comes to finding the perfect service to help you manage and track your invoices, time, and expenses, you can’t overlook FreshBooks. Designed for small businesses and entrepreneurs who don’t need full-blown, double-entry programming, but still want to keep their finances in check, you can’t go back once you start using it!

A lot of people can recognize an opportunity, but what separates an entrepreneur from the rest of us is the ambition and courage to seize on that opportunity. The opportunity Leila Janah recognized was enormous. Lucky for her, and the rest of us, she had the ambition to match it. Her goal? Fighting world poverty. Ever since founding Samasource in 2008, Janah has impacted the lives of more than 30,000 people, raising thousands up from the poorest parts in India, Haiti, Uganda, and more. Janah has been internationally recognized for her work, with accolades coming from the world's most prestigious universities and publications like the New York Times, Fortune, and Entrepreneur. The opportunity Janah saw was a simple one. There was a trend in the globalizing economy of companies looking to outsource their work, and she wanted to tap into that trend by giving people living in extreme poverty the training and skills needed to fill these jobs. With the idea that by providing people with the right skills could help them rise out of poverty, Janah managed to pioneer a unique and inspiring social enterprise. In taking on such a massive problem, Janah has faced virtually every hurdle that can be faced in her eight-year journey as a social entrepreneur, and it looks like nothing is going to keep that bold ambition in check. In this week's episode you'll learn: The business of tackling the world's largest problems How to find and instill passion into the people who work around you The strategy of divide and conquer when it comes to nonprofits How to keep it simple with project management and personal goals What you can accomplish as a social entrepreneur if you put your mind to it & much more!

At his very core, Matthew Kimberley is a salesman. Whether it's something he was born with, or a trait he picked up while growing up, Kimberley understands the art of the sale. Starting at the young age of 13, Kimberley took to the street as a young street performer. Juggling his way into his first few dollars, and finding within himself that perfect combination of charm, drive, and ambition that make up the best salespeople. Fast forward to his 20s, Kimberley had built himself an highly lucrative company earning a cool 7-figures a year, and yet, he was unhappy. He just didn't believe in what he was doing, and couldn't find the passion to keep on going. Taking a step back as a founder, he went back to what he knew best: selling. “I realized what I liked to do is sell and teach people how to sell. So what I did was become a self-employed sales trainer, and I haven’t looked back since.” To Kimberley, there is no other skill that is as important as knowing how to sell. “Here’s why sales are important. When you can sell, you don’t need any other skills. When you can sell, you don’t need to be a creator. When you can sell, you don’t need to be a manager. When you can sell, you don’t need to be a writer, you don’t need to be a speaker, you don’t need to be a talker, you don’t have to have a business idea. You don’t have to be a particularly good executor. You don’t have to be good at doing anything, other than asking, persuading, convincing,” Kimberley says. Today, Kimberley has honed his skills to the point of being one of the go-to gurus when it comes to the art of selling. He's taught hundreds of people and businesses how to not only grow, but double and even triple their profit margins by teaching them his practical system on how to sell hard, and sell fast. In this week's episode you will learn: Kimberley's 16 principles of professional persuasion The best place to learn and hone your skills as a salesperson Why learning how to sell is the most important skill for an entrepreneur How to follow your passion while maximizing your profits The importance of having a mentor and where to find one & much more!

The phrase “game-changing” gets bandied about a lot in entrepreneurial circles. And certainly, in this era of landmark technological change, we are spoilt for choice when it comes to people and products that have changed the way we live. We’re about to introduce you to a woman who raises that bar to life-changing. Someone who is paving the way for millions of women to have more personalized, accurate fertility care. One who has truly moved the medical sciences needle. (Pun intended). Piraye Beim, is indeed a rare woman. A mother to two, soon-to-be three, a world-leading genetic scientist and Founder/CEO at Celmatix – the New York biotech firm putting big data through its paces with some remarkable results. Since launching in 2009, Celmatix has released two world-first products. The first is Polaris, a cloud-based platform that uses big data to optimize the treatment of fertility patients. Its creation was what Beim refers to as a “happy accident” on the way to solving their number one goal – building the first genetic test for reproductive health. Fertilome, the realization of that mission, was released early this year. Today, Celmatix are well on their way to empowering an entire generation of women to proactively manage their fertility. And Piraye Beim is just getting started. In this week's episode: How critical it is to your success to be a part of a shared community What the business of medicine is like The importance of understanding the story of your customers How Piraye settles the debate between growth and profitability How to find the time to be both a parent and a game-changing entrepreneur & much more! This podcast episode was brought to you by Pipedrive. Made by marketers for marketers and with over 30,000 users worldwide, Pipedrive is one of the best CRM tools in the business. Keep track of all your sales, customers, and leads with their incredibly intuitive dashboard and simple design. Don't try any other CRM tool until you've used Pipedrive first!

Before heading to San Fransisco to devote himself fully as the CEO of the wildly popular customer relationship management (CRM) tool Pipedrive, Timo Rein was a sales consultant back in his home country of Estonia. With a knack for making sales and closing deals, Rein found himself successfully working as one of the best salesmen in his country for over 12 years. Despite loving the industry he was in, Rein knew that there was much more he could offer the world beyond just one-on-one consultation and training sessions. There had to be a way for him to apply his years of experience and distill them into a product that could help thousands of salespeople he knew must be frustrated with the exact problems he was facing. In Rein's own words: "We should either find a product like this, or build a product like this. We didn't find exactly what we were looking for so we decided to build it." Leaving the company that he called home for 12 years, he began to build his very first tech product. The product that would become known as Pipedrive struck a chord. Ever since launching in 2010, Pipedrive has grown to more than 30,000 customers who can be found on every continent on the globe, and impressively raised $9 million in its first round of funding. Rein shows no sign of stopping as he seeks to continue to grow Pipedrive in his own impressive fashion. In this episode you will learn: How to choose between building a service-based or a product-based business Rein's own tips on how to improve your own sales regardless of the niche How to find and develop your own leadership style What types of people you need around you to launch and grow a successful startup The key to continue moving quickly and efficiently as you grow & much more!

After being unceremoniously tossed out of the corporate world 20 years ago, Michael Stelzner took a chance and turned toward entrepreneurship. In the years that followed, Stelzner began building a reputation as an influencer with a huge network of writers and marketers. It all culminated in 2009 when, after noticing more and more people talking about social media, he decided to run an experimental project: see if he could build a following by creating a blog with detailed articles about social media. Grabbing the name Social Media Examiner, he got to work. His goal was simple. Instead of being one of the hundreds of bloggers already out there writing about what they didn't like about social media or simply covering the latest news in that industry, Stelzner wanted to create a blog where he would get the best writers to craft articles that would help the average person and marketer understand how to use social media. To say that his experiment paid off would be an understatement. Social Media Examiner is one of the biggest business blogs in the world, and is widely considered the authority on all things social media. Beyond having an incredibly successful blog, Stelzner has expanded the brand to include a top-ranking podcast and an annual event that attracts the best marketers and entrepreneurs in the world. Seven years into his entrepreneurial journey, Stelzner helms one of the fastest-growing and most respected media companies on the planet. His secrets to success? A powerful mixture of marketing know-how, a strong business model, and understanding how to get the most out of your network. In this week's episode you will learn: How to land interviews with some of the biggest names in your industry The value in giving away your best stuff for free What it takes to become the most influential authority in your space How to market effectively and connect with thousands of people The magic behind networking and how to harness it & much more!

For the past 10 years, Scott Harrison has made charity his business, and he's managed to raise $250 million and bring clean drinking water in people in more than 24 countries since he began his nonprofit charity: water. Ever since learning the majority of diseases suffered by the poor were caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation, he has made it his life's mission to bring clean drinking water to those who need it the most. It's been an amazing journey since he first started and his organization has not only affected millions of lives around the world, but he's also inspired hundreds of others to take the path of social entrepreneurship. But in the beginning, there really weren't many social enterprises quite like charity: water. "My advice to people is 'go find someone who's doing what you want to do and join them instead of starting something.' In my case, I just couldn't find anyone else doing what I wanted to do, doing what I had the vision for," says Harrison. Sleeping on the floor of a friend's closet and using the living room as an office, Harrison began to build something that would offer a solution to what he considered the greatest problem facing the world. Taking it upon himself to build an organization that he could believe in, Harrison created a fresh take on how nonprofits could run and worked to rebuild trust in the power of charity. In this week's episode you will learn: The art of storytelling and why it's so important for any social enterprise How to craft a story that everyone can relate to How to build and run a worldwide enterprise through nonprofit philosophies How to inspire and build a team of thousands of volunteers who believe in your vision How to build a brand that inspires & so much more! This podcast episode was brought to you by Infusionsoft Anyone looking for the gold standard in sales and marketing solutions should turn to Infusionsoft. The complete package for small businesses of all types, save yourself some time and let Infusionsoft do all the work for you by automating huge parts of your business.

Many of us have been to one of those startup events where you're divided up into teams and have to whip up a company in the span of a weekend. You make great connections and have some fun, but typically the business idea you were working on for past 48 hours is gone by the time your head hits the pillow. But Matthew Arevalo and his new friend, and soon-to-be co-founder, realized they were onto something special. While most people went back to their daily lives, Arevalo began dedicating all of his time and energy into this new business. The result was a company called Loot Crate, a subscription service that ships a mystery box of items made for geeks by geeks. "Subscription boxes had been around, and had existed in the past. But a lot of the focus had been on sampling. It had been on trying to get samples of products into a box and get them out to folks," says Arevalo. "Loot Crate really was the first company to work directly and say, 'We're going to put full-sized apparel, figures, collectibles, and items that pop culture fans gravitate towards and have an emotional connection to.'" Since that fateful weekend in 2012, the fledgling startup has grown into a powerhouse company with more than 650,000 subscribers, making it the fastest-growing company in the US. But earning such an accolade took a lot of experimenting, perseverance, and a couple of setbacks along the way, all of which Arevalo was more than happy to share with the Foundr audience. In this week's episode, you'll learn: The secret to tapping into a niche and creating a true emotional connection with your audience What your number one focus should be in the early stage of a fast-growing startup Why it's important to always be looking for feedback from your customers How to turn failure into a learning experience The difference between running a physical business and a digital one & much more! This podcast episode was brought to you by Fresh Desk. Make bad customer service a thing of the past with Fresh Desk. Whether it's with their live chat feature, their easy-to-use ticketing system, or their multi-channel customer support system, treat your customer to an experience like no other and keep them coming back.

The internet marketing scene is not exactly known for being grounded and humble. It's often as bombastic and self-inflated as a hip-hop rap battle. That’s why it comes as such a surprise to find that Darren Rowse, one of the world’s most successful bloggers, is so … normal. His down-to-earth nature is only the first thing that will surprise you. The second is where he's from—Rowse isn’t from Silicon Valley, or even the United States as many assume. Rather, he hails from from Melbourne in Australia’s southeastern corner. Rowse currently has two active blogs. ProBlogger needs little introduction, as it’s been the internet’s go-to place for everything blog-related for more than a decade now. And his second blog, Digital Photography School, has long been a content darling of photographers worldwide. Both of these blogs boast readerships so large, they put national media outlets to shame. In the words of Ron Burgundy, he’s kind of a big deal. Before every second person decided to set up a space to blog about their special interests, however mundane, there was Darren Rowse. He planted his flag deep into blogging soil before any of us knew it was a thing, and has since grown to become one of the world's leading authorities on blogging. As one of the world’s premiere bloggers, he’s breathing the rarefied air that comes with 5 million-plus monthly readers. In this week's episode you will learn: The secrets behind effective content marketing and how it can improve your business How to understand who your reader is and what kind of content they're looking for Why you need to network and the best way to do it What the best practices for SEO are The key to growing a business beyond yourself & much more!

If you're interesting in learning how to market more effectively and land more sales, a quick Google search will bring up thousands of results, each one promising that their specific tip will be the one that changes your business forever. The trouble is sorting the wheat from the chaff. What's the stuff that'll actually work for you, and what's the stuff that's just clickbait? According to Sean D'Souza, the secret to marketing is actually surprisingly easy to understand. At their very core, all marketing strategies follow the exact same model, D'Souza says. He has cracked the code, and he can prove it. "What I do is I break down things into little pieces, and when I break them down into little pieces it becomes scientific. That's really what science is. Science is taking something very complex and breaking them down into little pieces and reconstructing it so that anyone can do it," D'Souza says. Originally working as a freelance cartoonist, D'Souza somehow found himself indulging his talent for marketing and understanding consumer psychology by helping out others with their marketing efforts. It wasn't long before he started writing about his own experiences with marketing and slowly but surely, he began to gather an audience hungry to learn more. In this episode you will learn: The psychological triggers behind turning someone from a prospect and into a customer Why growing your company might not be the best move Sean's most effective marketing tactics and strategies The myth behind innate talent and why it's all about the hustle What the perfect marketer look and sounds like & much more!

There are many reasons people choose to become entrepreneurs. Some want to make money, others want the freedom of owning their own businesses, and some, like Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, want to make an impact. For Sivaramakrishnan, a self-described accidental entrepreneur, she never intended to become the founder of one of the fastest-growing companies in the world. It just so happened to be that it was only by doing so could she affect the change she wanted to see in the world. Originally intending to pursue a career in academia, by the time Sivaramakrishnan graduated from Stanford with a PhD in information theory, she realized that this was merely a milestone on a journey to something greater. After graduating she headed for Silicon Valley and found herself one of the original engineers of a soon-to-be successful startup. "I felt like here was a place where I could create an impact," Sivaramakrishnan says. By the time that startup was acquired by Google in 2009, Sivaramakrishnan had developed a taste for the intricacies of the startup world and soon began her own venture called Drawbridge. The company was all about helping other companies of all kinds understand their customers and their buying habits across multiple devices. Impressively, since she's launched, Drawbridge now has over 150 employees and is considered one of the fastest-growing companies in the world. Growing by almost 2000% in just the past year alone, in regards to size and the amount of revenue it generates. Not bad for an accidental entrepreneur. In this episode you will learn: Where mobile advertising is at now, and what the future holds How to find data solutions to marketing problems Why it's so important to find people who share your vision Who you need to hire as your company starts to grow The unavoidable, and the avoidable, pitfalls of running a fast-growing startup & much more!

You can't talk about fast-growing SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) companies without mentioning Zapier. In about five years, they've amassed a customer base of over 1.5 million registered users, and grown their team from just three founders to 60 people. But perhaps what's most impressive and unique about Zapier, is the fact that those 60 people can be found all over the world. While Wade Foster and his co-founders reside in San Fransisco, he is quick to mention that does not mean Zapier's headquarters are in San Fransisco. Not just employees, but also members of the executive team can be found on almost every continent, working remotely. Zapier is living proof that entrepreneurs and startups are no longer strictly bound by location, and that there is a whole world of talent out there. "The internet feels like our true home," Foster says. You might think that having such a team would be a detriment to a fast-growth company but, according to Foster, having such a large, distributed team is precisely the reason behind Zapier's impressive success. When it comes to managing and leading such a scattered team, all while building a fast-growing SaaS company, Foster is a master. In this week's episode you'll learn: How to validate your idea and find your first customer at the same time The pros and cons of managing a distributed team of over 60 people What a high-performing distributed team looks like Keys to building a B2B company as quickly as possible Wade's favorite apps and tools & so much more! This podcast episode was brought to you by Infusionsoft Anyone looking for the gold standard in sales and marketing solutions should turn to Infusionsoft. The complete package for small businesses of all types, save yourself some time and let Infusionsoft do all the work for you by automating huge parts of your business.

Over the past 20 years or so, the common understanding of what an "entrepreneur" is has undergone some massive changes. It used to be that an entrepreneur was someone who wore a proper suit, courted investors over fancy lunches and dinners, and ultimately cornered entire industries. Then the term started to shift. These days when you think of an entrepreneur, you're more likely to conjure some hip whiz kid, much more likely to wear jeans and a hoodie than a suit. The attitude has changed as well, with entrepreneurs these days less concerned about building Fortune 500 businesses, and instead wanting to take on creative pursuits that can fuel their lifestyles of travel, leisure, and adventure. You'd be hard-pressed to find a person who fits that 21st century entrepreneur archetype better than Sol Orwell. At only 32, he has already bought and sold multiple online businesses, co-founded a 7-figure business by the name of Examine.com, and finds himself globetrotting three to four months out of the year for fun. So how does he do it? Orwell is no stranger to the entrepreneurship life, having started his first online business of buying and selling virtual currency at the age of 14. Ever since, he's been in love with starting businesses, and everything that the online world can offer. As a tried and true digital nomad, Orwell knows exactly what it takes to build up the perfect business for anyone wanting to be a lifestyle entrepreneur. In this week's episode: How to find your niche in the online world The importance of putting the business first before your ego Why building evergreen content will always work better than anything viral Orwell's no-nonsense guide to building a self-sustaining online business The wonders of building a segmented audience and why you need to do it right now & much more!

Wil Schroter never set out to become an entrepreneur. In fact, he didn't have that much interest in business in the first place. But in 1995, he found himself in the office of his college guidance counselor saying that he was dropping out to start an internet company. The question she asked wasn't why Schroter was quitting college, but what was this "internet" he was talking about. A 19 years old, Schroter was one of the first handful of people in the world building successful businesses based on this world-changing piece of technology. While dropping out of college to pursue a career in entrepreneurship is pretty run-of-the-mill today, back in 1995 it was practically unheard of. Everyone around Schroter told him it was insane, that it'd be suicide, that he'd never make it. Fast forward a little over 20 years, he now finds himself as the founder of several multimillion-dollar companies, including Fundable, the world's largest business crowdfunding platform, and the internationally renowned startup launchpad startups.co. It's been a successful journey since that guidance counselor's office. Throughout his entrepreneurial career, Schroter has not only witnessed, but also participated in many of the world-changing impacts the internet has had. He's pretty much seen it all. In this episode you will learn: How to survive a business with less than zero business experience The things you need to know on how to close more deals Learn how to build a community How to deal with growth pains effectively Tips on what it takes to build a successful company & more!

After working in the children's media industry for over five years, there was something that was bothering Francesca Cavallo. She found herself asking the question: "Why does almost every princess in every classical fairy tale needs a prince to save her?" It was something she didn't particularly care for. But the reality was that there just weren't that many fairy tales where the princess was the hero, and not just the damsel-in-distress. So Cavallo did what any other entrepreneur would do in her situation. If there wasn't a solution to the problem, then she was going to create one. The result was a book called Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, a collection of 100 stories about great female artists, athletes, politicians, and scientists. Instead of hearing fairy tales like Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, children everywhere could instead listen to the stories of extraordinary women like Frida Kahlo, Elizabeth the First, and Serena Williams. In order to bring her idea into reality, Cavallo, co-founder of Timbuktu Labs, took to Kickstarter to reach her goal of $40,000 in order to print the first 1,000 copies. The book was a smash hit. Within 24 hours, Cavallo's campaign raised half of its goal, and by the end of the month she had raised over $650,000 in funds and was the creator of the most successful publishing campaign in Kickstarter history. It was a dream come true, but it was far from being a lucky break. Months before the campaign even started, Cavallo had begun planning. In our interview, she walks us through step-by-step how she engineered the massive success of one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns to date. In this episode you will learn: How to validate your idea before you even try crowdfunding Why the video is the most important part of any crowdfunding campaign How to establish trust in both your campaign and yourself The tools you can use to ensure your campaign's success Step-by-step instructions for what to do before, during, and after your crowdfunding campaign & much more!

A unique product snags attention. A boring product does not. Brad Munro says crowdfunding is most successful when you have the former—something innovative like Willi Footwear’s improved flip flops. “The kind of people that are contributing to your crowdfunding campaign, especially if they’re buying a product, they’re doing so because they can’t buy it anywhere else,” he says. “They’re not going to jump on and grab something that they can go down to the shop and get, that’s just as good or the exact same thing.” But they didn't rely on their product's uniqueness. By shoveling time into their campaign, both the preparation and execution, the team at Willi Footwear was able to integrate consistent messaging with outreach to people they knew, which earned them the money they needed to ensure the success of their fledgling company. In this episode you will learn: Why Indiegogo might be a better platform for crowdfunders How to strike the right tone for your campaign video What connections you can immediately leverage to ensure your campaign is a success The elements behind a high-converting project page What you need to start planning for once you decide to start crowdfunding & much more!

Thirty years ago, Michael Gerber released a book called The E-Myth: Why Most Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About it. It carried within it lessons on what it means to be an entrepreneur, the importance of systems in building a scalable business, even the different types of people who start their own businesses. It laid out the common pitfalls that happen to most novice entrepreneurs and gave practical advice on how to avoid them. The best-selling book has since inspired millions of people to start their own businesses, and is still considered to be a must-read for entrepreneurs everywhere. Startup thought leaders like Tim Ferriss and Seth Godin have heaped praise on the lessons outlined in this book. But before Gerber began changing the lives of a whole generation of business owners, he explains, he never intended to become an entrepreneur. It was only through a chance meeting with a distraught business owner that Gerber found himself with his first client and in the position to help someone grow a business. "I discovered something I'd never known before, and that is the conclusion I've come to over the years—that despite the obvious differences between industries, between vertical markets, between kinds of companies, what I began to discover was that from a business development perspective, they're not different at all." Despite all the technological changes that have happened since that first client, Gerber asserts that the key principles behind building a business have remained the same. In this episode you will learn: What exactly it is that makes an entrepreneur different from everyone else How to be a dreamer, a thinker, a storyteller, and a leader The difference between strategic and tactical thinking, and which one you should be doing Why everyone should start thinking about building a business How to make your business unique, even if your product isn't & much more!

Simon Griffiths sat down for what he believed in and, it turned out, parking it on a toilet was an epic marketing win for a good cause. Griffiths and the team behind Who Gives a Crap toilet paper employed a clever stunt in which they livestreamed their co-founder sitting on a toilet until they reached their crowdfunding goal, and it worked. The company gives half of its profits to charity to increase access to toilets and sanitation in developing countries. But it takes more than a good cause and a good marketing ploy to have a successful crowdfunding campaign. The team also relied on thorough preparation and consistent messaging to blow away their goal. Griffiths and his co-founder Jehan Ratnatunga did a first take on their video in January 2012, hoping to launch soon after. But they realized that it wasn’t quite what they wanted, so they went back and tried again, even taking the time to get advice from an ad firm in Melbourne. The video wasn’t the only thing they had to prepare. The team wanted to be sure that their campaign would be a coherent, quality whole, and if that meant delaying the launch so that they would have time to refine things, that was OK. “We thought we’d go live in February or March, and then it just kept on getting continuously pushed back, and then it wasn’t until July that the campaign did go live,” Griffiths says. They were only working on the campaign part-time during the preparation phase, and it ended up taking six months for all of their ideas to come together in a way that they were happy with. Preparing an effective campaign isn’t like heating up a microwave dinner. It’s more like cooking a multi-course feast. It takes time. In this episode you will learn: What makes your campaign newsworthy and why people should care How to make your campaign as shareable as possible Why the first 24 hours are the most important in any crowdfunding campaign Kickstarter or Indiegogo. How to pick the one that works for you How to keep your message consistent across every media channels & much more!

The Canary team didn’t start their company with crowdfunding. In fact, they had been working on the idea for roughly a year before turning to Indiegogo. “We decided that crowdfunding would be a great way for us to validate the market a little bit,” says Jon Troutman, co-founder of the company, which offers networked home security systems. It took the team about a month and a half to plan and prepare the campaign, but Troutman notes that they had already developed a voice for their brand and a story for their product. They didn’t devote as much time to preparation as some campaigns because they could already picture the puzzle. They just had to fit the pieces together. And getting users involved in the process would be key to doing so. After working on Canary for a whole year, they needed an outside view. “What we’re building is so much about filling a need for people, that it felt weird to go too far into product development without bringing more people into the process,” Troutman says. One of the great things about crowdfunding is that it lets the market decide in real time whether or not to validate your idea. In Canary’s case, it did. In this episode you will learn: The right way to communicate your message to your audience Where to go when you're looking for expert help How to analyse the competition and what you can learn from doing so What questions you need to ask yourself before you launch your campaign How much time you need to devote to your campaign in order for it to be successful & much more!

A team of doctors and engineers wanted a safer alternative to Q-Tips, so they created it. By understanding where potential users were coming from and staying on point with the idea that their product could alleviate those pains, the Oto-Tip gained the funding it needed to go big. The lesson from Oto-Tip is, before you start any crowdfunding campaign, you must know how your project will improve people’s lives, and you must explain it in a way that resonates emotionally with potential backers. In this week's episode, Lily Truong, co-founder of Oto-Tip and manager of its crowdfunding campaign, explains how they did it. “My key question I wanted to ask myself was … ‘Why would someone need this? Why would backers resonate with the story? What pain point are you really solving?’” Crowdfunding campaigns can reach their goals when they offer a clear way to deal with common struggles people experience. In the case of Truong’s campaign, Q-tips, cotton swabs, ear sticks, they all shove wax deeper into your ear, make you itch, and can even puncture your eardrum. The Oto-Tip offers another, far less irritating approach to earwax. It all goes back to that pitch: Look, there’s a problem, but here’s a way to fix it. Find out how your own campaign can tap into people’s emotions and offer a solution. In this episode you will learn: The importance of getting feedback before you even entertain the thought of crowdfunding something How to figure out the best media platforms to reach your audience Why you need a strong story and how to create one that works for you The good, the bad, and the ugly when working with PR firms Awesome hacks you can do with LinkedIn to boost your Kickstarter campaign & much more!

The problem Eskil Nordhaug wanted to solve for people was simple. Videos taken with smartphones or small cameras are notoriously shaky. So he simply looked at the needs. He asked himself what it would take to build a company selling a mechanical video stabilizer that exceeded expectations—the kind of product consumers needed, the amount of money he would need, the coverage help press outlets needed, the info his project page would need. The result was StayblCam, and it was precisely this needs-focused approach that led to a smash-hit Kickstarter campaign and the successful company that followed. Nordhaug says that the same principle can guide the way for any great crowdfunding campaign. “The most successful ones, generally speaking, are the ones that, there’s a need for it,” he says. “It solves a problem. It’s not just some fancy, weird thing that’s made for the sake of being made.” Crowdfunding appeals to ordinary people with limited funds, so they can’t back every project that breezes by. When people see your product, you don’t want them to shrug and think it’s neat. You want them to whip out their credit card and ask, “When can I get one?” If your product solves a problem that’s long-pestered people, they’re likely to do that. Don’t make something that people will want in on—make something that people need in on. Nordhaug shared with Foundr this golden piece of advice, and so many more related to running a successful fundraising campaign. “It’s about creating value for users,” Nordhaug says. In this episode you will learn: Why you need to start working on your campaign months before you even launch The correct way to figure out what funding goal you should aim for The best way to contact press outlets and start getting media mentions Paids ads. How and why you should use them What a great Kickstarter landing page looks like & much more!

There's a common thread in a lot of entrepreneurs' stories: They were facing a problem, couldn't find the solution they were looking for, so went ahead and built it themselves. That's exactly what Derek Flanzraich did when he started Greatist, a digital media startup that's all about health and fitness, without all the fluff and in-your-face marketing. As someone who has struggled with his weight his entire life, Flanzraich wanted to find a brand that would talk to him on a personal level and not as another client. Frustrated by the fact that the world was becoming more health conscious, yet at the time seemed to be more interested in shaming those who wanted to get in shape, Flanzraich set out to stake his own claim in an oversaturated market. The key difference, though, was that instead of making his audience feel bad, he would make them feel welcome. "It wasn't actually about the quality of what we're doing, which we felt that was gonna be best in class or whatever. It was actually the voice that really stuck out," Flanzraich says. It was a simple change in language, but its message connected with an underserved audience that would eventually translate into 10 million unique visitors every month. In an era where it seems like every media company is striving for page views above all else, and pumping out nothing but clickbait articles with little substance in order to attract them, Greatist takes a different approach. "We don't think quantity is a metric that matters. Just like I don't think, increasingly, uniques and page views is a metric that matters. All of these things can be gained and aren't inherently valuable on their own," he says. Greatist is now one of the world's most trusted brands when it comes to anything about health, fitness, and happiness. It's commitment to keeping a friendly and personal tone in all of its content has resonated with millennials throughout the world. With such a commitment to quality over quantity over everything else, Flanzraich has built from the ground up the kind of branding and engagement that most companies would kill for. In this episode you will learn: Why you'll never be ready to be an entrepreneur, and why that's okay How to find a voice and tone that resonates with your audience How to calculate your long-term brand value Flanzraich's unique approach to content and how it holds up against the SEO-focused practices of others What it means to build a powerhouse brand and how to do it & much more!

When you think about wine, you most likely imagine stern-faced sommeliers, or parties where tuxedos and hors d'oeuvres on silver platters are the norm. Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey do not fit the stereotype. You probably wouldn't even expect them to be wine-lovers, let alone the co-founders of Barefoot Wine, the largest wine brand in the world. But according to them, the reason they're so successful is precisely because they knew nothing about the industry going in. Houlihan and Harvey never planned on going into the wine business, but when the opportunity presented itself, they jumped on it. "If we had known then what we know now, there would be no Barefoot Wine. It's now the largest wine brand in the world, but it would not exist if we had a clue," Houlihan says. Not having a clue turned out to be their secret ingredient. Instead of being influenced by years of tradition and trying to fit the mold of the wine industry, they decided to do something different and make wine fun and accessible to the average person. Despite the backlash and criticism they received, despite the fact that they had no established brand or marketing presence, they found a strategy that led them to become one of the fastest-growing wine brands in the nation. To make it even more impressive, it was all achieved without paid advertising. "It was by contributing to the community, by supporting the same issues that our shoppers were interested in, that we were able to sell our product. Because we weren't paying for advertising, this became our form of advertising. It's what we called 'Worthy Cause Marketing,' and that's what we used throughout the nation when we started to spread the word and grow and expand," Harvey says. Barefoot Wine has come a long way since its inception in 1986, when Houlihan and Harvey naively thought they would make a profit within four years. Now they're a little older and a little wiser, but they still possess that lively spark that led them to create one of the most popular wine brands in the world. In this episode, you will learn: Why ignorance and naiveté might be your strongest weapons in disrupting an industry What "Worthy Cause Marketing" is and how you can use it to build your brand The painful lessons in logistics and distribution Houlihan and Harvey had to learn from selling a physical product Where to go to learn the lessons you need to succeed How to stay true to your vision and not let anyone else hold you back & much more!

When Zipcar first started it was nothing more than a green Volkswagen beetle named "Betsy." It was parked outside of Robin Chase's house and the key was hidden underneath a pillow on her porch. Inside the glove box was a piece of paper where you would write down the time you rented the car and the time you brought it back. That was it. These days, Zipcar is the largest car sharing service in the world, with more than 13,000 cars spread across almost every major city in the world. The first time Chase encountered her idea with Zipcar was when her co-founder came back from a vacation in Berlin. Among her many stories about her vacation, she told Chase about a peculiar business she had witnessed where she saw multiple people sharing a single car. Taken with the idea, Chase immediately began setting out to build a better version. "It's an idea that we didn't even invent. We just executed it way better than other people," Chase says. Zipcar launched within six months, with a founder who was a mother of three and had no technical experience. It was 1996, when the internet was still new and very different from what we know today. Nevertheless, Chase was determined to make her startup a reality. We had the pleasure to speak with Robin Chase about her incredible journey as an entrepreneur, a disruptor and a world-changer, and all the lessons she learned in her inspiring career. In this interview, you will learn: What it means to create a true minimum viable product to validate your idea Why the best ideas come from solving your own problems Advice on who to hire when you're a struggling startup What qualities you should be looking for when bringing in new people to your team The importance of user feedback and always listening to your customer & much more!

Casey Fenton, like many of us in our 20s, wasn't entirely sure where he would go in life. Growing up in a small town in Maine, he started to think about this entire world that existed beyond the borders of his hometown, and all the experiences he had yet to have. One thing he knew for sure was that his small hometown wasn't going to be offering him any of the new experiences he was looking for. "That got me to start buying random plane tickets to anywhere in the world," he says. From there it was traveling from place to place, mingling with locals and getting a backstage pass to the world's greatest cities. It was then that Fenton formed an idea for a business that would end up spanning the globe. Today, Couchsurfing.com has more than 10 million members in over 20,000 cities around the world. When it launched in 2003, Couchsurfing was a revolutionary concept. It was one of the first businesses to truly harness the power of a sharing economy. Instead of spending money at hotels and backpacker hostels, travelers were instead offered a choice to stay in the homes of hospitable locals free of charge. Since then, Fenton's business model has been replicated a thousand times over by the likes of Uber and Airbnb, just to name a few. We had the chance to talk with Fenton about his entrepreneurial journey, starting with being a backpacker to becoming the founder of a multimillion-dollar company with a reach that spans every corner of the globe. In this interview you'll learn: How to go through the hardships of starting your own business How to figure out which tasks to delegate and which tasks you need to prioritize as a leader Tips on creating and maintaining a massive and engaged community How to build an international reputation that people trust The most powerful drivers that'll get you to scale your business & much more!

For most entrepreneurs, the real test isn't whether or not you can grow a successful business, but how well you can bounce back from failure. For some, this will prove to be too much and they'll hang up the gloves and never try again. For the true entrepreneurs, though, they'll find a way to jump back into the ring no matter what. That is exactly what Eugene Woo, co-founder of Venngage, did. “I had like a taste of failure, but I still went ahead anyway and did it again,” Woo says. After his first startup went under, Woo found himself back in the corporate world feeling like a failure. Despite it all though, he dusted himself off, took it all as a learning experience and refused to give up. Armed with nothing but a nagging idea about helping job applicants by turning their resumes into beautiful infographics, Woo went ahead and pitched his idea at Startup Weekend in Toronto and, to his surprise, he won. One thing led to another and he found himself quitting his job once again to work on his startup full time. The startup known as Visiualize.me blew up, getting featured in places like Mashable and Tech Crunch and gaining more than 200,000 signups before the product was even properly released. But, once again, it was anything but smooth sailing for Woo. “I made a lot of the classic mistakes. One of the main ones was I started a company with people I didn’t know very well.” Within a few months, founders started leaving the company, with one even refusing to turn up to an interview with Y Combinator and leaving shortly after. Stung by failure again, Woo didn't know what to do and ended up selling his company. Despite it all, he knew he had a good idea on his hands. He charged right back into the startup world, this time with Venngage, a tool that allows you to easily make your own infographics, and armed with lessons he learned from his previous failures, he was determined to make Venngage a success. Today, Venngage has tripled in size with over a thousand new leads to their site every day, and over half a million users per month. We talk with Woo about the invaluable lessons he learned on his journey to success and ask him to share his best advice on how entrepreneurs can overcome their fear of failure, and the best marketing tactics to quickly grow your startup. In this episode you will learn: How to know when to give up or keep on going with your startup Why so many startups are doing content marketing wrong The secret to getting your company to start ranking high in SEO as soon as possible How and why you should do blogger outreach What the most important metrics are for growing your brand's exposure and visibility & much more!

Every morning of every day, Sujan Patel starts his day by getting out all of his creative energy onto paper. The process is relatively simple. He starts by recording himself talking about whatever topic he wants to write about as a way to order his thoughts. He'll then send this recording to a transcriptionist and when he gets it back he'll spend around an hour cranking out a 1,500-2,000 word blog post. For Sujan, this is the secret to being one of the world's best and most prolific content marketers today. Just 10 years ago, content marketing just wasn't a thing. Sure, blogs existed but they were rarely used in marketing. Today, content marketing is one of the go-to strategies for businesses everywhere. But with everyone eagerly jumping onto the content marketing bandwagon, simply having a high-quality blog just doesn't cut it anymore. In order to really harness the power of content marketing and see some tangible results, you're going to need a little out-of-the-box thinking. "Everyone's writing content for their customers, their existing customers, or who they think their customers are. What I like to do is, I don't even talk about any of that stuff. I talk about content circles. And what a content circles is, is [the] content that circles your industry." As the founder of ContentMarketer.io, the ultimate tool for content marketers, Sujan is one of the most knowledgable people around, and he shared a ton of his wisdom on the subject with us. In this week's episode you will learn: The best way to generate ideas for articles that your audience will love Just why content marketing is so powerful and why everyone is using it How to create content that generates you leads and customers What to do when you find yourself with writer's block How you too can start writing for places like Forbes, Inc. and Fast Company & much more!

During a creative career filled with awards and recognition, it took Alex Bogusky a while to realize that none of it mattered unless he loved the work. “You could win the Grand Prix at Cannes—the next day you’re going to go into your office and look at the same dude across the office and try to think of something. It doesn’t feel any better; it didn’t make you any smarter; it doesn’t make anything any easier,” Bogusky says. He did, in fact, win the most prestigious award at Cannes Advertising. Actually, under his leadership, the firm Crispin Porter + Bogusky won in all five categories, and became the world’s most awarded advertising agency. Bogusky himself was named Creative Director of the Decade by Adweek magazine, and Fast Company has called him both the Steve Jobs and the Elvis of advertising. Looking over his many endeavors, Bogusky is a hard person to pin down. There’s a friendly, surfery quality about him, but he’s also gained a reputation as a perfectionist and ferocious supervisor. He’s worked for both car companies and Al Gore’s climate change initiative. He’s overseen iconic ad campaigns for junk food, and the most successful youth-focused anti-smoking campaign in U.S. history. Having left the agency six years ago, he’s now focusing on work with a social responsibility component, supporting multiple creative agencies and a startup accelerator. But for all of the goals he’s achieved, Bogusky says the happiness he’s found in his career comes from loving the journey—that practice of sitting down with other people and thinking really hard to solve a problem. “I’ve found that I had to learn to love the process and forget all the goals. Because the goals, as you achieved them, they didn’t really change anything.” In this interview you will learn: How to embrace change and use it to fuel your creativity Why you need to listen to voices outside your startup and what it could mean for you When and where advertising and branding comes in for a business How to find opportunities to upset the status quo How you can start loving the journey regardless of its highs and lows & much more!

The future of media, if not the present, probably looks a lot like The Next Web, which is odd considering co-founder Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten says it’s not even really a media company. The Next Web instead thinks of itself as a tech company, firing on multiple cylinders at once, including international conferences, ecommerce, online courses, and of course, one of the most influential and trafficked news sites on the web. Soon they’re even opening up a brick and mortar space in Amsterdam that will serve as hub for technology startups. “For some people it’s sort of weird, ‘What, you’ve got a conference and a website and now you’re opening a space? That’s a totally different thing,’” Veldhuijzen van Zanten told Foundr (we’ll just call him Boris from now on). “For us, it’s a logical next step, instead of losing focus or branching out into different areas. They’re all connected by the brand and a curiosity in technology and the future of technology.” The Next Web actually started as a conference host. Its annual event in Amsterdam draws some 20,000 international attendees. However, the company is probably best known for its tech news site. That branch of the business is staggering, drawing up to 8 million visitors a month. But with its conferences expanding, its growing online marketplace, and Boris and his partners always looking for the next opportunity, the most impressive thing about The Next Web is how it merges such a wide range of services to meet the needs of its loyal community. And they do it all with a relatively small staff and a squad of remote contributors. “Everything is part of a circle that is growing stronger over time,” Boris says. “Part of our revenue comes from advertising on the sites with all the traffic we have, an important part is the conference, and now the ecommerce part is growing stronger.” Next could be research, consulting, video, anything within reason that the people who have come to love and trust the company might want. And that’s the secret to The Next Web’s success. It’s not a company that makes a product—it’s a network of people. In this interview you will learn: The subtle details behind what makes a great event that everyone loves How to conduct the best interviews with notable influencers Boris's number one tip on generating amazing content The tools that every startup should start using The key to keeping everyone in your company aligned to the same vision & much more!

No one ever "gives" an entrepreneur a job, they make one for themselves. Entrepreneurs don't ask for permission, they just do. And no one exemplifies this better than Ryan Holiday who has made an entire career out of refusing to play by the rules. As a writer he started off by dropping out of college to apprentice under Robert Greene as a research assistant. To date he's published 5 bestselling books, his first book now being taught in colleges around the world. As a marketer he got his first job as the Director of Marketing at American Apparel by starting off as a marketing consultant and catching the eye of founder Dov Charney. Today, he works as a world-renowned media strategist he can count among his list of clients the likes of Tim Ferriss, Tucker Max and Linkin Park just to name a few. So how did he manage to achieve so much all before turning 30? For Holiday it's a mastery of two things: the media and your own self-development. "I found that the more that I go out and learn stuff on my own, the more opportunities I create through me, then the better I am at my job," he said. We speak with Ryan as where we talk everything from his process to media strategy to his advice on how to always keep learning in order to be successful. In this episode you will learn: The secret to getting driving attention to your business with social proof How to pitch journalists, bloggers and reports from major media channels The importance of self-reflection and humility in order to succeed What works and doesn't work when it comes to successful PR Where to go and what to do when you need a mentor & much more!

In 2012 James Beshara and his co-founder officially launched Tilt, a platform that aimed to make crowdfunding not only more personal but to make the process as easy as possible. But if you ask the Y-Combinator alum himself, he'll say that Tilt was created years before it even launched. Originally starting off as an offshoot of an earlier startup that he was working on, he soon found himself working on Tilt more and more. It was then he realised he was onto something. "For every young entrepreneur out there, starting, or building, or founding something. It always sounds like it just starts one day in February or starts one afternoon when you get hit with inspiration. When in truth I think it is the amalgamation of just always starting things, doing things, trying out ideas and one of them just starts to get pulled from you, and you start to spend more time on it." Ever since it's inception Tilt has been on a tear. In just four short years Tilt is now valued at $500 million and has crowdfunded some of the world's most memorable campaigns in recent memory. Like sending the Jamaican bobsled team to the Sochi Olympics to raising over $180 thousand for several campaigns providing relief to the victims of Hurricane Sandy. Along the way though James has learnt some very valuable lessons on what it means to be the CEO and co-founder of a fast-growing startup. We chat with James today and he reveals his personal methods and strategies on how to build a startup that not only scales, but scales quick. In this episode you will learn: The importance of waiting for the right co-founder How to get out of your own head and move fast, all while developing the best product possible Why the smartest people in the room might not necessarily give you the best advice How to design and build a product to grow as fast as possible The two key things every entrepreneurs needs to focus on if they want to succeed & much more!

Something that most entrepreneurs struggle with the most is coming up with an idea for a startup. They'll study business forecasts and look at unique trends trying to find the next big thing. What most entrepreneurs forget though is that the most disruptive startups in the world were created to solve a single problem. Which is what exactly Polina Raygorodskaya was looking to do when she founded Wanderu, a platform that allows you to find, compare and book bus and train tickets anywhere within the United States. In just 4 years Wanderu have grown their database to over 5 million users. It turns out there were other people that were facing the same problem as Polina. A long time entrepreneur Polina came across the idea for WanderU while constantly commuting back and forth in New York. Often having to travel by bus or train she quickly found out, to her surprise, that there was no single database to allow commuters to easily find and book bus and train tickets. Sensing a startup opportunity she closed down her PR firm and began to build Wanderu. Despite having little experience in the travel industry Polina was undeterred and together with her co-founder they built North America's leading ground travel search platform. Today, Wanderu is now partnered and works together with the leaders of their industry like Greyhound, Megabus, and Peter Pan Bus just to name a few. In this interview you will learn: Tips on how to get started in the travel industry, even if you don't have any experience Importance of finding the right team that shares your vision How to find and connect with the best advisers and influencers to help you build your startup When to sacrifice profit for growth Secrets to creating a valuable network that'll sustain your business in the long run & much more!

There are no shortcuts when it comes to good online marketing, something that Dave Hobson knows all too well. As the resident expert on all things marketing at Foundr we give you a very special episode today about Dave from how he came to be at Foundr to his thoughts on successful online marketing. Funnily enough, it is entirely possible that Foundr would not be around if Dave had not cold-called Nathan nearly four years ago. At the time Nathan had only just started Foundr and Dave was at a job where he had to cold-call people and try to make a sale over the phone. Instead of making the sale the founder of Foundr and Dave got to chatting and they eventually became friends. In order to understand why Foundr may have never existed without Dave Hobson you first must understand his role at Foundr. Essentially he's Nathan right-hand man, the go-to guy whenever a discussion needs to be had about marketing, strategy or the future of Foundr. Even before he started officially working at Foundr, Dave has always been in the background helping Foundr out with his advice. Today we're very lucky to count him as one of our own and as Foundr's Business Development and Product manager. In today's episode we show you a little of what's going on behind-the-scenes at Foundr, but more importantly we have Dave divulge the tactics and strategies behind one of our best sale channels: webinars. Webinars are an amazing tool and they've become a staple in the online marketing world and no one knows that better than Dave Hobson, who knows all the ins and out behind what makes a successful webinar. In this episode you will learn: Dave's story and how he came to work at Foundr Why webinars are so powerful and why almost every business in the world can use them All the tools you'll need to start doing a successful webinar The structure every great webinar needs if you want to make sales How to choose the right webinar topic for you and your audience & much more! If you want to learn more about webinars, then check out our FREE guide on webinars at https://foundrmag.com/webinarguide!!

The term "unicorn company" describes a startup valued at over $1 billion that managed to get there in a relatively short period of time. Usually when we talk about unicorn companies, we're dealing with Silicon Valley and the cutting edge of the tech scene. Companies that are disruptive in the sense that they've created something totally new. Rarely, however, do we find a unicorn company that started out in an overcrowded and declining market. Yet somehow, despite the odds, Tom Bilyeu, co-founder of Quest Nutrition, turned a fledgling startup into a powerhouse in just six years. When Quest Nutrition first hit the scene with their protein bars, they were told by almost every expert in the space that it was insane and that it was guaranteed to fail. Yet Bilyeu and his co-founders persevered and tackled the problem in a way that no one else had thought of before. First they focused on their customers, to empower them and actually help them make healthy and positive changes in their lives. In short, they treated their customers differently than their competitors. The result was explosive, growing by 57,000% in their first three years and cracking the $1 billion mark three years later. We were lucky to sit down with Bilyeu and have him give us the breakdown and strategy behind Quest Nutrition and how they became the unicorn company they are today. In this interview you will learn: The challenges of managing a hyper-growth company and how to overcome them How to navigate the classic entrepreneurial debate of profit vs. growth Why you need to evangelize to your customer whenever you can How to build brand loyalty and have your audience believe in your vision How to crack the notoriously difficult and crowded health and nutrition market & much more!

When Hal Elrod was 19 he was involved in a car accident with a drunk driver that left him with brain damage, 11 broken bones, and doctors telling him that he'd never walk again. While many people would understandably give into grief or anger or any other whirlwind of emotions that come after such a traumatic event, Elrod instead made the conscious choice to be at peace with himself. He knew there was nothing he could control about his situation, but he could control how the situation affected him. While he accepted the fact that he might never be able to use his legs again and was at peace with it, he was also determined to find a way to walk again. “I’m going accept the worst-case scenario, while I focus on the best case scenario.” Three weeks later, defying all odds and expectations, he began to walk again. Since then, he's called upon his life story and lessons he's learned along the way to become a highly sought-after motivational speaker and bestselling author of the book The Miracle Morning. Through his book, Elrod has touched the lives of millions of people with his simple philosophy and has guided them to become more productive, happier, less stressed, and at peace with themselves. In this interview you will learn: How you too can start becoming a better entrepreneur, and a better person overall, every single morning Why the most successful people in the world take their mornings very seriously When to accept the worst and how to turn that into a weapon What your potential is and how to reach it What it truly means to put mind over matter and how to do it & much more!

Brian Scudamore of O2E brands knew all along that he wanted to be an entrepreneur. Relying on that sense of determination, he's built up a sprawling multimillion-dollar business empire, with franchises all over the world. But it all began with junk. To be specific, it all started in a McDonalds drive-thru, with Scudamore sitting in his car trying to figure out how he would pay for college. What he saw was an old pick-up truck filled to the brim with junk, and he immediately knew that this would be his ticket to chase his entrepreneurial dream. "A week later, I had a business hauling away junk, and that was the way into my job and a career path that's now been 27 years of pure entrepreneurial passion," he says. The first business he founded was 1-800-Got-Junk, which has since turned into multiple franchises all around the world and spun off into three more business in the home services niche. Altogether they generate a revenue of $250 million per year! But it hasn't been smooth sailing over the past 27 years, with many ups and downs along the way and some valuable lessons learned. We're very lucky to learn those lessons directly from Brian today through this week's podcast episode. In this interview you will learn: How to get your first round of customers within your first day of business The secrets to building a successful international franchise What the franchise business model looks like and how you can make it work for you Why you need to always hire for culture and fit rather than skill Traps and pitfalls to look out for when running such a large international conglomerate & much more!