Aydin Senkut is the Founder and Managing Partner at Felicis. He invested in Shopify's Series A in 2010 at a $25M valuation. He joins us to tell the story of how Shopify found product market fit.

Shopify is now a $100B company. But as Founder & CEO Tobi Lutke said, in the early days, his goal was "to build a 20-person company". Shopify is not a story of explosive, 10x growth and massive funding rounds. Shopify is a story of consistent growth. Of doubling year after year, from 0 to over $7B in revenue and a $100B valuation.

If your goal is to build a generational company,  you won't want to miss this episode.

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If you've been struggling to raise—you're not alone. Seed funding has been falling every quarter for the last 2 years. Rounds are smaller and take longer to raise.

So we decided to record an episode to help you. Here are all the mistakes, tips and tricks we’ve seen first-hand that actually work.  We touch on things like

• What the perfect raise looks like
• Why Post-Money SAFEs are TERRIBLE for founders
• The greatest power move that any founder can use when fundraising 

If you’re raising or planning to raise anytime this year, in a macro environment that is not friendly, don’t miss this episode.

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The Super Bowl is the best place to get in front of customers—if you have $10M to spend. Which means for virtually all startups, it’s 100% useless. So I decided to look into some of the best campaigns early-stage startups used to drive millions of leads.

Shopify used a $100K Build A Business Competition in 2010  when it was a bootstrapped business. The campaign drove 1350 new businesses and was paid back in under a month.

https://shawngraham.me/blog/shopifys-kickass-build-a-business-contest

DollarShaveClub launched with a YouTube video about its $1/mo razors. The video was everything a GIlette ad was not. The company was ultimately acquired for $1B.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUG9qYTJMsI&t=1s

Purple had the famous Raw Egg Goldilocks video that compared its mattress to others by seeing which one broke raw eggs. For less than $10K it got 200M views, more than the Super Bowl itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BvwpjaGZCQ

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This isn’t a unicorn fairytale. It’s a story about what it really takes to build a company and get to an exit.

Nazim takes us through how he nearly went bankrupt, took years to turn things around, and ultimately sold his business for $30M all cash. 

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4K likes, 365 re-shares and over 1M views, without any marketing spend.  For an ad promoting your product, that sounds too good to be true-- and yet that's exactly what Yoav did.  He leveraged it to get tons of press, more customers than he could manage, and raise a $15M Series A in under a year after incorporating.

Here's the story of how Yoav got started with Walnut and how he ultimately found product-market fit. Yoav goes deep on tactics you can use to drive inbound traffic, generate leads and fundraise.

Viral video: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/yoav-vilner_weareprospects-weareprospects-activity-6960959679111778304-nOrW?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

Viral video 2: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/yoav-vilner_weareprospects-weareprospects-activity-7006660780150427648-P4vD?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

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$1B startups get all the hype. But for 99% of founders, it’s the wrong goal. You’re better off building a sustainable business with consistent growth. 

Raising big rounds won’t make your company big and staying lean won’t make your company small.  That's just VC Myth 1. 

Raising round after round does not equal success. That's just VC Myth 2.

Just because you raise more money, doesn’t mean you make more money. That's just VC Myth 3.

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Over 10 years of hard work, Ilya has helped over 2000 individuals change their lives. In the meantime, he built a profitable, cash-flowing business with no outside funding. While the billion-dollar outcomes get all the hype, this is what success looks like for most founders. 

In this episode, we dive into how Ilya turned a resume-editing business into a multi-million dollar recruitment platform, how he landed his first customers, and exactly when he knew he had product-market fit. 

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 We released The Five Steps to Product Market Fit a few weeks ago and received lots of questions on how to apply the steps. In this episode, Rob and I share more colour and more stories on each step to help you understand how to apply them, and also, when these steps might need to be broken.

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Re-releasing the BEST episode of all of season 1. 

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I know most founders today are planning for the new year, so sharing the top 3 mistakes I've seen early-stage founders make when forecasting. If you're forecasting for 2024, you don't want to miss this.

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