Hey Crew!

Imagine you've spent years building a company around live events. You just cracked your first million dollar year, you're training the Eventbrite team in Nashville, you're about to partner with one of the biggest ticketing platforms in the world. Then Friday the 13th of March 2020 hits and every single client calls to cancel and ask for their deposits back.

That's where Nina McMahon was when COVID landed.

What she did next is the part worth talking about. Oh, and she accidentally invented the whole product in 2013 because Wi-Fi at events kept breaking and she told a client "we'll just bring the internet" before confirming that was actually possible.

We cover:
- The Friday the 13th phone call that broke everything and what happened in the weeks after
- How they accidentally invented portable Wi-Fi from a two-meter prototype that needed a truck to move
- Tripling revenue through COVID without a playbook
- Getting a cease and desist from Fox Media six events in (and why it was the best thing that ever happened to them)
- Powering a SpaceX launch without knowing it was SpaceX until the GPS said Cape Canaveral
- Why their company motto is "don't work with dicks" and how long it took to actually listen to it

ANNOUNCEMENT
I've just launched our very own Fayl Tales substack!!
If you love a good story, especially one from the trenches, with the ups, pivots and figuring it out, then search Fayl Tales on substack!

Follow Fayl Tales on all platforms @fayltales
Follow Loveth on LinkedIn and Instagram @lovethochayi
Follow Nina and Pop-Up Wi-Fi at popupwifi.com

YouTube Chapters:
0:00 the teaser
1:21 friday the 13th, every client cancelled, and what dissociation actually feels like
3:22 pivoting in under a month and why COVID was their volkswagen moment
6:08 why the industry refused to trust remote networks (until jimmy fallon had no choice)
8:35 accidentally inventing pop-up wifi because venue internet kept breaking
16:14 scaling without a sales team, a love letter to producers, and a cease and desist from fox
30:47 coachella, taylor swift in lake tahoe, and going all in on the US market
38:44 hardware advice, the "don't work with dicks" rule, and trusting your gut

#fayltales #startuppodcast #hardwarestartup #femalefounder #founderstory

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HHey Crew! What do you do when you build a recruitment firm from a cockroach-infested Surry Hills office into a nearly 100-person, $20M-a-year global business, and then look back and say, yeah, I was faking it the whole time?

That's Phaedon. He founded Mitchell Lake at 26, exited, and co-founded Innovation Bay, the longest running startup community in Australia. He's been inside more founder journeys than most of us will ever meet.

In this one he gets into a US founder who raised $360M from tier one VCs and still shut it down, Sequoia's "PowerPoint of death" during the GFC, an investor whose whole philosophy is "I drown puppies," and the mentor who told him mid-spiral: you're stuffed, stop everything.

We cover:

• How Mitchell Lake scaled to $20M across three countries and what he'd do differently
• The $360M raise that still ended in a shutdown
• Why Australian founders hold on too long and what it's costing them
• Why US VCs specifically back founders who already failed once
• Keeping a co-founder relationship alive when everything is on fire
• Building from Hobart and what other states are getting right

Follow Loveth on LinkedIn and Instagram @lovethochayi 

Follow Fayl Tales on all platforms @fayltales 

Follow Phaedon at Innovation Bay: innovationbay.com

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Hey Crew!

Haobo Zhang is 20 years old. He has a full scholarship to study biomedicine at University of Melbourne, 30,000 users on his AI platform, and a very public goal to build a unicorn by 25. He's also on a leave of absence from that scholarship, which is basically just a polite way of saying he dropped out.

He's been building since he was 14, and not for the reasons you'd think. It started because he wanted money to buy video games. He wrote novels, sold them online, then hired someone else to write them because he didn't want to do it himself. At 15, he was running a YouTube creator agency while pretending to be an adult because he knew no one would take him seriously. His dad was signing the Shopify forms on his behalf.

Now he's building Polarbear, an AI study tool for students, with 1,300 daily active users and a raise coming. But the most interesting thing about Haobo isn't the product. It's his philosophy. He calls himself lazy. And he thinks that's exactly why he's been able to build so much.

We get into:
- Why being lazy might actually be the founder superpower nobody talks about
- How a random Antler hackathon accidentally created Polarbear
- Why he markets to students instead of parents and why it works every time
- Building a content machine without being a natural content creator
- The reality of being 20 and building, the rent anxiety, the sleepless nights, calling 20 parents a day just to cover expenses
- What he's had to sacrifice to get here
- The unicorn by 25 goal and whether he actually believes it

If this one hit, subscribe to Fayl Tales wherever you listen and follow Haobo on LinkedIn. His journey is very much worth watching in real time.

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Hey Crew!

Millie Marconi has been building for 9 years. In that whole time she's had exactly one real job, and it only lasted a couple of months. She's the kind of founder who doesn't wait for permission, which is exactly why this episode hit different.

We get into the LinkedIn post that nearly broke her (and ended up building her next company), how she walked away from $100K in revenue because the vision was bigger, and the AI product she built back in 2019 that she dropped, the one that basically became Heidi Health.

Millie's current company is TestFeed, a synthetic audience platform for B2B market research. The industry is a $140B one, 70% of it is going synthetic by 2028, and she's already got 3000 people on the waitlist. She just pulled the B2C product and is going all in on enterprise. Raise is coming.

But beyond the startup stuff, we talk about building as a neurodivergent person, what it means to be a dark horse, and the Italian grandfather who crossed the world with nothing and became a horse trainer. That part will get you.

We cover:
- The accidental origin story of TestFeed (a LinkedIn post gone very wrong)
- Killing a $100K revenue product to go after something bigger
- What synthetic audiences actually are and why B2B is the play
- The AI note taker she built in 2019 (before the space blew up)
- Her grandfather and the "build with what you've got" mentality

#fayltales #founderlife #startuppodcast #buildinginpublic #startupstory 

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Hey Crew!

Picture this. You win world's best liquor. You're in Qantas first class lounges. You're in over 500 venues across the country. And you got here by betting every dollar you had on a family limoncello recipe.

That's Stefan Di Benedetto's story.

Stefan is the founder of Solbevi, the world's first limoncello spritz in a can, born from an Italian family tradition and $300k of his own savings. He quit construction, watched three capital raises collapse at the last minute, ran out of stock before the Formula One, and kept going anyway.

We cover:

• The Saturday afternoon that sparked the world's first limoncello spritz in a can
• How he landed Dan Murphy's 9 days after launching by guessing a category manager's email
• Three capital raises. Three last minute collapses.
• The Formula One stock disaster. He ignored his gut and paid for it.
• How a conversation with a stranger on a Qantas flight led to his cans being served in first class lounges
• His fiancée's breaking point after two years of never seeing him and what finally changed
• Why his advice to new founders is "don't do it" (and then the real answer underneath that)

One of the most entertaining and honest episodes we've had on the show. Stefan is the kind of founder who just makes you want to back yourself.

Check out Solbevi and follow Stefan on Instagram. Subscribe to Fayl Tales on YouTube and Buzzsprout, and follow us @fayltales everywhere.

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Hey Crew!

Picture this: you walk away from a successful corporate tech career, buy a vineyard in Tasmania with your partner, and dream about the simple life.

Then the vineyard goes haywire, you're burning through money, and you can't get anyone to come help.

Most people sell up. Fiona Turner built an AI company instead.

Fiona is the co-founder and CEO of Bitwise Agronomy — an AI platform now operating in 10 countries, with 3 petabytes of berry data (for context, ChatGPT was trained on 1), 89% revenue growth this year, and $5 million raised. All from Launceston, Tasmania.

We get into:

• How a broken vineyard became a $5M AI company
• The pivot from wine to berries and why vineyards just wouldn't pay
• Building drone swarms, vine rovers, and sensor networks from scratch with a kids robotics club
• Raising capital as a female founder when only 4% of Aussie startup funding goes to women
• Having a baby mid-capital raise while Silicon Valley Bank collapsed (her daughter flew 50 flights in her first year of life)
• What it actually takes to become the Google of forecasting

One of the most honest, unfiltered conversations we've had on the show.

Follow Fiona on LinkedIn and check out Bitwise Agronomy. Subscribe to Fayl Tales on YouTube and Buzzsprout, and follow us @fayltales — fayltales.com

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Hey Crew! Ok so this one hit different. Megan Luttrell has built Aussie Founders Club into a community of thousands of founders, runs Kairos Recruitment, just launched People Stack, won Victorian Ecosystem Hero of the Year, and landed a $200K grant from Launch Vic.

But her first year? She was broke. Like properly broke. She got her partner to pay her to clean their own house just to have an extra 80 bucks a week. She borrowed money from her uncle. She tried a bunch of ideas that went absolutely nowhere.

And the wild part is she didn't even think she deserved the Ecosystem Hero award. She literally told people not to nominate her yet. They did anyway. And when they called her name, she had her camera out recording someone else because she was so sure it wasn't going to be her.

We get into the stuff nobody talks about when it comes to hiring in startups. Why most founders completely skip thinking about who they are as an employer before they start recruiting. Why culture fit is actually code for hiring people exactly like you. And why your first hires are the most make-or-break decisions you'll ever make.

We cover:

• Why your first startup hires will either 10x your business or tank it
• The difference between culture fit and culture contribution
• How Aussie Founders Club went from a meetup with a 7-word name to thousands of members
• Why she spent her broke year building community instead of just chasing revenue
• The compounding effect of showing up when nobody's watching
• Her first startup experience where the CEO was allegedly high on the job and everyone quit on the same day

If you're hiring, building a community, or just trying to figure out what the hell you're doing as a founder, this one's for you.

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If you've ever read a piece of startup advice and thought "that doesn't feel right"... trust that instinct. This one's for you.

This is another solo episode. No guest. Just me unpacking the startup advice that sounds great on a LinkedIn post but actually messes people up when they're in the thick of building.

I've interviewed a lot of founders over the past year and I kept noticing the same thing. So many of them followed the "right" advice and it led them in the completely wrong direction. Move fast and break things. Your MVP should embarrass you. Passion is everything. Sleep is for the weak.

We've all heard them. But when you actually sit with founders who've been burned by this stuff, you start to see the cracks.

So I broke down 6 pieces of startup advice that I think are misguided, overhyped, or just straight up wrong depending on your context.

We cover:

• Why "move fast and break things" can destroy trust before you even get started
• The MVP embarrassment myth and why scrappy doesn't fly in 2026
• Hiring for culture fit vs culture contribution and why echo chambers kill startups
• How passion can actually blind you from fixing your product
• The difference between building a business and funding an expensive hobby
• Why hustle culture is a scam and burnout is not a flex

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Ok so this one is different. No guest. Just me.

I've interviewed so many founders about their failures and mistakes but I realised I've literally never talked about my own. A few friends and guests have called me out on it too so here we are.

I also recap the first ever Fayl Tales Live event at Canva in Sydney, which sold out in four days (still a bit shocked about that). I talk about what worked, what I'd change, and what's coming next with Melbourne.

And then I get into my own failure. A sports recovery product I spent months developing with a chemist who just... ghosted me. No contract. No IP protection. Just blind faith that it would work out. Spoiler: it didn't.

I cover:

• How the Sydney event at Canva sold out in 4 days and what the format looked like
• Why I designed the event to feel like friends chatting, not a panel
• What's different about the Melbourne event at Stone and Chalk
• How the podcast has pivoted from failed startups only to founders actively building
• Why self-funding this has been the best investment I've ever made
• My sports recovery product that died because I trusted without a contract
• The lessons I should have learned way earlier about IP protection

This is me being vulnerable for once. More of this to come.

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Ok so this one is a ride. 

Alex Melocco studied law AND software engineering (overachiever energy), ditched the safe corporate path, and went full send on building startups. 

First attempt? A tutoring marketplace that flopped because nobody actually needed it. Second attempt? A calendar app he built with a whole team for months only to find out people were basically like "yeah it's cool... I wouldn't pay for it though." 

Brutal.

Now he's building Mira, which pulls all your comms (Gmail, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Slack, the works) into one feed so you can stop losing your mind. And the way they validated it is actually so good. 

No demo, no fancy launch. Just a brochure, three promises, and a Stripe link. If you'll pay before it even exists, you actually care.

We get into the messy stuff too. Convincing yourself a problem is real when it's not, the awkwardness of shutting something down when your co-founder's livelihood is on the line, why Aussie tall poppy syndrome makes it so hard to just be loud about what you're building, and why he's obsessing over making like 10 people love the product before thinking about scale.

If you've ever built something nobody asked for, this one will hit.

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