Founder Breakthroughs

Every few years, there is a massive shift in the tools and platforms available to founders who are building out their dreams. On this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with John Rush, the Founder of Mars X – which is a new development platform that is reinventing how software gets developed.

We discussed a lot of great insights during our chat:

-       The dangers of building a startup without getting active customer feedback – and how this can waste years of time

-       Why you need to talk with customers to figure out which problems need solving

-       The inspiration for a whole new way of developing software called Mars X

-       How solving your own problem is often the best inspiration for a startup

-       Why it’s absolutely critical that you focus on your evangelists before wasting time converting skeptics

-       And how you can multiply your team by attracting a community and ecosystem around your product

As a lifelong programmer, it was exciting to learn about how MarsX is changing the way software gets built. 

There is a missing ingredient from all of the advice, strategies, tactics, and approaches given to founders on how to build their company. Today we dive deep into that missing ingredient:

• The Inner game – and why it’s so critical to founder success
• Why most advice given to founders always focuses on activities and neglects the most important ingredient
• How founders can build their inner game
• How to kickstart your inner game – and how to use it to crash through milestones and challenges as they arise 

On this episode, we're joined by expert marketer Josh Wilkinson to share insights on how founders can master the art of marketing to launch and grow their startups.  During our talk, we discussed:

- How marketing applies at every stage of the venture – from startup to growth and exit
-  A process called ends to the middle marketing that helps you clarify your positioning
-  How to strategically pitch your company to an acquirer 
-  And how marketing applies not only to your customers – but to firms that can eventually help you exit
-  The classic mistakes founders make – and how to reposition around these
-  An interesting strategy to go upstream to acquire customer leads at a much lower price
-  The importance of exit strategy – and why founders need to think about it at every step of the way

The online course space is exploding - but it's created a massive gap where video quality has made it into the 21st century, but we're still stuck using antiquated tools to do the exercises and learn the material. Jake Press is founder of Workbookable.com - a company that is looking to fill this gap and help bring the entire online learning experience into the 21st century.

In this episode, I explore the 2 main ways businesses create value - and how startups often fail because they focus on the wrong mechanism. Large companies make money through exploitation - or maximizing value of what they've already discovered. Startups that try to exploit before they've properly explored get into serious trouble - or never leave the launchpad.

Last week Sam & I talked about the challenge founders face when they try to get feedback on their startup idea. This episode, we peel back deeper to talk about how founders can actually start getting better feedback - and how they can make sure they are able to create a killer pitch for their idea.

I interview my brother and business partner Sam Durso about the challenges founders face right now in the current funding environment. We talk about how easy it is for founders to get bad advice - and how this sends them down the wrong path. We also cover how founders often invest an enormous amount of time and effort building something that they could have validated much easier - and finally, we talk about an approach you can take instead.

Last episode, we talked about how "luck" is created by consistent testing and experimentation - and how this leads to the big breakthroughs in business. Today's guest executed this plan to build the largest digital health care provider in the middle east. By running repeated experiments with multiple niches - he's been able to build his business from 0 to 5,000 consultations per day.

In the ongoing debate about what factor most contributes to startup success - between "Luck" and everything else, we settle the debate with some bad news (Spoiler Alert: It's all about luck). But, then we go on to talk about how once you accept that "it's all about luck" - you can focus on maximizing the amount of luck you experience in your startup.

Last episode, we first talked about the subject of fundraising - and introduced a framework for understanding fundability. Today's guest, Mike Miranda, started his company during the pandemic with a great idea - but later discovered an even more valuable idea when interviewing his customers for feedback. By focusing on his customers' biggest problem - he was able to develop a more relevant MVP - and successfully complete a $2m+ fundraise for his startup.