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For today’s episode, Mike is joined by Chris Silvestri, the founder of Conversion Alchemy. Chris helps B2B SaaS companies break through the noise, reach more would-be customers and show them why they are the obvious choice. Chris’s carefully honed approach uses the alchemy of copy, UX, and decision-making psychology to turn browsers and visitors into loyal, paying customers.
He digs deep into customer research, pulls out real insights, who your real buyer is, what their buying decision making process is and determine what language will resonate with them, so that your message lands and converts.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Be clear on what you do, how you do it and who you do it for.
BEST MOMENTS
1.14 "People underestimate the power of good copy when it comes to conversions."
3:25 "Invest more in research."
6:36 "The deep-seated layer tells you why customers make the decisions they make and how they make them."
15:24 "To uncover your customer´s pain points….reviews are a good starting point."
31:00 "You can make sure that everything it gives is accurate and that it doesn´t hallucinate."
40:40 "You can simulate personas with AI, but not real customer behaviour, at least not yet."
47:73 “Imagine that your copy needs to continue the phrase "I want to … that's your valuable position."
59:00 "The right message basically has the right positioning with the right language for the right audience."
1.05.36 “The best copy is copy that doesn´t look like copy.”
ABOUT THE GUEST
https://conversionalchemy.net
https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophersilvestri
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Demand-Side-Sales-101-Customers-Progress/dp/1544509987
ABOUT THE HOST
Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.
As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals.
For today’s episode, Mike is joined by Lukas Gentele, CEO and co-founder of Loft Labs, to discuss how to ensure that your open-source project doesn’t end up being one of the 80% that fail. Lukas has successfully launched multiple open-source projects and turned them into profitable businesses. Through this episode, he provides the bones of a framework you can use to do the same.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
BEST MOMENTS
00.30 "80% of open-source projects ultimately flop."
02:52 "Focus on the right problem in the right market."
07.47 “When you ship new features and talk about them, you create more and more opportunities.”
22.04 “ There needs to be a balance between what's open source and what's commercial.”
25.32 "That's the beautiful effect of open source; people actually want to work with the folks that built it."
30.12 "You are effectively building two different tools. One is open source, one is enterprise. ."
34.27 "If we had just launched a commercial offering, I don't think we would have a company today."
35.29 “There's a balance between what you open source and what you don’t. You don't want to tip the scale either way."
39.23 "Over 90% of users are consumers, not contributors."
45.29 "These people feel even more engaged with the product. They feel part of this community. They feel part of the project."
58.00 “Your success will equal other people's successes.”
ABOUT THE GUEST
https://www.vcluster.com
https://github.com/loft-sh/vcluster
https://slack.vcluster.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gentele
https://x.com/lukasgentele
https://www.loft.sh
ABOUT THE HOST
Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.
As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals.
Today, Mike is joined by Sam Piliero, founder of The Moonlighters, a marketing agency helping brands scale profitably. Sam and his team break down why most brands struggle to scale their ads, and how small fixes in strategy can make the difference between them running ads that are burning cash and ads that enable firms to scale profitably.
Sam explains how to use AI for marketing, work out what strategy is right for your company and which ad platforms are providing the best exposure and ROI, right now.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
BEST MOMENTS
3:19 "he next six months, we're going to see an acceleration of the use of some of the AI tools."
5:46 "You have to really focus on what's actually functioning the best today, and then focus on six months, nine months, then a year from now."
7:22 "Allow the market to iron things out, be a little bit later in adopting these new things."
9:55 "Companies that scale successfully evolve their customer acquisition model."
12:38 "Early days, it's okay to have even just one or two campaigns."
17.20 “Facebook and Google are the best converting platforms, period, right now.“
21.01 “Almost every time the geo-located campaigns are outperforming the E-com side because we are targeting a specific cohort of people.“
25.35 “Whenever big advertisers remove themselves from an ad platform, the cost of advertising decreases drastically.”
26.43 “If you spend the same amount across the board, e.g. $1,000 you would typically be seeing Facebook and Google outperform.”
32.05 “The more value you put in a piece of content, the more views it gets.”
33.16 “Virality is not only unique, it is actually earned.”
42.00 “Don't overreact to slight adjustments in the ad account.”
51.29 “Always focus on minimizing wasted ad spend and reallocating that ad spend to the best possible place.”
EPISODE RESOURCES
https://themoonlighters.com/techgrowth
https://www.youtube.com/@SamPiliero
Social - @SamPiliero
ABOUT THE HOST
Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.
As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals.
For today’s episode, Mike is joined by Marcelo Calbucci, the author of PRFAQ Lab. He has been successfully growing startups for 18+ years and is a former Amazon exec. His book PRFAQ Lab breaks down the framework Amazon uses to determine whether an idea is viable and how to develop it. This framework has helped to ensure that in a world where 92% of start-ups fail, most of Amazon´s succeed. As do other start-ups that use the framework.
If you want to learn how to de-risk your startup and build with confidence before you write a single line of code, listen in and turn your ideas into validated and fundable billion-dollar products, services and businesses.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
BEST MOMENTS
3:40 "You have to wear your archaeologist or anthropologist hat and really observe how people work through the problem that you're trying to solve."
7:13 "The best way to address that problem is to eliminate the problem."
12:43 "According to Harvard Business Review, startups that validate … market need for their solution are 2.5 times more likely to succeed."
30.53 “It's not really a customer discovery framework. PRFAQ is a framework that helps you discover what you don't know and helps you to capture and think critically about that.”
47.34 “So, your slides don't have the typical gaps that most pitch decks have.”
48.53 “According to Forbes, startups with well-structured pitch documents are 60% more likely to secure funding.”
52.31 “Every product you know that Amazon has launched over the last 20 years was backed by a PRFAQ.”
EPISODE RESOURCES
https://www.theprfaq.com
ABOUT THE HOST
Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.
As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals.
For today’s episode, Mike is joined by Jonathan Mast, the founder of White Beard Strategies. He is a leading voice in AI prompting mastery with over 400,000 followers. Jonathan has helped 1000s of business owners and entrepreneurs unlock AI's full potential using his structured four-step framework. Enabling some of them to experience a 5,000% uptick in their ROI.
This episode is a must listen if you want to stop wasting time with bad AI outputs and start getting results that actually move the needle.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
BEST MOMENTS
00:55 "It´s not AI that´s broken, it´s your prompts."
7:12 "Give the AI permission to ask you clarifying questions.."
21.15 “If we give it too many things to do, it's simply not going to follow through on that… it works best in a prompt if we give it 1, 2 maybe 3 things.”
38.59 ”When you're rolling it out at first, make it a win for your team, not just a win for the company.”
44.29 “Trust but verify.”
46.03 “By giving it (AI) permission to ask you questions, it'll avoid most of those hallucinations.”
51.18 “Have a conversation with AI. Don't expect to give it one prompt and get perfection.”
53.17 “We make too many assumptions that AI will figure it out. In other words, we don't give it enough context.”
57.53 “We are not at a point, nor do I see us ever getting to a point, where AI is that proverbial money tree in the backyard.”
ABOUT THE GUEST
Personal Website: https://jonathanmast.com
White Beard Strategies: https://whitebeardstrategies.com
AI Prompting Mastery: https://www.facebook.com/groups/aipromptsforentrepreneurs/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jonathanjmast
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanjmast
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@jonathanmast_withai
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonathanmast
Threads: https://threads.net/@jonathanmast
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonathanmast/
ABOUT THE HOST
Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.
As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals.
Mike speaks to Aditya Jain, the co-founder of Passion Fruit and a leading SEO growth strategist who has helped companies move beyond vanity metrics and generate income from their SEO efforts. They discuss why most businesses get SEO wrong and spend too long chasing rankings instead of revenue. Many are targeting high volume low intent keywords.
Aditya Jain is going to change the way you think about and use SEO. He provides truly practical advice that works in the modern marketplace. Including how to use AI to improve targeting and speed up content creation and data analysis.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
BEST MOMENTS
0:18 "High traffic doesn't pay the bills, conversions do."
00:28 "Understand which keywords actually drive revenue and how to adjust SEO in real time to capture more business."
2:24 "What drives growth is your customer’s pain point, figure that out and position yourself to solve that problem."
7:40 "We actually have a living, breathing document of all the common questions and concerns etc that our customers have."
10:16 "90% of pages receive no organic traffic because they optimise for broad, low intent keywords."
13:28 "Your North Star is not just revenue, it’s actually – am I matching my user's intent and am I building topical authority?"
15:10 "The readability of your code base, etc., is increasingly important."
33.10 "Any marketing strategy that involves producing content or doing SEO just comes down to delivering on customer needs.”
50.17 “Reviewing the data actually just tells you what type of customers want you, and then you choose, is this a customer I actually want?”
EPISODE RESOURCES
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aditya-j-985a92108/
https://www.getpassionfruit.com
ABOUT THE HOST
Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.
As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals.
Mike speaks to Peter Kaliuzhny, the founder of GetSales.io, who is an expert on B2B sales. He has closed numerous six figure deals with Fortune 100 companies. Peter leverages LinkedIn and can turn any profile into a lead generation machine, which is free to use.
Peter explains how to optimise your LinkedIn profile, create break-through first connection messages and generate inbound profile links. He shares how to understand your customers and use that knowledge to generate massive leads and sales.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
BEST MOMENTS
1:00 "Master the art of safe and effective LinkedIn outreach."
8:50 "Test, see how the conversation goes…. Don't just pitch something right away, explore it instead."
14:37 "Really connect … if you want to sell, you never sell. You have to think about how you can help them resolve their problem."
15.05 “Optimise your profile, fine tune it so that it is aligned with your goals.”
27.02 “Post really good content, consistently. content that helps them to solve that pain.”
31.46 “You have to identify those leads and understand what you really want …once you do that, you can go for automation.”
48.01 “Never send a wall of text.”
59.29 “Don't ask for a call.”
1.11.03 “Create content related to your job, to your expertise, it is super cool.. you increase the value of yourself….”
1.11.18 “They will be paying you more later on, if you show your expertise.”
ABOUT THE GUEST
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaliuzhnypeter
ABOUT THE HOST
Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.
As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals.
Today, Mike is joined by Sabir Semerkant, a top E-commerce growth strategist, with 25+ years of experience. Over the years he has helped brands like Coca Cola, Canon and Tommy Hilfiger to achieve massive growth. Sabir has turned that expertise into his 8D Method - a step-by-step framework for unlocking scalable, profitable e-commerce growth. His rapid 2x program has helped brands grow by an average of 108% in just 21 days
In this episode, Sabir breaks down pricing, marketing, product research and profitability strategies that will transform your online business. He also shares what not to do, his e-commerce sins.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
BEST MOMENTS
00:39 "E-commerce in 2025 is a battlefield."
02.14 "Tech actually is the thing that helps you elevate and accelerate your growth profitably."
13:25 "As an entrepreneur, you need to have a healthy dose of scepticism.."
21:00 “Don't dwell in the past, … the realities of 2025, are very different from the realities of 2020, and 2022 ."
30.00 “What is the consumer attention span in 2025? - 1.7 seconds.”
41.03 “Most Shopify owners don't know the behaviour of their consumers.”
54.30 “If you're not correcting these problems, it's de-ranking you.”
1.01.36 “When you are doing couponing to that extent, you're robbing yourself of your future.”
1.20.23 “I'm Mr. Miyagi … I'm telling you how to wax on, wax off.”
ABOUT THE GUEST
https://growthbysabir.com/masteringtechgrowth
Harvard Business School article - https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=62855
https://www.luckyorange.com
ABOUT THE HOST
Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.
As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals.
Mike speaks to Pranav Dalal founder and CEO of Office Beacon, a leader in remote staffing solutions that has grown the company from just five employees in 2001 to 5,500+, without any VC funding. He and Mike talk about how to identify your competitive advantage, leverage it, and how to automate successfully. They also discuss how to create an irresistible hook to break through the noise and get your conversion rate into double figures.
Pranav also explains how you can try Office Beacon´s fully managed remote staffing free of charge for an entire month.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
BEST MOMENTS
1:54 "Business leaders need to make sure that they stay aligned with their vision, along with industry and consumer trends."
5.45 "Businesses should be looking forward and asking how we gonna position ourselves within the market."
16.17 “It's just different levels of service, speed and price that you can get anywhere. You've really got to think about those unique things that you provide.”
31.49 “Make your initial messaging as short as possible.”
37.59 “Don't invest in automation or big technology until you're sure that that process is ready for it.”
45.14 “The biggest mistake I see is that business owners look at the sales funnel as just a transaction. What you're actually selling as a business is trust.”
1.08.48 “We are hiring top talent in these countries and our pricing is in the range of providing at least a 50% ROI to customers here in the US.”
1.09.19 “If they want to try out our service, we'll give them one month free to test it out (Office Beacon).” – how to sign up is explained
ABOUT THE GUEST
https://www.officebeacon.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/officebeacon/
https://www.facebook.com/officebeacon
https://www.instagram.com/officebeacon/
Blue Ocean Strategy - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Blue-Ocean-Strategy-Expanded-Uncontested/dp/1625274491
ABOUT THE HOST
Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.
As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals.
Mike is joined today by Katrena Friel to discuss how to turn your expertise into 7 new streams of income. Katrena is a business mentor, TEDx speaker and award-winning author who has spent 25 years helping professionals turn their skills into thriving businesses that give them real freedom.
Katrena reveals how you can turn what you know into 7 new income streams and do so within the next 90 days.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
BEST MOMENTS
2.18 "Personal development is just as important as professional development."
3.55 "Tech people are missing the people piece."
10.30 "Your brand is out there and it's there in their perception of you. That's happening regardless.”
13.55 "To hold that mask up of perfection is burnout waiting to happen."
15.21 "The more authentic you are, the more endearing you become."
34.48 “Speak to educate. Don't speak to sell or market yourself, be genuine, authentic, real, and your tribe will find you and connect.”
41.27 “The book still has gravitas, you're not the expert, until you've got a book.”
51.03 “Create a signature program for people, one that creates transformation. An end-to-end solution.”
55.30 “These online programs just aren't cutting it. People want personalised.”
1.04.38 “You need to mentor people, and other times you need to facilitate some sort of change.”
1.23.43 “I just teach you the bit that you need to know and when to do it.”
ABOUT THE GUEST
https://www.becomingtheexpert.com.au
ABOUT THE HOST
Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.
As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals.
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