By Andrew Warner
Business tips for startups by proven entrepreneurs
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Brent Underwood had a business idea: buy an abandoned town and turn it into a tourist destination. It didn’t work. Mostly because he tried running it remotely. Then he moved in. He started looking around, diving into old mines, and finding old...
Ryan Deiss’s business was too chaotic to grow beyond a few team members. So he tried creating SOP’s, you know those how-to docs that every business is told to create, but few people end up using. He figured there had to...
He built Art.com through the early days of the internet, despite the dotcom bust, and through heavy competition….After all that work, the company sold to a much bigger company….And that’s when the lawsuit came. You’ll hear how Joshua Chodniewicz built that...
Allbirds were the sustainable shoes known to be worn by Marissa Mayer, Jennifer Garner, and every dude I knew when I lived in San Francisco. How did the company get so big and where is it now? I invited the...
This founder found a niche that Airbnb didn’t reach and rode it to $6 million in revenue. Steve Satoru Naito’s Anyplace, accommodations come with big monitors, high-speed internet, an office setup, ergonomic chairs, webcams, and key lights, all tailored to create...
My vision for this interview was to hear Noah Kagan’s process for launching companies, like the $80+ million / year AppSumo – the process he wrote about in his book, Million Dollar Weekend. We did that. You’ll hear his step-by-step business...
Video Husky started with a challenge. Justin Tan challenged himself to get 10 customers in 90 days for his new venture. The company grew to over $1 million in annual sales by providing flat fee remote video editing services. In this...
When I interviewed founders of online courses and asked about their communities, they often said they host them on Facebook. “That’s where everyone is” was the answer. Sometimes they’d use Slack, but FB was dominant. So how did Circle break...
They used TikTok to promote their podcast, but podcasting is painful. There’s no discovery. It’s hard to grow. And there’s little audience feedback. Meanwhile, their short videos took off. This is the story of how the Our Future creators grew...
The clearest line to a business success is solving big pain. That’s what Benny Rubin did. Senders.co, optimizes email deliverability for businesses. You’ll hear how he came up with his business idea, how he got clients, why he left the...
How did Ali Abdaal reach over 5 million YouTube subscribers? How did he build his business? what insights can he offer to aspiring content creators? You’ll hear about that and about his new book, Feel-Good Productivity. Ali Abdaal is an...
Before we started, I asked Alyssa Ravasio, why she didn’t model her company on other marketplaces. “Why don’t you encourage more people to buy land near national parks and turn them into campgrounds that they list on Hipcamp? It’s a...
Jess Mah was listening to my interviews when I first connected with her, just like you are now. We got to know each other and I invested in her first startup, indinero. It aimed to take on Quickbooks, before pivoting...
I read a plea from Kevin Natanzon on X: Hi @harleyf, PLEASE HELP. I live in Israel ?? And I woke up to MORE BAD NEWS. Can it get any worse? Yes. The main source of our revenue was cut. @ShopifyDevs delisted our app. Why? Because of...
Lloyed Lobo believes anyone could have founded Boast, a company designed to help businesses secure R&D; tax credits. However, when asked about why he built it to tens of millions in revenue when others didn’t, he attributes it to community. Lloyed...
Today, SocialBee is a fully functional social media management tool. But at first, it was a guy secretly servicing his customers by using publicly available tools like Google Sheets and Zapier. That buy was Ovi Negrean. In this interview, he talks...
Yaniv Makover didn’t intend to launch Anyword, the AI writing tool for marketers. He set out to help publishers like the New York Times buy social media ads so they could grow their readerships. At first, humans wrote those ads. Then,...
Seven months ago, Bhanu Teja P saw his Twitter timeline fill with AI talk. He had an idea. What if web users could use a chat-like experience to talk with the content of their sites? He wasn’t sure it would go anywhere,...
The change: cutting expenses. Wistia was on track to lose $3 million per year when the founders bought out their investors with borrowed money. Chris Savage & Brendan Schwartz told me that meant the Wistia team had to be maniacal about...
Ritesh Agarwal was an entrepreneurial teen in India who loved to travel. So he created a travel search engine. One obstacle to growth was the subpar customer service provided by the local hotels. So he tried something novel: he helped hotels improve....
I feel like Dave Liniger is a self-help made man. On the verge of quitting real estate, a transformative seminar reignited his determination and radically changed his business trajectory. When his wife was in a coma, he infused their hospital room...
Yaro Starak had a problem we all experienced: too much email. It was important, but it also kept him from doing real work. So he hired an assistant to answer his email. It’s a bit scary to pass your inbox...
There’s no money in owning markets, John Catsimatidis told me. So how did he become a billionaire? He leveraged his supermarkets to buy real estate, gas stations, and more. Owning the markets protected his downside, as he explains in his book,...
Before the recent AI craze, Dima Shvets and his cofounders invented Reface, the viral tool that lets people rip a face from a photo and replace it with theirs. He says it’s doing tens of millions in revenue and was downloaded...
I’ve been waiting for literally years to do this interview. I’ve known some inside information about this startup for a long time but because it involved Shopify–we couldn’t talk about it. Today Jordan Gal is here to talk about what...
I’m excited to talk to the entrepreneur I have here today. In a world of AI and VR and web3, there is room for simple, offline business that are still innovating in the physical world. That’s the story behind PODS...
Arnaud Castillo got $1.5 million in prepayments from customers who think he found a way to make accurate predictions about financial markets…the weather…venture capital…and anything. Arnaud created CrunchDAO, which holds online tournaments in which data analysts compete to see who can...
Joining me is Seth Godin, one of the first entrepreneurs I interviewed back in 2008. He is a marketing legend and author of multiple books. He’s coined phrases that have become parlance for startup founders today and he’s back on Mixergy...
Joining me for a repeat visit is Derek Flanzraich. Last time I talked to him he was running the content site Greatest. Greatest was all about health and Derek became like a guru to my friends who were in the content...
Joining me is a friend whose businesses I have grown to appreciate so much more over the years. He’s recently written about the experience of building a profitable businesses while prioritizing family. The book is The Family First Entrepreneur. I’ll...
When I talk to entrepreneurs, they talk about how they use data but I think for a lot of people, looking at analytics is just not something they want to do. It’s much easier to focus on customer support or...
I was super excited to talk to today’s guest because he is the founder of Clearbit, a software that would magically take an email address and then tell you about the person behind the email address. I didn’t expect to talk...
Joining me is somebody who has pivoted so freaking much that my notes were out of date just after a few months. I admire how he’s been able to adjust and pivot and keep growing his business and today he’s got...
Many of the people who I’ve interviewed were lifelong entrepreneurs. They sold things as kids or had lawn mowing services. But joining me today is someone who went a different path. He’s a scientist who got a great job, made...
If you’re in SaaS, you know that you get revenue on an ongoing basis, which is really nice. But maybe you’ve been afraid to go into physical goods because you don’t get that kind of business model where you have a...
You know how painful it is to watch an explainer video from someone on your remote team? Well, Komodo is making that process a lot easier. I invited the co-founders here to tell me how they bootstrapped it. Today’s guests...
If you look on Instagram or YouTube or TikTok, you’ll people who are living out of their vans. These vans are usually beautiful and these van-lifers travel the country and live and work wherever they want. But the challenge with...
Joining me today is someone with multiple exits on his record. I thought his story was success, success, success but turns out that there was one big setback in there that knocked it all out and put him in the...
I thought today’s guest was making a mistake by getting into podcast hosting. I thought, why does the world need another one of these platforms? I was wrong. Find out why in this interview. Justin Jackson is the founder of Transistor,...
Today’s guest is a systems guy. He founded Leverage, a growth agency that also does operations, which means they do all the stuff that you think about for growth– SEO, paid social, et cetera. But they also help teams organize...
Linden Tibbets is the founder of IFTTT, which runs online digital automation platforms it offers as a service. It makes all your tools more powerful by creating automations between them. I want to find out how he built it and...
Usually I interview software founders but today’s guest created an in-person experience. Erik Anderson is the founder of Scissors and Scotch. It’s basically a 1920s style barbershop, modernized with a cocktail bar in it. I just discovered it here in Austin...
Joining me is one of my favorite entrepreneurs. His name is Phil Libin. He was the head of Evernote which was a phenomenal company and I remember hearing Phil say he was building a hundred year startup. I really was...
I actually signed up for Hulu just to watch today’s guest on Shark Tank. His company sells freaking shirts; How is he so successful? I’m going to find out in this interview. Justin Baer is the founder of Collars and Co,...
Today I’m talking to Edrizio De La Cruz, the founder of Arcus Financial Intelligence. He late sold that company to MasterCard. I want to find out how he did it. Edrizio De La Cruz is the founder of Arcus Financial...
Joining me is a person whose real name I don’t even know. He goes by the pseudonym Artorias. He’s not exactly running a company; he’s running a DAO, which means that he and a group of other people got together...
Nick Fogle is the co-founder of Churnkey, which makes clever retention tools to help SaaS Founders eliminate churn. Nick Fogle is the co-founder of Churnkey, retention tools to help SaaS Founders eliminate churn. Sponsored by Origami – If you’ve heard about DAOs...
I’ve got another web3 interview for you today. Today’s guest is Lucas Campbell. He was working at a publishing company called Bankless, which has been evangalizing web3 as the future. Bankless was doing well based–a little over a million a year–for...
My guest today created a company that I’ve watched from a distance. It’s called Under Canvas and what they do is put up these gorgeous, beautiful tents near national parks that let you be part of nature but without having...
Some of you are going to love what today’s company sells and others are going to not just hate it, but hate me for even talking about it. John Crain is the founder of SuperRare, a marketplace to buy and sell...