The Agile Entrepreneurship Podcast

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Guest: Brian Meert

https://youtu.be/yp0GkOS8Wus

Episode Transcript

00:09

Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to one more episode of the agile entrepreneurial video cast and podcast. And today I'm really excited to introduce a gentleman who is a CEO and founder of www. AdvertiseMint.com and it's a clever play of the word advertisement. So he took the E out and they put an AdvertiseMint. So the cleverness and then the creativity is, as you can see, it's coming right with starting with the name itself. And his name is Brian Meert and I happen to run into him in Los Angeles. And this gentleman, so Brian, welcome. So I’ll introduce you in a much more personal way in a second.

00:48

Brian: Oh, I love it. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to talk about business and marketing today.

00:56

Ramesh: Great. So Brian is the founder of AdvertiseMint. and AdvertiseMint. is an advertising agency for digital media, right? So they focus extensively on Facebook, but of course they also have other platforms and Amazon tik tok you know, Pinterest and all of them of course, which is really, really hot right now. So, and then secondly, I found out that Brian comes from the same town that where I live in Sacramento. Fantastic. Yes. Yes. Okay, so tell us a little bit about your company AdvertiseMint.,

01:28

Brian: Man. So, I mean, we're an advertising agency. We specialize in digital. We worked a lot with Facebook advertising is what we're really known for. A lot of people come to approach us because of that. And we're very robust. But we work with other platforms like tik tok, which is really hot right now. YouTube ads, Google ads, Facebook ads, or Amazon ads. So there's a lot of other platforms that we work within. Basically, you know, companies that need help either they're growing and they're like, we need someone to help us in this area. Or we've worked with big teams like Viacom that have 20 people in their marketing department, and they're like, we need an expert to handle this one aspect for certain events or shows. So we need you guys to take care of it. So, you know, we work with a range of different clients, but basically, we're helping businesses grow every single day.

02:20

Ramesh: Okay. So is it fair to say that your focus is much more on the paid advertisement space or do you also in the broad social media presence, you look at the entire picture for the companies, Hey, you know, what do you need to do from a social media presence and then advertisement is one piece of it.

02:38

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Guest: Becky Beach

https://youtu.be/XPXcXJe6uWw

Episode Transcript

00:03

Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to one more episode of the agile entrepreneur podcast. This is your host Ramesh Dontha. Today we'll be talking to an entrepreneur who has weathered through tough times before she made a very successful business by herself. Her name is Becky Beach, and by the way, I love the name Becky Beach, Becky Beach is a mompreneur who was in debt up to $150,000 before she started her online boutique. She was actually living from month to month and was barely making ends meet before her business. After the online boutique though she was debt free. So Becky nowadays helps other moms start their own businesses, save money, and live from home through her blog www.mombeach.com That's another interesting name there. So Becky, welcome.

00:59

Becky: Oh, thank you. I'm really excited to be here.

01:03

Ramesh: Fantastic. So Becky, so let's get straight to it. What were you, what was the work that you were doing when you were in that much of a debt around $150,000 if you could explain how you, not necessarily how you got into it, but essentially what were you doing? And what was the transformation?

01:23

Becky: Well, I was working for a small pain and injury clinic as a web developer. Like that's what I was doing, and they weren't paying very much. Like I was probably making like $20 an hour or less, you know, those weren't paying that much, you know, so I was like scraping by and I’ll work like 60-hour week. Sometimes it was just a lot of stress. Then I got pregnant with my little child, you know, when I just couldn't, it just was really so much stress, you know, and hard to deal with, you know. They just weren't paying very much at all, you know.

01:51

Ramesh: So then what happens? You are in debt and then the work, you're not enjoying it. It's stressful. Then how did that switch come on that Hey, no, I need to start something else. I need to do something else.

02:04

Becky: Well, I got pregnant with like, we had a child, my husband, and I just said, I just can't go back to work. I don't think I could work 60-hour days you know in this condition, you know, when I was, I had a little child that I was taking a daycare. It was after three months he has already gone to daycare, you know, that's just too short, you know, and I was just worried about him all day. I couldn't focus on my work, you know, because I just had a little baby that I wanted to be with. So I said, cause I got to do something. So like one day I went in,

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Guest: Erin Shea

https://youtu.be/41RN0ehSwPU

Episode Transcript

00:00

Ramesh: Excited about you know, talking to Vistaprinting and of course you.

00:04

Erin: You too, I think it'll be great.

00:06

Ramesh: Yeah. So I think Adam and Erin, I would like to introduce Vistaprint as a leading online provider of marketing products and services to small businesses. Is that fine or is there anything else you want me to do?

00:20

Erin: No, I think that's appropriate.

00:22

Ramesh: And then Erin, I think you as a marketing director for North America for Vistaprint.

00:28

Erin: Correct.

00:29

Ramesh: Okay. So good. All right, so we'll get started and then pretty much we will get into you know, the areas that you know, you really drive, which is the marketing for small businesses. And then we'll get into some of the study findings as well. And we want to take, you're welcome too. And [00:50 inaudible] you want to mention, okay. Thank you. Alright.

00:59

Hello everyone. Welcome to one more episode of the agile entrepreneur video cast and podcast. And this is your host Ramesh Dontha. Today, I am especially excited to talk to Erin Shea, who is the North America marketing director for Vistaprint. For I think almost all of you know about Vistaprint. Vistaprint is the leading online provider of marketing products and services to small businesses. And in full disclosure, I am a customer of Vistaprint. Every time I do my business cards routinely, I go there and then, so without thinking, so they gave me so much flexibility. So that's what I do. And then that's where I start as a customer and then I go into some other areas as well. Erin, welcome.

01:42

Erin: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

01:44

Ramesh: I know I introduced Vistaprint, but in your own words what is Vistaprint do and then especially what you do for Vistaprint?

01:53

Erin: Sure. Vistaprint is a company that's been around for over 20 years now and we are so proud to say that we've helped over 17 million small businesses really live their small business dreams. We started out as a startup, a small business of our own, and then have kind of grown to an international company. But small businesses have always and will always be our full passion. And it's why we kind of come into workday in and day out. We did start with sort of business cards as our core product. And then as small businesses have evolved, and the customers' needs have evolved we have expanded our assortment into a number of different printed marketing materials. So everything from so, your flyers and your brochures, your signage, and then of course, into digital. So websites,

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Guest: William Roberts & John Holmes

https://youtu.be/TNCO58o7wJI

Episode Transcript

00:04

Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to one more episode of the agile entrepreneur video cast and podcast. And this is your host, Ramesh Dontha. Today, with the very first time I'm going to talk to two co-founders, John Holmes and Will Roberts. Both of them are co-founders and executive partners at www.weworked.com. It's an online timesheet software company. They have bootstrapped it built into a company that serves customers in what, 120 countries. That is phenomenal. All right guys, John and Will welcome.

00:41

Will: Thank you.

00:41

Ramesh: So, John, can you introduce the company please?

00:46

John: Sure. I'm a little bit about weworked, we started, weworked about nine years ago. My time may be off a year or so. It goes back pretty fast, but not years ago. When I started, weworked we both worked for small companies and weworked basically as a time sheet invoicing payroll/ leave tracking software that we developed with the focus of small business clients. And it's kind of morphed into something much bigger. But from the beginning, that was the initial focus.

01:27

Ramesh: Okay, great. So Will how about you, if you could introduce yourself and then the side of the business that you focus on as well?

01:35

Will: I am Will Roberts; I am a cofounder here at www.weworked.com. I've primarily focused on the technical support team, database architecture, database management and some marketing.

01:53

Ramesh: Fantastic. So all right guys, so welcome. And so let's talk about the nine years ago before, right. So that's when you guys started. And how did you decide to start a company? What were you guys doing before that? So let me start with Will. So what were you doing before you guys started www.weworked.com?

02:14

Will: I actually was, I had started my own consulting firm, I think back in maybe 2005. And I was, you know, pretty much serving as a contractor to the federal government.

02:32

Ramesh: I see. So John, how about you? What were you doing before that?

02:36

John: I was a software programmer for small businesses. And I did some government contracting work as well.

02:47

Ramesh: Okay. So then how did you guys meet up and then how did the thought of starting a company come, who started and then who followed up?

02:57

Will: Well, firstly we met on the job.

03:02

John: Yes, we both met probably back in 2000, 2001 we were both working for a smaller tech company that created software for the government on the department of transportation. And Will and I kicked it off right away from beginning. So years later after Will started his business and I was probably two jobs moved from where we met. I had reached out to Will regarding weworked. So its kind of, I kind of had the initial brainchild of it. I was out of work for a few months and sat around thinking about what I could do to kind of change the projection of you know,

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Guest: Lori Cheek

https://youtu.be/JjGPQkGOm1A

Episode Transcript

00:15

Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to one more episode of the agile entrepreneur podcast and video cast. And this is your host Ramesh Dontha. Today I have an exciting guest. Her name is Lori Cheek. She's a New York city based architect turned entrepreneur and she's the CEO and founder of Cheeked. It's a hyper speed Bluetooth enabled mobile dating app. I know what you guys are thinking and I'm also very, very curious to know more about Cheekd and Lori Cheek. Lori, welcome.

00:50

Lori: Hi.

00:52

Ramesh: All right, so now you picked our curiosity. So what is Cheekd hyper speed Bluetooth enabled mobile dating app. Can you please go over what Cheekd is?

01:05

Lori: Well, yes, we are an app that helps people connect in the real world. So we are leveraging technology to try to get people off their phones. So if you walk into a crowded bar, a gym, a cafe, and anyone else with the Cheekd app and their Bluetooth turned on, you'll get an immediate notification that that person is single and potentially ready to mingle in that moment. So you can either walk up to them and say hello, which is what people used to do back in the olden days and it seemed to work. Instead of swiping through strangers from the comfort of your home online, so you can spark a conversation face to face and hopefully take it from there.

01:50

Ramesh: I see. And do these people need, both of them need to be on the Cheekd app for them to.

01:56

Lori: Yes. I mean, I'd love if there was a way to connect with people that weren't on the app, but that starts to get a tiny bit creepy.

02:06

Ramesh: Let's see how we could you know not get creepy, so and then people registered on Cheekd and then you'll find, it seems pretty, pretty exciting. So, Lori, let's say go through how could you, I mean, when did you think about this app? And so let's talk about the journey.

02:27

Lori: I mean, it's been a pretty long journey and Cheekd has been through several different iterations, but I was an architect in New York for 16 years. Just walking around thinking, how do you find love in a city of 8 million people? I mean, everybody in New York is like crossing each other's paths, but no one really speaks to each other. Like it was just so difficult for me to understand what was missing here. And one night I was out to dinner with a colleague and he slipped his business card to a woman and he'd written on the back of it,

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Guest: Vartika Manasvi

https://youtu.be/o5ZwU1UDrjU

Episode Transcript

00:04

Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to one more episode of the agile entrepreneur podcast and of course the video cast. And this is your host Ramesh Dontha. So today we will talk about career. We're going to talk to a women entrepreneur with a fantastic background and her name is Vartika Manasvi and Vartika is the second time founder of a company called stack raft as a career hub company. And she's the first woman entrepreneur from the South Asia to be granted a startup visa in Canada and right. So she took a one-way ticket to Canada and to start a company in Canada. So let's find more about Vartikas' journey. So Vartika welcome.

00:44

Vartika: Thank you. Thank you, Ramesh, for having me.

00:47

Ramesh: Vartika let's start with your company stack raft. So what is it?

00:52

Vartika: So Stack Raft is you know, a shorter version of that is like LinkedIn for engineers and, but we're not LinkedIn where people spamming each other. We are what recruiters and stuff like that. So it's like a career accelerator for software engineers around the globe. Who are looking for meaningful jobs and better opportunities? So the problem that we found was that the talent is everywhere. There are so many talented people around the world. But getting that job you know, it takes on which country you are in, what time zone are you in. How do you look, how do you speak? So these are the things that comes in between of your skills and talents and that is a problem that we are solving.

01:36

Ramesh: So how do you solve? Is it a marketplace where the software engineers put their resumes up and the skills something like a guru or up work kind of stuff? Or is it different?

01:45

Vartika: No, it's not like a Upwork or a career guru kind of a thing. Yes, it's a marketplace where software engineers create a profile. They put their skills, their personality indicators, like what's important to them and who they are like, what’s their career intent. What as for them they want to be and what kind of stuff they want to build. Now based on that deeply challenges on our platform. And these are skill-based challenges and they get connected to senior mentors and senior developers, we call them as talent coaches, who give them concrete feedback on these challenges so that these engineers can be better engineers. I mean, even if they do not get a job or they do not get selected, they're getting concrete feedback. Now imagine for one job, like 250 people apply for that particular job.

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Guest: Nathan Miller

https://youtu.be/T5I9PK3nE3Y

Episode Transcript

00:08

Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to one more episode of the agile entrepreneur podcast and video cast. So today I'm going to talk to a gentleman who is in the real estate industry. Both from a technology side as well as the investor in developer side. So Nathan Miller is the president and CEO of Rentec direct, a popular property management software that helps property managers and landlords with their day to day tasks. Nathan is also a real estate investor and developer and proud husband and father. So I'm very eager to meet Nate. Hey Nathan, do you go by Nate or Nathan?

00:53

Nathan: Nathan is great. Thank you.

00:55

Ramesh: Fantastic. Nathan, welcome to the agile entrepreneurial podcast.

00:59

Nathan: Thanks for having me.

01:01

Ramesh: Great. So I introduce you and Nathan, but if you could tell in your own words what is when tech direct and what do you do with that?

01:10

Nathan: Yeah, well Rentec direct is a, it's a project that I started as a more or less a hobby because I was a and still am a landlord and needed technology to help me be more efficient. As I started gaining properties and managing properties on my own, I realized there's a, there's a lot of stuff that goes into it. You have a lot of things to keep track of. Not just, you know, accounting records or taxes, but you got maintenance and you got, you know, who's late and you have tenant communication and all this stuff. Once I had five or six rentals, I was managing became a little, a little excessive, but it took a lot of brain power and the time to think about and to maintain. And I also had a full-time job. So part of my background is I'm a software developer and I'm self-taught and I understand how technology can help people be more efficient. So I went out on a journey to make my landlord activities more efficient through software and created an application to help me with all those tasks, anything that could be automated, I automate it. And that was the beginning of Rentec direct. It was not necessarily intended to be a business or what it turned into today, but what that ended up morphing into is a software application that now helps about 15,000 property managers and landlords. And we've added a lot of stuff in the last 10 years to make the life of property managers easy and kind of cool. Because you know, being a property manager isn't sound a that glamorous but we can provide them tools that make things better for their tenants and so your tenants can pay online so they ca...

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Guest: Kunal Jain

https://vimeo.com/450499038

Episode Transcript

00:06

Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to one more episode of the agile entrepreneur podcast and video cast. And this is your host Ramesh Dontha. And today I'm very, very excited to introduce a guest who I’ve been meaning to talk for quite some time. His name is Kunal Jain. Kunal is the founder and CEO of Analytics Vidhya. Analytics Vidhya is one of the largest data science community across the globe and Analytics Vidhya helps millions of people every month in the data science learning and helps its community members find the dream jobs, focuses on education and training and then jobs. And before starting Analytics Vidhya Kunal graduated from the India's prestigious Indian Institute of technology in Bombay studying aerospace engineering and joined capital one as a business analyst in UK in 2006 and later on he decided to start Analytics Vidhya. So let's talk to Kunal on his journey, why he did what he did. Kunal Welcome.

01:11

Kunal: Thanks. Thanks, Ramesh, for that lovely introduction and really excited and happy to be here on the show. I've been wanting to talk for a long time. But thanks for inviting me and looking forward to the session.

01:30

Ramesh: Definitely no worries at all. So Kunal let's take it from the beginning. So right now you are the CEO of Analytics Vidhya. So tell the audience and tell me about what is Analytics Vidhya and even though I introduced it in your own words, what does it do?

01:49

Kunal: Sure. The vision behind Analytics Vidhya is to create a platform where every data science professional can come and get their knowledge and career needs addressed in form of the platform in the community, which is there on the platform. So you know, if you think about the career needs data scientists, there are broadly for different needs which they have. So that is learning on a day to day basis. So that happens through various blogs, which we publish a lot of education material along with some free courses and paid courses. Recently we also started a boot camp, so maybe I’ll explain that a bit more, but this is like a physical nine-month program with people in there. Engagement happens through a whole lot of community activities starting from meetups, webinars, podcasts and you know, the biggest run which we do is a conference in India called Data hacks Ramesh. That happens in November every year. Then there is competition. So we organize you know, very short duration competitions or two-day competitions to 15-day competitions where companies give their data sets and problems to our community a...

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Guest: ​​​​Scott Swedberg

https://vimeo.com/450499054

Episode Transcript

00:05 

Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to the agile entrepreneur podcast and video cast. And this is your host, Ramesh Dontha and today we are going to talk about jobs. The next person I'm going to talk to, will get you a job. His name is Scott Swedberg. Scott is the founder and CEO of job sauce, a career services company focused on the individual. He founded the company while working at LinkedIn and the job sauce has helped 10,000 professionals since 2014. Scott, welcome. 

00:39 

Scott: Thanks for having me Ramesh. 

00:41 

Ramesh: so right off the bat, I know I introduced you as the founder of the company that focuses on the individual and I think that particular word is very important for you. So can you talk about, you know, what job's sauce is about and why the word individual means so much to you? 

00:57 

Scott: Yeah, so something that we recognize at job sauce and I founded it because I experienced personally is so much of your life is tied to the work that you do. It's how a lot of people express their fulfillment in life. That’s how most people make money. So it's really important for an individual to feel fulfilled in their career. And I noticed that most career services type companies, it was either, you know, an individual resume writers say helping people, which is great, but you kind of have to trade your time for money. You can only help so many people or you've got these bigger outplacement companies that focus more on a B2B level. Certain company has to lay off employees and they contract this company to ease the landing, provide them with resume services or what have you. What the job sauce does is we focus on the individual, like individual resume writers career coaches do, except we can do it at scale. And we bring in a lot more resume writers and career coaches to help the individuals who are coming to us, so we can actually impact 10,000 people in the last five or six years as opposed to if I were doing this just myself and didn't have any support, you know, maybe I could have eclipsed a thousand by now if that's all I did. But we're able to reach a lot more people because we're focused on this niche, helping individuals grow in their career as opposed to, and I'm just helping a company ease the landing of their weight off employees.

02:26 

Ramesh: Great. Okay. So just for my own clarification is job sauce a market place where you're connecting people like resume writers and career coaches with the people who are looking for a job or you as a bus...

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Guest: Will Hankinson

https://vimeo.com/450499063

Episode Transcript

00:07 

Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the agile entrepreneur podcast. This is your host, Ramesh Dontha. Again, this is both a podcast as well as a video cast. That's what we are trying in 2020. So let's give it a try. And then today I'm very, very excited to introduce you to founder or owner of a company. So his name is Will Hankinson. So Will Hankinson is the owner of www.introcave.com. He is a YouTube intro maker he purchased in 2018. And the Will has a very interesting and diverse background. He's been building websites and video games since 2007. That's 13 years. His expedience ranges from 2% startups to running large Facebook games to working at a digital agency. He has participated in game jams, hackathons, shipped multiple flash and mobiles games, built websites. And believe it or not, he taught as an adjunct professor at Savannah college of arts and design. It's a very popular, a famous college in Georgia and of course in the country as well. And also, he has some investment stake in real estate as well. So as you can see, a very diverse background that it's going to be very interested in conversation. And so Will welcome.

01:28 

Will: Thank you. Thank you, Ramesh.

01:31 

Ramesh: So you're a big-time gamer.

01:31 

Will: Yeah. I mean you can tell from giant gaming headset; apex legends is my current mega league vice.

01:42 

Ramesh: Will what's your pop current game.

01:42 

Will: Apex legends. It's a competitive Fortnite which you've probably heard of.

01:45 

Ramesh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So fantastic. So that's good. All right, so I have a gamer friend. I keep [01:50 inaudible] him like, man, what are doing? Just killing people in the game. So what fun you get out of it. But anyway, I don't know much about it, so I will not get into it. So let's talk about Intro Cave So you are the owner of www.introcave.com, so Will, why don't you introduce yourself in your own words and then about the business that you're running.

02:08 

Will: Sure. So I sort of bounced back and forth my whole career from video games and web development. That's kind of where I got started. At the time I was in 2018 when I bought it. I was working at a mobile game studio here in Atlanta and I would sort of work on video games all day and then come home and keep working on either the same game or different games, smaller games. I felt like I needed a little bit more variety.