The Mentors

While most entrepreneurs never raise money from professional investors, many first time founders want to understand how the process works. Having met with a lot of people eager to learn how they can raise money for their startup idea we decided to record a new series called Fundraising 101 to dispel some myths around the process and provide a template for those that think this is the right step for their business.

Part one of our series focuses on what you need to accomplish at minimum before you're ready to approach investors. We discuss the three areas of traction to focus on - Team, Product, and Customers, and why investors invest in lines not dots (ie: consistent output and growth, not individual indicators of success). 

We also discuss our experience with fundraising for our tech startup and what we could have done differently. In part two we'll explain how you can quickly setup meetings with professional investors through both cold and warm outreach. 

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There's a lot of reasons a producer may want to bring someone on a show, but how do they pick their guests and how does it actually happen?

We talk about going to watch a studio taping of Dr. Oz this week and why our friend Andrew Maksymowicz, founder of Poopers Guide in NYC, ended up on the show. 

In this episode you will learn:

1) The importance of doing something unique and niche thus becoming a leader in your category

2) The role of PR in showing credibility 

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Emotional health isn't just an abstract idea we should strive towards. It's a skill that can be learned just like anything else through practice. This thesis is the basis on which Nataly Kogan built her company, Happier, and people are starting to catch on. 

Before developing her program, which is now part of the corporate training curriculum at massive organizations like SAP Concur, Nataly spent years research, testing, and developing daily practices that would create major shifts in her mindset and life. Through her popular talks she caught the attention of corporate leaders, and Happier @ Work was born. 

In part two of our interview with Nataly she talks about the initial hurdles she faced as she attempted to reinvent her business and how she landed on a concept that's changing the way executives and leaders approach professional development.

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Inspiration is perishable, but if you capitalize on it when it strikes you can set big things in motion. This week we're giving you a simple yet important reminder to pay attention to when you feel inspired and to act on that inspiration right when it comes. 

This is the one thing that you can't leave until later because it may never manifest itself in quite the same way again. We discuss two events this week, one in which we succeeded in acting on a moment of inspiration and one where we failed. We talk through the repercussions of a missed opportunity to act on inspiration and talk about how Phil Knight created Nike from a similar moment. 

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What are the moments in your life when you felt that you were doing something natural, exciting, and powerful at the same time? When you felt truly present with no desire to change what was happening to you. Our guest Nataly Kogan, the founder of Happier.com, believes that these moments are signals that you should pay attention to. Signals that act as a window into what you really desire and where your passions might lie. 

Nataly didn't realize her real calling until she was 40, even though she had already attained incredible professional success. In our interview she talks about a dark period in her life that helped her reinvent herself and created a path where she can teach others how to do the same thing while avoiding hitting the proverbial rock bottom. 

We discuss how to remove the 'should' thinking that's present in most of us to focus on the things we want to do instead. We also talk about what correlates to true meaning in one's life and the importance of manifesting meaning in the work we do. 

In part two of our interview we'll discuss how her company Happier evolved over the last three years to reach millions of people, and why emotional intelligence and even happiness is a skill that can be learned by anyone. 

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If you're looking for a starting point for how to think about marketing for your business this episode talks through the same advice we give founders at NYU and beyond.

The idea for the Bullseye Framework originated from a book that was recommended by a startup CEO friend of ours called Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. 

We break down this simple tool designed to help you pick your top three customer acquisition channels and the 80/20 rule of marketing. We also explain a simple way that you can come up with over 40 different marketing ideas in just 30 minutes. 

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If you're not a marketer the discipline can feel like a black, box but learning the fundamentals will immediately increase your value as an entrepreneur. More specifically, digital marketing is now part of every business strategy, so to help our listeners understanding how to apply it to their business we invited Matt Wolfe and Joe Fier of Evergreen Profits to break things down for us. 

The two friends have been experimenting with online marketing for over a decade, from working for agencies with massive budgets to running their own, they've become experts at figuring out how to turn $1 into $10. In our interview we discuss how they generated $40,000 in monthly revenue from an affiliate partnership with their first client and the systems they put in place to repeat this with others. 

If you're new to SEO and SEM this is the perfect introductory episode for you, and we promise to have the duo back on the show to dive even deeper into some of these topics. 

Make sure you listen to the very end of the episode where Matt and Joe discuss the tools and technologies that help them execute these campaigns successfully with a lean team. 

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Finding a good mentor is hard but the real work is in keeping them. In today's episode we talk about how you can impress important people in your life, be they a mentor, advisor, investor, or simply someone that's further along than you. 

We give two specific examples of how our mentees have accomplished this by following up, following through, being solution oriented, and finding opportunities to add value instead of always asking for help.

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Winning a negotiation is simpler than most people think. While becoming a master negotiator takes a lot of practice, being good at negotiating comes down to understanding a few very basic principals.

In this episode we walk through three common negotiation scenarios, starting with a salary negotiation, to illustrate how you can be better positioned to win when entering a similar discussion.

A successful negotiation begins before the meeting ever takes place. Your goal is to be as prepared as possible, so that you can be armed with credible information that can be used as needed throughout the discussion. Once you’re at the table, your only job should be to learn as much as possible about the other side. Our assumptions about other people’s wants and needs are often incorrect. By learning the other party’s priorities you can anticipate what they might be willing to agree to.

The last piece to consider is your walk away point, which relates to your ultimate leverage in the conversation. A negotiation is simply an agreement between two parties to enter into a discussion that can lead to an outcome that both sides are satisfied with. If you have other options when entering into a negotiation, those alternatives give you more leverage since you’re more likely to walk away from the discussion if a favorable outcome isn’t reached.

If you’re interested in learning more about the art of negotiating, Getting To Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury is an excellent place to start.

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Many successful founders of our time started their businesses as side projects while they were still in college. This is something that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg all have in common, among many others. But sending a rocket into space? That’s something that most college students can only dream to do.

In this edition of the 5 Minute Pick Me Up we tell a story of a group of enterprising college students from Princeton, NYU and Duke, who not only figured out how to design, and build a rocket with a completely remote team using tools like Slack, but were able to get the necessary partnerships and government approvals to legally launch a rocket in just one year. 

That project has now led to a business opportunity that caused these students to take a leave of absence from school, much like the famed entrepreneurs before them. Listen to hear more about their incredible story. 

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