We interview hard to reach entrepreneurs. (Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss, Tony Robbins, Barbara Corcoran, Daymond John & many more).
Unlike most podcast interview series Nathan Chan literally started from knowing nothing. He was just an average guy working in a 9-5 job he utterly hated. He knew nothing about entrepreneurship, nothing about startups, nothing about marketing, and nothing about online or how to build a business. So from launching Foundr Magazine he's gone out and spoken to some of the most successful entrepreneurs and founders in the world in the world to find out exactly what it takes to become a successful entrepreneur, so YOU can learn from them.
Why this podcast? Because we're asking the same questions you want to know as an entrepreneur on their journey to building an extremely successful business. We're on the front-lines facing the daily battles you are. How do I get more customers? How do I scale my business? I want to start a business, but just don't know where to start? How did this person get millions of customers and make millions of dollars and have a such a massive impact on the world?
Some of these entrepreneurs are very well known, and some not known at all and that’s the cool part! Here we will share with you our best interviews from Foundr magazine showcasing this persons processes, failures, critical lessons learnt and actionable strategies showing YOU how to build a successful business. This is NOT your AVERAGE everyday entrepreneurship podcast.
Sophia Amoruso was a community college dropout, working a variety of odd jobs to support herself, when she set up a humble eBay store called Nasty Gal Vintage. The rapid growth that followed has become the stuff of startup legend, and in this episode of the podcast, Amoruso shares what she learned from the roller-coaster ride of Nasty Gal, and tells us about her new endeavor, Girlboss Media.
Over the course of a decade, Amoruso had a meteoric rise, during which she became the head of a retail empire, and was named one of the richest self-made women by Forbes in 2016. She also became a symbol of brash millennial entrepreneurs and a trailblazing icon for female entrepreneurs especially, following the release of her New York Times bestseller #GirlBoss.
Then, the same year Netflix developed a scripted comedy loosely based on the book, Nasty Gal found itself filing for bankruptcy. In those 10 years, Amoruso had bigger highs and lows than many entrepreneurs experience in a lifetime, but the story isn't over yet.
Today, Amoruso has moved on and is working on continuing the momentum of her book and the devoted following she built around her story. Nasty Gal Media is as focused as ever on helping women around the world launch their entrepreneurial careers.
We were very fortunate to be able to interview Amoruso amid her hectic schedule of growing a new business. She shared with us the many lessons she's learned from her exciting and colorful career, along with fascinating insight into what makes a brand explode, and how to come out on top in today's tumultuous startup world.
In this week's episode you will learn:
In 2011, four lads from Dublin were running a successful business that let programers and engineers know when a user encountered a problem with their program. The problem was that none of them were particularly interested in the world of programming errors.
Instead, they found their passions centered on why it was so difficult for online businesses to talk to customers. They didn't know it at the time, but they were about to reinvent the concept of content marketing.
So Des Traynor and his three co-founders sold their successful business, packed their bags, and moved to sunny California.
"We were four Irish founders and basically our previous company, we had already done the bootstrapping thing. ... When we were going through this change of business and this change of approach, we said, 'What's the opposite of running a bootstrapped business off the north side of Dublin?' Well that's come to Silicon Valley and raise a million dollars, and that's what we did," Traynor says.
It turned out to be the right move, as the company that now known as Intercom raised more than $160 million in the past six years, building a customer base of over 17,000 customers, and making over $50 million in revenue. Their mission was simple: to make online businesses feel less like talking to a robot and feel more personal instead.
The solution to that was to help businesses talk to their customers through their own websites and apps instead of the usual mish-mash of emails, texts, and phone calls. Intercom built its reputation and customer base through the power of content marketing, but in a way that might surprise you.
Instead of following the traditional strategy of hiring a content team, focusing on SEO and backlinks, and churning out at as much content as possible, Intercom went in the completely opposite direction and developed a unique content strategy that led their business to go viral within the startup community, while building a beloved brand.
"We're not one of those people that do all that black hat stuff. I really, really hate that. We had a recommendation recently to go post on discussions.apple.com and write a piece that links back to your site, and it was just so puke-worthy. I could never get excited about gamifying the Google algorithm and building the business on such a messy, fragile house of cards," Traynor says.
Traynor goes in-depth with us in this episode about why the conventional content marketing strategy doesn't work anymore, and how to really get your message across.
In this week's episode you will learn:
Every entrepreneur at some point faces the dilemma of simply not being able to pour any more hours of work into their company. As a result, they get stuck.
That's where Clate Mask, CEO of Infusionsoft, comes in. In the 10 years Infusionsoft has been operating, Mask has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs use the power of email marketing to double their growth, triple their leads, even quadruple overall revenue.
For Mask, automated email marketing is the secret weapon for any business that's trying to scale. In today's podcast episode, he dishes on how to do it right.
"What happens in an entrepreneurial business, when you're running a small company, it's very, very difficult to follow up effectively with all your leads and customers, and things slip through the cracks," he says. "You're wearing 10 different hats trying to run the business, and ... you just can't keep it all straight when the business starts to grow and when you start to have some success."
At that point, you can either hire more people to handle the workload, which can be costly, or learn how to automate your business.
Mask has helped Infusionsoft's 125,000-plus users create their own automation campaigns by mapping out customer lifecycles, and pinpointing the best times and messages to engage customers and get as much of a return as possible.
In this week's episode, Mask tells us what the marketing strategies of his best users look like, and how you can incorporate them into your own business.
In this episode you will learn:In his lifetime as an entrepreneur, Steve Olsher has crashed, burned, and reinvented himself in the face of tremendous failure. But for Olsher, there was never any other path. If you can relate, he's got some indispensable wisdom to offer.
"I've been an entrepreneur pretty much since I've been old enough to pick up a rake and move some leaves around, or grab a shovel and do some snow-shoveling and clear some sidewalks, driveways, that sort of thing. We're all naturally wired to excel in very specific ways, and for me, I've always just been wired to rub a couple of dimes together to make that quarter," Olsher says.
Olsher has spent his entire life as an entrepreneur, and with it has experienced all the highs and lows, from starting a widely successful business that was prepared to go public within a year, to losing it all and walking away from a company he spent nine years of his life building.
But if success is defined by how well you can bounce back from failure, Olsher is one of the most successful people on the planet. Taking the knocks in stride, and embracing the lessons they taught him, Olsher went on to pursue other entrepreneurial ventures over the next six years, before reclaiming his original business and domain name, Liquor.com, and building his business from the ground up again.
In the years since, Olsher has distilled a lifetime of experience and lessons into helping others figure out what their passion and their purpose are. Today, he is now a New York Times-bestselling author, and is all about helping people reinvent themselves into who they truly want to be.
In this episode you will learn:
Getting rich is for amateurs. A real entrepreneur, one with serious guts and vision, wants to make the world a better place.
If that's you, it's time to enter the world of social enterprise—business that seeks to make both a profit and a positive impact, on anything from education to world hunger. This is a tall order, but it's possible and an increasingly popular form of entrepreneurship. So today's podcast is going to show you exactly how to make money, while also making a difference.
Unlike your traditional businesses, social enterprises have a much harder time securing funding and even staff. The legal frameworks and business models can also be much trickier. Lucky for us, we were able to sit down with Adam Braun, founder of Pencils of Promise and MissionU. He shared with us how he managed to raise over $50 million in contributions, build hundreds of schools, and grow a worldwide staff of more than 125 employees as a social enterprise.
As he turned 25, Braun only had $25 in his bank account, but was still determined to build a school for the less fortunate. Before crowdsourcing was even a thing, Braun turned to strangers to help him fund his first project. He used social media and event marketing to attract people to his cause, relying on influencer and word-of-mouth to secure the funding he needed.
"You start scrappy and understand that maybe one day you'll have the resources to hire full-time staff and work with capital at hand, but most people don't start that way, and I certainly didn't," Braun says.
Starting with this grassroots marketing strategy and an all-volunteer staff, he built Pencils of Promise into a huge success. Today, more than 400 schools have been built as a result, and Braun's turned his sights to education in the United States with his new project MissionU.
In this episode you'll learn:
Russell Brunson knows a ton about building effective marketing funnels. It's a skill he learned after spending nearly 10 years making money online by building funnels for all sorts of things, from potato guns to coupons. Now as the CEO and co-founder of ClickFunnels, Brunson heads one of the fastest-growing bootstrapped companies in the world.
"We're growing faster than any VC-backed company that I know of, and we do it because we had to do it smarter, and we do it through the funnels that we practice and we preach, and it works," Brunson says.
In a mere two-and-a-half years Brunson has grown ClickFunnels to more than 36,000 active customers and, even more impressively, he's been able to turn those customers into a passionate community of evangelists loyal to the brand. He's since taken his talent and knowledge for building effective sales funnels and has distilled it all into an incredibly easy tool that anyone can use, as well as a number of bestselling books.
But it hasn't been an easy road and it's taken a heap of knowhow, expertise, and foresight to get there. Luckily for us, he's sharing his best advice with the Foundr audience.
In this week's episode you'll learn:
Tony Robbins advises billion-dollar CEOs, celebrities, even heads of state, but today, he's going to show you how to become a master of money.
The New York Times-bestselling author has once again topped the charts with his latest book Unshakeable, and to date, the world-renowned speaker has inspired tens of millions of people all over the globe. Successful people from Bill Clinton to Oprah have sung his praises, and he's had sit downs with the likes of Nelson Mandela.
What you might not know, however, is that before it all, Tony was a penniless kid growing up in Azusa, California. After leaving home at 17, Robbins decided to skip college so he could start working, which at first meant sweeping the floors as a janitor. But he constantly strove to continue learning and feed his voracious curiosity.
Every millionaire finds their start somewhere, and for Robbins it was in the pages of endless books that he found himself glued to. He was determined to be a millionaire, and he wasn't going to let a lack of formal education be a barrier, eventually working his way to the top.
Today, he's the one writing the books, sharing all the wisdom he's collected over all those years. And his latest topic of obsession is finance—how to master money and become truly free from worries about wealth.
Robbins has decades of experience in business and investing himself, but in recent years, he's been questioning the world's greatest financial minds to get to the bottom of that question. Many of the answers are in his new book, but fortunately for Foundr fans, Tony Robbins joins us today to share some of his most important lessons.
In this episode you will learn:
In 2012, Gretta Rose van Riel, like most aspiring entrepreneurs, found herself spending all of her free time building a business. It was nothing more than a passion project at the time, something to do in her spare time when she wasn't working at her day job.
Despite the fact that she had no real plans to become a full-time entrepreneur with her own business, it wasn't long before that passion project grew into something bigger. She soon knew that this was something she just had to devote all of her time and energy to.
"Basically, I had an idea that resonated with me so strongly, I just knew that it was something that I had to pursue," van Riel says.
The result was a multimillion-dollar ecommerce business called SkinnyMe Tea, the world's first teatox using the natural benefits of tea to help you achieve your health, fitness, and nutrition goals. That alone is impressive enough, but what really separates van Riel from the rest of the pack is that she didn't just build one multimillion-dollar business, she's built many.
In five years, Van Riel has transformed herself from just another employee to serial entrepreneur, with multiple ecommerce businesses under her belt. She's effectively cracked the code on how to successfully build a business online, including coming up with the perfect idea, the best way to market it, and how to rapidly scale.
In this week's episode you will learn:
In this very special episode of the Foundr Podcast, we answer all the questions you've ever had about building an ecommerce business and more!
The first installment in what we're calling the Foundr Incubator series, we recorded a live coaching session between one ambitious Foundr community member and the head of a billion-dollar company.
We organized a call with Jake McKeon, the up-and-coming founder of multiple ecommerce businesses, to receive one-on-one coaching from Tom Bilyeu, co-founder of unicorn startup Quest Nutrition. Like so many other entrepreneurs out there, McKeon was doing well, but looking to grow and not sure how. That's where Bilyeu, with his years of experience and wisdom, stepped in.
The result is a fascinating and honest conversation in which Jake asks just about every question an entrepreneur might have about how to grow, how to market yourself, and generally how to take an online business to the next level. Tom doesn't hold back and answers all of these questions and more, sharing his insights on what it takes to create a successful ecommerce business and a thriving community around your brand.
This is an episode you definitely do not want to miss, with so much gold being shared that you can't help but feel empowered and inspired after listening.
In this interview you will learn:
Sean Ellis is not just another marketer. In fact, he's something entirely different. He's the world's first growth hacker.
Originally selling advertising in the print industry in Budapest, Ellis found his calling when a friend began building a new company on this relatively new thing called the internet. Despite not knowing that much about it, Ellis immediately recognized the opportunities that online marketing presented.
"Nobody knew much about the internet at the time. But because I was selling advertising, I really liked the idea of being able to target specific ad messages to specific people," Ellis says.
In the years that followed, Ellis continued to stay ahead of the curve. While the rest of the world was still trying to grow their startups the traditional way, by pounding the pavement and paying for advertising with little understanding of the results they were getting, Ellis was already breaking the rules and experimenting with every possibility that the internet offered.
Instead of just focusing on marketing as something separate from the product that was being built, Ellis wanted to experiment and see if he could combine both product and marketing together. The result was a method he called "growth hacking," a term he coined in 2010 that would come to revolutionize how startups looked at marketing, and eventually become the name of his company Growth Hackers.
He tested his methodology over the years and played a key role in successfully growing companies like Dropbox, Lookout, and Xobni, eventually becoming the go-to guy in all of Silicon Valley for startups looking to grow as fast as possible. Today, you'll be hard pressed to find anyone with more experience, knowledge, or passion about the power of growth hacking.
In this week's episode, you'll learn:
