546: In Retrospect - Building BigCommerce: Mitch Harper’s Guide to Scaling a SaaS Empire

This is not your typical interview where I interview someone well known in the entrepreneurial space.   Steve Mehr is an entrepreneur, businessman, all round hustler and the founder of an Ad Agency called Webshark 360 in Southern California. I met Steve through Instagram via his extremely popular account (@agentsteven) and we have been great friends since. Overtime Steve has actually taught me a lot about life and business, so I thought why not get him on the show to share with everyone how he has built a multi-million dollar empire.   In this interview you are going to learn: -How Steve built his empire and fortune from the ground up -How to achieve scale with businesses and grow them at a rapid pace -Key mindsets required to not stay successful in business and life once you have attained "success" in the eyes of society -Hiring and Recruitment 101 -Managing a team -Setting goals and why it's Steve's secret to success -Instagram and the Importance of it -The importance of measuring   If you want to learn how to dominate your goals, make sure you check out Steve's book here, fantastic read and I highly recommend it! - http://stevemehr.com/   I Need Your Help!    If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people! Leave a review for the Foundr Podcast!

21 Mars 20151h 2min

A very long time ago before I even considered starting a business, I once read that the self storage industry was a brilliant business model, and a booming industry. Little did I know 4-5 years later I would be speaking to a disrupter of this industry. Enter Rob Rebholz, Co-founder of Spaceways whom are currently turning the self storage industry on it's head at a rapid pace, with the kind of growth that most startups would dream of.   Rob is an extremely savvy and interesting entrepreneur and in this interview he shares with us:   - The story behind spaceways, how the idea was conceieved - Customer Development, and how to find out what your customers truly want - Marketing 101 and the power it can bring to your business if you done properly - His experiences being backed by Rocket Internet - Top web apps and tools that they are using to help manage a rapidly growing business and team - & Much more   I need your help!   If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people!     Leave a review for the Foundr Podcast!

12 Mars 201538min

In the brave new world of business that has arisen with the growth of the web, there are many types of entrepreneurs. There is the planner, who plots every move from the beginning, never a scandal in sight. There is the accidental entrepreneur, who falls into a business and makes it work. There is the enfant terrible, such as Mark Zuckerberg, who was likely always going to be successful, but couldn't have anticipated the impact Facebook would have on the world. And nestled neatly within the pack there is the visionary, the type of entrepreneur that could just as easily pass for a seer such is their knack for knowing what to do and when to do it. Marie Forleo, the founder of Marie Forleo International, is nothing if not a visionary. Forleo's first rule of business is to lead with your heart, and it is safe to say that in 2015, with 14 years of entrepreneurship under her belt and an eight-figure business, Forleo's heart has served her well. Marie was named by Oprah as a thought leader for the next generation and one of Inc’s 500 fastest growing companies of 2014. She reaches over 275,000 readers in 193 countries worldwide and leads dynamic training programs that teach individuals to succeed in business and life. She’s the creator of the award-winning show MarieTV and has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, Fast Company, Glamour Magazine, Self Magazine, Forbes.com and The New York Times among others. Marie has been interviewed by Tony Robbins as one of the world’s leading lifestyle and online marketing experts and mentored young business owners at Richard Branson’s Centre of Entrepreneurship in South Africa. Her bestselling book, Make Every Man Want You: How To Be So Irresistible You’ll Barely Keep from Dating Yourself is published in 13 languages. Through her Change Your Life, Change The World® initiative, each for profit training program is tied to a non-profit partner who supports women, the environment and entrepreneurship. Choosing whether to follow her heart or listen to her head, however, hasn't always been easy. Forleo openly admits to questioning herself and wondering whether it was all worth it, "but I had this deep feeling in my heart that I was doing the right thing." In this interview you will learn: - How Marie Built her Online Business step-by-step - The importance of building your business with heart - How to challenge yourself - The importance of Value - Marketing & Copywriting hacks that are absolutely essential to know!

4 Mars 201551min

Greg Koch doesn’t care if you don’t like Stone Brewing’s Co.’s beer. Case in point, the label on a bottle of Arrogant Ale:   This is an aggressive beer. You probably won’t like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth. We would suggest that you stick to safer and more familiar territory…   Koch, Stone’s CEO and cofounder, insists that when he wrote that caption back in 1997 when they first released the beer, it wasn’t a marketing gimmick. He really didn’t want people who prefer “fizzy yellow beer” to buy this hoppy, high-alcohol monster without fair warning. Of course, he did have some fun with it, reveling in the mocking tone of the Arrogant Bastard.   “That’s a tone of voice that I attribute to the beer and not to myself. Although maybe there is a little bit of me in there,” says Koch, who with partner Steve Wagner started in 1996 what would become one of the largest and most beloved craft breweries in the United States.   That little bit of arrogance — although you might swap that descriptor out with optimism, passion, or persistence — is in large part what has made Stone the giant success it is today.   Stone Brewing started early in the craft beer revolution, when the market had little interest in bitter, heavy brews, but Koch and Wagner had strong and unwavering opinions about good beer. When they decided to start their own brewery they knew they had to stick stubbornly to their ideals, and accept that some set of people would like it … or they wouldn’t.    But they did, and as Americans came around to more aggressive flavor profiles in their beers (with Stone and other small breweries leading the charge), the Southern California-based operation grew rapidly, averaging 50 percent annual growth and ranking consistently as one of the country’s fastest-growing companies and best-reviewed breweries.   In this interview you will learn:   - Why Greg has never had to ever pay for advertisement for Stone Brewing Co - How to develop a cult following  - Creating something that people truly want - What it means to follow your heart and create true art - The Stone Brewing story, and how it all started - Marketing copy 101 - & Much more!   I Need Your Help!    If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people! Leave a review for the Foundr Podcast!

22 Feb 201549min

37,000 feet high in the air. Hurtling forward at hundreds of miles per hour. This was it. This was the scene. This was where Chris Ducker sat when he wrote his resignation letter – a step that helped his career take off and reach new heights. “I got my job because I ultimately become unemployable,” he says. His current job: CEO. But as he sat aboard that plane to Hong Kong in 2006, Chris wasn't the boss – he was being bossed around. He says that the head of the company he worked for was “such a painful boss, just a micromanaging boss.” Living in the Philippines, Chris worked for a Florida-based infomercial company. But his work earned the company half a million dollars per month in sales, which was far more than his salary. Throw that fact on top of the fraught feelings he bore towards his boss's management methods, and Chris was itching for something different. So he crafted his resignation letter on an airplane flight to Hong Kong. When the plane landed, he sent the email, officially resigning. He didn't intend to return to the world of work as someone else's employee, so he entered entrepreneurship. Having been involved in the Philippine call center market for several years, Chris decided that the niche could support a new company. He launched with seven staff and a lot of courage. Eight years on, Chris still works as CEO for his Live2Sell group of companies. Composing the group is a call center, a business to help people find virtual staff, and a co-working space. Starting with seven staff, the group now boasts 270 employees. To get there, Chris worked hard. He poured time and effort into his companies, striving to build them up to where they are today. And he pulled it off.   In this interview you will learn   - How to attain virtual freedom - Chris's strategies and tactics on buying your time back as a business owner - Productivity hacks - How to outsource & train overseas staff - Chris's best advice for entrepreneurs right now trying to grow their business - The 3 lists you need to create to attain freedom - & Much more!   I Need Your Help!    If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people! Leave a review for the Foundr Podcast!

13 Feb 201543min

This episode is proudly sponsored by DesignHill - The World's #1 Marketplace for Custom Designs. If you go to designhill.com/promo/foundrmag, foundr listeners will get $40 off the contest posting fee and $50 worth power upgrade of services for free. There aren’t too many startups on the planet that regularly make millionaires of their community members. Or who have doubled user, traffic, and revenue numbers consistently for the better part of a decade. The story of Envato going from a modest Flash design resource to a multi-site, multi-million dollar, online heavy-hitteris the essence of startup success. In fact, as a case study, it should probably be taught in business school. Except for the small fact that the journey of CEO and Cofounder Collis Ta’eed has been anything but textbook. Since its inception in 2006, Envato has boomed. Actually, you would have to say it has BOOMED. One and a half million active buyers, eight thriving marketplaces, 250 employees and over $215 million paid out to authors to date — all born from an idea to start a business that could support the travel aspirations of Ta’eed and his wife Cyan. “We had just got married and we had a lot of freelance clients. It was beginning to feel like a drag! Cyan said, ‘Let’s go traveling!’ I had always wanted to start a business and we had some ideas about how it would work, so we just thought, let’s go for it. Even though we had to keep freelancing for a long time to keep living as we built the company,” Ta’eed recalls. Since Envato launched FlashDen, its first digital marketplace that sells content created with Adobe Flash, the company has grown to include eight online marketplaces. There’s a good chance you’ve heard of at least one of them. The Largest of the Marketplaces is ThemeForest, which sells website themes and plug-ins. ThemeForest, is to digital creatives what Home Depot is to DIYers, The Envato Market also includes GraphicRiver, CodeCanyon, VideoGive, PhotoDune, 3DOcean, AudioJungle and ActiveDen (formerly FlashDen), while the broader Envato group is also home to freelance hub Studio and learning platform, Tuts+. Phew.   In this interview you will learn:   - How Collis validates his business ideas for marketplaces and how he chooses the right ones to pursue amongst the hundreds - How he has rapidly grown Envato - Raising capital vs Boostrapping - How he got his first 1000 customers - Marketing tactics and strategies for growth - What it takes to manage a large team and becoming a leader   I Need Your Help!    If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people! Leave a review for the Foundr Podcast!

4 Feb 201556min

This is a short episode of around 20 minutes. In this episode I answer your top 5 most popular questions. As I'm hearing from so many of you in our community, I'm finding a lot of commonalities in the questions that I'm being asked. Since I'm on this journey with you as an entrepreneur working towards building a successful business, I thought it would be fun to share with you what I'm learning and how I can further help you tackle these common problems and mix things up from our regular schedule.   Please let me know if you would like me to do more of these kind of episodes by emailing me at nathan@foundrmag.com   I Need Your Help!    If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people! Leave a review for the Foundr Podcast!

28 Jan 201526min

“What's the relationship-minded way that we can make cool stuff happen on the web?” “How do we use all these digital tools to be human at a distance?” “How do we make people feel like they're cared for and treated well, and how does that translate into revenue for companies?” Chris Brogan has big questions. He also has answers for those questions – answers that inform his own business endeavors and the efforts of companies that he has consulted for. This isn't middle-tier dabbling. Brogan has worked with big names like Disney, Motorola, Coke, Pepsico, Microsoft, and Google. Yeah, he's a big deal.   But Brogan’s company, Human Business Works, doesn't just serve corporate juggernauts. It also helps small businesses and solo entrepreneurs act on a community-centered approach to boost business. His company offers publications, online courses, and in-person training. He doesn't just have answers. He has proven solutions that could work for you. That's what has propelled Brogan to the top of the online blogging and entrepreneurial space. Besides working as CEO and president of Human Businesses Works, he publishes Owner magazine and delivers anticipated keynote speeches at conferences worldwide. With a massive following, Brogan has earned the respect and admiration of entrepreneurs everywhere.   In this interview you will learn: - Content marketing and the future of blogging - What it really means to develop deep relationships with your customers and how? - What influences Chris's business decisions - Community building 101 - How Chris has become an extremely influential marketer, blogger & entrepreneur online   I Need Your Help! If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people! Leave a review for the Foundr Podcast!

26 Jan 201535min