Foundr Magazine Podcast | Learn From Successful Founders & Proven Entrepreneurs, The Ultimate Startup Podcast For Business

"How can I solve a problem in the fastest way?" It's a question that Maneesh Sethi asks himself almost every day, and it's been the main driver behind who he is as a person, and as an entrepreneur. You see, Sethi lives a life of what you might call extreme productivity, and he wants to help you do the same. The question has manifested in a variety of ways throughout Sethi's life, including starting his own productivity blog, Hack the System, where he examines how people can be more productive and focused in their lives by looking for unconventional solutions. Then there was the time he paid someone to follow him around and slap him in the face every time he was being unproductive. Sethi's latest endeavor is par for the course in his never-ending quest to become as productive as he possibly can. As the founder and CEO of Pavlok, a wearable device designed to help you build better habits by literally shocking the bad ones out of you, Sethi is determined to help people transforms their lives. Even if it means gi

Jodie Fox loves her shoes. But unlike your average shoe lover, Fox was able to turn that love first into a living room-based passion project, and then a multimillion-dollar online business. She's the co-founder and CEO of Shoes of Prey, a popular online store that allows customers to design and customize their own shoes. Shoes of Prey recently raised $25 million in funding as part of its Series B round, and while that's impressive enough on its own, Fox managed to validate, launch, and break even on her very first business within two months. That's mind-bogglingly fast, even by startup standards. The former lawyer also skilfully scaled her business with a powerful mix of influencer marketing and deals with wholesale giants like Nordstrom, to the point that over 5 million shoes have been designed on the platform. Not bad for a first-time entrepreneur. "I think a founder's job when you start a business is just to do everything that you haven't hired anyone to do just yet," Fox says. Together with her co-founder

"The truth is I didn't like working for somebody else." Most entrepreneurs start their own business because they want to take charge of their own destiny, and for Brian Clark, the CEO and founder of Rainmaker Digital, Copyblogger, StudioPress, and the Rainmaker Platform, his story doesn't start off any different. It doesn't matter if you haven't heard of Clark before, but if you've been anywhere near the startup space in the past 15 years or so, you've undoubtedly felt his influence. With his first successful business he stuck with what he knew, taking his four years of experience in law and starting his own small law firm. He quickly set himself apart from the rest of the competition with his natural marketing instincts and his ability to build an audience. "What most young attorneys can't do is develop clients, and I figured out how to do that. And in that moment an entrepreneur was born. I was just so amazed that I could develop a business by myself with just an email newsletter. No one understood what I w

Jonathan Siegel has started close to a dozen different companies—some have been hugely successful, others didn't quite go as planned, and for one, he sold his shares after a falling out with his co-founders. Siegel has been a serial startup founder since he was just 12 years old. Now at 40, he has seen it all, and he's sharing his lessons—on products, investors, and selling a business—with Foundr. "It doesn't feel like a job, as much as it just feels like I'm getting paid to do something for fun," Siegel says, about his love for the entrepreneurial life. Siegel has had a knack for entrepreneurship since he was putting together and selling computers all the way back in 1989. From there, he's had a lifelong passion for creating something new every chance he got. Whether it was starting his own businesses, constantly creating new products, or building products for other people. For Siegel, entrepreneurship isn't so much a money-making exercise or a career, but a lifestyle that constantly allows him to strive for

In the late 1970s, Brian Smith was a young Australian surfer looking for the next big thing. Little did he know that while flipping through a magazine, he would stumble upon an idea that would grow into one of the world's most iconic brands. With more than $1 billion in sales worldwide, you can find the UGG brand in millions of households. What does it take to build such an iconic brand? Smith openly admits that, at the time, he had no idea. He struggled to get people interested in his product, and even when they were interested, he found it difficult to turn them into customers. In fact, after his first season of sales, Smith had sold only 28 pairs of boots. The outlook was not good for his fledgling brand. While many entrepreneurs would become disheartened and give up, Smith realized that no company becomes successful overnight. "You can't give birth to adults," Smith says. Smith believed that every successful business in the world has to go through a period of infancy, where almost nothing happens, and onl

Andrew Barnes's company  GO1 is a Y-Combinator alum that's raised over $4 million in funding, grown to over 400,000 users, and is currently the world's largest onboarding, compliance, and professional development learning platform. If that weren't impressive enough, Barnes hit those benchmarks in under three years. The secret weapon? An airtight B2B, or business to business, sales process. In our interview with Barnes, he shares with us how the Australian-startup-that-could found its path to achieving explosive growth and influence, eventually ranked as one of the 100 most disruptive startups in the world. He also tells us how he and his team mastered B2B sales, a huge arena of entrepreneurship today. "I remember in YC we were up late just basically cold-calling trying to generate interest and see whether they'd take us, we'd try Google Adwords and spent a fortune on that, we tried a whole host of different options. And what we eventually stumbled on is a model with sales development reps that identify people

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. To

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,

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

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 o

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

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

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 e

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 bu

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 in

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 m

At 20 years old, Daniel DiPiazza was comfortable. He wasn't making millions of dollars at his hourly wage job, but he wasn't struggling for money either. Like a lot of people in their early 20s, he just didn't know what he wanted to do. While the life he led was fine, it was a never ending cycle of making enough money to pay the bills, and that was about it. It wasn't exciting, more than anything it was dissatisfying, and after a few years, DiPiazza found himself restless and wanting more out of life. "It got to this point where I showed up at work one day and I was intensely irritated. It wasn't anything specifically that happened that day, it was just a culmination of a few years of doing things that were just ... very annoying. I made a decision that day that I was going to make a change," DiPiazza says. From that point on, it was like a switch had been flipped inside him. Instead of looking at all the things that held him back, DiPiazza began looking for opportunities. If no one was going to give him a jo

One of the best ways for an entrepreneur to come up with a great business idea is by scratching their own itch. If something's giving you trouble, it's likely that other people out there are feeling the same way. That's how it all started for Mike McDerment, back when he created FreshBooks. At the time, McDerment wasn't looking to create a new business, or invent some sort of revolutionary product to sell. He was just trying to solve his own problem—he was tired of using Microsoft Excel as a way to create and send invoices to clients. It originally started off as simple digital product to make his own life easier, but it wasn't long before others started taking an interest in McDerment's new tool. Instead of selling a complete software package, the common approach at the time, McDerment decided to try out a new business model that was relatively unheard of at the time. "The truth is, we were SaaS before there was SaaS. We were cloud before there was cloud," he says. While most people were selling software as

Many of us have a secret desire to make a living by following our passions, but not all of us have a passion quite like Vanessa Van Edwards'. Back in college, she loved reading academic and scientific journals. She tore through them. That might lead you to believe that she wanted to become an academic or work in a lab somewhere, but Van Edwards also had the soul of an entrepreneur. Even as a young adult, she had several successful businesses under her belt. Listening to that entrepreneurial spirit within her, she wondered if there was a way to link up her two loves—business and science. "All these researchers spend years and years doing this research, and they publish 20-page papers and they get read by, if they're lucky, a hundred people. And I wondered, is there a way to make a business out of this science research? Is there a way to turn science into business?" Van Edwards says. In 2012, she started the Science of People, a human behavior research lab dedicated to understanding the science behind what make

When Jim Kwik was in kindergarten, he suffered a terrible fall that resulted in head trauma and a brain injury. This would come to define the rest of Kwik's early life as he grew up suffering from learning difficulties. He constantly struggled to keep up with the rest of his peers and never quite found the ability to focus enough and learn fast enough, all of which was exacerbated by the fact that he didn't even have a fully functioning memory. "I was the boy with the broken brain," Kwik says. And yet, today Kwik is considered an expert on memory, learning, and the brain. He teaches thousands of people how they can hack their brains, just like he has with his own, in order to drastically expand their potential to learn and process new information. Kwik can count some of the most influential people in the world as his students, including Elon Musk, Warren Buffet, Richard Branson, and Oprah Winfrey, just to name a few. "Every single person can also do it, you just weren't taught how. If anything, you were taugh