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 ...
Mar 12, 2015•38 min
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...
Mar 04, 2015•51 min
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’...
Feb 22, 2015•49 min
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 ...
Feb 13, 2015•44 min
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 Fl...
Feb 04, 2015•57 min
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...
Jan 28, 2015•27 min
“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 wo...
Jan 26, 2015•36 min
Eight years ago, Charlie Hoehn had no job. He submitted application after application to no avail. Only two companies offered him employment. His choices? “Back-breaking labor and a pyramid scheme,” he says. Today, Charlie turns down work. He is a speaker, an author, and a marketing strategist. His recently-released book is Play It Away: A Workaholic's Cure for Anxiety . At one point, the former unemployed man worked so much that it burned him out – but he triumphed over that, too, and wrote a b...
Jan 20, 2015•47 min
Meet Kevin and Julia Hartz. In 2003, Kevin and Julia were sat next to each other at the Santa Barbara wedding of mutual friends. They hit it off, and the rest, as they say, is history. In 2006, they celebrated their own wedding, and in 2008, they welcomed the first children. You would be forgiven if you think this story sounds familiar, like the stuff Hollywood movies are made of. But rest assured: this story is anything but familiar. Along the way, the duo also founded Eventbrite, a self servic...
Jan 16, 2015•54 min
Forget social media. When it comes to marketing techniques, newer isn’t always better, according to marketing wunderkind Derek Halpern. You just started your blog. And now you’re ready to set the fiber-optic cables on fire with your wisdom and start raking in sales. In doing so, most likely you’ll be staring into a blue glowing screen until the early hours, cobbling together posts that your growing list of readers will find both valuable and compelling. Starting from scratch, how do you build an...
Jan 13, 2015•45 min
Forget everything you know, and everything you think you know, about starting a startup. If Andy Sheats' success with health.com.au tells us anything — and let's be clear, when you're bringing in $100 million in revenue within three years of launch, you're a success — it's that to be an entrepreneur, you need to think of yourself as everything but an entrepreneur. Sure, an Internet search of the phrase "how to start a business" would tell you otherwise. But the numbers speak for themselves. Doin...
Jan 08, 2015•49 min
AJ Leon walks backs to his corner office on the 28th floor. He closes the door behind him and walks past his $8,200 mahogany desk to his window. He surveys the stark Manhattan skyline in the winter morning sunshine. The Chrysler building, the Empire State. Without warning, tears begin to drip down his cheeks. In his boss’s office, right next to his own, he’d just been offered a promotion. His six-figure salary would track up to seven-figures. All before his twenty-sixth birthday. It dawns on him...
Jan 06, 2015•58 min
This is a story not to be missed. So often in the startup world, we only hear about the successes, the acquisitions, and how much money this person is making. But how about the real story of entrepreneurs? The struggles? The failures? Enter Nikki Durkin. Nikki Durkin founded 99dresses, a company that allowed women to trade fashion items with other users. 99dresses was a Y-comibnator backed startup that had thousands of users and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for it, but recently had to...
Jan 04, 2015•48 min
A life in the Hamptons, running a picturesque inn perched at the end of Long Island, sharing fine food and drink with visitors from around the world. Sounds like a version of heaven to many. Without a doubt, Gary Muller — chef and co-owner with his wife Sylvia of the high-end bed and breakfast The Mill House Inn — certainly does enjoy his work. But for Muller, it’s the joy of the business and the people he gets to interact with that truly make him happy. Hearing Muller talk about his work, it’s ...
Dec 31, 2014•1 hr 2 min
You can fund your baby on the Internet. That’s the world we live in. One in which a couple who wanted a child but could not conceive naturally were able to turn to strangers on the web to raise money for in vitro fertilization. A new life, crowdfunded. The couple’s campaign for a bundle of joy might seem odd — it’s certainly not ordinary — but it is a triumph of technology and humanity. It’s a story made possible through crowdfunding, a method of raising money for ideas online by seeking small c...
Dec 30, 2014•36 min
Brent Grundy was a man with a simple business idea who built his empire from the ground up, and became living proof that someone can go from flat broke to running a business that turns over $32 million per year, in just 18 months. But Grundy’s road to success has been anything but smooth. An unfortunate but often present component of any success story is that of hardship or failure; and Brent Grundy’s story is no exception. After a major business setback, Grundy found himself in the unenviable p...
Dec 26, 2014•52 min
Where do you see yourself in ten years? And more importantly, is that where you want to be? Without a doubt, you've spent an unproductive afternoon at your desk staring listlessly out the window, listening to the chatter of co-workers, staring at piles of reports, puzzled on how you ended up there. What happened to the life you dreamed about when you were in high-school? If you’re feeling a little unfulfilled, the good news is, you're not the only one. According to Harvard studies, a whopping 74...
Dec 21, 2014•50 min
Employed by Mercedes-Benz, pulling in $300,000 a year … By a lot of standards, James Schramko was doing pretty well for himself. Yet he felt stifled. He was relying on one source of income, which although high, he felt was capped, and didn't have creative control. As he tells Foundr, he wanted to be the primary beneficiary of his own efforts, rather than have his employer reap the rewards. The upside was that it prepared him well to strike out on his own, as he did six years ago. “Running a mult...
Dec 18, 2014•42 min
Becoming one of the world’s most influential people on social media is no small feat. Author and entrepreneur Mari Smith explains that it comes down to a love of technology, and above all, a love of people. Challenging traditional notions of marketing, author and entrepreneur Mari Smith explains that relationship marketing is based around creating trusting associations with customers that last a lifetime. It’d be an understatement to say that social media has fundamentally changed how we communi...
Dec 17, 2014•43 min
Fists clenched, hidden iPhone filming from his shirt pocket, Jia Jiang stands in a glossy-tiled shopping mall in east Texas. And, as if tugged by a magnet, he ambles towards a seated security guard. With beads of sweat gathering at his temples, Jia plants his feet. The guard glances up. Jia swallows. “Can I have a hundred dollars?” This is Jia Jiang’s first foray into the world of deliberate rejection. And he will continue deliberately seeking rejection for one hundred days. Have you ever walked...
Dec 15, 2014•38 min
Adi Tatarko, co-founder of online home design platform Houzz, began her journey by purchasing her dream home built in 1955 – a fixer-upper – and then setting about renovating it. “Unfortunately the process itself wasn't so dreamy… it was pretty much a nightmare,” Tatarko says. “So we ended up building Houzz in order to make the whole process better.” The cliché holds – a picture paints a thousand words – and in order to best communicate the vision of their dream home to their architect, Tatarko ...
Dec 14, 2014•43 min
David Brim never meant to get into the car manufacturing business. He initially planned to import and sell the Tomcar Australia — an Israeli military vehicle — in Australia, but as things snowballed he found himself running a full-fledged business selling highly customized ATVs to defense, agriculture, mining, emergency services and the odd individual. “Once we’d started we loved it. Nine years later we’re selling cars across Australia and people are loving it.” Speaking to Foundr along with Tom...
Dec 11, 2014•47 min
Growth Hacker TV launched on May 1st of last year and has taken the entrepreneurial world by storm. Co-founder Bronson Taylor has suddenly provided a place where experts on startup growth reveal their secrets and we are eating it up! But Bronson, ever humble, shares his remarkable success as the tale of two brothers with a dream: “About four years ago, I guess, my brother and I decided to start a company. So we started a company called Dumb Punk and it was a web development shop,” he says. “But ...
Dec 10, 2014•38 min
Nine hundred million people around the world do not have access to safe drinking water. Globally, consumers spend $60 billion on bottled water each year. In the face of these stark mathematics, most might give a resigned shrug and consider it someone else’s problem. Thank you Water Founder Daniel Flynn was 19 when he discovered the alarming facts about the world’s water. His response? Make it his business to change the world. In this interview you are going to learn: -What it takes to create a s...
Dec 08, 2014•43 min
Obstacles, opportunities, and the ability to operate amid them: that's the business of business. Dave Goldberg knows. He does it every day. After post-college stints in management consulting and the music industry, Goldberg wanted to lead. He had one problem — his young age. But he turned that obstacle into an opportunity. “I needed to try running something, and no one, at [my] age of 26, was going to let me run anything,” he says. “So I decided to start my own company.” That company, LAUNCH Med...
Dec 07, 2014•37 min
Neil Patel is the cofounder of two well-known and highly successful analytics companies: Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics. He is based in Seattle, Washington and wears many hats including that of an entrepreneur, analytics expert, blogger (www.quicksprout.com) and angel investor. Neil’s story is interesting with lots of takeaways because of how he attained his success. For example, he started selling $1,600 vacuums at the age of 16. From the outside looking in, this venture was a failure. Of all the do...
Dec 04, 2014•37 min
In this episode of the Foundr Podcast gears are reversed and Nathan invites his good friend Yaro Starak to interview him for the show. Yaro Starak is an entrepreneur, blogger and internet marketer from Entrepreneur’s Journey (www.entrepreneurs-journey.com ). Yaro is a well-known internet marketer and entrepreneur that has grown several ventures and has a pretty popular blog on how to grow your business. In this interview Yaro and Nathan Discuss: - Nathan's Journey and how he started Foundr - Nat...
Dec 03, 2014•44 min
Well before sunrise each day, Ari Meisel wakes up. The 30-year-old serial entrepreneur, husband, and father rises at 5:30 each morning to get started on the day's work. Along with business and blogging, he helps to take care of his three young children. Ari has a lot to juggle. But that doesn't faze him – after starting a series of successful businesses and even battling Crohn's disease, he holds a perspective of relentless optimism and a drive to help others. In an interview, Foundr publisher N...
Dec 02, 2014•41 min
“Writer. Traveler. Fighter of the status-quo.” This is how Chris Guillebeau describes himself on his website. Besides that, he is also a practical and logical guy. He couldn’t have otherwise accomplished his dream of traveling to every country in the world, 193 in total, by the time he turned 35. Mind you, he didn’t wander aimlessly. Fascinated by discovery and exploration, the travel hacker had thoroughly planned his adventure step by step to make it feasible. He analyzed the challenges of trav...
Dec 01, 2014•33 min
“My company fell apart. My relationships fell apart. My health fell apart,” Kamal Ravikant says. It was one of the darkest times in his life. “I was just locked in my bedroom, miserable out of my mind.” As a tech entrepreneur, Ravikant had his share of success. He also failed. In fact, the failure of his last company struck him down. But he got up. His embrace of one simple concept — loving himself — ended up saving him emotionally and then financially, as his writing on the subject allowed him ...
Nov 30, 2014•42 min
