Before I partnered with Jesse Pujji, we were buddy-buddy. Texting all the time. When we got started, we got excited about the world of possibilities for our company. Now? Something is missing. I asked him about it. And about where he put his money, why he’s not launching more companies now, what he’s building with AI, and more. Jesse Pujji is the founder of Gateway X , the venture studio. Jesse & Andrew are building Bootstrapped Giants , a resource for ambitious, unfunded founder...
Mar 05, 2025•Transcript available on Metacast When Kasey Grelle heard that private equity companies paid marketing agencies to evaluate companies they wanted to buy, she spotted a business opportunity. That realization became Aux Insights, the firm that’s become “the office of the CMO” for private equity companies. Listen to how they got clients & built their business. Kasey is a former reporter who founded Aux Insights , a global advisory firm that acts as the office of the CMO for private equity firms, specializing i...
Feb 21, 2025•Transcript available on Metacast Tucker Max thought his business was worth $64 million. Then it nearly died. This is the story of how Scribe, the ghostwriting and publishing company rose, crashed, and rose again. Tucker Max first became famous for his best-selling “fratire” books. He shifted to entrepreneurship when he launched Scribe , a book ghostwriting and publishing company. Today he spends time on his ranch where he grows his own food, and runs Tell Your Story Memoir Academy , which helps authors document their truth. Spo...
Nov 29, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast Zillow laid him off. So John Doherty launched Credo a digital agency matchmaking firm. Exactly 7 years later — to the day — he sold the company. This is the story of how he built and sold Credo, and how he’s building his latest company, EditorNinja, which offers outsourced text editing. John Doherty is the founder of Credo , which matches digital agencies with clients. After an exit in 2022, he built his professional editing/SEO service EditorNinja . When he’s not doing t...
Nov 22, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast Shaan Puri was exceptional at doing the Silicon Valley thing. Still, he says his newsletter was the fastest way he’s ever made money. Within a year of its creation, The Milk Road grew to 250k readers and a reported 8-figure exit. Shaan Puri is perhaps most famous for co-hosting the My First Million podcast with Sam Parr, which has garnered over 200 million YouTube views since it started in 2019. Some of his additional projects include Bebo (sold to Twitch in 2019), Blab (live-streaming service w...
Nov 15, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast They feel like the millionth company to offer email newsletter publishing. How are they growing so fast despite the competition? Tyler Denk is a big reason. A former Morning Brew employee, he took their growth techniques and turned them into a software company: beehiiv. Tyler Denk was the second-ever employee at Morning Brew. After growing it to the reported biggest exit of any newsletter business, he started building beehiiv . Now, they’re doing $15 million in ARR as a growing underdog. More in...
Nov 01, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast Vlada Lotkina noticed something wrong at her daughter’s school. So she built the solution and sold it for 8-figures. It’s called ClassTag, and it’s a platform where teachers, parents and school administrators can communicate and send out announcements. No flyers, no ridiculously long emails… My favorite part is that she’s a Mixergy listener herself. She literally called a previous guest of mine and got him to invest before her business took off. Vlada Lotkina is the co-founder and CEO of ClassTa...
Sep 20, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast Adam Robinson struggled to compete with MailChimp. So he built software that’s too dangerous for them to build. Businesses that use Retention.com can instantly grab email addresses from anonymous website visitors — even if they never fill out a form. To promote his software he made himself into one of the few interesting follows on LinkedIn by picking fights, bringing drama and adding production values. Adam Robinson is the founder and CEO of Retention.com , which identifies email ad...
Sep 13, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast Brent Underwood had a business idea: buy an abandoned town and turn it into a tourist destination. It didn’t work. Mostly because he tried running it remotely. Then he moved in. He started looking around, diving into old mines, and finding old treasures. He shot video of what he saw and of his renovations. That got hugely popular on social media, helped him raise money and allowed him to fund his project. It’s all in his book, Ghost Town Living, and in this interview. Brent Un...
Apr 12, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast Hiring has been a huge issue for me. And in a past interview with Cameron Herold, I brought it up because he’s the founder of the COO Alliance, the world’s leading network for the second in command. I don’t get embarrassed by a lot of stuff. If you heard my interviews, you hear me get pretty frank about my flaws, my mistakes. But this issue is something I was embarrassed about. I think if I don’t hire somebody to be the second in command at Mixergy, I am probably going to...
Feb 14, 2018•Transcript available on Metacast A topic we don’t talk about on Mixergy is how to actually manage a company. I remember when I was in NYU as an undergrad I loved all my business classes, but management just didn’t feel like me. I always thought of the guys in Dilbert but entrepreneurs were the ones who were creating, the ones who were doing. Mixergy’s grown and I’ve been running it, but I have to be honest, I’m not doing a great job of running it. So earlier in the year, the Mixergy team said, R...
Nov 22, 2017•Transcript available on Metacast About a year ago I realized that no matter how much effort we’ve put into my email list, I could never double the response rate. We kept growing it, but people were not using email much. So I started looking around for solutions and I started looking at bots. Bots are basically software that communicates with humans via a chat app. I came across one company that looked too good to be true. It’s called ManyChat. And I said, “I’ve got to find out who the founder is.” ...
May 26, 2017•Transcript available on Metacast I’ll be honest with you. I felt guilt about an interview that I did years ago with today’s guest. This was back in, let me see here, 2013. I interviewed Sam Ovens about how he built up this consulting business and was teaching people how to do consulting. I thought maybe I got taken for a ride. It was too good to be true. Then I started hearing people who were in his program talk about how big the program is. Then I started hearing more and more people say they were in the program. I...
Mar 03, 2017•Transcript available on Metacast How does a former lawyer build a multi-million dollar company that teaches social skills. Jordan Harbinger is the co-founder of The Art of Charm, a company that teaches confidence and emotional intelligence. Jordan Harbinger is the co-founder of The Art of Charm, a company that teaches confidence and emotional intelligence, and the host of The Jordan Harbinger Show , which interviews top performers, from legendary musicians to intelligence operatives. Sponsored by Lead Pages – Lead ...
Aug 13, 2014•Transcript available on Metacast On August 4, 2008, I posted a video up on Mixergy where I looked up into the web cam on my computer and I said “I failed.” And I said that I was going to shut down my invitation business and start doing interviews with entrepreneurs and people in general who I admire so I can learn from them and take back what I’ve learned from them to build a more successful company in the future. And I said that along the way you’d get to watch and learn as I learned directly from my he...
Apr 09, 2014•Transcript available on Metacast A few weeks ago, Andrew was interviewed about his inner doubt by Samantha Alford of WomeninBusinesspodcast.com. I (Arie Saint) thought it was too good not to share with our audience, so I’m publishing it on Mixergy. Check it out and let’s talk about it in the comments. Samantha Alford, the founder of the Women in Business Podcast . Sponsored by Walker Corporate Law – Scott Edward Walker is the lawyer entrepreneurs turn to when they want to raise money or sell their compa...
Mar 10, 2014•Transcript available on Metacast Update: based on the comments we’re getting, Jermaine sent this PDF about Automation. How does a high school senior from the inner city turn $70 into a multimillion dollar instruction web site? Jermaine Griggs is the founder of HearAndPlay.com, which trains musicians to play by ear, trains them to play by ear with online music lessons and piano video tutorials. Jermaine Griggs is the founder of HearAndPlay.com , which trains musicians to play by ear, trains them to play by ear with online ...
Apr 23, 2012•Transcript available on Metacast How does a wristband help a founder build a $169 million company? Ryan Allis is the founder of iContact, a provider of email marketing tools for small businesses. And a company that was recently sold for $169 million to Vocus. Here’s a quote from the last time I interviewed him, “we incorporated in July ’03, lived in the office, slept on futons, cooked on a George Foreman grill, did whatever we had to do to keep expenses low, while we built up revenue and customers, and improved the ...
Apr 09, 2012•Transcript available on Metacast Many founders I interviewed on Mixergy told me about how their companies virtually disappeared after they sold them. But 4 years after selling Reddit to Conde Nast, Steve Huffman is so proud of how much its grown that he’d be happy to still own it. I asked him to teach me how he grew his community, why some Y Combinator-backed founders, like him, succeed while others don’t get any traction and why he never resented his co-founder for getting so much attention. I also asked Steve abou...
Oct 20, 2010•Transcript available on Metacast The founders of Airbnb are guys who couldn’t make rent a few years ago, but they kept turning desperation into creative solutions. In October 2007, eager to make extra money, they noticed that local hotels were booked up because of a conference. So they pumped up some inflatable mattresses and listed their place online as an “air bed and breakfast.” It was quirky and it worked. That little act of creativity became Airbnb, the (profitable) site that allows anyone to list their e...
Jan 28, 2010•Transcript available on Metacast You listen to my programs because I don’t do the cute “let’s get to know the author” interviews that others are known for. I hunt down information that you can use because I’m passionate about helping you build a business that your great-great-grandkids would admire you for. That’s why I kept digging in this interview. I want you (and me too, frankly) to be able to produce the kind of hits that Seth Godin keeps cranking out, seemingly without breaking a sweat....
Jan 25, 2010•Transcript available on Metacast 
