Learn From Proven Entrepreneurs

How do you bootstrap a profitable outsourcing company?

Joining me in this interview is Abhishek Rungta, founder of Indus Net Technologies, an Indian company that started out with just him doing door-to-door sales and has grown to about 450 engineers and designers. Grab this interview and you’ll hear how mastering online sales helped him build up his company.

To help you learn from his experience, Sebastian Replanski did a very open interview about why his TechStars-backed company, Search-to-Phone, failed.

One of the reasons I started Mixergy is that books on business success often cheerlead for the winners, but neglect to study failed companies. As a result, they give you only half of an understanding.

This interview didn’t go as I expected.

I thought Mr. Confidence, Timothy Sykes, was going to return to Mixergy to reveal his blog’s 2010 revenue (he did, $1.3 million) and crow about the successful launch of his two new businesses, Investimonials & Profit.ly. But instead of talking up his successes, he decided to have a public airing of all the mistakes he made last year while trying to grow beyond blogging.

Laura Roeder runs a training company which teaches small businesses how to create fame using social media and online marketing. Last year, she says her business generated about $300,000 in revenue.

I invited her to Mixergy to teach how she built her business. We covered everything from how she created the first product that she sold, to how she got her audience, to what ideas she needed to communicate to convert that audience into paying customers. We also detailed the specific software you can use to create a similar business.

Paul Farnell is proud that he launched Litmus with a used computer and a few hundred bucks, instead of raising money for his company from investors.

But starting a business with little money meant he needed a lot of hustle, and you’ll hear him talk very openly about the feats he pulled off. I was going to add a few examples to this intro to give you a sense of how he did it, but I think you’ll miss the value if I take them out of context. Instead, I’ll tell you that if you trust me at all to steer you towards ideas you need to hear, you should grab this interview ASAP.

What do you do when giants in your industry make your original business idea obsolete?

In 2004, Alex Bard and his co-founders launched Goowy a web-based desktop replacement that gave users a more vibrant email interface than existed at the time. Then Google launched Gmail, which…

Brian Kaldenberg is a Mixergy viewer who grew ProofreadingPal to a over $8,000 in monthly within a few months by using clever marketing techniques that are easy to implement.

I hear from many Mixergy fans who hate when I talk about “big ideas,” instead of focusing on usable tactics. If that’s you, listen to this interview with a notepad, because Brian gets very specific.

This is the story of how a frustration led to a bootstrapped company that does over a million in annual revenue.

In 2005, Danny Wen and his friend Shawn Liu ran a consulting company that had trouble tracking time and invoicing clients. They figured other businesses had the same issue, so they set out to build a web-based solution. Four months later, they launched Harvest. Within a year, it was so successful that they were able to transition away from consulting work to focus completely on products.

My goal for this interview is to help you learn how to recruit all kinds of partnerships for your business by learning how Twilio teamed up with a massive number of developers.

When I heard that Twilio recruited 20,000 partners I invited the company’s founder, Jeff Lawson, to teach us how he did it. Twilio provides a web-service API for businesses to build killer apps that interact with phones.

Even though he can’t program and had zero previous experience in the jewelry business, Matt Lauzon, Gemvara’s founder, is disrupting the industry and generating millions in sales.

Part of the reason for his success is that he had a great idea: let people custom jewelry online. Not only does that model give customers exactly the design they want, it also has some search engine optimization and marketing advantages — as you’ll hear in the interview.

I read an article about how Matthew Inman’s web comic, The Oatmeal, generated sales of $70,000 in a single day last year — Black Friday — and $1,000 on a typical day.

So I invited him to Mixergy to hear the details of how he turned his passion into a business, and how that business enables him pursue his passion.

Most entrepreneurs who launch communities can hardly get anyone to join them.

When Erik Wachtmeister launched aSmallWorld, the opposite happened. More people wanted to join than he was willing to let in. I invited him to teach how he built such a sought-after community, and how…