Learn From Proven Entrepreneurs

Brian Gardner pioneered the business of selling themes for Wordpress. He created the Revolution Theme which showed publishers how Wordpress can go beyond the blog format and be used to create beautiful magazine-like sites. And by charging for his work, he showed the industry that there was a business in creating Wordpress themes. It wasn’t just a hobby.

This is the story of how he did it, a detailed biography of Brian Gardner’s business.

Rob Rawson says don’t do what he did.

Rob earned hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for several years using AdWords, affiliate programs, and SEO strategies. In this interview, you’ll hear him explain how he did it — and why he says you shouldn’t copy his approach. You’ll also hear about the outsourcing business he launched, how he travels the world while working remotely, and about Time Doctor, his upcoming time management software.

Sir Ken Robinson said that we’ve been educated to become good workers, not creative thinkers. I get the first part of that statement. I don’t want to be a cog in some corporate machine and I know you don’t either.

But since I have an audience of businesspeople — not painters — the big question I started this interview with is “Why should we care about creativity?” And…

SlideDeck is a bootstrapped and profitable business that’s helping web designers make their content beautiful and user-friendly so they can increase conversions.

Chuck Longanecker, SlideDeck’s founder, talked very candidly in this interview about why a few of his past products failed, and he explained how he ensured this one would be a hit before he even launched it. Before investing your time building a new product or feature, listen to how Chuck built SlideDeck.

As a student, Sean Glass had an idea for letting students use their college IDs for purchases anywhere – not just on campus.

After ten years of hard work, he and his co-founders had an overnight success. Higher One, the company they built, went public this past summer, and as I write this, its market cap reached a billion dollars. This is the story of how they convinced schools and investors to buy into their vision and give them a chance to…

Before he helped incubate new startups at Excelerate, Troy Henikoff was the founder of SurePayroll, a company that disrupted the payroll business by brining it online.

This is the story of how that company struggled to make it, and why it eventually went on to become the largest Internet-only payroll provider.

Rafael Corrales coined the term “Party Round,” to describe the way he raised money for his company from multiple venture capital firms and multiple angels. I invited him to Mixergy to teach how he did it.

Rafael is the co-founder of LearnBoost, a free online gradebook and classroom management tool for teachers.

When Mike Moon and Quoc Bui heard how profitable iPhone fart apps were, they decided to launch their own app business. Because they were inspired by the ideas in The Four Hour Work Week, they also decides to completely outsource their business. Their apps would be developed, designed and even promoted by people they found on outsourcing sites.

As a result, their first app cost them only $2,000 to launch, but it brought about $100,000 in revenue. Listen to this program to hear how they built that app, and over a dozen others.

In a private conversation with Jon Crawford, he told me how he bootstrapped his company by selling over $1 million in tshirt printing services. That’s when I stopped the conversation and asked him to come to Mixergy to talk about how he did it.

Jon’s company is Storenvy, which lets anyone create a free online store. When he noticed that many of the independent store owners who use Storenvy were selling tshirts, he decided to sell them tshirt printing services. This is the story of the clever way he funded his company.

I invited Jude Gomila to Mixergy to talk about the viral techniques his company used to reach 10 million monthly users. Jude is the co-founder of HeyZap, which monetizes and distributes social, casual and massively-multiplayer online games.

Ken Johnson launched Manpacks as a way for men who hate to shop to get underwear by subscription.

Good idea, but his site just sat there, unused and unnoticed. Then someone submitted it to Hacker News, the social news site for entrepreneurs, and suddenly “it got us tons of hits on the site,” Ken says. The Hacker News audience wasn’t a sales windfall for Manpacks, but it gave the site enough traffic to test different marketing ideas and see what increased conversions and it led to coverage in other media…

You’ll hear us mention in this program a lot of social networks that flopped. So why did LinkedIn take off when others couldn’t?

It all started with a series of walks that Konstantin Guericke took with his future LinkedIn co-founder, Reid Hoffman. In those walks, they…