Learn From Proven Entrepreneurs

A past Mixergy interviewee told me that customers were confused every time he said his company’s name. So he went to Brandstack and bought a brand package that included a new name, with logo and domain name.

A few viewers who saw that interview told me that Brandstack was a profitable company and asked me interview the founder about how he did it. That’s why I invited Wes Wilson to do this interview. Listen to the full program to hear…

I anticipated your skepticism. That’s why the question in the headline is first thing I asked brand strategist Sasha Strauss before he spent the better part of an hour teaching you the basics of finding your message and building your brand. And, of course, Sam Walton wasn’t using social media to build his brand, but [...]

You’ll hear Michael Fitzpatrick of ConnectSolutions explain why he doesn’t believe all those warm and fuzzy blog posts about how entrepreneurs can lead balanced lives. For three years, he and his co-founder were on non-stop, high alert. If you called at 3am, they knew about it.

Maybe Michael had a little more pressure to succeed than most. He…

ShowClix is Lynsie Camuso’s first startup, and she had to change the company’s direction along the way, but in the 3.5 years since she launched the site it sold over 400,000 tickets and generated over $7 million in sales.

This is the story of how she did it.

I kept spotting something as I researched this interview with GotCast’s CEO, Alec Shankman. The site’s users kept linking to their GotCast profile pages, asking everyone to “vote for me.” GotCast took American’s hunger to be discovered and turned it into a viral machine. The more votes its members get, the more likely they are [...]

I get a lot of requests for interviews with companies outside the US. Reshma Sohoni, Seedcamp’s CEO, has helped launch 22 of them. I invited her to teach what she learned from the hits and misses The FULL program About Reshma Sohoni Reshma Sohoni runs Seedcamp on a day-to-day basis as its CEO. She joined [...]

I was wrong. I assumed the founders of Eve.com lost everything. Not only did co-founder Mariam Naficy tell me that she didn’t lose it all, she jokingly offered to show me a copy of the check she got for her part of the business. (Maybe it wasn’t a joke. Let me know what you think after you listen.)

Today Miriam is running Minted.com, which creates beautifully designed stationary and invitations that are crowds-sourced.

Back when Starbucks was just a startup, Steven Dietz’s firm invested in it and helped it grow. It also backed Costco, PetSmart, Office Depot, Zany Brainy, Egghead, a number of other well-known brands. In this interview you’ll hear how he co-founded his firm, GRP Partners, and some of the stories behind hit investments like DealerTrack [...]

After working for two years as a sewer cleaner, Murray Smith says he started noticing that the owners of the company he worked for weren’t academically smarter than he was. If they managed to build a multi-million dollar business, maybe he could too.

That realization helped him go on to …

Jahanzeb Sherwani just wanted an easy way to control his computer from the couch using his iPhone. What he launched was pretty basic, but it touched a nerve. Turns out there were lots of other people who wanted to do the same. Actually, they didn’t just want to control their computers, they wanted to see their computers from their iPhones. And they had other ideas too.

So J, as he’s often called, started…

There’s nothing technically revolutionary about the technology that Jen Boulden used to launch Ideal Bite, but what she did with it is impressive. She used Constant Contact to send out an email newsletter that a “designer slash intern” created.

Listen to the full interview to hear: How she grew that mailing list. How she got high rates for her ads. And why she sold Ideal Bite to Disney for $20 million.

charity: water, the non-profit founded by Scott Harrison, doesn’t just give you facts like, “Unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation cause 80% of diseases and kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war.”

It has a blog with moving photos, like one of children in the developing world waiting for cows to finish drinking dirty water so they could have some too. Then, when you care, charity: water gives you…