Learn From Proven Entrepreneurs

Getting average internet users to give up their email addresses is easy. You just offer a free ring tone or Brintney Spears computer wallpaper and they hand over their addresses.

With tech founders, on the other hand, you have to earn every ounce of trust and work hard for every single email. Which is why I think it’s so impressive that StartupDigest, an upstart that’s been around for about a year, managed to grow its email list to 100,000 subscriptions.

Every Tuesday I’m introducing a new product on Mixergy.

I created this one to solve a GIANT problem.

Noah Kagan is teaching a course on how to find, recruit and motivate interns.

While other entrepreneurs focus on vanity metrics like number of Twitter followers or blog hits, Dane Maxwell says there are only two metrics that matter to him: leads and profits.

In this interview you’ll learn the process he uses to go from idea, to leads, to product, to profits. You may have noticed in the previous sentence that getting leads comes before building the actual product for Dane. That’s how he ensures success with minimal risk.

Have you ever had an outside force change completely and nearly wipe your business out? How do you regain your balance in a situation like that? How do you even sleep at night?

To find out, I invited Hussein Fazal, co-founder of AdParlor, an ad network built on the Facebook platform. Remember the time Facebook decided it…

TechCrunch leads much of the conversation in the tech/startup world, so aren’t you curious about how it operates behind the scenes?

When my friend Alexia Tsotsis got a job at TechCrunch a few months ago, I gave her some time to settle into the position and then I started peppering her with requests to do a Mixergy interview.

What you’ll hear in this interview is how she…

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.

I said that every Tuesday I’d be introducing a new product on Mixergy.

This is the first one.

Read on to see why I’m intentionally limiting attendance.

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.

I sent an email about this event to the Mixergy mailing list to gauge interest, and instantly over 200 tickets were snapped up.

I’m sorry to post this before I can reveal the details, but I’m worried that if I don’t post a link quickly, it’ll sell out completely and you won’t get a chance to lock in your ticket.

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.