Learn From Proven Entrepreneurs

Threadless sells tshirts, but if you call it a “tshirt company,” you’re missing the point. The important part of the business is that it’s all community-driven. Community members submit design ideas. Community members vote on those designs. And, after Threadless makes the highest-rated designs into T-shirts, community members buy them.

I invited Jake Nickell, the company’s founder, to talk about how he built this community and to tell me about his new book, which is also called “Threadless.”

This is the story of an artist who’s so passionate about fonts that, if you look over his shoulder as you watch this interview, you’ll see shelves full of books that he collected to study their fonts.

I invited Stuart Sandler to talk about how he turned that passion into a business.

Gustavo Caetano didn’t have it as easy as his American counterparts. Maybe that’s why he did so well.

This is the story of how he made Samba into a leading South American platform for games and videos by hustling to get customers to take his calls, finding revenue in a business where others didn’t think it existed and capitalizing on foreign companies’ underestimation of his part of the world.

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.

I’ve been invited to receive an award and give a small talk at econ2010 in Southern California.

Come join me. Here’s a free ticket.

I’d like to meet you in person and talk about what you’re working on.

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.