“It’s the boring stuff that makes money. Sometimes the sexy, interesting things are really great ideas, fun to use, but aren’t money makers. They aren’t durable businesses.”His first startup was a cool idea: Uber for Valet Parking. Investors loved it. But the unit economics didn't work out. So he had to pivot. He ended up selling it, but decided to do things differently the second time around.With Argyle, he didn't start with a cool idea. He replaced a product customers already paid for. His ...

His travel startup crashed 90% overnight. Here’s how he used AI to grow past $2M/year—to $2M a month:For a while, Andrew was crushing it. Accelerator -> $750K pre-seed -> $2M ARR -> $2.5M seed round. Then COVID hit. He was selling to events like CES, SXSW, etc. Revenue dropped from $160K/month to under $10K... overnight. Investors from his seed round refuse to wire funds. After nearly going bankrupt, he finds a way to pivot. A year later, his business takes off.2020 -...

Poojan is a multi-time successful founder. He raised $60M for his first startup and exited. He just raised a $75M Series D at his current startup. But it wasn't always easy.- In his first startup, he had to hover beside conference booths for hours to land his first customer.- He gave his product away for free to the first several customers.- It took him 6 years to cross $10M in ARRWhy you should listen:- Learn exactly how a successful repeat founder thinks about team structure in the early da...

Arvind founded 2 billion-dollar startups—by doing everything lean startup tells you not to do. - He didn’t focus on launching an MVP. - He ignored early market feedback. - He didn’t charge beta users anything— for 2 years. And it worked. He went from $0 to $3M in revenue the year he launched publicly. He tripled to about $9M the year after. And tripled every year since. Two months ago, Glean raised $200M at a $2B valuation. Why you should listen:- Learn exactly how outlier founder Arvin...

Snapchat got 0 downloads the day it launched. 5 months in, it had only 127 users. Today Snapchat is an $18B company with 400 million daily active users. Evan Spiegel noticed what even Zuck missed: daily communication is meant to be ephemeral, not recorded for all time.In this episode, we dive deep into how Snapchat went from idea to product-market fit. Our guest is Jeremy Liew, a Partner at Lightspeed and the first investor in Snapchat. He led Lightspeed's seed round in 2012 at a $5M val...

If you feel like the ‘unicorn or bust’ playbook isn’t for you, then this episode definitely will be. Rand Fishkin is a multi-time founder and published author of Lost and Founder. He founded Moz, raised $29M in VC, grew to $50M in revenue and exited for $70M.  But he ultimately realized that the VC-backed life wasn’t for him.  So he went on to start SparkToro, a profitable 3-person startup that does $2M in revenue and takes only 30 hours a week of work. For those of us in the VC-backed...

While Voice AI is all the rage now, it wasn't a hot sector in 2017. After Dylan graduated from YC, VCs rejected him. He couldn't raise a round. They all assumed Google would do it. So he raised what he could from angels and made it work for the next 3 years. He's now built the world's most accurate Speech AI model. He's grown to 5,000 customers and raised $115M in venture capital. Last quarter, he raised a $50M Series C from Accel.  Just this week,  Assembly launched Universal-1, their most...

Andrew is the founder/CEO of Enable. And he is riding a rocket ship: 2020: $17M Series A 2021: $45M Series B 2022: $94M Series C  A few months ago he raised $120M at a $1B valuation.  But it took him five years from the time he started Enable in 2015 until he was able to raise his first round in 2020.  Andrew was running a profitable development shop as he built the first version of Enable. He often had to chase down customers so he could make the next payroll. He had to balance serving...

Alex started Apt2B in 2010. He sold couches online before IKEA did. It took him over 3 years to make as much money as he used to as a furniture salesperson. But it paid off. After growing the business to $6M in revenue, he sold the company. Post-acquisition he grew the company to $40M in sales. In this episode, we dive deep into what Alex did to get started, how he closed his first few customers and what he did to grow to $1M in revenue. From landing a Super Bowl ad to selling couches at...

Every founder wants to build the next $1B+ company. So it’s normal to get inspired by what companies like Apple, Shopify and Microsoft do. But it’s also a huge mistake.  In this episode, we look at what Shopfiy, Fullscript and Spellbook did to find product-market fit. In many ways, it’s the opposite of what they do now, as big succesful companies.  Big companies are operating in a post-product-market fit world. Pre-product-market fit startups are in a different world entirely.  The same...

Spellbook is ChatGPT for lawyers. They've raised $30M in the last 6 months. They now have over 2,000 law firms as customers. But it wasn't a straight line-- it took Scott 6 years to get here. For the first 5 years, Scott worked on a legal tech platform called Rally. During that time,  Scott along with his co-founders and their small team ran hundreds of experiments, pushed dozens of landing pages and built a process to test feature after feature. In this episode, Scott goes through his...

Kyle Braatz is the founder of Fullscript, a $900M revenue company that started by helping health practitioners recommend supplements to their patients. It's like the Shopify for doctors, nurses and nutritionists Even though he captured 50% of the Canadian market in one year, early-stage VCs didn't see the opportunity. So he bootstrapped his way to success. He cracked open the US market and quickly scaled from $0 in 2012 to $25M in revenue by 2016. Today, Fullscript has grown to a profitable...

Aydin Senkut is the Founder and Managing Partner at Felicis. He invested in Shopify's Series A in 2010 at a $25M valuation. He joins us to tell the story of how Shopify found product market fit. Shopify is now a $100B company. But as Founder & CEO Tobi Lutke said, in the early days, his goal was "to build a 20-person company". Shopify is not a story of explosive, 10x growth and massive funding rounds. Shopify is a story of consistent growth. Of doubling year after year, from 0 to over...

If you've been struggling to raise—you're not alone. Seed funding has been falling every quarter for the last 2 years. Rounds are smaller and take longer to raise. So we decided to record an episode to help you. Here are all the mistakes, tips and tricks we’ve seen first-hand that actually work.  We touch on things like What the perfect raise looks likeWhy Post-Money SAFEs are TERRIBLE for foundersThe greatest power move that any founder can use when fundraising If you’re raising or planning...

The Super Bowl is the best place to get in front of customers—if you have $10M to spend. Which means for virtually all startups, it’s 100% useless. So I decided to look into some of the best campaigns early-stage startups used to drive millions of leads. Shopify used a $100K Build A Business Competition in 2010  when it was a bootstrapped business. The campaign drove 1350 new businesses and was paid back in under a...

This isn’t a unicorn fairytale. It’s a story about what it really takes to build a company and get to an exit. Nazim takes us through how he nearly went bankrupt, took years to turn things around, and ultimately sold his business for $30M all cash. 

4K likes, 365 re-shares and over 1M views, without any marketing spend.  For an ad promoting your product, that sounds too good to be true-- and yet that's exactly what Yoav did.  He leveraged it to get tons of press, more customers than he could manage, and raise a $15M Series A in under a year after incorporating. Here's the story of how Yoav got started with Walnut and how he ultimately found product-market fit. Yoav goes deep on tactics you can use to drive inbound traffic, generate...

$1B startups get all the hype. But for 99% of founders, it’s the wrong goal. You’re better off building a sustainable business with consistent growth.  Raising big rounds won’t make your company big and staying lean won’t make your company small.  That's just VC Myth 1.  Raising round after round does not equal success. That's just VC Myth 2. Just because you raise more money, doesn’t mean you make more money. That's just VC Myth 3.

Over 10 years of hard work, Ilya has helped over 2000 individuals change their lives. In the meantime, he built a profitable, cash-flowing business with no outside funding. While the billion-dollar outcomes get all the hype, this is what success looks like for most founders.  In this episode, we dive into how Ilya turned a resume-editing business into a multi-million dollar recruitment platform, how he landed his first customers, and exactly when he knew he had product-market fit. 

 We released The Five Steps to Product Market Fit a few weeks ago and received lots of questions on how to apply the steps. In this episode, Rob and I share more colour and more stories on each step to help you understand how to apply them, and also, when these steps might need to be broken.

Re-releasing the BEST episode of all of season 1. 

I know most founders today are planning for the new year, so sharing the top 3 mistakes I've seen early-stage founders make when forecasting. If you're forecasting for 2024, you don't want to miss this.

Here are the key lessons from the past 60 episodes that we've released to date.  Each of the 5 steps to Product Market Fit is based on actual case studies with real examples you can use. It's a recap of everything I've learned over the last two years- you don't want to miss it.

As they say, "Experience is the teacher of all things"... and my last startup was a ruthless teacher. Today, my co-founder Lee Silverstone and ex-CEO Rob Woodbridge join me to go through some of the insane stories from Gymtrack,  our last startup. From strapping a whiteboard to the roof of Lee's Civic, to going to conferences with a 3D printed "smart" pin, to getting PR at the worst possible time, the stories are funny, engaging, and clear examples of what NOT to do.