Run With It: Recent Episodes
Chris and Eathan
Need a business idea? Run With It shares unused business ideas from successful entrepreneurs, including the exact steps they would take to launch them. If you're looking for a ready-made business idea, proven founders are sharing them every week on Run With It.
For the next few weeks, you won't see new episodes because we're taking a short break. We'll be back October 1st. In the meantime, listen back to our catalog of 100 past episodes.
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In this episode Chris and Eathan get personal about what's going on in their family lives, their business lives, and their podcast lives.
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*Nuggets:*
- Currently there is more aluminum stored in landfills than in the mineral where aluminum is sourced in nature.
- Not all landfills are created equal. Landfills near industrial areas contain more metals like steel, aluminum, and iron.
- Jevons Paradox could be leveraged: The paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand.
*Action Steps:*
- Find ways to intercept potentially valuable materials before they end up in the landfill.
- "Bank" salvaged material for future use
- Reach out to explore partnerships with existing companies like Terracycle
*Links:*
- https://www.algiknit.com/
- https://www.terracycle.com/en-US/
Aaron Nesser is the founder of AlgiKnit, which creates eco-conscious, renewable yarns for the circular economy.
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Action Steps:
- Investigate current revenue split for concert venues
- Search for the managers/decision-makers of concerts at large venues
- Contact them via a cold call, email, or LinkedIn message
- Offer to run a trial event which you can help them presell a live stream of their upcoming concert
- If enough fans buy in, then produce the first event (keep a production budget of under $10K)
- Ask the venue to keep your equipment installed and sign them on as a partner
- Find more partners and offer a subscription service to fans
- You could offer a number of credits per month that could be used for various concerts
Janne Tamminen is the co-founder of Howl Live, a cutting edge live concert streaming platform built for the music industry.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- Many investors who buy a business trip up over simple operational details (e.g. forgetting to renew a domain name). Michael has seen this happen time and again.
*Action Steps:*
- Generate your opportunity to break into the space:
- Start a podcast
- Host an event
- Connect with recruiters who can source talented business managers
- Buy an existing business with the audience you want to serve
- If you’ve connected with a recruiter you can understand their fee structure, add a profit margin and use this information to sell this service to your first Investor clients
- You can begin charging a commission as soon as your make your first connection, probably 5-10%, or you can just get a testimonial and case study from the deal
- Once your more established in the space your can start to build out your platform for connecting Business Investors and Talented Operators
- You might reduce your commission slightly once the business requires less manpower and runs more on automation
- One way to build your client base is to buy an existing business that has a similar audience.
*Links:*
- https://www.domainmagnate.com/
- https://domainmagnatecapital.com/
- The Domain Magnate Show
- The White Coat Investor
Michael Bereslavsky is the Founder and CEO of Domain Magnate, a micro private equity firm that acquires and operates online businesses.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- The next wave in creative domains is often defined by those who master the tech that disrupt what’s already being done
*Action Steps:*
- Start by offering AI services that assist writers in tweaking their content (e.g. “overcome writer’s block!”)
- Then offer a contract to some of the best writers for a publishing contract
- Optimize not only the writing but also the marketing using AI resources
- Eventually transition to offering some content that is entirely AI generated.
*Links:*
- www.kennygould.com
- https://www.instagram.com/hopcultureken
- The Brewing Cloud: A Book of Short Stories
- https://www.hopculture.com/
- https://openai.com/
- Opinion | Did a Human or a Computer Write This?
- https://booksby.ai/
- https://nextglass.co/
Kenny Gould is currently the Creative Director at Next Glass the company that bought his beer-loving culture brand, Hop Culture. He’s currently working on the Untappd Beer Festival at the Padres stadium in San Diego, which will be happening in October 2021.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- If you are entering an industry with long sales cycles, hiring a salesperson with experience and relationships in the industry can move you forward a lot quicker.
- You can leverage already approved cloud service agreements to short circuit the enterprise sales process
*Action Steps:*
- You have a few avenues to pursue and each has its own first steps;
- Start creating your own pre-recorded training content and posting to YouTube
- Become a consultant (similar to what Zoom already offers)
- Start engaging with larger companies and be willing to endure a longer sales cycle (5-12 months)
- Regardless of your starting point, you’ll probably want to ultimately sell services to larger companies and work towards understanding and integrating more deeply with their needs.
- Once you are integrating with large companies, focus on beating their existing content. It will need to be less boring than competitors but also make sure that it’s boring enough to fit within company standards.
*Links:*
- TrackStar.ai – Predictive Credit Technology
- A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload
- The State of Video Conferencing in 2020 [50 Statistics]
- Zoom Online Event Consulting Services
- Requests for Startups
Clint Lotz is the founder of TrackStar.ai which Provides Machine Learning Technology to Lenders that Uncovers Future Borrowing Patterns Within Their Existing Data leading them to untapped revenue opportunities.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- The total addressable market for this idea is over 16 million individuals in the U.S. alone.
*Action Steps:*
- Partner with member of the community
- Research applicable grants
*Links:*
- https://www.packupgo.com/
- https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/disabilityandhealth/infographic-disability-impacts-all.html
- https://skift.com/2017/11/16/airbnb-buys-accessible-travel-business-accomable-in-its-latest-acquihire/
- https://www.freedomshowers.com/blog/small-business-funding-for-ada-accessibility-compliance/
Lillian Rafson is the founder of Pack Up + Go, a surprise travel agency.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- Parenting is a secure market! Over 3.5 million births in the US and 140 million worldwide will continue each year.
*Action Steps:*
- This is a great business idea for an aspiring entrepreneur without an idea but that’s nervous about supporting a growing family.
- Start with a cohort of expectant parents and partner with a handful of high-profile child development, mindfulness and parenting specialists.
- Aim for a subscription service that provides one-step-ahead advice on mindfulness and activities to make parenting easier, less stressful and more fun.
- Consider a custom consulting add-on that matches parents with 1-on-1 professional consults on-demand.
*Links:*
- https://www.nami.ml
- The Wonder Weeks - app that tells you the "stormy" periods
- Baby Care Products Market to Touch US$ 109.13Bn by 2026
Dan Burcaw is currently Co-Founder & CEO of Nami ML, a service that helps you launch, scale, and optimize your mobile app subscription business. He's been an entrepreneur at the forefront o tech since high school. But today he's bringing us an idea about.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- Dave's Cardinal Rule: Always Be Adapting (ABA)
*Action Steps:*
- Look at user feedback from poorly reviewed competitors in the app store
- Spend only a few hundred to a few thousand dollars developing a Chrome extension
- Collect user feedback
- Expand to other channels like LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter
*Links:*
- Kindlepreneur: Book Marketing for Self-Publishing Authors
- LinkedIn Loses Appeal Against Data Scraping Startup
- Colin Powell's 13 Rules of Leadership
- Publisher Rocket: Sell More Books and eBooks on Amazon
Dave Chesson is the founder of Kindlepreneur, which helps authors reach new levels with their book marketing. He created Kindlepreneur as a free resource with the sole goal of giving writers everything they need to take action, and see results.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- When you build a business realize that your community of clients may be more valuable than the money they give you. You can always build additional products and services that they need. But without an audience, you have no business.
- It’s okay to provide different amounts of compensation to co-founders based on their needs at a given time, but it’s also useful to start with an even share of the company.
- Communications add-ons for LinkedIn is still an underserved niche.
*Action Steps:*
- Choose to focus on a very simple product first: LinkedIn Inbox integration with Gmail.
- Create a landing page and collect emails of interested folks.
- Connect with technical co-founder(s) (or sales and marketing co-founders if you are technical)
- Start building with a small equal share investment from your co-founders
- Realize you are building an audience as you gain users. Focus more on the relationships and building it than monetization and your initial idea.
- Add features and build relationships with team members at LinkedIn to make sure you are not stepping on their strategy and to seed the prospect of acquisition by LinkedIn at some point.
- Grow your users and grow your features through feedback and rapid iteration.
*Links:*
- lemlist: Your Go-To Cold Email Software & Outreach Automation Tool
- Contact Center Software Market Size Report, 2021-2028
- Front - Customer Communication Platform | Team Email
- TechCrunch Twilio confirms it is buying Segment for $3.2B in an all-stock deal
- Paul Graham on Earnestness
- Territory Foods
- CookUnity: A Chef Collective
Guillaume is the Co-Founder and CEO of lemlist, a personalized cold email sequencing software. In 3 years, lemlist went from 0 to $8 million ARR and 10k+ customers worldwide, without any funding. His mission is to help 1,000,000 entrepreneurs to build a profitable business by 2025.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- You can often dominate a local business niche by implementing current marketing and technology (e.g. residential cleaning)
- People often get excited about new tech (drones, 3D printing, etc…) but their enthusiasm wavers before the breakthrough tech makes a sizable impact on the real world. There’s plenty of opportunity implementing tech from five years ago.
*Action Steps:*
- Contact Lucid Drones and get pricing for leasing one of their cleaning drones
- Investigate permitting in your local city
- Pre-sell window cleanings to several property managers (they often sign yearly contracts)
- Your selling point is that your clients will never have to talk to you again after signing up. You take window cleaning off their plate so they can focus on other things.
*Links:*
- MaidThis
- MaidThis Franchise
- Aurum property management is implementing drone window cleaning
- Tim Byrne Almost Live Podcast
- Don't Forget, Window Washing Is a Lot Safer Than Driving a Taxi
- Cleandrone
- How will drone window cleaning change your business? | INTERCLEAN
- Lucid Drone Tech – We build drones
- Window washing drone takes flight
Neel Parekh founded MaidThis, which helps short-term rental owners and homeowners meet their cleaning needs quickly, easily and affordably. He also founded MaidThis Franchise, which helps remote owners achieve financial independence via MaidThis.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- Plant a lot of seeds in the early stages of your business and see what grows. You may be surprised by the results.
*Action Steps:*
- Sell the vision to large companies (think IBM, Google, Amazon) in order to get a sponsorship
- Ask school teachers in your area to send you students that that are selling things to their classmates
- Recruit entrepreneurs to mentor students, both for pay and as volunteers to test which works best.
- Setup opportunities for students to start businesses and learn key lessons, like the nuances of how to fail toward success and how to build a support network of other entrepreneurs.
Links:
- Versus Game
- VCs Are Pouring Money Into the Wrong Education Startups
- The Thiel Fellowship
- Smart Face Masks - Way Beyond Air Quality
- Best Countries for Education | US News Best Countries
John Viti is the CEO of VersusGame, a pop-culture gaming app that lets users bet on trending topics. They've granted over 16 million in cash prizes to over 7 million players. VersusGame is a global entertainment pop culture gaming app where users can put money on trending topics about celebrities, pop culture, sports, entertainment, food, and more. This app is the first of its kind to bring power to the masses and allow consumers to capitalize on their knowledge of mainstream culture. Since its launch in 2019, VersusGame has grown significantly, with over $16 Million in cash prizes ($4 Million of that during the “COVID-19 Era”) to more than 7 million players.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- Startups like Uber and GreenPal succeeded by giving the common person a top-tier experience
*Action Steps:*
- Get a job as a concierge in a luxury hotel and note the ingredients essential to a smooth, positive and remarkable check in experience
- Discover ways to automate the most remarkable check in experiences. You could implement an app that senses location, includes pre recorded audio and video content, and tightly coordinates concierge behaviors.
- Partner with some mid range hotels, get paid as a consultant while testing your idea within their ecosystem. Sell them on the fact that customer satisfaction can dramatically be increased with lower wait times: a 5 minute wait to check-in lowers guest satisfaction by 50%
- Create a metric like lowering check-in times just 30 seconds and raising customer satisfaction to five stars
*Links:*
- GreenPal
- How Check-In Wait Times Impact Hotel Guest Satisfaction
Bryan Clayton is CEO and cofounder of GreenPal an online marketplace that connects homeowners with local lawn care professionals.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- Aside from the hype, there are many smart people excited about the practical potential of blockchain and NFTs
- Steveblank.com offers an incredible resource for entrepreneurs
- There are multi-billion dollar opportunities for companies that help crypto “cross the chasm,” making it more accessible to mainstream audiences
*Action Steps:*
- Get your own crypto security and succession plan in order
- Stay up to date on the latest developments in estate planning and password management as it applies to crypto assets
- Use a site like aytm.com to “Ask Your Target Market” about what type of product will serve them best.
- Consider a relatively lightweight solution to digital estate planning (e.g. set up smart contracts that automatically distribute assets to your family if you don’t log in every six months)
- There could be various niches within this broader category to build businesses in.
*Links:*
- http://edgeofnft.com/
- https://wearecanopy.com/
- https://steveblank.com/
- Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes
- Wallet Recovery Services
- https://safehaven.io/
- AYTM Market Research: Online Market Research
- Territory Foods | Healthy Meal Delivery
Jeff Kelley is a serial entrepreneur, investor, creator, and graduate of West point with a Yale MBA. Josh Kriger is a serial entrepreneur from Boston now staying warm in SoCal who has launched and consulted with businesses across a variety of industries.
Jeff and Josh co-founded Territory Foods, a national ready-to-eat prepared meal delivery company utilizing a unique network of distributed chefs. They also founded Canopy, a sustainability-focused apparel company that connects fans with what they love through collectible interchangeable patches.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- Successful businesses are incredibly focused. This often manifests as simplicity.
- When you’ve got high volume you can negotiate credit card fees down to 1%
*Action Steps:*
- Contact political candidates and pitch them on the benefits of a more transparent fundraising and spending platform
- Be simple with your strategy. Create a simple platform to collect donations and a simple ledger of categories politicians must report on.
- Take 5-10% of the money raised through your platform
- Don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be
*Links:*
- SkinX Funding Platform
- Nicole Guerrieri Loftus - Founder & CEO - SkinX
- GiveWell | Charity Reviews and Research
- Blueprint: your home for strategic political giving
- WinRed Pricing
- Political advertising on Google
- HR1 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): For the People Act of 2021
Nicole Loftus is a seasoned entrepreneur who has previously made it to #8 on Inc 500’s fastest growing companies. She’s now built SkinX, a tech-enabled ecosystem that is ready to launch and get every American in the game investing in entrepreneurs, innovators and job creators.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- There’s no need to partner with a developer if you haven’t already built a relationship.
- Agencies encounter great app ideas all the time but don’t have the bandwidth to pursue them.
- Hire the most expensive resource you can afford.
- Shopify is rapidly expanding their API access; now is a great time to build an app there.
*Action Steps:*
- Search Reddit, Quora, Facebook groups, etc… for pain points from Shopify store owners
- Speak to Shopify agency owners to collect more pain points
- Wireframe a solution
- Follow Shopify’s free app development to learn to build your solution
- (If you’re non-technical,) find a cofounder that “you would marry” and pay as much as you can afford
*Links:*
- Electric Eye
- Honest Ecommerce
- GuruHotel
- CartHook
- Charge Me Later
Chase Clymer is the Co-founder at Electric Eye where he and his team create Shopify-powered sales machines from strategic design, development, and marketing decisions. He is also the host of Honest Ecommerce, a weekly podcast where we provide online store owners with honest, actionable advice to increase their sales and grow their business.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- If an idea is doomed to fail, it’s best to find that out as soon as possible. You don’t want to get stuck in the uncertain middle ground
*Action Steps:*
- Research what happened to defunct trip planning apps (WorldMate, Google Trips, Kayak Trip Huddle)
- Talk with unsatisfied users of TripIt
- Create programmatic landing pages for “Napa trip itinerary” etc...
*Links:*
- Topic: The Best SEO Content Optimization Tool
- Air Travel Forecast: When Will Airlines Recover from Covid-19?
- US Travel Answer Sheet
- WorldMate's Retreat Leaves Itinerary-Organizing Rivals in Dogfight
- How I Started A $450K/Month Travel Agency That Curates Surprise
- Guruhotel: official hotel websites optimized for ecommerce
- Guruhotel on Indie Hackers
Nikhil Aitharaju is co-founder of Topic, a software which helps writers research and create search optimized content. Their AI analyzes the top results in Google, extracts key topics to cover, and provides an interactive editor to allow writers to grade their work. Topic is great for those writers looking to get actionable suggestions to drive higher traffic and get real results.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- The competitor software you create for early adopters may appeal by solving a specific complaint they have about the dominant solution. Later other’s will join just to join the crowd.
*Action Steps:*
- Investigate why people log in to LinkedIn; prioritize those functions in the new platform
- Conversely, research what are the biggest complaints people have about LinkedIn
- Research economics of Steemit
- Choose a niche hungry for connection
- Experiment with the incentive structure and pivot as necessary
*Links:*
- clarity.fm
- QuickMail
- Steemit
Jeremy Chatelaine a software developer that quit his job in 2014 and started his own successful SaaS business from scratch. That platform is QuickMail.io, a 7 figure business and a leading platform for cold email automation today.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- You can license an expensive domain name, if you need it for SEO or marketing but don’t have the capital in your business yet.
- If a client takes advantage of you or your idea gets stolen consider the odds of it happening again before wasting time on reparation or retaliation.
*Action Steps:*
- Brainstorm incentive structures with a behavioral economist
- Wireframe the app and shop it to JetBlue, Delta, etc…
- Research economics around credit card companies’ partnership with airlines
- Search for existing flight tracking apps. Offer to buy one for cheap. Add this idea to it.
*Links:*
- Swag.com
- Air Travel Forecast: When Will Airlines Recover from Covid-19?
- thoughtbot
- Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast
- Chad Pytel on Run With It
- Sani Abdul-Jabbar on Run With It
- [Inside the Business] AwardWallet with Alexi Vereschaga
- Track frequent flyer reward programs and plan your travel
- The Man Who Turned Credit-Card Points Into an Empire
Jeremy Parker is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and a serial Entrepreneur. He is CEO and co-founder of swag.com. He has also successfully exited a startup called Tipped media.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- Being new to an industry can be an advantage. It allows you to follow a template without getting distracted.
*Action Steps:*
- Target mid- to top-tier writers and offer to create a high-end podcast for them
- Court former clients of Book in a Box as your clients and create a success story from one of them.
- Contact business organizations like YPO and present lectures on “How to Start a Podcast” and/or become their preferred referral partner
- Create a basic DIY version down the line
*Links:*
- VezTek - Hire Freelance Developers from the Top 5%
- Podcast in a Box by Podcast Press
- Scribe Media | The Leader in Professional Publishing
- How Much Does It Cost To Make A Hit Song?
Sani Abdul-Jabbar is co-founder at VezTek USA an innovation consulting firm that partners with smart entrepreneurs to get great ideas off the ground.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- The USDA offers grants and special loans for first-time farmers
- You can often succeed in an old industry (e.g. restaurants, hotels) by simply following modern best practices
- Don’t underestimate the value of employing amazing people in the hospitality industry
*Action Steps:*
- Research best practices for starting a hotel
- Search for employees in the hospitality industry
- See if you can get a beginner farmer grant or loan
- Locate existing farms and offer to install cabins on their property
- Locate existing Farmhouse rentals on AirBNB and offer to optimize their business model
*Links:*
- Dominic Monkhouse: Business Coaching
- ‎The Melting Pot with Dominic Monkhouse
- F**k Plan B: How to scale your technology business faster and achieve Plan A
- Cabana - Mobile Hotels
- Avrame
- The Road to Less Stupid
- Kiss the Ground
- Featherdown Farms
- AirDNA
- The Ruby Slipper Cafe
- USDA Beginning Farmer and Rancher Loans
Dominic Monkhouse is a business coach, scale up expert, host of the Melting Pod podcast and author of Fk Plan B: How to scale your technology business faster and achieve plan A.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- “Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.” -Charlie Munger
*Action Steps:*
- Determine what niche you are going to sell in first
- Optimal co-founders might be content and SEO experts
- Build an in-house SEO team
- Fundraise
- Get people on the site through advertising the site itself and the products
- Develop the audience, then pitch vendors to partner with you
- Expand beyond your initial niche
*Links:*
- Purple Orange PR
- Visably - Improve your brand's visibility in search
- Chris Dickey on LinkedIn
- uberzon
- rebatekey
- outdoorgearlab
- US ecommerce grows 44.0% in 2020
Chris Dickey is the founder of Purple Orange PR and Visably, a new software to manage your brand’s visibility in search.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- Content creators aren’t satisfied with social media platforms owning their distribution channels
*Action Steps:*
- Partner with a Twitter influencer looking to monetize their brand through email marketing (search for users recommending Mailbrew).
- Presell the product to validate it.
- Integrate between Twitter and Mailchimp. Look to a service like Mailbrew for inspiration on how to deliver content via email.
- Augment your product with add-ons that offer templates and assistance with email marketing.
- You might even partner with third party brands and mimic the “dynamic ad insertion” model of podcasts within email.
*Links:*
- Exploding Topics
- Mailbrew
- MailerLite
- Stackla
- Social Board
Josh Howarth is the co-founder of Exploding Topics, an analytics service that surfaces rapidly growing topics before they take off.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- Almost half (40-60%) of the overhead is creating and selling carbon offsets is legal compliance, accounting, auditing
- “The world’s first trillionaire will be made in climate change.” - Chamath Palihapitiya
- Climate tech investing is growing 5X faster than overall VC from 2013-2019 ($60 billion of early-stage capital)
*Action Steps:*
- Investigate how Nori works and learn from their mistakes
- Research the current costs and details involved in carbon credits
- Decide on one niche of carbon offsets (e.g. planting trees) and pair that with one industry with easy to measure emissions (e.g. airlines)
- Determine the economics around trading climate on the blockchain - what would make people want to do it?
- Learn the ropes by contacting businesses potentially interested in offsetting carbon and helping to facilitate as a consultant
- Raise an ICO
- Get involved in addressing climate change any way you can - it’s a giant problem that will take many smart people to solve
*Links:*
- Nori
- tristanpollock.com
- Eco Coin
- Podcast: Reversing Climate Change
- Podcast: Carbon Removal Newsroom
- Air Mining
- SRECs: Understanding Solar Renewable Energy Credits
- Carbon Fee and Dividend Policy and FAQs
Tristan Pollock is an entrepreneur, founder, and startup investor, among many things and is currently building cto.ai. He has invested 30 million dollars into over 200 startups.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- You need some protectable “secret sauce” if selling components in a big industry (like flying cars). Otherwise, manufacturers will continually drive down your pricing by forcing you to compete with copycats for their business
- Creating networking events can launch you from novice to industry expert rapidly and provide a foundation for a powerful business.
*Action Steps:*
- Begin with a profitable strategy that sells shovels to the miners. E.g. start by hosting and organizing flying car conventions so you can meet key players, understand the industry, build your future team and build your future strategy.
- Aim high for your first clients. Court wealthy individuals who want to make aspirational purchases.
*Links:*
- Atakama | Multi-Factor File Encryption Software
- Larry Page’s flying cars
- Ford Flivver
- When Will Airplanes Be Electric?
- World eVTOL Aircraft Directory
- The Interchange Podcast: Electric Aviation Is Coming
Daniel H. Gallancy is the CEO of Atakama, a NYC based software company and uses his deep experience with blockchain tech to help companies manage security.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- We’re again reminded that you don’t need to solve the problem for everyone. Different people will have different goal setting tools & tactics that resonate with them. Helping a small percentage of those struggling with goal setting could still be massively valuable.
*Action Steps:*
- Research habit and goal experts and offer to partner with them on development of a goal achievement app
- Pursue the enterprise market: contact sales teams and offer to help them meet their sales quotas for free. Get a case study and charge for the next team.
- Start by shadowing one sales team that has sales objectives of $50K+ per month. Ask for a token $50 per month to validate the app value.
- After a month or two of noting how objectives get set and achieved and what leads to failure and success, document the systems that seem to help and start to implement them.
- Raise a couple hundred thousand in investment to fund development of your basic app, test and iterate with your existing group and add 4 more.
- Raise 1M more and launch to a wider audience within a year or two.
*Links:*
- Virtual Assistants for entrepreneurs and professionals
- The Hard Work Myth - the new book that explains why working harder is a waste of time | How to achieve more, without working harder | Timeetc
- Spar
- Stickk
- Coach.me | Instant Coaching for Any Goal.
- Noom: Stop dieting. Get life-long results.
- Blogger Maneesh Sethi hires woman to slap him when he procrastinates
Barnaby Lashbrooke founded Time etc in 2007 with the idea of giving entrepreneurs the help they need to be successful without the cost and hassle of employing a full-time assistant. He is also the author of The Hard Work Myth which uncovers how the world's top entrepreneurs achieve so much, despite working less than the average business owner.
Love a part of the show? Did we get something completely wrong? Let us know at update@runwithit.fm.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- Great businesses often start with an urgent demand that people are asking to pay for. You just have to notice it and double down on the niche.
- As baby boomers retire, there is a big opportunity in modernizing “sweaty startups”
*Action Steps:*
- Contact the owner of the Urban Lumber Co and see if he is interested in franchising his model
- Become a member of the Urban Wood Network for $50 to learn how to build an urban wood business
- Network with the local wood economy and become an intermediary between lumber collectors, furniture makers and firewood users in homes and restaurants.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- The Sketch Effect
- @williamcwarren
- William Warren’s personal website
- Ironwood Mills Phoenix | Ironwood Mills
- @michaeltoret
- iDry Kilns
- Woodpreneur Podcast
- Joe’s Premium Firewood on Youtube
- Urban Wood Network
- The Expensive Water Bottle with Jeff Proctor
William Warren is an entrepreneur, illustrator, and writer who has spent his career using visuals to help communicate ideas in an effective and enjoyable way. He is the Founder and CEO of The Sketch Effect, a Visual Communication agency that helps make ideas understandable and actionable through animation, live event sketching and graphic design. The Sketch Effect’s client list includes top-tier brands such as Marriott, Walmart, Microsoft, Chick-fil-A, P&G, and Delta in addition to premier consultancies including Boston Consulting Group, Bain, Ernst & Young and Accenture. The Sketch Effect has sketched for thought leaders such as Steve Wozniak, Brene Brown, Malala Yousafzai, Sheryl Sandberg, Peyton Manning, and more. William lives in Atlanta, GA with his wife Monica and young kids, Liam and Gracie.
Michael Toret has been a professional carpenter and woodworker for over 10 years. Most recently, he’s built unique furniture and household items out of large live edge slabs of wood at Ironwood Mills, an urban sawmill in Phoenix, AZ.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- Out of work travel and tourism specialists in vacation spots can be hired cheaply to build a business
- You can build a 300K / yr business starting with a spreadsheet and a private slack group
- If you think that buying property in other countries would be a headache, you’re right.
*Action Steps:*
- Contact Pieter Levels of Nomad List and pitch him a collaboration on this higher-end service.
- Smaller travel services are hurting. Pitch someone like “Scott’s Cheap Flights” a JV to help bolster his income.
- Get to one customer and do things that don’t scale to iterate on the product itself. Word of mouth marketing would be super effective.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Under30Experiences: Group Travel for Young Adults
- The Millennial Travel Guidebook
- Nomad List
- Selena’s Hostels
- Run With It Episode 23 with Jules Schroeder
- Live Different Podcast with Matt Wilson
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- Simple tip to increase your meeting effectiveness: stop 5 minutes early and ask “who will do what by when?”
- Generally easier to sell to a profit center than a cost center (listen to Aline Lerner episode for more on this)
- The hard part of this idea is building something users will stick with. Focus more on reducing friction and making the app a joy to use and worry less about back-end bells and whistles.
- Look for teachable moments within an industry as the foundation of content marketing for your business or even for the foundation of your app’s functionality.
- Note-taking is a necessary step in many industries (e.g. financial service, corporate governance) and non-compliance with note taking can come with serious penalties.
*Action Steps:*
- Decide on the niche you want to serve. Will you go broad and seek a large user base for a low LTV per user or aim for less users in a more profitable niche (e.g. lawyers, financial services)
- Start with a simple integration that triggers emails to the user 10-15 minutes before the meetings in their calendar. The user can reply with their notes. Store them in an organized database for review.
- As your user base grows you can add premium features, like integrating with CRM or other note tracking app.
- If you have niched down you can customize your app to serve your chosen niche. For example create custom notifications and note templates that facilitate note taking for corporate compliance.
- A healthy long term vision might aim for 50,000 users at about $5 per month, grossing around $3 million a year in revenue.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Less Annoying CRM | Simple Contact Management for Small Businesses
- Scheduling Platform for Business | Cronofy the scheduling experts
- Measuring the ROI of Hiring Funnels with Aline Lerner
- Nathan Latka on Buying and Monetize Chrome extensions
- Notion
- Market size of the growing note-taking industry
Tyler King is the Co-founder and CEO of Less Annoying CRM. He's a proud bootstrapper and is passionate about starting and growing sustainable businesses for the long term.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- It’s inevitable that micro-mobility apps consolidate in the next 5-10 years. Look to examples from other industries (e.g. hotels and airlines) to see that this can be done.
*Action Steps:*
- Partner with smaller players who are running scooter sharing services
- Bring clients to them through your app and take a percentage of revenues
- Move on to creating partnerships with larger players once you have built a foundation
- Consider ways to add value through this aggregated service (e.g. pay $10/month for someone to bring a scooter to your location)
- You might even entertain a bigger long-term vision... Facilitate a future in which transportation is seen as a utility. This business could eventually integrate public transit and other ride sharing platforms and incorporate government subsidies.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Soundtrack Your Brand: Background music that works
- Scooter app wars begin, and Lime isn't happy about it
- How the novel coronavirus is speeding the scooter apocalypse
- Uber reports $2.9 billion quarterly loss during pandemic
Ola Sars is a Stockholm based serial entrepreneur active in the music-tech space.
He is the Founder and CEO of Soundtrack Your Brand, the world's fastest growing music-platform for B2B, which he co-founded together with Spotify back in 2014.
Before founding Soundtrack, he was the co-founder and COO of Beats Music, acquired by Apple and transformed into Apple Music, as well as the co-founder of Pacemaker, the world's first DJ driven music platform.
Ola’s driving force behind his repeated efforts in transforming the music market comes from his conviction that music is undervalued as an art-form and that the music industry offers significant opportunity for value improvement and growth. Through his multiple start-ups in the music-space, he has focused on unlocking that intrinsic VALUE, both in B2C and now in B2B.
Ola has been featured in Rolling Stone, Billboard, Bloomberg and is a regular in music and technology publications.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Action Steps:*
- Show validation through initial users in a small, local market.
- Leverage social networks as early distribution channels.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- The Founder's Manual
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- Launching a great product can also build your email list
*Action Steps:*
Podcast Dashboard
- Start by creating an info and/or coaching product to help podcasters manage and grow their shows
- Understand the pain points podcasters are experiencing
- Create software to solve said pain points (listen to episode 15 with David Hauser for more details)
Teach programming to start a business
- Find the type of programming jobs that are boring to experienced coders, but still valuable to end users
- Develop a systematized approach for novices to learn and deliver upon this type of work
Bundle indie creator content
- Find independent creators who have a sizeable audience but aren’t huge; want them to both benefit from and contribute to your launch list
- Pitch these creators
- Consult with JV and Affiliate specialists
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Indie Hackers: Work Together to Build Profitable Online Businesses
- @csallen
- Humble Bundle
- Sahil Lavingia on the Indie Hackers Podcast
- codecademy
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
*Nuggets:*
- This idea is so exciting because it’s a platform that expands both sides of a marketplace; it makes it easier for fitness instructors to get their content out, and easier for people to work out remotely
- Don’t forget about the incredible power of puns in branding and marketing.
*Action Steps:*
- Create a business overview/plan including the product, points of differentiation, value proposition, etc...
- Create a financial model with some basic assumptions to ensure that the idea will be profitable
- Validate product/market fit (before spending serious money or seeking investment dollars)
- Create a basic landing page with the value proposition and run Facebook ads to it
- Use the data collected from ads to inform and iterate on the financial model
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Sheets & Giggles
- Startup Financial Modeling via Startup Rocket
- ATHLEAN-X
- Six Pack Promise
- Nike Run Club App
Colin McIntosh is Founder & CEO of Sheets & Giggles, a pun-based, eco-friendly bedding brand that launched in May 2018 on Indiegogo with their first product: lyocell bed sheets made from eucalyptus trees. In their first 6 months in business, they received over 6,000 orders and nearly half a million dollars in revenue. They won first place at Denver Startup Week 2018, have since gone on to make and raise millions of dollars in revenue and venture capital.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- If you notice many open-source projects with lots of followers on a single problem, it’s probably a good opportunity; open-source projects are rarely as good as those with commercial resources
*Action Steps:*
- Build a list of SaaS companies using Shopify
- Search for Shopify apps that enable SaaS companies to use Shopify; consider buying them to jumpstart your customer base
- Contact Venture Capital organizations and pitch them on partnering
- Engage with aspiring SaaS founders on sites like Indie Hackers and offer this service with the caveat that you plan to productize it
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- OneSignal
- Shopify's Tobi LĂĽtke on Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman
- Connecting Independent Software Vendors and CRMs with Steve Benson
- Can Shopify Compete With Amazon Without Becoming Amazon?
- The Toaster Project
George Deglin is Co-Founder & CEO of OneSignal, the most widely used mobile/web engagement platform. With over a decade of experience engineering software products, George was previously CTO for Uversity, a college social networking startup backed by Founders Fund and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- You’re not going to end homelessness worldwide. Don’t do nothing because you can’t do everything.
- Sometimes a non-profit model opens more doors for those who want to invest in a project.
*Action Steps:*
- Interview homeless people, social workers, and shelter employees to qualitatively understand this problem
- Read The State of Homelessness in America to quantitatively understand this problem
- Understand sources of funding, like HUD in the US or benefactors that have overcome homelessness themselves.
- Contact the founder of Samaritan and ask to pick his brain
- Learn how typical homeless shelters are financed
- Start small - determine how to best help a handful of people
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Simplero
- The State of Homelessness in America
- Samaritan
- Kiva
- How Not to Die (startup advice by Paul Graham)
- Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1 by Neale Donald Walsch
Calvin Correli is the founder of Simplero, the all-in-one platform for online educators. He started it in 2009 to run his own business of teaching spiritual tools, like belief, emotions, love, and life purpose, to other entrepreneurs. It has since grown into a multi-million dollar business serving entrepreneurs all over the world, on a mission to simplify lives and raise the level of consciousness on the planet.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- If you have a regular job, your employer might love you starting a business that serves the company
- Build credibility on the internet with people you might like to serve before you’ll need it
*Action Steps:*
- Build trust on the internet by creating helpful, intermediate to advanced content for SaaS business owners.
- Build list of $1M+ revenue businesses
- Contact owners offering to split-test their pricing pages
- Once it’s clear your strategy adds to the bottom line, start charging a percentage, perhaps 10-50%
- This is a service that might make itself obsolete to a given client within a year, so build a pipeline of other clients or offer other services after getting a foot in the door.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Tuple
- thoughtbot
- Art of Product Podcast
Ben Orenstein co-founded Tuple, a multimillion dollar company that allows coders to work simultaneously on a project remotely.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- If Aline were building another business, she would avoid selling to a cost center rather than a profit center
- When pricing your products and services inquire what your prospects’ discretionary budget is and price packages within that to get your foot in the door more easily.
*Action Steps:*
- Reach out to engineering managers that pay Lever or Greenhouse at least 5 figures a year.
- Offer consulting to companies promising to analyze their hiring data and optimize their process
- Try to price your services within their discretionary budget to avoid facing the approval process involving a chain of command.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Greenhouse
- Lever
- Jobvite
Aline Lerner is the founder and CEO of interviewing.io, an anonymous technical recruiting platform where companies like Facebook, Uber, Dropbox, and Snap have hired great software engineers.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- “Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.” - Lao Tzu
- How stressed can you really be about losing some money if you planned on giving it all away anyway?
*Action Steps:*
- Brainstorm a prototype both alone and also collaborating with designers
- Consider partnering with
- A successful inventor like Dyson
- Someone with an existing following (e.g. have previously launched successful design concepts via Kickstarter).
- Create a Kickstarter to test the idea
- Create funnels.
- Create Instagram ad and funnel to Kickstarter.
- Take a successful Kickstarter campaign to investors and plan production
- Partner with Influencers.
- When you find a marketing strategy with consistent conversion rate double down on it.
- Design your product and your marketing to take advantage of virality. (make it highly remarkable and shareable).
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Acadium - Kickstart your digital marketing career for free
- Moe Abbas’ Instagram
Moe Abbás is the CEO and co-founder of Acadium, a platform that matches digital marketing apprentices with business owners. They’re disrupting the education system by providing relevant and free training opportunities to apprentices while helping business owners grow at very little cost. Moe started from nothing and bootstrapped himself from selling landscaping services door to door as a teenager to growing his Housing Contracting Company to 10 million dollar a year by his mid 20s. And now he’s building Acadium, and changing the future of education..
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
*Action Steps:*
- Look within your own network and find a jeweler to partner with
- Run Google Ads to develop brand awareness
- Reach out to local influencers to develop a partnership
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Society Service
- LabTika
- Can You Tell Which Diamonds Are Lab Grown?
- Lab-Grown Diamond Jewelry | What are Synthetic Diamonds? | GIA
Marike Van der Velden is a Dutch entrepreneur who runs Society Service, a high-end escort service.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Tell us what you think at update@runwithit.fm!If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts.
*Nuggets:*
- It’s easier to pivot after starting than to get started, so just start.
- Management tip: to avoid over or under managing, work with your direct report to get started and then let them drive their own ship.
- Move fast and don’t look back: things that you think are important early on will seem trivial later so don’t sweat.
- Being a great curator of content can be just as valuable as creating content, especially in an increasingly noisy information space.
*Action Steps:*
- Start with a very minimal module (1 week) of management training
- Incorporate this into blog or newsletter as content for readers to apply
- Consult a lawyer to check whether it’s ok to share curated ideas in a paid newsletter
- Target middle-level companies of 50 employees or less to begin
*Links:*
- Laudable
- The Long-Term Effects of Management and Technology Transfer: Evidence from the US Productivity Program
- Google re:Work
- Lesson Plans as a Product with Rob Fitzpatrick
- Looking For Syllabus 2.0
- We Need a New Science of Progress
Angela Ferrante is the founder and CEO of Laudable, a startup making it easier (and more affordable) to create video content by doing it all remotely. Laudable is out to kill the boring B2B marketing archetype (cough, the PDF case study) and bring human stories to life through video. Angela was previously the founding CMO at Sparkfund, a venture-backed energy technology company. Before Sparkfund, she started the alternative energy group at a Boston-based insurance company.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- Don’t ask friends and family whether they like your idea. If they’re good friends, they’ll lie to you. Instead, ask them about their personal experiences.
- Listen with an open mind when hearing things you think you already know. Oftentimes, there’s much more depth to the idea than you’ve internalized.
*Action Steps:*
- Answer Joe’s guiding questions to understand what you really want from a business
- Choose your niche based on your interest and connections
- Talk with 30 members of that niche to understand their pain points
- Brainstorm solutions and ask prospects to pre-pay for them
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Ajax Union
- Joe’s LinkedIn profile (mention Run With It and he will accept your connection)
- Evyrgreen (LinkedIn lead generation)
- Lesson Plans as a Product with Rob Fitzpatrick
- Getting Things Done
- Think and Grow Rich
Joe Apfelbaum is the CEO of digital marketing agency Ajax Union. He is a public speaker, certified Google Trainer, and published business author. Joe enjoys speaking and writing about a broad range of business topics in his seminars, webinars and articles. Joe is the host of the popular podcast CEO Mojo and the producer of GrowTime.tv. In 2016 Joe was named the King of Kings County Brooklyn for his contribution to the business community in Brooklyn. Joe is proud of all his accomplishments, but most of all he is proud of his beautiful amazing kids.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- The most important asset an entrepreneur has is her persistence; don’t start until you’re ready to “sleep like a baby” (stay up all night crying)
*Action Steps:*
- Identify the problem
- read US Department of Justice Study on Identity Theft
- understand where the $25 billion per year losses are going (i.e who is getting hit the most)
- speak with these organizations to learn more about the challenges they are facing
- Develop the solution
- create a business plan of how one would solve this problem
- close the gaps needed to achieve this solution
- Persist
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Avail
- U.S. Department of Justice Study on Identity Theft
- Black Mirror episode White Christmas
- Credit Karma
- Stripe
Ryan Coon is the co-founder & CEO of Avail, an all-in-one software solution designed for do-it-yourself (DIY) landlords that is used by more than 600,000 landlords and tenants across the United States.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
Nuggets:
- If you desire power, you shouldn’t pursue it (paraphrased from Plato’s Republic)
*Action Steps:*
- Create a marketing plan for growing Roscioli Wine Club and community.wine
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Roscioli Wine Club
- Wine Tasting Rome
- community.wine
- The Flywheel Effect
- Gregg Popovich is a wine connoisseur
Lindsay came to Italy 5 years ago when she was studying wine in the US, came to Rimessa Roscioli to do Alessandro's wine tasting, left in awe, fell in love in every sense did a U turn to get back. She now is a partner in the business and manages the Roscioli wine club along with partners Alessandro and Mattia.
Alessandro Pepe has done it all - documentaries, theater, opened multiple wine bars in Dublin then returned back to Rome and ultimately was the mastermind behind Rimessa Roscioli, a wine bar and restaurant in Rome, and the created the Roscioli Wine Club and Community.wine.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Links:
Principles by Ray Dalio
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Accadium - Digital apprenticeships
Cal Newport
David Goggins
Tim Ferriss Podcast Episode
Erin Hooley's Run With It Episode for E-commerce Growth
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
*Nuggets:*
- Pick a business that you can grit through
- Sometimes grit is less intense and more zen. A reserved but committed approach can help you maintain energy on your project for the long haul.
*Action Steps:*
- Create a simplified Process Flow Diagram (PFD) for how recycling is done today
- Research values of each stream in the PFD
- Target the points at which you can amplify the most value.
- Incorporate some hard numbers in your research. Who pays for raw recyclable material, how much do they pay, and why?
- Research companies that incorporate recycled materials in their products or packaging. Find out the price points they pay. How do they make it profitable?
- Start a small local project where committed recyclers can contribute to special recycling containers and be tracked and get credit for their contributions.
- Raise some funding on the merit of the idea to test feasibilities. “Do good” projects like this may attract funders who strive to make a difference and care less about short term profitability.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- JustReachOut (Dmitry’s PR connection company)
- Criminally Prolific (Dmitry’s personal website)
- Terry Gross interview with Kate O’Neill
- Allbirds (more sustainable shoes)
- Pela (eco-friendly phone cases)
- Method (eco-friendly soap)
- Recycle More E-Waste with Anders Ankarlid
- A Good Company
Dmitry Dragilev is the founder of JustReachOut- a platform which has helped 5000+ brands and small businesses pitch journalists and get featured in press all on their own without the help of PR firms.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
*Nuggets:*
- A Software as a Service (SaaS) needs to be so easy your grandma could use it
- If you’re in a fear mindset, make a plan. No matter how great the plan is it will help you get into action, which is a much better state.
- If you want your business to grow, expect your marketing budget to expand ahead of growth. A stable marketing budget reflects a stagnant business.
*Action Steps:*
- Start with a plan. Understand the basics of why and how this business would work before moving forward.
- Create a mock up by getting bids from UI designers.
- Invest in creating a product that you can launch to a small group of enthusiastic clients.
- Aim to use your first clients as evangelists that can spread the word to others on the benefits of the product. Create compelling case studies and document customer stories.
- Once you’ve dialed the product in and garnered effusive praise from your evangelists, start selling to other business owners.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- JB Kellogg’s Website
- Marketing360 (Madwire’s marketing platform for small businesses)
- Paul Graham’s Do Things That Don’t Scale
- Ray Dalio’s Principles
JB Kellogg is the Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Madwire® which he started when he was 28 years old and, with the help of a championship team, grew the company to over 100MM+ in revenue and 500+ employees in under 10 years.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
*Nuggets:*
- The first step is often to build your self belief and overcome your fears
- U.S. business travel is a massive market ($1.6 trillion); business travelers took 462 million trips in 2013
*Action Steps:*
- Find a similar product and try to sell it to one of your appropriate connections—a frequent traveler—using the marketing and branding you intend to ultimately use.
- Get feedback via forums that business travelers use; ask what they think about the shower experience.
- Connect with an engineer on Upwork and hire them to design a prototype
- Utilize a Kickstarter or landing page to fundraise and test out your marketing ideas. Try mimicking a humorous & successful brand like Dollar Shave Club.
- After proving and tweaking the concept, build a larger market through giveaways, social media and influencer marketing (e.g. trade a tool for reviews or photos of influencers using it).
- Settle on a price point at which it will be “impossible to say no.”
- Develop more extensive distribution channels and make your way to airport gift shops and luggage retailers.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- The Creator Mindset
- nirbashan.com
Nir Bashan is a world-renowned creativity expert. He has taught thousands of leaders and individuals around the globe how to harness the power of creativity to improve profitability, increase sales, improve customer service and ultimately create more meaning in their work. Nir has spent the last two decades working on a formula to codify creativity.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
*Nuggets:*
- This idea is so exciting because it’s a platform that expands both sides of a marketplace; it makes it easier for fitness instructors to get their content out, and easier for people to work out remotely
- Don’t forget about the incredible power of puns in branding and marketing.
*Action Steps:*
- Create a business overview/plan including the product, points of differentiation, value proposition, etc...
- Create a financial model with some basic assumptions to ensure that the idea will be profitable
- Validate product/market fit (before spending serious money or seeking investment dollars)
- Create a basic landing page with the value proposition and run Facebook ads to it
- Use the data collected from ads to inform and iterate on the financial model
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Sheets & Giggles
- Startup Financial Modeling via Startup Rocket
- ATHLEAN-X
- Six Pack Promise
- Nike Run Club App
Colin McIntosh is Founder & CEO of Sheets & Giggles, a pun-based, eco-friendly bedding brand that launched in May 2018 on Indiegogo with their first product: lyocell bed sheets made from eucalyptus trees. In their first 6 months in business, they received over 6,000 orders and nearly half a million dollars in revenue. They won first place at Denver Startup Week 2018, have since gone on to make and raise millions of dollars in revenue and venture capital.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
*Nuggets:*
- James Dyson approached incumbent vacuum manufacturers with his idea for a bagless vacuum cleaner. They shot him down because “they sell bags”
- Even if your business is starting small, imagine the pitfalls you may encounter if it must rapidly scale.
- Be obsessed with your customers. It will arise from natural curiosity and even a bit of natural insecurity.
*Action Steps:*
- Find co-founders who complement your skill set; can save a ton of money over hiring everything out in the beginning
- Talk with home printer users to learn what matters most to them and how you can service them better than incumbents; build a list of potential customers from these conversations
- Create a Kickstarter campaign to presell the idea to your list
- Get a better printer designed and prototyped
- Find a manufacturer who will make your product
- Raise money as needed to fund manufacturing (that will likely be the expensive part of this idea)
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Built to Sell
- The Automatic Customer
- Everyone’s favorite Office Space printer scene
- RV Snap Pad
- Kent’s LinkedIn
Kent Wilson is the co-founder and CMO of RV Snap Pad He is in charge of all key growth marketing strategies and tactics, such as conversion rate optimization, social media marketing, search engine optimization, and brand messaging.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
*Nuggets:*
- There is a rich “non-adulting” economy wherein you can make money helping the continually youthful avoid or manage actual adult take so they can focus on other stuff.
- Homeowners typically spend 1-4% of their home cost on maintenance every year
- The existence of products like “Home Warranties” demonstrates a need for homeowner support for caring for their home.
*Action Steps:*
- Decide on what basic tasks you can start with.
- Find out what contractors charge for the tasks on your list.
- Create revenue projections.
- Decide on what your company’s fee would be: 15-30%?
- Piece the technical aspect together.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Dawn’s Light Media
- Money Plane
- Jason’s LinkedIn profile
- jasoncherubini.com
Jason Cherubini is the founder of Seraphim Associates International, a management consulting firm focusing on technology based startups, and a founding partner of Dawn's Light, a media production and financing company. He has held multiple faculty appointments in the United States and Europe, and is an avid proponent of the EdTech industry.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
*Nuggets:*
- Most of the tax code is there to help citizens save money by incentivizing behaviors that would benefit our society
*Action Steps:*
- Find experts to partner with who are already providing advanced tax strategies for their clients
- industry conferences
- authors
- forums
- ask business owners for recommendations
- Be willing to pay for high-end tax strategy and accounting specialists on your team
- Bootstrap from a simple system that implements simple, cheap, accessible technologies like Asana, Artable, and basic CRMs to create a client flow.
- Aim for ~$5-6K annual average customer value
- Scale to 100 customers
- Run Facebook ads to a landing page offering this service
- Raise money (approach VCs and offer 20% for $5 million, for example)
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Boostopia
- Wealthfront
- Betterment
- Hasan Minhaj Patriot Act episode on taxes
Justin Winter exited his prior company after growing to $22 million in annual sales to focus on a new problem. Boostopia is an all-in-one support operations platform that unlocks the power of your support data inside your support ticketing system to transform both your team and customer experience.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
*Nuggets:*
- Pursuing socially responsible business ideas can be quite lucrative - A Good Company is doing over $220k/month in revenue
- When you want to change someone’s behavior, positive reinforcement is much more effective than chiding them
*Action Steps:*
- Investigate how waste is currently processed
- Find out what value is involved and to whom value is added or extracted in the waste management process (e.g. are governments financially incentivised to minimize the amount of waste they have to process.
- Research the value of raw materials present in common e-waste items
- Research human behavior and how positive reinforcement may play a role in modifying consumer behavior.
- Research Best Buy’s e-waste recycling program
- Why are they doing it?
- Are they making money?
- Are there creative ways to manage this process, like adding rfid chips to electronics for identification during disposal. Can you fine or reward consumers to incentivise proper disposal?
- Research similarities to CO2 cap and trade proposals and map how a similar system could work for e-waste
- Speak out against companies who are making it difficult to recycle and/or reuse their electronics
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- A Good Company
- Starter Story interview
- Citizens Climate Lobby
Anders Ankarlid is CEO of A Good Company, a serial e-commerce entrepreneur, and a father of three. He has worked in e-commerce for more than a decade and he’s an activist against mindless consumption.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
*Nuggets:*
- The key leverage point of blockchain is the decentralization of valuation.
- Millennials value experiences over things.
- Don’t implement emerging trends unless they’re necessary.
- Many great ideas sit around waiting for the right time to flourish. If you get in too early, there may not be infrastructure to support them.
*Action Steps:*
- Understand social currencies
- Research social currency issuers (Roll)
- Find out the use cases that would apply. Who would want to issue social currency? All individuals? Influencers and celebrities? Small businesses abandoning punch cards for social currency?
- Find out how market makers work on traditional exchanges. (The individuals that set the buy and sell prices of various stocks).
- Engage with a platform like Steemit that currently use blockchain to exchange value for user created content
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- FestivalPass
- Ed Vincent’s LinkedIn profile
- Roll
- Steemit
- Rapper Akon Shares Whitepaper for Upcoming Cryptocurrency
Ed Vincent is an entrepreneur with over 25 years business, technology and management experience including 6 years banking and valuation experience. He founded an e-commerce business in 1999 which was sold to a competitor in 2001. He’s a Repeat Founder including the businesses SimplyEngage, myProducer, & Predict Ventures. He is Currently the Founder & CEO of FestivalPass.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
*Action Steps:*
- Offer performance-improvement consulting services to businesses in order to figure out a system that works for this idea
- validate that a boilerplate process will work for different businesses
- determine pricing
- Draft a business plan around the idea
- Create a no-code version of the performance review system
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Cory's Personal Website
- Saas Pegasus: The Django Powered SaaS Template
- Toggl
- Jason Cohen on Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business
- Patrick McKenzie
Cory Zue is a software developer and entrepreneur. These days he mostly works on SaaS Pegasus: the Django SaaS boilerplate. He also made Place Card Me—which is becoming the best way to make printable place cards on the internet.
Jason Cohen on Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
*Nuggets:*
- Like the real estate market, there are franchise brokers to facilitate deals. But you can also do the legwork by approaching franchise owners yourself. In the midst of pandemic, many of them are likely onsite.
- A typical franchise cost is nominal (somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000). But many franchises, like McDonalds, will not sell to you unless you have a minimum of five years operating costs.
*Action Steps:*
- Research rent costs for commercial spaces with the best walkability in your area.
- Walk into a prospective franchise location and ask the owner about his or her experience within the franchise.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- SGIC Consulting
- Lucas’ Instagram
Lucas Root is the founder of SGIC Consulting which helps clients build and implement a high-performance strategy to achieve the maximum growth potential possible.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Only two missing pieces can stop you: mindset and skill. Find out which one you need and fix it. You can tackle anything.
- Learn Erin’s three levers for growth in ecommerce: Traffic, Conversion Rate, Average Order Value.
- Always highlight your most popular and highest selling items. Don’t try to push your less popular products on clients up front.
- Throw in the towel only when you’re working on something that conflicts with your higher order goals.
- Find the opportunities during moments of great change. Where are people changing their habits and how can you turn that into a business opportunity?
*Action Steps:*
- Document Erin’s system for ecommerce growth
- Pitch ecommerce owners on implementing the system for free for one month
- Experience is the best teacher: create your own ecommerce business to test out these principles
- Partner with a master of ecommerce and sell their system as part of your agency model
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Bailey's Blossoms
- Peyton Bre
- Conquering Chaos (Erin’s Podcast)
Erin Hooley, President and Founder of Bailey's Blossoms a brand that reimagines infant and toddler fashion. She also founded Peyton Bre, a clothing company for tweens and teens with a call to empower young girls to feel confident and beautiful. She’s also a motivational speaker and a mom of six!
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
*Nuggets:*
- Find out the behind the scenes relationships building and negotiating sometimes necessary for successful software entrepreneurship.
- Social media is the new TV after work. If you want to start a business, delete all your accounts.
- Going the extra mile on business development often pays off big.
- Balancing a freemium model is tricky: listen to the episode to hear how Alexi thinks about it
- Use a B2B2C model to get other businesses to sign up your new clients.
*Action Steps:*
- Alexi’s biggest pains are
- managing business development and marketing (these are not his strengths) and
- managing relationships with big corporations, specifically 3 big airline companies.
- Use this information to consider what kind of businesses could support him and help his business thrive.
- Do you have business development skills or business and userbase growth skills? Maybe you could join Alexi’s team and fill in a central gap.
- Do you know someone that could fill that role? Is there a business in understanding what startup companies need out of additional team members and then finding the right match for them?
- Do you have an understanding of how to manage business relationships between small startups and large corporations? Do you know how to make it a win-win? Again, perhaps you can fill a role on Alexi’s team or help find the right new team members to fill in the gaps.
- Email ideas for what Alexi can do to address the concerns raised during the episode
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- AwardWallet
- The Travel Secret
- The Points Guy
- One Mile At A Time
- Auto Slash
Alexi Vereschaga is the co-founder and leads the development efforts of AwardWallet, which he launched in 2004. AwardWallet provides a free service that helps you manage your reward balances and travel itinerariesFrom its inception, Alexi has been AwardWallet’s product visionary. He is focused on continual improvement of AwardWallet to meet the needs of its 651,000+ global members and to respond to the evolving rewards program landscape, which is reflected in AwardWallet’s recognized leadership in rewards management.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
*Nuggets:*
- Stalwart staffing companies are doing ~$25 billion in revenue annually
- VCs are looking for great teams moving really fast toward the critical assumptions of their business
- Great two-person teams are often formed from one person with industry experience and the other with technical know-how
- If you’re a nontechnical founder, one of the hardest parts of starting a company is finding a phenomenal technical cofounder and get them to leave their terrific job to come work on your idea
- Build a product that gives users a much better experience than
*Action Steps:*
- Estimate Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) for both sides of the marketplace
- Brainstorm/research what customers will want, what their engagement would look like, and estimated churn
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- 1984 Ventures
- Aaron Michel on LinkedIn
- PathSource
- Indie Hackers interview re Key Values
- Test Interviews
- TrustedHealth
- Toolbox
Aaron Michel is a partner at 1984 Ventures, a seed stage venture capital firm in San Francisco. He was selected earlier this year as one of venture capital's 40 under 40 by Venture Capital Journal. He's a Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School alum and sold his last company, PathSource, in 2017.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
*Nuggets:*
- Successful businesses are started by people just like you; they go home and watch Netflix with their significant other, etc...
*Action Steps:*
- Compile list of ISVs from Salesforce App Exchange
- Contact ISVs to validate this idea (listen to David Cristello or David Hauser episode if you need more help with this step)
- Raise Angel money and/or apply to Startup Accelerators
- Hire ~4 software engineers
- Build MVP
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Salesforce
- Insightly
- Zoho
- Mulesoft
- Kloudless
- Cloud Elements
- Quickbooks
- Badger Maps
Steve Benson is the founder and CEO of Badger Maps. After receiving his MBA from Stanford, Steve was Google Enterprise's Top Sales Executive in 2009. In 2012, Steve founded Badger Maps, a software company that helps Field Sales People optimize their routes and schedules to save time and be on time so they can sell more. Steve is also the host of the Outside Sales Talk podcast where he interviews industry experts on their top sales tips.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
*Nuggets:*
- The best things in life come on the other side of fear (Will Smith speech)
- It’s incredibly difficult for business owners to be competent at their core skill AND marketing, delivery, etc…think of ideas that allow business owners to focus on their core skills
- Don’t underestimate the power of checklists as a foundation for a business or application
- Business Plans are hard to pivot away from, write out a vision document instead.
*Action Steps:*
- Talk with local business owners about this idea. Start with a geofenced location and businesses you know or spend time in normally.
- Presell business owners $99 for lifetime access.
- Find a technical co-founder.
- Brainstorm a business plan: put every thought you have on paper then come back a few days later to organize it.
- Local marketing: join local business and community groups. Throw flyers in the local stores. Use local mailers with an odd shaped piece of mail. Facebook marketing. Needls.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- Needls Media
- Justin’s LinkedIn
- jh@needls.com
- allrecipes.com
Justin has always had an entrepreneurial mindset. When he was ten years old, he worked at an outdoor lifestyle store that his grandparents owned in the small city outside of Kingston, Ontario. While working at the store, he made it his mission to sell as many backpacks as possible. He found it thrilling to identify a person’s needs and find the perfect solution for them even at that young of an age. Justin is an internet visionary that has pioneered markets, he has more than 18 years of startup and exit experience. Previously, he founded the first brokerage for online businesses. During that time Justin brokered $100 million in transactions to Fortune 1000 companies, PE firms, family offices and venture funds.
His plethora of experience making visions turn to reality makes him a known and respected player in the industry. There’s nothing he loves more than fixing problems. Justin sees himself as more of a leader and a mentor rather than a boss, he creates teams of meticulously picked industry specialists to help achieve his goals.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
*Nuggets:*
- Once you have ideas take action, always push the train forward
*Action Steps:*
- Contact friends who might be interested in having some videos edited
- Contact wedding or event videographers and hire them to do the editing
- Consider/test pricing strategies
- offer free or $99 for a 60 second video teaser
- upsell to a $300-$500 3-5 minute video
- offer a rebate of $100-$200 for sharing on social with a link to your service
- find more partners and offer a subscription service to fans
- offer a number of credits per month that could be used for various concerts
- Create a video editing course and have students edit videos for free that are shared socially to build your audience
- Find an event or a venue that might be good for videos
- if enough fans buy in, then produce the first event (keep a production budget of under $10K)
- ask the venue to keep your equipment installed and sign them on as a partner
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- The Travel Secret (David’s company)
- Acadium (useful for finding digital marketing apprentices)
David Adler, Founder and CEO of The Travel Secret. David is a seasoned entrepreneur who has had extensive experience in travel, e-commerce, telecom, hospitality, and international business.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
*Nuggets:*
- The value of the product goes beyond its functionality; for two equal quality products, the one that makes consumers feel better about themselves will win
- The snob effect is a documented phenomenon wherein a higher price point can actually increase the demand for a product or service.
- During a tumultuous time people who want to be perceived as doing okay may be a market for your products
- Some Craft Distillers are making bank by producing hand sanitizer instead of spirits
- Networking to develop one business can lead to other opportunities
*Action Steps:*
- Build a list of distillers who are currently making hand sanitizer.
- Contact your list and see who would list a product online and allocate stock to you.
- Act as an affiliate and drop ship the product.
- Hire a designer on Fiverr to create branded mockups for post-pandemic sanitizer packaging and marketing so you can help distilleries make this work.
- Market through the existing channels of the distilleries, through bars and restaurants.
- You might donate a portion of your proceeds to support a relevant cause.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
*Links:*
- https://jimsesh.com/
Australian Podcast Awards Finalist, Economist and Accidental Festival Owner, James Henderson develops audio brands with his businesses, Aych Media and CBD Entertainment in the Media and Music industries, respectively. His holding company commits to a broad philosophy to 'elevate universal consciousness'.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
For this event, 8 incredible entrepreneur guests paired up pseudo-randomly and all start from scratch sharing only their mindsets and experiences to co-create some innovative and unshakable project ideas that could beat a recession. We proudly raised over $400 on behalf of the WHO COVID-19 Response Fund in presenting this event.
- This session features Anthony Sarandrea, Josh Elizetxe, and Anthony Mink
Anthony Sarandrea
Anthony is recognized as one of the top customer generators in the world, specializing in the financial services space, running a team that drives over 1 million customers each year.
Anthony is recognized as one of the top lead generators in the world, running a team that specializes in driving thousands of inbound phone calls daily across a number of verticals including health, finance, legal, and education.
He is consistently featured as one of the top “under 30 year old” entrepreneurs and was featured along side Snapchat’s founder Evan Spiegel as one of the “Entrepreneurs that are changing the world”.
Josh Elizetxe
Josh Elizetxe is the founder of Snow and an Internet advertising veteran and successful serial entrepreneur. Last year, over 100,000,000 people interacted with websites and brands owned by Josh’s parent company. He serves on the board of the Phoenix Coding Academy and the Fleischer Scholars Program. Josh is a sought-after company advisor and Angel Investor in the software (SaaS), e-commerce, and advertising technology industries. With an uncanny focus on data-driven strategy, his work has resulted in over $1 Billion in proven enterprise value tracked since 2009.
Anthony Mink (Mink)
Anthony the co-founder of Live Bearded. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, hunting and fishing is a way of life and growing a beard is the rule, not the exception. Anthony comes from a long line of beardsmen including his father who has lived bearded for over 30 years!
Anthony has always had a desire to live life on his own terms, to not be confined by the system, or anyone in it so in 2011 he quit his "job" and started his own company so he could fulfill his dream of being his own boss, answering to no one, and traveling the world!
Since Anthony has built and sold 4 successful online companies and has traveled to 41 countries! With a deep passion for business, beards, and brotherhood, Livebearded.com is more than just a beard grooming company for Anthony, it’s a passion project and a way of life!
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
For this event, 8 incredible entrepreneur guests paired up pseudo-randomly and all start from scratch sharing only their mindsets and experiences to co-create some innovative and unshakable project ideas that could beat a recession. We proudly raised over $400 on behalf of the WHO COVID-19 Response Fund in presenting this event.
- This session features David Denny
David Denny is the Co-founder and a Partner at Carpe Diem Developers which is a renewable energy industry leader that provides development services for commercial and utility solar PV projects nationwide. They partner with business leaders, landowners, and utilities to develop and execute profitable solar projects. With over a decade of experience in solar project development, Carpe Diem Developers has the expertise to create projects that generate long term revenue streams and reduce carbon emissions.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
For this event, 8 incredible entrepreneur guests paired up pseudo-randomly and all start from scratch sharing only their mindsets and experiences to co-create some innovative and unshakable project ideas that could beat a recession. We proudly raised over $400 on behalf of the WHO COVID-19 Response Fund in presenting this event.
- This session features Sam Davidson and Matt Verlinich
Sam Davidson is a serial entrepreneur and professional speaker who has written three books. He is currently the CEO of Batch, a gift and retail company that makes it easy for people to find or share a taste of their favorite southern city.
Matt Verlinich was the founding General Manager of TechShop Pittsburgh and a founding member of the Protohaven makerspace. He’s also the founder of Clear Ice Rocks, where he invented, prototyped, crowdfunded, and mass-produced a system for creating completely clear ice at home. Matt is now a part of the Innovation Works team, where he works with early stage hardware companies to guide them through the design and manufacturing process.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
For this event, 8 incredible entrepreneur guests paired up pseudo-randomly and all start from scratch sharing only their mindsets and experiences to co-create some innovative and unshakable project ideas that could beat a recession. We proudly raised over $400 on behalf of the WHO COVID-19 Response Fund in presenting this event.
- This session features Peter Corbett and David Kosciusko.
Peter Corbett:As the child of a single mother with 3 kids, Peter learned to hustle at an early age to afford a better life. He bootstrapped a digital agency, grew it to 100 employees and sold it to WPP, the world's largest publicly traded ad agency holding company. He retired two years ago and since then has been training in hospice at Brooklyn hospital, working directly with people who's family members are sick or dying. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, and continues to help others in their entrepreneurial journey.
Dave Kosciusko:Dave has a couple of cell phone repair stores in Rhode Island. They buy and sell electronics for repair and resale on eBay and he also has a digital product teaching others how to profit from reselling phones the way he does.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Have customer discovery conversations in a casual setting to get real feedback; otherwise people will naturally try to placate your ego
- Design products (including education and workshops) such that attendees are energized at the end, not drained
- The key to sales is having a more expensive product; selling a $1,000,000 is within an order of magnitude as easy as selling a $1,000 product
Action Steps:
- Choose a topic you are interested in and curate a lesson plan
- Find educators who are teaching that subject and offer it to them for free
- Watch how users respond to the plan and use that feedback to improve it
- Fall off your bike
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
- @robfitz on Twitter
- The Workshop Survival Guide
- The Mom Test
- Union Square Ventures Looking for Syllabus 2.0
- Y Combinator
Rob Fitzpatrick is an entrepreneur of 13 years (his first business was funded, the rest have been bootstrapped). He's the author of The Mom Test, a book about how to talk to customers and figure out if your business is a good idea. He went through YCombinator in 2007. He describes himself as a techie who eventually learned sales. He currently lives in Barcelona, Spain.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Successful businesses are started by people just like you; they go home and watch Netflix with their significant other, etc...
Action Steps:
- Investigate current revenue split for concert venues
- Search for the managers/decision-makers of concerts at large venues
- Contact them via a cold call, email, or LinkedIn message
- Offer to run a trial event which you can help them presell a live stream of their upcoming concert
- If enough fans buy in, then produce the first event (keep a production budget of under $10K)
- Ask the venue to keep your equipment installed and sign them on as a partner
- Find more partners and offer a subscription service to fans
- You could offer a number of credits per month that could be used for various concerts
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
- CROSSNET
- 1,000 True Fans
- Twitch
- Music Hall of Williamsburg
- Terminal 5
Chris Meade is the co-founder of CROSSNET, the world's first four-way volleyball game. CROSSNET combines elements of the childhood game four square and volleyball in a competitive game to 11, win by 2. CROSSNET is now available at Walmart, Target, DICKS, Academy Sports, Amazon, and 20+ other retailers.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Non-linear thinking is critical to entrepreneurship; the path is rarely carved out for you so you need to make connections yourself.
- Successful entrepreneurs are looking for people to mentor and receive help from; if you take a little bit of action, you can stand out from the crowd.
Action Steps:
- If you’re a medical professionals, web developers, or other entities wish to contribute to the goals of DoctorLingo reach out or submit terminology here.
- Choose an idea from a previous episode and take one small step!
Do you enjoy this type of episode? What areas of business would you like us to focus on more? Email us at update@runwithit.fm and you may get an on-air callout!
Links:
https://getusppe.org/
DoctorLingo
White Coat Investor
Doctors Unbound
josh (at) doctorlingo.com
Josh Calvano is a third year medical student out of Rocky Vista University in Colorado. Prior to medical school he worked in IT doing end-user support, computer repair, and network administration. He is also currently a second lieutenant in the US Air Force and plans to pursue a career as an Air Force Anesthesiologist upon graduation.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Use the opposite of the “Mom test” - tell people about your idea/mockup as if it’s someone else’s terrible idea to get their honest feedback
- Waking up with a “poor mindset,” living on a budget and working hard to always earn more could be the secret of some very wealthy people
- Even if you have plenty of money it can still help to live less extravagantly so that you can maintain connections with close friends and family.
- Anthony echos a common entrepreneurial mantra “Fail fast.”
- Once one masters money, the next focus is often “impact.”
- Really dumb down your MVP a lot (e.g. the creator of palm pilot carried around a block of wood as a prototype to feel if it made sense to create)
Action Steps:
- Create a very “dumbed down” MVP to see what might make sense for you
- Sign up for an existing app, like Mint to explore the niche
- Consider tech savvy millennials and college students that you can support as their income grows.
- If you are not technical, connect with developers at meetups and join developer groups. Also, develop your skills at communicating vision, emotion and motivation to others.
- Experiment further with potential app features
- Consider account blocks on spending via the app based on triggers users set up
- Focus on making the experience fun and easy for users
- Create “hoops” that users have to jump through before making questionable spending decisions
- Find a way to get yourself obsessed with one relevant number in your pocket all day long.
- Look for partnerships with banks (start with small banks then move to the larger players)
- Look into collecting financial data on client habits to help them get great loan rates and connect them with lenders
- Consider using AI and user feedback to help curate a good budgeting plan for users
- As an aspirational plan, you could move users from budgeting to making impact: saving money for fun to sharing it with a cause that’s important to them
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Credit Karma
Mint
http://www.anthonysarandrea.com/
Anthony Sarandrea started off door knocking and built a company to $100k+/day with over 1M customers a year. He is recognized as one of the top customer generators in the world, running a team that drives over 1 million customers each year. Today, he runs a profitable portfolio of websites ranging from commerce to content blogs that combined reach millions of buyers every month.
He is consistently featured as one of the top “under 30 year old” entrepreneurs and was featured alongside Snapchat’s founder Evan Spiegel as one of the “Entrepreneurs that are changing the world.”
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Do you enjoy this type of episode? What areas of business would you like us to focus on more? Email us at update@runwithit.fm and you may get an on-air callout!
Links:
The Expensive Water Bottle with Jeff Proctor
Done-For-You Digital Marketing with TJ Clark
A Clever Take on Residential Window Cleaning with Richard Bitton
How to Start a Software Company with David Hauser
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- The idea is 5% of what makes a business successful; execution is the rest
- Jeff Bezos was savvy enough to make billions just investing in other companies
- Find a pain that elicits a visceral response in your customers
- Learn why some businesses pay some employees to quit
- Focus on three things when starting a business: your customers’ pain, their ideal outcome, and your mechanism for bridging the gap
- Craft your prospecting emails envisioning that you are the person reading it.
- “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing” - Teddy Roosevelt
- Be willing to build things that might not work and move on from them if they don’t.
Action Steps:
- In summary: Find a clear customer, get them a clear result, and implement a clear mechanism.
- Create sales funnels to recruit job candidates as if they were clients. Use landing pages, lead magnets, opt-ins.
- After the funnel qualifies them, prospective employees invest in personality tests, such as Kolbe A and Wealth Dynamics (test fees can be refunded if hired).
- Create a test that allows you to see how prospects implement a job-related task.
- Implement this idea manually. Take on your first client for free. Prove a result with some of their hiring jobs, then move on to clients 2, 3, 4 and 5, increasing your fee.
- Invest the majority of your time in client relationships and let the business details be determined by what you learn.
- Hire developers to build a saas around the systems that work.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm.
Links:
Start From Zero (no opt-in excerpt for Run With It listeners)
Kolbe A Index
Wealth Dynamics
Breakthrough Advertising
Key Values
Loom.com
We Work Remotely
Google Forms
Wufoo Forms
Teddy Roosevelt - A Square Deal speech
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- The idea is a small part of a successful business; it’s about the execution
- Creating a business idea that forces you to network with local businesses has collateral benefits
- The pain is deep here: local business owners are eager for something that helps them compete with bigger names
Action Steps:
- Create a list of all the businesses in your local area
- Build a minimum viable product website that houses these businesses' information
- Use targeted advertising to bring locals to your site
- Test monetization strategies
- Approach business owners and sell them on advertising with you
- Include an app-based discount card that promotes local businesses
- Gather local citizen email addresses and send them discounts and offers
- At a meta-level, you could create an app that allows local governments to implement this in their own towns and neighborhoods
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
The How of Business
SCORE Find a Mentor Program
Extracting Pain from Dentists with David Cristello
Smart Home Installation and More with Mehdi Kajbaf
Henry Lopez is a serial entrepreneur, Small Business Coach, and Host of top-rated The How of Business podcast show. In addition to investing in and growing his businesses, he is dedicated to helping others start, run and grow their small businesses. He has over 34 years of diverse business experience, including successful careers in the information technology industry, sales, sales training and business ownership. He has been directly involved in over 10 different small businesses since purchasing his first business in 1991. He has developed and launched his own businesses, and has bought and sold businesses as well. Henry also serves as a volunteer SCORE Mentor.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Spirituality doesn’t have to mean religiosity. Understanding your mind, body, and soul for yourself can be all you need to become spiritual.
- If you see the soul as a separate entity from our body, and a mind you may notice that all three conspire with each other to generate our experience.
- We want to improve in our personal development, but the content that is unique that has been accumulated over centuries and is not reaching the general public.
- Always be ready to pivot and stay detached from your ideas.
- Pivot or quitting depends on time, money and conviction.
Action Steps:
- Validate the idea by having conversations.
- Determine who you want to talk to.
- Then figure out how you're going to search for these people, Google, LinkedIn, etc.
- Reach out, pitch your idea and adjust it until you come up with something people will pay for.
- Design an MVP once you narrow in on an idea.
- Create KPIs to track the success of the project.
- Build the MVP, bring it to market, and track the KPIs. e.g. time spent, money spent.
- An MVP could be as simple as a PDF ebook or basic course.
- Be ready to pivot anywhere where potential clients see the value and will pay.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Innergamepurpose.com
Udemy Academy
Manuj Aggarwal is an entrepreneur, investor and CTO of Tetranoodle, a software consulting company that helps startup founders with tech projects. Manuj has become a technical leader and CTO of multiple startups. Through mindfulness and meditation, he broke through the emotional and mental barriers he faced along his journey starting from a 15-year-old working in a factory for $2 per day. Manuj remains passionate about education and spirituality.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Savvy founders often don’t come up with their own business ideas - they get them from an opportune market
- You can do this even if you have a full-time job - you have to get laser focused on the most important activities
Action Steps:
- Search for the top 100 dental practices in the country
- Reach out to them and interview them to find out what about their systems are producing results
- Starting a podcast about dentists as a platform to connect with them could provide you much more leverage than cold emails and build deeper relationships faster
- Notice that their processes are probably pieced together using spreadsheets and by connecting disparate software tools
- Start documenting the processes you discover
- Wireframe a software using Balsamiq, Keynotopia, or just cutting and pasting buttons and flows from your favorite software and apps
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Jetpack Workflow
David Hauser on Run With It
Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi
David Cristello is the CEO & Founder of Jetpack Workflow, which is used by thousands of accountants in 18+ countries to help them better manage their client work. He has a background in (lean, cost effective, measurable, value driven) Marketing, specifically for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and startups.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Learning to set and achieve goals has been the single most important skill Zachary has developed.
- The label of “ex-con” does significant damage. There can be a lot of value in rebranding after going through a certification process as we’ve outlined.
- Get the “right people on the bus then figure out where to drive out” - Jim Collins concept.
- Follow the “Learn. Do. Teach.” model for success.
- Save money, and do good: there’s a tax cut for companies that hire convicted felons.
Action Steps:
- Research how much prisons cost taxpayers.
- To promote and grow, invite coaches, entrepreneurs to speak in prisons.
- Create a platform for online course creators to share their content within prisons.
- Create a business forecast for how much money this will save society, and come up with very specific numbers on how this program could increase government revenues.
- Create a vetting process to choose the best, most committed participants for this program.
- Teach goal setting as a basic first step and then create categories to funnel people into training in line with their strengths.
- Start with one ex-convict and do your best. Build on their success.
- If you’re currently in prison, read Man’s Search for Meaning and write a reflection of what you’ve learned from it.
- Invite successful graduates to evangelize and recruit others within prisons.
- Investigate how Ghost was built as a successful business-like non-profit.
- Create a franchise model with smaller branches getting a stamp of approval from the larger organization.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Underdog Empowerment
Andy Frisella on Underdog Empowerment
Grant Cardone on Underdog Empowerment
Neil Patel on Underdog Empowerment
Dean Graziosi on Underdog Empowerment
Designing Education for Real Life with Zach Fleishman
Ghost
The High Line Project
Jim Collins - First Who, Then What
Awaken the Giant Within
Man’s Search for Meaning
From over 5 years in prison to building a 6 figure business, Zachary Babcock helps entrepreneurs launch, grow, monetize, and produce top-shelf podcasts.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Deep commitment to your business is essential. Don’t bother getting started if you’re not going to be all in
- Don’t need to reinvent the wheel in order to be successful. It’s ok to follow a successful model and execute it in your city
- Make up for your growing pains through good customer service
- Use complaints about a competitive product or service to find out how to launch a new product that’s better
Action Steps:
- Layout the menu of food, drinks, etc, and of course, games
- Run numbers to understand revenue, and see if you have a profitable model
- Once you’ve decided on your offerings and revenue model, decide on the layout of the space
- Investigate competitors in your area: what are they doing well and where are opportunities for improvement?
- Play some board games! Find out which ones are suitable for this idea and create a curated list
- Find a suitable location - either high-traffic or a large space
- Here are some potential models to use, one or all three:
- Patrons come in with friends, grab a table and technology or a person facilitates your experience
- Create a consistent time, say 7pm every night that anyone, even solo gamers can come in and join a game
- Create smaller rooms to host customized gaming experiences for groups including the appropriate atmosphere, props, music, etc.
- Explore potential revenue models: e.g. cover charges, order minimums, group rate custom experiences.
- Join forces with, or buy out an existing coffee shop, bar or restaurant. You can start by hosting some game nights or tournaments for them.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Brew Point Coffee
Starting & Running a Coffee Shop book
Snakes & Lattes Board Game Cafe
King Makers in Columbus
Pieces in St. Louis
Melissa Villanueva and Angelo Sepulveda are a couple who started a coffee shop (Brewpoint Coffee Workshop and Roastery) with nothing and in the past 6 short years grew it from one shop to a coffee company with multiple storefronts, and now their own book on how to start a coffee shop.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Find the joy in your work - Mehdi set up a ringtone to go off every time he made a sale. Have fun with your clients and make your products and services a joy for them.
- You need your values to drive what you do as an entrepreneur - Mehdi’s deep desire for freedom fueled his work ethic and helped him through the inevitable tough times
- You can always get value out of and generate value from a business project—even if it isn't financially successful and even if it fails.
- Live in the moment to create your future
Action Steps:
- Buy several smart devices and set them up in your own home
- Throw a party for friends & family who are not familiar with smart home technology and demonstrate it for them
- Post an ad on Craigslist or Kijiji
- Reach out to complementary businesses and pitch your services as an add-on for them
- Grow through word of mouth
- Develop an Amazon Affiliate income stream for equipment
- Add extra special touches for your clients and network with them
- Become an agent for other installers
- Consider this business as a jump-off for a larger home management service
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
10% off Matboard and More by using Coupon Code “runwithit”
Kijiji (Canada’s version of Craigslist)
Mehdi’s Starter Story interview
Mehdi Kajbaf is CEO of Matboard and More, the number one online retailer of custom matting and framing online. They've been working on the site since 2012 and have helped tens of thousands of customers get picture matting to showcase their art. He studied at the University of Waterloo in Engineering and completed his MBA at Schulich. He loves traveling, the Maple Leafs and believes you gotta live in the moment to create your future.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Find out the three Filters Justin uses to vet his business ideas
- Find people/corporations “already in motion” (e.g. don’t waste time and energy to convince people that climate change is real)
- How Justin thinks about unlikely competitors in entirely different industries
- Justin uses Twitter the way a comedian works out material at local clubs - collection of raw thoughts
- Product/entrepreneur fit and entrepreneur/market fit are just as important as product/market fit
Action Steps:
- Attend a sustainability conference, connect with people in charge of sustainability, and ask them about their current programs
- Build a better carbon impact calculator than sustainablestartups.co
- Collect emissions reports from large companies and compile an assessment of their biggest emissions
- Read up on strategies to improve efficiency and do an audit for your local YMCA, Police Station or City Hall
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Wildbit
Saul Griffith
Google Scholar
Paul Jarvis
Matt West
Amazon Employees for Climate Justice
Sustainable Startups Carbon Impact Calculator
Justin’s Twitter Account
Justin’s Website
Transistor.fm
Justin Jackson is the co-founder of Transistor.fm, a podcast hosting and analytics platform. He lives in BC, Canada.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Content is king, and with all of the data and information available, you need a diverse team to create the best content.
- Crowdsourcing of content creation could reduce creation time by 70%.
- Getting media exposure for your project depends on being relevant to current events.
- Be a problem solver. Most freelancers follow directions very well, but they are not problem solvers. Problem solvers are a rarity.
Action Steps:
- Brainstorm how the workflow is going to go from the writer’s perspective and from the company's perspective.
- Determine how the writers will be compensated.
- Submit a request for a document to be created in Google docs.
- Observe the workflow of the Google doc writers and document it.
- Pitch the “crowdsourcing” of content idea to companies that need content produced.
- Use the “crowdsourcing” workflow to create the content needed by companies that you pitched the idea to.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Mike’s Website
Mike’s LinkedIn page
Mike’s Upwork Page
Freelancer Master Class
Mike Volkin is a serial entrepreneur, public speaker, Army veteran, and author of 5 books (one bestseller). He has built and sold 4 companies. As the lead instructor of Freelancer Masterclass, he helps freelancers earn more money and get more freedom. Mr. Volkin has a tremendous track record of driving company growth and has consulted with over 400 companies.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Ask yourself, what is the very thing that has you interested in this conversation, and chances are that, if you classify it as mental health or not, that “thing” is giving you enough to want to participate
- Corporations are investing more money into wellness and these types of programs than they ever have
- Ask yourself, “What are my distinct natural assets (what is in my DNA)?”
Action Steps:
- Consider your natural assets and brainstorm what you can with them
- Create a training program, based on these natural assets that can be pitched to progressive corporations or to host a virtual summit (start small with room to grow)
- Use social media to pitch your idea to determine its viability
- Contact experts on the chosen subject to fill your virtual summit
- Record the lectures for future use to package into sellable products
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Jules’ personal website
Jules' articles for Forbes
Unconventional Life Podcast
Jules Schroeder Music
Ranked by Inc. Magazine as #1 of the “Top 27 Female Entrepreneurs Changing the World in 2017” and one of the “Top 40 Millennials To Follow in 2018″, Jules Schroeder is a musician and visionary on a mission to inspire people to create a life by their own design. With this vision, Jules created Unconventional Life, a Forbes column and top-ranked podcast for entrepreneurs that features the stories of millennials living from this new paradigm. Unconventional Life has reached millions of people from over seventy-five different countries and has become a global community of like-minded entrepreneurs, influencers, creatives, and thought leaders. Jules herself has always been multi-passionate as an avid cross fitter, yoga teacher, musician and singer, writer, avid traveler and overall life enthusiast.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Learn to think about the wide variety of types of capital.
- Learn the business side of a project that supports creativity.
- Learn about some interesting music and comedy projects.
Action Steps:
- Talk to local venues and musicians to better understand how open mics work and what problems you can solve.
- Learn something from existing venues that are streaming entertainment
- Get a national competition together among different bars that already stream their live acts
- Partner with a Restauranteur or a local bar that has a good reputation and good acts.
- Figure out a budget for one production. Talk to an AV expert. (Max will probably be 10-20K rental costs)
- Find a location, create a budget, plan construction, manage costs, do revenue projections
- Have an open call open mic every Monday and Tuesday night and create a tournament with a championship once or twice a year.
- Gather people who have a buzz about them in NYC as Open Mic participants.
- Explore the revenue stream of broadcasting to Youtube.
- Try to connect with Spotify, Redbull or another brand that is already promoting up and coming artists.
- Reach out to potential Partners, like bloggers or A&R reps who look for the next big artist. Maybe even have them pay to be involved
- Reach out to big-name artists and local artists to practice pitch and get people on board.
- Invite bigger artists to join randomly and draw a larger audience.
- Reach out to Arthur to get involved in any way, even if you want to be a host for the events
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Pete’s Candy Store: https://www.petescandystore.com/
Jalopy Theater: http://jalopytheatre.org/
The Creek and the Cave (Founder, Rebecca Trent): http://creeklic.com/
Impresario: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impresario
Empresario: https://www.google.com/search?q=empresario+en+ingles
Live Stream Karaoke New Orleans: http://catskaraoke.com/live-stream-2/
Mumford and Sons Outside of a Pizza Shop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0BoSQbk8pg
The Acoustic Open Mic Bridgeport CT: http://www.theacoustic.rocks/
Spotify: https://www.spotify.com/
Redbull: https://www.redbull.com/
Comrad: https://soundcloud.com/comrad-3/toptracks
Arthur Revechkis worked in data modeling for many years. After that, he was a partner in a chain of dental practices which he ran for 10 years and then sold his share of. Since then he’s invested in real estate, fast food restaurants, and is now writing and recording music and hopefully going on tour in the near future.
Listen to Run With It Anywhere:
https://www.runwithit.fm/subscribe
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Balancing 2-sided marketplaces is tricky - better to stick with roughly even instead of trying to match podcasters with dramatically different audience numbers
- The criterion that determines when you should build a business around a 2-sided market
Action Steps:
- Contact up-and-coming podcasters and offer this matching service
- Contact podcast hosting companies and sell them on building this service for their customers
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Sales for Founders
Gymhopper
PostPerk
FiveMinuteFounder.com
RedCircle
Piano World
Pod Hunt
Kickstarter for Podcasts with Mubashar Iqbal
Louis Nicholls is a self-taught developer, recently escaped from the crazy world of VC-backed startups. Through his Sales for Founders course and podcast he helps (technical) founders learn how to do sales, find their first customers and build a product people want to pay them for. He previously co-founded a B2B SaaS company, Gymhopper, which was acquired in 2018 and PostPerk, another B2B consumer company. He maintains a weekly actionable advice email for founders which you can subscribe to at FiveMinuteFounder.com
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Learn how, as an employee, to practice “smart planning” by building relationships with the leaders of your company.
- Learn how and why someone working in the mailroom in a company can make a direct connection with the CEO?
- Learn about the power of sharing your goals and aspirations with lots of people.
Action Steps:
- Contact CEOs that might be on board with this project that are givers.
- Explain Gary’s idea and get them to make a commitment
- Get in touch with folks in the urban community that are givers and get them committed to the project.
- As an example, you could go into a community, gathering just 5 to 10 of the right community members that would be committed workers. Organize an event where they can meet with powerful CEOs.
- This is a great opportunity for younger kids, aged 16-18, coming from rough urban communities to spearhead a project and connect with important people.
- As an intrapreneur, introduce this project to your company as a way to create a structured onboarding system, something many companies are great need of.
- Look into creating a "seal" for a special type of corp or business that would use Gary’s system. Study how things work with B corps. What can be applied to this idea?
- Do a pilot of Gary’s project, starting with just 300-400 kids.
- By your 3rd year, extend the project to 1000 kids.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
https://www.ditchdiggerceo.com/
https://www.rabine.com/
As a senior in high school, Gary Rabine dreamt of starting a landscaping and paving business while his friends were making college plans. He believed he had gained enough experience laboring in his dad's small business that he could do it. Surrounded by college-bound friends one day in a high school cafeteria, one of them asked his college plans and he replied that he'd like to save his money and start a business. A smart-alec friend eagerly termed him a "Ditch-Digger", loudly laughing “Gary's going to be a Ditch Digger”. Motivated by this memory and a desire to walk his own path, 37 years later, Gary Rabine has grown Rabine Paving and many other businesses which are now the Rabine Group of Companies. He co-hosts the Ditch Digger CEO Podcast about stories like his: From "ditch-digger" to the founder/CEO of a national facilities services empire.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- How a labor-intensive business can scale while providing a moat in the interim
- On a social media consultant “not really knowing your business”: business owners don’t always know what resonates best with their customers
- Whitney believes the shotgun approach is better than the “epic content” approach - again, you often can’t predict what will resonate with your tribe
- How and when to offer your services for free
Action Steps:
- Go after streaky prospects - people who’ve used social media with some success in the past but haven’t been consistent
- Run Facebook Ads to people who follow Gary V, Mel Robbins, Jasmine Star, etc… and presell this service
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
The Money Nerds Podcast
ClickMinded
Design Pickle
Temi (transcription service)
Whitney Hansen is a personal finance coach and entrepreneur, founder of themoneynerds.com and host of the money nerds podcast. She teaches overwhelmed millennials how to pay off debt and be financially independent by giving them the tools to have more fun with money and sprinkling in a little silliness. Some of her accomplishments include paying off $30,000 dollars debt in 10 months, buying her first home at 19, and paying only $472 for her master’s degree.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Learn how businesses like Jeff’s thrive despite living in a very competitive market.
- Discover the power of pricing at the high end.
- Find out how creating a product with marketing in mind can literally change our values and habits.
Action Steps:
- If you have the chops, brainstorm how to implement some of the functionality discussed in this episode.
- Go to the places where the ideal clients for this product might be, like a gym, and investigate what people would want to get out of a $150 water bottle.
- Try a second and third demographic for the product to get feedback from potential clients. Some example locations/events to visit might be a winery, or a gala event where you can find wealthy people. Alternatively talk to people, who for medical reasons, really need to focus on their water intake.
- Don't focus on folks who are not already actively willing to or interested in paying for products like this. Discover who would be your early adopters.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
DollarSprout
Jeff Proctor graduated from Virginia tech in 2013 with a BS in biochemistry, but he's always been a bit of a money nerd. After working one on one with clients for nearly three years in private wealth management Jeff launched DollarSprout with his business partner and longtime friend Ben Huber. A few stumbles and lots of lessons learned along the way, and he and Ben have created one of the fastest-growing personal finance blogs on the internet. Outside of work, Jeff is an avid golfer—avid, not necessarily good—and he enjoys spending time with his fiance, Paige and his two dogs, Annie and Max.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- If you’re not a developer, you can build the MVP without writing code using tools such as Makerpad
- If you’re a developer, you can build an MVP for this idea in a weekend!
- If you’re a non-technical founder searching for a co-founder, outline the value you’ll be providing the team when pitching technical folks to join
Action Steps:
- Build an MVP of this service (use “no code” tools or search for a cofounder if you’re not a developer)
- Brainstorm affiliate marketing opportunities and incorporate affiliate links in initial version
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Pod Hunt
Makerpad.co
Indie Hackers
Mubashar Iqbal (Mubs) loves making things and has been since he was 8 years old. He’s made so many things the he was selected as ProductHunt's maker of the year for 2016, runner up in 2015 and 2017. Recently he's been trying to help others make more. He's also the founder of Pod Hunt, a daily curation of the best new podcasts.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Learn why now is a great time to find a great domain for a new project.
- Find out how to start from a very simple mockup, validate an idea and grow it through iteration.
Action Steps:
- Do some market research on power users for domain names, i.e. people who spend a lot of time searching for and creating them. Can you attract enough that would pay a decent amount for a service like this? Find out if you can sustain a business based on power users paying for this.
- Research business models to find out what would work best. For example, affiliate programs, advertising or charging users at different tiers.
- Research registrars that you might connect with through an API to validate availability. Find out which registar(s) could be the right one(s) to connect your users to register with.
- Research the technical challenges of matching against all existing registered domains and storing and accessing the data on which domain name inquiries would be based.
- Keep in mind there may be "non-technical" ways to get this started. Don't assume you need to have advanced computer science skills.
- Validate with a landing page builder. But include a really rough version of it that people can play with. For example, generate four input boxes that accept nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. Spins them all together and gives users a huge list that gives them an idea of what could inspire them.
- Use this foundation, plus take advantage of tremendous capacity for constant evolution based on user suggestions and your observations to slowly iterate and improve.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
https://garrettdimon.com/
https://sifterapp.com/
Garrett Dimon is a software developer, entrepreneur and development consultant. In 2008, he created Sifter, a hosted bug and issue tracking application built with Ruby on Rails. In July 2010, he began working on Sifter full-time. In March of 2016, he sold Sifter to focus on recovering from medical issues that ultimately led to a left below-knee amputation. In 2013, he wrote the first edition of Starting & Sustaining, a book that addresses the logistics and lessons learned of starting and successfully running a hosted web application as a solo founder bootstrapping.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Don’t try to compete with the hundreds of startups working on the same problems for the same industries - do something different
- How to answer the objection “you don’t understand my industry so you can’t build software for it” by turning it into a strength
- Leverage your outsider status to build better software by asking childlike questions
- You don’t need to love the industry to be passionate about your work (e.g. empowering entrepreneurs to succeed)
- Be “as close to the money as possible” when developing enterprise solutions (help add customers or keep them longer)
- Enterprise managers are typically risk-averse - understand their motivations and reduce the risk of your solution as much as possible to close the sale
- Asking for money often surfaces the real pain points - do it before building the solution
- Don’t waste time trying to convince people who aren’t early adopters
- You don’t need to be a coder in order to follow this process
- Sometimes when your customers call to complain, all they’re looking for is to be heard
- Businesses like these are great to start during recessions - there’s more talent available and companies are looking for ways to reduce costs and increase revenue
Action Steps:
- Brainstorm a “first connection” - a corporate employee you’re connected with that can give you a baseline understanding of the problems in that industry and some credibility when calling others
- Talk with a minimum of 10 people in a particular industry and identify a theme around the main problems and opportunities in that industry
- Pre-sell your solution to ensure it’s a real pain that’s worth developing software for
- Develop an MVP yourself or hire someone else to do so
- Get feedback from early customers and iterate
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Y Combinator Request for Startups
Grasshopper
Chargify
David’s Website
Unstoppable: 4 Steps to Transform Your Life
David founded Grasshopper, which was bootstrapped over $30 million in annual recurring revenue and acquired by Citrix for $170 million in 2015. He also founded Chargify, which for over 10 years has enabled thousands of businesses to manage their recurring revenue life cycle. Mark Cuban was an investor and it was acquired by Scaleworks in 2016. He's built, sold and invested in a number of different companies throughout his life since high school. His most recent project is a book called Unstoppable: 4 Steps to Transform Your Life.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Learn how Revetize uses a business's existing clients to create new revenue opportunities with smart simple but incredibly effective strategies.
- Learn how to get out of the weeds in starting a business and focus on what’s important.
- Hear what it’s like for a seasoned entrepreneur to imagine starting a brand new business in under one week.
Action Steps:
- Spend a nominal amount to form an LLC, and make the commitment to get this started.
- Don't go into an intense research phase, just move quick.
- Research to discover what the market of local window cleaners looks like.
- Chat with window cleaners find out key info like:
- How much they are charging per pane
- What the standard rate is
- Different services they offer
- Their value proposition
- What margins they are looking for
- What they would do differently if they didn’t have to do marketing
- After establishing relationships with window cleaners, develop a compensation plan that will work for your salespeople (likely some high schoolers about to go to college). e.g.
- 18% commission for their first 100 sales.
- 23% commission for sales 100-300
- 30% commission on sales over 300
- Include some bonuses along the way to inspire
- Develop the sales pitch that you will teach the salespeople (Consider raising money for college as part of the pitch).
- Leverage the referral network of the existing salespeople to recruit more like them
- Create the behind the scenes systems to get appointments on cleaners schedules etc.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Revetize
Richard Bitton is the CEO and co-founder of Revetize. Revetize is a one-stop-shop for customer communication, lead gen, and reputation management. It allows you to leverage your happy customers & quickly acquire referrals, reviews, and repeat business. He previously founded Alpha Solar. He grew up in Idaho and started doing door-to-door sales at 15. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University and currently resides in Lehigh, Utah, A.K.A. the “Silicon Slopes.”
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Why focusing on inclusivity makes good business sense, and doesn’t detract from majority markets
- How everyday people can help those who are discriminated against
- How Lizzo leveraged the Kardashian brand to pave the way for plus-size women
- The typical success rate for an influencer to gain a sponsorship with a company
- How to write a quality cold email to people working at big brands
Action Steps:
- Draft a mission statement around why this idea is appealing to you
- Complete market research around outdoor space
- Create a business plan for this idea
- Find complementary businesses and pitch them on partnering
- Research influencers who are already working with big brands and find comparable POC ones
- Contact POC influencers in the outdoor space and pitch the project
- Contact executives in charge of partner relations at big brands and pitch the project
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Bravely Go
The Fairer Cents
Bravely Go on Instagram
Bravely Go on Twitter
Kara Perez is the founder of Bravely, a community that gives self-identified women the financial tools to bridge the gap between their dreams and their realities. Kara discovered her love of finances courtesy of her quarter-life crisis. Broke, underemployed and saddled with student loan debt, she realized that her lack of financial education was crippling her adulthood. After becoming debt free in June 2015, Kara created Bravely to help other women take control of their financial lives. She’s co-host of the Fairer Cents Podcast: Women, Money and the Fight to Break Even.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Learn why a business might pay you hundreds of dollars a month to do something they are already doing well themselves.
- Learn how to frame a sales offer so that it takes tasks off your client's plate instead of adding more.
- Learn how to land clients in a unique way that avoids SPAM and lets your personality shine.
Action Steps:
- Pick a niche. We’ve focused on web-based food businesses in this episode but the principles discussed can be applied in any number of other industries.
- Find a few potential clients that you could help with an introductory marketing task, like taking over their social media marketing. You might meet them at a local business networking event.
- Offer a basic review of their social media strategy for free. Make some suggestions they could implement themselves. But also be ready to handle these tasks if they want to offload the responsibility.
- Offer a low introductory rate of a few hundred dollars a month. Perform at a high level so that they will want to continue and recommend you to others.
- Create a “map” of services you offer, and that you could take them through step-by-step so that they know your relationship can grow to take on other marketing responsibilities.
- Check off the tasks you can cover month-by-month or week-by-week as the relationship grows. e.g. website, marketing photos, product photos, client education, any other branding and styling the company needs and wants, etc.
- To approach a business like TJ’s you might review their social media, find out that they regularly post photos of food with calorie counts and macronutrients, and then offer to take over this process.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Healthy Chew
GenM
TJ Clark is the CEO and Co-Owner of Healthy Chew, a weekly Meal preparation service based out of Little Rock, Arkansas. Their motto: Eat Great/Lose Weight! Founded in 2015,they have spent the last few years helping countless individuals reach their health and fitness goals through the power of meal prep. With a variety of plans, they can help you lose weight, build lean muscle, bulk up, or simply eat healthier without the hassle.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Why Fatimeh believes Angel Investors are better than VCs for social impact entrepreneurs
- Consumers get better products when marketplaces embrace diversity
- The ways in which the relationship between investors and founders is like a marriage
Action Steps:
- Outline business plan for how this service will work
- Draft standardized documentation for the relationship between founder and investor
- Speak to investors in order to understand their psychology and motivations
- Contact large companies that have in-house venture firms with social benefit funds
- Research “government opportunity zones” and summarize associated benefits
- Research conferences that exist for social impact entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Upside.fm - Venture capital outside of Silicon Valley
Alumni Ventures
Brotopia
Investors prefer entrepreneurial ventures pitched by attractive men
Legal Intelligence to Entrepreneurs (LITE)
Fatimeh is an attorney based in Illinois and Wisconsin. She helps entrepreneurs raise capital, capture intellectual property rights, and ground their professional relationships in strong contracts. Fatimeh delights in taking the intimidation factor out of law by educating her clients and giving them a sense of ownership over their legal tools. She spends a tremendous amount of time thinking about how to make the law more accessible, and aims to design elegant solutions to entrepreneurs’ practical problems. In 2018, Fatimeh founded LITE LLC, Legal Intelligence to Entrepreneurs LLC, a law firm devoted to providing proactive and holistic legal advice to social impact entrepreneurs.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Learn what the power is in aiming higher and serving niches that demand better services.
- Learn how having an audience that emulates your business leads to rapidly scalable revenue opportunities.
- Love what you do and you’ll never work a day in your life? Chad doesn’t buy it. Understand his distinction between caring about what you do and loving it.
Action Steps:
- Do some fact-finding. What are the logistics of providing payroll, benefits, and HR management services? How do these services make money? What are their margins?
- Pick a niche and contact HR or management to discover their pains, their willingness to try something new and the value of your solution. Chad suggests working with Design and Development teams because that’s his niche already. You could discover a new niche that works well for you.
- Tip. Contact growing teams of 20 or less that are considering hiring an HR director and propose to save them 80K per year implementing your services instead.
- Take advantage of the Q4 open enrollment period when these topics are top-of-mind to start discussions with businesses.
- An advantage of working in the design and development niche is that you can focus on smooth attractive interface and robust API where it will be appreciated most. Scale as the most elegant solution to a broader audience from there.
- Don’t forget, if things go right, you've got a great potential partner and customer with Chad and thoughtbot.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Thoughtbot
Giantrobots.fm
Seth Godin on Giant Robots
ADP
Paychex
Gusto
Justworks
Chad Pytel is a developer and the CEO of thoughtbot, a web and mobile design and development studio, with small teams of designers and developers in Austin, Boston, London, New York City, Raleigh, and San Francisco. thoughtbot has produced top-quality applications with hundreds of clients, from one-person startups to Fortune 500 enterprises, universities, and non-profits, for more than 15 years, and are the creators of many popular open-source projects. In addition to working with clients, Chad is responsible for overall strategy for the company. He has co-authored two books: Rails Anti Patterns and Pro Active Record, and spoken at conferences around the world. He lives with his wife and two children in Newton, MA.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- No evidence of added benefit for most new drugs entering German healthcare system (Journal link)
- Can be an uphill battle for innovators in entrenched industries. For example, the American Medical Association conspired "to contain and eliminate the chiropractic profession” in the 80’s (Wiki link)
Action Steps:
- Solidify overall mission/vision of this alternative healthcare organization
- Perform market research around existing small business and/or medical associations, including what typical membership dues are.
- Contact small healthcare businesses and ask them about
- the problems they face from the entrenched healthcare system
- whether this idea would be helpful for them
- what benefits they’d like to see as members
- Contact large companies outside of medicine who are pushing healthier living (e.g. Fitbit, Nike, Under Armour, etc…) and pitch them this idea
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Lost Empire Herbs
Legendary Strength
Knew Health
1% for the Planet
Health IQ Life Insurance
American Herbal Products Association (AHPA)
Logan Christopher aims to be a renaissance man. As a performing strongman he has pulled an 8,800 lb. fire truck by his hair, juggled a kettlebell that was lit on fire, supported half a ton on top of himself in a wrestler’s bridge position, and routinely bends horseshoes and rips decks of cards in half. He teaches people to do these things, as well as more foundational fitness at Legendary Strength. He is co-founder and CEO of Lost Empire Herbs which aims to bring performance herbalism into everyday people’s lives.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Learn how Zack became a tennis champion through laser focus and clarity of purpose starting at the age of twelve. Then hear how he used the same focus and clarity to excel in an entirely new arena, entrepreneurship.
- Find out the powerful things Zack learned about business through the process of applying for government grants.
- Learn how Zack’s research of tax law could save investors hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Action Steps:
- Listen to the episode, investigate weaknesses and missing information, fill in on them and report back. (e.g. Research how to become an accredited school.)
- Build partnerships and support with those already in the alternative education space. (e.g. Y Combinator, Thiel Fellowship)
- Start a high school program. (e.g. Start with one 9th grade class and take them year by year through a new program).
- Admit 100 students worldwide into an exclusive new online program to test this idea
- Start with a high-priced private school type format, hire great talent (many different teachers coming in on a part-time basis). Raise investment money and/or tuition money. Present a great product that grows itself and spreads by word of mouth. Expect slow, organic growth. Envision a long-term plan to make these systems accessible to a wider audience. Set up an online course, highly accessible version of the high-priced exclusive, high-tuition, program.
- Bootstrap by starting with a summer program. (e.g. A 6 week course on life skills to hone a new type of curriculum. This has a low barrier to entry and could start with $10 in fliers put up at the local YMCA
- Improvise, inspired by the episode and come up with your own avenues of getting started
- Start by interviewing homeschooling parents about their dissatisfaction with the education system and what they might recommend for curriculum.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Shark Wheel.com
ycombinator.com
theilfellowship.com
Zack Fleishman began his illustrious career as a professional tennis player, earning the rank of number one in the United States in the 18 and under division. After his tennis career ended due to injury, he used the skills he developed to launch multiple businesses. His current business is Shark Wheel where he serves as Chief Operating Officer. Shark Wheel literally reinvented the wheel, creating a wheel with better maneuverability over rough terrain. They have appeared on multiple TV shows including the 2015 season finale of Shark Tank.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Create a grassroots community before anything else.
- “Identify the minimum to get started and go from there.”
- How you start is not how you’re going to end up; allow space to grow.
- The best way to retain customers is by continually giving them value.
- Shape a community based on its own needs: keep track of your data, know who your customers are, make sure you know what they need, and charge accordingly.
Action Steps:
- Perform a comprehensive market study to establish existing competition in your city and what’s missing from them in order to determine which specific services you would offer.
- Evaluate how many potential members there may be in your area and establish a minimum vital number of members.
- Find the “Matt” in your city (someone who runs a maker space in your area) and meet with them to glean information about your potential market.
- Build up a community (create a Facebook group, attend Meetup events, go to local farmers markets or festivals, in order to drum up interest. Potentially pre-sell memberships. Find those existing businesses who have the need that you can meet).
- Consider running a Mastermind with a small core group in order to start building a grassroots community
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Sam Davidson
Starter Story Interview of Sam Davidson
Batch
Sam Davidson LinkedIn
Matt Verlinich LinkedIn
On The Rocks
Innovation Works
Sam Davidson has a passion for taking ideas and turning them into reality. His journey into entrepreneurship began over 13 years ago. In 2006, he cofounded Cool People Care, which connected people online in a world before Twitter and Instagram who wanted to make a difference with non-profit organizations who badly needed members, volunteers, donors, and supporters. More recently, in 2013, Davidson cofounded Batch, a gift and retail company whose unique offering allows customers and companies to experience a taste of iconic cities. Overseeing the company’s rapid and changing growth as CEO, Davidson has helped Batch cross the $1M annual revenue mark in less than two years. Batch is headquartered in Nashville with operations in Austin and offers gifts from iconic southern cities.
Matt Verlinich has an MS in Engineering Science and Mechanics from Pennsylvania State University. He was the founding General Manager of TechShop Pittsburgh, and after helping dozens of individuals start their own businesses at TechShop, he decided it was time to try and build his own business. Matt then prototyped, developed, crowdfunded, mass produced and distributed On The Rocks to over 55 countries. On The Rocks is an ice mold system that allows consumers to make crystal clear ice cubes, spheres and diamonds at home. Now Matt is putting his diverse experience to work for Innovation Works as their Manufacturing Program Associate where he helps local entrepreneurs build scalable businesses by consulting and connecting them with appropriate manufacturing resources.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- Consider how you can take what works in business relationships and apply it to a personal setting.
Action Steps:
- Start with a small test group of people interested in improving relationships. Provide basic coaching and action steps that are kept track of through a simple calendar app and checklists.
- Check back in over the course of weeks and months for feedback on how the process is proceeding.
- Work towards feedback from people that indicates they are extremely satisfied with the quality of their relationships—ideally they are functioning better than ever.
- Build an investor pitch deck with this data.
- Alternatively, build some simple forms and procedures that help guide folks through specific types of conversations, such as a conflict negotiation.
- Rank high or advertise on search for appropriate searches, such as: "how to resolve a conflict."
- Let the user who initiates the process invite other parties to work towards a common relationship goal using the methodology.
- Grow the network through these invitations.
- Read 5 books on relationships. Narrow down to the few basic principles. Help people implement simple but effective relationship building strategies and provide consistency, especially in the MVP version of this project.
- Build an MVP using standard PC or Mac process building apps to help reinforce users' relationship building habits. Create processes and workflows in apps like Google Calendar that people are already using.
- Create a workflow that allows users to request important dates from people they care about and automatically feeds them to their calendar.
- Don't be afraid to do manual work and leave automation for later stages!
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
toi.io
runsprints.com
salesforce.com
hootsuite.com
buffer.com
David Demember is a co-founder of Toi (toi.io) and a Design Sprint Facilitator. David has trained and facilitated workshops for Sennheiser, Glide, WeWork, Red Bull, Kraft, Waste Management, NBC/Universal (to name a few). Besides teaching Design Sprints, he loves coaching youth sports as well!
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Nuggets:
- The “game” Aaron plays around customer service that’s won Easy Song Licensing many customers for life and made them a ton of money.
- The culture of small towns and how to launch a marketing campaign in one.
Action Steps:
- Perform market research around how big the problem is and how much people would pay.
- Contact existing home maintenance providers (plumbers, lawn care, HVAC, etc…) and pitch them on joining Cabin Sit.
- Brainstorm list of services a vacation property manager could provide.
- Recruit the “Navy Seals” of property management in your area (people who’ve grown up around cabins and can handle most issues).
- Create Craigslist offer posts to test market demand and find potential employees.
- Canvas cabin owners and ask them how much they’ve spent on maintaining their cabin the last 12 months, and what services they would want from a vacation property manager.
- Sign up for a dog sitting app and begin offering additional services to homeowners.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Starter Story Interview of Aaron Green
TrustedHousesitters
Rover ($20 Off Referral Link)
easysonglicensing.com
aaron@easysonglicensing.com
Aaron Green is a Vice President and Co-Founder of easysonglicensing.com. They’re a 3rd-party music licensing agent specializing in music clearance for any type of permission and any type of use. They’re a bootstrapped company that started in 2005 around Aaron’s dining room table in Robbinsdale, MN. Easy Song Licensing now has a user base of 60,000 clients and growing. In 2018, they grossed $2.5 million and have increased by 30% so far in 2019.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Medicine is a different language by itself and is really, really hard to understand. Traditionally, the medical field's solution to this problem is to design boilerplate patient materials at a general reading level to inform patients about their healthcare issues. At best, the industry is moving towards video content and digital resources, but there is still a wide chasm of lost information between what a doctor understands and what a patient is informed about.
There are a ton of existing companies, many quite profitable, out there trying to address patient education, demonstrating high demand within this niche. There's little to nothing in existence that uses the doctors' own notes as the foundation for the clients' educational material.
In this episode, Shuhan introduces us to his new solution, called Doctor Lingo. He envisions a service that automatically detects medical lingo as used in a doctor's standard notation practices and translates it into something that is easily understandable to patients. We discuss several collateral applications for this service and a bootstrapped way to get started. Listeners will discover a useful and fun business project which serves as an entry point into the growing, nearly trillion-dollar industry of digital health.
Here's a major plus...
Shuhan has already launched a version of this service to one paying customer. Shuhan has experience in successfully partnering with ambitious new teammates and you could be the next. Your job is to help explore other avenues for revenue and growth, and don't worry, you'll find many ideas that arise in the course of this episode. Get started, gain some traction, and report back.
Nuggets:
- Learn how Shuhan thinks about partnerships and arranges them in a way that optimizes for performance and accountability.
- Learn how Shuhan applies his heuristic, "the best predictor of performance is performance" for hiring and business relationships.
- Learn the clever tactic that Mayo Clinic used to rocket to the top of Google for medical searches.
Action Steps:
- Create a marketing strategy to increase awareness of the product.
- Outline how you would improve the existing service.
- Collect lingo to attract and keep more users.
- Brainstorm product variations.
- Interview med students to understand what they’re looking for in an education app.
- Create wireframe for med student education app.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Doctor Lingo
Electronic Health Records
Anki
Duolingo
Shuhan He is a doctor and an entrepreneur. He is the founder of Conduct Science, a brand that creates high-quality equipment created and developed by scientists for scientists. He is also the mind behind Maze Engineers, a startup that creates automated mazes which allow doctors and researchers to further improve their studies on behavior and neuroscience. He is also a Fellow in Emergency Medicine at the Harvard Teaching Hospital Massachusetts General Hospital.
Outside of work, he is a fan of fitness and wellness, advocating intermittent fasting and daily exercise. He has also done the Gobi March, a 250km race, placed second in age division of 18-21-year-olds in a marathon, and has done over 15 marathons/ultra-marathons.
He is currently based in Cambridge, MA.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
Allie LeFevere deftly brings humor to topics where others often avoid it, and this episode is a masterclass in how she does it. Listen in as Allie formulates a marketing strategy for a subscription service that solves a headache affecting 50% of the world’s population.
Nuggets:
- What a brand “hook” is and why you should start your marketing efforts by developing one.
- How Allie uses “what if” questions to explore the edges of a marketing strategy, and how it affects UX, customer experience, packaging, etc…
- The most important concept in branding that people usually overlook.
- Questions to consider in addition to demographics when picturing your ideal audience.
- Using humor appropriately with touchy subjects to set yourself apart; how to make something lighthearted without making light of it.
Action Steps:
- Perform market research around this idea (what is the true market share, average monthly cost, etc…)
- Identify an intended audience for this service.
- Create several marketing angles that would appeal to the chosen audience (also consider what’s unique about your approach).
- Brainstorm a list of products that would serve the chosen market.
- Outline pros/cons of sourcing products yourself vs. purchasing existing products.
- Contact potential suppliers.
- Try pre-selling subscriptions (e.g approach five potential purchasers and ask them to pre-pay $100) and/or gather feedback on the idea.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Resources:
obedientagency.com
hi@obedientagency.com
https://www.facebook.com/obedientagency/
https://twitter.com/obedientagency
https://www.linkedin.com/company/obedient/
Allie LeFevere founded Obedient, a one-of-a-kind branding agency focused entirely on leveraging the power of humor in marketing. They’ve worked with heavy hitters like Chick-Fil-A, Dell, and AT&T, as well as fashion, home, and personal care brands like Argent, Parachute, and Sphinx.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
In this episode Zee presents us with his visions of an online custom orthotics provider and a niche on which to focus the marketing.
A kit is sent to your home that allows you to create a custom foot mold. Ship it back and orthotics arrive in just days. Compared with the lengthy back and forth to doctors offices that is currently the norm, it's a huge time and energy saver. Zee presents his idea and demonstrates the way he thinks about starting new businesses from a logistical standpoint.
The takeaway: A great business project grows out of your will to make it successful, and it's a huge plus if that will grows out of a meaningful connection to solving the problem the business addresses. So, if you've got foot pain yourself, or better yet, you have a "foot fetish," this is the project for you.
There's a bit of competition brewing in this niche but Zee has a plan to deal with that. Namely, niche further (the current solutions target an elderly market, so focus on a younger demographic) and serve an audience that needs to emotionally reconcile with the problem so as to address it early. Strategy: make orthotics cooler. Help people developing flat feet to face it, own it, be okay with it, and therefore be willing to take care of it.
Nuggets:
- Find out how Zee lets the fear-based marketing of competitors drive traffic to his more caring and understanding style of customer engagement.
- Learn that often reaching out to someone with a blue check on Twitter (verified account of public interest) actually gets you somewhere.
- Discover Zee's unique approach to tracking customer satisfaction.
Action Steps:
- Visit a foot doctor to better understand the process.
- Research competitor products (online and traditional).
- Research the margins, costs, financial details.
- Understand the market enough to select a great niche within it.
- Implement a simple, fun (we give some ideas) marketing strategy to get people engaged and interested.
- Reach out to a podiatrist and develop a relationship.
- Reach out to an influencer and develop a relationship.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Resources:
https://sayarcare.com/
https://www.facebook.com/sayarcare/
https://twitter.com/sayarcare
https://www.instagram.com/sayarcare/
Zee Schwab, scientist explorer, is the founder of Sayar Care. Sayar Care creates effective natural health remedies that are clinically tested, but as natural products can reach the market far more rapidly than typical synthetic pharmaceuticals that require extensive review for potential safety risks. The first product of Sayar Care was Retain, an all natural patent-pending formula that stops hair loss. It contains ingredients proven to work as well as pharmaceuticals but without any potential side effects.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run
David Kosciusko has always been good at predicting how new technologies will change our lives. He sees a massive increase in broadband speeds coming, and it will give us an unprecedented amount of data at our fingertips. Dave believes this bandwidth can be used to revolutionize how we shop for clothes. Hear how he wants to make that happen.
Nuggets:
- The most successful entrepreneurs of our time are able to see the big shifts of their time, and create a new solution that capitalizes on them.
- ”Logic never really is the thing that sells, it’s emotion.”
- ”Anything that’s worth doing is worth doing poorly.”
Action Steps:
- Verify idea is possible using near-term technology.
- Outline software development strategy.
- Assemble a team of people who could follow through on the above strategy.
- Contact clothing retailers and pitch them on manually implementing an intermediate step (we give you the measurements, tell us exactly what items will fit our customer well).
- Find apps that can accurately measure body dimensions and contact developers for potential partnership.
- Build email “weekly sale” service based on customers’ existing favorite items.
- Pre-sell the idea to friends and family to gauge interest in it.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Resources:
Flipphonesforprofit.com
Win at Life with Dave - YouTube Channel
Tai Lopez
Is there a mobile app that can accurately measure my body dimensions (neck to waist, arm length, even waist size etc)?
David Kosciusko is an expert at flipping phones on eBay for profit. He turned what he discovered about this into a retail operation consisting of several stores, and has also created a number of online courses in the interest of helping others achieve similar success making a profit by repairing and reselling used phones. He’s doing over 7 figures a year with his specialized knowledge in the cell phone industry.
🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run