StartingFromZero - Self-Funded Founder Interviews

Do you run (or want to run) a Digital Marketing Agency? Then this episode is for you. Ryan Stewart launched Webris.org in March of 2016, and in under a year has already bootstrapped it to the $750k revenue mark. Full Show notes at: http://startingfromzero.co/ryan-stewart/

This episode’s a bit different. We start off talking about business, John’s story and email marketing, but wax philosophical on “success”, what it seems to be in the internet business world… and if it makes sense for everyone. Skip to minute 33 for that part of the conversation. For in-depth email marketing advice, check out the show-notes and links at: startingfromzero.co/john-mcintyre

Brian Dean is the founder of Backlinko.com, one of the web's premier resources for understanding SEO (Search Engine Optimization) - the art and science of getting your website to show up on google when people search for what you are selling. SEO is cool. If you master the art of getting FREE organic traffic funneling into your website, you have the foundations of a real business. And backlinko has definitely mastered this science, with a Domain Authority of 77 at the time of this writing. That's higher than Tinder's landing page (75) or Angel.co (76). Crazy. But the business that Brian has built around his expertise is just as cool, if not downright beautiful in its simplicity. 1. Share awesome content for free - SEO tips and strategies previously only available to industry insiders. 2. Sell an online course (at the not-too-shabby price-tag of $2900) that repackages that knowledge into an easily digestible and implementable format. Listen to hear how Brian built this business.

According to Stephen Esketzis every business is at its core a Sales Funnel. In this episode we explore how Stephen built a 6-figure business from a 200 person email list, by focusing on his sales funnels.. Listen to Learn How Stephen got his entrepreneurial start in elementary school His first real venture right out of high-school – a guest-list app How that venture pivoted to a content, then a SaaS platform How he self-taught himself online marketing His guiding question in life “Where do you wanna be when you’re 60 years old?” How he reaches out to people above his level How he used affiliate networks as a research tool for building his first sales funnel Stephen’s Marketing Stack Some insights on building funnels for membership products

Shane Melaugh is Owner/Founder of ThriveThemes, a 35 employee, 7-figure turnover international software company. But the story isn't quite that simple.. To other self-funded founders, the success that Thrive has been having over the past 2 years may seem like an overnight success fairy-tale. But the story starts many years earlier. Shane wasn't good in school, dropped out of university and found himself working significantly "less-than-desireable" jobs for a few years. After a few years he began to find his feet creating and marketing information products, but as a non-technical founder, he was always frustrated with the complexity of building converting pages on Wordpress. The idea for the ThriveTheme suite was born from this frustration, and the rest is history.

Amir Salihefndic is a passionate builder of digital products... starting with a spell-checker app which he sold for $10k back in university, to his most successful brain-child today, Todoist, a popular web-app with over 5million users supported by a 50-person team, all 100% self-funded. Amir's family came to Denmark from Bosnia as refugees who had lost everything. From an early age he learned 1st-hand what it means to be an entrepreneur, and quickly developed a passion for technology. In this episode we talk about how he grew Todoist from nothing to what it is today.

John Jonas is a serial entrepreneur in the internet space. He’s built all sorts of online businesses, from affiliate sites, to marketing tools, to online marketplaces. In his early days online, he worked his tail off, burning the midnight oil while doing his best to help his wife manage the kids. As a Solopreneur, free-time on his part was basically non-existent. Even with a keen eye towards automation of what worked, if he didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get done. So logically, he began leveraging a portion of his income into more TIME by outsourcing. After some extremely unproductive experiences, he finally cracked the code to successful outsourcing… and today its his main business.

Sai Blackbyrn is founder of doubleyourdatabase, a humming online business-model that combines automated online trainings with “done-for-you” marketing services to offer what he describes as “high-margin products”. Today he does upper-6-figures yearly, but he didn’t always have things this figured out. Just over 3 years ago, he was broke, lining out of a suitcase in Bali with $300, a microphone and a laptop, after having been deported from Australia. Listen to Learn: How Sai started his first business with virtual currency arbitrage How he got his first investor How he got deported from Australia His first truly location independent business How he went from being a coach to serving coaches How to get a mentor (and what mentor’s are secretly looking for in great mentees) (27:45) How he went from $11k/month to $11k/day How Sai implemented Bosch’s systems in his business How "high-value" business owners and exectuives act differently from others

Gaël Breton is a traffic generation and monetization ninja... he consistently finds the most direct and systematic path to building sleek and automated internet based businesses. Over the years, he's also become an expert on Niche Authority Sites -> websites that rank organically via SEO, and which automatically spin off upper 5-digit monthly revenues (with extremely high profit margins) like clockwork. In this episode he shares how he went from working at the bottom rungs of an SEO agency in South East Asia to launching his own agency (higherclick.com), as well as some of the slick "authority hacks" he ran to get HUGE clients right out of the gate. Towards the end, we discuss also talk about Niche Authority Sites and a simple technique to rapidly boost your social media influencer status.

Joel Lederhause started DiscountRamps.com in 1997 almost by accident, after buying 10 industrial ramps on his credit card. After failing to move the products via his Auto-Repair side-business, he tossed a website up online, and forgot about it. Within a few months his über-basic site started to rank organically on Alta-Vista. Within 4 years he hit $1 million in turnover, after 8 years $10 million, and when he sold his majority stake in the company in 2011 they were doing over $30 million in annual sales, debt free, and with a significant inventory.

"If I can't find a university I can work in, I will create my own." I think of Anthony Metivier as the professor of the future. He's a true lover of knowledge, learning, research and teaching - but with a slight twist... He's also really good at branding and marketing himself online. And the results are staggering. 3 years ago (in 2012) he entered the online arena with his ebooks and courses under the Magnetic Memory Method brand. And through today, he's taught over 60k students everything they could care to know about memory, in language learning and beyond.

In mid-2014, Chris Dufey decided to leave his job as head of a fitness studio in Dubai, and take his personal training business online. Today, just over 1 year later, his combined businesses bring in well over $1 million/year - coaching elite body-builders to get their extra edge, and helping other fitness professionals grow their businesses to the next level as well.

Gabby Wallace started her Youtube channel back in 2011 as a way of sharing homework materials with students. It petered along for a while, but she started to step up production in late 2014, and managed to grow the channel from about 20k to 100k subscribers in less than 1 year. Today she runs a 6-figure business selling ESL courses via her youtube channel and her website, GoNaturalEnglish.com, and is launching a new venture to help other online teachers do the same.

Moritz Bauer is one of the few guys I know who TRULY lives a 4HWW-style business. Over 2 years he was able to build selbstbewusstsein-staerken.net into a 6-figure business next to his day job. And at this point, he actually only invests about 30min/day, bringing his grand total up to 2.5hours/week. But it wasn't always so simple, and Moritz's journey to find this particular business involved a lot of trial, error, some depressed moments, and other failed businesses along the way. From growing up in a typical German "Mittelstand"-style business, to spending multiple years studying (and constantly switching majors), to trying and failing several times online, Moritz has made a lot of experiences in entrepreneurship.

Natalie Sisson has worn many hats in her career. She started out as an "Intrapreneur" in the corporate world, before she got frustrated by the red tape and sluggish pace of change. So she jumped ship, left her house, job and community of friends in the UK, and moved to Vancouver where she found herself founding a tech company in short order. That didn't quite fit the bill either, and within a few years she found herself leaving the tech company to somehow turn her blog into a business. Today the "Suitcase Entrepreneur" blog is a 6-figure business which provides Natalie with the perfect platform from which to travel, adventure, and try new things.

Tim Fargo's numbers speak for themselves. He launched his first serious venture in 1996 - an "offline" business built around investigating insurance fraud. Over 7 years he grew the company, Omega Insurance Services, from a 3 man team in his 2nd bedroom, to a $20million company with over 300 employees, culminating in a 1x sale. Today, he's back to software solutions, and has bootstrapped his newest SaaS side project, TweetJukebox, from 0-20k users in 7 months with minimal investment. Talking with Tim was refreshing. As it turns out, the fundamentals of good business are still the same as the were 20 years ago, and his experience as an entrepreneur who scaled and sold a Human Resource based business, but is also in the SaaS business, affords him a unique perspective.

Bernard Schembri launched his ping-pong website back in the early days of the internet, when everyone still had a "homepage", and cheesy, pixelated graphics were the norm. But over the years, Bernard's teenage passion for table-tennis began to yield an interesting business opportunity, and he found himself programming his own shopping cart and launching an ecommerce store - long before this was the ubiquitous business model it is today. By the age of 23 he was financially free, and today his site is one of the top ping-pong ecommerce stores on the net, with well over 7-figures in revenue. In this episode, Bernard shares how he launched his venture from his home country of Malta, and grew it to what it is today.

When Yevgeni started his Psychotherapy practice in London in the early 2000s, he loved the work. But after seeing 15+ patients/week, back to back for several years, he was on the edge of total burnout. He took a break for a few months, and realized that a business that stops generating revenues when he stopped working, was not ideal. Over the next few months he transformed his expertise into an infoproduct with the help of Eben Pagan's course "The Guru Blueprint", and today he runs a mid-6-figure business selling a combination of online courses and online therapy.

Grant started his bootstrapping career in his hometown of Lexington Kentucky with building online courses as side projects. After a few months of running these courses on the side, he realized the potential of these courses to become a real business. Today he has over 8,000 students on Udemy, and, in addition to his own courses, works with other experts to help them monetize their expertise online.

Gabrielle Lods has always had a passion for sustainability, and after reading the Four Hour Work Week, decided to start working on her own product. After a thorough analysis, she discovered a interesting opportunity that ticked all of her boxes - social impact, sustainability, location independent, etc - and Sustainabum, a sustainable diaper manufacturing venture, was born. She first started working on the company on the side in 2012, then took advantage of a convenient corporate restructuring and went full-time 1.5 years later. After 1 more year, she was able to live 100% from her company, and today Sustainabum ships globally and has replaced more than 270k disposable diapers, saving approximately 50tons of waste.

Shayna's journey started off with a Fulbright grant to study in Brazil. She fell in love with the culture (as well as a local), and moved back to teach english. But teaching english isn't very lucrative in Brazil. At one point she calculated out her hourly rate, and found she was making just over $3/hour. So, she started slowly teaching online, by creating short little english lesson posts based on the lessons she was teaching anyway. The first post went live January 2012. Today, she has 300k monthly visitors to her site, 60k students, 15 courses, and a business that can support her and her husband pretty much anywhere in the world they choose to live.

Malte's founding story is unique on several levels. He got together with 6 other friends, they had their first client 1 month before they officially founded, they were profitable from the first day of business, and today, 10 months later, they have 36 employees and offices in 3 countries and growing. Empaua (previously Uberforce) is a salesforce consulting agency that focuses exclusively on startups, and which has the additional aim of redefining how companies work. Hierarchies are very flat at Empaua, employees choose their own salaries, the business and development units work very closely together, and anyone in the company is empowered to make significant decisions. And in a few weeks, they'll be implementing the Holacracy system of company management.

Johannis Hatt is a serial entrepreneur who has Co-Founded and taken 3 out of his 4 ventures to 7-figure revenues and beyond. He got his first startup venture off the ground back in 2008 with the launch of My Printing GmbH, a venture-backed monetization service for social networks that had a big photo-sharing component. They hit the 7-figure mark within 2 years, and while that business was a success (and growing strong today), Johannis decided to bootstrap his next venture. ProductsUp.io has been an incredibly successful SaaS company, most notably in pre-selling its services to large corporations such as Adobe and Marin Software.

Mobile apps can be an awesome source of passive income, and for Gabriel Muller they've paid (and continue to do so) in a big way. With $1k/day, and a 4hour workday, he's got the business side of things figured out. If you're looking for a business that will afford you lots of TIME for everything else in life, this is the episode for you. But just like any valuable business, this setup didn't just fall into his lap. And the degree to which Gabriel is willing to invest in himself is also inspiring.

Transitioning from selling your time to selling a product is a challenge for many in the consulting profession. This week I had the pleasure of sitting down with Conrad Wadowski to get the play-by-play of how he bootstrapped from consulting, to a successful product (GrowHack), to finally going all in on a software platform startup (Fedora). If you're looking for the blueprint for going from zero to $50K monthly course sales & beyond, listen to this episode.

Yan Liang started Happiness Boutique back in 2013, on the side next to her corporate marketing job. The early days building this Ecommerce store were grueling...full-time weekends and nights in addition to the day job. The store just didn't seem to be taking off Finally, just as they were about to throw in the towel, the market started to notice their hard-work, and orders picked up. Today, the business is alive and thriving. They've been incredibly successful with building up an active Instagram Channel, and the business serves 1000s of customers per month.

Thomas graduated with a business degree and NO CLUE about how to actually BUILD a business. So, he jumped in and immediately made 2 of the most basic mistakes of bootstrapping. -He spent 3 months writing a business plan without actually DOING anything -He then opened an LLC without any idea of what the business was going to be But then he got wise, joined an experienced friend in his business, and got his first lifestyle business, strandschicht.de off the ground. Today, he's involved in several Social Business projects, including EcoToiletten.de an ecological, portable toilet rental business which gives 25% of its profits to sanitation projects in the developing world, Guts For Change, a fundraising initiative for clean sanitation in India (includes a bicycle & hitchhking trip from Berlin to India, and his next project Generation Y Founders, which trains new founders to launch and scale their own profitable online businesses. Learn more at startingfromzero.co/007-social-entrepreneurship-and-experimentation-with-thomas-jakel

"I love my job... but I need to TRAVEL" This was the problem Fabian Dittrich had in early 2013, after working at Zen Desk for 1 year. Today, he travels the world non-stop, most recently living out of a Land Rover for 7 months, while handling 2x the work-load in 1/2 the time... and of course making a lot more profit. Listen to hear how Fabian came up with his idea, how he manages his work while on the road, and why nomadic living can be good for small teams.

What does it take to start a SaaS company from SCRATCH? 4 years ago, Christian co-founded Fastbill together with a friend from an internship. Today, they are the DACH market-leader for online billing & customer service management for small businesses and freelancers, with over 30k customers and a team of 25 employees. Listen to Learn: Why startups are a good first market for certain SaaS ventures How Fastbill Kicked off their Brand How to distinguish yourself at a German Tradeshow How to pick a good co-founder (hint = beer)

What does the future of Ecommerce look like if you're GREAT at CONTENT? 0-80k unique views/month... in under 1 year... Starting with 1 yoga mat for sale, and €500 in the bank, Robin Pratap of asanayoga.de exploded his online shop's organic traffic with an extremely aggressive content marketing strategy. Whether you're a blogger, an Ecommerce shop owner, or a digital publishing aficionado, you'll find Robin's content marketing story inspiring and informative.

Last week I got to catch up with Marcus Meurer and Felicia Hargarten of the DNX (Digital Nomad Conference) series. Since they launched their concept from a hostel on New Years eve in the first minutes of 2014, Marcus and Feli have sold out 3 DNX conferences - and the movement shows no signs of slowing. Listen to Learn: The DNX story How to lean-start a conference from the road Why Berlin is a hotspot for digital nomads How to know when you have an "event-worthy" movement

What does it take to crack the highly competitive MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) market? This episode is with John Nichols of Bitfountain, who ran the top-selling course on the popular MOOC platform Udemy. In early 2013 John and his co-founder Elliot moved to Berlin to begin bootstrapping their new brain-child... and within their first year of business they had netted over $1.5million profit. Today Bitfountain has their own platform, and a rabid customer-based of over 100,000 students. Listen to this episode to learn: The Bitfountain story How to build an online course that markets itself Bitfountain's secret sauce for awesome brand loyalty The tech setup you need for building your first course How they got 50K email sign-ups in one day

Ever had an idea for a mobile app? Johannes Metzler has had a few. 600 to be exact, and all built and uploaded to the iTunes Store in just the last 2 years. This week Johannes Metzler of escaleto.de outline for me just how he managed to ditch the corporate life and build his 6-figure "app empire". Listen to Learn: The inspiration for the idea How Escaleto released 600 apps w/ 17million downloads How they outsource Why a co-founder is critical