Startup Stories - Mixergy

When you hear that today’s guest sold his document sharing startup to Dropbox for $165M you might wonder how someone could be so lucky. Well, as you’ll hear in this interview, it was not an easy journey. Russ Heddleston is the founder of DocSend which was acquired by Dropbox.

Russ Heddleston is the founder of DocSend which was acquired by Dropbox.

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Lemon.io – Why squander time and money on developers who aren’t perfect for your startup? Let Lemon match you with engineers that can transform your vision into reality — diabolically fast. Go to Lemon.io/mixergy for a 15% discount on your first 4 weeks with one of their devs.

Masterworks – Masterworks is the first platform making it possible to invest in multimillion-dollar works from artists like Banksy, Kaws, Basquiat, and many more. It’s an exclusive community that allows investors to access multimillion-dollar paintings, buy and potentially sell shares on Secondary Market, and receive proceeds if and when the painting sells. Join the community at Masterworks.art/mixergy

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Tomer Rabinovich is an Amazon seller and author of the new book, Ride the Amazon Wave: The Pro Seller’s Guide to Private Label Success. I want to find out what he’s learned from selling on the platform.

Tomer Rabinovich is a top seller on Amazon.

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Lemon.io – Why squander time and money on developers who aren’t perfect for your startup? Let Lemon match you with engineers that can transform your vision into reality — diabolically fast. Go to Lemon.io/mixergy for a 15% discount on your first 4 weeks with one of their devs.

VAUBAN – VAUBAN is an online platform that makes it easy for you to raise capital from your network to invest in private companies. They make start-ups investing faster, easier and more accessible by building the infrastructure needed to deploy capital.

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Imagine you are someone who’s deep into a sector of tech, like maybe you’re the crypto person who really studies this, who understands it has inside access to the founders, or SaaS, or some other sector. And you say, “You know what? I’d like to make an investment in a company that wants me as one of their investors, because they want me to give feedback. But you don’t wanna put in all your money.” Well, what you could do through VAUBAN is create a Special Purpose Vehicle, go and raise money from others, maybe smaller amounts from other people, put it together with your money, and then invest that in the company or companies that you believe in. That’s what they do. I want to find out how it’s possible.

Ulric Musset is the founder of VAUBAN, an online platform that makes it easy for you to raise capital from your network to invest in private companies.

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Sendinblue – Sendinblue is the smartest and most intuitive platform for growing businesses. They will guide your business with the right marketing & sales tools and help you reach the right people and produce the right content. Mixergy listeners who sign up will get one month free with 100,000 emails by entering the coupon code SIBMIX at checkout.

Lemon.io – Why squander time and money on developers who aren’t perfect for your startup? Let Lemon match you with engineers that can transform your vision into reality — diabolically fast. Go to Lemon.io/mixergy for a 15% discount on your first 4 weeks with one of their devs.

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Lucas Martinez is the founder of Talent, a portal that aggregates both job ads posted directly by recruiters as well as ads from third-party recruitment sites. His goal is to post every job available on the entire Internet and he’s headed toward accomplishing it insanely fast. Find out how in this interview.

Lucas Martinez is the founder of Talent, a portal that aggregates both job ads posted directly by recruiters as well as ads from third-party recruitment sites.

Sponsored by

Sendinblue – Sendinblue is the smartest and most intuitive platform for growing businesses. They will guide your business with the right marketing & sales tools and help you reach the right people and produce the right content. Mixergy listeners who sign up will get one month free with 100,000 emails by entering the coupon code SIBMIX at checkout.

Lemon.io – Why squander time and money on developers who aren’t perfect for your startup? Let Lemon match you with engineers that can transform your vision into reality — diabolically fast. Go to Lemon.io/mixergy for a 15% discount on your first 4 weeks with one of their devs.

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Most people think about Chase Jarvis when they think about CreativeLive. Well, today I’m talking to the guy behind that guy. His name is Craig Swanson and he co-founder of CreativeLive. I’ll ask him about why he has no ego about not being in the spotlight and why, in his words, he’d rather own the spotlight.

Craig Swansons the c0-founder of CreativeLive, online classes in photography, art, design, craft & DIY, marketing, business, and entrepreneurship. Available on-demand 24-7.

Sponsored by

Sendinblue – Sendinblue is the smartest and most intuitive platform for growing businesses. They will guide your business with the right marketing & sales tools and help you reach the right people and produce the right content. Mixergy listeners who sign up will get one month free with 100,000 emails by entering the coupon code SIBMIX at checkout.

Lemon.io – Why squander time and money on developers who aren’t perfect for your startup? Let Lemon match you with engineers that can transform your vision into reality — diabolically fast. Go to Lemon.io/mixergy for a 15% discount on your first 4 weeks with one of their devs.

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Hiring has been a huge issue for me. And in a past interview with Cameron Herold, I brought it up because he’s the founder of the COO Alliance, the world’s leading network for the second in command. I don’t get embarrassed by a lot of stuff. If you heard my interviews, you hear me get pretty frank about my flaws, my mistakes. But this issue is something I was embarrassed about. I think if I don’t hire somebody to be the second in command at Mixergy, I am probably going to collapse. So, that’s what today is about. It’s not so much an interview as it is a coaching call with the guy who knows hiring better than anyone else. You’ll get to hear what I learned and my hope is that you benefit from it too.

Cameron Herold is the founder of the COO Alliance, the world’s leading network for the second in command.

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With Bench, you get a professional bookkeeping team to do your books for you and our simple, elegant software to review your finances. It’s everything you need to forget about your bookkeeping, without actually forgetting about your bookkeeping.

Sign up at Bench and get 20% off for your first 6 months.

Toptal – If you’re having trouble finding developers, Toptal is a network of elite pre-vetted software developers. You tell Toptal what you’re looking for, they search their network for the best people, they test the candidates, and then they present you with only the candidates who meet your individual needs. Once you pick someone you can start work with them the next day. They offer a no-risk trial period. Go to Toptal.com. Get the best of the best right now.

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A topic we don’t talk about on Mixergy is how to actually manage a company. I remember when I was in NYU as an undergrad I loved all my business classes, but management just didn’t feel like me. I always thought of the guys in Dilbert but entrepreneurs were the ones who were creating, the ones who were doing. Mixergy’s grown and I’ve been running it, but I have to be honest, I’m not doing a great job of running it. So earlier in the year, the Mixergy team said, “Andrew, go get a COO.” They kept challenging me. One of things that they told me to do was to talk to Cameron Herold. Cameron Herold was Chief Operating Officer at 1-800-GOT-JUNK? He is also the founder of the COO Alliance, the world’s only organization for those who are second in command.

Cameron Herold was Chief Operating Officer at 1-800-GOT-JUNK? He is also the founder of the COO Alliance, the world’s only organization for those who are second in command.

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About a year ago I realized that no matter how much effort we’ve put into my email list, I could never double the response rate. We kept growing it, but people were not using email much. So I started looking around for solutions and I started looking at bots. Bots are basically software that communicates with humans via a chat app. I came across one company that looked too good to be true. It’s called ManyChat. And I said, “I’ve got to find out who the founder is.” And today, Mikael Yang is the founder of ManyChat. Not only does the software work, but the intelligence behind the scenes of dripping out content, tagging people, interacting with people is brilliant. This whole space is still pretty young but it’s important to have this conversation because he’s gotten very far and because I want you to see the future of chat as a way of interacting with your customers.

Mikael Yang is the founder of ManyChat, a visual bot builder for Facebook Messenger with broadcasts, analytics, scheduled posting and many other features.

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Acuity Scheduling – Acuity Scheduling helps businesses offer and manage their appointments online. With this tool, you’ll be able to automate your client bookings, cancellations, reminders & even payments without sacrificing you soul. Plus, automated reminders and follow-ups eliminate your no-shows, and incentivize repeat bookings. Get an exclusive 45-day trial at AcuityScheduling.com/mixergy

Toptal – If you’re having trouble finding developers, Toptal is a network of elite pre-vetted software developers. You tell Toptal what you’re looking for, they search their network for the best people, they test the candidates, and then they present you with only the candidates who meet your individual needs. Once you pick someone you can start work with them the next day. They offer a no-risk trial period. Go to Toptal.com. Get the best of the best right now.

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I’ll be honest with you. I felt guilt about an interview that I did years ago with today’s guest. This was back in, let me see here, 2013. I interviewed Sam Ovens about how he built up this consulting business and was teaching people how to do consulting. I thought maybe I got taken for a ride. It was too good to be true. Then I started hearing people who were in his program talk about how big the program is. Then I started hearing more and more people say they were in the program. I realized, “Actually maybe I underestimated the guy.” And the more research I did into it, the more I realized that was true. Then I went hat in hand and said, “Hey, Sam, can I interview you again on Mixergy?” Sam Ovens is the founder of Consulting.com, it offers online training programs to help everyday people start their own consulting businesses.

Sam Ovens is the founder of Consulting.com, it offers online training programs to help everyday people start their own consulting businesses. Sam’s hosting a free webinar which shows you in detail how to start your own consulting business, click here to register for the free training.

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Toptal – If you’re having trouble finding developers, Toptal is a network of elite pre-vetted software developers. You tell Toptal what you’re looking for, they search their network for the best people, they test the candidates, and then they present you with only the candidates who meet your individual needs. Once you pick someone you can start work with them the next day. They offer a no-risk trial period. Go to Toptal.com. Get the best of the best right now.

Pipedrive is a sales management tool for small teams with big ambitions. It visualizes one’s sales pipeline and helps to make sure important activities and conversations won’t get dropped. Salespeople really like it because it’s easy to use and intuitive. Managers like it because they don’t need to nag their team to use their CRM. It also sports built-in forecasting, integrations with other software such as Google Apps, MailChimp and Zapier and a powerful API.

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How does a former lawyer build a multi-million dollar company that teaches social skills. Jordan Harbinger is the co-founder of The Art of Charm, a company that teaches confidence and emotional intelligence.

Jordan Harbinger is the co-founder of The Art of Charm, a company that teaches confidence and emotional intelligence, and the host of The Jordan Harbinger Show, which interviews top performers, from legendary musicians to intelligence operatives.

 

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Lead Pages – Lead Pages took my most successful page and turned it into a product that you can use—which magically converts strangers into leads. So if you want to use the page that I use to collect email addresses, check out AndrewsWelcomeGate.com. It will work on your site no matter what your site is built on. Even if you have no site, you can use this URL to collect email addresses for your business. It’s AndrewsWelcomeGate.com.

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