“Lean Startup” has become a popular concept in the world of entrepreneurship. All founders and founders-to-be have phrases like “pivot” and “fail fast” on the tips of their tongues.

But for Martin Hosking, lean isn’t just a fashionable trend. He’s lived it. And after applying and experiencing lean methods over decades of launching and running tech startups, the methodology has gained a more sophisticated meaning in Hosking’s mind. It is not just a clever strategy for testing markets, but rather staying nimble to truly fulfill the needs of the customer, something that drives him today.

“What I really like about lean is it puts the customer at the center,” Hosking says, adding a caveat. “You need to have lean, but you need to have a good strategic orientation. The customer doesn’t always know what they want."

Hosking’s nuanced understanding of lean startup methodology highlights the deep expertise he’s developed over the course his career. And it’s paid off. After experiencing more than his share of 1990s dot-com boom and bust, Hosking is now CEO of Redbubble, an Etsy-like online marketplace for artists that’s become highly successful.

But as any successful entrepreneur will tell you, it’s not just smarts and experience that get you there.

Passion is the vital ingredient that needs to be present to keep a company going during the hard times and bring it out of the shadows to phenomenal success. It’s a kind of passion that can’t be reeled in or held back. It comes out immediately when you meet a true entrepreneur. Martin Hosking is a prime example; the passion and dedication he has for his work spills out from his fast and excited manner of speaking.

In this interview you will learn:

• What it really means to go lean and how to get there
• The secrets to developing a passionate group of users
• How to be prepared when the unexpected arises
• The processes that Martin goes through in order to make sure that his business is always running in top shape
• What goes into building a successful online business
• & much more!

As a full time software developer working for a large company, Rob Walling dreamt of becoming an entrepreneur – and more than a decade later he has obtained serial entrepreneur status.

Rob Walling is many things…as a serial entrepreneur he has been at the helm of several tech companies including Drip, Micropreneur, HitTail and DotNetNovice. His personal brand is supported by regular posts to his blog which he forayed into a book, Start Small and Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup. In his spare time, he wears the hat of a podcaster, conference host, teacher, angel investor and audio book junkie.

When the entrepreneurial itch first infiltrated Rob’s being, he left his full time job and began consulting and freelancing. The move was great at first but he soon found that freelancing and consulting was a lot like working for someone else – which was seriously uncool.

His new dream was products – build something that people will buy on his own terms without the watchful gaze of a boss. But, it didn’t work like that…instead; Rob’s second transition came when he acquired a small software application and tasted true freedom. As Rob puts it, “My goal was to cobble together enough of a portfolio so that I could stop consulting.”

His acquisitions ran the gamut from a site that sold beach towels (but ranked high on Google) to a book on bonsai trees but eventually, he was able to give up consulting completely. He developed a strategy built on incremental progress - a solid stair stepping approach that has made every acquisition, his biggest acquisition.

In this interview you will learn:

• What to do when you want to bootstrap and how to make it work
• The secrets to keeping yourself in check and managing expectations
• The secrets to self-confidence in the startup world
• How to build yourself a top mastermind group
• What it takes to ensure that you have a proven product that people will love
• &  much more!

It's not easy to admit when you're wrong, but you'll rarely find a better time than when you're filing for personal bankruptcy.

That's what Tim Fargo of Tweet Jukebox had to do when he was a young man in 1991 and found himself a little too in over his head. But today he's the founder of one of the most exciting and innovative social media automation engines in the world, right after selling his previous company for $20 million.

So how does someone go from bankruptcy to $20 million?

Well, you do it by paying attention and learning from your mistakes, which is exactly why Tim is where he is today. He's experienced both the lowest and highest points any entrepreneur can go through and he's walked away from a better businessman and all the wiser for it.

We're very lucky to share with you today this episode of the Foundr podcast, in which he talks openly about the lessons he's learned throughout his career and all the different pitfalls and traps you need to avoid.

If you ever wanted to learn from someone with over 25 years of highs and lows in the world of entrepreneurship, you don't want to miss this one.

In this interview you will learn:

• What it's like to file for bankruptcy and how to recover from it
• The do's and dont's of cash flow management
• How to keep yourself in check and on the right track when starting a business
• The key steps to growing your business rapidly
• What you can learn from going broke
• & much more!

Gary Vaynerchuk is a bona fide Internet celebrity. At last count, he was sitting pretty at 1.21 million Twitter followers, and 226,000 Instagram followers. He’s appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien, Ellen, CNN, and MSNBC. He’s now the CEO of VaynerMedia, a digital agency with more than 600 staff. Vaynerchuk is an entrepreneur, investor, New York Times best-selling author, speaker, and, hailing from greater New York City, a fervent Jets fan.

But his success all started with Wine Library TV, a video blog he started when YouTube was still a 1-year-old Internet debutante. From the start of his career, Vaynerchuk has mastered social media to draw attention to his online persona GaryVee, and since then has leveraged his fame to build success with over a decade of shrewd planning and execution. But there’s one secret to success that Vaynerchuk always comes back to.

“The reason that I’m speaking to you is that I’ve worked harder than you.”

These brazen words were uttered by Vaynerchuk during one of his many training videos. While it’s impossible to know just how true that is, this is a belief central to Vaynerchuk’s life. Hard work is everything.

When discussing his success, the word hustle frequently bobs to the surface. “My hustle is better than everybody else’s,” he says, “so I have to bet on it. I bet on my strengths.” And despite living in an age of lifehacks and shortcuts, Vaynerchuk remains a staunch advocate of simple hard work. Armed with little more than his ball-of-fire personality and a will to succeed, he’s built an attention-hungry business empire worth millions.

In this interview you will learn:

• The best strategies to leverage social media for your business
• What to look out for when it comes to creating the perfect social media strategy
• The secrets to creating valuable content and why it works
• How to take care of your employees and build long-lasting and loyal relationships
• The secrets behind each social media platform and how to take advantage of each one
• & much more!

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