The Foundr community is full of passionate people from all walks of life, in the trenches daily doing what it takes to make their startup dreams a reality. In this week's podcast, we want to shine the spotlight on one of these rising entrepreneurs who we're especially proud of—Gamal Codner of Fresh Heritage.

In part one of a three-part Start & Scale podcast series, we talked with this corporate-sales-guy-turned-ecommerce-entrepreneur, who overcame some difficult setbacks to scale his business to incredible success. Codner is a student of our Start & Scale ecommerce course, and was able to leverage the principles he learned in the course to grow his physical products business by 30X in just three months.

Before becoming a Start & Scale student, Codner left his corporate sales job to become a successful affiliate marketer. He then joined an accelerator program and decided to create his own ecommerce business. Codner was having some success but it wasn’t until he joined Start & Scale that he was able to use the principles we teach in the course to catapult his business revenue from $2,000 to $60,000 per month.

In this rare interview with an up-and-coming member of the Foundr community, we learn the exact strategies Codner used to create products his audience loves, and take his business to the next level. We are extremely proud of Gamal’s achievements and we are happy to share his inspiring story with you!

Key Takeaways

• The one thing you must have to scale your ecommerce business
• How new ecommerce entrepreneurs can get their products in front of large audiences quickly
• Codner’s newest content marketing strategy, and how it will help him reach greater heights next year
• A low-risk strategy to testing new products before you launch them full throttle
• The one low-cost strategy Codner wished he had used during the initial stages of his business

As a former Navy Seal, Brandon Webb is no stranger to life’s roller coaster of adversities and triumphs. In the military, pressure is a constant, and learning how to withstand and thrive under that pressure has made Webb a victor in his own battles, whether in business or everyday life.

In this interview with Foundr, Webb shares the story of how he lost millions in his first failed startup and turned his misfortune around to build and scale his eight-figure media and ecommerce business, Hurricane Group, Inc. He shares exactly what the turning point was that gave him a burst of forward momentum and the realizations that led to his success.

Webb’s astonishing accomplishments have been shaped by the principles he's mastered to overcome adversity, maintain laser-sharp focus, and make better decisions under pressure. He discusses how learning the necessary principles of FOCUS have helped help him create attainable, actionable goals that influenced outcomes and have helped him win in life and business.

As a New York Times-bestselling author, Webb also takes you behind the cover of his new book, Total Focus: Make Better Decisions Under Pressure, where he discusses how to approach the challenges and complexities of growing a startup using the indispensable life skills and principles he learned as a Navy Seal.

Key Takeaways

• Why saying no to some irresistible opportunities can save your business.
• How to figure out the delicate balance between doing too much and doing just enough to move the needle
• Why raising money can sometimes bury you deeper into a hole of failure
• The one thing all young entrepreneurs should know to avoid an insecure financial future
• The single trait an entrepreneur needs to get investors to fork over their money
• Webb’s personal and business goal-setting strategies that have led him to winning in business and life.
• And more!

Anyone, technically, can build a business. But it takes real skill to convert an audience into die-hard followers who will stick with you no matter what. Ben Rattray is an expert at doing just that, now at the helm of one of the largest online communities in the world, not to mention a major force for social change.

Rattray is the founder of Change.org, one of the world's biggest social enterprises with over 100 million users spread across 196 countries, empowering everyday people to create and join social causes. In 2012, he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world, according to Time magazine, and he's partnered with titans ranging from Virgin to Amnesty International.

But before it became the massive vehicle for online activism it is today, Change.org looked very different. In fact, it actually wasn't until 2011 that Change.org became the online petition platform we all know and love today.

Like most entrepreneurs, Rattray had to go through a few pivots before finally developing a model that actually worked. While most entrepreneurs can only afford to pivot maybe once or twice, if they're lucky, Rattray had the power of community behind him. And that power can take you a long way.

Rattray did what most others could not, he managed to not only build a huge community that loved what he was doing, but he was also able to keep them loyal to his brand even while undergoing multiple changes. You don't have to be in social enterprise to understand the magnitude of such an accomplishment, and just how valuable it can be to any business.

Luckily for our listeners, Rattray knows exactly how to do it.

In this episode you'll learn:

• Why a name is everything. Rattray goes into detail about how to find the right name for your company
• Why you always need to find investment before you launch
• How to take advantage of upsells and cross-sells to increase your bottom line
• Pivoting and changing your business model
• The how-to guide for mobilizing your community using content
• & so much more!

If you don't know Kevin Kelly's name, you undoubtedly know his work. Staying mostly behind the scenes, Kelly has quietly influenced the world as we know it, from pop culture to how we interact with digital technology.

He launched and built up one of the most influential media brands in the world, with a devoted audience of millions—a brand that's published, and even launched the careers of Pulitzer Prize winners, presidents, filmmakers, and of course, billionaire entrepreneurs.

Kelly is co-founder of the one-and-only Wired magazine.

In his time as editor-in-chief at Wired, Kelly was a pioneer of helping the world understand and interact with the internet and digital technology at large, as their role in our lives exploded. Since then, he's gone on to publish multiple books and launch multiple successful businesses. Throughout this interview, though, one theme persists:

Kelly is a true futurist.

Not only have many of his predictions about the future come true, from crowdfunding to wearable technology, but his keen ability to hack into these cultures early on, before they've hit the mainstream, has been the key to his success.

Luckily for our listeners, Kelly reveals in this sweeping interview his methodology for culture-hacking and how he's just so darn good at predicting the future.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Kelly's method for culture-hacking an audience and building a worldwide brand
• The future of print media, and how digital entrepreneurs can take advantage of it
• A rare behind-the-scenes look at the history of Wired
• The true meaning of "a thousand true fans" and what it means for entrepreneurs
• How to package every product "like a magazine"
• & much more!

For any startup to be successful, it's going to need an amazing team. It's why Fortune 500 companies are willing to pay their executives so much, and invest millions of dollars into finding and hiring the right people.

For the founders of startups, though, especially those that are bootstrapping, there's barely enough money to pay themselves, let alone hire anyone anyone else. The challenge of finding the right person to bring onto your team becomes that much harder.

It's a position most founders find themselves in when they need to start bringing on new staff, and Cyan Ta'eed was no exception.

In the beginning of Envato, one of the world's leading digital marketplaces with over 1.5 million active customers, it was just Ta'eed and her two other co-founders. It was a 100% bootstrapped operation, and still is today, and for a while, the three-person team was enough. But they soon quickly realized that if they were to grow any further, they needed to grow their team.

"We couldn't offer above market, because so many startups who had taken funding to get these amazing, sort of, guns. These people who can command these incredibly high salaries," Ta'eed says. "So instead we would look for people with great potential, people who were entrepreneurial themselves, people who we knew could take the ball and run with it."

Ta'eed hit the pavement and began the seemingly impossible task of finding that unicorn who's driven, entrepreneurial, and a problem-solver. In the end, though, she found a system that made finding and hiring exceptional talent, exceptionally easy.

In this interview you'll learn:

• Where to look for when hunting for A-grade talent
• How to know whether your new employee is really going to help you grow
• What a highly effective founding team should look like
• How to juggle building multiple products without losing focus
• How Ta'eed disrupts an entire industry
• & much more!