When she came up with the idea for Oneforty, the Twitter app store, Laura Fitton thought she was “thoroughly unqualified for the idea.” She didn’t know how to code up a site. She never raised money for a startup before. And she didn’t even live in Silicon Valley. But she launched it anyway because she felt that a good idea is a gift and she owed it to herself to pursue it.

As she got going…

I had two agendas in my interview with Scott Gerber. First, I wanted to hear his business advice. Both Entrepreneur Magazine and Fox Business consider him an entrepreneurship expert, so I wanted to hear what he had to teach. Second, I wanted to find out how he made himself an authority in the entrepreneurship space. How did he get to be the expert, and more importantly, how can I help you be an authority in your space.

I met Colin Wright at a small get-together that my wife and I organized at the new apartment we’re renting in Buenos Aires. He told us how he’s growing his business while traveling. Since I’m noticing that many people in the Mixergy audience are curious about the digital nomad lifestyle, I invited him on to talk about his experiences.

At 17-years-old, he couldn’t legally drink, vote or even sign a contract, but that didn’t stop Rahul Sood from launching a company. He just did it. He didn’t have much money, but that didn’t stop him either. He got a credit card and took out $1,500. Most people assume they need to raise venture capital to build a tech business. Rahul couldn’t get it, but he didn’t need it. His computer business, VoodooPC, was profitable from the start — and it remained profitable when he sold it to HP.

I bet you want to know…

In 2008, Noah Everett wanted to share photos on Twitter. Since there was no way to do it, he grabbed an old server and created Twitpic as a side project. This program will show you how he did it, but before you listen to it, I want to impress you with some numbers…

The kind of spirit that you and I celebrate here on Mixergy is spreading around the world, largely because of creative entrepreneurs like Dominic Johnson-Hill, who you’ll meet in this interview.

Dominic is a backpacker from the UK who found himself in China. Today he runs Plastered T-shirts, the startup he founded in 2005 which does about $800,000 a year in sales, but when he first got to China he had little to his name — but the guy knew how to hustle. In 1995 he looked around and…

One of the first things I noticed when I looked at Aptimize, Ed Robinson’s year-old company, is a collection of logos from top clients that his company sold to. Microsoft and Google stand out right away, but if you check out this page, you’ll see there are others.

So I invited him to Mixergy to teach us how he did it.

If you’ve watched my past interviews, you know that I’m obsessed with interviewing companies that are actually charging their users (as opposed to hoping to profit from ads). I want to learn how they do it. Don’t you? In a world where everyone assumes that everything online is free, how do these rebel companies successfully say, “Our products are so good that people should pay for them. And, in fact, if users do pay for them, we can give them a better experience.”…

One day, Brandon looked down at the list of people who volunteered to be street team members for an artist on his record label. The name Steve Wozniak stood out, so he emailed him to find out if it was “THE Woz,” the guy who co-founded Apple. Turns out it was. Woz was a fan and he wanted to help out, so he volunteered.

The record industry counts on street teams to do everything from posting fliers to getting artists on radio stations. And, as you can see from this example, street teams can…

Today’s guest didn’t make it to the live interview, so I asked someone from the audience to step in and have a conversation with me. I didn’t expect to post it (which is why you might hear me sipping on my yerba mate more than usual), but the feedback from the live viewers was so good that I decided to edit and post it.

Just 5 years after launching his company, SafeWeb, Stephen Hsu sold it to Symantec for $26 million. The idea for the business came to him when he was a Physics professor at Yale, where he was put in charge of protecting the department’s network from hackers. Based on the solution, he and his partner created a [...]

Kevin Hale and his 2 co-founders started building their business before they even knew what business they’d be in. They did something that I’ve noticed other Mixergy entrepreneurs have done: they built an audience first. Then, when they launched their company, that audience became a big pool of potential customers, evangelists and defenders.
The idea for [...]