Vanity Fair said Amy Martin was the “tweetheart” with “1.2 million followers, who taught Shaquille O’Neal to tweet.” I invited her to Mixergy to talk about how she helped Shaq become one of the most engaging Twitter users and to learn how she’s helping brands like The Chicago White Sox, Discount Tire and The Cleveland Indians build communities and customers through social media.

One day in the late 90′s, Todd Friesen put up a quick web site to sell pills. “In the very first month,” he told me “I made $150. And I thought this is just silly.” But things changed quickly. “The second month Google picked it up and I got into the top three for some of the big keywords and made several thousand dollars. At that point my eyes got opened really wide and I started building web sites as fast as I could.” Then…

When I researched my interview with investor Brad Feld, I read that he called Service Metrics one of his best investments. So I invited the co-founder of Service Metrics, Niel Robertson, to talk about how he co-founded and built that business, and how it was sold for $280 million.

I also asked him about Trada, the company he launched which uses crowdsourcing to improve paid search clicks and conversions

What I admire about Patrick McKenzie is how methodical he was about building his online company, Bingo Card Creator. As a Japanese salaryman, he was expected to work long hours, but in his spare time (about 5 hours a week), he launched and grew his company.

In this interview, you’ll…

On June 19, 2008, Peldi launched Balsamiq, a one-man software company that helps people create quick & intuitive mockups. 3 weeks later, his revenue was $4,432. In less than 5 months, he reached $100,000. And 18 months later he crossed the $2 million mark.

In this program, I asked Peldi about the details of how he did it. I wanted to know …

You probably never heard of Paul Singh or MailFinch and might blow this interview off. Do NOT make that mistake!

If you listen, you’ll learn how Paul launched his business with nothing but a landing page and how he built it into a profitable, growing business by getting input from his users every step of the way.

One year and one day after he got funding for SiteAdvisor, Chris Dixon sold it to McAfee for $74 million. In this interview I take that one sentence and spend about an hour going through how it happened — from idea, to team-building, to product development, to sale.

We also talk about his latest company, Hunch, and his person investments in tech startups.

Listen around minute 9 of this interview and you’ll understand why I think talking about failure is so important. You’ll hear how one entrepreneur Brad invested in could have been a salve to the “never give up” cliché, but instead decided to build a successful business.

And, since Brad is one of the most admired tech startup investors (Zynga, Return Path, Service Metrics, etc), we spent a lot of time talking about what it takes to build a hit company.

Jennifer Kushell wanted to build a multimedia company that helped young adults as they transitioned from home and school into the real world. But a tough economic climate meant she couldn’t raise much money from investors. So she decided to write a book.

In this interview you’ll hear how she took the advance she got on her book and invested the money into making the book a best seller. The success of the book raised her profile and grew a community, which she used to launch her business.

Hiten Shah wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on past business ideas (and you can in this video how painful those losses are to him). Then everything changed…

I invited Sean Moriarty to Mixergy to learn how he thinks about buying companies.

At Ticketmaster, Sean’s acquisitions included Paciolan, TicketsNow, Emma Entertainment and Echo Music. In this program, you’ll hear how he thought about he and his team thought about and executed some of those acquisitions.

So this interview is kind of a 2-in-1. We start off with a biographical interview, where you’ll see how Todd launched a business while working a full-time job. Then we turn it into a mini-seminar about generating online ad revenue.