How a 3rd year Ph.D student dropped out to commit 100% to his startup, Olark – with Ben Congleton

Ben Congleton, Olark, Bootstrapping, Customer Acquisition, Outsourcing, SaaS (software as a service)

Today’s interviewee turned me down for years because he said he wasn’t ready to come on the program. Finally, a few days ago, he said yes. Find out what happened that gave him urgency to be interviewed by me.

Ben Congleton is the CEO and Co-founder of Olark.com which is a lightweight tool to chat with visitors to your website using your existing messaging client.

In this interview you’ll hear how Ben made the difficult decision to dropout of his Ph.D program and commit fully to his startup after years of doing both.

Ben Congleton

Olark

Ben Congleton is the CEO and Co-founder of Olark.com which is a lightweight tool to chat with visitors to your website using your existing messaging client.

 

Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. And I am enough of a pro to toss out this whole intro here that we’ve written, because instead I want to tell you that today’s guest is a guy I had asked on multiple times to do an interview, and multiple times he said no. And I’ve known him for a while and I thought we were friends, and we would talk on the phone, and he would still turn me down.

And then suddenly a few weeks ago he sends me a text message saying, “Andrew, I’m ready to come on Mixergy. So, here he is today. We’re going to find out why he said no up until now, what’s making him say yes, and, according to my researcher, he now has a multimillion dollar company. I didn’t realize it grew so much.

The guest is, Ben Congleton. He is the co-founder of Olark. They’re the easiest way to add live chat to your website, so you...

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