Andrew: Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their business. I’ve done over a thousand. There’s a pattern that I noticed, and this interview is about that pattern. I want to understand it a little bit better.
The pattern is that a lot of the most successful entrepreneurs who I’ve interviewed start out by understanding a specific customer pain, often by experiencing that pain themselves. Then they create a solution in the form of software, sometimes services, that solves that pain. What I want to understand is how they do it. I want to understand the process of how it’s done.
I specifically asked to have Steli Efti on here, the founder of Close.io, because this is how he did it. He started Close.io after doing sales himself, understanding the challenges involved in using other people’s sales software and realizing, “There’s got to...