Startups With Stu

Tim Shea's data analytics company has clients that include the NBA, UFC, Princess Cruise Lines,  and Reddit. He started the company solo, scaled to five employees during Covid, then went back  to solo — by choice. He calls VC "another form of poverty." He calls his current setup "crushing it." Tim Shea is the founder of Latticework, a retail and DTC data analytics company focused on&nbsp...

Fadi Alshalabi had 48 hours to leave Syria. He left behind his wife, his six-year-old daughter,  and his sick father. One week later, his wife told him she was pregnant with their second child.  He was starting over in Berlin with nothing but a research contract and a dream about education. Fadi Alshalabi is the founder of Niuversity — an online education platform that has taught  8...

Matt Friedman had a commercial kitchen available every night after 6:30pm — the fraternity  house kitchen. He installed a phone line, printed some flyers, went to Sam's Club for wings  and one type of Coke, and started delivering buffalo wings to college students at the University  of Florida. That was 1993. Twelve banks said no when he tried to get a loan. His parents  said ye...

A dentist Stu knew from church retired after decades of practice and just closed the doors.  Didn't sell it. Didn't know he could. Just locked up and walked away from what could have been  a real exit. Jason Morris heard the story and said it almost happened to a company he knows  every week. Rich Jarvis is the founder of Epic Capital Funds — $830 million under management, $3.4 bill...

Aaron Pridmore watched a kid rip his shirt off, climb the backstop to the song "Rodeo,"  and dance for the entire crowd at his first Banana Ball youth tournament. 75 teams had  shown up from 48 different states. Parents were cheering for both sides. Kids who were  about to quit baseball said they were coming back next season. He knew right then he'd  found his life's work. Aaro...

Ty Palmer built an app that plays a donkey sound when you're being an ass in an argument.  It detects 48 emotions, analyzes tone of voice in real time, and even catches you being passive  aggressive over text. Therapists loved it. Then they told him what they actually needed help with. Ty Palmer is the co-founder of Clary AI — an AI-powered admin platform for mental health  clinics — and Donkey Ch...

Sam DeMaio taught himself construction from a $34.95 Home Depot book. He was working full-time as a correctional officer, then a police officer — and running a side hustle the entire time. Nobody knew. He didn't need them to. Sam is the founder of Showcase Remodels out of New Jersey, a remodeling company he scaled to $17.6 million in gross revenue. He also owns 48 rental properties, has done 17+ h...

When her business partner asked how he should pay her, AnnaMarie Davis said she didn't want  an hourly rate. She wanted equity. She was a college student who had been working in his studio  for months, had never been paid a dollar, and didn't entirely know what equity meant. She ended  up with 35%. AnnaMarie Davis is a partner at Audio and Recording, a commercial recording studio in Salt Lake  Cit...

Chynna Hansen was taping boxes for a cross-state move when she turned to her husband and said  she was starting a business. He asked if they could maybe just get moved first. She said she  didn't think they could wait. Chynna is the founder and CEO of Vast Apparel and Little Mama Shirt Shop — both seven-figure  businesses built in Idaho Falls. She started with a $400 seed fund from a unicorn birth...

Scott Jensen liquidated his 401k, maxed out a HELOC, and spent six years burning through  his corporate savings to build a backpacking company. He's in Costco, Scheels, Walmart,  Macy's, and Amazon. And he's still almost out of money. Scott Jensen is the founder of Near Zero — a company on a mission to demystify backpacking  with a complete, bundled, patented kit that gets you trail-ready in 30 mi...

At 21, Todd Kuhn signed a $120,000-a-year lease. Everyone thought he was mad.  Twenty years and two exits later, he's never taken a dollar from a bank or an investor. Todd Kuhn is an Australian founder who built and sold two fitness businesses — the first a  multi-location gym group, the second a 20-studio boutique Pilates chain acquired by an  ASX-listed company. Now he's building Core Lab, bring...

Stu wired his whole career chasing recognition. He didn't know it until a live coaching session on camera revealed the exact lie running underneath everything. Dallin Harmon left a high-paying angel investing role to coach founders full-time — and in this episode, he does it live with Stu. What came up wasn't what either of them expected. What he covers: → Discovering the subconscious belief: "The...

She showed up to a city she'd never been to, knew exactly one person, talked 30 restaurants into joining her event, went on live TV twice, and then coded a backup solution by herself two hours before the launch party when her developer bailed. The app didn't grow the way she wanted. She didn't quit. Lee Balcomb is the founder of Healthy Anywhere — a hyper-curated restaurant app that functions like...

Rob Polecki was an elected official in Idaho when he took his 4-year-old son into a dirty airport bathroom and couldn't find a single hands-free way to clean the toilet seat. Everything else in the restroom was touchless. Just not the part that mattered most. That moment in 2015 turned into Washi — a self-sanitizing commercial toilet seat Rob has been building, bootstrapping, and fighting for ever...

The franchising consultant they paid $100,000 to get their paperwork done turned out to be embezzling money and having an inappropriate relationship with a staff member. The company collapsed. Eight months of work, gone. The other four companies they'd been working with also went under. Adam Newman's response was to keep going — and eventually sell for $31 million. Adam Newman is the co-founder of...

She sent an unscripted, badly lit, walking-outside selfie video to the CEO of Caterpillar — one of the largest companies on earth. Her client laughed at her. Told her it was unprofessional. She did it anyway. Seven minutes later, Paul emailed back. That email is now framed on her wall. Bianca McDownriver is a Texas-based entrepreneur, freestyle rapper, and founder of Box Voice, an 11-year marketin...

How Raleigh Williams Sold His Business for $26M | Episode 59 He had a panic attack on the gym floor 30 days into his dream law firm job — and called his wife thinking he was having a heart attack. Turns out his body already knew what his brain hadn't caught up to yet: he was in the wrong life. Raleigh Williams went from panic attacks at a prestigious law firm to building Williams Entertainment Gro...

She didn't know what entrepreneurship was two years before starting her company. She grew up in Taiwan, her dad worked in a factory, and when she landed her first U.S. job offer she went home and Googled "contractor" — and genuinely thought they wanted her to be a plumber. Anya Cheng spent 15 years at Meta, eBay, Target, and McDonald's before launching Taelor AI, a subscription service that uses A...

The guy sold longboards, princess dresses, tungsten rings, and hoverboards out of the same warehouse. Then he built the largest ninja warrior gym in the world. Wally Roskelly has been on American Ninja Warrior three times, took first place Masters gold at the World Ninja Games, and has started more businesses than most people have had jobs. He sat down with Stu at a live retreat recording to talk...

James Clarke is the kind of entrepreneur you don't hear about on podcasts — not because he hasn't built at scale, but because he's not chasing the spotlight. Growing up in Rexburg, Idaho, James watched his uncle and aunt build Diet Center, a diet franchise business that became the predecessor to Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem. But what inspired him most wasn't the helicopter in the backyard — it was...

Dallin Harmon grew up broke in Idaho selling potatoes door-to-door with his siblings. His brothers went on to build Harmon Brothers, Angel Studios, and Tuttle Twins. Dallin co-founded Cove Security, helped scale VidAngel under an employee-ownership model that tripled the business, and now coaches founders through Scale Me. In this episode, he shares the brutally honest moment he realized he'd neve...

Spencer Johnson stood on a street corner with a cardboard sign looking for investors — and it actually worked. The founder of Neuro Pouch (nootropic pouches that replace nicotine with cognitive enhancers like lion's mane) shares how a health diagnosis became his business calling, how he landed his first angel investor through a LinkedIn post, and what it takes to survive the early startup grind. S...

Case Lawrence built Sky Zone from nothing — no funding, no industry, no safety net. In this episode, the founder of the world's biggest trampoline park brand shares how he went from a failed real estate concept and near-bankruptcy to creating a $1B empire. We talk angel investing, equity splits, the sacred investor-entrepreneur relationship, and why watching your team win is the real payoff. His n...

What if the best business doesn't win—the best marketer does? Dennis Yu, a former Yahoo search engineer and co-author of books that sold 800,000 copies, is on a mission to close that gap. Dennis isn't an SEO trying to trick search engines—he's a search engine engineer who built the systems SEOs try to game. His unique perspective reveals why good businesses fail while inferior competitors with bet...

What does it take to make the Inc 5000 list five times, raise eight kids, survive a divorce, and come out stronger? Bubba Page (real name: Brandt) knows—and his journey will challenge everything you think about entrepreneurship, faith, and family. In this episode: Why Bubba bootstrapped his first company (Launch Leads) to $500K/year without raising a dollar The brutal reality of venture-backed fai...