Leveling Up with Eric Siu

Hey everyone, in this episode, I share the mic with Ismael Wrixen, CEO of FE International, an experienced website broker who offers highly personalized service and access to a large network of investors looking to buy and sell successful websites. Listen as we discuss FE International’s content marketing strategy and why they invest in people rather than distribution, the power of building client...

Hey everyone, on today's episode we've got Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific, an all-in-one platform for independent experts and entrepreneurs to create, market and sell online courses. Listen as we discuss how cold calls got Thinkific their first 50 customers, how Greg created an online course that got $10,000 in MRR which allowed him to start Thinkific, the simple funnel that Thinkific uses to grow r...

Today’s interview is with Qualaroo CEO Sean Ellis, who coined the term ‘growth hacker’ and founded growthhackers.com. Sean has a very impressive background growing startups such as Dropbox, Xobni and LogMeIn. Click here for key takeaways. Leave Some Feedback: What should I talk about next? Who should I interview? Please let me know on Twitter or in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? I...

Today’s interview is with David Hassell of 15five. He’s been labeled as the ‘Most Connected Man You Don’t Know In Silicon Valley’ by Forbes and he tells us how he got there. David is a serial entrepreneur and shares some tips for keeping himself sharp.  Click here for show notes. Leave some feedback: What should I talk about next? Who should I interview? Please let me know on Twitter or in the com...

Hey everyone, on today’s show we have Travis Truett, CEO of Ambition, an enterprise-grade sales productivity platform inspired by Fantasy Football. We talk about how Ambition was able to triple revenue in just six months, how they use gamification to show the amount of revenue employees are making and increase ROI, how they grew the to a 7-figure company via word of mouth and customer referrals, a...

Hey everyone, on today's show we have Dornubari Vizor, one of the co-founders of LeadQuizzes, a software solution that helps businesses generate leads through fun quizzes and assessments. In today’s interview, we’ll be talking about how Dornubari’s digital marketing agency evolved into LeadQuizzes, how they acquired their first 100 customers using an early adopter program (and achieved a 25% conve...

Today’s interview is with Treehouse CEO Ryan Carson, who I had the pleasure of working for. For starters, Treehouse is an $8 million dollar company that only works 4 days a week. And if that isn’t crazy enough, they’ve just changed their business to have no managers. And if that isn’t enough, the online education startup boasts an impressive list of world class investors such as Kevin Rose, Reid H...

Today’s interview is with Spencer Fry, CEO of Uncover, which is an employee rewards program for your company. Spencer previously co-founded TypeFrag (at age 19) and Carbonmade. All 3 of his companies were bootstrapped and Spencer talks about the benefits of bootstrapping. Click here for show notes. Leave Some Feedback: What should I talk about next? Who should I interview? Please let me know on Tw...

Today’s guest is Andy Mackensen, who is the co-founder and CMO of HUMAN healthy vending. Learn how he decided to disrupt a market about which he had to learn from the ground up and took the company from $0 million to $10 million in a very short amount of time. Andy also talks about his effective hiring process, masterminds, and one big takeaway that every entrepreneur should be paying attention to...

Hey everybody, today we have Bruno Haid, founder of Roam, an international network of communal living spaces that allows you to live in interesting places with interesting people for a week or a lifetime. In this week's episode, we'll be talking about how he managed to get 977 organic upvotes on Product Hunt, why targeted Facebook Ads work so well for them for customer acquisition and why it's so...

Hey everyone, today we have Jared Fuller, VP of Business Development at PandaDoc, the future of documents – where you can automate contracts, proposals, quotes, and electronic signatures. In today’s show we'll be talking about how they get 1,500 people to sign up each day (and became one of the fastest growing SaaS companies), what they do to get a more than 10% conversion rate from trial to paid...

Hey everybody, today on the show we have Greg Mercer, CEO of Jungle Scout, which helps Amazon FBA sellers find profitable product ideas, get sales data, estimates, and more. In today’s interview we’ll be talking about how Greg acquired their first 100 customers by leading webinars with other people's audiences, how they get conversion rates of 20% to 25% for their webinars when most people only ge...

Today’s guest is 26 year old Wade Foster, who is the Co-founder and CEO of Zapier, which is a tool that lets you easily connect web apps that you use.  Wade walks us through how the company started out as a remote team and how it has flourished by creating efficient internal processes. Click here for show notes. Leave Some Feedback: What should I talk about next? Who should I interview? Please let...

Rick Perreault is the CEO and co-founder of Unbounce, a landing page building tool that makes it easy to build and test landing pages quickly. His company does not have a sales team nor do they spend a lot on paid acquisition. Instead, they invest heavily into inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is something that I interviewed Rand Fishkin about and it’s good to see other people embracing it. Qui...

Have you wanted to take the plunge into entrepreneurship but aren’t quite ready to give up your day job yet? Well, that’s exactly what Todd Garland, CEO of BuySellAds did as he worked at HubSpot from 9-5 and orchestrated a multimillion dollar business during off hours. I should also mention that everything was bootstrapped and profitable in the first year! Click here for show notes. Leave some fee...

Hey everybody, today we have Irv Shapiro, CEO of DialogTech which helps companies drive sales through calls. In today’s interview we’ll be talking about how DialogTech raised over $60 million in funding and has well over 5,000 customers, why the leads with the highest conversion rates are from phone calls, and how they acquired their first 100 customers and built highly qualified links at the same...

Hi everybody, today we have Will Sentance, CEO and Cofounder of Codesmith, a software engineering immersive program that prepares graduates for roles as software engineers at top companies. In today’s interview we’ll be discussing what makes Codesmith different from other bootcamps, how they leverage a lot of customer/student acquisition from Meetup. com, and why the average salary of their gradua...

Hey everyone, today our guest is Tim Matthews, the Head of Marketing at Incapsula, which is a cloud-based application delivery platform that accelerates and secures websites of any kind. He is also the author of The Professional Marketer and The SaaS Marketing Handbook. Today we’ll be talking about how Incapsula doubles their business every year, why their number one customer acquisition method is...

Today’s interview is with Andy Johns, who was on the user growth team for Facebook, Twitter and Quora. He was recently an Entrepreneur in residence at Greylock Ventures and just joined Wealthfront‘s user growth team. There aren’t many people that are privileged enough to have worked on the growth team for massive businesses like Facebook so we’re very fortunate to have Andy join us. Click here for...

Today’s interview features Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income. Pat got into entrepreneurship after being let go from his job and hasn’t looked back since. He’s very transparent about everything he does and has a knack for helping others achieve success. In this interview, you’ll learn some strategies and tactics he uses to stay productive. Click here for transcript and key takeaways. Leave some fee...

Hi everyone, today we have Ian Blair who is the CEO of BuildFire, which provides the easiest way to build mobile apps in under five minutes. It’s a no-coding-required app-building platform where people can quickly build their own mobile apps and it works in any industry because every brand can benefit from an app. Today we're chatting about how BuildFire grew to a seven-figure ARR by using content...

Hey everybody, today’s guest is Austin Neudecker, head of Growth at Rev, which provides transcription services for audio and video formats, translation services, and caption and subtitle services. On today’s show we discuss how Austin went from startups to venture capital to the head of Growth at Rev, why they get 10-20% conversions even without a “beautiful” website, what their primary channel fo...

Hey everyone, today our guest is Scott Meyer, CEO of Ghostery, which alerts users about web bugs, ad networks, and web trackers allowing people to manage their privacy and data. Scott was previously the CEO of About.com and GM of The New York Times on the web before starting Ghostery. Today we’ll be talking about how Scott went from politics to business to a successful media career before founding...

Hello everybody, today our guest is Misha Chellam, the founder of Tradecraft, which is a full-time, in-person, immersive training program—sales, marketing, growth marketing and design—for people who want to break into the startup community. Today we're talking about how what Misha learned from launching a rock band, a commercial real estate company, and a medtech startup, how they acquired their f...

Hey everyone, today our guest is Ryan Holiday, the former Director of Marketing at American Apparel and current Founder and Partner at Brass Check Marketing where he focuses on creative consulting, advising, and marketing. Ryan is the author of several books including “Ego Is the Enemy,” “The Obstacle Is the Way,” “Trust Me, I’m Lying,” and “Growth Hacker Marketing.” In today’s interview, we’ll be...