Startup Hypeman: The GOAT to Market Show

700 customers, including Hubspot, Linkedin, and PayPal. $68.1 million in funding. 200+ employees. Next-level brand awareness. Category leader. Do you think all that happens just from direct selling? Think again. Gong has produced, in my opinion, the BEST content in the game. And it's reflecting in those numbers you see above (and oh yeah, nearly all of their content itself gets hundreds and thousa...

Nobody likes pitching investors, can we all agree on that? The capital raise process is long, laborious, and dejecting. But it's something many startups have to go through. Part of the pitch is explaining your business model. If you don't explain it the right way investors will either say "oh you're just like everyone else" or "this is too complex for me". And neither of those is a good response....

Introducing our brand new bonus content series: #HYPEsessions! These are short interviews with various trusted resource partners of the startup ecosystem (think VC groups, angels, incubators, and service providers) Each #HYPEsession is provided to you here in audio format through our podcast feed, but also simulcast with video on my personal Linkedin (linkedin.com/in/rajivnathan) and IGTV via the...

If you're an early stage company, you can't afford to bring on a cofounder who doesn't get the job done. Which means your selection process needs to be on point, and you need to be willing to go the Malcolm X "by any means necessary" route to assemble the right team. In this week's episode, networking app Pod.io Founder Dr. Jo Webber shares her wild story of assembling a global founding team which...

We're back! In our Season 12 premier, Tars Founder Ish Jindal steps up to the mic. Tars has bootstrapped their way to 10 FT employees and $600k ARR. A large part of their early success can be attributed to actually not letting success get to their head. Early on they saw a wide variety of users sign up for their product, but they realized it would be impossible to grow and serve all of them at the...

Enjoy one of our favorites from Season 11! Have you ever paid waaay over face value on a site like StubHub to go to a concert or sports game? Yeah, me too. Richard Davies has too, and he decided enough was enough. So he created Twickets, an ethical ticket resale marketplace, to help fans resell their tickets to other fans at face value. Twickets has been endorsed as the official resale platform by...

Enjoy one of our favorites from Season 11! Once you raise your first growth round, or achieve a certain revenue milestone, you're likely ready to hire. Your first hire is so critically important because the wrong person can set your company back 6-9 months, potentially tank you entirely. Your next few hires carry a similar weight. We know that 9 out of 10 companies fail, and one of the top reasons...

Have you been looking forward to a new episode these last few months and been sorely disappointed? Well, I'm finally breaking the unintended silence and giving you the full scoop on where the podcast has been, what's changing with the show, and the launch date of our next season (HINT: It's happening in October). Enjoy! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Enjoy one of our favorites from Season 11! There's revenue growth, and then there's rapid revenue growth. This week on the podcast I'm joined by Steve Glaveski, Cofounder and CEO of Collective Campus in Melbourne, Australia. He also hosts the Future Squared Podcast AND recently authored the book "Employee To Entrepreneur: How To Win Your Freedom And Do Work That Matters". Steve shares the strategi...

Enjoy one of our favorites from Season 10! I have a feeling this episode is gonna get A LOT of downloads. If you're a pre-revenue startup, I'm sure you've thought to yourself, "How do we raise money??" Or maybe you've been out there trying to fundraise and having no luck. Well, brew a pot of coffee or crack open a cold one, sit back and take notes for this one. Amber McDonald is the CEO and Cofoun...

Enjoy one of our favorites from Season 10! Okay, you founded a company. Are you an innovator? Is your company innovative? Many of us think because we're in the 'startup ecosystem' we're practicing innovation by default. Monica Kang has a different viewpoint. She's the Founder of Innovators Box, an innovation consultancy, and author of the book "Rethink Creativity". As a first-generation American,...

Enjoy one of our favorites from Season 10! Brian Letzter is a former U.S. Army Cavalry Scout, and the current Cofounder of HowDoWe, a fundraising platform for public schools, churches, and community action groups (sort of a local community-focused Kickstarter). I first met Brian in 2017 when he was enrolled in the Bunker Labs' Launch Lab program where I mentor. From his time in the Army, he learne...

Enjoy one of our favorites from Season 10! Any business owner will tell you the most important thing is customers. Last week's episode covered building relationships with them, and this week's episode we dive into finding them in the first place. My guest is Jason Bay, who joins the show for a record third time. Jason and I met in 2015 for, of all things, a podcast recording (his first appearance...

I can tell you from experience with my first company - you should never do a 50/50 founder equity split. Or any math breakout that gives all cofounders equal ownership for that matter. But what should the distribution be? And how does that change when you bring on investors or employees? This area is one of the biggest aspects that most founding teams overlook, and ultimately have messy fights and...

"My first business did over a million in revenue and I don't think I ever took home more than 3 grand a month." Those are actual words from this week's guest, Jake Jorgovan, CEO of LeadCookie. We all push for revenue as our north star, but what good is revenue if you aren't actually making any money? Cash Flow is vitally important to running a healthy venture, and LeadCookie hit a point where 9 mo...

Do not adjust your television sets, what you are seeing is correct -- Amanda Greenberg is in fact back for a 2nd straight episode! Appearing as the show's first ever back-to-back guest (with two completely different topics), this time around the Balloonr CEO talks through how the company saw early on that it was not like the others. Oftentimes when we start companies we look for what's already hot...

You're in the midst of a capital raise. You keep hearing from angels that they are interested, but they want you to find a lead investor first. What if you instead targeted a more prominent investor? One who would go lead AND introduce you to other investors to help close out the round. In my conversation this week with Amanda Greenberg, Balloonr Cofounder & CEO, she talks through her process...

You can, in theory, have high market need and a product that would be perfect to solve that need. But if the UX isn't on point, your market won't care. Especially when it comes to nontechnical people. The ones who aren't inherently tech-savvy are slow to adopt technology, and even when they do, they won't tolerate any friction in their user experience. Susannah Bailin is a seasoned entrepreneur, a...

I can't tell you the number of times I've seen startups just start building without having done any research into their audience. What happens? They build, release, and wonder why no one wants what they have. User research is critical early on (and even ongoing) if you want to build a lasting company. We've all heard of Product-Market Fit, but this week in my conversation with Humaira Ahmed, Found...

Have you ever paid waaay over face value on a site like StubHub to go to a concert or sports game? Yeah, me too. Richard Davies has too, and he decided enough was enough. So he created Twickets, an ethical ticket resale marketplace, to help fans resell their tickets to other fans at face value. Twickets has been endorsed as the official resale platform by the likes of Ed Sheeran, Sir Elton John, M...

Way before I was 'RajNATION', I was simply little Rajiv in elementary school. Every fall we had an assembly where this outside school fundraising group named Innisbrook would come talk to us about how our ‘cool’ factor could increase with the latest boombox, or a sleek-looking Wilson duffel bag we could take to baseball/softball practice, or they'd talk up other amazing prizes. I finished as a top...

230k total users. 10k monthly active users. $1.6 million ARR. $0 in outside capital raised. These are the numbers behind SaaS startup Bubble.is, Cofounded by Emmanuel Straschnov. Oftentimes when we think of achieving scale, we jump straight to "I need to raise money to get more users!" Emmanuel took the opposite route because he realized that if Bubble raised money early, investors would have requ...

Once you raise your first growth round, or achieve a certain revenue milestone, you're likely ready to hire. Your first hire is so critically important because the wrong person can set your company back 6-9 months, potentially tank you entirely. Your next few hires carry a similar weight. We know that 9 out of 10 companies fail, and one of the top reasons for failure is 'wrong team'. That means mo...

Last week we had a cold and rainy day here in Chicago. I was downtown on Madison Street waiting for the #20 bus when a homeless man walked up to me and asked for a dollar. What happened next was a lesson in using social proof to build your case to customers or investors. Welcome to the first ever podcast #HYPEtalk! Short and punchy insight to help your startup. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/priva...

It's generally not a good idea to build a product that's for 'everyone'. But when you build a marketplace product (think AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, Yelp, etc) by nature you're building for more than 1 audience, with the intention that the different audiences interact with one another to drive commerce. Marketplace products are incredibly attractive, but can often be more like the Sirens song luring you i...