DissedMedia: A Startup Story

Most couples, and seemingly most groups of friends, have spent far longer than they would care to admit debating where to eat, scrolling through map results that know very little about what they actually enjoy. In this episode of DissedMedia: A Startup Story, host Dr. Ben Olmos sits down with David Leibner, CEO of Stupid Good, whose career spans roughly a decade working bars and kitchens and about...

Daniel Alfon has been on LinkedIn since February 2004, long enough to have made every mistake the platform allows and to have built a method that runs against most of the advice circulating about it today. In this conversation, Daniel makes the case that a smaller, well-chosen network outperforms a large one, and that posting constantly is not the lever most business owners think it is. He and Ben...

Welcome to the first episode of a new show from DissedMedia; Better @ What You Do In this first episode of Better at What You Do, host Ben Olmos and four returning guests from DissedMedia: A Startup Story explore what that shift means for leaders by way of the Meta social media addiction settlement and YouTube's new monetization requirements, along with the steady decline in new podcast launches....

A hundred episodes into DissedMedia: A Startup Story, I step away from the usual guest interview to give an update on how the show and the company behind it got here, beginning with thanks to my advisory board and to former co-host Alan Landry, and moving into the PodFest event in Atlanta that, a little over a year ago, seemingly changed how I understood podcasting and convinced me to put the show...

Lady Jen Du Plessis holds every one of her five shows to a six-figure revenue standard, and in this conversation she walks Ben through the mechanics behind that number, which center upon what happens after the recording stops rather than inside the episode itself. She spent four decades in financial services, reaching the top 200 producers in an industry of roughly a million people, before turning...

Leadership teams across nearly every industry are moving quickly on AI implementation, and while the tools and models seemingly perform well, many rollouts stall at the handoffs and decision points that nobody took ownership of beforehand. Those gaps tend to surface the moment the technology begins moving work faster than the organization was built to handle. In this episode of DissedMedia: A Star...

Anyone trying to work out how to pick stocks on their own, without turning the whole portfolio over to a brokerage firm, tends to hit the same wall, which is that the language of Wall Street can seem designed to keep ordinary investors confused and dependent upon the people selling them products. Jaden Sterling spent the 1990s inside that world, first at Merrill Lynch and then at Citi Corp, and wh...

Willie Blake built WB Coaching around a premise that runs against most of the discipline and productivity advice sold to entrepreneurs, namely that a brain which does not process information in a straight line needs a different operating system rather than a harder version of the same one, and on this episode he explains what happens when a dyslexic or neurodivergent founder tries to force themsel...

Podcast guesting has become one of the most crowded channels in B2B marketing, and Josh Elledge, founder of PodVerified and host of The Thoughtful Entrepreneur, fields somewhere between 400 and 500 spam pitches every month for his own show, which may explain why so many would-be guests feel like the door has already been closed on them. In this conversation he pulls back the curtain on how the gue...

Most professionals build their pitch for the part of the brain that decides almost nothing, and Patrick van der Burght has spent two decades explaining why that habit quietly costs them business; in this episode he walks through the science of how people actually arrive at yes, drawing on the work of Dr. Robert Cialdini, who personally trained and licensed him as one of a small number of practitio...

Most software built by prompting AI, what people now call vibe coding, works well enough to impress in a demo, yet it tends to buckle the moment real complexity enters the picture, and Walt Thiessen has spent the better part of two years chasing down why that happens and what actually fixes it. Walt is the creator of Superfluidity and the founder of AI Gather, a project that began with a simple go...

Per Sjofors, known as The Price Whisperer, built his career on the idea that pricing strategy is the real lever separating profitable companies from struggling ones, more than product or marketing alone. In this episode, Per explains why pricing gets barely a page and a half in most business school textbooks, and how his holistic approach to pricing has helped companies scale from hundreds of mill...

Sheldon Wolf is the founder of Intellitary, a real estate lead generation platform built to solve one problem: most brokerages don't have enough qualified transactions coming in. After 30 years in real estate and finance, Sheldon built Intellitary's AI system to screen and qualify buyers and sellers before handing them directly to real estate agents, an approach he calls the "Un-Brokerage." In thi...

Kenneth Kollasch, a third-generation entrepreneur and certified business coach who spent fourteen years running a century-old franchise, joins Ben to talk about how to grow a small business through the exact transition that separates a mom-and-pop operation from a company that actually runs itself. Kenneth walks through his Small Business Flight Plan, a twelve-month framework built around leadersh...

Kelly Schuknecht spent a decade in publishing helping authors figure out what actually happens after a book hits shelves, then spent seven years growing an accounting firm's marketing department from four million to twelve million in revenue, and it was only after a layoff eliminated her role that she started asking what she alone was qualified to build. That question turned into Two Mile High Mar...

Most performance marketing fails long before a single dollar reaches an ad platform, and this conversation with Matthew Slaymaker centers upon that idea from the very first question. Slaymaker, founder of Slaymaker Marketing, has spent his career helping B2B brands and e-commerce companies build performance marketing programs that convert clicks into measurable revenue, and here he walks through t...

Kurt Uhlir has spent a career watching companies confuse activity with progress, and on this episode of Dissed Media he sits down with Ben Olmos to explain what servant leadership actually looks like once a company moves past the idea stage and into the hard, unglamorous work of scaling. Uhlir currently serves as chief marketing officer of Easy Home Search, and across a career that includes an $88...

Jack Oujo spent eight years chasing a Major League umpiring career before a release letter ended it at age 30, broke and with a baby on the way. He turned that setback into one of the most successful careers in wealth management, and in this episode he shares the exact strategies behind it. Jack breaks down why income taxes, not your mortgage, are most people's biggest expense, and how maxing out...

How do you get an AI search engine to recommend your podcast? Mitch Carson, known as the instant celebrity maker, joins the show to answer that question and walk through 40-plus years of media experience, from radio and television to podcasting and AI search visibility. Mitch and Ben break down the podcast workflow that keeps a show running consistently, why most podcasters quit within the first e...

Growth without protection is a trap. Attorney and asset protection coach Scherrie L. Prince joins Ben to break down the asset protection strategies entrepreneurs skip until something goes wrong, from choosing the right entity structure to building an estate plan that actually matches your business. Scherrie explains her four-part framework for structuring a business from day one, why a 50/50 partn...

Kati Peterman, founder of Your FRX, has worked with over 1,200 businesses and helped them scale into multiple seven and eight figure revenue. In this episode she breaks down the SIPOC framework her team uses with every client, covering suppliers, input, process, output, and customer journey, and explains why response time is the single biggest revenue leak she sees across industries. Kati and Ben...

On this episode of Dissed Media: A Startup Story, Ben talks sales motivation and sales execution with Drewbie Wilson, founder of Call The Damn Leads and five-time author who has generated over $15 million in sales. They dig into why most business leaders don't have a lead problem, they have an execution problem, and how self discipline outside of work builds sales confidence inside of it. Drewbie...

How do you monetize a podcast and turn it into a real business? In this episode of DissedMedia: A Startup Story, host Ben Olmos talks with Adam Torres, founder of Mission Matters and host of 15 shows with thousands of interviews behind him. Adam breaks down how to monetize a podcast from day one through live events, book publishing, PR, and paid guest experiences instead of waiting on downloads an...

Some of the most knowledgeable professionals in their fields are nearly impossible to find online. In this episode of DissedMedia: A Startup Story, host Ben Olmos sits down with Ashley Smith, a former realtor of 18 years turned personal branding strategist who studies what she calls the proof gap, the distance between what you know and what shows up when someone searches for you. Ashley explains w...

Most founders lose their best hours to the back office. Chore founder and angel investor Adam Spector explains how back office outsourcing hands HR, finance, compliance, payroll, and bookkeeping to a fractional team that runs all of it for you, so you get your time back for product and customers. Adam has founded four companies and made more than 200 startup investments, and he built Chore to solv...