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Tucker Max

Neil Patel

David S Rose

Bestselling Authors like Andy Weir

Espree Devora

Hiten Shah

Michelle Miller and More

Venture Capitalists

Lucas Carlson Interviews Entrepreneurs

Every week we will talk to different entrepreneurs about taking the long view on startup strategy.

Craftsman Founder with Lucas Carlson and Eliot Peper

Chris Tacy is one of my startup mentors and close personal friends. He is not only a brilliant strategist, but he has had 4 successful start experiences in a row with 4 successful exits and no (major) failures. A rare occurrence in startups. He has some surprising advice to share, so find out his secrets.

#1 Chris Tacy, How to Get 4 Successful Exits in a Row

Eliot Peper is an entrepreneur, an investor, an advisor… and now an author of startup fiction. His first book, Uncommon Stock (published by Brad Feld’s new publishing company FG Press) at its surface seems like an uncommon next step for most entrepreneurs. However if you treat a novel like a startup, you can understand the decision better. This week, I spend some time interviewing Eliot around a few topics:

 • How is writing a novel like doing a startup?

 • What can entrepreneurs learn from authors and vise-versa?

 • How does an author promote and do marketing for his work?

 • Are you a plotter or a pantser?

 • What writing apps do you use?

 • Who inspires you?

 • You were originally going to self-publish?

 • What attracted you to self-publishing?

 • Was it hard to decide between FG Press and self-publishing?

 • Was it harder than you expected to write the book?

 • What do you like best about writing?

 • What’s next for you?

#2 Eliot Peper, 3 Surprising Things Founders Can Learn From Fiction Authors

If you got a Stanford MBA and then worked as an investment banker... what would be your next career move? Michelle Miller decided to write a novel called The Underwriting. But she didn't just write a novel and hope to get traditionally published, she treated her novel as a startup. She raised investment, secured brand sponsorships, created screen savers and playlists, made a video trailer and serialized her novel (a modern Charles Dickens). This week, I interviewed Michelle in the Craftsman Founder Podcast and ask a bunch of questions:

 • Tell us about your background

 • What is The Underwriting?

 • What’s worked and what hasn’t worked well in promoting your novel?

 • With your Stanford MBA and then investment banking background, how is writing a novel like doing a startup?

 • What can entrepreneurs learn from authors and vise-versa?

 • How does an author promote and do marketing for her work today?

 • Are you a plotter or a pantser?

 • What writing apps do you use?

 • Who inspires you?

 • Have you considered traditional publishing?

 • What attracted you to self-publishing?

 • Is fiction a viable investment for venture capitalists?

 • Should more fiction authors consider trying to raise venture capital for their novels?

 • What do you like best about writing?

 • So what’s next for the Underwriting?

#3 Michelle Miller, How to Raise Venture Capital for a Novel

Many founders hope to one day take their company public on the stock market and have it be worth over $1B+ in market cap. To Dave Hersh, this dream is a reality with Jive Software, a company he founded and lead for 8 years and through 3 different business models.

Dave also happens to be one of my personal mentors and friends. This week we have the honor of interviewing Dave, who runs a brilliant startup blog and often talks about founder's impatience.

I ask Dave many tough and interesting questions this week like:

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You were involved with Jive for 8 years and stepped out right before it went public. Can you tell us why?
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What did you learn about work/life balance?
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Can you tell us about any bad startup ideas you had before Jive and how you knew Jive was different?
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What are the top 3 most common mistakes that you see startup founders make?
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What’s the best piece of advice you have ever received about starting companies?
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A few years ago, you became a Venture Capitalist with the top VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. What has being a VC taught you about startups and founders that you didn’t realize while being a founder?
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How has the way you approach and think about startups changed over the years?
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#4 Dave Hersh, How to Get Your Startup to IPO and Go Public

New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Entrepreneur, Patrick Vlaskovits, talks about how to apply lean startup principles to your company to find product-market fit and avoid common mistakes and pitfalls many entrepreneurs fall into. From coming up with startup ideas to evaluating them and marketing them, Patrick brings his wealth of expertise to bear in this great interview.

#5 Patrick Vlaskovits, What's Growth Hacking And How To Use It To Drive Attention To Your Startup

Neil Patel is an online celebrity and entrepreneur. He has been a prolific blogger on QuickSprout and the KISSmetrics blog since 2006. He has contributed to Entrepreneur Magazine, TechCrunch, Mashable, Business Insider, SEOmoz, and Geekwire. He has also mentored and advised endless numbers of entrepreneurs over the years, including myself.

Neil is a true Craftsman Founder of multiple companies: ACS (SEO), Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics which all have generated many millions of dollars a year in revenue. I am lucky to call him a friend and thrilled

Here is just the audio for those who are interested in listening:

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Show Notes

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Your startups, KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg both use data to tell you stories of how people use your websites. Why is that important? When people build websites, they tend to focus on traffic. A million visitors a month to your site doesn’t guarantee success if those visitors don’t convert into customers. Understanding the entire story path of your users from where they come from to when they buy is critical for long-term success.
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Many decisions are gut instincts and opinions, do you have any examples of how measuring data lead to surprising results? Yes. It is “common knowledge” that you need to reduce friction to get people to sign up, therefore you are supposed to minimize the things you ask a person to tell you up front. For example, you usually don’t ask for the person’s URL during signup. But using data, we found that asking for their URL first actually INCREASES SIGNUPS.
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How did you discover this?
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 1. Through data–Using Google Analytics, KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg

 2. Qualitative feedback–
SurveyMonkey 3. , 
Qualaroo 4. , 
Promoter.io
 5. Peers–We saw other smart people we know trying these ideas

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How does thinking like your customer help you make more sales? Think of a website as a first date. If someone lands on your site, let’s get married is: give me your email, password and credit card… that’s a really tough sell. But if you say: Good to meet you, what’s your name or URL? You start building a relationship with your audience which will make it easier for deeper engagements with your customers.
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How can you use data to piece together the stories about how customers find out about you? Do it in bite sizes. Figure out and optimize just one part of the story at a time. Find where you have the most drop-off to start with. For example, focus just on your homepage. Then focus on your checkout pages. Do it piece by piece.
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What do you do when you don’t know what needs to change?Survey readers (using Qualaroo or Promoter.io) and ask them “what else would they like to see on this page?” Then look for commonalities. Let your visitors tell you where you are wrong.
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What are the top 3 most common mistakes that you see startup founders make?
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Founders don’t execute fast enough. 1. They want to create the best product or over-thinking things rather than testing and measuring results.

Making decisions based on what they want vs. the data. 2. They end up building products nobody wants to use or pay for.

They don’t think about marketing. 3. The best product in the world still needs to be marketed. People think they can’t start marketing until they finish the product or feature. These are just excuses and the excuses never ends. You will always come up with more reasons to not start marketing yet. The product does not need to be done to start marketing it.

You are an expert on online marketing. How can people attract more attention to what they are doing?

SEO 1. . Google can drive a ton of traffic to your site. Read 
The Beginner’s Guide to SEO 2. . Then read 
The Advanced Guide to SEO 3. . Then focus on link building. Read 
The Advanced Guide to Link Building 4. and 
The Backlinko Blog 5. .

Content Marketing 6. . Educate people. If you don’t have time to create your own blog, guest post on other people’s blogs. Buffer did this on Forbes and Entrepreneur blog. Read 
Copyblogger 7. and 
ProBlogger 8. to learn how to blog effectively. Finally, read 
The Advanced Guide to Content Marketing 9. .

Social Media 10. . To figure out social media, read 
The Social Media Examiner 11. . Facebook is the second most popular site on the Internet (after Google) so figure it out.

Start from wherever you are and with whatever skill level you are, no matter how bad you think you are. The only way to get better is by practicing and doing things. If you tell yourself that you are bad at marketing or sales or whatever, and you let that be an excuse for ignoring it, you are handicapping yourself unnecessarily.

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What’s the best piece of advice you have ever received about starting a company? Go out there and generate revenue as quickly as possible. It sounds silly and simple, but most people think they need a product before they start charging people. Locking in customers before your product is done really helps change the perception of your business from a consumer or investor standpoint. Without revenue you give up control of your future.
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How has marketing changed in the last few years for startups? Gone from just SEO and paid acquisition to becoming much more creative. Engineers have become much more involved in marketing. Your product can be involved in marketing. Like Dropbox’s invite people to get free credit.
 •

#6 Neil Patel, How To Use Data-Driven Storytelling To Triple Your Sales

Are you paralyzed with fear of failure and rejection? Or do you have dreams of getting rich with startups? This week is a special episode where instead of Lucas interviewing one of his mentors, you will hear Lucas be interviewed about what it's like to start a company and how to manage yourself through the process. We talk about a little discussed topic of founder psychology and the crazy things that go on inside an entrepreneur's head while starting a business and how to break out of short-term thinking to build more successful businesses. We will also reveal the big secret key behind fundraising, sales, marketing, recruiting, leadership and every other aspect of running a startup.

#7 Lucas Carlson, How to Start a Company and Manage Your Founder Psychology

Tucker's New Blog: http://www.tuckermax.me Tucker's New Startup: http://bookinabox.co Tucker Max has sold millions of copies of his college humor books and is known for stunts like attempting to donate $500,000 to Planned Parenthood in order to decrease his tax burden and promote his new book. In this episode of the Craftsman Founder Podcast I ask Tucker if any of his past decisions still haunt him. We also go into big ideas like the future of publishing and talk about some disruptive technologies Tucker is working on now. Finally I ask Tucker what the best advice he has ever received is and what common mistakes he sees founders making every day. This is a great episode jam packed with awesome perspective and advice. Don't miss it!

#8 Tucker Max, How To Write a Bestselling Book in 4-Hours

Always wanted to know why investors go cold sometimes? Find out why in this candid conversation with a professional seed investor and mentor of mine.

#9 Chris DeVore, Inside The Mind Of An Investor

Learn from a real working venture capitalists in action, why does he invest and what does he invest in?

#10 Frank Artale, Learn From a VC the Tricks of the Trade

Entrepreneurs are perpetually interested in M&A and Venture Capital topics, but often have little direct experience themselves. The math behind this is pretty obvious: if an entrepreneur starts 3 or 4 startups in his career, there are only so many opportunities that an entrepreneur gets to learn about these kinds of deals.

On the other hand, the people who work inside of Corporate Development (those who do M&A deals as their job) and Venture Capital see hundreds of opportunities a year. To an entrepreneur, it is a big deal. On the other side of the table, it is just another day on the job. 

This week on the podcast we talk to Tim Porter (@tmporter), managing partner at Madrona Venture Group and former investor in my startup, AppFog. Before that, he worked at Microsoft doing M&A and Corp Dev which gives him a lot of perspective that many entrepreneurs don't have. We pick his brain and try to learn as much as possible this week.

#18 Tim Porter, Deep Strategy for M&A and Venture Capital

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