Not Your Usual Business Podcast

Seth Godin on freelancing: Freelancers get paid when they work. Freelancers can't scale because they are doing the work. Entrepreneurs make money when they sleep. Entrepreneurs build a business to sell.

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After spending the better part of three decades innovating and building businesses, we mostly know him as the co-founder and designer of Square -- those little white squares we see plugged into phones and used to take credit card payments.

Back in 2008, Jim, along with his soon-to-be Square co-founder Jack Dorsey, having just been removed as the CEO of Twitter decided to spend ten days coming up with a new business to start, when the idea for Square appeared.

After an intense and tumultuous few years, with Jim once again being removed from leadership, Square had succeeded in innovating in an archaic industry. And in the meantime, Jim had become a billionaire entrepreneur.

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Brian Scudamore of O2E Brands is anything but ordinary. He dropped out of high school and talked his way into college only to drop out again.

Finally, Brian Scudamore decided to take his last $700 and start 1-800-GOT-JUNK. Having built this company into a multi-million dollar home services empire, he is now passionate about empowering other small business owners to take the lead in their own companies.

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Dame Stephanie Shirley was born in Germany, in 1933 – the year the Nazis came to power – she fled to Britain at the age of six as a Kindertransport refugee, one of 10,000 Jewish children whose parents sent them away to escape persecution.

After dealing with endless bouts of sexism and not being allowed to get ahead in her career, she had an idea. She decided to start her own company, selling software. That doesn't sound controversial today, but it sounded crazy 50 years ago. With just £6, she set up her business from the dining room table.

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Dave Asprey began blogging at BulletproofExec.com in early 2010 while holding an executive position at Trend Micro. In 2013, he left the corporate world and went all-in on becoming Bulletproof.

The company bootstrapped itself into a global leader. In July 2015, they opened their first Bulletproof Cafe and raised $9 million in funding to the expand the Bulletproof Nutrition coffeeshops.

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Guy Kawasaki popularized secular evangelism in 1983 when he worked with the Macintosh Division of Apple. Guy is currently the chief evangelist of Canva, an online and easy to use graphic design platform.

He gives over fifty keynote speeches a year on topics such as innovation, enchantment, social media, evangelism and entrepreneurship. His clients include Apple, Nike, Audi, Google, and Microsoft.

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Brian Tracy is one of the top professional business speakers in the world. He is the author of more than 70 of the best business books — many of them bestsellers.

Brian Tracy has consulted for more than 1,000 companies and addressed more than 5,000,000 people in 5,000 talks and seminars throughout the US, Canada, and 55 other countries worldwide.

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Marc Merrill is the co-founder of Riot Games, the company behind the worldwide gaming sensation League of Legends. As of the beginning of 2020, League of Legends has over 100 million monthly players.

Mark and his college roommate Brandon Beck officially launched Riot Games in 2006, and the marathon of building a successful game and business began. After 4 years of pushing the project forward, they sold off 94% of the company for $400 million — and they kept on working on Riot Games and League of Legends. Today, both founders are still working on Riot Games as co-chairmen of the company.

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Chase Jarvis is one of the most influential photographers of the past decade, is a diehard creative, and an entrepreneur.

After spending tens of thousands of hours honing his photography skills and years working with 1,000s of creatives via CreativeLive, Chase decided it was time to share his understanding and insights into creativity. This led to him publishing his latest book, Creative Calling now a bestseller and highly recommended for anyone looking step-up their ability to consistently create and build on their ideas.

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Jon Stein is an economics graduate of Harvard University and a finance graduate of Columbia Business School. He says his interests lie at the intersection of behaviour, psychology and economics and he gets excited about making everyday products accessible and efficient.

Jon founded Betterment in 2008 after working as an adviser to Wall Streets biggest financial institutions. Wanting to create a more convenient way to invest, he started Betterment to re-invent the investment industry.

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Kevin Kelly has been writing on the Internet since 1982. He has spent the past 40+ years living project to project, accomplishing some truly impressive feats in the process without ever attending college or university.

He is a co-founder and editor of the popular Cool Tools website.

Kevin Kelly is also a world-renowned bestselling author of countless books, with his latest called The Inevitable. He is also the author of the viral Internet piece called 1,000 True Fans.

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Paul Jarvis is a veteran of the online tech world, and over the years has had such corporate clients as Microsoft, Yahoo, Mercedes-Benz, Warner Music, and even Shaquille O'Neal.

His latest project is his brand new book Company of One, your official guide to building around the idea that staying small and avoiding growth can be more durable and even more enjoyable.

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Gabriel Weinberg is an active angel investor in several companies and is the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, the search engine that doesn't track you and focuses on smarter answers.

He recently co-authored and self-published a book called Traction, a startup guide to getting customers. In less than 2 months they met their initial goal of 10,000 copies sold , and have sold more than 12,000 to date.

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Marcin Kleczynski is a Polish-born immigrant who moved to the US at the age of 3 and grew up in the Chicago suburbs. As a kid, he spent much of his time on forums and in chat rooms during the early days of the world wide web. Frustrated that his computer's anti-malware didn't prevent malware infection successfully, he took to seeking help from security message boards to troubleshoot and remove the malware by hand.

While developing his own tiny solution to this problem, he realized other people could use it too, and so he founded Malwarebytes.

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For the past 14 years, Natalie Nagele has been the co-founder and CEO of Wildbit. Wildbit is the parent software company of Beanstalk, Postmark, Conveyor, and Deploybot which they sold in 2017.

Wildbit builds software that enables developers to get out of the weeds and focus on what they do best — which is to design, code, and ship brilliant software.

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Patrick McKenzie was once upon a time, an engineer. He had an idea for some software. Programming it was pretty easy. Marketing it was not. At some point over the years, he graduated from being an engineer to running a software business.

His blog, Kalzumeus, has been read by 100,000s of people and is the go-to spot for understanding the business of software. His new posts constantly end up on or near the top of Hacker News.

He has spoken at the Business of Software conference, TwilioConf and Google has brought him in to talk about what engineers don’t know we know about marketing.

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Mike McDerment of FreshBooks is a former designer, collector of advisors, and Canadian entrepreneur.

One day, he accidentally saved over an old invoice, and something in him snapped – he knew there had to be a better way. Over the next two weeks, he coded up a solution for his clients and eventually turned that side-project into what is now FreshBooks.

Mike McDerment and his team spent the next three and a half years building FreshBooks out of his parent’s basement. In fourteen years, he has built a team of 250+ people and FreshBooks is used by more than 10 million people.

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Tom Kulzer founded AWeber back in 1998 and has since bootstrapped the company from a side hustle into a team of 100 employees and more than 120,000 users worldwide.

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Back in 1997, Brett Crosby and his brother co-founded a small software company called Urchin. During the next 8 years, they grew their company and developed the software that later became Google Analytics.

In 2014, he decided it was time to throw his hat back into the ring with another company, and became the Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of PeerStreet, a platform for investing in real estate backed loans. He crafts the company's strategy, product and messaging.

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Laura Roeder is a social media and marketing expert, speaker, a web designer who taught herself to code in junior high, and an entrepreneur.

At just twenty-two, Laura decided to quit her job and became the founder of Edgar, a social media scheduling and marketing automation app. She grew Edgar from zero to $100k in monthly revenue in just 11 months.

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Jesse Mecham is a brilliant entrepreneur and the founder of YouNeedABudget.com — Software built to give you laser-focus with your money.

When he isn’t writing or speaking about budgeting and being smart with your money, you can find him spending time with his wife Julie, and their five children.

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In January of 2006, Brian Clark started a one-man blog called Copyblogger. Copyblogger is now an 8-figure per year media company called Copyblogger Media, of which he is the founder and CEO.

He has ranked among the top in the world for social media, content marketing, and affiliate marketing. He's been featured in countless books about business and media, and he has graced many stages.

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Jon Ferrara is best known as the co-founder of GoldMine Software. He and a business partner started Goldmine in 1990, grew it to $25 million in annual revenue in 1999 when it was acquired for $83 million.

He took a brief retirement before jumping back into building products. He is currently the founder of Nimble, an award-winning social sales, and marketing CRM for individuals and teams.

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CoSchedule began in 2013 as an idea on a flight between Atlanta and North Dakota. Less than a year an a half later, they had received $500k in seed funding and acquired their first 5,000 customers.

This growth seems staggering until you hear Garrett Moon talk about his 10x Marketing Formula and how he focuses on 10x not 10% projects.

10x Marketing Formula is also the name of his brand new book.

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Syed Balkhi was born in Pakistan and immigrated to the United States at the age of 12. Without a social life due to his lack of English skills, he turned to the Internet and entrepreneurship.

Today Syed Balkhi is an award-winning entrepreneur and has been recognized as one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 30.

Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the world’s largest free WordPress resource site, and the co-founder of List25, OptinMonster, SoliloquyWP, ThemeLab, Envira Gallery, and WPForms.

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Ruben Gamez is a software developer that worked hard to slowly become an entrepreneur. He spent shttps://hacktheentrepreneur.com/podcast/syed-balkhi/everal years working as a manager for a billion dollar payroll company. And in his spare time he played around with some ideas.

He is now the founder of Bidsketch, which is online proposal software for web designers.

Ruben bootstrapped Bidsketch while working full-time and was able to grow it into a stable and profitable business. In fact, he has grown it to the point where he was able to quit his job, surpass his previous income, and enjoy the freedom of being an internet entrepreneur.

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Greg Mercer got a job as a corporate civil engineer at 22 years of age, due to pressure, uncertainty, and not knowing what else to do. It was during this time that he was introduced to the potential of selling on Amazon — and in 2013 he made his first sale.

It was this business that lead him to create a simple Google Chrome extension to help Amazon sellers. This simple solution has now been developed into Jungle Scout, a full suite of tools for Amazon sellers. And what began as a small side-project has grown into a 60-person team with offices in Vancouver and Austin.

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Mark Sears of CloudFactory is a CEO, world traveler, and social entrepreneur.

Back in 2008 Mark Sears and his wife went to Nepal for a two-week vacation — they ended up staying for six years. From training three young Nepali developers around one iMac, he has started and grown CloudFactory into 175 full-time staff and 2500+ part-time cloud workers on three continents.

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In 2013, Nathan Barry launched ConvertKit, email marketing to professional bloggers. He spent a couple years trying to get traction and dealing with friends telling him to give up and try another product.

ConvertKit now has serious traction with a team of 28 fully distributed employees and over $500k in monthly recurring revenue.

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Landon Ray of OntraPort is a serial entrepreneur. He has unparalleled perseverance and has failed more times than most.

Landon Ray is the founder and CEO of ONTRAPORT, an award-winning, all-in-one marketing and business automation platform to help entrepreneurs start, systemize, and scale their businesses.

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Jason Resnick is a WordPress Developer, podcaster, and a business coach.

He started like a lot of us do, with lots of dreaming up business ideas, thinking, and talking about working for himself and running his own online business. But, as for many of us, it wasn't an easy transition.

Jason has now been in business since 2010, and even though it hasn't always been unicorns and rainbows, he's persevered through the hard times and come out on the better end of business success.

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Pamela Wilson of BIG Brand System teaches content marketing, content strategy, and blogging — things we talk about constantly. In fact, I've said it before and I'll say it again, all businesses in 2019 are in the content business, whether they know it or not.

Throughout this journey, I've made a ton of mistakes and learned a lot about creating effective content online. One of the things that have had the biggest effect on my writing has been adopting a system and process for my creative process, and the system I've adopted was created by Pamela Wilson, the former VP of educational content at Copyblogger.

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Brennan Dunn is a freelancer, turned agency owner and entrepreneur. His first introduction to working for himself was doing side hustles after hours.

Now he makes his living by providing great software and products to freelancers and consultants from his upstairs office, with his wife and two girls just a room away.

He is currently the founder of Planscope.io, a project management tool built for consultants and he is the founder at Double Your Freelancing where helps 24,000 freelancers every week with his weekly newsletter.

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Sinikka Rohrer is a lady who knows how to hustle. After two years side hustling as a second shooter — aka a supporting and helping photographers, she went full time into her business and created Soul Creations.

With sheer will, determination, and as she calls is it “working scrappy,” she has transformed her side hustle into a destination wedding photography company.

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Troy Dean is a former voice-over artist, marketer, and online entrepreneur.
After spending nine years as a WordPress plugin developer and consultant, he noticed a gap in the WordPress market, and he aimed to fill it.

In 2013, he co-founded WP Elevation, which has since become the world's largest business accelerator devoted to helping WordPress consultants build their businesses. From a simple idea, they have grown to a team of 15 with a healthy community forum and live events throughout the year.

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Tara Gentile is a writer, community builder, and a brilliant entrepreneur.

Tara Gentile got her start with founding the premier website for promoting arts & crafts in Pennsylvania before moving on to creating an online publication called Scoutie Girl.

For the past five years, she has been growing her now main business called CoCommercial a fluff-free social network for small business owners on a mission.

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Kai Davis is an author, speaker, and coach with one goal: To help your business be better off than it was before you found him.

He is working to accomplish this goal in several ways; One, he sends a daily marketing tip in his newsletter. Two, he has written three books. And three is he coaches freelancers in the craft of marketing and selling.

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Bryce Bladon is an editor, writer, and entrepreneur. With 10 years experience in self-employment, he has published 12 books, gathered 780,000 blog followers, and 25,000 email subscribers.

Bryce is currently the editor-in-chief and co-owner of Clients From Hell, where they help creative professionals.

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Neil Patel is the co-founder of the analytics companies KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg, and Quick Sprout.

Neil is a frequent contributor to publications, such as Inc. Magazine, Fast Company, Forbes, and Entrepreneur Magazine. He also helps companies such as Amazon and Viacom grow their revenue. In short, he is a content marketing and blogging machine.

Behind the scenes, however, his team at Neil Patel Digital is busily updating an average of 90 pre-existing blog posts every month, attracting search engines like Google to give them a second look and, consequently, more traffic to some of his oldest content.

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Jason Harris is a bestselling author, award-winning advertiser, and entrepreneur. He is the CEO of the creative agency Mekanism and the co-founder of the Creative Alliance.

This past summer Jason published his first book The Soulful Art of Persuasion, already a Wallstreet Journal Bestseller.

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Emily started her career as a virtual assistant at a Facebook ad agency and fell in love with the process of customer acquisition via social media.

Today, she is the founder and CEO of Emily Hirsh Inc, a Facebook ad agency that is growing at a super impressive rate.

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Ryan Millman started his first business in 1999 out of the library in his college.

From this original venture and $5000 in startup money, he has built his original idea into Millman Multimedia, the umbrella that encompasses five companies and 350 employees.

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Stanley Meytin is the founder and Creative Director at True Film Production, a New York City-based video production company that creates videos for businesses and brands all over the world.

What started with a first sale for just $300, has grown into a video production company with seven locations across the country from New York to San Francisco.

Stanley's story is one of purpose and impact, resilience and humility.

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Reza Izad began his career as a partner at The Collective Management Group, where he helped grow the business into one of the world's largest music management firms.

Then in 2011, he moved into the YouTube space as the co-founder of Studio71. As global CEO of Studio71, he leads the most engaged digital network on YouTube with 1,300 channels driving 7 billion views a month.

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Ryan Malone spent the first years of his career as a marketing manager and VP of marketing across several technology companies.

But in 2007, Ryan took the leap into entrepreneurship and founded SmartBug Media, an inbound marketing firm with a current team of 50 full-time employees. He claims much of their success to the process-driven nature of how they drive results for their customers.

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Loren Baker made the seemingly insignificant decision to start a personal blog — this was in 2003 — and the blog was SearchEngineJournal.com. Today SEJ has morphed into a thriving media company, and has become one of the most popular marketing blogs online.

In 2013, with SEJ thriving he co-founded Foundation Digital, where he steers client strategies, digital production, and development. Their clients include ESPN, Apartments.com, ForRent.com and American Eagle Outfitters.

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Sean Smith of Simple Tiger is a marketer, writer, strategist, and an entrepreneur.

His career began in SEO by consulting for multiple Fortune 500 companies and 17 years old. Just two years later, he joined his first agency, Gravity Free, where he and spent two and a half years running SEO campaigns for leading brands like Holiday Inn and Best Western.

He is now the co-founder and VP of Simple Tiger, where they are building a killer team to help brands – from startups to Fortune 500's – better tell their story to customers.

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Jim DeCicco is an ambitious, intense, and determined entrepreneur. After college in 2015, he worked in finance for a few month before teaming up with his two brothers to create the world's first Super Coffee.

Today he is the CEO at Kitu Life Inc., makers of Super Coffee and Super Creamer.

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Karen Hoskin of Montanya Distillers spent 15 years as a graphic designer and growing her own branding agency when she decided it was time for a challenge — and a change.

Twenty years after falling in love with rum during a trip to India, she and her husband decided to see if they could turn that love of rum into a business. At this moment, Montanya Distillers was born.

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Matt Wan has had a burning desire to start and grow businesses since he was in grade school. Then a few years ago, he stumbled across an idea that was just too good an opportunity to pass up.

After doing some preliminary research and searching for reasons to NOT start, so he founded Momentous, the highest-quality protein powder available on the market, period.

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Jill Van Gyn is the founder of Fatso, an all-natural peanut butter company that began as a side hustle in the back kitchen of a local restaurant.

In October 2018, Jill appeared on Dragon's Den, Canada's version of Shark Tank. Her ask on the show was $200,000 for 15 percent of the company. Jill received four offers in the episode and she made a handshake deal for $200,000 for 30 percent of the company.

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Connor Riley attended the McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Arizona, where he came up with an innovative business idea —- subscription based coffee —- and called it MistoBox.

Connor and his partner recently took MistoBox onto the tv show Shark Tank — a tough show to get onto and an even tougher place to get funding. They received a $75,000 boost from serial entrepreneur Mark Cuban.

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Luke Holden grew up in Maine, working in his family's seafood business. In 2007, he graduated from university and moved to New York City to work as a financial analyst. After a couple years, he was earning a great salary, but he felt a calling back to his roots.

So at 25 years old, he decided to quit Wall Street and open a 200 square foot lobster shack in New York's East Village. With $30k in startup cash, from his savings and a 50% investment from his father, he founded Luke's Lobster.

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Barry Turner is a former competitive bodybuilder, but to American Gladiator fans he was known as “Cyclone.” As cool as that is, he's here today because he has built a successful business, sold it, bought back half of it, and sold it again!

Along with his business partner, he helped create the baked nutrition category back in 1993. While eating after a workout, they asked, “Why can't we put the protein from this chicken breast into that muffin?” This was the birth of Lenny and Larry's.

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Heini is the founder of Vivino. What began as a simple app for wine lovers has become the world's most popular wine community, just this month celebrating the 100 millionth rating submitted to Vivino by the community.

Back in July 2009, when the idea for Vivino was born, there were already 600+ wine apps in the app store — but this is no way distracted or discouraged Heini from creating Vivino within this busy market.

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At a young age, Reggie Milligan was finding ways to take action and make money online. From collecting mis-hit golf balls to apprenticing at The French Laundry, a three Michelin Star restaurant.

In February 2012, over drinks at a Toronto bar, my guest and his co-founder decided to start a subscription box service catering to men who love to eat good food. This was the birth of Mantry.

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Christina DuVarney is one of three co-founders of Beautiful Disaster, a clothing company with a mission to empower the beautifully broken and the perfectly imperfect with the clothing that we wear.

Christina and her partners started in 2008 — 12 years ago — and they spent the first 9 years working on the business part-time. Yes, weekends, evenings, and every spare moment were spent on the business while also working at other jobs to pay the bills.

The story of Beautiful Disaster is one of perseverance and determination, mixed with an insatiable desire to make their customers' lives better with clothing.

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Jaimee Newberry is a professional experimenter, speaker, and entrepreneur.

After a couple years working at Zappos and some major life circumstances, Jaimee Newberry suffered a nasty spell of life burnout back in 2012 and decided to redesign her life from the ground up. She spent the next year speaking around the world, podcasting, and writing.

Then in August of 2016, she co-founded a business called Picture This Clothing — and it took off as a viral hit from the very first Tweet.

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Dave Munson of Saddleback Leather Co. spent several years journeying across North America with his dog to create bags and other products made to outlast their owners. Their slogan is: They’ll fight over it when you’re dead.

His founding story is one of legend. He spent three years living in a $100 a month apartment in Mexico with his dog Blue, and dodged a crooked Mexican federale who was sent to kill him, all while trying to start his business.

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In 2003 Tibor Laczay and his wife created what is now Zenni Optical. They started in their garage with no outside funding of any sort.

What started in their garage, now has its headquarters in Novato, California, with nearly 1,000 employees worldwide — including one of the largest end-to-end manufacturing facilities in the world.

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Jessica Honegger is the intrinsically motivated founder and co-CEO of Noonday Collection. She has done everything from midwifery in Bolivia to flipping homes in Austin, TX, and earning herself a Masters in Education.

In 2010, a trip to Rwanda became the spark that ignited her to start Noonday Collection, the world's most successful fair trade jewelry business. Noonday Collection partners with 28 Artisan Businesses in 12 countries, as well as over 1,700 Ambassadors, independent business owners who sell Noonday's products at Trunk Shows across the US.

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At 29 and living in his home country of Australia, Brian Smith decided that a life in Public Accounting was not for him! He quit his job and went to California to look for a new business idea and to surf all the legendary breaks.

He soon noticed that there were no sheepskin boots in California, so he and a friend dug up $500, bought six pairs from Australia and brought them to California.

This was the birth of UGG Boots.

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Mike Kafka is a quarterback in the NFL, played for the Minnesota Vikings and is currently a free-agent. He is enrolled at the University of Miami School of Business and is an entrepreneur to watch out for.

Not one to take it easy in the off-season, Mike founded and oversees operations, product development, marketing and sales of Roo Outdoor, a lifestyle outdoor apparel company.

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Suuchi Ramesh is a former engineer and analytics consultant turned brilliant entrepreneur building an innovative company in a traditionally slow-moving industry.

Suuchi is the founder of Suuchi Inc., a design & manufacturing partner for the most innovative, forward-thinking American fashion and apparel brands and Fortune 1000 companies. In addition to this, Suuchi Inc. proudly makes everything in the USA, is women-owned and 70% women-operated.

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After graduating from University, Kai Klement and his co-founder decided to get jobs at Amazon.de, Amazon’s German marketplace. After spending three years there learning the ins and outs of the platform as a Key Account Representative, the two of them decided to develop their own product and business.

With zero business experience, they developed a leather case for iPads. This product turned into KAVAJ, and they have gone on to sell over $17,000,000 in the past 4 years from their home offices.

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David is a veteran of the health & fitness industry, with nearly a decade of experience building and running editorial teams in the space. This intersection of commerce and editorial experience lead David and his team to transform BarBend into a market-leading website and impressive business.

David runs BarBend with a team of writers, editors, videographers, and designers who love producing content that's as accurate as it is engaging.

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Nick Ruffini grew up in the family restaurant business but had the urge to set out on his own. Since he was 17 years old, my guest made his way as a professional musician —recording and touring.

Then in 2013 he started a podcast called Drummer’s Resource. In the past years my guest was transformed Drummer’s Resource into a full-fledged media platform — including a podcast, blog, and social — with entertaining, inspiring and lifestyle-focused content for drummers.

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Ryan Deiss is the founder and CEO of Digital Marketer, under which he blogs and coaches for the Digital Marketer Lab and other online courses. He started marketing online businesses from his dorm room in 1999 and has worked in over 500 different markets.

Ryan is the creator of the “Customer Value Optimization” methodology and has introduced many of the digital selling strategies that modern companies now take for granted. His company, DigitalMarketer, is the leading provider of digital marketing training and certifications.

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Michelle Green is a chef, cake decorator, super-connector, and relentless entrepreneur.

She began decorating cakes at 16 years old and spent countless years honing her skills. Then in 2004, she started her own bakery called Three Sweeties.

She now runs the popular blog, The Business of Baking.

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Have you ever thought to yourself, that would make a great app or that would be a cool idea for a game? 10 years ago Rob Ridgeway had the exact same thought, except unlike most people, he took small steps to push it forward.

This journey has taken many turns from selling individual games from mall kiosks to getting the game into 600+ retail outlets before Rob finally discovered the power of Amazon sales.

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Stephen Solomon, and a partner got started in business when they bought the now famous Tampa Bay Comic Convention for just $5,000.

Today, he is the co-founder of Imaginarium, the company behind the Tampa Bay, Indiana, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Michigan Comic Conventions.

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Scott Bintz refers to himself as the Red Headed Rebel and currently runs several companies — one in self-storage and self-storage investments, an e-commerce coffee company, and a dirt racing car parts company.

But he got his start in 1998 when he started RealTruck.com. At this time, e-commerce was not nearly what it is today. But since his suppliers wouldn't take his advice and start selling online, he did it himself. From the basement office of his duplex, he built RealTruck for 17 years, and brought in $100 million in revenue, until it was acquired in 2015.

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While still in college, Patrick Curtis launched WallStreetOasis.com, a forum-based site for investment bankers and those who wanted to become investment bankers — this was in 2006.

He spent the first few years running the site on the side, but in 2008 he went full-time into Wall Street Oasis. Today, he has built a core team of 10 employees and they receive over 1,000,000 visitors every month.

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Matt Miller is the founder of School Spirit Vending. But he didn't always think like an entrepreneur.

After a random conversation with a friend about the gumball machines his family owned, the seed was planted for what would eventually become School Spirit Vending.

School Spirit Vending started with a single gumball machine, and now spans the United States with hundreds of locations run by a small army of franchisees.

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Harry Campbell is a former aerospace engineer turned full-time blogger and digital entrepreneur.

Always willing to do the dirty work necessary to make some side income while working as an engineer, my guest tried his hand at personal finance blogging, driving for Uber and Lyft, before finally starting TheRideShareGuy.com in 2014.

After nearly a year of building up the site as a side business, my guest quit his engineering job and went full-time into digital entrepreneurship in early 2015.

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Jon Morrow, a brilliant writer and entrepreneur who can't move anything but his face. The only parts of his body he can move are his eyes and lips. His hands, feet, arms, and legs, are almost totally paralyzed, managing the occasional twitch and nothing more.

And yet, he has created an amazing life for himself.

Using speech recognition technology, he's written articles read by more than 5 million people. He's also built several blogs that have made him millions of dollars.

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James is an American hedge fund manager, entrepreneur, bestselling author, blogger, and podcaster. He has founded or co-founded over 20 companies and 17 have failed. He sold one for $15 million and spent all of the money — all of it. Then he built and sold another within its first year for $10 million.

Most recently he wrote the Side Hustle Bible, a business book about starting a business you run in your free time that allows you the flexibility to pursue what you’re most interested in. It’s your 5-to-9 after your 9-to-5, so to speak.

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Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz is a triple Pisces, marketing and growth coach, and an entrepreneur. She is the founder of IttyBiz, where she and her team turn smart, quirky people into smart, quirky entrepreneurs.

She has been coaching and teaching online marketing since 2006 and has been featured in major outlets such as Forbes, Cosmopolitan and USA Today.

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Brian Dean is an internationally recognized SEO expert who’s worked with companies like Disney, Apple, and IBM.

He is the founder of Backlinko, an SEO blog launched in late 2012. Brian has grown Backlinko from 0 to over 180,000 visitors a month. In short, this guy knows how to get stuff ranked in Google.

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Lindsay Ostrom is blogger, food enthusiast, and entrepreneur. Along with her husband and business partner, they have created the Pinch of Yum and Food Blogger Pro.

She always went back and forth about becoming a full-time blogger, but in June 2014, she officially made the jump to living this crazy full-time-food-blogging dream.

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Alex Nerney, co-founder of Create and Go, is a professional blogger, adventure junkie, and digital entrepreneur.

After making a bunch of money blogging and traveling the world, he and his business partner started Create and Go in early 2016. In the past few years, they've grown this business at an insane pace — ending 2018 with over 1,000,000 website visitors and over $1,000,000 in revenue.

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Abby Lawson is a former English teacher, lover of all things creative, blogger at Just a Girl and Her Blog, and an author of three eBooks, including Building a Framework:The Ultimate Blogging Handbook.

She started Just a Girl and her Blog as a hobby in January 2013 and made a six-figure income in just two years. My guest blogs about organization, home decor, creative ideas and random happy thoughts.

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Mike Matthews is the founder and CEO of Muscle For Life and Legion Athletics.

Back in 2013, he began writing about fitness and nutrition on MuscleForLife.com, and what started as a blog has transformed into a company growing rapidly with a team of 20 employees and contractors.

A year after starting Muscle For Life, and not wanting to promote junk products to his audience, he started up a supplement company called Legion Athletics.

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Heather Armstrong is a speaker, a bestselling and award-winning writer behind the blog Dooce, brand consultant, and an entrepreneur.

She also became an answer to a Trivial Pursuit and Jeopardy question after being fired from her job as a web designer for blogging stories involving her colleagues.

Heather is now the founder of and professional blogger at Dooce. She is also the author of the New York Times Best Seller, It Sucked and then I Cried.

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Steve Kamb is a fitness buff, nerd, writer, publisher, rebel leader, and an entrepreneur.

He is the founder of NerdFitness.com, a fitness community that helps desk jockeys improve their health and wellbeing. His mission is to show people that adventures are not just for superheroes and that improving your life is always a possibility.

Steve is the ultimate proof that geeks can deadlift too.

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Gretchen Rubin is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Better Than Before,The Happiness Project and Happier at Home, as well as a podcaster, happiness expert, blogger, and an entrepreneur.

She is also the co-host of her podcast, where she discusses good habits and happiness with her sister, Elizabeth.

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Jake Jorgovan had a lot of success with consulting over the years, but he wanted to build something bigger. Then he learned how to think like an entrepreneur and came up with another big idea and on July 15, 2017, he sent the first email pitching a new Linkedin outreach service called Lead Cookie.

Now, just seven months later they have grown from the first email to a team of 19 full-time employees and generating $43k in monthly recurring revenue.

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Back in 2013, Alex McClafferty was searching for an idea — a project he could dive into headfirst and turn into a business.

Then from California, he came across Dan Norris working away in Australia on a newly created service called WP Live Ninja. Alex loved the idea and saw that Dan had $478/month in revenue and was struggling to acquire customers. So he reached out to Dan to see if he wanted to partner up — and from this conversation, WP Curve was born.

Today, Alex has joined the ranks of the digitally nomadic as he travels the world with no set schedule or destination. While at the same time, he has started a private consulting company for CEOs looking to scale their productized companies the same way he did with WP Curve.

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Madeleine Taylor is a process-oriented entrepreneur from a small town up here in Ontario.

Just over two years ago she was working for a cool startup in Toronto but became tired of the hustle of the city. To deal with this, she moved to Collingwood, a small ski resort town and began looking for work.

Her search introduced her to Jon, who has changed from employer to co-founder of their new venture called Content Refined, a content marketing service company.

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Josh Cohen started his first “real” business at the age of 21 and equipped with a stack of homemade flyers and his Mom's SUV.

What started as a side hustle in 2004 has grown from a one-person show to an Inc. 5000 company serving 60 markets in 13 states. Since their inception, Junkluggers has also become an emerging franchise brand, with a quickly growing number of franchise partners opening around the country.

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Todd Garland coded up BuySellAds version 1.0 by himself and after waiting six months to get over the fear of releasing it, he finally launched it. Within two months he was making $5,000 a month and it has continued to grew from there.

BuySellAds.com is a self-funded startup. It is an advertising network targeting the design and development community. The company has been around for almost a 7 years and they currently do over $10 million in annual revenue.

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Alongside her husband, Nellie Akalp pioneered the business filings industry with MyCorporation.com in 1997, whilst they were both at Law School. A Fortune 500 company acquired MyCorporation.com in 2005, which allowed her to retire at the young age of 30.

She hated being retired and soon grew restless, so she and Phil founded Corpnet.com. Corpnet prepares and files the documents necessary to start a new business in any state or county in the U.S., and sends alerts to up-and-running businesses when annual reports and other business filings are due.

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Harry Duran was an Associate Director of Biz Dev at a technology company while he started a podcast called Podcast Junkies out of a genuine interest in and curiosity of the medium and the hosts behind it.

As he gained experience and an audience in the podcasting market, he started a company called FullCast. What began as a podcast editing and service company, has now transformed into a full-service podcast setup, launching, and marketing service for professionals who want to amplify their authority through the power of podcasting.

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Michael Alexis is a former culinary school student, turned lawyer. Today, he is an incredibly successful marketing consultant who values his independence, freedom, and doing engaging work.

He has spent the past eight years helping an impressive roster of clients get more traffic and make more sales. He has also spent the past three years as the Marketing Manager at Museum Hack, where he leads a team of 20 marketers, SEOs, and PR people to scale the business of leading unconventional tours of the world's best museums.

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Liz Picarazzi is a former marketer for American Express, an advocate for elevating the stature of tradespeople, and a brilliant entrepreneur.

Today, she is the founder and CEO of Checklist Home Services, CitiBin, and Reclaim-A-Space.

Each of these companies works hand-in-hand with each other and works to deepen their relationship with her customers.

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Russ Perry is the founder of Design Pickle, a graphic design subscription service that offers unlimited requests and revisions for a monthly fee

He is a charitable guy and has been on the board of directors for the Alzheimers Association and is the co-founder of One Small Business, which provides entrepreneurial education for young people.

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