Problem Solvers

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What’s Holding Your Company Back? Dec 25, 2017

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In its first four years, Tyson Lawrence’s logistics company reached $5 million in sales. “Everything I touched turned to gold,” he says. But then the golden touch disappeared, and his growth stalled. Why? When he looked into it, he discovered a disaster in the making: His biggest client, a national retailer that helped his company grow so fast, had become its biggest problem. And to help his company start growing again, he’d need to make some gut-wrenching decisions.

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How to Survive 150 Straight VC Rejections Dec 18, 2017

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Sam Sisakhti had a great idea for a company, and early on it seemed like others agreed. He got funded on his very first pitch. But when that funding fell apart, and Sam embarked on a punishing year and a half of brutal rejections, he learned invaluable lessons about himself, his business, and the nature of entrepreneurship, and he turned his failure into a big success.

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Survive the Holiday Crush Like Baked By Melissa Dec 11, 2017

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For many entrepreneurs, the stretch between Halloween and New Year’s is when teams get stressed, systems get strained, and even the smallest inefficiencies amplify into crises. But if a company builds itself well enough to survive into January, it’ll be in great fighting shape for the rest of the year. That’s what happened to popular New York-based cupcake company Baked By Melissa, whose disastrous 2009 holiday led it to rethink fulfillment year-round—and win the holidays every year since.

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Find Overlooked Growth Opportunities, With Study Giant Quizlet Dec 04, 2017

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Here’s a thought that’s going to make you crazy: Somewhere in your business, in a place you’ve completely overlooked, there’s a major opportunity you’re passing up. On this episode, we explore how it happened to Quizlet CEO Matthew Glotzbach. His company makes a hugely popular study platform for students, and yet for a while, Glotzbach was ignoring an opportunity to triple his advertising revenue. Listen to his story, and learn how to find the opportunities hiding right under your nose.

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What Happens When You Can't Deliver Your Kickstarter Project to Backers? Nov 27, 2017

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A successful Kickstarter campaign is exciting, but it can also be a curse. New entrepreneurs routinely miscalculate how much money they need to fulfill orders, and get drowned in unexpected costs. How can someone survive that? We follow the story of Ryan Lupberger, founder of an eco-friendly laundry detergent called Cleancult, who could have gone broke after his Kickstarter success -- but then made some major changes to his business (and his life!) in order to survive, and now thrive.

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Expanding Before You're Ready, With Yogurt-Maker Noosa Nov 20, 2017

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Dollar Shave Club for Couches Shows Upside in Asking "Why Are Things Sold The Way They Are?" Nov 13, 2017

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Here’s the most exciting question to ask today: “Why is this thing sold this way?” The answer will reveal all sorts of business opportunities, and startups who asked this question have gone on to disrupt everything from razors to the mattress industry. But the path to success isn’t simple; a startup must literally reinvent an industry. How? In this episode, we follow the path of Burrow, a company reimagining how furniture is sold -- but to succeed, it first had to create a new way of making furniture.

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When You Try Making "Something For Everyone," You Attract Nobody Nov 06, 2017

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You want customers to love your product, of course. But what happens when they don’t? The simple answer: You have to make a change -- and it won’t be easy. Today we follow the story of Grayl, a company that created a groundbreaking bottle that filters water. When it first hit the market, sales sagged and customers were confused. So Grayl spent three years better understanding its ideal customer and refashioning its product. Now sales are spiking, and Grayl knows a lot about how to take customer feedback.

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From A Garage To Its Own Warehouse, How Boxed Grew Fast Oct 30, 2017

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How do you scale when your business depends on it? Chieh Huang of Boxed knows this well; his company is like an online wholesale club (with no membership fees), and in four years, he took it from a garage to $150 million in funding and its own custom-built warehouse. In doing so, he survived one of the hardest kinds of uphill battles in business. Some business ideas only work at a large scale, but those businsses must start small like everyone else -- and then endure a long, gaping middle point when they’re running their business at a size that inherently doesn’t work. Huang shares how he got over the hump.

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How This Dating App Company Spiked User Engagement Oct 23, 2017

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Every company wants to increase user engagement. But for a company like Meet Group, it was a life-or-death need. It runs four free dating apps (Meet Me, Skout, Tagged, and hi5), and relies largely on advertising -- which means when user engagement was down, ad dollars were down too. To fix this, cofounder Catherine Cook Connelly radically rethought how users engage in the apps. Now revenue is up, users are using the apps for longer, and matches are being made with... live video!?

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