Rocketship.fm

Scot Chisholm, Co-Founder and CEO of StayClassy, talks with us about his unusual route to raising 1.5 million seed funding over the course of 2 years and how mentors and advisors helped them grow into one of the biggest non-profit donation platforms in the world.

Paul Farnell, Co-Founder and CEO of Litmus, talks about their early growth and how they were able to reach profitability without ever raising “traditional” rounds of funding. He shares the creative ways they funded themselves, including selling pre-orders of their product before it was ready, exclusive “patron accounts”, and more.

Ben Sardella, sales guru and co-founder of Datanyze, talks about specific sales tactics like personalized emails, social media outreach and more. He shares his “6-touch-point process” and digs into the mistakes he sees companies make over and over again.

Nick Francis, co-founder and CEO of Help Scout, brings a unique, middle-ground, perspective on funding and growth. He also talks about how going through TechStars Boston had a huge impact on their trajectory.

Aaron Ross, best-selling author of Predictable Revenue, talks with us about how he build an outbound sales program at Salesforce that increased recurring revenues by over 100 million dollars. We talked all about his tips and tricks for cold-calling and how to reach people by getting out from behind your computer screen.

David Sherry, Founder of Death to the Stock Photo, talks about the importance of authenticity. He shared his techniques for keeping high-touch engagement at the forefront of all their community-building efforts and how they’re able to grow their list by 10,000 subscribers a month.

Nathan Gilmore, Co-Founder of TeamGantt, shares how they bootstrapped their way to thousands of monthly customers. He also talked to Michael about how this team at Brandisty could benefit from something like Gantt vs. other methodologies.

John Sheehan, Co-Founder and CEO of Runscope talks about how to market to developers. He shares how they've both aqcuired and built an arsenal of free tools, and how those tools have become the primary source of qualified lead generation for Runscope.

Mark Roberge, Chief Revenue Officer of HubSpot, talks about really easy ways to turn your company into a content machine and drive more inbound leads. He also dives deep into HubSpot’s sales process and the metrics-driven approach that worked so well for them, even in the early days.

Jason Cohen, Founder and CTO of WP Engine, talks about why you shouldn’t be afraid to make ambitious changes to your strategy or pricing, and what those enhancements may look like. He also talks about the differences between raising money to grow your company vs. self-funding all the way.

Drew Strojny, former NFL player and Founder of The Theme Foundry and Memberful, talks about how Memberful was built internally out of necessity and later opened to the public. He also talks about how to stay positive and hungry, despite moving slower than your competition when you have a tiny team.

Thomas Schranz, Co-Founder & CEO of Blossom.io talks about how he thinks differently about product management. He doesn’t blindly follow standard agile practices - he picks the right tool for the job and avoids unnecessary process. He also talked with us about Jobs-To-Be-Done and the concept of Minimum Marketable Features.

Danielle Morrill, Co-Founder and CEO of Mattermark, talks all about funding - when companies should consider seeking it, and the metrics you should be monitoring to know if/when the time is right. She also shares some incredible lessons learned along the way as a startup founder (she’s covered A LOT of ground in the past few years).

Hiten Shah, Founder of CrazyEgg and KISSmetrics, talked about the pros and cons of funding vs. self-funding, and the impact each can have on your focus and early-stage strategy. Hiten also talked about mistakes he sees early-stage companies making time and time again.

Cat Noone, Co-Founder and lead designer for Liberio, talks with us about leaving San Francisco to start a startup in Berlin. She shares some really interesting stories about the experience, both from the social perspective as well as the fundraising side.