HackToStart

Justin Brooke is the founder & CEO of the Digital Media Buying Institute. Justin is a high school dropout who got into construction, but he’s always had a passion for marketing. Now, after more than 10 years in the business, building and growing his own agency, managing over $10M in ad budgets, and travelling the world, he’s now building his own platform startup. Justin launched The Digital Media Buying Institute or DMBI earlier this year. He’s already broken six figures in revenue - twice. With more than 2,500 students and growing, DMBI is the world’s most updated online advertising courses platform. Justin joins us to share his story, the challenges he faced in building a services agency, the creative tactics he leveraged to acquire some of his biggest customers in targeted niches, what it was like spending over $10M in online ads, the biggest mistake he’s seen other digital marketers make when it comes to online ad buys, the challenges of scaling a platform business, and much more!

Joel Flory is the co-founder & CEO of VSCO. Joel turned his passion for travel and seeing the world through photographs into a career as a professional photographer. After more than 10 years of running his own business, he and his co-founder Greg set out to build something that would fill-in the many gaps they saw in the industry. Visual Supply Company was then born in 2011. The company has evolved from a series of photography workshops, to a film emulation plugin for photoshop and illustrator, and then made the jump to mobile as a simple photo editing app in 2013, before becoming the product it is today. VSCO is now used by more than 45 million active users worldwide. While they were initially bootstrapped for the first 3 years of business, they’ve since raised over 70 million dollars to continue to build their platform and creative community. Joel joins us to share his story, what it’s been like building VSCO, why their community is incredibly important to the entire company, how they’ve grown over the years, how they approached raising money, what’s next for the platform, and much more!

Una Kravets is a blogger, podcaster, speaker, and UI engineer at Digital Ocean. In high school, Una started to explore new technologies like Flash and the Wacom Tablet. After a few internships, Una found a way to combine art and computer science into a career. She then joined IBM where she worked along a team making Watson more accessible and is now part of the team at Digital Ocean. Una also regularly speaks at conferences across the world and co-hosts her own podcast called Toolsday. Una joins us to share her story, what it was like working at IBM, how she’s (currently) living as a digital nomad, what it’s like working at Digital Ocean, how she started speaking at tech conferences, and much more!

Aydin Mirzaee is the co-founder & co-CEO of Fluidware (which was recently acquired by SurveyMonkey). Aydin has been an entrepreneur since a young age - working with his brother to find different ways to earn their own allowance. He then moved from New York City to Ottawa, Canada for school. After finding work in the tech field Aydin began to explore starting another business. He quickly left his stable job and dedicated himself to building a product and growing a company. In August of 2014, that company, Fluidware, was acquired by SurveyMonkey. Aydin joins us to share his story, what it was like starting off on his entrepreneurial journey, how he acquired some of his first customers, how they built a solid team & culture at Fluidware, what it was like going through the acquisition to Survey Monkey, the biggest challenges facing SaaS startups, and much more!

Kathleen is a lawyer by training, but following the start of her career in both the private and public sectors, she took a risk and decided to help launch Startup America where she was the founding COO. There Kathleen did everything from building the Startup America brand, to executing a growth strategy, and working with their founding sponsors which included: the Case Foundation & the Kauffman Foundation, an all-entrepreneur board, and with its key public partner, the White House. Following the success of Startup America, Kathleen was looking forward to the next opportunity and decide to undertake the challenge of helping New York City become the global model for tech and innovation. As executive vice president, Kathleen works hand in hand with industry leaders to address the needs of NYC's legacy and emerging businesses to spur economic growth and opportunities for all New Yorkers. Kathleen joins us to share her story, what it was like building Startup America, some of the toughest challenges they had to overcome, how she approaches managing massive partnerships with key stakeholders, what she’s working on today at the Centre for Economic Transformation, and much more!

Adam Michalski is focused on Partner Growth at Branch Metrics, a deep linking platform for mobile apps. Adam is an incredible entrepreneur based out of New York. After studying finance, Adam began a career in banking and started working with larger corporate clients. Through this experience, he began to understand business operations and financing. He then started to immerse himself in the local startup scene and taught himself more about tech startups. He launched a side project called DormChat. After growing it to 15 campuses and raising a seed round, Adam went in full time. One year later, he realized there was too much competition and made the difficult decision to shut it down. But mobile and startups were still a passion for Adam and he found his way onto the GoButler team as they had just closed a massive Series A round and were setting up operations in the US, where he became the Director of Business Development and Operations. Following his time with GoButler, Adam came across the opportunity to join the team at Branch Metrics in setting up an East Coast office in NY and help them continue to work with some of the biggest mobile companies out there. Adam joins us to explore the rapidly changing world of mobile, why messaging & bots were hot even years ago, and how the web & mobile are still evolving so quickly. Adam joins us to share his story, how he got into startups, what it was like launching and growing DormChat to seed stage, what he learned from joining and growing operations at GoButler through their Series A stage, what he’s now doing at Branch Metrics through Partner Growth and the launch of an East Coast office, why he’s so passionate about mobile, and much more!

Chris Messina is the Developer Experience Lead at Uber Chris Messina is the Developer Experience Lead at Uber, and pretty much an internet celebrity. From literally inventing the hashtag, to being a top Product Hunt user, to blogging on Medium, to his very own chatbot - The MessinaBot, we’re super excited to have him join us for this episode. Chris started his career with an interest for both art and technology. As a champion of the open web, Chris started off his career as a consultant before joining the Mozilla Foundation and helping them get their first 100 million downloads for Firefox. Afterwards, he launched some of his own startups and side projects before eventually joining Google to work on their social products (Buzz & later Google +) as well as building their developer brand. Today, Chris is the Developer Experience Lead at Uber - where he works with many different teams to help make it easier for developers to leverage Uber’s logistics platform. Chris also coined the term “conversational commerce” in 2015 and wrote what’s become one of the cornerstone posts for this new wave of technology and interface design. He continues to write about, experiment, and share his thoughts on bots, messaging, AI, voice, and the growing trend behind the many forms of conversational commerce. Chris joins us to share his story, how he got into startups, what it was like at Google, why he decided to join Uber and what his role there is all about, how he saw the conversational commerce trend emerging, why he’s so interested in bots & messaging, and much more!

Jeremy Goldberg is a Product Designer at Facebook - working on building Business, Platform, and AI on Messenger. Jeremy’s had a passion for and interest in design from an early age. He was part of a touring band as a teen and would often put his design skills to use for designing merch, poster, or other things the band needed. Following his time as a performer, Jeremy started to team up with product minded entrepreneurs in around his home town in Arizona. He launched a few side projects of his own before ending up working at Google on their search product for iOS. Today, Jeremy is part of the team at Facebook Messenger where he spends a lot of his time thinking about how people and businesses want to use Messenger to have conversations and get things done. Jeremy joins us to share his story, how he got into design and later tech startups, what it was like launching some of his own projects and the biggest lessons learnt from that, what it was like applying to Facebook, what it’s like working on the Messenger team, how he thinks about bots, AI, and businesses in the context of messaging, and much more!

Mada Seghete is the co-founder of Branch, the deep linking tool for app growth & attribution. Mada is originally from Romania and grew up under communism. She then moved to the US for university. While taking some business classes, one professor helped her realize that the next wave of companies would be started by people like her. After starting her first company and learning lots of valuable lessons first hand, Mada and her co-founders started Branch after realizing that their biggest challenge was user acquisition and referral tracking. Branch has now raised over $53M in funding and has customers like: Pinterest, Mint, Foursquare, Buzzfeed and many more! Mada joins us to share her story, how she got into tech and startups, what motivated her to start Branch, how they did things that didn’t scale to get their first customers, how she sees the future of mobile evolving, and much more!

Matt Schlicht is the founder and editor of Chatbots Magazine, the #1 place to learn about chatbots. Matt is a YC Alum, a Forbes 30 Under 30 winner and was also previously a product manager at Ustream as well as an advisor to several other startups. Several months ago, Matt decided to launch a community dedicated to messaging and bots. Chatbots Magazine was born and now reaches over 200,000+ people per month. Matt joins us to share his story, how he got into startups and tech, how he created the opportunity to join the team at uStream, how he approaches building products, why he’s so passionate about bots and messaging, what’s next for Chatbots Magazine, and much more!

Bri Connelly is an associate product manager at Google. She studied computer science at the University of Texas. While in school, she interned with IBM, Apple and Google. Bri was also part of a class project powered by IBM’s Watson called Celebri AI. The project was quick validated turned into a startup that got accepted into the Capitol Factory accelerator in Austin. Bri then joined Google as an Associate Product Manager where she got to work on the gboard, Google iOS keyboard. Bri joins us to share her story, how she help launch Celebri AI, what it was like being at the Capitol Factory Accelerator in Austin, how she joined Google, what it’s like being a product manager there, what it was like launching a search driven keyboard, and much more!

Ardi Iranmanesh is the co-founder and chief-of-staff at Affinio, an advanced marketing intelligence platform that leverages the interest graph to understand today’s consumers. Ardi is originally from Iran and moved here to study engineering. Having Always had a passion for business and how businesses are started, he quickly discovered the beginnings of the work that would become the Lean Startup framework by Steve Blank and Eric Ries. Ardi was eventually connected with a few local founders and joined them in building a lean product lab called 26ones. Affinio was born from a constant challenge they would inevitably face when trying to identify potential groups of customers online and through social media. Ardi joins us to share more about his story, how Affinio approached getting their first customers, why and how it’s so important to test everything, what he’s currently focused on, and much more!

Tracy Chou is a software engineer and was most recently at Pinterest, where she worked on the home feed and recommendations team, ads and web teams, API, growth and much more! Before Pinterest, Tracy worked at Quora, also as one of the first engineering hires there. Tracy is well-known for her work pushing for diversity in tech. In 2013, she helped kick off the wave of tech companies that began to disclose their data about the diversity within their companies through a Github repository. Tracy is now a founding member of Project Include and is focused on driving solutions in the space. She was named Forbes Tech 30 under 30 in 2014 and has been profiled in Vogue and WIRED for her advocacy. Tracy is also an advisor to Homebrew VC and on reserve with the U.S. Digital Service. She joins us to share more about her story, how she got into tech and startups, some of the amazing things she’s been able to accomplish as part of Quora and Pinterest, how she’s been challenging the status quo and championing for diversity in tech, and much more!

Corey Pollock is the co-founder of Leet, where gamers share and discover the best gameplay highlights. Corey is a product manager at Tiny Hearts in Toronto. He’s also built and launched several side projects over the years, including his latest startup Leet. Corey joins us to share his story, how he got into tech and startups, how he approaches working on side projects, how he approaches building communities, what motivated him to launch Leet, and much more!

Laura Roeder is the Founder & CEO of Edgar, an application that automates social media scheduling and marketing. Edgar is a cutting-edge service, and one of the fastest-growing competitors to HootSuite. Laura was still in junior high school when she taught herself to build websites. She then launched her first consulting business at the age 22. After consulting and running various online and offline classes on how to drive traffic and increase social engagement, Laura developed a process that would become the basis of her next software company. Within 11 months of launching Edgar, Laura grew it to over $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue, serving almost 3,000 customers - all while remaining bootstrapped. Laura joins us to share her story, how she got into consulting and then startups, how she got her first customers, how they’ve managed to keep growing while staying bootstrapped, how she approaches managing and building a remote team, and much more!