HackToStart

Niv Dror is a part of the community team at Product Hunt, a place for product-loving enthusiasts to share and geek out about the latest mobile apps, websites, hardware projects, and tech creations. He was previously the first community manager at Meerkat. Niv joins us to share his story, how he got involved in startups after completing his degree in accounting and getting a CPA, how to build communities, how to leverage your community for innovation, and much more!

Amy Muller is the co-founder of GetSatisfaction & Yes And Yes Yes. Amy is also currently the VP of Customer Care & Community at Automatic, a platform that enables you to connect your car to your life. Amy joins us to share her story, why she got into tech and helped start GetSatisfaction, how she approaches building community at Automatic, what motivated her to help start YxYY, and much more!

Nancy Hua is the Co-founder & CEO of Apptimize, a platform for creating the best mobile experience for each user and context through targeted A/B testing. Previously a mathematics and computer science student at MIT, Nancy became an algorithmic trader out of school before launching Apptimize. In 2013, Nancy and her team were accepted into Y Combinator. Today, Apptimize is used by companies like Strava, Hotel Tonight and more. Nancy joins us to share her story, what it was like going through YC, the difference between seed and Series A rounds, and more!

Fred Dixon is the CEO of Blindside Networks and the Product Manager at BigBlueButton, an open source web conferencing platform for online learning. Fred had previously worked for Bell Northern Research which merged with Nortel before starting his own tech startups. In 2007, Fred met Richard Alam, a student at Carleton University who started working on an open source web conferencing software that was trying to solve the problem of distance education. A year later Richard & Fred officially launched this project as BigBlueButton. Fred is going to share tons of insights around raising money, building an open source company, how to build an awesome community and more!

Liam Martin is the co-founder & CMO of TimeDoctor & Staff.com. As a teenager, Liam was a competitive ice dancer, training 8-12 hours per day. Unfortunately a knee injury forced him to look for a plan B and he pursued academia until he found out he didn’t like teaching. Liam began building a web based tutoring business and gradually got more involved in tech companies. He’s now the co-founder of TimeDoctor & Staff.com - which is now tracking more than 1,000,000 hours per month. Liam joins us to share his story, insights on productivity & outsourcing, why your domain name matters, how to acquire your first customers, which metrics matter most to SaaS startups, and much more!

Steli Efti is the founder & CEO of Close.io, a platform for closing more deals and making more sales. Originally from Greece, Steli began his career there bootstrapping several business before deciding to build a tech company. With no experience, background or clear idea where to start, he moved to Silicon Valley. After a few failed ideas, he launched a services company and developed an internal tool that would become Close.io. He and his team were accepted into Y Combinator and are now growing quickly with a very profitable platform. Steli joins us to share his story, insights on selling, the future of sales, how Close.io created software that solved a real need, and much more!

Jorge Soto is the founder of SotoVentures, and has been involved in sales and business development for over 12 years with experiences ranging from door-to-door, to enterprise software, to mobile advertising, and finally startup sales. Jorge has worked with several startups and large enterprises over his career - including MoPub - which was later acquired by Twitter. He also founded Sales4Startups (which was later acquired by SalesHacker). Jorge joins us to share his story, tactics, and insights on sales and much more!

Andres Izquieta is the co-founder, creative director, and CEO of FiveFour, the first subscription-based service for men's clothing. Andres helped start FiveFour over 10 years ago as a school project with a very different business model. Through ups-and-downs, Andres and FiveFour eventually pivoted into an e-commerce subscription model. Andres joins us to share more about how they helped pioneer this model, what makes it so successful, how they grew to over 60,000 subscribers in less than 3 years, what other startups can learn from their model and much more!

Kyle Braatz is the co-founder & CEO of Fullscript, a smarter way to recommend & sell professional-grade natural health products. In 2008, he started the Typically Canadian Group - a not for profit dedicated to inspiring Canadians who are battling cancer - and cycled across Canada raising $150,000 in the process. He then dove into tech startups with his co-founder Brad, launching Netgen, and later Fullscript emerged as an opportunity they were passionate about building. Kyle joins us to share his story and insights as an entrepreneur and philanthropist, how giving back to the community and charitable causes makes you a better leader, what it was like raising $2M dollars, and much more.

This is the sixty-ninth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Kim Bost (on Twitter @KimBost), a Product Designer at Dropbox. Kim is an incredible designer who started her career off with agencies before moving into the physical side of newspaper design at the New York Times. There she transitioned more into digital design while taking on new challenges through freelancing. Kim moved into products and startups working for brands like Etsy, Cover, and most recently, Dropbox. She joins us to share more about how networking can benefit your career, how she transitioned from design work to leadership (and back again), what the design scene is like in NY, some of the biggest lessons learnt along the way, and much more!

This is the sixty-eighth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Anne-Catherine Goulby, the Sales Manager at Quaid Media, a TV advertising platform for mobile apps. She was previously the marketing project manager at SwiftKey, a top third party keyboard for iOS and Android. She joins us to share her story, what motivated her to build a career in tech, how SwiftKey became a top app on Android and later iOS, some basic tactics app developers and startups can use to rank higher on the Google Play or App Store, why TV advertising is important for apps, and much more!

This is the sixty-seventh episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Poornima Vijayashanker (on Twitter @ Poornima), the founder of Femgineer, an education platform for professionals. Poornima was previously the founding engineer of Mint.com and then transitioned to a founding role with her first startup BizeeBee. She was then an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at 500 Startups. Poornima joins us to share her story as a founder, what it was like transitioning from an engineering role to a founder, how to raise money, and much more!

This is the sixty-sixth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Martin (on Twitter @ Smarty), the co-founder and CEO of nvite, the ticketing experience re-imagined. Martin is an award-winning product designer focused on marketing and business development. He’s launched his own agencies and startups, one of them being acquired by Twitter where he joined as their first Design Manager. Martin has extensive experience building and managing creative teams, driving product while continuing to push pixels and commit code. Martin joins us to share his story, insights, what it was like working at Twitter, why he started nvite, and much more!

This is the sixty-fifth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Cindy (on Twitter @ CindyWu), the co-founder of Experiement, a crowdfunding platform for scientific research. Cindy has a bachelor of science in cellular, molecular and developmental biology and she’s written several peer-reviewed articles. But when she started to look for funding to take a new drug to market she quickly realized there was a major problem. Experiment launched and was later accepted into Y Combinator. Today, more than 350 projects have raised more than 4 million dollars. Cindy joins us to share her story, why she helped launch Experiment, how they got accepted into YC, how they closed a seed round in 10 days, and much more!

This is the sixty-fourth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Jon Gold (on Twitter @JonGold), website creation powered by artificial intelligence. Jon joins us to share his story as a designer and entrepreneur, the differences between working at agencies, freelancing and startups, why it's important to pursue projects that you're passionate about, and much more!