The Rocketship Podcast : Startups | Entrepreneurship | Growth

Sam Soffes, founder of many awesome apps such as Cheddar, Roon, Whiskey, and Shares, talks with us about how he splits his time between freelancing and all his other projects. He's incredibly honest and really opens up about motivation and why he chooses to work on certain projects. Anyone juggling a few different projects will definitely relate to this one.

Josh Braun, VP of Biz Dev at Jellyvision, talks with us about getting into the mindset of being a good salesman, which is really being a good servant. His process is all about treating people like people, and he shares his techniques for research, developing champions within companies, helpful tools and a whole lot more. If you have any plans to ramp up sales in 2015 you'll want to catch this episode.

Abhi Lokesh, Co-Founder and CEO of Fracture, talks with us about the struggles of starting up a company that makes a physical product. The early days of prototyping and finding a market were incredibly interesting to hear about. He also shares some of the things they’re doing on the marketing side that have been paying huge dividends for them.

In this special compilation episode, we talk with the founders of three very different companies about the unique (and effective) ways they motivate their teams. No matter your stage, there's something valuable for everyone to take away from this episode. A very special thank you to Al Bsharah, Bryan Hall, Angela Cois and Mel Gordon.

Eliot Peper, author of Uncommon Stock and the newly released sequel Power Play, talks with us about his unconventional approaches to marketing and selling his second book. From giving the first book away for free on Medium, one chapter at a time, to opening up conversations with fans about early drafts of Power Play, Eliot broke a lot of rules in the publishing game.

Abby Covert, Information Architect and Author of "How to Make Sense of Any Mess", talks with us about the integral role IA plays in every aspect of our lives. In regards to business, she discusses how the concepts of ontology, taxonomy, and choreography make up the very core of our experiences with products and brands, whether we’re aware of what we’re doing or not. It’s a fantastic lesson in planning and being deliberate in all aspects of communication.

Josh Anon, Founder of Visioneer Studios, talks with us about the importance and the impact of storytelling. He takes something that often seems abstract and breaks it down into tangible elements that anyone can replicate to help better tell the story of their company. Truly enlightening talk with Josh.

Andrew Dumont, EIR at Betaworks, talks with us about his experiences building and selling Stride CRM, all while running business development at Moz. He shares his views on the difference between biz dev and sales, touching on how powerful it can be for scaling businesses without full-fledged sales teams. It didn’t take us long to figure out why Andrew made Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list!

Stefan Martinovic, Co-Founder of Create.io, talks with us about automating the very time intensive, archaic process of pricing projects and estimating the economic outcome of real estate development projects. They took a manual process that previously took many weeks and could cost over $10k can now be done in minutes. He shares about how he’s been traveling the country to meet people face to face in order to get buy-in from a variety of stakeholders, city by city, to methodically grow the business. The human element is crucial in this industry, and they’re using that to their advantage.

Rob Meadows, CEO of Originate, talks about how the barrier to entry to starting a new venture has never been lower, and why finding the one thing that’s unique to you is more important than ever. He gives some great examples and great perspective on creating an unfair advantage for yourself.

Robert Mueller, Co-Founder of FastMail, talks with us about growing the company since 1999 and surviving the first dot com bust. During this 15-year journey they were acquired, but subsequently bought the company back a few years later and are now wholly owned by the staff. He also shares his initial fears and realities of taking the leap into founding a startup, especially during those early days.

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.