Startup Stories - Mixergy
Business tips for startups by proven entrepreneurs
Episodes
September 10, 2025
I keep seeing AI agencies pop up everywhere, offering to AI-ify businesses.
But what are they AI’ing? How are they doing it? Seems too general and unfocused to work. Still, they do.
I wanted to understand how, so I interviewed Rob Howard, who teaches agency owners how to sell and deliver AI services.
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September 3, 2025
Pavel Doležal built Keboola to $15 million per year.
How he did it:
1. Start with consulting, so clients tell you what they need
2. Build software that makes companies’ chaotic data accessible. NO agents yet.
3. Create agents that take action. That’s the hardest part.
At the end of this interview, Pavel tells you how YOU should start an AI company and about the three successful companies that followed his advice.
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Ever wish someone would text you every day to make sure you stuck to your goals?
That’s exactly what Adam Gilbert built — first for fitness, now for business.
He’s the founder of My Body Tutor and DoneDaily, two remote coaching services powered by daily accountability. I invited him to share how he turned simple check-ins into a multi-million dollar company.
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June 18, 2025
How is Close doing so well in the CRM space against such big competitors?
The answer: focus.
Instead of chasing enterprise clients or trying to build a CRM that does everything from web hosting to calendaring, Steli Efti focused on sales teams at small and mid-sized businesses. And he built a product with a tight set of features focused on more client conversations and less data entry.
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May 12, 2025
Have you noticed how AI search results are now linking to websites?
Today’s guest runs an SEO agency that helps his clients’ sites show up in those chat responses.
I invited Chirag Kulkarni founder of Taco to talk about how he’s doing it and how he built his agency.
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April 29, 2025
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March 5, 2025
Before I partnered with Jesse Pujji, we were buddy-buddy. Texting all the time. When we got started, we got excited about the world of possibilities for our company.
Now? Something is missing.
I asked him about it. And about where he put his money, why he’s not launching more companies now, what he’s building with AI, and more.
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February 21, 2025
When Kasey Grelle heard that private equity companies paid marketing agencies to evaluate companies they wanted to buy, she spotted a business opportunity. That realization became Aux Insights, the firm that’s become “the office of the CMO” for private equity companies. Listen to how they got clients & built their business.
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November 29, 2024
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November 22, 2024
Zillow laid him off. So John Doherty launched Credo a digital agency matchmaking firm. Exactly 7 years later — to the day — he sold the company.
This is the story of how he built and sold Credo, and how he’s building his latest company, EditorNinja, which offers outsourced text editing.
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November 15, 2024
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November 1, 2024
They feel like the millionth company to offer email newsletter publishing. How are they growing so fast despite the competition?
Tyler Denk is a big reason. A former Morning Brew employee, he took their growth techniques and turned them into a software company: beehiiv.
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September 20, 2024
Vlada Lotkina noticed something wrong at her daughter’s school.
So she built the solution and sold it for 8-figures.
It’s called ClassTag, and it’s a platform where teachers, parents and school administrators can communicate and send out announcements. No flyers, no ridiculously long emails…
My favorite part is that she’s a Mixergy listener herself. She literally called a previous guest of mine and got him to invest before her busi...
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September 13, 2024
Adam Robinson struggled to compete with MailChimp.
So he built software that’s too dangerous for them to build.
Businesses that use Retention.com can instantly grab email addresses from anonymous website visitors — even if they never fill out a form.
To promote his software he made himself into one of the few interesting follows on LinkedIn by picking fights, bringing drama and adding production values.
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Hiring has been a huge issue for me. And in a past interview with Cameron Herold, I brought it up because he’s the founder of the COO Alliance, the world’s leading network for the second in command.
I don’t get embarrassed by a lot of stuff. If you heard my interviews, you hear me get pretty frank about my flaws, my mistakes. But this issue is something I was embarrassed about. I think if I don’t hire somebo...
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November 22, 2017
A topic we don’t talk about on Mixergy is how to actually manage a company. I remember when I was in NYU as an undergrad I loved all my business classes, but management just didn’t feel like me.
I always thought of the guys in Dilbert but entrepreneurs were the ones who were creating, the ones who were doing. Mixergy’s grown and I’ve been running it, but I have to be honest, I’m not doing a great job ...
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About a year ago I realized that no matter how much effort we’ve put into my email list, I could never double the response rate. We kept growing it, but people were not using email much.
So I started looking around for solutions and I started looking at bots. Bots are basically software that communicates with humans via a chat app. I came across one company that looked too good to be true. It’s called ManyChat. And I sa...
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I’ll be honest with you. I felt guilt about an interview that I did years ago with today’s guest. This was back in, let me see here, 2013. I interviewed Sam Ovens about how he built up this consulting business and was teaching people how to do consulting.
I thought maybe I got taken for a ride. It was too good to be true. Then I started hearing people who were in his program talk about how big the program is. Then I sta...
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April 9, 2014
On August 4, 2008, I posted a video up on Mixergy where I looked up into the web cam on my computer and I said “I failed.” And I said that I was going to shut down my invitation business and start doing interviews with entrepreneurs and people in general who I admire so I can learn from them and take back what I’ve learned from them to build a more successful company in the future. And I said that along the way yo...
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