Null to Zero
By Dignified
Null to ZeroSep 29, 2020
Interview with Henry Poydar of Status Hero: Bootstrapping, Selling a Company, and great advice on staying boring
This interview features Henry Poydar Founder and CEO of Status Hero who's been part of a founding team many times and even brought a business through an acquisition to Constant Contact. He's seen the internet era evolve in many ways from his own early companies trying to get band listings online (that was actually hard not that long ago!) to modern products handling thousands of API calls. But Henry has an interesting approach to technology, Stay Boring, and I can't wait to hear your feedback on his belief.
Henry has a strong background in engineering and leadership through many startups, an acquisition, and now a bootstrapped business.
This podcast is brought to you by Dignified a leading agency building digital products for bootstrapped to Fortune 250 companies. If you need help with Business & Product Strategy, Building a product, or Innovation we're here for you: goodday@wearedignified.com or @brandonwaselnuk
Our agency Dignified
Twitter link @brandonwaselnuk
Intro music by our friend Jack H. Litster
Interview with Aditi Shekar of AskZeta: Psychology, Finance, and how Couples Plan their Financial Journey
This interview features Aditi Shekar of Ask Zeta who's worked with multiple companies going from null to zero all the way to founding and scaling Ask Zeta! We discuss how Ask Zeta got started, Aditi's interesting approach to discovering the couples finance problem space, and how to grow and test a financial product when customer barriers to trial are so much higher as they require more upfront trust.
Aditi has a wealth of experience in and out of FinTech and it makes this a great listen, I can wait to hear your feedback.
This podcast is brought to you by Dignified a leading agency building digital products for bootstrapped to Fortune 250 companies. If you need help with Business & Product Strategy, Building a product, or Innovation we're here for you: goodday@wearedignified.com or @brandonwaselnuk
Our agency Dignified
Twitter link @brandonwaselnuk
Intro music by our friend Jack H. Litster
Interview with Sheridan Clayborne of LendTable: High Growth FinTech, Early Customer Acquisition, and Anime
This interview features Sheridan Clayborne of LendTable who's created multiple companies from null to zero all the way to multi-millions a year! We discuss how LendTable got started, Sheridan's approach to testing demand and funding the first loans himself, and a small masterclass on how a financial product like LendTable could offer 0% rates to end customers yet still the business can make profit at those rates.
Sheridan is high energy and it made this such a fun episode to record and listen too, I can wait to hear your feedback.
This podcast is brought to you by Dignified a leading agency building digital products for bootstrapped to Fortune 250 companies. If you need help with Business & Product Strategy, Building a product, or Innovation we're here for you: goodday@wearedignified.com or @brandonwaselnuk
Show Notes:
Books mentioned:
- How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
Anime mentioned:
- Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba
- Cowboy Bebop
- Samurai Champloo
- Kakegurui
- Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood
Our agency Dignified
Twitter link @brandonwaselnuk
Intro music by our friend Jack H. Litster
Interview with Nazim Ahmed of CanvasPop: Bootstrapping, taking on Venture Capital, and staying true to yourself.
This interview features Nazim Ahmed of CanvasPop who's been through many Null states to multi-million a year businesses. We go through multiple businesses Naz has started and grown, a hyper growth product that ended in failure, staying true to yourself, and great advice for founders in every stage of their career.
It's quite a ride and we're excited to have you join us.
This podcast is brought to you by Dignified the Digital Products Lab. If you need help with Business & Product Strategy, Building a product, Innovation, or engineering we're here for you: goodday@wearedignified.com
Show Notes:
Books mentioned:
Messy Middle by Scott Belsky, Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, and Play Bigger by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney
Our agency Dignified
Twitter link @brandonwaselnuk
Intro music by our friend Jack H. Litster
How to get your first customer and then 10 more, part 2
The continuation of a companies biggest question, where will your first dollar come from? Today's episode continues the conversation around getting your very first customer and then 10 more! This is part two focused on the tactics and example methods to grow your business including researching your leads on social media, learning mining your past wins for extra details, and other tactics. We hope you enjoy it! We also thrive on feedback so please tweet us or drop us an email if you have anything, good or bad.
This podcast is brought to you by Dignified the Digital Products Lab. If you need help with Product Strategy, Building a product, or engineering we're here for you: goodday@wearedignified.com
Show Notes:
- People to follow on LinkedIn and elsewhere for a good injection of sales and marketing tips and tricks in your feed:
- Josh Braun
- Kyle Lacy
- Jill Konrath
- David Cancel
- Dan Martell
- Reforge
Our agency is Dignified
Agency Twitter link @dignifiedinc
Host Twitter link @brandonwaselnuk
Intro music by our friend Jack H. Litster - You're the best, Jack.
How to get your first customer and then 10 more, part 1
The biggest question for all fresh new companies, where will your first dollar come from? Today's episode starts the conversation around getting your very first customer and then 10 more! This is part one so we focus on higher level more strategic methods to go out and find your first customers. Part 2 will focus more on individual tactics and more of the 'how' to get to pockets of customers. Enjoy! We also thrive on feedback so please tweet us or drop us an email if you have anything, good or bad.
This podcast is brought to you by Dignified the Digital Products Lab. If you need help with Product Strategy, Building a product, or engineering we're here for you: goodday@wearedignified.com
Show Notes:
- Our agency Dignified
- Agency Twitter link @dignifiedinc
- Host Twitter link @brandonwaselnuk
- Intro music by our friend Jack H. Litster
Interview with Chris Gimmer of Snappa: Bootstrapping, business growth, and how to get your first customers.
Our first Interview! Hurray! We're going to be bringing you limited interviews with great company and product builders. Our first episode features Chris Gimmer of Snappa who's even written about going from Idea to Product market fit! It covers a wide range of topics including why Snappa chose to bootstrap, how they got their first customers, how they price their product, and how they kept and keep growing it.
This podcast is brought to you by Dignified the Digital Products Lab. If you need help with Product Strategy, Building a product, or engineering we're here for you: goodday@wearedignified.com
Show Notes:
Books mentioned;
- Lean Customer Development,
- Steve Jobs Biography,
- Four Steps to the Epiphany,
- The Price of Tomorrow,
- and The Bitcoin Standard
Our agency Dignified
Twitter link @brandonwaselnuk
Intro music by our friend Jack H. Litster
The difference between artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI vs ML)
This is our first installment of "You Know Nothing About Tech" with Karl Clement. With this episode we're going to focus on the comparison of artificial intelligence and machine learning. What's the difference and how to identify each concept in real world application. We'll cover the building blocks while using concrete examples to quickly relate them to products we use everyday.
This podcast is brought to you by Dignified the Digital Products Lab. If you need help with Product Strategy, Building a product, or engineering we're here for you: goodday@wearedignified.com
Show Notes:
- Our agency Dignified
- Twitter link @karlclement
- Intro music by our friend Jack H. Litster
How to Build a Company without a Product
With this episode we're taking away all your excuses for not making that company you've always dreamed of by giving you three techniques to use (likely in order) to validate your idea, test demand, and then get value from early customers. All without writing a single line of code.
This podcast is brought to you by Dignified the Digital Products Lab. If you need help with Product Strategy, Building a product, or engineering we're here for you: goodday@wearedignified.com
Show Notes:
- Our agency Dignified
- Twitter link @brandonwaselnuk
- Intro music by our friend Jack H. Litster
How to Create an Ideal Customer Profile
This episode focuses on a strategic resource that becomes a tactical guidebook for getting into new markets / new customer segments known as the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). We talk about how to create one and how it can help guide you in bringing in new business.
This podcast is brought to you by Dignified the Digital Products Lab. If you need help with Product Strategy, Building a product, or engineering we're here for you: goodday@wearedignified.com
Show Notes:
- Our agency Dignified
- Twitter link @brandonwaselnuk
- Intro music by our friend Jack H. Litster
Why Distribution is Critical for your Business
This episode is a bit different, our listeners asked us to talk about challenges we're facing in products we build. Today I cover Distribution in startups and 3 mistakes we made with our product, Feathery, and how I'd do things differently if I were you and in the future.
This podcast is brought to you by Dignified the Digital Products Lab. If you need help with Product Strategy, Building a product, or engineering we're here for you: goodday@wearedignified.com
Show Notes:
- Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
- Our product Feathery
- Twitter link @brandonwaselnuk
- Intro music by our friend Jack H. Litster
What are Personas?
We cover the basics of what a Persona is, how to create one, why they are valuable, and finally how to use it to get stakeholder buy in at your organization in this episode of Null to Zero.
This podcast is brought to you by Dignified the Digital Products Lab. If you need help with Product Strategy, Building a product, or engineering we're here for you: goodday@wearedignified.com
Show Notes:
- Product Canvas by Roman Pichler
- Twitter link @brandonwaselnuk
- Intro music by Slenderbeats via Youtube Audio Library
Finding a Problem Worth Solving, For You - Part 2
The final part of our series on finding a problem worth solving, for you. We look at the convergence phase - how to filter down the big list of ideas you generated from episode 1 into a small list so you can start executing on your next big thing.
This podcast is brought to you by Dignified the Digital Products Lab. If you need help with Product Strategy, Building a product, or engineering we're here for you: goodday@wearedignified.com
Show Notes:
- The Idea filtering spreadsheet example we reference a lot
- Clayton Christensen's book How will you measure your life?
- Intro music by Slenderbeats via Youtube Audio Library
Finding a Problem Worth Solving, For You - Part 1
Ever wonder how people find great ideas? Hopefully we've got an answer for you! In this episode we take a look at the first half of finding problems worth solving - mainly the divergence phase of just getting ideas written down and how to get inspired.
This podcast is brought to you by Dignified the Digital Products Lab. If you need help with Product Strategy, Building a product, or engineering we're here for you: goodday@wearedignified.com
Links from this episode:
- Peter Thiel's book Zero to One
- Walkabout by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
- Charles Duhigg's book The Power of Habit
- Intro music by Slenderbeats via Youtube Audio Library