Startup Stories - Mixergy

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.

Jesse Pujji is the founder of Gateway X, the venture studio. Jesse & Andrew are building Bootstrapped Giants, a resource for ambitious, unfunded founders.

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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.

Kasey is a former reporter who founded Aux Insights, a global advisory firm that acts as the office of the CMO for private equity firms, specializing in digital growth strategy and marketing diligence. When she’s not scaling businesses, she’s up before dawn at 4 AM, savoring the quiet magic of early morning work before the chaos of her three-kid household kicks in.

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Tucker Max thought his business was worth $64 million. Then it nearly died. This is the story of how Scribe, the ghostwriting and publishing company rose, crashed, and rose again.

Tucker Max first became famous for his best-selling “fratire” books. He shifted to entrepreneurship when he launched Scribe, a book ghostwriting and publishing company. Today he spends time on his ranch where he grows his own food, and runs Tell Your Story Memoir Academy, which helps authors document their truth.

Sponsored by

beehiiv – The best email newsletter publishing platform because they’ll grow your audience faster than any other service.

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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.

John Doherty is the founder of Credo, which matches digital agencies with clients. After an exit in 2022, he built his professional editing/SEO service EditorNinja. When he’s not doing that, he disconnects from everything tech and goes skiing.

Sponsored by

Gusto – The HR platform so well designed that your team will thank you for using them.

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Shaan Puri was exceptional at doing the Silicon Valley thing. Still, he says his newsletter was the fastest way he’s ever made money. Within a year of its creation, The Milk Road grew to 250k readers and a reported 8-figure exit.

Shaan Puri is perhaps most famous for co-hosting the My First Million podcast with Sam Parr, which has garnered over 200 million YouTube views since it started in 2019.

Some of his additional projects include Bebo (sold to Twitch in 2019), Blab (live-streaming service with ~4 million users), a venture fund, and his newsletter The Milk Road (250K readers in <1 year).

Sponsored by

beehiiv – the email platform that Shaan used to build The Milk Road. It’s fantastic. Try it free using our link.

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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.

Tyler Denk was the second-ever employee at Morning Brew. After growing it to the reported biggest exit of any newsletter business, he started building beehiiv. Now, they’re doing $15 million in ARR as a growing underdog.

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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 business took off.

Vlada Lotkina is the co-founder and CEO of ClassTag, an edtech platform that simplifies communication between teachers and parents. She grew up in Ukraine and watched as her father pursued entrepreneurship during the fall of the soviet union. As a mother in the U.S., her own frustrations with poor school-parent communication inspired her. She eventually exited ClassTag for 8-figures.

Sponsored by

Gusto – The easy payroll and benefits software the Mixergy interviewees love.

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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.

Adam Robinson is the founder and CEO of Retention.com, which identifies email addresses from anonymous website visitors.
He previously worked in finance but launched the email marketing company Robly after the 2008 financial crisis jeopardized his career.
Following an 8-figure exit, he bootstrapped retention.com to over $21M in ARR.

Sponsored by

Gusto – The easy payroll and benefits software the Mixergy interviewees love.

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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 you’d get to watch and learn as I learned directly from my heroes. We did it. A thousand interviews later here I am today bringing back some of the most memorable and most influential interviewees. People who helped me both on camera here with you and off. I invited them on to a Google Hangout to talk about the old days, to ask them some new questions and to do short interviews with them all for you. That’s what this is all about. My goal when I started out was to build a successful company. I think Mixergy is that company. But I wanted to be even more successful. My goal is that I started to talk in interviews afterwards evolved into saying that I would like someone who is watching these interviews to learn from them, to use what they’ve learned and then build a successful company so they can come back and do an interview themselves.

I am the founder of Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart. And this is my 1,000th interview.

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