best podcasts for starting a business: 6 episodes, one for each stage

Kevin Ryan's test for an idea is almost romantic, on the captions: "I start with a business crush, meaning there's an idea and I can't stop thinking about it." he does not write a business model first. he waits: "if that sticks with me for like two weeks, I generally do it."

the tactic: crush test plus a 10-year trend. the crush tells you whether you will last. the trend tells you whether the market will. to build an important company, he says, "It does take 10 years." so the trend must hold that long: if it is hyped today and done in two years, or started five years ago, you are too late. his own miss: in 2003 serving video cost "about $10 per thousand" views while ads paid about a dollar. they saw the lines would cross by 2005 or 2006. "we should have started YouTube and we didn't."

try this week: write down every idea you keep coming back to, with today's date. do not work on any of them for 14 days. the ones you are still adding to unprompted pass. for each survivor, write the trend under it and one sentence on why it still holds in 10 years.

Mark Pincus starts with the market, not the idea, on the captions: pick the right body of water and you do not have to pick the right boat, "but if you pick the wrong body of water the best boat isn't going to help you".

the tactic: proven, better, new. copy what already works in that market, onboarding and all, and assume the incumbent figured out what users want. then be honest about your twist: "better is actually really hard to get to. What we think is better is new." better means nearly every user would pick yours. to find out, shrink it to one slice, like coffee shops in one city, and run it yourself. his rule: "Do it by hand first. If people don't like it better, you do not pass go." automation comes later.

try this week: pick the product your customers already pay for. write down its onboarding and pricing exactly as they are. under it, write the one change you think nearly every user would prefer. then deliver that change by hand, no code, to five people and ask if they like it better.

Greg Live's company now uses 11 manufacturers in the US, he says on the captions. he owns none of the lines. "I've only used 3PL's." checkout ran on Shopify. the start: "I started Bloom with $20,000." why that number? "that was the minimum order quantity at a third party manufacturer." and "the first product wasn't great by any means".

the tactic: rent the infrastructure, then let the minimum order set your budget. you do not need a factory, a warehouse or your own payments. you need the smallest order a supplier will accept, and a store. be clear on what this is: $20,000 is not zero. it is a smaller, real number you can plan for. one more lesson he paid for: "I'm never going to rely on one channel so much for our businesses again".

try this week: list everything you assumed you had to own to start. next to each, write the rented version (contract manufacturer, 3PL, Shopify, a freelancer). then ask three suppliers for their minimum order and price. the lowest real quote is your starting number.

Poppi started as Mother Beverage, an apple cider vinegar gut health drink, on the captions. after a Shark Tank deal, "we took 9 months off" to rebrand and "we asked ourselves, who is this product for? Who is our consumer?" the answer came from buyers: people drank it on the same occasion as soda. so the gut health tagline on the front of the can became a soda line.

the tactic: be 10 to 15% better, and sell the occasion. forget the 10x rule you hear in San Francisco. her version for food, drinks and beauty: "the best businesses are 10 to 15% better than the established norm." same flavors people grew up with, less sugar, and the extras stay in the small print. the hard part is letting the customer change you: "it's really hard for entrepreneurs to change, by the way."

try this week: write down the product your customer buys today instead of yours. write your 10 to 15% better in one line. then ask five customers when and where they use it, and rewrite your headline around that moment.

Jeff Harmon's first hit was a tongue cleaner, on the captions. the video cost five or six hundred dollars. YouTube had just launched its ad platform and "those ads cost less than a penny per view", so every dollar in ads brought back two or three. his rule: "everybody who starts a business, you have to find your glitch."

the tactic: find your glitch, then hold a beachhead. a glitch is a channel where attention is cheap because nobody else is paying for it yet. that tongue cleaner glitch is long gone, so the skill is spotting the next one: "look for things for areas where you have attention from people that nobody else is paying attention to." you do not need the whole market. "They don't have to take the whole beach, just that one little spot and then you can expand from that beach head." his first filter for the product itself: "go after things that solve a problem for yourself."

try this week: list every place your customer spends attention. mark the ones where your competitors are not posting or buying ads. put a small test (five posts, or a tiny ad budget) into the cheapest one and count what it brings back.

Dan Martell made the classic founder mistake early on, on the captions: as a developer he kept writing software when the problem was getting people to buy. "Writing more code didn't make me more money, but as a software developer, it felt safe." teams do the same. they speed up the steps they like while one step chokes the rest, because "throughput is the narrowest point of any workflow."

the tactic: the 10x question. map your steps from first contact to paid customer (in his example: lead, book a call, show up, close). then ask: "if I 10x the volume, leads in this example, what breaks?" a tell: work piles up right before the real constraint. fix that step and nothing else, and put a number on it, because "every bottleneck is just a hidden KPI."

try this week: draw your steps on one page. next to each, write how many people got through it last month. ask what breaks at 10x. spend this week only on that step, and pick the one number you will check every day.