Azhar's $550M media startup

Joshua's $230M Ai lawyer

Hey - It’s Guy & Farzan,

We have:

2 founder stories,
1 founder playbook,
and 1 founder tweet for you.

Estimated reading time: 10 mins

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Founder story (1 of 2)

See how Viv and Joe are doing $1M revenue normalising female pleasure.

Viv and Jo's entrepreneurial journey:

đź’Ľ Viv Conway, originally from Tauranga, New Zealand, embraced the hustle early on, from competitive swimming to various jobs, including starting a sportswear brand during university. Despite initial setbacks in academia, Viv's entrepreneurial spirit led her to explore Instagram marketing, eventually transitioning to managing accounts full-time.

🚀 Teaming up with friend Jo Cummins after years in the agency world, Viv co-founded Girls Get Off, aiming to normalize female pleasure by creating a positive space for women to explore their sexuality.

đź’° Since its inception in 2021, Girls Get Off has achieved impressive milestones, including over $1 million in annual revenue and a substantial Instagram following of 78,000+.

Top 5 Takeaways from Viv and Jo's story:

👉 Embrace the hustle and pursue your passions, even if it means diverging from traditional paths.
👉 Identify gaps in the market and capitalize on opportunities to create positive change.
👉 Prioritise community building and engagement through social media and interactive content.
👉 Learn from failures and setbacks, adapting strategies to overcome challenges.
👉 Stay focused on long-term goals while continuously improving and innovating to stay ahead in the industry.

Viv and Jo's story shows the importance of perseverance in achieving success. It’s not been an easy road for them.

Founder story (2 of 2)

See how Joshua built an AI lawyer to a $230M valuation.

Meet Joshua Browder, CEO of DoNotPay. He launched the company at 17 while studying at Stanford University. Inspired by his own 30 parking tickets experience, he shares insights on solving personal problems through startups and securing initial investment from Silicon Valley for his venture.

 Founder resource

From Facebook page to a $550M media startup: How InShort’s Founder-CEO Azhar Iqubal became a Shark


Azhar Iqubal's entrepreneurial journey:

đź’Ľ Azhar Iqubal, born in Bihar, India, defied the odds by pursuing entrepreneurship despite the challenges of his upbringing. Excelling academically, he attended India's prestigious IIT Delhi.

🚀 In 2011, Azhar co-founded InShorts, aiming to simplify news consumption with bite-sized summaries of under 60 words.

đź’° Starting as a Facebook page, InShorts quickly evolved into a full-fledged media application, attracting millions of daily users and achieving a valuation of $550 million.

Top 5 takeaways from Azhar Iqubal's story:

👉 Embrace simplicity and focus on solving real problems with straightforward solutions.
👉 Validate ideas through MVPs rather than relying solely on surveys or market research.
👉 Prioritize user engagement metrics as key indicators of success and growth
👉 Maintain profitability and scalability through a clear and hygienic business model.
👉 Seize opportunities for expansion and innovation while staying true to the core mission.

Azhar's journey shows how a simple idea, executed effectively, can lead to big success.

Founder Linkedin post

This makes sense, but why do so many of us not do it?

If I was an early-stage SaaS founder (pre-revenue to < $1m ARR), trying to build awareness for what I'm building on a VERY tight budget, here's how I'd go about it:


Let's say this is what we're building:

- An AI tool that suggests sales reps what questions to ask in real-time on their sales calls
- Initial ICP: Sales Managers at B2B companies with 10-250 employees
- ACV: $20k

Here's the strategy I'd run:

1. Start a podcast (yes)

2. Call it "The Sales Manager Podcast" (no need to get cute here)

3. Build a list on Linkedin Sales Navigator of 200-500 Sales Managers who match my exact ICP criteria

4. Use Lemlist to connect with 20/day, Mon - Fri

5. Attach this message when connecting with them:

"hey Andrea, any chance you'd be open to come on my podcast? It's called the Sales Manager Podcast and I'd love to interview you about your expertise and what trends you're seeing in the market. Let me know"

6. If they say yes, I send them a Calendly where they can book a 60min podcast interview slot on my calendar with a Zoom link

7. With 20 messages/week, you'll probably end up booking 1-3 podcasts/wk

8. Now that we have an ongoing stream of conversations with ICPs on our calendar, next question is what to ask on the interview

9. I'd ideate 10-20 questions I'd ask every single guest on every podcast. Be selfish here, use them to understand their pain points and how they are currently solving them. Some examples for our scenario:

- How do you make sure your salesreps ask the right questions?
- When you have top performing reps, how do you make sure that everyone else on the team learns from them and uses the same questions?
- What tools do you currently use to manage your sales team?
- When you hire junior reps out of college, what are you biggest challenges?
- How do you currently address these?
- What trends are you seeing in the market that's affecting your reps' workflow?
- etc etc.

10. Yes they are selfish questions, but they are ALSO interesting to other Sales Manager because they wanna know what their peers are struggling with and be up-to-date on trends

11. Record the interview via Zoom

12. Upload recording to Spotify and Apple Podcasts using Spotify for Podcasters. You can either just literally upload the raw recording or clip the beginning and end using Descript (again, keep it lean)

13. Upload video to Youtube

14. Next is leveraging the interviews for outbound. If a podcast guest replies to one of my questions in a way that signals that they have a pain point my product solves, I'd send them an email 1 day after publishing the podcast saying something like:

"Btw Nick, you mentioned that one of the issues you struggle with is getting your junior reps to ask the right questions without following a script. I've built a tool that uses AI to suggest the best possible question to a rep in real-time when they are on sales call. Would it...

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7191386633932288000/

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See you next Sunday.

Guy + Farzan
Founderoo

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