This podcast is about the stories of entrepreneurs. To shine a light on what inspired them to start and what they learned along the way. In essence, to find out their secret sauce for success.
The journey of entrepreneurs is often the hero’s journey with both the joy and pain that comes with starting and running a business.
What you will learn
We will be talking to the CEO’s, CMO’s and founders of businesses that are succeeding in this digital world. We will dive into their stories and find out how they grow their businesses.
- Why they started their businesses?
- What and who inspired them?
- Who are their mentors and resources (Eg. books) that have supported them on the journey?
- What have been their biggest obstacles and challenges?
- What has been the one thing they have learned by being an entrepreneur?
Some of the topics we will cover on the show will include the following.
- How to grow your business.
- Tools and technology to grow and manage the business.
- Skills to inspire, persist and be resilient.
- Routines and rituals that sustain them.
- Marketing hacks including social media, search engines, growing website traffic building an email list, getting business leads, converting leads into sales and much more.
- Books they have read that inspired them.
- Opportunities, threats and challenges for the next 10 years.
Jeff Bullas: Hi everyone, welcome to The Jeff Bullas Show. I'm Jeff from jeffbullas.com. In March 2009, I started a passion project website with a $10 investment. I started creating content, building community, and conversations about social media and about business in a digital world. It was about growth, impact, and inner secrets. A year later, that creation escaped the lab and I was traveling the world speaking about how to use social networks to grow your business and change your life. Now we have millions of businesses a year to our site at a tribe of over one million followers and subscribers and we make data reports. This podcast is an evolutionary passion project. We'll be interviewing successful entrepreneurs and founders of startups that are changing the world. Each week we deliver the top insights into their secrets, stories, and tips on how they started and grew their businesses.
Jeff Bullas: Hi everyone and welcome to The Jeff Bullas Show. This is episode zero. Now, why don't we just start this show? Well, in it I want to interview some of the successful entrepreneurs around the world and are succeeding in this digital world. Now we're going to ask them what inspired them to start. We're going to actually find out what the challenges were, who their mentors were, also find out what they learned along the way and some of their routines. You know, what are some of the habits that are formed. What we want to do is do a deep dive into their stories.
Jeff Bullas: Secondly, I want to share a little bit about me and how I came here to be on the show. Now, in 2008 I was between jobs that was code for unemployed. Now what I did have was plenty of time. So I was reading some books and so I had three insights and also three pieces of inspiration that got me started, to start the jeffbullas.com site. So it was when blogs were just starting to become popular. I read a book by Tim Ferriss called The 4-Hour Workweek. Now in that book, he actually opened up a whole world of digital business. In other words business that you can create online. I went, okay, that really is something that I'm really quite interested in. So then I came across David Meeman Scott's book, The New Rules of Marketing PR.
Jeff Bullas: Now in that book, he actually explained the role of content if you publish online to attract customers to your readers. It called that inbound marketing. As a salesman that actually had been in the middle of chasing customers, outbound marketing, cold calling, even knocking on doors, I decided, wow, if actually if I could create content online and attract customers to me and start a business online that way, that'd be pretty cool. So that was a second piece of inspiration.
Jeff Bullas: Then there was another piece of inspiration and it was a blog by HubSpot and said, if you have an inkling of what you want to write about, start a blog. I went, "Okay, that's not a bad idea either."But there was one other piece to the puzzle that really got me started and it was observing people's behavior on Facebook and generally on social media. So I was told to get onto Facebook by a friend of mine and I went, "Okay." And noticed people's obsession. I went, "Wow, there's something going on here." And then I noticed the same behavior on Twitter. So these platforms, social media, I thought there was something going on that might be worth writing about. So that's what I started doing. I started the blog in March 2009. That's 11 years ago this month actually.
Jeff Bullas: So we started to create content and I started writing and we continue to write. And then what happened was I started to get people inquiring whether I'd want to go and speak overseas about social media. So I remember that I got contacted by a guy called Johnny Hendrickson. Now Johnny now the founder of Shuttlerock, he actually sent me a short email saying would I like to come to New Zealand and run a workshop. And I went, "Okay." I went and checked him out and he was quite a successful entrepreneur. I went, "Okay." So I started the blog. As I shared my content, the world showed up and I started to get paid for my speaking. So that's how it all sort of started.
Jeff Bullas: In the meantime, I did find a full time job working in digital agency building online stores. So fast forward a decade later and now we have over 5 million businesses due to the blog and I learned a lot along the way. But in the middle of all this emerging automation and artificial intelligence, we're becoming a little less human. So what I want to do is I wanted to start this podcast, The Jeff Bullas Show, because I wanted to find out the stories, the human stories behind those successful entrepreneurs and startups. So that's what we're doing today. What are we going to ask them? We're going to ask them a bunch of questions. We want to find out the secret sauce. We want to find out what got them started. We're going to find out what they learn along the way, and what they can then share with us in terms of what it requires to succeed in this digital world. So that's it for me from the moment. I look forward to sharing episode one coming up shortly. Have a great day.
Jeff Bullas: Thanks for joining us this week on The Jeff Bullas Show. Make sure to visit our website, jeffbullas.com where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes, Stitcher, or via RSS, so you'll never miss a show. While you're at it if you found value in this show, we'd appreciate a rating on iTunes. Or if you'd certainly tell a friend about the show that would help us out too. Be sure to tune in next week for our next episode. Have a great day and be awesome.
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