How To Find Your First Customers

Want to get your ideas into the world? Writing coach Amber Rae (see: amberrae.com) has some counterintuitive advice: Don't think about your audience, and don't write what you "should" write. On this episode, she explains some of the most common mistakes that entrepreneurs make, and how anyone can find great stories and create meaningful, memorable work. Thanks to our sponsor Hertz Business Rewards for helping small businesses save big. Join for free at Hertz.com/businessrewards.

Resorts around the world face the same problem: It's hard to recruit and retain a great staff. A small, luxury resort group called Nayara Resorts is experimenting with an interesting solution to that problem — by tackling the housing shortage that often impacts resort workers. Nayara CEO Leo Ghitis explains. Thanks to our sponsor Hertz Business Rewards for helping small businesses save big. Join for free at Hertz.com/businessrewards.

Influencer marketing veteran Brendan Gahan has cofounded the first-ever agency specifically for LinkedIn, called Creator Authority. In this episode, he explains the state of marketing on LinkedIn, how professionals can become LinkedIn influencers, what kind of money we're talking about, and how both influencers and brands can better use the platform.

How can you make content that really connects with an audience? In this episode, Jason shares the strategy he uses to make engaging content. It's called "bricks and mortar", and it's a way of structuring content so that it's always relevant to your audience.

You've built a product, but how do you take it to market? And who even wants it? To answer that, we've set up a unique call between an entrepreneur and an expert. Birna Dröfn Birgisdóttir built a brainstorming tool called Bulby, and is now ready to take it to market — but isn't sure who her ideal customer is. She gets advice from Brent Tworetzky, SVP of Product at Peloton, who has decades of experience building consumer and SaaS products.

When you're looking to solve a problem or start a new business, Future CEO Rishi Mandal has a brilliant tactic: Find cohorts of people who already solved the problem for themselves, so you can understand their solution, why it works, and how you might scale it. On this episode, Rishi explains how to do this, and how he used it to build his company Future, which is the largest provider of personal training in America.

It's one of the greatest sales tactics, and also one of the most overlooked. In this episode, I explain why stories are so powerful, why you should start with them, and where to get the best stories to tell.

Many people start businesses with friends and loved ones — but if you're not careful, you can destroy both your company and your relationship. So how do you do it right? Take it from two women who know: Julie Griggs and Danielle Dietzek, cofounders of FourPlay Social. They share the very personal, often difficult side of their relationship, and how they've learned to thrive.

If you want to gain an edge on LinkedIn, there are two people you need to hear from: LinkedIn editor in chief Dan Roth and senior director of engineering Tim Jurka. In this episode, we discuss the impact of LinkedIn's ongoing algorithm changes, how to adapt your content strategy, new LinkedIn features to help you gain visibility, and an interesting new feature called “suggested posts” that could help boost your best posts for years.

Why are workers disengaged? Scott Greenberg has an answer: It's because of poor leadership, poor management training, and poor company culture. In this conversation, he offers a solution to all of that — by diagnosing his own one-time leadership failures, and the importance of understanding and relating to employees on a human level. Greenberg is the author of the new book Stop The Shift Show.