Adam: How did you first come up with the idea for CrowdGather and what made you believe this idea would make a great business?

Sanjay: CrowdGather came from my frustrations first as a forum member and then as a forum owner. I felt that forums and message boards had been ignored by technologists and investors alike, despite the fact that they are the largest repositories of user generated content on the internet. I started buying forums in order to gain some critical mass and soon my hobby took over my life so I was faced with no other choice than to do this full time.

Adam: In the initial days of CrowdGather, did you have a team of employees or did you “go it alone”?

Sanjay: Initially, CrowdGather was me, my forums, and engineering support provided by a couple of friends from those forums. I found it very difficult to work in isolation without a full-time team.

Adam: CrowdGather is a free service for members, so how do you make money?

Sanjay: We offer a free experience for our members, but we support it by running display advertising on our sites.

Adam: CrowdGather has recently raised a significant amount of finance, but initially you personally invested your life savings in the business. Do you think being so financially committed to the business helped or hindered your work?

Sanjay: I would have had a tough time asking others to invest and believe in my business vision if I was not able to demonstrate that I had sufficient “skin in the game”. Fear of losing everything is a very powerful motivator and it helps to drive me towards success. It can be overwhelming at times, but entrepreneurship is not for everyone.

Adam: CrowdGather has 1.9 million unique users monthly and this year your audience grew over 400%. Can you sustain this type of growth? Is there a point where you will feel you will be big enough or even too big?

Sanjay: Our growth rate is entirely based upon our access to capital. Given capital, we can keep driving our growth till we achieve critical mass and profitability. We anticipate this will happen when we are at around 10 million monthly unique visitors. Beyond that we will grow revenues by partnering with smaller forums in order to help them benefit from the higher advertising rates we have negotiated.

Adam: You occupied senior executive positions in several publicly held companies before starting your own business. Would you advise young entrepreneurs to work for others before striking out on their own?

Sanjay: Everyone should work for others in order to learn the discipline it takes to build a business. It is also helpful to watch others make mistakes so that you reduce your chances of having to learn everything the hard way- by screwing up yourself.

Adam: What about business education? You have a BA in English Literature from UCLA and seem to have learned your business skills on the job. Is formal business education important for entrepreneurs?

Sanjay: I would venture to guess that there are far more great business leaders such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who have never had a formal business education than those who have an MBA. I don’t think it really matters in the long run since entrepreneurship is usually learned in a real world setting.

Adam: You served as chairman of the board on two distinguished non-profits, Artwallah (arts festival) and TiE SoCal (venture capital networking). Do you think it is important for entrepreneurs to apply themselves outside of profit driven companies?

Sanjay: I achieved non-profit leadership positions by working hard and networking. This is no different than what it would take to succeed in a for-profit setting. My interest wasn’t philanthropic, it was to learn about different types of operational structures.

Adam: You are a founder of the California charity, EndDependence (scholarships for addiction treatment). Why did you decide to found this charity and are you still involved in their work?

Sanjay: I founded the non-profit while I was working at a for-profit addiction treatment company. It was heartbreaking to receive calls from drug dependent individuals who wanted to get better, but could not afford treatment. I convinced my employer to allow me to launch this venture so that those in need could apply for treatment scholarship. I named the company and found a very low cost way to launch it, but I was never officially involved in the day to day operations of the non-profit since it needed to be fully independent of my employer.

Adam: Finally, what is your next challenge or goal?

Sanjay: My goal is to build CrowdGather into one of the most successful internet companies. If my team and I are successful, forums will be treated as a big deal and not as second class citizens of the social media landscape.

Adam Toren

Adam: It’s not unusual for technology professionals to move into the consultancy business but what inspired your move?

Robert: After working in the USA during the dot com period, I moved back to Australia and began CustomWare. I was inspired by my mentor at the time, whom I worked for in the USA who also ran a consultancy firm. My first job in IT was on the developer support helpdesk at Borland and I always had great enjoyment solving other peoples’ problems.

Adam: Starting your own business is challenging yet deeply gratifying what have you enjoyed the most about the process?

Robert: The most rewarding part for me is being able to hire young team members and watch them grow and contribute to the company and community. Some of them go one to get married or work in other places, some stay with us, and a few have left the company, travelled around Europe and then returned. It is always good to keep in touch with them, as the industry is very small.

Adam: You lectured at the University of Technology casually for a while, did you find this a rewarding experience?

Robert: It was and still is a great experience. When you have to teach something, you actually have to know it, so being a teacher meant that I had to learn quickly and be able to research, summarize and be able to apply what I had learnt very quickly. I think combined with my support skills that I had learnt early on, it provided a great background in being able to quickly adapt to change.

Adam: You travel extensively covering some considerable distances what technology enables you to keep in touch?

Robert: Right now I am doing this interview on a train in California! The internet is so accessible these days, when I started we had dialup modems! I currently use a Palm Treo and a Dell Tablet PC. I do make use of many cloud technologies – such as Amazon based offerings such as Jungle Disk and SmugMug. I recently scanned my entire filing cabinets at home and now store them in the cloud so I can get to my information at any time.
It is easy for people to get caught up in technology and forget about methodology – meaning that learning efficiency and time management skills, like Dave Allens’ Getting Things Done (GTD) are a really important first step, and then you can apply technology from there.
Internally at CustomWare, we have a really cool wiki that we use to keep in touch, it is based on Atlassian Confluence.

Adam: Many technology and consultancies have been heavily impacted by the recent economic downturn, what are your top tips for weathering the current storm?

Robert: The formula is the same:
- Listen to your customers
- Provide Value

Adam: How would you describe your management style?

Robert: I like to ensure that my managers are in control of what they are responsible for and I try my best to keep out of their way and still be supportive. I am very big on data and keeping measurements and KPIs. I view our organization structure as an upside down team, with our leadership team supporting the each other.

Adam: Has this style evolved as your business has grown?

Robert: Certainly, when you run a small business, you can communicate directly with everyone face to face and keep aligned in the one direction. As you grow, you just can scale to do that in the same way, so you definitely need to change your style. It can be frustrating and for some, it can be too difficult a transition to make. In a larger business with more people, the idea behind the business is less relevant and the alignment of the team to achieve the companies goals are more important

Adam: Your offices are separated by vast distances yet there seems to be a cohesive culture throughout, how do you ensure that this is the case?

Robert: We have strong company values that we really believe in, top down – those are:
- Delight the Customer
- Share the Knowledge
- Think Team
- Focus on the Outcome
- Talk Straight

These apply to all offices, we also have a lot of travel between our offices that helps with improving working relationships. Another thing that we decided early on is that our org chat isn’t the same as our geographic location – meaning that our teams are spread internationally.

Every week 4, 8 and 13 of each quarter, we have an all hands meeting that lasts for 1 hour – every team presents for 4-5 minutes. Our rhythm is especially important to our culture and as mentioned above, our internal wiki helps with blogs etc. and general keeping in touch.

Adam: Can you tell us a little about your involvement with The Global Student Entrepreneur Awards?

Robert: Each year, as part of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, we run a global competition to find the best student entrepreneurs around the world. The regional winners fly to the US for the global final and a winner is selected. I am the chair for the GSEA in Australia and run the competition in Australia. The core idea of the competition is to encourage students who run businesses to celebrate them and stick to them after they graduate, not just to use them to fund their way through college/university and then get a corporate job – we’d love them to create jobs, not just take jobs!

Adam: What more do you think can be done to help foster entrepreneurial spirit in the next generation?

Robert: I think that there are vast resources out there these days that did not exist even 10 years ago, the biggest barrier I see is that many businesses fail, and for some people the risk is too high. The best resource is meeting other people – no amount of reading or studying can replace that!

Adam Toren

Adam: You had an extremely successful partnership with Jeffrey Kalmikoff, how did you meet?

Jake: We met about 2 years after I started Threadless. Jeffrey ordered a poster and it arrived damaged. In our communications with him to get him a new one, he invited us over for dinner. We went and met a lot of local designers. We started working with Jeffrey as a designer first and then we later merged our companies and he began working with us on Threadless full time.

Adam: What do you think are the benefits of starting a business with a partner?

Jake: For me the #1 benefit is simply having somebody there that can listen and discuss ideas with you. It’s very important to have at least one other brain to help you with your thoughts when you are starting a business.
However, I feel my case was a bit different because it was really more like 2 friends building a tree fort than building a business. We never intended to make money, it was all just a hobby.

Adam: Your partnership is very successful why do you think that is?

Jake: Our business model is incredibly unique. We are almost 10 years old as a business right now and I don’t think anyone else has really figured out how to replicate what we are doing. I feel like our model is so successful  because it really only works when you can legitimately think of your customers as your friends. The whole dynamic changes then and in our case, it is crucial to our business model.

Adam: Threadless is almost 10 years old now, what have been the milestones that were most important to you?

Jake: The first milestone for Threadless was in 2004, when it was given our full time attention. Before that Threadless was a side project and we were an agency creating websites for clients. In ‘04 we fired all of our clients and began focusing on Threadless full time. We grew the company a lot in the next few years. Come ‘06 and ‘07 we had a lot of changes take place to help us with our growth. First, we sold a minority share of the company to a venture capital firm to get somebody invested in helping us with the hard stuff that we didn’t understand too well. During our Christmas sale the previous year, it took a month for us to fulfill everyone’s orders. Clearly we need some help there. Most recently, we have been focusing more on partnerships and our international growth.

Adam: You started a collaborative business from day one, which has proven itself to be very successful, what are the key strategies in your business model?

Jake: The key for me is to try not to think about it as a business. It’s more about what would be cool, what would be fun, what would your friends want to be doing, what would be exciting and awesome. So that is the way I think about most of the decisions we make. In the end it has worked out for us – since we are such a community based business, we are just all about doing stuff to keep our community happy and to excite them. As long as we continue doing that, we believe the rest will follow.

Adam: Threadless now has some “bricks and mortar” retail stores, how big a decision was it for you to take this step?

Jake: We decided to do it because we thought it would be awesome. We felt like we needed a real place where you could touch and feel what Threadless is about. It was more of a flagship branding type move than to actually make money from it but our stores are profitable. We don’t plan to open any more of them in the near future but it was a lot of fun and I think they are a great part of the Threadless empire.

Adam: Have you learned any lessons from opening up this new channel?

Jake: Almost everything I know I learned in running this business. I was 20 when we got started and had a few years work experience beforehand but really Threadless is everything I know. If I were to do it again, I think the main thing that I learned is that a company can be started with very little money. In my case, $500. And you don’t have to grow quickly, take your  time. I would also be sure I am doing this because it is what I want to do with my life, not to make a bunch of cash. It’s funny, my wife is a chemical engineer and when I started Threadless we had a money discussion. The plan was for her to be able to make enough money doing what she loves to support our family – I was always the one who just had this crazy hobby that could never support us. So that’s really what it was about for me. Sure, I ended up finding financial success but that wasn’t even a piece of why I began this company.

Adam: Your business was mature prior to the start of the current recession, what impact has Threadless seen from the recession?

Jake: We have seen a slow down in our growth but we are still growing  substantially year over year from ‘08 to ‘09.

Adam: Design is obviously your passion, do you think that this passion is a contributing factor to the success of the business?

Jake: It has everything to do with it. As I said before, Threadless wasn’t even meant to be a business in the first place. It was a hobby – a hobby as a designer to make cool stuff with other designers.

Adam: You do not hold the copyright on the designs submitted to your website, the designers retain them. What do you think about sites like Facebook who do not follow the same ethos?

Jake: They have their reasons, we have ours. We feel that in order to really build a trusting community where members are interacting on such an in-depth level (it can take days/weeks/months for some of our artists to create one design), we need to create an environment in which no one is taken advantage of and we are very open about our intentions to our community members. I don’t know the details of what Facebook is doing so I’d hate to speculate about that…

Adam Toren

Adam: Is Clearspring your first entrepreneurial endeavour?

Hooman: Yes. As an aside, it was not only my first start-up, but also my first job.

Adam: What was it that inspired you to chose widgets as your main focus?

Hooman: We saw two trends. First, the web was shifting from a publishing mechanism, into a platform for delivering online services. Widgets are an easy way for users to consume online services. Second, we saw that a next generation of ‘portals’ was rising that enabled users to aggregate third party content and applications – start pages and social networks. Widgets were a key way for publishers and advertisers to reach audiences that, increasingly, spent their time on places like MySpace.

Adam: How have things evolved since you first researched social networking theory?

Hooman: When I was conducting research, social-graph based applications were just starting to take off. Friendster and Orkut had less than 1MM users. The idea of social applications has gone from concept to reality in just a few short-years. It amazes me to see how the world is now shifting from social networks, to all web applications leveraging a common social graph.

Adam: How do you think that social networking will evolve further on the internet over the next 2 years?

Hooman: Well, if you take the idea that all applications will start to leverage the social graph, then it is just subject to your imagination.

Adam: What business model does Clearspring follow?

Hooman: Our primary model is targeted, performance-based advertising. We leverage our platform, data and relationships with publishers to deliver efficient distribution of content (widgets, apps, or video) to brand advertisers.

Adam: You have interests in other ventures, how do you manage your time between them all?

Hooman: Sleep less.

Adam: What are your favourite social media sites and why do they stand out for you?

Hooman: The social services that I leverage most are currently Facebook, Wordpress, and – increasingly – iGoogle. All of those have one thing in common – utility. Every new consumer technology, or trend goes through a hype cycle. At the end of the day, however, a service needs to have lasting utility to a large enough audience to be meaningful.

Adam: What do you think of sites such as Threadless and Kluster that encourage on-line collaboration for a positive business oriented outcomes?

Hooman: I love Threadless and Kluster. I think that they are absolutely fantastic as they leverage best-of-breed collaboration mechanisms to deliver a real result – better decisions. At the end of the day, collaborative filtering and other such techniques are useful only insofar as they solve the a valuable problem. Sometimes, technical entrepreneurs get enamored with a concept to a point where they lose sight of their true aim, to solve a problem better/faster/cheaper than anyone else.

Adam: Kiva and TOMS and two sites that are geared towards social enterprise is this a side of the internet that you would like to see expand?

Hooman: I actually know founder’s of both efforts. Jessica and Blake are exceptional people that have leveraged the Internet to solve problems that are – at their very heart – intrinsically social. In Kiva’s case, they are doing an excellent job enabling entrepreneurial growth in areas that would otherwise be missed via a micropayments ecosystem. In the case of TOMS, they are enabling the collective group of shoe buyers to help a disadvantaged group have shoes. Both are amazing.

Adam: What do you see yourself doing in 5 years time?

Hooman: Projects that I love, with people that I love to work with. Life is an incredible thing. We have all the opportunity in the world if we simply open our eyes and seize it. Clearspring has been a fantastic project and it has given me a lot of perspective that has shaped my view on other projects I want to work on. Thanks!

Adam Toren

This year, Gary signed a 10-book deal with HarperStudio. His first book, Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passionwas published this month.

Adam: Can you talk us through your career progression, you started out as a journalist?

Alain: I started like most geeks, coding while in high school. I sent one of my programs to a magazine and they actually published it. From there, I moved to writing about technology in my spare time. Whenever I would see a cool new technology, I would contact my editor and convince him to let me write a story on it.

Adam: Looking back on your days as a journalist and the areas that you covered what are the most spectacular changes that you have since noted in the industry?

Alain: I focused on covering really exotic stuff, that only geeks would appreciate. For instance, I really liked virtualization in the early 90s, when no one had heard about it yet. I also would cover the first Unix ports on the Mac, which definitely was a niche market at the time. It’s fun to see that good technologies eventually become mainstream, even if it sometimes takes 10 years or more.

Adam: What is your OS of choice and why?

Alain: I have been a MacOS fan forever. I am very sensitive to good, smart, usable UIs. As an engineer by trade, I also became very fluent in Unix/ Linux, so MacOS X to me gives me the best of both worlds. From the number of people using Macs at conferences such as the Open Source Conference, I am not the only one who found MacOS X to be a killer combination.

Adam: Was Eve USA your first start-up and what lessons did you take from it when you started FairSoftware?

Alain: EVE-USA was the first startup I did as a co-founder (its exact founding would be a very long and complicated story). It’s a hardware company, selling to businesses. I always wanted to go back to software and the web, where the action is. What I really learned at EVE was to respect the customer. Before, I was like many R&D engineers, thinking that sales and marketing are basically clueless overhead. When circumstances forced me to get involved with customers, I started seeing things differently. You need both business and technical people to succeed.

Adam: What are your thoughts on services such as oDesk, Elance, Freelancer and Guru.com? Do you think that start ups can make good use of them or do you think that they are exploitative and devalue the services that providers offer?

Alain: Disclaimer: in a way, FairSoftware competes with such outsourcing companies, so you have to take my opinion with a grain of salt. I am still shocked by oDesk’s invasion of privacy. The other services like elance provide decent value, but startups should not use them for strategic development. A story I can share is that in the early stages of FairSoftware, we considered using outsourcing to develop our product, but cancelled those plans after two weeks: it was taking us longer to review and coach the remote team, so we decided to do the development ourselves.

Adam: What is your business passion?

Alain: I want to help people become entrepreneurs, because I see too many bright engineers get a boring job at a big company and waste their potential. By removing all barriers, I’m hoping that everyone who should do a startup, will.

Adam: Do you think that you need to be passionate about a subject in order to make a successful career from it?

Alain: Passion is very important in startups, because rejection will be permanent. Everyone will tell you that you are wrong, that your idea is bad, etc. If you are not passionate, you’ll quit very quickly. I also have seen people, especially during the dot-com bubble, do startups because the thought it was quick money. Those people were the first to leave when it got tough, and that’s how it should be.

Adam: What is the reasoning behind FairSoftware?

Alain: The concept is really to remove a barrier to entrepreneurship. Starting a company with your friends should cost nothing and be done online within seconds. That’s what we do. The core belief is that good products come from small teams. So we invented a legal structure with virtual stock options, shared decisions, so it really looks like a small startup. It completely removes any barriers to starting a company, so we hope it helps spread entrepreneurship.

Adam: Do you think that the project has been a success so far?

Alain: We were lucky to be selected for TechCrunch50 last year, which gave us a lot of exposure. We now have a core group of followers, people that are passionate and really love what we do. On the other hand, many people still don’t have a clue what we do or why it’s helpful, so we need to work on that.

Adam: How does the business model for FairSoftware work?

Alain: A key feature of our virtual companies is that we must guarantee revenue sharing, so you know that when you join a project, you won’t get ripped off. The way we do this is by funneling the income of those projects through FairSoftware and then redistributing it. So we have the potential to charge small fees, just like credit card companies do. We feel that we didn’t want to charge anything to our users until they are making money, to keep the cost of starting companies at zero. It also aligns our goals with that of our users: have them succeed.

Adam Toren

Andrew is the creator of Mixergy.com which helps ambitious people, who love business learn from a mix of experienced mentors.

Adam: You’ve described yourself as a “passionate salesman my whole life”. Business is clearly in your blood; when did you first recognise this, and what factors do you think contributed to this?

Andrew: When I was young I noticed that bleeding-hearts talk about peace and how the world would be better if we all loved each other. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs work like mad and actually help make the world a better place. Every week, I communicate with people all over the world using technologies built by companies that didn’t exist a decade ago. These interactions go a long way to creating a peaceful world. That’s the kind of contribution that entrepreneurs make.

Adam: The Mixergy mission is all about empowering and inspiring individual entrepreneurs. Is helping other people achieve their full business potential something you feel very strongly about?

Andrew: At a regular job, when you don’t know your way, you have a boss and coworkers to help you figure things out. But what happens when you’re an entrepreneur? You can lose money, confidence or worse. My goal is to give entrepreneurs mentors that they can learn from. Mixergy brings together some of the most successful online entrepreneurs so they can teach what they learned as they built their businesses.

Adam: You’ve been very open about some of the setbacks you’ve faced. It’s inevitable that every entrepreneur will meet hard times; what do you feel are the lessons you’ve learned from things not going the way you had hoped?

Andrew: I saw my biggest failures long before they happened. I just didn’t have the guts to admit it to myself.

Adam: How important is the social networking revolution to Mixergy.com? Does your brand “stand alone”, or do you think that no internet venture can survive without Tweets and Facebook fans?

Andrew: If your readers don’t know the answer to this question, they don’t belong on your site.

Adam: It’s arguable that an economic downturn could actually increase the number of people looking to start their own business. Have you found there to be greater interest in your seminars in recent times?

Andrew: I don’t do seminars. I do think that everyone should be an entrepreneur. It’s easy and cheap to setup a business online. I don’t understand why someone would miss out the eduction and revenue that comes from a business of their own.

Adam: The idea of leaving a legacy is obviously very important to you. Is this a personal ambition, a business strategy, or both?

Andrew: You tell me. What do you think is a more energizing approach to entrepreneurship? A goal of just making a few bucks? Or an aspiration to change the world?

Adam: After phenomenal success with Bradford – Reed, you described yourself as “burned out”, which led to you taking a period of time out. Did this experience alter your approach to achieving a work / life balance, and do you feel it’s helped you to manage your time more effectively?

Andrew: I’ll give you one example of how I changed and how having a life outside of work can help an entrepreneur. When I ran Bradford & Reed, I didn’t think ambitious people should waste their time being social. Not only wouldn’t I go out to dinner with anyone, but I avoided small talk. Now I have people over for dinner, drinks, brunch, etc. While it’s not directly related to work and I often relax and just enjoy myself, it’s led to valuable business relationships that I couldn’t have had otherwise.

Adam: What personal qualities do you consider essential to anyone wishing to forge their own path in business?

Andrew: If you have the ability to maintain your confidence when the world around you seems to be falling apart, you’ll think more clearly and act more decisively.

Adam: Mixergy.com events encourage successful people to share their ideas and experience, and inspire other entrepreneurs too. Which business leaders do you consider to be role models, and why?

Andrew: I still love Andrew Carnegie. The man raised himself by his own bootstraps and became the richest man in the country. Then he turned around and hired a researcher to study him and his successful friends so others could follow in their footsteps. Before he died, Carnegie left his money to charity and inspired other entrepreneurs, like Bill Gates, to give their money to worthy causes instead of leaving it all to their kids.

Adam: Where do you see yourself, and Mixergy.com, in 5 years time?

Andrew: I’m going to spend the next few years interviewing the most successful online entrepreneurs and passing on what I learn from them.

Adam Toren

Aaron Patzer started Mint.com when he was just 25, after becoming frustrated by the amount of time it took him to organize his personal finances using traditional computer-based programs. Launched in September 2007, Mint.com is a free, Web-based money-management tool that automatically culls personal financial data and provides users with an easy-to-digest analysis of their spending habits.

Adam: You have packed a lot of experience into a very short time, what kind of knowledge did you take from your first start-ups into Mint?

Aaron: When I started out, not everyone had heard of the Web, and most of the businesses where I grew up were manufacturing companies who couldn’t see any value in having a website. At this point, I started reverse engineering search engines, doing what would now be known as SEO (search engine optimization) to get ranked under phrases like “web site development”. I picked up most of my clients that way, but actually made more money off providing SEO to others – ultimately it helped me pay my way through college, and taught me a lot about running a business.

Adam: Your interest in computers started at the age of about 6, how did you first get involved and start to build upon these skills?

Aaron: Where shall I begin? I grew up in Evansville Indiana, which doesn’t exactly have a lot of economic opportunity when you’re a teenager. I’d been using computers since I was about 6, ran a bulletin board system (BBS) when I was about 10, and have had email since the late 80s (and I was born in the 80s). When the internet came around, I decided to start the Web development business I mentioned above. So, when I was 16, I taught myself JavaScript & HTML, and started cold calling businesses around town, and an Internet entrepreneur was born.

Adam: How do you get potential clients to make the step from seeing your website to actually signing up with the service?

Aaron: Security -and trust- is obviously a massive issue. The other big factor in building user confidence quickly, which is often done with site design quality. Mint.com has one of the best graphic designers ever (Jason Putorti); he cares about every pixel, all the fonts, all the transparencies and effects. And that shows instantly. People do make judgments of trust on appearance – in the real world and online. The last thing is you really need to back it up! My third hire at Mint.com was our VP of Engineering, David Michaels, who has 15 years of experience in security, including financial Web services.

Adam: You have been extremely successful with Mint, it isn’t your first business though, what advice would you give to young entrepreneurs that haven’t quite found the right product yet?

Aaron: The most important part of any business, product, or invention is that it must solve a real need and a real problem. Observe the world around you – everything you do, and especially everything you hate to do – solve a real problem and the world is yours.

Adam: You started Mint without any funding and then raised finance for the business. How did you solve the problem of raising finance for a website that required potential users enter their bank details?

Aaron: Regarding security, keep in mind Mint.com has a read-only connection to your bank account, so you can’t actually move money around and no one can drain your accounts. We also have bank-level data security, along with low-balance and unusual spending alerts to help you proactively identify fraud or identity theft.
That said, pretty much every investor I went to said we would fail for exactly the reasons you outlined: no one is going to trust an unknown startup with their financial information. It turned out not to be true at all. In our first four months, over 100,000 people entered their financial information into Mint.com, and we’ve had no security breaches at all.

Adam: Mint saw very rapid growth initially, how has the business continued to progress during the economic downturn?

Aaron: We recently announced that we have received $14 million in Series C funding. This funding round was led by DAG Ventures. In total, Mint.com has received more than $30 million in funding since launching in 2007. To be approached with funding in this climate is acknowledgment of our progress and potential in helping Americans to save and do more with their money. Now that we have a sampling of about 2% of the nation’s online households, we can see some interesting economic trends, and are establishing ourselves as a source of close to real-time insights into the US economy.
We’ve also just crossed the 1.5 million user mark, and are the fastest-growing financial software in history.

Adam: Where do you see Mint going over the next five years?

Aaron: My goal for the next five years is to grow Mint.com to tens of millions of customers, and dramatically make them more prosperous in the process.

Adam: Do you have any marketing tips that really helped put Mint.com on the map? What really worked for you?

Aaron: Prior to launch, one thing we did to build buzz was start a very active blog with over 200 articles on personal finance. In order to get into the Mint.com private beta first, you had to put up a little badge on your blog or social network page that said “I want Mint!”. That gave us lots of free advertising, and a bunch of inbound links which improved our ranking in Google – not only was it free, it made those customers feel special when we let them in early.

Adam: Initially with Mint.com you were working about 100 hours per week, have things settled enough now for you to have better work-life balance?

Aaron: Really I just work flat out as long and as hard as I can. I don’t have any rules like “only answer emails twice a day” or anything. The most important thing I can tell you is to set aside an hour or two each week to sit alone in a room with no distractions and just think. Think about your business and your product.

Adam: You took on some pretty big names which the launch of Mint, it must have been quite daunting, how do you overcome the feelings of self-doubt that must go along with this?

Aaron: I was 25 at the time, and basically oscillated day to day between thinking “This is the greatest idea ever!” and “This will never work. Who am I to take on Intuit and Microsoft? If this was a good idea, someone would have done it before.” It’s very emotional, and I don’t think people ever tell you about that. You see your net worth quickly draining, you have no idea what’s going to happen next, and you’re sitting alone in a room with no help, no resources, just your brain and sheer will-power. Whenever I got down, I would listen to “That’s Life” by Frank Sinatra, or think about a Shakespeare quote I liked as a kid: “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we might oft win, by fearing to attempt.”

Since my interview with Aaron, Intuit Inc. has agreed to buy Mint.com for $170 million. To find out more, click here.

Adam Toren

Peter Crawfurd and Michael Yang are cofounders of http://www.ShirtsMyWay.com, a great website that lets you design your own dress shirts in detail. They’ve been featured on sites like Financial Times, NBC, Tech Crunch, Mashable, Fast Company and a whole lot more.

With their option of full customization such as designing the color of buttonholes to the color of the pocket, customers have the opportunity to get designs exactly according to the personal style they want. They also get shirts that fit them incredibly well because the shirts are tailor made after each persons dimensions. Give it a try: ShirtsMyWay.com.

Adam: You launched ShirtsMyWay.com only 5 months ago, and are now selling shirts worldwide. Tell us about your experiences with this, and how you’re managing your phenomenal success.

Peter: More specifically we actually launched in February. We have been seeing a lot of PR attention surrounding our platform. This has included postings on some of the largest websites on the internet. This has really helped us get the word out about our shirts. Since our launch we have not spent anything on marketing.
Adam: Like all the best ideas, it seems really simple, but it is in fact quite clever. How did you come up with it?

Peter: Well Michael Yang (my partner and cofounder) and I came up with it together. We had been travelling a lot and got shirts tailor made from many different countries. We wanted to bring this to a new level where you could actually design your own shirt and get an idea of what it would look like before buying it.Although the platform was extremely tough to build, we have managed to make a live preview of the shirt possible no matter what combination shirt you design. This shirt design model is actually made up of thousands of images which is required as there are over 7 trillion different possible shirt design combinations on the site.

Adam: Obviously, undertaking a venture of this magnitude takes a great deal of input. How did your partnership work in terms of accomplishing all the necessary tasks, from system development to marketing the product?

Peter: We started from scratch which involved finding producers and building the platform. Michael Yang is in charge of the technology front and has a great background in it. He has managed the progress well, but we did have a few bumps in the road underway. We are very persistent with what we do and that in combination with working hard is really what gets us some where. We actually worked about 1 year on it before launching it.

Adam: What lessons and skills have you brought to ShirtsMyWay.com from the earlier stages of your careers?

Peter: We have both started smaller business projects up in Denmark and India. This helped us get a feel for the entrepreneurial spirit and what is needed to get some where. Michael has had years of programming experience earlier with various projects as well.

Adam: Do you intend to stay focused on your current product range, or do you plan to expand the brand into other areas?

Peter: Our future plans do involve diversification, however we have not yet decided on what that could be. There are a lot of possibilities though.

Adam: You’ve achieved an incredible amount in a relatively short period, and at a young age. How do you manage your own time, and how important do you consider a work/life balance to be?

Peter: Honestly, working is pretty much our lives at this point. We have decided to dedicate ourselves to this 100%. If you ask our friends or families they would probably expect us to be sitting and working a Saturday evening (I’m writing this Friday night at 12.30 am). This is a true contrast to how I lived earlier however, as just two years ago I had a small business arranging parties.

We really want to get real traction before we can start to let go a bit.

Adam: How do you see the business developing over the next 2 years?

Peter: We have a lot of ambitions for our company and are looking to expand in all aspects. In 2 years we have hopefully multiplied our current size several times over.

Adam: There must have been challenging times throughout the whole process. How do you stay focused when the going gets tough?

Peter: It definitely gets tough. IT can get really complicated really quickly and that can get frustrating especially when things drag out. After all the more time that goes by the slower you get anywhere and the more money you spend. One thing we have really learned is that starting a company is a very emotional process and keeping each other motivated and on top of the game is important.

Adam: It’s remarkable that you’ve attained such success in the current economic climate. What do you think are the factors that made this happen?

Peter: I think generally it is the degree of work we have put into it. As I mentioned, we have been working constantly on this for over 1.5 years now.

Adam: Do you have any key advice or guidance you’d like to pass on to Young Entrepreneurs who want to emulate your success?

Peter: Keep your business concept really really simple. Although we kept saying this to ourselves, we still found ourselves losing a lot of time and effort because we complicated matters or concepts more than they needed to be. There will be enough other external factors to complicate matters for you.

Adam Toren

Warren is 26 and the CEO of Affiliate Media. Warren and Raj Lahoti (check out our Interview with Raj Lahoti) co-founded the business just a few years ago.

Adam: Talk us through the inspiration behind starting your business?

Warren: The inspiration behind starting my own business was very simple – avoid the hardship my father went through and control my own destiny from a young age. My father immigrated from India in 1989 after sailing on cargo ships as Captain for 20 years. He started that career at the age of 17, became Captain in his early 30’s, and then immigrated to the USA at the age of 42 to take a low-paying job at $15,000 doing cargo surveying. It was definitely a humbling move for him, but one he had to take due to the lack of opportunity in India at the time – he knew his kids had no real future there. Finally, in 1997, he got laid off from his job as a cargo surveyor and made the leap of faith towards launching his own cargo consulting business with zero capital. He became very successful within a few years and that’s when I made the decision that I would never work for anyone else. Luckily I’ve never held a job working for “the man” to this date. I owe 100% of my success to my father and his demonstration of hard work and dedication.

Adam: Which part of the business process do you enjoy the most?

Warren: I am a deal maker and negotiator. I enjoy putting together profitable relationships that mutually benefit and grow our company along with our clients. I really enjoy being able to innovate and provide value at the same time to my audience.

Adam: Affiliate Marketing is a very competitive business what are your top 5 tips for aspiring internet marketers?

Warren:
1) The riches are in the niches – Everyone has heard this saying. The internet is indeed a highly competitive space today, but there are still tremendous opportunities to grow an audience by targeting OR creating the niche that everyone else thought was silly or wouldn’t work. A great example of this type of niche targeting is icanhascheezburger.com – I mean who thought you could build a business from LOLcats? Those guys do very well. The internet is the only market in the world that allows you to instantly create your own niche and develop a following around it.

2) Study your analytics – You must build around your web analytics. The smartest marketers let their analytics make their decisions for them on what to build and how to promote it. Don’t make decisions without data – trial and error will only cost you lots of time and money.

3) Master User Experience – Think of the web like a carnival. Why do carnivals attract thousands and thousands of people and keep them there for hours? Because they offer an engaging user experience. If you can create a virtual carnival for the web browser, they will stick around, come back, and continue to buy from you or your brand. Always design your product or website with the user in mind.

4) Leverage the power of social networking – I won’t beat this one to death like everyone else, but social networking truly is critical in being a successful internet market. Leverage tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin to promote your brand to massive audiences for free and develop a following.

5) Build for the search engines – SEO is critical to the success of any website. Nothing is better than free, targeted search traffic to convert your visitor into a sale. SEO is the toughest it’s ever been so be prepared to spend a LOT of time learning the ropes or even more money trying to hire a consultant. Strong SEO will also boost the performance of your PPC campaigns, and this successful mix is the fastest way to grow your online marketing efforts.

Adam: Which tools do you think that no Internet Marketer should be without?

Warren: The tools I absolutely can’t live without are Google Analytics, Google Apps, Basecamp, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Wordpress. I use these tools on a daily basis and find them instrumental to my business.

Adam: Which of the business models that you follow is the easiest in your experience to set up?

Warren: In terms of ease of setup, I would say PPC arbitrage. If you’re relatively strong at Excel and can build a good, solid website that doesn’t look like a standard affiliate website with a bunch of links, you can be generating a positive ROI from just Google in a matter of weeks by targeting a relatively untapped niche. Another great way to exploit affiliate marketing is doing something similar with Facebook Ads. I’ve met a lot of affiliates making decent incomes from just Facebook advertising.

Adam: There are so many internet marketing guru’s out there, in your opinion which are the ones to watch?

Warren: Wow, there are too many to list. I’ll be offending a lot of people if I only list a few names here!

Adam: There has been a huge explosion of casino and gambling related sites over the last few years, is this your biggest selling niche?

Warren: Not anymore. Online Gambling is a global phenomenon – the beauty of it for affiliate marketers is the customer value. You can earn a good amount of money by just referring a handful of players every month. We act as the intermediary between the online gambling operations and the affiliate marketers who promote them. Our biggest niche today is consumer financial services, specifically targeting the sub-prime consumer market.

Adam: Do you think that the proliferation of gambling sites is going to reach saturation point at any time soon?

Warren: I believe there is still a tremendous amount of opportunity for affiliate marketers to tap into this space. The consolidation is definitely happening on the operator side, but that only leaves more upside for the marketers to fill in the voids that the major conglomerates can’t fill themselves from a marketing and customer acquisition perspective.

Adam: How important is it to build a community for the niches that you are in?

Warren: Very important. Niches are generally less saturated, which leaves a huge opportunity to capture the market through communities. If you can service a niche with a like-minded community, you’re staying power and growth will be much stronger.

Adam: What innovations do you see arising in the affiliate program market over the next year?

Warren: I am seeing a lot of online merchants start to provide marketing mechanisms that will foster a higher level of user engagement such as widgets and tools with the goal to increase conversions and the effectiveness of their affiliate programs. Internet users are becoming savvier and it’s getting tougher to convert customers through traditional marketing methods such as banners or a simple data feed. I also believe affiliate programs will start to provide deeper insight into their customer profile and demands which will help the affiliate maximize the type of traffic being delivered to that specific merchant.

Adam Toren