Why You Need
To Hack To Start.
The path to success isn’t always linear. Hack. Start. Repeat.
Hack To Start is a podcast focused on interesting people and the innovative ways they achieve success.
Each week we’ll [ @FrancoVarriano and @TylerCopeland ] be interviewing a new guest about how they created, hacked, and hustled their way to the top and distill their insights and experience for you.
Why Hack To Start?
Our main objective with Hack To Start is to inspire others to take the first steps.
Whether you see yourself as an entrepreneur or not, sometimes taking that first step or knowing where to start is the hardest thing.
It means trying something that might not work, piecing together a solution to overcome a problem, shipping quickly, and learning continuously.
And nothing is perfect when you first start off — that scares most people too. But for us, Hack To Start is a mantra.
Who Are We Speaking With?
As mentioned, we want to interview innovative people who have created, hacked, and hustled their way to something special.
Here are some of our first guests:
Brandon Waselnuk, the CEO of Tattoo Hero about how the idea for the company started before a Startup Weekend, how they got into FounderFuel and how they raised a seed round.
Adam Benzion, the co-founder of Hackerster.io about how to create a physical product for yourself first and foremost — and where to find all the resources you’ll need. Adam sold his first company to Microsoft and his second was acquired by OtterBox.
Brandon Reti, VP of mobile at Breather about how to build an MVP for traction and how to add new features. Brandon used to lead mobile at Manwin, one of the largest adult entertainment sites in the world.
Ali Zahid, COO at Vanhawks on how they hacked their way to the biggest Kickstarter campaign in Canada and how they stuck to their original vision for a complete “smart” bike.
Josh Pigford, founder of Baremetrics on how to create a product with enough value you can charge for it from Day 1. He hacked Baremetrics to 5k/mth for the first 5 months.
Andrew Dumont, EIR at Betaworks, about the importance of side projects and how partnerships and distribution channels can help you grow your business. Andrew hacked his own side project, Stride App, to 20k in subscption revenue before being acquired by CrazyEgg.
Tomas Laurinavicius, founder of Despreneur, Refe and co-author of The Mobile Design Book, about how to build a blog based business and work from any where.
In future episodes, we’ll be speaking with some of the coolest people you’ll ever meet and continue to distill their insights and experiences into advice and tactics you can apply to your own life and projects. Our guests include:
Adrian Salamunovic — Adrian is the co-founder of WorkshopX, a company that invests in, builds and launches great technology businesses like: DNA11, CanvasPop, Crated, and PopKey.
Heather Payne — Heather is the CEO of HackerYou, Canada’s original programming bootcamp and to date, the only one of dozens around North America that was founded by women. She also founded Ladies Learning Code (LLC) that now has chapters in 19 cities across Canada.
Greg Isenberg — Greg is the CEO of 5By, you video concierge. They were recently acquired by StumbleUpon.
Andrew Draper — Andrew is a designer/developer currently working at Hootsuite Labs, building the products of the future. He also co-founded Manpacks, Snapable, among others.
And many, many more!
Some Tools We Use To Make This Happen
We’ll go more in-depth into how we hacked this podcast from idea to launch in just 4 weeks in a later post, but to share some insight into the tools we’ve used to make this happen:
Breather — to book us some amazing — quiet and inspiring — workspaces where we can record, edit and hack the site.
Ghost — we’re using the Ghost blogging platform to share our podcasts with the world. Tyler hacked a wicked custom theme for us.
Digital Ocean — for all of our hosting and server side stuff. They make it so easy and we just love them.
SoundCloud — to host the audio and make it super easy to embed into our site.
Blue Yeti Microphone — all our audio is captured thanks to this amazing tool.
CallRecorder — enables us to record our Skype interviews with our guests.
GarageBand — makes it super easy to do the editing etc.
Hack To Start Is For You!
Thanks for reading. The most important thing about Hack To Start is that it’s for you — yes you!
If you have any feedback or know someone who would make an EPIC guest, let us know (hey@hacktostart.com) or on Twitter @HackToStart.
If you think we’re doing cool stuff, please hit the “Recommend” button below to help share the word — Thanks!
