Startup Stories - Mixergy Andrew Warner

Lloyed Lobo believes anyone could have founded Boast, a company designed to help businesses secure R&D tax credits. However, when asked about why he built it to tens of millions in revenue when others didn’t, he attributes it to community.
Lloyed cultivated a network of entrepreneurs through local meetups and a significant annual conference, many of whom became Boast clients. He details his community-building journey in his book, “From Grassroots to Greatness,” and in our interview.

Lloyed Lobo is the founder of Boast, which helps companies find and claim their R&D tax credits. And the author of From Grassroots To Greatness, the book that explains how he built Boast by building a community and teaches others how to create their own communities.

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Today, SocialBee is a fully functional social media management tool. But at first, it was a guy secretly servicing his customers by using publicly available tools like Google Sheets and Zapier.
That buy was Ovi Negrean. In this interview, he talks about how he did that, while his cofounder wrote their company’s software. And how the services part of his business turned out to be a revenue machine that turned into a business of its own, called ConciergeBee.

Ovi Negrean is a co-founder of SocialBee, the social media management platform.

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Yaniv Makover didn’t intend to launch Anyword, the AI writing tool for marketers.
He set out to help publishers like the New York Times buy social media ads so they could grow their readerships. At first, humans wrote those ads. Then, one day, he experimented with getting writing help from BERT, the tool Google released in 2018, long before OpenAI launched ChatGPT.
It was clunky and flawed, but Yaniv was convinced this was the future. This is the story of how Yaniv’s company hustled, and defied death, to capture the opportunity to create AI writing software company.

Yaniv Makover is the cofounder and CEO of Anyword, the AI performance writing platform for marketing results.

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Seven months ago, Bhanu Teja P saw his Twitter timeline fill with AI talk.
He had an idea. What if web users could use a chat-like experience to talk with the content of their sites?
He wasn’t sure it would go anywhere, but it would be a good way for him to learn about AI. So he spent a weekend building what became SiteGPT. It took off immediately.

Bhanu Teja P is the founder of two sites: Feather, which turns Notion into a published blog, and SiteGPT, which enables web publishers to answer their visitors’ questions with a personalized chatbot trained on their website content.

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The change: cutting expenses.
Wistia was on track to lose $3 million per year when the founders bought out their investors with borrowed money. Chris Savage & Brendan Schwartz told me that meant the Wistia team had to be maniacal about cutting costs.
But why couldn’t they do it before? And cutting expenses isn’t enough to grow a business? What else did they do? Catch the interview and see.

Chris Savage & Brendan Schwartz are cofounder of Wistia, the video marketing platform for businesses.

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Ritesh Agarwal was an entrepreneurial teen in India who loved to travel. So he created a travel search engine.
One obstacle to growth was the subpar customer service provided by the local hotels.
So he tried something novel: he helped hotels improve. He modernized their lightbulbs. Rewarded staff when customers gave high reviews. Etc.
It worked. Hotel owners loved the new, higher occupancy. When Ritesh created a franchise option for them, they signed up.
Today you can see his company’s name – OYO – on hotels all over the world, which led OYO to a multi-billion dollar valuation.

Ritesh Agarwal is the founder of OYO, the multinational hospitality platform

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