Category: Entrepreneurship

Grant Baldwin felt burned out.

He worked as a youth pastor, which felt like a 24/7 profession. He had to attend student events held late into the night, which left him exhausted.

One night, he came home to find his wife crying. She told him that she felt like she had a roommate, rather than a husband, because he was gone so often.

So Grant did something drastic: he quit his job, with negligible savings, when his wife was four to five months pregnant.

(Editor’s Note: WAT?! Who does that?!)

For the following year, he waited tables and worked odd jobs, cobbling together gig-economy money while raising a newborn. During his rare unscheduled moments, he started crafting a new career for himself as a self-employed public speaker.

Today, Grant Baldwin is a speaker, entrepreneur, coach, and author of The Successful Speaker. He’s earned multiple seven-figures in speaking fees and has helped over 2,000 people become professional speakers.

He shares how he made his dream a reality in this episode.

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Ash Ambirge grew up in a trailer park in rural Pennsylvania.

She never met her biological father. Her father-figure mentor passed away when she was 14. Her disabled mother, who raised her on government assistance, passed away when she was 20.

Her childhood goal was to join the middle class. She dreamed of becoming one of those people who eats poppyseed bagels and lemon pepper chicken. After all, what’s more middle class than that?

Ash’s future changed the moment she received a need-based, full ride scholarship to college. After she graduated, she snagged a marketing assistant job and negotiated a $30,000 salary.

Ash had finally made it; she joined the middle class. To celebrate, she bought a brand-new car, financed a $5,000 mattress, and rented a luxurious apartment. Yet she felt that something was lacking (and it wasn’t the lemon pepper chicken).

Unfulfilled, Ash set out to answer two burning questions:

“What does it mean to live a good life?”
“What does it look like to do work that I’m proud of?”

Throughout her childhood, the answers to these questions had been elusive. Her mother hadn’t worked, and Ash had no idea what a “good life” involved. She had no role models.

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In November 2005, when Noah Kagan was 24, he was hired as Employee #30 at Facebook.

At the time, Facebook was a one-year-old company with only a few million users. The company was growing rapidly, adding 50,000 new users per day.

Noah joined the team as product manager. He made a base salary of $60,000 plus 0.1 percent of ownership, equivalent to 20,000 shares.

His stock options would have been worth $170 million if he’d cashed out in 2014, he says.

But he didn’t see a dime.

In June 2006, merely 9 months after he started working at Facebook, Noah got fired. Instead of making $170 million, he made zero.

He fell into a deep depression for a year. Then he rescued himself by starting his own company.

He became a serial entrepreneur. He tried his hand at a lot of things — including developing Facebook games, selling discount cards, creating a payment processor in the gaming space — but he’s best known for his two most successful companies.

In 2010 he started a company, AppSumo, which offers daily deals on software for small businesses. It’s like Groupon for online entrepreneurs. By 2012, AppSumo was grossing $4 million per year in revenue, with annual net profits of $500,000.

Yet Noah wasn’t fulfilled. So he pivoted. He offloaded the day-to-day management of the company to a colleague, and in 2015 he started a sister company, Sumo.com, which develops marketing tools for websites and online businesses.

In today’s episode, Noah and I discuss reflections on business, money and life.

Enjoy!

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Elaine Pofeldt, a writer for CNBC, Forbes, Fortune, Money Magazine and other business publications, decided to deep-dive into the world of solopreneur million-dollar companies.

What are the stories of entrepreneurs who gross $1 million or more in their businesses, despite having no employees? How did they begin? What do they do differently?

She interviewed hundreds of founders of non-employer seven-figure companies and wrote a book about her findings called The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business. Today, she joins us on the podcast to talk about what we can learn from this special class of entrepreneurs.

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