Getting Your First $10k/mo In Revenue with Ben Fisher of CartHook.com EP 203
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What inspired Ben Fisher to co-found Lean Startup Machine?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Dustin Goodwin. He's in the HR industry, specifically in the software as a service space, looking to increase his revenue. So congratulations, Dustin.
How did Lean Startup Machine evolve from a weekend experiment?
For your guys' chance to win 100 bucks every Monday on the show to build your idea, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444. Again, text the word Nathan to 33444. Coming up tomorrow morning, Top Tribe, and every morning at 9 a.m., you'll hear from Daniel Grusolowski. He went from zero to one billion impressions with his emoji company. Good morning, Top Tribe. I've got Ben Fisher with us this morning. He is a New York City-based designer and hacker. He co-founded Lean Startup Machine and Alchemy, which was acquired by Red Rover in 2013. He's got more than a decade of experience working with award-winning companies, including Volkswagen, Burger King, Disney, and IDEO.
His entrepreneurial work has been featured in Forbes, Esquire, Gizmodo, Mashable, Harvard's Neiman Lab on ABC World News, and many, many others.
What lessons did Ben learn from the ascension of Alchemy Labs?
Ben, are you ready to take us to the top? I'm ready. All right, so let's do this. So first things first, your current company is called Cardhook. Before we talk about that, though, let's go back to Lean Startup Machine and Alchemy. Which came first? Lean Startup Machine did.
And actually, it's sort of funny how there were companies or projects before Lean Startup Machine, which Lean Startup Machine was the evolution of. of those experiences, largely, you know, failing to start companies and probably focusing on the wrong stuff. And at the time, um, lean start machine, like, uh, one of my partners at the time, he, uh, he'd come across like Eric's blog, lean startup, Eric, Eric Reese, correct.
How did Alchemy Labs generate revenue before acquisition?
Um, was, you know, it, it was just a blog. His book hadn't come out. and at the time we were in the new york tech scene like even startup weekend was only going around new york once a year so it was a really interesting period within at least within tech on the east coast um and a bunch of us had just graduated college we're sort of figuring out our today our first adult companies um adults mean like after after we uh had graduated into the real world and a lot of stuff wasn't working and you know the economy was kind of in in the can. And so what we had was, um, I think especially for, for folks who are just out of college, a lot of people who get normal jobs after school, they'll have like a cohort or like a class, like in finance or even in advertising, um, or other industries, um,
Whereas if you work at a startup or you're trying to build a company, you don't have that same sort of peer group. And so the time, sorry.
No, I was just going to say, so I want to spend more time on your company. Lean Startup Machine was basically an extension of that.
Yeah, it started as a single weekend experiment where we were trying to have, like a hackathon is great.
What challenges did Ben face when raising funds for his companies?
And we'd actually approached Startup Weekend about just having it. frequently having more startup weekends in New York. And they basically were like, hey, we don't know you guys. You're welcome to go do your own thing. And so what was more interesting to us was we're like, all right, well, it's cool to do a hackathon. But what would be more interesting is if it was more skills-based because you release a bunch of folks and tell them to go build something in 48 hours. And after a while, you do that a few times, the results continue to be sort of chaotic. Some great stuff might come out of it. But at the time, the idea was there has to be a better way Like what are the skills that we can learn so that we're not just spending a weekend trying, making the same mistakes over and over again?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What inspired Ben Fisher to co-found Lean Startup Machine?
0:00–0:41
2
How did Lean Startup Machine evolve from a weekend experiment?
0:41–1:38
3
What lessons did Ben learn from the ascension of Alchemy Labs?
1:38–2:18
4
How did Alchemy Labs generate revenue before acquisition?
2:18–3:30
5
What challenges did Ben face when raising funds for his companies?
3:30–4:10
6
How does Cardhook help businesses recover abandoned carts?
4:10–4:47
7
What is the current status of Cardhook's revenue and customer base?
4:47–5:13
8
What advice does Ben have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
5:13–21:18