500 episodes listed below
Founder stories with the numbers left in.
The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan focuses on entrepreneurs who can explain the numbers behind the story. Episodes move quickly from headline growth to the less glamorous details: supplier samples, payback periods, ad spend, hiring mistakes, and pivots under pressure.
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The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan is a founder-interview show with a strong bias toward e-commerce execution. It is practical first. Recent episodes keep returning to the same question: what did the founder actually do when the business model, customer acquisition, hiring plan, or growth story stopped working? The answers are usually concrete. Danny Young talks through IM8’s subscription economics, including acquisition costs, gross margins, and payback windows. A mouth tape founder explains the early supplier search, sample testing, minimum order quantities, and the strain of building while still working demanding hours. Solo episodes push listeners away from vanity metrics and toward owned customer relationships, especially email lists and purchase behavior. The show is also interested in brand feeling, not just performance marketing. Camille Moore’s “overflow effect” appears as a way to think about products that create memorable moments rather than only transactions. Christina Stemple’s Farm Girl Flowers story brings a heavier edge, with revenue collapse, debt, rejected acquisition offers, and a pivot from scale obsession to profit discipline. Noura Sakkijha’s Majuri story adds another kind of pivot, from a failed crowdsourcing model to a fine jewelry brand built around women buying for themselves. Chris Voss brings the show into negotiation, with a clear lesson about why getting someone to say no can surface better information than chasing agreement. The pacing is brisk, and the questions are built to get past founder gloss. It does not avoid ambition. It does, however, keep asking for the mechanics behind ambition: the first order, the ad account, the supplier, the wrong hire, the broken assumption, the cash pressure. That makes the show most useful when a guest has enough history to explain both the win and the mess behind it. Some episodes include long promotional sections for founder tools, memberships, or sponsors. Those ads can feel close to the content, but they also reveal the show’s core audience: serious direct-to-consumer operators who care about growth systems. The tone is warm and founder-friendly, with enough skepticism to keep the conversation from becoming pure celebration. It suits listeners who want practical business pattern recognition more than polished success theater.
Made for: Best for e-commerce founders, direct-to-consumer operators, and ambitious early-stage entrepreneurs who want practical growth lessons. It also suits listeners who like business stories with real metrics, pivots, and operational detail.
What sets it apart: The show stands out by pressing founders for the mechanics behind growth: CAC, margins, supplier terms, hiring pain, conversion channels, and payback periods. It balances big founder narratives with the specific moves that made or broke the business.
Hear the stories, learn the proven methods, and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan. About the show: For over a decade, The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan has been a leading entrepreneurship podcast for open-book conversations with, by, and for founders. Whether you're starting, building, or dreaming about your business, The Foundr Podcast is where you can access experienced founders who've been in your shoes to learn their proven methods, lessons from failure, and inspirational stories. Past guests include Emma Grede, Mark Cuban, Neil Patel, Kendra Scott, Alex Hormozi, Trinny Woodall, Tim Ferriss, Sophia Amoruso, Simon…
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Founder interviews turn consumer-brand growth into concrete discussions of unit economics, advertising, staffing, sourcing and survival.
Nathan Chan keeps founder interviews close to the decisions that determine whether a consumer business grows or runs out of room. Conversations move through customer acquisition costs, payback periods, gross margins, advertising, subscription economics and profitability, with…
A $230 acquisition cost sounds scary; Nathan Chan asks the payback question you should, too.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A sharp look at how one fast-growing DTC brand thinks about paid growth and payback.
Nathan Chan uses the IM8 founder conversation to look closely at a brand that says it is spending $2 million to $3 million a month on ads while moving from zero to nine figures in just over a year.
A grounded look at turning early samples into a first supplier order.
This founder conversation works best as a practical look at how early product sampling becomes a first real supplier order. The guest walks through contacting manufacturers in China, receiving multiple samples, testing them, and handing them to as many people as possible for…
A grinding founder story that follows a half-million brand through a punishing first year.
The episode follows Jesse as he talks through building a brand that is closing in on half a million a year while still doing fly in fly out work.
A focused negotiation lesson on using no to uncover the problems hidden behind a polite yes.
Negotiation gets a clean reset around one counterintuitive move: ask whether the other side disagrees instead of trying to guide them toward yes.
A grounded founder conversation about surviving a revenue cliff by treating time, marketing spend, and unit economics as scarce capital.
Farm Girl Flowers began with $49,000 in personal savings, reached $55 million in revenue, and then hit a 50 percent overnight collapse that gave Christina Stemple 36 hours to test a major pivot before bankruptcy became likely within three weeks.
A lean-team case study on how operating design shapes speed.
Will Nitz's IQ Bar story makes lean operating design the episode's main business argument. It follows a founder who moved from selling Linsanity t-shirts in his college dorm to building a $125 million brain food brand with a team of 10.
Rob Walling on bootstrapped SaaS growth, plateaus, and exits — with founders who lived them.
Abbey Ashley's playbook for turning your job skills into a virtual assistant business.
SaaS operators on scaling, pricing and AI, metrics included.
Alex Blumberg interviews guests like Megan Phelps-Roper and Shane McAnally about failure and reinvention.
Christina Stemple, founder of Farm Girl Flowers, returns to discuss how her $55M bootstrapped business nearly collapsed when sales dropped over 50% overnight in 2021.
Will Nitze, founder and CEO of IQ Bar, discusses building a $125 million brain food brand with only 10 people.
Adam Ewart built Send My Bag, a $250M luggage shipping service operating in 145 countries, after being charged excess baggage fees by airlines, using scrappy PR and automation to scale profitably without external funding.
Matt Paulson says his 4.5-minute flatline changed how he thought about fear, recalling, "I died, and it was amazing." After a McLaren campaign raised $1.9 million, Omaze cut celebrity experiences from 300 annually to 50 and focused on its owned prize model.
Sandra Olin describes leaving eBay’s fashion business in 2011 to build KiwiCo from hands-on projects tested with her children and friends in her garage.
IM8's growth math gets pretty specific.
Michael says Breath Sleep Tape went from idea to a live store in 10 weeks and reached $60,000 in sales in the first six months.
This episode critiques the common mistake of treating social media as a vanity metric and emphasizes building owned audiences through email lists for sustainable e-commerce growth in 2026.
Christina Stemple, founder of Farm Girl Flowers, shares how she saved her $35M/year company by pivoting after a 50% revenue collapse during COVID, turning down acquisitions and shifting from growth to profitability.
This solo episode explains why successful brands focus on creating memorable moments rather than just delivering products, drawing on the overflow effect concept from branding expert Camille Moore.
This episode features an interview with Noura Sakkijha, founder of Majuri, discussing how she started a jewelry brand with $25K, pivoted from a failed crowdsourcing model, and built a successful global business by challenging traditional industry norms and prioritizing culture in hiring.
A big number sets the tone.
The host opens with a challenge to the usual chase for yes.
This episode features an interview with Konnie Simiklis, who built a $60K/month swimwear brand in 18 months while keeping her day job, highlighting her journey and strategies in e-commerce.
This episode features Will Nitze, founder of IQ Bar, discussing how he built a $125M brain food brand with just 10 people through hyper-lean growth, unconventional fundraising, and strategic pivots in the competitive CPG industry.
This episode features Jeff Lee, co-founder of Dibs Beauty, discussing how to build a successful beauty brand in a crowded market through customer-focused strategies, early retail entry, and community building.