Welcome to the second episode of Sticker Stories, our podcast. This week's podcast is all about entrepreneurship, focusing on Founder's Stories, and we have an extra-special visitor on the show to tell us his story.
Our guest will be John Fischer, the StickerGiant himself, and he will share with us the early days of this business and how it's become the company it is today. At the end of this podcast, we'll provide resources for budding entrepreneurs, and we'll preview some of the awesome entrepreneurial activity that we support worldwide--it's going to be a full show. You can watch or listen below.
Here's the SoundCloud to listen and follow along.
As we were saying, the theme of the podcast is Founder’s Stories and Entrepreneurship. We'll get our boss up here in just a second, but first we want to do our top of mind segment.
In today's Top of Mind: Bikes! Tour de France is in full swing, currently racing across the Pyrenees Mountains of Southwestern France. It's Bastille Day, which marks a turning point in the French Revolution and brings out all of France in a celebration not unlike our Fourth of July. And in a true show of patriotism and grit, a Frenchman won the stage of the day. Speaking of shirts, Andrew is in the yellow jersey of the new look for StickerGiant, and Hamish is resplendent in blue. We wrote a blog post all about our new design on StickerGiant.com, which you should check out.
John Fischer’s Founder’s Story
We did a fun Q&A with John Fischer where we talked about the How and Why of StickerGiant, and he talked us through the starting of the business in his basement, the move to Hygiene, the institution of Open Book Finance and then the growth and move into Longmont. He gave some great tips about how to start a founder's network to learn from others, and how to look at finance in a holistic way. John referenced the Great Game of Business, Zing Train and Ownership Thinking as three books that helped guide his founder's journey to creating StickerGiant's model of the Great Game of Business.
John also teased a future episode where he mentioned Traction by Gino Wickman and the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) that is driving the scale of StickerGiant's business. He shared some stories that actually brought tears to his eyes as he remembered the first check signing day when he transitioned to Open Book Finance, and how the burden of running a company was a shared experience.
Startup Week and Weekend - Entrepreneurship
We like to put our money where our mouth is, so we're sponsoring Longmont Startup Week that's taking place the week of July 24-28, and we're also participating as panelists and speakers. We printed up a fun sticker sheet for the event, plus the Wannapraneur beer sticker, so we're all over this event for sure. And that's the advice John gave in his sit down with us: build your network so you can learn and grow. We are proud to work with Techstars, Startup Week and Startup Weekend to help get these stickers out to the world, and also support new and young businesses as they grow and scale.
Longmont Startup Week Events
- Founder John Fischer has a fireside chat on Wednesday 7/26 at 3pm about StickerGiant's 12 laws of Business.
- On Wednesday, July 26th at 1pm, Andrew has a talk about Cannabis Journalism and America's New Normal
- On Thursday, July 27th at 11am, our marketing manager Jesse is on a panel called Business Success or Failure is Going Digital.
Sticker Highlight: Startup Week Stickers
Wannapreneuer collaboration beer die cut sticker to honor the local breweries that worked together for this special brew. The breweries include 300 Suns, Oskar Blues, Left Hand Brewery, Open Door Brewery, Skeye Brewing, Shoes & Brews, Wibby Brewing, The Pumphouse, Grossen Bart, and Bootstrap Brewing. St. Vrain Cidery is part of the collaboration, however due to liquor licensing, is not able to serve The Wannapreneur. Check out this blend if you're traveling through Longmont during the week.
Resources for starting a business
- Techstars
- Startup Weekend & Startup Week events
- Startup Resources dot .io
- 10 Expert Resources for Startups in 2017
- U.S. Small Business Association
- The Complete Startup Toolkit (The Best Free Online Startup Resources Right Now)
That was it for our second episode of the Sticker Stories Podcast. You can find us on the iTunes Store, Google Play, SoundCloud, Vimeo and YouTube. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next month for episode three when we talk about acquiring customers. See you at 10am MST on the second Friday of August.