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Steli Efti

By Josh Pigford on February 04, 2019
Last updated on February 07, 2024

Table of Contents

 

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This week I talk with Steli Efti, Founder of Close.io! In this episode we talk about growing up as an immigrant kid in a factory town, discovering books at 16, starting a slew of businesses like a DVD rental company and a hypnosis hotline, discovering sales, building a remote team and more!

Show Notes:

  • 1:04- Childhood
  • 2:30- Early realization on conformity
  • 5:00- Single most important moment in his life
  • 7:43- Nature vs. Nurture
  • 9:20- Positive reinforcement
  • 10:37- School experience
  • 13:20- “I’m going to prove the world wrong”
  • 16:00- Turning point
  • 21:36- “Anyone can start a business”
  • 22:14- The interesting and exciting thing about stocks
  • 24:08- Ownership creates wealth
  • 27:40- Dropping out of school
  • 31:00- Loving people more than money
  • 32:40- 24 hour DVD rental business
  • 34:10- Getting DVD rental machines
  • 36:10- Learning the importance of Branding, Pricing, and Location
  • 37:40- Finding a hook to get his brothers involved
  • 40:28- Sold or gave away everything to buy a 1 way ticket to Silicon Valley
  • 43:29- Getting into hypnosis
  • 45:35- Hypnosis Hotline
  • 47:30- Monetizing something that you are passionate about
  • 50:20- Moving and starting a tech company in the US
  • 53:14- How I thought things would go
  • 54:24- Internal turmoil and stress
  • 55:00- Fundraising
  • 56:41- Pretending everything is ok when it is coming to a painful and slow end
  • 57:41- Three month vacation to reassess
  • 59:30- Getting out of debt
  • 1:01:15- SwipeGood
  • 1:03:58- Biggest struggle with startups- hiring salespeople
  • 1:05:36- Moving to outsourced Elastic salesforce
  • 1:06:36- Deciding to create own CRM service… close.io
  • 1:08:35- “The last thing I wanted to do was launch a software business”
  • 1:09:16- Love/Hate relationship
  • 1:10:42- Catalyst for getting out of services and pursuing software
  • 1:12:35- Team thoughts on the side project becoming more successful than the main thing
  • 1:13:57- Least scaling growth-hack of all time
  • 1:15:08- Having businesses as customers rather than consumers
  • 1:18:22- Transitioning to a fully remote team
  • 1:21:29- Pros and cons to building a fully remote sales team
  • 1:24:31- Balancing content creation with the responsibilities of being a CEO
  • 1:26:12- Personal process for recording a podcast episode
  • 1:29:45- Forsight on the next year- A lot of change!

How to reach Steli: TwitterThe Startup ChatClose.io blog

Josh Pigford

Josh is most famous as the founder of Baremetrics. However, long before Baremetrics and until today, Josh has been a maker, builder, and entrepreneur. His career set off in 2003 building a pair of link directories, ReallyDumbStuff and ReallyFunArcade. Before he sold those for profits, he had already started his next set of projects. As a design major, he began consulting on web design projects. That company eventually morphed into Sabotage Media, which has been the shell company for many of his projects since. Some of his biggest projects before Baremetrics were TrackThePack, Deck Foundry, PopSurvey, and Temper. The pain points he experienced as PopSurvey and Temper took off were the reason he created Baremetrics. Currently, he's dedicated to Maybe, the OS for your personal finances.