The Story People Don’t Tell You About Building a Business

During WordCamp Nashville, I was privileged to sit down with Clark Buckner from TechnologyAdvice and talk about building our business in the context of the Nashville community. It’s a fun 15 minute interview we thought you’d enjoy if you also care about your community and want to build a great business to serve it.

I tell a little bit of the backstory of starting FoxyCart back in 2005 and 2006. It was a lot of hard work. Most of the fun “overnight success” stories we all enjoy are a bit disingenuous because they don’t describe the whole process required to get there. For example, I was building FoxyCart while still maintaining a full-time job. I’d get up around 7am, work my day job from 8:30am to 5:30pm, hang with the family until around 8:30pm and then go to work on FoxyCart until midnight, 1am, 2am… etc. It was common to put in another full day (or more) on Saturdays.

We’re proud our our story, self-funding and building this company from the ground up. We’ve never had to put our team members or our customers at risk with an investor-controlled burn rate. We also directly impact the very thing our customers pay us for, meaning we are developers ourselves continually improving the FoxyCart product.

More on that in the interview, but the basic idea being if you’re going to build an online business, you better be a technologist or be partnered directly with one or you won’t be able to meet the needs of your customers when something goes wrong at 2 in the morning.

Without giving the rest way, here’s the interview. Please let us know what you think and if you’d like to hear more content like this.