With the rise of binge-watching TV shows through streaming services, I found myself wanting to go back and watch some of the best episodes of my favorite shows.

The website has been steadily growing since launch and is currently at more than 200,000 unique visitors per month.

I couldn’t find a good place to find these rankings online other than random articles written by folks across different websites. It seemed like there should be an objective way to aggregate ratings and rank episodes of a show; thus Episode Ninja was born.

I grew up in Johnson City, TN - a small town in the northeast corner of the state. For as long as I can remember, I dreamed of moving to Los Angeles and starting my own business. When I was 18, I moved to LA to attend college and haven’t left yet.

I started my first business in 2008 when the startup culture was very limited in Los Angeles. Resources were scarce and it was difficult to learn how to start and run a company with no experience. Nonetheless, I trudged through the journey for a few years trying to figure it out. It was filled with some success and a lot of learning lessons, but ultimately, it didn’t end the way I had hoped. I spent a few more years working with startup companies and learning more about the landscape and how to hone my skills as a leader and entrepreneur.

In April of 2014, I started my second company, Lemonlight, out of a second bedroom with my two co-founders, Daniel Marlow, and Chad Rogers. Lemonlight’s mission was to offer small and medium-sized businesses access to high-quality, affordable video content that they could use to advertise their brand online.

So here’s how I got into working for myself:

• From 17 - 22 I was in a punk band called Lanemeyer. We toured 8 times over 2.5 years. Then we broke up because we were a shit show.

• When I turned 22 I moved to LA to figure life out. While working at a P.F. Chang’s in Woodland Hills, a buddy of mine had a clothing company called Down Apparel. I decided that I wanted to start a clothing company, bought a Gateway PC for $1,300, and started designing. I got a cracked version of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator not realizing these programs were scary as hell. I moved back to NJ and put myself through a technical school to learn graphic design.

This business idea was born in 2016, but the journey really began in 2014.

After working for a company for 8 years, I hadn’t really gotten far financially and felt stuck. I decided to find a job with better financial prospects and the possibility of advancement. After 6 months of searching, I was hired at a new employer and managed to double my salary in one fell swoop!

Just start! That little voice inside your head giving you doubts will always be there. Push through that voice and keep going until you reach a point where you’re lost.

I began my business career with the family in-store sampling business, C.A. Courtesy, in the 1990s, while at the same time attending college at Johnson and Wales University, where I pursued a degree in Web Management & Internet Commerce.

I’ve always had a knack for marketing and technology, and when I left C.A. Courtesy, I was the Vice President of Marketing and Technology.

People don’t remember what you say as much as they remember how they felt when you said it.

Tim and I met during an online hackathon. During the hackathon participants were encouraged to meetup for real. We actually got on really well, and stayed friends and kept spitballing ideas for a startup for years.

At this time, I was a design student at Central Saint Martins and I had recently won a competition for Sony Music creating an interactive music video for the band Hurts with my friend Virgil. Then soon after graduation, I started working as a creative technologist in London for a bunch of different advertising & branding agencies and a few startups too.

By 2012, stock photography was well established as an accessible and inexpensive visual content resource and Dreamstime was already a thriving Top 3 agency, counting the world’s largest stock photo community. It already featured a small free download library that subscribers were able to access unlimitedly, still available today. As donations grew, we felt these files needed a dedicated home and audience and this is how Stockfreeimages appeared. In the first year, we had around 110,000 customers and 1,5 million images and numbers continued to grow constantly. Its aim was to upgrade budget-oriented customers instead of eroding current revenues.

Not hiring talented people soon enough or hiring the wrong people and having to start all over, avoiding making leaps of faith, and being overcautious are some of the things that may change the course of your business for better or worse.

A large pool of individuals and freelancers were in need of good imagery for personal or start-up projects, at no cost at all if possible. Stockfreeimages came to answer this need for safe content with model released, high-quality photos, and illustrations that they were able to download for free. It also served as the next step in image copyright protection for both contributors and consumers and helped users protect themselves from the costly fines that often result from copyright violations.

I started my business with affiliate marketing, which I was doing for nearly 10 years. In the beginning, I was doing SMS marketing, but since it was already the 2010s, the golden age of email marketing had passed. But with the introduction of smartphones, other marketing channels such as WhatsApp and Viber messages, as well as SMS marketing were born.

SMS turned out to be a very successful marketing channel, mostly because it didn’t have such a negative reaction to marketing as email has today. The click rate was over 10% on completely non-targeted lists, which is amazing. It was also very easy to get phone numbers. With emails, there's an endless amount of possible emails, but with phone numbers, there are typically 100 million available numbers for a country with a 10 million population. Therefore it was relatively easy to clean them. We simply ran WhatsApp software to check all those numbers in bulk and got a database of real people who use smartphones.

With this method during the few years, I managed to get a database of 80 million high-quality mobile phone numbers. Soon after I started doing this other people discovered my success and started to do the same. At this point, the industry became so competitive that it was not profitable to continue anymore. ROI on a typical campaign dropped from 100-200% to only 30% and on many campaigns, it was hard to make any profit at all.

I remember vividly when my idea of business consulting came to me. I was at a networking conference with other business owners and when I stood up to introduce myself to the group, I called myself a systems consultant.

Industries change. Times are constantly changing. Relationships, if built regularly, can last forever!

From that day forward, I created the perfect way to audit an operational system or create one, effectively and efficiently. My systems consultation service is still available to this day and I’ve helped business owners dial in theirs to allow them to grow and transform their teams.

I am a licensed attorney in India and right after my master’s in law, I started working with a leading company as a lawyer. I worked there for about two years before I quit my job to become more location independent.

Choose a niche in whatever you start. It is critical for streamlining your efforts and make money.

My job paid me well but I worked 12 hours a day, I was exhausted by the end of each day, spent my weekends sleeping and I almost quit the things I liked to do - for example, sketching, yoga, traveling, etc.

I spent the last decade of my career as a social media manager, in the agency, in-house, and freelance settings. I really created a name for myself in my niche and people were always coming to me for social media advice. I absolutely LOVED teaching people and for a long time, wondering how I could combine my passions for teaching and social media into one career.

Fast forward to fall 2019 - I was at a crossroads. The agency I was working for was moving in a different direction and I was literally moving back home. I had a decision to make - stay at the agency under different circumstances, find a new job in my new home, or finally take the plunge and start my own business.

I chose the latter and it was the best decision I ever made! I was immediately able to gain clients using internal systems I created and literally built my own business from the ground up. In one year, I made almost $100,000 and put all my systems inside the Social Media Manager Society, so other aspiring social media managers could take everything I learned and implement it themselves!

We never had a moment like “Ah ha! Let’s start an online education company!”, it just naturally evolved and grew into what it is today.

But I can tell you exactly how we got here. Before we get into how we first discovered what entrepreneurship even is, I want to paint the picture of what life was like even before that.

Up until we were 21 years old, we were 2 guys just going through life on autopilot with no regard for the future. Worrying about what my next week would look like was hard enough. Then we basically “woke up” and found ourselves in a 1 bedroom apartment in Aarhus, Denmark, not showing up to our part-time job anymore and smoking pot every day. For the first time, we reflected on ourselves, what we were doing and we just felt embarrassed. We were wasting our precious time away doing absolutely nothing. I don’t want to get too into the emotions felt, but it was a rock bottom for us. Long story short, we have a private twin meeting and said to each other “this is f\cking sad, we have to change”. And because we had each other, we developed motivation and ambition to prove we weren’t useless, waste-of-space losers (but that’s exactly how we had acted).

I’m a filmmaker and that’s where my passion is. I’m an artist from my balls to my heart and I only became a producer and use my head because I also hate working 9-5s and I wasn’t interested in moving to LA. So I realized pretty quickly if I wanted to be free doing something I loved I would have to learn the business side.. which was really hard for me in the beginning.

I made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot of hard lessons because as an artist you don’t care about a lot of things that corporations care about (namely learning to look at a project as a product for capitalistic needs over self-expression) and also have to add a lot of components to your knowledge like branding, marketing, etc.

Luckily the fear of letting the corporate machine suck my soul out forever (I used to be in banking) outweighed my cynicism, so I sucked it up and made a business for myself.

But actually, the moment that really changed my perception of reality was when I accidentally started one of the world’s top modern art sites (at the time) with a group of friends way back in 2005 or so.

We were originally going to make a collaborative portfolio site to try and get clients for our businesses (filmmakers, photographers, graphic designers, etc.) and I was trying to solve the problem of how to get someone to come back to our website once they’ve visited it once.

So I had this hypothesis that if instead of making a simple portfolio site, if we actually made a blog and just shared dope art we love with the world, it might give people a reason to come back.

This whole thing started when I was working as head of marketing at a B2B SaaS business. We started a podcast.

The podcast was focused on the sales operations resource, and was called Sales Ops Demystified. We interviewed sales ops people.

It started to go pretty well, we got social shares, SEO value and even had some sales calls with our guests (we sold sales software). Sales Ops Demystified is now the most downloaded podcast in the world of sales ops.

Five years ago I was really lost and confused about what career path to pursue. I had graduated from college with a degree in Biology in hopes of becoming a doctor. I quickly found out that I didn’t want to spend my life working in an office or having to see as many patients as I could fit into my schedule to make back my medical school expenses. At the end of my senior year, I started to watch blogging really start to take off and was immediately interested—this was an entirely new career path we hadn’t see before and something about it made me want to learn more. I figured out how to use WordPress and made a free account to start something like a food blog. I published a few articles and just wrote about what I was eating and why I was so focused on eating nutritious foods over others.

After stumbling upon a writer’s Instagram profile with the bio, “Contributing Writer at EliteDaily”—I Googled, “How to be a contributing writer at EliteDaily” and sent in my application. They accepted me (to be fair, I think they were accepting everyone at this time) and I wrote a few articles for them. That was my first taste of the writing life, unpaid work that could get views if it struck the right chord with their audience. Those articles are still online today haha. But, because this was so new into the blogging world and I had absolutely no idea how to monetize or figure any of this out on my own, I didn’t take the opportunity too seriously. I assumed I’d need a “regular” job and soon stopped writing for EliteDaily.

After I graduated, I decided that I would take a break from applying to jobs I didn’t want and instead obligated myself to do something I loved every day with the hope of stumbling upon my passion and purpose. While it seems obvious now that I wanted to be a writer, at the time I was still pretty lost and confused. I didn’t know any successful internet writers and I wasn’t confident enough to ask people for help, guidance, or advice. But, a few weeks into obligating myself to do something that I loved every day, I started writing again.

My academic background has always been focused on management and strategy, I did economics, a PGDip in European Companies Management, and an MBA in England. Once I finished these studies, I started to work in Barcelona as a product manager for a couple of large companies. These were very well-known and large companies and, although I was in my twenties and I had achieved a relevant position in both companies but, for me, it was a waste of time.

At that time you could not expect to have a minimum influence in companies where all marketing decisions are always made in central offices, always abroad. Unfortunately, Spanish companies produced few goods and they merely buy and sell products manufactured in other countries.

I wanted to see all processes and, above all, feel that my efforts were worth something real and touchable. That’s why I decided that if I wanted to put into action everything I had learned, I should build my own company.

Gikken’s foundation was laid in 2011 or so. I don’t remember the exact year but I was in high school. I was amidst my most active English learning years. I was trying to read as many articles, blogs, essays, etc in English as possible. At some point, an idea that it’d be great to double click on words to get them translated right there struck me. It was the early days of Google Chrome that wasn’t the most popular browser yet. And, I think it already could translate pages entirely, but it was totally useless for me because when I can understand 80% of the text, why would I translate it entirely? It’s also terrible for mastering a language. Guessing the meanings of words from the context works better for memorizing new vocabulary. The more effort your brain takes, the stronger neural connections are.

So, physiology aside, I wanted a fast way to translate single words I didn’t understand or double-check sentences. The previous flow involved copying it, switching to a new tab with Google Translate opened there, translating it, and then switching back. Terribly inefficient and annoying when you have to do it 10 times per article, 100 times per day.

By the time I was obsessed with this idea, I could already easily implement anything I wanted on the web. I started coding at 13, so I had already at least 2 or so years of experience with copycatting news portals, trying to build my social network (who didn’t!), and reinventing a few popular JavaScript libraries. It was the early days of not only Google Chrome but also Chrome Web Store—the extension store. I made an extension that I needed for my own needs, called Instant Translate, and uploaded it to the Chrome Web Store. Uncunningly, the timing was perfect for organic growth through the store as Instant Translate happened to be one of the first extensions there. The 15-year-old me knew something only about building apps but absolutely nothing about turning them into a business. Thus, I relied on "organic growth". In other words, routinely checking analytics and praying that it grew. I did nothing more than that for the first few years.

I’ve personally kept a journal for 10 years now, ever since I first went into therapy to recover from PTSD. My mum took her own life 2 years prior to my breakdown, and I never really got to grips with my emotions or how to process everything that had ever happened.

When I started therapy I was still stuck in the mindset that talking about how I felt was not something I should do. So talking therapy was the most unnatural experience for me. So to help, my therapist recommended I tried journaling – as a way of privately thinking about how I felt and what was on my mind. It was a game-changer of a moment for me.

My mum took her own life 2 years prior to my breakdown, and I never really got to grips with my emotions or how to process everything that had ever happened.

It was 7:00 pm, about 8 days before Christmas in 2017 when my boss sent me a text message “Can I call?”.

I’d been in the tech industry as a software developer for a while now, so a late-night chat wasn’t necessarily out of the ordinary - especially if one of our clients had an unexpected, catastrophic error that couldn’t wait until the morning.

“Of course!” I said.

My name is David Tile. I own and operate a Content Writing Service, under the banner Article-Writing.co.

We don’t consider ourselves a content marketing firm. But a firm dedicated to the business of writing. Project management offers most often attached to marketing agencies. We work against marketing briefs delivering content on time and under budget.

Hey, y’all I’m Cinquanta Cox-Smith I hate putting myself in a box, but If I had to explain what I do: I’m a Multipreneur. (Author, Podcaster, and Entrepreneur) I’ve been helping entrepreneurs start an EASY Print On Demand side hustle from anywhere for about 3 years now. I’m originally from a small town in South Carolina called Georgetown. It’s historic in many ways, especially for the Geechee Gullah culture. I’m an Army Veteran and my Husband (Shawn) is an active-duty soldier. We have 2 kids Kyree (15) and Sharye (12). Let’s not forget about our dog ChuChu. He's most definitely the star of this show.

I’ve always felt like this was just a hobby, or I was just making shirts but Print On Demand is so much more than that. It’s helped me create $7,000 in one month selling POD journals on Amazon KDP, it’s helped me land a Magazine Cover with my T-Shirts for Stars & Stripes (American Military Newspaper). It’s helped me teach over 10,000 people how to create passive & residual income from home with just a computer and some wi-fi. Most importantly it’s allowed me the gift of TIME. Time to spend and travel with my family. Once we get further along into this interview. I’ll tell you about how I accidentally started in the Print On Demand industry 12 years ago.

Hi, I’m Mike Moloney, the founder of FilterGrade. FilterGrade is a marketplace for creators where you can find digital assets such as presets, LUTs, video templates, and much more.

Today thousands of creators from all around the world buy and sell digital products on FilterGrade and more than 450,000 users visit the site every month.

My name is Nimrod, and I am the CEO & co-founder of OnlinePianist, a mobile application that makes it super fun & easy to play one’s favorite songs on the piano.

Hi, my name is Mony Raanan, and I’m the founder of Voice Crafters, a multilingual voice-over agency and marketplace.

Voice Crafters operated as an agency until early 2020, at which point we launched our online marketplace. This move essentially helped double our revenue and we’re on track to making at least $500,000 in 2021 with a bottom line of around 40%.

Hey everyone!

I work with a group of artists and developers who are making tools for other artists. If you need royalty-free music, video effects, graphics, or sound assets, we’ve got you covered.

ProductionCrate got its reputation from our VFX library, FootageCrate. That’s our flagship product, and where most of our million-plus users first found us. Filmmakers don’t just need one asset, though. As soon as our users realize we have all kinds of production resources, they’re downloading everything they need to make their project awesome.

Hey, I’m Lacy and I’m a content strategist, author of the bestselling Kindle ebook Make a Killing With Content, and the Director of The Content Direction Agency. We specialize in done-for-you content strategy and writing retainers for the content between launches or promotions that helps businesses grow, nurture, and prime their audience to say “hell yes!” before they ever see the offer.

Over the past 9 years, we’ve helped hundreds of business owners create bespoke content strategies to consistently drive quality traffic to websites, increase monthly email leads by 300% or more, improve search engine rankings, enroll dozens of clients per month into membership programs, support multi-six figure launches, and drive millions of views of our articles.

Hello everyone! My name is Thomas Gullen and I’m the co-founder of Construct 3 along with my brother Ashley. Construct 3 is a game engine that allows anyone to make games without needing to know how to code - “Powerpoint for games”. We feel a lot of other low-code/no-code engines slip into cookie-cutter-style game engines, and a primary focus for Construct has always been not to fall into this trap and allow users to have complete control over every aspect of their games. We’ve recently celebrated our 10 years anniversary of starting the business, and it’s a little unnerving how quickly that time has flown by looking back!

We’re currently generating in the region of $100k per month in revenue - a number if you’d told me and Ashley 10 years ago we’d be generating I don’t think either of us would've believed it. We’ve gone through some major transitions in the business, not only the technology choices but also how we charge customers (moving from a pay-once model to subscription-based) and we’ve learned a huge amount along the way which I’m happy to share. I’ve always thought the most important thing when running a business is to minimize the mistakes you could make, and looking back I feel like this is a pretty large part of why we are where we are today.

We are Lisa and Ted Van Liew, owners of Superworld Comics, Inc., purveyors of vintage comic books, and original comic book art. Superworld is in its 34th year buying and selling comics from the 1930s to the 1970s. Our customers are nostalgia seekers who remember buying from the newsstands when they were kids, collectors who love comics and filling in their runs, and also investors looking to add some diversity and some fun to their portfolios. Prices of Silver Age (1955-1970) and Golden Age (1938-1955) comics have risen consistently since the 1970s.

Due to the success of our Tuesday show, we have recently launched Lunch With Jose on Thursdays at 1:00 pm EST. Jose Rivera is a long-time employee who possesses a larger-than-life personality and great knowledge of all things pop culture and comic book related. Our two full-time employees Joe Fish and Adam Fish have been instrumental in developing and marketing the live shows!

Joe Fish (at a computer) and Adam Fish (with camera) and Ted during an episode of Treasure Chest Tuesdays

Hey everyone!

I work with a group of artists and developers who are making tools for other artists. If you need royalty-free music, video effects, graphics, or sound assets, we’ve got you covered.

ProductionCrate got its reputation from our VFX library, FootageCrate. That’s our flagship product, and where most of our million-plus users first found us. Filmmakers don’t just need one asset, though. As soon as our users realize we have all kinds of production resources, they’re downloading everything they need to make their project awesome.

Hello. I am Abhishek Agarwal the CMO of two successful IT business ventures - Design’N’Buy & DesignRiver.co.

Our hard work and struggle helped us earn a turnover of 1.5 million dollars and 1000+ clients across 60+ countries currently and now we are expecting a growth of 50% in 2021-22 financial year.