Here we are at the end of another year, Foundr family. Another trip around the sun near complete, including a long list of daunting challenges faced and overcome, incredible news about the state of the brand, and many more new goals to achieve.

We want to share everything we’ve achieved this year and celebrate the progress we have made together. After all, everything we do is to help you succeed as entrepreneurs, and everything we accomplish is thanks to your support and engagement.

In 2019, we launched a lot of new courses, published dozens upon dozens of blog posts, and created some of the most popular YouTube videos in the entrepreneurial world.

In this post, you’ll find a full rundown of Foundr’s year. If you’ve been around this whole time, it will be a nice wrap up as we move into 2020. And if you’re new to Foundr and its community (welcome!), this will be a great entry point into the kind of things we do.

Either way, we’re happy to take you behind the scenes and let you see what we’ve been up to for the past 365.

New Courses Launched

In 2017, we had decided that if we were to get closer to achieving our goal of helping 10 million entrepreneurs launch 10 million kick-ass businesses, we had to scale our operations.

We had to create much more content through the publication of blog posts and podcasts, and even launch our own YouTube channel. Most importantly, we had to launch many more courses.

Hundreds of hours filmed and thousands of miles flown later, we published five new courses and got much closer to achieving our mission of helping entrepreneurs launch their businesses.

With the dozen courses we’ve launched to date, this year we can proudly say we enrolled 5,144 new students, individuals who have been able to learn the exact steps they needed to take to improve their online skills and become their own bosses.

We also fully re-shot and re-mastered our most popular program (Start & Scale) which now has 6,700+ members alone.

Here are the five courses we launched this year:

Advanced Email Marketing

One of the most powerful tools any business owner can have is an email list. Marketers and entrepreneurs across all industries use email marketing to generate more leads and sales for their businesses. It simply works.

For this course, we partnered with Jimmy Kim, the co-founder of Sendlane, a behavior-based email automation software company. He’s an expert when it comes to generating high-performance email marketing campaigns, and has been able to acquire over 40,000 users, transforming his company into one of the leading email marketing vendors on the market.

In this course, Kim teaches all the most advanced concepts of email marketing, including how email engagement works, how to increase deliverability, advanced segmentation tactics, and more.

To learn more about this course, you can sign up to know when we open our next enrollment.

Infinite Scale

Content creation is the core of Foundr’s business. We’ve built our entire company based on the magazine, blog posts, podcast episodes, and YouTube videos we’ve put together over the past six years and counting. Content is the product we sell and the way we market our offerings.

Based on the success we had growing our Instagram account and the interest it drew, Nathan realized some people from our audience needed more in-depth education on the fundamentals behind this kind of growth. That’s when he created Instagram Domination, our very first online course. After a few years, we became really good at creating courses as well as selling them.

To teach our community about how we found success using content and online courses, we created Infinite Scale, taught by our own founder Nathan Chan. Here, he teaches everything he’s learned over the years about managing course creation, launch planning, promotion, and a whole lot more.

If you’re an entrepreneur who wants to build a scalable business around digital products, sign up to get updates when we open for enrollment.

The Growth Hacking Playbook

Growth hacking is relatively new, yet incredibly powerful. It covers the systematized and scalable processes that companies like Facebook, Airbnb, and Tinder used to grow in such short periods of time.

For this course, we partnered with one of the experts who popularized this concept—Bronson Taylor. Bronson is the host of Growth Hacker TV, a subscription video service that features more than 170 interviews with the greatest growth-focused minds on the planet.

He has also been featured in many of the top books on growth and startups, including Growth Hacker Marketing and Lean Branding. In recent years, Bronson founded Growth Geeks, a marketplace that connects thousands of businesses with the top 1% of marketers in the areas of paid traffic, SEO, social media, data science, and other fields.

In this extensive video course, Bronson lays out the foundations of growth hacking, how it works, and how to implement it. He teaches “pull” and “push” tactics to get visitors, as well as advanced activation and retention tactics that will help you keep your users hooked to your product.

If you are looking to take your business to the next level, then check out the Growth Hacking Playbook. Click here to learn more about the course.

Blow Up Your Brand

Content is the foundation of our business, but creating great content only took us so far. What made the difference in the growth of our company was our content marketing—the way we positioned, created, and distributed our content to our audience.

And not surprisingly, when we asked our audience for potential course ideas, they were interested in learning how they could also use content marketing to grow their businesses.

That’s why we partnered with a genius practitioner of content marketing to create this course: Eric Bandholz.

Eric is the founder and CEO of Beardbrand, an industry-leading company that sells grooming products for beards. Eric became almost instantly famous in the small yet passionate field of beard care, thanks to the power of his own content marketing.

In this course, Eric teaches not only the basics of content marketing, but the exact tactics he used to turn Beardbrand from a one-person startup to a small empire.

If you are interested in learning more about Blow Up Your Brand and how you can use content marketing to grow, click here.

60-Day Startup

“Software is eating the world,” Marc Andressen once said. After looking at the riches developed by tech entrepreneurs the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Marc Benioff, people have been fascinated with learning what it takes to start and grow a software-based business.

Strangely enough, we found there wasn’t one trusted, tested resource that taught how to develop a software idea into a business model. That’s why, based on the interests of our audience, we decided to create a course to teach exactly that.

This time, we partnered with Mitch Harper, co-founder of BigCommerce—a company with over $100 million in sales alone—and seven other successful tech startups.

In this course, he teaches the exact launch system he’s used to grow his own companies. It includes everything from market validation to marketing to getting your first paying customers.

To learn more about the 60-Day Startup, click here to get notified when we launch this course.

2019’s Most Popular Blog Posts

This year we’ve published over 230 blog posts. Out of the hundreds of posts we put together, the five most-read posts that our readers really loved have been:

• How Much Should I Charge as a Consultant? Setting the Right Price for the Value You Offer
• How to Write a Consulting Proposal That Gets an Instant ‘Yes!’ (With Best Tools and Templates)
• The Critical Lessons I Wish I Had Known About Before Starting a Software Company
• Should I Start a Consulting Business? How to Know if You’ve Got What it Takes
• How Long Does It Take to Become An Entrepreneur? (And Why This is the Wrong Question to Ask)

Looks like we’ve got a lot of ambitious consultants out there! Keep tuning in for lots more on this topic.

The Top 5 Most Popular Podcast Episodes

Since Nathan launched the Foundr podcast, it’s become one of the most popular in the entrepreneurial field. Thousands of entrepreneurs listen to the informative interviews Nathan conducts with industry leaders. This year, the podcast feature people like:

• Nir Eyal, best-selling author
• Gabriel Weinberg, founder of DuckDuckGo
• Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt
• The founders of Refinery29
• Tony Fernandes, founder of AirAsia

From the dozens of podcasts published this year, our most episodes from this year were the following:

• 231: How to Do Your Best Work by Working Less, With Jason Fried of Basecamp
• 258: The Story Behind Game-Changing Travel Brand Away, With Founder Steph Korey
• 250: How Dollar Shave Club Used Mission, Humor, and Viral Videos to Lead Up to a $1B Acquisition, With Michael Dubin
• 254: A Behind-The-Scenes Look at How Foundr CEO Nathan Chan Built A Global Brand

Celebrate the Wins!

Before popping the champagne, we want to share one last batch of great news from this year—some killer partnerships and a new home!

To start, we closed a partnership with 99designs, the global creative platform for finding and hiring talented designers to grow your business. So the latest magazine issue of the year was designed by a team of freelance designers using the platform. As you can see below, the magazine turned out amazing; probably one of the most beautiful we’ve published, inside and out.

Shopify Partnership

On a similar note, this year Shopify, the largest ecommerce platform in the world, decided to name Foundr one of its few education partners thanks to the success of our Start & Scale ecommerce course.

According to the company, its education partners “have been carefully reviewed to ensure quality and accuracy; have been designed specifically to help you launch and grow your business; and have been developed by experienced and trusted Shopify merchants.”

We were thrilled to be inducted into this elite club.

Foundr is in New York!

Foundr has been growing rapidly in recent years. We’ve expanded the team to almost 30 people, and grew our student base, which now is made up of over 12,000 people.

We achieved all these amazing feats through the use of a distributed team. Some work from the United States, some from Europe, and the rest from Australia, where our HQ is located. But to continue our growth, we needed to continue creating more courses that satisfied our audience’s needs. And there’s no better place to create and produce them than in New York, home to top business and media production talent, alike.

So this year, we opened our own office in the big city, Brooklyn to be exact, a dream come true for us.

What it looked like before we fixed it up

Our new home 🙂

From this office, we’ve been recording many of our videos for our YouTube channel (which, if you haven’t checked, you should now!) as well as our premium courses.

There’s so much we have planned for next year, and our New York office will be the launchpad for many of these exciting projects.

Let’s Make 2020 Even Better!

2019 was a year filled with many challenges, opportunities, successes, and setbacks. That’s the life of the entrepreneur. It’s a rollercoaster, but one that we wouldn’t trade for anything in the world.

We’re continuing to grow this amazing community of like-minded founders, just like you. All the support we hear from you in messages, comments, and emails, and all the growth we’ve experienced thanks to your passion and interest, is what drives this company and its team forward.

Let’s make 2020 the year were we take our businesses to the next level. We’ll see you next year!