Foundr year in review 2018

For many of us, December is a time to reflect on everything we do, analyze all the progress made toward our goals, and be grateful for all the wonderful things we learned in the past year. This is no exception at Foundr’s headquarters.

As we prepare to ring in the new year, it’s time to look back at all the work we’ve done alongside our amazing entrepreneurial community.

If you’ve been with us throughout the year, you’ll know that we’ve been cranking out new courses, articles, and podcast episodes to educate and empower you to live your best life. But if you’re new to the site, or if you simply want a reminder, you might want to check out some of our most popular content listed below. And as you’ll see, there’s a lot of content. (I’ve personally been guilty of racking up some of our lengthiest posts…)

Transparency is also one of our core values, and because of that, we wanted to give you an overview of everything we’ve done this year over at Foundr HQ. It’s been an amazing year serving you, and watching your own successes unfold!

Let’s take a look.

New Courses Launched

Last year we published Start & Scale, a course we created with Gretta van Riel. We saw a massive turnout for this ecommerce course. Hundreds of people visited our Facebook group telling us all the things they’ve learned and the progress they achieved.

If we could replicate such success with more courses, we thought, we could be much closer to our mission of helping 10 million entrepreneurs launch 10 million kick-ass businesses. So in 2018, we set an ambitious goal to offer 10 in-depth courses in the next couple of years.

To achieve that goal, we needed to launch five more courses in this year. We didn’t just pick the topics randomly; we pre-validated our course’s ideas and got a lot of new, incredible ideas.

Then the hard work started. Creating these courses took a lot of labor, planning, filming and editing, as we invested tens of thousands of dollars into production. We had to step up our game and collaborate with some of the best practitioners in the industry to develop top courses that any entrepreneur could join and take their skills to the next level.

Zack Kinslow, our Education Production Lead, was the man in charge of this epic endeavor. I asked him about his experience leading the production team and all the students’ progress he contributed to. He responded:

The most rewarding thing is seeing people in the community getting amazing results from these courses, and actually using this content to build their businesses.

Just this year, we’ve seen a student go from zero to $500,000 solopreneur salary; budding ecommerce founders who 10x’ed their revenue in three months; and countless 9-to-5ers who successfully grew their side hustles to a point where they could quit their day jobs and pursue their true passions.

It’s extremely gratifying to produce something that helps fuel this entrepreneurial boom, and we are planning to create even more courses taught by world-class founders in 2019.

Thanks to the hard work of our production team, we were able to partner with amazing experts with a wide range of skills and have them share with us their knowledge so you can implement it in your own business.

We have many more courses waiting to launch in 2019, so we couldn’t be more excited to talk about them—for now, let’s take a quick look at the courses we’ve launched so far.

List-Building Mastery

When you build and grow an online business, you need to have an audience — your 1,000 true fans. There’s no better way to generate that audience than by building an email list.

We can safely say our email, which at one point we were able to grow to over 56,000 email subscribers in only 30 days, has been paramount to our success. Many of our subscribers come back to our site to read all of our new blog posts and podcast episodes as soon as we publish them, which helps us continue our growth.

For this reason, we created List-Building Mastery, a course co-created with the help of Stuart McKeown, co-founder of Gleam.io. This course, which is almost five hours long, teaches the latest list-building strategies to acquire your first 1,000 subscribers, and many more advanced tactics.

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

Landing Page Formula

Making sales and generating leads online requires a certain specific approach. You can’t put an offer anywhere you want and expect to convince anyone to take it. That’s where landing pages come into play—they focus your offers and make them easier for your visitors to take.

If you check our lead offers, like our ecommerce masterclass or our influencer ebook, you’ll see they’re positioned within landing pages.

Because we understand the importance of landing pages, we created a new course called Landing Page Formula.

Creating a landing page is more an art than a science, and who better to teach how to do it than the master himself: Oli Gardner. Founder of the pioneering company Unbounce, this four-hour course covers how to create high-converting landing pages from the ground up.

If you want to check out the course when it opens, sign up here for the latest updates.

7-Figure Copywriting

Whether you know it or not, you have a salesperson working for you 24/7. It’s your website—most specifically, your copy. Copywriting is an elemental member of your marketing team, so if you want to generate consistent sales, your website needs to be filled with great copy.

To teach you how to achieve this exact goal, we partnered with Arman Assadi, the co-founder & CEO of Project EVO, to create our latest course, 7-Figure Copywriting.

In this course, Arman lays out everything he’s learned writing copy for his seven and eight-figures clients—from finding the right message to the exact words he’s used to increase conversions, we made sure this course was packed with information that you can use on your own site.

If you want to be the first one to be notified when we open enrollment, sign up here.

Triple Your Business

We talk a lot about starting and growing a new business, but taking a business from its early stages to make it a massive success is a whole different game. Scaling and automating your business is as hard (if not harder) than starting it.

As Foundr grows, we’ve experienced this challenges ourselves. We had to implement new systems, processes, and tactics that help us break our traffic and revenue targets.

There’s a saying that goes, “What got you here won’t take you there.” But this course will, so we can confidently name it Triple Your Business.

Taught by Steve McLeod, the director of Courage for Profit and author of the book by the same name, this course teaches all the most important systems you need to take your business to the next level, including the same ones Steve has used to help us triple our own revenue in less than 12 months.

Triple Your Business was first offered for a limited time, and since we saw such an incredible positive response with over 1,000 enrollments in just a few days, we decided to close it to new students for now to keep it manageable.

We will open the doors once again in 2019 as part of our all new Foundr Premium course offering, which will include even more new courses.

New Free, Comprehensive Guides Launched

The courses we launched cover a long list of skills you need to have in place to launch and grow an online business. We know, however, some people can’t pay for our courses (at least not yet). We want everyone in our community to be able to gain a similar entrepreneurial edge, regardless, so this year we adopted a new educational strategy.

We launched three guides—basically online mini-courses—that anyone can access anytime for free. And we have two more guides set to launch within weeks! You don’t even need to enter an email address to access them (although our emails are great!). They are the most in-depth, free guides you’re likely to find online, that teach you everything you need about the subject at hand.

Without further ado, here are the guides we launched this year:

The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Online Business Using Instagram

We have written a lot about Instagram, from growing our account to 10,000 followers in two weeks to writing killer copy—we’re experts at Instagram marketing.

That’s why we launched this guide to help other social media marketers learn how to use Instagram and grow their businesses.

Access our Instagram guide here.

The Ultimate Guide on How to Start an Online Business

There’s a lot out there on launching an online business. We covered this extensive and critical topic, explaining everything from best types of online businesses you can start today, how to evaluate and validate a potential business idea, how to launch, and most importantly, how to monetize it.

Access our Ultimate Guide on How to Start an Online Business

The Ultimate Guide To Starting And Scaling An Ecommerce Business

Ecommerce is in our blood. We love the way entrepreneurs are able to launch businesses without any experience and grow a successful store in a few short months.

This guide offers an in-depth analysis of everything you’ve got to do to start and scale an online store. From finding your business idea to launching it, you’ll learn how to implement a marketing strategy, get your first sale, and scale it.

Access the Ultimate Guide To Starting And Scaling An Ecommerce Business

The Complete Guide to Becoming an In-Demand, Well-Paid Consultant, Coach or Freelancer

We also launched a free guide that includes the best ways to find and market your most profitable skills, a formula to calculate your hourly rate, how to land your first clients, and more.

Access the The Complete Guide to Becoming an In-Demand, Well-Paid Consultant, Coach or Freelancer.

The Ultimate Guide to Building Your Email List From the Ground Up (COMING SOON!)

We’ve written extensively about growing an email list, but we had never compiled a fully detailed guide to list building. That’s why we are so excited to launch this free resource.

In this guide, we explain everything from the basics of list building to creating lead capture forms to attracting new people to your lead offer, and more. Weighing in at almost 25,000 words, there’s hardly a more detailed guide on the subject anywhere online.

This guide is weeks away from being published. We will notify you once it is ready to go! Subscribe to our email list to be notified when we launch it.

2018’s Top 5 Most Popular Blog Posts

This year we’ve published a lot of blog posts—over 150.

Our readers have spoken. They have shown us the following five posts have been the most popular, both from the traffic they generated to the social shares and comments. The winners are:

The Top 5 Most Popular Podcast Episodes

The Foundr podcast is one of our favorite and most successful parts of our company. For the past year, our founder and CEO Nathan Chan continued to launch new episodes and interviewing people like:

Syed Balkhi, founder of Optin Monster and WPBeginner
Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz
Noah Kagan, founder and CEO of Sumo
Hiten Shah, founder of Crazy Egg
Gary Vee, you know who Gary Vee is

Our listeners have shown us our most popular episodes from this year were the following:

Let’s Ride This Wave Into 2019

It’s been a wild year for us—we launched a lot of new courses, workbooks, podcast episodes, and blog posts. But it’s been an even bigger year for our community! We’ve been blown away at how much progress you all have made in your businesses and careers.

People from all over the world have been sending us messages in our Facebook groups, Instagram account, and support email, showing us how they’re learning how to launch and grow their online businesses—their first, in many cases.

This is what we’re here for: helping you become a more successful entrepreneur. We expect 2019 to be as exciting and intense as this one. We hope you stay with us for the ride.

Are there any topics or courses you would like us to focus on in 2019? Let us know in the comments!