Founder's Journey Unplugged
Bastian & Markus
Bastian and Markus are experienced startup builders and founders of Flinn.ai. They candidly talk about their challenges, learnings, and experience while building the company from the ground up.
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Top 10 Founder's Journey Unplugged Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Founder's Journey Unplugged episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Founder's Journey Unplugged for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Founder's Journey Unplugged episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
Actionable Values: Building an Empowering Culture
Founder's Journey Unplugged
07/25/23 • 30 min
At Flinn, we strongly believe in empowering smart people, to act like entrepreneurs rather than employees. To scale such an approach, you need a strong foundation of values and principles.
In this episode, we are how we are building a culture driven by values and principles from day one on. We will address questions like:
- What is the difference between values and principles?
- How did we come up with our values, and how do we involve the team to develop them further?
- How do we make them actionable in the day-to-day work?
We invite you to take a look at our values, principles, & guidelines page to get some additional inspiration.
From Remote-First to Hybrid: Adapting Work Culture in a Growing Startup
Founder's Journey Unplugged
01/30/25 • 22 min
When we started Flinn.ai, we embraced a fully remote approach to attract Europe’s best talent and provide flexibility for our team. Over time, as we grew from 3 to almost 30 people, we refined our approach to remote work.
We will talk about:
- Why a fully remote setup worked so well in the pre-seed phase and the shifts we made as our team expanded.
- The role of off-sites in building strong team connections.
- How we’ve balanced the benefits of flexibility with the need for in-person collaboration.
- Why we trust our team to decide where they work best, inspired by Spotify’s philosophy that “employees aren’t children”.
Customer & Problem Discovery
Founder's Journey Unplugged
04/03/23 • 14 min
We are a product led company, this means we validate ideas and critical assumptions with experiments and research. In this episode, we explain how we have tested, validated and researched our ideal customer profile (ICP).
Founder Leverage: Entrepreneur in Residence
Founder's Journey Unplugged
11/07/23 • 29 min
As a founder, you're often inundated with a myriad of urgent tasks, making it challenging to prioritize the truly critical ones. One highly effective approach to ease the load during the early stages is bringing on board an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR). This dynamic individual can serve as your invaluable partner, working closely with you for a few months, and potentially evolving into a pivotal role within your company, growing alongside it.
What you'll learn:
1️⃣ What is the difference between entrepreneur resident, founder associate, chief of staff, and founder resident?
2️⃣ When is the right time, and why would you hire this role
3️⃣ How we did this at Flinn.ai
4️⃣ The responsibilities of these hires and what should stay with the founder.
5️⃣ How to find or recruit them
6️⃣ What should you look for when hiring this profile
Building a Strong Advisor Network
Founder's Journey Unplugged
10/19/23 • 23 min
They’ve helped us with strategic aspects, valuable customer introductions, feedback on the product itself and understanding of the industry, ... and we wouldn’t be where we are without the advisors we’ve had the chance to work with.
Join us in this podcast episode where we explore how we got our advisors at Flinn Comply, what are the positive outcomes we’ve got, what types of advisors you can get to help your company grow.
What you'll learn:
1️⃣ What is the difference between a business angel and an advisor
2️⃣ What kind of advisors do you need?
3️⃣ How many advisors should someone in an early stage should look for?
4️⃣ Advisory board vs. single advisory sessions
5️⃣ How regularly should you interact with advisors or board of advisors?
6️⃣ Compensation and legal set up
Mastering Early-Stage Product Roadmapping
Founder's Journey Unplugged
05/23/24 • 27 min
In this episode, we are looking into how to connect your product roadmap to your vision and goals, and how to approach roadmapping as an early-stage startup.
We will talk about:
- How to get sales and product aligned behind the roadmap
- Why it is import to distinguish between your roadmap and your backlog
- What it means to balance predictability and adaptability and why this matters
- Best practise around prioritization and roadmapping tools
If you want to read more about this topic, then check out Markus deep-dive article about "The playbook to fix your product roadmap" and us on Linkedin to not miss other important insights -> Markus & Bastian.
Identifying and validating your business idea
Founder's Journey Unplugged
03/20/23 • 18 min
Identifying your business idea to build your company upon is a massive challenge. In this episode, we will elaborate on our process of discovery and validation of several ideas and how we ended up with one of them.
From 0 to 100k ARR: Our Lessons Learned
Founder's Journey Unplugged
07/31/24 • 34 min
In this episode, we share how we transformed Flinn.ai from an idea to a revenue-generating machine. We reflect on our experiences, from initial cold calls to sealing deals, and the crucial lessons we learned along the way to hitting 100k ARR.
We talk about:
- The crucial role of founders in early sales efforts.
- Our experiences with different sales channels, and our key takeaways from our experiments.
- How we approached pricing, structured our first contracts, and navigated early-stage negotiations.
- How aligning product development with sales efforts helped us achieve our revenue goals.
Finding Product-Market Fit: A Startup’s Toughest Challenge
Founder's Journey Unplugged
04/09/25 • 34 min
Every startup works towards product-market fit, but how do you really know when you’ve reached it? Without it, scaling too early can be a costly mistake - yet waiting too long can mean missing the market. In this episode, we break down the process from early validation to measurable traction, sharing lessons from our own journey at Flinn.ai.
What we cover:
- The different stages of product-market fit and how to measure progress.
- Common myths vs. reality - why “you’ll just feel it” isn’t enough.
- The metrics that matter: NPS, retention, churn, and referral rates.
- How we approached product-market fit at Flinn.ai, from LOIs to our first paying customers.
- The nuances of achieving PMF in B2B SaaS vs. B2C.
Building a Founder Team
Founder's Journey Unplugged
03/06/23 • 21 min
The most important factor in building a successful business is the team, and it all starts with the founders. In this episode, we talk about how we have formed our team of founders and what we have learned of this journey.
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FAQ
How many episodes does Founder's Journey Unplugged have?
Founder's Journey Unplugged currently has 22 episodes available.
What topics does Founder's Journey Unplugged cover?
The podcast is about Product Management, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Podcasts, Business Development, Sales, Business and Growth Hacking.
What is the most popular episode on Founder's Journey Unplugged?
The episode title 'How to Leverage Public Funds in the Early-Stage' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Founder's Journey Unplugged?
The average episode length on Founder's Journey Unplugged is 27 minutes.
How often are episodes of Founder's Journey Unplugged released?
Episodes of Founder's Journey Unplugged are typically released every 28 days, 4 hours.
When was the first episode of Founder's Journey Unplugged?
The first episode of Founder's Journey Unplugged was released on Mar 6, 2023.
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