Meet Nathan Gwilliam and His Entrepreneurial Journey

Jaclyn Strominger 0:21

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another amazing episode of the Unstoppable Success Podcast. I am your host, Jaclyn Strominger. And in this podcast, we hear from amazing leaders, industry professionals about their tips or tricks and how they have had unstoppable success. And today I get to introduce you to Nathan Guilliam. And let me tell you a little bit about Nathan. He is a serial entrepreneur, like a lot of you, and he has built and successfully exited three digital ventures, including adoption.com, which became the world's most visited adoption website. And after producing more than 350 podcast episodes on digital monetization, Nathan discovered firsthand how fragmented and inefficient content creation ecosystem had become. And faced with managing more than 30 disconnected tools, we know how that goes, and thousands of monthly software costs, he saw an opportunity to reinvent the process. And today, Nathan is building his fourth major venture, an all-in-one podcasting and content syndication platform designed to help creators scale their influence, simplify operations, and monetize faster. His work sits on the intersection of entrepreneurship, media technology, and scalable impact. Welcome to Unstoppable Success.

Speaker 1:48

Thank you for having me on today. I really appreciate it.

Jaclyn Strominger 1:52

Um, you know, I am so glad you're here. You know, you're on to your fourth venture, and some people may be like, oh my God, I can't get one venture off the ground. You have truly had unstoppable success. So where does it come from?

Speaker 2:08

Where does it come from? Insanity? Does that count? Yeah, I I am an incurable creator. I I have to be creating something or I die. It some people like to go golf for fun. I like to create things for fun, right? And and it it I feel like I can do good in the world and make a difference. I feel like I can provide well for my family better this way than taking a job for someone else. And and it's just a it's a really good fit for me.

Jaclyn Strominger 2:41

I you know, I I like that. I love being able to always be creating something, but let's start with like, you know, getting into starting that that first venture. I mean, you know, how did it how did it start for you?

Speaker 2:57

Yeah, the first one is the hardest.

Why the First Business Is Always the Hardest

Speaker 2:59

And if you can get through the first one, the the second one is gonna be a lot easier. And and number four, my goodness, it is so much easier. When I raise money for number four, I've raised about six million dollars for number four. There's no way I could have raised six million dollars for number one, right? I had no credibility, I didn't know what I was doing. So, so just know it gets easier. It it's it's hard at the beginning, but just keep putting one foot in front of the next, keep making the next right decision, and and know that it gets easier. So, so you were asking about the first one. So, my first one, I was a college student, and I was going to Brigham, Brigham Young University in Utah, and I had my freshman year of college, I had left, I had left after my freshman year to go be a missionary for two years. And I went to Brazil and and was a volunteer missionary. And when I my freshman year, I had not heard about the internet once. I'd never even heard the word mentioned. And went to Brazil for two years and I came back and the internet had exploded. It was the hottest, biggest thing. It was like AI is today, right? And and so I saw this huge opportunity and it it felt like the gold rush. It felt like it felt like homesteading, right? In those early days in America when they had settlers and they could go out and just pick a piece of land. And if they picked it and did a good job on it and stayed there long enough, they could own that piece of land, right? And and that's kind of how the internet felt. It was this huge opportunity, and you could kind of pick whatever niche you wanted. And if you just did a good job at it and did it for long enough, you could be the best in that niche on the internet. And and so I decided I wanted to own adoption. When I was in but before my mission, my father had been an adoption attorney and I'd grown up around adoption. And and on my mission, I kind of fell in love with these street kids and would give them the change out of my pockets. And as a volunteer missionary, that ran out really quickly.

Jaclyn Strominger 5:04

And it's hard.

Speaker 5:06

Yeah, it's hard, and there's so many of them. And I vowed when I got back to do a lasting, to do something that would make a lasting difference in their lives. And and so I started, started adoption.com and and I was in the honors program at BYU. And as part of that program, you had to write a thesis related to your major. And I was studying entrepreneurship. So they allowed me to write a business plan. I was the first student they ever let write a business plan as my thesis. And that thesis ended up winning the business plan competition at the university, and then went in, went on to win another business plan competition. And we got a little bit of money from that and we got started. And I don't recommend that anybody do this. But as a college student, I went out and I applied for every single credit card I could get, and and I maxed out every credit card that I could. And and I got the business going with a loan, small loan from my father, and some loan from the business plan competition, and then these credit cards, and then I did something kind of crazy, but but I I think this is a strategy a lot of entrepreneurs can do is I found arbitrage in something and I funded my company in something that where I discovered some arbitrage. So in those early days of the internet, Network Solutions was the only vendor of domain names, and domain names cost $100 a year. Okay, but nobody trusted the internet to use a credit card over the internet. And so the way you bought a domain name is you registered it online and then they mailed you an invoice, and and you had 90 days to pay that hundred dollar invoice. And if you didn't pay it within the 90 days, they took the domain name away from you. And so what I did is I went and I registered tons of domain names, and then I went and tried to sell them to people during that 90-day period of time before I had to pay for the domain name. And if I could sell it to somebody, then I would I would pay for it and I would flip it right to that person. And if I couldn't sell it, I would just let it expire and not pay the hundred dollars. So I actually funded a lot of my early first venture that way by buying and selling domain names. I actually made mil, I've made millions of dollars buying and selling domain names. And so so for a young entrepreneur, don't do the credit card route. That's a that's a scary place to be. Find another way to do it. But friends and family, people that know you and trust you that can help you get that first money. And then find something where you see arbitrage, where where you can arbitrage means you can buy low, sell high. Find something related to your area of expertise, your niche. It may not be what you want to do long term, but it's something where you can make just enough money to get you through those early days as a business.

Jaclyn Strominger 8:05

Yeah, I I I love that. So I guess like one of the questions I have that I'm I keep thinking about is you know, this was a business, obviously, that you believe obviously needed to have more than just you. So it was not a solopreneurship.

Speaker 8:23

That's right. This has not been solopreneur. I have I have more than 50 team members right now. And there's no way I could have done any of my ventures without a very talented team. I I'm not smart enough, I'm not capable enough, I have lots of weaknesses and things I don't know, and I don't have enough hours in the day. So so yeah, every single one of my ventures has involved incredibly talented people.

Jaclyn Strominger 8:48

I I really love that. I actually really like that. And and listeners, first of all, you have to understand like that tip about starting to not max out your credit cards. I absolutely love that, you know, being able to arbitrage and find something. Or, you know, and if you can't arbitrage, you can always barter, like find ways, you know, so that you're not maxing out your credit cards, you can always trade. There's there's lots of ways to trade, you know, yeah, and to do that. And so, you know, I guess, you know, looking back, you know, what I what do you believe separates entrepreneurs who create the momentum from those who like stay in that stuck constant hustle? Oh, I gotta get it done, you know, mode, you know.

Speaker 9:34

Yeah. So I guess I would take issue with the question itself because sometimes I hire people and they're like, oh my goodness, there's so much going on, and and it's so stressful. And and they've maybe they've come from a big company and they're used to putting in eight to five, they're used to taking an hour lunch, they're used to, you know, watching movies while they work and watching the ball game on their screen next to them. And I've hired people that do that, right? I walk into their office and they're watching a Disney movie and they're like, I can work and watch the movie. They're, you know, and some of those people are like, we would you just push too hard, you expect too much. You you and I I had one board member who said, like, you get more done in a month than any employee I've ever had. And I think I was working for him 15 hours a week on a consulting project. And I think the reality is when you're a small business, that's the reality. If if you're not wanting to get it done and make it happen and work at a rapid velocity, if you're wanting an easy, simple job, you probably are not ready to be an entrepreneur.

The Sacrifices Required to Build Something Great

Speaker 10:50

You probably shouldn't do it. It's probably not gonna work. And your chance of failure is probably a lot higher. You've got to kind of get in and burn those boats, you know, that Cortez analogy. You got to get in and burn the boats, and you've got to just do whatever it takes and to make it happen. This venture, so so we've been doing it six years. And when we started this venture, I self-funded it for the first 18 months. My wife and I self-funded it for the first 18 months. And and then we got to a point where it needed more resources than what we could do, and so then we went and raised capital. And that's a good strategy, by the way. If you can self-fund it for a while before you raise capital, then you have to give up a lot less of the company. That's a really good route to take. But but there came a time where revenue just wasn't quite growing fast enough. And my wife and I were in our dream home. We were in a million-dollar home, we're on three acres of land, we had an acre pond, we had a you know, an orchard with a hundred trees. Like we we were in this ideal situation for us. We had a huge greenhouse and a garden for a crater, like it just speaks to my soul, those kinds of things. And and it was so beautiful. Like it'd be so hard to find a piece of a piece of property like that again. And and we sold our house. And and and bless my wife, she deserves all the credit. Like, we were all in to this venture. Not only did we put all the the cash that we had into this venture, we sold our settling house, we sold our dream house, we moved into a rental house. We're in a 1600 square foot house right now, right? Or 1,800 square foot house right now, renting. And and and we were able to put a lot of money back into the company. And you know what? This month, start starting in July, so so the last four months, not counting one strategic advancement, we've only bit lost about five to ten thousand dollars a month, which is amazing for a company like this with 50 employees. And starting in July, we should be profitable every single month going forward and and have have enough profits to to pay for the advertising and do all that, and and me take a good paycheck. And it just it just takes time, right? And so many people they give up too early, they leave too soon, and and they're not willing to pay the price and and put in the hours that it takes. So, going back to your question, like how do you how do you get by when it's so stressful and you have to do so much and you have to the reality is probably that's what it takes. That's probably what it takes, unless you have a lot of money going into it and you can hire all the people you need to do it all. You're probably gonna have to wear a lot of hats, you're probably gonna have to put in a ton of hours, you're probably gonna have to sacrifice, you're probably gonna have to sell your car, sell your house, you're probably gonna have to do a lot of those things to just get through those tough times. But then at the end of the day, it's you're gonna have something amazing to show for it.

Jaclyn Strominger 13:49

Right. And you know, and I and I love the passion, and you have to have the passion. And there's something that you just said that I really there's something that there's an underlying message that listeners, I re like I really want you to take. Did you hear how Nathan said his wife? It's a team, it's a partnership. I mean, you are you're not doing this alone. And I just I could I'm like, oh my God, like I can't wait for you to go be able to buy the the property back and find that or something as close as you possibly can. But you have a partnership there, and it takes a partnership in the sense of like if you're doing it yourself, like you know, building something, you also have most maybe there's a team member that you have, there's a partnership there, but you did this. I mean, you and your wife talk about this. You're a partner together, and you made difficult decisions, but in the to move a business forward, it's it's about the business and the passion for for what you're doing.

Speaker 15:01

And I I love it, yeah, and and honestly, I love it too, right? It's hard and it's stressful and it's it's difficult and it's challenging, but you know what? Most great entrepreneurs they thrive on solving problems and getting through hard things. And and going back to your comment about my wife, there is no way I could do this without my wife. There's been, I'll go back to with my first story, with my first venture, adoption.com,

The Power of Partnership, Family, and Support

Speaker 15:30

there was one night where where money was tight, funds are tight, and our accountant showed up at our house and one night late and said, I quit. And no notice, no anything. Our bookkeeper just left. And and my my wife, who had no accounting degree, had a a brand new baby, I think was like two weeks old at that time, three weeks old, our our first daughter. And my wife went back to work for two years. And my wife brought our newborn baby to work with her for two years. My my my oldest daughter spent the first two years of her life in my office walking around and turning off everybody's computers. She found she could get it.

Jaclyn Strominger 16:17

She knows numbers.

Speaker 16:18

Yeah, she found she could get everyone's attention if she walked over and turned off the computer buttons, right? That was when everyone had those those desktop, you know.

Jaclyn Strominger 16:26

I'm telling you with the towers and everything.

Speaker 16:29

Yeah, the towers. But but she did what it took, right? She she didn't know how to do accounting, but she went and figured it out. And and and we only survived that because of her. Like obviously, God, only because of God and and only because of my wife. But that that venture would have been a failure if I hadn't have had the support of my wife. And it would have been so easy for her when things got tough with that first businessadoption.com to turn to me and start criticizing me and saying, What who did I marry? What did I get into? I've got a brand new baby, and you're not providing for me, right? Instead, she said, she rolled up her sleeves and said, What can I do to help? And she's done that for me multiple times when times have been tough. And and I, except for God and except for my wife, there, there's no way I could have ever been successful as an entrepreneur.

Jaclyn Strominger 17:24

Oh, I I truly love that. So let's let's talk about what you're doing right now, right? I mean, you know, you you've, you know, 350 podcast episodes, and you're just like, oh, there's gotta be a better way. Like, totally get it. As a podcast host, there are lots of things I'm like, can I wish I could wiggle my nose and just pew, right? I can I can move my nose up and down, but I can't wiggle it left and right.

Speaker 17:53

So you're talking about my first show. You're you're going back to those challenges I faced when I did my first show. Okay. Yeah. So uh when I was selling my last business, adoption.com, uh I was, I signed up for a coaching program, a mentoring program with a guy that I think is the best digital marketer of our generation, Russell Brunson. And I was paying him a lot of money. And he made me a promise. He said, if you, you know, if you publish every day for a year, you will be financially free. And so I decided to trust him. I believe you hire the best mentors you can, and then you you do what they say. And and so I did it. I created a show, audio,

The Vision Behind PodUp and the Future of Podcasting

Speaker 18:34

long videos, short videos, blogs, social, newsletter, website, you know, all of it. And I published every day for a year, and it kicked my butt. It was so hard. At the beginning, I did not have the right producer, and so many times that producer was dropping the ball, and like it, you know, multiple times, like at midnight, I'd be there trying to get the episode published myself before I missed the day. And and about three months into that, I had an epiphany. I I saw what Shopify had done for podcast or for ventures around e-commerce, right? They brought a hundred different tools together into one platform. So an entrepreneur could easily create a venture for one low monthly fee around podcasting. Sorry, around e-commerce. And then, and and now they're like a $200 billion company. And they're not the best, they don't have the best couponing software, they don't have the best inventory management software. There's better software out there, but they were the first people to bring everything together into one platform for a low, easy, you know, easy to use platform for one low price. And so I saw what they had done and I knew somebody was gonna do that for podcasting, right? Instead of these 30 tools that I needed that didn't integrate that cost me almost $2,000 a month. I knew that someone was gonna bring it all together into one platform. And that was my aha moment. And I realized someone's gonna make a billion dollars or billions of dollars off of this, might as well be me. And so that's why I've I've I'm the first person that's been stupid enough to try to bring all of these different tools together into one platform, and now six years and six million dollars later, we have pot up, which is the all-in-one podcasting platform. And it has at actually now has 74 tools, and we've we've got some just ridiculously cool tools in there. There's 17, 18 AI-powered tools, there's 11 monetization tools, there's growth tools. We we have just launched a tool called the Repurposer. It's the second version of our repurposer. This is going to change how podcasting happens. We we just demoed it to our board meeting right before this. After your episode is recorded, you go in and you click a button and and it takes you through this little wizard and it uses AI. It takes you through these a few steps, and then it gives you like 15 or 20 different pieces of content that it creates for you. It creates your blog post for you. It creates the your your it helps edit your video for you, it creates short videos for you, it gives you the YouTube images, the thumbnails, it gives you the images for your blogs, it gives you the social images, it gives you the the descriptions that go on the YouTube, on the social posts. It just does, I bet it saves you at least five hours for every post you have to do, just that one tool, and that's one of 74 tools that we have. And then it will go post that and syndicate that out there to all of your different channels.

Jaclyn Strominger 21:47

That is awesome. That is fantastic. So how scary was it for you? I mean, this is absolutely fantastic, and I think that it's so fancy. So I guess how scary was it you to take this new venture and and like so and how many podcast people are using your platform now?

Speaker 22:07

Yeah. So so it's really interesting. We we launched it maybe a year and a half or two years ago, whatever, and and we found something interesting. There's there's a lot of podcast providers, you know. Riversides and the descripts that are kind of in the do-it-yourself model. They have maybe four or five tools integrated together. They have a recorder and an editor, and you know, a publishing syndication tool, maybe. And but they really don't have any monetization tools. They really don't have any growth tools. They're just missing a lot of those tools that are needed there. And oh my goodness. I lost my train of thought. Remind me of the question.

Jaclyn Strominger 22:53

Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Right.

Speaker 22:54

So so when we rolled it out, we we realized that businesses started coming to us. And businesses started saying, I need a podcast, but I don't have time. Can I just record the episode and you do everything else? So most of our clients are businesses that are recording their episodes. And we built out a team of almost 50 people in our Jaipur India office that we do the guest booking, we do the editing, the blog post creation, the posting, the syndication, the help you with your monetization. We run your ads for you. We do about 40 different services for you. So we don't have as many clients, but we have a lot bigger clients, if that makes sense. I think our I probably a descriptor Riverside, their average client pays $30 a month. Our average client pays $1,700 a month. And and we're we're kind of a done for you podcasting platform. That's that's where most of our clients have have been to this point.

Jaclyn Strominger 23:54

Got it. And so now are you moving into like the the the do-it-yourself? Yeah, the do-it-yourself model.

Speaker 24:02

Yes, we're rolling out all these wizards. So we've finished five wizards to make it easy for the user to just go through a step-by-step process and use AI and do it themselves. And we've got five more that we're trying to finish. So, so here in the coming months, we will we will be a lot more in the do-it-yourself space than we are now.

Jaclyn Strominger 24:21

Got it. Got it. And so that's absolutely that's actually truly fascinating as to where you're going to be going. And I think it's it's it's great as a podcast host. I know that's a lot of those things are like, oh, would love it, right? Has things so how thinking about the the monetization and the competition, like, so how do you feel that you, you know, someone said, okay, do I do pot up or do I do something like captivate or buzz sprout? Like, where do you fall in with those? And then there's other there are other platforms also out there, you know, Podfan and I can't even, what is it called? Patreon. I can't even say that word like Patreon. Yeah, it doesn't flow off my tongue. So I'm like, oh yeah.

Speaker 25:13

So most of the competition, if you think of a podcasting platform, they have a recording studio, right? They have an some way to edit that. Most of them have that, and then they have some way to publish that. And then if they have monetization, they they usually have some kind of integration with an ad network and they let you show some ads. But that's pretty much the functionality that most of the podcast providers have. That's like four or five features, right? We have 74 features. So if you just want to have a podcast and you just want to publish something, that's great. Go to one of them. If you want to create a venture around your podcast, if you want to really grow it, if you want to really monetize it, you know, if if you want this to be something that you can maybe retire off of someday, that's where we come in. If you've got an existing business and you want the podcast to be the marketing arm of your business, that's what we do. We're the we're the marketing end and the the venture end, the business end of podcasting.

Jaclyn Strominger 26:16

Got it. That's that's really great. So, you know, what where do you where do you, I guess, see it and then where is your dream, you know, five years from now? Retire?

Speaker 26:29

I'm a I'm a serial entrepreneur and and I've built and sold businesses. That's what I've done. So probably within the next five years, we will have built and sold this, hopefully for over a billion dollars. That's kind of the goal of the dream. I've I have not built something that big before, and but I think we definitely have that opportunity here.

Jaclyn Strominger 26:49

Well, that's that that's actually fantastic. So as somebody is growing something, you know, what is your like, you know, what would be like one tip that you would say to somebody, you know, to have that unstoppable success.

Speaker 27:05

If you are a person in faith, of faith, Ed or going back, I'll say that again. If you are a person of faith, involve God as your business partner from the very beginning. That's probably the most important thing that I've done. And there have been so many times in my history as an entrepreneur where I should have failed and I would have failed on my own. And the only reason I succeeded is is because of a divine hand of God helping, helping me through the process. So don't try to do it alone. There's no reason to do it alone. Let God help you.

Jaclyn Strominger 27:39

That's awesome. All right, listeners, do me the favor. Nathan is truly amazing. You've got to check out his brand new, well, six-year, but we I guess year and a half released

Nathan's Advice for Unstoppable Success

Jaclyn Strominger 27:49

venture. I was I was exploring it before we got in. I was like, hmm. So go check out and connect with Nathan. I will put the link to the company in there. Um, where else could people find you? Is it linked? Yeah, where are you? Where else are you?

Speaker 28:06

So if they want to do it themselves, they can go to pod up.com, pod.com, and uh and do the software themselves. And that's can be like 150 bucks a month. It's not very expensive. If they say, okay, I know I need a podcast, but I don't have time, we have done for you podcasting services, and that's at podallies.com, a done for you podcast agency. And then if they're a larger company and they want to they want us to create audiences, create platforms for their their target audiences, we do that as well. And that's myplatforms.com.

Jaclyn Strominger 28:44

Fantastic. Okay, well, we will put all of those in the show notes. Listeners, this is absolutely truly fantastic. There's so many great, there's such great information. And as you know, we love to share all of this information with friends and family. So please make sure that you're sharing the episode and also connecting with Nathan. Do that right after you hear this episode. And then lastly, we have an amazing brand new community on school, Unstoppable Success. Please head over there and join our community. We've got great things happening, people that are working together for power hours and roundtables so that you can actually grow your business with a lot of like minded, unstoppable, success minded professionals. So join us over there, Nathan. Thank you so much for being an amazing guest and listeners. Thank you for listening. This is the Unstoppable Success Podcast, helping you leap to your greatest success.