How a Blog Post Led to Zappos’s CEO Investing in This Startup – with Walter Chen [066]

How a Blog Post Led to Zappos's CEO Investing in This Startup

Walter Chen is the co-founder and CEO of IDoneThis, an email-based productivity tool that allows people to track their productivity with a daily email reminder. You reply to an evening email reminder with what you did that day. The next day, you get a digest with what everyone on the team got done. The company was founded in 2011 and its investors include folks such as the CEOs of Zappos, Shopify & Wistia. Walter is a software engineer and former big law firm lawyer.

In this episode we talk about:

• How a blog post Walter wrote got the attention of Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos)
• And how that led to them hanging out with the Zappos leadership & having Tony become an investor
• How Walter writes shareable posts even when he's not a subject matter expert
• A counter-intuitive approach to content marketing he learned from Buffer's founders

Success Quote

• “Doing the best that you can and by the people who care about you”

Book Recommendation

• “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity” by Andrew Solomon – Amazon.com | Audiobook

Links, Resources & People Mentioned

• iDoneThis – @idonethis
• Zappos
• Wistia
• “How To Prevent A ‘Bossless Culture' From Slipping Into Chaos”  by Walter Chen
• Tony Hsieh – @tonyhsieh
• Chris Savage – @csavage

Contact Information

• Walter Chen –@smalter
• Omer Khan –@omerkhan

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