We hosted our subscribers for a live episode at terraceloft studio in East Perth with two amazing founders Nick Hudson and Elizabeth Knight. Listen to these two founders share the ups and downs of startup life and how showing up and having a purpose driven venture has been the key to their success.
Purposeful helps young people find direction in their lives after school. Elizabeth wants to help people graduate with confidence. She's now participating in Plus Eight's Accelerator program to grow and get The Lost Button to market. Check out The Lost Button in the show notes.
Nick founded mental health charity event The Push-Up Challenge after a life changing experience and his own challenges with mental health. Here more about what drives him and all the great work his team has done in the mental health space. The Push-Up Challenge raised around $9 million 2021. To date over 241 million push ups have been done as part of the event.
Purposeful: Helping students find direction in their life after school
https://www.purposeful.org.au/ and https://www.thelostbutton.org/
Push-Up Challenge: Helping people push for better mental health
https://www.thepushupchallenge.com.au/
Purposeful: High school and university students
Push-up Challenge: Mental health advocates
Elizabeth: Just keep showing up. You become successful by showing up every day despite mistakes that you’re making. The number one rule of being in business is staying in business.
Nick: Fail hard and fail early. Make mistakes, learn from them, and move on quickly.
(0:00) – Introduction
(1:55) – Elizabeth’s journey to founding Purposeful: Helping students find direction in their life after school
(2:35) – Nick’s journey to founding the Push-Up Challenge: First-hand experience with the challenges of mental health
(3:54) – The companies Nick and Elizabeth would start if they weren’t already founders
(5:16) – Nick and Cam’s Start-up weekend experience building Textie and going viral
(10:25) – How Elizabeth is tackling the purpose problem and creating her own purposeful career through entrepreneurship
(14:57) – The impact of Bloom in building a community of change makers
(15:54) – How the push-up challenge has captured imaginations, and the important pivot Nick took to make the business what it is today
(22:35) – Elizabeth’s experience with the Plus Eight Accelerator and building The Lost Button
(26:38) – Introducing people to a concept they didn’t know existed: Ted Talks and building an initial community
(28:10) – How finding a novel approach to a universal problem helps drive authentic word of mouth
(29:44) – How the Push-up challenges leverages user-generated content and social sharing to give people a license to have fun
(32:37) – Nick’s unexpected major life event that served as a catalyst for the Push-up Challenge and the incredible growth of the company over the last five years
(39:48) – What the future holds for Elizabeth: Creating a scalable, sustainable, and purposeful business
(42:02) – People overestimate what they can achieve in one year, but underestimate what they can achieve in ten years
(42:47) – The advice Nick and Elizabeth would give to first-time founders
(44:35) – Show and tell
(48:09) – Nick’s experience being asked to do live push-ups with a celebrity
(49:19) – The most rewarding parts of Nick and Elizabeth’s start-up journey’s
(51:38) – How Nick & Elizabeth take care of their own mental health while leading companies
https://www.airtable.com/ - Multifunctional platform with endless business solutions
https://www.notion.so/ - All-in-one workspace
https://super.so/ - Build simple websites with nothing but Notion
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira - Software development tool used by agile teams
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this - Entrepreneurship podcast
