Sean Dowdell loved tattoos, but he hated tattoo parlors. They were dirty, uninviting, downmarket, unprofessional and often sexist. So when he set aside his music career to start his own tattoo parlor, he needed to find a way to make a traditionally lowbrow product appeal to a high-end, but still edgy, audience. A decade later, he’s now opening glitzy tattoo shops all over the world. Here’s how he pulled it off.

What happens when your customers are willing to use your product, but they're not willing to pay for it? Answer: Your business model may be wrong. That's what Ilir Sela learned after launching Slice, a company that helps local pizzerias sell online. He found plenty of early customers, but they weren't paying their invoices. As he dug deeper, he realized the problem wasn't them -- it was him. And he began the long process of figuring out what (and how) people were willing to pay.

Patrick Llewellyn discovered that his design company, 99designs, was only fulfilling some of his customers' needs. He wanted to fill more, so he created a spinoff brand called Swiftly. But in doing so, he created a major problem for himself: He was stretching his resources too thin, and confusing customers about which brand they should use. In the end, he discovered the Curse of the Problem Solvers: Sometimes, you have to let some problems go unsolved.

When Daniel McCarthy cofounded the music licensing company Musicbed, he had a big idea: "I don’t want customers to just think about Musicbed when they think about music licensing. I want them to think about Musicbed when they’re trying to get inspired." Accomplishing that would require a lot of experimentation, spending money with no sure ROI, and launching (and closing) a magazine. In this episode, we map how Musicbed became more than just the sum of its product.

Every entrepreneur’s journey starts with a big problem. That first hurdle—and hopefully, that first solution. Small and sometimes simple as it may be, this first moment contains so much ingenuity and inspiration, and captures just how resourceful entrepreneurs must be to continue along their path. Today, we’re telling three mini-stories of first-time challenges: how the creator of the Butterie butter dish cracked its market research problem, how GrowSumo found the right customers (and avoided the wrong ones), and how American Rhino created an apparel brand within weeks.

Glenn Kelman thought of himself as a software guy. Then he became CEO of a real estate company called Redfin, but insisted on seeing it as a software company. Confusion reigned. Cultures clashed. For Glenn, it would come to highlight an often-unspoken business challenge: Entrepreneurship means exploring unknown paths, sometimes leading entrepreneurs to a very different place from where they started. The result can challenge not just their business philosophies but their very sense of identity.

How do you find your first customers? It’s a question first-time founders are often flummoxed by. But Keith Krach has developed a tried-and-true strategy—starting during his days at Ariba (which sold for billions), and extending into his current time as chairman of Docusign. In this special live edition of Problem Solvers, taped at Entrepreneur Live in Los Angeles, Keith explains how to turn a company’s first customers into valuable ambassadors.

From the outside, Cogent Entertainment Marketing looked like a success: It got early into the influencer marketing game, quickly signing big clients and making good money. And because profits were high, founder Mark Zablow was afraid to make any changes—even as major leadership problems in his company began wreaking havoc. In this episode, we explore how Mark finally fixed his culture (while still making a profit).

What happens when you’re trying to sell to consumers, but your best customers are actually other businesses? Furniture-maker Poppin’s answer: It radically transformed itself to meet this new customer. That meant changing its brand voice, marketing, products, and supply chain. In this episode, we explore how and why it made the switch—and became the go-to furniture maker for Facebook, Snapchat, Google, Warby Parker, and others.

Beck Besecker believes in transparency. So much so, that he calls Marxent, “aggressively transparent.” That means everyone can talk to everyone else. Everyone has a voice. Everyone has access to management. Most important, everyone is trusted. There’s an assumption that the employees of Marxent are professional, responsible, mature adults, and thus they’re completely capable of taking bad news and rolling with it. But what happens when the news is really bad? Can employees still be trusted to handle it? Besecker found out.

Chrissy Monaco was basically raised at Monaco Ford, her dad’s car dealership. Then in January of 2017, she took over as co-owner and new boss—now in charge of men she’d known all her life, some of whom weren’t immediately comfortable with it. She knew her task: New leaders have limited time to set a company’s culture and get people on board with their vision, before doing so becomes far harder. In this episode, Chrissy takes us through her first, critical year—and the tough decisions it required.

Entrepreneurs love to say yes—to new ideas, to new opportunities, and to new markets. But yes can be dangerous: The wrong yes will compound itself, stretching a company thin and clouding its sense of purpose. Hamilton Powell learned this the hard way: As he built his watch company Crown & Caliber, he said yes so often that he was soon working 100-hour weeks and burning out his employees. Then he hired a COO who trained as a drill sergeant—and everything changed. Here’s how Hamilton learned to say no.

Tami Halton Pardee started out working in Hollywood—an industry known for crushing hours and sociopathic behavior. Then she left to work in real estate in Los Angeles—another industry known for crushing hours and sociopathic behavior. But instead of going with the flow, she decided she’d work differently, structuring her company to allow her employees a better work-life balance, and being kind to her clients. As she tells us, competitors looked at her like she was crazy, but her business exploded.

Every entrepreneur wants a loyal fanbase, a group of repeat customers who will evangelize their favorite brand. But superfans come with challenges: They love a company exactly the way it is, and they do not want it to change. That was a problem for Tough Mudder, whose obstacle course races were attracting primarily young, fit men. To grow as a business, it would need to attract different kinds of people too -- but without alienating those core fans. On this episode, we explore how Tough Mudder did it.

In its first four years, Tyson Lawrence’s logistics company reached $5 million in sales. “Everything I touched turned to gold,” he says. But then the golden touch disappeared, and his growth stalled. Why? When he looked into it, he discovered a disaster in the making: His biggest client, a national retailer that helped his company grow so fast, had become its biggest problem. And to help his company start growing again, he’d need to make some gut-wrenching decisions.

Sam Sisakhti had a great idea for a company, and early on it seemed like others agreed. He got funded on his very first pitch. But when that funding fell apart, and Sam embarked on a punishing year and a half of brutal rejections, he learned invaluable lessons about himself, his business, and the nature of entrepreneurship, and he turned his failure into a big success.

For many entrepreneurs, the stretch between Halloween and New Year’s is when teams get stressed, systems get strained, and even the smallest inefficiencies amplify into crises. But if a company builds itself well enough to survive into January, it’ll be in great fighting shape for the rest of the year. That’s what happened to popular New York-based cupcake company Baked By Melissa, whose disastrous 2009 holiday led it to rethink fulfillment year-round—and win the holidays every year since.

Here’s a thought that’s going to make you crazy: Somewhere in your business, in a place you’ve completely overlooked, there’s a major opportunity you’re passing up. On this episode, we explore how it happened to Quizlet CEO Matthew Glotzbach. His company makes a hugely popular study platform for students, and yet for a while, Glotzbach was ignoring an opportunity to triple his advertising revenue. Listen to his story, and learn how to find the opportunities hiding right under your nose.

A successful Kickstarter campaign is exciting, but it can also be a curse. New entrepreneurs routinely miscalculate how much money they need to fulfill orders, and get drowned in unexpected costs. How can someone survive that? We follow the story of Ryan Lupberger, founder of an eco-friendly laundry detergent called Cleancult, who could have gone broke after his Kickstarter success -- but then made some major changes to his business (and his life!) in order to survive, and now thrive.

Here’s the most exciting question to ask today: “Why is this thing sold this way?” The answer will reveal all sorts of business opportunities, and startups who asked this question have gone on to disrupt everything from razors to the mattress industry. But the path to success isn’t simple; a startup must literally reinvent an industry. How? In this episode, we follow the path of Burrow, a company reimagining how furniture is sold -- but to succeed, it first had to create a new way of making furniture.

You want customers to love your product, of course. But what happens when they don’t? The simple answer: You have to make a change -- and it won’t be easy. Today we follow the story of Grayl, a company that created a groundbreaking bottle that filters water. When it first hit the market, sales sagged and customers were confused. So Grayl spent three years better understanding its ideal customer and refashioning its product. Now sales are spiking, and Grayl knows a lot about how to take customer feedback.

How do you scale when your business depends on it? Chieh Huang of Boxed knows this well; his company is like an online wholesale club (with no membership fees), and in four years, he took it from a garage to $150 million in funding and its own custom-built warehouse. In doing so, he survived one of the hardest kinds of uphill battles in business. Some business ideas only work at a large scale, but those businsses must start small like everyone else -- and then endure a long, gaping middle point when they’re running their business at a size that inherently doesn’t work. Huang shares how he got over the hump.

Every company wants to increase user engagement. But for a company like Meet Group, it was a life-or-death need. It runs four free dating apps (Meet Me, Skout, Tagged, and hi5), and relies largely on advertising -- which means when user engagement was down, ad dollars were down too. To fix this, cofounder Catherine Cook Connelly radically rethought how users engage in the apps. Now revenue is up, users are using the apps for longer, and matches are being made with... live video!?

HelloFresh made one counterintuitive change in its business, and it sparked an immediate boost in sales. The result should be a lesson to all entrepreneurs: In business, simple things matter. Simple changes matter too. In this episode, the head of HelloFresh’s U.S. business reveals how he runs experiments in his business, how he honed in on the right change -- and why he’ll keep making little changes that can lead to big results.

It can be hard convincing others to work with you, especially if your company is new. And yet, you need them: They’re your future suppliers, contractors, partners, and sponsors, which means you must find some way to prove that you’re worth working with. That’s what Andy Sitt faced when trying to build an Asian stock photo company called Inmagine -- and solving it led him on an insane journey. Now Inmagine is a powerhouse, with 72 million images and 40 offices around the world.

Hanson Grant had built a hit product called Think Board, and what seemed like a world-class customer support team. But when his product started getting terrible reviews on Amazon, he scrambled to figure out what was wrong -- and discovered the problem was hiding in plain sight. Sometimes, the thing you think is solving a problem is actually creating one. In this episode, Grant explains how a disaster for the company forced him to rethink everything.

How do you raise prices? It’s not easy, as the cofounders of Motto can attest. For more than a decade, they’ve been raising prices -- while evolving from a little design shop to a full-scale, high-end branding agency. Along the way, they were forced to reconsider exactly what work they do, how they structure their relationships with clients, and even what kind of company they run. Because pricing isn’t just about a number. It’s about your value, what you’re really worth, and who you want to work with.

Patrick Llewellyn discovered that his design company, 99designs, was only fulfilling some of his customers' needs. He wanted to fill more, so he created a spinoff brand called Swiftly. But in doing so, he created a major problem for himself: He was stretching his resources too thin, and confusing customers about which brand they should use. In the end, he discovered the Curse of the Problem Solvers: Sometimes, you have to let some problems go unsolved.