Abdo Riani is the founder of StartupCircle.co where aspiring and rising entrepreneurs can connect with and learn from successful founders over daily live Q&A sessions. He also mentors and guides entrepreneurs to first paying customers and beyond. Key Takeaways: [0:22] Today’s episode of Franchise Euphoria is brought to you by The Franchise 5 package. Head over to franchiseeuphoria.com/franchise5 to learn more! [1:01] Josh introduces today’s guest, Abdo Riani, the founder of StartupCircle.co, a place where aspiring and rising entrepreneurs can connect with successful founders via daily live Q&A sessions. [2:20] Josh welcomes Abdo to Franchise Euphoria. [2:46] Abdo gives Franchise Euphoria a brief overview of his business background and how he came to create Startup Circle. [5:15] Abdo suggests that many business startups focus on the product and not the solution when their efforts should be focused on backing the solution if they want to gain traction. [7:54] With some of his previous endeavors, Abdo worked with a lot of tech startups, but recently he has turned his focus to entrepreneurs. [9:02] The vision of Startup Circle is to democratize guidance, and the way that is done is by creating a space where experts come into an easily accessible space to benefit those individuals seeking their direction. [12:02] Josh makes the point that one of the benefits of Startup Circle is the small group opportunity it provides for budding entrepreneurs to get one-on-one interaction and direct communication with these mentors. [16:11] With their current phase of their growth, Startup Circle is actually training some of the frequent session attendees to become session hosts themselves, which in turn gives them the opportunity to meet some experts that they look up to. [17:06] Starting in 2018, one of Abdo’s goals was to launch coaching services, but he found that audience was an issue for him. This led him to document the journeys of over 100 entrepreneurs. In this, he was able to leverage the audience of the experts who come on Startup Circle. He connects this to the franchising space, as many franchisees are already sponsoring local events, and Abdo believes he could connect those franchisees to host these sponsored events to grow their brand and build partnerships with local businesses. [21:06] Abdo suggests that franchisees need to focus on the content of these events in order to successfully execute them and furthermore highlight the content through quality guest speakers with large audiences. [22:22] Franchisees should be recruiting speakers who they either want to work or can bring in an audience of people they want to work with. [25:35] If you want to learn more about Startup Circle, head over to startupcircle.co, and if you want to learn more about Abdo Riani, you can visit abdoriani.com. [25:47] Thanks for listening, and please, reach out to Josh anytime through email at josh@franchiseeuphoria.com. If you enjoyed this interview, please leave us a review on iTunes.   Mentioned in This Episode: josh@franchiseeuphoria.com www.franchiseeuphoria.com www.franchiseeuphoria.com/franchise5 https://startupcircle.co/ abdoriani.com linkedin.com/in/abdo-riani-40b34745/ https://twitter.com/abdoriani