Welcome to Founder Real Talk, a podcast for founders, by founders.
We explore the real journey of building and growing a company. Each episode, we go beyond the highlight reel to unpack the strategies, decisions, and hard lessons that shaped successful businesses, revealing the good, the bad, and the ugly behind the growth.
This week, Josh sits down with Joy Curth, founder of El Locale, a platform making it easy to shop local. Joy also owns Societe, a brick-and-mortar wellness shop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and her own brutal experience trying to sell on Amazon — a $100 monthly fee just to exist, a 30% cut of every sale, and her own custom product buried on page 25 of search results — became the spark for El Locale. She opens up about building a fee model that takes 11% instead of Amazon's 30-50%, winning the audience award at Boston Innovation Night, and running a bootstrapped startup almost entirely with the help of 25 remote college interns.
-
This episode was brought to you by Wisdom Partners. If you’re looking for more real conversations, practical resources, and honest founder stories, follow us for upcoming episodes of Founder Real Talk. We invite you to subscribe to our Substack newsletters to receive weekly articles, insights, and resources designed to support founders through every stage of the journey!
Contact us: wisdompartners.llc/contact
Subscribe to our Substack: blog.wisdompartners.llc
Chapters
(00:00) - Intro
(01:38) - The Amazon story that started it all: page 25 and no buy-now button
(05:40) - Building a fee model that actually works for small businesses
(08:11) - Starting hyper-local: the New Hampshire Seacoast as the pilot market
(09:47) - A big win: the audience award at Boston Innovation Night
(11:04) - Learning to solve problems creatively without corporate resources
(14:05) - Competitors emerging as validation, not threat
(14:35) - The biggest challenge now: helping businesses that aren't online at all
(19:19) - Doing things that don't scale (yet)
(23:19) - Evolving as a leader: teaching 25 remote interns
(27:24) - What has to happen before expanding to a second community
Links & Resources
Keywords
founders, entrepreneurship, shop local, local commerce marketplace, El Locale, Joy Curth, Amazon alternative, Etsy alternative, small business platform, New Hampshire, Seacoast, bootstrapped startup, remote interns, fee model, marketplace economics, local economic impact, brick and mortar retail, onboarding challenges, do things that don't scale, first-time founder, corporate to startup transition
