Nothing cheers us up more than hearing founders beat adversity to build amazing businesses. 

Although we’re a “glass-half-full” bunch here at Boot HQ, you can’t deny life’s full of nasty surprises – from the financial to the plain life-threatening.

Jason Foster is an ironclad entrepreneur who’s stoic and upbeat in the worst of circumstances. Discover how he beat cancer to enable positive change through the open use of data.

How This Bootstrapped Founder Overcame a Cancer Diagnosis to Make His Company a Seven-Figure Success

“IWe want people to be successful with the way they deploy data for benefit. We create what good looks like and we help people to achieve that. We can use technology to solve climate crises. We use it to solve COVID. So let’s focus on that. It can do great things.”

Peter Handtevy devised a better way of calculating medicine dosages on-the-fly, helping save lives and reassure doctors. Find out how this simple crib sheet became an app popular in hospitals nationwide.

How This Pediatric Emergency Room Doctor Turned a Life-Threatening Error Into a Profitable Business That Saves Lives

“Just to give you an example, a one-year-old, a five-year-old, and a ten-year-old all need the same kind of series of drugs, but they’re all dosed very differently based on their size. The equipment is based differently on their size, too, and it’s impossible to know that information on the fly.”

Rafael Recavarren and Peter Semkowski developed the “Uber for phone repair” while still in business school and became so successful they almost failed their classes. Here’s how.

Dodging Failure To Disrupt the Installation Market, These Founders Rode the Startup Roller Coaster All the Way to $4 Million

“We had an assignment at the time to take a real-world problem and make a business plan to solve it. One of us had recently had a TV mounted and it cost $400 and one had just gotten their phone screen repaired for an exorbitant amount. We were thinking, ‘Why is there no affordable option for this?”

What do you do when you’ve lost everything? Build a business, says Jason Baudenstil, founder of Wibbets. Discover how this Navy veteran overcame a series of misfortunes to protect the privacy of 3,000+ internet shoppers?

This Disabled US Navy Veteran Overcame Scammers and Homelessness To Build an E-Commerce Business that Puts Privacy First

“You’re going to have good days and bad days where you just want to curl up in a ball and scream. You have to realize that what you’re building, if it’s important enough to you, is worth continuing forward.”

Ross Hudgens has enjoyed enormous success at the cost of doing too much alone and for too long. Learn how he became a better CEO with the help of the entrepreneurial community.

Why Entrepreneurs Need Each Other: A Lesson on Becoming a Better CEO From the Founder of a $12 Million Media Agency

“We didn't have a business development person until this year. It was just me doing all of the sales. I’m sure Siege could’ve done better and I could’ve fixed our operational issues if I’d gotten out of sales faster. I’d recommend anybody who’s running an agency to make that investment, not in year nine, which I did, but in year five or something.”

“One thing that always kept me driven is thinking of where my parents were at my age. When they were 24-years-old they were brand new to Canada, working around the clock to build a business out of nothing. They had no money, no English, no friends, or connections. Compared to that, my problems usually seem small.”

-Rafael Recavarren, Auxe