TMBA Podcast

To say that the last twelve months were unpredictable would be a massive understatement. For ourselves and so many other entrepreneurs, the COVID outbreak not only threw a wrench into our plans for 2020, it completely changed the way that we did business this year.

 Podcast 52:20 | Download | Spotify| Stitcher | iTunes | Comment Like so many other entrepreneurs, we are fascinated by cryptocurrencies. We’re partly drawn… Read More »TMBA576: The Kings of Crypto

Even though 2020 has been a difficult year for some entrepreneurs, it has arguably been an all-time year for many people running eCommerce businesses. Longtime listeners know that we first cut our teeth in the eCommerce space, and we love keeping tabs on how that industry continues to evolve and innovate. It's no surprise then that today's guest made his way onto our radar.

We are reaching back into the mailbag this week to answer questions submitted by Tropical MBA listeners around the world. In this edition, we'll be focusing on three specific questions that we believe get to the core of what it means to be resilient as an entrepreneur. We'll be discussing how much money you should save as a "runway" if you plan on leaving your job, the fundamental differences between hiring freelancers and hiring employees, and how you can navigate questionable business advice on the internet.

This week's episode is about something that is incredibly near and dear to our hearts: personal blogging and what it means to write on the internet. To help us tell this story, we've invited two of our favorite writers who both have a long and rich experience in the blogging space.

We've been receiving a ton of requests recently from listeners who want to hear an "old school" episode, so this week Dan and Ian are jumping on the horn to talk about the progress that they've made with their remote jobs business Dynamite Jobs. Since the start of the summer, we've been building a new software platform designed to make the hiring process a whole lot easier for entrepreneurs.

For our money, there is nobody quite like Kevin Kelly. Not only is he one of the co-founders of Wired Magazine, he is also the author some of our favorite pieces of writing about technology, including What Technology Wants, New Rules for the New Economy, and the brilliant essay 1,000 True Fans, which has been discussed countless times on this show over the years.

Today's podcast is all about one listener of this show who took the concept of productizing and applied it incredibly well at a very high velocity. More than that, it's a story about endurance, applying systems intelligently, and the power of community.

 Podcast 47:46 | Download | Spotify| Stitcher | iTunes | Comment Longtime listeners know that this is typically the time of year that we… Read More »TMBA569: An Ode to DCBKK

It goes without saying that as internet entrepreneurs, we are fascinated by the future of money, and it's hard to talk about the future of money without talking about cryptocurrency. Greg Gerber is our go-to guy when it comes to simplifying the complicated world of crypto. We've invited Greg back on to the show this week to talk about the state of crypto in 2020.

We've been devoting a lot of time to talking about software businesses in recent weeks. One of the reasons we are so fascinated by them is that despite how difficult it can be to start one, these types of businesses can have tremendous upside. Jordan Gal is the founder of CartHook, a software company that helps Shopify merchants present offers to shoppers at checkout. Jordan first reached out to us back in 2015 with an investment opportunity (and we turned him down!).

This week's episode is all about software startups, and there are very few people more capable or qualified to talk about them than today's guest. Simon Payne first joined us on this podcast back in 2016 to talk about his role as the technical co-founder of Leadpages.

Today's episode features a longtime friend and mentor who shared an idea with us many years ago that changed the way that we thought about entrepreneurship. David McKeegan and his wife Carrie are the founders of Greenback Expat Tax Services. Their entrepreneurial journey is a bonafide location-independent success story, but it hasn't come easy.

We talk quite a bit on this podcast about services businesses and the sorts of problems that they seek to solve for their customers.  You may recall that Eagan Heath joined us to share his thoughts about this back in 2018 on an episode titled "The Knowledge Gap vs. The Efficiency Gap Revisited". In that episode, we spoke about whether it is better to serve your customers by filling a "knowledge gap" and teaching them why they need your services or to fill an "efficiency gap" by helping them optimize something that they are already doing.

One of the promises of entrepreneurship is that there are opportunities to make money all around us if we can learn how to recognize them. Laurence Taylor has recognized some of them himself. Laurence and his wife are the founders of HipTen, a SwaS (Software with a Service) consultancy that works exclusively on the Salesforce platform for the insurance industry.

 Podcast 48:01 | Download | Spotify| Stitcher | iTunes | Comment We love hearing from listeners of this show. We put out the call… Read More »TMBA562: Mailbag: Freedom, Location, and Love in the Age of COVID

One of our favorite things about this podcast is that we get to talk to people who have inspired us or entertained us over the years. Matt Farah is certainly one of those people. Matt is somewhat of a pioneer in the automotive journalism community on the internet. His long-running YouTube channel The Smoking Tire and his podcast of the same name are both incredibly popular, and among our very favorites.

A few weeks ago on this podcast, we mentioned that we had started writing a new book based around The 1,000 Day Principle, a recurring topic we've talked about many times on this podcast. In doing research for that book, a few common themes have started to become apparent to us.

As the dog days of summer are coming to a close, we've decided to address several interesting topics that have come across our desk throughout the month of August. One such topic came in the form of an article by entrepreneur and author James Altucher, who discussed why he thinks ‘NYC is dead forever’.

In past episodes, we've talked about "Founder Fit", or the idea that you should be running the type of business that is best suited to your own personality and lifestyle. But what happens if you're not doing that? It turns out that having a bad fit between you and what you're building can potentially lead to a whole lot of pain.

Rob Walling is no stranger to many of the listeners of this show. Rob is the host of a brilliant podcast called Startups for the Rest of Us, where he has shared stories of entrepreneurial ingenuity and struggle, and many concepts that we have discussed on this show have origins on that podcast.

On today's podcast, we are sharing some personal updates, as well as three specific updates about our core businesses. We are also announcing that for the first time in nearly five years, we are hiring a Community Facilitator for our private membership group The Dynamite Circle. Later on in the episode, we'll be exploring the idea of the moment in a business that Seth Godin refers to as "The Dip".

Productized services have long been a subject of discussion on this podcast. They are a relatively attractive business model, especially among first-time entrepreneurs, and we've shared many examples over the years of how to create these kinds of businesses and scale them. Meryl Johnston, founder of the online bookkeeping firm Bean Ninjas, recently started a rather lively debate in the members' forum of our online community The Dynamite Circle with a post titled, ‘Are Productized Services Overrated?’

Christopher Gimmer is the Co-Founder and CEO of Snappa, a SaaS (Software as a Service) business that allows users to create online graphics quickly and easily. Christopher caught our attention recently when he opened up with a post on Twitter about the emotional cost of being an entrepreneur.

It started with an innocuous-looking image of a yellow aeroplane and ended with a number of threatening letters from a law firm on behalf of the travel site Expedia. In today’s episode, we bring you the denouement of the story of why we decided to remove ‘that plane’ from our branding.

On today's podcast, we're excited to finally reveal that our remote jobs platform Dynamite Jobs is officially a ".com business". After three years of running the company with a .co domain, that .com marks a huge symbolic change for our company, but it didn't come cheap. Enter Rob Barbour of DomainSOS.com and DomainVIP.com.

If we had to pick one word as our greatest motivation, it’s ‘freedom’. Freedom to live life on our terms, where we want, with the people we choose. Ali Marsland is the director of ‘The Effective English Company’. Ali began chasing her own freedom at the age of 18, as she traveled around the world for a year before embarking on a successful career in corporate communications.

At the beginning of the year, we recorded a podcast where we outlined some of our business goals and aspirations for 2020. We're now halfway through the year, and it's safe to say these past six months have been a period of disruption for entrepreneurs all over the world. Given the unexpected circumstances that we've all experienced, we thought it would be interesting to revisit those goals that we shared on this podcast back in January.

In 2009, we published an episode of this podcast called 10 Great Software and Tech Services We Use to Run Our Business. Over 10 years later, we've been challenged by one of our listeners to revisit that list and to talk about the core software and services that we are using to run our company today.

We've talked about the '1,000 Day Principle' at great length on this podcast. The idea is that it takes around three years of full-time effort for an entrepreneur to replace the income from their day job. But what does that principle look like in practice?