Tropical MBA: Entrepreneurship & Founder Lifestyle

In today’s episode, Dan talks with agency owner John Ainsworth about how implementing seemingly small, simple changes allowed him to take most of last year off, while his business still grew 30%. They discuss the modern business philosophies of Traction and Scaling Up and how sometimes those books leave you feeling overwhelmed. Dan’s perspective is that sometimes the biggest ROI comes from the changes that are deceptively simple, maybe even boringly simple. “People think of traction as a mechanical system that all works together and fits together. So, when you get to the end of the book, you think three things. Number one, I have to do it. Number two, I am definitely a visionary, not an integrator. And number three, I'm guilty relative to the percentage of all this that I've implemented. And so my philosophy is really just take one thing and do it, and your business will be better in the morning.”

Some bootstrapped entrepreneurs are fortunate enough to exit their businesses for life-changing money, but that’s not always the case. Today Dan talks to Einar Vollset, about the key mistakes founders often make when exiting their business. Einar is the Founder and Managing Partner of Discretion Capital, a Partner at TinySeed, and YCombinator alumni. In his experience, he says that many bootstrapped and startup founders alike often have blindspots that prevent them from having the best exit possible. “In some cases, bootstrappers end up with basically a stagnating business and one of the main mistakes you can do in terms of m&a is to wait and just let your business stagnate because it really hurts the value of the asset that you have.” Stick around til the end when Einar shares the 5 things founders often get wrong when exiting their business.

Today Dan and Ian analyze different frameworks for developing a good business idea, and reflect on how they didn’t always follow their own advice. They cover 6 idea frameworks: ‘Find a Channel, Not an Idea’, ‘The Classic Entrepreneur’s Venn Diagram’, ‘The Slippery Slope Arbitrage’, “Make it Incredibly Difficult and Pointlessly Complicated’ and ‘Polarize Your Range’. “You only need to answer one question, which is not do I hustle? Or do I chill? Or do I have the spirit or am I creative enough? It is simply, can I reliably and repeatedly get customers?” Stick around until the end of the show for a walk with Dan and Ian down the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, aka their domain registrar account.

In what could be a polarizing conversation for the pod, Dan and Ian discuss one of the most popular threads in the TMBA community this year: Is living in America worth it? They address the pros and cons of life in the US vs abroad and challenge the bigger questions about the values that pull some of us back to our home country, and the luxuries that make the digital nomad life so appealing. We’d love to hear you stand, and what other topics you want to hear on the pod (tweet us @TropicalMBA). We’ll be back next week with our regularly scheduled business programming (we promise).

Dan and Ian deep dive into the high-conflict personalities that could derail your business and how the role of finance changes as you grow out of one phase of your business and into the next. Lastly, in a throwback to the early days, Dan shares his latest “travel tips” as he prepares for summer in Europe. “...a lot of what having a good life is, from my perspective, is not wasting your time, not getting caught up in problems, and avoiding people who could derail your ambitions. Sometimes it's a little bit harder than advertised, because it can be subtle. So having a framework for anticipating it and avoiding it in advance before you get into any kind of problems, I think is extremely powerful.”

Dan Andrews (@TropicalMBA) talks with Jay Clouse (@jayclouse) about his $400K membership site, becoming a professional creator, and winning CEX Content Entrepreneur of the year. Jay Clouse, founder of Creator Science, long-time listener, and former guest of the pod is back. In early 2018, Jay joined Dan and Ian on the show to talk about some of the challenges he was facing as an early-stage entrepreneur just eight months into his journey. Fast forward to today. Five years later. Jay is back to update us on how he went from barely scraping by in 2018 to building a waitlisted community of 200 creators, and being an influential professional creator himself. He also gives Dan some advice on how to be good at Twitter.

On today’s show Dan tests out the theory that the most important factor in your business success might be choosing the 5 key friends you put yourself around. This idea was prompted by a conversation with Simon Treulle, founder of digital media site Pangolia and the e-commerce pet furniture brand Hepper. When he was 19 years old Simon heard about an SEO conference that was happening in Chiang Mai. So he took a chance, bought a plane ticket, and left his home city in Denmark to put himself around people who might help him on his entrepreneurial journey. Today Simon has a team of over a hundred and very successful businesses. He strongly believes the support and ’tough love’ from the friends and mentors he found in that beautiful walled city in the North of Thailand was instrumental: “One of the first days I was lucky enough to go to a Korean barbecue with two of my good friends today. And they pretty much grilled me on my business. Because my business was pretty much failing at that point. So they were like, ‘Hey, why are you overpaying for content? Or why are you doing it this way?’ I was super overwhelmed …. I've been working for a couple of years on this online marketing and content stuff and here I am sort of being told that what I do is not really the way to get success with it. So that was hard to swallow …. because I wanted this lifestyle so much. I wanted to live in Chiang Mai.”

On today’s show Dan shares some of the highlights of bringing together 200 entrepreneurs in Mexico City for this year’s DCMEX. And he also invites ‘friend of the show’ Travis Jamison to play the ‘Biz Model Mock Draft’ game asking, ‘If you had to ‘draft’ one of these to be your top business model to create or invest in for 2023, what would it be: Software as a Service, Agency, Communities, Publishing and Courses, Fund, Ecommerce or Marketplace?’ ‘Communities are probably more robust, assuming you get a good one. As the internet gets weirder and weirder (and) AI upcoming everywhere and taking over everything, you assume that most content is going to be AI generated. With all the deep fakes … you won't be able to trust any opinion, just like when you search “best vacuum cleaner” on Google …. So where do you go for authenticity? Small groups, people you trust, curated groups. And so communities become more valuable that way.’

Design is often, strangely, one of those things that bootstrappers tend to think about either too early or too late. Today’s show offers the case for integrated brand design from the get go. And it doesn’t need to cost thousands of dollars. The TMBA site recently got a fresh lick of paint with a new logo. This week Dan talks to its creator, Sharif El Komi, founder of Komi Studio. Sharif shares some of the mistakes he’s seen brands making when it comes to design, why he thinks the recent ‘Wise’ re-brand is a triumph, and how being daring can immediately give small business an edge on bigger competition: ‘It's a lot about risk as well. That's why branding is also a very strong weapon for the smaller guys to use. Because doing the crazy thing … with your logo, but also with your general brand, even non design stuff, like copywriting, all the kind of funnels into your brand, doing the crazy stuff and … doing the edgy, risky moves, the big guys aren't doing that in any industry because … it's really difficult for them to change anything about their logo, their colours, the voice of how they do any copywriting because if they do, they risk losing big.’

It’s an evolving economic landscape out there: interest rates are up, high paying tech jobs are down. One bank has collapsed and crypto doesn’t seem to be the panacea that some wished. On this week’s show we’re talking investing - the opportunities, possible pitfalls and safe bets. Travis Jamison is founder of the SEO agency Smash Digital, and also owns an e-commerce supplement brand. But in recent times, through his newsletter and online community Investing.io, he’s been focusing on investing in other online business opportunities and also assets like stocks and crypto. He talks to Dan about where he’s currently putting his money and who he sees as the winners and losers in the current economic situation. “Cash gives you optionality. People like to say that it allows you to buy deals when things are cheap. That's definitely true … but it also keeps people from making bad decisions. Liquidity is everything. You don't want to be forced to sell, especially when stuff is really bad. That's the worst time to sell. So keeping a cash, a heavy cash position, can just help you wait out the dips without the bad times and just stay invested in compounding over the long term. That's how you win over time.”

The story of how Property Hub, now a multi-7 figure online community and real estate acquisition and management business, was built from a podcast, a book, and a strategy of abundance. When Rob Dix started co-hosting The Property Podcast a decade ago he had no idea of the traction it was getting until they announced their first ‘in person meet-up’ for listeners and hundreds of people showed up. Today the show is downloaded by 400,000 each week. Rob Dix talks to Dan about the reasons he continues to create most of Property Hub’s content himself, and the schedule he uses to achieve it. They also discuss why Rob decided to sign a two book deal with a major publisher and why he believes their ultimate ‘competitive advantage’ is ‘giving more away for free than anyone else’.

The first quarter of the year has been volatile for many large US-based tech companies, with thousands of staff layoffs. Inflation and the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank have added to the sense of uncertainty. Yet, through all of this. bootstrapped businesses have proved remarkably resilient. On this week’s show Dan talks to Tiny Seed founder Rob Walling about how the economies of running smaller online businesses enable them to be nimble and resourceful in all circumstances. They also discuss Rob’s forthcoming book The SaaS Playbook, what it takes to build a Unicorn (and do you want to go there?) and the potential impact of AI: “It’s both over-hyped and under-hyped. Just like I think the Web was and just like I think with Web3, and crypto and blockchain … (they’re) not dead. Like I hear people saying, ‘Is crypto even worth anything anymore?’ It's still a thing. And I don't just mean Bitcoin as a currency but the idea of a blockchain, these have applications that will carry on. That's how I think of AI. I think if I was an employee today, or I was doing low skilled work, I would be shaking in my boots. For smart entrepreneurs, it is much like offshoring was - being able to hire a developer in the Philippines in 2009 changed the way I could operate business. I think AI is the same”.

The ‘Money Theory of Location’ argues that calculating 4x the average salary in the place you choose to live, whether that’s Mexico City, or Bangkok, or New York is a good indication for the amount of money you’ll need to achieve a great standard of living there, and a lot of potential for freedom in your life.. On this week’s show Dan and Ian talk location arbitrage, including their regrets about moving to San Diego and not San Francisco when they were straight out of college: “There's a little bit of naivete, a lot of naivete, in a 21-year old Dan saying, ‘Just because California is a state with opportunities, because there's a lot of big houses there and stuff, that that means that that has anything to do with you’. You have to decide what you're doing, and how that would align up with that small tribe of people that are doing those things, and where those people are”. They also offer some thoughts to a listener who has moved his freelancers to full time contracts. He’s seeing some decrease in productivity and is wondering what to do about it.

How one entrepreneur has achieved huge growth in his business by ditching the low-cost ‘productized service’ model and pursuing upmarket enterprise clients. That person is Harry Morton, founder of the podcast production service Lower Street. Harry talks to Dan about how pivoting has allowed him to reach a low to mid seven figure annual revenue, and grow a team of over 20. They discuss why building a network and evolving a strong company culture has been so crucial, the importance of getting a grip on your financials, how accepting who you are and what drives you is crucial, and the challenges and opportunities afforded by AI: ‘I think that while AI is coming for all of our lunches it's coming for the productised end first because you have a very clearly defined list of deliverables and you point Chat GPT or whatever at it and it's not going to take too long, I don't think, for that to catch up and make the make the drop the price even further. So I think for anyone in an agency business, certainly something I spend a lot of time thinking about is: How is AI going to affect us? How do we incorporate AI? How do we embrace it?’

Today Dan and Ian reflect on some of the key observations they’ve taken away from calls with over 50 business owners during the launch of their implementation program ‘DC Scale’. And, this being the TMBA, there are 5 categories: ‘The $500K Stall’, ‘The Solo Recording Artist Mentality’, ‘Pulling Punches’, ‘Grade A at Hiring But Grade B at Managing’ and ‘The Cloak of Invisibility’: ‘Even today, when there are more people to follow then followers, and everybody's a brand … Most of these entrepreneurs are just not brands. And they really don't need to be. The vast majority of people we spoke with have a personal network, they are using channels like events, industry contacts, and referrals to bring in the key relationships that they need in their business. They're not necessarily using internet marketing funnels to bring in customers’. Dan and Ian also give their take on how and why the ‘Visionary vs Integrator’ definitions came about, and how useful they are, and share thoughts on the pros and cons of the ‘4 Day Work Week’.

The story of Going touches on so many themes we’ve been following on this show for over a decade. Going’s original incarnation, ’Scott’s Cheap Flights’, came on the scene in 2013. And it started out mostly as a newsletter for digital nomads seeking the most cost effective ways to travel around the world, nerd out on ‘mistake fares’ by airlines, and other things of interest in the travel space. Today Going has over 60 employees and is a very substantial business, offering a range of options to its subscribers. On this week’s show Brian Kidwell talks to Dan about his personal journey from solopreneur to CEO of Going, the challenges of making that transition, the importance of seeking product market in whatever you’re working on, and finding time for ‘deep work’: “How can I have enough hours in the day to give the proper thinking, my best thinking, to the things that I need to work on? Because those things now have much more downstream impacts than before. It's like editing code, or responding to somebody - and I'm not trying to downplay them, because those are very important - but it was different for my brain … Now I can't work as long as I used to … I can't provide great thinking for 12 hours a day.”

TMBA has followed Tommy Griffith’s story for nearly a decade, watching his ‘dorky’ side-hustle teaching weekend SEO classes evolve into ClickMinded, a substantial online education portfolio. On today’s show Tommy talks to Dan about how ClickMinded has evolved further, with the help of a new CEO, to a white label documentation provider which turned over $2.3M last year. And he reflects on why he seems to have taken almost every ‘incredibly difficult and complicated option’ to get to where ClickMinded is today: “I think it was arrogance. We had this idea that we were an Ed tech company, that we were creating these online courses. I think there was also some sunk cost fallacy going on. I mean, we had 85 hours of HD videos, seven instructors, and some universities were using our courses … The product was great, we were super proud of it, and it took a lot of work to do. So the fact that people were saying, ‘Actually, can I just pay for all of these Google Docs’. It was a little hard to face that music.”

When starting a business or advancing your career, or even just seeking to increase your public profile, it’s a savvy move to build momentum through content, and specifically by focusing on a particular channel. Today’s guest is an expert at doing just that. Steph Smith is the author of ‘Doing Content Right’. She’s also the host of the a16z podcast and ‘The Sh*t You Don’t Learn in School’. Steph talks to Dan about the opportunities being a creator opens up, tips on how to choose the right channel for what you’re trying to achieve, and why being data driven is so fundamental to achieving growth: “If you are doing a good job with growth, data should rule the day. You should be able to clearly say, ‘here's an aspect of our funnel that we want to run a test on, because we believe it has this upside’. And you run the test …. I've gone on to other companies that were way less data driven. That's honestly something that I really struggle with because when you are in situations where you are having to kind of say, ‘hey, let's do this project, I think it'll maybe have some impact’. It's just not compelling to me. I think most things at a company should be pretty data driven”.

Today's guest has been massively influential on Dan and Ian from the very start of their journey. Seth Godin is something of a legend in entrepreneurial circles, and he hardly needs an introduction.His books about marketing, creativity, building companies and personal development include Purple Cow, Meatball Sundae, The Dip, and Linchpin. They are frequent recommendations on this podcast and have long been shared among our listeners. In addition, Seth has founded an intensive four-week alternative online MBA called altMBA. He has also created several podcasts including the popular Startup School and Akimbo. Today's show features a wide-ranging interview, which touches on a variety of topics including Seth's history as a writer and podcaster, what the business world can offer society and much more.

“This is an exciting podcast about traveling to tropical islands. And we're talking about employee scorecards.Why?” On this week’s show Dan and Ian share why they’ve introduced employee scorecards to their business, and how they’re helping establish more accountability, creativity and legibility in many different ways. They discuss the practicalities and principles of scorecards, the reasons they are so useful for both full-time staff and contractors, and why they are often welcomed by team members. They also give their thoughts in response to a listener email about one of the most frequently raised dilemmas in the startup world: how to handle equity splits when one person is doing the lion’s share of work while the other business partner still retains a full-time J-O-B.

As Dan recently reflected in the annual TMBA review, he and the Bossman saw their business almost double its revenue last year. On this week’s show Dan and Ian reflect on some simple principles or strategies that might help them and other business owners achieve the same in 2023. Now, as this is the TMBA podcast, they have to come in 5’s. Dems Da Rules. They include niching down to blow up, why playing with pricing dynamics can be so powerful, and the opportunities lifestyle businesses often miss by not defining clear strategies: ‘What is a strategy? It is a painful constraint about your mission in the marketplace, and how your entire operation is roped into that promise … (it’s saying) our strategy is going to be 100% organised around this deliverable. And because the whole organisation is organised around that, we can't be copied easily. That's the idea. We cannot be copied, we will sit alone in the marketplace.”

As Dan prepares to leave Barcelona after a month-long stay, this week’s show is all about being able to take time away from your business. Because that is, after all, one of the reasons many listeners to this show are creating lifestyle businesses - whether it’s for parental leave, to pursue a sport or hobby, or perhaps some very necessary mental health wellness. Both Sam Floy, founder of Cofruition, and Neil Callanan, founder of LooseGrip, have planned and executed successful sabbaticals. They share the reasons why, how they planned for it and some of the positive impacts it had on their businesses: “Maybe this is a male thing but you are less important than you think you are. And that was abundantly clear. I like to feel important, and I like to feel like my clients need to talk to me, and I need to set the direction for our team when working on a creative project or software thing. Turns out that's not actually true at all right? The team did great without me. Clients didn't feel a dip, really.”

Agencies: creating them, the opportunities they offer, and some of the issues running them can create has been a long running theme on this show. Today Dan talks with Matt Gartland who ran a successful creative agency for eight years before partnering with one of his then clients, Pat Flynn, and eventually becoming CEO of Smart Passive Income (SPI). Matt discusses how he’s helping SPI develop further as a diverse media brand, ways of managing a growing team, and how he sees online communities evolving: “The primary value of these community based experiences is less the content, even though the content is important. It's more the network, the network of the people, the peer to peer interactions, the habits and experiences that you ritualize within these communities based on experiences. You need good people to be able to facilitate and foster those.”

Business processes and systems have been an emerging theme on this show recently, and today Dan reflects on why, and where they fit into the entrepreneurial journey. This often starts with personal growth through things like maximizing your health, reading, making connections, and maybe therapy. The second stage of advancing small businesses is frequently through different sorts of coaching. But, at some point, owners tend to hit roadblocks that can only be overcome by deploying systems rather than constantly fighting fires. Today’s guest, Aaron Lynn, has dug deep on this, at colleges, in businesses he’s founded and as a business systems consultant. He joins Dan to talk about the importance of quick wins as well as long term strategy, the difference between personal and business productivity systems, the importance of meeting cadence, and a whole lot more.

Happy 2023 to all our listeners. The focus of this show has always been freedom, whatever that means to you. This pod is a judgement-free zone. It might be freedom to travel, to spend more time with family and friends, to work in a certain way, or with certain values, to give back to your community, or to support loved ones. Or just not to have a traditional J-O-B. Today’s guest Davis Nguyen initially founded My Consulting Offer, which helps people get management consulting jobs, to raise some ‘money in hand’ to pay a family member’s emergency medical bill. But it’s grown into so much more than that - a business that allows him harass his skills and to live life on his own terms, terms that just weren’t open to him when he was working for top consulting firm Bain & Company: ‘I loved the management consulting job. I love the fact that you get to work with really smart people … I just didn't like the fact that I couldn't take time off as much as I wanted … I remember my first year I literally went to negative vacation days because I wanted to take a trip to Japan. And, by the time I came back, basically HR said, ‘Alright, Davis, you have negative five days. Now basically, you can't take vacation for the next year.’

2022 has been the year that we all got on the road again. Dan and Ian spent the summer in Barcelona, Spain and hundreds of members of the Dynamite Circle met up to forge new friendships and partnerships, socialize, swap stories and strategies, and a whole lot more. Through it all, we have been fortunate to talk to some incredibly captivating entrepreneurs on this podcast. In today’s episode, we are revisiting some of our favorite moments and themes from the podcast this year, including thoughts about investing, the challenges of systemizing your business and motivating a team, what bootstrappers can learn from private equity firms (and vice versa), thoughts about the ‘anti-work movement’ and the amazing opportunities offered by living in a place with a lower cost of living than the West but equally great resources.

As 2022 draws to a close Dan and Ian are in a reflective mood. In this week’s show they ponder the ‘lifestyle business take’ on ‘The Parable of the Mexican Fisherman’ and come up with an alternative interpretation involving YouTube. They also discuss some the positives and negatives of their own business year including the results of their ambition to scale Dynamite Jobs, the power of reconnecting in person with colleagues, friends and mentors, and why alignment between founders is critical: “I think we can up the leadership game a little bit. And a lot of that is about figuring out these concepts and ideas that scale through the organisation and create alignment. It’s creating empowerment and autonomy in each individual actor to know that they're doing meaningful things on a day to day basis. That level of leadership is a tough nut to crack”.

On this week’s show Dan and Ian respond to some listener comments and questions including non-competes and potential conflicts of interest with your current employer when you’re thinking of starting an entrepreneurial side-hustle: “You’ve got to understand that, hey, there's three lawyers sitting in that office down there. If I take this vulnerable idea to them they're gonna say, ‘No’. I am not going to allow my life to be affected by a Mall Cop, or whatever .. when we say risk in entrepreneurship, it's the emotional risk of owning that and not asking for permission”. They also give their takes on the rewards of creating B2B versus B2C business, and why SOPs haven’t been mentioned on the show for quite some time.

On a recent show Dan and Ian touched on ‘the lifestyle ladder’, and what different levels of personal wealth can mean in your life. Following that they received an interesting email from today’s guest Matt Paulson who today shares why he’s found that achieving substantial personal wealth raises fundamental questions about how you want to spend that money, especially in relation to assessing investment opportunities, raising a family and contributing to a community you value: “My strategy is to create as normal of a childhood as possible for my children. So our house cost half a million dollars … I walk my kids to elementary school every morning. We fly private sometimes, we stay in fancier hotel rooms but the day to day is pretty normal .. I think if I can not set unrealistic expectations about what life is like when they're young, they'll carry over to when they're adults”. Dan and Ian also discuss the incredible opportunities opened up by the recently launched Open AI tool ChatGPT, and some exciting news about their latest product DC Scale, created out of their own frustrations establishing operational management systems within their own businesses.

When Johnathan Solorzano, founder of Solo Media Group, joined us on the podcast just over two years ago his agency focused on broad ‘white label work’, which he aptly described as ‘doing all the work and then someone else passes it off as their own’. Today, through what he learnt from doing that, he’s niched Solo Media to focus entirely on Shopify clients. Jonathan talks to Dan about how this evolution has provided him with a much more stable portfolio and revenue, and also why he feels ‘got distracted’ and wasted a year trying to develop some ‘Software as a Service’ products. He also discusses how creating a social media presence has helped his personal and agency profile, and why you don’t need to have thousands of followers to achieve that: “I’m not doing it for clicks. I'm not doing it for likes, and I'm not doing it for followers. I’m literally doing it to answer questions that I know people have. So some of my videos are like, ‘Whoa, this was like a $20,000 question’. If the right person sees this and sees they can save so much money .. To me, that's enough.”

Some call it ‘revenge travel’, others just call it ‘getting back to normal’ but people in the location independent community are, for sure, hitting the road again. In this week’s show, Dan and Ian look at what factors feed into creating ‘digital nomad hotspots’, and the possible new emerging cities suggested by listeners of this podcast, and members of the ‘Dynamite Circle’. They also discuss how they are going about implementing systems in their newest business, ‘Dynamite Jobs’, the pros and cons of those prescribed by ‘Traction’ and ‘Scaling Up’, and why they chose to work with a facilitator: ‘We did some of the exercises wrong. It's not that we didn't understand them. But maybe we didn't understand the intent and how they fit into the bigger part of the picture. So I found it really helpful to do the exercises with someone because we were exposed to a bunch of exercises, and now we get to pick and choose based on the way that we filled it out. So I felt, in a lot of ways, we condensed it by having a facilitator help us’.

It’s been three long years since DC members were able to gather in Bangkok to share great food, experiences and talk business. And DCBKK2022, our ten year anniversary event, with almost 400 attendees, was not only our biggest event but also such a blast. So this week Dan, Ian and Jeff Pecaro get together to talk about not only the highlights of DCBKK20220 - one of which was definitely a 100 strong Tuk Tuk parade which ferried people through the streets of Bangkok to the closing party - but also takeaways, trends spotting from the conference floor, and things that are up for improvement next year: “We're always gonna have speakers, we're always gonna have meetups, we're always gonna have presenters, we're always gonna have structured conversations. But one of the pieces of feedback that we've been getting for years is: how can we bring people together to just do things?”

There are big changes in the wind at Twitter, with Elon Musk suggesting he might further open the platform to longer form pieces, and also paid content. Might this open up greater opportunities for those with established blogs, or looking to start one? On today’s show we revisit a favorite episode from our back catalogue focused on personal blogging and what it means to write on the internet. And to help tell this story, which is close to his heart, Dan invited two writers who both have a long and rich experience in the blogging space. Taylor Pearson has been a frequent guest and contributor on this podcast. He is the author of The End of Jobs, and he runs an excellent blog on his website. Amanda Cook is an author, a podcaster, herbalist, and the founder of a business called Wellpreneur. Over the years, she has published online about a wide variety of projects, but the one consistent thing is that she’s always had an excellent blog, which you can find at AmandaCook.me. Join us for this round table discussion about the past and future of blogging on the internet, tips for those starting out with a personal blog, some of our favorite blogs to read today, and so much more.

When Jesse Schoberg, Co-founder of DropIn Blog, shared his thoughts about the huge benefits of living in Bangkok with CNBC, as part of their ‘Make It’ series, he had no idea it would go viral - both inside Thailand and abroad. The piece, titled ‘I live better in Thailand than I did in the U.S. — here’s how much it costs’ received lots of appreciation but also a stream of more negative comments from some members of the backpacking and expat retiree communities. They criticised how much Jesse chooses to spend on accommodation, food and travel in a place often seen as a mecca for cheap living. “A lot of people were like, ‘Oh, for $8,000 a month, you can live anywhere … no, you cannot live like we live here in New York, which is an equivalent city, for $8,000 a month. When we were in New York recently, the apartment we were staying in was a small studio, and it was $4,200 or $4,400 a month. It was nothing near the type of service or quality that we would get in Bangkok for much less.” On today’s show Dan and Ian talk to Jesse about why he decided to participate in the series in the first place, the very different reaction he received from the Thai audience and some possible reasons why ‘spend shaming’ exists.

Side-Hustles, which - with a lot of hard work - evolve into full-time businesses are a theme of many entrepreneurial journeys. We’ve covered a fair few on this show. But Brenden Marquardt’s story is particularly interesting for a few reasons: even though he was in a well-paid finance job, and knew he wasn’t great at ‘ideas’, he did the groundwork to be ready for when the opportunity he was looking for presented itself. On today’s show Brenden, Co-Founder of Homestead Brands talks to Dan about how a chance click on a website led him to buy Lori Beds, his methodology for working ‘on’ not ‘in’ the business “When I hired my first executive team member Dodes, who manages our product - the manufacturing, relationships, logistics and things like that. Even before I hired him, just talking with him, I realised we had set our goals way too small, because I didn't know how to do any of those things that he spent every day doing in the furniture industry”. And why Brenden takes inspiration for working with other family members in his business from ‘The Sopranos’.

It started as a hobby at college, and was also the way he met his wife but now ‘Dumpster Diving’ has become a major business opportunity for Dave Sheffield, Founder of Buffalo Bottle Craft. In today’s show Dave talks to Dan about how a Vice documentary, currently watched by nearly 1.5M people, and subsequent media interest has made him consider the many different ways a ‘Dumpster Diving’ enterprise could grown: from selling physical products from dumpster finds, to creating online content showing how others can do the same: “If I find some new material in the dumpster that I know that I can source at scale … I just make a video and I say, ‘Hey, guys, look at this cool thing. What do you think I could make from it? What would you make from it?’ And that's my product research right there.”

This week Dan is speaking to Andy Morgan, creator of RippedBody, a blog and coaching program targeted at committed but frustrated fitness trainees who have hit a stall in their progress. What’s interesting about Andy’s story is the way he’s found a niche not only in the fitness space but also in the market in Japan. Andy discusses why he only does bi-weekly email check-in with his clients, how a DC mastermind has prompted him to start hiring coaches, and the methodology behind his successful Instagram strategy: “The problem was I had too many content possibilities and I couldn't decide what to create each day. The solution that I came up with was to list the topics that I could talk about, the types of content that I could create and the formats that I could create in and then rotate through them. And so what that did is - it constrained my choices and allowed for tight creativity”.

In this week’s show Dan and Ian share their Q4 business updates, including the reasons why they have decided to launch an agency - Remote First Recruiting, which is targeted at startup founders, under the Dynamite Jobs umbrella. “The best customers of a job board typically have super strong hiring practices that are built over the years … (they’ve) hired for the same position multiple times. Whereas with an agency customer, which are typically startup founders, they're seeking to buy those systems into their business. They know they need to hire, they might be hiring 10 times a year. But every time it's a little bit different, and they want to purchase the systems. That's what the agency does.” Plus, responses to some great listener questions, including: how much money is ‘enough money’, the mindset challenges of living off capital, and some further reflections on ‘The Europe Question’.

Books: seeking out good ones, talking about them, and implementing some of the things we discover in their pages has long been a theme of this show. However, as longtime listeners will know, Dan is often disappointed by one category in particular: business books. But one he read recently, ‘Working Backwards’ by former Amazon executives Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, really blew him away. And he was thrilled when one of the authors, Colin Bryar, agreed to drop by the show. Colin joined Amazon in the late 90s, and worked closely with Jeff Bezos. That time at the company covered a period of incredible innovation - Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Echo and Alexa, and Amazon Web Services Dan talks to Colin about the principles and practices, many of them counterintutive to traditional business thinking, that drove that incredible succes, and how they can also be applied to the smaller businesses many of us are growing. They include: ditching the powerpoint in favor of narratives at meetings, why it’s essential for your best people to take on key projects in ‘single-threaded leadership’, and much more.

The summer of cycling and tapas in Barcelona, Spain has come to an end. Dan and Ian are back in Austin, Texas inspired by the conversations and feedback they’ve had over the past few weeks as listeners and friends have dropped by one of our favorite European cities. One of those people is someone we’ve had on the pod before, telling the early part of his story. So much has happened in his life that we thought it was high time to catch up with him again. Coran Woodmass’ entrepreneurial journey has spanned ecommerce, building a successful business brokerage, to multi million dollar deal maker at Billion Dollar Exits. He’s also an investor. Today he and Dan are going to discuss ‘Five small ways to go big’. These include why it’s sometimes necessary to ‘slow down to speed up’, the power of doubling down on your core entrepreneurial skill and the power of investing for cashflow. And just a caveat: as with all discussions about investing, this is not advice, it’s just some perspectives you might want to think about (or not).

Today’s show started, as so many of them do, as an in-person conversation in a dark bar in a cool city. That’s where Dan met Brent Zahradnik, founder of Amazon PPC agency AMZ Pathfinder. Now ‘the agency model’ is a recurring theme on this show because they can be spun up in a weekend, are often very profitable, and they can provide side income to what you’re already doing in a business. But done poorly, agency owners can find themselves trapped in the grind of ‘wrong’ clients and staffing woes. But Brent seems to have nailed it, and found a profitable business that also allows him to live in Montpellier, France and enjoy the great outdoor lifestyle that Mediterranean city offers. Topics covered include: the mistake of not getting ‘A players’ on your team earlier, why Brent feels his nomadic lifestyle held back his business for a while, and some ideas for agencies you could start today.

The ‘Stair Step’ approach to entrepreneurship is a recurring theme on the TMBA. Coined of course by Startups For The Rest Of Us host Rob Walling. Essentially, it describes how you can build up your business chops by for example, starting a freelance business, then parlaying some of those clients into running an agency and then maybe Software as a Service, and so on. But honestly, you can apply a similar approach in many different ways, including applying it to one brand, which is what today’s guest Ben Dziwulski, founder of WodPrep, which helps CrossFitters improve their techniques, has done over the course of many years. He talks to Dan about how WodPrep has grown into a $1.1M business that also allows him to enjoy the outdoor lifestyle he loves.

What began as a window cleaning service he started at college has now spun into a multi-million business for today’s guest Johnny Robinson. In January 2022 he co-founded Home Services Academy, a 90 day program and ongoing community which coaches others to reach five figures MRR by either starting their own cleaning business, or making an existing one more profitable. Johnny talks to Dan about their sales process, the pros and cons of implementing the ‘Scaling Up’ operating system, and why he feels he held on to his former business model for too long: “If you've been plugging away, and you're not seeing the growth, maybe it's time to take the skill set and what you've learned somewhere else … What I've realised, after building a few different businesses, is when you're in the weeds of things you start to find problems within that industry that are very, very niche. But you're like, ‘Well, that would probably be a better business than the one I’m running’”.

The COVID pandemic saw many online businesses boom, especially those centered on E-commerce. But entrepreneurs running in-person events really took a hit. Today’s show focuses on one of those stories, and narrates how one owner re-invented what his company was doing by becoming a ‘Value Added Reseller’ (VAR) software service. Dan Taylor is the CEO of AppsEvents, a ‘Google for Education’ partner whose company previously ran a huge number of conferences worldwide before diversifying into VAR: “There are different ways you can get into it. Some of the selling is direct with Google, some of that work is with a distributor but, essentially … The ‘value added’ part means you can sell your services on top. So you can sell ongoing support services, you can do setup services, you can do customization, that's kind of what the business model is.”

This show is a ‘drop in’ to the kind of conversations Dan and Ian have been having all summer long in their co-working space in Barcelona, as fellow entrepreneurs have come by the city. And today they’re joined by one of our favorite guests, AppSumo founder Noah Kagan. The idea is a simple one - let’s just have some fun, and hopefully useful insights, rating some of the popular business memes and ideas that have taken traction in the online business world. Which ones are overrated, underrated or appropriately-rated? The discussion includes - the value of coaches, the necessity of hiring a Chief Technical Officer, cold email outreach and more: “Where it's like, ‘I have a great idea. I just need a technical partner’, 100% overrated. Because when you're starting any business what you're really focusing on is - what is the actual problem you're solving, not a technical need. What often happens is people are using that as an excuse for rejection. And they're using an excuse from fear”.

One growing theme in the TMBA community has been the search for increased options for location independent families to provide education for their children. Traditionally it’s been home schooling, international or local schools, and very little in-between. But increasingly parents are coming together to try to create new solutions like pop-up schools, employing tutors and more. On today’s show teacher and entrepreneur Elliott Zelinskas offers his views on a range of emails and comments we’ve received on this subject, including thoughts about whether the COVID pandemic might have accelerated the drive for change: “I'm curious about the post COVID situation .. How did that change our world, not about how we think about viruses, but how we think about our lives, our families, our business .. The power structures got shook up, and I think there's been this kind of collective reflection on life. And you just don't really see people going back to normal in terms of their work. And I'm seeing it more with education too”. There are also some updates from Dan and Ian about Dynamite Jobs, and their thoughts on a recent ‘digital nomad debate’.

‘Rip, pivot and jam’ is a recurring theme on this show. It’s a way of overcoming the pressure of needing ‘the best business idea ever’ by taking a model that’s working elsewhere and applying it in another field. And that’s exactly what today’s guest Justin Tan did when he founded his productised video editing service Video Husky. Through his previous freelance career in Facebook advertizing, Justin had seen the growing importance of video creation as a marketing tool. And Russ Perry’s unlimited graphic design offerings at ‘Design Pickle’ inspired him to try that approach for clients who need regular video editing. Justin talks to Dan about the challenges and rewards of building, and recently ‘retiring’ from Video Husky over a four year period: “The key thing is being able to accept when your assumptions are wrong, ideally quickly, and moving on from them versus - I would hold on to certain key assumptions for the longest time, even though they weren't true. And so what I found was really helpful was getting in front of a lot of customers”.

Who doesn’t want to maximize results, and spend less time - or just make better use of it - in their business? On this week’s show Dan and Ian discuss five possible ways to make this happen from their own experience growing Dynamite Jobs. They include reaching out to an expert practitioner in your field, someone who has experience and insight at the level you want to grow to, creating tight ‘backward looking’ financial accountability that gives clarity on where your money is, and should be going. And there’s more, of course. It wouldn’t be a TMBA episode without five points. It’s the law. ‘We’ve reached out to several industry experts in the job space. And I think some relationships are going to come out of that … And I think the most valuable thing that's starting to change for us, it's just the product roadmap. So if you can identify somebody that's an industry expert in your field, a lot of times they can shave years off your product development cycle.” Listen and learn: ● Why reaching out to an industry expert in your space could be so helpful ● ‘Scaling Up’ by Vern Harnish v ‘Traction’ by Gino Wickman ● Choosing where to have a ‘work vacation’ ● The power of a system to get inside your business financials

The TMBA ‘summer in Barcelona’ continues with a long-standing guest visiting the city, and hanging with Dan and Ian. His name is Travis Jamison, founder of Smash Digital, and investor in numerous other companies. He’s a badass entrepreneur who exited his previous business AMZ tracker, a SaaS for Amazon sellers, for ‘a life changing’ amount of money, a story we told on this show. Today he talks to Dan and Ian about choosing where to live when you stop nomading, why Travis thinks agencies are highly underrated business models, ‘Defi summer’, and lots more.

We’ve received some great email responses prompted by last week’s episode ‘The Europe Question’. So on today’s show Dan and Ian will be reflecting on some of those comments. They’ll also be mulling over a recurring dilemma posed by a listener, one which is very much in their minds as they grow ‘Dynamite Jobs’: “David and Goliath or Dynamite Jobs versus Indeed.com .. At one time you mentioned how just hearing the word Indeed gave you anxiety, maybe excitement … (this) resonated with me. My partner and I are currently building a software product that will likely go head to head with some fairly big names, and they have at least a decade head start on us … The only thing that keeps me going back is that I've spent the past decade in entrepreneurship, always staying in safe little buckets of protected small niches .. Small niches are often easier to start but are easier to hit a ceiling in terms of market size. Having experienced growing our businesses to the upper limits of the markets we're in, we have our eyes on the bigger prize where the bigger players are players that really know what they're doing”.