It’s Time to Hack the Entrepreneur With Jon Nastor – WPCP: 091

Today we have Jon Nastor of Hack the Entrepreneur on the podcast! To say I was excited to talk with Jon would be an understatement... and I just got more excited as the conversation continued. It's refreshing for me to find like-minded individuals doing cool things online that don't believe you have to sacrifice everything else in your life to make things happen. When Jon was a teenager, way before he launched Hack the Entrepreneur, he spent a lot of time playing punk rock music. It was during this time he realized how much he loved “DIY” in the sense that if he wanted something, like making music, playing a show, etc. he had to do it himself to make it happen. He carried this with him into his 20’s and then in 2011 he discovered he could make a business on the internet. One of the biggest things he’s created is Velocity Page, a premium WordPress plug in. He created it with Bill, his brother in law, and Mark Jaquith. Velocity Page is a way to create WordPress pages without the “techy” mumbo jumbo. It takes you out of the admin panel so you can live edit on your page so what you see it what you get. Jon created this tool because a few years ago he needed something like this but he couldn’t find it so he went to Mark with this idea and they created it. In 2014 he went to Chris Ducker’s conference called Tropical Think Tank where there were a lot of serious podcasters (Chris runs Tropical Think Tank once a year and it's in the Philippines... and event I plan on attending at some point!). He realized he had both the time and the resources to start his own podcast. Even though he had little to no experience doing podcasts and interviewing people, he knew he just had to start somewhere. So that summer he made a list  of about 30 people that he wanted to interview and he thought he would interview them over the course of a few months and then be done. To his surprise, about 2 months later it got bigger than he expected so he ramped up production to 3 podcasts a week. The same sort of thing happened to me when I started my podcast... not that I jumped into multiple episodes per week (kudos to you Jon... I love it!), but my podcast definitely shifted everything in my business. For Jon he saw that there wasn’t really anything in the podcast space that he really like/captured his interest. So he decided to create it, just like one would create a product because they don’t see what they want out there already. He experienced the same sort of thing with Hack the Entrepreneur. With a little bit of help from a friend, Jon took the idea and ran with it. After the success of the show and his 5 categories of hacks (Being Wrong, Fears, Habits, Mindset and Ideas), he brought the best of all of this into a book! (Hardly a guy to rest on his laurels, right?). I highly recommend getting the book (in addition to the podcast). Questions I Asked: How did Jon create Velocity Page? What was it like for Jon to reach out to Mark? How did Jon come up with Hack the Entrepreneur? What is his book about? How does Jon come up with each hack? Things You’ll Learn: How to figure the right format of a podcast for you and your audience. Commonalities that Jon sees in a lot of entrepreneurs. The biggest thing you need to grow your business. Why “the hustle” isn’t relevant anymore when it comes to making money. A few of Jon’s favorite hacks from his book.   Where to connect with Jon Website | Podcast | Facebook | Twitter Links mentioned in this episode: Velocity Page Hack The Entrepreneur