Tropical MBA: Entrepreneurship & Founder Lifestyle

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”.