Tropical MBA: Entrepreneurship & Founder Lifestyle

Today's episode is unlike anything else Dan and Ian have ever recorded on this podcast. It all started with a cease and desist letter that we received via email at the beginning of the year. That letter was from an in-house counsel at a very large company and it alleged that The Tropical MBA Podcast was potentially infringing on their intellectual property. We decided to reach out to our friend Eric Misterovich from Revision Legal. Revision Legal is a law firm that specializes in working with businesses that make money online. Eric joins us on today's podcast to talk a little bit about intellectual property law, as well as the cease and desist letter that we received. Make sure to stay tuned until the end of this episode to hear more about the ongoing nature of this situation.

Dan and Ian are excited because they get to spend today's podcast doing one of their favorite things: complaining. This isn't just their everyday grinding of axes, though. On this week's episode, we are taking our own stab at a fun an unique concept popularized by the BBC in a classic television series called "Room 101". The term "Room 101" comes from George Orwell's 1984. In Orwell's fictional world, it was a sort of torture chamber that thought criminals are banished to. In this episode, Dan and Ian will each present three things that they want to complain about, and at the end of the episode, they are going to vote on which terrible things deserve to be banished to Room 101.

Hosting this podcast has allowed Dan and Ian to meet thousands of entrepreneurs over the last several years. Many of those entrepreneurs have gone on to become very wealthy people, and throughout our conversations with those people, we have found some common threads to the ways that wealthy people behave. One constant we've discovered is that you have to have a strategy for becoming wealthy and that there are several common strategies that people use to varying degrees of success. On today's show, we are going to be talking about five of the most common strategies to get rich that we have seen, which of those strategies resonate with us, and a whole lot more.

Dan and Ian love stories where creative people find success through entrepreneurship. Truthfully, it's not something we have had a chance to talk about much on this podcast, but art and entrepreneurship don't have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, the skillsets can actually be complementary. Today's guest has figured that out herself, as she went from working a 9-to-5 while living with her parents to traveling the world on her own terms. Cat Coquilette is an artist and illustrator who has made a career licensing her artwork and designs through companies like Target, Urban Outfitters, and Bed Bath & Beyond. On today's podcast, Cat joins us to share how she navigated the journey from her childhood bedroom to successful solopreneurship, without sacrificing her creative fulfillment along the way.

On this week's show, Dan and Ian are talking about getting real with yourself about what you need to do to succeed. Very few people are more qualified to talk about that than John Ainsworth. John is the CEO and founder of Data Driven Marketing, which builds, fixes, and optimizes automated sales funnels. Those sales funnels are the mechanisms that many online businesses use to communicate with customers and entice them to buy their products. As such, John has seen how a lot of businesses get it wrong, in particular, when it comes to knowing what their customer's problems are and figuring out how to solve them. On today's episode, we're talking about how to get in better touch with your customers, how to sell them what they want, and how to avoid getting distracted by shiny objects. As a bonus, John will also be nerding out about sales funnel information after the credits, so make sure to stick around for that.

Dan and Ian have been spending much of their time thinking about remote work these days. Ever since they started their new business Dynamite Jobs, they have been seeking more information about the remote work ecosystem than ever before. One of the things that they've realized is that remote work isn't necessarily for everybody. Just like the traditional office setting, it can come with its own set of challenges. Since they haven't worked in an office in many years, they thought it would be fun to spend a day in the office together and see how it compared to their typical remote workday. On today's podcast, you'll hear some on-location recordings from that work day, as well as an in-depth discussion about five of the most pressing questions that businesses should be asking about remote work in 2019.

On today's podcast, Dan and Ian are following up with the subject of one of the most popular episodes in recent years. Tommy Griffith is the founder of ClickMinded, an online SEO training course that he started while he was working at Paypal. Tommy joined us two and a half years ago to talk about how he started that business as a Saturday Morning Side Hustle. When we last spoke with Tommy in 2017, he was about to quit one of the best jobs in the world as the head of SEO at AirBNB to travel the world and focus on Clickminded full-time. It didn't go quite as planned, as you'll find out on this week's episode. Tommy returns to the podcast today to talk about what went wrong, and why he decided almost eight years into growing his business that it was time to take on a co-founder.

Dan and Ian have heard many variations of the same question over the years: "I want to be an entrepreneur, but how do I get started?" Today's guest has some really practical insight into what it means to take the leap into starting your own business. Dom Wells started out, as many do, building affiliate marketing sites. He's gone on to establish several successful spin-off businesses from what was effectively a side hustle, all while he was still working a full-time job teaching English in Taipei. This week, Dom joins us to share tips for getting started on the long journey of entrepreneurship, how to build a skillset and a network, and the mistakes that he made along the way.

Today's show is sort of like eavesdropping on a conversation that Dan and Ian often have when the microphones are off. Namely, that there are some things that people just don't tell you about entrepreneurship. Maybe it's because people in the entrepreneurial world don't like to come across as naysayers or know-it-alls, but the reality of what it's like to be an entrepreneur can often be hard to come by. Whether it's the fact that entrepreneurs undersell the amount of planning and work that goes into running a business or flat out ignore some of the cold realities of the entrepreneurial struggle, there are a lot of truths floating below the surface that would-be entrepreneurs aren't always aware of. On this week's episode, we're talking about those truths. Today's podcast is all about the stuff that people don't tell you about being an entrepreneur.

Recently, Dan and Ian have been revisiting some of their favorite books on this podcast in a recurring series that we like to call "The Re-Readables." This week, we are digging into a classic entrepreneurial book that was suggested to us by our friend, author, and frequent guest on this podcast, Kyla Gardner of KylaGardner.com. That book is Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad. In that book, Kiyosaki basically suggests that if you want to be rich and successful, you've got to ditch the middle-class mindset. Kyla joins us this week to discuss some of the controversial opinions in this book, which ideas in that book have aged the best and which have aged the worst, and much, much more.