Tropical MBA: Entrepreneurship & Founder Lifestyle

We’ve got so many cool things coming up here on the podcast including my made in India software screw up mid next week, our internet marketing summit in Thailand, and our auto trading product launch (we’ll be sharing all the details!). That’s just the start! This episode is about a topic that has been destroying my inbox in the past 2 weeks. So many smart people are getting hung up on analysis paralysis, and trust me people, I feel ya. Here’s our best tips. We’ve beat it before and we’ll beat it again. Have fun. Leave a comment. Give us a ring. 888-554-8428. Go make it happen! :)

an and I have both been manufacturing products in China for over 5 years. In this episode we talk in detail about our plan to be a distributor of sport bike replacement fairings and why the whole thing fell apart. This episode is sponsored by wordpress designers and developers, Gut Shot Studios.

Hey party people, I just stepped foot back in Manila and I’m catching up on mounds of email. This episode was recorded about a week ago. We have had tons more going on and a few more KILLER iTunes reviews since that time, thanks to everyone who takes the time to say nice things about the show there. Looking forward to recording another show this week! :)

YO! How are you? I’ve been back in the old USA for over one week now and I’m having tons of thoughts about it (its been over a year!) I hope to write a few blog posts about it. In this episode Ian and I discuss concepts that regular listeners of the show are probably pretty used to hearing from us. We currently have a lot of overhead in our business and we are exploring ways to efficiently deploy our staff to stuff that makes us money. Last month we had a nice little revenue hit from a new product we developed using what we call PIVOT: Position, Iterate, Volley, Outsource, and Time. If that sounds like a big fat put-on, it kind of is, but we had fun using it as a structure to talk about the way we got this done. Also there are lots of random little tidbits in this episode plus an impassioned rant during the quick tip section. Interested to hear your thoughts! I’ll be in NYC all next week doin’ some biznass and meeting old friends, if you are around LET ME KNOW HOMIES!

Hello from the good old USA, I believe this is our first 100% USA ‘cast in over a year. Yeowwwza! This is a big long episode where we talk about a wide variety of topics. In particular, we talk about why I believe Virtual Staff Finder is currently the best way to get started hiring virtual assistants in the Philippines. Check out Virtual Staff Finder today and get a free copy of my 44,000 word book The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Outsourcing to the Philippines. It’s Friday night, I’m too tired to type more! Hope you all have a great weekend :)

Hello from Bali! I really like it here. So far Bali is proving to be charming, sophisticated, and beautiful. Certainly a nice break from the Philippines which be a bit rough around the edges. It was great to record a podcast in the same room as @AnythingIan ! We’ve been getting a lot of work done this week, both on our core business and on a brand new information product we are cooking up. We are going to walk our listeners through the process of starting an internet based business from the ground up. We are hoping you find it entertaining and perhaps even useful. We are also newbies at a lot of this stuff, so we are hoping to get some help from you guys as well!

Hello from Malaysia! Well everybody I’m almost ready to hop on to a plane to meet up with @anythingian in BALI of all places. We are both long overdue to un-plug from the daily duties of our current lifestyle business, and focus on launching a brand new site that has some really cool implications for our lifestyle and current business. We are looking forward to sharing all of that with you on the podcast, and I’m sure that if we can be more transparent with our stuff on this show the listeners would be a HUGE asset to making sure we do things right. Ahem, here’s a hint: In this episode we get a great follow up from @DallasCarter about his 808FIT.NET weight loss website. If you haven’t yet seen Dallas’ incredible story clicksie this link baby and check out how a guy drops 190 and turns into a sexy beast. Issaac Dudek (@isaacdudek) also called in to ask two questions about the mindset of outsourced employees (we focused on the Philippines exclusviely) and the kinds of technology is prevalent in the Philippines. For the meat and potatoes we discuss 4 tips for deciding if a market is worth attacking, these tips are once we recently implemented as we have in the past week chosen two new hot markets to attack (very excited about that!), in terms of execution we’ll be following similar steps we took to create a $6,000 site in 6 months (that site was the last niche we selected). For the quick tips we talk about screen capturing, webex, and how to create great ebook covers in under 10 minutes.

Yeah buddy welcome back to another episode of the Lifestyle Business Podcast, got a little hung up there on timing we’ve been doing a lot of traveling and have been VERY busy with visitors, investments, and having a little fun too! In this episode Ian and I break one of our social standards– in general we are very AGAINST unsolicited critical feedback (UCF!) but we had a nice discussion talking about Dallas Carter’s great website. None of this applies to Dallas necessarily because there are plenty of business reasons why he might be doing what he’s doing or he could just be busy like the rest of us, but we thought it was fun to discuss a website on air so we broke the rule. We love to receive UCF so if you wanna send us some lovin’ feel free to drop some bombs in the comments. We talk about tons of other stuff in this episode and plow through as many listener questions as we could and still get out under the 30 minute mark. If you want to ask us a question or have us take a peak at your website, don’t be shy we’ll probably get back to you! Good times:)

I’ve been spending so much time responding to emails it finally dawned on me that I could respond with a podcast. WOW. Sometimes I am slow. That’s the new policy. In most cases we’ll answer questions that can benefit the whole community. Not only is this more valuable to everyone listening to the show, but I’m sure it will work out well for the person asking the question as well. I have opinions, but I’m absolutely certain that our collective audience knows way more about these issues than me alone. I just proofed parts of this episode and there are even things in there I could phrase a totally different way or see from a different angle– I’m sure there are some things in there we are just flat WRONG about… that’s gonna happen a lot. I’m cool with being wrong– its way better than not publishing a podcast. Enjoy the show ! We’ve made a lot of broad sweeping generalizations about entire countries in this episode. I’m interested to hear your opinions about some of these questions….

Hey you guys are good for a lot of things but nobody stepped up to tell me getting an office was one big fat stupid idea! JOKE! Kidding…No, I think as entrepreneurs growing a new kind of business, there aren’t any hard and fast rules so we end up testing out a lot of new ideas to see if they stick. One of this year’s big experiements was starting a brick and mortar office here in the Philippines. I learned a TON from doing this but it wasn’t really creating the explosive growth we thought it had the potential to do. We’ve also decided that scaling into more “lifestyle” focused internships is a much more effective way to grow our business in the short term than radically increasing our overhead and support stuff (um… duh?) So its not that the office was outright BAD, its just that everyone made big sacrifices to make it happen, and most of them hit home where it hurt most. We were having less FUN and spending more time on stuff like commutes and pushing ourselves to work outside of our natural rhythms. The key thing here is going to bat. We change our minds about what is working in our business very often, and to me thats a sign that we are pushing in as many ways as possible to look for ways to grow our business and have more fun.