Like so many other entrepreneurs, we are fascinated by cryptocurrencies. We are naturally drawn to the technology because we believe it has the potential to cause some serious disruption in the financial sector. You might recall a few years back that we interviewed Nathaniel Popper about his book Digital Gold, which chronicled the origins of Bitcoin. Today's guest has written what feels to us like the next logical chapter of that story. Jeff Roberts is the author of Kings of Crypto, a book that ...
Dec 17, 2020•52 min
Even though 2020 has been a difficult year for some entrepreneurs, it has arguably been an all-time year for many people running eCommerce businesses. Longtime listeners know that we first cut our teeth in the eCommerce space, and we love keeping tabs on how that industry continues to evolve and innovate. It's no surprise then that today's guest made his way onto our radar. Aaron Rubin is a longtime veteran of eCommerce. Aaron's growing annoyance with the shipping costs related to his business d...
Dec 10, 2020•50 min
We are reaching back into the mailbag this week to answer questions submitted by Tropical MBA listeners around the world. In this edition, we'll be focusing on three specific questions that we believe get to the core of what it means to be resilient as an entrepreneur. We'll be discussing how much money you should save as a "runway" if you plan on leaving your job, the fundamental differences between hiring freelancers and hiring employees, and how you can navigate questionable business advice o...
Dec 03, 2020•36 min
This week's episode is about something that is incredibly near and dear to our hearts: personal blogging and what it means to write on the internet. To help us tell this story, we've invited two of our favorite 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 over at TaylorPearson.me that has been required reading for us for quite som...
Nov 26, 2020•1 hr 7 min
We've been receiving a ton of requests recently from listeners who want to hear an "old school" episode, so this week Dan and Ian are jumping on the horn to talk about the progress that they've made with their remote jobs business Dynamite Jobs. Since the start of the summer, we've been building a new software platform designed to make the hiring process a whole lot easier for entrepreneurs. Just a few weeks ago, we finally started onboarding users into the platform. So far the results have been...
Nov 19, 2020•53 min
For our money, there is nobody quite like Kevin Kelly. Not only is he one of the co-founders of Wired Magazine, but he is also the author of some of our favorite pieces of writing about technology, including What Technology Wants, New Rules for the New Economy, and the brilliant essay 1,000 True Fans, which has been discussed countless times on this show over the years. This week, Kevin is joining us for a conversation about technology and how it informs our lives and businesses. On this podcast...
Nov 12, 2020•54 min
Today's podcast is all about one listener of this show who took the concept of productizing and applied it incredibly well at a very high velocity. More than that, it's a story about endurance, applying systems intelligently, and the power of community. Ian Horley left a long stint at a successful corporate job in 2014 to create his own web agency, but he ultimately found himself incredibly stressed and unhappy. Today, Ian is the founder of HubSnacks, a productized service which offers unlimited...
Nov 05, 2020•53 min
Longtime listeners know that this is typically the time of year that we host DC BKK, our annual Dynamite Circle event in Bangkok. Each year, hundreds of entrepreneurs flock to the capital city of Thailand for the chance to meet and share ideas with like-minded people from across the globe. This has always been sort of a magical time for so many of us in the community, and to say that we are disappointed that we can't take part in it this year would be a huge understatement. It has become somethi...
Oct 29, 2020•48 min
It goes without saying that as internet entrepreneurs, we are fascinated by the future of money, and it's hard to talk about the future of money without talking about cryptocurrency. Greg Gerber is our go-to guy when it comes to simplifying the complicated world of crypto. We've invited Greg back on to the show this week to talk about the state of crypto in 2020. As this conversation unfolds, you'll hear about the philosophical differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum, the emerging lending indus...
Oct 22, 2020•1 hr 10 min
We've been devoting a lot of time to talking about software businesses in recent weeks. One of the reasons we are so fascinated by them is that despite how difficult it can be to start one, these types of businesses can have tremendous upside. Jordan Gal is the founder of CartHook, a software company that helps Shopify merchants present offers to shoppers at checkout. Jordan first reached out to us back in 2015 with an investment opportunity (and we turned him down!). It really shouldn't come as...
Oct 15, 2020•1 hr 1 min
Today's episode is all about software startups, and there are very few people more capable or qualified to talk about them than today's guest. Simon Payne first joined us on this podcast back in 2016 to talk about his role as the technical co-founder of Leadpages. Since leaving Leadpages in 2016, Simon has gone on to found multiple software companies, including a video tool called Convert Player, and a ticketing tool that we regularly use in our own business called EventsFrame. But, as you will ...
Oct 08, 2020•42 min
Today's episode features a longtime friend and mentor who shared an idea with us many years ago that changed the way that we thought about entrepreneurship. David McKeegan and his wife Carrie are the founders of Greenback Expat Tax Services. David first joined us on the podcast back in 2013, and he is singlehandedly responsible for introducing us to one of our all-time favorite concepts, The 1,000 Day Principle. This idea that it takes 1,000 days of full-time effort to replace the income from yo...
Oct 01, 2020•58 min
We talk quite a bit on this podcast about services businesses and the sorts of problems that they seek to solve for their customers. You may recall that Eagan Heath joined us to share his thoughts about this back in 2018 on an episode titled "The Knowledge Gap vs. The Efficiency Gap Revisited". In that episode, we spoke about whether it is better to serve your customers by filling a "knowledge gap" and teaching them why they need your services or to fill an "efficiency gap" by helping them optim...
Sep 24, 2020•1 hr 2 min
One of the promises of entrepreneurship is that there are opportunities to make money all around us if we can learn how to recognize them. Laurence Taylor has recognized some of them himself. Laurence and his wife are the founders of HipTen, a SwaS (Software with a Service) consultancy that works exclusively on the Salesforce platform for the insurance industry. Prior to getting into that niche, they were struggling, as many small startups do, to find their place in the market. Laurence joins us...
Sep 17, 2020•56 min
We love hearing from listeners of this show. We put out the call a few weeks ago for listeners to send us your stories, and you responded to us in abundance. Our mailbox has been positively chock full of listener voicemails about all kinds of topics. In today's episode, we'll be listening to several of those voicemails and weighing in with our own thoughts and observations. The topics range from how much location really matters, why hustle is the ultimate entrepreneurial muscle, the value of bei...
Sep 10, 2020•48 min
One of our favorite things about this podcast is that we get to talk to people who have inspired us and entertained us over the years. Matt Farah is certainly one of those people. Matt is somewhat of a pioneer in the automotive journalism community on the internet. His long-running YouTube channel The Smoking Tire and his podcast of the same name are both incredibly popular, and among our very favorites. Matt was gracious enough to talk to us on this podcast back in 2016 about breaking through o...
Sep 03, 2020•1 hr 2 min
A few weeks ago on this podcast, we mentioned that we had started writing a new book based around The 1,000 Day Principle, a recurring topic we've talked about many times on this podcast. In doing research for that book, a few common themes have started to become apparent to us. There are several different paths to becoming wealthy, some of which follow traditional social norms, and others exist in the fringes of society that many listeners of this show might find themselves in. On today's podca...
Aug 27, 2020•53 min
As the dog days of summer are coming to a close, we've decided to address several interesting topics that have come across our desk throughout the month of August. One such topic came in the form of an article by entrepreneur and author James Altucher, who discussed why he thinks ‘NYC is dead forever’. He argues that COVID-19’s effects on the business and social dynamics of New York are so far-reaching that the city will never recover. But we see it a bit differently - less as a terminal decline...
Aug 20, 2020•46 min
In past episodes, we've talked about "Founder Fit", or the idea that you should be running the type of business that is best suited to your own personality and lifestyle. But what happens if you're not doing that? It turns out that having a bad fit between you and what you're building can potentially lead to a whole lot of pain. Jesse Hanley is all too familiar with this experience. Jesse is the founder of an agency called TalentTree, and he recently made the decision to shift the focus of his a...
Aug 13, 2020•51 min
Rob Walling is no stranger to many of the listeners of this show. Rob is the host of a brilliant podcast called Startups for the Rest of Us, where he has shared stories of entrepreneurial ingenuity and struggle, and many concepts that we have discussed on this show have origins on that podcast. He is also the co-founder of a conference called MicroConf, which is a community and conference for bootstrap SaaS founders. After a rather impressive exit with his last startup, Drip, Rob has moved on to...
Aug 06, 2020•1 hr 3 min
On today's podcast, we are sharing some personal updates, as well as three specific updates about our core businesses. We are also announcing that for the first time in nearly five years, we are hiring a Community Facilitator for our private membership group The Dynamite Circle. Later on in the episode, we'll be exploring the idea of the moment in a business that Seth Godin refers to as "The Dip". You'll hear why this "middle period" of running a business is so difficult, how it feels to be in t...
Jul 30, 2020•46 min
Productized services have long been a subject of discussion on this podcast. They are a relatively attractive business model, especially among first-time entrepreneurs, and we've shared many examples over the years of how to create these kinds of businesses and scale them. Meryl Johnston, founder of the online bookkeeping firm Bean Ninjas, recently started a rather lively debate in the members' forum of our online community The Dynamite Circle with a post titled, ‘Are Productized Services Overra...
Jul 23, 2020•51 min
Christopher Gimmer is the Co-Founder and CEO of Snappa, a SaaS (Software as a Service) business that allows users to create online graphics quickly and easily. Christopher caught our attention recently when he opened up with a post on Twitter about the emotional cost of being an entrepreneur. We invited Christopher onto the podcast this week to discuss his own journey as an entrepreneur, how difficult it can be for entrepreneurs to find and maintain what he calls "a healthy equilibrium", and how...
Jul 16, 2020•50 min
It started with an innocuous-looking image of a yellow aeroplane and ended with a number of threatening letters from a law firm on behalf of the travel site Expedia. In today’s episode, we bring you the denouement of the story of why we decided to remove ‘that plane’ from our branding. And, to find out whether we really needed to do it, we’ve invited back our good friend and Intellectual Property (IP) attorney Sarah Kornblet Waldbuesser from Destination Legal. You'll also hear Sarah's thoughts o...
Jul 09, 2020•39 min
On today's podcast, we're excited to finally reveal that our remote jobs platform Dynamite Jobs is officially a ".com business". After three years of running the company with a .co domain, that .com marks a huge symbolic change for our company, but it didn't come cheap. Enter Rob Barbour of DomainSOS.com and DomainVIP.com. Rob has worked in the domain space for over twenty years and he owns a substantial portfolio of his own domains. He also specializes in helping people acquire domains that are...
Jul 02, 2020•1 hr 9 min
If we had to pick one word as our greatest motivation, it’s ‘freedom’. Freedom to live life on our terms, where we want, with the people we choose. Ali Marsland is the director of ‘The Effective English Company’. Ali began chasing her own freedom at the age of 18, as she traveled around the world for a year before embarking on a successful career in corporate communications. The corporate world eventually made her feel trapped, and when the opportunity arose to become a freelancer, she decided t...
Jun 25, 2020•30 min
At the beginning of the year, we recorded a podcast where we outlined some of our business goals and aspirations for 2020. We're now halfway through the year, and it's safe to say these past six months have been a period of disruption for entrepreneurs all over the world. Given the unexpected circumstances that we've all experienced, we thought it would be interesting to revisit those goals that we shared on this podcast back in January. In today's episode, we're looking back at how our business...
Jun 18, 2020•35 min
In 2009, we published an episode of this podcast called 10 Great Software and Tech Services We Use to Run Our Business. Over 10 years later, we've been challenged by one of our listeners to revisit that list and to talk about the core software and services that we are using to run our company today. In this week's episode, we are sharing ten of the most important tools and services that we are using behind the scenes in our business. You'll hear the specifics of how we are using these tools, and...
Jun 11, 2020•37 min
We've talked about the '1,000 Day Principle' at great length on this podcast. The idea is that it takes around three years of full-time effort for an entrepreneur to replace the income from their day job. But what does that principle look like in practice? Johnathan Solorzano is the founder of Solo Media Group Inc., a remote agency of web developers that are primarily based in Latin America. Johnathan joins us this week to share the story of his first 1,000 days running an agency, how he has fou...
Jun 04, 2020•48 min
Here at the TropicalMBA podcast we have been inspired and motivated by the stories of resilience and adaptation that you’ve been sending us. One such story that we received recently resonated strongly with us, in part because it was about an industry that we have been working in for years. William Griggs created Virtual Reality Rental just over four years ago. He built a ten-person team that brought VR experiences to conferences, parties, and other corporate events across the United States. Then...
May 28, 2020•50 min
