We aren't usually the type for navel-gazing, but this summer marks an important milestone for us. 10 years ago, our desire to "find our tribe" led us to form the Dynamite Circle, a private membership community of location-independent entrepreneurs. Since then, there have been dozens of DC events all over the globe, and it has truly become a life-changing adventure for so many of the people involved in the community over the last decade. We've invited our good friend Jeff Pecaro on to the podcast...
Jul 15, 2021•42 min
This week's episode was inspired by a question from a listener. Katie recently graduated with her master's degree, and while she appreciated the insight that we've shared in the past about how to get a remote job, she wanted to know more about what it takes to succeed at a remote position once you get it. This got our wheels spinning, and we put together a list of five important factors that can help employees become "A Players" in their remote positions. This conversation is of keen interest to...
Jul 08, 2021•45 min
Nick Huber has been on a wild ride since we last spoke to him in 2019. Nick is the host of a podcast called The Sweaty Startup, and at the time he was running a business called Storage Squad, a storage company that helped students store their belongings at universities all across America. Covid threw that business for a loop, but Nick was able to make some fast decisions that allowed him to sell that company and pivot into a new endeavor, a multi-million dollar real estate private equity company...
Jul 01, 2021•54 min
Summer is here, and it's starting to feel like things are returning to "normal." For many of us in the community, that means that we're finally going to have the opportunity to pick up our backpacks and return to nomadic life. Jesse Schoberg is the co-founder and CEO of DropInBlog.com, a Software as a Service platform that helps users add blogs to their websites. Jesse has been a full-time nomad for over 7 years, and he joins us on this week's podcast to discuss how he was able to transition fro...
Jun 24, 2021•51 min
A few weeks ago we said something on this podcast in jest, but one of our more attentive listeners latched onto it. "I find myself some days waking up and saying 'are we going to make it?'" Our good friend John Ainsworth heard this and he reached out to us with a little bit of concern, hoping to find out more. What exactly does it mean when we ask that question, "are we going to make it?" We'll be seeking the answer to that on today's podcast, as well as sharing five principles that we have been...
Jun 17, 2021•39 min
We've learned over the years that being a part of a community of like-minded people is one of the most valuable experiences that you can have as an entrepreneur. This was our core motivation for forming The Dynamite Circle, our own online community of location-independent entrepreneurs, back in 2011. We originally built that community on a platform called Ning, largely because it was the best option on the market at the time, and it served us well for many years. Gina Bianchini is the former CEO...
Jun 10, 2021•32 min
This week's episode is full of so many recurring themes that we've seen over the years on this podcast, from the unique struggles that SaaS businesses face, to the decision between bootstrapping and funding, and much more. Derrick Reimer has had a long and storied career as a software entrepreneur, but he is perhaps best known as the technical co-founder of Drip, which he built alongside our good friend and former guest Rob Walling. Since exiting Drip three years ago, Derrick jumped headfirst in...
Jun 03, 2021•47 min
We've shared a lot of stories on this podcast from entrepreneurs who have started their own businesses, but one strategy we've increasingly seen to accelerate the path to wealth is to purchase a business that already exists and to leverage debt to do so. Today's guest is an expert at that. Shakil Prasla has been acquiring businesses through his company SZ Ventures for nearly a decade. He started with a loan from the Small Business Administration and now has a team of roughly 80 people who are ma...
May 27, 2021•35 min
Today's episode is all about creating content, in particular, how to create written content that people actually want to read. David Perell is the co-founder of an online writing school called Write of Passage, and he is an expert at teaching people how to cultivate ideas and distill them into writing. He's also an extremely savvy marketer, with tons of important insights into the future of social media and internet marketing. David joins us on today's podcast to share specific writing strategie...
May 20, 2021•54 min
This week's podcast is a little bit out of the ordinary. While we have been busier than ever this month over at Dynamite Jobs, we still can't help but find things on the internet to get worked up about. We thought it would be fun to take a look at five specific news items and ideas that have recently come across our desk that we just can't stop thinking about. These topics range from how to deal with FOMO, why it's important to get powerbrokers involved in your business, the "muddy middle" of fr...
May 13, 2021•40 min
Welcome back to another episode in our long-running series The Re-Readables, where we revisit some of our favorite business books to find out if they stand the test of time. How to Get Rich was written in 2009 by author and entrepreneur Felix Dennis. Felix was the founder of Maxim magazine, and he aimed to create a book about getting rich from "someone who didn't need to write it". The result is incredibly funny, direct, and thought-provoking. Joining us this week is our good friend Coran Woodma...
May 06, 2021•42 min
This week's episode features insider knowledge on the processes behind hiring and recruiting remote talent from someone who has been deeply involved in the industry for over a decade. Greg is the Senior Recruiter at Dynamite Jobs, as well as one of The Bossman's closest friends. Avid listeners might remember his name from the "ferret story" that we've shared on this podcast in the past. (We'll touch on it again in this episode as well) His addition to our team has been pivotal as we've been deve...
Apr 29, 2021•31 min
This week's episode is another installment of "The Re-Readables", a series in which we revisit some of our favorite business books to find out if they stand the test of time. Greg Gerber has become something of a regular contributor here on the Podcast. Greg is the founder of BitLift, and he is our go-to guy for all things blockchain and cryptocurrency. Greg joins us this week to talk about a book that has become eerily prescient, particularly among the cryptocurrency crowd. The Sovereign Indivi...
Apr 22, 2021•1 hr 3 min
We've been seeing some truly explosive growth at Dynamite Jobs since the start of 2021, and we've been helping more businesses than ever find great remote talent for their teams. When our friend Brendan Tully reached out to us on Twitter recently with some suggestions on how we could help candidates find better jobs, we knew we had to talk to him. Brendan is the CEO and founder of Robotmedia, which helps small businesses get more traffic and better conversions. He has been doing quite a bit of h...
Apr 15, 2021•57 min
What if your knowledge as an entrepreneur could benefit you as an investor? We've talked about cryptocurrency and unorthodox investments in the past on this show, but the traditional financial system is still something of a mystery to a lot of entrepreneurs. Enter Simon Stock. Simon is a longtime friend of ours, who cut his teeth as an entrepreneur running eCommerce businesses. These days, Simon is a full-time investor, and his approach to the stock market is not unlike the way that many of us h...
Apr 08, 2021•54 min
Our good friend Noah Kagan recently published a video that caught our attention. Noah is the founder of AppSumo.com, and his YouTube channel has been one of our favorite destinations as of late for thoughtful content about entrepreneurship and creating wealth. That video was called 10 Surprising Things About My Richest Friends, and in it, Noah outlined some specific habits that he has seen time and time again among the wealthiest people in his social circle. We were so enthralled by some of the ...
Apr 01, 2021•52 min
We always love receiving thoughtful questions from Tropical MBA listeners around the world. A few weeks ago, a winter storm in Texas forced us to re-run one of our favorite episodes of this show called 7 Things to Consider When Selling Your Business, in which Dan and Ian describe the process of selling their eCommerce business back in 2015. Our decision to revisit that particular story elicited a ton of responses from those of you who had never heard it before, and from those who were listening ...
Mar 25, 2021•36 min
We've been devoting a lot of time on this podcast recently to SaaS or "Software as a Service" businesses. That's because we love the upside of SaaS, including the potential for generating recurring revenue and creating life-changing exits. But is it possible to create a software business without knowing how to code? Alan VanToai is the founder of CrewFire.com, a brand ambassador and influencer management platform. Alan has very limited technical expertise, but that hasn't stopped him from creati...
Mar 18, 2021•52 min
When it comes to entrepreneurship, failure can often be more important than winning. So many of the greatest success stories start with failure because it's what we learn from those failures that ultimately leads us to the success that we seek. Today's guest describes himself as "an expert at failure". Sean Markey started his career as a special education teacher and spent the better part of a decade bouncing between jobs and going into debt, all the while trying to find a way to earn a living o...
Mar 11, 2021•1 hr 3 min
When we received an email from today's guest, we were fascinated by his story and we knew that we had to speak to him. Curtis Boyd is the founder of two incredibly unique businesses. The first one is a bespoke consultancy for high-level service companies and the second one is a software as a service business called Objection.co. Both of these businesses were created with a singular goal in mind: to identify and dispute fake reviews on the internet. Curtis began by disputing a single review for h...
Mar 04, 2021•50 min
After a wild and dramatic week in Austin TX, we are excited to return to our regularly scheduled programming and to highlight an entrepreneur with a unique career trajectory. Casey von Neumann started out as many of us do, by freelancing, teaching music classes to students in Atlanta, G.A. As her client base grew, she began scaling her services into a full-blown music school called Eclectic Music and has since built multiple businesses in the education space. It wasn't long though before Casey d...
Feb 25, 2021•47 min
Austin, TX was hit by a very unique winter storm preventing the team from putting out a full episode this week.
Feb 18, 2021•54 min
This week's episode features a story with a lot of familiar themes. Today's guest started out as so many of us do, with a weekend side hustle. Amar Ghose is the CEO of ZenMaid, a niche scheduling software for maid services that he co-founded in 2013. When his first attempt at launching a maid services company failed, Amar was able to use what he learned from that experience to pivot into a software product designed for other businesses in the maid services industry. Amar joins us this week to ta...
Feb 11, 2021•57 min
Today's podcast is about a topic that near and dear to our hearts and one that we've actually written a book about in the past. Longtime listeners know that roughly six years ago we sold our product business, and in the years since we have spent a considerable amount of time processing that decision and examining what happens not only at the core of successful exits but in the aftermath of them as well. John Warrilow is the author of a trilogy of books about this very subject, including Built to...
Feb 04, 2021•51 min
Since the start of the year, we've been focusing heavily on stories about starting new businesses as well as what we believe are the "fundamentals" of being an entrepreneur. When we received a video message from today's guest, who was telling us how excited he was to finally join our private membership group The Dynamite Circle, we knew we had to hear more about his story. In just a few short years, Sam Hill has grown his company E Comm CFO to nearly $300,000 in annual revenue, and he was able t...
Jan 28, 2021•39 min
We've been spending a lot of time over the past few weeks talking about the "business fundamentals", or the everyday habits that we believe entrepreneurs should be practicing. In keeping with that theme, we've decided to revisit some specific concepts that we've spoken about on this show in the past, and that we have seen at the core of so many successful entrepreneurial stories. On today's podcast, we'll be sharing four frameworks for how to get started with a profitable business idea in 2021. ...
Jan 21, 2021•50 min
January is one of our favorite months of the year because it's a time for starting over, setting new goals, and making plans for how to achieve them. It's no surprise then that our inbox starts filling up with messages from excited entrepreneurs who are looking for new ways to push forward with their businesses. This week, we're reaching into the mailbag once again to answer questions submitted by Tropical MBA listeners around the world. We'll be discussing a series of topics specifically relate...
Jan 14, 2021•43 min
Every once in a while a book comes around that completely captivates us and leaves us with more questions than answers. When we discovered "The Price of Tomorrow" by Jeff Booth, we knew we needed to hear more from the man who wrote it. Jeff is a Canadian-based entrepreneur who has built and invested in numerous companies, including BuildDirect, which he helped grow to $220 Million dollars in annual revenue. We were absolutely taken by the ideas he presented in his book, as well as Jeff's perspec...
Jan 07, 2021•1 hr 1 min
This is the time of year when so many people are making goals and resolutions. These types of things are great, but we've always believed that the best way to is to see real progress is to create healthy habits and practices. Successful athletes do this by continuing to practice their fundamentals, the core skills that are most important to their game. Today we're going to be looking at how we can practice our business fundamentals so we can improve our daily habits and set ourselves up for succ...
Dec 31, 2020•38 min
To say that the last twelve months were unpredictable would be a massive understatement. For ourselves and so many other entrepreneurs, the COVID outbreak not only threw a wrench into our plans for 2020, it completely changed the way that we did business this year. Many of us were operating in industries that were adversely affected by the pandemic on a profound scale. Others, particularly those in eCommerce, experienced one of the most successful years of their entrepreneurial careers. In today...
Dec 24, 2020•1 hr 5 min
