Category: Business

  • Dear Make Money Online People, Cut the Crap.

    I was recently scrolling through Quora to find questions to answer and I came upon this one: Oh, this should be good. Here are some of the answers: $60k per month using Bitcoins, wow that’s impressive. Amazon affiliate huh? Below that text was some fake screenshots of their earnings they probably got from Google images……

  • What Makes Your Product Different?

    Twice a month I have a mastermind group with a several of other business owners. In our most recent call I asked for some honest feedback about a product I’m working on. I ended up getting some very poignant thoughts from the group that helped me get clarity on where I should take the product.…

  • Sales are Everything

    I was watching Parks and Recreation with my wife the other night, and Aziz Ansari’s character Tom was starting a new business. He starts one every other episode, this particular business was renting upscale clothing to teenagers. How his character buys upscale clothing as a low level government employee is beyond me, but hey, it’s…

  • Make Your Own Damn Luck

    Successful people are lucky. Some will tell you luck is where preparation meets opportunity, and they were prepared. Definitely true. But it’s more than that. Successful people write books and do interviews to tell us how they made it, and we try to replicate their success. This doesn’t work, because you won’t have the same…

  • Trying to Focus on the System, Not the Results

    I recently heard Noah Kagan talk about his Proactive Dashboard. It’s basically a way to track metrics on what you are actively doing, not the results of those actions. For example, you track how many blog posts you write each week, instead of how much traffic you get. Or you track how much time you…

  • Delayed Gratification

    Most of the things you do when working on products won’t have any immediate effect. This is good and bad, when money is coming in you can take the week off and it won’t have any significant effect on your paycheck. When money is not coming in, there’s almost nothing you can do to stimulate…

  • The Great Content Marketing Experiment

    Since starting Holler Box, I’ve decided to make content marketing my #1 channel for customer acquisition. I’m considering it a big experiment, and a way to learn about content marketing. My goal is to build traffic to 5 figures per month in one year. It’s a lot of work for no money, and I don’t…

  • Feeling Down About a Lack of Success

    When you work really hard on something and you don’t see success right away, it can leave you feeling down. Feeling like you’re not doing the right things. Like you’re not as smart as you thought you were. Like you’re never going to see the upside. It’s hard to stay motivated when you’re feeling this…

  • Interview with Danny Van Kooten of MailChimp for WordPress

    I had the pleasure of interviewing Danny Van Kooten, author of the MailChimp for WordPress plugin. With over 900,000 active installs, and almost 8 million downloads, it’s one of the most popular plugins of all time. Danny has built a very successful business selling a premium version of his free plugin, and I wanted to…

  • The 3 Most Important Questions: Why, Who, and How

    Every product owner must be able to answer these 3 questions about their product: 1. Why does it exist? 2. Who is it for? 3. How are you going to reach them? These questions are critical to answer succinctly. Without a why, it’s difficult to tell people why they should buy your product. Without a…