Scott Bolinger

Adventures in Software Engineering

  • 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……

  • Breaking the Endless Make-More-Spend-More Cycle of Doom

    “What each of us calls our ‘necessary expenses’ will always grow to equal our incomes unless we protest to the contrary” – The Richest Man in Babylon When I first started working as a freelance web designer, I was making a fairly average salary. The cost of living in my area is quite expensive, so…

  • WooCommerce to Shopify: Interview with Joel Bronkowski

    I had the pleasure of interviewing Joel Bronkowski, who worked at WooCommerce for many years, and now works for Shopify. My recent post about a Shopify-centered conference got a lot of attention, so I wanted to dive deeper into this topic. I was excited to hear from someone with experience in both WordPress and Shopify,…

  • How We Paid Off $40,000 in Debt Using the Debt Snowball

    I married my amazing wife, Jennie, 3 years after graduating college. We had a lot of great times together the next few years, including backpacking around the world for 6 months. We visited 10 countries, met some amazing people and had life-changing experiences. When we came back, it was time to settle in and start…

  • What I Learned About Real Estate Investing After Buying My First Rental

    I always thought real estate was a good investment, but I never really knew why. I just thought people who had a ton of money owned lots of real estate, and somehow that worked out well for them. Living in an expensive area like Southern California, my wife and I struggled saving enough for our…

  • 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.…

  • What’s Your Retirement Plan?

    Can we talk about retirement for a minute? It’s super important for business owners because we don’t have a pension, or a company sponsored 401k. I’ve talked to too many self-employed people who are in their 30s and have not started saving for retirement yet. This is a huge mistake. If you are self-employed, no…

  • Perspective on WordPress

    I just got back from an eCommerce conference called Content and Commmerce Summit. It was very different from the WordPress conferences I usually go to, and it gave me a lot of perspective. I go to the same events every year, and talk to the same type of people. I love WordPress, and so do…

  • 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…