Blog

Someone – let’s call him Dougal – emailed me this question the other day: I want to start an online business but I heard that PayPal doesn’t work in some countries. Do you know if it works in South Africa? My first thought: Dougal is doomed ☹️ Because instead of Googling that question himself and finding the…

Jake Harris launched a video production company a year ago 🚀 On Reddit, he shares one of the biggest lessons he’s learned: I can tell you that for every client that has responded to a quote with, ‘Our budget is X can you bring your price down to match it?’ has never proceeded with the project…

This video showing continuous improvements made at a factory in the US had me drooling 🤤… As did the tour of the factory… Excellent example of a clean and efficient operation, the kind of “well-oiled machine” we can all aspire to when building a business, whether online or off.

From Wikipedia: Sprezzatura is an Italian word that first appears in Baldassare Castiglione’s 1528 The Book of the Courtier, where it is defined by the author as “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it” The…

A new video from Coffeezilla, breaking down what a couple of scientific papers 🤓 say about day trading… In short: “It is virtually impossible for an individual to day trade for a living, contrary to what brokerage specialists and course providers often claim.”

It seems the pandemic is making paid communities a more viable business model 🤗 Channing Allen writes about the trend and shares examples on Indie Hackers. These three examples, he notes, are all just a few weeks or months old:

This week I heard from a subscriber who recently started freelance writing and quickly landed an $800+ job on Upwork 🤑 writing product descriptions and blog announcements. These were the resources he found useful for getting started (all free): Related resource I came across this morning: a video showing how Mike Nardi learned copywriting and started earning $3000/month via Fiverr…

What have you learned about business that you wish you knew earlier? 🤔 Share your answer on Facebook or Twitter.

⛳️ Via Hacker News: Sales is a lot like golf. You can make it so complicated as to be impossible or you can simply walk up and hit the ball. I’ve been leading and building sales orgs for almost 20 years and my advice is to walk up and hit the ball. I reckon online business is…

Harry Dry of Marketing Examples explains how he did it 📈 What I find most insightful is a related comment he posted on Reddit: I do around an article a week. 5 days writing each piece. Then one day (8 hours) promoting it and replying to the comments, answering questions etc 5 days of writing to end…

Molly Conway writes that this is a trap, and quotes Adam J. Kurtz: “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life work super fucking hard all the time with no separation or any boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.” Which, aside from being relatable to anyone who has tried to make…

A follow-up to that Wired article I mentioned a couple of weeks back: ‘It’s bullshit’: Inside the weird, get-rich-quick world of dropshipping Dan and Ian from the Tropical MBA Podcast discussed that article last week and provided some much-needed nuance, though their conclusion is essentially the same: be wary of dropshipping as a business opportunity. However, as…