Tropical MBA: Entrepreneurship & Founder Lifestyle

This week Dan is the one hard at work and Ian is asleep on the job. Stranger things have happened…ever seen a tabloid alien story? Dan took the opportunity to chat up Prateek Dayal, founder of startups like Muziboo and recently SupportBee. Dan and Ian met Prateek as they traveled across Vietnam this summer meeting up with folks from the Dynamite Circle and LBP listeners. Having started companies from India, Santiago Chile, and now Saigon Vietnam, they knew they had to have him on the show to learn more about his travel adventures and success as a location-free entrepreneur, including: How Solving Your Own Problems Can Inspire Your New Business The Net Different in Lifestyle and Business: Chile vs. Vietnam Cafes, Laptops, and the Sexy Saigon Wi-Fi Scene Using Known Quantities in Blogging To Get Hacker News Quality Traffic

Dan and Ian are both in the States and working on their next big thing – the Dynamite Circle Conference in Bangkok in October. Planning conferences is a lot of work that you never even thought of until the hotel was asking what kind of breakfast menus you would prefer during your third break on the second day. Who has a breakfast menu during their third break?! They decided to call in a pro and chat it up with Rob Walling, the founder of MicroConf (The Conference For Self-Funded Startups.) With two successful events under his belt, he had a ton of great information on How To Profit From In Person Events, including:  How To Pitch Your Audience  Getting Speakers and Sponsors – Who Is In and Who Is Out?  Keynotes, Breakouts, Speaker Sessions, Workshops – What Is The Best Schedule of Events  and How To Get Your Event On Hacker News

Dan and Ian got so many great questions from last week’s carefully orchestrated listener request that they decided to keep a few for future episodes that needed more than a quick answer. In this episode they tackle this frustrating issue that plagues many an information product or intangible service provider Head down and pencils up – this episode is full of pricing insights and strategies you need to have a successful online business, including:  When To Offer Your Customers Credit  Why The Guy Who Asks For Bro Pricing Isn’t Really Your Bro  How To Compete With Custom Pricing – The Bundled Pricing Trick That Works Everytime  What Price Anchoring Is  And The Most Important Pricing Model In Online Business

Dan and Ian spent the past week working diligently to poll the LBP audience and find the deepest darkest unasked listener questions. Or they sent a Tweet before the show started. We leave it up to you to decide what really happened. Either way, they ended up with some great questions and requests for advice from the LBP community, many of which were from listeners they’d never heard from before. Which made Dan grin, cause he loves you silent majority folks.

Dan and Ian spent a fair amount of time (ok…they spent a session) learning Crossfit from Joe Bauer in the Philippines during the recent Tropical MBA session. After they managed to drag themselves back to the microphone, they realized there was some techniques to work out on the LBP. The thing with starting a biznass is that it isn’t all rainbows and puppies. There’s some heavy lifting that you have to do to get that baby off the ground, and we’re not talking reps with a tropical umbrella drink. Sure, everyone wants the 4-Hour Work Week, but you gotta put in the work to make that happen.

It’s a special podcast here at the LBP. Dan and Ian are joined for a bonus-length episode as they host the Summer Marketing Mashup guys (Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income, Jason Van Orden & Jeremy Frandsen from Internet Business Mastery, and Tim Conley from Foolish Adventure) to talk shop on niche selection. So sit back, grab your beverage of choice and a notebook (or Evernote), and check out the final installment in the Summer Marketing Mashup series.

Dan and Ian and the folks in the August TMBA session have made it through 40 days and nights of rain and wind in Puerto Galera. Ok, it’s more like 7 days, but 40 sounds way more intense. With all these businesses working on taking their businesses to the next level, marketing is a key piece of the conversation. Yet there’s so many options when you are setting up your marketing strategy. Some are quick and dirty, some are putting in for some long ball. How do you choose? Dan and Ian went back to their notebooks and online archives (thank you GMail!) and sorted through to find the most profitable marketing strategy they had ever implemented. Only problem? It’s also their most expensive. But when you’re a serious lifestyle business baller, you realize that sometimes you’ve gotta make the investment of resources to get the explosion of customers.

How does a lazy blogger increase their email subscription rate by 257% and in the process get an automatic sales machine working for them and generating sales in their sleep? Well– you could hire John McIntyre— but for those of you who have teams or willing to do it yourself, we invited John on the show to get the details on how he did it. It’s also time for us to offer another Tropical MBA internship here at Badladz resort in Puerto Galera, Mindoro (sorry, so much for the “no more interns” thing), so it’s good timing to ask John about his experience here in the Philippines plus the business and skills he’s been building over the past year.

Happy Friday everyone! Today Ian and I are joining you from Puerto Galera, Philippines. We found a few minutes away from the events here at the Tropical MBA to discuss a topic that’s been on our minds lately: How do we frame up this new style of multi-national small business entrepreneurship, and what are some related business opportunities? A lot of people have been talking about this trend lately, we dug up this article to serve as the basic structure for this episode. We believe the opportunities to create services and products for people just like us– global-thinking lifestyle entrepreneurs– is massive. We also take a few minutes to discuss some of the feedback we received on our last episode

It’s been a really rough week for Dan and Ian. This is mostly due to the fact that they arrived in the Philippines to meet with 14 bright eyed participants of our August TMBA Session and it was a bit of a challenge. Not because of the participants. Instead they encountered a slight typhoon wreaking havoc on Manila, Batangas City & Pier, Mindoro, Puerto Galera, and Badladz Resort. In other words, they were surrounded by the storm. What should have been a fun 3-hour tour of the Philippines to get to the resort turned in to an adventure of epic proportions. But everyone arrived safe and sound, amped up on the adrenaline of their adventure, with huge grins on their faces and dates with their beds. Which is to say, in true internet meme fashion, sometimes owning a business isn’t all double rainbows and Tiger Blood. Sometimes, you are killin’ it and sometimes you are struggling to get it all done, through some pretty adverse situations and circumstances.