Tropical MBA: Entrepreneurship & Founder Lifestyle
793 episodes - English - Latest episode: 13 days ago - ★★★★★ - 435 ratingsWith 10M+ downloads and thousands of listener meetups worldwide, the TMBA Podcast is the hub for 7 & 8-figure founders who’ve built life-changing businesses while attaining personal freedom. New episodes every Thursday morning.
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Episodes
TMBA590: Mailbag: How Long Does it Really Take to Achieve Freedom?
March 25, 2021 12:00 - 35 minutes - 28.7 MBWe 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 listeni...
TMBA589: Creating a Software Business Without Technical Expertise
March 18, 2021 12:00 - 52 minutes - 42 MBWe'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 fro...
TMBA588: Getting Comfortable With Failure
March 11, 2021 13:00 - 1 hour - 50.9 MBWhen 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 livin...
TMBA587: The Real Problem With Fake Reviews
March 04, 2021 13:00 - 49 minutes - 39.7 MBWhen 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...
TMBA586: The Reformed "Bad Boss"
February 25, 2021 13:00 - 47 minutes - 37.9 MBAfter 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 Ca...
TMBA585: There's No Business Like Snow Business
February 18, 2021 13:00 - 54 minutes - 49.8 MBAustin, TX was hit by a very unique winter storm preventing the team from putting out a full episode this week.
There's No Business Like Snow Business
February 18, 2021 13:00 - 54 minutes - 49.8 MBAustin, TX was hit by a very unique winter storm preventing the team from putting out a full episode this week.
TMBA584: From Services Failure to Software Success
February 11, 2021 13:00 - 57 minutes - 46.1 MBThis 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 ...
TMBA583: Building a Business With the Intention to Sell
February 04, 2021 13:00 - 51 minutes - 41 MBToday'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...
TMBA582: The Upwork Hustle
January 28, 2021 13:00 - 39 minutes - 31.3 MBSince 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 abl...
TMBA581: 4 Frameworks for Starting a New Business in 2021
January 21, 2021 13:00 - 49 minutes - 39.9 MBWe'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 202...
TMBA580: Mailbag: Making New Moves in the New Year
January 14, 2021 13:00 - 43 minutes - 34.7 MBJanuary 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 rel...
TMBA579: The Price of Tomorrow
January 07, 2021 13:00 - 1 hour - 48.8 MBEvery 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 per...
TMBA578: It's All About the Fundamentals
December 31, 2020 13:00 - 37 minutes - 30.4 MBThis 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 s...
TMBA577: A Wild and Unforgettable Year in Review
December 24, 2020 13:00 - 1 hour - 51.9 MBTo 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 to...
TMBA576: The Kings of Crypto
December 17, 2020 13:00 - 52 minutes - 42 MBLike so many other entrepreneurs, we are fascinated by cryptocurrencies. We are naturally drawn to the technology because we believe it has the potential to cause some serious disruption in the financial sector. You might recall a few years back that we interviewed Nathaniel Popper about his book Digital Gold, which chronicled the origins of Bitcoin. Today's guest has written what feels to us like the next logical chapter of that story. Jeff Roberts is the author of Kings of Crypto, a book th...
TMBA575: A Blue Collar Origin Story
December 10, 2020 13:00 - 50 minutes - 40.5 MBEven though 2020 has been a difficult year for some entrepreneurs, it has arguably been an all-time year for many people running eCommerce businesses. Longtime listeners know that we first cut our teeth in the eCommerce space, and we love keeping tabs on how that industry continues to evolve and innovate. It's no surprise then that today's guest made his way onto our radar. Aaron Rubin is a longtime veteran of eCommerce. Aaron's growing annoyance with the shipping costs related to his busines...
TMBA574: The Power of Entrepreneurial Persistence
December 03, 2020 13:00 - 35 minutes - 28.7 MBWe are reaching back into the mailbag this week to answer questions submitted by Tropical MBA listeners around the world. In this edition, we'll be focusing on three specific questions that we believe get to the core of what it means to be resilient as an entrepreneur. We'll be discussing how much money you should save as a "runway" if you plan on leaving your job, the fundamental differences between hiring freelancers and hiring employees, and how you can navigate questionable business advi...
TMBA573: The Art of Personal Blogging
November 26, 2020 13:00 - 1 hour - 53.5 MBThis week's episode is about something that is incredibly near and dear to our hearts: personal blogging and what it means to write on the internet. To help us tell this story, we've invited two of our favorite writers who both have a long and rich experience in the blogging space. Taylor Pearson has been a frequent guest and contributor on this podcast. He is the author of The End of Jobs, and he runs an excellent blog over at TaylorPearson.me that has been required reading for us for quite...
TMBA572: 4 Things We've Learned From Building a New Software Platform
November 19, 2020 13:00 - 52 minutes - 42.2 MBWe've been receiving a ton of requests recently from listeners who want to hear an "old school" episode, so this week Dan and Ian are jumping on the horn to talk about the progress that they've made with their remote jobs business Dynamite Jobs. Since the start of the summer, we've been building a new software platform designed to make the hiring process a whole lot easier for entrepreneurs. Just a few weeks ago, we finally started onboarding users into the platform. So far the results have b...
TMBA571: There is Only One Kevin Kelly
November 12, 2020 13:00 - 54 minutes - 43.5 MBFor our money, there is nobody quite like Kevin Kelly. Not only is he one of the co-founders of Wired Magazine, but he is also the author of some of our favorite pieces of writing about technology, including What Technology Wants, New Rules for the New Economy, and the brilliant essay 1,000 True Fans, which has been discussed countless times on this show over the years. This week, Kevin is joining us for a conversation about technology and how it informs our lives and businesses. On this podc...
TMBA570: Productizing Your Way to Freedom
November 05, 2020 13:00 - 52 minutes - 42.4 MBToday's podcast is all about one listener of this show who took the concept of productizing and applied it incredibly well at a very high velocity. More than that, it's a story about endurance, applying systems intelligently, and the power of community. Ian Horley left a long stint at a successful corporate job in 2014 to create his own web agency, but he ultimately found himself incredibly stressed and unhappy. Today, Ian is the founder of HubSnacks, a productized service which offers unl...
TMBA569: An Ode to DCBKK
October 29, 2020 12:00 - 47 minutes - 38.4 MBLongtime listeners know that this is typically the time of year that we host DC BKK, our annual Dynamite Circle event in Bangkok. Each year, hundreds of entrepreneurs flock to the capital city of Thailand for the chance to meet and share ideas with like-minded people from across the globe. This has always been sort of a magical time for so many of us in the community, and to say that we are disappointed that we can't take part in it this year would be a huge understatement. It has become some...
TMBA568: ‘I’m Fiscally Bitcoin and Socially Ethereum’
October 22, 2020 12:00 - 1 hour - 56.1 MBIt goes without saying that as internet entrepreneurs, we are fascinated by the future of money, and it's hard to talk about the future of money without talking about cryptocurrency. Greg Gerber is our go-to guy when it comes to simplifying the complicated world of crypto. We've invited Greg back on to the show this week to talk about the state of crypto in 2020. As this conversation unfolds, you'll hear about the philosophical differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum, the emerging lending in...
TMBA567: A Shopify Software Business Success Story
October 15, 2020 12:00 - 1 hour - 48.7 MBWe've been devoting a lot of time to talking about software businesses in recent weeks. One of the reasons we are so fascinated by them is that despite how difficult it can be to start one, these types of businesses can have tremendous upside. Jordan Gal is the founder of CartHook, a software company that helps Shopify merchants present offers to shoppers at checkout. Jordan first reached out to us back in 2015 with an investment opportunity (and we turned him down!). It really shouldn't come...
TMBA566: Why Do SaaS Businesses Fail?
October 08, 2020 12:00 - 41 minutes - 33.7 MBToday's episode is all about software startups, and there are very few people more capable or qualified to talk about them than today's guest. Simon Payne first joined us on this podcast back in 2016 to talk about his role as the technical co-founder of Leadpages. Since leaving Leadpages in 2016, Simon has gone on to found multiple software companies, including a video tool called Convert Player, and a ticketing tool that we regularly use in our own business called EventsFrame. But, as you wi...
TMBA565: The Origins of the 1,000 Day Principle
October 01, 2020 12:00 - 57 minutes - 46.2 MBToday's episode features a longtime friend and mentor who shared an idea with us many years ago that changed the way that we thought about entrepreneurship. David McKeegan and his wife Carrie are the founders of Greenback Expat Tax Services. David first joined us on the podcast back in 2013, and he is singlehandedly responsible for introducing us to one of our all-time favorite concepts, The 1,000 Day Principle. This idea that it takes 1,000 days of full-time effort to replace the income from...
TMBA564: The Knowledge Gap vs The Efficiency Gap Revisited (Again)
September 24, 2020 12:00 - 1 hour - 50 MBWe talk quite a bit on this podcast about services businesses and the sorts of problems that they seek to solve for their customers. You may recall that Eagan Heath joined us to share his thoughts about this back in 2018 on an episode titled "The Knowledge Gap vs. The Efficiency Gap Revisited". In that episode, we spoke about whether it is better to serve your customers by filling a "knowledge gap" and teaching them why they need your services or to fill an "efficiency gap" by helping them o...
TMBA563: How Software With a Service (SwaS) Startups Can Succeed Big in Traditional Industries
September 17, 2020 12:00 - 55 minutes - 44.8 MBOne of the promises of entrepreneurship is that there are opportunities to make money all around us if we can learn how to recognize them. Laurence Taylor has recognized some of them himself. Laurence and his wife are the founders of HipTen, a SwaS (Software with a Service) consultancy that works exclusively on the Salesforce platform for the insurance industry. Prior to getting into that niche, they were struggling, as many small startups do, to find their place in the market. Laurence joins...
TMBA562: Mailbag: Freedom, Location, and Love in the Age of COVID
September 10, 2020 12:00 - 48 minutes - 38.5 MBWe love hearing from listeners of this show. We put out the call a few weeks ago for listeners to send us your stories, and you responded to us in abundance. Our mailbox has been positively chock full of listener voicemails about all kinds of topics. In today's episode, we'll be listening to several of those voicemails and weighing in with our own thoughts and observations. The topics range from how much location really matters, why hustle is the ultimate entrepreneurial muscle, the value of ...
TMBA561: The Smoking Tire
September 03, 2020 12:00 - 1 hour - 49.5 MBOne of our favorite things about this podcast is that we get to talk to people who have inspired us and entertained us over the years. Matt Farah is certainly one of those people. Matt is somewhat of a pioneer in the automotive journalism community on the internet. His long-running YouTube channel The Smoking Tire and his podcast of the same name are both incredibly popular, and among our very favorites. Matt was gracious enough to talk to us on this podcast back in 2016 about breaking throug...
TMBA560: 3 Strategies for Acquiring Wealth
August 27, 2020 12:00 - 53 minutes - 42.7 MBA few weeks ago on this podcast, we mentioned that we had started writing a new book based around The 1,000 Day Principle, a recurring topic we've talked about many times on this podcast. In doing research for that book, a few common themes have started to become apparent to us. There are several different paths to becoming wealthy, some of which follow traditional social norms, and others exist in the fringes of society that many listeners of this show might find themselves in. On today's po...
TMBA559: A Summer in Review
August 20, 2020 12:00 - 46 minutes - 37.3 MBAs the dog days of summer are coming to a close, we've decided to address several interesting topics that have come across our desk throughout the month of August. One such topic came in the form of an article by entrepreneur and author James Altucher, who discussed why he thinks ‘NYC is dead forever’. He argues that COVID-19’s effects on the business and social dynamics of New York are so far-reaching that the city will never recover. But we see it a bit differently - less as a terminal decl...
TMBA558: Are You Running the Wrong Kind of Business?
August 13, 2020 12:00 - 50 minutes - 40.7 MBIn past episodes, we've talked about "Founder Fit", or the idea that you should be running the type of business that is best suited to your own personality and lifestyle. But what happens if you're not doing that? It turns out that having a bad fit between you and what you're building can potentially lead to a whole lot of pain. Jesse Hanley is all too familiar with this experience. Jesse is the founder of an agency called TalentTree, and he recently made the decision to shift the focus of hi...
TMBA557: Ascending the Staircase
August 06, 2020 12:00 - 1 hour - 50.4 MBRob Walling is no stranger to many of the listeners of this show. Rob is the host of a brilliant podcast called Startups for the Rest of Us, where he has shared stories of entrepreneurial ingenuity and struggle, and many concepts that we have discussed on this show have origins on that podcast. He is also the co-founder of a conference called MicroConf, which is a community and conference for bootstrap SaaS founders. After a rather impressive exit with his last startup, Drip, Rob has moved on...
TMBA556: Navigating the Dip
July 30, 2020 12:00 - 45 minutes - 36.5 MBOn today's podcast, we are sharing some personal updates, as well as three specific updates about our core businesses. We are also announcing that for the first time in nearly five years, we are hiring a Community Facilitator for our private membership group The Dynamite Circle. Later on in the episode, we'll be exploring the idea of the moment in a business that Seth Godin refers to as "The Dip". You'll hear why this "middle period" of running a business is so difficult, how it feels to be i...
TMBA555: Are Productized Services Overrated?
July 23, 2020 12:00 - 50 minutes - 40.9 MBProductized services have long been a subject of discussion on this podcast. They are a relatively attractive business model, especially among first-time entrepreneurs, and we've shared many examples over the years of how to create these kinds of businesses and scale them. Meryl Johnston, founder of the online bookkeeping firm Bean Ninjas, recently started a rather lively debate in the members' forum of our online community The Dynamite Circle with a post titled, ‘Are Productized Services Ove...
TMBA554: A Healthy Equilibrium
July 16, 2020 12:00 - 49 minutes - 40 MBChristopher Gimmer is the Co-Founder and CEO of Snappa, a SaaS (Software as a Service) business that allows users to create online graphics quickly and easily. Christopher caught our attention recently when he opened up with a post on Twitter about the emotional cost of being an entrepreneur. We invited Christopher onto the podcast this week to discuss his own journey as an entrepreneur, how difficult it can be for entrepreneurs to find and maintain what he calls "a healthy equilibrium", and ...
TMBA553: Protecting Your Passion
July 09, 2020 12:00 - 39 minutes - 31.6 MBIt started with an innocuous-looking image of a yellow aeroplane and ended with a number of threatening letters from a law firm on behalf of the travel site Expedia. In today’s episode, we bring you the denouement of the story of why we decided to remove ‘that plane’ from our branding. And, to find out whether we really needed to do it, we’ve invited back our good friend and Intellectual Property (IP) attorney Sarah Kornblet Waldbuesser from Destination Legal. You'll also hear Sarah's thought...
TMBA552: The Art of Buying and Selling Web Domains
July 02, 2020 12:00 - 1 hour - 55 MBOn today's podcast, we're excited to finally reveal that our remote jobs platform Dynamite Jobs is officially a ".com business". After three years of running the company with a .co domain, that .com marks a huge symbolic change for our company, but it didn't come cheap. Enter Rob Barbour of DomainSOS.com and DomainVIP.com. Rob has worked in the domain space for over twenty years and he owns a substantial portfolio of his own domains. He also specializes in helping people acquire domains that ...
TMBA551: Transitioning from Freelancer to Running a Business
June 25, 2020 12:00 - 29 minutes - 23.7 MBIf we had to pick one word as our greatest motivation, it’s ‘freedom’. Freedom to live life on our terms, where we want, with the people we choose. Ali Marsland is the director of ‘The Effective English Company’. Ali began chasing her own freedom at the age of 18, as she traveled around the world for a year before embarking on a successful career in corporate communications. The corporate world eventually made her feel trapped, and when the opportunity arose to become a freelancer, she decide...
TMBA550: Revisiting Our 2020 Business Goals
June 18, 2020 12:00 - 35 minutes - 28.4 MBAt the beginning of the year, we recorded a podcast where we outlined some of our business goals and aspirations for 2020. We're now halfway through the year, and it's safe to say these past six months have been a period of disruption for entrepreneurs all over the world. Given the unexpected circumstances that we've all experienced, we thought it would be interesting to revisit those goals that we shared on this podcast back in January. In today's episode, we're looking back at how our bus...
TMBA549: 10 Tech Tools We Use In Our Business Every Day
June 11, 2020 12:00 - 37 minutes - 29.9 MBIn 2009, we published an episode of this podcast called 10 Great Software and Tech Services We Use to Run Our Business. Over 10 years later, we've been challenged by one of our listeners to revisit that list and to talk about the core software and services that we are using to run our company today. In this week's episode, we are sharing ten of the most important tools and services that we are using behind the scenes in our business. You'll hear the specifics of how we are using these tools, ...
TMBA548: The First 1,000 Days of Running an Agency
June 04, 2020 12:00 - 48 minutes - 38.8 MBWe've talked about the '1,000 Day Principle' at great length on this podcast. The idea is that it takes around three years of full-time effort for an entrepreneur to replace the income from their day job. But what does that principle look like in practice? Johnathan Solorzano is the founder of Solo Media Group Inc., a remote agency of web developers that are primarily based in Latin America. Johnathan joins us this week to share the story of his first 1,000 days running an agency, how he has...
TMBA547: How Coronavirus is Disrupting the Events Industry
May 28, 2020 12:00 - 49 minutes - 39.9 MBHere at the TropicalMBA podcast we have been inspired and motivated by the stories of resilience and adaptation that you’ve been sending us. One such story that we received recently resonated strongly with us, in part because it was about an industry that we have been working in for years. William Griggs created Virtual Reality Rental just over four years ago. He built a ten-person team that brought VR experiences to conferences, parties, and other corporate events across the United States. T...
TMBA546: Adjusting to the 'New Normal'
May 21, 2020 12:00 - 55 minutes - 44.9 MBWhat do you do when you lose over half your Annual Recurring Revenue and test positive for Coronavirus, all within 48 hours? Jim Huffman described this exact experience in a post on his personal blog titled "The Hardest Day of My Career". Jim is the CEO of GrowthHit and co-creator of FunnelTeardowns, and when we discovered his blog post we knew we had to talk to him. Jim joins us on today's podcast to share his insights on how to create a successful marketing agency that aligns with your li...
TMBA545: Is Dropshipping Still a Valid Business Model?
May 14, 2020 12:00 - 42 minutes - 33.8 MB"Dropshipping" is one of the most used and abused terms in Digital Nomad circles. It refers to the practice of selling items without keeping inventory on hand, relying instead on a third-party manufacturer to ship the items directly to the customer. The term recently reached a much broader audience through a widely-shared piece in Wired magazine by Sirin Kale titled “‘It’s bullshit’: Inside the weird, get-rich-quick world of dropshipping”. On today's podcast, Dan and Ian weigh in with some of...
TMBA544: Should You Hire a General Manager?
May 07, 2020 12:00 - 43 minutes - 35.1 MBIn our book Before the Exit, we reflected on many 'thought experiments' that we wished we had run before we sold our business in 2015. One of those experiments was called 'The Mediocre CEO Test', which questioned whether it was smarter to hire someone to run your business than it was to sell it. Today's guest did just that. JP Ji is the founder of Pro Teeth Guard, an eCommerce business that manufactures custom dental mouth guards. When JP decided to shift his focus away from Pro Teeth Guard, ...
TMBA543: Taking the Entrepreneurial Leap
April 30, 2020 12:00 - 48 minutes - 39.2 MBOne of the most widely read and recommended books about business management is Gino Wickman’s 'Traction'. When Gino’s team reached out to say that he had a new book coming out that was aimed at helping would-be and early-stage entrepreneurs, we jumped at the opportunity to invite Gino on to the podcast to talk about it. On today's podcast, Ian sits down with Gino to discuss the ideas raised in his new book, ‘Entrepreneurial Leap’. In this wide-ranging conversation, you'll hear Gino's thoughts...
TMBA542: The Entrepreneurmobile Revisited
April 23, 2020 12:00 - 54 minutes - 43.9 MBWhether you’re saving a runway for a new business, or you need to cut your expenses to the bone due to the current economic climate, we know a lot of people are being forced to make some difficult financial decisions right now. On today's podcast, we are revisiting one of our most popular concepts, and something that we've discussed many times over the years as a sure-fire way for an entrepreneur to live a little more frugally. We're talking once again about the "Entrepreneurmobile", or how ...