This letter will go through each one of them, but explain why it may not matter at all for you specifically to make money.

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But first, here they are.

Market Cliche 1. - No one can beat the market

Heard this before? Even the best hedge funds in the world don’t beat the market consistently.

Sources, see the buffet wager, see general hedge fund performance charted against the S&P, see tony robbins 800 page book basically explaining that because you pay fees to advisors it ruins your compounding effect over a liftime.

These are all TRUE, but don’t necessarily apply to you, the retail investor.

Don’t Try and TIme the Market - It’s Impossible

Again, this is true broadly, but probably not true in specific cases. We’ll see why in a moment.

You Can’t Compete With Hedge Funds and High Frequency Traders

I worked in high frequency trading for years, and yes I can contest that you will never be faster, smarter, better educated, or focused than professional technology firms trading products.

Ok… so if all these things are technically ‘true’, what’s the point in trying to make money on your own as a retail investor (aka the dumb money)?

Because you don’t have to play the same game as your competition. In fact, a retail trader has advantages over all the genius, well funded traders out there at big funds.

Let’s get into them now, I call them the ‘retail edges’.

Retail Edge 1. You Don’t Have to Trade

Professional traders need to trade. They have to put bread on the table because they answer to fund managers, and customers of the fund. If you aren’t showing 20% + returns at your fund then you will be fired. That means if the market doesn’t seem great, or you don’t have a good idea you better find one or risk losing your job.

The retail trader doesn’t have this problem. They have their own job (most likely), or they’re fully independent and don’t have customers or a boss pushing them for quarterly profit figures.

Here’s an example. Let’s say there was a trade you were certain would make you 100% profit, but you couldn’t execute it for 1.5 years. Meaning you’d have to sit on your hands and do nothing else for that time.

As a retail trader, that would be no problem, go work on that fan-fiction movie script you always wanted to and wait for your winning trade to come in. Then bet it all and reap the rewards.

As a pro, you’d have already lost your job by then (no one is going to pay you a salary to sit around, you need to earn!).

Retail Edge #2 Getting Rich Off Crumbs

The big funds and traders have to manage unfathomable sums of money. Billions and Trillions. That means when they trade, it’s for massive amounts of shares/contracts/dollars.

Because of that, they can only really play in the biggest of markets (the most liquid) to make their bets.

You as a retail trader can exploit trade opportunities that are just too small to be interesting to big competitive traders. If a trade is only big enough to make 1-2k in a small stock, that could be massive for you, but ignored by the professionals as ‘not worth the trouble’.

This is where we live, trading the stuff that the big guys don’t care about (but still is big enough to make us thousands).

Retail Edge #3 You can Be Contrarian

You don’t have a boss to answer to, which means you can have the most unaccepted, wildly controversial opinion on the state of the markets and no one will care.

The hedge fund guys don’t have this luxury. When they make bets and decisions, they always need to justify them to their clients. And if their clients think they’ve lost their minds, they’ll pull their funds.

Watch ‘The Big Short’ (or read it) for an idea of what I’m talking about. In it Dr. Michael Burry makes the biggest (and smartest) bet of all time. But because it was so contrarian, his clients got scared and many sued him to try and pull their money out.

Only Trade With Your Edge

Professionals will only trade things they have a calculable edge on. They know they have an advantage and they bet accordingly.

As retail traders, we can do this too. But our edges are different.

We can wait for the absolute perfect time to make our trades.

We can find small opportunities with high probabilities of winning that the pro’s don’t bother with.

We can ‘bet against’ the crowd all day long without pressure from bosses, or clients.

And this is what the Lazy Contrarian newsletter will be all about. How do we make money as the little guy, without spending all day staring at screens, and without taking massive risks to our portfolios.

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We make enterprise software for regulatory and quality departments of medical device companies. If there was any industry where you think design might not matter, this would be it.

And you might be right. For the most technical, result-focused user design in terms of appeal doesn’t really matter. Ask any engineer that builds internal tools what their ideal application looks like and you will end up with a screen of 50+ buttons they can push in the exact sequence needed to work.

But in Enterprise, your customers are not just the expert end users. There might not be any technical users at all.

So how your product looks, and works matters.

In a 20 minute presentation, either a VP needs to be dazzled by smooth and shiny dashboards, or a disgruntled middle manager needs to feel that your thing will save them time, money, or headaches.

Here’s what can be done on a team level.

• Redefine what design means (hint, most people don’t know)

• Build a micro design loop into your product management process

In our world design does not mean the fonts and color schemes and what kind of shading we use on the buttons. It means how easy is it for for us to:

1. Show a new customer how to use our platform

2. Keep customers using it without frustration (and dare we say delight?)

That’s it. And this is how you can train your team to improve design day in and day out. Everything that gets made; for every screen, form field, menu item, and new feature you need to be asking:

• What is the purpose of this screen?

• Where do we want the user to look first, second, last?

• How does the user know this screen ‘worked’?

• Where do they go next?

If you can make obvious the answer to these four items then your ‘design’ will improve drastically. This is the 80-20 effect of enterprise design. Ignoring colors, re-imagined slick animations and the like.

Your application will demo better, and receive far more praise from customers if you can answer those four questions on every screen of your application.

Show don’t tell: A crusade against buttons and text

If you’re building fast (like us) it’s inevitable that buttons and text labels will start to clutter your interfaces. Engineers think in terms of click → action. The button nails this. The only problem is that once you get past 2-3 buttons on a screen only engineers will like using it. The rest of the mortal world will be overwhelmed and confused.

Here’s a quick example. Let’s say you have a field in a form called ‘Description’ that you want the user to optionally hide/show.

The button way: Slap a hide description/show description toggle button right above the description field.

The show way: Instead of adding buttons with more text, try blurring the description with the label ‘hidden’ over it, making that clickable to show the results.

Instill this in every engineer, and product reviewer

What I learned from reading a pile of top rated design books is that good ux is not that complicated. The best possible UX at the highest levels of innovation and design probably is, but we’re not there.

All good UX really comes down to is being aware of the main drivers of good experience (our four questions above), and constantly making our development and design choices based on the answers.

Barefoot and bare-chested I grab some cold water in the kitchen and head up deck. Our sailboat is bobbing gently in the morning waves, then sun is hot but the steady Caribbean breeze makes up for it. Erin’s up already and exercising on deck while streaming to her students.

Heart pumping from the swim, I sit at the table outside and pull out a notebook, a book, and my laptop. Doing a bit of ‘copy work’, until I get my mind rocking and ready to journal and then write for real. Coffee time.

A few hours of ‘work’ which involves 2 hours of uninterrupted writing. Essays, a book on our industry, blog posts for my fun side projects, landing pages/email copy to be sent off to developers, whatever.

By 10:30 or 11 it’s time to hit the real business/management stuff. Check in on how our deals are going, respond to any questions/fires etc. Maybe I need to give someone a ring, but the team’s capable of getting the job =done in the meantime.

The afternoon is for reading, and exploring (depending on where we are). Fun in the sun, and some relaxing with occasional mischief. A long nap with Erin (and maybe someone else), a few chapters of a book off my ever-present list.

The evenings for a nice dinner, and open time. If we have something good planned great, if we don’t, I’d watch a movie and maybe hack on some personal little initiative (a research project for the business, or one of my personal blog projects).

Now’s the time to ring a good friend and catch up.

Now it’s getting late, and time to unwind properly before bed with Erin (this can mean a whole variety of equally excellent options)….

—

Every 90 days I take another look at what would a perfect day be like for me, and then try and work backwards from there. This is a modification from Taylor Pearson’s get focused article (definitely worth the read by the way).

Setting goals, having dreams, your ‘vision board’ etc. is all fine and good. But when it comes to actually breaking down the things you ‘want’ in this life, most people fall short. Here’s how.

They don’t actually want the things they say they want.

This is a topic for another time, but the more I ask people about their dreams the more I wonder if they even know. Most people list either the same tired handful of high-end luxury brands (The Ferrari, the Gucci, whatever), or that they want to ‘travel more’.

Boring. And you don’t even like to drive in the city.

The second part of dreams that I find even more fascinating is this:

They have no idea how much their dreams would cost them.

We’re talking in real dollar terms, how much does your perfect life cost each year? “Way too much,” they scoff. But they never took 20 minutes to sit down and calculate it.

You can lease a Ferrari for a few thousand per month. Most people without a truckload of kids and a mediocre corporate job could afford it if they really wanted to. But that’s not the point, this isn’t an ‘how to lease overrated luxury cars’ article.

My point is that if you don’t break down the financial requirements of your dream lifestyle, you’ll never be able to architect a career/life plan that can ultimately get you there. Or, you may find out that some version of your dream life is attainable today.

Defining Your Dreams (For Real)

I find the best way to do this is to work backwards from a ‘perfect day’ daydream. This exercise isn’t new, and plenty of lifestyle design people have talked about it over years (despite few sitting down themselves to write it out).

So what does a perfect day look like? Where are you, who are you with, what do you see, smell, touch? Go into is a much detail as possible, and don’t worry about overkill, we’ll prune it down later.

Got it written? Ok, now let’s make a list of all the other major things that give you joy to spend money on. Ramit Sethi has some great writeups on this if you’re having trouble figuring out what you love to splurge on (everything is not an acceptable answer). What kind of stuff are you into that other people find funny you spend on? Does buying beautiful designer shoes bring you joy, or would you be fine rocking converse every day?

Here’s my list of major life value-adds:

• Flying business class on long-haul flights

• Having my ‘toys’ (Sailboat, and Motorcycle) to tinker on.

• Books, all the books.

• Staying in lavish Airbnb’s with a killer view.

Sit down and think through all the things in your life that spending on brings you joy. The idea is that if you could spend on all these things, that you’d be a major step closer to hitting your ideal life.

Buying Experiences Instead of Things

Advertising has us chasing things we don’t need, so we can impress people we don’t like (Fight Club paraphrase).

This is true, and can be incredibly sad if you really think about it… but I’d go one step further to alter this.

“Advertising has us chasing things, when what we really want as humans are feelings.”

The average man that buys a fancy or luxury car doesn’t derive his really pleasure from the machinery itself (except for a smaller percentage of mechanic enthusiasts that pick a very specific car for how it’s made), what they are really after is the feeling of owning it and being admired… ideally with a sexy companion in the front seat.

Think about any of your fantasy daydreams that involve expensive things (the yacht, the jet, whatever)… in your dream is it really the item itself that matters? Or is it the visceral experience that comes up. Ripping through the mountain pass curves on California’s Highway 1, looking out at the sunset with the warm salty breeze flowing over your head in your convertible…

That feeling is amazing, right?

Now think about it again. Would it matter if you were in a 150k BMW convertible, or a 5 thousand dollar used Mazda Miata to feel that same experience?? It wouldn’t, my friend.

And that’s my point, what someone at first blush would call at 100+ thousand dollar experience, can be had for a few thousand. Or even LESS, if you just rented the miata for a week and did a road trip with your partner.

Tim Ferriss, and Ramit Sethi have alluded to this in varying levels (they have drastically different styles), but it all boils down to the same thing.

The experiences you actually want, cost much less than luxury advertising would have you believe.

Lifestyle Arbitrage - Considering Your Options

Where you live matters drasctically in how much your dream life costs. Want to always go to amazing restaurants to eat every weekend? That’s going to come with a very different price tag in New York VS. Guadalajara.

Make sure you’re exploring the possibility of leaving your current big expensive city for an exotic affordable one. The world has become a very globalized place in the last 20 years, and with that standards of food, living, and entertainment have skyrocketed in notoriously cheap places.

In love with your New York or LA and couldn’t dream of moving? Fine, you’ll have to work harder and make more (but still doable) to get where you want t ogo.

If you’re not married to your current city, I’d encourage you to check out other parts of the world and see if you can get the experiences on your list, for less.

A quick note on relationships

“But money can’t buy you happiness!” you say? Well my friend, you are absolutely correct. However, it can buy the space, and situation to facilitate your ultimate happiness. If you hate the winter, money can buy you a ticket to the beach. If you love your family, money can get you a nice apartment that’s close to where they live (or vice versa).

I’d imagine on your list somewhere is a few entries about your family, friends, or a future partner to be-named-later who looks as good on the outside as they are on the inside.

You would be correct in saying that money can’t buy you relationships like this. But it can certainly help set you up for success. If building a strong relationship with your parents is important to you, then being able to fly out to visit them (or take them on epic family vacations) would be insanely valuable to you.

Your Perfect-Life Cost Spreadsheet

Once you have a list of all the components of your perfect life (where you’ll live, what you’ll do, what you’ll own etc.) it gets pretty easy from here.

Figure out roughly how much things cost (basic googling will suffice here) and start listing it out in a spreadsheet. What’s rent of a nice place in New York City? A few minutes of searching on Airbnb/apartment finders should get you a picture. These numbers don’t have to perfect, they just can’t be overly optimistic.

The main expenses you want to hit are where you live, how much you’ll travel, how much you’ll eat out, and any kind of hobbies/toys you want to pursue. I also like to factor in the more boring living costs (healthcare, retirement investing/saving etc.).

At the end of this exercise, a simple sum is all you’ll need to figure out roughly how much you’ll need to make per year to afford the life you’ve been fantasizing about. This number may shock you in both directions. For some people, it’s been well within reach all this time, for others a brief moment of sadness might wash over you as you realize there is no way to attain your budget without a lot of luck.

I made my spreadsheet template public by the way, you can copy it from Google Sheets here.

What Happens If I’ll Never Be Able to Afford My Dreams?

You really have only two options (aside from doing nothing).

The first is that you alter your career/business trajectory radically to give you a shot at earning what you have listed in your spreadsheet.

The second, is taking a long hard look at your wish list, and determining if you really do want what you say you want. This exercise is a bit more involved, and involves some introspection and a pretty major mindset shift (for some).

How do you approach it? My next article is going to tackle this in insane detail. Be sure to jump on my ragtag list of travelers, entrepreneurs, lifestyle designers and mainstream misfits so you don’t miss it.

Some of the first ‘lessons’ I ever took in the craft were over summer break in my late teens. My Dad thought it’d be fun to rent some Sunfish and mess around on the lake. Turns out we needed more instruction than we originally thought, but we were able to get out there 5 or 6 times mess around and make it back to the beach or more or less one piece.

I was hooked, not so much on the actual act of Sailing, which still terrified me due to lack of any skills or instinct whatsoever, but in the possibilities that means of travel can bring the salty dog that tames it.

A quick search on youtube brings you no less than double digit thousands of videos of ill-advised sailors throwing caution (sometimes) to the wind and exploring all over this beautiful planet. Some on fancy drool-inducing yachts, but even more on what I’d call ‘Craigslist Specials’. Just making it work, and cobbling their noble vessel together with all the duct tape and zip ties they can carry.

If you want to travel around the world on a powerboat. You’re going to need some serious engines, maintain them, and you better learn how to operate them safely. Then just buy tens of thousands in fuel and you’re on your way!

In a sailboat, you can learn how to use the wind in a weekend, and even something as cheap as a $10,000 hunk could get you from Florida all the way through the Caribbean islands. Note, that’s not advisable or comfortable, or even safe… but it’s possible.

With a few cables, and some old sails, you can get pretty much anywhere you want… if you have the time that is. And that’s the beauty of it. What’s the hurry? The journey is the destination, baby. Especially if that journey only costs you about 30 bucks in gas to get across an entire ocean.

The dream is clear to see. You wake up to a stunning sunrise (or in my case 9AM sun streaming into the cabin), and sip your coffee in your boats cockpit while gently bobbing in turquois carribean waters.

Maybe you do some work, or maybe you make some breakfast, plop down a map (chart) and plan out the days adventure. Exploring caves in the national park you’re parked in front of, hopping over to another island, meeting up with some newly made sailing friends who just cruised in the the area… and on and on.

And if you’re fortunate to have a girlfriend who loves both you and the sea, then the picture is pretty much made. Certainly no complaints about your lady lounging in bikinis day after day.

I don’t think I have to do much more selling her to convince you that a winter bobbing around the Caribbean is a very solid dream to have and make happen.

Alas, but dreams cost money my friend. At least this one certainly does at first blush.

What’s Required

So how do we accomplish this goal, of say 1 season (8~ish months) sailing and exploring the Caribbean? And more importanty, how do we do it if we’re not fabulously wealthy or have trust funds (damn you, Mom and Dad) to cash in?

• We need a boat that’s safe and comfortable (that we can afford)

• We need to know what the heck we’re doing on it.

• We need enough time to achieve both of the above.

The first is a matter of budget and research. The second is a matter of practice and some formal training, and the third is really just a function of how much I want to sacrifice and prioritize this.

The Timeline and Route

Timing wise, next ‘Winter’ would be ideal, setting sail by November through April/May pending the storm seasons and how far we actually make it.

I’m not big on planning a ‘route’, so lets just say we go ‘down’ as far as we make it. At the end of the season, will be a decision to store the boat, try and sell ‘in-place’, or boogie it all the way back up to Florida to finish out the adventure. I suppose there’s always the possibility that we get hooked on the life and want to carry on, through Panama/central america as well.

A Reasonable Budget for the Caribbean

This is where things get interesting. From my research and knowledge of boats, you have everythign available from the bareboans shit pile at 15k all the way up through a beautiful newish-production boat at 120k+.

That’s a pretty damn big variance, so to help zero in I think it’s important to establish exactly what need to have first. Then it’ll simply be a matter of researching boats with that filter criteria and getting an average cost idea.

I’ve made a detailed spreadsheet for this (shocking, I know), but we can list out some of the big must-haves in terms of boat and hardware.

Size

I don’t see us surviving on anything smaller than a 36 foot boat. I know couples have traveled the world on 30 feet and less (and love to tell you about how economical and great it is), but there’s no way my introverted sel would be able to survive all of that close quarters confinement.

Living Space

We need a big and comfortable bed (Queen is ideal), and a properly size bathroom ideally with a separate shower to keep my girlfriend sane.

Boat Gear and Accessories

Good sails, stronge anchor setup, a dignhy, a Bimini (sun/rain cover for the cockpit), autopilot, and AIS Radar/VHF Radios are all essentials to safe and efficient cruising life. All have a dollar amount (if yo uwere to buy them new), but the real value is in being able to find a boat for sale that already has them included.

Starklink and Electrical

To be discussed later, but it’s pretty much guaranteed that we will both be working our way through this adventure. The budget may allow for some less ‘frantic’ working on my end, but I know Erin will want to (and should) keep her day job. That means we’ll be relying on the wonders of Elon Musk’s Starlink to keep us connected to the money-making world.

Fortunately, I’ve already tested this out rigorously on a boat. So I know that with enough battery/solar power (and a gas generator for backup), we’ll have no real trouble.

Some form of Air Conditioning

This goes at the bottomo of the list for it’s not truly an ‘essential’. Though I’ll know I’ll be glad I sprung for it on those brutally hot middays when my lady is stuck onboard working and fans won’t cut it.

Water Maker

Another very overlooked and very worthwhile accessory on a cruising boat is a water maker. The alternative? Lug giant jugs of water back forth in your Dinghy to shore to fill up (hopefully) nearby your boat. Plenty of people do it, we will not be among them.

And on and on forever

You can really get crazy with fancy boat gear and creature comforts and blow as much of your budget as you want. But these above are the absolute essentials to safe and comfortable cruising. I’m hoping that the ability to do some work along the way offsets some of the additional costs.

Go Now - Go With What You’ve Got

My favorite saying in the sailors world is ‘Time and tide wait for no one’. Ay, it’s true. The online sailing forums/groups are chocked full of retirees who are perpetually waiting for the time to be ‘right’ to set off for the horizon. They are waiting on more cash, to have their boat setup just right, to retire from the job they couldn’t care less about with ‘enough in savings’.

Sometimes waiting and being strategic is the prudent thing. Hell, this whole series of articles is about waiting for the ‘time to be right’. But, with one key difference. I want to use these articles to set a firmer timeline, and actually identify what it takes to make a dream like this happen. The skills, the cash, all of it.

Fortunately, I’ve been building the sailing skills necessary for the last several years with pretty intense focus (another article on this soon for those that are curious).

As for the budget part of the equation. My approach to this is simple.

1. Figure out what we want/need (already done in this article)

2. Perform some rough ‘boat research’ to see what’s out there that has what we need (next article)

3. Add in some buffer costs, and then simply tally it all up.

That will get my ‘target number’ needed to buy the boat and set off. It likely will be higher than what I have in the bank right now… so that’s where the planning comes in and the ultimate question. Will a little over 1 year be enough time for me to close the gap between what I have, and what I need?

Time will tell.

Coming Up Next

My idea was to write a series on each of the biggest components in order ot make this kind of trip happen by next winter, 2024. Following articles will include:

• The Boat - Research, budgets, and buying decisions

• The Skills - how the f*ck do you learn to sail and navigate safely (and all the other things?)

• The Plan - Where to go, when, what to do when you get there?

• The Budget - What will it all cost at the end of the day (and how to make the cash needed)?

• The Why - Romance of the sea, philosophy of living alternative kinds of lifestyles, and all the existential reflections needed for such and undertaking.

Stay tuned my land-loving friends, things about to get interesting.

Sincerely,

Ethan

The feeling of drowning is not news to anyone who’s been running an internet based business.

We hire cheaper people overseas, teach how them how to do the things we need in our business, and (hopefully) make some kind of profit on their efforts. A

For being a community that prides themselves on efficiency, I’ve always found it interesting how averse so many entrepreneurs are to hiring their own assistants. Our business runs like a swiss watch, but we forget to file our taxes on time year after year or send thoughtful gifts to our parents (even though we love and appreciate them). If you think about it briefly, this phenomenon makes sense. There are only so many hours in day, right?

If you’re hyper focused on making a company work, dealing with customers, putting out fires, and then of course building the actual product/service… you barely have time to breath, let alone organize your own life.

At least that’s certainly how I felt. Barely staying afloat until the weekend, and then using that precious time with no meetings/calls to catch up on as much administrative paperwork as possible.

“Why don’t you just hire someone to do that for you?”

Ugh. Fuck you.

This is what an average bystander, or mediocre business coach will say nonchalantly whenever an entrepreneur is in the thick of it and really hurting for time and sanity. And it’s the easiest thing in the world to say (which is why it’s so frustrating). It’s the equivalent of telling a drowning person “well if you just tread water more efficiently, you’ll be fine!”.

It’s true, but it’s not always the most useful advice in the real world. But bad coaches and our friends don’t live in the real world of entrepreneurship. They live in the world of idealism, a far easier (and more profitable in the short run) place to be.

So we know we’re drowning, but we don’t have time to build our life raft (or yes, hire someone to build it for us).

The reason for this is that hiring a legit assistant is hard. Training them on how to manage your life (while you can barely keep it together) is even harder. Here are the giant time-consuming, soul sucking tasks one must do in order to start actually seeing results from an assistant.

• You have to draft a job post that is interesting and enticing to an assistant

• You have to post it somewhere, and plow through a mountain of resumes of people that didn’t even read said job description.

• You have to ‘interview’ several people and see if they’re a good fit.

• You have to figure out if the good fit lied about all of their skills/experience on their resume.

• You have to negotiate an offer, get them onboard, and train them on your life.

• You have to evaluate their progress, and course-correct as they make mistakes and learn.

• Replace them if they leave (without spending another massive chunk of hours repeating this process)

And of course, if your candidate fails in any one of the steps, you pretty much are starting over from scratch with someone new. Now does it make sense why “just hire someone” is absolute nonsense?

But imagine being able to have someone come start working for you today. They’d be able to look through all your emails, calendar, and figure out how you want things to work and what would be ideal for you.

They’d catch onto the fact that every 6 weeks you go get your hair cut, and that you had bookmarked a bunch of flights and airbnbs for that friends trip to Mexico.. but had forgotten to respond to the group email thread and get it pushed through. Then they sat on the phone with your internet company to troubleshoot some annoying billing issues and get you a partial refund credited to your account.

What if you had someone that just drove all of the little things in your life that pile up home towards completion? And then wrapped them up with a nice bow in a weekly summary email. Checked that off, that too, and don’t forget your Mother’s in town so I booked a table at a new restaurant for you both. The info is in your calendar already.

Fortunately for you, you’ve stumbled onto the blog of a meticulous psychopath that finds it enjoyable to build, write and organize insanely detailed instructions on how to do various things… like finding, hiring, and training an executive assistant.

I spent just under a year obsessed with the idea of efficiently finding, hiring, training, and managing an assistant that would run my life without me constantly needing to teach them stuff.

And it wasn’t just about finding that “perfect” assistant, it was about writing instructions so clear, that even if the first person I hired left I’d be able to slot in another and pick up right where they left off. Turnover is killer for a business, and even moreso in a business of 1 (you).

The Components of Executive Assistant Perfection

There are three big pieces to nail when it comes to your EA. Finding them, telling them what to do, and then making sure they do it. Sounds pretty simple, right?

A note on Executive Assitants Vs. Virtual Assistants

This is kind of a funny distinction, but it’s worth addressing here. The main different between an EA and VA (aside from one sounding cooler and more professional) is the autonomy and responsibility to oversee other people. VAs job is to follow the script, over and over again. an EA can be tasks with a broader challenged like “Plan my vacation”.

Like most things, it’s simple but not easy to do in the real world when you’ve got endless meetings and interruptions, and weekends to plan with spouse, family vacation coming up and then the dog gets sick. Life is too messy to start new projects right now (and spoiler alert: it always will be).

So I’ve fast-tracked all three of these big pieces for you in the most plug-n-play way possible. Here’s how it’ll work.

Finding and Hiring Your Executive Assistant

First we need to find the person that’ll take over your life and your daily tasks. This is where things go completely off the rails for most people. They dont’ know where to look, what questions to ask, how to recruit.

There are ton of good remote work job boards these days. To list a few:

• Upwork (old school, but i still find so many of my best people here)

• DynamiteJobs -

• Remoteok job board

• Infinite more on google

Posting

Then we need to craft a job post that will attract the ‘right’ kind of person. I’ve got a template for this, that you customize based on your personality and own values.

Filtering

Then it’s time to filter out all of the templated or ChatGPT written cover letters from the spam candidates (this is 95% of them). After that, we can actually review and assess the legitimate candidates.

The Challenge

Now that we’ve gotten a few solid looking prospects, it’s time to send them a challenge to do for the next step. Do not bother getting them on the phone at this point, just send the custom challenge (I have the template for this as well) and see who completes it well.

This does a few things, it tests for competency, their level of english (important), and most importantly their level of ‘give a shit’. Are they hungry and competent? We’ll see based on their challenge response.

The Interview

Here’s something a lot of people don’t understand when hiring. By the time you get on the phone with the person, you should already be 90% certain they have the skills you need. The phone interview is for assessing their vibe, and how sharp they are ‘in person’.

Personality fit is hugely important, especially with someone you plan to share a lot of details of your life (and ultimately trust with a lot of personal knowledge about you).

This one is a bit more of a ‘gut feeling’ type of analysis, but you should use the interview questions script I wrote as a starting point, then customize it to your specific needs. Maybe even throw a few technical questions to flesh out the phonies.

The ‘VA Finder Business Models’

I’m not sold on these yet. The pitch is very compelling (they find, train, and vette assistants for you so you’re just ready to rock). The only problem wit hthis, is that they do it at a markup to make money… and that extra pricing could destroy the whole advantage of having your assistant anyways.

Depending on how muc you make at your busines or job, a $25/hour fancy EA might be completely out of the question. If it’s not, then maybe htese services are worth a shot, but i think with a little leg work up-front you can save thousands a year.

Instructions - Telling Your EA What to Do

Now that you’ve spent 2 weeks and hired the perfect seeming assistant. It’s time to put them to work and get them helping you.

If you’ve never hired anyone before, you’re in for a bit of a rude awakening. Even for good employees, you tend to spend the first few weeks (longer on more complex jobs) spending more time teaching them how to do the thing than it would have taken to just keep doing your self.

This is the ‘dip’ in hiring people, where productivity actually decreases (because you stop doing it yourself, and start teaching someone new). This period totally sucks, and can be a real morale crusher, especially if 3 weeks in you find out your new employee is actually terrible.

So the name of the game is to reduce this period as much as humanly possible. We want your new assistant to hit the ground running, and start saving you time from day one. Not day 90.

In my Executive Assistant Operating System, I give you a mountain of ready-built instruction manuals on the highest value tasks for most people (managing your inbox, your calendar, booking your travel etc.) that your EA can start using right away to save you time.

Obviously, I cant pre-write instructions for every task in your life (so many different entrepreneurs need different things), but I can and have given you the framework and templates for building your own stuff quickly. Any afternoon inside Notion with a Loom Video Recorder account is all you’ll need to build up a rich library of explanations of how you do stuff.

Managing - Make Sure Your EA Is Actually Doing the Job

Most people are naturally terrible managers. Even most professional ‘managers’ are terrible at it (as you probably have seen if you’ve ever had a job in any industry).

But you’re not going to be one of them.

Management is hard to set up, but easy to maintain once things are rolling. You do the planning upfront, and then look like a hero later on when the results come in.

There are two big components to this. The first is making sure that your EA is working on the things you want them to (are they spending the time on the priorities etc.). The second is measuring how effective they are at doing things (are the results coming in?).

The temptation is to either go way too casual with both of these things, or way too intense. Too casual and you’re getting a shitty email every weeks about ‘how things are going’, and too intense your poor EA is spending 25% of their time just trying to make your reports about how they’re spending their time.

I’ve experimented with both sides of the spectrum, and I think I’ve found the perfect balance for most small-scale entrepreneurs or solo operators. Included, are my daily and weekly reporting templates (with instructions for your EA on how to fill them out and where to store them), as well as examples of how to set measurable ‘goals and metrics’ for your EA to be measured against.

This is how we know that they’re doing a good job. Your free time is increasing, your website traffic is going up, etc. These metrics will be super specific to your business and life… but usually they fall into the same broad categories.

Let’s Get On With It - Where to Start

Now you should be familiar with the biggest components of managing an EA and getting them rocking for your team from day 1. Where to from here?

You could try to build out all of the pieces we discussed yourself. It took me almost a year of testing and refining (and hiring the wrong people), but maybe you’d be better at it.

Or you could just download the massive and detailed Operating System from me and import directly into Notion. Save yourself months, with a few bucks and 30 seconds of time.

What’s Included in the Executive Assistant Operating System?

The Hiring:

• Job description templates (attract the right kind of people, not just the most qualified on paper)

• My list of the most effective and least spammy Remote Job Boards

• Framework for how to filter out the junk resumes and template cover letters to find the golden candidates.

• Interview Challenge Template - squeeze out the exaggerators and the talkers, and end up with a list of candidates that actually know what the heck they’re doing.

• Phone call script and interview questions (find the right fit for you, not just someone that can do the job).

• Negotation Mini-Master Class. We aren’t negotiating hostages with terrorists here, but you need some skills and info on how what to offer, and how to negotate with your new hires.

The Instructions

• EA Instructions Galore, including primary life ones like managing Emails, Calendar, Booking your travel etc.

• Clear and concise templates for you to easily build instructions for common tasks in your own life.

• A time logging ‘Assessment’ template you can use to have your EA produce detailed analysis of the time you’re spending on every part of your life.

• Reporting and Goal Rubrics, for your EA to fill out daily and weekly and keep them on track.

• Prioritization And Goal Setting Tables for you ( plus my personal examples)

• Social Media Management and Growth Reporting templates (have your EA take over your personal social media posting, and business posting while tracking growth meticulously).

The Managing

• Your personal productivity/goals tracker (simple to follow, use, and update unlike most over-the-top goal setting systems)

• Reporting for your EA and progress tracking.

That’s a lot of stuff - how much does it cost?

$8 bucks, seriously.

Why so cheap? Why give away a year of my life’s experience and frankly a shit ton of hours cranking away on the laptop after too much coffee? A few reasons:

Because this isn’t my main gig. I make my cash through my business, i just like this writing stuff and even more so I like sharing it and helping people out.

Also, I want to over-deliver so you’ll leave me a killer review or testimonial video. Maybe with enough raving fans, I’ll be able to sell some more useful stuff down the line.

Try it Risk Free

Look, this things only 8 dollars. If you’re hiring an EA for likely between 10-20 per hour, i’d hope that this price point isn’t exactly an issue.

But if you really think my Operating System is a pile of rubbish soaked in diesel and sweltering in the summer heat, just email me and I’ll send you the money back, no biggie.

Grab It Today

If you’re as swamped daily as I was, thank you for taking the time to read and check out what I believe is a complete gamechanger of a system.

Since you’re already here, go and download the templates now. If you wait, it’ll probably slip through the cracks and get forgotten like all the other pile of todos in your inbox. Make it happen today and get cranking on winning back some more of your free time!

I’ve listened to podcast after podcast about people who truly had amazing stories. Whether they hit it right the first time, or fought through a string of failures until making it big. Some exceptional people that pursued the right opportunity, with the right team, and on and on…

And the big public explosions of failures play just as well as the smashing successes in media.

Almost more so.

People have yapped endlessly about how social media distorts our perception of success by just showing us the hyper successful outliers, and that’s still true. But I think in business, there’s an even more sinister entrepreneurial programming going on that fellow startup folks should be aware of.

It also distorts our sense of what failure feels like.

There are a ton of business models out there, that simply are not ‘grow or die’ type plays. In fact, most of them are not.

Most solid businesses (internet based or otherwise), are more of a slow compounding of effort/reputation/relationships over time. These kind of ventures take years to get chugging along, but when they do finally hit a stride, it seems like the easiest business in the entire damn world.

Most of the time, it feels like you’re treading water and going nowhere. With brief periods of growth to the next level. Most of the time, it honestly feels like you’re failing (because you aren’t growing, or getting big validating wins day after day).

In our business (CM’s) we stack up with the best of them when it comes to marketing, sales, service, product delivery… and yet while we scrap it out for enough work to pay everyone, our competitors seem to rake it in year after year.

What’s the difference? Are we just delusional in what we have, and are being humbled by the market? Not quite.

The biggest differentiation between the fat cats and starving dogs of this industry of Regulatory, is your amount of time in the game and proportionate network growth. These guys aren’t out there hunting for new leads constantly, they’re accumulating long term clients year after year, and building up such a solid foundation of relationships with their clients that the opportunities flow right on in.

So, then it’s a marathon and not a sprint like much of the tech start-up world. We aren’t scrambling to get our products and services out there, they have (mostly) existed already and will continue to exist for decades.

I call this the ‘stair-master’ type of business model. I jut made that up now, and realize it’s not great but we’ll stick with it. The idea is that instead of a massive exponential curve (like a revered ‘startup’), you spend a decent amount of time on plateaus of slight growth or decay, with quick but big bumps up in your level.

The stair-master is one of the most brutally boring, but effective pieces of cardio equipment in the gym. It’s hard, and very monotonous, but there’s no better way to burn calories and sculpt that beautiful booty.

Yet most would opt for liposuction, or a kickboxing/dance/poledancing class. Why? Because they’re more interesting, faster(seemingly), or sexier. Not that there’s anything wrong with doing any of those things to get in shape, they can be great workouts. But the efficiency of the stair-master is undeniable when it comes to hardcore results.

There are multiple ways to get there (your ideal result) in business, just like there are in working out. Some are much more fun to talk about at a party, and others are exciting on a day to day, or month to month basis. Look at how much money we raised, look at our product that’s gone viral! Wheee exciting!

But for those that are in a similar model to the stair-master, where you experience long periods of seemingly boring stagnation (while you are putting in the work to get to the next level), hang in there. There’s nothing wrong with the ladder/stair model of business. In fact, it’s a far more sustainable long term play for that very reason.

So few people are willing to grind through the periods of boredom and stick to the fundamentals. Most get off the stair-master once they realize how damn hard it is.

The reward is there. Just keep on climbing and pay no mind to the other flashier methods out there. When you do get to the result you wanted, it’ll be far longer lasting and far more satisfying. While your friends and competitors are starting fresh on their 7th sexy business idea of the year… a crowd-funded AI solution for Virtual Reality.

Alas, you can’t sit around and do nothing when times are lean…, or can you?

If you spend more than 10 minutes on social media, there’s no doubt that you will come across someone creating passive income and building massive wealth through real estate. They are flipping/wholesale properties, or Airbnb hacking and only starting with 1 thousand dollars.

Guys are cruising around in Rolls Royce’s, preaching the ease and simplicity of building infinite streams of RE income, and using the banks money to do it all!

First off, these things are almost all bullshit, and you shouldn’t trust them. But the purpose of this article isn’t to discuss the frauds and over-exaggerators of the ease of real-estate.

It’s to talk about the best ways of making piles of cash (that work for you). And hey, real estate might even be it after all.

An Introduction to Leverage (And Why It Matters)

Are you ready to take a massive leap in your mindsets as an entrepreneur/investor?

Then you must start understanding and obsessing over leverage.

Leverage is the key to getting rich, doing things on a big scale. Essentially, it’s about multiplying your efforts. There are three forms of leverage in today’s world.

• Capital (investment of other people’s money)

• Labor (people working for you)

• Tech (code you wrote, or media available online)

These are the three levers you need to pull if you’re ever going to make a pile of cash and ‘succeed’ financially in the business world. Let’s look at an example to illustrate each point.

Let’s say you are insanely talented at cutting grass, and landscaping. You are a veritable picasso with some hedge clippers and a lawn mower.

If you are just going around your neighborhood and doing people’s lawns, there is a very fixed amount you can make. You can only do so many lawns in a day, thus you have no real leverage (despite your amazing skillset).

So, if this was your ‘thing’, how are you going to get rich? Let’s look at each of the levers of leverage to see what you could do.

Labor

This is the most obvious one, you could simply start hiring a bunch of employees, and teaching them how to cut grass like a master. More employees means more lawns, and more profits. But, you are still a little limited in the sense that it takes a TON of time to find, hire, train and manage massive amounts of people.

Capital

If you knew a ton about landscaping, i’m sure you could also easily identify other great companies and people that are on your level when it comes to doing lawns. So, if you had the money you could probably pretty easily invest in and ‘pick winners’ in other landscaping companies.

This is a pretty awesome way to do things if you can raise money and convince investors to believe in you. All you’re doing day to day is looking for companies that handle all the other tasks (finding people, hiring people, managing customers etc.) and deciding who to buy and invest in. So your time spent daily, now can get spread out across many companies, not just yours.

Notice this chart starts off way higher, sooner. (You are much more profitable from the start because you are starting with a pile of cash to invest).

Tech

OK, so investing in lawncare companies is looking pretty great, but there are limits to how many companies you can find, source and invest in. Some will fail, some will underperform, and of course there aren’t enough hours in the day for you to review and vette every single company in existence (in the world), so you are still limited by your time here.

Enter the final lever of leverage, technology.

What if instead of investing in the companies, you were able to build something that ALL landscaping companies could use to improve their business? This could be something like a training course (expert secrets you’ve learned) that owners could use to train their teams more easily and efficiently.

Or maybe it’s a tool. A web platform for a landscaping owner to manage all of their customers, employees, jobs, payments, marketing etc.

Both of these things are infinite when it comes to scale thanks to software and the internet. In theory, every company in the world that did landscaping could buy your course, or use your tool once it’s available online. Whether it’s 1 company or 1,000,000, it would essentially cost you the same time to create and maintain the product. Now THAT is interesting… isn’t it? Let’s look at the chart here.

Technology is the clear winner here. It takes off in an exponential way far sooner and faster than labor, or capital.

Another Look at Real Estate

Knowing what we know now about real estate, which levers does it primarily engage?

Labor, and Capital over time. You need people to find and manage your deals, and you need capital to be able to buy them. These are great levers, and no doubt you can make a ton of money in this game (as many others have before you)

Now which levers are the guys shilling their airbnb arbitrage course pulling? Yup, technology/info. That’s why they’re making a pile selling you a dream, and you’re toiling in the streets trying to get something going.

… but it’s not the best way to do it. Especially if you have any skills in the technology world.

For me, I’m a trained software engineer, with over a decade of building, launching and selling software related products and information products on the internet. I have the capacity to make full use of the 3rd and most juicy lever of leverage (technology). Unfortunately, real estate investing as an individual in multi-family properties doesn’t make the most of this lever.

That’s why I’ve put all thought and efforts in the RE world on hold for now.

That’s not to say it still might be the best path for you… if you have no skills on the internet, or desire to build and sell software… then labor and capital are the best options for you without doubt. Carry on, but with the proper expectations this time.

Just keep an eye on them, to make sure you maximizing (especially capital) in order to grow faster and faster. Don’t just work sunset to sundown cutting lawns yourself. Figure out how to convince investors of your prowess and knowledge, and then reap the fruits of using their cash to multiply your business.

Don’t forget to learn how to cut grass yourself

It’s really easy to get sucked into thoughts of grandeur now that you are thinking in terms of leverage that you forget to actually build the skills. You need to know how to do the basics of the thing first, before you apply leverage.

If you can’t find, evaluate, buy, and manage a single apartment building profitably by yourself… then you have no business raising money to go out and buy 50 of them.

So, starting small, and un-levered is not only fine, but ideal. Master your craft and the fundamentals first.

Then apply as much leverage as you can get your hands on.

When it comes to business, entrepreneurship and the making of money. We often find ourselves going down a path towards ‘success’ that the best long-term investment of our energies.

Smart people tend to figure stuff out. And most even thrive in environments where there are challenges put in front of them. That’s to say that a very talented entrepreneurs can spend years making the wrong idea work, just because.

The last thing you want to be reading is how the thing you’ve invested the last 4 years of your life into isn’t the right thing (even if it might conventionally make money and work).

So i’m not here to talk about the viability of business models and ideas, there are tons of great ones out there that are profitable that you personally shouldn’t pursue.

And why? Isn’t a good idea just a good idea that can be done?

I bet this is the point where you think I’m going to talk about finding your passion, and doing some kind of work that you skip to every morning after you glided out of bed without the slightest bit of anxiety or existential dread.

I think searching for that bliss is a scam myself, but that’s an article for another time.

No, I’m talking about the most competitive business you could be working on. One that sits at the intersection of the stuff you are good at and the stuff you actually like doing.

I was re-listening to an old Naval podcast about the getting of money and building wealth. One of the things he keys on, is finding something that you can do better than anyone else.

We can’t all be the world’s best copywriter, or programmer, or writer. So what’s an average joe supposed to do?

Naval contends that the thing you can be no-contest the best at, is being your authentic self. No one can be a better version of Joe Rogan, or Tim Ferris, or Mark Manson. Which is why money comes to them by the truckload.

So your niche chosen for making money should come from within. Your authentic self. Only then can you be certain that if you execute you will win. Because competing in a niche that doesn’t align… means you are probably competing with someone who absolutely loves that shit. Which one will work harder, longer, smarter?

The true advantage you can give yourself (paraphrashing Naval again here) is loving the work that simultaneously is building your competitive business edge. If the juice of your business feels like play to you, you will beat all the guys and gals for whom it does not.

The movie critic that loves to watch and talk about film more than anything is going to beat the guy that just saw the search traffic trends looked solid in things related to cinema. Am I making sense here?

Let’s recap what we have so far:

• We need to find things we are good at

• We need to find the activities within those things that feel like playing to us

• We need to intersect the above with Industries and Markets that are big enough to support our aspirations.

Fortunately on the last point, i think you can make a life changing sum of money in just about any niche or topic if you’re crazy enough about it. But the first two require you to really sit down and ponder just who you are, what you spend you time on, and what are you actually good at.

I write this article sitting atop my own existential entrepreneur crisis of sorts. I wonder if I spent the last few years working on hard problems in a great market just because they were objectively so.

And I worry that I’m losing out (at the low points and struggles of cash flow/success) to the competitors that love the space, whereas I am cool and indifferent.

What a better time than to perform this exercise for myself, and provide some structure for you dear reader. Should you find yourself in need of a similar self-inventory.

What Are Your Interests - Self Evaluation

What are my interests? What kind of stuff do I enjoy spending my time doing or thinking about doing?

• Unconventional Adventures

  • Long Term, Sustainable Travel

  • Riding motorcycles through new and increasingly questionable places

  • Sailing anywhere.

• Building (Hacking) Ideas together with code.

• Building actual things to sell (vs. info products/consulting)

• Writing in Non-Fiction (Copy/Articles/Books) and Fiction forms (Stories, Movies)

• Dating, Relationships, and the pursuit of bettering both.

What Are Your Skills?

So that’s what I like. Now for the hard part. What am I actually good at? What skills (if any) have the last 10 years in business yielded me with that are worth building on?

This part I think ideally you could survey those closest to you anonymously (particularly your Mother, and best friends) because we often aren’t aware of our most admired traits.

Often times it feels like we aren’t aware of our most admired skills, because those are the things we take for granted (that come naturally). So it’s a useful exercise to ask people.

I’ll try and do some introspection into my own here.

Building rapport and friendships

Being charismatic and likable has always been a sneaky skill set of mine. It’s helped forged friendships on the road, and close sales despite not really having the ‘chops’ of a killer salesman.

Cutting to the Core

Whether it’s dissecting a theoretical argument, or building the smallest hunk of junk application that actually does something useful…. I’ve always thrived at simplification and iteration.

Rapid learning and the first half of the learning curve —

this might be a curse just as much as skillset.. .but i always love diving in and learning the first big chunk of a new technology, or skill. Going from zero to ‘better than average’ is insanely engaging for me and lights me up. Past that… I usually lose interest. Leading to a ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ type distribution of my personal skillsets.

This is also a super useful skill when it comes from going to 0 to 1 in a startup/mvp type situation… but not ideal for the marathon that is building an iterating on a product for the long haul.

Writing just about anything —

Little creative video scripts, love letters over email, or just big analytical articles like this one bring me a lot of satisfaction, and I’d say my ability to express points (and persuade) through the written word has now climbed above average and is approaching excellent.

Bridging the Gap Between Nerdom and the real world

I am certainly an above average software engineer… but not a top 5% one that a company could be built around. In my career, I attribute most of my success to being solid, professional, but mostly just exceptional in my ability to ‘sell’ my services and build trust with non-technical partners and clients. I thrive as the go-between between the hardcore engineers (that I like to find and hire) and the business/product folk that barely know how to use Wordpress.

I think if i had to go out and get the highest paying ‘real job’ possible, it would probably be something like a solutions engineer who spends their days talking to customers about real needs and then selling them technical solutions to fit. Or maybe working in venture capital, and getting up to speed very quickly on a new company/technology to sniff out the real deals from the bullshit artists.

Building

My mind cranks into gear when it’s time to actually start building something real. I’m always the driving force between ‘oh yeah what a great idea’ and ‘OK, but how would it actually work if we built it?’.

Evaluating the Opportunity

Not all businesses are created equal when it comes to staff, skills and product. But let’s not forget about the importance of industry, market conditions, and timing of the opportunity. A rising tide lifts all boats, as it were. So ideally, we are selecting an idea that not only suits our skills and interests, but exists in a growing industry we can compete in. Some industries would cost billions to ‘break into’ in any meaningful way (good luck on your telecom/fiber startup buddy), while others are wideee open and can be cracked with a laptop and a few amazon giftcards. So let’s add a few additional evaluation categories to our calculation here.

Value of the Industry

How juicy is the industry you’re planning on entering? Are we talking Artificial Intellgence based Virtual Reality… or Beanie Babies that look like presidents? Take notice of the size of the market and how much people are already spending on widgets/services there.

Ease of Competition

How much time and capital will it take for you to be the best of the best? Like we mentioned before, to be the best cell network provider would take billions… but to be the best violin player that simultaneously manipulates puppets with her feet would be far quicker.

Does it Fit Your Lifestyle

This is an often forgotten one in the world (less so our world obviously). Does your career offer yo uthe time and freedom location that suit your ideal lifestyle? A lot of people say they love to travel, and then become a full-time ER Nurse… no alignment there.

Whatever your ideal lifestyle is (i’m guessing it’s similar to mine in the sense of wanting complete location (work where i want) and time (when i want) freedom.

I could make a pile of cash working in high frequency electronic trading in Chicago. But, I’d be chained to the desk for years and years and thus not able to live the life I truly want. This category deserves very careful deliberation.

Working with ‘Your People’

Listening to a Derek sivers podcast, he also hit on an interesting point of “what kind people do you like and admire the most?”. His point is that in the ideal world, you business serves and puts you around the tpe of people you most enjoy hanging out with and serving. This makes total sense, if you love writers and all your heroes are writers… ideally your vocation puts you around writers on a daily basis.

If you love the energy of tech people and nerds, then a nerdy solution makes the most sense. I’m not 100% sold on this either… and consider it more of a luxury than an absolute necessity. When you’re building a business with the aim of giving yourself as much personal freedom (time and location) as possible… then I’d imagine it’s pretty easy to put yourself around your favorite type of person regardless of whether or not it’s your business.

Calculating Your Edge - The Skills/Idea Matrix

So now that we’ve gotten a good smattering of advantages and skills down on paper, i guess it would make the most sense to take a few potential career options and throw them in the ‘matrix of some kind’

Let’s try and rank each one 1-10 for possible fits and alignment. Add a small multiplier factor for ‘importance’ of the category, and then just add up the scores at the end of the day.

Below is a snapshot of the excel sheet i built to calculate (comment if yo uwant a copy of it), let’s walk through a quick example to see how it’s working.

• I wouldn’t really get to leverage my writing skills at all (so it’s a 1)

• But I WOULD use my communication skills from Technologiest to Normal/Corporate person to the max (so it’s a 10)

Take the idea of ‘Solutions Architect for a Big Tech Company’.

In theory, this little matrix could be used to calculate and quickly evaluate any new career path or idea.

So i’m not sure we can possibly exhaust every avenue of earning a living or business idea i’ve got rolling around in my head here… but i think the framework does prove to be useful when kicking around a new potential career trajectory or idea. Might also be prudent to add a ‘weighting’ calculation to make certain categories more valuable than others (for example, a biz that fits my lifestyle goals is far more important than a biz that is in an easy niche)

What Does Your Matrix Look Like?

I’m curious to see what other people’s spreadsheet would look like (if they find this kind of exercise useful). Hopefully at the very least this post has given you a framework for evaluating the infinite possibilities in your own life and career.

We have all heard the same success story. 

She quit her job and started out as a freelancer. Then after doing great work got more business and hired an assistant.

Fast forward 2 years and BAM.  She’s onstage talking about how to facilitate remote culture in a 7 figure agency style business.

“Now it’s your turn!”

Except you’ve been trying to ramp up operations, sales and your business but instead have been treading (profitable at least) water for months. 

It’s time to acknowledge the harsh reality of the majority of 1 man shops and small consulting groups. 

It’s when you are scrambling for day after day to keep up with client work, yet you just don’t have the cash in the bank (or time) to go out and hire that rockstar that could lighten the load. Assuming you even know how to find and hire of course.

I call it “agency hell”, and believe that an unspoken majority of small businesses in a service model suffer silently in it’s clutches. 

The way out requires a shift in thinking with a focus on revenue and efficiency.  Either you need to make a way bigger pile of cash (more revenue),  or you need to keep more of every dollar that comes in (efficiency). 

Let’s discuss both in detail and how they might apply to your specific business.

Planning Your Escape

Are you ready to crawl our way out of the cellar and into the warm afternoon sunshine?  There are really two big paradigms that you should adopt when trying to boost business.  

Revenue

Efficiency

In short, how can you earn more money (in your existing setup), and how can you crank up efficiency so you are either selling more or spending less? 

Revenue Approach 

This is the big rock that solo founders and entrepreneurs will go to the ends of the earth to avoid turning over.

“Is there enough profit built into my business model to pay for operations while leaving enough left over for myself?  And is that leftover portion greater than what I would earn if I just had a regular job?”

This one hurts.  Because a large percentage of the time the answer is your margins aren’t big enough to support a legitimate business. 

Don’t completely despair yet.  If you margins aren’t big enough there are always a few avenues worth exploring.  They’re so fundamental, but often when you are in the trenches of day to day operations you forget to take a look.

Raise Your Prices

An astonishing amount of profit problems are solved by simply charging more.  You probably can get away with more than you think (most people tend to underprice their usefulness).

Changing Your Model

Do you have some products or services that sell at higher price points yet take less time/cost to fulfill?  Try conducting a quick inventory of what you sell (and what it costs you) and try and restructure to spend more time selling the good stuff.

80/20 and the efficiency approach

If the money is coming in at high margins, it’s entirely possible that the limiting factor is truly you and your time spent.  Are you wasting countless hours on tasks that you really could delegate?  Are you clinging to doing things that pump up your ego (sales calls) but are really a drain on your schedule?  

Take a look at the time you are spending to fulfill client work or customer orders.  Are you being paid enough for all that labor?   Probably not, which is why you need to take a harder look at your efficiency. 

Grab your pencil and notebook, it’s time to 80/20 rule the shit out of your business. 

Start by listing every activity that you (or your employees) do during the average business week.  This can be things like:

sales calls with new leads

Invoicing

Team Meetings

Any task that you spend your time and precious focus on each day is fair game here.  Once you have an exhaustive list, it’s time to assign an hour estimate to each task.  

For the tiny tasks, make sure that you don’t break them down into intervals of less than 10 minutes.  Even a 30 second item can break your focus for the immediate future.

Now for the tricky part, we need to group these tasks into 3 of the biggest optimization categories and figure out how the hell you’re going to slash those timelines.

People

Can you easily hire, train and instruct someone to do the tasks for less than it’s costing you? You need to keep in mind what your hourly rate for your business.  Oftentimes this is not viable (no cash in the bank), so move on.

Processes

What can be streamlined for yourself or employees by changing your approach?  Adding project management software that automates more correspondence,  writing better SOPs for your existing team, making videos explaining routine things to clients. These are all possible with just a little bit of sweat equity and can buy you precious time each week to get you over the hump and continue growing. 

Innovation

This is a more subtle form of optimization.  What can you create or eliminate that changes how your business operates? 

On the creation side, this could be building internal tools, or leveraging a ‘premium’ product from another company. 

On the elimination side, this could be firing bad clients (that take up all your time and headspace)  or narrowing your product/service offerings to zero in on your most profitable sales. 

The best way to get around this is to simply install them inline in your jupyter notebook.  Make sure you create a separate box so that you only have to install one.

The biggest challenge here is managing the tokens and the forced 're-auth' every 60-90 days.

You can check out the code here ,  ping me on github if you have any questions!

Over the years I've noticed that there are a handful of use cases/configurations that always come up.  Funny enough I rarely find good documentation/examples on all of them, and end up searching around and piecing together blog posts.

With that said, I am starting a post containing all of my most used templates.  I'll review them here if there's time, but more importantly I'll share the repositories so you can just grab what you need.

Django Template #1 - Heroku Database + Email Username Logins  + AWS Static File Storage

This is my most used template, grab the full example code here

More to come!

Today we’re going to get to the core of why your last launch flopped or why no one wants to hire your services. 

You’re aren’t the only one (believe me), we all completely miss the mark when it comes to selling the products/services of a new venture.   Even if you know your product is exceptional, it’ll never reach it’s full potential until your sales process is firing on all cylinders.

Flops happen.  Business is slow and drags on without major sales.  The real challenge is working out exactly why cash isn’t raining down on you and your startup. 

Today we’re going to jump right in and discuss the 3 keys to squeezing every last bit of revenue out of your fledging enterprise on the sales side.  These are the foundational concepts of any business selling anything and I use them as a framework to tune up my own processes and sales funnels.

Offer

This is the pillar everyone has some version of no matter how lousy.  What exactly are you selling people?  An ebook, an hour of coaching, a desk chair.  These are all ‘offers’.  

Here’s where most people miss out on the big bucks.

Your offer sucks (no one wants it)

Your offer is mispriced

You don’t sweeten the deal

Your offer sucks

If NO ONE is buying, then it’s high time you consider the possibility that what you’re selling isn’t that great. There are ways around this, mostly by playing with the following two points to see if you peak more interest (i.e. sweeten the pot with more goodies and lower the price).

Your Offer is Mispriced

Pricing products and services (especially digital ones)  is black magic when you first start out.  Eventually it turns into a ice cold data driven machine, but for young ventures the data doesn’t exist yet. 

I’m not going to get into a huge guide on how to price your stuff, just know that pricing is one of the levers you can pull when tweaking your offer to maximize revenue.

You Don’t Over

You Don’t Sweeten the Deal

Everyone likes feeling like they’re getting value before they fork over those hard earned dollars.  Make sure you have a kicker in your offering, it can be free stuff, access to a previous digital product (old courses), recordings of you talking about the product, an invite to an exclusive Facebook group, and anything else we perceive to have value.

You DON’T need to spend extra money on sweetening the deal usually.  Get creative with the content/community you (hopefully) have already built. 

This also applies to having multiple pricing/status levels to your product or service.  Don’t just sell a regular widget, make sure there is a premium and a budget version for sale too. 

Audience

Your audience is the amount of people who you can reach out to directly to sell something.  This includes everyone on your email list, social media, forum groups, friends and family. 

In the vast majority of cases when new businesses struggle it’s simply because they aren’t getting in front of enough potential customers.  People don’t buy things they can’t find. 

There are two factors to your audience that you should always be evaluating.

Quantity

Simple. How many people can you directly contact with your offer?

Quality

Also simple.  How many of those people like and trust you and find value in what you’re selling?  How many of them have the problem that your product solves?

Copywriting

Your ‘copy’ is any text, audio or graphic that you put out there to entice people to buy your offer.  It can be in the form of landing pages, Instagram Livestreams,  Webinars, anything where you’re out there ‘pitching your stuff’. 

I also include things like educational content on social media, blog posts, and email lists under the copywriting umbrella.  Technically they aren’t ‘sales’  but they’re building your product’s value and trust with your audience.  Both of which are essential parts of a killer sales game. 

The average startup founder is a terrible copywriter who thinks they’re great.   Time for a quick reality check.

If you have never studied copywriting directly, or written words to sell thousands of dollars of a product then you are not a good copywriter. Yet. 

How to Rip Apart Your Sales Process

If your business bank account has been looking like a sick puppy in recent months then the culprit is almost certainly one of the above three concepts. 

You either aren’t selling something people want (fix the offer),  aren’t finding enough of the right people to buy it (grow your audience),  or you just can’t get people juiced up enough to fork over their credit card.

I spend a lot of time assessing all three parts in my business.  As feedback comes in from customers (or prospects) we constantly tweak the offer or the copy while trying to build an audience that responds to it.

By now you should have an inkling in the pit of your stomach when you think about your offer, audience, or copy.  Stay tuned, next week we’ll start with some easy to implement strategies to fix problems in all three categories. 

There’s nothing more exciting than the promise of a brand new venture.  Potential profits and explosive growth rates linger just around the corner, and the world bursts at the seams with possibility. 

Unfortunately that’s the high point of most ventures.  Most of them end in lawsuits, bankruptcy, or simply dwindle to nothingness with only the slightest scent of shame.

For all the reasons your venture can fail (and there are a shit ton), I’m here to help you avoid a simple and all too commonly overlooked mistake....

Choosing a rotten business partner.

It won’t guarantee you’ll find a product market fit in 6 months, nor will it ensure that you’ll raise capital successfully or get that first MVP sale.

But it will guarantee that if you DO do these things, you won’t hate yourself later for making a bad deal in your fledging company’s early days. 

I’m here to tell you about how to choose a business partner (if you are insistent on having one) without jeopardizing your idea’s future.

Over the past 10 years I’ve made just about every partnership mistake in the book.  They all caused me significant financial and emotional damage and in hindsight, all are completely avoidable. 

My overall recommendation is to NEVER directly partner with someone at the very beginning of a new venture (especially if it’s your idea)...

But since you insist… here are my top 3 types of Partners to avoid at all costs (and how to identify them).

The Charlatan

Who they are

In the startup world you’ll find a lot of people that love talking startups.  The prospect is invigorating no doubt, and many of them know their stuff.  There’s just one small miscalculation everyone makes.

Talking about startups is insanely easy.  Actually building a product from a scratch and selling it in the market is one of the most challenging (and rewarding) raw components required to build cash-cow venture.

How to spot one early

This is fairly straightforward: look at their history and experience.  Have they built and sold anything in the past?

If they’re a first time founder, you have to take a more holistic approach and look at their whole life.  Do they have a history of following through?  Or is their resume littered with 15 projects that never ‘got off the ground’.

If they want to come in as a ‘marketing partner’ to sell what you build but only after it’s complete. 

Beware of the talkers,  search endlessly for the men and women of action and concrete results.  

The Ghost Partner

Who they are

This person is the quintessential hustler.  They’ve got 10 things going on at once, all of which are just bursting with potential and about to hit big (so they say).  Their enthusiasm and amount of activity is intoxicating.  You want to get on the same level as them!

Why be concerned?  Because this person isn’t actually after the long term play, they’re addicted to the startup excitement and the lust that comes with new projects. 

Building companies to reasonable levels of profitability takes YEARS. 

Source: Paul Graham via andrewchen.co

This cheeky graphic covers the first few YEARS of a tech startup.. and all new ventures follow a similar curve of enthusiasm/success.   Your hustler partner that has 8 other irons in the fire will never stick around for the low times (trough of sorrow) and will gravitate to more exciting projects.

How to spot them

Multiple projects, always a new idea they’re trying to ramp up.  If they consider themselves as ‘entrepreneurs’  and haven’t spent over 2 years on one project consistently they might be a significant flight risk down the line. 

The (Lazy) Corporate Troll 

Who they are

The corporate troll is one of the most frustrating types of partners.  They’re accustomed to operating in a bureaucracy, and employ their full corporate bags of tricks to attempt to offload the maximum amount of work -on you-.  

New features are someone else's responsibility, they don’t want to troubleshoot or do manual paperwork to accommodate an early client.  

This type of person will always stick around, but over time their lack of effort will breed resentment in the partners that do the actual work.  

How to spot one

These people want to be a part of a startup without speculating and risking their time in the early phases. They only want to work if they are sure it’s going to payoff.

Because of this, they are always putting off the work of today, in hopes of a more promising future.

Common things a lazy troll will say are  “once the product is done I’ll be able to go out and sell it”  or “Once the market shows more promise I’ll spend the time on that…”.

Escape Partner Hell - How to Structure Your Startup Relationships

Of course there is nothing inherently wrong with partnering up.  A partner can provide capital, ideas and -ideally- skills that you personally are lacking.  If you do choose to go with a partner from the get go, make sure you’re watching out for these key types of lousy partners.  To choose a partner poorly is to securely wrap an anchor around your neck before swimming for the shore.  

No one likes to face uncertainty alone.  Aside from a synergy of skillsets, a partner provides an emotional level of comfort.  You’re in this together, right?

Until you’re not.

Partners can leave, lose interest, screw you over, or worse: stay and shower you with negativity day in and day out.  In my opinion it’s better not to have them…

If you must  bring on a new partner to build an idea, try and adhere to these maxims:

Don’t Give them 50% Upfront

Most people’s first step with their idea is to incorporate as a partnership and sign over half their idea before any work is even done.  Do not do this:

Your tax filing burden increases before you even know you have a company

It enables your partner to do nothing and be entitled to half of what the company creates (at first)

If the partnership doesn’t work out or your partner wants to leave the project, then you have another potential headache of paperwork and negotiations. 

Work With Separate Entities on a ‘Project’ Basis

If this is a new idea for you, make sure you own it all.  Instead of ‘Partnering’ in the legal/tax sense, have your co-founder form their own entity and enter in some kind of agreement between the two.  It’s best if you can do this based on the smallest project possible.  

The reason this is my preferred structure (when the idea is mine):

It allows me to own all of the IP I create (software, marketing materials, content).

Flexibility to compensate partners on a project based on their contribution levels (not all work splits should be 50/50)

If a partnership doesn’t work out or my partner disappears, no paperwork is needed to end their involvement. 

If I incorporate as a single member LLC then I’m not required to file a separate tax return each year.

Final Thoughts

Partners can be an incredible asset to your company and in the building of your ideas.  But tread lightly before forking over 50% of your future assets and profit to someone that will rarely have the same priorities, desire and work ethic as you. 

Instead, dip your toe in the waters of collaboration.  Make sure you own as much of the IP and content as humanly possible, and keep your legal agreements flexible and simple.

Happy partner hunting!

If you’re a maker (creative, developer etc.) with either limited time (solopreneur) or cash then you might find this guide useful.

At some point in every developer's career, they get tired of consulting or having a full-time job. Usually, they start to envision a world where their side project becomes a SAAS company with a few thousand subscribers.  

A $10 per month product with 5k subscribers is pretty damn alluring to a developer (that knows he/she can fully build and maintain the code). 

So we labor for months building a great product, publish it to the world, share a bit on social media and sit back waiting for the subs to come flooding in.

Except they never do...

Makers are a proud bunch. We value hardcore contribution above all else and attach most of our self-worth as professionals to building real stuff that works.

We scoff at the average knowledge worker with a bunch of ‘soft skills’ that anyone could learn and deliver.   

Yet barely anyone seems to care about the shit we make...

Who This Guide is For

This guide will apply to anyone trying to sell their product/services online, and it will be written in the context of my experience (selling B2B big-ticket software/services).  It’s designed with the overworked/overcommitted entrepreneur in mind, with a focus on what are the minimum processes needed to get you the maximum amount of sales. 

I also have experience in a lot of other models such as B2C subscriptions and info products, and I will try to throw in anecdotes that also cover these.

Disclaimers

These are not always the ABSOLUTE BEST methods, but they are the best for people who have bootstrapped a small company without a huge team or capital investment. 

In fact, all of the things I say in this guide can be picked out and done better.  The problem is that if you’re running the whole show yourself (building the product, getting leads, doing sales calls, writing content etc.) then its less about doing everything the best possible way and more about finding methods that work for your time/capital requirements.

Consider this a comprehensive list of everything you should learn and implement in your sales strategy. It does NOT break down and teach the fundamentals of every aspect (but I do give you comprehensive lists of resources for learning each piece).

I do NOT cover other social platforms aside from LinkedIn.  Instagram/Facebook/Pinterest can all be killer, but this guide has gotten long enough.  More on those in future works.  

Let’s get into it and start selling!

Your Customer Avatar

This is the first stop on our sales and marketing journey. It’s also where almost everyone goes wrong and sabotages their entire sales potential.

Before you can write landing pages, emails that close, or start messaging prospects, you must understand who you’re selling to.

Who are they?

Picture your ideal customer and then start answering these questions: 

• What is their role in the company?

  • If they’re a customer, what is their job, status in life, etc.?

• What’s their current status as a potential customer?

  • Are they aware of the problems your product can solve?

  • Do they need to be educated on your solution?

What do they need?

What are their actual needs for your product/service and why?  This should be the core reason you built your product/service in the first place. It’s your cold hard assessment of the market.

What do they want?

This is where things get creative. You need to understand your prospect at a deeper level. You need to boil it down what they say they want into a more primitive emotional desire.

An old sales adage that directly addresses this is:

“There’s the reason a man buys something, and then there’s the reason he tells his friends and wife”

While a bit outdated, it is essential that you understand it. For example, why buy the new 2021 Corvette? It’s got the best track time, most power to weight in its class, and the luxury trim package is on par with a Maserati interior.

Are these the reasons a guy might cite for buying one of those sweet machines? Maybe not.

The real reasons might include that he gets a ton of attention from women when he goes out driving, which makes him feel like a boss.

Get it? The first list of specs are reasons you’d buy, but the second list of emotional reasons are the real reason our prospect buys.

It’s essential in your sales copy that you understand both. You need to provide a prospect with the features, the specs. But to close sales you need to speak to them on a deeper level beyond the features. You must speak to the core (and often emotional) side of the buyers. 

What pleasure (or other emotion) do they get from your product?

This is closely tied with the above.  What are the benefits of your service? How will their lives be improved?  How will it help their business? Dig deeper than the obvious benefits.

What is their fear?

Fear is what drives most objections you’ll face from new prospects.  You need to understand what their concerns will be, and do your best to address them while they’re reading your copy. 

Copywriting - Landing Pages and Beyond

There are a TON of amazing copywriters out there that can be studied to master copywriting. For the bootstrapper, I do recommend reading a few of them (like Ian Stanley, John Carlton, Dan Kennedy, Frank Kern, Ramit Sethi), but we can go over a few of the biggest principles here.

Write Benefit Driven Copy

Most people’s instinct is to simply list how great their product is and what it does. The better method is to tailor your writing towards the benefits your customer gets.

Use Bullets to Illustrate More Detail

Bullet points are simple and powerful for getting your point across in a concise way. Learn to master them (and you’ll see the results).

Don’t Hide Your Flaws

Every product/service has flaws, including yours.  Get in front of them and call them out in a productive way.  This will help build trust with your prospect, while not ruining your landingp page.

Anticipate Objections

As you get out there and start selling to customers, you’ll start to hear objections and excuses to avoid buying your product. These are gold for writing copy.  List out the objections and handle them proactively. Your copy (and landing pages) should read like a natural conversation between you and the prospect. 

Use as Many Testimonials as Possible

Testimonials are pure social proof for your product or service.  Get as many authentic ones as possible and display them prominently on your site/landing pages (near the top!).

Videos are the best (even if it’s a quick selfie-style video from a client), but written ones are great too. 

A Basic Sales Page

There are a million guides/courses and products around developing a good sales page.  My favorite resources are from Ramit Sethi, Ian Stanley, and John Carlton.  I’ll summarize the main components here.

1. A benefit-driven and catchy headline (that makes them want to keep reading)

2. Lead In Story (with good visual language) that hooks the reader and hits on their deepest desires or primary problems.

3. Social Proof + Testimonials

4. Develop their problems further and demonstrate your knowledge/competence

5. Introduce the answer to their prayers!

6. Now mention your weaknesses, and start handling some objections

7. Handle objections and go into details on your product

8. Now you can build value (depending on the type of sales page) and introduce your pricing

9. Make your guarantee here (take all the risk-off buying from the prospect so it’s easy to buy without worry)

10. Add scarcity and urgency to your offer. They should buy now!

Again I recommend becoming a student of sales and landing pages, but the above points will help you structure a compelling argument on your own. 

If you want to learn more copywriting tricks then I suggest you look to the masters such as John Carlton, Ian Stanley, Joe Coleman, Lawrence Blume, and more.  

Social Media Strategy

This is where a caricature of Gary Vaynerchuck jumps out of the screen and kicks you in the face while screaming one of his many trademark phrases. 

The man does have a point a lot of the time though, and he does know how to build an audience.  Fortunately for you, it’s not necessary to watch his hour-long montages of him speaking every day because he says the same few things over and over again. 

Here they are:

• Find the social media platforms where your prospects hang out.

• Create GOOD organic content, and give it away for free on those platforms (without asking for anything in return).

• Do this every single day.

That’s pretty much the essence of good social media selling and audience building these days.  

Using LinkedIn Strategically

For us, all of the action is on LinkedIn so I’m going to walk you through my approach.  But first, a few thoughts.

Stop Sending Templated Drip Campaigns.  

Seriously, they don’t work enough to justify your effort and/or hiring a VA to crank them out.  These are the generic ‘spam’ style messages that are currently clogging up your inbox.  They smell of automation and templates, and 99.5% of people won’t even reply.  

I suppose if you have a mass-market type of product they might yield some traffic/signups, but if you’re selling anything B2B and more high end I think it’s a giant waste of your time. 

Optimize Your Profile

Your profile is your personal sales page.  Your photo, headline, description, and subsequent job descriptions need to read like great sales copy.  What result are you offering people who buy your product?  Make sure the result (not just the product itself) is very clear in your headline and description.

Bad Example:  “Ethan Drower,  Software Developer”

Better Example:  “Ethan Drower,  I help early stage startups massively scale their revenues through strategic code updates”

Get a lead magnet

We talk about this in the Email Funnel Section.  You’ll want to post your Lead Magnet as a ‘featured project’  on your LinkedIn Profile.  

Post Useful Content (Or Pay Someone To)

Now that you have a nice profile that clearly explains the benefits you’re offering, it’s time to get people to read it.  The cheapest way to do this is to become a great Linkedin user.  Post useful content, industry news, custom articles, quotes, etc. Do it every day.

This is tough to maintain, which is why I recommend finding and hiring someone with your industry knowledge to do it for you.  You can find writers/people with your industry experience easily on sites like Upwork who will manage your profile.  

Whether you pay a Virtual Assistant or not, just make sure you’re posting great content and are staying in front of your network daily. 

Adding a Ton of Connections

A surprisingly effective way to drive traffic to your profile is to simply start adding a ton of connections in your industry.  Some will decline/ignore, some will accept, but just about everyone will at least take a peek at your profile to see what you’re about.  

If you wrote a solid description that creates some intrigue, it may be enough to get yourself a real lead. 

You can use a tool like Jarvee to automate this for you, but the safest bet is to have a virtual assistant login to Sales Navigator and do it for you. 

Sending Messages

Cold messaging people on LinkedIn is an art, and I can’t cover it all in just one measly section (nor do I know it all).  But here are some guiding principles to get you started.

• Do NOT just pitch your service/product in the first message

• DO send people good wishes, and valuable content/information

• Do NOT lead by ‘introducing yourself and your company’

• DO show interest in the person you are messaging, ask about them, their company, their challenges, etc.

• Do NOT give up if they don’t reply to your first message

• DO send nice follow-up messages

• DO share relevant articles (ideal ones you’ve written) over messages

The hardest part with messaging is staying consistent and keeping track of your leads.  This is where sales navigators come in handy. You should be using a CRM, at the very least Airtable.

If you have a big-ticket product like mine, life is easier because you can maintain a smaller list of people to obsess over and follow up with.  If you have a lower-priced product or SAAS, you may need to consider outsourcing this work to a VA as well.  It takes a LOT of time to message properly. 

Dana Lindhal and Amar Verma have great books on LinkedIn marketing to check out.

Your Email Funnel 

This is a fundamental concept that a surprising amount of online business owners are missing.  I’ll break it down into the basics.

Get a Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is just a thing that you give people in exchange for their email addresses.  It’s your “Free Guide on X”,  or “Seven Money Tips You Must Read!”.  It must be compelling enough for your audience to be willing to type in their email to get. Period.

Get Active Campaign and a Signup Form

Active Campaign is a great functional email campaign manager for the cost.  It’s worth it, trust me.  Plenty of others (Mailchimp Contact, will do the trick too)

Once you sign up for AC, you’ll want to create an email list and a signup form.  Put that form on your website (so people sign up to download the lead magnet you’ve created). Check out this tutorial. 

Embedding your form on WordPress is easy.

Creating an Autoresponder (Automation)

Next, you’ll create an Active Campaign Automation.  This automation represents a series of emails that automatically get sent out to people that sign up for your email list.  You program it to send the first email, wait a day (or more), send a second email etc.

You can learn how to do this in 20 minutes on AC’s website

Writing Emails for Your Autoresponder

Now for the hard part. You will need to write a series of at least 5 (ideally 10-15) emails that will be sent out over a few weeks to each person that subscribes.  Again, there are entire courses on this (Check out Ramit Sethi and Ian Stanley for how to write amazing emails) but here are the basics of what you want to accomplish.

Get them reading

The goal of the first line in an email is to entice the reader to read the second, and then the next, and the next. You want your emails to hook them in and compel them.  This is not done by droning on and on about how great your product is.  It’s done by appealing to the readers’ wants/needs/desires/fears.

Build Trust and Authority

You need to communicate to them immediately that you know what you’re talking about, and are not just trying to score a quick buck off them.  This is accomplished through empathy and by understanding exactly where your reader is at in their lives. 

To build authority you’ll want to talk about your accomplishments (some bragging is allowed),  showcase testimonials and case studies, and tell your own story. 

Offer and Close

You want to at some point make your offer. First, this is done by subtly communicating what you do and what you sell. Then, near the end of the funnel, you’ll want to make an actual hard offer of your services/sales. If you don’t ask, you will never receive.

Pay Per Click Advertising

I’m not a PPC expert, but I have used them in a profitable (and low touch/time) way to bring in some money for our business.  If you want to go down the PPC rabbit hole, I suggest buying one of the thousands of good courses that walk you through all the usage, advanced techniques, etc. 

But this is a guide for bootstrappers.  People who are running the show by themselves and don’t have 20 hours a week to tweak retargeting ads and build 8 different audiences.  The following steps should get you started in a way that isn’t going to blow all your cash or time.  You will need basic knowledge of Adwords and keyword matching (Adwords’ free tutorials are more than sufficient). 

Run a fairly general campaign for a month

This is like dipping your toes in the water. I have summarized some basic steps below.

• Set a cheaper budget (so you’re getting at least 10 clicks per day, more ideally),  

• Write 5-10 ads (remember our copywriting section above!),  

• Pick as many keywords as you’d like (think SEO keywords, and get creative with what YOU would search for)

• Drive traffic to one of your landing pages (not your homepage)

• Let it run for a few weeks -> month

Writing Ads and Picking Keywords

These are where your campaigns are going to vary the most. Good ads, along with the right keywords, are essential to a successful campaign.  Again, there are a million resources out there for these so I’m not going to belabor their importance.  Do some quick weekend learning and make sure you’re giving your campaign a fighting chance. 

Reviewing Your Results

After your trial period is up, it’s time to dig into the results and make adjustments.    Go through all of the searches that your ads were clicked on (this is the best feature of Adwords/Bing).  

You should see a bunch of searches that have nothing to do with your product.  Make sure to take note of these (and add them as negative keywords to be excluded).

Hopefully, you also see some searches that are right on the money (right customer, right intention, etc.).  If you’re selling Management Consulting services in New York, a golden search would be “Management Consultants NYC”. 

A ‘golden’ search is just one where you can tell that it’s a potential buyer searching, not just someone doing research or browsing.  

In the above example, a 'meh’ or even bad search would be “how to become a management consultant NYC”.  See the difference?  It’s the same keywords,  but the intention is completely different.  The first guy is a BUYER,  the second one is just looking for some information.

Create a Second Campaign

This is where we start to get targeted.  Take all of your searches from the exercise above that are buyer searches and turn them into more specific keywords/phrases in the new campaign.

Then take all of the keywords from the first campaign that yielded bad searches/non-buyer ones and add them as negative keywords here.  What you’re doing is creating a campaign that ONLY targets buyer’s searches. 

Note that you can still run both campaigns if you’ve got the budget. Just know that the second one is your hot prospect campaign (and thus should get more budget!). 

Run the second (or both campaigns) and optimize/change your ads/keywords as often as you have time. We do it once a month for 2 hours now.

Can You Afford PPC?

This is where it gets tricky.  If you’re in a more common/popular niche, then clicks can become expensive in a hurry.  You might notice your second campaign (the hot prospect campaign) has an insanely high cost per click.

You need to make the call whether or not it’s worth running.  You can do this by running for 2 months and doing the math (cost per lead, the amount earned per lead, etc.)  or you can play the game of finding ‘cheaper’  keywords that still get the job done.  This costs more time than it’s worth in my opinion, but it’s an option.

Google offers some great free tutorials. Also be sure to check out the below resources for PPC.

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6146252?hl=en 

https://ads.google.com/learn/beginners/tools/google-digital-garage.html

https://grow.google/

https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/

https://workspace.google.com/training/

https://edu.google.com/code-with-google/ 

Referral (and Affiliate) Advertising

I’ve got a friend who built a SAAS company to over 200k/year in revenue just by implementing a referral.   His offer was simple.

For every customer, you refer (paying), you get a free month of service.  

Welcome to the beauty of SAAS! Since our code can scale infinitely for (almost) no cost,  you can offer amazing incentives to encourage a network effect of subscriber growth.

If you’re subscription-based then I’d say this should be at the absolute top of your list.

If you’re service-based (like we are) then it’s still valuable to do, just slightly trickier in B2B.  We have a templated ‘contract’ that reads more like a sales PDF about our referral program.  It offers 10% of revenues paid over 1 year for each new client referred.  

And since our average client value is well over $40k/year, this is a pretty juicy offer for people…

Conclusion

Starting your own SaaS isn’t without challenges, and it’s not for the faint of heart. However, if you dedicate time to planning, research, and execution, you will be on the road to success in no time. Be sure to read back over this guide if you are unsure about anything, and remember to be patient as you progress in your journey. Good luck!

The sound of my alarm clock fills me with dread as I rolled over and contemplated smashing it against the wall. 

Time for another day of cubicle life. 

I recently came across a notebook of ‘personal development’ that I had written in long ago, back when I was at the second (and final) soul crushing office tech job of my illustrious career. 

I was stuck,  they were paying my tuition as a benefit and quitting would mean taking out loans to finish my Bachelors in Computer Science.  The smart play was to suck it up and get paid a solid salary to attend free college classes.  Not terrible in the scheme of things. 

So every morning for two years I dragged myself to a job that could’ve be done from home.  The work was easy enough, and gave me a lot of time for planning my escape.  I wanted to be remote and travel.  I wanted to be free of an arbitrary schedule.

In my rediscovered notebook I had written only two essential goals.  

1. Make six figures

2. Wake up without an alarm clock

If i could achieve those two, THEN I’d be happy and content.  

It’s funny how your goals of what will make you happy tend to move and grow with your accomplishments.  First it’s make 100k, then it’s make 100k working from a beach, then it’s make 100k working only a few hours a week, then it’s make 100k every month completely passively.  

My point is that if you base your happiness off of goals, you better make damn sure you celebrate achieving them and relax before eyeing the next big thing down the road. 

Remembering those two goals (which i’ve already been achieving for the last 3 years) is powerful.  According to them, I should already be totally happy and content!

One of the biggest unknowns about entrepreneurship is the guilt of work and growth that plague founders every single day.    We fight for freedom, only to build ourselves an even sturdier cage than the cubicles we escaped from. 

I built myself the freedom to sleep 9 hours a night and wakeup at 10am.  Yet whenever I’ve done this in the past, instead of basking in my achieved goals I’m more likely to spend the day feeling lousy I ‘wasted’ so much time that could’ve been spent grinding on my businesses.

It’s hard to sit in a hammock when the Gary Vaynerchucks of the world are sleeping 4 hours a night, working HARD all day.  And of course simultaneously vlogging the whole fucking thing to an army of devoted social media followers.

And YOU have the audacity to sleep in and blow off most of the morning?  Pathetic.

The challenge of running your own show is that you constantly fight the pressure of working.  There’s no escape like a normal job.  

At least in an office job, you walk out the door for the weekend and you can completely ‘shut it off’ for a few days.  If it’s your own company, the concept of a weekend doesn’t always exist.

So I made the decision to be guilt free when it comes to work and leisure.  Building businesses is a blast, and so is living a great life.  They can be done at the same time in perfect harmony if you drop the guilt of achieving NOW.  

Take a breath, get some perspective on all that you’ve built up to this point.  Life is probably a lot better than you’re willing to admit.   If you’ve worked towards something, make sure to smell the roses when you get there.

This was a pretty solid essay.  I think I’ll take a nap. 

The hardest challenge about being independent and freelancer in the software world is figuring out how to bill for your time.  What should your hourly rate be? Should you operate on project basis and fixed costs (please don’t)? Should you work as a partner with equity in exchange for doing the development work?

Over the last ten years I’ve operated under pretty much every kind of compensation model (that almost sounds dirty doesn’t it) that exists in the software world.  And I’ve come up with a few rules to live by if you’re on a similar path. 

Here are a few things you probably aren't doing as a freelancer that I think you SHOULD be.  

You Are Not Accounting For All The Time/Hours Spent Not Writing Code   

A major mindset shift is that clients aren’t paying just for your time or code, they’re paying for access to your vast amount of experience and your mental capacity.

When you sit down with a timer and actually look at the amount of time you spend WRITING code, I mean really focused and typing and testing… it’s not really that much time.  

However the PROCESS of writing code, much like the process of writing anything else is a comprehensive thing that goes far behind the time your fingers spend on the keyboard. 

If you're going to work as a contract engineer You need to account for all of the time spent mulling over issues, and sitting down to actually get stuff done.  

You Can’t Work on a Ton of Projects Effectively

I learned this one the hard way, because I lacked an understanding of what Paul Graham calls the Maker’s Schedule

Let’s say your average software developer works 50 hours a week.  Those 50 hours could be spent all on one project, or you could do 10 hours on 5 separate projects.  Simple math.

When I was first starting, I opted for the second option because I figured it was smart to diversify my work across several employers.  If one company went under, or changed priorities etc. then my income wouldn’t be as vulnerable.  

The problem with this logic is that I didn’t account for the Makers schedule or the cost of switching focus.

Every time you change projects or the problem you are thinking about, there is a mental commission that gets charged.  You lose momentum on the first thing, and expend more mental effort to get into the second thing.

Make sure you pick one or two projects to focus on intensely, and charge enough to enable you to do so.

Do NOT Accept Fixed Price Contracts

The main reason for this is because while pricing may be fixed, your scope and requirements NEVER are.

Most of the time it’s the fault of the clients for not knowing exactly what they need, this really sucks.

Some of the time it’s YOUR fault for underestimating the complexity of a project, this makes you want to jump off a cliff. 

There’s nothing more demoralizing than watching your ‘hourly rate’  diminish with each passing hour as you read over API documentation for the 17th time.

Easiest way to avoid this?  Just don’t offer fixed pricing on contracts. 

You Aren’t a Typist, Charge for Your Experience Too

Your experience as a developer has massive value for clients, and can not only assist in getting hired but also in how much you can charge. 

A business owner would almost always rather pay double to someone that has ‘done it before’ than save the cash on a junior engineer.   That’s why it’s important that when you sell yourself to a new client, you are leading with your experience and confidence in building a real world solution. 

This is the same in almost any other high end trade.  You don’t pay your plumber $100 for a 5 minute fix because swapping some PVC pipe is so difficult. You pay them for the last 2000 pipes he swapped to fix the same problem you are facing now.  The certainty has value, and he charges you for it.

In software, you should be doing the same, and you have the added bonus of the fact that most clients aren’t able to conceptualize the work you do. 

Start Thinking In Terms of Solutions - Their Business Case

We want to get away from being just a hired gun or service.  If you treat softwre development as a commodity the prices of your service will ultimately be driven down with increased competition.  If all developers are more or less the same and offering the same ‘commodity’ (an hour of developer time) then why wouldn’t your prospective clients pick the cheaper one?

We need to get away from this method of thinking.  The way to do it is to speak in solutions not in software. 

All freelancers tend to get too hyperfocused on their services, their hourly etc.  It’s not about YOU, it’s about the client and THEIR business.  

This is why it’s imperative you get some entrepreneurship and business savvy under your belt as soon as possible.  So that when you are talking with a client, it’s all about their business and the solution that would make them the most money, grow their brand etc.

By shifting the conversation away from the task at hand, you are subtly selling them not on your hours of dev time but on the actual real business RESULT.  Once the image of that result gets in their mind, it ultimately will get tied to YOU as the guy that can make it happen.

Now compare that to the other 10 developers your client spoke too that just talked about their 8 years of ‘experience’ and rattled off 16 buzzword technologies they’ve worked with.  

Who would you rather hire?  A generic ‘consultant’ or a guy that understands your business and wants to build something that’s going to help you grow and profit? 

Getting to the Next Level

A combination of the above is what helped me go from haggling over hourly rates to long running partnerships with companies on my own terms.  

If you want to have a more stable business consulting or freelancing, then it's crucial you take steps away from a replaceable hourly commodity and move towards becoming a trusted and valuable partner in the business you work with.

None of the key storage/auth methods worked for me after multiple attempts... so here is my workaround for quick token usage that suits me just fine.

Install AutoKey

Create a macro with your key

For this I used the macro ctrl+j  but you can set anything you want.

1. Click New -> Phrase

2. Paste your token in the field,  set your hot key, click save.

That's it!  Now in your terminal when you get prompted for github credentials simple hit your hot key (

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[/fusion_text][fusion_separator style_type="single|dashed" sep_color="#c6c4c4" border_size="" icon="" icon_circle="" icon_circle_color="" alignment="center" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" class="" id="" bottom_margin="5%" top_margin="1%" /][fusion_title title_type="text" rotation_effect="bounceIn" display_time="1200" highlight_effect="circle" loop_animation="off" highlight_width="9" highlight_top_margin="0" before_text="" rotation_text="" highlight_text="" after_text="" content_align="left" size="2" font_size="" animated_font_size="" line_height="" letter_spacing="" text_color="" animated_text_color="" highlight_color="" style_type="default" sep_color="" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" class="" id=""]How To Stay Creative[/fusion_title][fusion_text columns="1" rule_style="none" column_spacing="40px"]

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[/fusion_text][fusion_separator style_type="none" sep_color="" border_size="" icon="" icon_circle="" icon_circle_color="" alignment="center" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" class="" id="" bottom_margin="3%" /][fusion_imageframe image_id="1577|full" max_width="" style_type="" blur="" stylecolor="rgba(0,0,0,0.7)" hover_type="liftup" bordersize="0" bordercolor="#ffffff" borderradius="" align="none" lightbox="yes" gallery_id="" lightbox_image="" lightbox_image_id="" alt="" link="" linktarget="_self" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" class="" id="" animation_type="fade" animation_direction="up" animation_speed="0.6" animation_offset=""]http://ethandrower.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/testimonial1@2x.jpg[/fusion_imageframe][fusion_separator style_type="none" sep_color="" border_size="" icon="" icon_circle="" icon_circle_color="" alignment="center" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" class="" id="" bottom_margin="7%" /][fusion_title title_type="text" rotation_effect="bounceIn" display_time="1200" highlight_effect="circle" loop_animation="off" highlight_width="9" highlight_top_margin="0" before_text="" rotation_text="" highlight_text="" after_text="" content_align="left" size="2" font_size="" animated_font_size="" line_height="" letter_spacing="" text_color="" animated_text_color="" highlight_color="" style_type="default" sep_color="" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" class="" id=""]Why Creativity Is Important[/fusion_title][fusion_text columns="2" column_spacing="40px" rule_style="none"]

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Available on Audible.com

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Find this book on Ebay

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Available on the App Store

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Read it on your Kindle Fire

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