A few of the inputs I’ve been inputting

This is a challenge to take back your productivity.

(The initial challenge is over but a ton of people are starting again this week – DO IT!)

Hi. My name is Kyle and I have a problem:

I’m addicted to information. 

The above photo is of books that I am either currently reading or recently finished (missing: Antifragile, The Impact Equation, and Antifragile). It’s a whole bunch of input.

I love digging into one book and then another and another. There is so much fascinating information out there. Brilliant people wrapping up their brilliant ideas in a couple hundred pages. How can one resist?

It’s even worse when I go into Google Reader or my inbox and I see the headlines of a million bloggers with life-changing things to say. They have the key to life! They have the final answer to getting all the traffic in the world to this blog! They have the best business lessons we can learn from ancient civilizations! All the answers are there every time.

Some information is good to miss out on.

So I click. I click and I read and I find interesting information. Sometimes I even use that information. Recently, though, it’s just been a binge. Hours of shoveling ideas into my head. If you try really hard, you can know everything (read: 0%) there is to know.

My head is so full of their ideas that my own are drowning. My own idea muscle is atrophying.

It’s time to reboot and remember that the most important ideas are the ones you act on.

I’m challenging myself and you to do an information reset. Below are the rules:

For one week:

• No reading books.
• No reading blogs.
• No reading newspapers.
• No going on Facebook (even just to post).
• No watching TV (shows, sports, news, anything).
• No watching movies.
• No listening to talk radio.
• No going on Reddit.
• No going on Twitter.
• No information input - only output!

I know this sounds absurd but believe me, this week (starting Monday!) could help establish your relationship to information input and output for the rest of the year.

Keep in mind that I’m not hating on learning by reading. Reading holds a near-sacred place in my life. The idea here is to reset our relationship with reading and watching and consuming. Mindless consumption can kill our creativity.

Take a step back and look at your information intake

The Case for Input Deprivation Week

You’ll take more action. When you take out all the time in the day that you spend on reading and looking at pictures of kittens online you suddenly find yourself with a ton of free time. I understand that looking at mindless pictures online and reading a business book are two different types of inputs – obviously the cats are much more useful – but both of them drain you of opportunities to move forward on things you know you need to be.

It’s much easier to start in on the next item on your action list when you can’t distract yourself with whatever people are deciding to yell about on their Facebook walls. I am finding that it’s actually much easier to be productive because I’m not thinking of that book I want to be reading or going on reddit.

Get Zen!

Increased mindfulness. While writing this post I have hit CMND+”T”+”FAC” about 5 times. Those are my keyboard shortcuts to get to Facebook. It’s my reflex every time there’s a pause in work. I do the same thing if a page is taking a while to load.

I deleted the Facebook and Pulse (app for reading blogs) off my phone because my reflex was to go on and read Seth Godin’s genius blog every time I was in line or stinking up a bathroom.

It’s amazing how much like crack addicts we information addicts actually are. We think we have to be getting new information and staying on top of the news or we’re falling behind. We think that if we go one minute without putting something new into our brains that we’ll become outdated or something. When you aren’t allowed to quench these info-cravings you are forced to notice your relationship to information. Very rarely do we go to a blog or book looking specifically for an answer to a problem. It’s a guiltless way of entertaining ourselves. We can call it education even though it’s almost always just an excuse to procrastinate.

You become aware of what you post to social networks. There have been three distinct times today that I’ve had an urge to post to Facebook and Twitter. It’s brutal. I had the wittiest things to say! They would have gotten a million “Likes”, it would have been great. If only I didn’t have a stupid rule stopping me… Posting on Facebook takes much more than just making the post. It’s the time I’d spend looking at how many likes it had and wondering if people would comment on it.

You have more ideas. It’s common for people to report that they get their best ideas in the shower, walking, or something similarly relaxing. Albert Einstein said that he found solutions to the most difficult problems while playing the violin. By taking away your reflexive consumption of information you open yourself up to way more opportunities to sit in that silence. When you’re not busy looking at other people’s ideas it’s easier to hear your own.

LIGHTNING STRIKE IDEAS!

You realize what you’re looking for. When you have the urge to read a book and can’t it’s easy to see why you’re trying to read it. We often go to read about a problem that we already know how to solve. The solution is usually better found by sitting and actually trying to think about it ourselves.

For instance, reading a 10th book on health won’t make you more healthy. We all know the basics – just stop eating shitty food and go work out. That will take most of us farther than any book.

Reading another post on writing well won’t help me nearly as much as continuing to write will. Reading the newest business acquisition almost definitely won’t help me grow my own business. When I have the urge to read about something I now have to ask myself, “How can I best solve this problem myself?” Often, the answer I needed is waiting right behind that question.

Makes you more social. The first thing I do when I get in line at the coffee shop is get my phone out. God forbid somebody make eye contact with me. I don’t want to talk to you people, I wonder if anybody liked that very purposeful status I just made? Maybe you won’t talk to a bunch of people in line – I know I won’t – but at least I’m not avoiding standing with some fellow human beings.

You realize what news matters. You will hear about any news that impacts you from a friend. People talk about the things that matter. A meteor hit Russia yesterday and did a ton of damage. It’s crazy! That’s news! And I heard about it immediately because people talked about it. I didn’t hear about anything else. Apparently it wasn’t all that exciting. One of my good friends loves tech – he tells me everything I should know about the tech world. If I looked at a newspaper today I would probably get excited or upset about tons of headlines and then do exactly zero about them.

Thanks Amy!

You gain respect for your own ideas. When you spend too much time reading other authors it’s easy to get lost in all the things you should be doing. You begin to see all the things that you’re not doing and all the things that others are doing better than you. You miss all the things you’re doing right. Reading an article about building a relationship with an audience doesn’t help me build an audience with you. I need to spend time testing ideas and writing about them for you. I need to spend more time emailing and meeting with you. That can’t be done be reading, only engaging.

 You gain perspective on information intake. When the week is over and you return to your information intakes, you will have a better relationship with them. You’ll catch yourself when you run to reddit to procrastinate. You’ll realize that you’re not actually on Facebook for anything productive most of the time. You’ll be more likely to take action on the information you read because of the self-discipline you’ve developed.

You’re forced to be original. When you can’t look for another person’s ideas on something you’re forced to come up with something yourself. When you can’t go looking online for inspiration you have to find it around (and inside) yourself.

Sometimes it’s a matter of setting up your environment

How To Stay Strong

It can take a lot of willpower to stop yourself from so many habits at once. Most of us can barely fix one bad habit at a time. I’ve found some tricks to make it easy though. The secret is to set up your environment so it’s more annoying to fall back into your bad habit than it is to maintain your input deprivation. Take 15 minutes to guarantee that you won’t be tempted to give up on Day 1.

• Install StayFocusd or its equivalent and put all your time-sucking websites on there. ALL of them! Facebook, Twitter, MySpace (??), reddit, Digg (??), Chive, EVERYTHING!
• Delete your consumption apps. I deleted Facebook, Pulse, and Twitter off my phone. Delete the apps that you reflexively go to when you have a minute of free time.
• Move your books and magazines. They will just taunt you if they’re sitting on your bedstand or at your desk. Make a stack and put it out of site.
• Carry a notebook with you. You’re going to begin having ideas pop up in your head, make notes of them. I like notepads more than phones because we associate them with creating instead of consuming. It’s risky to take notes on a smartphone if you’re trying to avoid inputs.
• Take the batteries out of your remote. When you have the urge to flick on the TV you’ll have to go get batteries for the remote. This is a barrier to TV that will save your willpower pool from draining as you stare down the remote thinking about all the Jersey Shore and MadMen you’re missing.

If you did these 5 things you’re good to go.

Let’s Do This!

This is going to be tough, but it will be easier if we do it together.

If you’re game – comment below. Let us know you’re doing it with us and check in throughout the week.

If you have a question about the challenge (or a challenge for the challenge), let me know in the comments!

As always, feel free to email me at kyle at startupbros dot com.

Are you ready to MAKE some shit this week?

I hope so.

Because it’s all starting.

RIGHT NOW!

(Or Monday… if you want to be a baby about it…)

The post Input Deprivation Week: Forcing Action by Killing Information Addictions appeared first on StartupBros - You don't need a job....

The StartupBros logo is dead, and I killed it. While our old logo wasn’t in dire need of replacement, we weren’t in love with it, so we decided to change it up.

I’ve had a lot of logos designed, so I’ve developed a pretty good method to finding the one your customers love the most.

As you may know, this is one of the most controversial things I’ve ever written (a surprise to me). There is definitely no shortage of people who don’t like this method, even HATE it.

That’s fine by me. This is the best method I, as an entrepreneur, have developed to get a logo created. It’s an efficient way to get an effective logo. It doesn’t take into account anything I can’t measure, and I realize many designers think that is the wrong way to go about logo creation. It’s just the way I do it.

That being said, keep reading below if you’d like to see how I do…

Below you’ll find my “Visual How-To Guide” to getting the perfect logo designed. I’ll also walk you through the recent StartupBros redesign.

So let’s get started…

Step 1 – Get Logos Designed

First you need to get some high-quality logo designs to test.

I’m going to suggest you use 99Designs for this and any other logo design you need done. You simply won’t get as much creativity for a better value.

A lot of designers hate 99Designs, but that is because they can’t compete with it. For $300 you can get hundreds of different logo designs from different artists. It’s an absolute steal. I’ve been running contests on there for a few years now, and I have learned a few tricks that will maximize your value and make sure you get some amazing logos to choose from.

Here’s the basics of launching a logo design contest -

The Right Way to Launch a Contest

1. Head over to 99Designs and Sign Up for an account
2. After you’ve signed up for an account, start a new “Logo Design” contest and fill out the Design Brief. The more details you can give on here, the better. Sometimes, I even attach various logos I like, so the designers get an idea of my style (but I didn’t do that below).
   Here is what my design brief looked like for the StartupBros logo redesign - 
3. On the next page you’ll set up payment options and a few other settings. Here are the settings I recommend using most of the time (Note: If you don’t see the “Blind Contest” option, you’ll have to ask 99Designs support to switch it to blind after the contest is live) - 
4. Pay for the contest and launch it on the next page, and then your contest should be live.

Maximizing the Value of Your Contest

There are a couple of things I do after a contest is live that make sure I get an awesome logo. Honestly, if you don’t do these next steps, I can’t promise you’ll find a logo you and your audience loves.

What you’ll basically be doing is going around to existing/past logo design contests to find the best designers, and then messaging them to rub their ego and beg them to join your contest. I’ve done a lot of testing with this, and this is the best way to do it -

1. Click “Browse” to browse around the existing/past contests and open up 10-20 of them in new tabs
2. On each contest page, click the “Designers” tab. Then, open up 5-10 designer profiles from each contest.
3. In each designer profile tab, click “Send message” and send them a message inviting them to your contest. You can also use the built-in invite feature, but I usually just send messages. Here is a message I sent out for example -
   

   Hello,

   I love your past work and put you on my watchlist a while back hoping I could get your design-brilliance on my next logo.

   I just launched a new logo contest for my new project, and would really love to get your input on it.

   Really looking forward to seeing your submission,
   Will

   (link to my Design Brief on Live Contest Page)

As you can see, I make it known that I like their past work and tell them they have been on my watch list (even if they haven’t). I’ve found that by handing out a few compliments, you can get the top-tier designers to stoop down for a lower payout contest (which they rarely do).

I send these messages to at least 100 designers, but sometimes even more if it is an important logo and I want to see a lot of different concepts. It gets monotonous, but it’s definitely worth it in the end.

Watch Logos Start Pouring In

You’ll start to get logos pretty quickly, and within a day or two you should have 25+ to choose from. I usually just go through and rate them as they come in.

Make sure to give good feedback in your comments to the designers. They will read everything and re-design their submission based on your requests.

Once you have found 2+ logos that you like, you can proceed to the next step and start testing them against each other.

I should note though, I always ask the designers if it is alright that I test their design before moving forward. I’ve never had one not give me permission…

Step 2 – Setup tests

You basically have two options when it comes to running these tests. Luckily, they’re both free with a 30-day trial as of now…

If you already have a website or are hosting your landing page yourself, then you’ll be using Visual Website Optimizer to test traffic that comes to the page. This is the method I’ll be showing below.

If you don’t have a website, then I’d direct you to this article on using Unbounce to validate business ideas. The only thing to keep in mind is that the only variation should be the logo.

So, if you are using Visual Website Optimizer, proceed reading below…

Setting Up the Test

1. Create an account on Visual Website Optimizer with a Free Trial account. It should be pretty quick and easy.
2. Create a Multi-Variate Test, and enter the URL to the page you’ll be testing.
3. This should bring up a screenshot of your website. Click your logo, then change the image with your designs from 99Designs.
4. You can add additional variants on the bottom-right corner

We are testing 11 logos for the StartupBros re-design. Here they are –

After you are done adding variants, click “Proceed to Next Step” in the top right

The next page will ask you to set up your conversion goals. You can set up multiple goals, and I would encourage you to. Here are the ones I set up. Next is the Step 5 page, there a few things you should do here -

• Enter a name and hypothesis/reason for your test
• Add a * on the end of your URL if you want the test to apply to all of your traffic (which I do). It would be useful to not do this if you were testing an image on a specific page of your website, like a landing page.
• Integrate with Google Analytics (you’d better have analytics…)
• You can also set it to “Automatically disable losing variations”, but I like to be hands on with my testing.

Here is an example of my “Step 5″ settings – We’re almost done – I promise! Now you just need to set up your tracking code(s). I use Thesis so this is pretty easy for me (and that is what is shown in the picture below), but most WordPress themes should make it easy to add things into the <head> of a document. There is also a WordPress Plugin you can use to set up the code on your site. Just make sure the end result is this –  After you see this, start your test –   Now your test should be running smoothly, but I’d encourage you to both check out everything in the “Live Preview Combinations” area, as well as test on different computer to be sure everything is going right.

Step 3 – Drive Targeted Traffic

This step should be easy if you already have an established website, since you can just sit back and wait to see the results (that’s what we are doing).

If you are running an Unbounce landing page, you’ll have to run some targeted traffic via PPC or content marketing of some sort.

Just make sure it is your ideal customers who are visiting, because that’s who you want making the decision on your logo.

This is probably a good time to offer up some more $100 Adwords Coupons as well.

If you need a certificate, StartupBros has you hooked up

Step 4 – Results

The ideal amount of time to run your test will depend on your traffic volume and the number of variations you’re testing. Here is how our test went…

Day 1

By day one we can already see some of the variants drop off, all though it is a little early to make any judgement with such little data. I did turn off the ones that were really not looking good (all the variants with less than a 5% chance to beat the base variant).

You’ll see below that some of the variants I turned off ended up making a comeback. This is due to people that are assigned to a specific variant coming back to the site in the days after their first visit. Obviously, this is a good thing and something we want to keep in mind.

Day 3

By day three we had enough data to see where things were going. You can see almost all the variants had a slight improvement from day one. This is again due to repeat visitors (which is the goal we are measuring).

Day 5

By day five, we had enough data to comfortably make a decision. Note – In an experiment like this, the control will raise naturally over time. The reason for this is that your regular readers will be shown the original logo that is in their cache (the control). These are our most engaged readers, and thus they skew the data on the control a little over time.

Step 5 – Select a Winning Logo Design

Now that you have a good amount of data, you can confidently make the right decision and select your winning logo.

Just head back over to 99Designs and select a winner, then the logo is yours. The designer will send you the files via 99Designs within a few hours.

You can see in our experiment, our control ended up doing pretty well. Again, keep in mind that the control will always be artificially high in this experiment, and will be more artificially high for people with a more dedicated following. This is because the past readers (regulars) will be shown the control.

We like our new logo much more, and I’m happy I decided to run this contest and test.

What Do You Think?

So, what do you think?

Think I missed anything? Do you know a better way? Think this was a big waste of time? Tell me about it in the comments!

And as always, if you decide to use this method and have any trouble with it, comment below or email me at will <at> startupbros.com and I’ll be there to help!

God speed, Bros!

The post How To Get the Perfect Logo Designed appeared first on StartupBros - You don't need a job....

a couple actors shaking hands (played by paid actors – ZING! hahahoho!)

I hate networking.

When writing the networking section for our upcoming book I redefined networking as “authentically making friends within areas you want to be in“. It hurts to say “networking” because it bring up images of over- (or under-) dressed people chucking business cards like ninja stars. It sucks. They suck.

I don’t even understand what networking is. I looked it up on Google and I got back definitions for connecting computers. Even Google doesn’t know what networking is. Google is probably the best networker I know, though. They connect everybody to everything and everyone. Google has networked me with all sorts of people.

The other day I was sitting on my couch talking with some people who are starting a new school (a New School new school) on the hallowed grounds of Black Mountain College and we were talking about education and meditation and having a jolly-good time. It came up that I had authored a book. Now, Will and I are the authors of required reading for their new program.

flesh machines connecting!

It’s only after they left that I realized something like networking had just happened. It’s only after a moment of, “OMG, did we just become besties?” that we were able to move on to what I think most people would call networking.

Will and I are still recovering from our two weeks of StartupBus and SXSW. We built a company in three days on StartupBus and SXSW is a tech conference and music and movie festival. It’s all very awesome. People like to network hardcore at those things. They throw business cards into your eye ball and say that we’ll synergize our connection later. I have a stack of business cards and I have no idea who gave them all to me.

When I talk about the experience and all the amazing new friends I made people will say, “Wow! Sounds like you did some awesome networking!” I guess they’re right.

Again, networking, in my book, means making authentic friends. If I want to “network” within a certain industry then I’ll meet a bunch of people in that industry and see if I become friends with any of them.

Some reasons we feel like we need to network:

1. People tell us we need to network. And so we just assume that we need to spend a ton of time making connections. 
2. Other people are networking with a fervor. Oh no! Don’t fall behind! Look at how many cards that guy has. It’s going to get him everything he’s ever dreamed of having (and everything you’ve ever dreamed of having, too)!
3. “It’s all about who you know.” Relationships are a huge part of life and business but I don’t know if card-slinging builds relationships. Making friends builds relationships. Being generous and loving with people builds relationships.
4. You need that thing they have. Okay. You don’t need to network to get it, you need to make an offer. Friendship isn’t a possibility here because you can’t make a friend when you’re thinking about what you want from them.
5. Emotional support. Maybe this isn’t what we think about when we’re networking but, in the end, it’s one of the best thing a strong network provides. Only friends can provide that though.

I have a good friend who is a professional networker. I love her but she has networked too much and made too little. She knows it and is currently correcting.

I’m not negative on having a network of people to reach out to. What I’m concerned with here is switching the network from “people I can call for favors and further connections” into “friends”.

YEAH!

Why make friends instead of “contacts”?

1. They will help you more. A friend is more willing to help you than a business acquaintance. What’s in it for him? Nothing? Click. 
2. It’s more fun. Friends are fun. It’s fun to meet people and pursue the relationships that mean something to you. It’s fun to connect with people without worrying about what they can do for you. 
3. It’s easier. Things that are fun are easy to do. When things are easy to do you keep doing them. If you’re having a good time building your tribe and making friends then you will have a massive group of connections before you know it. 
4. It keeps you closer to your dream. When you follow true friendships you stay close to the place you want to be. You will resonate with people who want similar things to you. If you are forcing yourself to spend time with people you don’t like you can feel yourself veering off your path. 
5. You won’t become a liar. Even if you never tell them a lie, you’re lying to yourself by investing time with people you don’t actually like. You’re also lying to them by making them think you want to be their friend when you don’t. It’s just dirty all the way around.
6. The people in your life actually matter. Life is too short to hate the people in it. I want to spend every day with people I love. I write the things on this blog to connect with people like you who resonate with the message. You’re who I want to be spending my time with. Not haters. Not naysayers. Not fuckwads giving me paper-cuts at conferences, barely stopping for an eye-to-eye. You. I wouldn’t mind spending time with that cute barista behind the counter either…

Make a friend!

Those who are still trying to network like a dad (ie: old school) are missing out on making real human connections and stressing themselves out. Maybe I don’t know anything about anything. Actually, I know I don’t know anything. Whatever. The following are things I do to make better friends. I have a lot of friends. I’m not popular, I just stick my neck out to a lot of people. Some chop it off and some give me a hug.

It’s weird, I like to do business with the same people that give me hugs. I’m weird. We’re all weird now, right?

Shoot, I’m getting ahead of myself. Weirdness is one of my ‘techniques’.

Here are my favorite ways to make friends:

Bleed honestly and learn to communicate.

Be honest loudly. When you’re honest about what you’re thinking then you will attract others who resonate with your ideas. Even before StartupBros I blogged on my personal site and would talk about things that were personal. Like scary personal. I talk about my depression and suicidal thoughts and some of the girls I’ve had sex with. I talk about philosophy and the nature of existence and ways to be happier and ways to live more deeply. I just talk about what interests me. Whatever I can’t put here for you goes there. I have to talk about it somewhere.

now she doesn’t have a choice

At first I just did it because I have to write ideas and I have to share them. It’s just something that I have to do or else I pop and probably die. It was only after a year or so that I realized I was getting better at writing (people on reddit may disagree). After two years I realized that a ton of people were reading the blog. I wasn’t getting amazing amounts of traffic but people who I never suspected were coming up to me or sending emails and thanking me for helping their life. They would share the articles with people who needed them.

Other people would approach me and begin conversations. They were just acquaintances before and I had no idea that we were interested in the same kinds of things. Now we were having interesting talks and I had a new friend. Hell yeah!

Now with StartupBros I get mail every day talking about how an article helped a life. Other people email just wanting to talk about ideas. When Will and I went to SXSW we hung out with a bunch of people who we wouldn’t have even known about if it weren’t for StartupBros. We made friends that we’ll have forever. And they’re all genius business-techies, so it’s probably networking, too.

If nobody knows about your ideas or the things that you’re embarrassed about then you’re going to have lame relationships you’re whole life. You won’t be able to communicate with other people who also thing that weird thing about you is cool.

Open up to others to make room for a human connection. Then learn to communicate that effectively.

sometimes it’s as simple as being interested

Be interesting (ie: weird).

Well, you’re already weird. This is more about embracing it than actually being it. If you talk to anybody for long enough they will become fascinating. Everybody has a crazy story – even if they don’t realize it.

Okay I hit a wall writing this just as Jon Salem called me. Jon is an ADHD coach in Tampa, FL and overall a great chap. He wanted advice on selecting a new name and logo for his business. I sent him a couple articles that Will wrote a while ago that have helped a lot of people. I also told him what my intuition was telling me (niche down!).

How does one become interesting? Sometimes it has nothing to do with having people say, “What an interesting person!” Jon immediately became more interesting to me just because he called. We only met once before and now he’s calling. He was also honest in that he said, “I want to keep in touch and so I called!” How many times have I said, “I want to keep in touch,” and not called? Pretty much all of the times. Jon is interesting because he takes action.

I’m stomping on the toes of a bunch of the following techniques for making friends.

Let me give you two more examples of new SXSW friends of StartupBros.

Three of the people mentioned in this post are in this picture: Tedd Fox is in the back left with the crazy face. Egon is up front with his hat. Mansal’s head is right above his. And I’m over there on the right smiling up a storm

The first thing Tedd Fox said to me was a joke too dirty to put on the internet (too dirty for the internet!) and then he kept making jokes that I had to laugh at. If I were Catholic I would probably have to repent for laughing later but I’m not, so I just kept laughing. Tedd is one of the weirdest people I know and he’s made three #1 apps for various companies. He’s a champion and he’s hilarious and now he’s a good friend. If you want to get a taste of Tedd (or you need help with mobile development) check out NineRocketships.

“You look like shit.” That’s Zach Price’s idea of introducing himself. He wasn’t wrong. I was still drunk from the (New Orleansian) night before and hadn’t shaved or slept. Indeed, I looked like shit. If Zach didn’t introduce himself in such an interesting way I wouldn’t know him as well as I do now. As it turns out, Zach is one of the nicest/coolest/smartest dudes on the planet – and a publisher. We recorded a podcast for you on the future of the publishing industry and we’ll probably be working with Zach in the future to launch a couple projects we have lined up.

I almost forgot Egon! Egon contacted us through StartupBros.com and we had a beer with him. The first thing he started talking about was quantum physics and bizarre philosophies mashed into crazy sciences. YES! It wasn’t until a couple hours later that we learned about his business. He ended up going on the StartupBus and staying at the StartupBros house for SXSW. The guy epitomizes weirdness in the best way possible.

And now I can’t stop thinking of them. I can’t even begin to mention them all. (Sorry everyone!)

That sliver of weird that you hide away is your greatest asset. Stop covering up the most interesting thing about you.

One of the best uses for social media is to show everybody what’s interesting to you. The more you post the more chances you have of finding somebody else that’s interested also. When somebody “Like”s that you posted an article, message them about it. They are signaling to you that, “Hey, me too!”

Show people what you’re interested in and be interested in them and stop repressing the weirdness and you can’t help but be interesting.

sweet ringing

Call people.

I’ve been getting in the habit of randomly calling people in the car. It’s much better and more engaging than the radio. I even call Will every once in a while. We live close together but still spend most days texting and emailing StartupBros stuff. It’s more fun to go voice-to-voice.

I just told you Jon called me. He got my words flowing again. He didn’t mean to do that. Just the thought of “I’ll call Kyle” then he clicked the buttons to do it.

I did that with my great aunt the other day. She’s one of the wisest women I know. I didn’t have anything to talk to her about but I called her and 30 minutes later she had to leave our fascinating conversation.

Sometimes I will call a friend I haven’t spoken to in a year. Sometimes a friendship that has gone stale is revived. Sometimes not. It doesn’t matter, it still felt good to pick up the phone and call someone.

Random acts of connection.

This is an extension of calling people. Keep friendships sizzling.

I was talking the other day to a 30-something entrepreneur about this whole friend-making business. His most important thing to say was, “And keep connected, otherwise they just fade away…” and his voice faded away with saying that. He was thinking about friendships that he wish he still had.

It’s hard. You can’t keep in contact with every person you meet. I can barely keep in contact with my family and close friends that I see every day. Every time you read a news article ask yourself who you know who would find it interesting. Send it to them.

When a picture makes you laugh, send it to someone.

Just click “Like” on Facebook. Stop being so stingy with those things. How do you feel when you get one? Like a king! Spread the love, it’s not like you only have a few of them.

Send random texts saying hello or giving out some weird piece of information.

Just make random acts of human connection.

TIGER PICTURES

Give them something.

You can’t get anything without giving anything. This isn’t a debit system, either. Giving without getting is the only kind of giving that matters. So you have to give more and more and more – the kind of giving that feels good.

You need to be generous right now. You need to stop hoarding everything and start giving it away. Let’s say you want to meet some CEO that everybody else wants to meet. Everyone is taking from him. “Give me this and that please.” Nobody give him anything anymore.

He has everything! What could you possible give him? Ideas!

Get good at having ideas.  Here are some to start you off:

● Give them nutrition advice.

● Give them fitness advice.

● Send them an article you think they’d enjoy.

● Relationship advice.

● Ideas to help further their cause.

● Ideas to help them get more business.

● Ideas to market their products.

● Ideas for features for their products.

● A flaw you noticed while using their product.

● Information about one of their passions.

● Ideas for their family members.

● Compliment something they’ve done.

StartupBros has been getting to that weird stage where it’s hard to keep up with email. Will and I get emailed by people and we love it! It’s just hard to keep up. So many of the emails look the same.

Then Eric starts emailing about trading and meditation and interesting things he’s doing. Then Casey emails and says, “Your site looks like shit and here’s what I’d do about it.” Both of them are awesome guys that I can’t wait to continue talking with.

Even when you have “nothing” to give, you have your mind. Sack up and realie that you have good ideas. That you’re as interesting as anyone else.

MAKEMAKEMAKE

Make things.

People who make things are more interesting than people who don’t make things. When you have made things then you have more ways to help people. There are more ways for you to help your friends out.

If you’re trying to get a job, it’s nice to be able to point to something and say, “Look what I did!”

Making things with people is one of the best feelings in the world. It’s awesome when you have something that you’re making and you can involve other people in it.

One of the people who we hung out with constantly at SXSW was Mansal from The Hacked Mind. Mansal doesn’t drink. He’s not a vegan or paleo-er but he has his own regimen that is even more insane. Will and I drink though. We hung out with Mansal a bunch of nights and drunkenly yelled. He said I was still smart but “just more passionate”. I guess I can deal with that.

Oh yeah, making things. We made a podcast together! Just because we both like making things. We also interviewed the CEO of MediaHound because Mansal is awesome.

When you make things it’s easier to help you out. Start making something now. Makers draw in good people.

a human is a human

Humans are humans.

Yeah, but what if I want to meet a famous person!? Well, then meet them.

At SXSW I walked up to Jack Black and told him that he informed my entire childhood. He asked, “What are you, twenty?” Then the security cards came and pushed me away because the surrounding crowd now thought they could talk to Jack Black. Bastards ruined it for me. Some humans have security guards sometimes.

Jack Black or Peter Thiel or Steve Jobs all are humans with the same human needs as you. They also worry about not being loved. They also worry that humanity might nuke itself out of existence.

The other day I met Adeo Ressi  and he talked about how his friend Elon Musk is going to send people to Mars in our lifetime. That’s exciting. Adeo hangs out with billionaires all the time. One of the things that happens when you hang out with billionaires and people that send other people to space is that you begin to think big. Like, fucking BIG, and easily. He confidently talks about sending people into space and coating buildings in solar panel-goo and revolutionizing email like it’s no big deal. But he’s human.

If you watch anyone closely enough you will see insecurities pop up. You will see a micro-second of doubt or a harsh reply to something that hit too deeply. We’re all humans and we all need the same things.

Some dude gave Adeo an idea for the relationship between SpaceX and Tesla (Elon Musk’s two companies) which got him excited and he texted Elon immediately. There’s a chance that that idea speeds up our trip to Mars. Probably not, but maybe.

The best thing you can do for a superstar is treat them like a human. Not some idol like everybody else.

still love Ron… but don’t hate you for not sharing the love

Stop judging people so harshly.

It’s hard to make friends with someone while you’re sitting there judging them. It’s hard to make new friends when you sit making harsh assumptions from afar. “I bet he’s a liberal” or “He’s going to hate the idea” or “She is going to think I’m an idiot” or “She has a zit, ew” or whatever else you’re thinking before approaching someone is not going to help you make a friend.

I used to be obsessed with politics. Will and I would go to rallies and protests to set this crazy world straight. It was to the point that I would be disgusted with people if they wouldn’t convert their beliefs to mine. They’re ignorance was dragging our world down! It wasn’t until I realized that I had less friends (and certainly a less diverse group) because of my judgements of people based on their political beliefs that I finally stopped.

Actually, it was after that. It was after I had a few of my rock-solid perspectives on life turned on their head. Experience teaches you that you know nothing. Every great sage throughout history has pretty much told us, “You don’t know shit.” And every one of us thinks we break the mold. Until one day we take a more honest look and admit that this whole thing is much too large for us to understand.

harhar!

There are a multitude of “right” ways to live in this world and they are going to vary from person to person. If somebody is a shitty person and hurts people then maybe they deserve tolerance. If they want to worship a weird statue or believe some weird book or vote in some weird way then maybe you should have a little tolerance.

Your harsh judgements of others are a waste of your energy. Try asking yourself why that thing bothers you so much. Is it really upsetting to have to look at a fat person? Is that person really dressed so offensively? Is their poor business decision really a drag in your life (and not a valuable lesson of what not to do)?

When you stop being mean to people in your head you will notice you begin to have more friends. When you’re more accepting of people you have a whole lot more chances at friendship.

Don’t give up your values, but realize they are yours. 

I tried to find an image for watering a garden but this came up. So I’m sorry. And you’re welcome

Follow up with people (picture texts, articles)

I just got an email from a girl I met at SXSW. I gave her a copy of the book and met her for ten minutes in the morning. She was a fast-talker and didn’t seem to like the way I was dressed. She loves the book! Maybe she also now likes my hair. Either way, I forgot about her but now I remember.

While writing this article I’ve been reminded to text or email four other people that I met at SXSW that I wanted to touch base with.

It’s nice to meet people but, “Out of sight, out of mind.” I am the worst with this. I haven’t even called to say hi to my baby niece because she’s across the country. I’ll be right back.

Okay, back,  she’s doing great. Walking and everything!

that’s not her, but she’s even cuter

My ex used to hate it because I wouldn’t text her every day. I would go a couple days just working and forget I had a girlfriend. That’s no good.

The same thing with all my relationships. Even with Facebook, email, texting, teleporation, and the power of speech I still don’t stay connected with all the people I want to. I don’t see them every day, how can I remember to say hi?

Well you can start with the random acts of connection I talked about above.

Be like John, call when you think about calling.

Be like my ex wanted me to be like – text when you thought of texting.

Relationships fade extremely quickly. Make a list of ten relationships you don’t want to fade.

Maybe five of these are strictly personal and the other five are personal and professional. Make an event on Google Calendars that repeats every Monday. Put the list in the event and then contact all of them that day.

Don’t break the chain. Keep your relationships alive by constantly infusing interest and love into other people’s lives.

say yes to invites

Accept invitations

I hate going to events and meeting new people. Like I will make up almost every excuse not to go.

Meeting new people is such a drag. “What do you do?” Then I have to tell people that I don’t even know what I do but I run this site StartupBros and have they heard of it? Then they will sit there and make fun of me and tell me about their boring business and the whole time I’ll have to pee. They’ll probably also stake me out as a fraud and laugh in front of the whole party or event.

Or at least that’s what I assue will happen every time.

What actually happens is I make a new friend every time. I meet a new person and my heart beats fast and I blurt out the weird thing I’ve been thinking about all day and then they say, “Wow! I love that, too, have you heard that…” and we have a magical conversation and go frolicking together.

My heuristic for accepting invitations is:

The worse you want to stay in, you have to go out.

Every time I put off a meeting with a person I know that I need to schedule it for ASAP.

Next time somebody invites you to something. Go. Unless it’s a heroin party. Those will shit on your life faster than a seagull watching you buy a new car. Go with an open mind. Go with the willingness to shake a hand, look somebody in the eyes, and say something interesting.

master interviewer charlie rose

Interview people

One of the best ways to get to know somebody is to interview. There is something about sitting in front of a mic together talking for an audience that brings out stories and little details that don’t come out otherwise. You’ll see what I mean when we start releasing our recorded podcasts.

You don’t need to have a platform to interview people. Do an information interview. This is a great way to meet new people.

I’ve gotten to know a lot of huge successes just by asking them questions. People who have had success want to share the love.

It doesn’t need to be a sit down interview, either. You can email back and forth.

I just met a kid who had literally zero business experience before landing a job at a private equity firm. How did he get the job? He asked the founder of it if he could email him some business questions. Apparently he asked great questions because he got the job and is now working on a brand new (massive and exciting) education project. I can’t wait to tell you more about that but for now, just email somebody who you wish you could connect with.

sometimes the best idea you can introduce is a kiss

Introduce ideas together (the people that have them)

When two people want to do things and they mash up to fill each other’s holes, you’ve got a magic. You now are making friends by connecting friends outside of yourself.

A friend needs a website built for some city that’s booming in Panama. I have a friend that loves building websites for booming cities! I e-introduced the two. I hope the hug and become good friends. Another guy paints to music and needs a videographer – I know videographers who love painting! BAM! More friendships.

When you create a friendship outside of yourself it’s like multiplying your own friendships. They will be building their relationship and you’ll be in their mind.

When somebody says, “I need to find somebody who can do ____ or is interested in ___,” then go through your friends and see if any match up. Ask your friends if they have any friends that match up.

Nobody loses when connections are made. It’s like this web of a thing that just keeps growing and growing. Almost like a network. Don’t scientize the building of the web (or worry about my neologisms) or you’ll miss the magic sauce. The magic is friendship, human connection. That doesn’t happen unless there’s sincerity.

Nassim Taleb, my mind-hero

Barbell Networking: Create an Antifragile Network of Friends

“Kyle, you’ve told me nothing about networking. Fuck you and your friendship ideals, I wanted actual advice!”

Yes, huh! I did too! If you know how to make a good friend and you understand that every human is in fact a human then you know how to meet anyone you want.

But fine, if you don’t believe me that you’re network depends on your ability to make friends. If you don’t believe me that life is better when you make more friends (and that those friends will also bring you the most business success) that’s okay. One day you will. Everyone burns out when they network for networking’s sake.

In the meantime, I’ll give you some real, hardcore, “practical” networking advice.

Anybody who has read me before knows that I love Nassim Taleb, especially his most recent book, Antifragile. In it he describes a strategy of barbelling activities. His barbell fitness routine is this: lift extremely heavy weights once a weak or so and then walk 20-30 hours a week. For eating: feast one day and fast another. Investing: have 90% of assets in the safest thing possible and 10% in the riskiest (highest potential reward) possible. He creates these situations for himself that gives his life variation.

As humans we tend to try to straighten things out and force them into easily digestible/definable explanations that make a nice story. We are scared of uncertainty. But everything extreme happens in uncertainty.

For instance, a good friend of mine has been playing guitar gigs in the Florida Keys for a few years. Recently Andy Hilfiger (Tommy’s brother) saw him at a gig and said, “You got to get out of Florida, come to LA and I’ll do what I can to make it happen for you.” Bam! Completely unexpected and now John is going to L.A. Here is him singing The Beatles’ Here Comes The Sun:

What did John do? He showed up. He kept showing up (just like The Beatles). And then he connected with a bunch of people and one of those people happened to be Andy Hilfiger.

You have this kind of serendipity in your life. Let’s add more.

We are going to make a barbell out of your friend-making life.

Step 1: Connect as shallowly and widely as possible. Go on Facebook and “Like” everything. Join a bunch of groups that interest you. Go to a bunch of parties and meet everyone there. Shake as many hands as you can.

HOLD IT! Doesn’t this go against everything I said before? No. These aren’t people that you want to be friends with. Go as shallow as possible. Meet a million people until….

You look in the other person’s eyes and you see magic. Or you just get the strong feeling that you want to know more about the person. Or if they just make you feel good about life. Skip as quickly as possible all those people who you know you don’t want to be friends with. Spread your seed wide! Get it all over social networking sites and parties. Literally twenty seconds ago a guy messaged me on Facebook (which is the dumbest tab I could possible have open while trying to write) to tell me that he met a guy at a party that invited him to the New York House of Genius (the other dumbest thing is putting links to point away from your website – come back to me!)

The difference here between card-slinging networking and friend-making is that we’re actually looking for friends on this one. The connection is different. When you feel that connection, dive!

Step 2: Go deep. After you make the initial connection, commit. Don’t treat the person like an acquaintance, treat them like a friend. You shouldn’t make 100 friends at a conference, maybe just 10 (and that’s probably too many). Get to know them. Get to trust them. Maybe see how you can build something together. Put in the TIME! It will be weird to see other connections passing you by. Business cards walking past. Don’t make a friend feel like shit because you want to spread your seed further. 

At SXSW this year I probably made six friendships that will last for years. That’s more than almost anywhere else there can say.

Spread your ideas wide, skip over everyone. Then when you find one that hits you, commit! (This advice is easy for me to follow in friendships, harder in romance.)

YOUR NETWORK IS VAST AND SPACEY!

Finally, Your Network Is Already Massive And Powerful

I learned about 3rd degree connections in Ben Casnocha’s (and Reid Hoffman’s, I guess) fantastic book The Startup of You. He points out that you’re connected to like a bajillion people if you go by the third degree. That means your friend’s friend’s friend. LinkedIn demonstrates the power of the third degree like this:

Suppose you have 40 friends, and assume that each friend has 35 other friends in turn, and each of those friends of friends has 45 unique friends of their own. If you do the math (40 × 35 × 45), that’s 54,000 people you can reach via an introduction.

That’s a LOT of people. And most of us have more than 35 direct friends. The secret here is that one person in the chain knows you. Look at this chain: You -> John (1st) -> Jane (2nd) -> Jim(3rd). When John introduces you to Jane, John knows you. When Jane introduces you to Jim she knows you through John. This keeps the trust in the connection.

Do not go around crying that you don’t know the people who are included in the “it’s about who you know” thing. Don’t accept that excuse from yourself. You’re better than that. Your friends know it and you know it.

The point is, wherever you need friends, there they are. 

The post The Definitive Non-Networking Guide: How To Make Friends appeared first on StartupBros - You don't need a job....

We live in a time of unprecedented opportunity. With a simple Internet connection anyone and everyone has the potential to launch a profitable, high-impact Internet business.

But if this is true – and it is – then why doesn’t everyone become a successful Internet entrepreneur?

It’s hard to know for sure…

In a recent episode of the TechSmart Podcast one of the things Lee and I talked about was what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.

That discussion really got me thinking…

What DOES it take to be a successful entrepreneur?

Which traits have I most relied on over the past 9 years to get where I am right now?

Which traits do I need to continue developing to reach new heights of success?

Most importantly, which traits should you be identifying and nurturing to ensure that you see success?

Just because the Internet makes entrepreneurship accessible doesn’t mean that there is no barrier to entry. There are still several requirements that each and every one of us must meet before we will see our way to the top of the digital food chain.

I can tell you right now, though, that a college degree and J-O-B experience are not on this list. In fact, just the opposite… These traits will almost always come easier when left untainted by the collegiate and corporate world.

Unquenchable Desire

“The starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small amount of fire makes a small amount of heat.”

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Napoleon Hill

Napoleon Hill – the Godfather of self-development and writer of Think and Grow Rich – realized this simple truth after studying the traits and habits of the wealthiest entrepreneurs of his time. The people who made the biggest impact on the world (and made the most money doing it) were also the people that most fervently DESIRED their goals.

As human beings, there is one rule that governs our behavior – we do exactly what we want to do. And it doesn’t matter whether our wants help us or hurt us.

If you want to sit around and be lazy more than you want to create a thriving business, then you will never get anything done.

If you want to make your own way and carve a new, unexplored path through life, then you will.

Even though it’s a dark example, you can see this rule played out most clearly through an addiction.

Whether to alcohol, cigarettes or drugs (or dare I say, procrastination?), an addiction won’t be broken until the pain of continuing that addiction is greater than the pain of stopping. An addict won’t be able to really, truly quit until they WANT to quit more than they want to continue.

This same rule is why desire is a prerequisite to success. Without desire, you will never be driven to create something of value.

Guts

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” 

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Thomas Stearns Eliot

I wish I could lie to you.

I wish that I could boldly proclaim that the entrepreneur’s world is one made of marshmallow mountains and chocolate rivers, with rainbows on every corner.

But I can’t.

So I’m telling you this with a heavy heart, like a parent tells their kids that Santa’s not real. You deserve the truth:

There is no way to guarantee that your business or start up will see success.

That’s why one of the essential traits of a successful entrepreneur is the guts to take a leap of faith. You need to take risks.

Many young entrepreneurs aren’t reaching their full potential because they’re afraid to explore unknown territory. They never realize that the best ideas are completely unique, which makes it impossible to determine how your audience will react to your proposition ahead of time.

Sure, you can use some of the tactics we’ve discussed here on StartupBros to increase the likelihood of your success…

For example, you can predict an audience’s response to your business’ name by split testing paid traffic. You can make sure your business idea has all 5 crucial ingredients. You can even ask your family and friends for feedback on your idea or product, although the it may not be reliable.

Despite all this, in the end there is nothing you can do to guarantee your success. All you can do is go as far as you can, just to see how far you can go. So buckle in and enjoy the ride, baby!

Access to Seed Money

“Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.”

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Ayn Rand

As we all (hopefully) know, free money doesn’t exist.

Unfortunately, a sad number of people are rather predictably attracted to the prospect of free or easy money. Just look at the countless MLM schemes out there, or get-rich-quick infomercials. Those things don’t come out of nowhere, and they wouldn’t continue to pop up if somebody isn’t making money.

That’s why this is something that a lot of “gurus” won’t talk about. One of the hard but true facts of life is that it DOES take money to make money. It doesn’t necessarily take much, but it always takes some.

If you’re reading this in dismay because you don’t have access to any seed money, don’t be discouraged! There are a few exceptions, but just about every successful person (entrepreneur or otherwise) started from the bottom of the barrel and worked their way up.

Just look at Bill Simon, Walmart’s current CEO. He started out washing dishes for $2.50 an hour. Now he’s head honcho for one of the largest companies in the world – ever – that makes $34,880 per minute.

It’s important to understand that “seed money” doesn’t have to mean tens of thousands of dollars.

If you plan to start an Internet-based business (aka, most of you reading this), then you can reasonably get started on $1,000 or less. Especially if you have enough time and savvy for a DIY approach. Just take a look at our secret weapons; almost all of these tools come in under $100.

If you’re tight on cash at the moment, get creative. Sell some old stuff on e-bay. Go mow some lawns as the weather gets warmer. Offer to do some freelancing for a local business or through places like Freelancer or Elance.

Or hey, you can hone your marketing skills and earn some start up cash by working part-time as a telemarketer. Recommending any job is normally not something you’ll catch me doing, but this is one of the few that will provide real-world experience relevant to launching a business. In fact, several top copywriters I know have honed their skills in exactly the same way.

Whatever you choose, the important thing is to put some extra cash in your bank account and move forward with your business.

Shiny Object Immunity

“Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” 

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Steve Jobs

I cannot tell you how many potential entrepreneurs I’ve seen waste away because they did not have this crucial trait.

The Internet is a very fast-paced environment. It seems like every week there is a new fad that gets heralded as “the next big thing” in digital marketing.

Even worse, there are a surplus of marketers out there that know exactly what buttons to push. They’ll make you honestly believe that you NEED to capitalize on each and every one of these “shiny objects”.

In order to succeed online, you need to be able to recognize “shiny objects” when you see them. But, you also need to recognize legitimate trends (such as social media) so that you don’t get left in the dust. This is where a knack for objective evaluation and awareness of your target market become important.

If you ever deviate from your business plan in any way shape or form, make sure you’re actually improving and not just succumbing to the latest trend.

Whatever happens, don’t let some slimy marketer forge your opinion for you… That’s a quick way to lose a lot of money and a lot of time.

Patience and Persistence

“Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.”

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Napoleon Hill

Yeah, yeah, I know that I already used a quote from Napoleon Hill. I can’t help it; the guy’s a stud! Really knows his stuff. And he hit this one right on the head.

Successful entrepreneurs don’t magically gain business-prowess overnight. It takes time in the real world to develop the skills you’ll need to become successful. It can be a tedious process.

Actually, scratch that; it WILL be a tedious process.

You have to put your nose to the grindstone every day just to get a little further on your journey to success.

And the days that you don’t work hard? Well, you’ll just stay put.

If you get discouraged? The only person to cheer you up is yourself, unless you’re part of a great community like the one here at StartupBros (have you joined our Rewards program yet?!).

Nobody said being an entrepreneur would be easy. This is where that first trait becomes relevant; if you’ve got an unquenchable desire, then you won’t be satisfied with anything less than your full potential. Even if you have to push yourself beyond your limits to get to it.

Self-Awareness

“People of the world don’t look at themselves, and so they blame one another.”

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Mevlana Rumi

Self-awareness is a trait that you will never fully master. Let’s get that out of the way up front.

It’s easy to slip into this autopilot state where you let your your mind go numb and fall into a box of routine, but that is a very unproductive place to be.

One of the best ways to move forward is through self-examination. Give your self an objective analysis:

• How do you see yourself?
• How do others see you?
• Who is the person that you actually are?
• What needs to improve about your habits, or how you spend your time?
• What are you doing well?
• Are you moving towards your goals, or are you staying stagnant?

Now, start asking yourself those questions every day. Get used to it.

This isn’t an exercise to make you doubt yourself – You and I both know that you have what it takes to see success. Rather, this exercise is designed to develop an objective mental mirror to check that you’re going where you want to go as an entrepreneur. Learn to check it regularly.

Humble Time

I will finish by trying to salvage some semblance of modesty.

Just because these traits make up my prerequisites for a successful Internet entrepreneur does not mean that I have mastered each and every one of them. However, I see at least a glimmer of each in myself, and I’ve seen them in other successful entrepreneurs, too. I’m sharing them with you to give you a jump start on your own personal entrepreneurial journey.

Still, keep in mind that it’s possible there are a few essential traits that I missed. Can you think of any?

I’d love it if you’d chime in below with any other important entrepreneurial traits you see in yourself or others around you. Share with the community, help us all be better!

If not, you definitely should. It’s free and eye-opening, although should be taken with a grain of salt since it’s 75 years old… You can download it here if you’re interested

But I digress.

The post 6 Traits You’ll Find in Every Successful Entrepreneur appeared first on StartupBros - You don't need a job....

If you’ve been taking action on the previous importing articles, you already know that Alibaba is the world’s biggest B2B marketplace. In fact, it may be a little too big…

There are millions of suppliers listing millions of products on Alibaba. Finding suppliers is easy, the hard part is selecting the right one.

The most dangerous obstacle in your path to the perfect supplier are the ocean of scammers and middle-men.

Luckily, it’s not too difficult to avoid these low lives.

Below, you’ll find a step-by-step guide on avoiding scams, middle-men, and fraud on Alibaba.

Step 1 – Review the Company Profile

The Company Profile consists of information both verified and unverified  by Alibaba.com. For an untrained eye, this short list of information might seem to be completely irrelevant to the purpose of the visit, which is to find the right products. However, you can get a good idea about whether this company is worthy to include in your sourcing process by analyzing the points listed below:

Company name

(Note - Applies to companies registered in Mainland China only)

• City: Small and medium-sized companies have the city they are located in as part of their company name. For example, “Ningbo Everbright Trading Co., Limited”.

• Province: Larger companies can be named after the province where they are located. For example “Zhejiang Everbright Trading Co., Limited”.

Business Type

• Manufacturer: This indicates that the supplier is only selling products it manufactures. A manufacturer is limited by its production line, set-up and tooling. For this reason, manufacturers tend to be highly specialized in their field of products.

• Trading Company: Some Trading Companies are independent while others own, or are owned by, a manufacturing company. While everybody wants to cut out the middleman, one has to keep in mind that many factories in Asia have neither the knowledge nor resources for exporting their produce. This function can then be filled by a Trading Company. On the other hand, some Trading Companies offer no added value and will only raise your costs.

• Manufacturer & Trading Company: Many factories have expanded their operation by not only selling and marketing products made in their own facilities, but also by trading similar products manufactured by other factories. While this Business Type indicates that the company is indeed a manufacturer, you cannot be sure whether they are manufacturing or subcontracting your products. So it’s tough to be sure if this supplier is a good choice or not.

Management Certification

Quality issues is a serious risk when importing from China. In fact, you’re more likely to lose money due to quality issues then getting scammed. Quality issues can  never be completely eliminated, but they can be minimized if the supplier applies a Quality Management System (QMS) such as ISO9001.

• Even multinationals such as Boeing and Toyota have quality issues. A “good manufacturer” is not a manufacturer that is completely free of quality issues, but one that is continuously monitoring quality during production. You know it’s time to walk away from a Chinese supplier when they claim to be completely free of defective and damaged products.

• When a defective product is discovered, the supplier should have a routine for how it should be managed. Some suppliers remake, others repair. The most important thing is not how they deal with defective products, but that their employees know exactly what do to when something goes wrong.

• ISO compliance require more than having a quick check up before the products are packed and shipped. The supplier is required to inspect incoming raw materials and components before production, set up inspection stations during productions and do final inspections after production.

• Some products require stricter quality assurance than others. These products have a low error tolerance and a mistake at one production stage can ruin a whole order. If you are importing “complex products” such as electronics or mechanical equipment, a Management Certification should be a basic supplier requirement.

Registered Address

• City, Province: Many cities in China are highly specialized in one or more industries. If you are sourcing consumer electronics for example, you will discover that Shenzhen, Guangdong, is very dominant. A manufacturer is dependent on the surrounding support industries such as logistics, component suppliers, raw material suppliers and labor. For this reason, a supplier that is based in an industrial cluster is likely to be more competitive than a supplier that is not.

Legal Representative

The Legal Representative is the only employee who can sign agreements on behalf of the company. Make sure that he or she writes a signature on any Invoice or Sales Agreement, along with the company stamp.

Registered capital

• Indication of company size: Companies with less than RMB 500.000 [around US$ 80,000] should be avoided if possible. This is the strongest indicator of the supplier’s scale of operations. The more capital they have, the more likely they are to care about their reputation. Also keep in mind that even the most reliable supplier cannot compensate you for defective or damaged products if they don’t have the resources (money) to do so.

• Foreign Currency Capital: Indicates that the company have foreign investors, which usually is a mark of quality. The currency invested can also give a hint about where the investor comes from;
  • Hong Kong Dollar (HKD) indicates that the investors are from Hong Kong. These guys has been exposed to international trade since the place was founded by the Brits back in the 19th century.
  • United States Dollars (USD) indicates that the foreign investors are… well, foreign. European, Asian and Latin American investors also tend to stick to the dollar for their investments in Chinese companies.
  • Taiwan New Dollar (TWD)

Step 2 – Review Other Company Certifications

First, why this is important…

Some products need to be compliant with a predetermined national and/or market standard. Different standards apply to different products, and it’s always the buyer’s responsibility to ensure that the imported products are compliant. Most products won’t require this; but if you’re thinking about buying a product in bulk, you might want to research and make sure.

The “Other Certification” link can be found under “Company Certification”.

Certification compliance is not mandatory for Alibaba suppliers, so don’t be surprised if many suppliers don’t have any “Other Certification” page at all.

Key Facts

• Compliance requires more than testing; products need to be produced with specific materials and components. If you don’t clearly specify that your products must comply with a certain standard before you place the order, the products will not be compliant.

• Far from all suppliers in Asia have the knowledge about which and where certain product standards apply, even less have the capability to actually manufacture products that comply with European and/or North American product standards.

• Many suppliers seldom update their Company Profiles. If you have a hard time to find suppliers with the right certification listed in the “Other Certification” page, then send out a message and ask them directly whether or not they can comply with the required certification standard. It’s quite common that suppliers can offer more than what’s shown in their Alibaba profile.

• An easy way to find compliant products is to type in the Product name and the certification standard in the Alibaba product search. [E.G. Mp4 player + CE]

Action List

1. Research which product standard is required for your product in your country and/or market.

2. Review the “Other Certification” page.

3. Are any of the product standards listed?
   - If not, review the product description and the company introduction. Some suppliers that have test reports available are not uploading them to the “Other Certification Page”.

Step 3 – Review Supplier’s Product Selection/Niche

There has been a lot of focus on paperwork in this article, but what you’re looking for is products.

An Alibaba suppliers product catalog can give you a lot of information, and it’s the most important factor when selecting a supplier. The golden rule is to find a supplier that is specialized in manufacturing or trading a certain product. Product specialization comes with a number of benefits that will have a large impact on your business.

Checklist

Is your product mentioned in the supplier’s company name?

This is a strong indication that the company was registered for the sole purpose of manufacturing the product you are sourcing. [E.G. Shenzhen Golden Watch Factory Co., Ltd].

Is your product making up the majority of the supplier’s product catalog on Alibaba.com?

It’s a strong indication that the supplier is highly specialized in manufacturing and/or trading the products you are searching. A supplier that is highly specialized in a certain product is more likely to be better at managing the quality standard and offer more customization options. It can also affect the pricing since they buy large volumes of materials, components and tooling that is used only for the manufacturing of your product.

You’ll also want to grow with your supplier and a supplier with only a limited product selection will prevent this from happening.

Is the supplier listing products that are completely different from the type you’re looking for? [e.g. Wrist Watches and iPhone cases]

The factories of the real world are not like Santa’s Workshop where anything imaginable is manufactured. You can’t use the same workforce or tooling for the manufacturing of both 3D Printers and Polyester Ties. This matters because you should not deal with a disorganized and opportunistic supplier selling a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

An “opportunistic” supplier is also more likely to discontinue products than a professional manufacturer. The result could be disastrous since you’re left without products to sell to your customers. This is especially dangerous if you’re selling products to retailers where reputation and reliability is everything.

How to use the Alibaba supplier search to identify specialized suppliers

Last year Alibaba.com introduced the suppliers search, a useful feature for finding highly specialized and professional manufacturers. In the beginning, all it did was presenting a list of suppliers with the product in the company  name. Now, it also searches the suppliers product catalog and shows the number of matching products each supplier have!

1. Go to Alibaba.com

2. Change the search box from “Products” to Suppliers

3. Enter the product name and search

4. Now you will get a long list of all suppliers selling the product you just searched for. This can save time when sourcing suppliers since you can skip the manual review of the product catalog.

Case Study

Guangzhou Guanghao Watch Co., Ltd is manufacturing and exporting LED watches. That’s in fact the only thing they do since they have listed 900 different models. When you work with this company, you can be sure about the following:

• All this supplier will ever care about is wristwatches, and certainly LED watches. They will develop new models and your company can grow your product selection together with Guangzhou Guanghao.

• 900 different models equals hundreds of thousands of different components. This supplier certainly know how these things work, and more importantly – what doesn’t work. Perhaps not today, but in the future you might want to create your own product its own unique design and features.

You’ll always be limited by the components and product knowledge a supplier can provide you with. If you would choose Xiamen Well Imp & Exp Co., Ltd**as your supplier, you will be very limited. They offer a staggering amount of 6 different LED watches to choose from. Then how can they be competitive? Why do they even bother to add a few watches on Alibaba when articles like this one clearly states that importers should stay away from these suppliers? Because few importers bother to read articles like this, thousands of importers fall for the trick of low prices and positive answers to every question. Don’t be one of these guys that think they’ve are smarter than everybody else – until they realize they just got what they paid for.

* We have no relation with Guangzhou Guanghao Watch Co., Ltd and they are mentioned for reference only. They do however have a nice selection of LED watches.

** We have no relation with Xiamen Well Imp & Exp Co., Ltd and they are mentioned for reference only. They are probably a great supplier, but maybe not for LED watches.

Any other questions?

Feel free to comment if I’ve left anything unanswered!

The post How to Avoid Scams, Middle-Men, and Fraud on Alibaba appeared first on StartupBros - You don't need a job....

Look at all those books that somebody wrote

...when you have to write your ideas out in complete sentences and complete paragraphs, it forces a deeper clarity of thinking. – Jeff Bezos

(This post is a celebration of completing our first full book, SelfMadeU! You can get a fat preview of it riiiighhhtt HERE. Enjoy!)

I was working with Mark Medoff, an Oscar-nominated, and Tony Award-winning writer, on his most recent play and asked him for writing advice.

He said, “I can tell you everything you need to know about writing in  thirty seconds.”

He told me what Kurt Vonnegut told him, “There are three parts to everything, the question, the exclamation, and the conclusion.”

? ! .

“Other than that, nobody has any idea what they’re doing.”

He teaches a class on writing so I’m sure he was being facetious. Sort of.

People ask me how to write all the time thinking there is an answer beyond, “write”. The fact is, most of us just need permission to start writing. Every great writer will tell you that you’ve got to just keep writing.

Once you begin writing we’ll add the technical stuff one write.

This post is broken down into nine sections:

1. Why Your Business Needs You To Write Well
2. Why You Need To Write For You
3. How To Be A Better Writer
4. How To Write Better
5. Technical Tips
6. Tips For Kickass Sales Copy
7. How To Keep Writing
8. Recommended Reading
9. How To Begin NOW

Your business needs you to write. You need you to write. We need you to write.

Connection is all that matters now. We’re all disillusioned with lame marketing tactics. We know the dirty secrets of those yelling about “Make $3000 TODAY From Your Computer! No Effort Required!” – they’re full of shit. We know there are good guys out there, but who?

How do we (the Good Guys!) show that we’re trustworthy? How do we connect to other humans on a level that corporations and phonies can’t?

We need to be honest and then learn to communicate that honesty in the most effective way possible.

Arm yourself.

<Calvin&Hobbs3

Why Your Business Needs You To Write Well

Whether you work for yourself or somebody else, you’re going to be better off if you can write (read communicate) effectively. You’ll also just be better. At everything. Like making money and making business.

Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it. – Walter Benjamin

• Communication. There is not a single person on the planet that doesn’t use written communication every day. If you are hiring a virtual assistant, you need to be able to give them crystal-clear instructions. If you’re trying to get a client, it helps to be comfortable using your words to get them on board. If you can’t word a status update well then you’re going to have a tough time engaging anybody. Think about all the ways you write to people every day: texting, tweeting, status updates, blogging, email, bathroom graffiti, writing AdSense Ads, deciding on what tattoo you want.
• Everyone is a media company now. Content marketing is huge and blowing up even more in 2013. More stuff is being put out there and Google is learning how to get rid of the crap. Writing well is probably your greatest SEO strategy. Videos, podcasts, and images are a boon here as well but writing remains king. Without stellar content nobody will care about you. Nobody will find you. And you need to be found. Get generous – get great at writing.
• Sales. Nothing sells you or your business like beautifully placed words. If you can’t describe your product to somebody in an emotionally powerful way, you can forget about selling it.
• Investors. Entrepreneurs must be effective communicators. This isn’t an “extra”, if you can’t clearly describe what you want an investor to invest in… well, just go home.

Jeff Bezos made Amazon and thinks writing makes you better at thinking

• Strategize. If you can’t clearly put a business strategy into words, how is anyone going to follow it? How will you follow it? How will you know if it even makes any sense? Writing will help you think about your business goals and how to get there. Amazon’s Bazos
• Solve problems. Entrepreneurs are basically independent problem solvers. We see an opportunity in a problem that people are having and then create something to solve it. This takes a lot of thinking and wading through a lot of bad ideas. Writing is one of the best ways you can see whether your solution actually makes sense. It’s like the pre-test to the validation test.

Why You Need To Write For You

I told you about how writing saved my life once. It hasn’t stopped since. If I go a week without writing I will become scattered and stressed. Overwhelm takes hold, new ideas stop coming in, and I find myself reading too much garbage (or finding myself on page 17 of reddit). Even if you don’t believe me that writing is necessary for business, you’ve got to try it out for your own life at large.

• It’s for your business. Your business is your source of finance and fulfillment. That should be reason enough to learn to write well.
• Overcome Overwhelm. There are always too many projects going on, too many problems to solve, too many thoughts to remember, too many things in general. Writing puts the mess of thoughts onto paper or computer. Once a week (or more) I write down all my projects and everything that needs to get done for each. When I do this it becomes easy to focus on the task at hand. If I don’t do this I’m constantly anxious about whether or not I’m spending my time on the right thing. Do yourself a favor and get everything you need to do on one sheet of paper.
• It’s free therapy. Writing your stream of conscious is worth more to me than a therapist. We’ll talk more about the details of this later but for now, believe me. If you’ve been looking for a way to reduce anxiety, depression, or just generally “get your life together” this is your holy grail – and it’s free. It’s a beautiful thing to learn about yourself in this way.
• Externalizes ideas. Your brain is constantly full of ideas and it gets clogged if you don’t empty it out. You need to put the ideas that have been swimming around in your head on paper and make new for the fresh ones.
• Build subconscious associations. When you write about something you will find that your brain immediately starts making connections. You start to pull in other ideas and mix them up with your current ones. You start to have certain types of ideas. If you spend a week writing about ways you could make your business better then your brain will start feeding you those ideas.
• You notice those quiet ideas. When you write the ideas that your subconscious brain feeds you then you are showing respect for those ideas. Carry a notebook to record these and you’ll begin to find them coming to you all the time.
• Measured thinking time. We all know that we should spend more time thinking, but it’s difficult to just sit down and think about something. When you sit down and write for thirty minutes you know that you spent thirty minutes thinking about something.
• You will learn more. When you write you are forced to recognize what you understand and what you don’t. If you want to learn a skill, begin writing about it. Find your knowledge gaps and then fill them – then write to find some more!
• You connect to people you wouldn’t have otherwise. Writing honestly has connected me with tons of new friends that I wouldn’t have made otherwise. When you put your ideas in front of people and connect with them, you’ll be amazed at the people you meet. So many of us are just grateful for somebody to say something that nobody else will. We need your perspective to help explain our own.
• Learning. When you write about something you discover what you actually know. It’s the same idea as teaching something to understand it more thoroughly. This is almost always less than you think. When you’re thoughts get organized into sentences and paragraphs then you realize the missing parts. Now you know what you need to go and find.
• You see your soul. There is something about creating that lets you sneak a peek at that magical thing artists, philosophers, and saints talk about. Writing is especially interesting for this because you have words to remember the moment by. This sounds weird, I know, just try it.

Jack Kerouac bled, too.

How Be A Better Writer

In order to write you need to be a writer. Which means you need to give yourself permission to write. The following are ways to get your mind into writer-mode.

• Stream of conscious. If you take one thing from reading this, make it this. Writing my stream of consciousness has been one of the coolest ways to understand my current situation in life. Set a time for 20 minutes (or an hour…) and just start typing. Or writing, pen and paper is even better. The rule is that you have to keep moving your fingers. You’re not allowed to pause to think or anything else. If you get stuck then just keep writing “I don’t know what to write” or “My brain is empty” or whatever else comes out of your finger. After a while you will just say “screw it” and find the good stuff. I promise you you couldn’t use your time better than this. (This is also great for people who have been meaning to meditate but can’t bring themselves to. You end up with similar results.)

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material. – John Steinbeck

• Know you will write mostly terrible things. You don’t get to start making things and immediately be really good. After a ton of practice your writing gets better on average, but you’ll still have terrible days. Yesterday was miserable. I couldn’t type anything worthwhile. Today is different (well… it feels different). Don’t let this stop you. Just like working out or gaining a skill – you don’t just start out genius at it.
• Be passionate. If you don’t care what you’re writing about then don’t be surprised when we don’t care about it. If you have no excitement for what you’re writing then you won’t be able to make it interesting.
• Write it like you won’t show it to anyone. Always remember that the first draft is for you. You never need to show another person what you’re doing. You may end up deciding to share it but always write knowing that you can keep it private. This makes it more candid. It’s easier to be brutally honest when you know you don’t need to show it to anyone.
• Write to somebody. If you can pretend like you’re writing to your best friend then you’ll be helped immensely. It will be easier for your voice to come through and it will feel more conversational. You’ll be connected to the person you’re communicating with – even if it’s a stranger. For instance, I’m aiming this at a couple friends of mine who are beginning to write but need some assistance.

Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one. – John Steinbeck

• You know enough. People think they need to have something epically important to say before they begin writing. You don’t. You already know enough right now to write a book, I promise you that. Humans care less about information than they think; a lot of times we just need human connection or a reminder. If you don’t get good at writing now, what will happen when that epic idea comes along and you have to tell people about it? Nothing. You won’t understand how to communicate it effectively.
• Be strong. Don’t apologize or “guess” about your opinions. We know it’s your opinion, you’re writing it! Own the damn thing. Don’t give us disclaimers or anything else that makes it harder to care about what you’re saying.  You have an opinion – tell us!
• Be relatable. Some authors think they have found every answer to the Universe. Is it fun to read an arrogant author? Nope. We’re all humans here. We have problems and have failed and cried and all the rest. You’re a human, act like it.
• Be conversational. Well, conversational like when you’re conversing well. You want the reader to be able to read your work quickly and easily.
• Find solitude. At least for your own head. I love the solitude of being in a coffee shop with head phones. It’s impossible to write while somebody wants to talk to you. It’s impossible to write if you’re more interested in doing something besides writing. Sometimes it’s best to be by yourself. Sometimes coffee shops are the best. Find your spots and use them.
• Caffeinate. If you are blocked, it’s because you haven’t had coffee. Caffeine let’s words flow like nothing else. Somehow a cup of coffee makes that thought important enough to write down.  
• Embarrass yourself. If you have something written and you feel completely comfortable hitting “Publish” then re-read what you wrote. Is their any power in it? Is the information great? Is there a way you can make it more relatable?
• Never stop writing. When I go a day without writing, I’m guaranteed to write something bad the next day. When I go a week without writing it takes several days of crap before I get anything decent. Write every day. Even if it’s just for yourself. Put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.

When you can’t create you can work. – Henry Miller

• Never stop writing: Part II. Everything that happens in your life is fodder for writing now. Use everyday life to make connections. Can you connect a football game with your article on SEO? Can you use that interesting fact your friend just let loose in a novel? When you begin writing, you’ll notice yourself getting excited to pull things that happen in life into your writing. Take a notebook with you and make notes to remember them.
• Bleed or bore. I can’t say this enough. If you’re not going to be honest with us, we won’t care. If you hide yourself in your writing then we won’t read it.

Don’t ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out. – Charles Bukowski

• Be funny. If you can make someone laugh then you win.
• Read a ton. Read every day. You need to make good writing an input to make good writing an output. Read in your area of expertise and outside of it. If you want to be any good at all you have to read great writers. That means if you’re a business blogger you should be reading some great fiction. I find it extremely helpful to read immediately before I write as well.
• Become a wordsmith. Learn to love words. Use words as your tool to creating something beautiful. Don’t be afraid to make words up. Sometimes the word we need doesn’t yet exist – make it!
• Have fun! If you’re miserable we’re going to know it and we won’t have any fun at all. And, damnit!, we want to have fun! Words are easier to put down when you’re in a playful attitude. You take yourself less seriously and therefore are fine with the imperfect sentences you’re throwing out.

Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand. – Henry Miller 

• Steal. Take good ideas unapologetically and make them your own. Don’t plagiarize, go deeper than that. Take an idea so completely that you can’t help but make it your own.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. – T.S. Eliot

• Do research. Bring information into your writing and watch it become more powerful. Data shows us that you can’t be lying (we don’t believe that statistics would do such a thing). It also gives you interesting details to write from.
• Be brave. If you won’t say the thing that’s scary to say then you’re no different from the rest. You selfishly hold back the one thing that we could connect with. Don’t. Be free. Don’t be afraid to type something you don’t mean – you don’t have to show it to anyone else if you don’t want to.

Don’t be a pussy – SAY IT! (image from www.brainpickings.org)

Technical Tips

Let’s get down and dirty. The above list is all about your posture. Lean into your writing and let everything loose. It’s about getting to the keyboard or

• Be brief. The quicker you can get an idea through the better. This usually happens in the editing. You have to keep deleting things until everything that is left belongs. George Bernard Shaw said it best in a letter to a friend, “I’m sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”
• Use little words. It’s not impressive to use words that you wouldn’t use in everyday conversation. It just sounds contrived. Get your idea through in the most effective way possible. Your vocabulary will naturally expand as you read and write more.
• Make lists. In order to get a post going, I will write down as many ideas about the topic as possible. I have about thirty unused ideas for this post. Just keep writing down ideas that may fit into whatever you’re writing.
• Make an outline. This isn’t necessary all the time. It’s helpful for longer pieces, though. It’s nice to have a bit of a roadmap to keep you on target. Sometimes you can get lost in your own writing and need to come up for air. An outline can help reorient you by giving you a wider perspective.
• Alliteration. It’s pleasant to read two words with the same beginning sounds for some reason. I don’t know why. Inject some poetry into your prose.
• Rhyme. This is also pleasant. Studies have shown that rhyming makes something more convincing. Don’t overdo it. Unless you’re trying to be Dr. Seuss – then let loose.
• Use pictures. If you’re a blogger then don’t forget to use images. Pictures have also been found to be persuasive.
• Short sentences work better. Just give us one idea per sentence. Sometimes we want to say everything right now in this exact sentence. Don’t. Take your time. Make it easy and enjoyable for us to read your ideas.
• Clarity is key. Without clarity you have nothing. No communication. Focus on that and everything else will come (voice, style, rhythm). Einstein said, “Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.” And, by golly, Einstein is always right. Except for when people smash particles together and find black holes and say that theory of relativity might not matter anymore (or something).

No time for poetry but exactly what is – Jack Kerouac

• Don’t use jargon. Don’t use words we wouldn’t know, it’s rarely impressing and never relatable. Focus on who you’re trying to get your message to. Use words they use.
• Clichés don’t work. We skip over them like they never happened. Same thing with faddy words. Don’t try to be hip’n’hoppin’n’happen’n (see what I mean?). It’s more fun to write when you come up with your own weird expressions anyway.
• Be active! Never say, “This is the company built by me.” when you can say, “I built this company.” We love verbs! Give us movement!
• Kill “very”. The worst way to emphasize a word is to put “very” before it. “I am very cold” isn’t nearly as effective as “I’m freezing.” Same thing with “quite”, “really”, and the rest of those stupid things. (And while we’re here, it’s perfectly fine to put a comma before “and” when listing things.)

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. – Stephen King

• Fewer prepositions please. It’s tiring to read sentences with too many prepositions. Focus on keeping your sentences active and you’ll be safe.
• Get to the point. Nobody is as interested in your buildup as you are. This is especially important for you if you’re writing to educate. You have one sentence and a headline to make me care.
• 3 Parts. We know movies are broken into three acts (or you do now) but we forget to use this magic number in our own writing. Everything should be broken down into three acts: the story, the chapter, the paragraph, and sometimes even the sentence. We start with a question (?) then get into some trouble (!) and end with an explanation (.).
• You’re telling a story. Treat all of your writing like a story. Even in education. If you’re throwing information at me I won’t be able to care about it (i.e. learn) unless you’re entertaining me to. Tell a story to make us care.
• Show me. Express what you’re trying to explain in your writing style. This will come naturally after writing for a while. It’s good to keep in mind.
• Leave things out. If you’re too detailed then our imaginations have nothing to do. We are bored by stories that tell us too much. Your whole story is too long, anyway. Give us just the right details.
• Metaphors! Metaphors are webs in the mind different from those that most people are operating with. Start connecting!

By far the greatest thing is to be a master of metaphor. It is one thing that cannot be learned from others. It is a sign of genius, for a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of similar among dissimilars. – Aristotle

• Read it out loud. When you read your words out loud you will see whether they flow naturally. It will become easy to spot uncomfortable areas that need fixing. It’s uncomfortable to do but it will make your writing much better instantly.
• Focus. Write a one sentence summary of what you’re writing. Let that keep you focused when you forget why you’re sitting in front of a keyboard. My sentence for this article is, “A writing resource that will be helpful enough to be bookmarked.” Am I doing it? Let me know what you think in the comments!
• Put statements in the positive. Never hesitate in your writing. Make us feel you’re committed. “The ice cream man wasn’t often on time.” can be turned into “The ice cream man was usually late.” We find what is much more interesting than what is not. Instead of “not good” say “bad”. Instead of “did not remember” say “forgot”.
• Express similar ideas in similar ways. This is a specific example of structure helping you express what you’re saying. In a list, this would sound weak: “I love to comment, share, and to Like.” It’s stronger to make it: “I love to comment, to share, and to Like.” Or even, “I love to comment, share, and Like.” Expressing similar ideas using similar form makes them more powerful.
• Keep the tenses the same. Don’t send us to the past and then throw us into the future and then assume we’ll know when you’re talking about the present. It’s not fair. When telling a story that happened in the past, be sure to let us know when we’re back in the present.

Tips For Kickass Sales Copy

I avoided learning about sales copy for a long time. We don’t want to admit that we have something to sell; it feels dirty. We’re all selling all the time though. We want people to agree with our ideas on politics, religion, or the nature of reality. We want to convince people that Tyrian is, in fact, the most fascinating character in Game of Thrones. And, once in a while, we want somebody to give us money for something. That’s the only way we get to eat.

• Create scarcity. We are frightened to miss out. What if they get the information and we get left out? It’s creating the FOMO (fear of missing out) for your product or service.
• Repeat things. We need to hear things over and over again for them to sink in. The massively popular blog ZenHabits repeats many ideas over and over again and we love Leo for it. He says it in new ways that make lessons sink in. So repeat yourself to hammer home the ideas that you really want to hit.
• Ridiculous guarantees. Eliminate all the risk from their purchase. Give a free trial, offer a 120% refund, or tell them they can keep the product at no cost if they don’t like it. Again, make not buying your product the absurd choice. Make this a major focus in your offer.
• Social proof. Show clearly that everyone else is doing it. Of course they are, you’d have to be dumb as hell not to jump on a deal like this!
• You’re special. Make them feel special that you’re even offering your services to them at all. It’s an exclusive club and they better feel grateful to be involved. Or make them feel like they could be one of the few chosen ones.
• Paint a picture. Help them imagine their whole new life or business or whatever that they will get once they give you what you want. You’ve got to make them want the result of your offer.
• Appeal to their ego. The vast majority of our purchasing decisions are based on ego. This holds true for business purchases. We want to make people feel great about purchasing our products (or, if you’re a jerk, terrible for not purchasing them).
• Show credibility. We only trust the people who’ve proven themselves. Make your case obvious through past achievements, current endeavors, or deep understanding. We’ve got to feel safe paying you.

How to Keep Writing

Writing is one of those things (like meditation, exercise, eating well) that’s easy to stop after you’ve seen the benefits from it. You begin to take your health for granted and so you start eating donuts again. You forget that the reason you’ve found that health is because of the practices you had! Here is how I keep my words coming:

 Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised. – John Seinbeck

1. Daily stream of consciousness. This is where I externalize everything that needs to be externalized for the day. Often I’ll find new ideas for a blog post or business in the stream. You can find more detailed rules in the How To Have Ideas post but for now remember that you have to keep your pen or fingers moving for the whole time. When you have nothing to say then type, “I have nothing to say.” Set your timer for twenty minutes and write whatever is in your head.
2. Small goals. Don’t plan on writing 1000 words a day right off. Definitely don’t plan on showing people the first things your write. Set yourself an incredibly low minimum (like 200 words) and meet it every day. Consistency is the key here.
3. Carry a notebook. Having a notebook serves as a place to put your ideas and a reminder that you have ideas. I recently forgot to carry my notebook with me for a week and had precisely 63% fewer ideas. When you write an idea down you show respect to the act of having ideas. Another way to increase the amount of ideas is to buy a decent notebook – the monetary investment is also a sign of respect. My idea-maker loves these shows of respect and pays me back with a whole lot of ideas.
4. Read. It’s much easier to stay inspired to write when you read good books. After a while without reading I tend to dry up in the idea or style department.

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. – Stephen King 

Recommended Reading

what she’s reading…

• Bird by Bird was the first book I ever read on writing and it gave me permission to write badly – something you have to do if you have any hope of writing well. I’ve given this book to multiple blocked authors and it immediately opened them back up to writing again. There are plenty of great life lessons for anybody sticking their neck out (read: entrepreneurs) and trying something hard.
• On Writing is Stephen King’s memoir of writing. It’s written in a straightforward style that is amazingly powerful. Anybody who recounts stories from their own life in writing will especially find the book helpful.
• Elements of Style is on pretty much every great author’s “must read” list. It’s impressively short and will give you a solid foundation to write from. It gives you strong rules to follow without infringing on your expression at all.
• The Spoke Zarathustra is Friedrich Nietzsche’s masterpiece. It combines poetry and prose in a way that is beautiful and brutally potent. Reading this book informed my own writing in a massive ways when I began. Nietzsche’s excitement for ideas is intense and contagious. (You can also insert your favorite fiction novel here – one that you appreciate for it’s writing.)
• Dr. Seuss and writers like him (Shel Silverstein comes to mind) show us how clear you can be using the simplest words out there. See how powerful humor and rhyme and rhythm is in making a point.
• Anything that interests you. Reading is dull when you’re reading something because you feel you should. When something is dull we don’t learn from it. Follow your interests, even if they’re not where you think they should be. There is often more business wisdom in biographies than business books.

How to Begin NOW!

I urge you to do begin right now. If you don’t start now then you won’t ever start. I can pretty much promise you that. You don’t have time? Take five minutes.

Everyone

1. Open up your text editor (Text Editor or Notepad is fine).
2. Click your cursor inside.
3. Set your timer for 15 minutes.
4. Turn your monitor off (or screen brightness all the way down).
5. Start typing.
6. Don’t stop moving your fingers for 15 minutes.
7. Write, “I have no idea” if you don’t have any ideas.
8. Repeat 7 until you give up on having no ideas and write down your idea.

This will force you to see that you can write, that you have ideas, and give you forward momentum with any other writing you’re doing.

For Potential Bloggers

We all need blogs now. You probably know this but haven’t been acting on it. Do this planning exercise to get your brain going.

1. Write down five potential blogs you could make.
2. Pick one.
3. Write down thirty possible blog posts you could make for that.
4. Write one short blog post.

This should take you about an hour and you will have started a blog. Maybe you won’t want to continue with it. Maybe you’ll want to spend your time talking about something else. You can’t help but learning a lot from this.

 For Potential Book Authors

You can write that book that you’ve been thinking about. Stop telling people abou the thing you want to do and take the first step towards creating it. You can finish a book amazingly quickly if you commit to 500 words a day. That would take you about 20-30 minutes a day.

1. Write the mission of your book. This is a one or two sentence summary of what you want to do. 
2. Create an outline. This won’t be final but it’ll create a guiding structure for your thoughts.
3. Commit to a certain amount of words that you’ll write every day. Maybe you just want to do 200 words every day. Some days you might do more but you need to do at least X words every day. (There are no roll-over words!)
4. Meet your quota today.

You will finish your book amazingly fast if you do this. Consistency is key.

Take this moment to put your dent in the universe and WRITE

Comment below and let us know what you’re writing!

Are you trying to write a book but can’t quite start? Blog?

Let me know what’s holding you back from starting or where you’re getting stuck.

RIGHT NOW

WRITE NOW

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Maybe Myspace?

We all remember the days when snapping narcissistic photos in a mirror was the “cool” thing to do. Shockingly, many years have passed since Myspace mania petered out and we bid our adieus to our first friend, Tom. Since then, popular platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have surfaced as top social media contenders; distancing enough space and time to memorialize Myspace as the Grandaddy of social networking.

However, they’re not out of the picture quite yet.

It looks like Myspace is re-inventing themselves with the help of an entirely new design. The improved site has been wrapped, packaged and re-labeled for its premiere unveiling. We present to you: the “New Myspace”

A Myspace Recap

Myspace was launched in August 2003 from Beverly Hills, California. It was acquired by News Corporation in July 2005 for $580 million.

From 2005 until early 2008, Myspace was the most visited social networking site in the world, attracting 75.9 million unique visitors a month at its 2008 peak. It surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States in 2006.

In April 2008, Myspace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors, and was surpassed in the number of unique U.S. visitors in May 2009, though Myspace generated $800 million during the 2008 fiscal year.

In June 2009, Myspace employed approximately 1,600 workers. Since then the company has undergone several rounds of layoffs and by June 2011, Myspace had reduced its staff to around 200.

Since then, the number of Myspace users has declined steadily in spite of several redesigns. MySpace reached its lowest point of membership in 2010. They lost half of their monthly visitors in just one year.

However, since introducing their new new music player, the site has signed up ONE MILLION new users.

“We went from zero signups per day to 40,000,” said Chris Vanderhook, the company’s chief operating officer.

It looks like New Myspace is finally marching to the beat of their (refurbished) drums.

He’s Bringing Sexyback? More like Myspace

Justin Timberlake has since matured from his ‘N Sync image. In 2011, Timberlake and Specific Media Group joint purchased the Myspace company for an estimated $35 million, This was just a fraction of what News Corp. had paid, six years prior. Looks like the investment is paying off:

In June 2012, Myspace had only 25 million unique U.S. visitors.
As of January 2013, Myspace was ranked 215 by total web traffic.

A New Ambition

Myspace served as the first real medium of social networking. Despite its decline in popularity over the last few years, the New Myspace may create its own niche in the entertainment sector, as the re-vamped platform hosts a multitude of musical and gaming features.

Myspace is not likely to regain their previous demographic of users, as they’ve moved on to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest, but that can prove advantageous in their favor. By reinstating their brand and appeal, the site has since generated an estimated 20 million users per month.

Refurbished Layout

A “lick of paint” has done Myspace some good. On the surface, the new site is both visually-appealing and user-friendly. Now an entertainment discovery tool, Myspace projects a mature and professional image, and offers a slew of multimedia features, along with a sleek design.

The Sounds of Music

MySpace is revolutionizing its musical roots. The company has full licensing deals with thousands of record labels, and has a library of 53 million tracks and 13K songs, uploaded daily; far more than new competitors such as Spotify or Rhapsody.

Myspace Artist Breakdown

Furthermore, the Myspace player offers:

• Unlimited, on-demand listening to both established and unsigned artists
• Personalized radio modes
• Credible recommendation engine

Myspace continues to serve as a catalyst for new artists, trying to connect to a larger consumer audience.

Restored Intentions

“We’re staying true to our roots in one important way—empowering people to express themselves however they want. So whether you’re a musician, photographer, filmmaker, designer or just a dedicated fan, we’d love for you to be a part of our brand new community.” – New Myspace Mission Statement.

In order for Myspace’s redirected goals to succeed, they must continue with a complete reset of the brand, while opening up to a wider audience. Additionally, the site needs to promote a different “selling” product than before, while remaining on neutral, non-competitive ground with other social media sites.

At the end of the day, the success of Myspace is largely dependent upon the response of social media users. With over 1 billion Facebook users, 625,000 users joining Google+ per day and 575 Instagram likes each second, it’s hard to believe they haven’t thrown in the towel already! We can only surmise that Mr. Timberlake saw potential in the prototype social network that the rest of us have evidently overlooked.

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Kickstarter Endeavors – The Best of the Best

Kickstarter, pioneer of the crowdfunding model, was launched on April 28, 2009 by Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler and Charles Adler. Sites like Kickstarter allow for people without funding to take a good idea and generate the funding they need to turn it into a finished product. It has served as the launchpad of several successful businesses, especially technology based ones.

These are the 10 most heavily crowdfunded projects to come out of Kickstarter so far.

1: Pebble: E-Paper Watch for iPhone and Android

Company: Pebble Technology
Category: Design
Launched: Apr 11, 2012
Goal: $100,000
Backers: 68,929
Total Pledged: $10,266,845

The Pebble E-Watch is the watch built for the 21st century. This watch is easy to customize with apps such as heart rate monitoring, exercise tracking, and more. Pebble connects with smartphones using Bluetooth, and alerts you to incoming calls, emails and text messages. It’s probably where Apple got the idea for the iWatch from…

2 : Ouya: A New Kind of Video Game Console

Company: Ouya
Category: Video Games
Launched: Jul 10, 2012
Goal: $950,000
Backers: 63,416
Total Pledged: $8,596,474

OUYA is a new game console for the TV, powered by Android. OUYA’s world-class controller, console, and interface come in one beautiful, inexpensive package. All the games on it will be free to try. Developers will have access to OUYA’s open design so they can produce their games for the living room, taking advantage of everything the TV has to offer. They designed the controller to be a “love letter to console gaming“, and it will even employ a touchpad for any games making the trek from mobile or tablet to the TV. They are calling it the “Stradivarius of controllers’.

3 : Project Eternity

Company: Obsidian Entertainment
Category: Video Games
Launched: Sep 14, 2012
Goal: $1,100,000
Backers: 73,986
Total Pledged: $3,986,929

Project Eternity is an RPG set in a new fantasy world developed by Obsidian Entertainment. As veteran developers of computer role-playing games, the team says that there is still nothing they love more than making and playing RPGs. The Kickstarter community is eager to play as well, donating nearly 4 million dollars to the cause.

4 : Reaper Miniatures Bones: An Evolution Of Gaming Miniatures

Company: Reaper Miniatures
Category: Games
Launched: Jul 23, 2012
Goal: $30,000
Backers: 17,744
Total Pledged: $3,429,235

Since the original launch of Bones in March, demand for the Bones miniature figures has exploded! Fans are after the awesome sculpts at a terrific price, but as it turns out, they’re also really expensive to produce. The mold costs alone are “astronomical.” In order to expand the product line, the company used Kickstarter to launch a whole lot of new figures in a relatively short time, to the delight of the fans.

5 : Double Fine Adventure

Company: Double Fine and 2 Player Productions
Category: Video Games
Launched: Feb 8, 2012
Goal: $400,000
Backers: 87,142
Total Pledged: $3,336,371

Double Fine Adventure is a brand-new, downloadable “Point-and-Click” graphic adventure game for the modern age.

Big games cost big money, which is why Double Fine turned to Kickstarter! Even something as “simple” as an Xbox LIVE Arcade title can cost upwards of two or three million dollars. For disc-based games, it can be over ten times that amount. To finance the production, promotion, and distribution of these massive undertakings, companies like Double Fine have to rely on external sources like publishers, investment firms, or loans. It’s the kind of creative luxury that most major, established studios simply can’t afford. At least, not until Kickstarter.

6 : FORM 1: An affordable, professional 3D printer

Company: Formlabs
Category: Technology
Launched: Sep 26, 2012
Goal: $100,000
Backers: 2,068 Backers
Total Pledged: $2,945,885

An affordable, high-resolution 3D printer for professional creators who are frustrated that low-end 3D printers don’t have the quality to make the true beauty of their designs real. This has the power and resolution of a truly professional machine right on your desktop It is an easy-to-use system that rivals the output of high-end printers at a fraction of the cost.

7 : Wasteland 2

Company: InXile Entertainment
Category: Video Games
Launched: Mar 13, 2012
Goal: $900,000
Backers: 61,290
Total Pledged: $2,933,252

Wasteland 2 is a sequel to the amazingly popular 1988 RPG Wasteland and the post-apocalyptic predecessor to the Fallout Series. IGN named it one of the top 25 PC games of all time, Computer Gaming World named it the Adventure Game of the year in 1988, and it was short-listed for inclusion in the Smithsonian Institution’s current “Art of the Computer Game” exhibition.

8 : Elite: Dangerous

Company: Frontier Developments
Category: Video Games
Launched: Nov 5, 2012
Goal: £1,250,000
Backers: 25,681
Total Pledged: £1,578,316

“Elite: Dangerous” is the latest installment of a long series of epic space games, starting with “Elite” – one of the most successful games of the 1980s. It was the first ‘open world’ game in which the player can freely roam a vast space. It was the first true 3D game too, and set many other benchmarks. The creators were sick of games with three lives then a new life every 10,000 score, and they wanted something new, so they developed it themselves. Thanks to Kickstarter, they can fund the sequel.

9 : Homestuck Adventure Game

Company: MS Paint Adventures
Category: Video Games
Launched: Sep 4, 2012
Goal: $700,000
Backers: 24,346
Total Pledged: $2,485,506

Homestuck is an illustrated, semi-animated story on the internet. It is not a comic that just happens to be hosted on the internet – it was specifically designed to exist there, to explore the potential of the medium, and evolve through reader participation. The readers, through their participation, have helped make Homestuck what it has become. With such a strong community, it’s no surprise that this Kickstarter was so successful.

10: Oculus Rift: Step Into the Game

Company: Palmer Luckey
Category: Technology
Launched: Aug 1, 2012
Goal: $250,000
Backers: 9,522
Total Pledged: $2,437,429

The Oculus Rift is the next step towards a virtual reality gaming system. Like a pair of goggles worn on the head, the gaming environment is totally immersive and makes for one exciting time! Kickstarter contributors were granted special thank you gifts and access to the SDK developer kit for this gaming platform.

The post Top 10 Most Successful Kickstarter Projects [INFOGRAPHIC] appeared first on StartupBros - You don't need a job....

You’ve heard of all the success stories…

Tons of people have created businesses on the side that eventually enabled them to leave their day jobs and live their dreams.

So why not you?

They make it sound easy enough…

You’ve listened to what everybody has to say, and took action to launch your own side-business.

It felt great taking action at first, but now that you’ve lost momentum you feel like it’s all for nothing.

You probably feel like you’ve exhausted every option. You’ve consumed all the content you could, trying to find the missing piece.

But it still isn’t working…

Seems like everybody is successful but you…

You start to convince yourself that success is just luck.

Maybe you just can’t find your passion, or the right niche. Maybe all the success stories were just well-thought out lies. But you’re only lying to yourself.

The only person to blame is you.

This takes some people years to learn

The cold hard fact is that you’re doing something wrong. There is a kink somewhere in your master plan (if you even have one).

Success stories always sound easy in hindsight, but becoming one takes years of hard work and dedication. Almost all of them occur only after a long string of failures.

So how can you reduce your chance of failure, and increase the chance of your side business becoming a success?

Here are some of the top things I see take solopreneurs and their businesses down, along with how you can avoid them.

If you feel your side business is stuck, then it is probably for one of these reasons…

You Have No Plan

You don’t know what your goals or objectives are. You are shortsighted and have no action plan to achieve your vision.

“If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.”

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Jim Rohn

 Why you must have a plan

Success doesn’t just happen, it’s planned for.

If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re going to end up going nowhere. Knowing what your business will be and how you will sell is not enough to make it successful.

I’m not suggesting you write out a formal business plan, but you need to know everything about your business. If you cannot literally see yourself and your business far into the future beyond today, then you are on the path to destruction.

Not having this consciousness is the reason most entrepreneurs fail. Since they aren’t thinking about the future, they are constantly falling behind those who are creating it.

How to get a plan

• Make sure you have short and long terms goals, know your business’ finances and how to manage it, your target market and how you’ll capture a share of it.
• You need to understand your business and how it fits into your target customer’s life, like the back of your hand. I understand people read things like this all the time, but most never grasp what it truly means.
• You need to be the rain man of your business and how it will succeed. You need to know EVERYTHING about these things, from 10 years ago til 10+ years from now. What can you start doing today to meet the needs of tomorrow?

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You Started For The Wrong Reasons

The only thing you thought about when building your business was how it would make you rich and awesome.

“One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves. You don’t choose your passions; your passions choose you.”

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Jeff Bezos

Wrong reasons to start

Did you think that starting your own business would quickly lead to lots of money, more time with friends and family, or freedom from answering to others?

I can’t even begin to tell you how wrong you were…

The entrepreneurs who have achieve that kind of freedom do so only after a long period of struggle and sacrifice. So strap down and get ready for the grind.

Right reasons to start

• You need to think about your interests and passions, and how you can leverage them to provide value to people and help them enrich their lives.
• You must have a passion for and love what you’re doing. You need to believe, with your entire being, that your product or service fulfills a real need in your target customer’s life.
• Be ready for the long haul. Building a business is one of the most demanding things a person can do.

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Nobody Wants Your Product

There’s no demand for your product, and you didn’t check before building it.

“Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.”

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Henry R. Luce

If you build it, they won’t care

Thinking that “if you build it, they will come” will doom you to failure.

History is heavy with companies that built a product before they really understood who their customer was or why they needed it. More often than not, it ends in failure.

It’s much less risky to know your product will sell before you build it.

You must find or create demand

• You have to leverage existing demand or learn how to create it yourself.
• The easiest way to see if anybody wants your idea is simple validation testing. It’s imperative to validate your idea before you launch it into a full-fledged business.
• Talk to prospective customers and find out what they really need and why.
• Find the customer first, then figure out what solution to provide and how.

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You’re Not Focusing On The Right Things

You’re not focusing, or you’re focusing on the wrong things. You try to do too many things at once. Your actions don’t align with a big picture.

“If what you are doing is not moving you towards your goals, then it’s moving you away from your goals.”

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Brian Tracy

Know what not to do

All entrepreneurs are cursed with having too many ideas that are too tempting not to execute. The trick is knowing what not to do and focusing on what counts.

You need to know how every action is fitting into your master plan.

Focus on what makes the biggest impact

• Strive to make sure that every action you perform benefits your customer in some way. Whatever task you’re doing, ask yourself how it will benefit the end user.
• Focus on your strengths. As an entrepreneur your success or failure will be as a result of how well you maximize your strengths. Your strengths are those activities you naturally enjoy doing and would naturally do for free your entire life if necessary. Entrepreneurship is about using your skills and passions for the benefit of others. Stop doing what everyone else is doing and start doing what you can do exceptionally well.
• It’s important to focus on the right metrics and ignore vanity metrics. Create value for your target customer.
• Focus on the thing with the best timing and most potential. Jack Dorsey shelved the idea for Twitter for almost a decade before he felt the time was right to execute.

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You’re Not Trying Hard Enough

You have no follow through. You can’t handle what it takes to build a successful company from scratch.

“Success comes down to hard work plus passion, over time. If you work really, really hard over a long period of time, it will pay off.”

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Stanley Tang

Most people can’t handle it

There is a reason entrepreneurs are few and far between.

Most people don’t want to put in the work required to build a successful business from scratch. It can be due to stress, risk aversion, lack of confidence, fear of failure, or any one of an onslaught of unforeseen reasons.

That isn’t any knock against them. Most people would much rather have the comfort of a typical job.

I suspect that isn’t you, though…

Get pissed

• When others throw in the towel, you have to be more joyfully determined than ever.
• You have to have drive, determination, patience, and a positive attitude.
• You must thrive on independence, and be skilled at taking charge when nobody else will (possibly with nobody supporting you).
• When building a company from scratch, you have to be extremely dedicated and committed.
• You have to believe in your ability to achieve your dreams with unwavering strength.

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Your Product Is Too Complex

Your target customer doesn’t understand how to use your product or why it will be valuable for them.

“Any darn fool can make something complex. It takes a genius to make something simple”

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Albert Einstein

 Complexity shows confusion

If your product is too confusing for your customers to understand or use, then it is useless. People don’t buy what they don’t understand.

Complex products are a result of confused production. With attention spans getting shorter and shorter, your solutions need to be more and more simple.

Simplicity Sells

• Your challenge is to make complex challenges simple to solve for your target customer.
• Develop a deep understanding of how your customer will benefit from your product, and allow them to accomplish that in the simplest manner possible (for them).
• Constantly work with your customers to reduce friction and enhance the simplicity of your product.

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You’re Not Taking Enough Action

You spend more time learning how to grow your business than you do on growing your business.

“The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.”

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Nolan Bushnell

Knowledge is useless until put into action

Every piece of knowledge is completely valueless until put to use.

If you’re not taking action, then you’re not really doing anything. At least, not anything your target customers will pay for.

Learn through action

• Try to learn by doing rather than reading or watching others.
• If you do decide to consume content, make sure you can implement it in your business immediately. And then implement it.
• Read this a few times…

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You’re Afraid Of Failing Fast

You don’t have the courage to embrace failure and learn from it. You spend a significant amount of time coming up with reasons your ideas won’t work.

“Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
“

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Winston Churchill

Failure is success

You can’t let failure defeat you, you have to leverage it to make you stronger.

Many studies have shown that successful business owners attribute much of their success to “building on earlier failures” and using failure as a “learning process”.

Learn to use each failure as a building block in your business empire.

Fail fast and often

• Understand that failure is what enabled successful people to become successful.
• Understand that every failure makes you stronger overall.
• Fail fast and fail often, using every bump as a learning opportunity.

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You’re Not Creating Value

You’ve lost focus on creating innovative solutions that will add value to your target market.

“Entrepreneurial profit is the expression of the value of what the entrepreneur contributes to production.”

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Joseph Schumpeter

Never stop creating value

Your primary job as an entrepreneur is to create value and solve problems. That’s what people will pay you for.

If you stop being valuable, people will stop giving you money. It’s that simple.

 Provide value first

• Focus on providing value to your target customer first, then move on to everything else.
• Create value-adding products that help enrich the lives of your target customers.
• Purpose (value) driven entrepreneurs will always be more successful than survival (money) driven ones.

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You’re Executing Your Idea Poorly

Your projects never seem to get done. When they do get done, they’re done poorly or rarely work.

“Building a visionary company requires one percent vision and 99 percent alignment.”

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Jim Collins

Ideas are worthless

Clever ideas don’t make businesses successful, superb execution does. So it makes sense that most businesses fail due to poor execution.

When you’re the boss, you’re the only one the blame.

Execution is everything

• Evaluate your skills and only pursue opportunities aligned with your strengths. 
• Surround yourself with talented people who will tell you when you’re going in the wrong direction.
• Try your hardest to eliminate your ego so you don’t get ahead of yourself and in over your head.
• Make sure everything you’ve got everything else on this list down

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You’re Not Willing To Invest Money

You assume that any money spent trying to grow your business is money wasted.

“I’d say it’s been my biggest problem all my life…it’s money. It takes a lot of money to make these dreams come true.”

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Walt Disney

 It takes money to make money

You need to spend money to make money.

New businesses need money to grow at any meaningful pace.

The real problem is that you’re not confident that you can spend the money and see a return.

Spend money in the right places

• Buy what you absolutely need.
• See every dollar that goes into your business as an investment, and expect a return.
• Know how every dollar you put in will come back out as $2.

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You’re Spending Too Much Money

You’re comfortable investing money in the growth of your business, but you don’t keep track of it. You don’t really know what expenditures are helping and which are hurting.

“The essence of a successful business is really quite simple. It is your ability to offer a product or service that people will pay for at a price sufficiently above your costs, ideally three or four or five times your cost, thereby giving you a profit that enables you to buy and to offer more products and services.”

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Brian Tracy

 Cash flow is your company’s blood

It’s key to manage your resources effectively.

Never ignore your finances or your cash flow. Poor money management has taken down many entrepreneurs that would otherwise be successful.

Being an entrepreneur means being able to do more with less.

Everything must have a return

• Don’t make any expenditure unless you’re sure you can turn it back into cash flow.
• Try to only spend money on urgent and important needs. Don’t splurge on anything, only buy what is necessary.
• Focus on making the most out of the assets you already have at your disposal.

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You’re Thinking Too Big

You’re trying to solve many problems for many people, or build a product for everyone. You think you can compete head-to-head with industry leaders.

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”

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Bill Cosby

Think big, act small

If you try to please everybody, you’ll end up pleasing nobody.

Think like a big company. Shoot high, and have a grand and noble purpose.

But act like a small company. Keep close to your customers and provide them with exactly what they need, better than anybody else can.

Niche down

• Focus all your efforts towards a small, well targeted niche. Dominate that niche.
• Be one thing to one group of people, but do that one thing better than anybody else could ever do it. You can branch out from there.

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Your Business Isn’t Scalable

You’re selling your time for money. You can’t seem to grow your business without putting in your own time.

“Organize around business functions, not people. Build systems within each business function. Let systems run the business and people run the systems. People come and go but the systems remain constant”

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Michael Gerber

 Focus on scale

If you ever want to build a business that makes money without you actively working on it, it’s key that you focus on scale.

Make sure you build your business in a way that it can grow without your active involvement.

Build business systems

• Operationalize everything in your business. Break it down to the point where you can easily hand it off to another person with minimal friction.
• Focus on building systems that grow your business, rather than doing everything by hand on your own time.
• Build your business so it could continue to grow even if you weren’t there.
• Automate, outsource, or delegate everything you can.

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Your Niche Is Too Small

You’ve completely dominated your niche, but there’s not enough of them to create any meaningful revenue.

“I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along without it.”

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Walt Disney

Niche down, but not too far

You’ll need to specialize in a niche market to compete against larger rivals.

However, you still need to do your homework to be sure that the niche is large enough to support your business.

Make sure your niche isn’t too small

• Don’t be afraid of any competition at all. Competition shows that there is enough money to sustain multiple companies. What you need to be afraid of is a complete saturation of competitors.
• Figure out how fast your niche is growing and how much market share you’ll need to capture to sustain your company.
• Don’t move forward unless you’re confident your competitive advantages will enable you to become a market leader.
• Just because a niche has no competition doesn’t mean it’s a good niche. It could mean it’s a terrible niche that puts everybody out of business.

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Your Existing Clients Are Unhappy

You’re servicing the people who do buy your product poorly.

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

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Warren Buffett

 Word of mouth works both ways

It’s imperative that you keep the customers you do have happy. They will tell people about their experience with your company, good or bad.

Not to mention – existing customers will spend an average of 7x more money with you than new ones.

 Make the customer happy

• Don’t promise more than you can deliver just to get the sale.
• Don’t tell customers what they want to hear, tell them what they need to know.
• Set expectations for what you’ll provide, and then exceed them. Give the customer more than they expected at every opportunity.

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You Don’t Know Enough About Business

You’re managing the business incorrectly.

“A business idea is just another idea. But an idea backed by a strong feasibility, a thorough business plan and a smart team is no longer an idea. It’s now a solid business opportunity worth pursuing.”

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Ajaero Tony Martins

Many hats of business

There are many different facets of running a successful business that some never take the time to learn.

Financial management, employee relations, advertising, marketing, technology, purchasing, inventory, production, hiring, accounting, and many other essential business responsibilities ultimately lie on you.

You must not only understand them all, but understand how they work together as a whole and how you can manipulate them to help you grow.

Never stop learning

• Find out what areas you’re weak in, and start making up for it.
• Seek out people who have already done what you’re trying to learn. Try to pick their brains.
• If all else fails, outsource it to somebody who knows what they’re doing and figure out exactly how to do it in the future.

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You Think You Can Do It By Yourself

You refuse to let anyone help you, and think it can only be done right if it’s done by you.

“I’ve been blessed to find people who are smarter than I am, and they help me to execute the vision I have.”

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Russell Simmons

 You can’t do it alone

There is a limit to what you can achieve alone.

The only way to grow beyond that is through leveraging team work and the work of others.

Great things are seldom achieved alone.

You’ll need help

• Understand that your idea is not entirely yours to dominate. You are only a vessel through which an idea is being launched.
• Learn how to enlist others to help you grow your business and achieve your dreams.
• Realize one of the only way to get more work done beyond your own time constraints is with the help of others.

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You’re Not Pivoting

It sometimes seems like you should change your business or product, but you refuse to change it. You think your vision is perfect the way it is, and can’t understand why your customers don’t feel the same.

“There is only one boss; the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company, from the chairman down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

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Sam Walton

 Change can be good

Not having the courage or decisiveness to pivot can be just as bad as creating a product nobody wants.

Take every piece of feedback and data you can, and consider implementing all of it.

The customer is always right

•  Have the flexibility to change your business and your vision over time.
• Constantly revisit your goals and objectives as you get more feedback and learn more about your customers.
• Cherish every piece of feedback you get, and work to get more it wherever possible.

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You’re The Same As The Competition

Your product doesn’t provide any more value than the existing solutions. You’re not creating enough value to differentiate yourself from the competition.

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently – they’re not fond of rules…because the ones how are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

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Steve Jobs (Apple Commercial)

Be unique and differentiate

A lack of competitive advantage will be fatal for any business.

If you want your business to thrive, you need something that makes you unique and differentiates you from the competition. Even though the your advantage won’t last forever, it will be enough to get you started.

Set yourself apart

• Build your business on things that will be hard to duplicate. Proprietary technologies, brands, location, people, or business processes that are hard to replicate are just some examples.
• Take a new angle that your target market hasn’t seen before. Don’t think that just because your competition hasn’t done it, it won’t work. Be the innovator in your field.
• Make sure you provide more value for your target customer than your competition. It’s that simple.

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You’re Not Reaching Your Target Customer

You’re not effectively targeting your ideal customers, or you’re not targeting the correct market.

“In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.”

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David Ogilvy

Marketing is essential

There are many remarkable pieces of human art and innovation that you’ll never hear of. The reason is that many of the world’s greatest writers, artists, musicians, scientists, engineers, and other creators simply don’t know how to market themselves.

It doesn’t matter how awesome your product is, or how much it will help your target customers, if you don’t have a way to inform them about it and deliver it to them.

Make sure you know how to acquire customers in a cost effective manner.

Learn how to sell

• Learn the fundamentals of online marketing and sales.
• Try to find a mentor to walk you through setting up your marketing funnels and systems. Learn everything you can from the process
• Watch what others are doing to sell and make money online. Extract the value you can from their processes.
• Habitually A/B test everything you can.

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You Have No People Skills

You don’t know how to deal with people properly.

“When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.”

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Dale Carnegie

Marketing is essential

Human relations is one of the most important skills for an entrepreneur. You must love your fellow man, and show this in every interaction.

You won’t be very successful unless you know how to make people like you. You need to know how to deal with people.

Human relations is about more than conversational skills, it’s about having the kind of charisma that can make a man famous.

Learn how to sell

• Genuinely care for people. You must take a genuine interest in others.
• Always smile
• Make others feel special. Talk to others about themselves, and never about you. If they want to know about you, they’ll ask.
• Understand that every person is the same thing as you living under different circumstances. Try to understand people, and why they work the way they do.
• Help make people’s lives better whenever the opportunity presents itself.

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How Did You Do?

This will be an extremely uncomfortable post for some people to read.

If you felt uncomfortable reading any of the above points, go back and read it again. That is probably one that you need to work on.

Building a successful company from scratch is a complicated task.

I hope that these tips help you avoid some of the pitfalls and obstacles that prevent many entrepreneurs from reaching their dreams.

Did I miss anything?

If I missed something, or you still feel like you’re having trouble even after reading this post – I want to help.

Leave a comment below or email me – I’ll help you as much as I can.

The post The Harsh Truth: Why Your Side-Business Is Failing and How To Fix It appeared first on StartupBros - You don't need a job....

(or, how not to have a Homer-brain)

This is a guest post by Mans Denton of The Hacked Mind. You met Mans when I told you about why I’d rather make friends than network. Remember how he sat there sober watching Will and me lose our equilibriums? Well now we’ll find out why.

Nobody has pushed me to take more action to improve my health than Mans. The stories he tells about neurons in your brain and chemicals in your body effecting your mood and appearance make it easy to begin making the changes you already know you should (and some you’d never guess). The story behind advice is more important than you think. A lot of the time we need to be given advice in a

I recently read the massively popular Man 2.0: Engineering the Alpha and found myself thinking, “Mans told me about that months ago.” He knows his stuff. I’m going to keep listening to him.

If you like this article at all, then you’ll need to go to his site and grab his free ebook. It’s like this but lots more.

Enter Mans (isn’t that a badass name?):

Fuel For Entrepreneurs

When success with your new business is all you think about, healthy dietary, fitness, and sleep habits are the farthest thing from your mind. Every entrepreneur has gone through stressful times that test their ability to function efficiently for extended periods.

What if spending a little time investing in your health could help you invest a lot more in your business.

Yes, there will be times for every entrepreneur when healthy habits are thrown by the wayside in favor of a hectic launch or massive growth. Holding tight to these simple rules will allow you to work more efficiently on your business, prevent burnout, and extend the life of your entrepreneurial career.

Your Brain is Running on Fumes

Creativity, quick thinking, and the ability to learn from mistakes are all necessities for entrepreneurs. Eating Ramen noodles or a Big Mac with fries doesn’t provide your brain with the nutrients that it needs to perform all of these functions efficiently. As an entrepreneur, your main tool for success is your brain. Therefore, it is a good idea to develop healthier eating and drinking habits to ensure your brain is at peak performance at all times.

Sparing you every bit of science, here’s a list of food-hacks that you can perform in order to eat healthier thus increasing efficiency and sustainability for yourself and business:

• Eggs are a great source of protein and omega-3 fatty acids. Cooked scrambled, boiled, or over-easy does not matter so choose the quickest method for your work routine. To start your day, your body needs to produce serotonin and eggs do that better than anything.

• Have leafy green vegetables in your refrigerator (like spinach, kale, arugula etc.) that can be thrown into a bowl with salt, pepper, and olive oil for a quick and healthy salad. Leafy greens have phytonutrients you have never even heard of. Pronouncing “carotenoids” might be tough, but they are natural nutrients your body needs.

this is a high definition image of seeds

• Replace your chips with olives and raw seeds (sunflower and pumpkin). Frying foods alters the type of fat, which restricts quick neurological connections in the brain.

• Eat healthy by cooking yourself, but save time by making food in bulk for multiple meals. A quick recipe that I make takes only 5 minutes of prep. Cut 1 lb. of chicken breast, 1 bell pepper, and a handful of mushrooms. Throw it all into a pan with olive oil and get back to work. You have two meals ready 20 minutes later.

• Don’t follow society’s rules on meals. You simply need a certain number of calories. I eat a small breakfast with eggs and then a second huge meal that sustains me the rest of the day and doesn’t take up a lot of time or money.

• Shop online for some of your items to save time and money. Coconut oil is far cheaper online than at any grocery store.

• Reduce intake of bread, pasta, bagels, etc. These foods give you a boost of energy, but lead to your brain crashing later in the day. Refined carbs affect your insulin production, which informs every other aspect of your body. When you disturb the balance of insulin, your brain suffers.

• Drink less caffeine and drink it earlier. It may be the thing causing your sleepiness. More importantly, even though caffeine blocks adenosine from making you tired, it only increases easy task performance while impairing your ability to complete complex tasks.

• Drink more water instead of soda, milk and juice. Every cell of your brain (and body) is composed of water. The only reason soda or juice quenches your thirst is because of the water content!

Eating out might seem like a quicker alternative, but it is not. Consider that you must leave your home or work to go to the restaurant, then wait in line, get your food, and then travel back home. In most situations, even for fast food, this can take far longer than cutting some meat and vegetables, throwing it in the pan, and getting back to work while it cooks by itself.

Anyone who is under-capitalized or bootstrapping their business knows the value of a dollar. Instead of over-paying other businesses to cook food, cook it yourself! I spend less than $1,000 on food and rent combined in Austin, Texas every month, which leaves me a lot for re-investing in projects. Look at your expenditures and you will see that eating out is leaking money.

Following these simple substitutions and rules will save you time and money that you can invest in your entrepreneurial pursuits. Furthermore, it will help you to work more efficiently and treat your body in a way that values long-term function rather than short-term.

Exercise Your Brain and Your Body

Modern athletic journals and television shows praise triathletes, long distance running, biking, swimming, and “hard work” in order to be physically fit. While the physical determination and dedication is admirable, none of these athletes are necessarily “healthy”. And entrepreneurs certainly don’t have to go to such lengths in order to increase their own wellness.

When expending calories in those activities, your body undergoes a constant state of stress and alarm that harks back to our caveman days. When in this state, your immune system is weakened, which can cause disruptions with your business if you must take days off. Also, your cortisol levels are much higher as a result of stress from running in addition to the stress from your taxing entrepreneurial venture. This impairs brain function and cognitive ability.

In contrast, exercise that lacks this stress can be incredibly important for an entrepreneur. Some level of exercise will stimulate dopamine, which activates learning centers in your brain and maintain focus. Furthermore, you will be able to regulate testosterone production, which also enhances memory.

Here is a brief list of exercise options for entrepreneurs in order to maximize efficiency with health and sustain long-term results:

• Walking normal to fast pace can be considered healthy exercise. I use a FitBit tracker and try to achieve 10,000 steps in a day. To achieve your walking goal you can take telephone calls while walking around. You can also walk to nearby stores. This produces a very steady amount of dopamine, which stimulates creative centers for your brain.

• Lift heavy weights until exhaustion one time per week. It only takes 20 – 30 minutes to fatigue completely, but you will activate fast twitch muscle fibers that stimulate slow, sustainable muscle growth and strength gains. To do this, perform slow movements to reduce momentum, high weight, and track both number of reps and the “time under load” (the period in which you are lifting the heavy object). This will give a solid boost in testosterone, which improves memory and cognitive ability. It will produce some cortisol as well, but only enough to stimulate muscle growth rather than break down your body.

• Track your data in the gym. If you do not track “time under load” and the reps, you have nothing to gauge your success. It is like split testing many factors for an A/B test – there would be no way to know which one proved the difference.

• Stand up. You can create or buy a standing desk or a treadmill desk. Both of these will allow you to continue working on your business, but in a much healthier manner. [Kyle: I cleared my bedside table and put it on top of my desk to try this out.]

You Snooze, You Don’t Lose

Exercise and food are areas where it is easy to make changes. My suggestions not only make the entrepreneurs’ life cheaper and easier, but also more efficient and sustainable in the long-run. Sleep is a big issue that is divisive in the entrepreneurial community. Lacking sleep in order to work on your business is highly romanticized. Sleeping in the early morning only to wake up a few hours later is seen as dedication for a business pursuit.

Nonetheless, sleep is a vital part of the brain’s healing and organizing process. Without it, your body will produce more cortisol, which decreases brain function and your immune strength. It is best to aim for 7 – 8 hours of sleep every night. This may seem like an impossible goal but you’ve got to realize that you’re actually buying yourself more effective working hours.

Getting enough sleep equates to more efficient work throughout the day. A task that takes two hours to complete while tired takes one hour while energized. You no longer have to think of sleep as a waste of time, but more as an investment in a more efficient workday.

Everyone has a different balance between health and their business. Some people may need less sleep than others, but consistently working while sleep deprived could lead to burnout and reduce the life of your entrepreneurial career. [Kyle: Sleeping less than 5 hours a day kills your testosterone, which is no good at all.]

Here are a few tricks for you to use in order to get more sleep, but increase efficiency and productivity at the same time:

• Get into a sleeping rhythm. This way you can spend less time awake while you wish you were sleeping. Your circadian rhythm regulates when your body produces the sleep hormone, melatonin.

• Wear earplugs (if there is excessive noise) in order to ensure you do not wake up during the night

• Go to sleep earlier and you will wake up when nobody else is around to distract you. I sleep around 10:45pm – 7:30am, which means that I usually have a couple hours before anyone harasses me on Skype, via telephone, etc.!

For the Love of the Game

Most successful entrepreneurs I have ever met, including myself, are dedicated to entrepreneurship for the love of the game. Like a professional athlete, entrepreneurship is not about the salary or large endorsement deals (as nice as they are), but instead about pushing yourself at the highest level of competition.

Unfortunately for athletes, their body takes such a toll that they cannot extend their career indefinitely. For entrepreneurs who use their brain instead of their body, it is possible to enjoy making new businesses until old age. But only if health and wellness becomes a priority. Wellness is not only helpful to become more efficient with your current venture, but is also easy to implement and can result in a long-lasting career as an entrepreneur free from burnout.

The post Fuel for Entrepreneurs: Increasing Efficiency and Sustainability appeared first on StartupBros - You don't need a job....

Need some motivation?

Be careful what you wish for…

Here’s a compilation of the best motivational and inspirational videos I’ve found over the years.

I absolutely guarantee you’ll cry if you watch all these videos. Definitely NOT SAFE FOR WORK – unless you want your co-workers to think you’re some sort of crybaby…

Your internal voice after you’re done crying here…

Level 1 – Standard Motivation

Consider these a warm-up. You’re probably not going to cry (yet).

Never Quit – Persist!

Short reminder for anybody considering giving up.

“I’m Mad As Hell!”

Classic that always gets me fired up.

Will Smith’s Secrets to Success

Great montage of Will Smith’s speeches on success.

Motivational Montage

Awesome motivational montage.

Level 2 - Tear-Jerk Inspiration

Your eyes will water up.

Bill Mills Great Olympic Upset

Like clockwork, I always tear up when seeing Bill Mills come out of nowhere for the win. Hearing his story is chilling.

Derek Redmond Olympic Perseverance

Despite tearing his hamstring, Derek Redmond finishes his race with the help of his Father. A powerful demonstration in perseverance.

How Bad Do You Want It?

Powerful video filled with lessons for success. Success is intentional and deliberate. Make the choice and never stop pushing.

Take It To The Next Level

A point-of-view journey from newbie to pro. Though this is about soccer, I think it can help anybody.

Level 3 – Life Changers You’ll Never Forget

You’re absolutely going to have tears streaming down your face.

The Deathcrawl

The best motivational video I’ve ever seen. Pure motivation right here. A powerful lesson in believing in yourself.

Autistic Basketball Player Scores Like Crazy

This is one of the most inspirational things I’ve ever seen. An autistic basketball player is finally given the chance, and completely dominates. The crowd erupt in pandemonium after this kid is done putting on a show.

Father and Son Marathon Team

The story of a Father who would do anything for his Son, and a reminder that anything is possible if you work hard enough.

Don’t You Dare Waste Your F*cking Time

Absolutely the most powerful video I’ve ever seen. This video has changed my life multiple times over. I constantly think about this video and try to watch it once a month.

In Closing…

I hope this helped to motivate and inspire you.

If you’re not out there changing the world, you’re wasting your time.

You have the power to make anything you want of yourself.

Stop wasting time, and start changing the world.

And also comment below, and let me know what your favorite video was

The post Need Motivation? NSFW Inspiration Guaranteed to Make You Cry… appeared first on StartupBros - You don't need a job....

this post will show you how this beautiful thing came to be – and how it proved itself most effective (click the book to get 3 chapters FREE!)

Catching Eyes

“Never judge a book cover,” is a cliché attempting to reverse our instinct to make permanent judgements immediately.

When you go on a date you know whether it was a good or bad idea in the first twenty seconds. As soon as you make a judgement you’re probably not going to change it.

Think about how you buy books. I almost exclusively buy books that are:

1. Recommended to me by somebody I trust (or cited in a book I love).
2. Released by one of my favorite authors.
3. Catch my eye as I’m browsing the bookstore or Amazon.

This post will show you how to get a book cover that is guaranteed to get attention and master the third scenario.

You know how hard it is to write a book. You’ve been through pain of birthing something that you truly care about. Don’t lose steam and half-ass the cover.

It’s your duty to get your ideas into as many minds as possible. An effective book cover is one of your most powerful tools to sell books. Make it count.

I am going to show you how to:

1. Brainstorm design ideas and communicate them to designers.
2. Get about 50 designs made for cheap.
3. Test which cover is most effective with your audience (while building your email list).
4. Determine the best book cover based on your collected data.
5. Make the final decision on what book cover you want to use.

You may want to bookmark this page for later reference. For now, read the whole thing to get an overview of the process and see if you have any questions about it. If you come across any problems not addressed, feel free to comment below and I’ll help as best I can.

Before we go on, congratulations on your book! You’ve taken a massive step. You’re probably exhausted and ready to move onto the next project (or am I just projecting that onto you?). Don’t drop the ball now! Follow through and make this book kick ass! You will thank yourself when it’s flying off the shelves – digital or not.

Step 1: Conceptualizing and Communicating the Design

The bulk of the creative work for your cover will be done by an army of designers online. Even some of the critical decisions will be made by other people when you set up the tests for your book. You may not have a real specific idea of what you want your book cover to look like but you need to have some idea of what you want it to convey. This step will help you help the designers make the best possible book cover.

Write down the answers to the following questions. Actually write them down. RIGHT MEOW!

That reminds me, sometimes to get creative it’s good to see something funny. I present to you: 83 seconds from the legendary Super Troopers:

Okay, MEOW let’s get some design ideas!

• Sum up your book in 1-3 sentences. These should include the major ideas in your book.
• Write down the first 30 words you associate with your book. It’s fine if they don’t make any sense. Just get 30 down.
• Now add 10 more, but make all of these images that you associate with the ideas.
• Go to the Amazon.com. Scroll through the most popular Kindle books and notice which grab your attention. How did they get your attention?
• Go to a physical book store and do the same thing.
• Check out The Book Cover Archive and find some inspiration.
• Are there any elements of style that stuck out to you when looking at books?
• Check out COLORlovers and see if any color schemes stick out to you. Pick 10 of them that could make sense for your ideas.

Okay, even if you did 5% of the above you now have some idea of what you’d like to see on or express with your book cover. Now we’re going to put together a design brief that we’ll use in the next step to communicate your vision of the book cover to designers.

NOTE: Don’t be worried if you have no idea what you want your cover to look like. There are plenty of capable of designers who love having free reign creatively. Specificity is only important if you have a concrete idea. If you have a feeling that you want communicated, they can do that; you just have to be open to more varied designs.

Here are the things you need to include in your design brief:

• The goal of the book. 
• What you want people to feel (what they feel is more important than what they think) when they see the book cover.
• What imagery do you want used? If you’re in love with a certain image, tell them. Otherwise you can give a suggestion and say that you’re not too attached to it. In the case of Self-Made U, I just told them I want imagery that makes the viewer feel a certain way. I wasn’t in love with any particular symbols.
• If you have color palettes you like a lot then suggest them like you did the imagery.
• Emphasize the need for your book cover to stick out. It sounds obvious, but explicitly underlining the importance of remarkability will push the designers to make stand-out work.
• If there are certain books you want modeled then include their titles.
• Whatever else you think is important.

This is a picture of my brief. Keep in mind that some of the information is in attachments separate from the text.

The brief itself doesn’t need to be a work of art. (Click to enlarge the hell out of this thing.)

Time to get your cover designed!

Step 2: Getting Great Designs

Go to 99Designs right now. There’s no place on the internet where you can get more quality creative hours for the price. It’s absurd.

A lot of designers hate it because they think it undermines what they do. The thing is, most self-published writers don’t want to spend thousands of dollars to get a book cover. Well, I want to, but that’s just a bad idea. For anybody looking to maximize their value, this is the place to go. You’ve got to think like an entrepreneur here, maximize value!

If you hire a single designer it will be difficult to get many variations. They may change a few things but you’ll almost definitely need to pay for any kind of full redesign. With 99Designs I was able to get 65 designs for $300. Pretty badass, huh?

Most people who run contests on 99Designs to get that kind of response. I’ve got some ninja moves that will make sure you get the best designs possible.

Time to get designers working on your book cover!

The Best Way To Launch A Contest

1. Okay, time to actually go to 99Designs.
2.  Register an account. Give them all your details. Tell them about your love life, your childhood, your social security address, and whatever else they want. (Don’t do those things. But do register. You won’t get far without registering.)
3. Start a “Book Cover Design” contest.
4. Fill out the Design Brief (use your answers from Step 1 here).
5. On the next page, Contest Details, I make two changes. First, set it to a $300 bronze (it says to expect 30 designs – I ended up with 65 entries). Second, make sure it’s a Blind Contest. (If the option for blind contest isn’t there, make a special request to the 99Designs team to make it one.)

   This makes it so designers can’t see the other work of designers. We don’t anyone to lose hope!

6. Pay for your contest then launch it! You are now LIVE!

Hacking Your Contest!

This section is imperative. If you don’t do these next steps then you are robbing yourself of the best possible book cover and hundreds of dollars in value.

It’s time to hunt down great designers and boost their egos while asking them to participate in your contest. This is how I got 65 entries when I should have only gotten something like 30.

1. Click “Browse” from the top menu bar.
2. Click “Book and Magazine” from the “Categories” box on the right.
3. Now open the top 15 contests in new tabs. (On a Mac, you can do this by holding “command” and clicking on the links.)
4. In each contest, open up the “Designer” page and open up 5 designer pages.
5. Go to each designer’s profile and send them a message. Here’s the one used for Self-Made U:

Hey there,

I was going through some Book Cover designs and noticed yours in a couple of contests. I thought they were really awesome, you’re an awesome designer! I just launched a Book Cover contest, and I was hoping I could get some of your design brilliance in there

Hope to see your work in there!

Ohhh yeah, rub that ego good. These are people you want participating in your contest. You’ve seen there work, let them know how much you like it! If you do this right you will be able to get designers who only go for the higher-priced contests to compete in yours.

Send this message to at least 100 designers. If it’s a really important design then do even more. This is a tedious task but don’t discount it. The more messages you send the more designs you’ll get. Beyond that, it’s good to explore the work of all these different designers.

Here is a small taste of designs we got back:

Some of our runner ups.

Step 3: Set Up Your Book’s Landing Page (i.e. Test Site)

You now have a bunch of great book cover designs but you don’t know which to use! You’ve probably selected some of your favorites but you don’t know which will be most effective to get people to act. Most people will guess about this or do a poll of a few friends. You’re not most people.

You’re going to collect a whole bunch of data about each of your favorite covers. You’re going to let people show you what their favorite cover is based on real actions; this is infinitely more useful than opinions.

This single step will teach you an immensely valuable skill: setting up landing pages. You will be able to use this for any product launch you do. I promise you the effort will be more than worth it. Like way more than worth it.

To get an idea of what we’re making here, you can check out the Self-Made U launch page. A screen-capture of it is below:

Pretty AND effective

• Go to LeadPages and sign up. Gasp! It’s not free! It’s worth it, I promise. Get the annual one and it ends up being less than $17 a month. This thing will allow you to create all sorts of pages with no hassle. If you’re at all serious about building a business (especially a platform) then it’s imperative that you  make investments like this.
• Once you’ve signed in click “Templates”.

Click “Templates” at the top right

• Now just below that and to the right click the “Use This Template” button under “Basic Squeeze Option”. You can try a different one, but this worked perfectly for us.

We used the top right option, “Basic Squeeze Page”

• Now you can edit this page to look anyway you’d like. Click the text to put in your own copy. Click the email box to customize the text there, the button to customize the text there. Click the image of the book to upload your cover. (You will need images of your books with transparent back grounds. This goes beyond the scope of this post currently but feel free to ask questions in the comments.)

Make it your own!

• Choose just one cover for now (Step 4 will show you how to test them all). You may need help getting your cover designs to look like a book. We use graphicriver to make ours.
• Once you have the page just the way you like it, click “Save”.
• Now you will choose how you want to publish your page. I used WordPress because that’s what our site is built on. There is a great LeadPage plugin as well that will help you with everything you need.

We hosted on WordPress but may use LeadPages next time for quicker load times (and thus overall higher conversion rates).

• [Assuming that you are using the WordPress option and have installed the plugin. I'm not going to show you how to install a plugin, damnit!] Go to your LeadPages plugin and click “Add New LeadPage”.
• Keep the top “Normal”.
• Select the site you just made from the drop-down menu.
• Select the URL you want the page to be published to. This is what the settings for the Self-Made U landing page look like:

Our Self-Made U settings

• Now publish that shit! You’ve got yourself a beautiful landing page to be proud of.

Bonus Step! Capturing Emails For Fun & Profit

Ever wonder why everyone online (including us) is willing to give you some great ebook in exchange for your email address? It’s because your attention has become one of the most valuable things in the world. You should treat it as such (but I already convinced of that). Your attention isn’t just valuable to you, it’s valuable for other people. That’s precisely why you want to collect email addresses.

There is no better way to keep a relationship with a community of people than their Inboxes. Facebook barely shows your posts to anyone (even if you promote them). Google+ is a bit better but nobody seems to want to hang out their for long. Twitter. Well, at least we have @replies.

What percentage of Facebook statuses do you see? Probably somewhere near zero. What percentage of emails do you see that come through your inbox? Probably pretty close to all. All of the percentages. At least the headlines. It’s a powerful way to reach people and it’s an honor to be in someone’s inbox. Don’t take it for granted. That’s a discussion for a whole other post though. For now, get  into inboxes.

To increase engagement (and therefore get a better measure of what cover was the best) we bribed people with a free copy of the book and a free preview of 50 pages immediately. It worked well and we ended up getting a great sample from something less than a ton of traffic. This is how to set yourself up for

• Sign up for mailing service. We use InfusionSoft because we use some pretty heavy-duty features. If you’re trying to keep things simple then MailChimp is probably your best option. If you want a bit more functionality and can deal with a slight learning curve then check out Aweber. 
• Set up a list on your chosen service.
• Get the embed code or API for that list. Then copy the hell out of it (highlight it, right click, click copy).
• Find your way back to LeadPages (usually using the address bar or some other digital transporter).
• Click “My Account” from the top-right menu.
• In the left menu select the email service you chose. You’ll find these under the “Email Marketing Services” heading.
• Plug in your API or otherwise activate your marketing service.
• Now get those emails!

Remember, taking the time to do this bonus may potentially pay for this whole process if you get enough emails. This is an in-depth topic that we can easily spend too much time on. It deserves it’s own post (and book), and, by-golly, it’ll get them!

Step 4: Setting Up the Test

Now you have a bunch of book covers designed and a beautiful landing page to gauge how effective your site is at getting people to give you their email addresses. It’s time to now test the different book covers and see which is the most enticing for your customers.

• Sign up for VisualWebsiteOptimizer.
• Select your favorite 4-5 covers. In the next step we’ll be driving traffic to the landing pages. You want to get as much traffic to each page in order to get a valid data set. Focusing the traffic to fewer covers you get enough data more quickly.
• Click “A/B Test” from the “Create Test” menu.

Click “A/B Test”

• Enter the URL of your landing page and click “Create Test”. You will see the page you made earlier.
• Now click “Add Variation” from the bottom right. This will add a duplicate page. Now you can begin changing things.

This will help you keep track of all your page variations.

• Click the image of your book.
• Click “Change Image”. Select the next book cover you want to test.

Similar to your view after clicking the image of your book.

• If you want to edit the text, do that now.
• Keep adding variations and changing the cover until you have made a variation for every book cover you want to test.
• Click “Proceed To Next Step” at the top right.
• Fill the boxes out using the formula I used below. “Optin [your book]” triggers when visitor “visits a page” [link to a "thank you" page].

You can always find your own way as well

• If you don’t have a thank you page already setup, make one now. It’s as simple as going into your WordPress Dashboard and clicking “Make New Page” under “Pages” in the menu. Here is an example of what (a variation of) ours looks like.

Thank YOU!

•  Name your post.
• Check off “Heatmap”. We won’t go over this in this post, but it’s pretty sweet.
• Click “Start Test”.
• You have started your test!

Now we are going to begin driving traffic to your page. We’ll find out exactly what cover works best!

Step 5: Driving Traffic to Find Your Winner

Get as many people to your page as possible. We opted out of mailing our list because our audience would be bias – of course they want more of our goods!

Google Adwords and Facebook Ads are great for getting you a bunch of traffic quickly.

Make sure that you are driving qualified traffic. You don’t want somebody interested in gardening on your landing page for a book about starting an online business.

To get you started, we’ll give you $100

If you need a certificate, StartupBros has you hooked up

Step 6: Finding the Winner

Alright, now let’s look at the results. For reference, here are the results for our test.

Remember to leave plenty of time to get a decent sample size. Our control initially did better than the best and then quickly dropped to being the worst performer. You need to give yourself enough time to see how each one does.

These are some pretty amazing differences in performance, aren’t they? I really liked the control – and it ended up performing more than 50% WORSE than variation 1 (which I also happen to like a lot)!

It will quickly become obvious which are performing and which are not. As you can see, we waited for just over 100 sign ups to let us know which of our covers is the best.

Once you have your winner. Claim it and order your books!

Step 7: Celebrate!

When you’re done, congratulate yourself! This method can be used for future projects and makes for a great conference-conversation. Share this with your friends who have written a book and are considering launching with a haphazardly designed cover.

If you go through this whole process please share your results! Either comment here or email me at kyle <at> startupbros <dot> com.

I’d love to know what you think about this so please leave a comment or email me even if you don’t go through the whole process. Maybe a step is unclear, let me know. Maybe you have a suggestion to make it better, let me know.

Good luck!

The post How To Get A Book Cover That Is Guaranteed To Sell appeared first on StartupBros - You don't need a job....

“Happy Day of the Dead”

While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer’s pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death’s honesty
Won’t fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes
Must get lonely.

-Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”

This post aims to create a lasting impression, not a superficial boost. Instead of offering up platitudes I’ve provided tricks you can use to harness your relationship with death and turn it into motivation. This doesn’t happen with skimming. It only happens with engagement. When you get to the exercises, actually do them. The time spent will be worth more than reading a hundred posts on motivation because they are tools you can take with you.

Learning to Die

The faint red of blood was fading from my vision as smoothly as the sensation of experience. The sense of touch grew less, sounds simultaneously got farther away and closer in, and every experience I ever had collapsed into infinite peace. Sensation began to fade, my grasp on existence weakened. I continued to approach pure nothingness. Just before it was there, I was awake. That was the sixth time I had woken up after being killed in a dream in two months.

It seemed to me that my life was hanging only by the tip of my lips; I closed my eyes in order, it seemed to me, to help push it out, and took pleasure in growing languid and letting myself go. It was an idea that was only floating on the surface of my soul as delicate and feeble as all the rest, but in truth not only free from distress but mingled with that sweet feeling that people have who let themselves slide into sleep. – Montaigne

Remember the original Goldeneye game? It kind of reminded me of that, except without the respawn. Which, come to think of it, is kind of like going to bed without waking up.

I wasn’t dreaming when I jumped out of a plane. I was strapped to another dude with some apparently herculean straps. He had a parachute attached to his back and I had him attached to my back. Sounds safe. After sixty seconds of free-falling, watching the Earth transform from sphere to flat, he pulled a little rope and the parachute came out.

As the parachute caught wind it jerked the guy away from me. He got pulled up but I kept falling. The straps must have been connected incorrectly. I knew I was dead. “Well, this has got to be the most beautiful way to go,” I thought after I had an instant-long freak-out. All my worries instantly dissipated into perfect peace, just like in my dreams about getting shot.

Then all at once the correctly connected straps jerked me. There were a few inches of give between my tandem friend and me. I was going to live some more. But I was perfectly fine with death. At least for that moment.

After these experiences I came to believe Montaigne’s idea that death, when it comes, won’t be a big deal. Nature or God or whatever you put on the mysterious forces of the universe will make it easy for us. After Montaigne’s near-death experience described in the above quote he came to this realization:

If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.

what does your flash look like?

When we think about our end though, a fire is lit under our asses. We’ve got a limited amount of time left and it’s never going to stop running out.

Facebook and Tumblr feeds are flooded with exciting quotes of, “You’re going to die! So live!” Reminders of death are often reminders that we won’t be here for long, so quit wasting your time! When those reminders become commoditized and stuck between a picture of a friend at a bar and another pithy quote then they lose any power they had. They aren’t helping us think about our mortality. They aren’t helping us think about life either. If anything, they inject us with a feeling of, “I’m not doing enough with this life, from now on I’m really going to…” and this potentially life-changing epiphany is then cut off by a funny picture of a kitten.

Contemplating your death can be helpful if you do it well. It can infuse your life with energy, awareness, and freedom if you do it right. This post will give you tools to do just that.

Cicero said, “To philosophize is to learn how to die,” which may be true, but it forgets the most important part – to learn how to die is to learn how to live. And as living humans, isn’t that what we’re concerned about?

Death has the potential to be the most powerful force to help you live a better. Let’s see how past greats have used death to live.

Dying to Live

Before we begin the thought experiments, let’s think about thinking about death for a second. Many of us may want to avoid thinking about death and that’s fine. There’s no shame in thinking about something else if you don’t believe that your life can be made better by it.

A painful notion takes hold of me; I find it quicker to change it than subdue it. I substitute a contrary one for it, or, if I cannot, at all events a different one. Variation always solaces, dissolves, and dissipates. I cannot combat it, I escape it; and in fleeing I dodge, I am tricky. – Montaigne

Tricky indeed.

If you, like me, have an inkling of interest in using the idea of your end (impermanence! mortality!) then go on and see if you can’t benefit by taking a minute to think about it. How can we not think about it? An asteroid could hit. Lightning could strike. A car could come hurtling head-on from the other lane. A disease could decide to take hold in your system. Any of these things could happen at any moment.

With such frequent and ordinary examples passing before our eyes how can we possibly rid ourselves of the thought of death and of the idea that at every moment it is gripping us by the throat? – Montaigne

Tricky and inconsistent. (Good thing “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”)

Death has infinite opportunities in your life. Just look at a newspaper; lives rarely end romantically. It’s much more common to trip and have the life knocked right out of your head than it is to get eaten by a shark.

With a life that so fragile and with death so uncertain how can you not think the possibility (and eventual certainty) of what non-life means for life?

 YOLO

Anybody who has ever yelled, “YOLO!” before taking a shot of tequila has contemplated death. For the uninitiated, YOLO (You Only Live Once) is a phrase coined by some damn hooligan rapper named Drake.

Ever since he blasted it onto the radio people have been yelling it before they do stupid things. Maybe it precedes a smart thing every once in a while, but probably on accident.

The Lonely Island saw the other side:

Contemplating death is not always serious or worrisome. Mexico’s Dia del Muerte is a celebration of the dead. Cartoon skulls on clothing are a reminder of the impending death.

It can be easy to be surrounded by symbols, jokes, and cultural reminders of death without actually considering it. They seem lighter than the real thing somehow. Allow yourself to be brave enough to confront it head on.

Switch it up!

Experiments

Death as Pre-Birth

“What’s this?” I said. “So death is having all these tries at me, is he? Let him, then! I had a try at him a long while ago myself.” “When was this?” You’ll say. Before I was born. Death is just not being. What that is like I know already. It will be the same after me as it was before me. – Seneca

Regardless of your belief in a post-human existence, try this idea on. Imagine going to bed and never waking up. There is no struggle. There are no dreams. There is only nothing.

There’s no time to regret the things you wish you did or the things you wish you hadn’t. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. There’s nobody to tell you that you should have done this or that differently. There’s nothing.

When I think about that I get a sense of supreme freedom. It gives me permission to try all the things that others might think are silly. It frees me to write more honestly. It frees me from feelings that I should have this or that thing. Those won’t matter in the end. What matters is how I use my time right now.

Perspective

 “Place before your mind’s eye the vast spread of time’s abyss, and consider the universe; and then contrast our so-called human life with infinity.” – Seneca

It’s popular now to watch space videos. Especially the kind that start at a level that we are familiar with and that zoom out to a degree that we can’t fathom. It shows us just how small we are on the universal scales.

Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” speech reminds us of the ridiculousness of even the greatest empires when looking at Earth with a little distance. When we look at ourselves as a little dot it’s hard to imagine that every great person, empire, or happening that we learned about in history class could occur there. That every problem we have is a speck of sand next to every other problem in human history.

Our entire history is a blip of that dot’s existence.

We get the same sensation when we look at time. Consider a great redwood, like the ones in Muir Woods north of San Francisco. These trees are massive. They’ve also been around more than a thousand years. Imagine what they’ve witnessed.

When we zoom out in time and space and see ourselves from a higher place we can appreciate our current position. We get a feeling that we’re not as all-important as we might think. We also get a feeling that we’re a part of something much more massive than we are usually aware of. This vast timeline that we get to take part in needs us here in this spot. We are as vital a part of the universe as any star out there.

This gives me a feeling of connection with the world around me. It makes me feel less disconnected. It also gives me the freedom to work on my projects with more gusto. They aren’t Apple yet, and they don’t need to be. Steve Jobs himself knew he only left a “dent” in the Universe – and that might even be optimistic.

ReSpawn

and then one day you find ten years have gone behind you
no one told you when to run
you missed the starting gun

-Roger Waters

I think I got this idea from Marcus Aurelius but I can’t find the definite source. Anyway, he did something like this. And he was a badass. So it’s worth at least trying it on.

Imagine that you just died in a freak accident – and then came back to life. You’ve been given a second chance at life.

Who are you going to call?

What are you going to build?

What are you going to stop working on?

Who are you going to stop hanging out with?

How are you going to treat the people you meet?

Imagine being reborn into this world. The awe of being delivered back to earth. Imagine the things that you used to take for granted that you wouldn’t anymore. Imagine the things that you used to scare you that don’t anymore.

Live that. Because that freak accident might happen. And you probably won’t get a second chance.

Eternal Recurrence.

The greatest weight.– What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?… Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

Imagine living your entire life over and over again. Every moment. Every action you take, thought you have, feeling you feel. For the rest of eternity you are bound to your life exactly how you lived it. Over and over again. Not in a familiar way. The exact way that you are experiencing it now. As a matter of fact, you are probably in the midst of reliving the exact life that you’ve led an infinite amount of times before and will continue to do so for an infinite amount of times after you die (again). Every detail, action, and feeling you’ve ever experienced will happen again. Forever.

Ouroboros – Google it!

This is difficult to fathom. Try this: imagine reliving the last five minutes of your life. You’ve probably been at your computer. Maybe you’re just clicking around trying to find something interesting. Maybe you’re feeling dull and searching for something to inspire you. Maybe you’re confused about where you are in life right now. Maybe you’re trying to decide what business you want to start. What is it? Would you enjoy reliving the last five minutes again? How about five more times? Ten more times? If not, then you probably wouldn’t want to spend the rest of eternity in that moment.

Notice the weight this adds to the moment. It’s no longer just a moment wasting away until you get to your next milestone. Every moment becomes important. You become acutely aware of the present moment.

Do not seek to have everything that happens happen as you wish, but wish for everything to happen as it actually does happen, and your life will be serene.  – Epictetus

This heightened awareness of the present moment makes real for us something that many of these exercises do: it’s less about what you do and more about how you do it.

We all have to do “tedious” tasks. We make them “tedious”. Alan Watts has said that “Zen is not thinking about God while peeling potatoes, it’s just peeling the potatoes.” Think of the most tedious task you have. Maybe it’s answering emails. If you had to answer those emails for the rest of eternity, how would you treat them? I doubt it would be a light, frustrating experience. You’d probably care a lot more about them. You may be able to infuse them with more meaning. You may realize how much you hate email and figure out a way to stop doing it. If you are faced with doing something forever it becomes slightly less meaningless.

Maybe, if you truly learn to love your life, you will be able to say what Montaigne did:

“If I had to live over again I would live as I have lived.”

Dead in a year.

Imagine this: you check your inbox you will get a letter from Homeland Security. It reads, “Hello Sir/Madam, You have been selected to participate in our Patriot Population Protection Program. Congratulations! You’re country thanks you for your brave service in the protection of our nation’s diversity. In advance of your acceptance to the program, we’ve implanted you with a time-delayed Dutiful Death Chip. You should feel no discomfort from the procedure. The chip will be activated sometime in the next 365-400 days. When this happens you will have the sensation of falling asleep. You will not wake up. To honor your service we have included in this packet a Dove Dark chocolate bar, a sample of Crest Whitening Pro toothpaste, and a lifetime subscription to USA Today.”

You have about a year to live. What now?

Or, as Tyler Durden put it:

Fight Club 4Evur

You’re not going to die tomorrow so you don’t need to go crazy. Save the 50 Big Macs, mound of cocaine, and sex binge for later. You have to preserve yourself for a while yet. You still have time to do something.

Thinking a year out can provide us with a sense of urgency that isn’t available when we think about dying when we’re 100. I don’t even feel a sense of urgency imagining I’ll die in a decade. Ten years just seems so long. Napoleon built an empire in 5 years. Maybe it’s my (dissipating) youth, but I’ve got to think short.

I got the same email you did. That means that starting June 5, 2014, I may have my first and last bout of narcolepsy (assuming I don’t get hit by a rogue ice cream truck before then).

Relationships.

At first this doesn’t feel like much. I still can’t really get my head around it. It’s hard to imagine the (literally) unimaginable. Then my little sister calls.

My default hand movement when somebody calls is tapping this magical code on my keyboard: “CMND + T > R > E > ENTER”. That means that, as I say, “Hello”, I am loading the top meme on Reddit. Some might call this rude. They’d be right in most cultures (all of them that I know of).

Today is different. I’m writing about death. No silly cat diving into boxes will take this precious moment away.

“Hey!”

Before the first word comes out of my mouth I’m already thinking about this post. All the way through the conversation my attention is on the ideas I want to write about. Stupid. One of the main dangers of writing is that you put more emphasis on the idea than what the idea means. Contemplating death isn’t useful if you just play with the ideas – it needs to inform how you act right now.

How would you treat people if you were going to die soon? How about if they were going to die soon? I bet you’d be more patient with them. You’d be forgiving, kind, and attentive. You’d actually hear what they had to say instead of running off.

Imagine what this would do to your relationships. Everyone you met would want to talk to you. Everyone you came in contact with would have benefited – and therefore would want to do more for you.

You want to know the secret to networking? Pretend they’re going to die. Don’t pity them for it, just give them your attention.

 Effective Enjoyment.

If I was going to die in a year I would immediately stop doing the things I don’t want to do. That means no more bullshit tasks that I do to appear busy. No more reading books I think I should. No more working on projects I don’t love.

When you cut out the things that suck enjoyment out of your life – bosses, tasks, boredom, mediocre TV shows – you end up with a whole lot of time. More importantly, by killing your energy-vampires you are now free to create the things you want to create. This means you will begin to naturally utilize your strengths and therefore get a ridiculous amount of work done.

Our initial reaction to impending doom is almost always selfish. “I want to accomplish this. I want to see that. I want to travel there. I want …”

When you really consider what you would want to do in the last year of your life you will probably move pretty quickly through the me-me-me and into what you will leave behind.

365 Day Legacy.

Science teachers and part-time car wash attendants who are faced with terminal cancer quit their jobs and start making meth. That’s what I learned from Breaking Bad anyway.

To provide for his family, our (anti?)hero immerses himself in an occupation he detested. Making and selling meth. I haven’t seen the whole series but when I left off (season 2 episode 4 I think) he seemed to be enjoying it well enough.

With his death imminent he had no concerns other than the wellbeing of his family.

I’m sure you’re experiencing a similar reaction (if not, then imagine a death more vivid). You have a year. That’s probably not enough time to build an empire but it’s certainly enough time to start.

It’s more than enough time to write that book you’ve been talking about.

It’s more than enough time to create the foundation of the business you want to start.

It’s more than enough time to have the house ready for your baby.

What do you want to leave behind? Don’t pretend there’s not enough time.

Imagine what would happen if you spent the next 365 days focused on building your legacy. Then imagine if you did it another year. Then another. This kind of focus compounds quickly.

Your legacy isn’t just the things you build, but the relationships you have with others. We already talked about relationships above but I want to highlight that point. If you look at the legacy you’re leaving every day it becomes obvious how powerful your interactions with other people are. You may go for a week without hitting any major milestones in your business. You might go to bed without seeing any real progress or increasing profit. Every day you can make somebody’s life better, though. You can compliment someone who’s looking unsure. You can welcome someone who feels left out.

Every time you make a day better for somebody else it passes on to the next person they meet and the person after that. You will, no matter who you are, change the world much more in your daily interactions than you ever will in your “world-denting mission”.

TL:DR – Living the 365 Life

Visualize yourself dying in a year from now. Make it as benign or brutal as you wish. Maybe you fall asleep and don’t wake up. Maybe you get your head chopped off by an armored knight’s axe as he gallops by on a warhorse. I don’t know. Make it visceral though. Feel the end.

Then listen.

What do you have the urge to do? Who do you want to see? What do you want to create?

For the rest of the day do the following things:

• When you’re talking with someone, imagine that you’ll both be dead in a year. This will make the conversation better for you and them.
• When you’re working, ask yourself if you would spend time on this if you were going to die in a year. If not, then look for a way to delegate or eliminate it.
• Notice the legacy you’re leaving. Your posture, your attitude, and your interactions (spoken or not) with people are part of your legacy. You have a year to stand tall; do you really want to spend today slouching?
• Before you do anything today, ask yourself, “Would I do this if this was my last year to live?”

You probably won’t die in a year.  You probably won’t even die in the next two decades.

On the other hand, you might die before you finish this post.

The only thing we know is that you aren’t going to live forever. Your time in this life is precious. Treat it that way.

Concluding Our Death-Talks

Death has this much to be said for it:

You don’t have to get out of bed for it.

Wherever you happen to be

They bring it to you – free.

-Kingsley Amis

It feels funny to conclude a post talking about the conclusion. I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating the end of it all and it’s had different effects on me. Sometimes it provides me the fire I need to refocus my efforts. Sometimes it saddens me and makes me call a friend. Sometimes it just makes the leaves seem a little bit more vibrant. It’s always worth it.

For those of you who are entrepreneurs, these contemplations may help balance out your life. They may remind you what is important. They may help push you to reconnect with your family. They may help you push your company in a new direction.

For those of you who are striving to be entrepreneurs, you may gain similar insights, and you may find yourself realizing that you are worthy today. The path to being a successful entrepreneur is rugged and requires failures of all of us. Remembering that our time is limited may help push us to try faster, fail faster, and thus succeed faster.

The dead don’t fear the judgments of others, they don’t fear failure, they don’t fear the unknown. Those are burdens of the living. They are also our boons.

Allow the rush of your fears to propel you forward until you have no fear left. And then may you Rest In Peace.

NOW

 What Do You Think?

Where these ideas as powerful for you as they were for me? Is there another perspective you take?

Comment below and let me know!

The post 5 Ancient Secrets Of Death And Motivation appeared first on StartupBros - You don't need a job....

Steve Jobs.

That son-of-a-bitch.

I just finished his biography. Why didn’t I do that a year ago when I started it? Anyway, it rocked. This is news, right?

For a while after he died everybody wrote stories about him. I read as many words in those stories as were in the entire biography (I should have just finished the biography!). They were all trying to sell me on, “Hey, you’re a little like him, too. Maybe you’ll make the next Apple.” And so we all bought the magazines and said, “YES! Tell me how much like Steve Jobs I can be and why I will make the next Apple!”

They forgot something, though.

The next Steve Jobs isn’t going to act like Steve Jobs. He/she is going to be completely unpredictable. (Also, the next Mark Zuckerberg will probably not wear a hoodie everywhere.)

Anyway. Here are some of my favorite bits from the bio:

1. Respect your experience.

“When you have feelings like sadness or anger about your cancer or your plight, to mask them is to lead an artificial life.”

Nothing should be thrown out. Everything that’s happened to you in your life adds to it. The good and the bad inform the future. Go in with everything you’ve got (or don’t).

2. Don’t fear pissing people off.

“I’m disappointed in Obama. He’s having trouble leading because he’s reluctant to offend people or piss them off… Yes, that’s not a problem I ever had.”

Boldness that’s likely to piss people off isn’t usually smart for an intern. But maybe it is. The thing you’re afraid to say is usually the idea that needs to be heard. Not everyone is going to like you all the time. They’re certainly not going to like everything you do. Boldness is more forgivable than weakness. If you go big and it works, people will forget how upset they were.

3. Be grateful for those that came before you and add something to flow.

“What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how – because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talent we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contribution that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me.”

Stand on the shoulders of giants, but once you’re there you’ve got to move! Do a dance or climb up higher or find more shoulders or make some new shoulders. Whatever you can do, do it. It will lead you to whatever you will be able to do. Add something to the world, dent the universe in your own way – don’t worry about the dent you “should” be making.

4. Make a better TV.

“I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use. It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”

This is direct advice. Better TVs are coming, maybe you can be a part of that.

5. Get into biotech.

Speaking of his son, Reed,

“[Reed's] enthusiasm for [cancer research] is exactly how I felt about computers when I was his age. I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.”

Steve Jobs sees biotech as being in a similar place that tech was when he was coming up. If you want to be involved in the next big wave it would be worth checking it out.

6. Think long-term.

“Living with a disease like this, and all the pain, constantly reminds you of your own mortality, and that can do strange things to your brain if you’re not careful. You don’t make plans more than a year out, and that’s bad. You need to force yourself to plan as if you will live for many years.”

Carl Jung said that you should think as if you would live for 100 more years. (At 3:00 in the video below.)

There are many other ways to consider the End but this seemed to be most effective for Jobs. He stayed at Apple and helped with product development and launches. He also kept designing his yacht in order to stay in the long-term mindset.

Long-term

7. Do business with good people.

He constantly talked about doing business with people who he liked, because he thought they were good guys. The biography is full of examples of him remarking that they should do business with one company or another just because of the people there making decisions. Disney and Pixar (Jobs’ other company) had a terrible relationship for a couple years. Disney switched out an executive and their relationship was restored.

8. Listen to Bob Dylan.

At the famous “1984″ launch, Jobs Quote’s Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’”,

Jobs constantly groups Dylan in with other great artists in history. Apple even helped produce “No Direction Home”, a documentary of Bob Dylan’s life directed by Martin Scorsese.

This is really on the list because I’m in love with Bob Dylan. Especially “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”

9. Motivation Matters.

“The older I get, the more I see how much motivation matters. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music.”

Jobs considered himself an artist. He had a laser focus on making a better product. Sometimes to the detriment of immediate profit. When you let yourself focus on what you love, you have to make something great.

Buckminster Fuller nearly committed suicide because he kept trying to throw himself into business instead of following his passion for inventing and failing. Then a voice came to him right before he followed through with it and told him that he didn’t have the right to kill himself. “You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe.” On the way home he realized his mistake and committed himself to following his inclinations.

9.5 Do it for the ones you love.

“We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.”

It’s easy to get lost in the idea of Apple and forget what they actually do: focus on making one beautiful product, then another. Steve Jobs was the hardest customer to please in the world. He constantly sent food back at restaurants. In his hospital bed, he hated the design of the oxygen mask and demanded that five other options be brought to him. He was just as hard to please when designing his own products. He didn’t let anything out until it was as close to perfect as it could be.

10. Use small words.

“You make some of the best products in the world — but you also make a lot of crap. Get rid of the crappy stuff.” to Nike
—As said to Mark Parker, The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs

He calls things crappy all the time. For years he’s been calling crappy things crappy. Simple.

He realized that intelligence doesn’t come with how complex you make things. It’s how simple you can make them.

11. Use your intuition.

“Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a culture shock than going to India. The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.

Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic; it is learned and is the great achievement of Western civilization. In the villages of India, they never learned it. They learned something else, which is in some ways just as valuable but in other ways is not. That’ the power of intuition and experiential wisdom.”

Later he says, “I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis.”

12. Meditate, don’t be a monk, and take a leap of faith.

Continuing from the above quote, “Coming back after seven months in Indian villages, I saw the craziness of the Western world as well as its capacity for rational thought. If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It’s a discipline; you have to practice it.

Zen has been a deep influence in my life ever since. At one point I was thinking about going to Japan and trying to get into the Eihei-ji monastery, but my spiritual advisor urged me to stay here. He said there is nothing over there that isn’t here, and he was correct. I learned the truth of the Zen saying that if you are willing to travel round the world to meet a teacher, one will appear next door.”

13. Feel like you’re special. And independent.

“Knowing I was adopted may have made me feel more independent, but I have never felt abandoned. I’ve always felt special. My parents made me feel special.”

This feeling let him try to do things that others wouldn’t. It gave him the confidence (ie arrogance) to have a deep trust in his intuition. And to tell other people their work was shit. He was special, he knew what was right. (Again, these aren’t “lessons”… just interesting things about the man.)

14. Cry for purity.

“It choked me up, and it still makes me cry to think about it, both the fact that Lee cares so much and also how brilliant his “Think Different” idea was. Every once in a while, I find myself in the presence of purity – purity of spirit and love – and I always cry. It always just reaches out and grabs me. That was one of those moments. There was a purity about that I will never forget. I cried in my office as he was showing me the idea, and I still cry when I think about it.”

He cared so much about somebody caring that he cried about it. He loved purity to the extent that it brought him to tears. Are you in love with anything as deeply as that?

15. Don’t settle.

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

After his bouts of his cancer he still spent the vast majority of his time working on Apple products. His family didn’t get any increased attention from him. His priority was obvious.

16. Run away.

“If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.

The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.”

I think Jay-Z echoes this sentiment well in, “On To The Next One”

Sometimes you’ve got to abandon the path you’ve been on. Maybe even backtrack a little bit. You’ve got to go and clear your head and come back and do it like you want to.

17. Be willing to lose it all (and have nothing).

“We had nothing to lose, and we had everything to gain. And we figured even if we crash and burn, and lose everything, the experience will have been worth ten time the cost.”

What’s the worst that could happen? It’s usually not nearly as bad as you think.

18. Do (psychedelic) drugs.

“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important – creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”

19.  Connect things.

“Creativity is connecting thing.”

Apple was never way ahead of the curve tech-wise, their genius laid in connecting and simplifying. The iPhone simplified our life by putting all our devices into one.

20. Steal (from the shoulders of giants).

“It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done. And then try to bring those things in to what you’re doing.”

He didn’t like it when people stole from him, though. He pretty much sued everyone that tried.

20.5 Be a hypocrite.

Like Emerson said, “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Jobs didn’t think twice about going after the people who stole from him. He seemed to put zero mental effort into staying consistent with that particular belief in order to keep is focus available for other things.

Wired Coveer

21. Be Paranoid.

Jobs was scared about the mobile phone market cutting into iPod sales. Voila! The iPhone was born. Jim Collins wrote in “Choosing To Be Great” that Productive Paranoia was a key to any great leadership. Instead of sitting back pleased with himself for revolutionizing the music industry, Jobs was scared he was going to lose it. Talk about vigilant.

22. Be Crazy.

And?

What’s your favorite Jobs quote or story? What do you think about him being a jerk? Genius?

Was he overrated?

Comment below and let’s chat.

The post 22 Things That Steve Jobs Told Me appeared first on StartupBros - You don't need a job....

Running a small business is a dream come true for a lot of people, but as business starts booming, burgeoning entrepreneurs find themselves face to face with a nightmare: the overwhelming volume of administrative tasks involved in working for yourself. To cope with this reality, many have considered hiring a virtual assistant to help manage some of the day-to-day operations of their business.

However, there’s still a lot of confusion about what a virtual assistant is and what he or she does for business professionals. To answer some of the questions you might and figure out if hiring a virtual assistant might be the right for you, check out the handy guide below.

Who should think about hiring a virtual assistant?

Running a business involves a lot of administrative tasks – preparing paperwork, answering emails and phone calls, keeping up a website. Many small business owners find this kind of stuff to be unpleasant and become frustrated when it begins to interfere with other, more important facets of running the business. If you find yourself increasingly bogged down with phone and computer-based work that you could easily train someone else to do, it might be time to consider hiring a virtual assistant.

What is a virtual assistant and can s/he do for my business?

A virtual assistant, as the term implies, is an office professional that works remotely. While this means virtual assistants aren’t physically present in your business, given the increasingly web-based world we work in, they often don’t have to be. Virtual assistants do the same tasks as traditional assistants, such as:

• Answer emails and phone calls
• Prepare paperwork (invoices, payroll, etc.)
• Coordinate meetings
• Create employee schedules
• Interface with clients over the phone or using Skype
• Create and maintain a company’s website
• Keep up with a company’s social media sites (Facebook page, Twitter feed, etc.)

Where do virtual assistants typically work?

Virtual assistants work from their own home offices, and could theoretically be based anywhere in the world. Because the tasks they do are technology-based, the home base of your virtual assistant isn’t a factor in her ability complete her assignments. One consideration, though: if your business deals with a lot of time-sensitive material, it might be helpful to hire an assistant based in your time zone, for the sake of simplicity when it comes to task due dates.

When do I assign tasks to my virtual assistant?

You and your virtual assistant will have to spend some time working out her schedule and how many hours per week she will be working for you, but virtual assistants are typically flexible and turn tasks around based on your needs. In fact, this is one of the advantages of hiring a virtual assistant over a traditional assistant, whose work hours would be more rigid.

Why does a virtual assistant make more sense than hiring a secretary?

Although the hourly rate for virtual assistants can be slightly higher than that of a secretary or traditional assistant in some cases, it’s generally cheaper to hire a virtual assistant because they are classified as independent contractors. This means that you are not obligated to provide health insurance or other benefits, which can be costly. Also, you won’t have to spend money on office space, furniture, supplies, utilities, etc. for her, since she’s responsible for her own remote workspace.

How do I hire a virtual assistant?

Business owners have a lot of options when it comes to finding a virtual assistant, but before beginning the search, it’s important to figure out exactly which tasks you plan on having your assistant complete; it’s probably also helpful to estimate how many hours you think this will amount to each week. This way, you’ll be able to give the VAs you interview a clear picture of your expectations.

When you’re ready to begin your hunt for the perfect virtual assistant, begin by asking people in your professional network. There’s a good chance one of them already has a virtual assistant and can make a recommendation. Next, advertise the position on your business’s social media sites, especially Facebook and Twitter; a lot of virtual assistants look for work on these sites. Finally, sign on to one of the major websites that connect virtual assistants with those looking to hire. Two popular sites are VA Networking and Elance. If you take all of these steps, you’ll be casting the widest net possible, increasingly the likelihood that you’ll find a virtual assistant who will meet your needs.

Hiring a virtual assistant is a great way to keep your business running smoothly – keep these tips in mind when considering whether a virtual assistant is right for you!

The post The Virtual Assistant appeared first on StartupBros - You don't need a job....

You’re Screwed.

If you have a boss, anyway.

Jobs are getting demolished like crazy. Yours is probably next.

Robots and software are making each worker amazingly productive. This has been happening forever. Ned Ludd is famous for smashing a couple stocking frames because they took his job. A bunch of people thought this was a good idea and so they also started bashing technology. Then they became Luddites. They were scared. They were professionals who became obsolete because of technology.

Fortunately, no amount of bashing can stop technological progress. (Well, actually, some guy discovered aluminum like 1800 years before we started using it but a greedy King had him beheaded. So sometimes it can work for a while. But he didn’t have the Internet or any backed up data.) The Luddites lose every time.

The original Luddites (like everyone else) ended up getting factory jobs and pay raises. There was more going around. But what happens while the new jobs get made?

In recent history, the new jobs have come in quick. Not now, though. There’s been no obvious place for displaced workers to go.

The rest of this post will give you the information you need to understand what’s happening and, more importantly, how you can secure a place for you and your family among the beneficiaries of all this disruptive craziness.

 I quote heavily from Al Gore’s most recent book, The Future, which is a phenomenal look at the current landscape we’re dealing with. I have also quoted James Altucher’s Choose Yourself which is one of the better books out there. For a more in-depth and step-by-step approach to thriving in this crazy world check out our book, Self-Made U.

A. Robots are Taking Over

Consider the following graph provided by the MIT Technology Review

Productivity is consistently rising while more people are losing jobs. Where are all the extra goods going?!

Pretty wild, huh? There’s an increased abundance of stuff but a decrease in the amount of people who can afford it.

Damn robots!

I hope you’re beginning to create a robot-leveraging scheme.

Look, for example, at the coal industry in the United States. In the last quarter century, production has increased by 133 percent, even as jobs have decreased by 33 percent.

He points out that it’s not just blue collars that are getting pink slips. Nobody is safe.

Consider the impact of intelligent programs for legal and document research in law firms. Some studies indicate that with the addition of these programs, a single first-year associate can now perform with greater accuracy the volume of work that used to be done by 500 first-year associates.

He also discusses the massive impact that automated cars and trucks will have on jobs.

Much has been written about Google’s success in developing self-driving automobiles, which have now travelled 300,000 miles in all driving conditions without an accident. If this technology is soon perfected – as many predict – consider the impact of the 373,000 people employed in the United States alone as taxi drivers and chauffeurs  Already, some Australian mining companies have replaced high-wage truck drivers with driverless trucks.

Getting rid of drivers is just the start. Think about the entire auto-industry. Auto-body and mechanics are all going to be consolidated to a few major companies. Traffic lights won’t be necessary.

To “drive” (harhar!) this point home, here is an anecdote from James Altucher:

Recently I joined the board of directors of a temporary staffing company with $700 million revenue. The year before they had $400 million. That growth occurred in a flat economy. I now can see firsthand and immediately what parts of the economy are hiring full-time and what parts of the economy are moving toward using more temporary workers.

I’ll tell you the answer: ZERO sectors in the economy are moving toward more full-time workers. Everything is either being cut back, moved toward outsourcing out of the country, or hiring temp workers. And this goes not just for low-paid industrial workers, but middle-managers, computer programmers, accountants, lawyers, and even senior executives.

This kind of destruction is happening everywhere. It’s important to keep in mind that this is creative destruction and will create industries as well. Chances are they are going to be industries that require you have some technical skills though. Or, even better, understand how to leverage the technical skills of others.

B. A Couple People Own The Big Robots

The factory (virtual or physical) owners appear to be soaking up the increased efficiencies.

Now, just because the factory owners are getting all the extra money from these technological advances it doesn’t mean they’re taking all the extra stuff. Most of that money is saved. Saved money is just a store of redeemable promises. It has no affect on what’s happening around it. So it’s not like the top 1% are the only people benefiting from this productivity. (As goods get cheaper we can afford to dole out more good as “natural rights”.)

The wealth inequality in the U.S. is worse than Canada, China, and pretty much the rest of the world. However, this measurement on its own isn’t fair. Our “poor” are much better off than the “middle class” in most countries because of excess productivity in that 1%. Our Human Development Index (life expectancy, education, income) ranking is 3 versus China’s 101 ranking. We need to keep in mind that statistics are the third kind of lie (the first being lies and the second being damn lies) and shouldn’t scare us too much. (It’s also worth noting that rarely has any good come of attacking income inequality, it’s better to work with what is than cry about what isn’t.)

The point is this: the money is getting sucked out of the class middle class. You’ve got to choose to move up or get pushed down. Since you’re here, I know which way you want to go.

EVERYTHING is getting robosourced…

C. But Not Most of the Robots

As technology focuses productivity to fewer corporations it also puts more power in your hands. A laptop and Internet connection are the equivalent of having a small team of programmers a couple of years ago. Consider the fact that you can start an online store for about $15 a month at Shopify.

From The Future:

Where services are concerned, we are also seeing a third trend, which might be called “self-sourcing”: individual consumers of services, empowered with laptops, smartphones, tablets, and other productivity-enhancing devices, are interacting with intelligent programs to effectively partner with machine intelligence to effectively replace many of the people who used to be employed in service jobs. Many airline travelers routinely make their own reservations, pick their own seats, and print their boarding passes. Many supermarkets and other stores enable shoppers to handle the checkout and payment processes on their own. Banks began to provide cash with ATM machines and now offer extensive online banking services. Customers of many businesses now routinely deal with computers on the telephone. National postal services disintermediated (that is, their “middleman” role is being made obsolete - by email and social media.

This self-sourcing trend is still in its early stages and will accelerate dramatically as artificial intelligence improves year by year. One obvious problem is that there is no compensation for all the new work done by individuals, even as the compensation formerly paid to those in firms who lost their jobs is also lost to the economy as a whole.

How are you already benefiting from these massive increases in productivity? How can you use these advancements to further benefit you?

this was 3d printed

D. The Transition Is Far From Complete

While jobs are disappearing rapidly, some, at least, are being created. There are always opportunities for those who will look for them. Gore mentions that robosourcing will actually shift jobs away from the developing world and back home:

The wave of automation that is contributing to the outsourcing and robosourcing of jobs from developed countries to emerging and developing markets will soon begin to displace many of the jobs so recently created in those same low-wage countries. 3D printing could accelerate this process, and eventually could also move manufacturing back into developed countries. Many U.S. companies have already reported that various forms of automation have enabled them to bring back at least some of the jobs they had originally outsourced to low-wage countries.

Most of the forces underway are moving jobs away from us. Some trends are developing that will bring jobs back. Gore and Altucher don’t seem to think that these jobs will come back. We never know what the next revolution will bring, though. “Change is the only constant,” is a tired saying that deserves another look. Change will come and we don’t know what it will look like. The one thing that seems certain: it’s coming faster…

keep in mind: this is LOGARITHMIC graph!

E. It’s Happening Faster… And Faster ANDFASTER!

These massive upheavals are happening more frequently as we move forward. Technology itself propels new technology forward. So the better the technology the quicker it can push us into the next wave of technology. Our ability to adapt is what allowed us to survive extreme conditions early on in our species’ history and that ability will be pushed as we face an ever-increasing pace of change. From The Future:

Consider again the larger pattern traced in the history of these three epochs: the first lasted 200,000 years, the next lasted 8,000 years, and the Industrial Revolution took only 150 years. Each of these historic changes in the nature of the human experience we more significant than its predecessor and occurred over a radically shorter time span. All were connected to technological innovations.

Major breakthroughs are occurring in genetics/biotech, sustainable energy, and AI. All of these movements have the potential to create even more massive increases in productivity per employee. They also have the potential to create a new demand for those AI-steroided employees.

F. “It’s Different This Time”

Every previous epoch has been the brain developing technology. That technology worked like a basic tool. Now the tool is like our brain. Artificial Intelligence is nearing a point where it can do much of the work our brain used to – the very thing we used to further technology. The role of “humanity” in production is being pushed farther and farther to the side (even “creativity” is being put in question). This makes this shift different than any other before. (Note that Ray Kurzweil, an optimistic futurist, doesn’t believe the brain will be able to be replicated for decades to come… so at least some of our brain will still be needed.)

As artificial intelligence matures and is connected with all the other technological extensions of human capacity – grasping and manipulating physical objects, recombining them into new forms, carrying them over distance, communicating with one another utilizing flows of information of far greater volume and far greater speed than any humans are capable of achieving, making their own abstract models of reality, and learning in ways that are sometimes superior to the human capacity to learn – the impact of the AI revolution will be far greater than that of any previous technological revolution.

One of the impacts will be to further accelerate the decoupling of gains in productivity from gains in the standard of living for the middle class. In the past, improvements in economic efficiency have generally led to improvements in wages for the majority, but when the substitution of technology capital for labor creates the elimination of very large numbers of jobs, a much larger proportion of the gains go to those who provide the capital. The fundamental relationship between technology and employment is being transformed.

Again, this sounds pessimistic. Keep in mind that if there is nobody to buy products then there is no profit in producing them. This shift will ultimately steady itself, but in the meantime – you better start out-human-ing the machines. You need to create a platform. You need to serve others in the way computers can’t. You need to use the leverage being created by these computers.

G. You Probably Didn’t Choose Your Dream

There are a few of people who spend trillions of dollars to make you want certain things. It’s difficult to keep your mind sane when it’s bombarded by paid ads all day. Especially when these come from people you trust. Many of our obsessions started with the “American Dream”, which James Altucher describes in his book Choose Yourself:

In fact, “the American Dream” comes from a marketing campaign developed by Fannie Mae to convince Americans newly flush with cash to start taking mortgages. Why buy a home with your won hard-earned money when you can use somebody else’s? It may be the best marketing slogan ever conceived. It was like a vacuum cleaner that that sucked everyone into believing that a $15 trillion mortgage industry would lead to universal happiness. “The American Dream” quickly replaced the peace and quiet of the suburb with the desperate need to always stay ahead.

Now is a time to look back on your dreams. Why are you going after that dream? Did somebody tell you it was the right thing to do a long time ago? The machines are mostly taking jobs that people didn’t want in the first place. Use this opportunity.

you’ve got to take one

H. Your Choices

According to Altucher, you have two choices:

In this new era, you have two choices: become a temp staffer (not a horrible choice) or become an artist-entrepreneur. Choose to commoditize your labor or choose yourself to be a creator, an innovator, an artist, an investor, a marketer, and an entrepreneur.

If you’re reading this, I know you’re not trying to be a temp staffer. The entrepreneur’s path has more people on it than ever before – and it’s also more accessible than ever before. You have the tools, you just need to start using them.

it’s a whole new worllddd

I. This World Is Better

This increased productivity must be a good thing at the end. It’s the transition that’s painful. In Self-Made U I wrote:

One of the many beautiful parts of this shift is that fulfillment, a feeling of purpose in life, is no longer something you do after-hours. The whole world is becoming more integrated and so is your life.

The reward system is different now. You aren’t getting paid to do what they tell you really well because they don’t know what to tell you! You’ve got to figure that out now. It’s a return to our roots. Before the industrial revolution we were all pretty much entrepreneurs anyway. You had to figure out your craft and how you were going to sell it.

So here we are. Being pushed out into the open again. It’s scarier. There’s no map and nobody seems to know what’s going on. We’ve got to find our way. But we can’t really find what’s not there… so we’ve got to make it!

This is a world where your work can make you feel alive. That’s a better place to be.

… to comment below!

K. What do you think?

This whole thing is crazy! So much excitement, opportunity, and uncertainty. How are you approaching it? Do you have strategies you are using?

Do you have more questions that you’d like to have answered?

Do you have a story you’d like to share?

Comment below and let’s learn some more about the future…

Also, for all sorts of how-to on taking advantage of these things… buy our book!

The post 10 Reasons The Future Doesn’t Include Your Job appeared first on StartupBros - You don't need a job....

At least half of the questions readers send me go something like this…

“I’ve been struggling to find a product for weeks now. Can you help me? How do you find products that make you money? Why can’t I find any profitable products!?”

And MY GOD! It’s getting old…

There’s nothing I hate more than seeing a recurring question come up. That means I’ve failed to answer something.

Luckily, I finally nailed the common thread in all the frustration.

This blog post will answer “Why can’t I find a good product to import” once and for all.

The Common Problem

After answering several hundred emails along those lines, I think I’ve discovered the common problem would-be importers are having.

They’re all looking for a silver-bullet product that does the work for them.

Let me explain…

Many people are still in the “get-rich-quick” phase of their entrepreneurial careers.

Apply that mentality to importing, and you get people that try to play the arbitrage game.

Arbitrage is simply buying something for less than you are selling it for.

Arbitrage products are goldmines; they have great margins and basically sell themselves…

And you can make money with arbitrage products.

For a while…

“Your margin is my opportunity.”

Jeff Bezos

It’s only a matter of (increasingly spare) time before a big player uncovers your goldmine, and eats it up for themselves.

This is the sad state of importing today, years after the “wild-west-ecommerce” days of 1995-2005.

Any Hope?

This is surely bad news to anybody in that mindset.

Is there any hope left for small time importers? The kind that are just getting started, with little capital to invest…

Spoiler alert – There is!

But it’s going to require a shift in your mindset and how you think about importing.

What Makes a Product Good?

Sure, you want your product to have healthy margins. Great margins even.

And yea, it would be good if it was easy to ship, reliable, had a factory warranty. Sure, all of that is a plus for any product.

But none of that is going to make your product sell over a competitor who will take slimmer margins.

The Right Questions

Most people waste weeks (if not months) of their time looking for a miracle product that will build their business for them.

They are asking themselves the wrong questions, and looking at things from the wrong angle.

What you need to be thinking about is the other side of the transaction…

How are you going to sell your products?

Why would somebody buy your product over the competitors?

How will you acquire and retain customers in a cost-effective way?

These are the questions you should be thinking about while doing product research.

Bubble-Burster: This Is Business…

Many people seem to have the impression that importing is a quick road to easy riches…

It’s not.

It’s a business, like any other.

There’s a lot of things to worry about when starting a business. But when thinking about what you’re going to sell and how you’re going to sell it, you need to think about competitive advantage.

Competitive Advantage Cheat-sheet

You need some sort of competitive advantage that nobody can steal from you.

This means new importers have to focus on a few things.

Advantage 1  - Your Brand

Building a brand that your target customer loves is a sure-fire way to keep an edge on the competition.

In fact, building a good enough brand will even allow you to charge a premium price.

The examples here are endless…

Practically every “counterfeit” you can buy from China is a company that can charge a premium because their brand is so valuable.

Another example I often use is my friend Kevin Schlenker, who built the Skar Audio brand around his importing activities.

The only thing to make sure of if you take this route is to register your trademark.

Advantage 2 – Your Product

Another place you can provide value in ways nobody else can is the product itself.

I’d encourage any importer to really get to know his target customer, and then try to build in new product features that will make the target customer’s life better.

Small things can go a long way here. For some products, something as small as a color change can make a world of difference.

Sometimes, you’ll have to negotiate with your supplier directly and see what’s possible. You’ll be limited by his capabilities, your budget, and your imagination.

And of course, you could always go all out and create your own product. But I’ll save that for another blog post

Advantage 3 – Your Marketing

Simply put, if you can build an audience and a sales funnel; you can pretty much sell whatever you want.

Example – I was just talking the other day with somebody who built a lead-machine for the baby niche.

Before he had anything to sell, or any desire to make money off of it, he just decided to build a few websites and try to get “hot baby leads” (as he calls them).

Now he is out shopping for baby products, knowing that he can sell anything he chooses.

He hasn’t decided if he will start his own brand, begin drop shipping, or get into affiliate marketing. But no matter what he chooses, I’m confident he’ll make money

Advantage 4 – Your Capital

This won’t apply for many people reading this article.

It actually applies more to the guys you want to avoid in importing. Or beat!

It’s definitely possible to spend your way to the top in importing.

Somebody with deep pockets can quickly negotiate the best prices with the best suppliers. They can also afford to set up a more efficient distribution system.

Luckily, they’re easily defeated with the other competitive advantages (usually).

Advantage 5 – Your Contacts

Your network of contacts can also be a big competitive advantage.

This applies everywhere in business, but perhaps even more in importing. Personal relationships play a huge role in Asian (especially Chinese) culture.

If a Chinese factory owner likes you, you get the friend discount and best quality.

If they don’t like you, you get scammed.

It’s just the way it is…

The relationships you don’t think of are often the ones with the most potential.

Do you have a friend who was put in charge of buying 250 pool chairs? I’d look into pool chairs…

Does your Dad work at a company that uses a limitless supply of zip-ties and box cutters? Try to find out what they’re paying and pitch them otherwise.

Relationships like this can be solid gold.

It’s Tough Work

Any way you spin it, importing is a tough gig.

It’s a lot of fun, and has tons of potential.

But it’s far from a “get-rich-quick” solution.

I hope this guide helps to clarify what really makes a product profitable.

If you have any questions or want to be an awesome person, leave a comment below.

I’ll be sure to respond!

The post Importers – Here’s The Real Reason Why You Can’t Find a Good Product appeared first on StartupBros - You don't need a job....

It all started out when I saw many freshmen at UC Berkeley unable to get summer jobs.

I asked: How can I take advantage of people who are super smart but can’t get an internship?

I decided to create a local business consulting company. Why?

Because:

1. I was around college kids all the time (I was in college myself).
2. The kids wanted experience and something cool to put on their resume.
3. I’ve always wanted my own army.
4. I figured it was something that could be fun for the summer.

Over the course of two months, we contacted major companies through the college’s alumni list.

The very first gig we got was for Dell computers. We helped dell recruit students. After that we began advising local businesses about their menus and on-campus marketing.

A great tip for anyone to use (in school or not) is to start off doing stuff for FREE to build your expertise, client base (for repeat business), and testimonials (for new business).

This is something we encourage in our course that helps people create a $1,000 a month business.

We grew to a small army of 20 people doing this consulting. Then one day, Kenny (an intern) suggested we do a student discount card.

Oy vey.

There are about 5 prototypical student businesses: selling credit cards, discount cards, t-shirt company, tutoring company and something with booze.

The year before, a company did a discount card and it was wildly popular over campus but they decided not to do again.

I figured it wouldn’t really cost us a lot and would be good to keep some of the (unpaid) interns busy.

A few of the key things to note about this business:

1. Focus on Local Business. Local businesses are always happy to get more business for free.
2. Make Agreements. It’s good to have agreements when you are working with people. One of my campus reps ended up not returning $500 worth of cards which she agreed to in writing.
3. Document processes. As we expanded to 5 campuses, we had a clear handbook so it took less than one week to get a campus up and running.

We ended up getting about 20 businesses together on the first Ninja card. We sold them for $10/each.

You can see what our card and first landing page looked like here:

The keys for growing a business in college:

1. Partnerships. We found that giving the discount cards for free as a fundraiser to student groups + the greek system was our #1 method. We helped others make money and took a small cut.
2. We expanded to multiple campuses. If you find that your business is working well, see how you can duplicate and multiply.
3. Flyering. I know it’s a bit old school, but don’t default to buying ads or what you see others doing. Use the medium that will get YOUR customers attention.

Ultimately, we spread across 5 campuses and generated $50,000 within a year. Not bad for a senior (me) and some freshmen.

Since then I’ve been an early employee at Facebook and Mint, plus I started 2 multi-million dollar businesses. A LOT of people have asked me how I started those businesses.

Instead of repeating myself over and over I created the solution to get you your own business.

If you want the blueprint to start your own business, personal support, and access to a community of 3,000+ entrepreneurs, take a look at “How To Make A $1,000-A-Month Business.”

The post How I Made $50,000 in College (and What You Can Learn Too) appeared first on StartupBros - You don't need a job....

If I tell you to picture a successful entrepreneur – what comes to mind?

Most people think of the outliers, like Zuckerberg or Musk or Jobs, because they’re the most memorable.

But they’re not what makes up the bulk of successful entrepreneurs – not by a long shot!

With every business-based Hollywood film further distorting our image of entrepreneurship, many people have lost touch…

What is takes to become a successful entrepreneur has never and will never change.

The numbers don’t lie.

Here’s a double-dose of infographic with the facts on what it takes to become a successful entrepreneur - you might be surprised!

The one thing that really jumped out at me was that nearly half of all successful entrepreneurs weren’t even considering that path in college – I wouldn’t have guessed that!

Let me know what jumped out at you in the comments below - or share these bad boys around if you really want to help me out

Either way, thanks for reading – hope you learned something valuable!

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Are you drowning in a sea of stress?

I’ve got news for you – achieving success shouldn’t be a negative thing…

Seeing progress towards your goals and dreams should be energizing – invigorating!

It shouldn’t drain you or make you feel depressed.

Stress isn’t inherently generated by the tasks that you do. You and your brain create it because you’re doing something wrong.

If you associate the word ‘grind’ with your pursuit of success, then this guide could change your life…

I’ve listed these simple principles of stress-free success in (rough) order of importance.

Focus On Yourself First

Get very straight on who you are and what you want out of life.

Once you know and love yourself, you’ll can avoid things that stress you out.

If you don’t know yourself extremely well, you risk making commitments that make your life a living hell. Commitments that limit your potential as an entrepreneur…

Ask yourself why you want to do what you’re doing. Ask yourself who you want to help, how you want to help them, and why.

From there, focus on being the best performing, most confident version of yourself you can be.

Don’t forget to reward yourself often, and enjoy some of the spoils of life now. Carve out time for yourself every week things that decompress and center you.

Be Confident and Decisive In Taking Action

The truth is, everybody is just making their best guesses based on their experiences…

The ones that win are the ones that take constant, decisive action.

Stop worrying if your idea is good, or if you’re doing things ‘right’…

Just focus on taking constant action.

As long as you’re taking action, it’s hard to NOT become successful.

One study on Fast Company showed the main difference between entrepreneurs and serial-entrepreneurs is the realization that every venture and every action has positive a spillover into every future decision you make.

So make that realization!

Don’t worry if you know enough to do something – just do it!

Surround Yourself With The Right People

Nothing is more stressful than having to entertain people who don’t believe in you and want you to be successful…

They will spew negativity all over your hopes and dreams, usually to make themselves more sure of their own life-decisions.

That’s why it’s so important to spend your time with like-minded people. Surround yourself with people who energize and inspire you to succeed, in the way you want to succeed.

If you really want to jump start your success, get a friend or mentor to keep you accountable to your goals. Even better, join a business group or coaching program that will make you truly see how much more you could be doing.

Know What NOT To Do

Don’t do things you don’t want to do. Maybe you shouldn’t stop NOW, but the principle holds true…

If you have tasks to perform that stress you out, phase them out of your life.

You can hire people to do everything from your grocery shopping, to filtering and helping to answer your emails.

There’s an endless stream of time saving software coming out every year.

Don’t be afraid to invest in things that will save you time and energy.

Of course, this can’t be taken to an absolute extreme. But work to phase out or simplify the things that are causing you stress.

There are also complete time-wasters we can cut out of our lives, if we’re truly serious about achieving our dreams…

Most of us watch TV or play video games rather than finish the tasks that need to be done.

Don’t intentionally distract yourself from success just so you can feel stressed out later…

Do yourself a favor – turn off the TV shows and work on what needs to be done instead.

Always Give Your Best Effort

If you’re going to do something, give it everything you’ve got…

In most cases, people care much more about the effort you give than the outcome. It’s a better indicator of how you’ll perform in the future.

If you always put 110% effort into every action you perform, people will quickly take notice – and you’ll gain momentum fast.

Keep Your Word

You’re only as good as your word.

If you break your promises and engagements, people will write you off quickly.

So be dependable and keep your word, and people will know that they can trust you.

Make it a habit to always be at least 5-minutes early to meetings and phone calls. You’ll have the unfair advantage of always starting with the upper hand.

And once again – don’t say ‘Yes’ to things you know you won’t do!

Don’t Be A Dick…

The more likeable and memorable you are, the easier your journey to success will be.

Read books like How to Win Friends & Influence People and How To Talk To Anyone.

Learn how to become a Master of Communication, Body Language, and Conversation.

Address Problems Immediately

The longer you let a problem sit, the worse it will become.

Take care of problems right away, and your mind will be free of anxiety and free to move onto the next task.

Stay Healthy

You know the drill here…

Eat healthy, exercise, and sleep consistently well.

If you don’t, then none of the above will help that much…

Don’t Fall Into Stressful Patterns

Most people are at fault for creating stress around them.

Some people even subconsciously create it to make themselves feel busy – even though they feel like they’re getting nowhere.

Don’t be like that. Don’t become comfortable with being stressed and depressed.

Start moving toward a less stressful work and personal life NOW.

You only live once! Don’t torture yourself…

The post The Stress-Free Guide To Success In Business, Life, And Anything Else… appeared first on StartupBros - You don't need a job....