Mastermind.fm

In today’s episode I sit down with fellow Maltese entrepreneur Philip Camilleri, who recently made his exit from Smartasset.com, a company he co-founded in 2010 and through which he achieved tremendous success in the United States over the past 10 years. He is now hard at work on his new project Founderslist.com.

We discuss the differences in the fintech spaces of Europe and the United States, his journey with Smartasset.com, why he decided to create Founderslist and what are the problems that founders still face and that he is trying to help with.

With Malta being such a small country, it’s not common to come across such highly successful entrepreneurs as Philip, so his journey should serve as an inspiration to all those who come from small countries and regions that are far from the epicenter of startups and investors.

Kris Gunnars is the founder and ex-CEO of the world’s most trafficked nutrition site Authority Nutrition. He went on to sell that website to Healthline.com, which then became the world’s biggest nutrition site.

Kris now dedicates his time to investing the handsome returns from the acquisition and runs Stockanalysis.com where he shares the results of his research and learning.

In this conversation, we talk about the personality traits and skillset needed to build a successful authority site. We also go through some of the challenges faced by website owners and how to know when to sell.

Both Kris and Jean agree that there is a lifecycle that one goes through when owning an authority site, and it’s important to know at what stage your business is at in order to have the right expectations and select the appropriate strategy, which might even be that of selling, as in Kris’ case.

Big transitions are never easy, and we discuss how Kris’ life changed after the financially life-changing sale of his site to Healthline.

If you want to learn how one person with the right focus and perseverance can build a hugely successful internet business make sure you don’t miss this episode.

In today’s episode, I sit down for a chat with Chris Grech, one of my classmates from high school who has gone on to attain success as a CPA working with international clients and based out of Malta.

We touch on various topics, including:

I enjoyed catching up with Chris and having some of my ideas challenged; this is an exercise that is extremely important to sharpen your thoughts as an investor.

As in many other areas of life, there isn’t necessarily either a good or bad to do things, it all depends on your circumstances and future plans. While I might have an investing strategy that is diametrically opposed to someone else’s, we can both achieve our goals simply because the goals themselves are very different.

And that is why I predicate caution in blindly copying what other investors are doing. My most important conversations are those that I have with my own family and my accountant as well as a close circle of investor friends where we discuss our goals and possible outcomes in order to eventually pick the strategy which has the highest probability of being successful in our scenarios.

Enjoy this episode, and please let me know whether you liked the show in the comments section or by leaving a review on iTunes.

You can contact Chris via email on chris[dot]grech[at]white[dot]mt

On this week’s show, Jean is joined by Gabriella Galea, his sister, and Yoran Brondsema, a European index investor and entrepreneur.

Gabriella is new to the investing world and is trying to figure it all out, while Yoran has been researching the best way to invest and allocate assets in a sensible portfolio for several years. He developed a tool for Europeans to backtest different portfolios and thus help decided which portfolio they want to adopt.

In this episode, we focus on index investing, with a specific focus on European investors. We discuss how to track an index, what asset mix you should have in your investment portfolio, how and when to rebalance, how to choose an ETF and stock broker, and how taxes play an important role in your investment returns.

It was a pleasure for me to interview Yoran and you’ll find that this episode is packed with information. I also recommend the book “Investing Demystified” that Yoran recommends. I had bought and read it a while back, but I am going to go back to it and give it another read, as I think there will soon be very good opportunities in the stock market, making it a great time to build a stock and bond portfolio.

In this week’s episode we interview the CEO of Reinvest24, Mr Tanel Orro. This platform is one of my favorites as they are growing organically and doing things the right way. I like their updates on the properties they are working on as they record videos of the progress, and it seems that they are very responsible towards their investors, which is always good to see.

We discuss many aspects of investing in real estate, including the hottest trends in real estate investment in Europe, why invest in buy-to-rent properties vs developmetn loans, and where most of the investors come from and why. It was a really enjoyable episode for us to do, and I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

This week we have Gustas from Evo Estate with us. This platform is different from the majority of online real estate investment platforms in that it is a curated aggregator of deals from various platforms.

It is a platform that is dedicated to serving the investors’ needs, as Gustas emphasizes. In this episode, Jean is joined by his dad Joseph, an experienced finance expert and together they discuss Evo Estate and online real estate deals in general with Gustas.

We thoroughly enjoyed our discussion with the young but very knowledgeable Gustas and we think you’ll enjoy this too.

In today’s episode, Jean is joined by Sterling from P2P-Millionaire.com. Sterling is one of the biggest investors in peer-to-peer lending and has an active portfolio of over a million euros invested across several P2P platforms.

We discuss how he built the initial capital that he now invests, thoughts about living in China, and how he goes about choosing P2P platforms. We touch upon setting up an auto invest strategy on these P2P lending platforms, and what would happen in an economic downturn.

Other topics we go into are the calculation of XIRR, the three fund portfolio, ETFs vs funds and real estate investing.

Sterling together with his friend Scrappy are very involved in the European FIRE community as well as several forums dealing specifically with P2P lending, so I really encourage you to listen to this episode and visit their site for their latest monthly reports.

In today’s episode, Jean is joined by Jørgen Wolf who is documenting his journey towards financial freedom on his blog. He promises to bare all: his income, his expenses and his investments.

In our chat, we talk about the FIRE movement and differences between the European movement and the US movement, how he evaluates P2P platforms, living in Denmark, how to raise a financially intelligent kid, real estate investments and much more.

Definitely an episode that will be useful for all those who want to make their money work for them and provide some very good returns. Jørgen is averaging more than 10% returns per year on his investments, with his favorite platform being Mintos, so it’s well worth listening to his approach.

In this episode, Jean interviews Matthew Melbourne from Republic.co, a platform where investors from all around the world can invest in US startups.

Deal flow has been hard to come by for small investors in the US or investors outside the US with no contacts or physical presence in hotbeds for startups like San Francisco. Republic’s mission is to change all that and make investing easy and open to everyone, whichever net worth they have. This means that you don’t need to be an accredited investor to invest in startups on this platform.

Matthew walks us through the process of investing (as an investor) and raising funds (as a startup). We also talk about success stories (including a company that was acquired by Marcus Lemonis from The Profit) and plans for future expansion.

We also talk about crypto investments and the Crowd SAFE instrument for crowdfunding in startups.

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius.

In this episode Mark is joined by Stephan Venter from WooCrew to discuss WooCrew, a WooCommerce maintenance and technical support service.

The conversation delves a bit deeper into the most common struggles WooCommerce users face, what kinds of users are opting for WooCommerce today, and what tests and tools are being used to keep WooCommerce stores up and running (and growing!).