Run With It

Nuggets:

• There is a rich “non-adulting” economy wherein you can make money helping the continually youthful avoid or manage actual adult take so they can focus on other stuff.
• Homeowners typically spend 1-4% of their home cost on maintenance every year
• The existence of products like “Home Warranties” demonstrates a need for homeowner support for caring for their home.

Action Steps:

1. Decide on what basic tasks you can start with.
2. Find out what contractors charge for the tasks on your list.
3. Create revenue projections.
4. Decide on what your company’s fee would be: 15-30%?
5. Piece the technical aspect together.

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at [email protected]. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.

Links:

• Dawn’s Light Media
• Money Plane
• Jason’s LinkedIn profile
• jasoncherubini.com

Jason Cherubini is the founder of Seraphim Associates International, a management consulting firm focusing on technology based startups, and a founding partner of Dawn's Light, a media production and financing company. He has held multiple faculty appointments in the United States and Europe, and is an avid proponent of the EdTech industry.

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run

Nuggets:

• Most of the tax code is there to help citizens save money by incentivizing behaviors that would benefit our society

Action Steps:

1. Find experts to partner with who are already providing advanced tax strategies for their clients
   1. industry conferences
   2. authors
   3. forums
   4. ask business owners for recommendations
2. Be willing to pay for high-end tax strategy and accounting specialists on your team
3. Bootstrap from a simple system that implements simple, cheap, accessible technologies like Asana, Artable, and basic CRMs to create a client flow.
4. Aim for ~$5-6K annual average customer value
5. Scale to 100 customers
   1. Run Facebook ads to a landing page offering this service
6. Raise money (approach VCs and offer 20% for $5 million, for example)

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at [email protected]. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.

Links:

• Boostopia
• Wealthfront
• Betterment
• Hasan Minhaj Patriot Act episode on taxes

Justin Winter exited his prior company after growing to $22 million in annual sales to focus on a new problem. Boostopia is an all-in-one support operations platform that unlocks the power of your support data inside your support ticketing system to transform both your team and customer experience.

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run

Nuggets:

• Pursuing socially responsible business ideas can be quite lucrative - A Good Company is doing over $220k/month in revenue
• When you want to change someone’s behavior, positive reinforcement is much more effective than chiding them

Action Steps:

1. Investigate how waste is currently processed
2. Find out what value is involved and to whom value is added or extracted in the waste management process (e.g. are governments financially incentivised to minimize the amount of waste they have to process.
3. Research the value of raw materials present in common e-waste items
4. Research human behavior and how positive reinforcement may play a role in modifying consumer behavior.
5. Research Best Buy’s e-waste recycling program
   1. Why are they doing it?
   2. Are they making money?
6. Are there creative ways to manage this process, like adding rfid chips to electronics for identification during disposal. Can you fine or reward consumers to incentivise proper disposal?
7. Research similarities to CO2 cap and trade proposals and map how a similar system could work for e-waste
8. Speak out against companies who are making it difficult to recycle and/or reuse their electronics

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at [email protected]. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.

Links:

• Agood Company
• Starter Story interview
• Citizens Climate Lobby

Anders Ankarlid is CEO of A Good Company, a serial e-commerce entrepreneur, and a father of three. He has worked in e-commerce for more than a decade and he’s an activist against mindless consumption.

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run

Nuggets:

• The key leverage point of blockchain is the decentralization of valuation.
• Millennials value experiences over things.
• Don’t implement emerging trends unless they’re necessary.
• Many great ideas sit around waiting for the right time to flourish. If you get in too early, there may not be infrastructure to support them.

Action Steps:

1. Understand social currencies
2. Research social currency issuers (Roll)
3. Find out the use cases that would apply. Who would want to issue social currency? All individuals? Influencers and celebrities? Small businesses abandoning punch cards for social currency?
4. Find out how market makers work on traditional exchanges. (The individuals that set the buy and sell prices of various stocks).
5. Engage with a platform like Steemit that currently use blockchain to exchange value for user created content

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at [email protected]. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.

Links:

• FestivalPass
• Ed Vincent’s LinkedIn profile
• Roll
• Steemit
• Rapper Akon Shares Whitepaper for Upcoming Cryptocurrency

Ed Vincent is an entrepreneur with over 25 years business, technology and management experience including 6 years banking and valuation experience. He founded an e-commerce business in 1999 which was sold to a competitor in 2001. He’s a Repeat Founder including the businesses SimplyEngage, myProducer, & Predict Ventures. He is Currently the Founder & CEO of FestivalPass.

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run

Action Steps:

1. Offer performance-improvement consulting services to businesses in order to figure out a system that works for this idea
   1. validate that a boilerplate process will work for different businesses
   2. determine pricing
2. Draft a business plan around the idea
3. Create a no-code version of the performance review system

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at [email protected]. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.

Links:

• Cory's Personal Website
• Saas Pegasus: The Django Powered SaaS Template
• Toggl
• Jason Cohen on Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business
• Patrick McKenzie

Cory Zue is a software developer and entrepreneur. These days he mostly works on SaaS Pegasus: the Django SaaS boilerplate. He also made Place Card Me—which is becoming the best way to make printable place cards on the internet. 

Jason Cohen on Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run

Nuggets:

• Like the real estate market, there are franchise brokers to facilitate deals. But you can also do the legwork by approaching franchise owners yourself. In the midst of pandemic, many of them are likely onsite. 
• A typical franchise cost is nominal (somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000). But many franchises, like McDonalds, will not sell to you unless you have a minimum of five years operating costs. 

Action Steps:

1. Research rent costs for commercial spaces with the best walkability in your area. 
2. Walk into a prospective franchise location and ask the owner about his or her experience within the franchise. 

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at [email protected]. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.

Links:

• SGIC Consulting 
• Lucas’ Instagram

Lucas Root is the founder of SGIC Consulting which helps clients build and implement a high-performance strategy to achieve the maximum growth potential possible.

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run

Nuggets:

• Only two missing pieces can stop you: mindset and skill. Find out which one you need and fix it. You can tackle anything.
• Learn Erin’s three levers for growth in ecommerce: Traffic, Conversion Rate, Average Order Value.
• Always highlight your most popular and highest selling items. Don’t try to push your less popular products on clients up front. 
• Throw in the towel only when you’re working on something that conflicts with your higher order goals.
• Find the opportunities during moments of great change. Where are people changing their habits and how can you turn that into a business opportunity?

Action Steps:

1. Document Erin’s system for ecommerce growth
2. Pitch ecommerce owners on implementing the system for free for one month
3. Experience is the best teacher: create your own ecommerce business to test out these principles
4. Partner with a master of ecommerce and sell their system as part of your agency model

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at [email protected]. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.

Links:

• Bailey's Blossoms
• Peyton Bre
• Conquering Chaos (Erin’s Podcast)

Erin Hooley, President and Founder of Bailey's Blossoms a brand that reimagines infant and toddler fashion. She also founded  Peyton Bre, a clothing company for tweens and teens with a call to empower young girls to feel confident and beautiful. She’s also a motivational speaker and a mom of six!

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run

Nuggets:

• Find out the behind the scenes relationships building and negotiating sometimes necessary for successful software entrepreneurship.
• Social media is the new TV after work. If you want to start a business, delete all your accounts.
• Going the extra mile on business development often pays off big.
• Balancing a freemium model is tricky: listen to the episode to hear how Alexi thinks about it
• Use a B2B2C model to get other businesses to sign up your new clients.

Action Steps:

1. Alexi’s biggest pains are
   1. managing business development and marketing (these are not his strengths) and 
   2. managing relationships with big corporations, specifically 3 big airline companies.
2. Use this information to consider what kind of businesses could support him and help his business thrive.
3. Do you have business development skills or business and userbase growth skills? Maybe you could join Alexi’s team and fill in a central gap.
4. Do you know someone that could fill that role? Is there a business in understanding what startup companies need out of additional team members and then finding the right match for them?
5. Do you have an understanding of how to manage business relationships between small startups and large corporations? Do you know how to make it a win-win? Again, perhaps you can fill a role on Alexi’s team or help find the right new team members to fill in the gaps.
6. Email ideas for what Alexi can do to address the concerns raised during the episode

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at [email protected]. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.

Links:

• AwardWallet
• The Travel Secret
• The Points Guy
• One Mile At A Time
• Auto Slash

Alexi Vereschaga is the co-founder and leads the development efforts of AwardWallet, which he launched in 2004. AwardWallet provides a free service that helps you manage your reward balances and travel itinerariesFrom its inception, Alexi has been AwardWallet’s product visionary. He is focused on continual improvement of AwardWallet to meet the needs of its 651,000+ global members and to respond to the evolving rewards program landscape, which is reflected in AwardWallet’s recognized leadership in rewards management.

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run

Nuggets:

• Stalwart staffing companies are doing ~$25 billion in revenue annually
• VCs are looking for great teams moving really fast toward the critical assumptions of their business
• Great two-person teams are often formed from one person with industry experience and the other with technical know-how
• If you’re a nontechnical founder, one of the hardest parts of starting a company is finding a phenomenal technical cofounder and get them to leave their terrific job to come work on your idea
• Build a product that gives users a much better experience than 

Action Steps:

1. Estimate Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) for both sides of the marketplace
2. Brainstorm/research what customers will want, what their engagement would look like, and estimated churn

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at [email protected]. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.

Links:

• 1984 Ventures
• Aaron Michel on LinkedIn
• PathSource
• Indie Hackers interview re Key Values
• Test Interviews 
• TrustedHealth
• Toolbox

Aaron Michel is a partner at 1984 Ventures, a seed stage venture capital firm in San Francisco. He was selected earlier this year as one of venture capital's 40 under 40 by Venture Capital Journal. He's a Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School alum and sold his last company, PathSource, in 2017.

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run

Nuggets:

• Successful businesses are started by people just like you; they go home and watch Netflix with their significant other, etc...

Action Steps:

1. Compile list of ISVs from Salesforce App Exchange
2. Contact ISVs to validate this idea (listen to David Cristello or David Hauser episode if you need more help with this step)
3. Raise Angel money and/or apply to Startup Accelerators
4. Hire ~4 software engineers
5. Build MVP

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at [email protected]. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.

Links:

• Salesforce
• Insightly
• Zoho
• Mulesoft
• Kloudless
• Cloud Elements
• Quickbooks
• Badger Maps

Steve Benson is the founder and CEO of Badger Maps. After receiving his MBA from Stanford, Steve was Google Enterprise's Top Sales Executive in 2009. In 2012, Steve founded Badger Maps, a software company that helps Field Sales People optimize their routes and schedules to save time and be on time so they can sell more. Steve is also the host of the Outside Sales Talk podcast where he interviews industry experts on their top sales tips. 

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run