Craig and Ken are back at it giving updates on their businesses, lives, and the intersection of those two.

MastermindJam2 is getting closer to launch, and Ken is excited about the prospects of a much better mastermind platform and the multiple monetization opportunities it presents.  It's been a long road but Ken sees the light at the end of the tunnel where sharing his new version of MMJ with his audience and allow business owners to further their businesses.

PodcastMotor continues to thrive and is pretty much on autopilot with Craig's focus shifting much more to Seriously Simple Podcasting.  As SaaS goes Seriously Simple Hosting has gotten off to a good start, and now Craig is managing growing a team and managing the reinvestment of time and money resources.

Welcome back! Sorry about the extra-long hiatus (blame Ken).

It's amazing how hard it is to publish a podcast episode that highlights missed goals.

Anyway...

This week Ken and Craig discuss priorities for 2017.

Topics include:

Ken is clumsy with hot coffee

Craig's buttery smooth voice courtesy of new headset mic.

Podcastmotor acquired WP plugin: Seriously Simple Podcasting

Craig likes to ski, Ken not so much.

Progress on MastermindJam 2.0, and balancing software completion with marketing tasks

Resources to improve at Email Marketing

Invisible Selling Machine by Ryan Deiss of Digital Marketer fame

Josh Earl

Bryan Harris, of Video Fruit

Clickfunnels.com

Drip Workflows

Funnel Engine: Done For You Sales Funnel Creation by Richard Patey

MetricDrivenMarketer Funnel ROI Calculator

Thrive University inside ThriveThemes

Moving from Services to a Product-First business model

Time Scarcity, vs. Paralyzed and Overwhelmed

 

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If you enjoyed the show: please, right now, head over to iTunes and leave us a 5-star review.

Leave your comments on our site at this episode’s show notes, or send 140 characters of love our way on twitter.

This week is a tribute to Alan Thicke, writer of The Facts of Life theme song, among many others.

Today Ken and I are catching up on our businesses, and talking about some next steps for both of us.

Craig has his first professional coaching call set up, as he's looking to further refine the operations, independence, and profitability of PodcastMotor.  Looking into 2017 this will be a major focus for him in building out a more diversified, not as dependent on any one person or thing, business that can sustain for the long term.

Ken is just weeks away from launching the newest version of MastermindJam, and along with it will come much enhanced user onboarding, meeting scheduling, and hopefully retention.

Ken is also looking to build out a small mastermind style trip (similar to the Big Snow Tiny Conf events), but on a sailboat.  If you're interested in meeting other entrepreneurs, talking shop, and working out your businesses in a beautiful setting check out bigsailtinyconf.com

It all comes down to eyeballs sometimes.  Both Ken and I are finding ourselves in a situation where more traffic (and maybe a lot more traffic) will make business really perform better.  Going through the process of testing, evaluating, and implementing some of these traffic generation techniques will be exciting to follow along with in the coming months.

MastermindJam is going through a rehaul in the matching algorithm, onboarding, and mastermind automation that it provides.  With this Ken will need to drive a lot more traffic to the site to start getting the engine really purring.

Craig has started a new project, a Remote Jobs board that allows businesses with distributed workforces to hire remote designers, developers, marketers, and support team members, anywhere in the world. WorkRemotely.io is going to be a really fun project, but one that will need to grow it's traffic by 10-20x.  No small feat indeed, but Craig is excited about learning some traffic generation techniques that he's not had to utilize with PodcastMotor.

As a business grows and matures it experiences the eventuality of getting some of that "been around for a while" organic juice. Both Ken and I have seen this lately with MastermindJam and PodcastMotor.  More organic search, site traffic, and 'cold' customers coming to our site in the past couple of months, and the only thing to explain it is the slow grind of more content, more chatter in the community, and more reputation for Google to look at.

Both Ken and I have been working a lot lately about how to build PodcastMotor and MastermindJam in a way that compliments all of the work we've already done.  It's tempting to look at the shiny object out there that's a totally new field, but it's much more difficult to make an impact in a new field, as opposed to just improving on your current app or market.

Resources Mentioned

Business Systems Explored

LevelsIO on Twitter

Entrepreneur on Fire Blog

This week Ken and I are talking about a new project that I'm developing.  After the discussion last week about being a newbie programmer in training I've settled on an initial product to develop.

The app is going to be called Monsoon, and you can find it at monsoonapp.com.  While I'm sure the final product will be much different than this initial idea the space it's going to be in is marketing analytics.  Initially this will be a tool to help you plan and prioritize your marketing efforts.

Inspired by a blog post by Josh Pigford of Baremetrics and the Traction book by Gabriel Weinberg this is something that I know is top of mind for a lot of folks.

Ken's been busy on some new revisions to MasterMindJam, and also starting some customer discovery in the charter sailboat niche. This is a big industry and lots of different approaches he can take to finding a problem to solve. Customer discovery is always a fun, but challenging process, so it'll be interesting to see where this leads.

p.s. A virtual High Five for anyone who can tell me where this picture was taken.  Tweet at us @weekendspodcast

This week Ken and I do a bit of thinking about what we're looking at with our businesses now that we both find ourselves with a little time on our hands.

One of the tools that Ken has been using is Poindexter to map out what a business model could look like down the road.  Pretty interesting tool to check out.

Hope you enjoyed the show this week.  As always we'd love a review in iTunes if you're not too apathetic!

Just as quickly as some things start, they can also end.  The show today is all about a few of updates from us, a few new directions we're taking in our businesses, and lessons we've learned along the way.

Nugget saw some fantastic growth in it's initial launch, and was poised to grow quickly as a platform where entrepreneurs can come to find business problems to solve, but also to congregate to talk through what their business problems are, and hopefully how to solve them. After the launch Ken and his cofounder Justin found a few growing pains along the way as the business began to evolve.  A few important lessons came out of this:

Alignment of business/personal focus with your cofounder

Ensuring the business model is one you want to pursue long term

Beginning with the end in mind across all aspects of your business

Ken has chosen to step away from Nugget and let Justin run with things from here, and the lessons he learned were valuable and in the grand scheme of things rather painless.

He's seeing MastermindJam continue to grow, and is looking at a few new ways to approach the business, and find ways to monetize it outside of the matchmaking service.

Craig is now settled(ish) in France and is able to finally start concentrating on work again.  The business has done well over the course of their first 2 weeks in the new house, which is a testament to the systems and processes that he put in place several months ago.  While it doesn't pass the litmus test of taking 2 solid weeks away from the business, overall things are running pretty smoothly.

PodcastMotor continues to grow and every month Craig is fine tuning the way the business runs and the end product that customers are getting as a result.

We don't talk too much about reviews on the show, but honestly we'd love to hear what you think.  If you're enjoying the show please head over to the ole iTunes and leave us a review.  Would love to hear your thoughts on what we're doing here.

Welcome back!

This week Ken gives the latest updates on Nugget, the community that he's been working on with Justin Vincent.

 

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If you enjoyed the show: please, right now, head over to iTunes and leave us a 5-star review.

Leave your comments on our site at this episode’s show notes, or send 140 characters of love our way on twitter.

Welcome back! Since you last heard from us, Craig and his family have found themselves in Aix-en-Provence, France, and are absolutely loving it there.

Show topics:

Ken and Craig debate Ken's newest side project, Nugget, that he's been working on with co-founder Justin Vincent.

The importance of choosing the right place to settle down with your family, and what impacts those decisions.

 

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If you enjoyed the show: please, right now, head over to iTunes and leave us a 5-star review.

Leave your comments on our site at this episode’s show notes, or send 140 characters of love our way on twitter.