When I was eleven years old, I spent a lot of time playing Sim City 2000 and its sister games, such as SimTower, SimCopter and SimEarth. I even made a website called “SimWeb” hosted on GeoCities that had cheat codes, saved games and demo downloads for my favorite games. One day, I had the idea …
During the last few years, I’ve built up a wide network of loose business connections in Sioux Falls and around the world by attending events, buying people lunch, simply being engaged in business and being an active member in the community. Because I’m a person that’s more “out there” than most, there’s not a week …
I really only do a handful of things outside of building my business and spending time with my family. I don’t have a lot of crazy hobbies or extra-curricular activities. Of the few hobbies that I do have, I put a lot of energy and effort into them. One of those hobbies is reading. I …
When most people release a book with a traditional publisher, they will make a series of appearances at local bookstores as part of their marketing strategy–commonly known as a book tour. Since my book was being published exclusively through Amazon, it only made sense to do a virtual book tour. Instead of reaching potential readers in persona few hundred people …
When people ask about the various businesses that I run, one of the most common follow-up questions that I receive is “What’s next for you? What’s the next business that you’re going to start?” As someone that runs a few different profitable online businesses, it would be natural to think that I have a list …
If you have never built a successful business, you might think the dream of building a profitable company is something that you won’t ever be able to achieve. If you’ve tried to start a business that didn’t work out, you might think you just don’t have what it takes to build a profitable business. You …
When I launch a new product for any of my company’s brands, I’ll develop a product offering, identify the pricing, create a landing page and write a series of marketing emails to promote the product. The end goal of product launches is to convert email subscribers into customers and to create revenue. When it came …
Ten years ago, you might have thought Blockbuster Entertainment was an unstoppable entertainment giant. The company had a near monopoly in the video and video game rental markets. At its peak in 2004, the company had 9,000 stores and 60,000 employees. Just six years later, the company went bankrupt. Blockbuster simply couldn’t compete with its …
I had the opportunity to chat with an entrepreneur who is building a mass-market physical product a few weeks back. We’ll call him Fred for the sake of this discussion. Fred has been working on his project for over a year and has put the vast majority of his business effort into perfecting his product …
A while back, my wife Karine received an email from one of her former co-workers at Terry Redlin Elementary. The co-worker’s husband, Todd Kolb, was building an Internet business and wondered if I would be willing to meet with him to see if I had any suggestions to help grow his company. At first I …