Streamlined Solopreneur: Build Systems so Your Business Supports Your Life

My newsletter has gone through a lot of changes over the years, but something that's been steadfast is promoting the latest episode of this podcast at the beginning of the week. And that made perfect sense when both the newsletter and this podcast talked about largely the same thing. But now this show talks about running a solo business generally, while the newsletter is supposed to focus on podca...

I remember the first time I got an affiliate payout. I didn’t even know it was coming. The money just showed up in my account.  “What is this from?” Then an email followed. A hosting company I had written a blog post about paid my affiliate commission for the last 2 months.  Since then, I’ve been stumbling through, clumsily trying to make affiliate income an appreciable part of my income – but it’...

A common thread on the show this year has been the push and pull of finding the right tools while also balancing our time and money as solopreneurs.  A while back I invited my friend and fellow podcaster Sarah St John onto the show. She’s the host of the Frugalpreneur podcast, and at first, I thought we’d share podcasting war stories.  But then everything went wrong. We were having both hardware a...

I remember the first time after my wife and I started dating that a mutual friend of ours became pregnant. I was the first one to find out and got to relay the message to her. "Amy's pregnant," I said. My wife then asked a series of questions: "When is she due? What is she having? How is she feeling?" I had the same answer to every question: "I don't know." All I knew was that Amy was pregnant. My...

Just this morning I watched an incredibly interesting video that sent me down a rabbit hole. A 19-year-old kid was arm wrestling against a massive bodybuilder – and won, pretty easily. Thinking this could be rigged or fake, I looked at other matches this fellow – Maxim appears to be his name – competed in. And he won…a lot.  See, while he is very strong (just not as big as the other guys), Maxim h...

Perhaps the most important lesson I learned over and over again running a business is that it’s never about the tool – it’s about the solution to a particular problem.  So while I recruited Mike Schmitz to talk about Obsidian, what we actually talked about was much, much deeper. Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is much more about defining your approach, and intentionality and making time for th...

Tell me if this sounds familiar: you know you need to publish a blog post, video, or newsletter, but you have no idea what you’re going to talk about. And this isn’t the first time it’s happened.  You definitely have ideas, but you can’t think of anything at the moment. That’s why you need a content calendar – and why I’ve brought on Kaitlyn Merola to tell us all about them.  We're going DEEP on h...

If you have kids and you’re a solopreneur, you know how tough summer care could be — especially if you have small children. Today, I'm diving into why my wife and I decided to skip summer camp for our kids and how this big decision is changing how I’m structuring my business for the summer. Discussion Topics: Financial and Family Considerations : The high cost of summer camp motivated my wife and...

One day in March I started getting regular inbound requests from my coaching form – I had no idea why. When I looked into it, it turns out that I was ranking at #2 on Google for “Podcast Coach.”  Not to sound like a broken record…but I had no idea why. I didn’t feel like I was doing anything special. I didn’t do keyword research. I didn’t write content in a certain way.  So I wanted to learn more....

Context is everything. It’s easy to think that if you have a salesperson who’s actively frustrating potential clients to the point where they never consider hiring you, you’d fire that salesperson. But what if your website is doing it? Would you fire your website?  You should. That’s why I’m SO excited to have Monica Pitts on the show today. She’s going to tell us how we can save HOURS per month b...

I know this is going to sound like an Italian stereotype, but my mother makes the best chicken cutlets. They are thin cuts of chicken, perfectly breaded and seasoned, and taste amazing hot and cold.  I’d watch her in hopes of learning how to make them as well (or at least close to it). She’d tell me things like, “You just know how much breading to use,” and “cook them until they look right.”   Wha...

There's an old adage in construction that you should measure twice and cut once. The idea being that cutting is a permanent action. If you cut a piece of wood, you can't put it back together. So you should measure where you're cutting, make sure you're measuring it right, and double-check your work before you take that permanent action. Now on the Internet, things aren't necessarily as permanent....

I’m currently reading Stories that Stick by Kindra Hall. In it, she mentions that “story” has become such a common term that people use it for everything, even if it’s not a story.  I feel the same thing has been done to the term “repurposing.” See, when you repurpose something in the real world, you take it, you make changes to it, and you give it new life. You don’t just lop a piece off of it an...

After 8 years, I'm changing the name of this podcast from How I Built It to Streamlined Solopreneur. Here's why.  You can learn more at https://streamlined.fm 

The first documented parachute jump happened in the late 1700s, when André-Jacques Garnerin just from balloons at “only” 2000 feet. He no doubt prepared for this moment, testing his parachute and doing everything he could to mitigate risk. Today, skydiving is a sport and a recreational activity, with a lot of safety measures and technology to further mitigate risk.  Why am I telling you this? Beca...

Today we have a good old fashioned feed drop from my friends at The Podcast Host, and their show, Podcraft. What really makes someone a successful podcaster? Is it a certain number of episodes, downloads, or reviews? Is it whether content creation has become their full-time job? Or could it be because they’ve been recognised with a prestigious award? That's what they'll discuss on this episode, an...

I love shuffling poker chips. In fact, I love playing poker…but there’s a fallacy in gambling that can get you into a lot of trouble. It’s the fallacy of sunk cost. Basically, you think you should continue what is ultimately a losing battle because you’ve already invested some amount of money in the pot. The same thing can be applied to lots of stuff. Have you ever finished a book or a movie you d...

I remember touring a Murano Glass factory on my honeymoon to Italy. Basically as soon as we stepped foot into the place, a man giving us the tour had us pegged . So when it came time to sell us something, he didn’t just ask us if we wanted to buy some glass art.  He painted us a picture of a unique conversation piece that we can put in our home, to help us remember this time at the beginning of ou...

My grandfather came to the United States from Italy in 1949 and worked in New York City for much of his life — primarily in construction. For as long as I can remember, he had this big, metal toolbox. And when he passed away, he gave it to me, and I still have and use it to this day. Pop had that toolbox for decades. When he found something that worked for him, he held on to it and took care of it...

I abhor hustle culture. Telling someone to work a full-time job, then go home and work more all for some goal that keeps changing is, in my opinion, how to lead an empty life. I’m worried that, even in 2024, we continue to fetishize making money and hustling. So I decided to take it to Khe Hy.  Khe, if you don’t know, worked hard – as he puts it, he hustled for 10 years of his life. He worked on W...

What do you want your life to look like? Last week I talked about how not being intentional is kind of like driving a car without the GPS. But goal setting without knowing what you want – that’s a bit like driving a car without having a destination in mind.  Well, today, Tanya Alvarez is going to help us figure out the destination – you can think of her as your own GPS. And much like that Google M...

Not being intentional in your business is a bit like getting in your car and driving without the GPS. Sure…you generally know where you’re going. But what if a road is closed? What if there’s avoidable traffic? A GPS can help you navigate around those things. When you’re intentional about your business, you go from wandering aimlessly, taking any work that makes ends meet, to setting and achieving...

Do you really need social media to build a following? To build expertise? To be successful? It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. I think lots of creators are too. The rote advice that you see from the ultra successful people just doesn’t work for most of us. And it doesn’t have to. What if I told you there was a better way.  As it turns out, today’s guest, my friend and Amazon best selli...

During the pandemic, we were told one thing seemingly over and over again: You need to start a membership. You need a community. That’s the only way you can scale your business. And to be honest, I fed into it. I believed that a membership was the key to stop trading for hours for dollars.  But the truth is I was trading more hours for fewer dollars. See, what most solopreneurs don’t realize (what...

Choosing the right platform can feel like an impossible task sometimes. There are so many options, from services to creating your own website and owning everything – how do you choose? Well, Nathalie Lussier and I have both been around the block. She owns a popular WordPress-based LMS called AccessAlly, and I’ve tried dozens of platforms for memberships, including ones I’ve built myself.  So it wa...