The War on Mediocre Business

Whatever happened to Napster? At its peak it had 80 million users and was the single biggest thing on the internet. Then the music industry sued it out of existence and learned exactly the wrong lesson. In this episode of Whatever Happened To, I break down how a 19-year-old named Shawn Fanning built the fastest-growing service the internet had ever seen, why Napster was really the loudest customer...

I read a book. I had what I call an entrepreneurial seizure. And then I spent nine months forcing a broken sales strategy on my team and calling it conviction. Here's the real story, and the leadership lesson I didn't expect to learn from it. In this episode of From the Trenches, Scott Monday walks through one of his most expensive leadership mistakes: a new sales model he built from scratch, roll...

Toys R Us once sold one in five toys in the United States. Then it was completely gone. Here's what actually killed them, and why the same mistake is happening in businesses right now. In this episode of Whatever Happened To, Scott Monday unpacks the rise and fall of the world's largest toy retailer. From Charles Lazarus's category-killer strategy in 1957 to the leveraged buyout that buried Toys R...

In January 2023, I launched my third business with a color-coded, detailed proforma. By the end of 2024, I had lost nearly half a million dollars. This is the TBS story — and the four lessons I learned the hard way. I'm Scott Monday. I run two businesses in California's Central Valley. Trinity Builder Solutions (TBS) was my attempt to move into the commercial stone market after years of running ki...

MySpace had 100 million users and more web traffic than Google. Then they made one decision that started a five-year collapse — and a decade later, ChatGPT might be making the same mistake. In this episode of Whatever Happened To, I break down how MySpace went from the most visited site on the internet to a $35 million fire sale — in five years. The short answer: they stopped doing what made them...