Tropical MBA: Entrepreneurship & Founder Lifestyle

After two weeks in Puerto Galera with the October TMBA session, Dan and Ian celebrated Dan’s birthday in style at the classic Filippino restaurant TGIFriday’s and then curled up under a staircase in the Mall of Asia to bring this episode to you. Having done three sessions with various TMBA participants and being asked weekly similar questions from folks starting their own businesses, they’ve come...

Coming to you live from Badladz Resort in the Philippines, complete with patented LBP cafe noise and janky wi-fi upload speeds. This week Dan jumped on the phone with the man, the myth, the Aussie legend in content marketing and helping customers online, James Schramko of Super Fast Business and one of Dan’s new favorite podcasts Freedom Ocean. A super-sized episode that caused Dan to spend the pa...

Do you know where you were and what you were doing five years ago this week? Five years ago (October 2nd, 2007 to be exact) Dan and Ian were sitting at brunch when Dan got a notification on his original iPhone that they had gotten paid for their first product sale. Sure, there were some problems. Like the fact that they didn’t actually have a manufactured product to ship out at the time of the sal...

This week Dan is the one hard at work and Ian is asleep on the job. Stranger things have happened…ever seen a tabloid alien story? Dan took the opportunity to chat up Prateek Dayal, founder of startups like Muziboo and recently SupportBee. Dan and Ian met Prateek as they traveled across Vietnam this summer meeting up with folks from the Dynamite Circle and LBP listeners. Having started companies f...

Dan and Ian are both in the States and working on their next big thing – the Dynamite Circle Conference in Bangkok in October. Planning conferences is a lot of work that you never even thought of until the hotel was asking what kind of breakfast menus you would prefer during your third break on the second day. Who has a breakfast menu during their third break?! They decided to call in a pro and ch...

Dan and Ian got so many great questions from last week’s carefully orchestrated listener request that they decided to keep a few for future episodes that needed more than a quick answer. In this episode they tackle this frustrating issue that plagues many an information product or intangible service provider Head down and pencils up – this episode is full of pricing insights and strategies you nee...

Dan and Ian spent the past week working diligently to poll the LBP audience and find the deepest darkest unasked listener questions. Or they sent a Tweet before the show started. We leave it up to you to decide what really happened. Either way, they ended up with some great questions and requests for advice from the LBP community, many of which were from listeners they’d never heard from before. W...

Dan and Ian spent a fair amount of time (ok…they spent a session) learning Crossfit from Joe Bauer in the Philippines during the recent Tropical MBA session. After they managed to drag themselves back to the microphone, they realized there was some techniques to work out on the LBP. The thing with starting a biznass is that it isn’t all rainbows and puppies. There’s some heavy lifting that you hav...

It’s a special podcast here at the LBP. Dan and Ian are joined for a bonus-length episode as they host the Summer Marketing Mashup guys (Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income, Jason Van Orden & Jeremy Frandsen from Internet Business Mastery, and Tim Conley from Foolish Adventure) to talk shop on niche selection. So sit back, grab your beverage of choice and a notebook (or Evernote), and check ou...

Dan and Ian and the folks in the August TMBA session have made it through 40 days and nights of rain and wind in Puerto Galera. Ok, it’s more like 7 days, but 40 sounds way more intense. With all these businesses working on taking their businesses to the next level, marketing is a key piece of the conversation. Yet there’s so many options when you are setting up your marketing strategy. Some are q...

How does a lazy blogger increase their email subscription rate by 257% and in the process get an automatic sales machine working for them and generating sales in their sleep? Well– you could hire John McIntyre— but for those of you who have teams or willing to do it yourself, we invited John on the show to get the details on how he did it. It’s also time for us to offer another Tropical MBA intern...

Happy Friday everyone! Today Ian and I are joining you from Puerto Galera, Philippines. We found a few minutes away from the events here at the Tropical MBA to discuss a topic that’s been on our minds lately: How do we frame up this new style of multi-national small business entrepreneurship, and what are some related business opportunities? A lot of people have been talking about this trend latel...

It’s been a really rough week for Dan and Ian. This is mostly due to the fact that they arrived in the Philippines to meet with 14 bright eyed participants of our August TMBA Session and it was a bit of a challenge. Not because of the participants. Instead they encountered a slight typhoon wreaking havoc on Manila, Batangas City & Pier, Mindoro, Puerto Galera, and Badladz Resort. In other word...

Happy Friday afternoon! We are back with our weekend podcast with the hopes of giving you a little fuel for your projects over the next few days. Today I discuss with the CEOh-yeah and issue we’ve brought up a few times before. One of the biggest questions we get asked is: should I start a personal blog for networking purposes? I don’t think these are benign decisions and I take this question very...

We know that Dan and Ian are consumate consumers of information and business theory. So it was a bit of a somber moment earlier this week when we learned that Dr. Stephen Covey, the author of 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People, had passed away. Covey’s book “has been a top-seller for the simple reason that it ignores trends and pop psychology for proven principles of fairness, integrity, honesty,...

Hey there weekend warriors! This week’s happy hour drink sponsor is Orangina, a beverage with a special place in the heart of @AnythingIan. Today we are going to talk about high level content strategy. First, it’s worth taking a look at Karol’s notes from reading Turning Pro. Many of you know I’m a huge War of Art fan, and I just got started with Turning Pro today based on Karol’s suggestion. “The...

Dan is all about the public peer pressure on Ian. Getting him to sign up for email lists. Getting him to go to NYC with him in September. Getting him to divulge his espionage trade secrets in a future episode. What else is this podcast gonna get Ian into?! This week the guys are slowly making their way to meeting up with each other in Saigon for a couple weeks before the next Tropical MBA session...

Hey there weekend warriors! I’m happy to announce that Tropical Talk Radio (iTunes link) will now be a weekly show for entrepreneurs seeking some weekend inspiration. That means I’ll try to get you new episodes by happy hour on Friday evening. This week I’m joining you from from Vietnam’s capital city of Hanoi. Tiger beer (via nearby Singapore) is my unofficial sponsor. If a brand manager is readi...

Dan and Ian have been busy hopscotching across SE Asia the past couple weeks (Bali, Philippines, China, Vietnam) and have plans to continue the journey later in July with a motorbike excursion in Cambodia. All this travel got the guys thinking about the places they go and the things they love/hate about each place. More importantly, how a location independent entrepreneur can live and work from th...

Dan and Ian are jet-setting around Asia for the next month between Tropical MBA sessions, currently doing some money biznass in Hong Kong. After the first Tropical MBA was so much fun and so successful, not only did they decide to host yet another session in October 2012, but the effectiveness of the program caused them to stop and re-evaluate their online priorities. All good businesses grow and...

This week Dan and Ian were reminded of a great project that you have all helped us to grow in the Lifestyle Business Podcast community. To date you guys have raised over $5000 on Kiva micro-funding businesses and entrepreneurs in developing countries. That’s pretty baller. Check out our Kiva page to pay it forward cause that’s what entrepreneurs do. What else do entrepreneurs do? Well, what an ent...

Want to be the first to hear the details of our October Tropical MBA? You can check out the information here, and we’ll email you the final details on Friday. I managed to sneak away from the start-ups here at the first Tropical MBA in Puerto Galera Philippines for a few minutes in order to share some of the lessons we’ve been learning together. Today we ask the question: what mindsets are critica...

We’re a few days in to the first Tropical MBA Startup Session here in Puerto Galera and the entire team is buzzing with excitement and motivation working with these guys. Basically Dan and Ian just wander around with huge grins on their faces helping the guys with their startups. If you walked in to the think tank on Monday night of 11 entrepreneurs with their noses buried in laptops hustlin’ thei...

Dan and Ian are together again at the infamous Badladz Resort in Puerto Galera, Philippines. This week they are joined by special guest Tim Conley from Foolish Adventure who will be working with the first group of folks here for the TMBA Start-up Summer project. Stay tuned in the next couple weeks for updates about these guys, their projects, and our Start-up Summer. This week they got a question...

It is a sad day in the LBP world. After a year of pool parties, long nights of discussion and brainstorming on the deck, and countless DCers and LBP listeners visiting and crashing on our couches, the time has come to say good-bye to our Bali House (aka TMBA HQ). It’s been good times on the good old Jl Drupadi in Seminyak. We’re not giving up the compound dream, though. In fact, it’s getting bigge...