We’ve received some great email responses prompted by last week’s episode ‘The Europe Question’. So on today’s show Dan and Ian will be reflecting on some of those comments. They’ll also be mulling over a recurring dilemma posed by a listener, one which is very much in their minds as they grow ‘Dynamite Jobs’: “David and Goliath or Dynamite Jobs versus Indeed.com .. At one time you mentioned how just hearing the word Indeed gave you anxiety, maybe excitement … (this) resonated with me. My partner and I are currently building a software product that will likely go head to head with some fairly big names, and they have at least a decade head start on us … The only thing that keeps me going back is that I've spent the past decade in entrepreneurship, always staying in safe little buckets of protected small niches .. Small niches are often easier to start but are easier to hit a ceiling in terms of market size. Having experienced growing our businesses to the upper limits of the markets we're in, we have our eyes on the bigger prize where the bigger players are players that really know what they're doing”.
Recently Peer Richelsen tweeted ‘Ok, serious question: what keeps the average American (that can afford it) from moving to Europe?’. By the next morning he’d received hundreds of different responses. On today’s show Dan and Ian, who have just arrived in Barcelona for the summer, offer their thoughts about ‘The Europe Question’, a topic they think will be increasingly discussed as more mainstream American workers have increased opportunities to live and work remotely outside the United States: “We have a whole new graduating class on our hands … people went to school, a lot of people that used to be teachers, administrators, bureaucrats, waiters, bartenders …They decided that they don't want to go to their in person jobs anymore, they wanted an online job. At the same time, a lot of companies that had knowledge workers realised that they needed to allow those people to work from home during COVID. Those people didn't want to come back to the office so they needed to keep allowing them to work from home. And now all of a sudden, I think these questions aren't so much what does the digital nomad, who's this edge case traveller, want to do, we’ve got this entire graduating class of the mainstream, who are asking themselves the digital nomad question: why don't we live in Europe? It's so nice. They have public transportation. Why haven't we been there yesterday? Why don't we move here this year?”
Last time Dustin Overbeck came on the show he talked about why he chose to live in Transylvania, Romania with his family whilst growing an agency and ‘Town Web’ which helps local governments in the US build and re-design their websites. Today he tells Dan about why he felt it was vital to institute structural changes to the way he worked and hire a General Manager, and about his new software business ‘Hey Gov’: “I realised Dustin is now an arsonist. But he's also a firefighter. He's creating problems that only he can solve … And sometimes you just have to step back and realise that smart people will figure out the solutions. And that's what I did.”
Today Dan talks to one of our favorite writers Sam Dogan, the man behind ‘Financial Samurai’. And Sam has recently written a book called ‘Buy This, Not That’, laying out the ideas and strategies he learnt not only from his decade long career at Goldman Sachs but also investing personally and interacting with the many millions of visitors to his blog. This week’s discussion ranges from why the traditional ‘Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE)’ model, of which Sam was an early pioneer, is now outdated; the reasons you can’t just ‘set and forget’ your financial planning but need to think about opitimizing it for the different decades of your life; and what it’s like to be involved in writing a book for a major publisher: “One of the reasons why I don't want to write another book is because it's so painful. A lot of cooks in the kitchen. They're all on your side, they want to make the book amazing, inclusive and a success. But I'm not used to that, I’m used to waking...
Do you remember when you had to pretend that you had a dental appointment just to be able to attend a job interview? Dan and Ian do. With so many more people working remotely, even within large corporations, those days are gone. And good riddance. But a listener emailed the show asking our thoughts about what they see as a more challenging aspect of the increasing numbers of people, especially Americans paid in dollars, now able to work from anywhere: skyrocketing rents and real estate prices in European cities like Lisbon and Barcelona, often pushing locals out. And an update from Dynamite Jobs where the team has been hard at work on an applicant tracking system (ATS) to try to help with the problem of the huge amount unsuitable applications many business owners receive when they are trying to recruit, and also a new innovation that allows users to gauge the potential number of suitable applicants for a specific role that they can expect to access when using DJ : “Our goal is to kind of demystify the results that you'll get if you post with us. I want you to know, hopefully, what you're gonna get before you post with us, especially if it's for the first time”.
The ‘post-COVID’ location independent summer is beginning. We’re seeing more and more posts in the DC forum that begin: ‘Who’s in Medellin this month?’, ‘Anyone in Poland or the Balkans’. Traveling and navigating new cities, and regions is very much the theme of today’s show, which is a discussion for those thinking of visiting Bangkok, and Thailand in general, later in the year. And, of course, we’re hugely excited for our first DCBKK event in three years, coming in October. With that in mind we’ve asked Kyla Gardner and Jesse Schoberg - both of whom have lived in Bangkok, and other places in Thailand, and attended a fair few DCBKKs - to share their thoughts. We’ll cover: where to stay in Bangkok for a great vibe and delicious food, where to consider going after DCBKK, how to manage your time around events like DCBKK, and much more: “I don't know whether to advise people to just accept that you really just have to go really hard, you’re not going to sleep, you're going to be exhausted but it's going to be worth it. Or advise them to try to take some power naps … it is just so stimulating, so much fun.”
The 4-Hour Workweek was, and continues to be, a life changing inspiration to many seeking more freedom in their lives through the path of entreprenuership. But, prompted by listening to a recent podcast featuring a conversation between its author Tim Ferriss and Cal Newport, Dan and Ian reflect on what they see as ‘the elephant in the room’ in the book, in relation to others seeking to emulate the path it lays it: “Tim is talking to people who already have a lot of enterprising know-how and other resources like industry relationships … But the book’s audience extended well beyond the well heeled and gainfully employed. It also appealed to those of us who didn't have businesses, established cash flows, or other traditional advantages”. And this episode also includes responses to a related question posed by a listener, one that often pops up in the TMBA mailbag: how to have an impactful career as a solopreneur.
Today’s guest, Sherry Walling, is a respected clinical psychologist who specialises in entrepreneur mental health. She’s also the host of Zen Founder, a podcast where she is sometimes joined by her husband Rob. Those who have listened to Zen Founder know that Sherry has been sharing movingly about the upheavals and losses she’s gone through over the last few years - in 2018 she lost her father to cancer followed, six months later, by her brother to suicide - and how it's affected her, and their whole family. On today’s show Sherry talks to Dan about how she tried, in some way, to make sense of what happened by penning a book “Touching Two Worlds: A Guide To Finding Hope In The Aftermath of Loss” “The events of the past few years have been so strange to me that I must force myself to study the story, like something I am learning from the outside in, like something that happened to someone else ”. It’s a moving account of what she discovered, including some great practical suggestions for others finding themselves in a similar place and struggling to cope. In Sherry’s case this included joining the circus (evenings and weekends only).
Unless you’ve been living in a cave recently (and if you have, hit us up because we’d love to hear about that), you’ll be aware that crypto has been on a wild (at the time of writing mostly downward) rollercoaster. As we’ve mentioned before, it is a volatile investment, especially when viewed short term. But today’s show isn’t about that. It’s about how crypto can be - *insert an important ‘health warning’ here: this is not advice, it’s just thoughts and views - a practical way to fund other things, like buying a house, and even be set to be a relatively low ‘management threshold’ investment, as today’s guest did when she had a baby. Cathryn Lavery is well known in the entrepreneurial community as the CEO of Best Self which produces stylish and imaginative planning, goal setting and relationship journals. She talks to Dan about how a painful business break up, in part, lead her to create a practical course for those who want to learn more about investing in crypto, called ‘Zero to DeFi’: “It was such an emotional drain for me. The crypto stuff, just learning about it and getting into it, was something exciting for me … I didn't even talk publicly about crypto. Because there's this vibe of scammy. Like how do you go from Best Self to talking about crypto …And then, at the end, I was like: screw it I'm just gonna start talking about this stuff. Because I think, as entrepreneurs, we get interested in different stuff. And so if I'm excited about working on something, then hopefully other people are excited about it as well”.
On today’s show Dan and Ian are reaching into the mailbag to reflect on some topics that listeners have asked about. These include an update on the incredible response to our upcoming DCBKK, things to consider when thinking about business models, and how to manage your net worth without hurting your brain: “I have been guilty in the past of overcomplicating my financial process with too many credit cards, too many bank accounts, too many clever tax manoeuvres, and I would have been much better off to keep it super, super simple’.