This is a guest post from Charlie Gilkey of Productive Flourishing. On the off chance that both my husband Jamie and Charlie’s wife Angela die in a tragic knitting accidents, Charlie and I will be running away to Spain. In the interim, we will just say nice things about each other on our blogs.

Somewhere along the line, someone convinced a lot of people that the way to learn about business was to go to school to learn about it. So when people start thinking about starting their business or start looking to solve problems in their existing business, the solution seems obvious: go to school.

Wrong. The best way to learn about business is to start your own business and learn on the go. Formal business education most often teaches you how to perform some role in an already existing business, not how to effectively be the CEO, COO, and CFO of your own ittybiz. Read More

Yesterday we talked about assumptions in marketing and why they turn you into a lonely, impoverished failure. Today we’re going to talk about some ways to fix those assumptions.

In order to avoid wandering around freelancerville (or homebizville — we’re not discriminating here) not knowing what the fuck you’re doing, you need to know who you’re selling to and what they dig. You need to know your target demographic. How do you find out?

Market research.

The problem with traditional market research, though, is that it’s really, really, really expensive. Like, really expensive.

If you hire a classic marketing firm — which you can’t, because it’ll cost you five figures, but hear me out here — they will do $20,000 worth of surveys and trend analysis and competition reconnaissance to tell you what your people like, want, value, can afford and might buy. (If you don’t know who your people are, they’ll happily charge you another twenty grand to find that out, too.)

And this is if you and your buddy want to sell some software from your basement. If you and your buddy happen to own Coca Cola, you’re going to have to add another couple zeros and call it even at two mil. Read More

Around the time that I launched Online Business School, I was in the market for a new laptop. I had recently made a lot of money in a very short time and it was time to invest in a decent work computer.

Conveniently, around this time, the lovely people at Apple released the MacBook Air. Because the MacBook Air is the most beautiful computer in the history of the known universe, it was at the top of my shortlist. Frankly, it WAS my shortlist. The guy at the genius bar would’ve had to take the candy out of my young son’s mouth while SIMULTANEOUSLY PUNCHING ME IN THE EYE before I gave any serious thought to crossing the floor and buying something else.

The funny thing is, though, when I was thinking of buying one, everybody and their mother was trying to convince me not to. My husband, my Twitter peeps, techie friends, the whole shebanga.

They said that it didn’t have the right drives or something. That I’d need to buy peripherals. That it wouldn’t fit in the little envelope any more if I had to buy a bunch of shit to go with it.

So now I don’t have a MacBook Air, but I don’t have a different new computer either. I wanted the MacBook Air and nothing else would feel the same. Apple didn’t get my money, but neither did the other guy.

Why? Assumptions. Read More

Let’s define marketing, shall we? We talk about it a lot here, this being a marketing blog and all, so maybe it’s time for a common terminology.

The Definition of Marketing

Marketing is the shit you do that makes people buy your shit.

Please note that our above definition does not refer to split testing or copywriting or ad campaigns or going viral or word of mouth or any other specific shit.

It is simply the shit you do that makes people buy your shit.

It’s time for a story, don’t you think? Read More

First, I’ll tell you a story. Then I’ll tell you why you care.

When we launched Online Business School, some things went wrong. There was a plan, and some things decided that they didn’t like that plan. The details of this would bore you senseless so I won’t get into them, but we can basically sum it up by saying we had distribution problems.

We had a good product but had problems delivering it the way we wanted and distributing it the way we wanted.

The Short, Less Boring Version

Suprise! File is massive. Zipping it doesn’t help. Decided to host it for download on own server. Didn’t realize how long it would take to upload. Lots of people waiting. Lots of affiliates telling lots more people that something is coming.

Finally got it uploaded. Didn’t realize how many people had slow internet connections. Cue numerous emails saying downloading will take 40 hours. Realize one of the bonuses didn’t make it into the zipped file. Couldn’t get it to people in timely manner.

Fulfillment provider’s customer service takes too long to get back. Nanny quits. No childcare. Moving to England.

(While we’re on the topic, for people who have been wondering, the Rolodex is up on the download page and we’re reshooting the video with the audio gap as soon as we have our recording equipment back from Canada. Sorry dudes, and thank you for your patience.)

That pretty much sums up the interesting stuff, anyway. Nothing earth shattering, and nothing an experienced business owner would consider to be out of the ordinary stuff on launch day. But there’s a chance you are not an experienced business owner and you could benefit from me making a handy little list of advice that stems from this experience. Read More