How to Get Startup Ideas: The Meat Grinder Approach

There are a million books and blog posts on how to get startup and business ideas. Many people think the biggest road block to successful entrepreneurial life is having that one great idea. Once you get even a modicum of success, lots of people will start asking you about how you got an idea like that, and for any tips and tricks on how to “come up” with a similar idea.

The concept is extremely tantalizing and sounds so imminently teachable that it’s a favorite tool of lifestyle business spammers everywhere. 7 Step Guide to Profitable Business Ideas. Join My Webinar on Finding Your Dream Business Plan.

But this is entirely the wrong way to think about it.

First of all you should be coming up with at least five possible business ideas every day. This part should be basically effortless. People trying to sell this part are scamming you.

If you are going to be a successful entrepreneur at all you should innately be looking around you at your life and the lives of others, thinking what are their problems. What are their desires. What do they spend money on. Which of those things are broken or could be done massively better or cheaper or faster. You should be constantly thinking this way. It should annoy people who spend a lot of time around you.

If you’re not doing that, you’re probably not going to be an entrepreneur… sorry. It’s okay. There are lots of other great life paths but this one isn’t for you.

There is one common exception to the rule. You might be hung up on one idea, and that stops the process of thinking of new ideas. It’s cool, you just need to build yourself a better meat grinder.

The secret to coming up with a successful business idea is putting hundreds of ideas through the meat grinder.

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Build Your Own Personal Robot Army: Part 1

I never set out to build a robot army. But today, there are at least a dozen little robots who do my bidding on a daily basis. Between managing my personal life and running my Micro-SaaS Business (Storemapper), my robot army does drudgery while I sleep and makes my life a little easier and more productive. Here’s how you can build one yourself. In Part 1 I’m just going to look at the robots that required no coding to set up, later I’ll do a post about all the little custom scripts I’ve got running on Heroku Scheduler.

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Mindfulness without the Woo Woo

How to survive Ubud, Bali as a skeptical empiricist.

I recently spent 6 weeks in Bali, most of them living and working in Ubud. Ubud is in the middle of Bali. There’s no beach. En route towards Bali’s highest mountains, the elevation is higher. The air is a bit cooler. Everything is lush rice terraces and

It has also been made famous by the book Eat, Pray Love (EPL). I’ve been there three times but only ever seen it post-EPL. Thousands of spiritual tourists head there every year to immerse themselves in breathwork, yoga, meditation, reiki healing and chakra balancing. You can get vegan food and coconut water on every corner and a coffee colonic any time of the day.

I haven’t spent a lot of time defining my epistemological views, but words like skeptic and empiricist would likely be included. No one would ever refer to me as spiritual. And yet, among all that “woo woo” hippie stuff I still manage to thoroughly enjoy Ubud. But I can see how someone, with views similar to mine might hate the place and the people in the place and groan-worthy stuff they sometimes talk about.

So I thought I would write a little empirical survival guide to enjoying yourself in a place like Ubud or generally any place filled with lots of spiritual stuff that you think is a bunch of hokum.

Just repeat the following mantras to yourself.

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Human-powered Software Services

Your bookkeeper, now with superpowers

Your bookkeeper, now with superpowers. Bench.co

I’m very interested in human-powered software services. I recently signed up for bookkeeping services from Bench which replaced my frustrating experiences with purportedly easy to use bookkeeping apps like Quickbooks and LessAccounting. Which is not to say that those options are bad software options, but Bench takes a completely different approach that I like much better.

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Debt Free

I turned 30 last week and as a birthday present to myself I paid off the last chunk of the nearly $60,000 in debt I accumulated trying to build a software startup. I thought I would write a little about what that’s like and whether I’d do it again.

In the Summer of 2011 — four and a half years ago… dang — I quit my job.

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