Winning business strategies often combine proven business models with unproven or trending customer acquisition models.

Here’s a decent business maxim: stop taking on aspects of projects in which you provide no unique value. And sitting here in this steamy room, I feel secure that I am providing no unique value.

As many of you know, I’m a podcast fanatic. I was listening to podcasts years before I ever started recording my own shows

There was a nice post about being happy that was everywhere on Facebook last week. One of my favorite bloggers, Rob Walling, did a great job of adapting it for entrepreneurs on his podcast.

Resistance is more than mere procrastination– it’s our deep inner fear of expression often masquerading as productive tasks or “stuff we have to do.”

There’s been a lot of excitement around the interwebs about the latest Only 72 sale. There’s also been a lot of groaning. I saw somebody on Facebook say “these types of launches are so two years ago.”

People often say to others who are making big changes to “be careful.” Sometimes they’ll follow up with something casual like: “you might mess up your career.”

For all the talk of how great info-only business models are, I don’t see a lot of success in-person. I know my sample size is limited, but it got me thinking– maybe making the entrepreneurial leap with an info product is harder than we think.

A few weeks ago Ian and I recorded a podcast where we asked the question– what if we invited a small group of entrepreneurs to a tropical island this summer and help them launch their startups?

Hi! If it’s your first time here, thanks for dropping by. I hope you’ll join the 2000+ readers on our RSS feed, or follow me on Twitter. On this blog I write about starting honest-to-goodness businesses from your laptop.

Although I had a great time in college, I wish I would have been smart enough to skip it. In the end, I feel it unnecessarily disciplined me into believing that I wouldn’t be capable of making any real contributions or decisions for another 4 to 6 years.

This episode of This American Life is fascinating. It’s a story about the fundraising requirements for senators and congresspeople.

For aspiring entrepreneurs, there’s no question that niche selection is the biggest sticking point. It’s odd then that for more established entrepreneurs it evolves into one of the easiest elements of starting a business.

Internally, we’ve been using all sorts of terms in the same ballpark as “passive income”: location independent, leveraged, automated, online, recurring, scalable, residual, info-income, etc.

The design calls for a circular prison built around a guard tower. The prisoner’s cells are arranged in such a way that the guard, positioned in the tower, can see into any of the prisoner’s cells.

Internet marketing is a term often used for the industry that teaches people how to make money online. I was thinking about internet marketing today as I was putting the polish on a private blog network for DCers.

Most blogs are going to fail. The blog you are writing right now is probably going to fail. Lord knows, most of the blogs that I have started have failed.

How does one get a good sense for what is commercial? It’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot this week. Recently, I put out an open call to review blog concepts in the following format:

There are a bunch of reasons why SEO talk is confusing. It’s tough to isolate variables and duplicate conditions on the web. I often find legit experts having to speculate about the cause of ranking changes. Even at the top level there is no shortage of shoulder shrugging.