As the dog days of summer are coming to a close, we've decided to address several interesting topics that have come across our desk throughout the month of August. One such topic came in the form of an article by entrepreneur and author James Altucher, who discussed why he thinks ‘NYC is dead forever’.

In past episodes, we've talked about "Founder Fit", or the idea that you should be running the type of business that is best suited to your own personality and lifestyle. But what happens if you're not doing that? It turns out that having a bad fit between you and what you're building can potentially lead to a whole lot of pain.

Rob Walling is no stranger to many of the listeners of this show. Rob is the host of a brilliant podcast called Startups for the Rest of Us, where he has shared stories of entrepreneurial ingenuity and struggle, and many concepts that we have discussed on this show have origins on that podcast.

On today's podcast, we are sharing some personal updates, as well as three specific updates about our core businesses. We are also announcing that for the first time in nearly five years, we are hiring a Community Facilitator for our private membership group The Dynamite Circle. Later on in the episode, we'll be exploring the idea of the moment in a business that Seth Godin refers to as "The Dip".

Productized services have long been a subject of discussion on this podcast. They are a relatively attractive business model, especially among first-time entrepreneurs, and we've shared many examples over the years of how to create these kinds of businesses and scale them. Meryl Johnston, founder of the online bookkeeping firm Bean Ninjas, recently started a rather lively debate in the members' forum of our online community The Dynamite Circle with a post titled, ‘Are Productized Services Overrated?’

Christopher Gimmer is the Co-Founder and CEO of Snappa, a SaaS (Software as a Service) business that allows users to create online graphics quickly and easily. Christopher caught our attention recently when he opened up with a post on Twitter about the emotional cost of being an entrepreneur.

It started with an innocuous-looking image of a yellow aeroplane and ended with a number of threatening letters from a law firm on behalf of the travel site Expedia. In today’s episode, we bring you the denouement of the story of why we decided to remove ‘that plane’ from our branding.

On today's podcast, we're excited to finally reveal that our remote jobs platform Dynamite Jobs is officially a ".com business". After three years of running the company with a .co domain, that .com marks a huge symbolic change for our company, but it didn't come cheap.Enter Rob Barbour of DomainSOS.com and DomainVIP.com.

If we had to pick one word as our greatest motivation, it’s ‘freedom’. Freedom to live life on our terms, where we want, with the people we choose. Ali Marsland is the director of ‘The Effective English Company’. Ali began chasing her own freedom at the age of 18, as she traveled around the world for a year before embarking on a successful career in corporate communications.

At the beginning of the year, we recorded a podcast where we outlined some of our business goals and aspirations for 2020. We're now halfway through the year, and it's safe to say these past six months have been a period of disruption for entrepreneurs all over the world. Given the unexpected circumstances that we've all experienced, we thought it would be interesting to revisit those goals that we shared on this podcast back in January.

In 2009, we published an episode of this podcast called 10 Great Software and Tech Services We Use to Run Our Business. Over 10 years later, we've been challenged by one of our listeners to revisit that list and to talk about the core software and services that we are using to run our company today.

We've talked about the '1,000 Day Principle' at great length on this podcast. The idea is that it takes around three years of full-time effort for an entrepreneur to replace the income from their day job. But what does that principle look like in practice?