After a wild and dramatic week in Austin TX, we are excited to return to our regularly scheduled programming and to highlight an entrepreneur with a unique career trajectory. Casey von Neumann started out as many of us do, by freelancing, teaching music classes to students in Atlanta, G.A.As her client base grew, she began scaling her services into a full-blown music school called Eclectic Music and has since built multiple businesses in the education space.

This week's episode features a story with a lot of familiar themes. Today's guest started out as so many of us do, with a weekend side hustle. Amar Ghose is the CEO of ZenMaid, a niche scheduling software for maid services that he co-founded in 2013.

John Warrilow is the author of a trilogy of books about this very subject, including Built to Sell, The Automatic Customer, and his most recent book The Art of Selling Your Business. He has also spoken with hundreds of entrepreneurs on his own podcast (including our very own Bossman) about their experiences exiting from their businesses.

Since the start of the year, we've been focusing heavily on stories about starting new businesses as well as what we believe are the "fundamentals" of being an entrepreneur. When we received a video message from today's guest, who was telling us how excited he was to finally join our private membership group The Dynamite Circle, we knew we had to hear more about his story.

We've been spending a lot of time over the past few weeks talking about the "business fundamentals", or the everyday habits that we believe entrepreneurs should be practicing. In keeping with that theme, we've decided to revisit some specific concepts that we've spoken about on this show in the past, and that we have seen at the core of so many successful entrepreneurial stories.

January is one of our favorite months of the year because it's a time for starting over, setting new goals, and making plans for how to achieve them. It's no surprise then that our inbox starts filling up with messages from excited entrepreneurs who are looking for new ways to push forward with their businesses.

Every once in a while a book comes around that completely captivates us and leaves us with more questions than answers. When we discovered "The Price of Tomorrow" by Jeff Booth, we knew we needed to hear more from the man who wrote it. 

This is the time of year when so many people are making goals and resolutions. These types of things are great, but we've always believed that the best way to is to see real progress is to create healthy habits and practices. Successful athletes do this by continuing to practice their fundamentals, the core skills that are most important to their game.

To say that the last twelve months were unpredictable would be a massive understatement. For ourselves and so many other entrepreneurs, the COVID outbreak not only threw a wrench into our plans for 2020, it completely changed the way that we did business this year.

Like so many other entrepreneurs, we are fascinated by cryptocurrencies. We're partly drawn to the technology because we believe it has the potential to cause some serious disruption in the financial sector, as well as being an interesting retail investor option. You might recall that a few years back we interviewed Nathaniel Popper about his book Digital Gold, which chronicled the origins of Bitcoin.

Even though 2020 has been a difficult year for some entrepreneurs, it has arguably been an all-time year for many people running eCommerce businesses. Longtime listeners know that we first cut our teeth in the eCommerce space, and we love keeping tabs on how that industry continues to evolve and innovate. It's no surprise then that today's guest made his way onto our radar.

We are reaching back into the mailbag this week to answer questions submitted by Tropical MBA listeners around the world. In this edition, we'll be focusing on three specific questions that we believe get to the core of what it means to be resilient as an entrepreneur. We'll be discussing how much money you should save as a "runway" if you plan on leaving your job, the fundamental differences between hiring freelancers and hiring employees, and how you can navigate questionable business advice on the internet.

This week's episode is about something that is incredibly near and dear to our hearts: personal blogging and what it means to write on the internet. To help us tell this story, we've invited two of our favorite writers who both have a long and rich experience in the blogging space.

We've been receiving a ton of requests recently from listeners who want to hear an "old school" episode, so this week Dan and Ian are jumping on the horn to talk about the progress that they've made with their remote jobs business Dynamite Jobs. Since the start of the summer, we've been building a new software platform designed to make the hiring process a whole lot easier for entrepreneurs.

For our money, there is nobody quite like Kevin Kelly. Not only is he one of the co-founders of Wired Magazine, he is also the author some of our favorite pieces of writing about technology, including What Technology Wants, New Rules for the New Economy, and the brilliant essay 1,000 True Fans, which has been discussed countless times on this show over the years.

Today's podcast is all about one listener of this show who took the concept of productizing and applied it incredibly well at a very high velocity. More than that, it's a story about endurance, applying systems intelligently, and the power of community.

Jeff is an incredibly talented copywriter and the founder of MostlyStories.com. He is also the man behind the content at most of our in-person events. This year, Jeff is joining us virtually on the podcast to commiserate and share some of our favorite memories, thoughts, and insights into the history of DCBKK.

It goes without saying that as internet entrepreneurs, we are fascinated by the future of money, and it's hard to talk about the future of money without talking about cryptocurrency. Greg Gerber is our go-to guy when it comes to simplifying the complicated world of crypto. We've invited Greg back on to the show this week to talk about the state of crypto in 2020.

We've been devoting a lot of time to talking about software businesses in recent weeks. One of the reasons we are so fascinated by them is that despite how difficult it can be to start one, these types of businesses can have tremendous upside. Jordan Gal is the founder of CartHook, a software company that helps Shopify merchants present offers to shoppers at checkout. Jordan first reached out to us back in 2015 with an investment opportunity (and we turned him down!).