023 : An entity’s warm blanket with Matthew Moisan

Matthew Moisan Legal When I was talking to my friend Andrew about joining him to help co-found TripExpert, I was handed a big stack of legal papers to trudge through and eventually sign. As I was reading them, my eyes began to cross. I thought I understood most of it, but I had no idea whether anything in there was good or bad, or if anything should be added or removed.

I knew I needed to get some help from someone who was better versed in founders’ agreements than me. On the recommendation of a friend, I got in touch with a lawyer specializing in startups and had him take a look. With just a 30-minute phone call and a few emails back in forth, he potentially saved me thousands (if not tens of thousands) of dollars. And I now had full understanding of the document I was signing.

Law can be an intimidating field, and first-time entrepreneurs often have so many unanswered questions: when should you talk to a lawyer? What type of lawyer should you hire? Where can you even find a lawyer?

My guest today is Matthew Moisan of Moisan Legal. We discuss exactly what you need to know about law as you’re delving into entrepreneurship, and how to best set yourself up for success.

In just 50 minutes, he’ll raise you out of law novice-dom, and there’s honestly not a dull moment.

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022 : Why you should have started a blog yesterday

Dann Berg by Michael Shane In this week’s podcast episode, I share how I escaped the retail world and got into tech journalism. It’s all because of a little personal website I started. I also explain how you, too, can benefit from starting your own website — even if you don’t want to get int journalism — and how to do it.

This is a special edition of the podcast because there’s no guest, it’s just me! I ended up getting so much feedback and so many questions about last week’s podcast that I wanted to tell my story in more depth.

If you don’t yet have your own website, you need to listen to this episode. When you’re ready to get going, I’ve embedded the first tutorial in my video course.

If you found this helpful, please use my Bluehost affiliate link to get your hosting and domain!

Check out the rest of the videos here!

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021 : Pitching, press, and passion with TechRadar’s Joe Osborne

Joe Osborne of TechRadar When I was in high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I ended up taking a theater class as an elective freshman year (my mother’s suggestion) and loved it. I took more and more classes until I was eventually staring in almost all my high school plays (oh god, don’t click that link).

It only seemed natural to carry that passion over to college (as I still had no idea what I wanted to do) so I enrolled as a Theater major. But when I got to college, I just didn’t feel like acting any more. It was my creative writing classes that were the most fun for me, so I switched to an English and Creative Writing tract. For my honors thesis, I wrote a play.

But I still didn’t know what I wanted to do. When I graduated, I got a job in the mall at French Connection selling clothes. I was still working retail when I launched my first blog, IAmDann.com, and just wrote about random stuff. Seriously, go back to the first posts on IAmDann.com and check out the unorganized and unfocused content I was producing.

But I kept writing, and kept posting content. And after a couple years, I had a realization:

I was a writer who wrote a play and had a two-year-old blog.

As I was doing all that work, it didn’t feel like I was accomplishing anything. And even though I didn’t have much focus during any of that time, I suddenly had a pretty impressive sounding CV.

I used that blog to land a full-time writing job at LAPTOP Magazine, and the rest is history.

When people say that you should follow your passion and do what you love, it’s because someday it’ll be valuable. If you love video games, and write a short post after every video game you play, it won’t feel like work. You might not even get any traffic. But eventually you’ll have a massive portfolio of work and you can turn that into a real, paying job.

My guest today is Joe Osborne, Reviews Editor at TechRadar, who is passionate about technology and video games. Unlike me, he had focus from early on, writing for small local blogs and systematically working his way up to his current position. In this episode of the podcast, he shares exactly how he did it, what he looks for in pitches, and shares his thoughts on the future of tech.

This episode is just plain fun, and it goes to show that you really should be pursuing your passion, even if it doesn’t feel like you’re getting anywhere as you’re doing it.

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020 : Gotta keep hustling with Laura and Sara of DigitalFlash

Have you ever gone to an event and thought it was just “meh”? Maybe you signed up because of the awesome lineup of panelists, but the questions posed by the moderator were just boring and there wasn’t any opportunity to ask questions. Or maybe the food sucked and all you wanted was a drink.

Laura and Sara met at a networking event that just didn’t suit their tastes. But they didn’t let it bother them — they turned their experiences into opportunity. Both Sara and Laura knew that together, they could throw amazing events, and they did just that.

DigitalFlash grew out of a desire for the types of events that the cofounders wanted to attend, and people responded. In this podcast, the two co-founders share how their events grew and how they started creating digital experiences for larger companies. If you visited the Samsung booth at the 2014 SXSW, you were a part of their work.

These two women are the very definition of the word hustle — they even left a convention floor in Vegas to appear on this podcast! They never stop.

If you need some motivation to keep on keeping on, this is the episode for you.

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019 : Passive income through YouTube and Kindle with Brian Yang

Brian Yang Most people think securing passive income is all about releasing a killer online product that generates a boatload of income and will continue to sell itself in perpetuity.

With this mindset, people will often sit around doing nothing, waiting for the “perfect idea” to strike. Or they’ll spend years tweaking their product, making small changes with every new article or tutorial they read, but never actually release the finished version.

But passive income isn’t about creating and releasing a perfect product that nets thousands of dollars. It’s about setting up lots of smaller imperfect products, testing the market, and perfecting the most effective income generators.

Once your goal become diversifying your offerings, instead is creating a perfect single product, you’ll start seeing the money start rolling in. And that money will only snowball larger as it’s reinvested.

My guest today is Brian Yang, an online entrepreneur and the most popular dance teacher for men on YouTube. He shares exactly how he built his YouTube business, as well as what he’s doing in the Kindle Marketplace.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:25 — 38.1MB) | Embed