This week we're taking a break from the Tiny MBA podcast tour to bring you a very special conversation with a very special guest: Nilofer Merchant. Unlike many voices in positions of corporate power, Nilofer is a creator like you and me, and uses her position and experience in the business world to make the business world a better place for more people. Nilofer is one of us :) And here's the thing: whenever I have a conversation with Nilofer, we end up somewhere much deeper and more...

In this episode I took a virtual trip to India to visit to my friends Mayur and Shahzada on the Remote Explorers Podcast where they talk about remote work and more generally, the culture of work. In the full episode that you can find on remoteexplorers.com, we talked a lot about the current and future state of coworking but here on Stacking the Bricks I pulled out some of the highlights about business, entrepreneurship, and education that are most relevant to you, including: - The three...

Nathan Johnson left a corporate gig to bootstrap an affiliate business to 100,000 users. But to get it any bigger - and profitable - he would have to give up the very thing he left his corporate gig for: freedom. Ouch. Find out how he changed course to build a different business that DOES let him travel and spend more time with his family, while helping an audience of professional photographers.

I've been wanting to do an episode with Brennan Dunn for a LONG time. He's one of our most successful students, having built an empire of resources and products for freelancers at doubleyourfreelancing.com. But freelancing rates aren't the only thing Brennan has figured out how to double...now he's mastered the art of personalizing on-page content to boost conversion rates, often 2x or more! Brennan has come a long way since he joined 30x500 with the idea to build and AirBnB for homecooked...

Dave Ceddia knew how to ship, but none of his projects had ever made a sale. Today, $15,000 in sales of his book "Pure React" later, he knows how to create new, bigger products for his loyal and growing audience. In this episode, you'll find out how he stopped thinking of himself as a "lifer" at a cushy job to being in control of his professional future.

Donovan picked up JFS in December. Read it over Christmas. By the end of February, he'd grown his mailing list to 1,500 people. He created a landing page and JFS'd an email course on CSS animation, with a price tag of $49. In the first 7 days, he made 50 sales — for a total of over $2,000. NICE. To learn more about how Donovan did it — including specific techniques for getting traffic to his blog posts — listen in right now…

Here is the double-edged sword of the software business: All the “features” in the world will not matter if you don’t have the customer pipeline. It is better to lose many customers over a missing feature than spend a month on a feature that people say will make them sign up. Yet there really are features you’ll require in order to get and retain your best customers. OK, so maybe it’s a triple edged sword. Or maybe a citrus reamer. Shut up.

Adding people - partners, employees, contract staff - is one of the hardest parts of growing a business. It doesn't get talked about enough, and partly, because it's hard to talk about openly. In this episode we talk about the reasons why working with people falls apart so often and some things we've learned along the way to make wise decisions when adding people to the team.

2015 was the best ever for Amy's SaaS business Freckle, with $625k of gross receipts, and so far we’re on track to hit close to $800k annual run rate (ARR) before this year is out. Those are some big numbers, but we didn’t start out there, and it hasn’t been all smooth sailing. In this episode we talk about the first of five things I wish I’d known when I started Freckle, things that would have made my life so much more profitable and pleasurable. Up first: "Inflection Points," aka the myth...

When Kai Davis sends you an email, there's a good chance he's asking for something.

Let us show you how most of the "risk" in starting a business isn't really risk at all.