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Big List of Podcasts for Online Business

By Bobby Voicu

Besides reading as much as I can, I listen to lots of podcasts on a weekly basis. I listen mostly to technology and “tech lifestyle” if you want, but I also listen business podcasts, on an episode by episode basis. I listen to them when I walk my dog, when I go around the town doing chores, whenever I have some “dead” time on my hands.

Today I found a really comprehensive list of 80 podcasts for the online business owners, from Businessese. They’re categorized, with categories like Marketing and Sales, Blogging, Finance and Legal, Mindset, Branding, Writing and Content Creation, Organization and Productivity, Creatives and Creativity, General Business. What’s more interesting, for me, at least, is that they avoided the most well known podcast, like Tim Ferriss’s one, and they tried to find less known, but really targeted ones.

In our own searches for new blogging and business podcasts to devour, we’ve found that most “best podcast” lists tend to feature the same major players we’ve heard before. That’s no good for the podcast obsessed! So we rolled our sleeves up and scoured the internet to curate a huge list of podcasts that has something for everyone, at every stage of business. Enjoy!

I got the list from an interesting newsletter I subscribed a long time ago to, Useletter by Amy Lynn Andrews. Look over it and, while you to this, don’t forget Cristina sends a really good newsletter every Monday, as well, here, at The CEO Library. She often recommends good podcasts she listen to, so you have that, as well, as a good reason to subscribe.

Finally, here are some podcasts I listen to, mostly Tech: Accidental Tech Podcast, Connected, Cortex, Analog(ue), The BirchTree Podcast, Real Money, Real Business. If you’re Romanian, I also listen to Andrei Rosca’s Zero Plus, Podcastu’ lui Katai and Radu Dumitru’s Radu and Matilda.

Oh, and one tip: if you want to listen to more podcasts or you don’t have enough time, use Overcast as your podcast client of choice, if you’re on iOS. It has a smart thing called Smart Speed that actually cuts pauses and it can cut 10-15% of the time you need. Also, I listen on 1.1x or 1.2x speed, which doesn’t distort the voices too bad and I get some more time from this as well.

Happy listening! :)

Make your Startup’s Investor Pitch Deck Better with These Resources

By Bobby Voicu

Great startups pitch deck presentations

If you’re ever in the position to raise money, the first thing you’ll probably do will be to look for examples of pitch decks to use with your potential investors. In 2012, when I was raising money in earnest for MavenHut, finding this kind of examples was difficult. I needed to access my own network (which was not that big) because there were almost no decks available online.

Actually, I think the one that helped me the most was Reid Hoffman’s Linkedin deck, which he published on his own website, along with explanation and context for each deck. It was gold for me, because it helped me understand a little bit more about investor perception and targets. You can still find the article here and I hope it will still be there a long time, because I learned more from it than most of other resources combined.

I wouldn’t have mentioned pitch decks and presentations if I didn’t find today, in Ben Evans’s newsletter (one of the best tech related newsletters online) a mention to an article with 30 pitch decks from some of the most successful startups in the world or, how they put it, legen…wait for it… dary startups. You have the likes of Airbnb, Square, Buffer, Mint, Mixpanel, Moz (of Lost and Founder fame). You can even find Buzzfeed or YouTube. A really good collection that you shouldn’t miss if you’re raising money or think of raising money.

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention MavenHut’s public presentation at the end of Startup Bootcamp in June 2012. While the deck is not available online, you can see me barely breathing with stress on stage. It might actually be funny, but I think it’s also educational.

Since we’re on The CEO Library and we’re all about books, here are the books that helped me when pitching and when learning how to pitch, maybe they will help you as well:

If your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch won’t turn on or is frozen

By Bobby Voicu

From here:

If your screen is black or frozen
If your screen is black or frozen, you might need to force restart your device. A force restart won’t erase the content on your device. You can force restart your device even if the screen is black or the buttons aren’t responding. Follow these steps:
– On an iPad Pro 11-inch or iPad Pro 12.9-inch: Press and quickly release the Volume Up button. Press and quickly release the Volume Down button. Then press and hold the Power button until the device restarts.
– On an iPhone 8 or later: Press and quickly release the Volume Up button. Press and quickly release the Volume Down button. Then press and hold the Side button until you see the Apple logo.
– On an iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus: Press and hold both the Side and Volume Down buttons for at least 10 seconds, until you see the Apple logo.
– On an iPhone 6s and earlier, iPad, or iPod touch: Press and hold both the Home and the Top (or Side) buttons for at least 10 seconds, until you see the Apple logo.

This is on top of my Mac’s microphone not working in Skype (on MacOS, of course).

Photo credit

Favicons in Safari 12 Tabs

By Bobby Voicu

Safari 12 just introduced favicons in tabs. I know, I know :)

I’ve been using Safari more and more in the last year and I hated the hacks necessary to get the favicons to show. Finally, Apple added them.

Here’s how to get them: Safari -> Preferences -> Tabs and check “Show website icons in tabs”.

No Virtual Machine apps in Spotlight search on MacOS

By Bobby Voicu

One thing that annoys me on my Mac is the fact that apps from the Virtual Machines I use appear in Spotlight search. The issue appears when I have the same app on multiple operating systems: MacOS and Windows, let’s say. You search for Chrome, hit enter aaaaand… you start opening the Windows 7 virtual machine, instead of the MacOS Chrome app. I’ve found the solution today:

2. If you want keep Windows apps integrated but removed from Spotlight only. This changes from version to version of Parallels, but for version 7 do this. System Preferences –> Spotlight –> Privacy tab. Hit the + sign. Add the folder “Applications (Parallels).”

From here.

And yes, I’ve created this post just so I have the information at hand when, without a doubt, I forget how to do it again.

Indie Hackers grew to $5,000/month and was acquired in 10 months

By Bobby Voicu

Timeline of indiehackers acquisition, revenue of $5,000

I was thinking of ways to generate revenues for content sites the other day. My focus is on interview based sites (for obvious reasons) and I remembered Indie Hackers doing a really good job about it. I thought I read a sort of income report on their site, but I couldn’t find them anymore, since the /blog section redirects now to the home page. I initially thought that since their acquisition by Stripe, they removed it. A “site:indiehackers.com/blog” search later, though, the articles were still available.

What is interesting for me in these blog posts is the fact that Indie Hackers started in August 2016, it was acquired by Stripe in April 2017 for un undisclosed amount, but by that time they were making around $5,000/month with not so much traffic on the website to speak of. They had a combination of revenue sources, from ads on the site to site sponsors and podcast/newsletter sponsors as well.

In case you want to read them, here they are, in chronological order:

Here’s also 2 answers from the founder on Hacker News and on the Indie Hacker Forum:

I hope they don’t remove the articles (they can still be found on archive.org, in case the links aren’t working anymore).

Reward Behaviour, Not Milestones

By Bobby Voicu

I was reading recently some article or book about getting off your ass and doing shit. And I remember thinking this: Reward each action you take. Or, better said, reward behaviour.

It basically means that whenever you choose a target or a goal, you define the actions you need to take to get you there and, instead of celebrating hitting specific milestones, you celebrate the consistency of doing those actions over and over again, until you achieve what you set your mind to achieve.

Let’s say you want to lose weight. Don’t celebrate losing 1kg, 5kgs or even 10kgs. Celebrate, instead, the fact that you got to the gym 3 times a week, as planned. Celebrate you had 1 day, 3 days, a week, a month, a year of eating well. As Cristina does, when she celebrates being consistent with logging the meals she eats in MyFitnessPal for 800 days. Not an easy feat, I tell you, as I only kept at it about 40 days, the most, without a break in habit.

When you celebrate milestones and targets you risk being demotivated when it takes longer than you planned initially. When you celebrate and reward your own behaviour you allow yourself to fail from time to time. You just need to get back in the saddle.

It worked for me for the last 6-7 years, since I first started to pay more attention to my actions and I kept my focus on a goal at a minimum. It actually made it easier for me to achieve what I wanted. But it took me several years to get there and I’m still a work in progress.

One final thought: you still need targets, because they help you establish the actions you want to take and they can also be tracked more easily. But focus on the consistency of actions initially and, once you get those working, go back to your goals.

The photo is just some really tasty ice cream I chose to reward my behaviour. You should try it, too

Best Productivity Hack: Enough Sleep

By Bobby Voicu

Cristina, my co-founder at The CEO Library, always praised sleeping. Well, not always, but in the last few years. She used to be a night owl that despised sleep, so it is a relatively recent change in her life, as well.

While I agreed with her on the surface (I mean, yeah, it’s true, more sleep is better, right?), I never actually felt it. I never slept a lot to begin with and I can wake up at any hour, after almost any time sleeping and I can function quite well after several minutes. I don’t need a “wake up”/morning ritual to start the day, I just go to the bathroom, wash myself and that’s it.

Recently, though, I started to feel that even when I sleep enough in terms of hours, if it’s not during the “correct” hours, it’s not good.

When I sleep from around 11pm-12am I always wake up around 7 and I’m really productive. When I sleep the same amount of hours (or even more), but I go to sleep at around 1-2am, the next day is a lot worse. It’s not that I don’t put in the work, but I have problems focusing on the task at hand, it takes longer to start tasks and, worse, I feel sleepy all day.

So, starting next week, I will go to sleep in the coveted 11pm-12am interval. And it’s next week because I’m traveling this one, on a short seaside vacation here, in Portugal, and not because of the “I’m starting on Monday” syndrome. Or maybe it’s the same, who knows.

In case you want to find out more about sleep as a productivity tool, you should read Why We Sleep.

The Price of Success

By Bobby Voicu

Scott Adams once wrote: “One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard goes something like this: If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it. It sounds trivial and obvious, but if you unpack the idea it has extraordinary power.”

Good quote. From The Psychology of Money.