Zero To One is a great book that pulls no punches, the basic premise of it is, when creating a startup, to really make a difference:

• Be first
• Be 10 times better than the competition

Obviously it’s up to you what you do, some business models are just about scratching some of the existing market rather than creating a new one and that’s fine, but this definitely echoes a recent project I was late to market for, which definitely wasn’t first and was only objectively 3-4 times better than the competition 😉

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I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t drink, or because I stayed in the completely wrong area of Hong Kong, but my week here was not as fun as I had expected and super expensive. A lot of my friends completely love Hong Kong, I’ve friends that were born and raised here then moved to the UK, friends from the UK that moved out to Hong Kong to live for a few years and then I know other nomads that love travelling here. So there must be something about it that’s awesome. I was hoping for a super fun, sexy, James Bond Bottoms Up club vibe, but what I found was basically a super corporate, concrete city reminiscent of 80s London with the price tag twice that of 21st Century London!

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Just before Christmas I needed to leave Thailand on a visa run as I’d done my 30 day VOA + Extension so after much humming and harring, as I didn’t really want to leave, the day before I booked a weekend in Singapore! It was pretty awesome.

The first thing I noticed though, getting a taxi was impossible. Very few taxi ranks and even when there were, the taxis came and immediately picked up someone who used Grab Taxi, then departed. This actually resulted in quite a few heated arguments between people in the taxi queues and the Grab Taxi users! Fortunately I’m smart and worked it out! Unfortunately I cheaped out and bought a data only SIM card on arrival so couldn’t activate Grab Taxi as I didn’t have an actual Singapore number. Idiot.

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Ready to get your WordPress site up and running in minutes? Even if you don’t have a business plan, even if you don’t have a professional UK web design & development firm on payroll, it’s better to start sooner rather than later. You can increase your income by having more value and now is the time to learn WordPress and kickstart your online life.

Set Up Your Hosting Account

Your hosting account is where your websites will live, so before we get started with WordPress we need to get you up and running with a host!

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The entire purpose of my European rail adventure was to head down to Barcelona, Spain, to live in one of Chris Reynold’s Entrepreneur Houses for 4 months, get some serious work done and get a handle on my type 2 diabetes situation.

The premise was simple, at any time 10-15 entrepreneurs were living together as a social and work collective, with regular organised dinners, social events (beach trips, running of the bulls, etc), co-working and most importantly masterminds. It was absolutely amazing to be able to drop in to a new city (and country) and be given the keys to an affordable apartment as well as an instant social circle of amazing likeminded individuals who have now become friends for life.

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As a beginner to Google Adwords, who was blowing $100+ a day and making no sales (serious) this book was an eye opener.

In theory Adwords is easy, choose keywords, create advert, throw money at problem, profit, but the reality wasn’t quite like that for me. This book explained exactly why, what I was doing wrong and how to make it right.

I was expecting the Ultimate Guide To Google Adwords to be extremely dry, but instead it was full of fascinating commentary like how to crowd source the best brand name or tagline quickly, by simply by creating Adverts for each one and seeing which gets the most clicks!

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Paris is undeniably one of my most favourite cities. It’s nice.

Cinema Paradiso

As I travelled round Europe I used the Stay.com app to help me find my way, which is single handedly the best app you can get for your phone, other than Google Maps and some others. One of the awesome lists of things to do for Paris was a list of places from films! This was good as it kept me very entertained, I got to do a lot of walking and I had to get to grips with the underground system which was hilariously easy. Like most underground systems, it put the London underground to shame.

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Google’s been shit for quite a while now but today I’m finally sick of it, so switching.

Do they think I typed out the word barcelona for my health or something? Or maybe I’m using the Internet wrong (does the Internet actually come with a manual?). So they just decided, again, to drop one of the words I’m searching for, that give my search context, from the first results they provide. Ok, I could quote it. OR .. if I actually wanted matches that dont contain the word Barcelona i could prefix it with a – sign, so fuck that as an excuse.

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I launched a new product on Amazon recently that had taken a LOOONG time to develop and since day one of conception my plan was always to do a Zonblast with it and see what performance was like. So earlier this month, I did.

To give you some context, the new product I’m launching is a super competitive pharmaceutical with 55,000 products being returned for the exact match product name.

I did a 4 wave Zonblast, on Saturday 28th, Sunday 29th, Monday 30th August and Tuesday 1st September, giving away 75 coupons each day. The product usually retails at $34.99 and we provided coupons so it was available at $1.99

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I’ve been using Bitcasa as a cloud backup solution as I work for about 16 months now. Initially they were great, I’d synced about 260gb of photos and work data to them before I left the UK and everything was running smoothly. I felt secure that my laptop backups were working and my data was safe in case of user error or laptop theft.

Then Bitcasa deleted all the data I’d backed up in November 2014 as they were re-architecting their backend.

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