Sunday, July 16 by David Askaripour in Featured Articles | 14 Comments
Listen to Podcast
Reid and I decided to record a chat of the two of us just talking about various issues that entrepreneurs face on their path to success. We simply chatted in an unscripted, down-to-earth, and raw fashioned style that came out really well. Sure, we didn’t agree on everything, but would it be fun if we did? Nah. It was a great podcast and Mind Petals plans on rollin’ out these uncut podcasts more often, with various young entrepreneurs
Here are some of the topics that we covered in the podcast:
Extra Ways to Make Cash
- Reid spoke about becoming a part of focus groups and making $75 - $120 per hour to review a service.
- I spoke about finding Java programmers to do assignments for friends in need of help.
Motivational / Self Help books
- I tried to convince Reid that “it’s the entrepreneur’s duty to read books.”
- Reid felt that entrepreneurs don’t need books to succeed in life – just talk to people!
- We eventually came to a common-ground: entrepreneurs should read books – just the right books!
- Books mentioned: Never Eat Alone, Buffetology, and Rich Dad Poor Dad.
Educations vs. Certification
- Reid spoke about his parents being worried about him not excelling in school.
- I got into the flow as I began telling my story about school not teaching people to become entrepreneurs, but simply “certifying” them to work for someone for the rest of their lives.
- Do entrepreneurs need school?
Friends
- Who are entrepreneurs hanging out with?
- Surround yourself around other ambitious and motivated people.
Fear and Risk
- So many students are scared to take a risk even when there isn’t much to lose.
- It’s time to get over the word “No.”
- Entrepreneurs need to build up a tolerance for rejection and carry out their plans.
- Forget what people say and make things happen.
Talking or Creating
- Many student entrepreneurs talk a lot but don’t do much.
- If you’re so passionate about becoming successful, then why aren’t you doing what you love?
- You call yourself an entrepreneur?
Mind Petals
- The future of our network.
- Looking for hungry, passionate, motivated, serious, and ambitious entrepreneurs.
- Keeping it focused on young entrepreneurs.
- Not limiting entrepreneurs to just one network.
- How we seek entrepreneurs for membership.
- Our Vision.
Wrappin’ it up
We hope you enjoyed our chat, banter, arguments, whatever it was… we definitely did! Two passionate entrepreneurs talking about their lives and experiences – can’t get more real than that! Keep an ear out for more entrepreneurs chatting up a storm on Mind Petals. And if you’re a young entrepreneur that would like to chat with us on a podcast, then right on! Let us know.
Cool.
Wednesday, June 28 by Dan Marques in Featured Articles | 2 Comments
Why am I writing this article? Because a long time ago I read an article on how to best read the Wall Street Journal and I was amazed at how useful it was. Well, I have been a subscriber to Entrepreneur Magazine for about eight years and I have picked up some useful methods to get the most value out of the magazine.
Why is Entrepreneur Magazine great? It is filled with countless useful tips, motivational stories, facts, and relevant advertisers. Every issue I find at least a handful of things that either help my business, make me a better entrepreneur, or help someone I know with their venture.
Here’s how I read Entrepreneur Mag:
- Set aside 1-3 hours to read it from cover to cover (ideally, doesn’t always happen this way)
- Start from the back: The best articles are always in the later pages of the magazine and the classified ads are generally more valuable to take a look at then all the full page ads that are front loaded.
- Fold the pages that have something you want to check out further (either a website url, interesting fact, article you want to send to someone, etc.)
- Use a pen to identify the section on the folded page that was useful and leave a quick note to yourself as to why it was important (i.e. “send this to fred”, “check out this website for the blog”, “new business idea”, etc.)
- Read the heading and subheading of the articles, then the bold subtitles…if that article is interesting read more, if not then keep going.
- Make note of the authors and companies mentioned that peak your interest, do not be afraid to send either an email mentioning the article and why you found it worthwhile, it could spark a valuable future relationship.
- After you have gone through the whole magazine, now go back to the folded pages when you have time and check out the valuable websites, email the article to a friend, add a fact to your business plan, etc.
This may not be the perfect way for everybody but it has worked great for me so far. Also, be sure to check out their website for even more valuable resources in addition to the print magazine.
Tuesday, June 20 by David Askaripour in Featured Articles | 2 Comments
This is part 3 of “A Tale of Mind Petals.” Jump to part 1 then part 2 to catch up on all the goodness.
So now it’s June 4, 2006 (the day before the launch) and I am sitting my room (Mind Petals headquarters) and I’m running through lines of code for the site, checking out functionality, design elements, and content. And what do you know? Just like that I accidentally erase a very important file containing about 16 pages of the entire site!
Shit! Fuck! Damn! Yup, that’s all I did for a good solid hour – curse up a storm. But actually I handled the situation quite well. I didn’t punch any holes in the wall, punch any faces, or punch anything! I just sat there thinking how I could correct this stupid mistake.
Luckily with the help of my developer I had the site back up and running within a few hours and the code was back and better than ever! Well at least I made such as mistake before the site was live, right?
That night around 12 AM I launched the site and Mind Petals officially became live. I was so happy to see what I have created in my head become something real, alive, and simply amazing.
Now it’s June 20th, roughly 2 weeks since Mind Petals has opened its doors and we are 14 members strong. Over these past 2 weeks, we have attracted some of the most powerful entrepreneurial bloggers on the net and we’re not stopping here!
Entrepreneurs from all over the world have been requesting to join the network, some have made it in and some haven’t. The ones who did were the most passionate about what they are doing and how the represent themselves through their blogs.
In a perfect world, every entrepreneur blogger who be allowed into Mind Petals, but what fun would that be? In doing that, we’d just be diluting the hell out of our focus to help entrepreneurs with quality, passionate, and powerful content – nothing more and nothing less.
The feedback we have received up to this point has been amazing and we are looking forward to rolling out a Phase II of the network in the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for some good stuff to come.
I’m just a young, motivated, hungry, and passionate 22 year-old entrepreneur living in NYC trying to change the world. Mind Petals was once just a thought and now it’s a reality. The power of the mind, amazing!
This is just the beginning of my vision for this network. I am working on a masterpiece. And with the help and contribution from our members, readers, and supporters, we can not fail.
I’ll leave you all with some pics of the official Mind Petals Headquarters – my room!
Tuesday, June 13 by David Askaripour in Featured Articles | 1 Comment
This is part 2 of “A Tale of Mind Petals.” Jump to part 1 to catch up if you haven’t already.
So after doing some pretty intense research and brainstorming for quite some time, I then began to talk with various young entrepreneurs – you know, just shooting around ideas and such.
I wanted to know if this was something that entrepreneurs such as myself would want to be a part of. So I started asking around and received some great positive feedback. But to tell you the truth, I was (and still am) so passionate about creating the network, that I would have went ahead and done it regardless of the encouragement.
That’s just how I am. If I have a gut feeling about something, at the end of the day I’m always, always going to trust myself first and just do it. If I am wrong, then I am wrong and I just keep at it. Simple as that.
After some time of talking with some sharp minds, I started to write. I just began unloading all of my ideas for the network on paper. For a few weeks, I simply just wrote ideas, content, whatever and sketched design ideas. I wanted the design to be crazy!
Things started coming together and history was being made. Started scoping out blogs that I thought would make great fits for the network and made sure that they were a part of the founding members when the network launched.
Around this time, I contacted my good friend Dan who offered a tremendous amount of support when I was deep into the project. Dan brought good ideas to the table and eventually came on the Advisory Board along with Matt and Jason. Great bunch of smart guys!
Now it’s around late May and the network is well into production. Matt’s banging out some sick designs and we’re working on painting a masterpiece. My concept was all about growth and prosperity, so the flowers, grass, and bright colors was just what I had in mind to really project this vision. It’s Spring time on the network, 24/7. The growing never stops!
Stay tuned for part 3………
Saturday, June 10 by David Askaripour in Featured Articles | 3 Comments
Figured I’d do a mini 3 Part series focused on the last few months from the day I thought of starting an entrepreneur blog network up to now.
Here we go….
Ok, so I graduated from college a semester early in Jan. 2006. I moved back home to Long Island with my parents and brothers. There I was, back at home just after completing 3 ½ years of college. What a fun 3 years!
Around the time of early January I started really exploring this “blog” movement that seemed to be all over the internet. I knew that I needed to jump on this new way of expressing yourself over the net, so I created a blog called “Flush the Toilet” to speak about something I really felt passionate about: entrepreneurism!
For days and days I was just be blogging the hell out of the internet. Interviewing other successful entrepreneurs, networking like a storm, writing tutorials, just about anything that came into my head. I was a beast.
After about a month of blogging on FTT and realizing that it’s been almost a year since closing the book on my last project, I knew that it was time to get back to the drawing table and create something new.
I started thinking about all of the great entrepreneurs that I have been meeting over the last few weeks and how I enjoyed networking with all of them so much. I wanted there to be some type of unification of all these savvy guys that I’ve been chatting with.
So what do you know…. I said to myself… “I should create some type of network.” I wasn’t exactly sure how it would work or anything. At that point, it was more of a fundamental concept in my head. I just knew that there was something there and I needed to get into it right away.
BUT…before doing ANYTHING…. I had to do some studying up and research. As you can see from my garage back at home, my wall was packed with all types of information: ideas, connections, articles, emails, stats, whatever…
For a few weeks straight I was basically just brainstorming, researching, innovating, and thinking about the future of what’s to come next in the Blogosphere. Just letting my mind run wild. On the train, after taking a shower, while on the phone, basically everywhere, I carried my handy notebook with me to jot down ideas and improving, improving, improving on former ideas and concepts.
I was in the zone and I knew that creating a network was a promising idea as my vision began to unfold and grow.
Stay tuned for part 2 …..
Until then, here are some shots of my new place in NYC.
Friday, June 9 by Dan Marques in Featured Articles | 8 Comments
I finished a course in search engine marketing from Web CEO University today. It was a great course; you can see my certification certificate here.
I figured I would share some of the core things you should keep in mind for your website in terms of search engine optimization:
Analyze related keyword traffic, use a tool such as the one at inventory.overture.com to see what individuals are searching for, then search that keyword to see how popular the top 10 results are. Find 1-3 keywords that are highly relevant, have a decent amount of daily traffic, and the competition is not all incredibly big sites.
You then want to optimize your main page for these 1-3 keywords. The key is to not be a spammer and just stuff the site with keywords, do it in an authentic way that brings value. Have the keyword(s) in the beginning of your title, in your meta tags, in your content, your site links, and at the bottom of the site.
Then try to build authentic links pointed towards your page from other websites (the more popular they are, the better). If you have to do reciprocal links try to put the reciprocal link on another page so it is not viewed negatively by the search engines. You want the link to have a keyword in it, as well as have some anchor text related to your keyword. Ideally, you want one way links pointed to your site on related sites that are popular.
Start with this simple strategy, work hard, deliver worthwhile and fresh content, and you are well on your way…who needs an SEO consultant 
In all seriousness, SEO is a mix of art & science, I thought I knew a great deal before the course but now I have a much greater understanding and now understand the value a professional search engine marketer can provide.
Monday, June 5 by Dan Marques in Featured Articles | Leave a Comment
There are many reasons why I became an entrepreneur, perhaps I may have been born an entrepreneur and it just took a few years to figure that out. Regardless, an event happened last year that provided additional reasoning and inspiration for being an entrepreneur. Except this was a bad experience, it was my first (and only) traditional “internship”.
I took a job in the fall of 2005 as an Analyst/Research intern at a market research firm. The job sounded interesting enough, the company sounded really interesting. They were involved in technology, marketing, research, cutting edge trends, etc…or at least that is what they told me.
They put me in a cubicle, my first time ever in the gray box as an employee. I was given an organization chart and that is when I noticed something strange…the entire company consisted of only VP of X and interns…that’s it! There were no employees? Odd. There was also about 3-5 interns for every VP. I thought this was strange.
They gave me some tasks that for the most part consisted of a lot of cold calling…not fun at all but it did discipline me because before I was afraid of cold calling.
They had me build an entire project from start to finish for a client. I did pretty much everything, all they did was tell me what to do and when. I noticed a document that was from the client that noted the tasks they requested (of which I was doing 95% of them) and the payment the company was receiving was $XX,000, I received $500 to do 95% of the project!!! I left a few days later and never looked back…
Moral of the story? You can create value as an employee or as an entrepreneur, the question is: Who is receiving the benefits of that value creation?
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