Check out this question from a Breaking Free reader…

Hey Brian,

I have been thinking about opening a coffee shop, not long actually probably for this past month, Im 21 years old and currently part of an internship. I have a lot of time to plan, and research, but I cant seem to grasp what exactly I need to do. The obvious would be taking a basic course in business, however, in the meantime… Do you have any suggestions on what I should start learning, if I am someday to own a coffee lounge? Books? Sites for people starting coffee shops? Anything you post is HIGHLY appreciated thanks…

Brimo Knight

Hi Brimo,

I have zero experience starting coffee shops, but I can tell you what I’d do if I wanted to learn how: find half a dozen local coffee shops that seem to be doing really well, and see if you can get a meeting with the owner.

Most business owners are willing to help if you approach it as a younger person who is eager to learn. Just tell them you are an aspiring entrepreneur and have no idea what you are doing, but want to see if you could get 10 minutes of their time and some advice. They’ll talk your ear off with all the challenges they’ve faced, some may try to talk you out of it, but it will all be valuable. If you happen to connect especially well with one of them, try to follow up with them on a regular basis and get them as as mentor.

Remember: the best way to be successful is to find someone who has already done it and do what they’re doing. Only after you have really mastered what they’re doing is it time to innovate – not in the beginning.

Also, be careful not to get advice from a coffee shop owner who is also doing it for the first time, almost bankrupt, or barely getting by. Obviously this is a delicate issue and you can’t ask them outright for their financial statements, so you’ll have to use your best judgment. Advice from a failing coffee shop owner could actually be worse than no advice at all. Find the people who have been doing it a long time, own multiple shops, and are actually successful at it.

At least that’s how I’d go about it – do any readers have experience opening coffee shops? Maybe you can leave your advice for Brimo in the comments.

Good luck, and keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

It’s been a cool week. I’ve been reading this awesome book, the 22 Immutable Laws Of Marketing. It’s short, simple, and profound. Highly recommended.

I also met up for drinks with another American entrepreneur living in Buenos Aires (found me through the blog). Turns out he started http://www.virtualdatingassistants.com/ Check it out and let him know what you think :)

I’ve continued to improve UniversityTutor.com. It is now ready for an international audience. Tutors can list prices in any currency and subjects in their local jargon. People can search anywhere in the world now, and I’ve imported a database of 80,000 cities around the world so it will continue to generate search engine optimized pages in various cities.

Marketing has already started internationally. I’ll be targeting other English speaking countries first, specifically the UK, Australia, Canada, and India. Did you know India has the second largest English speaking population of any country in the world (after the U.S.)? I didn’t.

I think I can get 10,000 or 20,000 tutors signed up by the end of the year.

Ideas On Improving BuyersVote.com

I’ve also taken a bit of time to refine my thoughts on BuyersVote.com – and gotten some great ideas from other people over the last week which have helped, so thanks for that. If you’re reading this I’d like to get your input as well.

I like the basic concept of user generated online reviews in ANY category, but it needs some work.

Specifically, the mental barrier to creating a new page is too high. There are too many fields to fill out for one thing. As a first time visitor to the site, I think I’d like the concept, but probably wouldn’t take the plunge to actually create a new page.

This is part of the brilliance in the simplicity of Twitter. There is a very low mental barrier to posting because you KNOW it can’t be more than 140 characters. If it was an open ended text field (like a blog post) people would subconsciously avoid it.

Another thing I’ve been looking at it the relationship between “pages” and “categories”.

The site right now is designed around the idea of adding a page, then you give it some categories later.

But whenever I’ve found myself wanting to use the site (like “man I wish there was a list of the best XYZ out there”), I’ve always thought about it in terms of a category, not a page.

So I got around to doing some sketches on paper (this is the best method of website design for me at least). Let’s put on our user interface design caps for a moment.

What do you think?

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t do posts about my personal life that often, but I thought this one might help some people.

DSPS is a sleeping disorder (Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome) and while I only found out it had a name years later, I started experiencing it around the time I entered high school (13 years old).

Here is a simple description of it:

The major feature of these disorders is a misalignment between the patient’s sleep pattern and the sleep pattern that is desired or regarded as the societal norm…. In most circadian rhythm sleep disorders, the underlying problem is that the patient cannot sleep when sleep is desired, needed or expected.

The symptoms are:

• Regardless of how sleep deprived you are, you are unable to fall asleep until very late
• Once you do fall asleep you can sleep for a normal amount of time, this differentiates it from other sleep disorders like insomnia
• There is a relatively severe to absolute inability to advance the sleep phase to earlier hours

I first started noticing this problem around the time I entered high school. I’d have to wake up fairly early (7am?) for school every day and of course it was difficult. This in itself was not remarkable. What was remarkable was that I would be unable to fall asleep before 2 or 3am any night, even after five days of little sleep.

So you can imagine Monday goes by on 4 hours of sleep. You aren’t feeling great. You should be tired the next night right? Nope…I would be exhausted all day, but as 9PM started to roll around I’d finally wake up for the day and start to get my best work done. Hours would just fly by like nothing. Even at 2 or 3 AM I was wide awake and could have easily kept going. But I knew I had to wake up in 4 hours and would force myself to go to bed.

The second day goes by on 4 hours of sleep. You feel even worse. Surely, tonight your body should be wanting to catch up on sleep right? Nope…same problem (you’re exhausted all day but start to wake up at night). Even when I would “go to bed” at 10 or 11PM to try and catch up, I would literally lie there awake in bed for hours and hours (until about 3AM) bored out of my mind.

The entire week goes by like this, each day getting worse and worse (in the morning and throughout the day) as you are in permanent jet lag, yet you can’t fall asleep any earlier.

The best way I can describe it is if you’ve ever had to wake up in the middle of the night and do something in a deep sleep. It’s like if you suddenly had to start getting up for work every day at 1AM.

I was on an entirely different schedule than the rest of the world, and couldn’t adjust no matter how hard I tried.

The Worst Part About It: People’s Perceptions

By far the worst part of DSPS is the societal stigma around it. Obviously, most people (even doctors) have never heard of it. It only affects 0.17% of the population. And most people when you tell them about it think it’s bullshit or that you’re lazy/making excuses.

“It’s just a habit you have to get into.”

“I find exercise/light reading helps me.”

“You just have to give up caffeine.”

Yes, I tried all these things and all of them help me fall asleep faster: at 3AM. That’s just what my body considers it’s normal bed time.

It can be frustrating at times because people make suggestions about it that come across as patronizing. Sometimes you just want to scream “duh! this has been fucking with my life every day for the last 10 years, don’t you think I would have tried not drinking caffeine and saved myself the trouble 10 years ago!!!”

But obviously, you can’t blame other people. If I was in their shoes I probably wouldn’t believe it either. People invent all sorts of limitations which are entirely mental.

After reading every piece of literature I could find and trying dozens of treatments to fix it over the last 10 years, I’m fairly convinced that it is a genetic predisposition for me though and not psychosomatic (possibly still curable but I haven’t found anything reliable yet).

Perhaps the worst offenders in the “people’s perceptions” category for me was my parents. Throughout high school (and partially even to this day, I’m not really sure) they did not believe it or fully understand it.

Obviously, after a school week of sleeping four hours per night (and falling asleep again Friday night at 3AM) my body was DESPERATE to sleep a full 8-12 hours on the weekend till noon or later. My parents weren’t happy about this and believed it was a sign of laziness. They would play all sorts of games to get me up on time (I was not amused – again, imagine being woken up at the equivalent of 1AM after a week of sleep deprivation – I believe the North Koreans use similar tactics in labor camps! :).

To their credit, I know they only wanted the best for me, and they didn’t know. DSPS wasn’t even formally recognized as a sleeping disorder until 1981, a few years before I was born, so they had no way of knowing.

Still, it was tough.

A World Designed Without You In Mind

For a long time, I felt like one of those 7 foot basketball players where doorways and airplanes seats never fit you. The world was just not designed for me.

Teachers in high school would routinely harass me for not being alert. I remember actually having hallucinations (the medical term for this is a microsleep) while sitting in class fairly often – a common symptom of extreme sleep deprivation. I didn’t know this wasn’t normal. I figured everyone just “spaces out” sometimes. It’s a really bizarre feeling to have your eyes open while dreaming. You are frozen, almost paralyzed, for 10 seconds or so in a trance until you jerk back suddenly to reality.

College was better, I was able to schedule many of my classes in the afternoon. However, not all of them. Early morning exams were difficult. There is well documented evidence about the negative effects of sleep deprivation, namely:

• Mental acuity decreases significantly
• Healing – a 2007 study showed a 20% decrease in white blood cell count in sleep deprived rats as compared to a control group
• A variety of accidents including the Exxon Valdez spill and Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown have been linked to sleep deprived workers

I remember one time in college I went to the gym (it was a small weight room and nobody else was there). I was laying on the incline bench, and put down a set of weights. A moment later I woke up and looked at my watch. An hour and a half had gone by. I had fallen asleep in the middle of the gym without even knowing it.

There were other incidents as well. In the mornings driving to school I would sometimes fall asleep at stop lights. When it turned green people would honk behind me and I’d wake back up. Obviously not the safest way to drive.

Again, all I can compare it to is imagine having to wake up at 1am to take an exam. You probably wouldn’t do quite as well, right?

This is probably what bothers me about it the most: I feel like I was cheated out of a lot of learning especially in high school (and partially in college). I mean, everything considered I still did pretty well, but if that’s how I did being under under extreme sleep deprivation EVERY DAY, just imagine how much I could have accomplished fully rested! Imagine the energy, connections, opportunities, clubs, etc. Ah well…

Discovering I Wasn’t The Only One

Years later (it was toward the end of college) I had become somewhat of a student on sleep disorders during my free time. I had read extensively on it and tried a number of experiments to try and correct it (including polyphasic sleeping, expensive light therapy devices which worked but didn’t have a long term effect, chronotherapy, and others).

One day I came across this wikipedia article on DSPS and I was absolutely STUNNED. It felt like it was describing me perfectly and as I read it, I thought “my God, someone else actually knows about this and has it…and there is a name for it”. It sounds silly but I think the most important thing I realized was that I WASN’T CRAZY.

My entire life up to that point I had always wondered if people were right, maybe I was just lazy or kidding myself. Finding this article at least brought some validity to my own experiences, and let me know there were people out their actively researching it.

Thank God for the internet. It allowed me to self diagnose what would have easily gone unrecognized by a dozen doctors due to it’s obscurity (DSPS is frequently mis-diagnosed as insomnia or depression, often involving the prescription of psychoactive drugs – thank god that didn’t happen).

Despite my excitement over the article, I was somewhat disheartened to learn that even with the best treatments available today (light therapy, melatonin, etc) it is still largely incurable with 90% of patients seeing a relapse within 1 year. At least I knew I wasn’t alone.

Adapting To Life

I’ve had to admit lately that a big part of the reason I’m an entrepreneur is that I have DSPS. It allows me to keep any hours I want, which still means sleeping at 3am (but I actually get to sleep as late as I want now – the full 7-9 hours I need). With this setup I am able to function 100% normally as a productive adult, and I’m very thankful for that.

My brief stint in corporate America was not easy (once again under constant sleep deprivation unlike in college where it was about half and half). It certainly wasn’t the only factor in my decision to break free (I happen to REALLY appreciate having complete freedom for example, and I think it’s a better way to build wealth) but it certainly affected my decision.

So these days, having DSPS is NOT much of a handicap and the past is….well, the past. You can’t change it so no use worring about it.

It still affects me in small ways…for example I never schedule early flights and don’t attend meetings before noon if it can at all be avoided. I absolutely despise alarm clocks and consider it a matter of personal pride that I don’t own one and only ever use one (my cell phone) a few times a year for special events.

The occasional one day of sleep deprivation is manageable for special events where I need to get up early. Its the multiple days in a row that are really bad and cause the microsleeps (hallucinations), so those are luckily a thing of the past.

So that’s it. I’ll just close by saying that this post is not a “poor me” cry for help. On the contrary, if this is the worst genetic disorder life has to throw at me I’m home free – I got an easy one and it barely affects me at all today. Also, for some people it apparently fades out later in life. Older people naturally sleep less, so it may (or may not) go away on it’s own.

If you have any sort of similar health problem read the next paragraph:

Lots of people take a negative attitude toward these things and say “great, 0.17% of the population gets this and of course I’M the one to get it!” But that’s bullshit, there are tons of diseases/disorders you probably have a 0.17% of getting, and adding them all up means you have a pretty good chance of having SOMETHING if not lots of them. DSPS is much better than a lot of problems I can think of having (like this guy), and I feel EXTREMELY lucky to have been born with all the other advantages I have in life. I’ve got zero room for whining on something like this.

But I thought I’d post it out there for a few reasons:

1. A lot of entrepreneurs I’ve met seem to have this, and don’t know they have it. They might feel like I did (like something is wrong with them) and this will help them to understand it. And…
2. So that if you ever invite me to a morning meeting, you’ll understand when I don’t show up… :)

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

I was thinking the other day about the times in history where there have been opportunities to generate huge amounts of wealth.

It seems to be when a new piece of technology comes along that is a TOTAL game changer.

In recent memory of course is the internet, and all the things it has enabled. A small example being distribution of media such as music and video, and reducing the cost of publishing content to basically zero.

But this trend is not new and has been going on throughout history.

What about the printing press? It was basically the first internet. Even before that, what about the first civilization to create an alphabet or writing?

What about when everyone was using coal and then oil came along? HUGE amounts of wealth generated.

What about when everyone was running around on horses and then railroads came along? COMPLETE game changer.

What about when everyone was using blocks of ice and then refrigeration was invented?

Steel? Plastic? Agriculture? The wheel? Flight?

Wikipedia actually has a list of the wealthiest people in history (adjusted for inflation) and you can see that aside from Royalty (which doesn’t really count as earning it since you’re born into it) most of them are people who got in early on a complete game changing technology.

The trick is getting in at the right time.

Coming in too early: There are also lots of “next big things” which turn out to never materialize, like the flying car or a battery which lasts a long time. People have been waiting for those for 50 years. So it’s definitely not easy to bet on the next big thing and be right. You have to hedge your bets.

Coming in too late: The market for oil and automobiles is very mature today. It would be very difficult to build the next great oil company today, or shoe manufacturing company, or any other mature industry where there are strong incumbents. So it pays to be looking for the NEXT big one, not ones that have already passed. If you can be the only expert around when it does hit then you’re positioned well to capitalize. This requires you to toil away in a particular industry when a lot of people probably think you’re wasting your time.

I feel like the internet still has lots of untapped potential, and it’s probably one of your best opportunities for generating wealth today. But it’s starting to feel a bit mature at times.

So that begs the question: what do you think is going to be the next big thing?

For me I see some of these being complete game changers where people will build huge amounts of wealth. See if you agree with my predictions. Maybe you can get in early on one of these…

• genetic engineering (crops, bacteria for various purposes, and most importantly humans to prevent various diseases)
• robotics (the military will increasingly become unmanned – casualties are more acceptable if they’re robots)
• artificial intelligence (I think Jeff Hawkins and his company Numenta have a good chance of solving this in the next 5-10 years, btw it will not be like terminator, the part of our brain which accounts for desires and motives is very old and easy to replicate or leave out of a robot, the hard part is the neo-cortex which other mammals don’t have and is good at learning to make good predictions – this would definitely be a game changer – for more check out his excellent book On Intelligence)
• Renewable energy, in particular solar and electric vehicles

What do you think will be the next big thing?

From time to time I get in touch with various readers of this blog who are “Breaking Free” in their own way.

Please take a minute to check out their respective sites below and give them a look! It’s always pays to get around like minded people and see what you can learn.

• Gordie Rogers is an entrepreneur living in Tianjin, China and has built various web businesses
• Andrew is just graduating and debating how to navigate corporate America vs. the world of entrepreneurship
• John Bardos is runs JetSetCitizen.com and is living in Japan
• Erica Douglass sold her web hosting business for over $1M after coming to silicon valley in 1999 and is now a full time entrepreneur
• Manuel Zeh is currently traveling the world indefinitely and is a world class pianist. He has lived in dozens of countries (over 30 now?)
• Mike McCoy created CollegeTownMenus.com and is in the process of breaking free
• Gaurav Khandelwal helps companies launch new products and services online at the ChaiOne blog and has worked with numerous fortune 500 companies
• Andy Liu is an experienced angel investor and dispenses lots of wisdom to first time entrepreneurs
• Neil Patel is a self made millionaire having started a number of web businesses
• Charles Cohn runs a (somewhat) competing site at VarsityTutor.com and is a brilliant guy to brainstorm with
• Philip Arthur Moore is a freelancer living in Vietnam and fellow Rice University alum

These are just a few that I know of and there really is a “movement” going on right now of people who’ve realized working for someone else isn’t the end goal of life.

Who are your favorite entrepreneurs to listen to?

Last weekend I took a day trip to Tigre, Argentina which is a little town on a river delta about an hour outside Buenos Aires. I went with some people who live in the same house, and met some new people along the way. It has nice boat trips, restaurants, and some boardwalk/themepark type stuff.

It was a fun outing. I looked at some tourist packages that charged $75 or $100 USD to take a trip to Tigre. But my Argentine friends said it was a waste of money and i should just take the train and get a boat when I got there.

They turned out to be right. The train ticket was a whopping 1.35 pesos (or 36 cents USD) and the boat ride was 18 pesos (less than 5 USD). Glad I didn’t take that “tour” for Americans!

Here is some video I shot:

Audio is by hisboyelroy via ccmixter.org.

Update On UniversityTutor.com

My transition back to the old business model of monthly subscribers is now complete. I’ve already started to recover some subscribers. I’m split testing 2 price points right now of $9.95 per month or $89.95 per year vs $5 per month or $45 per year. I’ll report back the results on that after a few months collecting data.

It feels good to be back on track with that – the water wheel is running again! To transition I simply put together an email for all tutors. Nobody was upset by the change like last time and the response has largely been positive.

My next goal will be to get UniversityTutor going in some more countries. I’m going to start with English speaking countries first because it’s a major amount of work to internationalize a website into a bunch of languages. But there are still plenty of places to start (England, Canada, Australia, large parts of Europe, etc).

I’ll then probably do another marketing round to university students there.

First step will be to import this huge free database of cities around the world (thanks to MaxMind.com for open sourcing it). This will help with the SEO for each new city so that a page is created for all tutors who sign up there.

Sometimes it’s easy to take things for granted and forget how good you have it. This morning I had to pinch myself. If I had been following the “normal” life plan I’d have woken up at 7AM this morning and gone do a job I probably hated. Instead I woke up at noon in Buenos Aires and went to work for myself.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

As you might have seen a few weeks ago, I posted about how the new UniversityTutor.com business model wasn’t working very well. Revenue has fallen by about half during this time.

Also, it’s not just the summer time effect. There are still a fairly large number of contacts going through the site (see below). Even taking this into account, it does not look good.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about it over the last week, and I’ve decided it’s probably time to cut my losses on the “online payments” business model and go back to the subscription model I was using before. Adoption of the online payment system has been very low – and most people aren’t using it (probably a combination of the fact that is less convenient, and also to avoid the fee).

At least I know that my previous business model was working fairly well and growing steadily – and this test to see if I could beat it has just about reached it’s conclusion (2 months).

I surveyed some of the tutors this week to get their feedback, and you can read some reactions there.

Read the rest of this entry »

Scott Adam’s has a great post out today on how teamwork can hurt your productivity.

I personally despise working in teams and rarely if ever do it.

If I need to get something done:

• Outsource it to a contractor

If I need to figure out what to do:

• Brainstorm it with select mentors and friends

“Friends” also includes making a blog post and getting feedback from people that way.

It’s better to be the sole decision maker on any project.  Otherwise too much time is lost in keeping everyone on the team up to date and making sure their feelings don’t get hurt.

It’s also much more efficient to not have to justify your ideas to other people and try to convince them.  If I’m convinced, or I think someone has given me some good advice, I just start working on it right away without delay.

I think it’s a mistake to ever say “hey can you two be in charge of XYZ?”  If you watch The City or The Apprentice you’ve seen examples of this gone wrong.  The same is true in planning a birthday party or night on the town.  Pick one person to be in charge or you’ll get drama, not results.

What do you think about teamwork?

Update: Seth Godin agrees “Only one person in charge at a time”

For the last year or two I’ve been hosting this blog (and others) on 1and1 Hosting with a shared hosting plan. While it was very inexpensive (about $10 per mont) the performance has been seriously lacking lately.

On a regular basis I would come to the homepage, or try to log into the backend, only to find the entire site was down or unresponsive. So I haven’t been very happy with 1and1.

It would usually come back up fairly quickly as 1and1 would reboot the server quite often, but it was frustrating and very slow to use. If I was getting frustrated using my own site, then I imagine many users as well.

So I finally bit the bullet and moved several blogs over to my hosting account on SliceHost. My hosting plan with SliceHost is a virtual private server (VPS) which should offer better performance. I already had this account because I was using it to host UniversityTutor.com (Ruby On Rails apps require more than what a shared plan can offer), and the extra capacity should be enough to run StartBreakingFree.com and HomeworkHelpBlog.com along side it.

In case you didn’t know, there are basically 3 tiers of web hosting you can get:

• Shared – this is the cheapest and lowest performance, basically it means perhaps dozens (or more) websites are all running off the same web server
• VPS – this the mid range both in price and performance and mimics a private server by running less than a dozen “virtual|” operating systems on one server. You get a private IP address, root access, and freedom to change whatever you want so there is more control.
• Private Server – this is the most expensive and most performance. Also the most freedom – it’s an entire webserver to yourself. It’s just that someone else manages it to make sure it has electricity and reliable internet at all times.

Read the rest of this entry »

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