There are so many people calling themselves “Social Media Experts” these days it is ridiculous. 99% of them are full of shit. Despite all the jargon they will spit  about  gaining twitter followers, or building your Facebook fanpage, or using Tumblr or Pinterest to drive highly converting traffic to your website, there is only ONE thing that matters for your business when it comes to social media. You no longer control the message That’s it. [...]

Not all Investment Money is created Equal There’s no two ways about it, we’re in a tech bubble. It has cooled down a little but there is still a lot of dumb money floating around just looking for somewhere to go. What is dumb money? Dumb money is money provided by people who can bring no other value to you other than money itself. Its often the easiest type of money to get in bubbles [...]

Ukulele Underground was massively unprofitable for its first 3 years. The funny thing is that we never knew it, so we just kept going. It’s one of those things where I think back on now and just laugh and shake my head, but I can’t get over the fact that if we knew what we were doing, we probably would have quit a long time ago and never got to where we are today. Let [...]

I was fortunate to be flown to Oahu to last month to attend a software industry skills development panel. It was a great experience as I got to meet a lot of people who are passionate about the same things as me; entrepreneurship, tech startups, developing a software based industry to transition Hawaii away from its heavy dependence on tourism (which I personally have a long standing beef with).  It sadly was the first time [...]

Something strange happens as we grow older; we become deathly afraid of failure. Though brought into this world fearless, we’re conditioned over time that failure is bad, failure is something to be avoided at all cost, that failure can be avoided if you “just do your homework”. This fear often prevents us from doing the things we always wanted to do. We may get very excited about something yet after spending a little time talking [...]

I have to admit, when I first started hearing all this buzz about Jessica Mah a few years ago, I didn’t really get what all the hype was about. Sure, I guess she’s a girl…who’s really young, who can program and launched a few web startups with very little money… but I didn’t see the difference between her and all the guys who have done the same. Not only that, others have done it and [...]

I’ve been tossing around an idea in my head for a while to create something that will help inspire and guide a new generation of entrepreneurs, artists, and movement leaders. Inspired by the work done by Andrew Warner at Mixergy.com and Jason Calacanis at This Week in Startups, I want to start interviewing entrepreneurs who’s ventures were built on passion. I hope to accomplish a few things by doing these interviews: I want to champion [...]

So many people like to talk about how to use social media for business and I just wanted to give an example of an exchange I had today with site5, a hosting company that I have worked with a lot throughout the past year. Here’s some background information. On May 1st, the main server for Ukulele Underground which is hosted by Godaddy (we signed up prior to learning about site5) was hacked and a malware [...]

I can honestly say that my one of my strongest passions in life is business. More specifically the early stages of business. The genesis, and creation of something tangible from basically nothing. Although I am not anywhere near what I would consider a success yet, I feel I’ve accumulated a ton of knowledge and experience from my many failures and few successes throughout my professional life. I think many of my friends realize this as [...]

In my first post of the new year, instead of talking more about myself, I’d like to point out a few people who I think should be watched in 2010. I fancy myself as someone who can identify the “it factor”. There are a few I stumbled across in 2009 who were just getting their personal brands going and I think can really kill it in 2010 and create legitimate businesses around their content. Although [...]