ChecklistApp Update: Twitter Sign In, Private Checklists And News
February 13th, 2012
Robert Dempsey
Today I have a quick update for you on ChecklistApp.net.
I’m happy to announce that we’ve made three large additions to the site:
- Twitter – you can sign into ChecklistApp using your Twitter account.
- Private Checklists – any checklist you create when signed in is private. It won’t show up in the list of public checklists, ever.
- Updates – an “updates” page keeps you in the know with all the latest additions to the site. They’re going to be coming hot and heavy so stay tuned
Sign in today with your Twitter account and start creating some private checklists.
Also over the past few days I added descriptions to checklists as well as updating our help page. If you have any questions about ChecklistApp put them in the comments below and I’ll be happy to answer them and put them on the site.
What’s In The Hopper?
Well speaking of updates, here’s what’s on my to do list for ChecklistApp:
- Sign in with Facebook – in a day or two you’ll be able to sign in using your Facebook account.
- Sign in with LinkedIn – for the business types who stay away from Facebook and Twitter (for perhaps understandable reasons, or perhaps not
) you’ll be able to sign in with your LinkedIn account - Sign in with Google – the new Borg of the Internet, soon you’ll be able to use your Borg, I mean Google, account to sign in as well. If you’re like me and have more than a few (like 10 or more) you’ll have to pick one and run with it
- Make a private checklist public – if you have a private checklist you want to share with the world you’ll be able to make that happen with a check of a box.
Now I know what you’re thinking! You’re thinking…
This Is All Free?!
Yes it is! So far 
ChecklistApp will be working on the freemium model, meaning you’ll get the core features for free – making, saving, sharing and printing checklists – and then pay for more advanced features.
Oh yes, there will be advanced features. Many, and they will be good.
Like what you ask?
Stay tuned.
Running A Services Business While Living Overseas Guide – Background
February 12th, 2012
Robert Dempsey
When I was deep into Internet Marketing (the information product selling kind) everyone wanted to have the Internet lifestyle, which typically meant working from wherever you wanted. Thanks to the Internet this is possible, however it’s not easy. In this post I want to shed some light on what it takes to have a successful services business while living outside of your home country based on my experience.
Who This Guide Is For
Much of what you’ll read in this guide applies to people single or married. However I’m married and have a child, so I’m writing from that point of view, not someone galavanting over the world getting trashed at bars, acting supremely stupid, giving their home country a bad name.
This guide is for people interested in living a year or more in a foreign country.
Laying The Foundation
This post is part 1 and lays the foundation for the rest of the guide. In this guide you’ll see how to:
- Determine the structure of your business
- Create a list of services that you will be providing
- Formulate a plan of action for getting and keeping clients, including content, SEO and community building strategies
- Set up a website that represents you
- Ensure you get paid regardless of where you are
You’ll be provided a reading list. If you don’t already have an Amazon Kindle it’s time to get one. Having a reference library at your fingertips is a must for every entrepreneur.
You’ll also be provided a list of tools that will help you be more productive. I use a Mac however I’ll try to find appropriate alternatives for the PC.
What This Guide Doesn’t Cover
You won’t find specific legal or accounting advice. I’m a fan of hiring professionals for those aspects of my business and am happy to pay accordingly. I suggest you do the same.
I won’t be suggesting what business you should be in. That’s entirely up to you to decide. What I will provide are examples of services businesses being run successfully by people living overseas. If you have your own let’s add it to the list!
So with that said let’s begin!
How We Came To Live In Thailand
During Thanksgiving week 2010 my family and I left Minnesota and headed to Thailand. At the time I was in the process of shutting down my web development firm – Atlantic Dominion Solutions – and trying to decide what to do with my current project, Life Of The Freelancer, which wasn’t making any money.
My wife had been teaching Thai cooking and our daughter was about to turn 3.
We had wanted to move to Thailand earlier however riots in Bangkok (where we would fly into) put those plans on hold. When thing settled down we were able to head over.
The reasons we wanted to live in Thailand are few but important:
- So our daughter could learn Thai, spend time with the Thai side of the family, and experience Thai culture
- So my wife could learn cooking from the various regions of Thailand and bring that experience to her cooking classes
If you didn’t guess already my wife is from Thailand. That’s important to know because when it comes to your choice of country to live in there are a number of important things to know.
10 Important Things To Know Before Choosing A Country
If my wife wasn’t from Thailand I would not be able to live here as successfully as I am. We’re able to stay away from the tourist areas where the prices are higher and she can get us better deals on many items.
Also if someone tells you that a lot of people in Thailand speak English they are incorrect. The common person on the street where you buy food (if you want to save money) speaks no English whatsoever. The extent of my Thai is asking where the bathroom is and how much things cost. Not quite enough to get along on my own.
So before selecting a country at a minimum find out the following ten things:
- How much English is really spoken in the country
- How difficult it may be for you to learn the native language, and how much you need to know to survive
- The average price of a meal
- The cost of renting an apartment in a non-shady part of town
- Whether or not you’ll need to have your own transportation – bicycle, motorcycle or car
- How much public transportation costs, and how prevalent it is
- The quality of schools in the area, and if they teach in English
- The cost of schools
- The quality and cost of an Internet connection
- Visa requirements
Many people have told me how awesome it must be to live in Thailand. Don’t get me wrong I really like living here minus a few cultural issues. As long as you aren’t here to change things you won’t be as frustrated, especially as an American.
In the next post I’ll answer those 10 questions above for Thailand.
Subscribe To Get The Full Guide
Be sure to subscribe to the blog to get all parts of the guide as they’re published. There’s a nifty little form below this post you can use to subscribe.
What Questions Do You Have That I Can Answer?
Let me know in the comments below and I’ll see that as many as possible get answered in the guide.
Today I Launched ChecklistApp.net to Make, Share, Save And Print Checklists
February 9th, 2012
Robert Dempsey
Ever have an itch that no one seems to be scratching? You find that you need a tool that does just one thing really well but that tool doesn’t exist? Instead, all you find are existing apps that kind of do what you want but don’t go far enough?
That’s where creating and launching your own application comes in.
I’ve been told and found from experience that some of the best applications online today were created by people that couldn’t find tools that did what they needed. I ran into that problem myself last week. Here’s what happened.
The (Short) Back Story
Last week I needed to create a checklist for a client of mine. Sounds simple right? So what to use to create said checklist. Hmmmm…
I’m on a Mac so I could either use Pages (word processor) or perhaps Numbers (spreadsheet). I could use the excellent OmniOutliner however that didn’t give me the look I wanted to provide to my client.
So what’s a geek to do?! Build an app!
So that’s what I did.
ChecklistApp.net Is Born
I’m happy to announce the launch of ChecklistApp.net today. With ChecklistApp you can do a few things: make, share, save and print checklists. Head on over there and give it a try!
From Idea To App In 3 Days
What you’ll see today is the culmination of three days of work and everything I’ve read up on design until this point. A lot of the same thinking is going into the upcoming Banyan Tree HQ, so stay tuned for that.
One geeky note is that the site uses something called “responsive design” which means you create a website once and as the size of the screen changes the elements on the page change position. In plain English that means you don’t need to create a separate website just for mobile devices.
To try it out open up ChecklistApp.net and make your web browser window smaller. Watch what happens with the navigation at the top of the page as well as the sidebar. Geeky isn’t it?
Now back to the main point of this section…
So how do you launch an app in 3 days? It helps if you can code. For the sake of this post let’s say you can sling some code. Here’s a short outline for getting your app live:
- Come up with the idea
- Mindmap out what you want the app to do (the less the better)
- Build it using Ruby on Rails and existing software (I used a few Ruby on Rails gems and Bootstrap from Twitter)
- Find a programmer friend to set up a virtual private server (VPS) for you so you don’t FUBAR anything since you haven’t launched an app yourself in more than 5 years. My friend Marc Jeanson at Redline Software helped me out with that
- Launch the app
- Write a blog post and tell the world!
If you plan on making money from your app then you want to be sure profit is on that list somewhere
Give ChecklistApp.net A Go
I’ll be adding more functionality to the site including sending a checklist via email, adding your own header graphic, and more.
Please head on over to ChecklistApp.net, give it a go, and let me know what you think.
See you there!
In this entrepreneur interview Tara Hunt shares her experience moving from the Valley to the East Coast to co-found Buyosphere, and how their members are changing the direction of the business.
Who uses the site might just surprise you.
Learn more about Buyosphere
If you’re looking for great deals or interesting pieces definitely check out Buyosphere. All you have to do is ask.
Here’s a preview of what you’ll see there:
Relationship Nurturing: What To Do After Getting Their Business Card
February 3rd, 2012
Pete Machalek
You’ve done your networking job right. You’re back from the event with a pocket full of business cards. Now what? You’re not sure if it’s appropriate to call them immediately with a follow-up conversation, but you don’t want to just put them in a pile because you know you’ll forget about them. You want to nurture the relationship, but there are only so many hours in the day, and you can’t spend all of them in one-on-one conversations with everyone you meet.
There are a few things that I suggest you do.
First off, consider who you want to stay in touch with. There are two schools of thought about this. You might want to restrict your potential relationships inside of your target markets to maximize your efficiency. Does it make sense to invest your limited time, energy, and attention on someone outside of these markets? Maybe, because (as the other school of thought goes) everyone you meet knows a lot of additional people. And if you win someone over, you might gain access to this network of people that they know.
But how do you win someone over that well? By planting yourself into their brains as a source of value, or potential value, to them. If your networking conversation went the way we suggest, you’ve already begun that process, by leading conversations not necessarily about yourself, but about them – finding out who they are, what their current challenges are, and what their goals are. Then thinking about how you or someone you know can get them from where they are now to where they say they want to be, or at least closer to that place.
Even if you can’t directly help or immediately connect them to someone who can help, you’re still succeeding with them because you’re planting yourself in their minds as someone who wants to help, and someone who potentially can help in the future by keeping your eyes open for people who can help them.
So, after each conversation, take notes about how this person wants to be helped. If you can help them by connecting them to someone they know they want to be connected with, make that connection.
Then, send them a message like this:
[First Name]:
I really enjoyed our conversation at [location]. I’m happy to keep an eye out for [people you’re looking for] for you. In the meantime, to make it easier to keep in touch, I’m adding you to my contact list, which means you’re going to start receiving occasional messages from me. If these touch-bases ever become unwelcome, feel free to “unsubscribe,” but in the meantime, please feel free to keep me abreast of who and what you’re looking for so I can continue to keep an eye out for you.
This will set the table for you to start sending them, and everyone on your contact list, occasional messages that share your expertise. It really doesn’t matter what you’re an expert in. If you network, you’re looking to help someone, and you’re looking to help them with some kind of expertise.
- Write about who you help and how you help them.
- Write about past success stories.
- Write about nuggets of value that you find as you continue to build your expertise.
Share this expertise with the people on your list. If they can’t directly benefit from it, they might know someone who can, and they’ll indirectly benefit from sharing it with those people.
So if you don’t already have a CRM system that allows you to mass email your contacts, you’re going to want to get one. I recommend two excellent resources that specialize in helping subject-matter experts share their expertise, called SendPepper and OfficeAutoPilot.
And if you’re going to write these messages, you might as well put them online in a permanent place, like a blog. WordPress is an excellent place to go to start, and if you really want to get it set up to work for your precise needs, you’ll want to talk to this guy.
Regardless of what you write, bear this cardinal rule in mind (and note that it’s consistent with what I said above): Be a source of value to your contacts. Be an expert, and give your expertise away. Share what you know. Plant yourself in the minds of everyone on your list as a source of value to them, and they’ll value hearing from you. They’ll want to have that relationship with you, and every relationship will represent a source of potential value back to you.
