How A Tech Writer Built A $3+ Mil Per Year Business By Not Focusing On Business – with Anand Shimpi
In my pre-interview, Anand Shimpi warned me that he didn’t care as much about business as my other interviewees. I liked that. Mixergy can’t give you a real view of entrepreneurship if everyone I interview thinks and works exactly like I do. We need a mix of approaches.
So how did Anand build AnandTech, a tech review and analysis site, generates over $3 million in sales a year if its founder isn’t especially into sales or business? By focusing obsessively on the technology his site discusses. You can see this single-minded obsession from the start, when he ran ads on the site and got paid not in cash, but in hardware. And it explains why he keeps working on the site, even though he could sell it and retire.
Okay, passion is great, but how exactly does he make sales? How does he get an audience? How does the every day part of business happen? You’ll hear him explain it in the interview. For now, I’ll give you this short answer: he lets others who care about those things take care of them.
Anand Shimpi is the founder of AnandTech, the leading IT source for hardware analysis and industry news.
Before we get started I have to tell you about my three sponsors. The first is Wu Foo. You get forms and surveys that you can embed into your website and they look so beautiful that I use them on my wedding site and they’re so functional that I have them on my contacts site, on Mixergy dot com. Check out Wu Foo dot com. Second is Shopify dot com where you go to get a new online store that you can manage easily online and sell directly to your customers and take orders and credit cards and all that. Shopify dot com. Let me be clear about that: Shopify dot com. Finally there’s Grasshopper dot com, the phone system that I use and entrepreneurs love because it has all the features of the big robust systems but you can manage it online and you can use your current phone system with it. I use my current iPhone and I use the landline here in the office with Grasshopper. Not that I like the landline but I’ve got it so why not? Grasshopper dot com and here’s the...
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