I’m delighted to be joined by Dan Norris, whose book “The 7 Day Startup” had a tremendous impact over on this side of the pond when it was released. Dan is an award winning content marketer and the author of the bestselling business books “The 7 Day Startup”, “Content Machine”, “Create Or Hate” and “Operation Brewery”. If you haven’t read “The 7 Day Startup” and you’re interested in business, go and get it now. It’s amazing.
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The Dan Norris Interview
Nicola: In June 2014, after failing at entrepreneurship for seven years, he founded WPCurve.com, a worldwide team of WordPress developers providing unlimited small fixed and support 24/7 for $69 a month. It became profitable in just 23 days and 14 months later has 21 staff, 500 customers, and continues to grow at 15-20% a month.
Dan is a passionate content marketer and has created 600 plus pieces of content around entrepreneurship, WordPress, and online marketing. In 2013, he was voted Australia’s best small business blogger by the readers of Telstra’s Smarter Business Ideas magazine.
In 2014, Dan released his book The 7 Day Startup, which became a top 10 bestseller in three Amazon categories, and I know personally has changed the life of entrepreneurs across the globe. Welcome to the call, Dan. How are you?
Dan: I’m very good. I’m a bit flattered after that intro.
Nicola: No, it totally is true. I can’t remember how it came on my radar. I think my sister Sarah alerted me to it. She was reading it and she was in the middle of trying to get something going and it just had such tremendous effect on her. I bought it as well and read it in a weekend. The clarity. I honestly think it’s the best book since the Lean Startup books for new and aspiring entrepreneurs.
Dan: That’s very nice of you to say. I really wasn’t sure when I pulled the trigger to put it up there. I really had absolutely no idea whether anyone was going to grab it. What’s happened since has been a big surprise.
Nicola: I’m sure. Let’s go back. Let’s go back. Obviously I’ve read your story in the book, but I want you to share with my listeners in 84 countries now how you became an entrepreneur, what kind of background you came from, and how you got through all those years when it just wasn’t working. Tell us all about you.
Dan: You’ve mentioned the seven years of running my previous business, which was a web agency. I think I probably wanted to be an entrepreneur a long time before that. Probably another six years before that when I was at university, but I didn’t launch anything. I kind of came up with ideas reasonably often and I did subjects at university and did planning and that kind of thing, but I didn’t actually launch anything. 2006 it was, when I was 26, I was working in a good job and I always thought I would be an entrepreneur at some stage, so I decided that that was the time and I left a very good job where I was getting paid very well, I didn’t have to work all that hard, I was getting a promotion just about every year, and I didn’t really have anything to go to. Luckily, I had a wife who was earning an income and we could get by if everything went really, really bad.
I just left and I started building websites for people and I just slaved away at that for seven years. Just could never really make it work. I was always able to make enough to pay a really small wage, but I was never able to grow it really significantly. Even in year seven, I wasn’t making any more profit than I was making in year one. It was just making more revenue, but more money, more problems type thing.
Listen to the interview for Dan’s full story…
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If you prefer to read, Dan’s full interview featuring his mind, marketing and money tips for entrepreneurs can be discovered in the book “Mindset, Marketing & Money – Vol 1” by Nicola Cairncross, available globally on Amazon UK | Amazon US