I started IdeaMensch about six years ago because I wanted to learn from entrepreneurs. I didn’t really want to be an entrepreneur but was obsessed with how entrepreneurs of all kinds seemed to be the absolute best at bringing ideas to life. At the time I was in working for ad agencies, where most ideas ended up on the proverbial creative graveyard.
IdeaMensch has come along way since then. We have interviewed over 2,000 entrepreneurs, organized 50+ events and drove across every state in America. Not bad for a side project.
A couple of years ago I actually quit my day job to pursue IdeaMensch full time. Considering it was my first year as a full-time entrepreneur, we did really well. IdeaMensch grew in leaps and bounds and we generated close to six figures in annual revenues. Unfortunately, I stopped loving working on IdeaMensch as I was constantly on the verge of burnout. I love entrepreneurship, but that doesn’t meant I should be an entrepreneur. If you’ve talked to me IdeaMensch, you probably heard me say that I want IdeaMensch to be a 100-year company. I want to run IdeaMensch until the end of my days and then hopefully pass it along to someone as passionate about it as I.
Growing traffic and making money, while nice, really isn’t my goal. I want IdeaMensch to help people bring their ideas to life and I want to do that for a really long time.
Last year I went the wrong way with that whole idea. I tried to make it a bit “too” sustainable. I hired a developer and turned IdeaMensch into what felt to be more of a database. It generated a ton of eyeballs (good) and with that revenues went up significantly (good, too). Unfortunately, I wasn’t super jazzed with how the interviews looked anymore and it was darn near impossible for me to make improvements myself anymore. IdeaMensch was loaded up with legacy code and I had very little ability to make changes myself. But IdeaMensch continued to grow in both traffic and revenue, without just about any work on my part. It was a well oiled machine, a machine I really didn’t enjoy operating anymore.
So, late last year, I decided to do something drastic.
Start over.
I scrapped the old site and design, along with the thousands of dollars I invested into custom code, and moved IdeaMensch to a whole new platform. A platform called New Rainmaker (affiliate link) by the guys at Copyblogger. It’s pretty darn powerful, with lots of bells and whistles that I currently don’t even need. If you have never checked it out, you should. It really has made building a web business fun for me again.
A part of that, we just launched a new ebook, our first paid ebook. It’s called 99 Daily Habits for Entrepreneurs and examines the habits that help successful entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life. How they think about productivity. How they structure their work days. How they maintain their health and sanity.
The ebook contains 99 daily habits, direct quotes taken directly out of some of our best interviews in 2014.
The ebook is only $5 and if you send me some feedback, I’ll send your our next ebook for free. It’s my goal to do at least three or four of these in 2015 and I’d love to use your feedback to make each one better than the last.
Check it out.
My vision for IdeaMensch is to keep asking entrepreneurs smart questions and then passing along their lessons to other entrepreneurs to benefit from. Thanks to this fresh start, I am as excited about that as I was on day one.
Thanks for being part of our community.
-Mario
Links mentioned in this post:
- The New Rainmaker Platform
- Copyblogger
- 99 Daily Habits for Entrepreneurs
Mario Schulzke is the Founder of ideamensch, which he started a decade ago to learn from entrepreneurs and give them a platform for their ideas.