Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

Awkward title, I know. I received an email from a reader that wondered why I’ve been getting all “data crazy” on them lately with our posts. It is a bit unusual for me.

I’ve never written a business plan (yet sold two businesses so far – one for $3,000,000 and one for several hundred thousand). I’ve always thought “creating” all that data was a waste of time. Trying to come up with projections five years from now on a business that has zero revenue is a fool’s game. I’d much rather spend that time working on the business itself and let the results create the data.

These days the only reason I would spend time doing one is if I wanted to raise venture funds or solicit investors. I don’t see either in my future at this point.

I’ll be honest, even with all the data we’ve been collecting recently, Emile and I review it all and ultimately make a decision that we just have a “gut feel” is right. But I’ve never thought the two things were exclusive. The data helps me formulate the gut feeling, or at least adds to it.

I’ve worked for big organizations (City of Los Angeles) and I see how data and the collection of it can bring decision-making to an absolute crawl. No one wants to make a bad decision so instead the engine continues to grind out statistics and data that are suppose to help the process. It rarely does.

I tend to rely on my gut more than I probably should, but it has served me well in the past. So I’ll continue to spit out our data and show it to you. Perhaps you’ll see something I don’t and will point it out to me.

My gut tells me it’s the right thing to do.

So which drives your decisions about pricing content? Creating new content? Marketing content?

Intuition or data?

starting a membership site