6 ms·

Mixergy Premium

62 points by AndrewWarner 14y ago

badalyan 14y ago
One of my best investments as a startup entrepreneur. I begin each day with my "Mixergy Morning". Not only do I gain deep insight, I'm also provided with enormous amounts of motivation for the day.
cpuspin 14y ago
Startup / business content is not something I'm short on lately. There's a ton of free stuff I have yet to consume, and so spending $25 /mnth doesn't seem necessary for me.
- brandnewlow 14y ago
  Andrew's stuff is in a league all it's own.
antonioevans 14y ago
I evangelize Andrew's stuff to the NYC Startup community all the time. It's like one of those secret clubs in Chinatown which you need the password. I just tell them : Mixergy
dools 14y ago
I can't imagine a more emphatic Mixergy fan than myself. I wrote a post at the beginning of this year[1] with a list of things you can do to afford the paltry sum Andrew charges for his content. I don't even pay $25/month, I pay $200 per year. The content I've seen on Mixergy has not only helped me refine the pitch for my products, but also my service and consulting business which helps me make money to build the products. In fact, I get work by simply pitching people the exact same systems I learn on Mixergy - basically taking what I've learned and applying it to other people's businesses. It's like having a degree. Someone introduced me the other day as the "walking, talking Mixergy king". Like in entrepreneurial circles, it's so well known that having an encyclopedic knowledge of the content is tantamount to having a qualification. If you're not already a Mixergy premium member, get in now while the price is this low. It's the single best source of business advice in existence. [1]http://www.workingsoftware.com.au/page/A_list_of_things_you_can_do_to_afford_Mixergy_Premium_in_2012 http://www.workingsoftware.com.au/page/A_list_of_things_you_...
drewcrawford 14y ago
I am a Mixergy fan, but I have been debating about canceling. It is a great show, and Andrew is wonderful. That's the problem. It's easier for me to listen to other people's success stories than to write my own. I am concerned that I spend too much time learning how to be successful and not enough time actually working on being successful. Rarely at this point do I feel that the barrier is because there is some knowledge that I did not know, but rather because of failure to ship. It's possible that my perception is wrong, but obviously I do not think so, or else I would change my perception. If I was able to contain it to one hour a week, it would be fine. But the problem is finding that one interview that is most optimal this week. He turns out too many high-quality interviews even to evaluate. It's hard for me to evaluate objectively what is the right balance between genuinely helpful consumption and genuinely valuable production. I seem to oscillate quite a bit from week to week, and so I wonder to what extent my opinion is reactionary. But my thinking lately is that I do not make effective use of the resources I have available to me. Improving the quality of the signal is only good if it makes a net improvement at some point, it is no good if the signal runs straight into earth ground. I am not saying that consumption is non-useful at all, we are at different stages, etc. I am just wondering if I have personally been overestimating the utility of consumption to the detriment of production. I also do not have a commute, so I do not have the "how do I make use of this dead time?" question that swombat seems to have. That may play a role in my analysis.
- dools 14y ago
  Oh hey there :) How's your biz going since we last talked? We should catch up again some time ...
- AndrewWarner 14y ago
  Drew, what's your biggest challenge with shipping?
  - drewcrawford 14y ago
    I could write you a small novel, but the short version is, by analogy, the knapsack problem. I can fit so many tasks into my bag for [time unit]. Which ones do I pick to meet my goals? On what basis? This problem can be cloaked in many different ways: What feature do I implement right now? Should I go to the Python meetup tomorrow? When should I read the sci-fi book that guy recommended? Do I push for the refactor that the code base really needs or the refactor that the client can afford? Should I be answering the phone more or answering it less? Should I cancel my Mixergy subscription? If I can time-afford to attend N events, what is the right mix between developer and non-developer events? I make a hundred micro-decisions a day that lead to me not shipping. For each decision or decision category, I can give you some reason that makes some amount of internal sense in its immediate context. But ultimately I think I am incapable of really rationally understanding how tens of thousands of tiny choices affect my trajectory over the course of a year at decision-time. The second generation of the problem is that other people have the problem, and it has a trickle-down effect. Jim irrationally wants to put out a short-term fire vs the long-term solution to the problem. He may do this over my protest. How interested am I in shipping the project, and how interested am I in not butting heads with Jim? It is extremely hard to get the mix right between acquiescing and putting out the fires, educating Jim, and cutting him loose, and that is literally the difference between accomplishing nothing and shipping dozens of products a year. It's really a problem with rationality in decision-making.
jonathanjaeger 14y ago
I've listened to Andrew's interviews several times. He's the best at prodding to get an answer in the nicest way possible, and sometimes that leads to the most insightful comments from the entrepreneurs.
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
I like and respect swombat, and Andrew seems like a great guy who is on a mission, but this subject is a lot more complex than just people randomly nay-saying anything that gets posted on HN (which happens). The problem is that there is simply way too many people wanting way too much money for stuff. Everybody that has a business model that includes startups is doing some kind of Chinese Math that begins with "if we can take 1 million startups and help them make 50K per year, and then we only ask for 20% of their profit in return...." The problem is that most startups fail, even with the super-awesome help you are providing. That means there's no money for anything. There are far too many companies selling the dream of doing X instead of X itself. So yes, I can provide you with a master class on product positioning, and hell, at the end of the day you can even feel like you've learned something and took lots of action items, but did I actually help you position your product? Or just give you stuff to do in the "product position" space? Acceptance critera has to be either "this mandatory overhead" or "this directly generated X amount of sales". That's it. Leads don't count (unless you've established a pipeline and can demonstrate it works). Being pleased with content -- even having a great feeling after consuming content and picking up things you feel are really useful -- doesn't count. Like I said, I'm not trying to knock Andrew. For the few interviews I've seen, he's doing a bang-up job, and if the issue is just what to pay for quality entertainment, I'd much rather pay 20 bucks a month for that kind of content than something silly like a cable movie channel. I'm just saying that over a period of years I have grown exceptionally careful about spending money on anything. It's way too easy to spend more for stuff than you'll ever make back. Want to know where I feel like I've picked up the most value? Serendipity. Some guy posts a random link on HN. I'm doing a Google search on one thing and come across something else. Those kinds of things only happen once every year or two for me. If I had my way I'd make a big house and invite the top 100 scrappy entrepreneurs to live there while I just hung out. Now that would be worth making a sacrifice and taking a gamble. Once again, this has nothing to do with this particular offer. Some kinds of information transfer work best in an interview/publish-subscribe format. Some work best in a P2P, informal, indirect setting. To me at least, important startup lessons seem to fall into the second category.
- swombat 14y ago
  Paradoxically, I don't think Mixergy is most useful to the broke failing startup. Failing startups at that stage tend to be time-rich and cash-poor (I know, I've been there!). If that's where you are, I don't think Mixergy Premium is right for you. As for me, right now I am cash-rich (well, relatively) and time-poor. I barely find the time to do any of the important stuff. You know, like figuring out how to get leads out of linkedin and redoing our website to generate more leads. So for me, if I can pay some double-digit amount of dollars and make progress on those important objectives that have a bottom line impact of tens of thousands of dollars, as I said, it's a no-brainer. I know it's an easy argument to make, but if I sell a single client because of one of Mixergy's talks that will be worth £5-10k this year (based on our average claim size) - and that's not counting future years and other leads that may come from that client. And from following the instructions in the LinkedIn masterclass, I have already generated about half a dozen leads. Sure, maybe none of them will convert, but that's half a dozen more leads than I generated through LinkedIn ever. Sitting through a bunch of videos that teach you about stuff you can't really apply is a waste of your time and your $25/m. Sitting through a video that teaches you, in a concise manner, something you can use right now in your business is priceless. Anyway, so to summarise, Mixergy is gold dust for the time-poor and cash-rich, but not the time-rich and cash-poor.
BryanB55 14y ago
I'm a Mixergy premium subscriber and was at Andrews event in Austin during SXSW. It's mostly all great content but I must say I probably haven't logged in to listen to anything within the last 3 months or so because I've just been so busy and trying to focus on creating rather than spending so much time learning. I feel like I often go through phases where I'll learn a lot of new techniques and then spend time implementing but lately implementing has been taking up a lot of my time.
- dools 14y ago
  Do you download the audio? Even when I'm not actively studying Mixergy I constantly listen to both the interviews and courses while I do exercise. You'd be surprised how much sticks in your mind simply by osmosis.
WadeF 14y ago
Mixergy Premium is worth subscribing to simply because you know the content will be good and you don't have to wade through a bunch of random startup advice porn to get the good stuff. I've found it helpful to take notes and try to implement just one or two of the easiest things afterwards. The strategy has worked well and I more than recoup the monthly cost.
andrew_wc_brown 14y ago
Mixergy Premium is like a gym membership. You'll end up spending money on something you won't actually do because when it comes down to it you just have to do it.
sopooneo 14y ago
My complement and gripe: Mixergy is great. I listen to it because I enjoy it a lot. It's because I enjoy it so much that I tolerate the host projecting his insecurities onto his guests. Its interesting that Marc Maron's comedy podcast is a very near parallel. He is a good but slightly lesser known comedian who interviews masters of the craft about their histories and how they succeeded. But also parallel is Maron's tendency to frame his questions around his own neurosis, effectively assuming his guests deal with the same demons he does. To some extent both hosts are correct and we all struggle. But in both cases, they almost put words into their guests mouths. Again, Mixergy free and premium are well worth it and, if you read this Andrew, despite my unsolicited criticism, I do love your show and appreciate all the work it must take.
zacharywentz 14y ago
Mixergy is well worth the price. However, I just can't stand some of the marketing techniques implemented on the site. Almost everything feels like a landing page, and if I'm a paying subscriber, I feel like I should be sold to just a little bit less. That and the fact that the search and navigation is really atrocious. I can't find anything on the site after I've seen it. And in general it's just not obvious what to do on any given page, that isn't a marketing page of course.
mindcrime 14y ago
OK, I'll bite. It's only $25/month, and I got a good vibe from reading swombat's notes from the one course. I just signed up, and am looking forward to gaining some useful knowledge here. We (Fogbeam Labs[1]) are still in the "Customer Discovery" phase of Customer Development, and I'm hoping some of the material on Mixergy will: help with finding people who will participate in the CD process with us, and help us nail product/market fit. [1]: http://www.fogbeam.com http://www.fogbeam.com

62 points by AndrewWarner 14y ago

One of my best investments as a startup entrepreneur. I begin each day with my "Mixergy Morning". Not only do I gain deep insight, I'm also provided with enormous amounts of motivation for the day.

cpuspin 14y ago

Startup / business content is not something I'm short on lately. There's a ton of free stuff I have yet to consume, and so spending $25 /mnth doesn't seem necessary for me.

brandnewlow 14y ago
Andrew's stuff is in a league all it's own.

antonioevans 14y ago

I evangelize Andrew's stuff to the NYC Startup community all the time. It's like one of those secret clubs in Chinatown which you need the password. I just tell them : Mixergy

dools 14y ago

I can't imagine a more emphatic Mixergy fan than myself. I wrote a post at the beginning of this year[1] with a list of things you can do to afford the paltry sum Andrew charges for his content. I don't even pay $25/month, I pay $200 per year. The content I've seen on Mixergy has not only helped me refine the pitch for my products, but also my service and consulting business which helps me make money to build the products. In fact, I get work by simply pitching people the exact same systems I learn on Mixergy - basically taking what I've learned and applying it to other people's businesses. It's like having a degree. Someone introduced me the other day as the "walking, talking Mixergy king". Like in entrepreneurial circles, it's so well known that having an encyclopedic knowledge of the content is tantamount to having a qualification. If you're not already a Mixergy premium member, get in now while the price is this low. It's the single best source of business advice in existence. [1]http://www.workingsoftware.com.au/page/A_list_of_things_you_can_do_to_afford_Mixergy_Premium_in_2012 http://www.workingsoftware.com.au/page/A_list_of_things_you_...

drewcrawford 14y ago

I am a Mixergy fan, but I have been debating about canceling. It is a great show, and Andrew is wonderful. That's the problem. It's easier for me to listen to other people's success stories than to write my own. I am concerned that I spend too much time learning how to be successful and not enough time actually working on being successful. Rarely at this point do I feel that the barrier is because there is some knowledge that I did not know, but rather because of failure to ship. It's possible that my perception is wrong, but obviously I do not think so, or else I would change my perception. If I was able to contain it to one hour a week, it would be fine. But the problem is finding that one interview that is most optimal this week. He turns out too many high-quality interviews even to evaluate. It's hard for me to evaluate objectively what is the right balance between genuinely helpful consumption and genuinely valuable production. I seem to oscillate quite a bit from week to week, and so I wonder to what extent my opinion is reactionary. But my thinking lately is that I do not make effective use of the resources I have available to me. Improving the quality of the signal is only good if it makes a net improvement at some point, it is no good if the signal runs straight into earth ground. I am not saying that consumption is non-useful at all, we are at different stages, etc. I am just wondering if I have personally been overestimating the utility of consumption to the detriment of production. I also do not have a commute, so I do not have the "how do I make use of this dead time?" question that swombat seems to have. That may play a role in my analysis.

dools 14y ago
Oh hey there :) How's your biz going since we last talked? We should catch up again some time ...
AndrewWarner 14y ago
Drew, what's your biggest challenge with shipping?
- drewcrawford 14y ago
  I could write you a small novel, but the short version is, by analogy, the knapsack problem. I can fit so many tasks into my bag for [time unit]. Which ones do I pick to meet my goals? On what basis? This problem can be cloaked in many different ways: What feature do I implement right now? Should I go to the Python meetup tomorrow? When should I read the sci-fi book that guy recommended? Do I push for the refactor that the code base really needs or the refactor that the client can afford? Should I be answering the phone more or answering it less? Should I cancel my Mixergy subscription? If I can time-afford to attend N events, what is the right mix between developer and non-developer events? I make a hundred micro-decisions a day that lead to me not shipping. For each decision or decision category, I can give you some reason that makes some amount of internal sense in its immediate context. But ultimately I think I am incapable of really rationally understanding how tens of thousands of tiny choices affect my trajectory over the course of a year at decision-time. The second generation of the problem is that other people have the problem, and it has a trickle-down effect. Jim irrationally wants to put out a short-term fire vs the long-term solution to the problem. He may do this over my protest. How interested am I in shipping the project, and how interested am I in not butting heads with Jim? It is extremely hard to get the mix right between acquiescing and putting out the fires, educating Jim, and cutting him loose, and that is literally the difference between accomplishing nothing and shipping dozens of products a year. It's really a problem with rationality in decision-making.

jonathanjaeger 14y ago

I've listened to Andrew's interviews several times. He's the best at prodding to get an answer in the nicest way possible, and sometimes that leads to the most insightful comments from the entrepreneurs.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

I like and respect swombat, and Andrew seems like a great guy who is on a mission, but this subject is a lot more complex than just people randomly nay-saying anything that gets posted on HN (which happens). The problem is that there is simply way too many people wanting way too much money for stuff. Everybody that has a business model that includes startups is doing some kind of Chinese Math that begins with "if we can take 1 million startups and help them make 50K per year, and then we only ask for 20% of their profit in return...." The problem is that most startups fail, even with the super-awesome help you are providing. That means there's no money for anything. There are far too many companies selling the dream of doing X instead of X itself. So yes, I can provide you with a master class on product positioning, and hell, at the end of the day you can even feel like you've learned something and took lots of action items, but did I actually help you position your product? Or just give you stuff to do in the "product position" space? Acceptance critera has to be either "this mandatory overhead" or "this directly generated X amount of sales". That's it. Leads don't count (unless you've established a pipeline and can demonstrate it works). Being pleased with content -- even having a great feeling after consuming content and picking up things you feel are really useful -- doesn't count. Like I said, I'm not trying to knock Andrew. For the few interviews I've seen, he's doing a bang-up job, and if the issue is just what to pay for quality entertainment, I'd much rather pay 20 bucks a month for that kind of content than something silly like a cable movie channel. I'm just saying that over a period of years I have grown exceptionally careful about spending money on anything. It's way too easy to spend more for stuff than you'll ever make back. Want to know where I feel like I've picked up the most value? Serendipity. Some guy posts a random link on HN. I'm doing a Google search on one thing and come across something else. Those kinds of things only happen once every year or two for me. If I had my way I'd make a big house and invite the top 100 scrappy entrepreneurs to live there while I just hung out. Now that would be worth making a sacrifice and taking a gamble. Once again, this has nothing to do with this particular offer. Some kinds of information transfer work best in an interview/publish-subscribe format. Some work best in a P2P, informal, indirect setting. To me at least, important startup lessons seem to fall into the second category.

swombat 14y ago
Paradoxically, I don't think Mixergy is most useful to the broke failing startup. Failing startups at that stage tend to be time-rich and cash-poor (I know, I've been there!). If that's where you are, I don't think Mixergy Premium is right for you. As for me, right now I am cash-rich (well, relatively) and time-poor. I barely find the time to do any of the important stuff. You know, like figuring out how to get leads out of linkedin and redoing our website to generate more leads. So for me, if I can pay some double-digit amount of dollars and make progress on those important objectives that have a bottom line impact of tens of thousands of dollars, as I said, it's a no-brainer. I know it's an easy argument to make, but if I sell a single client because of one of Mixergy's talks that will be worth £5-10k this year (based on our average claim size) - and that's not counting future years and other leads that may come from that client. And from following the instructions in the LinkedIn masterclass, I have already generated about half a dozen leads. Sure, maybe none of them will convert, but that's half a dozen more leads than I generated through LinkedIn ever. Sitting through a bunch of videos that teach you about stuff you can't really apply is a waste of your time and your $25/m. Sitting through a video that teaches you, in a concise manner, something you can use right now in your business is priceless. Anyway, so to summarise, Mixergy is gold dust for the time-poor and cash-rich, but not the time-rich and cash-poor.

BryanB55 14y ago

I'm a Mixergy premium subscriber and was at Andrews event in Austin during SXSW. It's mostly all great content but I must say I probably haven't logged in to listen to anything within the last 3 months or so because I've just been so busy and trying to focus on creating rather than spending so much time learning. I feel like I often go through phases where I'll learn a lot of new techniques and then spend time implementing but lately implementing has been taking up a lot of my time.

dools 14y ago
Do you download the audio? Even when I'm not actively studying Mixergy I constantly listen to both the interviews and courses while I do exercise. You'd be surprised how much sticks in your mind simply by osmosis.

WadeF 14y ago

Mixergy Premium is worth subscribing to simply because you know the content will be good and you don't have to wade through a bunch of random startup advice porn to get the good stuff. I've found it helpful to take notes and try to implement just one or two of the easiest things afterwards. The strategy has worked well and I more than recoup the monthly cost.

andrew_wc_brown 14y ago

Mixergy Premium is like a gym membership. You'll end up spending money on something you won't actually do because when it comes down to it you just have to do it.

sopooneo 14y ago

My complement and gripe: Mixergy is great. I listen to it because I enjoy it a lot. It's because I enjoy it so much that I tolerate the host projecting his insecurities onto his guests. Its interesting that Marc Maron's comedy podcast is a very near parallel. He is a good but slightly lesser known comedian who interviews masters of the craft about their histories and how they succeeded. But also parallel is Maron's tendency to frame his questions around his own neurosis, effectively assuming his guests deal with the same demons he does. To some extent both hosts are correct and we all struggle. But in both cases, they almost put words into their guests mouths. Again, Mixergy free and premium are well worth it and, if you read this Andrew, despite my unsolicited criticism, I do love your show and appreciate all the work it must take.

zacharywentz 14y ago

Mixergy is well worth the price. However, I just can't stand some of the marketing techniques implemented on the site. Almost everything feels like a landing page, and if I'm a paying subscriber, I feel like I should be sold to just a little bit less. That and the fact that the search and navigation is really atrocious. I can't find anything on the site after I've seen it. And in general it's just not obvious what to do on any given page, that isn't a marketing page of course.

mindcrime 14y ago

OK, I'll bite. It's only $25/month, and I got a good vibe from reading swombat's notes from the one course. I just signed up, and am looking forward to gaining some useful knowledge here. We (Fogbeam Labs[1]) are still in the "Customer Discovery" phase of Customer Development, and I'm hoping some of the material on Mixergy will: help with finding people who will participate in the CD process with us, and help us nail product/market fit. [1]: http://www.fogbeam.com http://www.fogbeam.com