Erich Stauffer

  • Underutilized Me

    I work 8-5 and do IT support and web design nights and weekends. My wife sells essential oils and makes soap for Skinny Coconut Oil. We have 5 kids. I go to church 2 times a week. I have an hour commute. There’s just not a whole lot going on. I’m underutilized. There are whole…

  • 10,000 Hours

    Have you ever heard that it takes “10,000 hours” to become good at something or that you should “follow your passion” and “do what you love”? If you’re still wondering What Color is Your Parachute? and you still don’t know what you want to be when you grow up, it may be time to take…

  • The Value of Conferences and Trade Shows

    Mike McDerment, the founder of Freshbooks, recently wrote a post titled How I Earned A Lot More on Projects by Changing My Pricing Strategy in which he talks about how he used to be a web designer (only) and it was his frustration with invoicing that moved him to create Freshbooks, which is online accounting…

  • Anyone Can Take a Reservation

    One thing I keep hearing from programmers and product owners is that the most important thing (or the hardest thing) is marketing and sales of their product. And to that I say, you have to have a product to market and that’s the hardest part is figuring out what people want, making it, and getting…

  • Presentation Secrets from Amish Shah

    “Some people have the uncanny ability to make more in a week than most will earn over a lifetime. What’s better, they do it all the time. Amish Shah is one of those people.” Below is a screenshot of his presentation secrets, which I have outlined below. Click the image to watch the full video…

  • Balls of Steel

    In response to marketing and distribution device about product development: Sometimes you just have to write something, make a decision, just do something before the true answer will come to you. That’s how it is with me at least. A lot of times I won’t know what to do so I’ll just choose something and…

  • Things have changed. Times are different.

    Business owners used to be able to pay the Yellow Pages once per year and get business all year long without having to do anything. Things have changed. Times are different. You now have to do content marketing, social media marketing, traditional marketing. Social media is complicated: http://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-marketing-landscape-complicated-2012-5

  • Mesh Networking

    In one of my last posts about networking in Indianapolis, Jeremy Houchens of Pro Media Publishing said, “Thanks for including the links to the local events!”, which when juxtaposed against a recent comment from Ashley Hardy of ANH Media about how, “You know all the networking events in Indianapolis”, and it made me wonder if…

  • Grain Harvest? More like Great Harvest!

    I recently wrote about how I typically work and network in Indianapolis and while it started out as a way to discuss how to get the most out of little pieces of the city (what in my mind I call “hacking the day”), it ended up being more about networking and how I spend a…