Summary: In this session of The Smart Passive Income Podcast, I'm incredibly excited to talk about creating successful startups and life as an entrepreneur with visionary serial entrepreneur, John Saddington from <a href="http://john.do" target="_blank">John.do</a>. I recently discovered John and his work when I met and connected with him in person at the Platform Conference in Nashville this past February. Here is why I love John and was really interested in having him on the show: He has several successful projects under his belt. We're talkin' idea to execution to getting acquired, multiple times. We only talk about a few of these examples on the show, but he has many more, and it doesn't look like he's slowing down one bit. Like myself, John is a family man. He presented at the Platform Conference and shared some great images of his family life at home and I totally connected with both the joys and challenges of being a husband and a father while also being an entrepreneur. Like me, he loves to experiment with stuff. Try something - if it works, awesome (and then he writes about it), if it doesn't work, awesome (and then he writes about it). He's totally honest and transparent about what he does, which you'll hear in today's episode. He's a coach and advisor for other businesses and startups, so he has a ton of great experience and advice to share. <a href="http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/JohnSaddington.jpg"></a>At the Platform Conference, John said the following during his presentation: "A shift in perspective radically changes the use of objects and ideas - and that is entrepreneurship." This quote totally resonates with me, and you'll hear how John has taken some things that were a part of who he was, things that were a part of his everyday life, and without reinventing the wheel how he was able to create something valuable, useful and "acquire-able". And like I said, he's done this several times now. A more recent example of this shift in perspective can be found in a Kickstarer campaign for something called <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tentblogger/pressgram-an-image-sharing-app-built-for-an-indepe" target="_blank">PressGram</a>, an Instagram inspired Instagram alternative, which is gaining quite a bit of buzz in the tech space right now. In a nutshell, it's an Instagram inspired Instagram alternative that will allow you to take images and apply filters (like Instagram), but publish them on your own Wordpress site so that you maintain full control of when, where and how your images are used. As a result, all of the pageviews, as well as conversations around the images you share are on your own site. Views of your images become your own pageviews again, which could be huge for any online publisher. John touches on Pressgram a little bit at the tail end of the show, and you can <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tentblogger/pressgram-an-image-sharing-app-built-for-an-indepe" target="_blank">read more about it here</a> in case you're interested. It was organically finding this kickstarter campaign that re-connected me with John and what he does, and I got so inspired that I just had to get him on the show. In this session you'll discover: Why John loves to build software based businesses as opposed to anything else. How he started developing software solutions for large corporations at the age of 14. What John did to build his first company, and why it was important even though he never had any clients. Why becoming an executive at a Fortune 50 company felt like a "living death" Why it's okay to invest in yourself and explore opportunities "on the side" and you don't need to take a giant leap right away. How the ordinary and mundane can turn into business opportunities. How being an adopted, South Korean twin helped him create his first commercial success, and how it all started with just one email.
