About the Podcast

Each week Dave Hamilton and Shannon Jean discuss topics related to starting, growing and managing your small business. You’ll find real-world advice from them as well as interviews and tips from other business owners. Listen in and learn from their mistakes, share your successes and generally have a good time talking about small businesses.

About the Host

Shannon Jean & Dave Hamilton

Shannon Jean: I’m not a big fan of dry resumes or bios. I’d much rather tell you a story. Always looking for a new adventure: I guess you could say that fits my personality pretty well. Or, maybe it’s just my ADHD that keeps me bouncing from project to project, starting new companies and generally having as much fun as possible while surrounding myself with great people in the form of co-founders, employees, partners, family members, vendors and customers. Founder: A great term that describes exactly how I have started one company after another – literally “found” a reason to be in business and then built an organization around that reason. Like Steve says, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” Looking back, it all makes sense, but each time I was at the foundry of a new startup, much of it was either accidental, fortunate timing or cast from a brief flash of insight that pushed things forward. And let’s be clear, often that insight did not come from yours truly – but rather, one of those great people I mentioned above. Who are you, anyway? Good question, actually. I’m Dave Hamilton… beyond that, a quick history of current business-related involvements might help. In 1998, Bryan Chaffin and I started The Mac Observer, the best Apple-oriented site on the web. Then we hired Greg Snyder to head up our ad sales department. Pretty soon we had other Mac-based web sites coming and asking if we would do the same thing for them that we’d done for ourselves. This made us all realize that we had yet another venture on our hands, and as such BackBeat Media was born out of the combined energies of Greg, Bryan, and myself. Then in 2000, The Mac Observer partnered with the wonderful folks at Rebound Technologies to form Deals On The Web (then it became Deal Brothers, and is now on hiatus), delivering a healthy, daily dose of hand-picked deals and coupons from — you guessed it — around the web. Not wanting to let my free time get away from me, in 2005 I started the Mac Geek Gab podcast where John F. Braun and I do something akin to Car Talk for Apple users each and every week. It’s a total blast.

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