Ep 011: How to Just Go For it on Amazon w/ John Mikaelian

Startup Life Hacks | Business and Life Advice | Founders | Entrepreneurship

Between class, work, sports, and a social life, most college student don’t have time for anything else. This isn’t the case for John Mikaelian. John is a graduate at San Diego State University and majored in Business Administration. Somehow, John found the time to write, self-publish, and sell a book through Amazon called, Reality Check: A College Student’s Survival Guide, which outlines the positive and negative aspects of the real world.

Strategies used to fund business

Self publishing has becoming really popular so my business I could say is my book. There are a lot of platforms where you can send in your book from the cover, to the text inside the book, so there really wasn’t that big of a startup cost. I was able to fund the book myself and it cost me a couple hundred dollars.

Describe a moment when you felt like giving up

Amazon doesn’t really do any marketing for you, so you kind of had to push your own traffic to the website, and I wasn’t really familiar on how to do that. So I decided to zero in on my target and started selling the book on college bookstores, and since then, the book has been doing well.

HUGE SUCCESS

One of the recent things I am proud of was that I became the president of the entrepreneurship club at Cal State Los Angeles

Kryptonite

I’m not a very patient person.

If you can have any superpower…

My superpower would be invisibility. That way I can see what students are doing when I’m not around when it comes to their startups because sometimes they might be doing shortcuts whenever I do workshops. So when I’m invisible I can sit down and find ot what they’re thinking and how they are collaborating.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCE OR APP

Evernote: For everything you’ll do, Evernote is the workspace to get it done.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!

Reality Check: A College Student’s Survival Guide

The Entrepreneur Cheat Sheet: A Straightforward Guide to Starting and Growing Your Business

ADVICE TO HACKER NATION

Just get started. A lot of the entrepreneurs think that they have to wait for the so called “perfect moment.” So just get started and you’ll figure out the answers as you go along.

FOLLOW

Twitter

http://johnmikaelian.com/