The $100 Startup
Chris Guillebeau, is an American entrepreneur, author, blogger and speaker. He is best known for The Art of Non-Conformity blog and book. Chris has also written guides for travel and small business topics under the brand Unconventional Guides. Moreover, He wrote the book called The $100 Startup which is one of the most popular books for entrepreneurs.
Book: The $100 Startup
This book is based on multiple case study describing small businesses success from simple ideas. These case study have been based on specific criteria such as:
- Follow your passion: In fact even though not every passion can potentially become a business, it is important to select an industry that you have most interest in. As the Author mentioned, even though you are passionate about eating pizza you cannot make a business based on eating pizza. Then, Passion + skills + usefulness = success
- Low startup costs: this book focused on very low capital such as $1000 or even $100 to prove that you do not need an investor to get started. Just a small investment can get you started.
- At least 50k a year: All interviewee were generating 50,000 dollars the first year of launching their business. In fact, the business could quickly generate profit and allow to completely cover your expenses.
- No special skills: all businesses could be created with small to no training and then quite easy to launch right away.
- Full financial disclosure: interviewee were willing to provide their financial situation and their projected profits in the next 2 years.
- Fewer than five employees: this book help you to get started on how to run your business. Therefore, it only describe case studies of multiple small or self employed businesses that successfully run their businesses. It is up to you to decide how you are willing to scale your business
3 important key points to run a business
- Product or service: to start a business you need something that you can sell. It could be a product or a service.
- People willing to pay for it: even if you have a product to sell, you need to have customer ready to pay for it. If no one is ready to pay, then it is not a business.
- A way to get paid: even though you have a product and people are ready to pay for it, you still need to provide them with a solution to receive money.
As a conclusion, this book explains the starting steps to run a business. It simply prove that anyone could start a business right now. It is a great book for people still working and willing to start their own business. However, this book is not focused on small business owner looking to expand their business to a medium sized business.
Great write-up! I remember reading The $100 Startup a few years back.
And although it’s not purely startup focused, the author’s more recent work with the Side Hustle School podcast and book (https://sidehustleschool.com) are great for coming up with ideas and those starting out.
Thank you for your comment and sharing an interesting link Chris! I like the approach that this author takes when telling people how to start a business. He makes it like it is not that hard to start a business and it requires little to no money.