This week, I read the third and fourth chapters of The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau. The third chapter was all about taking someone’s interest and turning it into a business by finding a way to sell their knowledge on the subject. I read about Benny who loved learning new languages. He would travel to countries for a few months at a time which forced him to learn the language. He did this eight times and then he realized that he now knew the best way to learn new languages so he started teaching people new languages. Unfortunately, not everyone’s passions can be turned into businesses; Benny’s company only worked because the knowledge from his passion was desired by many people. There was a list of questions that were supposed to help the reader decide if they should turn their passion into a business. The question that I thought would be the most difficult to answer was “Are there enough people that would be willing to pay for your product or service”. If your product is unique (which it should be according to this book), I feel that you won’t know if people will be willing to buy your product or service until you try selling it.
The fourth chapter was all about the roaming entrepreneur. The idea of a roaming entrepreneur is fairly new because it is all about having your business being online so all you would need is a laptop, internet and a product that is digital. This allows entrepreneurs to work from anywhere at anytime because there isn’t any person to person interaction. I feel like this chapter was less useful than previous chapters because this chapter is only applicable to people that start a specific type of business while the other chapters were useful to all entrepreneurs. I feel like you shouldn’t try to come up with a product or service that would make you a roaming entrepreneur; I think you should come up with a product or service first and then see if you could make it a mobile business.
Sounds like a good plan to me. Does the author give you any sense of how you can figure out whether your business idea is viable? I agree with you that you often can't tell whether there will be buyers for your good or product until you try to sell it. But getting ready to sell often requires an influx of cash (more than $100, I assume), so how does the author get around this?
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