No More Excuses – How to Make an Extra $100,000 in the Next 6 Months. The Wilburns have created a multinational from their home. (Photo: Dana Smith) “So, do you have any ideas?” “Well, if we’re going to do something, it should be big. It should make people sit up and say OMFG. Make people actually do something,” I responded. The conversation continued in front of the Thai restaurant, me pacing on my cell phone in San Francisco — foregoing food in excitement — and Tobi in his offices in Ottawa, Canada. We decided in the subsequent 10 minutes to offer $100,000 cash as a bribe to you all. . * $100,000 for the grand winner * $120,000 total in prizes * 6 months starting January 1 but you can (and should) get started now * Even if you don’t win the prizes, you should end up with a viable business at the end of 6 months The details make it even better… Background The problem?
Some things just aren’t as simple in execution as they appear on paper. Let’s change that. Tobi Lutke is the CEO of Shopify. It seems I was late to the party. The Competition – More Than One Winner. Tim Ferris’ Recommend Reading « Rachel Denning. 20 Apr Posted April 20, 2008 by racheldenning in To Read. Tagged: 80/20 principle, bo burlingham, business has legs, dan kennedy, david schwartz, e-myth revisited, ferris recommended reading, four hour work week, goldian vandenbroeck, how to make millions, less is more, magic of thinking big, michael gerber, monk and the riddle, pareto principle, peter bieler, randy komisar, recommended reading, richard kock, roger dawson, rolf potts, secrets of power negotiating, small giants, thoreau, tim ferris, vagabonding, vilfredo pareto, walden. 4 Comments Share with a friend About these ads Like this: Like Loading...
Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose Discuss Their Top 5 Must-Read Books. Up to no (coherent) good once again, The Random Show returns. In episode 3, Kevin Rose and I discuss our top 5 must-read books, how we use them, and who should read them. The 10 books are… The 22 Immutable Laws of MarketingGetting RealVagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-term World TravelSeneca: Letters from a StoicLeaving Microsoft to Change the World Envisioning InformationThe Tipping Point8 Weeks to Optimum HealthZen Mind, Beginner’s MindThe Intelligent Investor Others mentioned:Surely You’re Joking, Mr.
Feynman! If you missed them, check out Episode 1 and Episode 2. Six-Figure Businesses Built for Less Than $100: 17 Lessons Learned. Photo: 401K. The following article is a guest post by Chris Guillibeau, who’s traveled to 150+ countries and studied more micro-businesses than anyone I know. I hope you love this piece as much as I did. Enjoy! Enter Chris Over the past several years, I’ve been on a quest to study micro-businesses—small operations (typically one person) that make $50,000 a year or more (often a lot more).
The quest took me all over the world, at first to a large group of 1,500 “unexpected entrepreneurs” who volunteered to share their stories in detail. I wanted to hear from all kinds of businesses–both offline and online–to decipher what made them so successful. After much effort, a small team and I narrowed down the case studies to a subset of 70 that I focused on for final analysis. Here is a highly-condensed list of 17 lessons learned… The 17 Lessons of $100 Start-ups Note: Links show the businesses in action. Latch on to a popular service, then simplify it for others.
Don’t beg your friends for money! 8 Steps to Getting What You Want… Without Formal Credentials. (Photo: ElMarto) Michael Ellsberg has been a good friend since 2000. In the last few years, he has made a study of self-study. How do the best in business do what they do? Using his findings, he has: - Overcome a debilitating case of bipolar II (here’s how). - Landed one of the most powerful literary agents in the world. - Published not one but two books from major New York publishers, the second scoring a 6-figure advance. - Found the woman of his dreams and married her. - Built a well-followed blog on Forbes.com with zero prior blogging experience.
Most recently, Michael has interviewed the likes of fashion magnate Russell Simmons, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, Facebook founding president Sean Parker, WordPress lead developer Matt Mullenweg, and Pink Floyd songwriter and lead guitarist David Gilmour. Why? In this post, Michael will discuss how uber-successful people leapfrog their peers without any formal credentials. “Badges? There is a surprise ending to this post. Connections. How to Create a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend (Examples: AppSumo, Mint, Chihuahuas) Noah Kagan built two multi-million dollar online businesses before turning 28. He also looks great in orange. (Photo: Laughing Squid) I first met Noah Kagan over rain and strong espressos at Red Rock Coffee in Mountain View, CA. It was 2007. It would be the first of many. The matchmaker then introducing us was the prophetic and profane Dave McClure, General Partner of 500 Start-ups, which is now headquartered just down the street from Red Rock.
Mr. He was employee #30 at Facebook, #4 at Mint, had previously worked for Intel (where he frequently took naps under his desk), and had turned down a six-figure offer from Yahoo. The purpose of this post is simple: to teach you how to get a $1,000,000 business idea off the ground in one weekend, full of specific tools and tricks that Noah has used himself. He will be your guide… Enter Noah For some reason, people love to make excuses about why they haven’t created their dream business or even gotten started. Same deal for AppSumo. 1. 1. 1. 2. 3. 4. Built to Sell — Making Your Company Sellable. Waterfall in Aix-en-Provence, France.
(Photo: Mat3270) “Didn’t you write that you believed BrainQUICKEN couldn’t be sold?” The question — a common one — was from writer John Warrillow and for an article in Inc. Magazine. The embarrassing answer was “yes.” For example: counter to expectations, I ended up caring more about lack of strings than maximizing price… Several chess moves into price negotiation, after the suitor and I had arrived within 10% of each other, I offered to reduce the asking price 20% in exchange for the elimination of most “reps and warranties.”
Lessons learned, part deux: branding and customer databases are sometimes worth as much as defensible “hard” intellectual property. Silly rabbit. John, on the other hand, provides the contrast. John, you see, does more than write. From the standpoint of lifestyle design, John lives in Aix-en-Provence where he’s struggling to master French, “despite listening to more Michel Thomas than any one man should have to endure.” 1. 2. 3. Feeling Stuck? Read This… Parc del Laberint d’Horta, Barcelona (Photo: Marcel Germain) Big successes often seem like foregone conclusions. In reality, most entrepreneurs (read: creators) who appear to have unique genius suffer through the same frustration as the masses of unknowns.
They simply test and persist a few steps further. Richard Branson will tell you this of his Virgin empire.Tony Hsieh of Zappo’s shares similar stories.Steve Martin can prove that it applies to anything creative, not just business. Below is a piece of paper from 2005 I recently unearthed while purging books and folders from my house. It reflects a complete failure–protracted over weeks–to find a good title for what later became The 4-Hour Workweek (4HWW). Most of the ideas are horrible beyond belief, and it wasn’t until I tested a few variations using Google AdWords that we decided on “The 4-Hour Workweek,” which I still disliked on multiple levels. Let me know which title is your favorite ridiculous option. In Conclusion. The Way of the Dodo — How to Sell 10,000 iPad Cases at $60 Each (and Other Lessons Learned) DODOcase, one of more than 1,000 businesses created in the last six months, has sold more than 10,000 units at $60 each.
From today’s New York Times coverage of the Shopify/4-Hour Workweek build-a-business competition that just ended: To encourage early, positive buzz among Apple iPad buyers, Mr. Dalton [of DODOcase] hired street teams via Craigslist to “hang out with Apple fanboys, while they waited on line for hours, maybe even days, outside of Apple retail stores for a chance to buy the first edition iPad.” The street teams, he said, hit Apple store locations in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco.DODOcase also scored favorable reviews with the tech blogs Engadget and The Unofficial Apple Weblog.
DODOcase iPad cases cost around $60, so you can do the math. This post will cover how it all happened… The Shopify build-a-business competition was a financial carrot for anyone who’d dreamed of starting a business but hadn’t taken the jump. Here are their answers. How to Create Your Own Real-World MBA – II. Brainstorming in Boulder, CO with a class of founders from TechStars, where I’ve been a mentor. After this particular trip, I ended up advising Graphic.ly. (Photo: Andrew Hyde) Disclaimer: nothing on this site is legal advice, and I am not an investing expert. This post is continued from Part I. Part I explained how, instead of getting an MBA, I invested the tuition dollars into angel investing.
To recap, my current stats for the two-year “Tim Ferriss Fund” look like this: 15 or so total investments 0 deaths 2 successful “exits”, or sales (including my own company) If we look at the value of my remaining start-ups on paper, based on subsequent funding and valuations, the portfolio is probably up well over 4x. This post will look at how I’ve found deals, how I filter deals, and the rules I’ve set for myself. Before we get started: you almost always need to be an “accredited investor” to angel invest. Before we get started – part deux: angel investing can be complicated. Investors vs. 1. A. How to Create Your Own Real-World MBA. (Photo: DavidDMuir) It’s fun to think about getting an MBA. They’re attractive for many reasons: developing new business skills, developing a better business network, or — most often — taking what is effectively a two-year vacation that looks good on a resume.
In 2001, and again in 2004, I wanted to do all three things. This post is the first of two that will share my experience with MBA programs and how I created my own… In the process, it’s my hope that these writings will make you think about real-world experiments vs. theoretical training, untested assumptions (especially about risk tolerance), and the good game of business as a whole. Last caveat: nothing here is intended to portray me as an investing expert, which I most certainly am not. Beginnings Stanford University Graduate School of Business (GSB). Within 30 minutes, Pete had taught me more about the real-world inside baseball of venture capital than all of the books I’d read on the subject. How to Make a Small Fortune. Do You Really Know Bill Gates? The Myth of Entrepreneur as Risk-Taker. Photo: Laughing Squid/Scott Beale Before I had to establish my no-blurb/no-review policy for books due to volume (picture: one day’s mail), I received an e-mail from Rick Smith, the founding CEO of the World 50, one of the most exclusive senior executive networking companies on the planet, with members and contributors like Bono, Francis Ford Coppola, and Phil Knight… He was interested in having me look at his new book Leap, and I suggested he send it along with the understanding that I might not have the time to read it.
To tell the truth, it took me a looong time to bother flipping it open, as the subtitle “How 3 Simple Changes Can Propel Your Career from Good to Great” is–in my opinion–devoid of sex appeal and misleading. It should be subtitled “How to Propel Your Life from Good to Great.” “Career” is not the right word at all. I finished the book in two sittings. Here is an excerpt from Leap that shows just how far off most perceptions of entrepreneurs are. This was a lie.