Bvlletpoint

Author: Chris Guillebeau

File under: Lifestyle

Executive Summary: The $100 Startup is fundamentally a lifestyle business start up guide in a similar vein to The Four-hour Work Week by Tim Ferris.

The book is primarily a motivational guide to setting up a small lifestyle business for little upfront capital cost and without the need to take any sort of venture money and, in most cases, avoiding business loans.

The book presents itself as a series of case-studies by people who have created small & micro-businesses across a variety of categories from retail to services. Like most books of this sort its major failing is the focus on purely successful businesses while overlooking the large number of people who have tried and failed at starting their own business.

While there are some useful titbits in here, particularly if you are starting out from scratch or looking to launch a new product to an existing fan base, its not a book that appealed to me personally. Much of what is in this book could be found online fairly easily these days, and its clearly dated since it was first published back in 2012.

Overall, I would say that this book is good if you are looking for ideas on what a life-style business could suit you but if you are launching something a bit more ambitious or already know what you want to do then there are better resources out there.

B>llets:

• The key to a lifestyle business is understanding what you are selling and marketing correctly.
  • Rather than selling a country holiday, you are selling escapism
• When developing a lifestyle business, your focus should not be on innovation, but rather on providing usefulness
• It pays to test a new idea or product before launching it or investing time. This can take the form of offering a service or product for sale and only taking expressions of interest, or refunding people if there is insufficient business generated
• Avoid taking advice from people who ‘know less about the business’ you are in than you. Often their opinions are unfounded and may result in missed opportunities.

Great Read for: Lifestyle businesses, Killing time