Book Review: $100 Startup

Reinvent the Way You Make a Living (A Bite-Sized Review)

Book Title:

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau.

$100 startup is about starting a side hustle, a microbusiness. This book is somewhat outdated largely because there is little available marketplace infrastructure at the time of writing (2012) to enable revenue from side hustles (so the author did not cover this). Today the creator’s economy is mature. With platforms like Coursera, YouTube, Kajabi, Roll, Circle, and the like. Nevertheless, this book is still pretty good. In fact, very good for anybody new to entrepreneurship.

It follows the follow your passion (skillset) model because you have very little to lose if things don’t eventually work – which is usually the case. And the author, rightfully, quickly added:

“In the rush to pursue a passion, a number of things tend to get left out. First, you can’t pursue just any passion—there are plenty of things you may be passionate about that no one will pay you for. Remember the all-important lesson of convergence we’ve been looking at throughout the book. You must focus continually on how your project can help other people, and why they’ll care about what you’re offering in the first place. I like to eat pizza, but no matter how passionate I am, it’s doubtful I could craft a career around my love for mushrooms and black olives. Instead, I had to find something more interesting to the rest of the world.”

And for the ‘$100 part’ of the title, it indicates an extremely low startup cost model. The writer emphasizes that this is not about starting the next great startup on the block but the ability to put your resources to use and do good for yourself financially if you choose to. The book - in spite of its publication date - has good startup tips.

Things you would expect ‘everyone’ to know, but that isn’t always the case in practice. For example: “a good offer has to be what people actually want and are willing to pay for,” “price on the basis of value, not time,” and “you must learn to think about value the way your customer do, not necessarily the way you would like them to.”

I also liked his emphasis on making the value proposition extremely clear. If this is not clear, and you go and start a business, good luck to you! It is easy to get carried away with UI and flashy screens these days that you might run the risk of forgetting what the hell you are doing in the first place. Very easy.

Finally, another thing I liked about the book is the lovely little templates for getting the interested reader started: a template for drafting a mission statement, a pager for a business plan, an instant consulting business template, steps to market testing, and a product launch checklist. All of which are still available on the book’s website.