Do you feel stuck in your life? Is your school or 9-5 getting to you and making you feel suffocated? Do you wish you had the courage and the money to start a business to chase your dreams?
Well, according to this book, it might be easier than you think.
The 0 startup. by Chris Guillebeau.
Gone are the days when you needed a large capital and had to suck up to uptight investors in suits to start a business. Now with the advent of the internet, you can practically start a business anywhere.
If anything, this book contains all the reasons why your excuses for not starting a business are invalid.
Alright, according to this book, there are only three things that you need to start a business. A product or service, a group of people willing to pay for it and a way to get paid.
Now, the question remains, how do you find that niche to start a business? How can you know what is the right market for you?
All you need to do is to find out what your passions and skills are. Let me give you an example.
Let’s say you have a passion for playing video games. You could play them all day and never get tired. And your skill is humor. You have a knack for being funny, and can find humor in the smallest of things. Well, as we have seen from the huge gaming industry on Youtube, it completely possible to merge the two of them.
Here’s a good analogy from the book. We all have heard of the quote, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Well, the fact remains that most people don’t want to learn how to fish. So your job as an entrepreneur is to become a fisherman, and make their lives easier.
Think about it this way. It’s incredibly hard to become the best at anything in the world, be it editing videos, playing the piano, or voice acting. However, it’s not that hard to become decently good at all those three. Now, when you merge the three of them, you create an entirely new category in which you are the best, which gives you a huge advantage.
However, you do need to make sure that there is a need for the content or product that you are making in the market. Here’s my favourite example from the book.
Brett Kelly was a software engineer and had a stressful life. However, one day he had an idea that literally transformed his life.
He was an avid user of Evernote, a free note-taking software. However, he realized that there was no user manual for Evernote in the English language per se. So what he did was he spent the next few months curating all the tips and tricks he knew about the software, and took copious notes and screenshots. He compiled it all into a pdf and started selling it on a website.
It was a massive success. He ended up making 0,000 from the sales of that e-book, and also got a job at evernote because the company liked his idea.
That’s the power of exploiting an inefficiency in a market.