the $100 startup 
by chris guillebeau 

The Book’s Main Idea
“This book is for those who take action and those who provide the inspiration.”

The $100 Startup is a business-centric book whose aim is to help prospective entrepreneurs become aware of the challenges that come with creating a successful small business that generates enough revenue to allow the entrepreneur to escape the 9-5 rat race and start living a ‘rich’ life.

“The new reality is that working at a job may be the far riskier choice.”

1: Passion + good business sense is the magic formula
“The missing piece is that you usually don’t get paid for your hobby itself; you get paid for helping other people pursue the hobby or for something indirectly related to it.”

The secret to all success is simple really: capitalize on your passions but do so with good business sense by looking into how you can turn your skills (or passion) into a workable and successful product/or service.

Aim to strike what Chris calls convergence, a state where your skills or passions are valuable in the sense that they intersect with the things/elements other people find useful. If you can strike this convergence and from it, package your passion/skills into a service or product a specific audience would find invaluably useful—in that it serves a purpose such as helping solve a problem—you will create a successful business because:

“Passion or Skill + Usefulness = Success" or “(PASSION + SKILL) –> (PROBLEM + MARKETING) = OPPORTUNITY”

For someone starting out in entrepreneurship—perhaps starting with $100 or less—to aim for this convergence, ask yourself, “Which skills or passions can I package into a valuable service,” or “what am I good at that I can offer to a ready audience?”

“Ask three questions for every idea: a. How would I get paid with this idea? b. How much would I get paid from this idea? c. Is there a way I could get paid more than once?”

2: Where great business ideas come from
If you have ever wondered where great ideas come from, Chris offers invaluable insight. He notes, “Great ideas are everywhere. They are seized opportunities from an emerging technology, or a solution to a hidden or glaring problem.”

To find a great business idea, aim for convergence of your passion and what is useful to others, but also cultivate a deep understanding of your target audience not based on conventional targeting wisdom—targeting audiences based on age, gender, income, etc.—but based on what matters the most to the people you intend to serve:

"What do people really, really want? At the end of the day, they want to be happy, and businesses that help their customers be happy are well-positioned to succeed."

3: Your success depends on the actions you take
Success—business or otherwise—is not that complicated really. All you truly need to do is take action; yes, spend time planning—because failing to plan is planning to fail—but more importantly, spend more time acting. This is the secret to small business success.

"There's nothing wrong with planning. But you can spend a lifetime making a plan that never turns into action. In the battle between planning and action, action wins."

We are fortunate enough to live in an age where all the information we could ever need to succeed in our lives and businesses is readily available to us. At the click of a button, you can test business ideas, launch a microbusiness, and grow it into a thriving business. Without action, however, creating any sort of business success is impossible because:

“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”

Being an entrepreneur or microbusiness owner calls for what Chris calls, “planning as you go” or “bias towards action.” This means finding that convergence and then getting started with implementing your idea right away by creating and launching a prototype of your product/service. With the product/service in play, you can “learn and plan as you go” and scale your business.

Conclusion
All business success comes from action taken at the right time. As long as you can create something a specific audience will find valuable, you can create a low-startup cost business around it.