The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future is a one-of-a-kind resource for entrepreneurial hopefuls, young and old alike. Chris Guillebeau chooses to hone in on the “solopreneurs” (entrepreneurs going at it alone or with just a handful of friends or family members) who wish to have a low startup cost in creating a thriving personal business.
The book is more inspirational than it is how-to, but often that is the perfect way to motivate someone to take the next action step. There are some specifics missing if you’re looking for a very detailed, step-by-step guide to starting your own business, yet this book rounds out what is missing in a lot of small-business books. (There are sections of the book that do include details, as well as contact information for a variety of business building tools.)
I profited in gaining a lot of insight into what makes small business work, and this is a book we’ll be adding to our “paper collection” to use as a reference tool.
Table of Contents:
- Prologue: Manifesto
- Part I: Unexpected Entrepreneurs
- 1. Renaissance: You already have the skill you need–you just have to know where to look
- 2. Give Them the Fish: How to put happiness in a box and sell it.
- 3. Follow Your Passion…Maybe: Get paid to do what you love by making sure it connects to what other people want.
- 4. The Rise of the Roaming Entrepreneur: “Location, location, location” is overrated
- 5. The Demographics: Your customers all have something in common, but it has nothing to do with old-school categories.
- Part II: Taking It to the Streets
- 6. The One-Page Business Plan: If your mission statement is much longer than this sentence, it could be too long.
- 7. An Offer You Can’t Refuse: The step-by-step guide to creating a killer offer
- 8. Launch! A trip to Hollywood from your living room or the corner coffee shop.
- 9. Hustling: The Gentle Art of Self-Promotion: Advertising is like sex: Only losers pay for it.
- 10. Show Me the Money: Unconventional fundraising from Kickstarter to unlikely car loans.
- Part III: Leverage and Next Steps
- 11. Moving On Up: Tweaking your way to the bank: How small actions create big increases in income.
- 12. How to Franchise Yourself: Instructions on cloning yourself for fun and profit.
- 13. Going Long: Become as big as you want (and no bigger).
- 14. But What If I Fail? How to succeed even if your roof caves in on you.
- Coda
- Disclosures and Interesting Facts
- But Wait, There’s More!
- Fish Stories Appendix: Twenty-Five Selected Case Studies
- Gratitude
- Rockstars from the $100 Startup
- Index