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

Everything you need to get you started in launching a business, from overcoming fears to tools to overcome obstacles. The stories in the book help you see the possibilities.

The first edition of Tim Ferriss’ book “The Four Hour Work Week”, which I loved, faced one common criticism among those who didn’t like it – that it wouldn’t work, and that Tim’s success was a fluke. Tim answered his critics in the second edition of the book, adding case studies showing that the principles work, which can also be found in the Case Studies section of his Four Hour Work Week blog.Chris Guillebeau (I really want to find out how to properly pronounce that last name – jzill-a-bow? gill-eh-bau?) side-steps the issue nicely with his book “The $100 Startup” (affiliate link) by starting with the case studies and working backwards. Rather than present a list of ideas and explain how they can be used, he presents a case study and then uses the case study to illustrate the point he’s trying to make. Starting with the idea that going into debt to start a business is no longer necessary, he details several people who started successful businesses with little money. (He’s also fair in that saying while the book suggests you can start with less than $100, many still use more, as there’s a spectrum from $0 to about $6k.) Convergence is the second point – the one I have the most difficulty with – because it discusses focusing on what you love and how to make money from it. Chris is fair in that this may not be possible for everyone – using the example of pizza eating (a man after my own heart!) – but illustrates several instances where people were successful in combining passion and profit.Skill transformation and finding out what people want are the next two main points, and those are followed by the idea that you needn’t wait to get started – being an expert is as much a function of you than it is some external verifying body. Action takes up the rest of the book – learning to use the knowledge economy and putting that into practise by using a one-page business plan for yourself to take action. Offer creation, hustling, and self-franchising make up the additional action points, the latter presenting a unique perspective in which you can actually be in two places at once! The book finishes with some debates on whether or not to outsource and whether or not to grow the business to where you need to hire employees. Chris rightly points out that these will be individual instances, and in the latter, contrasts the “build to sell” method of entrepreneurship with the “build to exist” method most of his case studies chose to use.I would suspect that Chris and Tim run in the same circles, based on the fact that they seem to know each other, and that they share some similarities when it comes to their work. The point about expertise is something Ferriss mentions in his book, and one of their case studies – the music teacher making $300k+ per year – is the same person. This could be seen as collusion, but realistically, my guess is that it’s just reinforcement that the ideas can work.The book is well written, and Chris has an engaging style. I would recommend the book to anyone interested in entrepreneurship and I look forward to reading more of Chris’ work!

Chris Guillebeau's "The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future" is the kind of book I was actually a little hesitant to review, out of a selfish desire to keep such excellent information to myself. Nonetheless, here I am.The $100 Startup is a book about entrepreneurship, but it's about more than that. It is a profile of successful startup businesses, that have been significantly successful for their owners, with a minimum initial investment. The manifesto in the prologue calls it "a short guide to everything you want," and really, that's what this book is about. It is a blueprint to start you on the path to doing better work.If you take one key idea away from this book, it should probably be the magic formula. Passion or skill + usefulness = success. In other words, if you can use your passion or skills to solve a problem that other people have, you will be successful. The book then delves into a bunch of great examples of startups, some of the challenges they faced, and some additional lessons to consider on your path.Everyone had skills and passions. How can you turn those into a successful business and earn enough money to have the life you want? That's for you to decide, but I finished this book with an idea about how to transform my own passions into a business. I was starting to do that before I read the $100 Startup, but this crystallized my desire to pursue the lifestyle I want by utilizing my passions, and started me thinking about what needs I could fulfil and benefits I could provide. If you read this book, you will probably feel the same way.Guillebeau's book is packed with a lot of useful information. Better yet, it has a companion website, [...], which features some of the resources in the book in a handy pdf format.Do you need this book to start your own business and because an entrepreneur? Of course not. Are you a lot more likely to become one if you read this book? Probably. Are you more likely to succeed if you read this book? Probably. This is about more than just having an idea. This book takes you from the initial step of the idea, to how to research and build your product or service, how to market it, and how to build your business.I am sitting down to read this book again, which is what prompted this review. I expect I will come away having learned more after the second read. How is my startup business coming? Slowly. I want to build a superior service, and that takes time. That's okay. This book changed how I think about my future, and what my plans were. It was without a doubt the most important thing I've read in a long time.

A few things to note if you are thinking of buying this book:1. It's basic. I mean really basic. It is full of simplistic suggestions such as "every morning, set aside 45 minutes to think about your business. What can you do to move things ahead (p.235)", and "in deciding what to sell, the best approach is to sell what people buy (p.33)". The patronizing guidance it provides almost assumes that the reader is unaware of really, really obvious and sensible things, which is really frustrating.2. It is full of superficial examples based on random people - Kyle, Gary, Sarah - who are these people? And some of the examples appear unhelpful. For example, the author tells the story of Kyle Hepp, who got fired from her job, but having dabbled in a little photography before, she decided to take up wedding photography with her husband and now they earn $90,000 a year. This is one of many unhelpful anecdotes based on random people and unnamed companies (which by the way, sound completely made up) which add zero value for the reader.3. All of the case studies in the book are about people who quit their jobs and do microbusinesses that earn them between $40,000 and $60,000 a year. In the greater scheme of things, that isn't too bad a salary, but remember this book is aimed at telling you to quit your job, and note the average salary in the UK is £35,423 (US$46,014). My point is, if you are telling people to quit a comfortable, steady job to start a start up, basing your "success stories" around start-ups that generate just about the same amount of money is not exactly inspiring. In fact, it is quite de-motivating. We need to be realistic. People have families to feed. Who on earth would quit a stable job to start their own business and expose themselves to financial risk (there is actually a chapter on failure in the book) just to end up in the same position financially?In summary, if you are as good an entrepreneur as this author is a writer of start-up books, don't quit your day job.

Lots of pages to repeat the same thing. Case studies are superficial and simplifying. The book can be summarised in 1 sentence: start simple and early, keep it low budget/low risk, cash the money and go to the beach

In between the stories of the many types of people who went from zero to hero with their startups, there's very little substance. Each story seems to fit a different personality, which eventually resembles a reader of the book and makes them say "That could be me". I couldn't help notice this after the second chapter and it kinda put a downer on the book after it. A bit like watching friends on tv and noticing the fake laughter in the background. Flicking through the book it felt like I've read it all before in more depth elsewhere, "The 4 Hour Workweek", "The Lean Startup" some Tony Robbins stuff. A grand read for the motivated newcomer, but come back in a year and tell me how the startup went.

I found the book incredibly frustrating. After about 50 pages in I tried speed reading it. After about 90 I’d just about had enough. The problem is there’s just about nothing useful I hadn’t read elsewhere. There were two or three things which I greatly appreciated being reminded of but the odd titbits that I did come across were buried in so much chaff that I don’t think I can bear to fight my way through any more of it. The case studies get very samey and stop adding anything to the message after the first few. I read the 4HWW many times. I thought about it everyday for years. I’ve read a number of other books in the same vein and got something really significant from most of them. I really had high expectations for this one, not least because I first read about it on Tim Ferriss’s blog. I don’t like to be so negative. I’m sure the book could be pared down to perhaps a fifth of its length and be quite good. The other thing is if it was the first book on this kind of thing I’d read then I’d probably quite like it. But I’m approaching forty, my sixth child is due in four weeks and I don’t have time for ‘infotainment’.

I read this book right after the 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss and I have to admit I had mixed feelings about it.Pros:- Good motivation to start a business (no excuses)- Many success stories and business examples- Easy read although sometimes it is hard to follow the different stories (the author leaves a story pending, tells 10 others and then comes back to it when we already forgot what the original story was)Cons:- Barely any substantial tool or technique to benefit the reader (not like the previously mentioned book)- I personally had the feeling that I already knew most of what was in the book