The $100 Startup
Chris Guillebeau
Proof you don't need permission or money to start. You just need something worth paying for.
Chris Guillebeau went looking for people who'd started businesses with almost no money, often a hundred dollars or less, and were now making a real living from them. He found well over a thousand. The book is built from their stories: people selling travel guides or teaching skills online, most of them alone or with one or two others.
The pattern he finds is simple. Take something you care about or are good at, and find where it overlaps with something people will actually pay for. Passion alone doesn't make a business. Neither does a skill nobody needs. The overlap does. He's also practical about getting started. He includes a one page business plan, and tells you to launch quickly and improve once you have real customers.
It's a friendly, encouraging book. It won't teach you to build a big company, and it isn't trying to.
It's on the shelf for the reminder that the barrier to starting is usually lower than it looks. The pamphlets started with a friend and me working out which glue to buy, which is exactly the kind of start this book describes.
