Category — Business

Are you a programmer with lots of creative entrepreneurial ideas but scared to leave the man? Well, check out Dan Grigsby’s talk from RubyFringe at InfoQ: Dan Grigsby on Programmer/Entrepreneurs and Creative Hacking and Marketing.

He talks about how tools today let you do more software development faster. He talks about how this enables trying out tons of things for free and seeing what sticks. He talks about marketing Tai Chi, breaking into the “walled garden” and other creative marketing hacks. Go check it out and get your ventures rolling!

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Be sure to check this awesome book he mentioned in the talk!

Eric Schlosser

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America’s black market is much larger than we realize, and it affects us all deeply, whether or not we smoke pot, rent a risque video, or pay our kids’ nannies in cash. In Reefer Madness the best-selling author of Fast Food Nation turns his exacting eye on the underbelly of the American marketplace and its far-reaching influence on our society. Exposing three American mainstays - pot, porn, and illegal immigrants - Eric Schlosser shows how the black market has burgeoned over the past several decades. He also draws compelling parallels between underground and overground: how tycoons and gangsters rise and fall, how new techonology shapes a market, how government intervention can reinvigorate black markets as well as mainstream ones, and how big business learns - and profits - from the underground. Reefer Madness is a powerful investigation that illuminates the shadow economy and the culture that casts that shadow.

View More about Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market

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I was working with some folks and someone reminded us of Beeker on the Muppets and we decided to check YouTube for some Beeker videos. I love this one where they’re trying to solve a business problem that doesn’t exist.

Good stuff. I then recalled Ali G’s “Ice Cream Glove”. I love his market research and his “Zen” diagram.

Just remember that he put a “C” on all his stuff so you can’t nick it.

May all of your business ideas prove to be useful and ultimately profitable!

At lunch the other day I mentioned mentioned the following books …

Michael E. Gerber

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“A business without a dream is like a life without a purpose.”
—Michael Gerber

Dream • Vision • Purpose • Mission

These words have been defining the life of Michael Gerber, bestselling author and international small business guru. He created E-Myth Worldwide in 1977 to transform the way that small business owners grow their companies. Now he’s created In The Dreaming Room as a place where entrepreneurs and future entrepreneurs come to discover how to make their dreams a reality.

Michael’s Dream: to inspire people to dream by awakening the entrepreneur within them.

Michael’s Vision: to be the authority for helping dreamers everywhere create the small businesses they once could only imagine.

Michael’s Purpose: to transform the lives of ordinary people by providing them with the thrill of creation while creating the means to generate their own and others’ economic freedom.

Michael’s Mission: to create a turnkey system for awakening the entrepreneur within every person who wishes to go into business for themselves, while providing them with the support for doing it.

And he has done it. In Awakening the Entrepreneur Within you are invited into the Dreaming Room, where your own entrepreneurial dreams will come alive and become reality. Michael will help you shape your dream into a viable, economically successful company! As he writes: “It is time to dream. It is time to care about something bigger than you. It is time to imagine something sorely needed in the world—the world you live in—that somebody would pay to have. It is time to look around you and ask yourself, ‘What’s missing in this picture?’”

If you see something missing in your world, it’s time to start dreaming. Let Michael Gerber welcome you to the Dreaming Room.

View More about Awakening the Entrepreneur Within: How Ordinary People Can Create Extraordinary Companies

Michael E. Gerber

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In this first new and totally revised edition of the 150,000-copy underground bestseller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. He walks you through the steps in the life of a business from entrepreneurial infancy, through adolescent growing pains, to the mature entrepreneurial perspective, the guiding light of all businesses that succeed.

View More about The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It

Tim Sanders

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Are you wondering what the next killer app will be? Do you want to know how you can maintain and add to your value during these rapidly changing times? Are you wondering how the word love can even be used in the context of business?

Instead of wondering, read this book and find out how to become a lovecat—a nice, smart person who succeeds in business and in life.

How do you become a lovecat? By sharing your intangibles. By that I mean:
Your knowledge: everything that comes from all the books that I’ll encourage you to devour.
Your network: the collection of friends and contacts you now have, which I’ll teach you how to grow and nurture.
Your compassion: that human warmth you already possess—in these pages I’ll convince you that you can show it freely at the office.

What happens when you do all this?
* You become a rich source of information to all around you.
* You are seen as a person with valuable insight.
* You are perceived as generous to a fault, producing surprise and delight.
* You double your business intelligence in one year.
* You triple your network of personal relationships in two years.
* You quadruple the number of colleagues in your life who love you like family.

In short, you become one of those amazing, outstanding people to whom everyone turns, who leads rather than follows, who never runs out of ideas, contacts, or friendship.

Here’s the real scoop: Nice guys don’t finish last. They rule!

From the Hardcover edition.

View More about Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends

Timothy Ferriss

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What do you do? Tim Ferriss has trouble answering the question. Depending on when you ask this
controversial Princeton University guest lecturer, he might answer:

“I race motorcycles in Europe.”
“I ski in the Andes.”
“I scuba dive in Panama.”
“I dance tango in Buenos Aires.”

He has spent more than five years learning the secrets of the New Rich, a fast-growing subculture who has abandoned the “deferred-life plan” and instead mastered the new currencies—time and mobility—to create luxury lifestyles in the here and now.

Whether you are an overworked employee or an entrepreneur trapped in your own business, this book is the compass for a new and revolutionary world. Join Tim Ferriss as he teaches you:

• How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want
• How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs
• How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist
• How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and freuent “mini-retirements”
• What the crucial difference is between absolute and relative income
• How to train your boss to value performance over presence, or kill your job (or company) if it’s beyond repair
• What automated cash-flow “muses” are and how to create one in 2 to 4 weeks
• How to cultivate selective ignorance—and create time—with a low-information diet
• What the management secrets of Remote Control CEOs are
• How to get free housing worldwide and airfare at 50–80% off
• How to fill the void and create a meaningful life after removing work and the office

You can have it all—really.

View More about The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

Paulo Coelho

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SpringQ.com says: The Alchemist is about having the courage to first open yourself up to listen for your true calling and then having the courage to follow your “Personal Legend”. While The Alchemist is not categorized under entrepreneurship, there are many life and business lessons to be learned from reading this book.

Treat yourself to an uninterrupted full morning or afternoon to read The Alchemist and then put it’s lessons into action!

From Amazon.com:

My Heart Is Afraid that it will have to suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.”Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams.”

Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. The Alchemist is such a book. With over a million and a half copies sold around the world, The Alchemist has already established itself as a modern classic, universally admired. Paulo Coelho’s charming fable, now available in English for the first time, will enchant and inspire an even wider audience of readers for generations to come.

The Alchemist is the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as any ever found. From his home in Spain he journeys to the markets of Tangiers and across the Egyptian desert to a fateful encounter with the alchemist.

The story of the treasures Santiago finds along the way teaches us, as only a few stories have done, about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life’s path, and, above all, following our dreams.

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Pete Blackshaw

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springq.com says: Credibility is the lifeblood of all great organizations! Read all about Pete Blackshaw’s six critical credibility drivers:

1. Trust
2. Authenticity
3. Transparency
4. Listening
5. Responsiveness
6. Affirmation

In today’s Internet-driven world, customers have more power than ever. Through what interactive marketing expert Pete Blackshaw calls “consumer-generated media”—blogs, social networking pages, message boards, product review sites—even a single disgruntled customer can broadcast his complaints to an audience of millions. Blackshaw shows managers, marketers, and business leaders how to establish and maintain credibility for their brand by being authentic, listening and responding to customers, and forming relationships built on openness, transparency, and trust.Filled with stories based on his experience working with Fortune 500 brands such as Toyota, Dell, Nike, Sony, General Motors, Hershey, Unilever, Nestlé, Lexus, and Bank of America, Blackshaw offers a clear strategy to sustain a competitive advantage by creating enduring, loyal relationships with today’s consumer.

View More about Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000: Running a Business in Today’s Consumer-Driven World

Craig Stull

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Tuned In argues that the key to business success lies in understanding and connecting with what consumers and markets want most. Being tuned in to the needs of buyers, whether those needs are expressed outwardly or not, is the ultimate secret to creating and marketing products and services that people want to buy. For anyone who markets a product, service, or ideas in any business, industry, or organization, Tuned In delivers a simple six-step process for discovering real and deep insights into any market: finding unsolved problems, understanding buyer personas, quantifying impact, creating breakthrough experiences, articulating powerful ideas, and establishing sustainable connections. Tuned In shows readers how to stop guessing what consumers need and stop wasting time and money building, marketing, and selling solutions that the market doesn’t value. This insightful book shows readers how to connect with their market in order to create products and services that truly resonate with people.

View More about Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs

Ken Blanchard

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Mega-bestselling author Ken Blanchard and celebrated business leaders Don Hutson and Ethan Willis present an inspiring story that reveals the secrets to becoming a successful entrepreneur.

In THE ONE MINUTE ENTREPRENEUR, Ken Blanchard (coauthor of the #1 bestselling business classic The One Minute Manager), Don Hutson, CEO of U.S. Learning, and Ethan Willis, CEO of Prosper Learning, tell the inspiring story of one man’s challenges in creating his own business. Through a powerful and engaging narrative, we confront many of the typical problems all entrepreneurs face in starting up their business, from finding new sources of revenue to securing the commitment of their people and the loyalty of their customers. More important, we learn the secrets to becoming a successful entrepreneur, including how to build a firm foundation, how to ensure a steady cash flow, and how to create legendary service. In addition, the book offers invaluable advice, delivered through One Minute Insights, from such entrepreneurs and thinkers as Sheldon Bowles, Peter Drucker, Michael Gerber, and Charlie “Tremendous” Jones.

Today, in the midst of the largest entrepreneurial surge in U.S. history, four out of five small businesses continue to fail. THE ONE MINUTE ENTREPRENEUR offers businesspeople and would-be entrepreneurs a treasure trove of wisdom on how to think, act, and succeed in creating and sustaining a business, no matter what their industry.

View More about The One Minute Entrepreneur: The Secret to Creating and Sustaining a Successful Business

David Heinemier Hannson of 37Signals and creator of the web framework Ruby on Rails, gave a great talk at Paul Graham’s Startup School this weekend. In the same way that he and his 37Signals comrades defy conventional wisdom on developing technology, he presents his unconventional ideas on business (at least unconventional compared to the VC-ish and We-Want-To-Get-Bought-Out-By-Google crowd that probably attended Startup School).

Some highlights:

• Comparing over-fearing terrorism to over-hoping to be the next billion+ dollar Facebook or MySpace
• Targeting the “Fortune 5,000,000″
• Charge REAL MONEY for your product/service! *GASP*
• You don’t have to be the best Italian restaurant, there’s room for LOTS of excellent ones in the world
• You don’t always have to have a super original or creative idea … Zappos.com created a great business selling shoes online for godsakes! They just do it great with extraordinary customer service.

Anyway, watch the video, it’s well worth your time (and check out the always interesting comments on this over at the Signal vs. Noise blog when you’re done):

James Webb Young

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A McGraw-Hill Advertising Classic

A Technique for Producing Ideas reveals a simple, sensible idea-generation methodology that has stood the test of time.

First presented to students in 1939, published in 1965, and now reissued for a new generation of advertising professionals and others looking to jump-start their creative juices, this powerful guide details a five-step process for gathering information, stimulating imagination, and recombining old elements into dramatic new ideas.

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photo credit: mistersnappy
There’s a nice, no-nonsense list from Small Biz Survival: Checklists for starting your first business. Some folks may take issue with starting as a sole proprietorship, some say you should never do that and should always do business as an LLC, S-Corp, etc., but it’s up to you! Check out the list!