The $100 Startup, by Chris Guillebeau.

The $100 startup, by Chris Guillebeau, talks about the vast amount of opportunities today to make money by yourself without the constraint of long term commitments and with the freedom to work on what you want to work on. The idea Guilllebeau emphasizes primarily in this book is that anyone can work towards what they want by themselves and aren’t required to borrow a lot of money or go to business school. He examplifies this throughout the book with various stories of people starting their own business.

Guillebeau first talks about a man named Michael Hanna, a sales professional in Portland, Oregon, who upon losing his job gets contacted by his friend with a proposition. Michael’s friend offers him a large amount of closeout mattresses for him to potentially sell on Craigslist. From there on, Michael researched the mattress market and made a very surprising profitable business off of selling mattresses for the next two years. Additionally, Michael’s store neighbor named Sarah Young also started a yarn store called Happy Knits. Despite practically no prior experience in entrepreneurship, Sarah’s store became profitable within six months.

What I take away from this book so far is that the author tries to express how much opportunity most people have to be able to start their own business without much experience or a large investment. I was surprised by some of the examples he gave of start up successes, but I think that the author left out certain details about starting up businesses when describing his “$100 Startup Model”. For example, he stated that he expects a small business to gain at least a $50k yearly income but he doesn’t give an example of how one would gain that much through a startup. Overall though, his book is interesting and eye opening about how startups can become very successful.