The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future (8 page)

Gary’s business, like many others we’ll look at, can be described as a follow-your-passion business. Gary was passionate about travel and
had found a number of creative ways to enjoy first-class trips around the world at economy prices. He started helping people do the same thing, first as a volunteer community member for several travel forums, then on a blog, and then on an individual basis for people he knew. Word got around—“Hey, Gary, I’d like to take my wife to Europe and I have all these miles … What do I do?”—and before he knew it, he had more requests for help than he could handle.

The next logical step was to start charging. He built a very basic website and set up shop in a short period of time, not entirely sure what would happen next. Would anyone purchase this unusual service? Well, yes, they would—and even though Gary is content in his day job and has no plans to leave, he no longer depends on it. If something changed at work, he’d have no problem living off the funds from his side business or ramping it up to something bigger.

Gary’s story is inspiring but not all that uncommon. As I foraged for case studies and went from interview to interview, I learned to stop being surprised when I heard that a coupon-clipping website run by a single mom brought in $60,000 part-time or that a handmade toy business was closing in on $250,000 and hiring multiple employees.

When I met Megan Hunt at the co-working space she owns in Omaha, it was 6 p.m. and she was just coming to work. Megan keeps odd hours, preferring to work through the night with her infant in tow. Unlike most of our stories, Megan was determined to be an entrepreneur from a young age. “I started when I was nineteen and a sophomore in college,” she said. “I never intended to do anything but work for myself. I always knew that I didn’t want a conventional job, so I never expected to resign myself to a fate other than the one I wanted as an artist. I worked a few eight-to-five desk jobs, but I wasn’t discouraged because I only saw them as the means to an end: gaining enough capital to start my own full-time venture.”

Megan now makes custom wedding dresses and bridal accessories full-time, selling them to women age twenty-four to thirty all over the world (42 percent of her customer base is international). After earning $40,000 her first year, she’s now scaling up by carefully hiring two employees as well as founding the co-working space where her business is situated. (Since she’s the owner, no one can complain about her night-owl work habits.)

Almost every business owner we’ll meet in our journey has at least one disaster story, when something went off track or even threatened the life of the business. In Megan’s case, the big disaster came right before the holiday season in 2010. After spending seventy hours crafting high-end flower kits for two customers, she shipped them out via the U.S. Postal Service … and the packages disappeared into the postal service void. “It was terrible,” Megan told me. “I had to refund money I didn’t have, and the worst part was thinking about the brides who now didn’t have flowers for their wedding.” But she did what she had to do—refunded money, wrote teary apology notes, posted the whole story on her blog for others to learn from—and moved on.

Aside from vowing never to use USPS again, Megan loves her business and wouldn’t want to do anything differently. “I spend every day learning from people who inspire and motivate me in the co-working space,” she says, “and I interact every day with customers who are in the midst of their own love stories. I have a young daughter who I am able to bring to work. My earning potential is unlimited, and I am free to reinvest in my happiness with every dollar that comes in.”

It all sounds so simple: Pick something you love and build a business around it, the way Gary and Megan did.
Cha-ching!
But is it really that easy? As you might expect, the real answer is more complex. Building a business around a passion can be a great fit for many people, but not everyone.

In the rush to pursue a passion, a number of things tend to get left out. First, you can’t pursue just any passion—there are plenty of things you may be passionate about that no one will pay you for. Remember the all-important lesson of convergence we’ve been looking at throughout the book. You must focus continually on how your project can help other people, and why they’ll care about what you’re offering in the first place. I like to eat pizza, but no matter how passionate I am, it’s doubtful I could craft a career around my love for mushrooms and black olives. Instead, I had to find something more interesting to the rest of the world.

Sometimes a false start precedes a successful microbusiness. In Reno, Nevada, Mignon Fogarty created the QDT Network, best known for her signature show
Grammar Girl
. The show was a huge hit almost from the beginning, spawning a line of books, related programs, and non-stop media attention. But before she
was Grammar Girl, Mignon pursued a similar idea in an unsuccessful attempt to build popularity through podcasting. Here’s how she tells the story:

Mignon changed course, trading science for grammar. The answer wasn’t to abandon her passion altogether but to make sure she connected the right passion with the right audience.

Next, many successful follow-your-passion business owners understand an important principle that aspiring (and unsuccessful) business owners don’t. The missing piece is that you usually don’t get paid for your hobby itself; you get paid for helping other people pursue the hobby or for something indirectly related to it. This point is critical. I began my writing career by sharing stories about a quest to visit every country in the world, but I don’t get paid for that. I have to create value in my business the same way anyone else does—without real value, I wouldn’t get paid, and the travel would be just a hobby (albeit a passionate one).

Let’s look at another example. Benny Lewis, originally from Ireland, likes to say he gets paid to learn languages. Benny’s story is inspiring: He makes more than $65,000 a year, reports to no one, and goes from country to country immersing himself in different cultures. But as we look at the story more carefully, we find that there’s more to it.

I first met Benny on a layover in Bangkok. Benny doesn’t drink, which is probably a good thing because he is quite possibly the most naturally enthusiastic person I’ve ever met. Over a couple of mango juices, he told me his story. Twenty-four years old, Benny had been traveling abroad for the past two years. As a child, he spoke only English. He graduated with an engineering degree and no known aptitude for foreign languages. Moving to Spain after graduation and consulting with clients back home, he became determined to learn Spanish.

Six months into his stay in Seville, however, Benny felt frustrated with still not knowing the language, spending most of his time with a group of expatriates and Spaniards who spoke English. He decided to speak only Spanish for an entire month, with no exceptions. At first it was awkward and embarrassing; he didn’t know how to conjugate verbs, so he just used the present tense and wildly waved his arms behind him to indicate that something had already happened. But the funny thing about using only another language is that you learn it much more quickly than when you rely on English as a backup. Within a few weeks, Benny was speaking comfortably. The month-long immersion was much better than the six months before it, and he was now hooked on learning other languages. He moved to Berlin and learned German, then to Paris to learn French, and then to Prague to learn Czech, a notoriously difficult language.

Putting his engineering career on hold, Benny started traveling and never stopped, working at short-term consulting jobs to pay the bills wherever he could. With his non-stop energy, he got up in the middle of the night for conference calls in North America. Being single (and not drinking) made it easy to live on a small amount of money, but it was obvious that Benny had a great skill to share with the world. His message to everyone who would listen—by this point the whole bar of expats had heard about it—was that anyone can learn another language even if you think you aren’t “gifted” or spoke only one language as a child.

Benny’s method was based on proven success. Within two years, he had learned seven languages (fluently!), and regularly tested himself with native speakers he met while traveling. Once in a while, he tutored someone in language learning, but the approach was scattershot.

“Benny, your skill is amazing,” I said when I met him that night in Bangkok. “Why don’t you get more serious about teaching this method to more people?” (To be fair, I can’t take much credit for pushing him. Benny had been thinking about the idea for a while, and many other people had gathered around the bar at that point, encouraging him.)

He toyed with a few different names for the idea before hitting on the perfect one: Fluent in 3 Months. Everyone raised a bottle of beer in approval while Benny sipped his juice. Just as soon as he learned Thai (his
eighth
language), he would get to work outlining everything he knew about language hacking.

The vision was solid, but the work was tough. Benny struggled with fitting everything he knew into a collection of documents, videos, and interviews. He kept waiting for it to be perfect … and then he kept waiting. “I finally just had to give up on
perfection and get the thing out the door,” he said later. The course is now available in eight languages—all taught by Benny himself, naturally.

To market Fluent in 3 Months, Benny made YouTube videos giving a tour of his apartment in five languages (including different dialects). He stood on street corners in various countries and sang in the national language, dressing up in native costume and offering free hugs. When I ran into him next in Texas, he was wearing a set of goggles on top of a hat. “Uh, what’s with the goggles?” I asked. His answer was typical: “I wear them when I travel so people will ask, ‘Why are you wearing those?’ Then I have an easy way to get to know them and try to learn their language.”