The $100 Startup

The Cardboard Box and the Tandem Bike

May 4, 2009. Michael Hanna walks out of Nordstrom in Portland carrying a cardboard box and wearing the suit they sold him. He has spent twenty-five years in commission sales. Now it is 2:30 in the afternoon and he does not have a job. A friend mentions a closeout deal on mattresses. Hanna rents a defunct car dealership showroom, posts on Craigslist, and starts selling. Two years later he donates the Nordstrom suit to Goodwill, mounts a custom tandem bicycle rigged to haul a king-size mattress, and rides to work. He delivers mattresses by bike. Customers who arrive by bike get free delivery. They film thank-you videos for YouTube. He says he has never been happier.

This is the kind of story Chris Guillebeau spent four years collecting. *The $100 Startup* is the result — a study of fifteen hundred people who built profitable, location-flexible micro-businesses with startup costs that rarely cracked four figures, and a manual for anyone who wants to do the same. The book has a thesis and it does not hide it. The old contract — show up at the same desk for forty years, get a pension and a gold watch — is broken. Self-employment is no longer the riskier path. The riskier path is staking everything on a single employer who can lay you off Friday at 2:30. Guillebeau is not asking whether you should build something of your own. He is asking what is stopping you, and then he is dismantling each excuse in turn.

The book's mood is cheerful and slightly impatient. Guillebeau himself imported Jamaican coffee from a Memphis apartment in his twenties, then spent four years in Sierra Leone and Liberia driving Land Rovers for a medical charity, and is now working through a project to visit every country in the world. "There's no rehab program for being addicted to freedom," he writes, and the line is a thesis statement disguised as a joke. Freedom and value. Those are the two words you will see again and again. Build something that gives people genuine value, and you earn the freedom to live as you choose.