Breaking Free
How to Quit Your Job and Start Your Own Business
Four Hot Product Launches That Will Inspire You In 2008
In: Business Ideas By: Brian Armstrong
29 Dec 2007A great post from Seth Godin’s blog:
While you’ve been wishing for the inspiration to start something great, thousands of entrepreneurs have used the prevailing sense of uncertainty to start truly remarkable companies. Lucrative Web businesses, successful tool catalogs, fast-growing PR firms — all have started on a shoestring, and all have been profitable ahead of schedule. The Web is dead, right? Well, try telling that to Meetup.com, a new Web site that helps organize meetings anywhere and on any topic. It has 200,000 registered users — and counting.
Read the rest of the post here.
Also of interest: 37 Signals explains how to start accepting credit cards on your website when you launch a new product.
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Breaking Free is a blog for people who'd like to quit their 9-to-5, start their own business, and achieve financial freedom. It's written by web-entrepreneur Brian Armstrong. You can read more here »
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Andre Wilson
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:22 am
Five years ago I saw some laser crystals in the store of Bill Clinton and Elvis, and thought to myself, “wouldn’t it great if people should put their own pictures in a laser crystal cube”. After doing a lot of research, I learned that it was possible to do. So I set out a goal to make this service available to people by starting my very first online business, selling laser crystals. My company is called MyCrystalPortrait.com
It was a lot of work to get to the point where I am actually doing business online, but giving people the opportunity to put their image into laser crystals is very rewarding. It really took one year of hard work and preparation to get up and running. The first thing I had to do was to purchase a machine from China, then I had to learn how to use the machine, and then develop a web site. Marketing the site has been a big challenge. One of the techniques I have been using to push some of items and drive traffic to the site is to sell discounted crystals on ebay. I wasn’t sure what the market would really bear when it came to pricing the crystals, but after selling on ebay, I got a pretty good ideal. I am also using web logs to learn who comes to the site and from where, this has been a big help. I took a seminar class with Mary Gillian, at EEI, entitled “marketing online”. She said I should create a blog, which was a lot of fun except I am the only ones reading it (LOL). So far it has been more work then money, but I am enjoying myself.