by Jason L Baptiste
I move forward the only direction
Cant be scared to fail in Search of perfection
-Jay-Z, On To The Next One
I’m going to go and replace 3 years with a “short time frame”. Some things to focus on:
Market opportunity– A million dollars is not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it certainly is a lot if the market opportunity is not large enough. Even if you put Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as founders in a new venture with a total market size of 10 million, there is no way they could become too wealthy without completely changing the business (ie- failing).
Inequality of information- Find a place where you know something that many undervalue. Having this inequality of information can give you, your first piece of leverage.
Leverage skills you know- You can go into new fields such as say Finance, but make sure you’re leveraging something you already know such as technology and/or product. Someone wanted to start a documentary with me. I said that would be fun, but it would be my first documentary regardless of what happened. There was a glass ceiling due to that. If I do something leveraging a skill I know, I’m already ahead of the game.
Look in obscure places- We’re often fascinated with the shiny things in the internet industry. Many overlook the obscure and unsexy. Don’t make that mistake. If your goal has primarily monetary motivations, look at the unsexy. One example would be email newsletters, which I’ve profiled before.
Surround yourself with smart people- Smart people whom are successful usually got there by doing the same and have an innate desire to help those do the same. It’s the ecosystem that’s currently happening with the paypal mafia and can be traced all the way back to fairchild semiconductor.
Charge for something– Building a consumer property dependent upon advertising has easily made many millionaires, but it isn’t the surest path. It takes a lot of time and scale, which due to cashflow issues will require large outside investment probably before you are a millionaire. Build something that you can charge for. That’s how business has worked for thousands of years prior to the 1990s. Make something, charge for it, repeat it. DHH explains this really well at Startup School 08.
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