If you follow internet business trends at all, then you've probably heard a lot of talk about "the bubble bursting" in reference to the millions of dollars venture capital firms have been throwing at various social networking/"web 2.0" startups. If there's any silver lining to the current economic condition, it's that the spending free-for-all has stopped as many VC firms are forced to tighten the belt just to survive. Hopefully this will force funders back to the good 'ol days when investment opportunities were researched, analyzed and conservatively chosen without regard to the trends of the moment. If you think I'm crazy for attacking the recent investing habits of well-established VC firms, then check out this article on Why VCs invest in stupid companies.

Luckily, there are still resources out their for those without the california mentality who believe in starting small and building from the ground up. A few weeks ago, I came across Adam McFarland's "Funding Your First Business" which spells out pretty clearly how a young person can get a reasonable business off the ground without much outside financial help. Click below to get the basics...

McFarland writes:

My advice – eliminate all of the uncertainty by using a job to fund yourself. Here’s what I would do if I was graduating today and starting out again from scratch tomorrow:

1. Get a non-career job where you can work 30 – 40 hours/week and make enough money to live off of. It might not impress your parents, but that job bartending or waiting tables or being a barista or bank teller is going to afford you the opportunity to do what you truly want.
2. Pick a potential business idea…then start a related service for under $100. Let’s say you’re like me and want to run lots of successful web apps. Starting a web app from scratch and building it to a point where it brings in solid revenue is very difficult and many times doesn’t work out. Instead, start a web design business first. $100 gets you some business cards, a simple website, and a Skype phone number. Throw and ad on Craigslist, work Twitter and Facebook, go to a few local networking events, and whatever else it takes to get your first clients for free. For more ideas, check out my post How To Do Client Work Right that I wrote just after we got rid of the service side of our business.
3. Use the remaining time to work on your “ideal” business. If you still want to build that web app, take advantage of all of the free time that you have to slowly-but-surely build it without the stress of needing it. Build something that has true value to people, even if it takes a year or two to do it. The more stress, the more you need a web app to succeed, the more likely you are to press and make drastic changes instead of being patient. Great websites take years and years to build.
4. Pump profits from your service into growing your “ideal” business. Since you are living off of your job, you can “reward” yourself by spending some or all of your service profit on growing the web app.

Here’s how your average week likely breaks down: 30 – 40 hours working, 15 – 25 hours on your service, and 5 – 10 hours on your ideal business. ~60 hours is no joke, but it’s also not a bad deal for how much benefit you’re getting.

This is a very low risk, high reward path that gives you TONS of future options:

* If things don’t take off, you can try again or get a career job.
* If the service grows, you can quit your part time job or stop working on the web app.
* If the web app grows, you can stop providing service or quit the part time job.
* If they both grow and you can cover your living expenses, you can definitely quit the part time job!

Are you building a business without outside financing? Do you have experience with starting really small? Share you insight by commenting below.

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For those who think Twitter is useless, consider this article that I just came across via famed entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki's Twitter page:



The link in the Kawasaki's tweet refers to the article "How to Build a Powerful Personal Brand", from the American Express OPEN Forum. The article provides wonderfully concise advice on creating a powerful brand for yourself and for your business. Check it out below...

We all have personal brands because we're always being judged based on first impressions and we always have to sell ourselves in various life situations, including pitching to venture capitalists and influencing management to let us take on the next big project. Personal branding can be a major differentiator for you and allow you to gain opportunities that you wouldn't have received otherwise. Here are ten tips for building a powerful personal brand.

Select a niche.
There are thousands of marketing and probably a million social media blogs, which means you'll get lost if you position yourself the same way. The best way to stand out is to choose a niche that isn't saturated and where you have a lot of value to contribute. If you're passionate about that niche, then you'll be willing to work hard enough to become the leading voice or expert on that topic. A niche is how you position your brand in the flooding marketplace known as the Internet. By choosing the right niche, people will find you, you'll get hired for jobs and have many other opportunities.

Be the real you.
The greatest differentiator you have is your own unique personality. If you try and copy someone else, then you won't stand out nor will you have much self-respect. Make sure you present yourself as authentic, natural, and transparent, so people know they are talking with a human, and not a robot. Oprah, Trump, and Madonna are who they are, and people cling to that and appreciate it. If you want to grow your fan base, or simply want to succeed in an interview, be yourself.

Claim your name.
When it comes to online brand building, claiming your domain name has become a necessity. Your goal is to claim the top ten results for your full name in Google and domain names always rank really high (yourname.com). Go to Godaddy.com or another hosting service to get your name before someone else does. If .com isn't available, then try .net, and then .org. If nothing is available, then use your middle initial or brand yourself relative to a topic of your choosing or a nickname.

Network like a rockstar.
You can't succeed without the help of other people. Brand building is supported by a strong network because marketing exists through other people. You should treat your life like one giant networking event and recognize that you're already well networked. You have friends, families, teachers, managers, and acquaintances that you've met throughout your life. If you draw upon these contacts and try and help them out, then they will do the same for you. Over time, this strategy will boost your brand and get you to where you want to be.

Blog with passion.
You're going to need a lot of passion to blog because posting every day is impossible unless you do. You need to be dedicated and for me, that even meant publishing a few posts while on a cruise ship last January. Your readers aren't stupid people. They know if you're just trying to make money and get attention or if you're truly passionate about the content you produce.

Create content and market it.
Even if you built it, they probably won't come. You need to actively market your blog or website, in order to gain new readership and be found. There are several ways to do this including: commenting on other blogs, guest posting on blogs, writing article for online sources, speaking at events, starting an email newsletter, creating a LinkedIn group, joining networking events in your field, etc. Anyone can write a blog entry, but not everyone can take that blog entry and pass it around the world through various marketing channels.

Monitor your reputation.
After getting involved online or if you're already a well known brand, you'll want to constantly see what people are saying about you. Tools, such as Google alerts and Twitter search, will allow you to get a pulse for your brand name online and allow you to intercept both positive and negative results for your name. For negative results, you can prevent 'virtual forest fires' before they spread and for positive results, you can use them as endorsements for your brand.

Link everything together.
After you've signed up for all of your social networks, it's important to link all of them together by playing a link to your accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc). This way, all of your sites will rank higher for your name and people will be able to follow your digital trail to uncover more information about your brand.

Bring your brand offline.
Don't count on becoming best friends with a hundred people you met online. Try and meet people outside of your digital world, so that you can further relationships. Also, your brand online and offline has to be consistent, so if you come off differently offline, you won't be taken seriously. When going for an interview, you can print many of the documents and websites or blogs you have and bring them with you.

Build a community.
If you really want to succeed at building a powerful brand, then creating a community of people that are passionate about what you're doing is vital. You want brand ambassadors to spread positive word-of-mouth messages and to recruit other people to be apart of your community, without you having to work twice as hard. The more you can focus on bringing new people into your world, the better.

What are your thoughts on building a personal brand? Do you have one? Share your comments and tips below.


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Watching TV is a dangerous trap that seems to creep up during my strongest bouts of procrastination. What I should have been doing this morning was writing, but instead I was slipping into the vortex that is Bravo TV. While the ideals of entrepreneurship will always be my first passion, I get so easily sucked into anything that relates to fashion because as a concept, it's self-gratifying and liberating...much like entrepreneurship. My love affair with the world of fashion is especially dangerous when Project Runway reruns and the vintage clothing category on eBay are, respectively, a channel change and mouse click away...



Halfway through the end of the season finale of The Fashion Show, my boyfriend called to reprimand me for my fashion-induced lack of focus, given I hadn't updated my blog all weekend (apparently he's an avid reader). Though I knew he was totally right, there was something about today's episode that felt like more than mindless TV. Here I was, in awe of one of the contestant's fashion collection only to watch all of the judges shoot her down for lack of consistency. At first I disagreed with the judges criticisms as I felt the contestant had designed brilliant clothes with lots of interesting patterns and shapes, but it wasn't until the last judge made her comments that I suddenly "got it".

I paraphrase, but the judge said to the contestant, "What you've done with your work is create lots of beautiful, interesting chapters. I worry; however, that with all of these brilliant pieces that you've lost the storyline. You've forgot how to edit."

I never expected to find today's post topic from reality TV, but what that judge said was genius. So often as ambitious, spritely, young adults we dive head first into a lot of truly exceptional projects only to lose the "storyline" of our true goals. I am so, so, SO guilty of this as I am blessed and cursed to be pretty good at a lot of different things. If we want to be truly successful at the things that mean the most to us, we really have to learn what it means to edit and ratchet our efforts down.

A great article on this is The Power of One, from Life Learning Today (via Leo Babauta of Zenhabits.com). This article suggests that you rank all of your goals in order of importance, then work solely on the most important one until it is accomplished, then move down to the next one. Essentially, this method is the debt snowball of goal setting.

While I agree that you have to create a hierarchy for goals if you ever hope to complete any of them, working on one at a time is just too limiting for me as there is a lot that I want to accomplish. My method for editing is to choose one goal per category in your life to accomplish at a time. The trick is then to pick goals that still relate to the other categories. For example, I have a goal of finding an effective workout routine that I can do on a consistent basis. Though this would fall under the "health" category in my life, it's related to my productivity and spirituality goals. In other words, its okay to work on more than one goal at a time as long as you're being incestuous about it; keep it all related. If you're really determined, keeping everything in an excel spreadsheet or a simple notebook can help.

I know all this goal talk may seem geeky some, but it's really important to continuously edit yourself so that you can keep all of your energy focused. Had that contestant learned that, she might have had the winning collection.

Had I learned that, I might have had this post written a whole lot sooner.


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If you were reading this blog earlier today, then you probably came across my post on Gurbaksh "G" Chahal, the high school dropout who made his millions after selling an internet advertising company at the age of 18. At the end of his Current TV interview, he talks about how he went undercover of a FOX TV show called Secret Millionaire that aired back in December of 2008. The premise of the show is that these millionaires go into underpriviliged neighborhoods unbeknownst to the residents, only to surprise one lucky person at the end of the show with $100,000.

After a little digging, I cam across this video on YouTube which features some of the other "secret" millionaires describing how they made their money. I'm excited to say that they have some women featured in this clip...check it out and let me know what you think. Have you seen this show?
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When you start something new—whether it be a blog, a magazine, a clothing line, a party or whatever—it's only normal that you want to make your new thing stand out from all the other things before it. The following video of Australian style magazine Russh Magazine gives us a simple reminder that it's not hard to be different and in fact, difference is key. One of the easiest ways to stand out is to use a basic medium in a new way.

Instead of just posting "Hey, we have a new issue!" on their website, Russh Magazine did a video flip-through of the new issue and made it available for their readers. How clever. Now potential readers can see what they're getting into before...well, they get into it. Have you ever taken something conventional and used it in a new way? Essentially, that's what all successful business ideas are built upon. What do you think of Russh's idea? Give your opinion below.

Thanks Jazzi MG for the heads up.
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I came across this video months ago, and I fell in love with this story. Gurbaksh Chahal aka "G" is an Indian immigrant, a high school dropout, and a multimillionaire under the age of 30. I always watch this video when I'm lacking inspiration; he's the very definition of how hard work prevails over circumstance everytime.

He's written a book called "The Dream" and has his own blog at http://gurbaksh-chahal.blogspot.com/ You can also follow him on twitter at @gchahal. Enjoy!
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Here's a clip of an interesting NY Times article I came across a few days ago. I think the most telling discussion in the article was about how high unemployment rates has highly experienced, laid-off adults competing with teenagers for traditionally "teenage" jobs like working at the mall, drugstore, or being a camp counselor. Times are very, very hard, but it's good to see people as young as 15 years old fighting for their financial freedom.

PERIODS of high unemployment tend to be particularly hard on teenagers, who wind up competing for jobs with more experienced, laid-off adults.

When Faith Borden, 16, of Metuchen, N.J., applied for a job in March to be a counselor at a summer day camp, she looked around and saw “all these 30- and 40-year-olds,” she said. “Usually it’s just teenagers.” ...

She also applied at pizza restaurants, drugstores and most of the stores at her local mall, and even attended a job fair in Edison, N.J., but didn’t receive one offer. So she decided to work for herself, selling Avon products.

Also facing a competitive job market, Max O’Dell, 14, of Cary, N.C., started Smiley Inc., a custom T-shirt design business. He paints shirts in his driveway and hangs them in the garage to dry; revenue so far has been $170.

“Business is very steady, and I would much rather work for myself than at a fast-food place or something like that,” he said. “It feels really good to be my own boss.”

Unemployment for 16- to 19-year-olds is at its highest rate since 1992 — at 22.7 percent in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is causing some teenagers to rethink their notion of work and to embrace entrepreneurship.

“This is a generation raised to believe they can do anything, and the first to grow up with entrepreneurial celebrities like Steve Jobs of Apple and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google,” said Donna Fenn, who interviewed 150 young entrepreneurs for her forthcoming book, “Upstarts: How Gen Y Entrepreneurs Are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit From Their Success.”

Many teenagers have also seen the turmoil in the auto industry and layoffs of parents or other adults. They no longer associate financial security with big corporations, Ms. Fenn said.

In a survey conducted by the Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship in December 2007, 4 out of 10 people from the ages of 8 to 21 said they would like to start their own business in the future.

But that might reflect youths’ aspirations more than reality, said Scott Shane, an economist and a professor of entrepreneurship at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and a contributor to The New York Times’s small-business blog, “You’re the Boss.” “The percentage of the population becoming entrepreneurs is actually declining,” he said. “It’s true today that people are more likely to say they want to be in business for themselves, but that may reflect their attitude more than their behavior.”

Still, interest in entrepreneurship education among teenagers is rising. The Distributive Education Clubs of America, or DECA, which provide high school and college students with training in marketing, management and entrepreneurship, says it has found a 20 percent increase this year in interest in its entrepreneurship events.

Amy Rosen, chief executive of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, a nonprofit group that provides entrepreneurship education in low-income communities, says her organization has more inquiries from school districts than it can serve and has been overwhelmed this year with applicants for its spring-break and summer camps.

“These kids are concerned that the world their parents grew up in no longer exists and the notion of taking control and owning your own future is really appealing,” Ms. Rosen said.

The Internet may be the most significant catalyst for teenagers’ entrepreneurship. The ability to start a business online has lowered many barriers to self-employment faced by young people — you need only a domain name and a Web site to set up shop and are largely anonymous to customers, who never have to know your age, said Alan Lysaght, co-author of “The ABCs of Making Money for Teens.”

There is also an abundance of information online about starting a business.

Laura Durst, 18, a recent high school graduate in Woodstock, Conn., in the state’s northeast corner, said that there were so few jobs for teenagers there that two years ago she began setting up a Web-based business, WorkInMyRoom.com. It provides teenagers with information and online resources to find jobs that can be done from home.

Ms. Durst said she was inspired by her mother, who also is an entrepreneur. “Seeing her work from home, where she could be her own boss, I liked the idea of that,” she said.

Ms. Durst’s revenue comes from advertising. She uses Google Ad Sense — which displays relevant Google ads on her site — and earns money when users click on them. She says she is making about $250 a month.

TEENAGERS start a wide range of businesses, Mr. Lysaght said, from selling art, jewelry or collectibles online to Web site creation and design. “They also do non-Web-based things like yard work, house cleaning, dog walking, pool care, tutoring and party planning,” he said.

In addition to the money they are earning, teenagers say entrepreneurship has made them more mature. Max O’Dell said he could now relate when his father talked about his own work, and Ms. Borden said she has learned how to speak to adults as an adult. “I feel like this experience is getting me ready for the real world,” she said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/jobs/28teens.html

When I was in highschool, my hustle was cleaning out cars in our driveway with some Armor-all and my mom's vacuum cleaner. What were your teenage gigs? Were any of you "business wiz-kids" back in the day? Share your nostalgia below...


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