Born for This: How to Find the Work You Were Meant to Do by Chris Guillebeau

Author:Chris Guillebeau [Guillebeau, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781101903988
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2016-04-05T06:00:00+00:00

Note: As with other tactics and markets, eBay may not be available where you live, or it may be less relevant by the time you read this. The general rules still apply.

GOLD RUSH 101

Back in the days of the original gold rush, aspiring prospectors hopped trains to California in hopes of striking it rich. Many failed, but some made it. Modern equivalents of gold rushes still come along, and these days they tend to be easier to spot. They also require much less investment and risk—no need to sell everything you own and hop a train.

Benny Hsu, whose story you’ll read in more detail in the next chapter, earned more than $100,000 by designing T-shirts and selling them through Facebook ads. Thanks to a new technology and a lot of creative effort, he never had to stock a single shirt—another company did that for him, leaving him free to focus entirely on design.

In Vancouver, Canada, a creative entrepreneur founded Pirate Joe’s, a grocery store reseller dealing entirely in products purchased an hour away and across the U.S. border in Bellingham, Washington. Many Vancouverites are fans of Trader Joe’s products, which have a reputation for good quality and low prices, but the store has no Canadian presence. Mike Hallatt, the founder, regularly makes south-of-the-border grocery store runs to purchase tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of product. It’s not illegal, but Trader Joe’s is still so afraid of the competition that they’re trying to shut him down. (Enjoy the gold rush while it lasts, Mike.)

I once had my own gold rush in online advertising. While experimenting with a side business I had started when I was volunteering as an aid worker in West Africa, I figured out a trick so that I could consistently earn more money than I spent by purchasing ads on Google and sending the traffic to a lead-generation site that paid me on commission.

Alas, the possibilities weren’t infinite. I could regularly spend $300 and make $350 (for a $50 profit), and on some days I could spend $1,000 and make $1,200 (for a $200 profit), but I couldn’t go much higher than that. Still, it was great to be able to spend one amount of money at night and wake up to a larger amount of money in the morning. After a year, the opportunity disappeared as other people figured it out and crowded the market, but before that happened I was able to save the profits and use them to pay for an expensive graduate school program.

Opportunities are always around us, and when one gold rush door closes, another opens. Walk through the open door!

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