Less Doing, More Living by Ari Meisel

Author:Ari Meisel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

WHERE TO START

There are many companies devoted to creating custom products. Sometimes, a quick Internet search may find you a company that will make exactly what you want. Other times, you may need an expert to create it for you.

If what you need is less tangible, like software or travel planning, you can find someone to do it for you on Elance. From my perspective, Elance is the number-one outsourcing marketplace in the world—much better than Guru and Odesk. It’s free to post the job you want done. Once you post the project, people from around the world bid on it. There’s an escrow system, and you can check the contractor’s feedback before you hire anyone. Elance has experts in many different fields, from software development and graphic design to travel planning, legal advice, and private investigation. It’s a great way to get the job done.

Another favorite outsourcing website is www.fiverr.com. Fiverr is a site where people will do gigs for five dollars, ranging from the extremely bizarre to the very useful. On the bizarre side, there’s a guy in New York City who, for five dollars, will call anybody you want and wish them happy birthday . . . as Christopher Walken. He’s making fifteen hundred dollars a month doing this.

There’s also an older gentleman who will do a fake skydiving video holding a sign with your website written on it for five dollars—weird stuff.

But there’s also really useful stuff, like “I will tweet your message to my 240,000 Twitter followers in the next twenty-four hours for five dollars.” Or “I will submit your site to 1,250 search engine directories for five dollars.” Or “I will review your website and give you ten tips for improving your search engine optimization for five dollars.” They all have feedback, and there’s some really good stuff.

A few years ago, when I bought my Mac mini, I put these services together to create a custom bracket to mount it on the wall. I can’t draw, but I was able to make a terrible drawing of what I wanted. Then I paid someone five dollars on Fiverr to turn the drawing into a 3D model. Then I sent the 3D model to www.shapeways.com. Shapeways charges by the amount of material, so for forty-three dollars, I was able to get a 3D printed prototype of my 3D model. A week later, it came in the mail, and I had the perfect bracket to hang my Mac mini on the wall.

On top of that, if you use Shapeways, you also get access to their e-commerce platform. I ended up selling six of these brackets for sixty-five dollars apiece. So, with about an hour of my time and an initial cost of forty-eight dollars, I was able to create a custom-made one-off product that was exactly suited to my needs, and make almost four hundred dollars selling that product to other people. If a solution doesn’t already exist, you can probably create one a lot more easily than you might think.

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