Kickstarting Potato Salad when the Chips are Down

In the past week a potato story dominated the airwaves not since freedom fries made their brief appearance over ten years ago. (A valiant attempt to rechristen Guinea pigs “Freedom pigs” unfortunately never took on).

The story made waves as the creator, Zach Brown managed to raise an extraordinary $50,000 on the eponymous kickstarter.com for such a culinarily inexpensive, simple recipe.

What this story tells us about the Internet age, where a flippant story can provoke much mirth and sharing as well as far too many copycats (bacon cupcakes anyone) is  a topic for another day.

It does raise the interesting question however of what makes a business and perhaps more critically what skills do I possess to make my own business?

And the crucial word here is skills. More and more people sell services online, from painting walls to mowing lawns to providing math help or music lessons.

These kinds of business require little or no capital to get started but the rewards can be huge.

A Real Life Example – Threadless.com

One company that started with just $1000 in a garage in the US was the (now) t-shirt giant threadless.com. Visitors would vote on a favorite design and the winning t-shirt would be printed and sold in small batches until the stock ran out.

This created exclusivity (quick, buy one before they’re all gone!) and prevented a large and costly stock overhang for the founders at the beginning.

Businesses like this interest us. At CommerceGurus we want to focus on how you can get up and running with minimal cost and avoid expensive start up mistakes.