Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

This is a pretty amazing story.  An out of work Canadian starts a business because he wants to learn how to use ASP.net.  No venture capital, no staff, and a home computer as a servers turns into a $10 million dollar business.  This is truly inspiring.  I`d love to hear other stories like this from the community.

Read this entrepreneur success story : plenty of fish, here.

Interesting story. It reminds me of the guy who wrote eBay over the weekend because he just thought it`d be fun to have an online way to buy used stuff. Then there`s the Craig (not me) who wrote Craig`s List because some friends of his were looking for an apartment to rent.

What`s the "learning point" of this? That we should all be accidental entrepreneurs?

I think that it might just be the point.  That our hobbies, learning experiences or anything else for that matter might become the next big hit.  Sometimes you stumble upon something when you aren`t thinking about it, so it always pays to be on the lookout.

I was listening to an interview with Guy Kawasaki, formerly with Apple computers, now a venture capitalist and advocate for entrepreneurship.

One of his basic rules about "the next big thing" is that it almost always begins with someone getting a flash of inspiration. "Wow! Wouldn`t it be totally cool if....."

That "coolness" factor is a really important thing, I believe. It wasn`t that eBay, Craig`s List or this dating site were developed as an attempt to make money.

Instead, each thing was developed because of the personal fascination with how "cool it would be if" there was such an application.

In this particular example of the dating service, note that the guy who created it was much more interested in learning programming language. He wanted "the most difficult thing" he could think of as a test, just to see how cool ASP.net might turn out to be.

So another learning point would be for each of us to look at our Web site, ecommerce site, or business idea. Ask yourself how much you`ve factored into it the "cool" factor. :-) What makes it cool?