Author
Chris Guillebeau
The writer who surveyed 1,500 people who started businesses with almost nothing and wrote down what they had in common.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Chris Guillebeau spent his twenties as a volunteer in West Africa and the following years visiting every country in the world, funding the travel with small online businesses. His blog, The Art of Non-Conformity, became a book of the same name in 2010.
For The $100 Startup he surveyed and interviewed people who had started with under a hundred dollars and reached a full-time income, and the book, published in 2012, is their cases and the pattern behind them. He went on to write Side Hustle and The Money Tree, and to run the World Domination Summit, an annual gathering in Portland for people building unconventional lives.
The signature
Guillebeau writes as a reporter of other people's businesses rather than a theorist: the case first, the rule second, and a preference for the small, specific and already working over the ambitious and planned.