Author
Chris Guillebeau
The writer who studied about 1,500 people whose small businesses earned $50,000 a year or more from modest starts.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Chris Guillebeau spent four years as a volunteer aid worker 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 identified about 1,500 people who had built businesses earning $50,000 a year or more from a modest start, in many cases $100 or less, and interviewed many of them. The book, published in 2012, tells fifty of 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.