Quote
“Value is created when a person makes something useful and shares it with the world.”
— Chris Guillebeau, in The $100 Startup (2012) · The $100 Startup →
Why it was said
A line from The $100 Startup, Chris Guillebeau's study of people who built businesses earning $50,000 a year or more from modest starts, often $100 or less. It replaces the language of capital and scale with something a person with a skill can act on this week.
What it actually means
The sentence has two verbs and both are required: make something useful, and share it. Many people do the first and wait for permission to do the second; many start with the second and have nothing useful behind it. The practical reading is to do both at the smallest size: make one useful thing, offer it to a few people who have the problem, and take the first payment before building anything larger. Value, in this definition, is not a plan; it is an exchange that has already happened.
How to use it
- 1Write the useful thing you can make with what you have now, and the ten people you could share it with by Friday.
- 2Take the first payment before you build the second version.