The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future (10 page)

P
acking a carry-on bag with running shoes and two changes of clothes, I head out into the world via a short connection from Portland to Vancouver International Airport. Later that evening, the twelve-hour Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong gives me two hours to watch a movie, six hours to sleep, and four hours to write emails.

Arriving in Asia, I clear immigration (no bags to claim), check my wallet to see if I still have local currency from the last trip here, and settle into a concourse chair before jumping on the train into the city. I flip open the laptop, connect to “HKG-Free-WiFi,” and log onto the world.
Whoosh
 … out go all the emails I wrote on the plane, and in come 150 more that arrived during the night.

I check in with Reese, my designer, about a project we’ve been working on. I answer customer support requests—a page on our site is down, someone needs a login, and so on—and write a quick update to customers. I review reader comments from my latest blog post and quickly check my daily list of email signups, the only
metric I monitor on a frequent basis. (If all’s going well with new subscribers, everything else should be OK.)

I often stay in guest houses and hostels, but later tonight I have a conference call scheduled for the bleary hour of 2 a.m.—it’s daytime in North America—so I head to the Conrad Hotel. Fortunately, I slept enough on the plane that I’m good to go after a shower, so I set up shop in my “office” for the next two days. A few hours later, the host on the call is saying “good afternoon” to everyone, and I try to refrain from mentioning the local time while looking out at the Hong Kong skyline.

On this trip I’m headed on to Vietnam and Laos, but I could be going anywhere. After I adjust to the time difference over the next couple of days, I settle into a routine of morning work and afternoon exploration. At least one week a month, I live in this dream world of travel, work, and frequent coffee breaks. The business is structured around my life, not the other way around.

I know what some people think: It sounds like a fantasy. Well … it really is happening, on a broad scale, for thousands of people all over the world. My example is just one of many; let’s hear about a few others.

In 2009, Brandon Pearce was living in Utah and working as a successful piano teacher, meaning that he got by and paid the rent while doing something he enjoyed. But Brandon was also intensely curious, and wanted to combine an interest in technology with his passion for music education. As he thought about colleagues he knew, he found the convergence point between his skill and what they needed.

“Music teachers don’t want to deal with business administration; they want to teach music,” he said. “But in the typical music teacher’s workday, they have to spend much of their time dealing with administrative tasks.” Scheduling, rescheduling, sending reminders—in addition to time, all these things take up a lot of attention and distract from teaching. Furthermore, many music teachers aren’t making all the money they should, since payments are sometimes overlooked and students fail to show up.

Brandon didn’t intend to create a business at first; he just wanted to solve what he called the “disorganized music teacher problem” for himself. The answer was Music Teacher’s Helper, an interface that Brandon created for personal use before turning it into a one-stop platform for music teachers of all kinds. The teachers could create their own websites (without having any technical skills) and handle all aspects of scheduling and billing, thus enabling them to focus on the actual teaching they enjoyed.

Was this a market in search of a solution? Yes, and the market was substantial. Was Brandon giving them the fish? Yes, and because music teachers are often on a low budget, Brandon made sure to highlight the fact that paying for Music Teacher’s Helper might actually
save
them money over time, but to ensure the business’s profitability, he didn’t skimp on the price. The service is available in several different versions, including a free version for limited use and going up to a $588-a-year version depending on the number of students.
^*

Three years later, Brandon’s life is quite different. Instead of living in Utah, he now wakes up in sunny Escazú, Costa Rica, where he lives with his wife and three young daughters. He has
ten employees living in different places around the world. He carefully tracks his time and estimates that he spends eight to fifteen hours a week directly related to the business. The rest of his time is spent with his family and on various side projects that he pursues for fun.

Brandon and his family used to live in Utah and now they live in Costa Rica, but that’s not the whole story; the whole story is that they could live anywhere they want. When they needed to do a visa run, they went over to Guatemala for eight days, and since Brandon and his wife are “unschooling” their children and can easily take them anywhere, there’s no telling where they’ll end up next. (A tentative plan involves moving to Asia.)

Oh, and one more thing: Music Teacher’s Helper is currently on track to earn at least $360,000 a year. Because his customers commit for the long term and pay monthly, it’s unlikely that this number will ever go down. Instead, it will continue to increase as more and more music teachers join the ranks.

Originally from Michigan, Kyle Hepp is an “accidental” entrepreneur in the literal sense. Having relocated to Chile with her husband, Seba, Kyle made ends meet by working on side projects for AOL while she looked for a job in her planned field of sports management. The South American lifestyle was great, but Seba’s job as a construction engineer was far from secure, and the company started to go under. One Friday afternoon, he received notice that his salary was being cut 20 percent. He declined to sign a new contract and was immediately let go.

Two days after learning of the layoff, Kyle was out jogging when tragedy struck in the form of a pickup truck that ran into her at a crowded intersection, sending her flying a hundred feet from the point of impact. Her injuries weren’t life-threatening or permanent, but as you’d expect, Kyle was badly hurt. After a week in the hospital, she spent several more weeks at home, unable to walk and with so many bruises that she couldn’t even type—thus ending the side gig with AOL, which was done on a contract basis. “Between my husband’s layoff and getting run over by the car,” Kyle told me with a straight face, “it was kind of a bad weekend.”

Kyle and Seba had been married for nearly three years at that point and hadn’t ever had a real honeymoon, so they decided they might as well take vacation time while they could. Instead of looking for work, they booked flights to Italy and spent several weeks seeing Europe for the first time. Before the accident, Kyle had been dabbling in wedding photography. She had never really tried to make a career of it, but before flying out she updated her website and announced that she was accepting new bookings. A request came in right away, giving Kyle confidence that she might be able to make some kind of career out of it.

When they returned to Chile, Kyle and Seba decided to try photography full-time, “at least until the bookings stopped coming and the money ran out.” To their surprise, request after request arrived in Kyle’s inbox, and the schedule quickly filled up. Two years later, they were making $90,000 a year and were fully booked another year in advance.

They now work all over the world, doing weddings in Argentina, Spain, England, and the United States. You might wonder what the big deal is with Kyle’s work—since there is no shortage of other good photographers available locally, why do clients fly her
from country to country? Kyle says that her clients are usually well traveled themselves, and aren’t afraid of hiring someone from afar. “They know that the world is a small place,” she says, “and they like our work because we build relationships over time.”

A description of Bernard Vukas’s work space is typical of roaming entrepreneurs: “I work from anywhere, anytime. Time zone and location are irrelevant. All my property fits in a single backpack, including the laptop,” he told me in an email from a beach in Koh Tao, Thailand, where he was living on an indefinite basis. Bernard is from Croatia, which has nice beaches of its own, but he wanted to see more of the world.

Bernard helps companies that use Microsoft Office applications to process large amounts of data, creating or modifying extensions that make the data easier to manage. Bernard started by pricing at a decent wage by Croatian standards but much lower than what North American companies were used to paying. This strategy worked well in helping him establish a client base and a good reputation, but the best business decision came when he tripled his rates for new clients.

One day, Bernard made $720 on a big project. Reflecting on the amount’s significance, he wrote: “Many people on a minimum salary in Croatia are getting this amount in one month. People who get double that amount are considered well paid. To have it all come in on a single day is unheard of.” Bernard might return to his country of origin at some point, but it was hard to imagine him ever returning to another way of life.