Back in mid May I attended the Fortune Leadership Summit. A fellow EO member named Marc Ostrofsky also attended the event, and although he was not a scheduled speaker, he did take a few minutes to speak to all of us.
Marc has a successful background in entrepreneurial start-ups, with his current portfolio of online businesses generating over 75 million a year. When he got on stage, he talked about making money online and the vast opportunities available. One story that he told literally made my jaw drop.
He told the story of a guy who had made a YouTube video on how to jump higher (yes, the vertical leap). He posted it up just for fun. The number of hits it received was enormous, so he took it town and built an e-commerce site with educational material, such as videos on how to jump higher. Users can subscribe to the videos via a monthly payment plan. Marc said that this guy made over a million dollars last year, with over 7,000 people subscribed and paying $9.95/mo.
Marc told us of a few other stories that are portrayed in his new book called Get Rich Click!. I just saw a report in this last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal that popularity of his book is growing quickly, up 814% for the week. What is so fascinating about his story and his book is that it’s an entrepreneur’s utopia of ideas to start making money. The title of one of his topics is “The Riches ARE in the Niches…$5 Million a Year Selling Cuff Links Online!”
What’s awesome is when you look at it from the niche perspective. Think about those areas of life that we are passionate about (discussed in my last blog), which can usually unfold some niche opportunity to scale and sell something that we know and love. In some cases you don’t even have to invest capital, make a product, buy inventory, or ship anything…you can have others handle that while you simply bring in the customers and maintain a portion of the profit.
There was a great example in the book about a couple of kids that were really into bike riding with their dad. Tires being the most important gear in this sport, their dad ordered bike tires from a UK specialty shop in just enough quantity for their bike club. When they came in a color that no one liked, he offered the kids the option to get rid of them (in quantities of 10) and just pay him the cost of $30 per tire. The kids set up an ebay store and sold the tires for $35 each. They made a $50 profit, then turned around and ordered more and sold them as well. This happened back in 2002 when they were only 10 and 12 years old. They now own BikeTiresDirect.com, and generate over $8 Million a year in sales. WOW!
We are in an age of opportunity that is unprecedented in our history. Never before could you start a business with so little, and reach so many customers so easily with the help of the internet. There is nothing standing in our way, so what are you doing to get started? Personally, my team just released a beta version of a software tool called Sluice (Join the beta users community) that is built to simplify requirements gathering and collaboration for projects, and we hope to sell thousands.
What is your passion, which leads to your niche, which leads you to profits…which will lead you to financial freedom???