Page 96 - The $100 Startup_ Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love

and had been trying to break into doing something on his own for a while. The
“something” wasn’t working yet, though. “I’m not sure I’ve got the right site
design or the right message for visitors,” he told me in the coffee shop where we
met.

I’m always curious about other people’s projects, so I flipped open my laptop
and asked for the URL to take a look. “Well,” said Nick, “I don’t actually have
the site up yet.”

I’d love to tell you that I gave him some brilliant advice, but I didn’t have to
say anything at all. Nick stared down at his coffee cup in realization of the
obvious: For the project to be successful, he needed to get started. The other
people we were hanging out with encouraged him too, and he left the coffee
shop determined to make progress quickly.

I was in Kentucky that day on a fifty-state book tour, and when I made it to
West Virginia a few weeks later, I saw Nick again. This time, he had an excited
look on his face and an important update: “I got the site up, and I made a sale!”
A stranger had followed a link from somewhere on the Internet and paid Nick
$50 for a print. If you’ve never sold anything of your own before, you may
wonder, What’s the big deal? He sold one $50 print. But I understood
immediately: The first time you make a sale in a new business, no matter the
amount, it’s a very big deal.

In the weeks between Kentucky and West Virginia, Nick had figured out the
real culprit behind his delay. “That conversation made me think about why the
site wasn’t up yet,” he said. “In my head, it was all technical: I had to tweak the
design and fix some errors in the code. But being honest with myself, I realized
it was really that my fear was still holding me back; the technical stuff was just
an excuse. What if I don’t sell any prints, or what if nobody likes my work?
After realizing why I was stuck, I went home and made the site public that same
evening. Within two weeks, I had sold that first print.”

Other interviewees told countless versions of this story—about how hard it
was to get started but how rewarding it was to receive that first sale. “Once the
first sale came in, I knew I’d succeed,” someone said. “It may not have been
completely rational, but that single sale motivated me to take the business much
more seriously.”

“I was doing a live presentation and opened the shopping cart for our first
product launch,” someone else said. “I saw orders coming in and literally said
out loud, ‘Yes, this is it!’ It was huge for my momentum at the time.”

Therefore, the question you need to ask is … how can I get my first sale?
Competition from other businesses is a problem for another day; the greater
problem you face is inertia. Nick won the battle against inertia by getting his site