“I Turned My Hobby Into a Jobby. Now What?” (Listener Intervention)

Curious about how Uber and Airbnb grew from seedlings to internet juggernauts?

The Upstarts covers the history of Uber and Airbnb, from their founding in 2008 to present day of 2016. Learn how each company started as just a side project, gathered momentum, and grew exponentially throughout the world. Learn how neither Uber nor Airbnb was the first idea of its kind, but through strategy and will, they came to dominate. Also learn how Uber and Airbnb attracted the ire of government, incumbents, the collaterally damaged, and its own customers.

Airbnb has made Barcelona one of Europe’s most popular tourist destinations. But it’s also having a negative impact on the cost of living and quality of life for locals—leaving some questioning whether the benefits of tourism outweigh the costs.

When VICE reporter Allie Conti tried to book lodging in Chicago through Airbnb, things didn’t go well. She investigated and found a network of scammers on the platform—but little interest from Airbnb in getting rid of them.

Tired of competing head-to-head with other companies? Do you feel like your strategy differs little from the competition surrounding you? W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne suggest that the answer to competitive problems is to create a blue ocean: a brand-new market for an innovative idea, allowing your company to avoid competing with rivals—because it has no direct rivals.

In Blue Ocean Strategy, Kim and Mauborgne discuss how you can create such a market by focusing on your product’s characteristics that customers really care about while discarding the characteristics they don’t. This creates a new product offering that doesn’t currently exist, in a space without direct competitors.

In this guide, we’ll explore how to develop a blue ocean strategy, how to execute it, and how to anticipate potential problems. We’ll also look at how a blue ocean strategy aligns with other business strategy frameworks, and where it differs.

If you’re looking to break away from your current work arrangement and start doing something that you’re passionate about, consider starting your own microbusiness, a business run by one person. Where you once needed to have a fair amount of funding to get started, Chris Guillebeau suggests you can now do so for as little as $100.

In The $100 Startup, Guillebeau breaks down the process of starting your own business. He covers everything from finding your target audience to creating a development plan, explaining how you can find success without loaning a cent from the bank.

Do you dream of owning your own business but aren’t sure how to get funding to start it? In The Minimalist Entrepreneur, Sahil Lavingia says you don’t need any. In this book, the successful business owner gives detailed advice for starting your own profitable “minimalist” business without using venture capital or spending a penny on advertising.

In this guide, we’ll explain Lavingia’s business model, from identifying a business you’ll love to run by finding inspiration in your own communities, to setting up, testing, marketing, and launching your business. We’ll also discuss how to run your business sustainably, with the ultimate goal of achieving “time affluence” for yourself, and making a positive contribution to the world.

Throughout, we’ll compare and supplement Lavinagia’s advice on starting a business with that from other books like The Lean Startup, The $100 Startup, and Blue Ocean Strategy.

NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are digital proofs of ownership of something—usually something digital like art or tweets that otherwise aren’t “ownable.” They're typically traded on dedicated websites using cryptocurrencies (usually Ethereum). Transactions for NFTs have exploded over the past year, with notable recent sales including NFTs for a digital painting from artist Beeple (selling for almost $70 million) and Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet (sold for $2.5 million). We explain the basics of NFTs here.

Austin Kleon has risen to fame with his trilogy of books about creativity in our digital culture: Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going, which address how you can succeed at your creative endeavors and how you can promote yourself effectively.

In Show Your Work!, Kleon argues that the best way to promote what you do is to publicly share it throughout your whole process, from the earliest phases to the finished product. This allows you to focus on honing your skills while making yourself available to be discovered.

In this guide, we’ve organized Kleon’s ideas into five themes:

1. Why you should share your work all the way through your process
2. How to share your creative process
3. How to deal with online attention
4. How to make money off your creative work
5. How to persevere

Along the way we’ll consider other views of these topics, including perspectives on how you can overcome perfectionism and how you can handle criticism.

Zero to One is entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s unconventional advice for technology startups. Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook, argues that technology has stagnated. Most new companies improve incrementally on existing products, but Thiel argues that the most valuable and game-changing startups create something new. They move the world from zero to one. Creating new things is not only the best path to profits—it’s also the only path for human progress. In this guide, we’ll compare Thiel’s perspective with W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy, Geoffrey Moore’s strategy for high-tech startups, and the insights of other innovation experts.