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06/12/2005 Entry: "How to make a million dollars by Marshall Brain."
How to make a million dollars by Marshall Brain. Its actually not about making a million dollars, but about starting your own business. Brain gave this presentation to 200 students at Duke and its worth reading. Although it may sound stuffy, it very much embodies the DIY mentality.
Let me emphasize that the idea does not have to be complex. Domino's is not a complex idea: "We make pizza and deliver it to people's houses." How simple is that? Yet it has made millions and millions of dollars. Here are a couple of other examples: * Netflix -- "You send us $20 a month, and we will mail three DVDs to you. When you mail one of the DVDs back to us, we send you another one." That's pretty simple. The genius behind Netflix is that they got rid of all the little niggly problems that make you hate video stores. People liked it.
* Southwest airlines -- This is a little more complicated because it involves jumbo jets and the FAA and drink carts and such, but at the start Southwest was a still pretty simple idea. They picked three cities in Texas and flew from one to the next in a circle. They picked people up at one city and dropped them off at the next. That's it. Once that was working, they started adding more cities, and pretty soon Southwest was changing an entire industry.
