InformationWeek Weblog: Accidental Entrepreneurs
If you’re at all dissatisfied with your job, this is a tough week for you. You’ve got a four-day weekend behind you, and the height of the long, hot summer ahead of you. Plenty of time to sit and daydream about telling the boss to take a hike and making money doing what you love.
Many of you have personal Web sites you work on in your spare time, either blogs or little e-businesses or software-as-a-service applications. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just make a living on that stuff and leave the paycheck-to-paycheck grind behind?
The subjects of our article on accidental entrepreneurs did just that.
InformationWeek interviewed five people who run successful Internet-based businesses that started out as hobbies. These are people who started out holding day jobs or unemployed and saw their hobbies bring in enough money that they could support themselves. A couple of our subjects got rich off it.
We interviewed Kevin Rose, founder of the Digg online news site; Joshua Schachter, founder of the del.icio.us social bookmarking service; Mena Trott, co-founder of Six Apart, the blogging software and service company that produces Movable Type software; Tom Davis, who wrote information management software called Zoot; and Heather Armstrong, who writes the popular blog Dooce.
Our article describes for you the history of their projects and how they evolved from hobbies into paying businesses. It required hard work, ambition, supportive spouses, and a little luck.
Meeting some of these people you could probably see how much work it’s taken to get themselves this far. I have to say that the interviews seemed sorta fluffed over. I liked the article about building the Googleplex more in it’s depth. But over all you do get a little background and it does make the mind wander. The fact you could build a living, by starting so relatively cheap.
Tags: del.icio.us, Digg, DIY, Financial, Interesting, OpEd
