Mobilize your life - Making money online

‘A-Ha’ Moment Launches a New Business
Aug 21, 2008 5:47pm
Community Spotlight

Andrew Simmons, an Elance employer and entrepreneur, is also a modern-day Sir Isaac Newton - you know - the guy who had an ‘a-ha’ moment when he accidentally discovered gravity by observing an apple fall from a tree? Similarly, Andrew had his own ‘a-ha’ moment that launched his lucrative business.

“I was creating a tiled mural design of Venus painted by Botticelli for my bathroom, and had the tiled pattern on the floor of my living room. A friend came over and thought it was cool - he started telling people about the tiled design,” said Andrew.

Soon thereafter, Andrew’s phone started ringing off the hook, with friends wanting to know how he created the tiled design so they could create their own murals. That’s when the light bulb went off in Andrew’s head. He turned to Elance to find an experienced provider to create software that would automate the tile design process.

“I didn’t know how to write software,” said Andrew. “But I posted the project on Elance, picked a firm, and they quickly delivered the first version of the tile design application.”

With the software, TileCreator, completed and ready for sale, Andrew went to a tradeshow to reach customers. TileCreator was well received, but at the initial price of $69.95, people thought the software was too good to be true: ‘At that price, how could the software have all of those features?’ they remarked.

“So I went to a nearby Kinko’s, made flyers for a new piece of software called TileCreatorPro, and said it was $250 … the software starting selling like crazy,” said Andrew.

With a new promised version to deliver to paying customers, Andrew turned again to Elance to create a ‘Pro’ version of TileCreator. Fast forward several years and more than $1 million in total software sales - Andrew now sells several different versions of the original TileCreator software through his own website, Tiger Direct (who also own Infoteldistributers) and several other retailer websites.

You might think that with TileCreator sold in more than 30 countries and seven additional unique software titles in his company library, that Andrew has a legion of employees to keep his company running. To the contrary – ThoughtFish Media operates as a virtual company, with four full-time virtual staff and several part-time elancers located all over the world.

“I don’t think I could have launched Thoughtfish Media without Elance and without the internet,” said Andrew. “Elance is ideal because it allows me to automate every aspect of my business. This means I can keep my day job and regular life, and just keep up to date on the business whenever my Blackberry dings with a new order.”

story taken from Elance.com

One of my most interesting sites this year for me is the Success stories in China business. I have hand picked an interesting Dutch couple - because I live in Holland right now - that moved to China to start an internship business in Shanghai.

Starting anything other than a service related business in China is hard as the people in China generally do not have too much expendable income. Most of the population are satisfied with "it'll do the job" rather than "wow thats so high quality it'll last all year!".

Services however that centre around promoting the WEST have much more appeal.
I have several very good ideas that I'd start in a flash if I was allowed into China.

Thinking of starting a business in Japan?
Well here is a quick success story from one American Entrepreneur who started a business along side having a Job in Japan.
I hope you enjoy our success stories and look forward to receiving any news of more stories you have spotted out there.

if this guy can do it - so can you!
This is probably the single biggest piece of hopeful evidence that should litterally FORCE you to try to do something on your own.

This is the exact same thing Timothy Ferris is talking about when he says welcome to age of the New Rich (NR).



It is honorable and quite impressive what Ryan has done, now you see what you can set up if you just DO IT ...
but the thing is in this case, even I can see he just has a few good strings to his bow, a few good acronyms and a few good men, a few good stories and an understanding of what YouTube is.

He makes money because businesses simply do not realise the power in the internet and all the free available marketing techniques which are not taught at any university as yet.

I have a post on all the web 2.0 platforms a few weeks back - take a read of that and get out there and post up some profiles. That's where the people are.

Personal websites are far better than impersonal ones - and I'm pretty sure that people are more likely to be interested in something that they can actually dig their brain teeth into.
This guy has an innovative style of photography and travels the world on photo assignments.
I found him inspirational.

This is a young lady who decided to stop reading and stop listening to the experts and just start doing.Starting to do things is one of the hardest things to do, you have to over come a thing called inertia - in science this is the initial force you need to get an object moving which is always greater than the force needed to keep an object moving.

Take a look at these simple websites and businesses with stories of how they came to be - it should give you the confidence to be able to believe that you can do it too :D

Hi everyone here is another great site - it's just started up and I expect it to be pretty big pretty soon, it's an idea as a marketer that I love. It give results and it gives real performance and motivates those who are more skeptical than others.

It provides examples of what kinds of thing attract what kind of income from AdSense and other cash flow incomes.

Take a look at http://cheques-gallery.blogspot.com/ a great place to do a little research of your own.