One day I came up with this idea to define how I’ve approached the business world these so many years: Low-Impact Entrepreneur.
It could mean a lot of different things, but the concept behind it for me is that with the web, one can dip one’s foot into the waters of some new venture or technology without having to go to deep. You can try a website, try a service, try a little bit of code and see how well it works, see if anyone finds it, see if anyone happens to find it worthwhile enough to spend money on it and go from there.
Should it draw some response you do a little more, recrafting the concept, expanding the service, increasing your involvement. If it takes off, you get more and more entangled. If it doesn’t, no skin off your back.
So, for example, if you set up a site and think “oh, i’ll charge for monthly memberships to get access to a wealth of new information they’ll pay to get” you’ve just now tied yourself down to a lot of responsibilities – regardless of how many people ever pay. You have to build/manage a system which rebills monthly (including handling rebills, charge backs, confused customers, etc.), you need to provide new content every month, and probably much more. If only one person joins, you still offered to provide them all of that – not much fun, right?
In my case, I chose to provide a “membership” type service but instead of possibly gaining more revenue from billing people again every month or year, I chose to bill once – good for as long as the site is around. What did I save? Well, I never build a complex rebilling system. I spend absolutely no time trying to find out if the guy has changed his email, didn’t know it was going to rebill and now wants a refund, etc. Low-impact. They get their immediate rewards and a good chance of long term gains. I get the freedom to forget it and walk away if that’s what makes sense.
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