Here’s a few I liked:

1) A company setting up christmas light displays

2) The turtlemobile – a guy who turns cars into strange advertising gimmicks

3) Dog manikins

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More importantly, the fact that the incident is getting blogged about is an important lesson for people who have their own business: dissatisfied customers are a bigger problem than ever. Many E-bay sellers find this out the hard way, as only a few unhappy customers can destroy their business. If you have a regular small business, anyone can put up a blog entry or web site about how you treated them. You’ll never be able to avoid bad feedback entirely – sometimes it is indeed the customer who’s wrong. But if you act unreasonably, don’t expect the word not to get out. The case of the guy who taped AOL refusing to cancel his service and made national news when he put the call on the Internet shows the same thing.

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1) Personalize your auctions to stand out.

Whether it’s with free shipping, or a very high level of customer service, set yourself apart from the masses. Consider adding a picture of yourself or a personal touch to the description. After McGrath added an audio message to many of his listings, he noted a dramatic increase in sales. And be sure to pack and ship your items professionally and in a timely fashion. Including a handwritten card or note is a nice touch.

2) Write the headlines so that people find your auction when they type in common search terms.

If you don’t write good headlines, nobody is going to click on your auction and you’re not going to sell anything. Seems pretty obvious right? But it’s not quite so simple. When writing headlines, keep the user in mind; try multiple spellings (i.e., hairbrush, hair brush) and be as descriptive as you can (i.e., tortoise shell, made in London, England).

3) Include pictures of the items so people know what they’re getting.

The good advice for small business owners is based on a worker at a shoe store who used his position to start a multi-million dollar business on E-bay selling overstock shoes. If you have any kind of business with substantive product, you need to be selling the excess on E-bay. For many small business owners, the “side business” has taken over the original one, and they now do E-bay full time.

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It sounds like he went around badgering people until they taught him what he needed to know to start up his own food business, among other things, and eventually ended up supplementing it as a motivational speaker. That’s the one power kids don’t realize they have: they’re cute enough that people will help them out with ideas like this where they wouldn’t even talk to an adult. It’s always good to hear about someone’s ambition and drive letting them live the American dream.

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The two books both deal generally with the idea that the future of business will involve a lot more small businesses than we have today, often focused on extremely tiny niches. Rather than a big, generic business, both books believe consumers will in many cases turn to small, focused businesses that are able to thoroughly understand and dominate the market for a small set of customers. The phrase “long tail” comes from the idea that these businesses are carving out a chunk of the market on the tail end of a graph of consumer interest, where only a few people reside. The phrase “army of davids” refers to the ability of a number of individuals, often working partly or entirely out of a desire to have fun, to utilize modern technology to outcompete the Goliath businesses.

One example of this phenomenon Reynolds gives here is a woman who put herself through college selling adult diapers on E-bay to men with a “baby fetish.” This, obviously, is an extremely small niche. It wouldn’t be profitable for a big diaper company to try to meet the needs of a tiny, weird consumer segment. But one person did it and made a big chunk of money. Less weird examples include microbreweries tailoring themselves to the tastes of a small minority, people using the cheap modern cameras and software to film low-budget documentaries and movies that only a few people like, or the numerous blogs that address a very small set of readers with common interests.

The moral for someone looking to start a small business today is this: you can start a very profitable business meeting the needs of a small group of people. Underwater basketweaving may never have many adherents as a hobby – but the cost to make and sell things tailored to a hobby in small numbers is decreasing rapidly. And the Internet makes it much easier to find a group of people with like interests, even if only one in thousands has the same interest as you. So if you’re thinking of starting a small business, ask yourself whether there’s a market that isn’t being served because it’s too small. Then look at whether you can serve it yourself on the cheap – and make a tidy profit doing so.

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Over 50 percent of small businesses fail in the first year and 95 percent fail within the first five years, according to the Small Business Association. So it may be wise to hold on to your day job until your side business not only launches, but really takes off.

Although it’s tempting to devote yourself full time to building a business, working as an employee for someone else means that you have a steady paycheck to rely on if things don’t go as planned, said Michael Masterson, author of “Automatic Wealth for Grads . . . and Anyone Else Just Starting Out.”

That’s not a bad strategy in some cases, but I don’t think this is as good an idea as they promote it to be. My problems with the idea:

1) It really depends on the kind of business your in. Running a website, for example, can be done while keeping your day job. The example they give is a guy who is running a restaurant chain. It would be very difficult to manage a restaurant, let alone a chain, without being able to be there during the day. Unless you have a partner who can go by during those time periods, it’s hard to have a good idea of what is actually going on – and that’s crucial to starting a successful business.

2) Your day job will still be absorbing a lot of your time and energy. If you’re exhausted coming home every day, you may not have the focus and drive to succeed in a small business.

3) It also depends on how difficult it would be for you to find another job if you quit. Being a “chicken entrepreneur” means you’re increasing the chance your new business will fail. If you have skills and experience that are sought after, it’s probably better to take the plunge if your small business is something that would do better with your full time attention. 

This strategy isn’t a bad idea in all cases – but for a traditional small business, if you don’t have a partner to help bear the load, I don’t think it would work.  

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The conventional response is simply to give up. Prospective entrepreneurs are told that they must risk their savings on an all-or-nothing shot – and you only get one, with the odds heavily stacked against you.

This response is bunk. The most important thing a new entrepreneur can keep in mind is the Edison principle: failure can be a success. Thomas Edison considered this crucial to his vast scientific achievements. When told by an assistant that he must be depressed over the thousands of failed tests he had attempted in developing a battery, he replied that he hadn’t failed: he’d proven that thousands of things didn’t work.

This isn’t just a pithy quote – it has a nugget of wisdom that all entrepreneurs should keep in mind. Namely – what you are doing is an experiment. It’s no different from what Edison did – you have a goal of having a successful business in a certain field, and to do that you’re going to have to suffer some failures along the way. The trick is to fail successfully. How can you do this?

1) Fail cheaply – don’t bet the farm on one way of doing things. If you’re trying something new in your business, it should always be something that won’t kill your business off if it doesn’t work.

2) Remember that it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to hit on the best way of doing things right out of the gate. This is especially important for new entrepreneurs to remember. Your business will likely have to go through several iterations before it gets to something that will work well.

3) Related to #2, don’t be afraid to admit that something you were doing has failed. If a change in your business or a way of doing things is losing money, you need to be able to shift directions and try something else. To do that, you’re going to have to be able to admit that you failed. The key is not to let the failure drag the business down with it.

4) Remember that the Internet, in lowering the barriers to entry in starting up a new business, has also made it easier to experiment. And that’s what any good business should be – a continuing set of experiments in how it can be effectively run. For example, if you run an E-bay business, it’s fairly cheap to test out new product lines. You already have the infrastructure in place, you already know the mechanics of shipping and selling things – you shouldn’t be afraid of trying a new product for sale and finding out it’s a dog. If you sell products through a web site, you should be testing out different formats, different looks for the site, etc. in an effort to figure out what is most likely to make your customers buy. In fact, if you have ideas about multiple different ways you can structure your site, why not try them all? It costs virtually nothing to host a new domain.

5) Learn from your failures. If you’re just randomly trying out different things in the hopes you’ll hit on a miracle solution, you’re wasting your time. You need to evolve your business – what doesn’t work should give you ideas that will clue you in on what does. Sit down and think about what went wrong, and what you can change about it that might fix it next time. You should also be aware of the various skill sets that you could be learning. In the process of starting your own business, you’ll have a chance to learn skills that can be useful to you even if you fail completely and are forced back into the life of a working drone. From web design, to marketing, to programming, to writing – you can pick up virtually any skills that you want as part of operating a small business.

6) When you find something that works, keep doing it. But don’t quit trying new things. The goal of experimenting in your business isn’t to find one way that works. As Edison said, it’s also to find out what doesn’t work – and that process of experimentation can be extremely important if market conditions or the tastes of consumers change in a way that makes the business model that used to work obsolete.

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