I was sitting in the office of the cable magazine for which I was working a few years ago when a friend clicked his mouse and said he just made $15.
I thought perhaps he was doing some sort of online gambling or had just filled out a restaurant survey and had received a $15 dollar gift certificate, but what he had actually done was sell a $5 coffee mug for $20. He explained to me what he had done and told me that he would soon be starting a home based business of his own.
Essentially, he went to an area dollar store and purchased 20 mugs that bore the emblem of our local hockey team, which had just recently won the Stanley Cup. Realizing that there would be a lot of bandwagon jumpers and that our team was not a major-market program, he put the mugs on Ebay for $20 a piece just to see how they would do, as he said.
By the time he told me he had just made $15 that afternoon in the office, he had already sold 19 of them, making a total profit of $275 with one mug to go. The next step, he said, was starting a home based business, and he had a number of ideas for other items to sell that he felt would be just as successful as the mugs.
Now, nothing appealed to me more than the idea of sitting at my home computer and working from there all day. Starting a home based business would be a great thing for me, but the problem was, my mind did not work the way that my friend's did.
Every time that I thought of something that might sell well, I could never find it at a price that would allow for a decent mark-up or it simply didn't draw any interest from potential customers. I began to brainstorm other possible options.
I tried taking his approach and hit the local dollar stores for items that might appeal to a large Internet audience that would also be difficult to find outside of my community, but nothing jumped out at me, and eventually I gave up.
Suddenly, starting a home based business seemed more like wishful thinking than a possible means of financial freedom, but I am not ready to give up just yet.
It will probably take more planning on my part or some kind of spontaneous inspiration. I have always been more of the creative type, and in many ways, I just don't think in marketing terms.
Starting a home based business is still my ultimate dream; I will just have to find my own niche before that can happen.