Find Something

This summer my kids started to understand the concept of money. At 4 and 7 they've received enough birthday cash to realize money gets them toys. If they wanted more toys, they needed more money.

I said no to a lemonade stand. But that didn't stop them.

I came downstairs to find they had set up shop on our front step, making money hand over first selling rocks to our neighbors and anybody passing by. And good money.

Their expenses were negligible ("Hey, there's a rock!") and their pricing strategy worked pretty well (Pay whatever you want).

They had found the perfect product.

No, it wasn't rocks. It was irresistible children as salespeople.

The exact product proved to be of little importance over the next few weeks as my kids tried selling pet rocks, bookmarks, flowers, stickers and more. They even modified their sales pitch to be pay whatever you want or take it for free.

They figured out what worked for them. And milked it.

And so I apologize to my neighbors and everyone who passes by on the sidewalk if you've been guilted out of your pocket change by a precocious 4-year-old. And yes, my 7-year-old quickly learned to send her little brother to make the pitch.

Find a Good Fit
The point of that little lesson in salesmanship is to figure out what you can sell that makes sense for you. What would be a good fit for your company or organization?

Think about what you do and what you're good at. What you're already doing or creating and how you might be able to repackage, repurpose or rework it. You don't want to come up with a second job.

You want something that compliments what you already do. You want something you can offer with a minimum of extra effort. It might be something you're already doing for yourself, but could easily share with the world.

It might not even be a product. It could be something else. It could be turning your product into a service, or your service into a product. It might mean taking a look at your current business model to see if there's a way you can do something different. Maybe you do both going forward, maybe you change gears completely.

That's what happened with 37signals, the makers of Basecamp and other web-based software. They started out as a web development agency. They made websites for clients.

But being geeks, they created their own internal project management system. They needed something that worked the way they wanted it to, so they built it. When their clients got a glimpse of it, they wanted it too.

Basecamp was born.

And so 37signals began to shift away from service-based client work and toward subscription-based software products.

That kind of shift probably isn't going to happen for everybody. But it's possible.

The goal is to find your thing. 37signals truly excels at creating and perfecting software like Basecamp. While they created great websites, it's clear their talents were wasted on client work.