Start Small, Keep Your Costs Down, Dream Big

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Shackleton on set (left) & Purkayastha with his beloved truffle oil (right). And good-looks don't hurt a bit.

I came across two articles yesterday, one profiling a 19-year old "truffle dealer" and the other about a professional snowboarder turned Hollywood filmmaker who also owns a constructrion business. What do these men have in common? The word is "entrepreneurship." Both of them started small, dreamt big, and became successful.

"Dream big" is as cliche as a cliche phrase gets, but these two stories were in fact very interesting and inspirational, at least for me.  Ian Purkayastha's truffle adventure is more like a love story. He says he fell in love with truffles when he was foraging for wild mushrooms in the woods of Arkansas, where he's from. He started selling truffles to restaurants when he was only 15. His mother drove him around to meetings with restaurant owners and chefs, and he says the chefs wouldn't give him the light of day at first. But in the end, he convinced a major Italian exporter to hire him as their North American representative and open a house in Hoboken, New Jersey. He built the company from ground up in 3 years and created a 3 million dollar business. The Yahoo story ends with a cheesy epilog of sorts that goes, "Ian is proof you're never too young to chase your dream. Go get it! We're here to protect it..." followed by a melodic "American Family Insurance" sing-a-long at the end. But Yahoo's cheesiness aside, the story is inspiring and one that makes you get up from your seat and think about what you really want to do... in life.

The other story was on Forbes and it profiled a former professional snowboarder who now runs his own film comapany on Sunset Boulevard. York Shackleton is probably not a name you've heard of as far as director names go, but his movies are surely making money. And what does a filmmaker want besides making the film he wants to make and making money off of that film? OK, perhaps other things like, fame, glamour, and I don't know, I'm running out of assumptions here, but yes, the point is do what you want to do and make a living out of it. York Shackleton (great name, right?) is doing that. According to Forbes, York considers himself an entrepreneur first, a movie maker second.  He made his first film for $14,000 and sold it to a foreign film company for three times that. And he gives the younger generation of independent filmmakers some great advice. I'm just going to put the headlines here, and you can read the details by going to the article page.

1. Make a Sample Product

2. Learn The Boring Stuff

3. Show Sample Product to Potential Investors & “Door Openers”

4. Secure Distribution

5. Start Small, But Make $10,000 Look Like a Million

York's business models is simple: Having something to show, starting small, keeping your costs down and dreaming big. So, who's feeling excited? Yeah, I know. Let's go do that thing we've been wanting to do.

 -- Eren Gulfidan



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