Building Zero Cost Knowledge-Based Business (I)

"白手兴家" (bai shou shing jia), a term to address successful business man who started with just penny-like capital. Its seems hard to start a business without much capital these days. My friends has been asking me, how do you start selling and stop dreaming without capital?
As what the Chinese proverbs says 创业难，守业更难, starting business is never easy, maintaining a business is even harder. However, if you start with limited risk running business within your domain of expert and interest, it would be much easier than thought. Some of the tips are as below.

1. Service, Solutions, Product
Many of us just don't like working for people. I have friends making Rm20K and above a month with average 3 months of bonus every year who quit their jobs. You can be making RM5K, 10K, 20K, and yet you will still quit for the same reason: I want to be FREE! However, many people quit for the wrong reasons, they just want to be FREE without preparing themselves for financial freedom. Many end up returning to employment with even more grouses and depression over their employers and jobs. Generally, I classify businesses into service, solutions and product.
Without much capital, most of the people started out by self-employing as a service provider a.k.a free-lancer. Freelancer will not keep you going far as you might be "hitting-flies" during low-business-cycle. Therefore, freelancing might be something good to start with but one must quickly turn him/herself into a solutions provider or product seller. A lot might ask, what is the difference between service and solutions? Service generally involves exchange of labor or knowledge for goods/money. Solutions on the other hand, involves problem-solving. Solutions can be documented and reapplied to different parties easily. Thus, solutions are valuable and might contain some sort of intellectual properties.
Let me quote you an example. I have a friend who is a web scripting programmer, took up a freelancing job years back to create a server monitoring web-based application. It's a simple job with little wages. However, he managed to turn the scripts into an SMS-based server monitoring solution, which is currently sold to 32 countries worldwide at http://www.hyperspin.com. He managed to quit his day job to run this business full time after slowly building up the business for more than a year.
As for products, you can turn your services into products and engage resellers to sell for you as well. Just burn your software product into a CD/ USB drive and package them into a box. Alternatively, you can use a serial-key controller to control your software distribution through the web and get paid using Pay-Pal.
Yes, service is just a short term solution for business-running and you can't go far with that. You need to try to turn everything you do into a sell-able solution or product.

In the second section, I will talk more about the using Power of Collaboration to build your zero cost business. Watch out for more,:).

To be continued.................