What is MachineThatMakesMoney.com? It is my attempt to make entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial thinking a lot more accessible to a lot more people. Here at Machine That Makes Money, my goal is to:
- Break things down and make entrepreneurship as easy-to-understand as possible
- Help you to understand that it is possible for you to become an entrepreneur today
- Show you lots of examples
- Help you see that it is possible for you to think big and make a lot of money as an entrepreneur
Who am I? My name is Marshall Brain, and I am most widely known as the founder of HowStuffWorks.com. HSW is an award-winning website that offers clear, objective and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world around us actually works. I created HSW as a hobby, and then we took it through several rounds of angel and VC funding. Eventually HSW was purchased for $250 million by Discovery Communications.
That’s crazy if you think about it. How can a “normal guy” start writing a little web site as a hobby one day, and then several years later that web site is worth $250 million? This is “the power of entrepreneurship”. In the entrepreneurial ecosystem of the United States today, crazy things like this happen all the time. For example:
- Phil Knight started selling track shoes out of the trunk of his car, and eventually that simple exercise became Nike. (his book, Shoe Dog, is fantastic)
- Similarly, Kevin Plank started selling a new kind of undershirt out of the trunk of his car, and that became Under Armour. (Learn more about how UA scaled up)
- Michelle Phan started a little YouTube channel one day, and several years later VCs handed her $100 million to compete against BirchBox (and BirchBox itself is crazy as well)
You can understand how to become an entrepreneur yourself and follow in their footsteps here at MachineThatMakesMoney.com
It’s called “Machine That Makes Money” because your goal, as an entrepreneur, is to build a Machine That Makes Money. It might be an extremely simple machine (like a blog) or a very complex one (like Southwest Airlines), but either way your goal is to build some kind of machine so that you can start making money. The mission of this web site is to help you create your machine through insightful articles, helpful advice, and answers to your questions. We will walk through the IPESSI process as an organizational framework to guide your steps. MTMM helps entrepreneurs, startups and small businesses make their way through launch and profitability.
-
If you are brand new to this, and if you aren’t even sure what the word “entrepreneur” means, start with this article: How Entrepreneurship Works
-
If you are just starting out and would like to learn how to become an entrepreneur, head to the Table of Contents. You can cherry pick points of interest, or start at the top and work down.
-
If you want to understand how entrepreneurs make millions of dollars and understand the art of thinking big, read: 1) How Startup Stock Creates Transcendental Wealth, 2) Prototyping a $1 billion startup, 3) How to Think Big about Your Startup
-
If you have questions, head over to the forum and ask away!