Chris Guillebeau’s Empire Building Kit: Insights from Week 4

Chris Guillebeau is the author of The Art of Non-Conformity and Unconventional Guides. He runs a course called Empire Building Kit (EBK for short) which I recently bought. This post is a little late because I was relaunching my part time jobs website. Nonetheless, this is the week 4 mindmap of my lessons from EBK.

Click on the link to see a large version of my Mindmap for Chris Guillebeau’s Empire Building Kit: Insights from Week 4 (opens in a new window/tab).

The main lessons of the week 4 (gosh can’t believe a month has passed by since I started this course) are:

• What lessons can I learn from existing successful lifestyle business through the case studies and how I can apply that into my business. There are 18 case studies, I got through 6 for this week and you can see in the mindmap what I learned from them.
• The main benefits of lifestyle business are tax deductions and most importantly, freedom. Freedom to choose your hours and freedom to work from anywhere but this freedom comes with its own set of responsibilities.
• Estimate market demand before working very hard on a product nobody wants. I learned a cool technique of marketing before manufacturing.
• The nuts and bolts of doing a survey to find out what the market wants. I love the tip on how to structure the survey to get effective response.
• Test the order process thoroughly as Chris discusses a funny but ironic case where he did not test out his order process causing his launch to falter.

Check out Empire Building Kit (aff link) where you can choose from 3 different versions to purchase.