The idea is not to make money, well, not in the sense of making earnings from it. You're not meant to take it literally as in 'make money from reselling stuff on ebay'.
Of course you lose in the transaction fees (it also mentions craigslist).
Of course you're not going to make real money doing this.
The point is to sharpen your sales skills and realise that experimentation and refinement is the key to developing a good sales strategy. It goes back to the central theme of the piece, which is to continually drum on things - practising all the time. Of course drumming on the steering wheel isn't applicable to playing in a band, except that it's all mental stimulation and practice of sorts.
The point is to sharpen your sales skills and realise that experimentation and refinement is the key to developing a good sales strategy.
This is like saying the point in picking up trash at the highway will be refining your work ethic. Sure it helps, but you could be doing something more efficient.
Note how he says to find something that is a "commodity". A commodity by definition is a product that fungible, which means for those of you who haven't taken Econ 101, no one cares who they get it from, they only care about how cheap it is. This tells me that Jason Fried doesn't know what he is talking about even though he made everyone's favorite Ruby on Rails company.
If you're a lazy person with no work ethic, pickup up trash will improve that. That is inarguable.
I think you're just trying to be difficult because you've posted that you don't like the author. Fair enough, you don't have to like him or even agree with him. But I think you understand the point by now.
The arguments here that it is good advice is some mumbo jumbo handwaving that you will learn "something" because it is hard. Guess what else is hard? Trying to sell lemonade for $1000 a cup in the ghetto.
Will you learn "something"? Probably.
Will it be a good use of your time? Probably not.
And for your information, my posts here have plenty of upvotes, so do not take the sheer number of 37 Signal fanboys retorting as a sign of evidence. PS, 31 Pixels? Seriously?
I disagree. I mean like people have already mentioned, it's all about getting some practice and not really being profitable. You could think of it as the opportunity cost (hopefully I'm using that term right as I'm no Econ guy either). You lose a little money for the opportunity to become really good at making more later (or maybe you'll defy the odds and actually profit). And it doesn't have to be eBay. Any kind of low risk practice really.
I don't really think your comment on picking up trash to improve work ethic really fits. It really doesn't matter how you practice as long as you do it. For those of us already in business we could simply practice this using our own businesses to experiment. We pick a product, service, or just some smaller, lower risk aspect of our business that we feel comfortable playing with and then charge more, less, or change the pricing model altogether. I think his post makes total sense in these terms and I doubt he means we should literally sell iPods. It's just a nice example.
He probably did use commodity wrong (it's debatable, iPods can be a commodity as some would rather get a deal than get a brand new one from the Apple store) but it wasn't a huge error. All in all, it's hard to tell you that you're wrong because you make total sense but at the same time I also think you're reading into this a bit much and maybe taking what he says too literally?
Of course you lose in the transaction fees (it also mentions craigslist).
Of course you're not going to make real money doing this.
The point is to sharpen your sales skills and realise that experimentation and refinement is the key to developing a good sales strategy. It goes back to the central theme of the piece, which is to continually drum on things - practising all the time. Of course drumming on the steering wheel isn't applicable to playing in a band, except that it's all mental stimulation and practice of sorts.