Acting Big

Technology, in general, and the internet, in specific, empowers the little person to act big.

A stay-at-home mom can open an online craft store by creating an Etsy account. All it takes is a username, password, and an email address. If business goes well and she starts getting serious, she can move the store to her own domain. She can scale inexpensively using online business applications like dropbox, mail-chimp, base-camp, and hundreds of other more specialized options. Suddenly, she’s competition to craft franchises with hundreds of employees.

As technology continues to cut out the middle-men, I think we’ll find that corporate infrastructure (with all it’s inefficiencies) will become less and less necessary for delivering value. The age of the freelancer has already started and will only get stronger.

All it takes to act big is good design, a bit of technical know-how and some marketing intuition.