Best Business Idea #5 - Real-time biography service

The first book you'll write in your next business

“Write your own life’s story.” That’s what they say. Whether you like the story you’re writing or not, you are writing your own life’s story. Everyone around you is writing theirs, too. Odds are pretty good that you and most of the people you know have one issue or another with their own story writing, ranging from wishing for minor changes in setting all the way up through being in the wrong genre entirely.

Don’t worry; you know me well enough by now to know that I never introduce a problem without providing you with a solution. Introducing real-time biography services, a business you’ll provide so that people can live their best lives. It is exactly what it sounds like—your client will hire your business to provide a trained biographer to follow them around and write the story of their lives in real time. The biographer will write the story of the person’s week, month, or year, whereupon the customer will be forced to read their real-time biography or hear it narrated to them. An audiobook of the biography can be made available for an additional fee.

With this service, your customers will be able to hear their own life’s story literally as they’re writing it metaphorically. This has the potential to be a powerful, life-altering tool. Take, for instance, Karen, who has a dream of climbing Mount Everest. She just can’t find it in herself to train for the event, nor save the money for it. It seems to her that as time slips by and age creeps up on here, her dream is slipping through her fingers.

Enter your real-time biography service. Karen hires your business. You’re just getting started, so you do the work yourself. You follow Karen around, taking notes on everything she does and highlighting the interesting bits. By night, you compile your notes and craft them into a fascinating story requiring no embellishment. That is, you would, if Karen did anything fascinating. You’re duty-bound to be accurate, so you write a biography just as dull as Karen’s life. When you deliver your work to Karen at the end of the week, you narrate the following:

Karen always had dreams of climbing Mount Everest since she first learned of its existence at the bright young age of 9. Now approaching middle age, she is watching her dream die a slow yet predictable death. This week, she did absolutely nothing to move closer to her dream. She went to work at the paper company for 8 hours per day, Monday through Friday. Her boss, who’s a bit of a clown, stressed her out with his inappropriate jokes and general incompetence. Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights, she dealt with this stress by binge watching The Office…again. On Tuesday and Friday, she went for drinks with her coworkers to commiserate. Friday evening was a real rager, so she ate trashy bar food, stayed up extremely late, and woke up around noon with one heck of a hangover. She knew checking her credit card transactions would only make her feel worse, so she didn’t. She canceled her brunch plans with her friends on account of the hangover and because, truth be told, they ridiculed her dream of climbing Everest. She didn’t really know why she’d agreed to the brunch in the first place.

Karen spent the remaining time Saturday emotionally flogging herself for wasting yet another opportunity for a morning training session. She stayed up late again, partly out of a sense of self-loathing and partly out of a desire to get back some of the time she’d lost from the morning. She slept in again Sunday, promising herself she’d get to training next weekend—she was tired, and it was too tough to get started during the week. At least that’s what it looked like from an outside perspective; I can speak authoritatively to what Karen did, but when it comes to feelings, I can only project my own onto her as she wouldn’t discuss her feelings with me.

Karen lived happily ever after, or at least I assume so, because it would be absolute lunacy to choose to live a life that makes you miserable.

Karen, upon hearing your narration, initially rages, railing against the injustice of your writing. She threatens to fire you. You shrug because you’d frankly rather be writing a more interesting story anyway.

Karen calms down. She realizes you’re right and decides to it around. She starts training. She gets her spending under control and even earns a little extra income. Ten months later, she has a job offer at a better company, but she tells them they’ll have to wait a couple of months before she’s available because she’ll need the time to finish training for, as well as accomplish, her Mount Everest climb. They oblige. She completes the climb, only losing a couple of fingers to frostbite. She returns to work in her new job earning far more money and experiencing far more fulfilment.

Karen has turned her life around, and it’s all thanks to you. You have made a handsome profit, or at least you will. Biographers can either be commissioned to do a book or receive royalties from it. Karen hated her life, so she paid you minimum wage to write about it for a week. Not good. But Karen is now an Everest graduate with a harrowing, life-changing survival story. She’s so impressed with the impact your first biography had on her life that she asks you to write another one. This time, she’ll pay you minimum wage while you’re writing and go halfsies on the book proceeds. Together, you make a killing. Your work with Karen is done, so you repeat this winning formula with other clients while continuing to rake in royalties from your joint venture with Karen. Pretty soon, there are so many people knocking down your door that you have to hire others to keep up with the workload. You take a small cut of their royalties as well.

You are now set for life. You’re welcome.