coconara

coconara is a micro-service platform for mostly non-physical goods.

It is a mix of Quora (for having someone to answer a particular question) and 

Amazon (for actually selling the product online). 

What I think interesting and attractive about coconara are two things; contents and pricing. 

coconara contents are bizarrely unique and attractive. 

For example, I have requested some professional advice for this blog to become 

better and more interactive media. The advisories are all professional and although 

they can only give their advice with certain limitations (due to price mostly), 

it is truly amazing experience to have someone to take a look at such things. 

Other stuff I instantly purchased was romance advice from experienced lovers, 

and even more substantial stuff such as logo for my friend's rock band. 

Other offerings include "revise your resume", "advice for MBA essay questions", 

"diet" and etc. I realized that at the end of the day,

 all these trivial things that make me very happy.

To add, ,most of sellers in coconara are individuals. 

So you directly feel as if you are connected to the person by buying their product.

Another critical coconara factor is its pricing. 

At coconara, every service is only for 500 yen (roughly 5-6 US dollars). 

This is such a huge advantage of coconara, and I hope they will continue the price or

even challenge lowering the price.

In web or in any other scale-able businesses , the product must be "insanely" cheap. 

I don't know about average prices of online consumer retails, but 500 yen pricing so far

does seem to work. 

I hope coconara will grow further with better quality controls, rich service lines, and so on.

The Intelligent Entrepeneur

I just finished reading the book "The Intelligent Entrepreneur". 

An insightful, and very practical in some way to know what you will have

to go through once you decided to start up a company.

Marc Cenedella, one of three "intelligent entrepreneurs" who are described in 

this book, graduated Harvard Business School with a Baker Scholar, which is given to

top 5% of 900 students in the graduate program.

Marc started his own business before he came to Harvard.
He already had started a successful trading company and moved it into black.

But one night, he thought to himself,
that he won't be satisfied by doing that business for the rest of his career.
He chose to go to HBS and started up TheLadders.com after the graduation.

Entrepreneurship is often defined as following; 

"the relentless pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled".

So start-up folks dream big.
But the thing is, it is how the idea gets executed.
This book's narrative described in detail how 3 of HBS graduates including Marc,

struggled and succeeded making a company and creating an impact.