By Morf Morford
Tacoma Daily Index

Want to get inspired to start your own business? Ever wonder how a certain business got started?

Here’s is a podcast that profiles how many familiar businesses got their (sometimes rocky) start.

Some of the companies profiled include Wayfair, FUBU, Larabar and 1-800-GOT-JUNK.

Traditionally businesses have been all about solving problems. In our frantically paced market, a successful business defines a problem – or even better, make customers  “need” a product they didn’t even know they wanted as Steve Jobs did with his assumption that “customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.”

A person starting a business needs to have a larger view than the customer.

Jobs was inspired by Henry Ford’s line “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’”

An enduring business that will make a difference – as well as a profit – is one with a clarified, distinct and irresistible vision.

As Steve Jobs put it, “Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

If you think about it, the vast majority of skills required for most “jobs” are largely interchangeable, but starting a business takes a level of courage and perhaps even recklessness that might capture why the entrepreneurial character is near mythical in its power and presence.

As Steve Jobs put it “the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

Listen to some of their stories here – https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this