My good friend Beverly read my blog post The Web, The Future and Who Wins! and posed these questions: How do individuals without huge bankrolls make good ideas profitable. How does a little guy get capital in a credit constrained environment? And how does a little guy get economies of scale for production to test an idea?

Beverly was once in big time marketing, now she is a minister. So you can hear both sides of her life in the question: the big biz person and the socially conscious one.

Great Ideas. Everyday each of us has at least one. So the key is choosing the right one. Getting to the right idea means doing due diligence: researching the market, exploring the competition, seeing how it can be done better, talking to prospective customers, inquiring how much they would value your idea, how much they are willing to pay for it. Then it requires pulling out the spreadsheets and running the numbers in best and worst case scenarios.

Capital in a Constrained Environment. How do you get it? You don’t. Great businesses are built on guile, a shoestring and low personal overhead. Great businesses require enormous creativity, great relationships with others and a willingness to change things up when things aren’t going right. Sometimes it means giving up on the original dream. It can mean barter, going off-shore to lower costs, enlisting passionate “volunteers” who promote you and, in return, you promote with a passion.

When you have no money, you understand that you must be profitable from early in the game. And that means your idea has to work — or you cut your losses, dump it or change it up. It is a highly efficient way to operate. Business Darwinism. No more bloated profitless Facebooks, yours will be a real business from Day 1.

Economies of Scale. The Web, the future and who wins? Businesses that deliver unique value to small slices of the market and that means they operate at solid margins that negate the need for “scale”. If you choose to scale, you risk your own capital and self-fund it, but if you are making a comfortable middle-class income is it worth the risk? How much do we each really require to live a decent life? That’s for you and you alone to decide – without bankers, investors or venture capitalists breathing down your neck. The freedom to make that decision is called success. When enough of us get to that decision we will have experienced a Capitalist Revolution.