For example, what exactly is the classified ad offering, a product or a service? If it's a product, how much will you have to pay for your inventory, and where will you will store it? Will there be manufacturing costs? Shipping costs? If it's a service, will you be performing it yourself, or contracting it out? And how much will it cost to place 1000 classified ads? In the San Francisco Chronicle, the one-time rate for a commercial ad is $16.16 per line. Even the tiniest classified ads are at least two lines, so that's $32.32. Multiply that by 1000 and you get $32,320. Generally, you don't have to pay in advance to place an ad, so theoretically your sales will covers your costs. But what if that ad that worked so well in the Zenith Register is a bust in the nation's other 999 newspapers? It's easy to see how a housepainter might go bankrupt in the initial stages of perfecting this kind of money-making technique.

But let me forego skepticism for a moment; say the ad does work. Don didn't specify if that "lousy $40 profit" was the result of several transactions or just one. For the sake of simplicity, say it's one. That's one thousand sales coming in each week, from all over the country. Think of the paperwork! You have to place the ads, you have to make sure they run, you have to settle your bills to the newspapers, and you have to fulfill 1000 orders for some type of mysterious product or service. Each week. I don't know...maybe I'm just a lazy, passive pessimist, bereft of that essential entrepreneurial can-do spark, but managing the kind of business that Don's scheme implies doesn't sound too easy to me. In fact, it sounds pretty darn hard.