It’s the end of the week, and just like every Friday at The Solopreneur Life, I have some tasty, mostly-nutritious bits of information to share with you.

This week’s menu includes:
• A mom-and-son team that created a successful, custom food product
• An example of a great target market
• Should you be on BlogTalkRadio?
• Stories of solopreneur startups
• Moleskine masterpieces
• My favorite Web site discoveries of the week, and
• A post that shines a flashlight on some of the worst fake IDs ever made

YouBar, a Super-Fun, Custom Food Product

This is the era of customization, and a brilliant example is YouBar, a Los Angeles company that creates custom-made energy bars.

You Bar was launched in 2006 after Ava Bise and her son, Anthony Flynn, began creating protein bars at home to meet their taste, health, and allergy needs. They loved eating their unique bars so much that they thought there would be a huge market for protein bars made freshly to customers’ taste and nutritional needs.

As a You Bar customer, you:

• Choose the ingredients and the bar size

• View the nutrition facts of the energy bar WHILE YOU ARE CREATING IT!

• The bars are shipped directly, and each comes in a package that includes your chosen bar name and the nutrition facts.

I built a bar, and it was a blast. I really liked being able to see how I could manipulate the nutritional values, based on my choices. My goal was to create a bar that would taste good to me and have very low sugar content.

My chosen ingredients were: sunflower seed butter, whey protein, pecans, sunflower seeds, goji berries, organic shredded coconut, clover honey, natual unsweetened cocoa, vanilla extract, and oat bran. (The coconut protects the bars from being stolen by my daughters, who hate coconut.)

And this is smart: in the ordering process, it’s easy to choose to have your bar(s) of choice made and delivered on a recurring basis.

I named mine The Solopreneur Life Bar, of course. I should have my bars sometime next week. I will let you know how they taste.

A Great Target Market and a Valuable Service

I am frequently impressed with the target markets that solopreneurs are able to identify. An interesting example that I found this week is The Winter Blues Coach, a Web site published by Marsha Stopa, who says:

I am an expert on miserable winters. I live in summer beautiful but winter gray Michigan, where we can go for weeks without seeing the sun during the seven months from October to April. If the cold doesn’t get you some winters, the wet, gray blanket of a sky will.

Marsha’s site is dedicated to helping people maintain their mood and energy during the winter months through the use of light therapy, diet, and exercise.

I live in the Land of 100,000 Light Boxes (Minnesota), and Marsha is going to help a lot of people.

Is BlogTalkRadio In Your Future?

An expert chat titled “Interested in Hosting Your Own (Free!) Radio Show? You Can With BlogTalkRadio” will be held 1 p.m. Eastern, Thursday, November 4 in the Get Connected social network. Nicole Fende of www.smallbusinessfinanceforum.com will host the chat and share the knowledge she has gained from hosting a podcast. I want to know how much Nicole’s program has extended her reach within her target market. You can be part of the chat by joining Get Connected.

Stories From the Summit

Rob Place of Solventurer.com has begun a series of profiles of solopreneurs, focusing on how they started their businesses. The features are called “Stories From the Summit,” (great name, given Rob’s mountaineer branding!) and Rob featured me this week.

I hadn’t thought about my start-up in a while, and in doing so, it reminded me that an advance in technology (desktop publishing, 1993) made it possible for my business to prosper.

A Solopreneur Can Dream

I wish the inside of my Moleskine notebook looked like this!

My Favorites This Week

Here are some of the cool things I came across this past week in my travels:

• My favorite Web site discovery, Part 1: I found Amy Pryor Fine Art this week. Amy Pryor is an artist, and there are three things I really like about her site:

1. Amy’s art is terrific

2. The art is the star, and it’s the first thing you see when you reach her site

3. She has a tab for “available” art, and she includes the price for the available works

After visiting Amy’s site, it felt like I had been to an art exhibit. Very cool.

• My favorite quote of this week was from @GaylandAnderson: “Remember that a kick in the behind is…a step forward.”

• The funniest thing I saw this week was a collection of the “15 Worst Attempts At A Fake ID Card.” I especially like #4: “Don’t include your girlfriend!”

Did you ever have a fake ID? I didn’t, but I had friends who did.

• My favorite Web site discovery, Part 2: Sara Dean Jenkins has launched a cool new Web site, Handmade Marketing Success, that targets “creative solopreneurs.” Sara writes:

I’m a creative solopreneur who makes & sells two handmade bath & body lines, Moonsteam Alchemy and Geek Bliss, both run on Etsy. In the past year of selling there, I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to make sales (and what hinders them), and I want to pass on what I’ve learned. I’ve also learned a lot about growing an online business, and since I kept seeing so many other handmade sellers struggling in business—and after having watched my mom, a crazy-talented folk artist, struggle in hers—I feel that my calling is to teach others how to stop struggling and start thriving.

That is a great calling. Sara mentions Etsy, which claims to be the world’s most vibrant handmade marketplace. I checked out the site, and the merchandise is wonderfully original! I might do some of my holiday shopping there.

Solopreneur’s Digest

In case you missed any of this week’s columns, here they are:

• You Know You’re a Solopreneur When…
• An Introduction to Trademarks for the Uninitiated
• Featured Soloist Revka Stearns: “Don’t Wait for Perfection”
• How to Prospect, Using Social Media

Welcome back. Are you ready to begin your life's work, ready to change the world? Then click here.

Related Posts:

• The Solopreneur Life’s “Friday Bits” Column #40
• The Solopreneur Life “Friday Bits” Column #2
• The Solopreneur Life “Friday Bits” Column #19
• The Solopreneur Life “Friday Bits” Column #32
• The Solopreneur Life’s “Friday Bits” Column #36