Ferriss is certainly invested in the idea of one-person financial power, but in the laptop-stand case study there would seem to be more to the story.
What I think is valuable is the constant reminder that the business/income-building is a means to an end, and there's a wide world of choices out there for what the "end" is.
I think the lesson of the story is that there are so many people and competitors now that running a business/muse as a means to an end is impossible unless you lower your expectations as to what an end is.
You must either lower your expectation by living in 3rd world countries as Ferris suggests, or work 7-days a week like Tim Ferris did on his herbal supplement company. Or be plain lucky and find a niche that no one has found out like the ones shown here. Most niche ideas fail.
But Jason did pull this off almost entirely on his own.
I also really like seeing improved and successful implementations of existing technology, proven in the story by the example of his dad being perfectly willing to get a punch style timeclock in this day and age. And not only is Clockspot able to leverage the history of timeclocks, it can also be seen to be a kind of "time twitter," so all of the published domain expertise about implementing that can be relied on to provide another huge chunk of the app and mobile clients.
Which is why software patents are bad. ;)
I'm quite intrigued by how he arrived at the current pricing model. It looks like it's been through a few iterations and I'd be really interested to learn more about it.
Does anyone know if this has been discussed anywhere online?