9 ms·

How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter

248 points by maxklein 17y ago

icey 17y ago
I think the bigger hurdle for most people is getting from $0 a day to $1 a day. Replicating success isn't as hard as finding success.
- sabat 17y ago
  Max is proposing that it isn't that difficult for a programmer to find a way to make $1/day. Max -- care to elucidate?
  - maxklein 17y ago
    If you want to make $1 a day, go search for a keyword. Like Owls. Then find a bunch of videos of owls in YouTube, put them on the site and call the site OwlVideo.com. In a week you will be making $1 a day. Or if you prefer to program for the desktop - go wrap ffmpeg and make an AVI to MP4 converter. Def make $30 in sales in a month. Or if you prefer to program for the web, make something that parses Apples XML of new iPhone apps, put all that text on your website, slap adverts on it. There is $1 a day. Or you can copy the bible and allow people to annote it. Put on web. There ya go. Find a commonly done task like file uploading. Write a wrapper script for this in PHP. Sell it on a scripting site. $1 a day. Make a wordpress theme and target a specific group. "Theme for Doctors". Make it premium and put it for sale. $1 a day. It's easy, you just need to think in the right mode.
    - javery 17y ago
      So these might be great ways to make a little bit of money, but they don't really create value (except for the theme). Creating a successful startup should be more about creating value then making money, if you create value the money will come. When you think about success do you define it as money or building something people use and love (and also makes you money). If you want to make a cheap buck there are plenty of ways to do it without providing value. Go create a trash blog on a popular keyword, become a domain squatter, etc. But I want to create value and build something people will use and enjoy using.
      - garply 17y ago
        I want to make many cheap bucks and I hope people here will continue to teach us how to think of ideas that will generate these cheap bucks.
      - philfreo 17y ago
        Agreed - these ideas are not a startup - they don't create real value as a company. However the idea of making passive income is very attractive to many programmers, and creates an opportunity to have time to work on something big.
    - sabat 17y ago
      they don't really create value Maybe they do -- it depends on who's judging. To use Max's example, let's say I am casually interested in owls. Seriously, there are such people. I'm 60, I am on the internet but am somewhat uneasy with how to use it, and I like owls. Somehow, I find Max's owl video site. I like it! Maybe I even see an ad and click and buy. Maybe. But to me, finding the site and being entertained by his collection of owl videos -- that has value.
      - javery 17y ago
        Yeah, the people who created the owl videos are providing value, youtube is providing value by making them available, the owl site is just leaching off of that to make a buck.
        qjz 17y ago
        Aggregation has always had value (the Bible, Familiar Quotes, Readers Digest, The Big Picture, etc.).
        javery 17y ago
        Thoughtful aggregation does add value, to me it sounded like the idea was to grab the first X videos on youtube.
        qjz 17y ago
        Even thoughtless aggregation adds value, if you consider successful sites that are nothing more than a bulletin board built around a user community that does the actual gruntwork. Putting things in context may be the "location, location, location" of the Web. You could say we're doing it right now, here on HN.
        thesethings 17y ago
        I really disagree. Some call it "aggregation," but I'm starting to call this layer "discovery." This very site, Hacker News, is a filter that is mere pointer to content elsewhere. (There are occasional "Ask HN," but most every post posts elsewhere). Most sites and tools I use every day are filtering tools. Techmeme is another great example. It is true that a purely automated owl video scraper wouldn't be as good and one that was even cleaned up for five minutes a day, but that wasn't the suggester's point.
    - sabat 17y ago
      the owl site is just leaching off of that to make a buck Editorship -- or, if you're more cynical, "leeching". There really is value in collecting other people's works. I am convinced that it's more than mere leeching.
    - windsurfer 17y ago
      Do you have a newsletter or blog?
      - slig 17y ago
        He is the author of the post.
    - bpick 17y ago
      Damn! Someone already owns Owlvideos.com - I thought it was my ticket to the big time :)
    - moconnor 17y ago
      Ok, I'll bite. I challenge you to make an owl video site that makes $1 a day and post the link and revenue here. Ditto for an AVI to MP4 desktop converter. Ditto for the iPhone app site. Ditto for the annotated bible. Ditto for the file uploader script. Ditto for the Doctors theme. I don't believe any of these will make $1 a day. I believe they'll make $0 a day. There's a world of difference between $0 a day and $1 a day. Just because $1 a day sounds like almost nothing doesn't mean you'll get it for a site that's worth almost nothing. It's $365 a year. You won't make that with 30 owl videos and adwords.
  - gcheong 17y ago
    Well, I have 2 apps on the app store right now. One of them makes nothing, it's not free, just does not make any sales and one makes just about $1 a day (after I raised the price from .99 to 1.99). Both apps are pretty simple, are in the same category (healthcare and fitness) and I've done nothing to promote them.
    - allenbrunson 17y ago
      Yeah, I'm in that same boat. Two apps on the store, one is free, the other is making about $3.00 a day: http://www.platinumball.net/hearts/ http://www.platinumball.net/hearts/ Kind of frustrating, because when I made my app free, it was being downloaded 1700 times a day. So it seems like there is demand, but not enough to push them over into the 'pay real money' category. I'd love to work with somebody who is better at marketing than I am, if somebody wants to get in touch.
      - gcheong 17y ago
        It looks like you're in San Francisco. Mobile Monday Group is holding some kind of event tomorrow about how to increase app sales. I saw the post on the Silicon Valley iPhone Developer's Meetup Group mailing list. May just be a sales pitch but might be worth checking out as it's free: http://momosvfeb10.eventbrite.com/ http://momosvfeb10.eventbrite.com/
        allenbrunson 17y ago
        i actually don't live in san francisco, i was just there when that photo was taken. and i'm kind of over doing marketing on my own, i know perfectly well i'm not any good at it. i'd like to work with somebody who has the personality for it.
      - tjr 17y ago
        I experienced the same thing. There seems to be a world of difference between free and 99 cents on the app store. And, I think, understandably so. If I want to try a whole bunch of programs, I'd much rather try free programs. If it costs even just 99 cents, then I am forced to stop and think about it before downloading. "I can download hundreds of free programs for less money than this one 99-cent program... do I really want the 99-cent program, or am I okay with some more free programs?" I also noticed that making an app that was 99 cents to be free not only increased downloads, but also increased bad reviews. I guess people who get programs for free expect a lot more out of them and are perfectly happy to express their disappointment both rudely and publicly than those who pay for the programs.
- ja27 17y ago
  I refer anyone that's interested to Ed Dale's 30 Day Challenge. It's a free online course to learn to make your first $1 online. It's mostly about niche selection, test marketing, and beginning SEO, but it's great for beginners. It's not overwhelmingly awesome, but it's free and targeted to people that aren't ubergeeks like us. http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com
dbz 17y ago
Sounds like a great strategy if one only cares about making money and doesn't care about working on any projects, startups, software for companies, ect.
- icey 17y ago
  The other side of that is that if you don't have to work, you can work on anything you'd like.
  - dbz 17y ago
    It will take years to make 400 projects. Looks like a full time job to me. Allow me to explain.... You make a project today. 1 buck. Another project tomorrow. 2 bucks. Wait a minute. I can't like off of two bucks..... You will need another job to provide that needed income to live off of. Especially to pay bills. It will take years
    - icey 17y ago
      If you make a throwaway app every 2 days, that's 400 apps in a little over 2 years. That's far less time than it takes to go to college and get a bachelor's degree. When you're done, you've got enough income to live off of, and you can work on anything you damned well please. I don't know that I necessarily agree with Max's premise, but I don't think timing is that big an issue (assuming everything else works out).
- chime 17y ago
  If you take his definitions of in-crowd vs. normals to be true, the in-crowd has the prerogative to choose energizing startups and work on exciting projects without putting much thought into making money early-on. The normals have bills to pay, kids to send to school, and sick family members to take care. For us normals, money is always a large (though not the only) factor in making decisions that relate to our career, projects, and products. I would love to leave everything and work on some of my ideas but too many people rely on me to have a stable income at this point for me to just abandon them midstream. This doesn't mean I'm doing nothing. I'm slowly changing my life around so I can get to where I want to be. But at every project I look into, I have to consider how much money I can potentially make and how soon would I see a cash flow. The normals aren't all dreaming of being the next MS/Google. Just like the in-crowd, we want to make good products that users would love. We just have a lot more baggage and need to make sure our dreams don't get in the way of our loved ones' care.
Sukotto 17y ago
There's a third option not mentioned in the article. That's creating a $1/day project, then working to make it a $2/day, then $3/day. Either through improving the thing you're selling, or by finding better ways to sell it. Take, for example, Patrick@bingocardcreator.com . He seems do have done pretty well following that method. I don't know if that's any more or less work than building 400 projects, each selling for $1/day though.
- maxklein 17y ago
  I think that's the first option. Which is focusing on one thing and making it better and making more money from it.
  - patio11 17y ago
    I'm confused then, because it seems from your post that you say the first option is difficult unless you're a US-based MIT-educated elite startup founder Twitter-chasing wunderkid with VC money coming out your ears and good writing ability. At the risk of stating the obvious, I am not a US-based MIT-educated elite startup founder Twitter-chasing wunderkid with VC money coming out my ears. Nor do I think any of these are pre-requisites or, well, even all that helpful in terms of building successful businesses. Some of them even contribute to the pathologies in our industry, like obsessive focus on building products to be used by ourselves rather than reaching out to more diverse groups of customers with desirable properties such as "pays money for software."
    - maxklein 17y ago
      I'm not saying it is impossible to write and sell good software and keep improving it. I'm saying that a lot of people have tried it and do not have the neccessary advice and reach to make the software successful. Look at all the Review my startup posts. I have only ever seen a handful actually become successful. Most just seem to fade off. I'm not saying you NEED to be from that group to do it successfully. But it is difficult. What you did, has not been replicable by most of the other people here.
ryanwaggoner 17y ago
This is an interesting post, and I'm eager to hear what other people who have spent more time in the startup scene think of it. Here's my thoughts: 1. I think I've seen the "two groups" that the post talks about, but I have begun to have serious doubts that they're as fatalistic as they're made out to be. For example: The in-crowd live in the U.S, they attended MIT or Berkeley, they write well, have interesting blogs and are followed by 400 or more people on twitter. You can't change where you went to school, but you can improve your writing skills, start a blog, and get 400 followers on Twitter. In fact, this is trivial over a period of months. Writing good content is not only for the elite; it's how you become one of the elite ;) 2. If you do a little research up front on the market for whatever you're going to create, you might be able to just create one product rather than 400. It might be more difficult in the beginning, but you just might learn an incredible amount and turn out to be one of the most well-rounded sources of startup insight on HN. See patio11 / Bingo Card Creator for an example :) 3. My main concern would be sustainability; those 150 projects that make you $12k / month aren't going to do so forever. You'll run yourself ragged trying to keep them all together, and at some point, you'd probably be better off with a job. I guess what I'm saying is to try and pick a model that will scale more than $1/day projects will. In spite of these criticisms, I did enjoy this article for its thought-provoking angle that's very different from a lot of the stuff I read on HN.
- maxklein 17y ago
  1. It's very very difficult to learn to write well or be interesting. I have many friends and I know that no matter how hard they actually tried, they would not be able to write stuff people want to read. They are good at what they do, but they can't write even if they tried. 2. Creating one product is the route everyone takes by default. Yes, it works, but this is introducing an alternative route 3. Part of the optimisation is focusing on projects that are easy to spin off into new projects. If one project is selling clothes and the next is hospital management software, that's just stupid. If one is an auction management dashboard, the next is a sales management software, then it's easy to adapt. You learn quickly what ideas have generic code bases that are easy to adapt, and what ideas are very specific in their technology and are difficult to adapt.
olalonde 17y ago
Although I wouldn't see myself doing 400 "half baked" projects, I understand that it could be a solution for people who are in it for the money. That being said, I definitely agree with the fact that your social network and environment can have a big influence on your success. We don't all have the chance to live in Silicon Valley.
sailormoon 17y ago
Ah, that photo brings back memories. That's the keihin-touhoku line in tokyo and believe me, it's an accurate depiction.
cwalcott 17y ago
It seems like marketing would still be an issue though. Even to make $1/day, someone has to find your software. If you're not marketing through a blog or Twitter, that leaves advertising. So now in addition to writing good ads, you need to make sure each project is making more than you're spending on advertising, which is a lot of work on its own.
- DXL 17y ago
  I wrote a script sometime ago, which sells about 4 copies a month for $25 each. The only way I marketed was by adding it to directories such as HotScripts. That will you give you some traffic if you're providing a solution in a field that's not highly competitive (a niche). You could try that.
- maxklein 17y ago
  Actually, it's not. If you have to move 1000 copies of software in a month, then you need to market. If you want to move 1 copy a month, list it on download.com and you will move 1 copy. That's the beauty of the system - it minimises the need for marketing and instead ups the project count to make up for the loss there. You are basically moving resources from one thing (marketing, promotion) into another (designing generic software, finding new ideas, writing software very fast). The second options are easy for software developers to do compared to marketing.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    If you write software to move 1 copy per month then you'll be writing software to move 25 copies during the lifetime of that version. It'd be very hard to even support your users.
mixmax 17y ago
Assuming a 20 day work month and a 10 hour workday that will give you half an hour a month to work on each of your 400 projects. And assuming (optimistically) that you will spend 2 weeks doing each project it will take 15 years to get to 400. And that's not counting overhead such as accounting, etc. for all of your projects. I like the idea of the post, but maybe he took it a bit too far...
- maxklein 17y ago
  That's the point - you don't start a new project every 2 weeks. You start off with an idea easily adaptable to various scenarios. Then adapt each time, target new people, and observe if the variation makes you required $1 a day. When you have nichified a codebase that nothing more can be squeezed of it, you start on the next.
  - waterlesscloud 17y ago
    So it's not really 400 projects, it's maybe 20 projects optimized in 20 different ways each. That's a whole different way to look at it.
- nfnaaron 17y ago
  I think the idea is that each project gets an initial small period of launch work, and then after that they're mostly self-sustaining for their economic lifetime. "Optimize for time." In that case, half hour/month may be enough. The 1$/day and 400/month figures are just for illustration. The idea is to crank on multiple simple things that share characteristics. As you optimize for time, you're also optimizing for "crank," getting better at cranking out simple things.
AmericanOP 17y ago
I think the odds of creating 400 money-making projects without one of them becoming a real success are very low.
- dbz 17y ago
  One of the projects was putting thirty ninja videos on a website. When that project becomes a real success I'll buy you dinner.
  - mrtron 17y ago
    Ask a ninja is ridiculously popular and probably started with a bunch of videos.
    - sabat 17y ago
      Ask a Ninja is so popular that he/they (I'm unclear) appeared alongside a bunch of stars in SF recently -- in honor of Conan O'Brien, whom I presume was there as well. Holy cow.
agbell 17y ago
I think if you try to create 400 projects, most will make 0/day and a couple will make 10/day. Then you optimize those. Slowly you end up with a small number of projects generating a half decent amount money. This is actually a great way to prevent yourself from choosing a local maximum in the product space. You climb a bunch of hills a little bit. (edited)
- brianobush 17y ago
  Over diversification is dangerous too. Jack of all apps, master of none? I like the idea, but the problem with this product space search is that is dead slow. You might want to search like this for a bit and see what takes off, then put more energy into the ones that are doing well.
  - agbell 17y ago
    You are right about the dangers of diversification. You would have to prune down projects as you go or else risk not doing anything well. However, if the projects are designed to be all up front effort and no ongoing time costs, you can just leave them to languish. I have had things take off in a minor way, long after abandoning them.
aw3c2 17y ago
How on earth are you supposed to create and maintain 400 "projects" at once?
- brianobush 17y ago
  Over time I assume the maintenance/attention would drop off. Though, I could see revenue dropping off too.
- thibaut_barrere 17y ago
  It all depends on what you put behind the word 'project' (and there's no judgment in my sentence). For most programmers, a project is something that has already a decent size, is complex to get out and test on the field. If you think this way, a "side-project" can only be rare. On the other hand: a friend of mine started exactly the way Max describes a long while back, and currently runs way more than 400 sites/projects. He is also doing way more than 12k€ per month. The thing is 95% of his projects wouldn't even catch the 'regular' (if there's such thing) programmer's interest :)
  - tjogin 17y ago
    It would be really interesting if you could describe some of these projects briefly.
    - thibaut_barrere 17y ago
      Those I know revolve around affiliation, alternate search engines, porn/erotic stuff, niche technological forums and such topics :) Not by him but in the same kind of idea, here's an example: http://fastpowertools.com/ http://fastpowertools.com/ A while back I know the owner of this site did a few hundreds $ per month. It was really an eye-opener to me :) Of course this requires SEO skills to earn more than a few bucks, that need to be learn on the way. I started a couple of sites like this one, and although I earned a bit of money, I wanted to try sites that are really useful to myself, which I'm focusing on now. I think it's always good to remind myself that between what would look a half-spammy site to a regular programmer, and the typical too complex projects regular programmers would start, there's a sweet spot in the middle.
conesus 17y ago
This is a sure-fire way to create a lot of spam and hack products. The creative element of fostering a project and putting real intellectual effort is gone, for sake of trying to turn a measly profit. There is nothing artistic or genuine about what he is doing here. There is no soul in these products. Of all the products and software I use, there is soul in every single one of them. Safari, Tweetie/Twitter, Hacker News, iTunes, Adium, Fireworks, TextMate, Sequel Pro, zsh, Firefox, and all of the websites I read. They each have something to be proud of. If you are making software and services that you cannot be proud of and are only there to make you money, then you have chosen a path that is less meaningful and will not bring you the kind of happiness and security that I think most software creators are looking for in building software. Feeding your family is one thing, but creating and harboring what is effectively spam is not the only way to do it. Labors of love are perfectly capable of making you money, and with the right amount of luck, and much more preparation, you can find yourself rolling in the same dough as these bottom of the barrel money makers that this writer is scheming. As they say, don't eat your soul to fill your belly.
- sabat 17y ago
  I'm not sure your conclusion necessarily follows what he's proposing. He's saying: find 400 things that each make $1/day -- it's a thought experiment as much as it is a proposition, BTW. Some people would certainly make 400 spam blogs or something else equally useless. I don't think that was the author's intention, though. I wish I could personally say that every single thing I do has my heart and soul in it. I can't, for reasons outside my apparent control. I bet I could find 400 things I like enough to spend time on, and that's enough for me.
  - conesus 17y ago
    My conclusion stems from his primary example: A collection of ninja videos slathered with adsense. It's half-way to a spamblog, but he considers it something to be proud of.
    - sabat 17y ago
      he considers it something to be proud of I think he considers it that only in the sense that someone else may find it entertaining.
patio11 17y ago
I'm not a big fan of creating that many products since it seems like you're forcing yourself into a churn-and-burn corner (and you'll probably be building systemic weaknesses into your model, like being one Googlewhack or AppStore reordering away from penury). However, the core insight about creation being one more process that can be scaled is potentially pretty big. You can even use it in the service of the one big lovingly-handedcrafted adequately-supported non-sucking product that you're supposedly not capable of building/marketing/etc. For example, everybody and their dog has done "photo sharing website", and if you're coming to the Internet today with photo sharing site #85421 you're probably not going to get too far. However, you could probably do fairly well with the same tech and a focus on wedding photographers. (I happen to know that pond is well-fished, too, just an example.) And you could roll out new facets of your marketing/product creation strategy to target each niche you can identify, big and small. For example: I very much doubt that I could make a software product about a subject as niche as owls of Asia while still adequately devoting time and resources to supporting/maintaining/improving it, but I'm pretty sure with an established product adding a bit about owls of Asia to the marketing mix is pretty much just a bolt-on-and-go sort of maneuver. (You might ask "Now is there anyone in the world who will actually pay money to do something associated with the owls of Asia?!" I have evidence in the affirmative.) Edit to add: It seems Max and I independently chose owl-related niches as our practical examples, since he posted before me and I didn't see it. What are the odds, right?
deleted 17y ago
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vaksel 17y ago
Did you set the "in crowd #" at 400 twitter followers because that's what you have? Because 400 is pretty low, I'd say the number should be closer to 15,000
- maxklein 17y ago
  15k followers is not in-crowd that's more like the exclusive country club crowd. Most seem to have 60 or 70 followers. The people who are just random programmers and not real marketers seem to have 400-600. But I obviously did not do any serious research on this.
acon 17y ago
This sort of reminds me of the old pottery story, where they had one group making which was graded on how many pots they made and another one which was only graded on their best pot. Of course the group which was graded on quantity made better pots in the end. I really think that by iterating really quickly you will become good faster than if you try to make the perfect thing right away. So don't be paralyzed by trying to achieve perfection; go out and create, and then create some more.
- gridspy 17y ago
  There is a lot of merit in setting a series of easily achievable targets, each one slightly harder than the last. This is the way I get everything done.
- Psyonic 17y ago
  Sounds like the proverb taught to GO beginners: "Lose Your First 100 Games As Quickly As Possible"
  - jacoblyles 17y ago
    Also works great for Chess. But horrible for Boxing.
    - Psyonic 17y ago
      You certainly do have to modify that advice to avoid serious injury, but from my limited boxing experience I'll say that nothing teaches you to keep your hands up like getting smacked around a few times.
dnsworks 17y ago
If ever I wanted the ability to down vote a blog submission, it was this one.
jacquesm 17y ago
Interesting, I've been doing just that for the last couple of years. It's been a mix of partial successes and total failures, mostly failures. I didn't want to go the 'mfa' route for obvious reasons, so I try to make these sites in to something that actually is useful, and that have a sense of community about them. Here is a breakdown of what you can make this way in a month based on adsense alone after several years of work, not something to be proud of, that's for sure. It is very hard to make stuff that does not need maintenance. pfn 3,203 18 0.56% €0.08 €0.26 leftsidebar 68 1 1.47% €0.00 €0.00 linkbar 72 0 0.00% €0.00 €0.00 ccm 1,012 2 0.20% €0.06 €0.06 dzleft 52,480 34 0.06% €0.03 €1.81 dzlink 47,804 98 0.21% €0.04 €1.87 dzmain 46,950 222 0.47% €0.17 €7.93 fls 90,839 459 0.51% €0.50 €44.98 gms 4,242 61 1.44% €0.31 €1.31 hst160x600 30,360 54 0.18% €0.20 €6.13 hst468x60 29,992 55 0.18% €0.20 €6.00 jks 359 10 2.79% €2.06 €0.74 lrmsmall 90 0 0.00% €0.00 €0.00 lrmtall 2,173,823 2,039 0.09% €0.05 €112.76 lrm 5,209 17 0.33% €0.35 €1.81 lrmlink 2,204,212 2,234 0.10% €0.05 €115.06 lrmlinkbar 24,719 109 0.44% €0.15 €3.64 mdcl 84 1 1.19% €0.05 €0.00 pcs 93,418 225 0.24% €0.21 €19.21 pcslinkbar 89,701 1,206 1.34% €0.43 €38.88 stroompunt 1,039 17 1.64% €3.60 €3.74 cams 1,510,897 5,889 0.39% €0.19 €289.18 ztk 27,112 711 2.62% €3.69 €100.15 ztklinkbar 28,534 462 1.62% €1.30 €37.10 These figures are for the month of January. I've removed the ones that I consider total failures from this list or it would have been three times as long. $1 per day per site sounds like a great plan in theory, but in practice it is quite hard to do that across a broad number of sites and not get bogged down in maintenance issues. Anything with a form will attract spammers more than it will attract users, software will over time stop working because external things it depends on will change and so on. Passive income is nice, but it is hard to make something that is really passive. It's not a complete failure, but it definitely wasn't the success I expected either. This is due to a whole pile of factors, maintenance has already been mentioned, lousy ECPM is another, inability to get any traction with some projects is a third (anybody interested in a complete platform for trading second hand cars or houses ?).
- sabat 17y ago
vijayr 17y ago
Interesting article. I guess there is definitely some money to be made, if the site is useful ("tool" based). Some examples: http://selfmademinds.com/200811/mini-site-case-study-update/ http://selfmademinds.com/200811/mini-site-case-study-update/ http://www.calendarsquick.com/printables/index.html http://www.calendarsquick.com/printables/index.html (don't know how much this site makes, I'd assume more than $1 per day)
- joelhaus 17y ago
  Curious, how important do you feel a good domain name is for these mini-sites? Imagine that a highly relevant name could significantly reduce your marketing investment and get you more traffic.
  - vijayr 17y ago
    not sure if domain name is that important, for such tiny sites. Most of your traffic is going to be from search engines, so I guess you'll need to worry more about SEO than coming up with a memorable name (as people aren't going to remember it). From SEO point of view, keyword rich domain names are important, not sure how much though.
mattmaroon 17y ago
This article is silly, and just wrong in every way. It totally discounts time spent doing these projects, and totally fails to understand expected value. For instance: "I wrote a desktop software once, and priced it at $29.90. I sold one copy a month, which was terrible. That's $1 a day. It's really easy as a programmer to do something that makes $1 a day." I suppose if that desktop software took an hour to make it would be worth it in a few months. More likely it took an amount of time that would better have been spent (from a purely financial perspective) working at Wal-Mart and then investing the funds in an ETF. To make $1 a day ($365/yr) takes only around $4k (what a good programmer earns in <2 weeks) tossed into the market. Thus any project that takes you longer than that for $1/day in return is a waste. Also even if you assumed every project would net $1 per day, you'd still be better off thinking big. A hit Facebook app, for instance, might make $10,000 a day. (A megahit 10x that.) A good keyword to arbitrage via an affiliate account and AdSense could do the same. You're far better off taking a 1% shot at $10k/day than a 100% shot at $1. (You're far better off taking a .1% shot.) You might say "well what about variance" but apparently you have the time to create 400 products. Also, Twitter followers have done little of real value for anyone in terms of making a business profitable. On the list of ways to get customers to your web-based business, Twitter's still pretty far down the chain. A far better plan would be to try to create one product that makes $1 per person you drive to it. This is doable. Then you can buy users for far less with ads, roll your profits into more ads, rinse, repeat. This is how people like me who rarely if ever use Twitter have made oodles from the web. (I've done this now multiple times, for reference.)
- zaidf 17y ago
  Matt, a huge part that I think he has left out is the use of outsourcing stuff offshore. A lot of his projects seem to be content plays. You can get lots of content produced offshore for very cheap. The end result? You can have 5 people working full-time at $500/month each($2500/month), each producing content for 50 of your sites. Now you might wonder how one guy can write content for 50 sites. It's actually not that hard. Give 2 hours per blog post per site. And in a 9hrs day, you can cover 3-4 sites, averaging out to about 2 blog posts/month per site--which can be profitable in the big scheme of things. When quality is not a huge consideration, you can get a lot of cheap stuff done offshore.
sshumaker 17y ago
A better approach: Get a job at at a startup run by those MIT elite. Kick ass and make yourself invaluable. The next time one of the founders starts their own thing, they'll bring you along at the very beginning. Use that role to get more involved with the business and network like crazy. Wash, rinse, and repeat. Depending on your effort, by the third time around you should have the connections and experience necessary to do your own startup - get VC funding - and make the deals necessary to give it a good chance at success.
- albertni 17y ago
  Just as a sidenote, there really aren't that many tech startups started by MIT people, at least relative to say Stanford or Harvard.
  - sshumaker 17y ago
    I was referring to the "MIT elite" mentioned in the original link. Basically - if you haven't gone to a school where you were able to make great connections (Stanford, MIT, Harvard), you'll need to make those connections on the job.
- thibaut_barrere 17y ago
  I have not a huge startup experience (except my first two jobs that were kind of startups), but someone following this track should be careful about avoiding burn-out.
dabeeeenster 17y ago
"The normals lack any of those attributes. They may be 50 years old, or have gone to community college, or may have learned programming on their own, or may come from Bulgaria or some other distant country." That is, frankly, racist.
- sabat 17y ago
  Why is it racist?
  - dabeeeenster 17y ago
    Just because someone comes "from a distant country" doesn't mean you can make any sort of preconception about them...
    - maxklein 17y ago
      A bulgarian with bad english is very distant from the silicon valley connections.
prawn 17y ago
I do something roughly like this on the side, but trending more towards MFA stuff (not that ninja videos with ads isn't the same). Rather than $1/day, I look to cover the base cost of the domains as a starting point (4c/day at least). Some sites absolutely struggle because they're half-arsed with poor content, no pagerank and few backlinks while others rank really well for reasonable 2-3 word keyphrases. Of the sites, 5-10 have some traction, took a few hours to set up (total) and make $3-4k/mo, passively. It's definitely possible and can ease pressure enough to give you time to work on more serious side-project pursuits because your living costs are already taken care of.
- enriketuned 17y ago
  Would you mind pointing out how your domains are hosted and registered? Thanks
  - prawn 17y ago
    I either register domains based on keyword research and bulk searches to see what's still available, or I try to grab expired domains at auction (via drop.com.au). Vast majority of my domains are .com.au - smaller audience obviously, but also less competition when it comes to SEO. I register through TPP (wholesale account) and host them with CrystalTech. On a base ColdFusion plan ($11.90ish/mo reseller rate) I can host 26 domains and then split out the requests either via ColdFusion or Mod-Rewrite. Some sites are standalone, while a few others use a quick publishing engine I built that takes articles from the database and outputs them with nav, AdSense blocks, etc ready to go. Given content and a domain pointed to the right nameservers, I can have a multipage site up and running in a few minutes. I have tried having content written by someone cheaply ($6/300 words) but it's quite obviously MFA, the content isn't massively helpful to those arriving from Google and the sites are rightfully struggling because they're uninspiring. Another example is a six-page site targeting 2-3 word keyphrases. Content was written by my partner after she had to look into the topic herself and realised there was a bit of a gap in the market. Took her an afternoon to write six pages of content a couple of years back. Took me a couple of hours to put together. Makes about $3-4k/yr from AdSense and I haven't really touched it since I put it together. If I were to make any recommendations to people hopeful of trying this sort of thing, I'd say: - have patience, domain age and so on will stop anything from raking in cash immediately - if you have another side-project with decent pagerank, use that to help out the new project - don't go for a single keyword as you'll struggle with competition; pick a keyphrase niche - make sure you pick something that will have advertising in the space and where the clicks will pay (Google the phrase you're considering, and if no ads show, avoid that phrase) - use Google's keyword research tool to find a niche with some traffic - try to pick a space where you have some passion/interest and write decent, useful content yourself. If you do use a dodgy paid-writer, take what they've created and try to polish it a bit yourself. I think if you're just looking for a cash-cow, it'll show. I looked at opening comments through Disqus to try and get some longtail content, but comments are just a waste of time and kill you on maintenance. You want something that will stay relevant and if it needs any maintenance, it's just an hour a month or so to tweak.
stokee 17y ago
I actually don't agree with the in-crowd - normal philosophy. As long as someone works hard and gives good focus then the chances of someone being highly successful is pretty good. As I always say, 99% effort, 1% luck.
galactus 17y ago
In short, forget interesting projects, spam and SEO are the way to go :P
maneesh 17y ago
Making $1 400 times is exactly my business model. I've been building websites that hire excellent writers to write excellent content about specific keywords, targeted for SEO, and every article brings in about $1.50/day. Each article costs me about $10 to make (so I make back my investment in 7 months, purely passive). I write about 100-200 articles/month. I wrote software and hired assistants to do everything, so my actual work is < 4h/week. The software I wrote can be seen just after the 3m' mark here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1merER1zVFg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1merER1zVFg . I find targeted keywords, use SEM to get my article into the top 4 results and sit back and wait for passive income. It's not as hard as you'd think.
timtrueman 17y ago
This advice feels wrong but it reminds of what Jason Fried said at this year's startup school, which I feel is better advice anyways. [I'm probably butchering it but one of the gists of it was] Just get started and practice making money. http://www.justin.tv/clip/b897875d2e8cd907 http://www.justin.tv/clip/b897875d2e8cd907
VladimirGolovin 17y ago
To borrow Warren Buffet's term, the in-crowd are the winners of the Ovarian Lottery, and the normals (with me among them) are the losers. "I’ve had it so good in this world, you know. The odds were fifty-to-one against me born in the United States in 1930. I won the lottery the day I emerged from the womb by being in the United States instead of in some other country where my chances would have been way different. Imagine there are two identical twins in the womb, both equally bright and energetic. And the genie says to them, “One of you is going to be born in the United States, and one of you is going to be born in Bangladesh. And if you wind up in Bangladesh, you will pay no taxes. What percentage of your income would you bid to be the one this is born in the United States?” It says something about the fact that society has something to do with your fate and not just your innate qualities. The people who say, “I did it all myself,” and think of themselves as Horatio Alger – believe me, they’d bid more to be in the United States than in Bangladesh. That’s the Ovarian Lottery."

248 points by maxklein 17y ago

icey 17y ago

I think the bigger hurdle for most people is getting from $0 a day to $1 a day. Replicating success isn't as hard as finding success.

sabat 17y ago
Max is proposing that it isn't that difficult for a programmer to find a way to make $1/day. Max -- care to elucidate?
- maxklein 17y ago
  If you want to make $1 a day, go search for a keyword. Like Owls. Then find a bunch of videos of owls in YouTube, put them on the site and call the site OwlVideo.com. In a week you will be making $1 a day. Or if you prefer to program for the desktop - go wrap ffmpeg and make an AVI to MP4 converter. Def make $30 in sales in a month. Or if you prefer to program for the web, make something that parses Apples XML of new iPhone apps, put all that text on your website, slap adverts on it. There is $1 a day. Or you can copy the bible and allow people to annote it. Put on web. There ya go. Find a commonly done task like file uploading. Write a wrapper script for this in PHP. Sell it on a scripting site. $1 a day. Make a wordpress theme and target a specific group. "Theme for Doctors". Make it premium and put it for sale. $1 a day. It's easy, you just need to think in the right mode.
  - javery 17y ago
    So these might be great ways to make a little bit of money, but they don't really create value (except for the theme). Creating a successful startup should be more about creating value then making money, if you create value the money will come. When you think about success do you define it as money or building something people use and love (and also makes you money). If you want to make a cheap buck there are plenty of ways to do it without providing value. Go create a trash blog on a popular keyword, become a domain squatter, etc. But I want to create value and build something people will use and enjoy using.
    - garply 17y ago
      I want to make many cheap bucks and I hope people here will continue to teach us how to think of ideas that will generate these cheap bucks.
    - philfreo 17y ago
      Agreed - these ideas are not a startup - they don't create real value as a company. However the idea of making passive income is very attractive to many programmers, and creates an opportunity to have time to work on something big.
  - sabat 17y ago
    they don't really create value Maybe they do -- it depends on who's judging. To use Max's example, let's say I am casually interested in owls. Seriously, there are such people. I'm 60, I am on the internet but am somewhat uneasy with how to use it, and I like owls. Somehow, I find Max's owl video site. I like it! Maybe I even see an ad and click and buy. Maybe. But to me, finding the site and being entertained by his collection of owl videos -- that has value.
    - javery 17y ago
      Yeah, the people who created the owl videos are providing value, youtube is providing value by making them available, the owl site is just leaching off of that to make a buck.
      - qjz 17y ago
        Aggregation has always had value (the Bible, Familiar Quotes, Readers Digest, The Big Picture, etc.).
        javery 17y ago
        Thoughtful aggregation does add value, to me it sounded like the idea was to grab the first X videos on youtube.
        qjz 17y ago
        Even thoughtless aggregation adds value, if you consider successful sites that are nothing more than a bulletin board built around a user community that does the actual gruntwork. Putting things in context may be the "location, location, location" of the Web. You could say we're doing it right now, here on HN.
      - thesethings 17y ago
        I really disagree. Some call it "aggregation," but I'm starting to call this layer "discovery." This very site, Hacker News, is a filter that is mere pointer to content elsewhere. (There are occasional "Ask HN," but most every post posts elsewhere). Most sites and tools I use every day are filtering tools. Techmeme is another great example. It is true that a purely automated owl video scraper wouldn't be as good and one that was even cleaned up for five minutes a day, but that wasn't the suggester's point.
  - sabat 17y ago
    the owl site is just leaching off of that to make a buck Editorship -- or, if you're more cynical, "leeching". There really is value in collecting other people's works. I am convinced that it's more than mere leeching.
  - windsurfer 17y ago
    Do you have a newsletter or blog?
    - slig 17y ago
      He is the author of the post.
  - bpick 17y ago
    Damn! Someone already owns Owlvideos.com - I thought it was my ticket to the big time :)
  - moconnor 17y ago
    Ok, I'll bite. I challenge you to make an owl video site that makes $1 a day and post the link and revenue here. Ditto for an AVI to MP4 desktop converter. Ditto for the iPhone app site. Ditto for the annotated bible. Ditto for the file uploader script. Ditto for the Doctors theme. I don't believe any of these will make $1 a day. I believe they'll make $0 a day. There's a world of difference between $0 a day and $1 a day. Just because $1 a day sounds like almost nothing doesn't mean you'll get it for a site that's worth almost nothing. It's $365 a year. You won't make that with 30 owl videos and adwords.
- gcheong 17y ago
  Well, I have 2 apps on the app store right now. One of them makes nothing, it's not free, just does not make any sales and one makes just about $1 a day (after I raised the price from .99 to 1.99). Both apps are pretty simple, are in the same category (healthcare and fitness) and I've done nothing to promote them.
  - allenbrunson 17y ago
    Yeah, I'm in that same boat. Two apps on the store, one is free, the other is making about $3.00 a day: http://www.platinumball.net/hearts/ http://www.platinumball.net/hearts/ Kind of frustrating, because when I made my app free, it was being downloaded 1700 times a day. So it seems like there is demand, but not enough to push them over into the 'pay real money' category. I'd love to work with somebody who is better at marketing than I am, if somebody wants to get in touch.
    - gcheong 17y ago
      It looks like you're in San Francisco. Mobile Monday Group is holding some kind of event tomorrow about how to increase app sales. I saw the post on the Silicon Valley iPhone Developer's Meetup Group mailing list. May just be a sales pitch but might be worth checking out as it's free: http://momosvfeb10.eventbrite.com/ http://momosvfeb10.eventbrite.com/
      - allenbrunson 17y ago
        i actually don't live in san francisco, i was just there when that photo was taken. and i'm kind of over doing marketing on my own, i know perfectly well i'm not any good at it. i'd like to work with somebody who has the personality for it.
    - tjr 17y ago
      I experienced the same thing. There seems to be a world of difference between free and 99 cents on the app store. And, I think, understandably so. If I want to try a whole bunch of programs, I'd much rather try free programs. If it costs even just 99 cents, then I am forced to stop and think about it before downloading. "I can download hundreds of free programs for less money than this one 99-cent program... do I really want the 99-cent program, or am I okay with some more free programs?" I also noticed that making an app that was 99 cents to be free not only increased downloads, but also increased bad reviews. I guess people who get programs for free expect a lot more out of them and are perfectly happy to express their disappointment both rudely and publicly than those who pay for the programs.
ja27 17y ago
I refer anyone that's interested to Ed Dale's 30 Day Challenge. It's a free online course to learn to make your first $1 online. It's mostly about niche selection, test marketing, and beginning SEO, but it's great for beginners. It's not overwhelmingly awesome, but it's free and targeted to people that aren't ubergeeks like us. http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com

dbz 17y ago

Sounds like a great strategy if one only cares about making money and doesn't care about working on any projects, startups, software for companies, ect.

icey 17y ago
The other side of that is that if you don't have to work, you can work on anything you'd like.
- dbz 17y ago
  It will take years to make 400 projects. Looks like a full time job to me. Allow me to explain.... You make a project today. 1 buck. Another project tomorrow. 2 bucks. Wait a minute. I can't like off of two bucks..... You will need another job to provide that needed income to live off of. Especially to pay bills. It will take years
  - icey 17y ago
    If you make a throwaway app every 2 days, that's 400 apps in a little over 2 years. That's far less time than it takes to go to college and get a bachelor's degree. When you're done, you've got enough income to live off of, and you can work on anything you damned well please. I don't know that I necessarily agree with Max's premise, but I don't think timing is that big an issue (assuming everything else works out).
chime 17y ago
If you take his definitions of in-crowd vs. normals to be true, the in-crowd has the prerogative to choose energizing startups and work on exciting projects without putting much thought into making money early-on. The normals have bills to pay, kids to send to school, and sick family members to take care. For us normals, money is always a large (though not the only) factor in making decisions that relate to our career, projects, and products. I would love to leave everything and work on some of my ideas but too many people rely on me to have a stable income at this point for me to just abandon them midstream. This doesn't mean I'm doing nothing. I'm slowly changing my life around so I can get to where I want to be. But at every project I look into, I have to consider how much money I can potentially make and how soon would I see a cash flow. The normals aren't all dreaming of being the next MS/Google. Just like the in-crowd, we want to make good products that users would love. We just have a lot more baggage and need to make sure our dreams don't get in the way of our loved ones' care.

Sukotto 17y ago

There's a third option not mentioned in the article. That's creating a $1/day project, then working to make it a $2/day, then $3/day. Either through improving the thing you're selling, or by finding better ways to sell it. Take, for example, Patrick@bingocardcreator.com . He seems do have done pretty well following that method. I don't know if that's any more or less work than building 400 projects, each selling for $1/day though.

maxklein 17y ago
I think that's the first option. Which is focusing on one thing and making it better and making more money from it.
- patio11 17y ago
  I'm confused then, because it seems from your post that you say the first option is difficult unless you're a US-based MIT-educated elite startup founder Twitter-chasing wunderkid with VC money coming out your ears and good writing ability. At the risk of stating the obvious, I am not a US-based MIT-educated elite startup founder Twitter-chasing wunderkid with VC money coming out my ears. Nor do I think any of these are pre-requisites or, well, even all that helpful in terms of building successful businesses. Some of them even contribute to the pathologies in our industry, like obsessive focus on building products to be used by ourselves rather than reaching out to more diverse groups of customers with desirable properties such as "pays money for software."
  - maxklein 17y ago
    I'm not saying it is impossible to write and sell good software and keep improving it. I'm saying that a lot of people have tried it and do not have the neccessary advice and reach to make the software successful. Look at all the Review my startup posts. I have only ever seen a handful actually become successful. Most just seem to fade off. I'm not saying you NEED to be from that group to do it successfully. But it is difficult. What you did, has not been replicable by most of the other people here.

ryanwaggoner 17y ago

This is an interesting post, and I'm eager to hear what other people who have spent more time in the startup scene think of it. Here's my thoughts: 1. I think I've seen the "two groups" that the post talks about, but I have begun to have serious doubts that they're as fatalistic as they're made out to be. For example: The in-crowd live in the U.S, they attended MIT or Berkeley, they write well, have interesting blogs and are followed by 400 or more people on twitter. You can't change where you went to school, but you can improve your writing skills, start a blog, and get 400 followers on Twitter. In fact, this is trivial over a period of months. Writing good content is not only for the elite; it's how you become one of the elite ;) 2. If you do a little research up front on the market for whatever you're going to create, you might be able to just create one product rather than 400. It might be more difficult in the beginning, but you just might learn an incredible amount and turn out to be one of the most well-rounded sources of startup insight on HN. See patio11 / Bingo Card Creator for an example :) 3. My main concern would be sustainability; those 150 projects that make you $12k / month aren't going to do so forever. You'll run yourself ragged trying to keep them all together, and at some point, you'd probably be better off with a job. I guess what I'm saying is to try and pick a model that will scale more than $1/day projects will. In spite of these criticisms, I did enjoy this article for its thought-provoking angle that's very different from a lot of the stuff I read on HN.

maxklein 17y ago
1. It's very very difficult to learn to write well or be interesting. I have many friends and I know that no matter how hard they actually tried, they would not be able to write stuff people want to read. They are good at what they do, but they can't write even if they tried. 2. Creating one product is the route everyone takes by default. Yes, it works, but this is introducing an alternative route 3. Part of the optimisation is focusing on projects that are easy to spin off into new projects. If one project is selling clothes and the next is hospital management software, that's just stupid. If one is an auction management dashboard, the next is a sales management software, then it's easy to adapt. You learn quickly what ideas have generic code bases that are easy to adapt, and what ideas are very specific in their technology and are difficult to adapt.

olalonde 17y ago

Although I wouldn't see myself doing 400 "half baked" projects, I understand that it could be a solution for people who are in it for the money. That being said, I definitely agree with the fact that your social network and environment can have a big influence on your success. We don't all have the chance to live in Silicon Valley.

sailormoon 17y ago

Ah, that photo brings back memories. That's the keihin-touhoku line in tokyo and believe me, it's an accurate depiction.

cwalcott 17y ago

It seems like marketing would still be an issue though. Even to make $1/day, someone has to find your software. If you're not marketing through a blog or Twitter, that leaves advertising. So now in addition to writing good ads, you need to make sure each project is making more than you're spending on advertising, which is a lot of work on its own.

DXL 17y ago
I wrote a script sometime ago, which sells about 4 copies a month for $25 each. The only way I marketed was by adding it to directories such as HotScripts. That will you give you some traffic if you're providing a solution in a field that's not highly competitive (a niche). You could try that.
maxklein 17y ago
Actually, it's not. If you have to move 1000 copies of software in a month, then you need to market. If you want to move 1 copy a month, list it on download.com and you will move 1 copy. That's the beauty of the system - it minimises the need for marketing and instead ups the project count to make up for the loss there. You are basically moving resources from one thing (marketing, promotion) into another (designing generic software, finding new ideas, writing software very fast). The second options are easy for software developers to do compared to marketing.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  If you write software to move 1 copy per month then you'll be writing software to move 25 copies during the lifetime of that version. It'd be very hard to even support your users.

mixmax 17y ago

Assuming a 20 day work month and a 10 hour workday that will give you half an hour a month to work on each of your 400 projects. And assuming (optimistically) that you will spend 2 weeks doing each project it will take 15 years to get to 400. And that's not counting overhead such as accounting, etc. for all of your projects. I like the idea of the post, but maybe he took it a bit too far...

maxklein 17y ago
That's the point - you don't start a new project every 2 weeks. You start off with an idea easily adaptable to various scenarios. Then adapt each time, target new people, and observe if the variation makes you required $1 a day. When you have nichified a codebase that nothing more can be squeezed of it, you start on the next.
- waterlesscloud 17y ago
  So it's not really 400 projects, it's maybe 20 projects optimized in 20 different ways each. That's a whole different way to look at it.
nfnaaron 17y ago
I think the idea is that each project gets an initial small period of launch work, and then after that they're mostly self-sustaining for their economic lifetime. "Optimize for time." In that case, half hour/month may be enough. The 1$/day and 400/month figures are just for illustration. The idea is to crank on multiple simple things that share characteristics. As you optimize for time, you're also optimizing for "crank," getting better at cranking out simple things.

AmericanOP 17y ago

I think the odds of creating 400 money-making projects without one of them becoming a real success are very low.

dbz 17y ago
One of the projects was putting thirty ninja videos on a website. When that project becomes a real success I'll buy you dinner.
- mrtron 17y ago
  Ask a ninja is ridiculously popular and probably started with a bunch of videos.
  - sabat 17y ago
    Ask a Ninja is so popular that he/they (I'm unclear) appeared alongside a bunch of stars in SF recently -- in honor of Conan O'Brien, whom I presume was there as well. Holy cow.

agbell 17y ago

I think if you try to create 400 projects, most will make 0/day and a couple will make 10/day. Then you optimize those. Slowly you end up with a small number of projects generating a half decent amount money. This is actually a great way to prevent yourself from choosing a local maximum in the product space. You climb a bunch of hills a little bit. (edited)

brianobush 17y ago
Over diversification is dangerous too. Jack of all apps, master of none? I like the idea, but the problem with this product space search is that is dead slow. You might want to search like this for a bit and see what takes off, then put more energy into the ones that are doing well.
- agbell 17y ago
  You are right about the dangers of diversification. You would have to prune down projects as you go or else risk not doing anything well. However, if the projects are designed to be all up front effort and no ongoing time costs, you can just leave them to languish. I have had things take off in a minor way, long after abandoning them.

aw3c2 17y ago

How on earth are you supposed to create and maintain 400 "projects" at once?

brianobush 17y ago
Over time I assume the maintenance/attention would drop off. Though, I could see revenue dropping off too.
thibaut_barrere 17y ago
It all depends on what you put behind the word 'project' (and there's no judgment in my sentence). For most programmers, a project is something that has already a decent size, is complex to get out and test on the field. If you think this way, a "side-project" can only be rare. On the other hand: a friend of mine started exactly the way Max describes a long while back, and currently runs way more than 400 sites/projects. He is also doing way more than 12k€ per month. The thing is 95% of his projects wouldn't even catch the 'regular' (if there's such thing) programmer's interest :)
- tjogin 17y ago
  It would be really interesting if you could describe some of these projects briefly.
  - thibaut_barrere 17y ago
    Those I know revolve around affiliation, alternate search engines, porn/erotic stuff, niche technological forums and such topics :) Not by him but in the same kind of idea, here's an example: http://fastpowertools.com/ http://fastpowertools.com/ A while back I know the owner of this site did a few hundreds $ per month. It was really an eye-opener to me :) Of course this requires SEO skills to earn more than a few bucks, that need to be learn on the way. I started a couple of sites like this one, and although I earned a bit of money, I wanted to try sites that are really useful to myself, which I'm focusing on now. I think it's always good to remind myself that between what would look a half-spammy site to a regular programmer, and the typical too complex projects regular programmers would start, there's a sweet spot in the middle.

conesus 17y ago

This is a sure-fire way to create a lot of spam and hack products. The creative element of fostering a project and putting real intellectual effort is gone, for sake of trying to turn a measly profit. There is nothing artistic or genuine about what he is doing here. There is no soul in these products. Of all the products and software I use, there is soul in every single one of them. Safari, Tweetie/Twitter, Hacker News, iTunes, Adium, Fireworks, TextMate, Sequel Pro, zsh, Firefox, and all of the websites I read. They each have something to be proud of. If you are making software and services that you cannot be proud of and are only there to make you money, then you have chosen a path that is less meaningful and will not bring you the kind of happiness and security that I think most software creators are looking for in building software. Feeding your family is one thing, but creating and harboring what is effectively spam is not the only way to do it. Labors of love are perfectly capable of making you money, and with the right amount of luck, and much more preparation, you can find yourself rolling in the same dough as these bottom of the barrel money makers that this writer is scheming. As they say, don't eat your soul to fill your belly.

sabat 17y ago
I'm not sure your conclusion necessarily follows what he's proposing. He's saying: find 400 things that each make $1/day -- it's a thought experiment as much as it is a proposition, BTW. Some people would certainly make 400 spam blogs or something else equally useless. I don't think that was the author's intention, though. I wish I could personally say that every single thing I do has my heart and soul in it. I can't, for reasons outside my apparent control. I bet I could find 400 things I like enough to spend time on, and that's enough for me.
- conesus 17y ago
  My conclusion stems from his primary example: A collection of ninja videos slathered with adsense. It's half-way to a spamblog, but he considers it something to be proud of.
  - sabat 17y ago
    he considers it something to be proud of I think he considers it that only in the sense that someone else may find it entertaining.

patio11 17y ago

I'm not a big fan of creating that many products since it seems like you're forcing yourself into a churn-and-burn corner (and you'll probably be building systemic weaknesses into your model, like being one Googlewhack or AppStore reordering away from penury). However, the core insight about creation being one more process that can be scaled is potentially pretty big. You can even use it in the service of the one big lovingly-handedcrafted adequately-supported non-sucking product that you're supposedly not capable of building/marketing/etc. For example, everybody and their dog has done "photo sharing website", and if you're coming to the Internet today with photo sharing site #85421 you're probably not going to get too far. However, you could probably do fairly well with the same tech and a focus on wedding photographers. (I happen to know that pond is well-fished, too, just an example.) And you could roll out new facets of your marketing/product creation strategy to target each niche you can identify, big and small. For example: I very much doubt that I could make a software product about a subject as niche as owls of Asia while still adequately devoting time and resources to supporting/maintaining/improving it, but I'm pretty sure with an established product adding a bit about owls of Asia to the marketing mix is pretty much just a bolt-on-and-go sort of maneuver. (You might ask "Now is there anyone in the world who will actually pay money to do something associated with the owls of Asia?!" I have evidence in the affirmative.) Edit to add: It seems Max and I independently chose owl-related niches as our practical examples, since he posted before me and I didn't see it. What are the odds, right?

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vaksel 17y ago

Did you set the "in crowd #" at 400 twitter followers because that's what you have? Because 400 is pretty low, I'd say the number should be closer to 15,000

maxklein 17y ago
15k followers is not in-crowd that's more like the exclusive country club crowd. Most seem to have 60 or 70 followers. The people who are just random programmers and not real marketers seem to have 400-600. But I obviously did not do any serious research on this.

acon 17y ago

This sort of reminds me of the old pottery story, where they had one group making which was graded on how many pots they made and another one which was only graded on their best pot. Of course the group which was graded on quantity made better pots in the end. I really think that by iterating really quickly you will become good faster than if you try to make the perfect thing right away. So don't be paralyzed by trying to achieve perfection; go out and create, and then create some more.

gridspy 17y ago
There is a lot of merit in setting a series of easily achievable targets, each one slightly harder than the last. This is the way I get everything done.
Psyonic 17y ago
Sounds like the proverb taught to GO beginners: "Lose Your First 100 Games As Quickly As Possible"
- jacoblyles 17y ago
  Also works great for Chess. But horrible for Boxing.
  - Psyonic 17y ago
    You certainly do have to modify that advice to avoid serious injury, but from my limited boxing experience I'll say that nothing teaches you to keep your hands up like getting smacked around a few times.

dnsworks 17y ago

If ever I wanted the ability to down vote a blog submission, it was this one.

jacquesm 17y ago

Interesting, I've been doing just that for the last couple of years. It's been a mix of partial successes and total failures, mostly failures. I didn't want to go the 'mfa' route for obvious reasons, so I try to make these sites in to something that actually is useful, and that have a sense of community about them. Here is a breakdown of what you can make this way in a month based on adsense alone after several years of work, not something to be proud of, that's for sure. It is very hard to make stuff that does not need maintenance. pfn 3,203 18 0.56% €0.08 €0.26 leftsidebar 68 1 1.47% €0.00 €0.00 linkbar 72 0 0.00% €0.00 €0.00 ccm 1,012 2 0.20% €0.06 €0.06 dzleft 52,480 34 0.06% €0.03 €1.81 dzlink 47,804 98 0.21% €0.04 €1.87 dzmain 46,950 222 0.47% €0.17 €7.93 fls 90,839 459 0.51% €0.50 €44.98 gms 4,242 61 1.44% €0.31 €1.31 hst160x600 30,360 54 0.18% €0.20 €6.13 hst468x60 29,992 55 0.18% €0.20 €6.00 jks 359 10 2.79% €2.06 €0.74 lrmsmall 90 0 0.00% €0.00 €0.00 lrmtall 2,173,823 2,039 0.09% €0.05 €112.76 lrm 5,209 17 0.33% €0.35 €1.81 lrmlink 2,204,212 2,234 0.10% €0.05 €115.06 lrmlinkbar 24,719 109 0.44% €0.15 €3.64 mdcl 84 1 1.19% €0.05 €0.00 pcs 93,418 225 0.24% €0.21 €19.21 pcslinkbar 89,701 1,206 1.34% €0.43 €38.88 stroompunt 1,039 17 1.64% €3.60 €3.74 cams 1,510,897 5,889 0.39% €0.19 €289.18 ztk 27,112 711 2.62% €3.69 €100.15 ztklinkbar 28,534 462 1.62% €1.30 €37.10 These figures are for the month of January. I've removed the ones that I consider total failures from this list or it would have been three times as long. $1 per day per site sounds like a great plan in theory, but in practice it is quite hard to do that across a broad number of sites and not get bogged down in maintenance issues. Anything with a form will attract spammers more than it will attract users, software will over time stop working because external things it depends on will change and so on. Passive income is nice, but it is hard to make something that is really passive. It's not a complete failure, but it definitely wasn't the success I expected either. This is due to a whole pile of factors, maintenance has already been mentioned, lousy ECPM is another, inability to get any traction with some projects is a third (anybody interested in a complete platform for trading second hand cars or houses ?).

sabat 17y ago

vijayr 17y ago

Interesting article. I guess there is definitely some money to be made, if the site is useful ("tool" based). Some examples: http://selfmademinds.com/200811/mini-site-case-study-update/ http://selfmademinds.com/200811/mini-site-case-study-update/ http://www.calendarsquick.com/printables/index.html http://www.calendarsquick.com/printables/index.html (don't know how much this site makes, I'd assume more than $1 per day)

joelhaus 17y ago
Curious, how important do you feel a good domain name is for these mini-sites? Imagine that a highly relevant name could significantly reduce your marketing investment and get you more traffic.
- vijayr 17y ago
  not sure if domain name is that important, for such tiny sites. Most of your traffic is going to be from search engines, so I guess you'll need to worry more about SEO than coming up with a memorable name (as people aren't going to remember it). From SEO point of view, keyword rich domain names are important, not sure how much though.

mattmaroon 17y ago

This article is silly, and just wrong in every way. It totally discounts time spent doing these projects, and totally fails to understand expected value. For instance: "I wrote a desktop software once, and priced it at $29.90. I sold one copy a month, which was terrible. That's $1 a day. It's really easy as a programmer to do something that makes $1 a day." I suppose if that desktop software took an hour to make it would be worth it in a few months. More likely it took an amount of time that would better have been spent (from a purely financial perspective) working at Wal-Mart and then investing the funds in an ETF. To make $1 a day ($365/yr) takes only around $4k (what a good programmer earns in <2 weeks) tossed into the market. Thus any project that takes you longer than that for $1/day in return is a waste. Also even if you assumed every project would net $1 per day, you'd still be better off thinking big. A hit Facebook app, for instance, might make $10,000 a day. (A megahit 10x that.) A good keyword to arbitrage via an affiliate account and AdSense could do the same. You're far better off taking a 1% shot at $10k/day than a 100% shot at $1. (You're far better off taking a .1% shot.) You might say "well what about variance" but apparently you have the time to create 400 products. Also, Twitter followers have done little of real value for anyone in terms of making a business profitable. On the list of ways to get customers to your web-based business, Twitter's still pretty far down the chain. A far better plan would be to try to create one product that makes $1 per person you drive to it. This is doable. Then you can buy users for far less with ads, roll your profits into more ads, rinse, repeat. This is how people like me who rarely if ever use Twitter have made oodles from the web. (I've done this now multiple times, for reference.)

zaidf 17y ago
Matt, a huge part that I think he has left out is the use of outsourcing stuff offshore. A lot of his projects seem to be content plays. You can get lots of content produced offshore for very cheap. The end result? You can have 5 people working full-time at $500/month each($2500/month), each producing content for 50 of your sites. Now you might wonder how one guy can write content for 50 sites. It's actually not that hard. Give 2 hours per blog post per site. And in a 9hrs day, you can cover 3-4 sites, averaging out to about 2 blog posts/month per site--which can be profitable in the big scheme of things. When quality is not a huge consideration, you can get a lot of cheap stuff done offshore.

sshumaker 17y ago

A better approach: Get a job at at a startup run by those MIT elite. Kick ass and make yourself invaluable. The next time one of the founders starts their own thing, they'll bring you along at the very beginning. Use that role to get more involved with the business and network like crazy. Wash, rinse, and repeat. Depending on your effort, by the third time around you should have the connections and experience necessary to do your own startup - get VC funding - and make the deals necessary to give it a good chance at success.

albertni 17y ago
Just as a sidenote, there really aren't that many tech startups started by MIT people, at least relative to say Stanford or Harvard.
- sshumaker 17y ago
  I was referring to the "MIT elite" mentioned in the original link. Basically - if you haven't gone to a school where you were able to make great connections (Stanford, MIT, Harvard), you'll need to make those connections on the job.
thibaut_barrere 17y ago
I have not a huge startup experience (except my first two jobs that were kind of startups), but someone following this track should be careful about avoiding burn-out.

dabeeeenster 17y ago

"The normals lack any of those attributes. They may be 50 years old, or have gone to community college, or may have learned programming on their own, or may come from Bulgaria or some other distant country." That is, frankly, racist.

sabat 17y ago
Why is it racist?
- dabeeeenster 17y ago
  Just because someone comes "from a distant country" doesn't mean you can make any sort of preconception about them...
  - maxklein 17y ago
    A bulgarian with bad english is very distant from the silicon valley connections.

prawn 17y ago

I do something roughly like this on the side, but trending more towards MFA stuff (not that ninja videos with ads isn't the same). Rather than $1/day, I look to cover the base cost of the domains as a starting point (4c/day at least). Some sites absolutely struggle because they're half-arsed with poor content, no pagerank and few backlinks while others rank really well for reasonable 2-3 word keyphrases. Of the sites, 5-10 have some traction, took a few hours to set up (total) and make $3-4k/mo, passively. It's definitely possible and can ease pressure enough to give you time to work on more serious side-project pursuits because your living costs are already taken care of.

enriketuned 17y ago
Would you mind pointing out how your domains are hosted and registered? Thanks
- prawn 17y ago
  I either register domains based on keyword research and bulk searches to see what's still available, or I try to grab expired domains at auction (via drop.com.au). Vast majority of my domains are .com.au - smaller audience obviously, but also less competition when it comes to SEO. I register through TPP (wholesale account) and host them with CrystalTech. On a base ColdFusion plan ($11.90ish/mo reseller rate) I can host 26 domains and then split out the requests either via ColdFusion or Mod-Rewrite. Some sites are standalone, while a few others use a quick publishing engine I built that takes articles from the database and outputs them with nav, AdSense blocks, etc ready to go. Given content and a domain pointed to the right nameservers, I can have a multipage site up and running in a few minutes. I have tried having content written by someone cheaply ($6/300 words) but it's quite obviously MFA, the content isn't massively helpful to those arriving from Google and the sites are rightfully struggling because they're uninspiring. Another example is a six-page site targeting 2-3 word keyphrases. Content was written by my partner after she had to look into the topic herself and realised there was a bit of a gap in the market. Took her an afternoon to write six pages of content a couple of years back. Took me a couple of hours to put together. Makes about $3-4k/yr from AdSense and I haven't really touched it since I put it together. If I were to make any recommendations to people hopeful of trying this sort of thing, I'd say: - have patience, domain age and so on will stop anything from raking in cash immediately - if you have another side-project with decent pagerank, use that to help out the new project - don't go for a single keyword as you'll struggle with competition; pick a keyphrase niche - make sure you pick something that will have advertising in the space and where the clicks will pay (Google the phrase you're considering, and if no ads show, avoid that phrase) - use Google's keyword research tool to find a niche with some traffic - try to pick a space where you have some passion/interest and write decent, useful content yourself. If you do use a dodgy paid-writer, take what they've created and try to polish it a bit yourself. I think if you're just looking for a cash-cow, it'll show. I looked at opening comments through Disqus to try and get some longtail content, but comments are just a waste of time and kill you on maintenance. You want something that will stay relevant and if it needs any maintenance, it's just an hour a month or so to tweak.

stokee 17y ago

I actually don't agree with the in-crowd - normal philosophy. As long as someone works hard and gives good focus then the chances of someone being highly successful is pretty good. As I always say, 99% effort, 1% luck.

galactus 17y ago

In short, forget interesting projects, spam and SEO are the way to go :P

maneesh 17y ago

Making $1 400 times is exactly my business model. I've been building websites that hire excellent writers to write excellent content about specific keywords, targeted for SEO, and every article brings in about $1.50/day. Each article costs me about $10 to make (so I make back my investment in 7 months, purely passive). I write about 100-200 articles/month. I wrote software and hired assistants to do everything, so my actual work is < 4h/week. The software I wrote can be seen just after the 3m' mark here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1merER1zVFg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1merER1zVFg . I find targeted keywords, use SEM to get my article into the top 4 results and sit back and wait for passive income. It's not as hard as you'd think.

timtrueman 17y ago

This advice feels wrong but it reminds of what Jason Fried said at this year's startup school, which I feel is better advice anyways. [I'm probably butchering it but one of the gists of it was] Just get started and practice making money. http://www.justin.tv/clip/b897875d2e8cd907 http://www.justin.tv/clip/b897875d2e8cd907

VladimirGolovin 17y ago

To borrow Warren Buffet's term, the in-crowd are the winners of the Ovarian Lottery, and the normals (with me among them) are the losers. "I’ve had it so good in this world, you know. The odds were fifty-to-one against me born in the United States in 1930. I won the lottery the day I emerged from the womb by being in the United States instead of in some other country where my chances would have been way different. Imagine there are two identical twins in the womb, both equally bright and energetic. And the genie says to them, “One of you is going to be born in the United States, and one of you is going to be born in Bangladesh. And if you wind up in Bangladesh, you will pay no taxes. What percentage of your income would you bid to be the one this is born in the United States?” It says something about the fact that society has something to do with your fate and not just your innate qualities. The people who say, “I did it all myself,” and think of themselves as Horatio Alger – believe me, they’d bid more to be in the United States than in Bangladesh. That’s the Ovarian Lottery."