6 ms·

How I Monetized My Passion

165 points by iisbum 16y ago

messel 16y ago
Great tale of web designer gone freelancer, and finally ended up with a successful business model.
patio11 16y ago
As a heavy Wordpress user, I have a lot of love for the folks who create both free and premium themes. They solve huge business problems for me. (Substantially all of the publicly visible content of my next product is getting served up by Wordpress with a WooThemes template, because I'd rather spend a week talking to early adopters rather than a week handwriting copy and markup in Rails.) They're even better for folks who don't have good designers available or who don't have the technical chops to make adjustments to their sites themselves. As a business model, it is pretty good if you can get traction, too -- the content scarcely ever rots, per-customer value is high (relative to, say, B2C software), and you stand a decent chance of getting repeat business if you continue expanding your product line. I wouldn't want to get into it myself (no design skills and I think I'd be about four years behind the curve even if I could design my way out of a paper bag), but it is clearly successful for some folks.
spudlyo 16y ago
Inspiring. I wonder what other Open Source ecosystems have opportunities for selling premium add-ons. As a sysadmin, DBA, and sometimes programmer I already love what I do, but I'm starting to realize the limits of the money I can make working for somebody else.
- messel 16y ago
  I like to imagine the flow of wealth I can get into more capable hands than my own. I've seen incredible designs and tech with only a few days work. These folks need more $$ and models to move their creations to others in need. I think part of the attractor for a startup is enabling better conditions for people with impressive skills that prefer a job, autonomy, but don't wanna deal with the business side.
- tortilla 16y ago
  Not open-source but the ExpressionEngine community is pretty nice. This guy is doing pretty well selling extensions: http://pixelandtonic.com/ http://pixelandtonic.com/
nihaar 16y ago
IMHO there is a growing niche of creating websites on WP (or any other extensible CMS) as a way to cheaply test your ideas rather than invest the upfront cost of building a site from scratch. Providing a service of building websites quickly & cheaply using something like WordPress can be valuable and lucrative even in the corporate world. I recently proposed this to my company for a new project and got the green light (after getting quotes of above $15K from other shops for a custom job). It was however difficult to find WP hackers easily and ended up building the site myself (in a fraction of the time and cost).
- jasonlbaptiste 16y ago
  do you mind me asking how much they were willing to pay for the WP version vs. the original 15k quote from other shops.
  - nihaar 16y ago
    edited since i misread. they were willing to pay 4-5K for the WP version
wildmXranat 16y ago
As a developer and a publisher who has used Wordpress for many projects, I have to say: good for him. He's doing it almost as it should be. Uses solid CSS frameworks, and sort-of good publishing platform(WP) and provides good support(According to his site). For todays projects, I tend to use small microframeworks using Python, but WP is still my 0-60 in 5 seconds platform.
- pmjoyce 16y ago
  As a press75 customer I have to say I've had a very positive experience. They're selling a high quality product and support seems to be good even though I haven't had to call on it myself.
rick_2047 16y ago
Ok lessons learned in this post 1) Chasing your passion is better than chasing your money. Sometimes money becomes the by-product of the former. 2) (A hidden message) You need to be talented and committed to successful.
dschobel 16y ago
Great story particularly because he seems like an average (but talented, obviously) guy in a cubicle farm with a wife and kids and mortgage, not yet-another Stanford golden-child.
amohr 16y ago
Always appreciate stories of people that made the jump, but I was kind of hoping this was going to be about a less obviously monetizable passion.
jasonkester 16y ago
Not all passions monetize. At the moment, I'm passionate about rock climbing, travel, surfing and computer programming. If it weren't for that 4th one, I'd be screwed. I currently run maybe the 3rd most popular Travel Blogging site out there. It's had a good 5 years of passion poured in now, off and on, and if I were to slap ads on it today I'd pull in a buck thirtyfive a day. I also run a little service that processes the draconian logfiles that Amazon provides for its webservices and spits out pretty analytics. It's a subject that no human being could ever be passionate about and it pays my rent. Sometimes it's better to monetize something boring that people are willing to pay for.
- pellicle 16y ago
  > and if I were to slap ads on it today I'd pull in a buck thirtyfive a day. Do you mean $1.35/day? If that's the case, then I see your point: even though you're passionate about it, it (in and of itself) won't pay the rent.
  - jasonkester 16y ago
    Indeed. Every adsense test I've done on the site has pulled in about a dollar a day. More fun, it's always been $1/day even as the site grew to 10x and 50x the original traffic. It seems our growth was inversely matching people's decline in tendency to click on ads.
    - icey 16y ago
      Have you considered trying affiliate sales? Pick something that you like, mention it with an affiliate link. Blogs with some kind of focus seem to do pretty well with this approach.
      - jasonkester 16y ago
        Yes. For a while we tried Amazon links to Lonely Planet guidebooks and Affiliate links to hostels. That made maybe ten dollars after 6 months, and dropped the site into Google's "Hotel Affiliate Site" black hole for the next year. Bad move. The problem with monetizing the Travel side of a site like this is that there are dozens of big money sites devoted to doing exactly that. Blogabond's whole appeal is that we don't surround your blog with banner ads and we don't try to help you book flights and rental cars. So yeah, we could do that sort of stuff and maybe make a few dollars, but it would just turn us into another TripAdvisor instead of a cool place to host your blog.
jasonkester 16y ago
The author touched briefly on one thing that's worth noting, but it might have got buried in the article so it bears repeating: If you build something cool, people will find you and give you consulting work That's a strategy that has worked for me several times over the years. I mentioned a silly unmonetizable Travel Blogging site elsewhere in this discussion, but if you look at the paying client work that resulted from that site's existence, you could argue that it's been one of my most successful products.
- patio11 16y ago
  In addition to cool, I might suggest building something public which comes close to meeting business needs for people. With those provisos: yeah, it works great. Having a reputation in whatever your circle of competence is gets you more leads and lets you be pickier about who you work with, what you work on, and how much you charge.
  - ctd 16y ago
    But sometimes it's easier and faster to build something cool than to try to build a useful business product. I'm facing that dilemma now. Should I focus on the product I want to build and possibly fail months later with nothing to show for the effort and no budget left to live on (I'm still recovering from the last one)? Or should I build several smaller demo projects as portfolio pieces I can shop to get client work to fund the part-time development of my eventual product? Especially considering that my walled-off enterprise projects are inaccessible and built with tools other than the open source ones I'd prefer to be working with. It's almost like starting from scratch.
rao 16y ago
Did you not feel obliged about how your sabbatical led to everything, and you may have to work for few more weeks so that they find your replacement?
spudlyo 16y ago
Interesting how he integrated the price for all his WP themes into his brand -- everything is 75 bucks, hence press75.com. That seems great for now, but does it make it difficult to raise prices in the future?
- jonpaul 16y ago
  According to http://www.thesevenfive.com/about/ http://www.thesevenfive.com/about/ that's not the case. In fact, your statement is backwards. His price is a reflection of his brand, not the other way i.e. his brand is "75"... thus changing his price won't matter much in the future, as his brand won't change.
- petercooper 16y ago
  It hasn't stopped The Carphone Warehouse from remaining one of the largest cellphone companies in the UK :-) Many companies have products that have migrated away from the original brand definition.
joubert 16y ago
Oh, this is not about the oldest profession
petercooper 16y ago
One lesson I got from this is to follow trends. In this case, Wordpress and commercial themes. It's taken me years to see that most small businesses make money this way, rather than forging entirely new paths or inventing new technologies.. Find something that's already becoming popular, do it a bit better, profit..
mogston 16y ago
Great story - really chimes with what i did two months ago...I left my well paid corporate job to do something that i really enjoyed...solving real world problems for real world clients who really need them solving (not just pleasing the boss). So i set up PageDo (http://pagedo.com http://pagedo.com).
claymmm 16y ago
That's it, HN is dead to me. "How I Monetized My Passion" is self-parody. When you can't tell the difference between parody and the real thing you're a goner.
- jjs 16y ago
  HN died for you in 55 days?
parka 16y ago
Hidden lesson is how his passion also solves the problems of someone else, hence he's able to monetize it.

165 points by iisbum 16y ago

Great tale of web designer gone freelancer, and finally ended up with a successful business model.

As a heavy Wordpress user, I have a lot of love for the folks who create both free and premium themes. They solve huge business problems for me. (Substantially all of the publicly visible content of my next product is getting served up by Wordpress with a WooThemes template, because I'd rather spend a week talking to early adopters rather than a week handwriting copy and markup in Rails.) They're even better for folks who don't have good designers available or who don't have the technical chops to make adjustments to their sites themselves. As a business model, it is pretty good if you can get traction, too -- the content scarcely ever rots, per-customer value is high (relative to, say, B2C software), and you stand a decent chance of getting repeat business if you continue expanding your product line. I wouldn't want to get into it myself (no design skills and I think I'd be about four years behind the curve even if I could design my way out of a paper bag), but it is clearly successful for some folks.

spudlyo 16y ago

Inspiring. I wonder what other Open Source ecosystems have opportunities for selling premium add-ons. As a sysadmin, DBA, and sometimes programmer I already love what I do, but I'm starting to realize the limits of the money I can make working for somebody else.

messel 16y ago
I like to imagine the flow of wealth I can get into more capable hands than my own. I've seen incredible designs and tech with only a few days work. These folks need more $$ and models to move their creations to others in need. I think part of the attractor for a startup is enabling better conditions for people with impressive skills that prefer a job, autonomy, but don't wanna deal with the business side.
tortilla 16y ago
Not open-source but the ExpressionEngine community is pretty nice. This guy is doing pretty well selling extensions: http://pixelandtonic.com/ http://pixelandtonic.com/

nihaar 16y ago

IMHO there is a growing niche of creating websites on WP (or any other extensible CMS) as a way to cheaply test your ideas rather than invest the upfront cost of building a site from scratch. Providing a service of building websites quickly & cheaply using something like WordPress can be valuable and lucrative even in the corporate world. I recently proposed this to my company for a new project and got the green light (after getting quotes of above $15K from other shops for a custom job). It was however difficult to find WP hackers easily and ended up building the site myself (in a fraction of the time and cost).

jasonlbaptiste 16y ago
do you mind me asking how much they were willing to pay for the WP version vs. the original 15k quote from other shops.
- nihaar 16y ago
  edited since i misread. they were willing to pay 4-5K for the WP version

wildmXranat 16y ago

As a developer and a publisher who has used Wordpress for many projects, I have to say: good for him. He's doing it almost as it should be. Uses solid CSS frameworks, and sort-of good publishing platform(WP) and provides good support(According to his site). For todays projects, I tend to use small microframeworks using Python, but WP is still my 0-60 in 5 seconds platform.

pmjoyce 16y ago
As a press75 customer I have to say I've had a very positive experience. They're selling a high quality product and support seems to be good even though I haven't had to call on it myself.

rick_2047 16y ago

Ok lessons learned in this post 1) Chasing your passion is better than chasing your money. Sometimes money becomes the by-product of the former. 2) (A hidden message) You need to be talented and committed to successful.

dschobel 16y ago

Great story particularly because he seems like an average (but talented, obviously) guy in a cubicle farm with a wife and kids and mortgage, not yet-another Stanford golden-child.

amohr 16y ago

Always appreciate stories of people that made the jump, but I was kind of hoping this was going to be about a less obviously monetizable passion.

jasonkester 16y ago

Not all passions monetize. At the moment, I'm passionate about rock climbing, travel, surfing and computer programming. If it weren't for that 4th one, I'd be screwed. I currently run maybe the 3rd most popular Travel Blogging site out there. It's had a good 5 years of passion poured in now, off and on, and if I were to slap ads on it today I'd pull in a buck thirtyfive a day. I also run a little service that processes the draconian logfiles that Amazon provides for its webservices and spits out pretty analytics. It's a subject that no human being could ever be passionate about and it pays my rent. Sometimes it's better to monetize something boring that people are willing to pay for.

pellicle 16y ago
> and if I were to slap ads on it today I'd pull in a buck thirtyfive a day. Do you mean $1.35/day? If that's the case, then I see your point: even though you're passionate about it, it (in and of itself) won't pay the rent.
- jasonkester 16y ago
  Indeed. Every adsense test I've done on the site has pulled in about a dollar a day. More fun, it's always been $1/day even as the site grew to 10x and 50x the original traffic. It seems our growth was inversely matching people's decline in tendency to click on ads.
  - icey 16y ago
    Have you considered trying affiliate sales? Pick something that you like, mention it with an affiliate link. Blogs with some kind of focus seem to do pretty well with this approach.
    - jasonkester 16y ago
      Yes. For a while we tried Amazon links to Lonely Planet guidebooks and Affiliate links to hostels. That made maybe ten dollars after 6 months, and dropped the site into Google's "Hotel Affiliate Site" black hole for the next year. Bad move. The problem with monetizing the Travel side of a site like this is that there are dozens of big money sites devoted to doing exactly that. Blogabond's whole appeal is that we don't surround your blog with banner ads and we don't try to help you book flights and rental cars. So yeah, we could do that sort of stuff and maybe make a few dollars, but it would just turn us into another TripAdvisor instead of a cool place to host your blog.

jasonkester 16y ago

The author touched briefly on one thing that's worth noting, but it might have got buried in the article so it bears repeating: If you build something cool, people will find you and give you consulting work That's a strategy that has worked for me several times over the years. I mentioned a silly unmonetizable Travel Blogging site elsewhere in this discussion, but if you look at the paying client work that resulted from that site's existence, you could argue that it's been one of my most successful products.

patio11 16y ago
In addition to cool, I might suggest building something public which comes close to meeting business needs for people. With those provisos: yeah, it works great. Having a reputation in whatever your circle of competence is gets you more leads and lets you be pickier about who you work with, what you work on, and how much you charge.
- ctd 16y ago
  But sometimes it's easier and faster to build something cool than to try to build a useful business product. I'm facing that dilemma now. Should I focus on the product I want to build and possibly fail months later with nothing to show for the effort and no budget left to live on (I'm still recovering from the last one)? Or should I build several smaller demo projects as portfolio pieces I can shop to get client work to fund the part-time development of my eventual product? Especially considering that my walled-off enterprise projects are inaccessible and built with tools other than the open source ones I'd prefer to be working with. It's almost like starting from scratch.

rao 16y ago

Did you not feel obliged about how your sabbatical led to everything, and you may have to work for few more weeks so that they find your replacement?

spudlyo 16y ago

Interesting how he integrated the price for all his WP themes into his brand -- everything is 75 bucks, hence press75.com. That seems great for now, but does it make it difficult to raise prices in the future?

jonpaul 16y ago
According to http://www.thesevenfive.com/about/ http://www.thesevenfive.com/about/ that's not the case. In fact, your statement is backwards. His price is a reflection of his brand, not the other way i.e. his brand is "75"... thus changing his price won't matter much in the future, as his brand won't change.
petercooper 16y ago
It hasn't stopped The Carphone Warehouse from remaining one of the largest cellphone companies in the UK :-) Many companies have products that have migrated away from the original brand definition.

joubert 16y ago

Oh, this is not about the oldest profession

petercooper 16y ago

One lesson I got from this is to follow trends. In this case, Wordpress and commercial themes. It's taken me years to see that most small businesses make money this way, rather than forging entirely new paths or inventing new technologies.. Find something that's already becoming popular, do it a bit better, profit..

mogston 16y ago

Great story - really chimes with what i did two months ago...I left my well paid corporate job to do something that i really enjoyed...solving real world problems for real world clients who really need them solving (not just pleasing the boss). So i set up PageDo (http://pagedo.com http://pagedo.com).

claymmm 16y ago

That's it, HN is dead to me. "How I Monetized My Passion" is self-parody. When you can't tell the difference between parody and the real thing you're a goner.

jjs 16y ago
HN died for you in 55 days?

parka 16y ago

Hidden lesson is how his passion also solves the problems of someone else, hence he's able to monetize it.