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I built a profitable business with a $100 budget
- d--b 10y agoThat Travis guy spent a nice $100. Cheap money for hacker news front page!
- seppin 10y agoAlt title: How to get the right title to get a front page of NH article. Budget? Who cares!
- Cenk 10y agoWait, what? You sold ads on a podcast where you read articles you found on medium aloud?
- viperchill 10y agoYep, with permission from all of the authors :)
- startupdiscuss 10y agoI know what you're thinking: I prefer to read, so maybe you should start a business where you transcribe the words onto text so people can read it!
- pavel_lishin 10y agoThis would actually be great; I'm reasonably sure I can read faster than a podcaster can speak, and I can certainly skim faster than I can listen for key phrases with a podcast on 2x speed.
- athenot 10y agoThat would be a Genius idea! https://genius.com https://genius.com
- dealomni 10y agoThat is certainly more labour intensive. I transcribed a couple of lectures from youtube (ok they were mathematical) and it is quite time consuming and I made a lot of mistakes too.
- greenyouse 10y agoThis seems good until one of the blog posts mentions VoiceOver or screen readers :p
- Lockyy 10y agoThat's actually a really good idea. If the recordings are high quality and enjoyable to listen to I'd subscribe to that podcast. Most web content does not have an audio transcription beyond screen readers.
- startupdiscuss 10y agoCan another reader please pick up on the first two discarded ideas and follow those? Those sound great! Like the author, I am wary of self-help type stuff but would be enthusiastic about finance and marketing.
- viperchill 10y agoThanks @startupdiscuss Would love to see someone else take those projects on as well. Appreciate the comment :)
- dang 10y agoWe took "Show HN" out of the title. A blog post is not a Show HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
- analognoise 10y agoHow's that lemonade stand holding up?
- viperchill 10y agoWhat?
- eddz 10y agoFirst of all, congratulations on your success and experience. Second of all, correct me if I am wrong, but you do not seem to be factoring in your time (16 working days) or any kind of opportunity cost required to produce the content?
- viperchill 10y agoThanks for the comment. This is the third and final update, so didn't really cover the time aspect as in-depth as I had in previous updates. My aim was to show what you can do without spending money. Time is undoubtedly an expense, but you have to factor that into any online business.
- eddz 10y agoI understand. But to many businesses – especially online businesses – time is the most significant expense. It is the elephant in the room here. You are not "profitable" (not even "ramen profitable") until you've factored in this expense.
- viperchill 10y agoFor month one, sure. But that's to be expected :)
- blunte 10y agoRight near the top of the post: "Time was undoubtedly my biggest expense, which I’ll cover in more detail at the end."
- cestith 10y ago$350 over 16 days is about $22 a day. What am I exactly missing about these profits?
- giarc 10y agoThey could grow as you get my listeners, and therefore increase the ad sales.
- viperchill 10y agoHow businesses work.
- palakchokshi 10y agoThat's a bit snarky no? considering you don't put in labor costs and time costs it's a bit ingenuous to say you built a profitable business. At a "profit" of $22 a day you could not pay your rent and food. Your customer acquisition cost at this stage is much higher than what the customer pays you.
- viperchill 10y agoProbably. I apologise. Just reading so many negative comments it's (slightly) frustrating. Maybe 'profitable' should have been in quotes instead of startup. I never tried to wow anyone with my final results, but rather show what could happen if you just take action :)
- palakchokshi 10y agoI agree. But here's what I think would have gotten your point of "take action" across much better. At the end be honest about ROI and projections. This is a cold calling marketing campaign you had to do to get your sales. If at the end you had actionable advice on improving conversion rate of cold calling campaigns with numbers to back it up(not anecdotal evidence) that would be very useful. My suggestion is to track SpokenGrowth.com over a period of 3 months now that you've handed it off to someone who might not have your marketing skills. Do another post 3 months later that either proves you can make a viable business if you "just take action" or shows how hard it can be and maybe do a lessons learnt post. I'm all for hustling to market your product or your skills. Good luck on SpokenGrowth.com
- danpalmer 10y agoThe question is: could you take the $100 to a wholesale distributor, buy a bunch of cheap things, and then go and sell them at a market stall for more than $400. My guess is yes, especially if you have 16 days of selling to make your $400. That operation would scale about as well, possibly better, than the one described in the blog post. This idea ignores the pay for labour, but so does the blog post.
- iliketosleep 10y agoI tried buying goods wholesale and selling at a market stall :) Failed dismally and lost money :( Need to have the right personality. The guys who were natural extroverts and spoke with a booming voice got most of the sales. It's the same in this blog post. He's a marketing guy and very tactful. He's good with people. Most other people who tried his "business" idea probably wouldn't get a single sale. So for the average person, it's even worse than what you suggest.
- wfunction 10y agoDid you fail at the buying end or the selling end? (i.e. did you have to pay a higher price compared to these people, or were you unable to sell at a high price compared to these people?)
- iliketosleep 10y agoI failed at the selling end. I just wasn't able to attract people to come to my stall. The aggressive sellers got most of the customers.
- tomcam 10y agoI love the fact that you gave it a shot. Most people don't get nearly that far. It's much better experience than most college classes.
- iliketosleep 10y ago
- iliketosleep 10y agoWhat i took away from the 15 minutes I spent reading was this: If you're not afraid to reach out to prospective customers and you know how to make a sales pitch, you can sell any half-baked product. Whether it could actually be a successful business or not is an entirely different matter and would take much longer to find out.
- viperchill 10y agoGreat comment! I think that's a fair summary :)
- nedwin 10y agoAnd you'd be surprised how few people actually do this kind of validation before building a product.
- privateprofile 10y agoOne thing I don't understand: why was this person contacting prospects using a deliberately fake name? Did his name carry so much clout that customers would reply 'shut up and take my money', therefore invalidating the "challenge"? I also wonder if this person procured authorization from the parties involved before publishing their e-mail responses on the Web, especially given the fact that it's rather easy to identify some of these (unwittingly?) "challenge participants"...
- viperchill 10y agoHey PP, I am "this person". My name carries no clout at all, unless it's (potentially) mentioned in the online marketing world. I simply didn't want people to be able use the excuse of - "they already knew who you were" - to account for any sales. I don't understand your second paragraph, sorry.
- jdormit 10y ago> I don't understand your second paragraph, sorry. Seems pretty clear to me: did you get permission from your customers before publishing your correspondence with them?
- viperchill 10y ago4 out of 5 yes. The one that I didn't get permission for, I didn't share.
- jdormit 10y agoGotcha. Thanks for the reply.
- AngeloAnolin 10y agoThanks for the lengthy article. It was a good read. Although I would have probably titled this: "Building a Profitable Business with 100$ and XX Hours" People only see the $ amount but never take factor the time actually spent (which is the highest cost I reckon).
- bbcbasic 10y agoI am not sure how many hours he worked a day, but if he did the full 8 hours, then for me I see this as costing just $100 plus cough $10k in sacrificed salary! Taking that into consideration it would have been more prudent to outsource a lot of the things and cut it back. I would be more interested in what you can launch in 16 hours (a single weekend).
- palakchokshi 10y agoThat's a marketing headline. A little clickbait-y. That's fine you're a marketing hustler after all. Let's break down your numbers: $99.75 in expenses (not counting time spent getting sales or building website) 5 total sales resulting in $450 of sales 108 hours of work done by you. We don't know how much time it took your brother to create the podcasts. Let's assume he didn't do the 6 podcasts perfectly in the first go. 30 days of total case study. $350 in "profit" Divide your profit by the hours you worked on it. $350/108 = $3.24 per hour. Now let's consider setting up the website was a one time cost so moving forward your operating expense is $30/month to host the website and the podcasts[edit] Let's take the hours your took to get the sales and divide those by the number of sales you got. 90/5 that comes to 18 hours per sale. Your average sale value was $450/5 = $90. Let's say your put a bare minimum hourly rate for your time of $10/hour that's $180 spent getting a $90 sale. Now unless you get more visibility and are super savvy in promoting your podcast your ROI just doesn't pan out. Let's see what your $1000 budget gets you in 3 months. Might be a good post to regenerate interest in your podcast. :)
- dharmon 10y agoI wonder what Bill Gates' pay per hour was for Microsoft's first month? ;) I totally am on board with back-of-the-envelope math, evaluating ROI, market size, etc. But come on. This was month #1, a good chunk of which was doing one-time tasks (figuring out what the hell the site would actually be, setting up the template, etc.) If you want to fault him for something, fault him for the lack of market analysis to see if this idea really has some legs, besides citing someone else "making millions of a similar idea". E.g., a red flag was one decent sized advertiser telling him their ROI on podcast ads are not worth it.
- palakchokshi 10y agoActually a good chunk of work was actually research, marketing and sales since he didn't start on the website creation till the very end. He picked a template and modified it so that's not a lot of work either. In the end he got lucky with getting the first sale. As shown by him he was not able to replicate his initial sale. In fact now that I read it again all his sales were lucky shots. None of which he could reliably replicate as a sales strategy. Bill Gates also lived with his parents and worked out from their garage. If this article was targeted at rich kids that want to make money on the side and don't have to worry about paying rent and buying food then sure don't worry that you are going to end up losing money in Month #1. and Month #2 and Month #6.
- 0898 10y ago"I hope your biggest takeaway is not that I made any money or that you like the concept, but that my results are held up by a massive pillar of failure." This part stood out for me. There are so many moments in a new venture like this, where you're just feeling your way forward, and it feels like nothing is working. But you keep chipping and one day the rock cracks. Nice read, thanks for sharing.
- viperchill 10y agoGlad you liked it. Thanks for the comment!
- dheera 10y agoTurning $100 into $500 is easy. You can do that by selling lemonade for a week on the beach. The hard part is to do it in a way that scales more than linearly.
- garysieling 10y agoThis was really neat - thanks. I built a search engine for lectures (https://www.findlectures.com https://www.findlectures.com) to counter the "lots of noise" problem (not podcasts or audiobooks, but it's the same idea). It never occurred to me there were so many ways to approach the problem, so this post gave me some things to think about :)
- handzhiev 10y agoMaking 5 sales and $450 is not a "profitable business", it's just some cash. With all due respect to your work, the title is just a clickbait. It's to early to conclude you'be built a profitable business.
- maxsavin 10y ago~"I genuinely wanted to help" and then.. ~"Why didn't that tactic work on others?