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How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

647 points by jaxsonkhan 8y ago

robpalumbo 8y ago
Love it
PhilWright 8y ago
Goes into good details about the tactics used to come up with an idea and then recruit the first few customers. After signing up $5k/month revenue it meant he needed to generate 5,000 leads per month for those customers. That is the hard bit, how did he do that on a side project? He says that the income was passive, so how did he generate 5,000 targeted leads passively? That is the magic, not the ability to recruit some customers.
- mike2477 8y ago
  Hey there! Author of the post here -- we sold leads for $1 but our cost was $.30 and completely outsourced so I didn't have to do it.
- TeeJay942 8y ago
  He said that as a salesperson himself, he outsourced this work to VAs. I assume he continued to do so for this side project.
  - PhilWright 8y ago
    Aha, so he is performing arbitrage. Charge customers a $1 for something he can buy for much less than a $1. I wonder if the recursion works, use the virtual assistants to bring in leads to also get his own customers.
    - wtracy 8y ago
      To be fair, it sounds like he put in work up front vetting and training the VAs.
- hudibras 8y ago
  True, but I'm pretty sure he's not going to tell us about the "secret sauce," especially since he's sold the company.
  - mike2477 8y ago
    Happy to share the "secret sauce" if helpful. Planning to go into how I scaled ops and automated stuff in the next post. But fire away any questions you have now and happy to share. All about transparency!
  - fossuser 8y ago
    Replying for mike2477 who wrote the article and responded to this post, but his comments are dead. Mike - it looks like you got shadow banned, but it’s not clear why? Maybe dang can help.
    - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
      How does one see shadow banned posts?
      - graeme 8y ago
        In your profile there is a "showdead" option
    - newppc 8y ago
      Maybe shadow banned because the story is 4 years old, and has been repeated word for word already? https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mike2477&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mike2477&sort=byPopularity&pre... https://upupgrow.com/how-i-built-a-5000-per-month-side-project/ https://upupgrow.com/how-i-built-a-5000-per-month-side-proje... https://getsimpledata.com/blog/sales-best-practices/2015828how-i-built-a-5k-mrr-side-project-in-5-months/ https://getsimpledata.com/blog/sales-best-practices/2015828h... Great story, but may be one reason.
    - csa 8y ago
      I vouched for the dead comments. The story might need to have a missing date on it (4 years old?), but the two comments that the author of the post made don’t seem to violate the terms or spirit of HN rules. If someone can show me how the rules were broken in his comments, I will gladly unvouch.
- kokokokoko 8y ago
  Based on when this product was created, I can almost guarantee they are just manually scraping LinkedIn (plus a few other places - Facebook, twitter, Bloomberg, maybe even Pitchbook). There are custom Google search portals you can use to search LinkedIn via keyword that not everyone knows about. From there one can use a bunch of services that will provide you (mostly)valid emails at various companies. I imagine he made a quick set of tutorials for his outsourced contractors and had his virtual assistant he found on oDesk do the hiring and setting up of those contractors. This quote from the article is wild: "Customers have to train their team and the billing is variable so your cost per lead ranges from $.50 to $5" You can beat that number paying people $20/hr to do this stuff, let alone exploiting people out in the Philippines on I'm sure the not livable wages he's paying them(Aka the fallacy of low rent/cost of living in developing economies). Sigh... you know we're at the end of the cycle when it's just a bunch of outsourcers with marketing backgrounds.
  - hnzix 8y ago
    > the fallacy of low rent/cost of living in developing economies Let's say a knowledge worker in a developing country could survive on $1 USD a day, adjusting food and rent to local cost. If a local white collar job paid them $5 a day, and a remote "exploiting" job paid them $15 a day, but an American could earn $50 a day for the same task, is this really a moral hazard?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - hawkice 8y ago
      No, ya see, it's wrong to pay people in poorer countries less because now you're talking to a poor person. If you hire an American, you never even spoke to a poor person, so it isn't your fault. If that sounds like a fever dream, you aren't alone, but it's my best guess at understanding what's happening. Obviously, my complete lack of employing people in central Africa is why they are all middle class Americans now, so I'm doing my part.
      - 8y ago
- asimjalis 8y ago
  It was a lead gen tool. He could have used the tool to generate leads for the tool.
wilsonnb3 8y ago
> Most people in the tech industry are brainwashed by Silicon Valley group think. These people believe that every business must have a billion dollar opportunity. If anything, I’d say that most people in the tech industry in Silicon Valley are brainwashed into thinking that entrepreneurship is the One True Path to salvation. Much like whoever wrote this article. Who else would recommend that someone follow the path that “led to depression, social isolation, and the hardest time of my life” just because they got lucky in the end?
- Swizec 8y ago
  > Who else would recommend that someone follow the path that “led to depression, social isolation, and the hardest time of my life” just because they got lucky in the end? One of my favorite Ewan McGregor quotes from watching Long Way Round recently was when he would say ”This is the part that really sucks right now and is just so hard it makes you wanna cry, but it’s the part we remember most fondly later” He said that on multiple occasions. It maps well to stuff I recently learned in Thinking Fast and Slow about our experiencing self versus our remembering self. It turns out we cherish sucky experiences tht end well more dearly than we do experiences that are great (or bad) throughout.
  - mcguire 8y ago
    What about sucky experiences that don't end well?
    - solveit 8y ago
      Fuck those. We wish we hadn't been so mindblowingly stupid as to put ourselves through those.
      - all2 8y ago
        Well, those can also be remembered fondly. One that crops up in my memory with some frequency is lying face-down in three inches of snow. My feet are going numb. My SAW is freezing my fingers. My helmet keeps sliding down over my eyes. We've been out here on the perimeter for almost two hours, just waiting for the word to move. They told us to embrace the suck. It was fun. I've never felt so alive.
blakesterz 8y ago
> As a millennial there are few things that rank as desirable as finding a recurring source of income that doesn’t take much work That made me laugh! As someone much older I can honestly say that there are few things that rank as desirable as finding a recurring source of income that doesn’t take much work for me too.
- Skunkleton 8y ago
  As a millennial myself, I would like the need for income taken off the table so that I can find a recurring source of meaningful work.
  - zanny 8y ago
    This is such a modern problem too. No matter what anyone feels about it having to farm crops to eat was definitely meaningful work a hundred years ago. Even if you were being exploited in a factory suicide was common but mostly from abuse and injury rather than the vacuousness of the job. Its wholly contemporary to invent bullshit jobs and imagine complexity to keep people at desks en masse, leaving them with such a feeling of their lives being pointless.
    - Skunkleton 8y ago
      Truth. My job is "important", but at the same time I don't think anyone's life would be measurably worse if I didn't do it (besides mine lol). IMO it is kind of a problem with software in general. It is getting me down honestly; I could use some advice.
      - maxerickson 8y ago
        Short term, find sources of fulfillment that are not your job. Longer term, seek a similarly comfortable position that you find more meaningful.
      - sbov 8y ago
        Part of why I like working at smaller companies that focus on serving small-medium sized businesses. At this level you are actually building a piece of software for users rather the C-suite.
holoduke 8y ago
I created a successful side project back in 2014. It is still running and making 20 times more than I would get with a normal job. But i was lucky. Lucky to be born in a rich country. Lucky because I was given a computer at the age of 5. Lucky because I had unlimited education opportunities. Lucky because I had a friend who gave me access to something I needed for my business. And many other lucks. I will never deny that fact. But reading these stories makes me a bit angry, because it is just not that simple. It's always easy to translate a successful story into a guideline. But that guideline isn't worth anything when all those luck properties are different.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  What was your side project, if you don’t mind me asking?
- arbuge 8y ago
  In hindsight, all these stories seem to have a clear thread running through them which can be replicated by anyone with reasonable intelligence, drive, and time. In practice that particular thread likely required all kinds of environmental details to occur - details the entrepreneur might not have noticed at the time, might have forgotten about later, or might be discounting as unimportant.
  - tachyonbeam 8y ago
    One of the things that helps the most, it seems to me, is having the self-confidence to take the risk. You also have to be motivated enough and in good enough health (eg: not burnt out) to be able to work on this side-project after your job. Then of course you need the right skills, the right timing, and the free time and financial resources to execute your plan. However, at the end of the day, you are taking a risk, it's a gamble. What stops most people is the fear of failure. This fear isn't necessarily unwarranted. As the author points out, he has a previous failed startup. Most people don't have the drive to work hundreds of hours after work and possibly invest their own hard earned cash in a project they suspect deep down might not actually pan out. I know I find it difficult. Still, I don't dislike these stories. It's good if it inspires people to take (calculated) risks, and it is possible to learn from failures. Though I would also say that yeah, there's probably some self-selection going on. The people out there with 2 or 3 failed attempts at monetizing side-projects probably don't feel super eager to write a blog post and tell us all how we can improve our lives by following in their footsteps.
yellowapple 8y ago
I witnessed "Play #3" firsthand. The first startup for which I worked (developing a peer-to-peer learning system that paired up students to learn off one another, whether in person or via video chat) had an uphill battle getting customers and investors because we had to convince them that the problem our product solved was actually a problem they had. Our product happened to chiefly operate by integrating with a different one (Khan Academy), so much of our time "in the wild" pitching to potential customers was spent giving KA free advertisement before we could even explain what our product did. There were multiple other factors behind why we ultimately didn't succeed and ended up all going our separate ways (and I know I wasn't blameless there), but in hindsight I think this was the central factor. We barely had the resources - sapient or monetary - to sell our own product; trying to sell other people's products upon which ours depended was doomed to fail. I still think we had an excellent and valuable product, and I stand by the code we wrote and the platform we built; we were just too far ahead of our time :) One of these days, when things like Khan Academy are a bit more mainstream in classrooms, I'd love to (with my old boss' permission, of course) try restarting that particular project and giving it another go.
- ironSkillet 8y ago
  coursolve?
- cosmie 8y ago
  > We barely had the resources - sapient or monetary - to sell our own product; trying to sell other people's products upon which ours depended was doomed to fail. Just to know, this isn't a particularly uncommon problem. I spent quite a few years working in the B2B lead generation space, and there are countless companies built around the value proposition of being a complementary product to another software platforms. There are quite a few techniques you can use to suss out what software and platforms companies are using internally, in order to better target your prospecting. Or you can skip that step and go straight to purchasing a list of companies that are known users of that platform. There are companies that curate that type of information - similar to BuiltWith[1] or Wappalyzer[2], but include internal-only technology and not just what's visible by crawling their website. Or you can take it even further, and commission a custom program from a B2B lead generation firm which includes a requirement that any leads have self-reported that they use a specific platform and that they have decision making authority over it[3]. There are also a ton of options in between; feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat more (email in profile). [1] https://builtwith.com/ https://builtwith.com/ [2] https://www.wappalyzer.com/ https://www.wappalyzer.com/ [3] These are a patently different class of lead generation program than what the article references - both in quality and cost. You're looking at $20-$50 per lead vs. $1 per lead. But with a guarantee that they match your targeting and pre-qualification criteria, even if that pre-qualification criteria was as random as "she has confirmed they use Khan Academy internally, and that she's in charge of it, and that <insert your complementary product's niche> is a pain point for them".
beezle 8y ago
Left unsaid is what the bottom line margin is. 10%? 30%? More?
wyldfire 8y ago
Stupid question, how could you possibly automate lead generation? For that matter, how do you do it manually? Search for potential customers and read up about their business?
- jbigelow76 8y ago
  - Google AdWords > Landing page data entry form - Email (spam) blast > Landing page data entry form - Game or content paywall > submit personal info to bypass.
- wtracy 8y ago
  LinkedIn is one starting point.
- derekp7 8y ago
  What about Reddit type ads ("Promoted posts"), in a relevant subreddit, with comments enabled? I've seen that on other advice lists, would like to know real-world experiences on that though.
- csa 8y ago
  1. Know the keywords that will lead you to potential leads. 2. Pay a VA to use the keyword list to locate businesses and/or people in search engines, FB, and LinkedIn, and record their contact info. 3. Sell this info. The steps are easy. The execution is decidedly less so.
- infinii 8y ago
  I don't think he automated it. It looks like he outsourced it to cheaper labour in the Philipines
- systematical 8y ago
  You can, I replied to the main thread about my two side businesses without going into specifics. Both my businesses were lead generation. I won't give the industries a way, but here's the jist. I had a system I built for a clients lead generation business. I asked if I could re-purpose the software and in exchange I'd provide the enhancements free as well as discounted development. He agreed. It was a basic system where a lead would come in for a geographical area, that area would have a vendor assigned, and an email would be dispatched. If you do the SEO and marketing right, the leads become pretty passive. I improved the system in two ways: 1. My client generated monthly invoices. This was a problem since he had to chase people down for money. I setup a credit system where you purchased credits (leads) in advanced. I gave a 20% discount for purchasing 100 credits at a time. I also gave new customers their first 10 credits free. No obligation, no contract, not joking. 2. Email sucks. I integrated twilio and did direct call dispatching with numbers I controlled. I spammed the internet with these numbers. If a customer ever dropped off, I'd just find someone else. Rarely did I need to do that since the leads were so good. This required a lot of work up front, but in areas where my marketing was dialed in already it just always generated income. This is the kind of stuff fluff articles like this never tell you, the actual specifics. You could now take this basic model and apply to any industry that requires leads. Bonus if the industry is underserved, not huge, and filled with techno-peasants.
burtonator 8y ago
I actually did this too... I create Datastreamer (http://www.datastreamer.io/ http://www.datastreamer.io/) which (when I created it) was an RSS syndication platform as a service. You gave us RSS feeds and then we would index them and send you the output without having to deal with the insanity of RSS feeds. This was a decade ago though. I've been running it since and now it's more of a massive search engine of content - nearly a petabyte at this point. We have an Elasticsearch API which our customers query. We also have a streaming API if you just want to listen to the crawl data directly. It's been a wild ride but here's my big takeaway - if your company is profitable it actually might be because you're sitting on something MASSIVE and don't realize it. Datastreamer was the first company in the content indexing space and we were WAY ahead of everyone else. I was more focused on enjoying life, traveling, backpacking, etc. In retrospect when you're sitting on a rocket it might make sense to buy more gas and light up that bad boy. I'm actually in the middle of a (mild) pivot of Datastreamer right now. We think it might have significant value for the coming 'code war' we're in right now with Russia. With companies continually looking at social media as a way to manipulate democratic societies these governments need tools (and data) to figure out where they're being attacked and how their citizens are being manipulated.
- yeldarb 8y ago
  > I was more focused on enjoying life, traveling, backpacking, etc. > In retrospect when you're sitting on a rocket it might make sense to buy more gas and light up that bad boy. I can identify with this. I started a Facebook game in early 2008 that picked up a million users in its first year. Back then all the stars were aligned and if I would have had a bigger vision for it there’s no reason it couldn’t have turned into a massive company. I remember reading the TechCrunch article about Zynga raising 100 million in VC and laughing because “why would a Facebook game company need that much money? I’m really profitable being completely bootstrapped!” Don’t get me wrong, the lifestyle it has allowed me has been amazing. And it’s still going strong 10 years later (we have users who have been paying $10/mo for their premium subscription for that whole 10 years). But the opening to grow it into something huge was only available for a short period of time. Now users are too expensive, organic traffic is minimal, and most users on the platform are locked into their existing games and resistant to trying new ones. Zynga rode that into becoming a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company. “Think bigger” is a take-away I’ll definitely bring with me to my next venture someday.
wyldfire 8y ago
> That was made possible when I took a couple friends (who are salespeople) out for drinks to tell them what I was working on. Afterwards they both said they would try to think of people to refer me to. Thomas deserves all the credit for building and selling his business, but the value of this point here is critical, in my mind. IMO key takeaways are (1) knowing lots of people helps a lot, and (2) asking for help/daring to talk about your project helps a lot.
derekp7 8y ago
If you don't mind me asking, I'd like some help laying out what my next steps should be on one of my side projects. I had an idea for a side project, ran it by a hand full of friends and associates, expecting to have a bunch of holes poked into it (they have done that to me many times in the past). This time they all think I have something. Problem is I work full time, as a Linux systems engineer (30 years of Unix experience), with a side passion for C programming, web technologies, and have built a hand full of web apps that are getting a lot of use at work (btw I'm not under any contract prohibiting side projects, and have cleared it with my management). Next problem: The project itself is relatively simple, has client-side pieces that will be open source, and over all I prototyped it in about a weekend's worth of work, but need probably a month or so to get it more polished and robust. The upshot is that it can be easily replicated by anyone in a similar space. There are similar products that try to solve the same problem, but in a rather backwards and less secure method, but I'm really not sure why other vendors haven't thought of this project first. Third problem: I'm relatively new at modern advanced web apps, so things like taking payments, handling customers, integrating to a customer's on-premise or cloud based authentication (O365, Active Directory, etc) is something I'm not too familiar with (for my projects I just used ldap bind for authentication against a local AD server). So for my next step, should I put a prototype / demo site online, and let people create demo accounts that last for a couple weeks? Then if there is sufficient interest, set up something like a Stripe account? Start off with local user account authentication, then later on add the ability for customers to set up users authenticating against their own AD domain or O365 account? Or would I be better off finding a business partner that has been through all this already?
- blacksoil 8y ago
  > The upshot is that it can be easily replicated by anyone in a similar space I think many problems are like this. We engineers to think that we have to build something "rocket science", but actually many businesses don't require "rocket science" software to take off. It's more about the execution. >I'm relatively new at modern advanced web apps, so things like taking payments, handling customers, integrating to a customer's on-premise or cloud based authentication These days, there are almost already SaaS for everything. A little googling here and there will find you what you need :) Also sites like indiehackers.com is really awesome. People share what indie projects they had built, there's also a comment section where people can ask. >Or would I be better off finding a business partner that has been through all this already? I think you should try to do this in parallel with trying to learn it yourself. Finding a good, competent, and suitable business partner isn't exactly the easiest thing to do.
nowarninglabel 8y ago
"the first thing I did was hire a team in the Philipinnes to ensure I never had to stay up until 1am building lists" Is it possible for anyone to share how they found people to hire/outsource building sales lists to?
- illumin8 8y ago
  He says right in the article: odesk.
  - sah2ed 8y ago
    Right, but they now go by the name UpWork. That the article uses the old name of oDesk from 4 years ago points to the need to add “(2015)” to the thread title. https://www.upwork.com https://www.upwork.com
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - vonseel 8y ago
      actually, the article was posted yesterday. He’s writing about his experience in 2015...
      - sah2ed 8y ago
        That the article was published recently may be true but the article’s contents doesn’t really contain new info. Please see this comment up-thread [0] which surfaced older incarnations of the same content. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18880312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18880312
csa 8y ago
Only a tangent to the OP, but... I find it hilarious that he calls Abercrombie & Fitch the “high end clothing brand for middle schoolers”. A&F used to target “elite outdoorsmen” (not a joke — think a high end LL Bean), and they made some really good stuff. Some of that quality lasted until the 90s and early 00s after changing hands and shifting towards targeting youth casual wear, but their clothing line is almost all overpriced junk now. Such a sad loss.
- iddqd 8y ago
  Not a fan of how they portray their brand, but in my experience A&F makes really solid fits for althetic type build (think big thighs). This in my experience is really hard to find on clothes of a somewhat modern cut.
  - csa 8y ago
    I hear ya. Even though I’m not their target demographic, I bought some of their stuff for the same reason — great quality and great fit for athletic builds. Something happened in the late aughts. The fit is not as consistently good (my body changed very little over that time), and the quality of the material and stitching is much lower.
the_other_guy 8y ago
shady and only tells what kind of person OP is
blunte 8y ago
This is great and educational. But I've noticed that many (most?) of the successful side projects were started by people who had some sales and marketing experience. Sales first, tech second (or third). If you want other people to buy, rent, invest, etc., you have to be able to find the right people and communicate with them in a way that will lead them to become your customers/partners. Unfortunately, I doubt many of us with CompSci degrees and years/decades of experience have those sales and marketing skills. So I guess there's a business just waiting (for someone who knows sales + tech)! Teach nerds how to market. I might be a customer.
- shostack 8y ago
  I'm a marketer who has gradually gotten more and more technical over my career. I refuse to believe that people with CompSci degrees can't quickly pick up the more basic (and even many intermediate and advanced) marketing skills, particularly in the digital realm. Yes, knowing how to apply them, and learning about audiences messaging, etc. are going to be challenging, but you'd be shocked how far you can get for many products and services just by semi-intelligent testing and implementation of best practices with things like paid search, SEO, email marketing automation, analyzing web analytics, etc. In fact, I'm often shocked at how many marketers are not technical enough to do those things at even a basic level. There's a LOT of good information out there, and sometimes it really is just a matter of honing your bullshit detector to weed out the guru spam. Heck, spending a week reading through the Google Ads and Facebook help docs would set you ahead of quite a few of your peers, AND you'd have a leg up on implementing the more advanced approaches that require technical integration. That said, finding an experienced marketing mentor or consultant can help you short circuit the learning curve and guide you away from wasted time and money. Spending $5k with a consultant to help you create your initial plan might be wiser than say, randomly spending $5k on FB ads without having known you should setup conversion tracking, how to properly structure your account and audiences, how to build great creative, etc. and then not even having any clue what the spend did for you because you don't understand what the data is actually saying.
  - blunte 8y ago
    We can definitely learn things (CompSci people). In fact, my career is full of near constant learning. However, when it comes to marketing, knowing where to start (on one's own) is a challenge. And as you say, having a good bs detector is important. I'll take your advice about reading the Google Ads and FB ads docs! Thanks.
ttty2 8y ago
So how did he got customers? > As I mentioned, my first lead/opportunity came from an introduction. That was made possible when I took a couple friends (who are salespeople) out for drinks to tell them what I was working on. Afterwards they both said they would try to think of people to refer me to. > My next two customers came from a less obvious channel. A friend told me about a service called Growth Geeks and suggested I create a profile for my service. I was hesitant at first because it seemed like a distraction, but I signed up nonetheless. So basically he sent an email to the founder of that website like this https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5706d181b09f95e331b219de/t/5c37799ff950b7bb44f11390/1547139502227/4+hour+post+img+3.png?format=1000w https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5706d181b09f95e331b21... saying that the author (a bit confusing to figure out as both are called Mike/Michael) can grow your sales with no marketing. Then this happened: > He responded that day and asked if I had time to speak on the phone. > On the call I learned that he had a customer who needed 2,000 leads a month and they needed 2,000 leads a month for themselves. I used the same sales process as my first call and closed two deals in 30 minutes worth $3,000 / mo (25% of the $4,000 in revenue went to Growth Geeks). Suddenly I went from $1,000/mo to $4,000 / mo. My question is now, how he manages to make 4k leads?! > Later that week I decided it was time to double down on this side project. I spent a couple nights writing email templates and planning outbound email campaigns. By May of 2015 I had sent over 30,000 sales and marketing emails so I knew how to get high response rates (see play #1). So now he says he sent over 30000 emails (I assume he has a mailing list of 30000 and sent an email, but that doesn't match what he says, he seems to have sent multiple emails). So let's say he has 30000 email list and a click-through rate of 13.3% (which I think is very very high, maximum I got was around 3-4% and was only once) then he would make 4000 leads. First thing I think is strange, is how he got 30000 emails? That's kind of the most important part of the guide, without this he couldn't make any lead. Then he says this: > I sent emails to about 500 people over the course of a month which resulted in ~20 free trial sign-ups. Two of those free trials converted within the month and by the end of June, I had $5,000 in booked MRR. Note that this is another customer acquisition source. So he has an additional 500 emails. I mean how can a person reproduce this guide without these mailing lists? So even if he says how he did it, you can't really do the same unless you have: - Friends that can sign up for your product or refer other people - Big email lists - Create leads from ??? I feel like all these missing points leads directly to his startup https://getsimpledata.com/ https://getsimpledata.com/ - So I guess is more about marketing. Anyway, I think the post was interesting, but not too much I can do about it because I probably know about: - Focus on a problem that already exists - Work on your pain point - Outsource to a cheap country - Positioning in the market Some types for the author: Philipinnes
systematical 8y ago
The truth is, there is no 5-10 hour work week for 99% of people. Even if you make something like this person did, if you don't continue investing a lot of time into it, eventually competition will break you to pieces. Why? Because your competitor is hungry and working a lot more than 5-10 hours a week. I know this, because I've built two side income businesses, sat back and collected money only to find competitors had taken me over. They weren't big by any means but the $3,000 a month I made off one and the $1,000 a month off another was quite nice. I could've quit my job and traveled, but instead I paid down my mortgage and banked/invested the rest. This left me with a lot of money (for me). I eventually sold both businesses when I saw the writing on the wall with various competitors and industry changes. I did end up traveling for a while though. I did that with a remote job. Sure I had to work during the day, but that left plenty of time to explore whatever city I was in at night and do bigger adventures on the weekend. TLDR; 5-10 hour work week doesn't last.
- madeuptempacct 8y ago
  I experience this on a microscopic scale. When crypto was new, there was no way to get price for micro-coins, so I built a site doing that. I got a decent amount of traffic and got actively pursued by exchanges to put up ads for them. In the end, I didn't really make anything, but saw the aggressive development of similar sites as we tried to outcompete each other, in a "business" where the potential profit was maybe $100/month without growing huge. A lot of similar sites don't make money and survive on donations to this day.
SexOfGand 8y ago
This project is shady as hell. I am making better money working at FAANG for relatively ethical work better by hundreds of lawyers and moral force. I just look down on these people who have no programming skill to get paid higher at top companies. Resorting to cheap tricks at us.
RyanShook 8y ago
Good article, thanks! The business seemed to have been built on oDesk workers but now that site it called Upwork. Are there any alternatives to upwork out there?
ihavelorda 8y ago
Shady as fuck. I'd never do such unethical things to make money. I work at FAANG where I get paid more than these scums for ethical work policed by 100s of lawyers team who are stalwart of ethics. Honest question, how do these guys sleep at night? Knowing that you've been scamming grandmas with your shitty sales funnels is a grave threat to internet and entrepreneurship. Real entrepreneur are like Elon Musk who do something of value.
person_of_color 8y ago
Has anyone done this with a hardware product?
herova 8y ago
Next topics for Hackernews: "How to be a success spammer" "How to grow web doorways network as side project" etc
ForHackernews 8y ago
> found a virtual assistant on oDesk named Jonathan Am I correct in thinking this "virtual" assistant is not a bot, but just a human hired remotely?
- rchaud 8y ago
  That's exactly what it is. Freelancers working for relative pennies. Tim Ferriss started the bad habit of calling this 'automation' in the 4hr work week book.
- molticrystal 8y ago
  Virtual indeed refers to their presence. While to you, you know they are remote, for any outward facing function though, such as with customer interaction, ideally they'll seem like they are no further then the next office or department of your company.
ensiferum 8y ago
This article reads like total BS. Within 6 months to 30k income. Yeah right.
charliebrownau 8y ago
Goes to show * Hard Work * Effort * Capitalism * Free market Actually leads to success and reward
bayesian_horse 8y ago
To me this always sounds like "How I won the lottery..." Maybe I am too pessimistic and jaded from studying statistics...
haihaibye 8y ago
500 emails for 20 signups = 96% off target. >> By May of 2015 I had sent over 30,000 sales and marketing emails .96 × 30,000 = You just annoyed ~28,800 people. It's only because this immense amount of time lost is borne by strangers that it's a viable business. Let's not glorify spammers.
- Zelmor 8y ago
  The article is also just shit clickbait.
- growt 8y ago
  A 4% signup rate actually signifies really well targeted emails. Not everyone who doesn't sign up is annoyed by the mail (or did even open or read it). I think this is far from beeing spam, where you would see signup rates well below 1%.
  - smohare 8y ago
    Spam generally includes unsolicited and unwanted emails, targeted or not.
    - growt 8y ago
      Sure, but it also generally means large quantities of those (regarding email I don't think 30k qualifies as large quantities). My personal definition would be that the messages were sent without any thought if the audience might be interested in the content and that does not appear to be the case here. If your personal definition is that every email you receive ,that you did not ask for in some way yourself, is spam then thats ok. But as a general definition thats a bit strict.
      - devdas 8y ago
        It's unsolicited bulk email, and bulk is generally > 10 or so for most people, > 1 if you are strict.
willart4food 8y ago
Nice. (commenting so that I can remember this post)
- akavel 8y ago
  There's a "favorite" link you should click instead, located just below the article's title on this very page — it'll add the article to your "favorites" list at: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=willart4food https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=willart4food

647 points by jaxsonkhan 8y ago

Love it

Goes into good details about the tactics used to come up with an idea and then recruit the first few customers. After signing up $5k/month revenue it meant he needed to generate 5,000 leads per month for those customers. That is the hard bit, how did he do that on a side project? He says that the income was passive, so how did he generate 5,000 targeted leads passively? That is the magic, not the ability to recruit some customers.

mike2477 8y ago
Hey there! Author of the post here -- we sold leads for $1 but our cost was $.30 and completely outsourced so I didn't have to do it.
TeeJay942 8y ago
He said that as a salesperson himself, he outsourced this work to VAs. I assume he continued to do so for this side project.
- PhilWright 8y ago
  Aha, so he is performing arbitrage. Charge customers a $1 for something he can buy for much less than a $1. I wonder if the recursion works, use the virtual assistants to bring in leads to also get his own customers.
  - wtracy 8y ago
    To be fair, it sounds like he put in work up front vetting and training the VAs.
hudibras 8y ago
True, but I'm pretty sure he's not going to tell us about the "secret sauce," especially since he's sold the company.
- mike2477 8y ago
  Happy to share the "secret sauce" if helpful. Planning to go into how I scaled ops and automated stuff in the next post. But fire away any questions you have now and happy to share. All about transparency!
- fossuser 8y ago
  Replying for mike2477 who wrote the article and responded to this post, but his comments are dead. Mike - it looks like you got shadow banned, but it’s not clear why? Maybe dang can help.
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    How does one see shadow banned posts?
    - graeme 8y ago
      In your profile there is a "showdead" option
  - newppc 8y ago
    Maybe shadow banned because the story is 4 years old, and has been repeated word for word already? https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mike2477&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mike2477&sort=byPopularity&pre... https://upupgrow.com/how-i-built-a-5000-per-month-side-project/ https://upupgrow.com/how-i-built-a-5000-per-month-side-proje... https://getsimpledata.com/blog/sales-best-practices/2015828how-i-built-a-5k-mrr-side-project-in-5-months/ https://getsimpledata.com/blog/sales-best-practices/2015828h... Great story, but may be one reason.
  - csa 8y ago
    I vouched for the dead comments. The story might need to have a missing date on it (4 years old?), but the two comments that the author of the post made don’t seem to violate the terms or spirit of HN rules. If someone can show me how the rules were broken in his comments, I will gladly unvouch.
kokokokoko 8y ago
Based on when this product was created, I can almost guarantee they are just manually scraping LinkedIn (plus a few other places - Facebook, twitter, Bloomberg, maybe even Pitchbook). There are custom Google search portals you can use to search LinkedIn via keyword that not everyone knows about. From there one can use a bunch of services that will provide you (mostly)valid emails at various companies. I imagine he made a quick set of tutorials for his outsourced contractors and had his virtual assistant he found on oDesk do the hiring and setting up of those contractors. This quote from the article is wild: "Customers have to train their team and the billing is variable so your cost per lead ranges from $.50 to $5" You can beat that number paying people $20/hr to do this stuff, let alone exploiting people out in the Philippines on I'm sure the not livable wages he's paying them(Aka the fallacy of low rent/cost of living in developing economies). Sigh... you know we're at the end of the cycle when it's just a bunch of outsourcers with marketing backgrounds.
- hnzix 8y ago
  > the fallacy of low rent/cost of living in developing economies Let's say a knowledge worker in a developing country could survive on $1 USD a day, adjusting food and rent to local cost. If a local white collar job paid them $5 a day, and a remote "exploiting" job paid them $15 a day, but an American could earn $50 a day for the same task, is this really a moral hazard?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - hawkice 8y ago
    No, ya see, it's wrong to pay people in poorer countries less because now you're talking to a poor person. If you hire an American, you never even spoke to a poor person, so it isn't your fault. If that sounds like a fever dream, you aren't alone, but it's my best guess at understanding what's happening. Obviously, my complete lack of employing people in central Africa is why they are all middle class Americans now, so I'm doing my part.
    - 8y ago
asimjalis 8y ago
It was a lead gen tool. He could have used the tool to generate leads for the tool.

wilsonnb3 8y ago

> Most people in the tech industry are brainwashed by Silicon Valley group think. These people believe that every business must have a billion dollar opportunity. If anything, I’d say that most people in the tech industry in Silicon Valley are brainwashed into thinking that entrepreneurship is the One True Path to salvation. Much like whoever wrote this article. Who else would recommend that someone follow the path that “led to depression, social isolation, and the hardest time of my life” just because they got lucky in the end?

Swizec 8y ago
> Who else would recommend that someone follow the path that “led to depression, social isolation, and the hardest time of my life” just because they got lucky in the end? One of my favorite Ewan McGregor quotes from watching Long Way Round recently was when he would say ”This is the part that really sucks right now and is just so hard it makes you wanna cry, but it’s the part we remember most fondly later” He said that on multiple occasions. It maps well to stuff I recently learned in Thinking Fast and Slow about our experiencing self versus our remembering self. It turns out we cherish sucky experiences tht end well more dearly than we do experiences that are great (or bad) throughout.
- mcguire 8y ago
  What about sucky experiences that don't end well?
  - solveit 8y ago
    Fuck those. We wish we hadn't been so mindblowingly stupid as to put ourselves through those.
    - all2 8y ago
      Well, those can also be remembered fondly. One that crops up in my memory with some frequency is lying face-down in three inches of snow. My feet are going numb. My SAW is freezing my fingers. My helmet keeps sliding down over my eyes. We've been out here on the perimeter for almost two hours, just waiting for the word to move. They told us to embrace the suck. It was fun. I've never felt so alive.

blakesterz 8y ago

> As a millennial there are few things that rank as desirable as finding a recurring source of income that doesn’t take much work That made me laugh! As someone much older I can honestly say that there are few things that rank as desirable as finding a recurring source of income that doesn’t take much work for me too.

Skunkleton 8y ago
As a millennial myself, I would like the need for income taken off the table so that I can find a recurring source of meaningful work.
- zanny 8y ago
  This is such a modern problem too. No matter what anyone feels about it having to farm crops to eat was definitely meaningful work a hundred years ago. Even if you were being exploited in a factory suicide was common but mostly from abuse and injury rather than the vacuousness of the job. Its wholly contemporary to invent bullshit jobs and imagine complexity to keep people at desks en masse, leaving them with such a feeling of their lives being pointless.
  - Skunkleton 8y ago
    Truth. My job is "important", but at the same time I don't think anyone's life would be measurably worse if I didn't do it (besides mine lol). IMO it is kind of a problem with software in general. It is getting me down honestly; I could use some advice.
    - maxerickson 8y ago
      Short term, find sources of fulfillment that are not your job. Longer term, seek a similarly comfortable position that you find more meaningful.
    - sbov 8y ago
      Part of why I like working at smaller companies that focus on serving small-medium sized businesses. At this level you are actually building a piece of software for users rather the C-suite.

holoduke 8y ago

I created a successful side project back in 2014. It is still running and making 20 times more than I would get with a normal job. But i was lucky. Lucky to be born in a rich country. Lucky because I was given a computer at the age of 5. Lucky because I had unlimited education opportunities. Lucky because I had a friend who gave me access to something I needed for my business. And many other lucks. I will never deny that fact. But reading these stories makes me a bit angry, because it is just not that simple. It's always easy to translate a successful story into a guideline. But that guideline isn't worth anything when all those luck properties are different.

saagarjha 8y ago
What was your side project, if you don’t mind me asking?
arbuge 8y ago
In hindsight, all these stories seem to have a clear thread running through them which can be replicated by anyone with reasonable intelligence, drive, and time. In practice that particular thread likely required all kinds of environmental details to occur - details the entrepreneur might not have noticed at the time, might have forgotten about later, or might be discounting as unimportant.
- tachyonbeam 8y ago
  One of the things that helps the most, it seems to me, is having the self-confidence to take the risk. You also have to be motivated enough and in good enough health (eg: not burnt out) to be able to work on this side-project after your job. Then of course you need the right skills, the right timing, and the free time and financial resources to execute your plan. However, at the end of the day, you are taking a risk, it's a gamble. What stops most people is the fear of failure. This fear isn't necessarily unwarranted. As the author points out, he has a previous failed startup. Most people don't have the drive to work hundreds of hours after work and possibly invest their own hard earned cash in a project they suspect deep down might not actually pan out. I know I find it difficult. Still, I don't dislike these stories. It's good if it inspires people to take (calculated) risks, and it is possible to learn from failures. Though I would also say that yeah, there's probably some self-selection going on. The people out there with 2 or 3 failed attempts at monetizing side-projects probably don't feel super eager to write a blog post and tell us all how we can improve our lives by following in their footsteps.

yellowapple 8y ago

I witnessed "Play #3" firsthand. The first startup for which I worked (developing a peer-to-peer learning system that paired up students to learn off one another, whether in person or via video chat) had an uphill battle getting customers and investors because we had to convince them that the problem our product solved was actually a problem they had. Our product happened to chiefly operate by integrating with a different one (Khan Academy), so much of our time "in the wild" pitching to potential customers was spent giving KA free advertisement before we could even explain what our product did. There were multiple other factors behind why we ultimately didn't succeed and ended up all going our separate ways (and I know I wasn't blameless there), but in hindsight I think this was the central factor. We barely had the resources - sapient or monetary - to sell our own product; trying to sell other people's products upon which ours depended was doomed to fail. I still think we had an excellent and valuable product, and I stand by the code we wrote and the platform we built; we were just too far ahead of our time :) One of these days, when things like Khan Academy are a bit more mainstream in classrooms, I'd love to (with my old boss' permission, of course) try restarting that particular project and giving it another go.

ironSkillet 8y ago
coursolve?
cosmie 8y ago
> We barely had the resources - sapient or monetary - to sell our own product; trying to sell other people's products upon which ours depended was doomed to fail. Just to know, this isn't a particularly uncommon problem. I spent quite a few years working in the B2B lead generation space, and there are countless companies built around the value proposition of being a complementary product to another software platforms. There are quite a few techniques you can use to suss out what software and platforms companies are using internally, in order to better target your prospecting. Or you can skip that step and go straight to purchasing a list of companies that are known users of that platform. There are companies that curate that type of information - similar to BuiltWith[1] or Wappalyzer[2], but include internal-only technology and not just what's visible by crawling their website. Or you can take it even further, and commission a custom program from a B2B lead generation firm which includes a requirement that any leads have self-reported that they use a specific platform and that they have decision making authority over it[3]. There are also a ton of options in between; feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat more (email in profile). [1] https://builtwith.com/ https://builtwith.com/ [2] https://www.wappalyzer.com/ https://www.wappalyzer.com/ [3] These are a patently different class of lead generation program than what the article references - both in quality and cost. You're looking at $20-$50 per lead vs. $1 per lead. But with a guarantee that they match your targeting and pre-qualification criteria, even if that pre-qualification criteria was as random as "she has confirmed they use Khan Academy internally, and that she's in charge of it, and that <insert your complementary product's niche> is a pain point for them".

beezle 8y ago

Left unsaid is what the bottom line margin is. 10%? 30%? More?

wyldfire 8y ago

Stupid question, how could you possibly automate lead generation? For that matter, how do you do it manually? Search for potential customers and read up about their business?

jbigelow76 8y ago
- Google AdWords > Landing page data entry form - Email (spam) blast > Landing page data entry form - Game or content paywall > submit personal info to bypass.
wtracy 8y ago
LinkedIn is one starting point.
derekp7 8y ago
What about Reddit type ads ("Promoted posts"), in a relevant subreddit, with comments enabled? I've seen that on other advice lists, would like to know real-world experiences on that though.
csa 8y ago
1. Know the keywords that will lead you to potential leads. 2. Pay a VA to use the keyword list to locate businesses and/or people in search engines, FB, and LinkedIn, and record their contact info. 3. Sell this info. The steps are easy. The execution is decidedly less so.
infinii 8y ago
I don't think he automated it. It looks like he outsourced it to cheaper labour in the Philipines
systematical 8y ago
You can, I replied to the main thread about my two side businesses without going into specifics. Both my businesses were lead generation. I won't give the industries a way, but here's the jist. I had a system I built for a clients lead generation business. I asked if I could re-purpose the software and in exchange I'd provide the enhancements free as well as discounted development. He agreed. It was a basic system where a lead would come in for a geographical area, that area would have a vendor assigned, and an email would be dispatched. If you do the SEO and marketing right, the leads become pretty passive. I improved the system in two ways: 1. My client generated monthly invoices. This was a problem since he had to chase people down for money. I setup a credit system where you purchased credits (leads) in advanced. I gave a 20% discount for purchasing 100 credits at a time. I also gave new customers their first 10 credits free. No obligation, no contract, not joking. 2. Email sucks. I integrated twilio and did direct call dispatching with numbers I controlled. I spammed the internet with these numbers. If a customer ever dropped off, I'd just find someone else. Rarely did I need to do that since the leads were so good. This required a lot of work up front, but in areas where my marketing was dialed in already it just always generated income. This is the kind of stuff fluff articles like this never tell you, the actual specifics. You could now take this basic model and apply to any industry that requires leads. Bonus if the industry is underserved, not huge, and filled with techno-peasants.

burtonator 8y ago

I actually did this too... I create Datastreamer (http://www.datastreamer.io/ http://www.datastreamer.io/) which (when I created it) was an RSS syndication platform as a service. You gave us RSS feeds and then we would index them and send you the output without having to deal with the insanity of RSS feeds. This was a decade ago though. I've been running it since and now it's more of a massive search engine of content - nearly a petabyte at this point. We have an Elasticsearch API which our customers query. We also have a streaming API if you just want to listen to the crawl data directly. It's been a wild ride but here's my big takeaway - if your company is profitable it actually might be because you're sitting on something MASSIVE and don't realize it. Datastreamer was the first company in the content indexing space and we were WAY ahead of everyone else. I was more focused on enjoying life, traveling, backpacking, etc. In retrospect when you're sitting on a rocket it might make sense to buy more gas and light up that bad boy. I'm actually in the middle of a (mild) pivot of Datastreamer right now. We think it might have significant value for the coming 'code war' we're in right now with Russia. With companies continually looking at social media as a way to manipulate democratic societies these governments need tools (and data) to figure out where they're being attacked and how their citizens are being manipulated.

yeldarb 8y ago
> I was more focused on enjoying life, traveling, backpacking, etc. > In retrospect when you're sitting on a rocket it might make sense to buy more gas and light up that bad boy. I can identify with this. I started a Facebook game in early 2008 that picked up a million users in its first year. Back then all the stars were aligned and if I would have had a bigger vision for it there’s no reason it couldn’t have turned into a massive company. I remember reading the TechCrunch article about Zynga raising 100 million in VC and laughing because “why would a Facebook game company need that much money? I’m really profitable being completely bootstrapped!” Don’t get me wrong, the lifestyle it has allowed me has been amazing. And it’s still going strong 10 years later (we have users who have been paying $10/mo for their premium subscription for that whole 10 years). But the opening to grow it into something huge was only available for a short period of time. Now users are too expensive, organic traffic is minimal, and most users on the platform are locked into their existing games and resistant to trying new ones. Zynga rode that into becoming a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company. “Think bigger” is a take-away I’ll definitely bring with me to my next venture someday.

wyldfire 8y ago

> That was made possible when I took a couple friends (who are salespeople) out for drinks to tell them what I was working on. Afterwards they both said they would try to think of people to refer me to. Thomas deserves all the credit for building and selling his business, but the value of this point here is critical, in my mind. IMO key takeaways are (1) knowing lots of people helps a lot, and (2) asking for help/daring to talk about your project helps a lot.

derekp7 8y ago

If you don't mind me asking, I'd like some help laying out what my next steps should be on one of my side projects. I had an idea for a side project, ran it by a hand full of friends and associates, expecting to have a bunch of holes poked into it (they have done that to me many times in the past). This time they all think I have something. Problem is I work full time, as a Linux systems engineer (30 years of Unix experience), with a side passion for C programming, web technologies, and have built a hand full of web apps that are getting a lot of use at work (btw I'm not under any contract prohibiting side projects, and have cleared it with my management). Next problem: The project itself is relatively simple, has client-side pieces that will be open source, and over all I prototyped it in about a weekend's worth of work, but need probably a month or so to get it more polished and robust. The upshot is that it can be easily replicated by anyone in a similar space. There are similar products that try to solve the same problem, but in a rather backwards and less secure method, but I'm really not sure why other vendors haven't thought of this project first. Third problem: I'm relatively new at modern advanced web apps, so things like taking payments, handling customers, integrating to a customer's on-premise or cloud based authentication (O365, Active Directory, etc) is something I'm not too familiar with (for my projects I just used ldap bind for authentication against a local AD server). So for my next step, should I put a prototype / demo site online, and let people create demo accounts that last for a couple weeks? Then if there is sufficient interest, set up something like a Stripe account? Start off with local user account authentication, then later on add the ability for customers to set up users authenticating against their own AD domain or O365 account? Or would I be better off finding a business partner that has been through all this already?

blacksoil 8y ago
> The upshot is that it can be easily replicated by anyone in a similar space I think many problems are like this. We engineers to think that we have to build something "rocket science", but actually many businesses don't require "rocket science" software to take off. It's more about the execution. >I'm relatively new at modern advanced web apps, so things like taking payments, handling customers, integrating to a customer's on-premise or cloud based authentication These days, there are almost already SaaS for everything. A little googling here and there will find you what you need :) Also sites like indiehackers.com is really awesome. People share what indie projects they had built, there's also a comment section where people can ask. >Or would I be better off finding a business partner that has been through all this already? I think you should try to do this in parallel with trying to learn it yourself. Finding a good, competent, and suitable business partner isn't exactly the easiest thing to do.

nowarninglabel 8y ago

"the first thing I did was hire a team in the Philipinnes to ensure I never had to stay up until 1am building lists" Is it possible for anyone to share how they found people to hire/outsource building sales lists to?

illumin8 8y ago
He says right in the article: odesk.
- sah2ed 8y ago
  Right, but they now go by the name UpWork. That the article uses the old name of oDesk from 4 years ago points to the need to add “(2015)” to the thread title. https://www.upwork.com https://www.upwork.com
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - vonseel 8y ago
    actually, the article was posted yesterday. He’s writing about his experience in 2015...
    - sah2ed 8y ago
      That the article was published recently may be true but the article’s contents doesn’t really contain new info. Please see this comment up-thread [0] which surfaced older incarnations of the same content. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18880312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18880312

csa 8y ago

Only a tangent to the OP, but... I find it hilarious that he calls Abercrombie & Fitch the “high end clothing brand for middle schoolers”. A&F used to target “elite outdoorsmen” (not a joke — think a high end LL Bean), and they made some really good stuff. Some of that quality lasted until the 90s and early 00s after changing hands and shifting towards targeting youth casual wear, but their clothing line is almost all overpriced junk now. Such a sad loss.

iddqd 8y ago
Not a fan of how they portray their brand, but in my experience A&F makes really solid fits for althetic type build (think big thighs). This in my experience is really hard to find on clothes of a somewhat modern cut.
- csa 8y ago
  I hear ya. Even though I’m not their target demographic, I bought some of their stuff for the same reason — great quality and great fit for athletic builds. Something happened in the late aughts. The fit is not as consistently good (my body changed very little over that time), and the quality of the material and stitching is much lower.

the_other_guy 8y ago

shady and only tells what kind of person OP is

blunte 8y ago

This is great and educational. But I've noticed that many (most?) of the successful side projects were started by people who had some sales and marketing experience. Sales first, tech second (or third). If you want other people to buy, rent, invest, etc., you have to be able to find the right people and communicate with them in a way that will lead them to become your customers/partners. Unfortunately, I doubt many of us with CompSci degrees and years/decades of experience have those sales and marketing skills. So I guess there's a business just waiting (for someone who knows sales + tech)! Teach nerds how to market. I might be a customer.

shostack 8y ago
I'm a marketer who has gradually gotten more and more technical over my career. I refuse to believe that people with CompSci degrees can't quickly pick up the more basic (and even many intermediate and advanced) marketing skills, particularly in the digital realm. Yes, knowing how to apply them, and learning about audiences messaging, etc. are going to be challenging, but you'd be shocked how far you can get for many products and services just by semi-intelligent testing and implementation of best practices with things like paid search, SEO, email marketing automation, analyzing web analytics, etc. In fact, I'm often shocked at how many marketers are not technical enough to do those things at even a basic level. There's a LOT of good information out there, and sometimes it really is just a matter of honing your bullshit detector to weed out the guru spam. Heck, spending a week reading through the Google Ads and Facebook help docs would set you ahead of quite a few of your peers, AND you'd have a leg up on implementing the more advanced approaches that require technical integration. That said, finding an experienced marketing mentor or consultant can help you short circuit the learning curve and guide you away from wasted time and money. Spending $5k with a consultant to help you create your initial plan might be wiser than say, randomly spending $5k on FB ads without having known you should setup conversion tracking, how to properly structure your account and audiences, how to build great creative, etc. and then not even having any clue what the spend did for you because you don't understand what the data is actually saying.
- blunte 8y ago
  We can definitely learn things (CompSci people). In fact, my career is full of near constant learning. However, when it comes to marketing, knowing where to start (on one's own) is a challenge. And as you say, having a good bs detector is important. I'll take your advice about reading the Google Ads and FB ads docs! Thanks.

ttty2 8y ago

So how did he got customers? > As I mentioned, my first lead/opportunity came from an introduction. That was made possible when I took a couple friends (who are salespeople) out for drinks to tell them what I was working on. Afterwards they both said they would try to think of people to refer me to. > My next two customers came from a less obvious channel. A friend told me about a service called Growth Geeks and suggested I create a profile for my service. I was hesitant at first because it seemed like a distraction, but I signed up nonetheless. So basically he sent an email to the founder of that website like this https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5706d181b09f95e331b219de/t/5c37799ff950b7bb44f11390/1547139502227/4+hour+post+img+3.png?format=1000w https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5706d181b09f95e331b21... saying that the author (a bit confusing to figure out as both are called Mike/Michael) can grow your sales with no marketing. Then this happened: > He responded that day and asked if I had time to speak on the phone. > On the call I learned that he had a customer who needed 2,000 leads a month and they needed 2,000 leads a month for themselves. I used the same sales process as my first call and closed two deals in 30 minutes worth $3,000 / mo (25% of the $4,000 in revenue went to Growth Geeks). Suddenly I went from $1,000/mo to $4,000 / mo. My question is now, how he manages to make 4k leads?! > Later that week I decided it was time to double down on this side project. I spent a couple nights writing email templates and planning outbound email campaigns. By May of 2015 I had sent over 30,000 sales and marketing emails so I knew how to get high response rates (see play #1). So now he says he sent over 30000 emails (I assume he has a mailing list of 30000 and sent an email, but that doesn't match what he says, he seems to have sent multiple emails). So let's say he has 30000 email list and a click-through rate of 13.3% (which I think is very very high, maximum I got was around 3-4% and was only once) then he would make 4000 leads. First thing I think is strange, is how he got 30000 emails? That's kind of the most important part of the guide, without this he couldn't make any lead. Then he says this: > I sent emails to about 500 people over the course of a month which resulted in ~20 free trial sign-ups. Two of those free trials converted within the month and by the end of June, I had $5,000 in booked MRR. Note that this is another customer acquisition source. So he has an additional 500 emails. I mean how can a person reproduce this guide without these mailing lists? So even if he says how he did it, you can't really do the same unless you have: - Friends that can sign up for your product or refer other people - Big email lists - Create leads from ??? I feel like all these missing points leads directly to his startup https://getsimpledata.com/ https://getsimpledata.com/ - So I guess is more about marketing. Anyway, I think the post was interesting, but not too much I can do about it because I probably know about: - Focus on a problem that already exists - Work on your pain point - Outsource to a cheap country - Positioning in the market Some types for the author: Philipinnes

systematical 8y ago

The truth is, there is no 5-10 hour work week for 99% of people. Even if you make something like this person did, if you don't continue investing a lot of time into it, eventually competition will break you to pieces. Why? Because your competitor is hungry and working a lot more than 5-10 hours a week. I know this, because I've built two side income businesses, sat back and collected money only to find competitors had taken me over. They weren't big by any means but the $3,000 a month I made off one and the $1,000 a month off another was quite nice. I could've quit my job and traveled, but instead I paid down my mortgage and banked/invested the rest. This left me with a lot of money (for me). I eventually sold both businesses when I saw the writing on the wall with various competitors and industry changes. I did end up traveling for a while though. I did that with a remote job. Sure I had to work during the day, but that left plenty of time to explore whatever city I was in at night and do bigger adventures on the weekend. TLDR; 5-10 hour work week doesn't last.

madeuptempacct 8y ago
I experience this on a microscopic scale. When crypto was new, there was no way to get price for micro-coins, so I built a site doing that. I got a decent amount of traffic and got actively pursued by exchanges to put up ads for them. In the end, I didn't really make anything, but saw the aggressive development of similar sites as we tried to outcompete each other, in a "business" where the potential profit was maybe $100/month without growing huge. A lot of similar sites don't make money and survive on donations to this day.

SexOfGand 8y ago

This project is shady as hell. I am making better money working at FAANG for relatively ethical work better by hundreds of lawyers and moral force. I just look down on these people who have no programming skill to get paid higher at top companies. Resorting to cheap tricks at us.

RyanShook 8y ago

Good article, thanks! The business seemed to have been built on oDesk workers but now that site it called Upwork. Are there any alternatives to upwork out there?

ihavelorda 8y ago

Shady as fuck. I'd never do such unethical things to make money. I work at FAANG where I get paid more than these scums for ethical work policed by 100s of lawyers team who are stalwart of ethics. Honest question, how do these guys sleep at night? Knowing that you've been scamming grandmas with your shitty sales funnels is a grave threat to internet and entrepreneurship. Real entrepreneur are like Elon Musk who do something of value.

person_of_color 8y ago

Has anyone done this with a hardware product?

herova 8y ago

Next topics for Hackernews: "How to be a success spammer" "How to grow web doorways network as side project" etc

ForHackernews 8y ago

> found a virtual assistant on oDesk named Jonathan Am I correct in thinking this "virtual" assistant is not a bot, but just a human hired remotely?

rchaud 8y ago
That's exactly what it is. Freelancers working for relative pennies. Tim Ferriss started the bad habit of calling this 'automation' in the 4hr work week book.
molticrystal 8y ago
Virtual indeed refers to their presence. While to you, you know they are remote, for any outward facing function though, such as with customer interaction, ideally they'll seem like they are no further then the next office or department of your company.

ensiferum 8y ago

This article reads like total BS. Within 6 months to 30k income. Yeah right.

charliebrownau 8y ago

Goes to show * Hard Work * Effort * Capitalism * Free market Actually leads to success and reward

bayesian_horse 8y ago

To me this always sounds like "How I won the lottery..." Maybe I am too pessimistic and jaded from studying statistics...

haihaibye 8y ago

500 emails for 20 signups = 96% off target. >> By May of 2015 I had sent over 30,000 sales and marketing emails .96 × 30,000 = You just annoyed ~28,800 people. It's only because this immense amount of time lost is borne by strangers that it's a viable business. Let's not glorify spammers.

Zelmor 8y ago
The article is also just shit clickbait.
growt 8y ago
A 4% signup rate actually signifies really well targeted emails. Not everyone who doesn't sign up is annoyed by the mail (or did even open or read it). I think this is far from beeing spam, where you would see signup rates well below 1%.
- smohare 8y ago
  Spam generally includes unsolicited and unwanted emails, targeted or not.
  - growt 8y ago
    Sure, but it also generally means large quantities of those (regarding email I don't think 30k qualifies as large quantities). My personal definition would be that the messages were sent without any thought if the audience might be interested in the content and that does not appear to be the case here. If your personal definition is that every email you receive ,that you did not ask for in some way yourself, is spam then thats ok. But as a general definition thats a bit strict.
    - devdas 8y ago
      It's unsolicited bulk email, and bulk is generally > 10 or so for most people, > 1 if you are strict.

willart4food 8y ago

Nice. (commenting so that I can remember this post)

akavel 8y ago
There's a "favorite" link you should click instead, located just below the article's title on this very page — it'll add the article to your "favorites" list at: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=willart4food https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=willart4food