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Six Figures in 6 days
- pulse7 6y agoHe writes "97% profit margins". How is that possible if AppStore takes 30%? EDIT: This seems to be outside AppStore.
- eertami 6y agoIt isn't an App Store app, he's taking payment on his own site and delivering PNGs to an email address. Not sure how I feel about the article. Kind of reads like those "I got stupid lucky this one time, so can you!" fluff pieces at best, and at worst is just further advertisement/marketing for the icon pack.
- todd_t 6y ago> I got stupid lucky this one time, so can you! If you publish often, act immediately, be transparent, etc, etc. Luck is at the intersection of preparation and opportunity.
- MauranKilom 6y agoNot sure how far you read, but the "lessons learned" at the bottom abstracts very well from the necessary but not sufficient "I got lucky" condition. I found it informative.
- leppr 6y agoIt is advertisement for his "Notion to Website" product. It's nicely done, because this is the first thing I got from the article, and I think so will most entrepreneur types reading it. The whole point is "I made $100k from being able to quickly spin up a website + payment system at the right time".
- holtalanm 6y ago> just further advertisement/marketing for the icon pack. this reads 100% like most blog posts looking to promote their product. a bit of inspiration wrapped around 'try my product!', with a dash of bragging about their success.
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago> a bit of inspiration wrapped around 'try my product!' Where exactly did you find a “try my product” in the post?
- colinmhayes 6y agoThe notion stuff. The entire post is about using his product to quickly create a website that capitalizes on timing.
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoOk, I hear you. But I disagree that the entire post is about that. It was just a paragraph (which I didn’t even really notice initially).
- traf 6y agoI shared the post with the sole goal of sharing the story behind it. I only linked the icons so people can have context.
- aceelric 6y agoCongrats !
- maaarghk 6y agowhy when i ctrl+clicked on a link did the current tab change URL instead?
- kyran_adept 6y agoAs an Android user, I am completely blown away by two things: #1 iPhones got this only in 2020, when Android had this since the first version, #2 iPhone owners are willing to spend $28 for a icon pack, a very nice one, but still an icon pack.
- hnlmorg 6y agoTechnically it's still not available to iPhone users. The actual method of changing the icons is a really nasty workaround that needs to be performed for each and every application. Instructions: https://icons.tr.af/how https://icons.tr.af/how Don't get me wrong, I do love my iPhone, but this isn't something most people (myself included) will have the patience to do.
- tl 6y agoIt also slows down the launch of every app because you're launching an app to launch your app. The idea that people would pay money, do a bunch of extra work and make their device slower just to change the appearance of their home screen because a handful of people on social media popularize it blows my mind.
- newen 6y agoI see no one remembers MySpace.
- hnlmorg 6y ago> The idea that people would pay money, do a bunch of extra work and make their device slower just to change the appearance of their home screen because a handful of people on social media popularize it blows my mind. I'm surprised you find that surprising because customisation isn't exactly a new phenomenon. I mean is it really any different to techies slapping stickers on their laptop? Or car enthusiasts modding their vehical? Or home owners decorating their house? Maybe you consider this different because it is software rather than physical stuff; but people do also change their ring tones and wallpaper images too, people customise their avatars on MMO games and profile pictures on social networks. Heck, I even have an alternative coloured border on HN. So while this particular workaround will undoubtedly be more work than most people are willing to take I do still get why some people might want to customise their home screen.
- LandR 6y agoThere is nothing on this blog that I can see except text and some links at the bottom, yet if I have JS disabled I just get a black page. JS to display text. Brilliant.
- elliotbnvl 6y agoReact.
- Uberphallus 6y agoDoesn't this piss search engines off? Does the content even get indexed?
- diath 6y agoI'm sure they're sophisticated enough to be able to render the website properly w/ JS. Search engines aren't just regular simple crawlers (not that I condone the use of JS for what could have been a simple static HTML & CSS page given how minimal it is).
- reflectiv 6y agoGoogle started rendering pages before indexing a while back because of this...so generally it's ok from an indexing perspective (assuming you still have working URLs that can also be loaded in the same way for all your linked-to content).
- m1gu3l 6y agoJS to display text = i don't have to read this.
- aendruk 6y agoI feel strongly enough about this that I had “js;dr” stickers made and have been distributing them at conferences for a couple years.
- infraviolet 6y ago
- m12k 6y agoAll I'm seeing is a completely black page. Wonder if it's uBlock origin, Firefox, or macOS that the page doesn't play nice with.
- querez 6y agoSame here, but if you let the page sit for ~30 seconds, it suddenly loads some content. Probably a very unoptimized homepage design.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- michaelbrooks 6y agoI thought it was uBlock, and disabled it to see what would happen. Once I refreshed the page, it displayed which led me to believe something weird was going. I tried again with uBlock enabled and refreshed the page which worked. So the bottom line is, refresh the page, and you should see the content.
- marzullo 6y agoFor me, on Windows10/FF82b4, I had to click the reader view mode. No clue why it rendered like that by default.
- Daniel_sk 6y agoBlank page with FF + uBlock but then the text appeared after page refresh.
- traf 6y agoI believe this was the animsition script that was causing the issues. I removed it and should load fine now.
- malydok 6y agoThe same issue occurs on https://super.so/ https://super.so/, if you happen to have any affiliation with them.
- dt3ft 6y agoSo he says oversharing doesn't exist? I built https://20-things.com https://20-things.com but I doubt anyone would care to look at its source code since it was built with ASP.NET MVC (not Core). To publish or not to publish?
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoMicrosoft published the source code for things like calc and other ancient tools (I seem to remember notepad and minesweeper but I could be wrong). The interest was huge and it made the HN front page. So why not? If nothing else, it is historically significant.
- dt3ft 6y agoValid point. I'll get it out asap. Thank you.
- m12k 6y agoSo the trick to being in the right place at the right time is to find the right place, then just wait there for the right time to arrive.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoIf you read his post, he says to continually publish to find out what sticks. Your comment sounds like you want to publish once and succeed. You need to also fail to succeed.
- m12k 6y agoI don't think we disagree. One of Unity's founders once compared what they did, making a game engine for Mac, to building a ship in the desert. Then the iPhone App Store came along, like a tidal wave through the desert, and they've been riding that wave ever since.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago> find the right place But you won’t know it’s the “right place” until after the fact.
- glaberficken 6y agoI guess the gist of it is more that with digital assets you don't really need to wait at the right place. You keep laying "traps" in several places as you "wait". Then just keep on the lookout and when one of the "traps" is triggered go and attack it again taking in mind the current context.
- macNchz 6y agoIt’s funny how trends change but Apple users’ appetite for icons stays the same...10 years ago Apple made the navigation icons in iTunes greyscale instead of color. I wasn’t sold on it so I fired up ResEdit and quickly edited the old icons into the new sprite file inside the app package. I saw other people complaining online so I posted the updated resource file on my $5/mo shared hosting and put a link on a forum...it was picked up on some blogs but I didn’t realize it had become popular, then I woke up a couple of days later and I’d blown through 10s of gigs of bandwidth and had my hosting account frozen (conveniently the day I’d planned a long roadtrip to test a gps/photo sharing app I’d been working on). Years later people were still asking if I could help them change their iTunes icons, or even getting mad at me that I hadn’t updated the file to work with newer versions! https://osxdaily.com/2010/09/03/get-color-icons-back-in-the-itunes-10-sidebar/ https://osxdaily.com/2010/09/03/get-color-icons-back-in-the-...
- jacquesm 6y agoNothing like free users when it comes to entitlement. I think this is mostly because they don't realize which companies are large and which are small or even just hobby projects, it is trivial to appear much larger than you are on the web.
- MiroF 6y ago> think this is mostly because they don't realize which companies are large and which are small or even just hobby projects Definitely - it is hard for many to grasp how productive a single engineer can be in putting together a project that looks quite polished and professional. But also, some people are just mean.
- a1369209993 6y agoTo be fair, part of that (as suggested by "getting mad at me that I hadn't updated the file to work with newer versions"), is that macNchz was providing a service that should have been provided officially by Apple, and many users lack (or decline to exhibit) the perceptiveness to realize that Apple has abrogated its reponsibility to correct defects in products it recieves payment for, and that this is not a official Apple website, but rather a internet rando cleaning up after one small subset of Apple's negligence. Though, as MiroF points out, some people are just jerks.
- falcolas 6y agoMeta rant: Why, oh why do people use low contrast colors and expect people to be able to read their blog? Has nobody heard about accessibility? Or do they not care, because “I can read it”.
- hamza_nouali 6y agoI checked Chrome DevTools and it looks accessible. even though, it's hard to read.
- falcolas 6y agoChrome tools will tell you if it meets the minimum "don't sue me" standards, not whether it's readable. Their other choices - thin stroke font, minimal font size - make the contrast insufficient.
- jedimastert 6y ago> Has nobody heard about accessibility? Or do they not care, because “I can read it”. Genuinely, no. For those who have it, vision is such an integral part of...well, existence that intuitively grasping that people have completely different ways of perceiving it beyond the obvious is extremely difficult. This goes a bit beyond the "try to explain 'blue' to someone" troupe. I have difficulties explaining my own brand of vision difficulties (or hearing difficulties, for that matter) without basically explaining the optics of vision and going from there. For instance, for folks with without some kind of color difficulties, being able to look at two colors (what most would perceive as) completely different colors and being able to say "those colors would look the same to color blind folks" is almost impossible without training or extra tools. So no, it doesn't occur to someone without training to constant question their own perception, unfortunately. The most we can do is give web masters a shout when we notice and promote accessibility tools wherever we can
- falcolas 6y agoI get what you're saying, but decreasing vision acuity is one thing everybody in this world is guaranteed to run into (barring an early death, that is).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- MrLeap 6y agoThis is heartening. I've made some goofy stuff recently that I've been vacillating between releasing or not. The most complete thing is a uhh.. parody text editor.. game. I've seen other indie projects recently that gave me all sorts of imposter syndrome and made me second guess the value in something so critical as a text editor made for laughs. I'm encouraged by a 28$ icon pack to wrap it up and put it out there, even if it's for 2$ and doesn't sell at all. Ride or die, right?
- huhtenberg 6y agoRe: the icon set that this guy's pitching - does anyone remember the Prada phone? It was one beautifully done UI. https://www.slashgear.com/prada-phone-3-0-by-lg-review-08215250/#jp-carousel-215258 https://www.slashgear.com/prada-phone-3-0-by-lg-review-08215...
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoIt looks like an amateurishly themed phone to me. But I probably would have thought differently in 2012.
- vmception 6y agoI would ignore most of this advice and simplify it this way: Act Immediately Get an influencer All the rest of OP's journey doesn't really matter. My newest venture this summer did 7 figures after I got motivated by watching Hamilton, this was also a week long period of sales, which came after a 2 week long period of idea and building hype. It definitely came down to doing something very trendy and having people know about it, and there is nothing organic in that process. I don't think the same venture could do that now already. It would have to be new trendy things.
- 55555 6y agosame experiences here. timing and big scale. trends and influencers are powerful.
- chrisbrauns 6y agoI think "Publish Often" is also an important part of OP's success. Had they not practiced making custom icons since 2013, they probably would not have been ready to capitalize on the one time they got buzz.
- vmception 6y agoI don't. I've hired people on fiverr and tapped development teams I've worked with before to deliver quickly. "Had I not have already vetted that development team I wouldn't have been ready to capitalize so quickly. Had I not practiced making static websites. Had I not practiced tying SSL to domain names so that people take me seriously." I'm not diminishing OP's skill, I am diminishing the message and pointing out which parts are repeatable. This is prosperity preaching (being rewarded for prior sacrifices because of those prior sacrifices) and wasting everyone's energy if they actually believe that and approach life this way. Unsubscribe to that logic and you still have execute quickly + make sure people know about it.
- nicky0 6y agoI appreciate this view. The story our culture tells us of reward being proportional to sacrifice is well entrenched and of course a complete fantasy.
- trwhite 6y agoAnyone know which font that is? Devtools says "space" but for obvious reasons it's hard to find with Google search. Space Mono is made by Colophon but I don't see it on their website.
- aroundtown 6y agoThe good-ole be lucky story.
- umvi 6y agoIt's like Among Us. Published in 2018, absolutely exploded in 2020 due to a single Twitch streamer. I'm pretty sure the devs of Among Us became millionaires virtually overnight. Influencers with large followings wield awesome power.
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoAnd Flappy Bird before that, right?
- giarc 6y agoI don't think Flappy Bird went viral as a result of a single or even multiple influencers. It seemed to spread by word-of-mouth and blew up that way.
- zulln 6y ago> Although originally unsuccessful, the game received a massive influx of players after being reviewed by the Swedish YouTuber PewDiePie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy_Bird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy_Bird Wikipedias source for that, https://www.businessinsider.com/flappy-bird-origin-2014-2?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/flappy-bird-origin-2014-2?r=...
- giarc 6y agoI stand, incredibly, corrected.
- kevmo314 6y agoAlso before the hype, Among Us wasn't doing well at all. They went from practically zero to straight millions. That's some crazy luck.
- DLay 6y agoMy takeaway from the success of these things is that influencers need to happen upon them organically rather than being paid to advertise them.
- ansible 6y agoI must congratulate you on having a settings icon not be a gear, or even a less meaningful tool of some sort.
- tubularhells 6y agoApple users pay 28 USD for an icon pack. I'm blown away. Is this how they behave with everything? Just ask what you want and they will pay for it?
- spiderfarmer 6y agoPeople who just want something that sets them apart from their peers. Why are you blown away? People pay 50 USD for a personalised phone cover. Is this different because it's software?
- tubularhells 6y agoThere is no difference between these two kinds of insane behaviours.
- spiderfarmer 6y agoOkay you seem to have a weird worldview. I’m intrigued. Why do you think it’s insane? Did you ever buy clothes? What did you buy and what was your reasoning?
- lma21 6y agoI'm an Apple user since 2007. I didn't buy this icon pack.
- cestith 6y ago4,188 sales out of 6,200,000 impressions. That's a 0.0675% conversion rate. The exposure is what's driving the numbers. When the author said "charge more" that's correct when the initial price was $1. I wonder the conversion rate on this if it had been $7. Maybe at a quarter of the price there would have been five times or even ten times the sales. We don't know because no data was gathered. Clearly the conversions would have been higher at a notably lower price, but it's unclear where the crossover point for total profits would be. Alternately, some portion of those 4188 buyers would have purchased at $60 or even $80. Something to remember here is while you can as a consultant make more money in 40 hours if you charge more per hour for your time rather than working extra hours or turning away excess work, the point the author made about leveraging digital distribution should prove it's not the same scenario. Once your development cost is sunk, distribution (outside of an app store) is nearly free. Selling fewer units at a higher price isn't necessarily any better than selling more units at a lower price. The total's the thing.
- georgiecasey 6y ago> In 2013, the jailbreaking days of iOS were in full effect. I thought jailbreaking was basically over by 2013
- skinnymuch 6y agoThat’s correct. That’s around The downfall of jailbreaking.
- hota_mazi 6y agoWhat blows me away is that this is 2020 and iOS still won't let you place icons anywhere you want on your screen. It's not just that you're not allowed to make your home screen look the way you want it, it's that even if you decide for a certain ordering, moving the icons in the right order is tougher than a sliding puzzle.
- jasonv 6y agoThe way widgets are handled in iOS 14, I'll go so far as to say Apple decided this would never be available. It's all very automated now, the re-ordering of icon placements based on widget insertion, the folding and unfolding of "screens" based on the flow of icons to the next screen when widgets push an overflow.
- hota_mazi 6y agoApple decides things will never happen until they make them available (e.g. the iPhone 1 didn't support third party apps). You are describing how the broken way iOS handles icons works. Great. That was not my point. It's broken in the first place. Do you know how many operating system developed in the past forty years don't allow users to position icons where they want? There's just one: iOS. I just don't understand the motivation behind this decision. It makes no sense.
- person_of_color 6y agoHow do these idea even pop into ones head? How can I start hustling? I’m a simple pleb engineer at FAANG, but want to get rich quick.
- nicky0 6y agoBe smart and creative, think different, and most importantly actually try stuff. Have a product in the world that people can pay you for. Don’t expect anything to happen but do it anyway. Whatever idea sets off a feeling of fear and excitement, do that idea. Don’t wait for a safe bet because there are none. If you are embarrassed to describe your idea because it doesn’t make sense to people, that’s also a good sign.
- burlesona 6y agoIf you are working at a FAANG you are already getting rich quick. Working as a freelancer / small business hustler etc., bursts of success like this are extraordinarily rare, and typically fall between long seasons of not making much at all. The upside of the freelancing / side hustling life isn’t the money, it’s the freedom.
- tstewart161 6y agoLots of practice, learning, and failure. This guy got a great combination of product/market fit, timing, and exposure. Finding product/market fit is a skill trainable like anything else (although an incredibly difficult skill to master), timing is just that (plenty of luck involved - but easier with product/market fit). Finally: exposure is easy with the first two - if you have solved a hot problem really well, of course everyone will pick up on that and make it viral. Start with practicing finding product market fit and getting better at timing things. If you can do those, the rest (exposure, wealth, connections, etc) fall into place. It’s that simple, but it definitely isn’t easy at all
- person_of_color 6y agoBut I have the mindset that icons aren't worth a god damn dime yet 100k.
- codegladiator 6y agoGet an influencer and you can sell even an icon pack at $28 to thousands of people.
- m3kw9 6y ago28 is too high for icons. The conversion rate is very telling. Do a 70% sale and promote it and watch it rocket. Maybe that was the plan
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- b20000 6y agoso how much was paid in ads on twitter and how much was paid to the influencer?
- harrisonjackson 6y agoNice coverage for super.so, too! That bump will keep boosting the earnings from this icon pack - whole ecosytem you have here.
- Igelau 6y agoThe "no copyright intended" notice on super.so is the text equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.
- bochoh 6y agoI have several side projects and blog regularly and can definitely agree that it's rain or shine for smaller creators without large audiences. I go from several sales in a day to weeks without any interest. Edit: That being said I'm on Twitter @k0ode if you want to follow along.
- atarian 6y agoHmm I can see this potentially creating a new market. The biggest issue is probably getting app developers on board with variations of their logo.
- nerfhammer 6y agothe actual tweet (doesn't seem to be linked in the article) https://twitter.com/traf/status/1307707156788060160 https://twitter.com/traf/status/1307707156788060160
- bb88 6y agoGood job on the icons. They look more apple than the Appleish than the apple icons.
- gregcrv 6y agoTwo questions: - who pays $28 for icons you have to install yourself one by one?! - most of these icons are protected by copyright/trademark laws, how is still legal?
- xorfish 6y agoAh, success, luck and skill. A really interesting topic. There is also a very good Veritasium Video about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I
- tengbretson 6y agoOf course I check the comments here and theres the usual chorus of dismissals as "just luck." It's funny because anyone who actually believed that would never have created those icons 7 years ago. They would have never published them and they would have never stuck their neck out to promote them. In a way it seems like the best way to ensure that you never "get lucky" is to assume that it's all just luck in the first place.
- dralley 6y agoThis is basically the origin of the saying "you create your own luck". Luck is absolutely, 100% a factor here, but you won't get lucky without putting the effort in first.
- animal_spirits 6y agoOpportunity is where preparation meets luck
- cromulent 6y ago"Victory awaits him who has everything in order — luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck." -- Roald Amundsen
- ConsiderCrying 6y agoIt's not just luck because it's talent plus savviness plus the ability to spin your story. Sure, luck factors in but as anyone with a success story will tell you, it's never just luck unless you're talking about the lottery.
- rodolphoarruda 6y agoWell, from a business perspective this is no less than very impressive. Was he just a heck of a lucky guy? I don't know, luck is everywhere now, but the guy was pretty aware of the steps his product was taking and was able to react accordingly to maximize revenue... that's the secret.
- nonsapreiche 6y agoPeople what to change an X but can not make one theirself so find someone who sell an X that fits the willing (x={icon,...})
- delaaxe 6y agoThis is a typical phenomenon of Extremistan: https://coffeeandjunk.com/mediocristan-extremistan/ https://coffeeandjunk.com/mediocristan-extremistan/
- luord 6y ago> Try many things once to figure out what you want to do twice. For some reason, that was the line that stuck with me the most. Now, the only real skill I have is in software development, but fortunately there are a lot of things to try in software development, so I can give that suggestion a try run.
- erdinc 6y agoit is always good to read success after the story.
- block_dagger 6y ago"the idea of being annoying or over-sharing is only an idea that you invent to stop you from sharing" - I strongly disagree. It's invented by the community to prevent enormous amounts of spam.
- maciejw 6y agoWhat blows my mind is how humble and optimistic that post is. I think the author is still a little bit sceptic: he was well prepared and after initial success he executed perfectly but still: what are the odds? Good luck!
- anderspitman 6y agoMy takeaway from this is build an audience.
- hansdieter1337 6y agoThe most important part to achieve this: Have a lot of luck
- ponker 6y agoNothing is as powerful as having someone’s attention. If Brownlee can get this guy $100K with a tweet imagine what he’s pulling down himself.
- lxe 6y ago> So I quickly packaged them, uploaded them to Gumroad, and embedded them on a Notion site using Super. All of this took about two hours. Love the software stack. Is this the norm these days? Am I out of touch with web tech?
- lxe 6y agoOh no I just bought this but then I looked at the instructions... It's not for the faint of heart to do this for every app.
- andrepd 6y agoHe forgot the most important lesson: be lucky :)
- dheera 6y ago> All from one. Single. Tweet. Well yes, but you usually either need (a) tens of thousands of pre-existing Twitter followers or (b) a huge amount of luck that some celebrity that you @ed retweets you.
- sturza 6y agoThe most important point was missed: MKBHD happened
- wgx 6y agoSeems lots of people are jumping on the bandwagon: https://gumroad.com/l/aLnrp https://gumroad.com/l/aLnrp