5 ms·

A product about optimizing products, followed by a series of blog posts about making such product, making-of videos, and finally an ebook telling you everything

by jiofih 6y ago

A product about optimizing products, followed by a series of blog posts about making such product, making-of videos, and finally an ebook telling you everything about the launch of the product and how you can apply that to your products (hopefully real). Aren’t we all tired of these marketing treadmills?

thomas 6y ago
It’s turtles all the way down
nelsonenzo 6y ago
I think the key difference is authenticity. This person admits they have a day job, they continue thier day job (at the moment), and they made 10k - not quite enough to buy a Lambo. If you were seriously considering launching a product, this looks to have some usefull information. Certainly looks better than the 'marketing 101' or 'seo for Google's books on Amazon.
- kyriakos 6y ago
  This is absolutely right. Most of similar products sell themselves as experts in the field and try really hard to convince us that they offer some special magical recipe. This guy seems sincere about what he's giving.
nicoffeine 6y ago
For most of the modern economy, it's marketing treadmills all the way down. The primary idea -- that a product will make the consumer's life better -- is what is being repackaged and resold over and over again. In most cases, consumers are buying the quick shot of dopamine they get when they swipe their credit card, not the product itself.
- dexwiz 6y ago
  The fact that “shop therapy” is a term makes me shudder.
- FPGAhacker 6y ago
  > The primary idea -- that a product will make the consumer's life better -- is what is being repackaged and resold over and over again. I wish. What’s being resold and repackaged is telling other people how to make money by telling other people how to tell other people how to make money by telling other people how to make money.
playcache 6y ago
"Internet marketing" is full of this. Folks start out trying to make money online, until the eventually come to realise, the only way to make money online, is to sell a product telling other people how to make money online.
- eli 6y ago
  Maybe another way to look at it is people overestimate the importance of marketing strategies and underestimate the importance of a product people really want. Lots of people spent time getting really good at marketing and e-commerce only to find the thing they were selling didn’t have much of a market fit.
- bt3 6y ago
  There's also a terrible self-fulfilling cycle where the the content producers will solicit their testimonials from those that will undoubtedly speak highly about the content regardless of its quality, under the quid pro quo of getting it free. I suppose this is not limited to the internet marketing genre, but I've found from my own experience, this is common. Small anecdote: I was once asked to review an ebook in the internet marketing space based on some things I was doing at the time. The "author" had created an ebook that consisted of clipart, default Microsoft Word formatting, and egregious spacing to pump up the page count. The "author" was furious when my review was neutral rather than glowing.
- puranjay 6y ago
  > the only way to make money online, is to sell a product telling other people how to make money online That's patently untrue. For every huckster hawking his latest course, there are 10x as many successful marketers. You just never hear about them because they run actually successful websites. Anyone you see ranking for "best hosting" or "best website builder" is likely pulling in nearly 6 figures a month
- sak5sk 6y ago
  I totally agree with this statement, but don't see how it applies to what I wrote. My summary was to explain how I utilized my time and energy to build a product and launch it on a popular platform (with some pre-sales). I do not teach anyone how to make money online. In fact, most product hunt launches are free apps and resources.
mmww 6y ago
triangle of opportunity
switch11 6y ago
I feel exactly the same At the same time - if you are on the Dev side it is well worth it to learn as much about marketing as you can There is an Art and a Science to creating these Marketing Treadmills and making them work The dream is A truly talented dev team that can make an AMAZING product MERGED WITH A splendid marketing team that can really market it * While there might not be very many similarities, you can always learn from what people do to market and sell their product. Heck some of the best marketing strategies are used by people who have things to sell which seem completely pointless
bartread 6y ago
> A product about optimizing products, followed by a series of blog posts about making such product, making-of videos, and finally an ebook telling you everything about the launch of the product and how you can apply that to your products (hopefully real). Aren’t we all tired of these marketing treadmills? This actually reminds me a lot of the way pyramid/MLM schemes worked back in the 90s (and probably still work now). I got briefly snared by one of these things as a kid, and the materials were certainly of high perceived quality (nicely bound, etc.), but it didn't take long to figure out that the whole thing was about selling the thing you were being sold. Similarly a massive proportion of Amway's revenue, and the revenue of successful Amway members comes from the sale of materials and seminars related to building your "business". The household products themselves are very much a sideshow. All these deeply meta, self-referential product optimization products have a similar - slightly grubby - feel to them. Old ideas repackaged as new. I mean, I suppose fair enough if you can make a living out of it and you're not actually scamming anyone, but how many of these damn things does the world really need?
- monadic2 6y ago
  Reminds me of the joke "a man was selling books on the corner entitled 'how to become a millionaire'. Naturally, I bought one—turns out the trick is to sell a million books for a dollar."
  - sak5sk 6y ago
    It's a good joke, but I think it's intellectually cheap and easy to use as a snarky response, but completely misses the factual arguments. Not everyone who teaches can sell. Not everyone who sells can build. I can read a detailed step by step guide by a guru who spells out exactly how he made his billions, but that doesn't mean I can execute it. My shared account is just me sharing my learnings. I have already shared most of it in public. The ebook is me practicing what I preach -- that everything can be monetized if you just apply some effort. Check out my tweets to see exactly what I am talking about.
    - aleksandrm 6y ago
andrei_says_ 6y ago
As tired as of books on how to make money?
sak5sk 6y ago
Hey, thanks for the comment. The process of talking about building a product is fairly standard and is called "build in the open". While there is certainly a rewarding feeling in selling something you built, I get more pleasure to know that my work has inspired someone on the sidelines to pick up their side project or even quit their job and start their own micro SaaS. In fact, I've already had a handful of conversations with people who told me my writeups were the reason they are working towards a life that does not involve the 9-5. For this, I am eternally grateful and happy that I wrote what I wrote. The entire marketing industry is a treadmill and everything you do in life is touched by it. That thing you ate for breakfast? Marketing treadmill. The car you drove to work? Marketing treadmill.
- jiofih 6y ago
  I don’t drive to work or even eat breakfast. That’s a sad view of the world. I get the positivity aspect here, but my rant is about meta-products marketed to other “builders” - there is just something unsettling about the idea of making money from other people’s dreams before they have even started. “Build in the open” is nice when you are actually building something.
  - sak5sk 6y ago
    You live in a world driven in large part by marketing and sales. It's not a worldview, it's facts. I am not making any money from "other people's dreams. I sell a product which helps companies make their sites sell better, retain users, and satisfy their users's needs. Your definition of building "something" other than a digital product is quite interesting, thank you for sharing your view. Personally, I like to think that I help companies thrive, which means they can hire more people, create more jobs, enable their communities to grow. If that's not impact, I don't know what is. My blogging about it has already inspired many people to pursue their side projects - and I'm very happy about that. Not really sure what you are getting at here... at all.
robjan 6y ago
How to make a million dollars: write a book about how to make a million dollars.

by jiofih 6y ago

thomas 6y ago

It’s turtles all the way down

nelsonenzo 6y ago

I think the key difference is authenticity. This person admits they have a day job, they continue thier day job (at the moment), and they made 10k - not quite enough to buy a Lambo. If you were seriously considering launching a product, this looks to have some usefull information. Certainly looks better than the 'marketing 101' or 'seo for Google's books on Amazon.

kyriakos 6y ago
This is absolutely right. Most of similar products sell themselves as experts in the field and try really hard to convince us that they offer some special magical recipe. This guy seems sincere about what he's giving.

nicoffeine 6y ago

For most of the modern economy, it's marketing treadmills all the way down. The primary idea -- that a product will make the consumer's life better -- is what is being repackaged and resold over and over again. In most cases, consumers are buying the quick shot of dopamine they get when they swipe their credit card, not the product itself.

dexwiz 6y ago
The fact that “shop therapy” is a term makes me shudder.
FPGAhacker 6y ago
> The primary idea -- that a product will make the consumer's life better -- is what is being repackaged and resold over and over again. I wish. What’s being resold and repackaged is telling other people how to make money by telling other people how to tell other people how to make money by telling other people how to make money.

playcache 6y ago

"Internet marketing" is full of this. Folks start out trying to make money online, until the eventually come to realise, the only way to make money online, is to sell a product telling other people how to make money online.

eli 6y ago
Maybe another way to look at it is people overestimate the importance of marketing strategies and underestimate the importance of a product people really want. Lots of people spent time getting really good at marketing and e-commerce only to find the thing they were selling didn’t have much of a market fit.
bt3 6y ago
There's also a terrible self-fulfilling cycle where the the content producers will solicit their testimonials from those that will undoubtedly speak highly about the content regardless of its quality, under the quid pro quo of getting it free. I suppose this is not limited to the internet marketing genre, but I've found from my own experience, this is common. Small anecdote: I was once asked to review an ebook in the internet marketing space based on some things I was doing at the time. The "author" had created an ebook that consisted of clipart, default Microsoft Word formatting, and egregious spacing to pump up the page count. The "author" was furious when my review was neutral rather than glowing.
puranjay 6y ago
> the only way to make money online, is to sell a product telling other people how to make money online That's patently untrue. For every huckster hawking his latest course, there are 10x as many successful marketers. You just never hear about them because they run actually successful websites. Anyone you see ranking for "best hosting" or "best website builder" is likely pulling in nearly 6 figures a month
sak5sk 6y ago
I totally agree with this statement, but don't see how it applies to what I wrote. My summary was to explain how I utilized my time and energy to build a product and launch it on a popular platform (with some pre-sales). I do not teach anyone how to make money online. In fact, most product hunt launches are free apps and resources.

mmww 6y ago

triangle of opportunity

switch11 6y ago

I feel exactly the same At the same time - if you are on the Dev side it is well worth it to learn as much about marketing as you can There is an Art and a Science to creating these Marketing Treadmills and making them work The dream is A truly talented dev team that can make an AMAZING product MERGED WITH A splendid marketing team that can really market it * While there might not be very many similarities, you can always learn from what people do to market and sell their product. Heck some of the best marketing strategies are used by people who have things to sell which seem completely pointless

bartread 6y ago

> A product about optimizing products, followed by a series of blog posts about making such product, making-of videos, and finally an ebook telling you everything about the launch of the product and how you can apply that to your products (hopefully real). Aren’t we all tired of these marketing treadmills? This actually reminds me a lot of the way pyramid/MLM schemes worked back in the 90s (and probably still work now). I got briefly snared by one of these things as a kid, and the materials were certainly of high perceived quality (nicely bound, etc.), but it didn't take long to figure out that the whole thing was about selling the thing you were being sold. Similarly a massive proportion of Amway's revenue, and the revenue of successful Amway members comes from the sale of materials and seminars related to building your "business". The household products themselves are very much a sideshow. All these deeply meta, self-referential product optimization products have a similar - slightly grubby - feel to them. Old ideas repackaged as new. I mean, I suppose fair enough if you can make a living out of it and you're not actually scamming anyone, but how many of these damn things does the world really need?

monadic2 6y ago
Reminds me of the joke "a man was selling books on the corner entitled 'how to become a millionaire'. Naturally, I bought one—turns out the trick is to sell a million books for a dollar."
- sak5sk 6y ago
  It's a good joke, but I think it's intellectually cheap and easy to use as a snarky response, but completely misses the factual arguments. Not everyone who teaches can sell. Not everyone who sells can build. I can read a detailed step by step guide by a guru who spells out exactly how he made his billions, but that doesn't mean I can execute it. My shared account is just me sharing my learnings. I have already shared most of it in public. The ebook is me practicing what I preach -- that everything can be monetized if you just apply some effort. Check out my tweets to see exactly what I am talking about.
  - aleksandrm 6y ago

andrei_says_ 6y ago

As tired as of books on how to make money?

sak5sk 6y ago

Hey, thanks for the comment. The process of talking about building a product is fairly standard and is called "build in the open". While there is certainly a rewarding feeling in selling something you built, I get more pleasure to know that my work has inspired someone on the sidelines to pick up their side project or even quit their job and start their own micro SaaS. In fact, I've already had a handful of conversations with people who told me my writeups were the reason they are working towards a life that does not involve the 9-5. For this, I am eternally grateful and happy that I wrote what I wrote. The entire marketing industry is a treadmill and everything you do in life is touched by it. That thing you ate for breakfast? Marketing treadmill. The car you drove to work? Marketing treadmill.

jiofih 6y ago
I don’t drive to work or even eat breakfast. That’s a sad view of the world. I get the positivity aspect here, but my rant is about meta-products marketed to other “builders” - there is just something unsettling about the idea of making money from other people’s dreams before they have even started. “Build in the open” is nice when you are actually building something.
- sak5sk 6y ago
  You live in a world driven in large part by marketing and sales. It's not a worldview, it's facts. I am not making any money from "other people's dreams. I sell a product which helps companies make their sites sell better, retain users, and satisfy their users's needs. Your definition of building "something" other than a digital product is quite interesting, thank you for sharing your view. Personally, I like to think that I help companies thrive, which means they can hire more people, create more jobs, enable their communities to grow. If that's not impact, I don't know what is. My blogging about it has already inspired many people to pursue their side projects - and I'm very happy about that. Not really sure what you are getting at here... at all.

robjan 6y ago

How to make a million dollars: write a book about how to make a million dollars.