4 ms·

>I announced the (extremely) early-access edition of the book on Reddit last week and received a lot of positive feedback. Idea validated. Funding secured. Thi

>I announced the (extremely) early-access edition of the book on Reddit last week and received a lot of positive feedback. Idea validated. Funding secured. This is extremely extremely extremely naive. In reality, it's very easy to get praise and encouragement from a random stranger on the Internet, but it's extremely hard to get a single dollar of actual commitment from them. The original Reddit thread has 85 comments. Optimistically assuming that every single one of them donated the asking 10€, it's 850€ for multiple months of work. In reality, the donation ratio would be the same order of magnitude as the conversion rate for ad clicks to downloads, that is about 1-5%. So, it's 8.5-42.5€ for multiple months of work. Sorry to be brutal, but making money off something is a craft that is not easier than software development itself. That involves market analysis, lead acquisition, feature prioritization, price research, and a magnitude of other factors. Having a bunch of positive Reddit feedback is a marketing equivalent of downloading a "Hello, World in Java Script" tutorial and managing to run it in the browser. It's very far from the final product.

gerdesj 6y ago
"I announced the (extremely) early-access edition of the book on Reddit last week and received a lot of positive feedback. Idea validated. Funding secured. " OP seems happy enough. I quoted the same as you and yet read it differently. They have literally said: "Funding secured. <party>". Sorry to be brutal but Sylvain seems quite happy about their approach to making money. [Edit: Soz, my quote is not quite the same as yours and things may have changed between your and my quote. I await DV oblivion 8) ]
- john_moscow 6y ago
  I am merely a random stranger on the Internet with a random opinion. It's up to OP to consider it or ignore it. Speaking for myself, I ran a few donation-funded projects for a few years and found out that it involves too much mental gymnastics. Hey, I'm almost making the minimum wage. I don't have a family, I live with my parents, but at least I'm free and don't have a shitty boss. It's great, and I'm happy, right? Right? Tell me people, it's great, it's truly great? So I learned the business skills, started working on a for-profit business idea, tweaked it based on the early feedback, and grew it into a full-time business that pays comparably to a corporate job. It was much harder than keeping to tell myself that my parents' basement is all I need, but it paid off well in the long term.
CrazyStat 6y ago
FWIW, I read "Funding secured" as sarcastic--probably a reference to Elon Musk's funding secured tweet, when (like the author) he hadn't actually secured any funding.
- sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
  No no, I actually made enough money from the early-access sales to work on it full-time for the coming months :)
sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
No no, I actually made enough money from the early-access sales to work on it full-time for the coming months :)

gerdesj 6y ago

"I announced the (extremely) early-access edition of the book on Reddit last week and received a lot of positive feedback. Idea validated. Funding secured. " OP seems happy enough. I quoted the same as you and yet read it differently. They have literally said: "Funding secured. <party>". Sorry to be brutal but Sylvain seems quite happy about their approach to making money. [Edit: Soz, my quote is not quite the same as yours and things may have changed between your and my quote. I await DV oblivion 8) ]

john_moscow 6y ago
I am merely a random stranger on the Internet with a random opinion. It's up to OP to consider it or ignore it. Speaking for myself, I ran a few donation-funded projects for a few years and found out that it involves too much mental gymnastics. Hey, I'm almost making the minimum wage. I don't have a family, I live with my parents, but at least I'm free and don't have a shitty boss. It's great, and I'm happy, right? Right? Tell me people, it's great, it's truly great? So I learned the business skills, started working on a for-profit business idea, tweaked it based on the early feedback, and grew it into a full-time business that pays comparably to a corporate job. It was much harder than keeping to tell myself that my parents' basement is all I need, but it paid off well in the long term.

CrazyStat 6y ago

FWIW, I read "Funding secured" as sarcastic--probably a reference to Elon Musk's funding secured tweet, when (like the author) he hadn't actually secured any funding.

sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
No no, I actually made enough money from the early-access sales to work on it full-time for the coming months :)

sylvain_kerkour 6y ago

No no, I actually made enough money from the early-access sales to work on it full-time for the coming months :)