11 ms·

I'm a really big fan of Brennan, Patrick, and Amy. But there's a pattern here that makes me very nervous: * Huge success with consulting and it seems quite rel

by jere 14y ago

I'm a really big fan of Brennan, Patrick, and Amy. But there's a pattern here that makes me very nervous: * Huge success with consulting and it seems quite reliable * Huge success on information products, which are sold exclusively to developers/freelancers * Impressive, but somewhat less success on actual apps (often sold to developers/freelancers) So the disturbing part is products seem really fricking hard, unless you include information products in which case they are gold. I've been following (and rooting for) some of these people for a while and even after years it's a bit depressing that they couldn't make a decent salary off their best web applications. And what's worse is it feels like the only people we hear about finding success are those that are selling to us.

uezr 14y ago
I really have to echo this sentiment. Let me preface this by saying I have the utmost respect for all of these people. They're doing exactly what I want to do (SaaS products), and I follow each of their stories closely. However, it can be disheartening when I see Product X owner posting "I made 6 figures this year!", only to open the post and see 10% of their income is from Product X, and the other 90% is selling information to people on how to create their own product X (often accompanied by doing consulting gigs for other people). I know the info products are high quality, but it still feels a little 'spammy'. One of the reasons I'm getting into SaaS and not employment/consulting is because I want to work on my own schedule, on my own products, while traveling the world, without having to answer to anybody else, while still making more money than I could working as a developer in the Valley. Regardless of this, I still fully believe it can be done. As a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, if Planscope's growth stays on the exact same linear growth path for 2013, it will make over $110k for the year. But I predict it will make a whole lot more than that as Brennan increases marketing and develops reliable customer acquisition channels resulting in exponential growth. Looking forward to the end of 2013 reports!
- ahoyhere 14y ago
  Yeah, it's definitely disheartening that success takes time and the willingness to do different things to make it work. Really disappointing how life isn't like a movie. Also, hate to disappoint you again, but when it comes to a paying product, "exponential growth" is a unicorn. Just cuz Github can make it work doesn't mean anyone else can.
amix 14y ago
Their business model isn't creating software - it's selling "get rich fast schemes" and other information for high margins. You are the target of their sales channel. You can just see it in the financial Brennan posts: 12% comes from selling software, 88% comes from selling to you -- and he earned most from selling a $1199! course on how to build your own multi-million dollar consultancy. It should ring bells as it's a very common theme in most other markets (where you have a lot of people selling "how to get rich quick" - - and the only people that get rich by these schemes are the people that are selling them).
- cityzen 14y ago
  A colleague of mine was a finance major and said in one of his higher level finance classes on the first day the professor asked, "Who wants to make a million dollars?". Of course, everyone raised their hands and he responded, "ok, go write a book."
  - mgkimsal 14y ago
    Which is 100% the opposite of what most of us get told in most areas, at least in tech, because book writing will net most people only a few thousand bucks, and often takes several months. But self-publishing? Owning everything? There seems to be more upside potential there (and yes, it's harder up front, because you have to market yourself too).
- ahoyhere 14y ago
  > … selling "get rich fast schemes" That's a pretty serious accusation. Do you have any evidence to back that up? If you actually ready any of the things we wrote, I think you're going to find it really hard to find any suggestion that "getting rich" is easy, fast, or common.
  - to3m 14y ago
    A kinder - but not, I think, less accurate - phrase might be, "selling pickaxes to gold miners". To my eyes, this "accusation" is more like stating the plain facts of the matter. There's often more reliable money in selling people advice or tools, that they use to do something, than there is in actually doing that thing. When people are trying to sell you advice, or tools, or what have you, it's worth bearing in mind that their interests are not automatically aligned with yours. This is general-purpose advice, given apropos of very little.
ahoyhere 14y ago
Freckle's earning the better part of $400k/yr… not sure how that's "somewhat less." Did 30x500 bring in the same money as Freckle in 2012? Yeah, but that's after a lot of neglect of Freckle… which we're rectifying.[1] Infoproducts are no less hard than software products, by the by… not if you put in the effort to make good ones. They're faster, yes, but not easier. It's not merely "sitting down and writing words" any more than creating good software is merely "sitting down and typing code." Also, developers are not my audience (for Freckle). I doubt there are very many of "us" (Hacker News types) who use Freckle. [1] (And the neglect of Freckle was due to focus on Charm, not my infoproduct biz. Which, on the balance, was a mistake, but boy did I learn from it!) EDIT: > And what's worse is it feels like the only people we hear about finding success are those that are selling to us. That's because you don't venture out of your comfort zone. Naturally, the people you hang out with are the people you'll hear from. I, otoh, belong a lot of different, even weird communities, and I know people making a fantastic living off Wordpress plugins, design themes, social media how-to videos, healthy & super simple cooking classes, etc. I recently met a lady who grosses 7 figures a year on dog agility training products. (She's a respected industry expert; we're not talking Teach Your Parrot to Talk here.) Get out of your comfort zone / fishbowl and it won't be so "weird."
- jere 14y ago
  I just wanted to say, I appreciate the response and I wasn't trying to be accusatory here. I guess what frustrates me is, personally speaking, I don't want to sell info products. And like many other people, I don't want to consult either. So I start to get dejected when it seems like those are the only real routes to success. Freckle definitely doesn't fit the pattern I was seeing (I vaguely knew it was doing well, but that's amazing).
  - jessedhillon 14y ago
    This is a weird complaint. You're getting depressed because the things that the world wants and rewards with value are things you don't want to do? Aren't you saying that you don't want to do what other people value, but (implicitly) you still want to enjoy the results of doing valuable work?
nathanbarry 14y ago
Amy is making a fantastic salary off of Freckle, Patrick is doing great from his software, and Brennan is doing $6k/month from Planscope less than a year after launch (and growing like crazy!). I think they are all killing it with software.
bdunn 14y ago
Great questions! RE: Less success on actual apps Planscope's revenue is fairly small right now, but trust me when I say Freckle could give Amy and Thomas a very comfortable life if that's all they were working on. Subscription products can take a while to build up in monthly recurring revenue. Product's like Freckle have been around for 4+ years. RE: Selling to developers/designers I'm a developer, so it'd naturally be a lot easier for me to make a product for my peers than it would for, say, construction managers. There are a lot of people doing very well selling information products to non-developers. RE: Consulting is reliable It is. I could have made a lot more money this year had I focused on just that, but the long term equity isn't comparable. I'm fairly certain I could maintain a comparable growth rate with Planscope if I were to do absolutely nothing with it right now. Given enough time, the work I put into it this year will pay off.
gavingmiller 14y ago
You bring up a good point with: "Impressive, but somewhat less success on actual apps". For the longest time, I thought the path to success was: * Launch an app * Quit my day job the next day * Live life on the fast lane forever more. This is simply not true of apps. From what I'm seeing in those who have shared their revenue openly (Brennan, Patrick, Amy, Nathan), it takes about 2 years (+/- 1 year) to get to the place where an app is providing a living income. Software is a long game. I've only been able to have the attention span of 3-6 months. So I lost that game. Here's to 2013 and changing my attention span! :D
- crucialfelix 14y ago
  note that of course their SaaS apps are directed at a small market of developers. and developers are in the pre-chasm area of early adopters. we are cheap bastards and many of us won't buy things. we get so much open source for free. we like to just play with new things and we switch easily. a hideous market, we are. and then again mass market sales apps require significant marketing campaigns to get the plane in the air.
  - npsimons 14y ago
    The truth of the matter is that the "switching easily" mentality makes us a very easy market to break into. I say this as someone who always looks for open source first (not because it's cheaper), but is more than willing to pay (or get work to pay for) tools that are really worth something. It's like the cost/benefit analysis of good furniture and good hardware: it just doesn't make any sense to skimp on anything that will give a significant boost in productivity, as long as it's not outrageously expensive and you don't waste time learning it. Hence, the easy switchers.
    - crucialfelix 14y ago
      Definitely, early adopters are your friends. They experiment. They validate the idea. They feedback rather than complain. And they may keep you in business for a while. And going mass market isn't everything. The nature of the fickle early adopter crowd just needs to be known and appreciated.
stevenwei 14y ago
While I disagree with a lot of the negative sentiment found in the other threads, I find myself agreeing with you. I don't know why, but there's something rather uncomfortable about people selling books/courses telling you "how to make more money doing X" and then 6 months later writing a blog post saying "how I made $Y selling a book/course on how to make more money doing X".
- jpdevereaux 14y ago
  Seems like the strategy is 1) do some standard business that makes a standard amount of money, 2) convince people you can make money, being "transparent" by offering a bunch of upward-trending income graphs, 3) write a book about how you did step 1, 4) rinse and repeat. To me it'd be most interesting to learn about step 2, or "how to build a community willing to pay you to follow in your footsteps". I've tried it before but couldn't find the right balance between helpful and sales-y.
- ahoyhere 14y ago
  But Brennan is selling a class teaching what he used to do -- consulting -- not what he's currently doing. And he had a $1m/yr consulting biz without any products at all. I understand your feelings, but the facts don't match them.
  - stevenwei 14y ago
    I don't really see how that contradicts what I said.
    - ky3 14y ago
      The perfect scam is the self-fulfilling prophecy [1]: Write a book titled "How to make millions writing ebooks." Suppose it goes on to make millions. Done. Now suppose a guy named Jack flew to the moon. He writes a book "How I flew to the moon." It makes millions. He blogs about "How I made millions selling a book about how I flew to the moon." See the difference? [1] Especially pernicious in stock market pump-and-dumps.
larrys 14y ago
"it's a bit depressing that they couldn't make a decent salary off their best web applications." As someone who comes from the traditional old school world where you had to do traditional marketing to gain business (pre-internet and obviously pre-social media) one theme I see (which I highlighted in a comment on patio11's post yesterday) is the lack of traditional marketing to move the product. Specifically I'm wondering what type of outreach Brennan or Patrick have done to gain business? Patrick was thinking about flying to industry conferences which was a step in the right direction although I thought the payback for such a low revenue product wouldn't make it worthwhile and I suggested a few traditional ways to test out (that had worked for me in the past). http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4982785 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4982785 One thing that I see happening is people thinking that the way to build a business is strictly by WOM online by low or no cost methods while there are a host of things out there that work and have worked for years (that people aren't using to push their apps). They cost money for sure but after you are established and have some cash flow the are possible.
- bdunn 14y ago
  This year I'm going to heavily invest in experimenting with paid advertising. Surprisingly, about a quarter of my growth comes in organically. People find me through a blog post, research the product, and then buy. Can't beat that :-)
  - larrys 14y ago
    "People find me through a blog post, research the product" .001% of your market (arbitrary to prove a point) reads blog posts. So you have to get to the others who are a virgin market (with no competition by the way) for the same product. Off the top I'm thinking airports or places where consultants spend time or publications which consultants read where you could write some articles and get mention that way. (As a start anyway). Card packs are good (if they are offered and I don't know they are in that biz.) Maybe even advertise in the inflight magazine (for ads that is) which I did at one time. Back in the 90's I did ads in The Economist, the WSJ (marketplace) and Business Week. (Not saying they are good today I don't know but they did work then I picked up customers who are still with me today..) Feel free to email me and bounce any ideas/costs and I will give you my opinion. One last thing. You need a .com name if you are advertising to the traditional world. They are thrown a loop by anything that isn't .com . You can still use .io just get another one under .com. You might also want to put up consultant specific sites for planscope that cater to specific industries (more targeted) "engineering consultant" "city planning consultant" (with templating) it will go a long way toward getting you businesses in specific areas and making you the go to resource.
truthseeker 14y ago
There are many who peddle stuff which is not their primary source of wealth. Suze Orman became wealthy not by saving for 401k and 'paying herself first' as she preaches. She became wealthy by selling her books, shows and other stuff. Many an entrepreneur, when their products failed to get the traction they expected became: - social media consultants - lean canvas experts - marketing experts for startups I would like to hear from them how they are different from the late night infomercials who teach you to become rich from real estate and government grants.

by jere 14y ago

uezr 14y ago

I really have to echo this sentiment. Let me preface this by saying I have the utmost respect for all of these people. They're doing exactly what I want to do (SaaS products), and I follow each of their stories closely. However, it can be disheartening when I see Product X owner posting "I made 6 figures this year!", only to open the post and see 10% of their income is from Product X, and the other 90% is selling information to people on how to create their own product X (often accompanied by doing consulting gigs for other people). I know the info products are high quality, but it still feels a little 'spammy'. One of the reasons I'm getting into SaaS and not employment/consulting is because I want to work on my own schedule, on my own products, while traveling the world, without having to answer to anybody else, while still making more money than I could working as a developer in the Valley. Regardless of this, I still fully believe it can be done. As a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, if Planscope's growth stays on the exact same linear growth path for 2013, it will make over $110k for the year. But I predict it will make a whole lot more than that as Brennan increases marketing and develops reliable customer acquisition channels resulting in exponential growth. Looking forward to the end of 2013 reports!

ahoyhere 14y ago
Yeah, it's definitely disheartening that success takes time and the willingness to do different things to make it work. Really disappointing how life isn't like a movie. Also, hate to disappoint you again, but when it comes to a paying product, "exponential growth" is a unicorn. Just cuz Github can make it work doesn't mean anyone else can.

amix 14y ago

Their business model isn't creating software - it's selling "get rich fast schemes" and other information for high margins. You are the target of their sales channel. You can just see it in the financial Brennan posts: 12% comes from selling software, 88% comes from selling to you -- and he earned most from selling a $1199! course on how to build your own multi-million dollar consultancy. It should ring bells as it's a very common theme in most other markets (where you have a lot of people selling "how to get rich quick" - - and the only people that get rich by these schemes are the people that are selling them).

cityzen 14y ago
A colleague of mine was a finance major and said in one of his higher level finance classes on the first day the professor asked, "Who wants to make a million dollars?". Of course, everyone raised their hands and he responded, "ok, go write a book."
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  Which is 100% the opposite of what most of us get told in most areas, at least in tech, because book writing will net most people only a few thousand bucks, and often takes several months. But self-publishing? Owning everything? There seems to be more upside potential there (and yes, it's harder up front, because you have to market yourself too).
ahoyhere 14y ago
> … selling "get rich fast schemes" That's a pretty serious accusation. Do you have any evidence to back that up? If you actually ready any of the things we wrote, I think you're going to find it really hard to find any suggestion that "getting rich" is easy, fast, or common.
- to3m 14y ago
  A kinder - but not, I think, less accurate - phrase might be, "selling pickaxes to gold miners". To my eyes, this "accusation" is more like stating the plain facts of the matter. There's often more reliable money in selling people advice or tools, that they use to do something, than there is in actually doing that thing. When people are trying to sell you advice, or tools, or what have you, it's worth bearing in mind that their interests are not automatically aligned with yours. This is general-purpose advice, given apropos of very little.

ahoyhere 14y ago

Freckle's earning the better part of $400k/yr… not sure how that's "somewhat less." Did 30x500 bring in the same money as Freckle in 2012? Yeah, but that's after a lot of neglect of Freckle… which we're rectifying.[1] Infoproducts are no less hard than software products, by the by… not if you put in the effort to make good ones. They're faster, yes, but not easier. It's not merely "sitting down and writing words" any more than creating good software is merely "sitting down and typing code." Also, developers are not my audience (for Freckle). I doubt there are very many of "us" (Hacker News types) who use Freckle. [1] (And the neglect of Freckle was due to focus on Charm, not my infoproduct biz. Which, on the balance, was a mistake, but boy did I learn from it!) EDIT: > And what's worse is it feels like the only people we hear about finding success are those that are selling to us. That's because you don't venture out of your comfort zone. Naturally, the people you hang out with are the people you'll hear from. I, otoh, belong a lot of different, even weird communities, and I know people making a fantastic living off Wordpress plugins, design themes, social media how-to videos, healthy & super simple cooking classes, etc. I recently met a lady who grosses 7 figures a year on dog agility training products. (She's a respected industry expert; we're not talking Teach Your Parrot to Talk here.) Get out of your comfort zone / fishbowl and it won't be so "weird."

jere 14y ago
I just wanted to say, I appreciate the response and I wasn't trying to be accusatory here. I guess what frustrates me is, personally speaking, I don't want to sell info products. And like many other people, I don't want to consult either. So I start to get dejected when it seems like those are the only real routes to success. Freckle definitely doesn't fit the pattern I was seeing (I vaguely knew it was doing well, but that's amazing).
- jessedhillon 14y ago
  This is a weird complaint. You're getting depressed because the things that the world wants and rewards with value are things you don't want to do? Aren't you saying that you don't want to do what other people value, but (implicitly) you still want to enjoy the results of doing valuable work?

nathanbarry 14y ago

Amy is making a fantastic salary off of Freckle, Patrick is doing great from his software, and Brennan is doing $6k/month from Planscope less than a year after launch (and growing like crazy!). I think they are all killing it with software.

bdunn 14y ago

Great questions! RE: Less success on actual apps Planscope's revenue is fairly small right now, but trust me when I say Freckle could give Amy and Thomas a very comfortable life if that's all they were working on. Subscription products can take a while to build up in monthly recurring revenue. Product's like Freckle have been around for 4+ years. RE: Selling to developers/designers I'm a developer, so it'd naturally be a lot easier for me to make a product for my peers than it would for, say, construction managers. There are a lot of people doing very well selling information products to non-developers. RE: Consulting is reliable It is. I could have made a lot more money this year had I focused on just that, but the long term equity isn't comparable. I'm fairly certain I could maintain a comparable growth rate with Planscope if I were to do absolutely nothing with it right now. Given enough time, the work I put into it this year will pay off.

gavingmiller 14y ago

You bring up a good point with: "Impressive, but somewhat less success on actual apps". For the longest time, I thought the path to success was: * Launch an app * Quit my day job the next day * Live life on the fast lane forever more. This is simply not true of apps. From what I'm seeing in those who have shared their revenue openly (Brennan, Patrick, Amy, Nathan), it takes about 2 years (+/- 1 year) to get to the place where an app is providing a living income. Software is a long game. I've only been able to have the attention span of 3-6 months. So I lost that game. Here's to 2013 and changing my attention span! :D

crucialfelix 14y ago
note that of course their SaaS apps are directed at a small market of developers. and developers are in the pre-chasm area of early adopters. we are cheap bastards and many of us won't buy things. we get so much open source for free. we like to just play with new things and we switch easily. a hideous market, we are. and then again mass market sales apps require significant marketing campaigns to get the plane in the air.
- npsimons 14y ago
  The truth of the matter is that the "switching easily" mentality makes us a very easy market to break into. I say this as someone who always looks for open source first (not because it's cheaper), but is more than willing to pay (or get work to pay for) tools that are really worth something. It's like the cost/benefit analysis of good furniture and good hardware: it just doesn't make any sense to skimp on anything that will give a significant boost in productivity, as long as it's not outrageously expensive and you don't waste time learning it. Hence, the easy switchers.
  - crucialfelix 14y ago
    Definitely, early adopters are your friends. They experiment. They validate the idea. They feedback rather than complain. And they may keep you in business for a while. And going mass market isn't everything. The nature of the fickle early adopter crowd just needs to be known and appreciated.

stevenwei 14y ago

While I disagree with a lot of the negative sentiment found in the other threads, I find myself agreeing with you. I don't know why, but there's something rather uncomfortable about people selling books/courses telling you "how to make more money doing X" and then 6 months later writing a blog post saying "how I made $Y selling a book/course on how to make more money doing X".

jpdevereaux 14y ago
Seems like the strategy is 1) do some standard business that makes a standard amount of money, 2) convince people you can make money, being "transparent" by offering a bunch of upward-trending income graphs, 3) write a book about how you did step 1, 4) rinse and repeat. To me it'd be most interesting to learn about step 2, or "how to build a community willing to pay you to follow in your footsteps". I've tried it before but couldn't find the right balance between helpful and sales-y.
ahoyhere 14y ago
But Brennan is selling a class teaching what he used to do -- consulting -- not what he's currently doing. And he had a $1m/yr consulting biz without any products at all. I understand your feelings, but the facts don't match them.
- stevenwei 14y ago
  I don't really see how that contradicts what I said.
  - ky3 14y ago
    The perfect scam is the self-fulfilling prophecy [1]: Write a book titled "How to make millions writing ebooks." Suppose it goes on to make millions. Done. Now suppose a guy named Jack flew to the moon. He writes a book "How I flew to the moon." It makes millions. He blogs about "How I made millions selling a book about how I flew to the moon." See the difference? [1] Especially pernicious in stock market pump-and-dumps.

larrys 14y ago

"it's a bit depressing that they couldn't make a decent salary off their best web applications." As someone who comes from the traditional old school world where you had to do traditional marketing to gain business (pre-internet and obviously pre-social media) one theme I see (which I highlighted in a comment on patio11's post yesterday) is the lack of traditional marketing to move the product. Specifically I'm wondering what type of outreach Brennan or Patrick have done to gain business? Patrick was thinking about flying to industry conferences which was a step in the right direction although I thought the payback for such a low revenue product wouldn't make it worthwhile and I suggested a few traditional ways to test out (that had worked for me in the past). http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4982785 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4982785 One thing that I see happening is people thinking that the way to build a business is strictly by WOM online by low or no cost methods while there are a host of things out there that work and have worked for years (that people aren't using to push their apps). They cost money for sure but after you are established and have some cash flow the are possible.

bdunn 14y ago
This year I'm going to heavily invest in experimenting with paid advertising. Surprisingly, about a quarter of my growth comes in organically. People find me through a blog post, research the product, and then buy. Can't beat that :-)
- larrys 14y ago
  "People find me through a blog post, research the product" .001% of your market (arbitrary to prove a point) reads blog posts. So you have to get to the others who are a virgin market (with no competition by the way) for the same product. Off the top I'm thinking airports or places where consultants spend time or publications which consultants read where you could write some articles and get mention that way. (As a start anyway). Card packs are good (if they are offered and I don't know they are in that biz.) Maybe even advertise in the inflight magazine (for ads that is) which I did at one time. Back in the 90's I did ads in The Economist, the WSJ (marketplace) and Business Week. (Not saying they are good today I don't know but they did work then I picked up customers who are still with me today..) Feel free to email me and bounce any ideas/costs and I will give you my opinion. One last thing. You need a .com name if you are advertising to the traditional world. They are thrown a loop by anything that isn't .com . You can still use .io just get another one under .com. You might also want to put up consultant specific sites for planscope that cater to specific industries (more targeted) "engineering consultant" "city planning consultant" (with templating) it will go a long way toward getting you businesses in specific areas and making you the go to resource.

truthseeker 14y ago

There are many who peddle stuff which is not their primary source of wealth. Suze Orman became wealthy not by saving for 401k and 'paying herself first' as she preaches. She became wealthy by selling her books, shows and other stuff. Many an entrepreneur, when their products failed to get the traction they expected became: - social media consultants - lean canvas experts - marketing experts for startups I would like to hear from them how they are different from the late night infomercials who teach you to become rich from real estate and government grants.