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It is worth noting that people who do not have 8,000 blog subscribers or 10k twitter followers have used essentially the same playbook and made significant amou

by patio11 13y ago

It is worth noting that people who do not have 8,000 blog subscribers or 10k twitter followers have used essentially the same playbook and made significant amounts of money doing so. Take Nathan Barry or Brennan Dunn, for example. I think some HNers know who they are these days, but a year ago, "nobody" knew them, and they both have published stats in the mid five figures for their first books. Also, if you're savvy about things, the "$ per audience member" has enough dynamic range in it such that it makes up for a smaller audience size. "Revenue divided by Twitter followers" strikes me as a pretty silly metric, but if we accept it as a rough test of the proposition "Being Internet famous means you make mad bank, conversely, there is no profit without Internet fame", I have personal knowledge of enough data points to say that that metric has greater than X to 100X dynamic range.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago
It's also worth noting that 1) HN is it's own market now, with people who sell into the crowd, and 2) "I'm an expert on X" is becoming a cottage industry, with folks claiming to know all sorts of interesting things that may or may not be true. Not trying to be cynical. Once again, my goal here is to separate the things we consume on HN from the actual business models in the background. Yep, it's certainly not as simple as $ per Twitter followers. There's also a Heisenberg Effect here, where the closer the HN audience looks at a thing, the more distorted the results we get are. I'm a big fan of Brennan and Nathan's. I've also spent quite a bit of money on things the HN crowd thought was cool for startups which didn't amount to a hill of beans. It's very difficult having a discussion with 100K of your best buds about ways to find your own way in the X arena. Too many slightly diverse interests all playing out at the same time in the same forum :) Geesh. I could start a list of high quality services offered by great HNers for startups. Things that, if you need them, could easily pay for themselves. Some of your stuff would be at the top of that list. It would not be a short list.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- thenomad 13y ago
  That would actually be an extremely useful list, if you fancied creating it...

by patio11 13y ago

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

It's also worth noting that 1) HN is it's own market now, with people who sell into the crowd, and 2) "I'm an expert on X" is becoming a cottage industry, with folks claiming to know all sorts of interesting things that may or may not be true. Not trying to be cynical. Once again, my goal here is to separate the things we consume on HN from the actual business models in the background. Yep, it's certainly not as simple as $ per Twitter followers. There's also a Heisenberg Effect here, where the closer the HN audience looks at a thing, the more distorted the results we get are. I'm a big fan of Brennan and Nathan's. I've also spent quite a bit of money on things the HN crowd thought was cool for startups which didn't amount to a hill of beans. It's very difficult having a discussion with 100K of your best buds about ways to find your own way in the X arena. Too many slightly diverse interests all playing out at the same time in the same forum :) Geesh. I could start a list of high quality services offered by great HNers for startups. Things that, if you need them, could easily pay for themselves. Some of your stuff would be at the top of that list. It would not be a short list.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
thenomad 13y ago
That would actually be an extremely useful list, if you fancied creating it...