5 ms·

One thing that I really notice a lot as I get older is that so many people say it isn't possible to make money anymore, early adopters had it easy, etc. People

by debacle 12y ago

One thing that I really notice a lot as I get older is that so many people say it isn't possible to make money anymore, early adopters had it easy, etc. People say this about apps and startups and the like. I tell myself these same things sometimes, but then I have to check myself - it is actually easier to make way more money on an app these days than ever before. What is bigger is the risk proposition, which is why people tell themselves that success is entirely about luck - if your own skill doesn't matter, there's no reason to try, and if you try and don't succeed it isn't your fault. This is a very real trap and I think in the reddit age (where if you aren't a cynic by 15 you're behind the curve) it is a mental virus. The world still rewards value, even if it takes some time. The people clamoring that it doesn't are doing so because they want to believe that it isn't their fault they didn't succeed. You need to be willing to emotionally and mentally invest yourself in something with a reasonable chance of failure or you will never, ever succeed. The people that you see who you are smarter than that have succeeded haven't gotten there because of luck - they've gotten there because they tried. Luck just helped.

naithemilkman 12y ago
Thanks for writing this. It spoke so much truth I feel like I could have been the one writing this.
placebo 12y ago
Yes, it is still possible to make money, even a lot of money, writing an app but that doesn't mean early adopters didn't have a big advantage. Market vacuums will always be filled and the later you arrive at the scene, the higher the probability you will have to rely on hard marketing work to be noticed and stand out in the overcrowded application markets. The good news is that: a) Persistence and hard work will usually pay off in the long run (assuming your product does indeed provide some sort of value) b) There will always be new vacuums. If keep you a close watch on developing trends you might be able to climb on the tree when it's still young and sit back while it grows, instead of spending your resources building giant ladders...
HamboneWilson 12y ago
People have been saying it's impossible to make money since they invented currency I'm sure. That's why everyone with an idea and some programming knowledge isn't a millionaire. It will always take passion, hard work, and business sense to be successful.
serve_yay 12y ago
It's partially a problem of silent evidence. For this time tracking app there are hundreds mouldering in some corner of the App Store. And the people who made them aren't gonna write any blog posts, and we wouldn't read them if they did. It's a blockbuster model, sure it's possible to make money but unlikely. It's possible to make money acting, but you probably won't. That's just how it works out. I don't think that's so cynical. Those who succeed in such a scenario are often insensitive to the unlikelihood of their success - so are those who fail.
- jakobegger 12y ago
  There are lots of people writing blog posts complaining that their apps don't earn them money. Conventional wisdom right now seems to be that it's normal that developers don't make any money. But it is very much possible to make a money selling apps. Just identify a market that you can serve, then make a good app, then advertise it effectively. Profit! However, it's not easy to become a billionaire with your app; for that you need lots of luck among other things. I think the comparison with acting is actually pretty good. There are a lot of people who make money acting. It's not that difficult. You need a bit of talent and a lot of commitment, but I happen to know more than one person who managed to become professional actors. It is of course unlikely to become a world famous super-rich actor; but making a reasonable living from acting is absolutely achievable.
  - nsxwolf 12y ago
    The best decision I ever made as an iOS developer was to quit. Now I don't owe Apple $99 a year.
  - davedx 12y ago
    > Just... > It's not that difficult... > I happen to know more than one... > ...absolutely achievable. I admire your optimism, but have you personally tried and succeeded at these things you claim are so easy?
    - mathgeek 12y ago
snowwrestler 12y ago
Most people have misconceptions about making money. They think it's sometimes easy to make money. The truth is that it is always hard to make money, and always will be. To see why, we can reverse it in our heads: do you think carefully about how you spend your money? Me too; and so does everyone else. That's the hump a product or service needs to get over before it can make much money. And it's true 100% of the time. When a product or service looks like an easy way to make money, what's really happening is that it's a great product or service, so it gets over the hump more easily. Another big misconception is that they think that ideas make money. They say, "there's already a great time-tracking app in the App Store," and think, "so it's not an idea worth pursuing, because it already succeeded." The reality is that execution and operations are what make money--which means that many businesses executing on the same idea can all make money. How many dry cleaners are there in the U.S.? How many pen manufacturers? How many car companies? How many Mexican restaurants? Or car washes? It's extremely rare that a concept is totally dominated by one large company. But because it is rare, those stories are endlessly told and retold within the culture. So if people are not thinking carefully, they can come to (paradoxically) perceive those rare types of companies to be the norm. Here's a fun exercise: pull up the list of the Fortune 500 companies and see how many names you recognize. These are all huge businesses, but most people will not even recognize half of them. It gives you a sense that there is a big difference between being a famous business, and being a successful business.
- rnernento 12y ago
  I really like this comment but I tried the "fun exercise" and I recognize way too many of the companies. Maybe I'm just a product of effective advertising...
btbuildem 12y ago
> world still rewards value, even if it takes some time This is the takeaway for me - success takes time. In an age of 30s videos and short snippets of text, who has the attention span for success?
404error 12y ago
Thanks, this to me read like a pep-talk. Might be just what I needed to get me off my butt and start working on something. Better to fail than to not try at all. Now if only I could quit playing Destiny after work.
doomlaser 12y ago
The problem is that the popularity of products in a networked economy follows the power law: http://www.aspeninstitute.org/policy-work/communications-society/power-curve-society-future-innovation-opportunity-social-equity http://www.aspeninstitute.org/policy-work/communications-soc... You might recognize the power distribution curve, as it's the same as the graph of the long tail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law#mediaviewer/File:Long_tail.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law#mediaviewer/File:Long... What happens is that you have a handful of people who make a LOT of money, a small few who do OK, and the vast, vast majority starve. Since our economy is increasingly becoming an online, globally networked one, these effects are becoming stronger, and are a contributor to economic inequality. Power Law phenomenon on the net has been observed for ages. Here's a post from 2003 where Kottke notes the distribution in the popularity of blogs on Technorati: http://kottke.org/03/02/weblogs-and-power-laws http://kottke.org/03/02/weblogs-and-power-laws I imagine the curve fits similarly for things like app store rankings, Reddit and Hacker News post popularities, top Steam sellers, Amazon rankings, etc. > The world still rewards value, even if it takes some time. The people clamoring that it doesn't are doing so because they want to believe that it isn't their fault they didn't succeed. The funny thing is, this is not entirely true. Quality is only important up to a certain threshold, after which you're at the mercy of what are essentially chaotic network effects early in the lifecycle of your product. Salgankik, Dodds, and Watts performed an experiment that begins to provide some empirical support for this intuition [359]. They created a music download site, populated with 48 obscure songs of varying quality written by actual performing groups. Visitors to the site were presented with a list of the songs and given the opportunity to listen to them. Each visitor was also shown a table listing the current “download count” for each song — the number of times it had been downloaded from the site thus far. At the end of a session, the visitor was given the opportunity to download copies of the songs that he or she liked. Now, unbeknownst to the visitors, upon arrival they were actually being assigned at random to one of eight “parallel” copies of the site. The parallel copies started out identically, with the same songs and with each song having a download count of zero. However, each parallel copy then evolved differently as users arrived. In a controlled, small-scale setting, then, this experiment provided a way to observe what happens to the popularities of 48 songs when you get to run history forward eight different times. And in fact, it was found that the “market share” of the different songs varied considerably across the different parallel copies, although the best songs never ended up at the bottom and the worst songs never ended up at the top. Salganik et al. also used this approach to show that, overall, feedback produced greater inequality in outcomes. Specifically, they assigned some users to a ninth version of the site in which no feedback about download counts was provided at all. In this version of the site, there was no direct opportunity for users to contribute to rich-get-richer dynamics, and indeed, there was significantly less variation in the market share of different songs. There are clear implications for popularity in less controlled environments, parallel to some of the conclusions we’ve drawn from our models — specifically, that the future success of a book, movie, celebrity, or Web site is strongly influenced by these types of feedback effects, and hence may to some extent be inherently unpredictable. http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch18.pdf http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networ...
adambratt 12y ago
A simple comment but one of the best I've read on here

by debacle 12y ago

naithemilkman 12y ago

Thanks for writing this. It spoke so much truth I feel like I could have been the one writing this.

placebo 12y ago

Yes, it is still possible to make money, even a lot of money, writing an app but that doesn't mean early adopters didn't have a big advantage. Market vacuums will always be filled and the later you arrive at the scene, the higher the probability you will have to rely on hard marketing work to be noticed and stand out in the overcrowded application markets. The good news is that: a) Persistence and hard work will usually pay off in the long run (assuming your product does indeed provide some sort of value) b) There will always be new vacuums. If keep you a close watch on developing trends you might be able to climb on the tree when it's still young and sit back while it grows, instead of spending your resources building giant ladders...

HamboneWilson 12y ago

People have been saying it's impossible to make money since they invented currency I'm sure. That's why everyone with an idea and some programming knowledge isn't a millionaire. It will always take passion, hard work, and business sense to be successful.

serve_yay 12y ago

It's partially a problem of silent evidence. For this time tracking app there are hundreds mouldering in some corner of the App Store. And the people who made them aren't gonna write any blog posts, and we wouldn't read them if they did. It's a blockbuster model, sure it's possible to make money but unlikely. It's possible to make money acting, but you probably won't. That's just how it works out. I don't think that's so cynical. Those who succeed in such a scenario are often insensitive to the unlikelihood of their success - so are those who fail.

jakobegger 12y ago
There are lots of people writing blog posts complaining that their apps don't earn them money. Conventional wisdom right now seems to be that it's normal that developers don't make any money. But it is very much possible to make a money selling apps. Just identify a market that you can serve, then make a good app, then advertise it effectively. Profit! However, it's not easy to become a billionaire with your app; for that you need lots of luck among other things. I think the comparison with acting is actually pretty good. There are a lot of people who make money acting. It's not that difficult. You need a bit of talent and a lot of commitment, but I happen to know more than one person who managed to become professional actors. It is of course unlikely to become a world famous super-rich actor; but making a reasonable living from acting is absolutely achievable.
- nsxwolf 12y ago
  The best decision I ever made as an iOS developer was to quit. Now I don't owe Apple $99 a year.
- davedx 12y ago
  > Just... > It's not that difficult... > I happen to know more than one... > ...absolutely achievable. I admire your optimism, but have you personally tried and succeeded at these things you claim are so easy?
  - mathgeek 12y ago

snowwrestler 12y ago

Most people have misconceptions about making money. They think it's sometimes easy to make money. The truth is that it is always hard to make money, and always will be. To see why, we can reverse it in our heads: do you think carefully about how you spend your money? Me too; and so does everyone else. That's the hump a product or service needs to get over before it can make much money. And it's true 100% of the time. When a product or service looks like an easy way to make money, what's really happening is that it's a great product or service, so it gets over the hump more easily. Another big misconception is that they think that ideas make money. They say, "there's already a great time-tracking app in the App Store," and think, "so it's not an idea worth pursuing, because it already succeeded." The reality is that execution and operations are what make money--which means that many businesses executing on the same idea can all make money. How many dry cleaners are there in the U.S.? How many pen manufacturers? How many car companies? How many Mexican restaurants? Or car washes? It's extremely rare that a concept is totally dominated by one large company. But because it is rare, those stories are endlessly told and retold within the culture. So if people are not thinking carefully, they can come to (paradoxically) perceive those rare types of companies to be the norm. Here's a fun exercise: pull up the list of the Fortune 500 companies and see how many names you recognize. These are all huge businesses, but most people will not even recognize half of them. It gives you a sense that there is a big difference between being a famous business, and being a successful business.

rnernento 12y ago
I really like this comment but I tried the "fun exercise" and I recognize way too many of the companies. Maybe I'm just a product of effective advertising...

btbuildem 12y ago

> world still rewards value, even if it takes some time This is the takeaway for me - success takes time. In an age of 30s videos and short snippets of text, who has the attention span for success?

404error 12y ago

Thanks, this to me read like a pep-talk. Might be just what I needed to get me off my butt and start working on something. Better to fail than to not try at all. Now if only I could quit playing Destiny after work.

doomlaser 12y ago

The problem is that the popularity of products in a networked economy follows the power law: http://www.aspeninstitute.org/policy-work/communications-society/power-curve-society-future-innovation-opportunity-social-equity http://www.aspeninstitute.org/policy-work/communications-soc... You might recognize the power distribution curve, as it's the same as the graph of the long tail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law#mediaviewer/File:Long_tail.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law#mediaviewer/File:Long... What happens is that you have a handful of people who make a LOT of money, a small few who do OK, and the vast, vast majority starve. Since our economy is increasingly becoming an online, globally networked one, these effects are becoming stronger, and are a contributor to economic inequality. Power Law phenomenon on the net has been observed for ages. Here's a post from 2003 where Kottke notes the distribution in the popularity of blogs on Technorati: http://kottke.org/03/02/weblogs-and-power-laws http://kottke.org/03/02/weblogs-and-power-laws I imagine the curve fits similarly for things like app store rankings, Reddit and Hacker News post popularities, top Steam sellers, Amazon rankings, etc. > The world still rewards value, even if it takes some time. The people clamoring that it doesn't are doing so because they want to believe that it isn't their fault they didn't succeed. The funny thing is, this is not entirely true. Quality is only important up to a certain threshold, after which you're at the mercy of what are essentially chaotic network effects early in the lifecycle of your product. Salgankik, Dodds, and Watts performed an experiment that begins to provide some empirical support for this intuition [359]. They created a music download site, populated with 48 obscure songs of varying quality written by actual performing groups. Visitors to the site were presented with a list of the songs and given the opportunity to listen to them. Each visitor was also shown a table listing the current “download count” for each song — the number of times it had been downloaded from the site thus far. At the end of a session, the visitor was given the opportunity to download copies of the songs that he or she liked. Now, unbeknownst to the visitors, upon arrival they were actually being assigned at random to one of eight “parallel” copies of the site. The parallel copies started out identically, with the same songs and with each song having a download count of zero. However, each parallel copy then evolved differently as users arrived. In a controlled, small-scale setting, then, this experiment provided a way to observe what happens to the popularities of 48 songs when you get to run history forward eight different times. And in fact, it was found that the “market share” of the different songs varied considerably across the different parallel copies, although the best songs never ended up at the bottom and the worst songs never ended up at the top. Salganik et al. also used this approach to show that, overall, feedback produced greater inequality in outcomes. Specifically, they assigned some users to a ninth version of the site in which no feedback about download counts was provided at all. In this version of the site, there was no direct opportunity for users to contribute to rich-get-richer dynamics, and indeed, there was significantly less variation in the market share of different songs. There are clear implications for popularity in less controlled environments, parallel to some of the conclusions we’ve drawn from our models — specifically, that the future success of a book, movie, celebrity, or Web site is strongly influenced by these types of feedback effects, and hence may to some extent be inherently unpredictable. http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch18.pdf http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networ...

adambratt 12y ago

A simple comment but one of the best I've read on here