
How I Made $350 In Two Days With Three Pages and Some Payment Code (2011) - tpatke
http://danshipper.com/how-i-made-350-in-two-days-with-three-pages-a
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ChuckMcM
This is misstated:

 _"You can find the post here. It didn’t have any upvotes (besides mine) for
about 10 minutes. Then it slowly started to climb. And climb. By about 1 am it
was at the top of the front page and the orders were pouring in! By 2 am I was
scrambling to fill orders. I had a huge TextEdit file open with customer
names, site URLs, and email addresses. I sent every email, and set up every
survey by hand.

By 6 am I had completed processing every order and went to bed. I got up an
hour later forwork at 7 am. In those few precious moments of sleep I had made
another $40. By the end of the day on Monday I had made over $330 and the
number kept climbing.

So now I’m sitting here writing this blog post with a bunch of orders to fill,
features to build, and customers to help. My Stripe account also says that
I’ve made $350 to date. All from three pages and some payment code."_

You made $350 from 3 pages, a payment code, and 5 hours of manual labor from
1AM to 6AM. And the additional hours you spent creating the pages. So that is
about $70/hr at best and closer $25/hr if you include the other time
investment.

I only mention this because it is a common mistake people make when they see
real money come in for the product of their work that they see it as paying $x
for the product because they haven't included any value for their own time.

If you are not careful that mistake can have you working below minimum wage
:-).

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dshipper
Hey guys great to see an old article of mine like this posted here. For the
people who asked, the site is down because I sold it and the new owner
neglected to take care of it :(

Read about the experience here: <http://danshipper.com/110636263>

Happy to answer questions about it if you have them.

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ambuj
To the people wondering whether the website is down: yes, Dan has sold the
website: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3698539> (DomainPolish: From MVP
To Exit In 6 Months)

~~~
hahla
Is this exit really a significant milestone? If I'm not wrong, he sold the
site for $3,500 which really is not alot. That plus considering the fact that
he probably got out at the right time considering the venture was not
profitable for the new owner (a presumption based on the fact that the site is
on longer online). Sales like these happen numerous times a day, usually
theyre fly by night business ideas, spam adsense sites, or etc. Its nothing
new, and posting stuff like this to hn does not make it any different, go to
digitalpoint theres 15 year olds doing this stuff day in and out.

~~~
kriro
It's a very significant milestone. He created value for customers from a basic
idea and managed to sell the entire thing to some other guy.

It's a great little story to get you funding. Ignore the 3.5k (which isn't
horrible imo) the entire story is worth way more from a career building POV.
It's not your typical adsense pump and dump either this is miniature startup
entrepreneurship. I'm not a VC guy but a story like this would get my "yeah
invest in that dude" senses tingling.

~~~
hahla
Sorry, I come off sounding as a cynic from the start. But I have liked the
quality and content of Dan's previous posts, and this is not anything
personal. With that said - Really? I could find you hundreds of others doing
this same exact thing and I wouldn't find that as a reason to qualify them to
get my "yeah invest in that dude" senses tingling. I think I see this from a
different viewpoint because from my years on hn it seems as most of the
readers are blind to the other side of the startup world - the one where
people focus on building products for 1) money or 2) flip. There's a whole
ecosystem out there full of these small, medium, large, business that are
bought and sold everyday.

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mistercow
What I found particularly interesting about this is just how _minimum_ the
minimum viable product was. I think it's easy to lose perspective on the MVP
concept and forget that not everything has to be automated right off the bat.
Instead of starting out with a web app that automated a process, he started
out by offering a manual service, and then automated the job he had created
for himself. Very smart.

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teh_klev
This was covered a while back: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839534>

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fmax30
In other news a friend of mine actually earned 600$ in 1.5 hours by selling a
static html5 website (he had a site in his portfolio the client asked him to
make the same ) to a client on odesk.

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Zoophy
"$350 In Two Days With Three Pages" sounds really awesome (and a bit
linkbait-y), but how many hours did you actually work? Looks like you had to
do a lot of manual labor.

I am also a bit skeptical about it otherwise, seeing as this is simply a proxy
for another service.

~~~
milkman
I sometimes do "one off" stuff like this, and it usually takes about 2 days of
solid work at the computer.

That said, it doesn't often work as well as Dan's did.

~~~
Nowyouknow
You have to take into account him manually creating surveys and getting
reviews for his customers.

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phineas
Seeing as this site is no longer functioning and the article is 1.5 years old,
is there a site that does inexpensive focus groups to review websites?

~~~
ricardobeat
<http://fivesecondtest.com/>

<http://www.usertesting.com/>

<http://usabilla.com/>

<http://www.testgang.com/>

<http://feedbackroulette.com/>

<http://www.loop11.com/>

<http://feedbackarmy.com/>

<http://www.usaura.com/>

<http://www.conceptfeedback.com/>

<http://www.pickfu.com/>

<http://ethn.io/>

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paigalhaes
Is <http://www.domainpolish.com/> down, or just me that can't access it?

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kfullert
Great story and good to see success - how scalable is it - from what I read,
the early feedback praised you on the quality/depth of questions, which if you
move to a more automated way of producing the surveys you'll lose?

~~~
gabemart
I guess you could hire someone on mechanical turk to write tailored survey
questions?

It's mechanical turk all the way down!

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verroq
>Posted on August 3, 2011

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roozbeh18
haha he probably doesn't know yet that he is one the first page of HN and his
website is down.

~~~
dshipper
yea pretty fun to wake up it. the site's not down because of traffic though.
as others have alluded to I sold it a while ago.

~~~
paigalhaes
would be nice to have a warning message there... unless all the work was done
and no client waiting for results, and there is no will to carry on the site
by the new owner

no news because maybe a competitor wiping it out? ;)

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sixQuarks
I love that you're not afraid to share both your failures and successes. The
important thing I see is that you're out there testing different things, if
one path leads to a dead-end, you figure out another path. I think you're on
your way to success. Good luck!

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sparkinson
Seems your site is taking a bit of a hit:
<http://isitup.org/www.domainpolish.com>

What a great idea though, glad to see it's a success! Now you just need to
automate it a bit further.

~~~
finspin
The article is 1.5 years old so it's possible that the website doesn't exist
anymore (the domain is still actively registered though).

~~~
sparkinson
Oh wow, I didn't even notice how old it was. Guess it was more of a hit a run
thing. A shame really, though it was a nice use of Mechanical Turk.

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jrajav
The site: [http://web-
beta.archive.org/web/20120525003840/http://domain...](http://web-
beta.archive.org/web/20120525003840/http://domainpolish.com/)

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robotic
Reading this guys bio humbles me. He's done more in the last 10 years as a
student than I've done in the past 10 years professionally.

~~~
dshipper
You can still get stuff done! Read: [http://danshipper.com/the-choices-are-
fake-and-the-truth-is-...](http://danshipper.com/the-choices-are-fake-and-the-
truth-is-all-made-up). Feel free to email me at dan@danshipper.com if you have
questions :)

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TallboyOne
Man, this somewhat distresses me. It is so incredibly easy to add basic
automation... write down by hand, really? (Although I really like the custom
thank you videos for your first customers - nice touch).

Great story though, I'm glad you cashed out, i guess i just feel that twinge
of pain at the fact you could have kept it going for hardly more work, but i
understand entirely where you're coming from - so props to you !

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pknerd
Making "How Do I" posts can only bring traffic to the site than any other
benefit to others.

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javajin
Really enjoyed this article. Back to the drawing board is great advice

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slykat
Is there a mobile version of this type of service?

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escaped_reddit
How do you know someone goes to an ivy school? Don't worry, they'll tell you.

