

A tiny niche in collectible coins grows into a $5 million mini-empire - chwolfe
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/01/AR2009110102261_pf.html

======
patio11
For folks wanting to see samples <http://store.coinsforanything.com/c-9-other-
coins.aspx>

P.S. Legacy media: When we cite folks on the Internet, we include links. I
should not have to use Google to complete your articles for you.

~~~
jamesbressi
Thank you! I was just about to use Google to find the link and then realized
I'm on Hacker News and if there were comments already on the article, someone
beat me to it.

+1 for you, and another +1 for catching legacy media up to speed ;)

------
shaddi
It bears repetition: make things people want and sell them at a profit.

------
nazgulnarsil
he calls himself a serial entrepreneur even though he's still on his first
business and his second is going to be T-shirts (notoriously bad business
sector)? I forsee bad things in the future.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
He's been successful, which I'm pretty sure gives him the right. Whether he'll
do it again, is yet to be seen. I bet people would have said selling coins
would be a notoriously bad idea/sector,etc. but he did well. I foresee good
things in his future.

------
jeromec
Wow, he may end up in the dictionary next to the word 'capitalist'. I love
that he has positive cash flow. I know websites and Internets are all the rage
but he may be actually making more profit than Facebook, and certainly more
than Twitter.

~~~
clistctrl
Twitter may not be making anything right now, but when they decide to start
monetizing it, they have the potential to rake in huge profits.

~~~
jeromec
"...when they decide to start monetizing it"

You say that like it's as simple as making the decision. Why would they hold
off on making money? I think it's because they don't know _how_ to monetize
it. I'm curious to see what they come up with.

~~~
jfarmer
Because money often interferes with growth, and in any case if your first
priority is growth it's best to focus on that rather than bring in secondary
or tertiary concerns.

~~~
jeromec
According to a Mashable article in March '09: _"The latest numbers from
Nielsen Online indicate that Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year in February,
registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for
the month."_

I'm not sure how much you can interfere with that kind of growth. My point is
that people seem to _talk_ easily about monetizing all those users, but nobody
seems to be able to give specifics on how to do it.

~~~
abstractbill
Even if users don't mind the ads, it can take a depressing amount of time to
integrate ads into a site [1]. Assuming you don't just use adsense, each
advertiser often has their own way of doing things and will have one-off
requirements for how their ads should behave on your site. That's engineering
time that could be used to fuel growth by developing features and working on
scaling.

[1] I'm speaking from personal experience. For about six months, I worked on
nothing but integrating various advertisers' products into justin.tv. Video ad
providers are particularly difficult to work with, since it's still quite a
young market.

~~~
jeromec
Ads may be their obvious route, but I wonder how much of a turn-off that will
be for users. I'm totally rooting for Twitter to be successful, I just wanted
to highlight the contrast between this small $5M business actually making
money vs. "hot" web companies that _may_ be faddish, and have yet to prove a
model to make money, yet get all the press plus $100M investment.

