

Startups Open Sourced, 1 Week Later: $10,000+ in Revenue - siong1987
http://www.startupsopensourced.com/2011/05/01/startups-open-sourced-1-week-later-10000-in-revenue/

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daeken
> If you’re feeling really bold, try out Evan Reas’ hack: tell them you want
> them in your book so badly, you’ll e-mail them every day for the next 30
> days with a good reason why they should do it.

If someone were to do this to me, it would bring me from on-the-fence firmly
into the "no" camp. It shows a blatant lack of respect, IMO.

~~~
mootothemax
_If someone were to do this to me, it would bring me from on-the-fence firmly
into the "no" camp. It shows a blatant lack of respect, IMO._

That was my initial reaction as well. But after thinking about it - if the guy
emailed me every day with a _good_ reason, I think I'd start to be gently
amused. Could work. Irritatingly ;)

~~~
njl
I wouldn't read the emails after day three, I'd probably have them
automatically filtered by day five.

~~~
jacobolus
wouldn't it be easier to just send an email back saying "I'm not interested;
please don't send more reasons", after reading something along the lines of
_"Let them know that if they ask you to stop then you’ll stop, but otherwise
you’re really excited about talking to them."_

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mdolon
> AppSumo.com 24-hour special: $8,120 (keep $2,436)

So AppSumo made $5684 in profits by promoting and selling your book? What a
sweet business model..

~~~
guynamedloren
Sweet indeed... would love to hear more about this.

~~~
swanson
It's the same model as Groupon.

The article mentions that the author only requested a 30% share - to ensure
that it was featured on AppSumo from what I understood. I'd imagine the normal
cut is closer to 50-50.

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biot
$10,000 per week sounds like a good haul, but his personal share was closer to
$3000. If the initial rush of sales dies down, he'll be making less than he
would at a job... and that's excluding the opportunity cost from all the
unpaid time it took to write the book. I guess what they say about writing a
book being a labor of love is true.

~~~
guynamedloren
Not sure I follow your argument here. The thing about selling an ebook is that
it's all passive income from here on out. Assuming he set everything up
correctly, which it appears he has, the author has to do almost nothing to
propagate the sales of his book. Sure, he could put in an hour or two a week
for advertising, emailing, etc, but that's negligible. The ball is already
rolling, so there's nothing stopping him from collecting money week after week
while he works a _real job_ , writes another ebook, or runs a startup.

~~~
mattmanser
Look at the sales spike, there's no way that's a sustainable income. 80% of
the sales was from one 24 hour period where he gets only 30% of those sales.

From scanning the article he didn't really say how long it took to write.
There's 32 founders on the 'founders' page, sounds like he put well over 3 or
4 hours per founder. Quite a lot of transcribing and interviewing by the look
of it so I'd guess at least a month.

Kudos for him for making a couple of weeks salary in a week, but put it into
that context. He still only made $3,000 in a week _after_ already putting the
unknown time into the book.

Ignore the $10k claim, $7k effectively went on advertising (appsumo).

imho, the real winners in the story were appsumo.

~~~
jmtame
I'll need to adjust this. We talked about it again and Noah insisted on paying
me more. My cut will be $3 per copy on that $7 sale (42% gross) before PayPal
fees (I am not sure what that will net to). Effectively, my cut will be closer
to $3k or $4k, rather than the current $2k.

I'll update the article when i can with the most accurate information.

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peng
> $15 per audio hour may seem low, especially considering that one hour of
> audio may take up to 4 hours to transcribe. But when you look at the
> conversion rate, it’s not that bad. $1 USD converts to 83 Kenyan Shillings.
> I paid around $800 total for the transcribing, which converts to 66,400
> Shillings. That’s about a month’s worth of rent in Nairobi, the largest city
> and capital of Kenya.

This bothers me. Yeah, rent and food is going to be cheap in Kenya, but an
iPad will cost the same. There's a good chance it'll be costlier because of
import taxes.

Of course, this is a unique case where transcriber had no feedback. In general
though, you shouldn't be paying someone based on your opinion of their cost of
living. It demonstrates a lack of respect, and shows that you don't treat them
as an equal human being.

Maybe it's idealistic nonsense.

~~~
walkers
What's more, his figures work out to 5.3 weeks of work at 40hrs/week, for the
equivalent of one month's rent (not one month's living expenses). Be a shrewd
manipulator of globalization if you want, but don't try and justify away the
raw deal you're giving someone to save a few bucks, especially considering
those bucks would be far more valuable to the guy doing the work than the guy
who is saving them.

~~~
Retric
A relative used to do transcription so while in the worst case it may take 4x
as long (bad audio + intelligible speaker) he often worked at about twice real
time. So that 15$ / could be anywhere from 4$/hour to 30$ an hour.

PS: At those exchange rates 66,400 Shillings = 800$/month rent which seem
really high. I know people in the US paying under 600$ / month rent for fairly
reasonable apartments near major city's.

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patio11
I read most of this. It was worth the $20. (Wufoo: "We're a fan of [ad
retargetting] because it works." is probably worth $20.)

~~~
paraschopra
Yep, I am a fan of retargeting as well (if done within limits so as to not
spook your users). So many users congratulate us for advertising Visual
Website Optimizer every where on the web: Youtube, CNN, Digg, etc. They think
we have big advertising budget. But we really have $500 budget per month.
Retargeting works wonderfully as far as brand recall is concerned!

I recommend AdRoll and Retargeter for the same.

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omouse
The title demonstrates why "open source" is a bad term to use. It's been
loaded with multiple meanings. I thought the book was about startups that
created free/open source software.

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hvass
The first thing that struck me was the amount of money AppSumo was keeping.

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davidw
I'm not sure it's as effective for 'big bang' types of things like this where
you want to sell as much as possible in a brief period, but to me, starting
with a Kindle version only makes a lot of sense:

[http://blog.liberwriter.com/2011/04/22/self-publishing-
the-i...](http://blog.liberwriter.com/2011/04/22/self-publishing-the-
incremental-way/)

That way you don't have all the typesetting and print on demand overhead; you
just get it out there and see how it goes before investing in that stuff.

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Soupy
cache -
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wHndBgg...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wHndBggSdOoJ:www.startupsopensourced.com/+startupsopensourced&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com)

Congratulations to the author, I would love to hear some reviews from those of
you who have already read this.

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guynamedloren
Congrats on your success! It seems like your hard work has definitely paid
off.

Just a few nit-picky things: Not sure if you are a native English speaker or
not, but your analysis was somewhat difficult to follow. Spelling was okay,
but there were just weird little things here and there that were confusing.
Also, please link images such that they open in a new window/tab. I can't even
tell you how many times I opened an image, then Xed out thinking it was in
it's own window.

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jayliew
For people doing consumer internet startups, learning how the average normal
person thinks, what makes them tick, is something I'd pay for. All of you
reading this here are by definition, not normal ;)

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imagetic
I feel like I'm reading the contents of a self-help infomercial.

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jmtame
for anyone interested, i wrote about how i dealt with the traffic here:
[http://jmtame.posterous.com/startups-open-sourced-is-out-
go-...](http://jmtame.posterous.com/startups-open-sourced-is-out-go-grab-it)

the story was down for the first 20 minutes. i was trying to call siong to
delete the story but he didn't have his phone on him, so i was pretty much
stuck with fixing it on the spot.

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jmtame
i hope my linode doesn't crash again...

edit: reboot #1. this is like monday all over again. i'm resizing my linode to
4gb now, then will install wpcache. will be back up in 4 min.

edit: wow, that was like 20 minutes of downtime. it should be working now.

~~~
mootothemax
A tip for when you have a spare half hour - switch from Apache to nginx :)

Let me convince you as to why: I have a 1GB VPS with prgmr.com, and it's
comfortably survived being top story on the Hacker News homepage, all whilst
running my regular web apps running in the background.

Edit: If you're feeling _really_ brave (or foolish - always a thin line), you
could try setting up nginx now on a random port (e.g. 8080), and if it looks
OK, kill Apache and move nginx to port 80. All depends on how much your server
is struggling - would it be worth 20 mins downtime now if you don't have to
worry about it again?

Edit 2: Looks like you're using Wordpress - are you using a cache plugin as
well? If not, install W3 Total Cache right this very instant :) If you'd like
any help with this, I'll be around for the next couple of hours, email is in
my profile :)

~~~
petercooper
Good advice but still not entirely necessary. I run several VMs and dedicated
servers and have had numerous HN front pages and other high traffic leads to
1GB VMs running Apache (WordPress without caching, even). The issue here seems
to be a less than optimal Apache configuration and not having just enough
memory to handle the requests properly (but 1GB seems to be a sweet spot for a
regular Apache setup nowadays).

~~~
mootothemax
_Good advice but still not entirely necessary_

 _The issue here seems to be a less than optimal Apache configuration_

I couldn't agree with you more. The problem is my Apache knowledge pretty much
well starts and ends with setting up virtual hosts. A year ago I was having
serious issues with my Apache set up, and spent hours trying to reduce its
memory footprint, and playing with lots of other settings, all to no avail. So
I gave up, installed nginx... and it just worked. Which is why I'm so
evangelical about it :)

That said, I'm certainly not against Apache; just the setup time and my abject
failure. Which is, most likely, incompetence ;)

~~~
petercooper
Yeah, Apache is like a giant lump of clay you need to "sculpt" into something
useful, whereas nginx is a fast and empty potter's wheel waiting for you to
throw the clay on ;-) nginx is definitely well worth it if you don't have
complex Apache-specific requirements.

Another alternative I've been playing with lately is running haproxy on port
80 and then throwing requests to different daemons (like Apache and nginx)
based on the host header.

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DomesticMouse
I'm enjoying reading it. =)

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braindead_in
Shameless plug. For an free Skype recorder for Windows and a painless audio
transcription outsourcing service check <http://scribie.com>.

