
Making money twice - brm
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1256-making-money-twice
======
shafqat
Interesting post. Not everyone can get away with repackaging though. You
better be damn sure you're content is amazing before trying to serve it up
over and over again. Otherwise it'll just piss people off.

They get away with because the content itself is so valuable.

~~~
mixmax
I would actually say that the content isn't spectacular. It isn't bad by any
means - but not in a league of it's own either. Getting real can probably best
be described as a cooked down version of common sense and business 101.

What is amazing though is the marketing - which is what this post is all
about. I'm sure that at least one third of the people on this site could
create the same content if they put their mind to it. What almost nobody can
do though is market it like 37signals.

~~~
pchristensen
_"at least one third of the people on this site could create the same content
if they put their mind to it"_

I'll give you that your one third could produce the ideas, but how many could
also produce the straightforward, simple, clear writing? It's harder than it
looks.

~~~
ckinnan
If I've learned anything on Hacker News, its not the idea that matters, its
the execution.

------
cousin_it
This must be how people transition from doing useful work to being marketing
gurus etc. Yeah it pays, but it's bad for the soul :-) I recall Phillip J.
Eby, once an unusually smart Python programmer, now a self-help author.

~~~
rglullis
Thank you for your comment. I thought I was the only one that read this post
as "more ways to keep milking money from the same suckers."

They already cried foul when Google did a product that was slightly similar to
Campfire. Now, I'd love to see their reaction if someone decided to
"repackage" one of their products on their own.

~~~
jacobbijani
Repackaging someone else's content and repackaging your own content are two
extremely different things.

------
j2d2
This is bordering on something I'd expect Donald Trump to suggest. Whether or
not it can make money, it's a tactic I usually expect people like Trump or
Robert Kiyosaki to promote and I start tuning out...

~~~
whatusername
Really? How so? It's not that they were necessarily selling to the _same_
people 6 times? In one sense all they were doing is "making something (in a
format) people want"

Some people read blogs - that's great - they got the info Some people only
just found out about them and want the easy full back story - that's great -
buy an ebook. Some people hate ebooks, but love the tactile feel of paper -
buy the book Some people are more audible and need to hear it spoken to them -
go to the conference..

All they did was come up with an idea once - and then present it in different
and more appropriate ways to different people _. How is that Trump tactics?

_ Note - I realise that some people will buy the content multiple times - but
honestly - this is a capitalist society, and they obviously derive some
benefit from it...

~~~
j2d2
Because they're telling us to pay them to teach us how to be successful _just
like them_. Follow our easy program and you'll get rich, just like us!

I'm aware we live in a capitalist society. It's fine to make money. I'm saying
it won't be my money.

~~~
toby
I thought the same thing when I read this article. It's actually the exact
formula described by Tim Ferris. \- Establish yourself as an "expert" in some
field \- Sell information products about how to make money in said field \-
Make far more money talking about said field than you ever actually made
working in it

Nothing particularly wrong with it, maybe the advice is good and many people
need someone to look up to. But the parallel with Kiyosaki is accurate.

~~~
stupiduser
Sort of like how Joel Spolsky makes more money via the job board on his blog
than via sales of Fog Bugz. Hmm, doesn't some other blog have a job board as
well?

------
rokhayakebe
If you have an audience it is easier to sell many products. You can repackage
all your blog posts into whatever you want, but if there is not much people
who come across it, you wont make much.

~~~
run4yourlives
Um, you won't have an audience until you start distribution though. There was
a time that 37S didn't have any audience at all, and that wasn't too long ago.

------
mooneater
Easier once you are already well known.

~~~
henning
They have been well-known, but it's because they were saying smart things even
back in the dot-com bubble: amidst the insanity of Pets.com, they were the
ones citing the Dutch tulip mania (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania>)
on their homepage as part of their pitch to potential clients and the world as
a whole.

------
jrockway
FWIW, this doesn't always work. I know of a certain columnist who took some of
his columns and had them made into a book (via Apress). Well, nobody bought
the book and he now has several thousand of them sitting in his garage. I
picked up 5 of the books when he was giving them away, meaning to give them to
coworkers two jobs ago. I forgot, and now they take up a lot of space.

(This was the publisher's loss, though, not his. That's the way to do things
:)

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
Vanity presses are risky that way. These days I think print-on-demand is the
way to go for small runs like that.

------
axod
<http://decknetwork.net/>

Jesus Christ do they have to shout quite so loud?

------
skmurphy
We are doing some of those, not to as large an audience as 37signals. One
thing that makes it difficult is a lack of good tools to re-purpose content
across blogs, wiki, web, print, presentations, animation/video, and PDF. We do
workshops where we have the content both as a presentation (slides), a
workbook/handout, and in a wiki. It's a lot of extra work right now.
Conceptually we develop/refine in a wiki and deliver as presentation (PPT
slides), print, and wiki (slimmed down, that is then available as an on-line
notebook where further work can be done). I have contact info in my profile
and would welcome any suggestions for tools that make it easy to develop and
re-purpose content.

~~~
Hutzpah
Emacs Muse Mode. Write the thing in Muse. Than export it to whatever you like
it's everything available: wiki, html, pdf, latex and so on.

------
alex_c
Hmmm... the flip side of this advice, of course, would be "don't spread
yourself too thin", or "pick one thing and do it well"...

~~~
brandnewlow
That's not a flip side at all.

What they're talking about here is the "do it well." They're making an
argument that doing it well involves repackaging that one thing you're doing
for multiple audiences.

Content is half the battle. Distribution is the other.

~~~
t0pj
_Content is half the battle. Distribution is the other._

Don't forget the third half; getting people to give a damn (i.e. marketing).

~~~
brandnewlow
well said.

A comment I read somewhere about Rocketboom often comes back to me. It was
something like this:

"They made a halfway decent video show....and then got it played everywhere.
The everywhere was the real value."

The blog post linked about is not about making a video show, it's about the
everywhere part of the equation.

