
How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget - ChanningAllen
https://www.indiehackers.com/@Louis_Grenier/2cc8c6c79c
======
glibgil
A better guide would be how to launch a business on a budget of 45 minutes a
day. I'm sure that's the bigger challenge for most of us

~~~
a-saleh
Unfortunately I realised that my brain just doesn't work that way. It seems
that for any meaningful, productive work I need at least hour and half. On
smaller budget I can only do chores, i.e. pay an invoice or answer a trivial
email.

As if there was some weird rule stating "if you can't complete a thing in 15
mins, it will take you at least an hour"

For harder work, I need 3 hours and quiet. 4 hours seem to be the most
efficient time chunk anyway, and after that it starts sharply falling (usually
there is little difference if I work for 6 or 10 hours straight)

~~~
mikekchar
I think it's a matter of practice. I experimented with trying to do a long
kata (the old Core Wars game) one pomodoro a day [0]. I didn't finish it, but
I managed 66 pomodoros. I kept a detailed TODO list and I was really surprised
that I could maintain a fairly decent pace. The link has Asciinema videos of
every Pomodoro I did. It's painfully slow watching me type, but if you use the
">" key, you can speed up the video (3-4 times seems about right).

At the beginning I had difficulty getting much done, but by the end it only
took me about a minute to get into the zone. I think the other main problem I
had (which culminated in me not continuing) is maintaining a regular schedule.
1 pomodoro a day doesn't seem that hard to do, but sustaining the pace over
the long term was pretty difficult. I ended up skipping lots of days
(sometimes going a week between pomodoros) and finally gave up. One of these
days I'll learn how to overcome that problem :-)

[0] - [http://mikekchar.github.io/core-wars-
kata/](http://mikekchar.github.io/core-wars-kata/)

~~~
travisjungroth
You spent 30 hours on a coding problem? How big was this thing?

~~~
mikekchar
Hmmm... It's a couple of thousand lines of code I think. I forget. If you go
to the link, the code is there (I run everything through Github). Each
pomodoro is in it's own branch and I kept them around so that I could study
the diffs later (haven't gotten around to it yet).

My original goal was to practice constant refactoring on a non-toy sized
problem. Normal katas necessarily require you to work on toy problems. Because
of this many interesting real world problems never come up. Frequently you can
see people using techniques that aren't sustainable, for instance.

In the end, while I _did_ get some value from that, by far the most
interesting thing I discovered was that you can write code 1 pomodoro a day!
If you take this as being about 1 weeks worth of work, I think my productivity
is a bit lower than normal. However, it's not off by that much.

Even more interestingly, because I work in a timezone 9 hours separated from
my colleagues I've always wanted to be able to hand over work. In other words,
2 people working on the same story. 1 person works during the night and the
other person works during the day. They hand over the code in the morning and
the evening. Using the TODO list techniques I was using in the kata (and
making sure to end the day on a failing test), I've actually been able to
accomplish this with like minded colleagues. It's actually quite incredible.
Probably I should write a blog post about it ;-)

~~~
mattcanhack
> Even more interestingly, because I work in a timezone 9 hours separated from
> my colleagues I've always wanted to be able to hand over work. In other
> words, 2 people working on the same story. 1 person works during the night
> and the other person works during the day. They hand over the code in the
> morning and the evening. Using the TODO list techniques I was using in the
> kata (and making sure to end the day on a failing test), I've actually been
> able to accomplish this with like minded colleagues. It's actually quite
> incredible. Probably I should write a blog post about it ;-)

I would definitely be very interested in this. Seems like a smart way to work
remote or on personal projects.

~~~
mikekchar
OK. I'll do it. I've been resisting re-awakening my blog because I have too
many other things to do, but it's probably time. Sometime in the nearish
future (give me a week anyway ;-) ), take a look at
[http://mikekchar.github.io/portfolio//index.html](http://mikekchar.github.io/portfolio//index.html).
If you don't notice any changes since 2013, feel free to email me and kick my
ass ;-)

------
fairpx
Nicely summarised steps. We went through the exact same process to launch our
business. Tip: If you want to spend less than a $1000 bucks and launch even
faster, start with a service instead of a product. That's pretty much exactly
how we launched our business. Took us less than a $100, and grew to $10k/mo
relatively fast.

I wrote a tiny [1] summary about it on Reddit last week [1]
[[https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6wz5d5/10kmrr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6wz5d5/10kmrr_in_3_months_i_have_nothing_to_sell_you/)]

~~~
justboxing
> If you want to spend less than a $1000 bucks and launch even faster, start
> with a service instead of a product. Took us less than a $100, and grew to
> $10k/mo relatively fast.

Agreed. SaaS, done right, makes money while you sleep.

~~~
fairpx
Totally. However, when you start as a service, you can quickly get cashflow
and use that money to self fund your saas dev. Once your SaaS starts growing
you can decrease and maybe at some point kill the service part of the business
(or keep it around as a premium upsell). It's the best way I know to bootstrap
a business without having to live on ramen.

------
gist
> Seth has published 18 books and is regarded as one the best marketing minds
> alongside Ogilvy or Tim Ferris, so he doesn't need to be in the trenches
> anymore.

I hate statements like this ie 'best marketing minds alongside Ogilvy..'.

Who considers Seth equivalent of David Ogilvy or anything close? That's really
quite ridiculous actually.

Oh yeah and Tim Ferris is certainly no Ogilvy either.

Ogilvy built a world renown career in advertising. Seth wrote books and
started a small company that doesn't even exist anymore. He may have some good
things to say but he is certainly not in the league of a David Ogilvy.

Lastly ideas and 'how I'd do it' don't matter as everyone knows. You can have
tons of ideas a new idea everyday. Not even trying to implement the idea and
just being interviewed about it is like hypothesizing how you'd pick someone
up in a bar or win the Olympics.

~~~
erdle
100% Ogilvy is a God.

------
DizzyDoo
I started my business with less than $1000. I worked a full-time job and built
my first video game product
([http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900/The_Cat_Machine/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900/The_Cat_Machine/))
by waking up earlier in the morning to get an hour or two in before my 'real'
job, and working Saturdays, and doing that for a year. I found customers by
putting an enormous about of effort into marketing, and finding only some of
it paid off (but what did, really worked). Obviously, having a comfortable day
job and not having familial responsibilities lowers many of the risks of
starting a business, I'm not sure how I would have approached it had I a
family or less secure employment.

The biggest expenses were commissioning a composer friend of mine to produce
an excellent soundtrack, and licensing a couple of pieces of development
software, but that was <$1000. That product has funded my current product, so
it's still early days for my business, I'm only a few years into this.

I feel like product one taught me so, so much, and product number two has been
a similar learning experience. I'll probably know what I'm doing by my sixth
or seventh game!

~~~
schnevets
I know someone who has written two hugo-nominated sci-fi novels, but otherwise
lives a typical 9-to-5 work life. I finally asked how he gets his writing done
and learned that he wakes up at 5am each day. According to him, "the first
thing you do every day is the most important thing".

~~~
DizzyDoo
Oh, I absolutely agree! I'm definitely an early morning sort of person, and
when you're a self-employed, self-directed programmer, that feeling in the day
of 'getting going', digging into a good chunk of work with free hours
stretching ahead of you, that can't really be beaten.

So I do get up earlier, and start work earlier than most, but I don't start
the day with news sites, or emails, or twitter or anything like that. At best,
it distracts from getting the work-day going, and at worst, it introduces an
awful lot of negativity. Took me a while to figure out, perhaps it's more
obvious to others, but a truly 'quiet' first few hours in a day is very
beneficial to me.

~~~
mdekkers
_it introduces an awful lot of negativity._

So true - I used to start my day reading news. No more, and my days are
happier for it. Most of it is shit you cannot influence anyway.

------
frgtpsswrdlame
Seems like fluff junk. I've noticed a lot of these indiehackers posts are
either a 1000 word post that could be distilled to a few bullet points of
common sense or are just extrapolating on survivorship bias.

~~~
thanatropism
So I spent a few days mesmerized by Jocko Willink, the ex-marine turned
motivational coach until I realized all of these people are saying the same:
stop daydreaming and keep doing something until it hurts and then continue
some.

This is obviously survivorship bias. Everyone who has gone out and achieved
success has started by starting. There is no success story that starts without
this initial spark and usually a lot of hard work. But all of these are
necessary not sufficient conditions.

This (again) goes down to the nature of skill: even in technical or service
roles, etc. much of how we go about our jobs (sufficient conditions) is
implicit and nonverbalizable; moreover because that, we can't peel our skills
to their "core", to their necessary conditions. We clumsily apply an abundance
of skill to get by.

This is compounded in the case of entrepreneurs by the fact that besides not
being fully aware of what their magic sauce is, they can't also cleanly
decompose what was blind luck and favorable timing from the moxie they brought
to the table.

\--- Summary for nihilists: every lottery winner starts by going to the store
and buying tickets and following the draws and praying a lot and at times
cursing at God in the rain at midnight. This is the nature of great
achievement.

~~~
packetslave
tiny little nitpick: Jocko was a Navy SEAL, not a Marine.

------
clemParis
The interesting thing being that he didn't do any of the things he says he
would do (so, maybe despite all his best undercover efforts, things would fail
!), yet people listen as if the messiah was talking.

------
idlewords
Seth Godin is a marketer and talented self-promoter. His job (which he does
well) is to write pithy stuff that captures your attention.

This is an agency problem with a lot of business advice. The people who really
know how to launch a business on $1K are almost never the ones writing about
how to do it.

~~~
gist
This is exactly true. His super skill is self promoting and capturing
attention. He has definitely done well at that. And sure it's possible that he
could start a business on $1000 but quite honestly I am not sure that is even
a good yardstick anyway. A good business could take much more to start and in
business you wouldn't never arbitrarily limit yourself in that way anyway.

Not sour grapes either. I started a business years ago with roughly $2000
(let's say it's $6k in today's dollars) that I had saved up. Made money, sold
it and it's still operating to this day many years later.

~~~
newbear
What is it?

------
kevmo
"We, marketers, are selfish, lying, short-term thinking scum. We believe that
our job is to manipulate people as we market to them."

The book Propaganda by Edward Bernays is an excellent read about how to think
long-term about marketing. Define your ultimate goals -> dial out several
levels and think about what conditions drive people to participate in those
goals -> work to create those conditions.

Interesting to think about how to do it in conjunction with "focus on the
tiniest audience possible."

~~~
raldu
Propaganda is the _exact_ opposite of what digital marketing is about.

In fact, the provided quote from the article is supposed to highlight that the
"time for propaganda is over" in an _ironical_ way.

Propaganda is the way of the TV, shouting, manipulation, disruption, etc.

Focusing on a defined audience, on the other hand, is the way of the "new"
marketing that Godin (an the article) talks about.

Therefore attempting to think about "the tiniest audience" in conjunction with
"propaganda" terms is going to be unproductive; because in propaganda,
"everybody" is your audience, not a defined segment.

~~~
kevmo
"In propaganda, "everybody" is your audience, not a defined segment."

Everybody _can_ be your audience. Or a group of 1,000 can be.

------
stevenj
>How do you get the word out about your product or service if you have only
$1,000 in the bank? In the words of Seth Godin, "by giving people an abundance
of confidence which will create an abundance of value and all I’m asking in
return is to be trusted."

The quoted part from Seth Godin sounds like it goes against what the author
stands for, as it sounds very salesy.

------
ansek
Always wondered why marketing gurus couldn't create any big companies. They
write about people psychology, how to sell, how to create hypes and go viral
plus they have the network of investors, CEO and brands.

And yet, they're not the people behind behemoths like Stripe, AirBnB, Uber -
you name it - nor smaller cool companies out there.

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wheresvic1
I'm actually wondering how to market the medium post that I wrote that
delivers value - seems a bit of chicken and the egg problem.

~~~
WA
Exactly this. Same as "build a side project as a marketing channel for your
main thing" – as if that side project markets itself. People seem to assume
just because something is free, it automatically reaches a big audience.

~~~
jaf656s
In the actual interview, he says the only way to really learn marketing is to
market something.

So write the medium article and try different ways to get people to read it.

Most people don't know how to do the latter and give up before even starting.

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dsfyu404ed
Step 3 is where most businesses fail.

------
Heraclite
I really enjoyed this article. Any news aggregator where I can find similar
articles? (HN for marketing?)

~~~
ChanningAllen
We publish a few marketing articles a week at Indie Hackers, and that rate
will only increase as we attract more authors. I'd suggest either checking in
with our site a few times a week or subscribing to our newsletter.

