I'm not a big fan of creating that many products since it seems like you're forcing yourself into a churn-and-burn corner (and you'll probably be building systemic weaknesses into your model, like being one Googlewhack or AppStore reordering away from penury). However, the core insight about creation being one more process that can be scaled is potentially pretty big.
You can even use it in the service of the one big lovingly-handedcrafted adequately-supported non-sucking product that you're supposedly not capable of building/marketing/etc. For example, everybody and their dog has done "photo sharing website", and if you're coming to the Internet today with photo sharing site #85421 you're probably not going to get too far. However, you could probably do fairly well with the same tech and a focus on wedding photographers. (I happen to know that pond is well-fished, too, just an example.) And you could roll out new facets of your marketing/product creation strategy to target each niche you can identify, big and small.
For example: I very much doubt that I could make a software product about a subject as niche as owls of Asia while still adequately devoting time and resources to supporting/maintaining/improving it, but I'm pretty sure with an established product adding a bit about owls of Asia to the marketing mix is pretty much just a bolt-on-and-go sort of maneuver. (You might ask "Now is there anyone in the world who will actually pay money to do something associated with the owls of Asia?!" I have evidence in the affirmative.)
Edit to add: It seems Max and I independently chose owl-related niches as our practical examples, since he posted before me and I didn't see it. What are the odds, right?
This is a sure-fire way to create a lot of spam and hack products. The creative element of fostering a project and putting real intellectual effort is gone, for sake of trying to turn a measly profit. There is nothing artistic or genuine about what he is doing here. There is no soul in these products.
Of all the products and software I use, there is soul in every single one of them. Safari, Tweetie/Twitter, Hacker News, iTunes, Adium, Fireworks, TextMate, Sequel Pro, zsh, Firefox, and all of the websites I read. They each have something to be proud of. If you are making software and services that you cannot be proud of and are only there to make you money, then you have chosen a path that is less meaningful and will not bring you the kind of happiness and security that I think most software creators are looking for in building software.
Feeding your family is one thing, but creating and harboring what is effectively spam is not the only way to do it. Labors of love are perfectly capable of making you money, and with the right amount of luck, and much more preparation, you can find yourself rolling in the same dough as these bottom of the barrel money makers that this writer is scheming.
As they say, don't eat your soul to fill your belly.
I pay for software. TextMate isn't free. Neither is Fireworks. Safari comes free on Snow Leopard, which isn't free. I paid for NetNewsWire, Tweetie, etc. Of course I pay for software. So do many other people. The folks and companies behind these products make money off their labors of love.
Schlock like this "Videos of Owls littered in ads will net you cash" scheme is a hair away from spam, and is not in HN's best interest, other than to demonstrate that this is the route creative professionals should avoid.
I'm not sure your conclusion necessarily follows what he's proposing. He's saying: find 400 things that each make $1/day -- it's a thought experiment as much as it is a proposition, BTW.
Some people would certainly make 400 spam blogs or something else equally useless. I don't think that was the author's intention, though.
I wish I could personally say that every single thing I do has my heart and soul in it. I can't, for reasons outside my apparent control. I bet I could find 400 things I like enough to spend time on, and that's enough for me.
My conclusion stems from his primary example: A collection of ninja videos slathered with adsense. It's half-way to a spamblog, but he considers it something to be proud of.
This article is silly, and just wrong in every way. It totally discounts time spent doing these projects, and totally fails to understand expected value. For instance:
"I wrote a desktop software once, and priced it at $29.90. I sold one copy a month, which was terrible. That's $1 a day. It's really easy as a programmer to do something that makes $1 a day."
I suppose if that desktop software took an hour to make it would be worth it in a few months. More likely it took an amount of time that would better have been spent (from a purely financial perspective) working at Wal-Mart and then investing the funds in an ETF. To make $1 a day ($365/yr) takes only around $4k (what a good programmer earns in <2 weeks) tossed into the market. Thus any project that takes you longer than that for $1/day in return is a waste.
Also even if you assumed every project would net $1 per day, you'd still be better off thinking big. A hit Facebook app, for instance, might make $10,000 a day. (A megahit 10x that.) A good keyword to arbitrage via an affiliate account and AdSense could do the same.
You're far better off taking a 1% shot at $10k/day than a 100% shot at $1. (You're far better off taking a .1% shot.) You might say "well what about variance" but apparently you have the time to create 400 products.
Also, Twitter followers have done little of real value for anyone in terms of making a business profitable. On the list of ways to get customers to your web-based business, Twitter's still pretty far down the chain.
A far better plan would be to try to create one product that makes $1 per person you drive to it. This is doable. Then you can buy users for far less with ads, roll your profits into more ads, rinse, repeat. This is how people like me who rarely if ever use Twitter have made oodles from the web. (I've done this now multiple times, for reference.)
Matt, a huge part that I think he has left out is the use of outsourcing stuff offshore. A lot of his projects seem to be content plays. You can get lots of content produced offshore for very cheap.
The end result? You can have 5 people working full-time at $500/month each($2500/month), each producing content for 50 of your sites. Now you might wonder how one guy can write content for 50 sites. It's actually not that hard. Give 2 hours per blog post per site. And in a 9hrs day, you can cover 3-4 sites, averaging out to about 2 blog posts/month per site--which can be profitable in the big scheme of things.
When quality is not a huge consideration, you can get a lot of cheap stuff done offshore.
I'd still not give you odds on making more than $1 per 'project' per day though.
Factoring in all the costs you'd be very happy to be a bit above break even after a year with tons of 'content' ripped by mfa sites that don't do all the work and that don't invest the money. They'll be making your profit. And at $1 / day per project you're not going to spend any time suing the infringers either.
It's totally doable IMO. A friend of mine who knows nothing more than how to setup a wordpress(answer: get her bf to do it) wrote 20 posts and forgot about the blog. She gets ~$50 check from google every month. She was laughing about it.
The life time value of her blog post is pretty cool!
I don't know if it scales(I'm presuming it does from posts like the OP). But hey I like the initial numbers.
A small site about a project that I built years ago.
I rebuilt it using drupal, and the template had a nice spot for a google ad in it so I thought oh well, whatever, let's do that.
To my surprise it made some money! Hey I thought, that's easy, let's do that some more. And that's when I ran in to the statistics of the thing, when the numbers get larger the payout seems to drop considerably.
$50 per month is great as 'found' income, and as long as your site is small you'll be able to stay under the radar of the cloners, but as soon as you start getting significant traffic (as in show up on alexas 100,000 or so) then you're going to be cloned left right and center.
You'll be competing with your own content on 20 other sites.
Even on HN we get plenty of 'blogspam' submissions that are basically nothing but the original article quoted with a one line addition (if that).
There's a third option not mentioned in the article. That's creating a $1/day project, then working to make it a $2/day, then $3/day.
Either through improving the thing you're selling, or by finding better ways to sell it. Take, for example, Patrick@bingocardcreator.com . He seems do have done pretty well following that method.
I don't know if that's any more or less work than building 400 projects, each selling for $1/day though.
I'm confused then, because it seems from your post that you say the first option is difficult unless you're a US-based MIT-educated elite startup founder Twitter-chasing wunderkid with VC money coming out your ears and good writing ability.
At the risk of stating the obvious, I am not a US-based MIT-educated elite startup founder Twitter-chasing wunderkid with VC money coming out my ears. Nor do I think any of these are pre-requisites or, well, even all that helpful in terms of building successful businesses. Some of them even contribute to the pathologies in our industry, like obsessive focus on building products to be used by ourselves rather than reaching out to more diverse groups of customers with desirable properties such as "pays money for software."
I'm not saying it is impossible to write and sell good software and keep improving it. I'm saying that a lot of people have tried it and do not have the neccessary advice and reach to make the software successful.
Look at all the Review my startup posts. I have only ever seen a handful actually become successful. Most just seem to fade off.
I'm not saying you NEED to be from that group to do it successfully. But it is difficult. What you did, has not been replicable by most of the other people here.
That's because most of the Review my startup posts are really "check out my weekend project I threw together". You can get all the advice you need through great books and online content, and reach is simply a matter of building up your online presence through a good blog, open source projects, etc.
Not necessarily. If you're being followed by 7,000 "people" who really turn out to be just Twitterfeed dumps and folks trying to sell you something, that's a useless set of followers. If you have 1,000 followers where a good portion of them actually interact on Twitter (and with you), I think that's more helpful. I know people with tens of thousands of followers who can't seem to get more than 10 people to retweet any blog post they write, but others with less who seem more influential.
This is an interesting post, and I'm eager to hear what other people who have spent more time in the startup scene think of it. Here's my thoughts:
1. I think I've seen the "two groups" that the post talks about, but I have begun to have serious doubts that they're as fatalistic as they're made out to be. For example:
The in-crowd live in the U.S, they attended MIT or Berkeley, they write well, have interesting blogs and are followed by 400 or more people on twitter.
You can't change where you went to school, but you can improve your writing skills, start a blog, and get 400 followers on Twitter. In fact, this is trivial over a period of months. Writing good content is not only for the elite; it's how you become one of the elite ;)
2. If you do a little research up front on the market for whatever you're going to create, you might be able to just create one product rather than 400. It might be more difficult in the beginning, but you just might learn an incredible amount and turn out to be one of the most well-rounded sources of startup insight on HN. See patio11 / Bingo Card Creator for an example :)
3. My main concern would be sustainability; those 150 projects that make you $12k / month aren't going to do so forever. You'll run yourself ragged trying to keep them all together, and at some point, you'd probably be better off with a job. I guess what I'm saying is to try and pick a model that will scale more than $1/day projects will.
In spite of these criticisms, I did enjoy this article for its thought-provoking angle that's very different from a lot of the stuff I read on HN.
1. It's very very difficult to learn to write well or be interesting. I have many friends and I know that no matter how hard they actually tried, they would not be able to write stuff people want to read. They are good at what they do, but they can't write even if they tried.
2. Creating one product is the route everyone takes by default. Yes, it works, but this is introducing an alternative route
3. Part of the optimisation is focusing on projects that are easy to spin off into new projects. If one project is selling clothes and the next is hospital management software, that's just stupid. If one is an auction management dashboard, the next is a sales management software, then it's easy to adapt. You learn quickly what ideas have generic code bases that are easy to adapt, and what ideas are very specific in their technology and are difficult to adapt.
1. You might be right :) I still think more people could do it than think they can. And also, you don't have to write all that well to be popular online. Witness the majority of popular blogs.
2. I guess I'm arguing for fewer (several) as opposed to hundreds. I just wonder if creating 400 projects is sustainable, as well as whether it's the right mindset to have. But on the other hand, I'm guessing that, as you said, most people will hit their income target long before that, and I'd also guess that most people would naturally optimize this kind of strategy and focus on the most successful projects.
3. I'd have liked to see more about this in the article.
I will write about specific time optimisation techniques sometime later - I could write a lot about that, but I don't want to distract from the core message.
those 150 projects that make you $12k / month aren't going to do so forever.
I guess what it really comes down to is how much each project makes over its lifetime, relative to how much time you put into it. Pulling more numbers out of thin air, if it takes one day to push out a project making $1/day (a reasonable assumption, I think, once you've already made 100 of them or so), and if the project's useful lifetime is about 1 year, and if you work 200 days a year (so, 200 projects), that gives me $71000/year. You're not getting rich off this, but you can live comfortably almost anywhere in the world.
Of course, the catch is that the projects should require zero maintenance, otherwise it adds up very quickly.
Wikis are forever sustainable, even if it is horribly outdated.
However, depending on the niche you occupied, you barely get enough money above your domain cost renewal. Beyond a certain point, it is not worth your time to invest in it.
For me, it helps that I can wait a few year before bootstrapping my next website, along with freelance work. That wiki is still earning me money.
I refer anyone that's interested to Ed Dale's 30 Day Challenge. It's a free online course to learn to make your first $1 online. It's mostly about niche selection, test marketing, and beginning SEO, but it's great for beginners. It's not overwhelmingly awesome, but it's free and targeted to people that aren't ubergeeks like us.
If you want to make $1 a day, go search for a keyword. Like Owls. Then find a bunch of videos of owls in YouTube, put them on the site and call the site OwlVideo.com. In a week you will be making $1 a day.
Or if you prefer to program for the desktop - go wrap ffmpeg and make an AVI to MP4 converter. Def make $30 in sales in a month.
Or if you prefer to program for the web, make something that parses Apples XML of new iPhone apps, put all that text on your website, slap adverts on it. There is $1 a day.
Or you can copy the bible and allow people to annote it. Put on web. There ya go.
Find a commonly done task like file uploading. Write a wrapper script for this in PHP. Sell it on a scripting site. $1 a day.
Make a wordpress theme and target a specific group. "Theme for Doctors". Make it premium and put it for sale. $1 a day.
It's easy, you just need to think in the right mode.
So these might be great ways to make a little bit of money, but they don't really create value (except for the theme). Creating a successful startup should be more about creating value then making money, if you create value the money will come. When you think about success do you define it as money or building something people use and love (and also makes you money). If you want to make a cheap buck there are plenty of ways to do it without providing value. Go create a trash blog on a popular keyword, become a domain squatter, etc. But I want to create value and build something people will use and enjoy using.
Agreed - these ideas are not a startup - they don't create real value as a company. However the idea of making passive income is very attractive to many programmers, and creates an opportunity to have time to work on something big.
Ok, I'll bite. I challenge you to make an owl video site that makes $1 a day and post the link and revenue here. Ditto for an AVI to MP4 desktop converter. Ditto for the iPhone app site. Ditto for the annotated bible. Ditto for the file uploader script. Ditto for the Doctors theme.
I don't believe any of these will make $1 a day. I believe they'll make $0 a day. There's a world of difference between $0 a day and $1 a day.
Just because $1 a day sounds like almost nothing doesn't mean you'll get it for a site that's worth almost nothing. It's $365 a year. You won't make that with 30 owl videos and adwords.
Maybe they do -- it depends on who's judging. To use Max's example, let's say I am casually interested in owls. Seriously, there are such people. I'm 60, I am on the internet but am somewhat uneasy with how to use it, and I like owls. Somehow, I find Max's owl video site. I like it! Maybe I even see an ad and click and buy. Maybe. But to me, finding the site and being entertained by his collection of owl videos -- that has value.
Yeah, the people who created the owl videos are providing value, youtube is providing value by making them available, the owl site is just leaching off of that to make a buck.
I really disagree. Some call it "aggregation," but I'm starting to call this layer "discovery." This very site, Hacker News, is a filter that is mere pointer to content elsewhere. (There are occasional "Ask HN," but most every post posts elsewhere).
Most sites and tools I use every day are filtering tools. Techmeme is another great example.
It is true that a purely automated owl video scraper wouldn't be as good and one that was even cleaned up for five minutes a day, but that wasn't the suggester's point.
Aggregation itself doesn't necessarily create value, but depending on what is done with the aggregation can create much value.
Google news is a good example, no one could really say that having all that article discovery and grouping was providing no value. Google scholar provides no content by itself but is very useful.
Even thoughtless aggregation adds value, if you consider successful sites that are nothing more than a bulletin board built around a user community that does the actual gruntwork. Putting things in context may be the "location, location, location" of the Web. You could say we're doing it right now, here on HN.
the owl site is just leaching off of that to make a buck
Editorship -- or, if you're more cynical, "leeching". There really is value in collecting other people's works. I am convinced that it's more than mere leeching.
Well, I have 2 apps on the app store right now. One of them makes nothing, it's not free, just does not make any sales and one makes just about $1 a day (after I raised the price from .99 to 1.99). Both apps are pretty simple, are in the same category (healthcare and fitness) and I've done nothing to promote them.
Kind of frustrating, because when I made my app free, it was being downloaded 1700 times a day. So it seems like there is demand, but not enough to push them over into the 'pay real money' category.
I'd love to work with somebody who is better at marketing than I am, if somebody wants to get in touch.
I experienced the same thing. There seems to be a world of difference between free and 99 cents on the app store. And, I think, understandably so. If I want to try a whole bunch of programs, I'd much rather try free programs. If it costs even just 99 cents, then I am forced to stop and think about it before downloading. "I can download hundreds of free programs for less money than this one 99-cent program... do I really want the 99-cent program, or am I okay with some more free programs?"
I also noticed that making an app that was 99 cents to be free not only increased downloads, but also increased bad reviews. I guess people who get programs for free expect a lot more out of them and are perfectly happy to express their disappointment both rudely and publicly than those who pay for the programs.
i think i have that angle pretty well covered: there is a free version of my game. it's intended to give people a taste of what it's about. if you like it, then you can buy the better one. if you're a cheapskate, fine, stick with the free one.
people who like the game tend to really like it. here's the text of a review for the free version i got just yesterday:
I've now played 150 games against the ai players and
it's a great implementation! It can be a bit easy to
shoot the moon (something apparently improved in the
author's hearts net) but still MUCH better than most
other iphone hearts games. Highly recommended, great
fun.
so, let's review. here's a guy who has spent many hours playing my free game, and likes it. he is aware of my paid version. he is even aware that the paid version fixes a criticism he has of the free version. yet he is apparently still not willing to spend just a couple of bucks buying it. sheesh.
this has been enough to pretty much put me off the iphone ecosphere. i plan to port my game to macosx, whose users have a much better reputation for paying for software they use.
This also highlights one of the big problems with the App Store - there is no way to get in touch with that user to find out why he hasn't upgraded to paid.
It looks like you're in San Francisco. Mobile Monday Group is holding some kind of event tomorrow about how to increase app sales. I saw the post on the Silicon Valley iPhone Developer's Meetup Group mailing list. May just be a sales pitch but might be worth checking out as it's free: http://momosvfeb10.eventbrite.com/
i actually don't live in san francisco, i was just there when that photo was taken. and i'm kind of over doing marketing on my own, i know perfectly well i'm not any good at it. i'd like to work with somebody who has the personality for it.
Apart from the fact that then, you're not visiting them all on a single trip, so by the time you get to the 5th or so, you can't remember the 1st any more (If you don't pay projects attention, they die).
A while back I know the owner of this site did a few hundreds $ per month. It was really an eye-opener to me :)
Of course this requires SEO skills to earn more than a few bucks, that need to be learn on the way.
I started a couple of sites like this one, and although I earned a bit of money, I wanted to try sites that are really useful to myself, which I'm focusing on now.
I think it's always good to remind myself that between what would look a half-spammy site to a regular programmer, and the typical too complex projects regular programmers would start, there's a sweet spot in the middle.
Is there a generic webapp (something like OSCommerce) that can automatically create an affiliate store like the one you linked when supplied with a list of item names or URLs?
iPhone apps. 2 of 3 of them use the standard free+ads, paid+features model. The other, my most successful, is strictly paid at $1.99.
They were a lot of work up front and some have required minimal maintenance- but supporting them hasn't even taken up even 2% of my coding time in the past year.
Maintaining 400 projects is impractical, but it is possible to create 400 micro-businesses that don't need to be taken care of.
For example, you can create a website, write 10 high-value blog articles and make a landing page for a product you want to sell that is related to the articles. (This costs <$10) You have to put in the initial hours to tweak the content, maximize conversions and get good SEO, but after a certain point you can just let go.
Of course, you will get nowhere near the revenue you can get if you put in the hours to actually build the business. But if the purpose of the site is to maintain a certain level of income (like a lifestyle business) and grow no more, then this is definitely feasible.
Jeremy Schoemaker (online marketer) uses exactly this approach. 1) Find a niche, 2) create a product to help people in that niche, 3) create a system that will stay intact even if you don't touch it for a year.
Get a job at at a startup run by those MIT elite. Kick ass and make yourself invaluable. The next time one of the founders starts their own thing, they'll bring you along at the very beginning. Use that role to get more involved with the business and network like crazy.
Wash, rinse, and repeat.
Depending on your effort, by the third time around you should have the connections and experience necessary to do your own startup - get VC funding - and make the deals necessary to give it a good chance at success.
I was referring to the "MIT elite" mentioned in the original link. Basically - if you haven't gone to a school where you were able to make great connections (Stanford, MIT, Harvard), you'll need to make those connections on the job.
I have not a huge startup experience (except my first two jobs that were kind of startups), but someone following this track should be careful about avoiding burn-out.
This sort of reminds me of the old pottery story, where they had one group making which was graded on how many pots they made and another one which was only graded on their best pot. Of course the group which was graded on quantity made better pots in the end.
I really think that by iterating really quickly you will become good faster than if you try to make the perfect thing right away. So don't be paralyzed by trying to achieve perfection; go out and create, and then create some more.
You certainly do have to modify that advice to avoid serious injury, but from my limited boxing experience I'll say that nothing teaches you to keep your hands up like getting smacked around a few times.
Interesting, I've been doing just that for the last couple of years.
It's been a mix of partial successes and total failures, mostly failures. I didn't want to go the 'mfa' route for obvious reasons, so I try to make these sites in to something that actually is useful, and that have a sense of community about them.
Here is a breakdown of what you can make this way in a month based on adsense alone after several years of work, not something to be proud of, that's for sure.
It is very hard to make stuff that does not need maintenance.
I've removed the ones that I consider total failures from this list or it would have been three times as long.
$1 per day per site sounds like a great plan in theory, but in practice it is quite hard to do that across a broad number of sites and not get bogged down in maintenance issues.
Anything with a form will attract spammers more than it will attract users, software will over time stop working because external things it depends on will change and so on.
Passive income is nice, but it is hard to make something that is really passive.
It's not a complete failure, but it definitely wasn't the success I expected either.
This is due to a whole pile of factors, maintenance has already been mentioned, lousy ECPM is another, inability to get any traction with some projects is a third (anybody interested in a complete platform for trading second hand cars or houses ?).
I agree completely, $1 a day times 400 sites is simply not feasible.
This article is terrible advice, the kind that will probably lead you to failure. I have a fairly successful affiliate marketing business (I make more than I would if I had a day job), and it seems like every day I talk to people who are taking this approach and making $1-$2 a day. The article's logic is flawed- if it were that easy to make projects that do $1 a day on autopilot, your competitors(and big corporations) would already be scaling that model.
The truth of the matter is that nothing runs on autopilot for long. Even with SEO, you constantly need to be producing fresh content, building links, and keeping abreast of ranking changes. And most of the time, these kinds of small-time efforts will still fail and lead to making $0 a day.
On the other hand, every millionaire Internet marketer I've ever talked to (and I've connected with many of the big ones) has succeeded by focusing on a single market/product and scaling it up instead of running around from one failed project to the next like a chicken with its head cut off. Oh, and most of these people are "normals"- they don't have popular blogs or lots of Twitter followers, they're quietly grinding every day and making a killing online.
Trust me, taking one project and not giving up until you MAKE IT WORK will be much more profitable in the long run.
Oh, and I've just gotten into AdWords a couple months ago( most of my previous experience has been with social traffic like Facebook) and am doing very well with it, so anyone who tells you it's too late to get in is either a competitor who doesn't want more competition on a traffic source, or doesn't know what he's talking about.
Talk to people who are actually succeeding online about their strategy, and you'll quickly see a pattern emerge. I bet very few of them got rich by making 400 AdSense sites.
"Every millionaire Internet marketer I've ever talked to has succeeded by focusing on a single market/product"
My freshman year of college our rowing coach took us out to the salmon dam on the edge of the lake. He turned to the boat and asked, "How many times do you guys think the salmon try to jump over the dam before they give up?" I can't remember everyone's guesses, but the punchline was basically "They keep trying until either they make it or they fucking die."
This seems to be the ideal strategy for startups. The person who wins isn't the one with the biggest shovel or the one who digs the most holes, it's the person with enough discipline to keep digging in one place with the shovel they have.
Hmmmm. As it happens, you're wrong and to the extent your parent supports your thesis, he's wrong, too. I work for an SEO marketing firm and one of my coworkers built up a portfolio of $1/day projects exactly in the mold of this article over the course of 2 or 3 years, and once he got to about $6000/month, he quit to do it full time. And he was no genius and had very little technical skill--he hired out all his programming.
I would do it myself, but I have no desire to work on projects like that full time, even for only 2 years.
Interesting! So, what's the state now, has he been able to continue that trend? Does he have maintenance issues yet? Or does it seem like his model will scale forever?
My 'little projects' make about 800 euros or 1200 dollars per month, so that's about 1/5th of what your friend is doing, or rather was doing when he quit to start working full time.
I'm not saying it's a total failure, but it's not the success I'd hoped for either. And, to be honest at $6,000 per month I'd probably still not be too happy about it, but that's simply because I figured I'd be doing much better when I started out. (I already had a $10,000 per month project with 0 maintenance to tide me over while doing this, if it weren't for that I wouldn't have made it this far).
If he's managed to take $1 / day with 0 input from now forward then he's done very well, but from a business point of view investing 2 to 3 years and getting to $6000 (or $1200 as in my case) still does not count as time well spent.
For instance, if I had spent that time consulting it would have brought a multiple of that (but I'd have to continue to consult, which is of course the whole point of this exercise).
This is a standard guy with no real experience and no programming experience getting to $72k/yr after investing some time. Not quite living the dream, but it's not awful either given that he may not have had some outrageous education or experience and is now getting passive income that he can gradually build on.
I think anyone here with some general startup knowledge/ability (e.g., can buy a domain, set up hosting, write HTML, write content, etc) could probably build up a passive $50/day source to give them a bit of a buffer to create bigger projects. Or they should at least be trying it to see if they can pull it off.
Trust me, taking one project and not giving up until you MAKE IT WORK will be much more profitable in the long run.
This sounds like it could be recipe for burnout and a waste of your life. Some businesses won't work no matter how hard you try. It seems like the best strategy would be one that is good at finding a reasonably scalable business model. If you don't find one after a few iterations, it might be a good idea to try something new.
Maybe I should have added a corollary.
I'm assuming you already have a solid business model, or at least a well-defined market. "Adsense" is not a business model.
Also, monetization is NOT hard if you're selling something people want.
Getting traffic is hard. Monetizing is trivial if you're running an actual business and not a hobby.
And what, pray tell, is the difference between a business and a hobby? I became an entrepreneur precisely because that allows me to focus on doing what I like doing and doing those things in a way that I can feel good about myself. To me, that means my business /is/ a hobby, even though I'm full time on it now.
That's absolutely true, which is why the 'throw it at a wall and see what sticks' method is really good to find out what works and what doesn't.
Making 400 sites that all work is undoable. But making say 10 sites that work and that all contribute a bit is definitely a workable scheme (see above), but it still won't make the kind of money that it potentially could because monetization is really hard.
Solve the monetization issues and the thing looks a whole lot better right away.
But reliable ad networks (both in not serving malware and in paying out on time (or at all)) are few and far between.
Sticking to one thing and doing it well has made me lots, trying the '400 different projects' (ok, a bit less, but still) worked to some extent but definitely not on the level that Max makes it seem should be trivial to achieve.
And that's with me being free to dedicate 100% of my time to this stuff.
You misunderstand the optimisation principle. A project that makes $1 a day but is impossible to modify to make new projects is not a valid project. A project that requires an hour of maintainance everyday is not a valid project.
The point of my approach is TIME optimisation. For this, you have to automate - it is the first step of time optimisation. If you are not automating, or automation was not built into your plan before you started, you are doing it wrong.
What you have is the first iteration - my method would take all the ones above $1, then optimise the time spent maintaining it till it became minimal. If it were not possible to optimise it in that method, then someone external can be brought in, who maintains it for half the income, giving you absolute free time to make the next project.
I did not speak about bad performers yet - the projects who do not make the required $1. It's not possible to follow this system without hitting some duds. You spend a reasonable amount of time trying to bring it up, if it does not work, you have to get rid of it. You are optimising your time, so you cannot afford to do something that does not warrant the time spent on it.
> A project that makes $1 a day but is impossible to modify to make new projects is not a valid project.
Ok, this reduces the number of 'possible projects' considerably.
> A project that requires an hour of maintainance everyday is not a valid project.
Obviously, because at 1 hour of maintenance every day you'd be doing less than 15 projects total if you need some sleep.
But even the most trivial piece of software requires some maintenance. And at 400 projects you can spend no more than half a day per year building and maintaining, and that includes saturdays and sundays. Better hope you're single, if you're not you will be by the end of that year.
> For this, you have to automate - it is the first step of time optimisation. If you are not automating, or automation was not built into your plan before you started, you are doing it wrong.
This more or less limits you to very superficial sites that do nothing but aggregate other content or that are extremly thin variations on a theme.
Which is possible, but then it becomes hard to make that 1$ / day.
> What you have is the first iteration - my method would take all the ones above $1, then optimise the time spent maintaining it till it became minimal.
That sounds very theoretical, I think instead of keeping in the theoretical realm that you should actually do this, and write about how well it works. That would make for some very interesting reading.
> If it were not possible to optimise it in that method, then someone external can be brought in, who maintains it for half the income, giving you absolute free time to make the next project.
Why would they maintain it for half the income, if it was trivial to build they could build it themselves and keep 100%?
> I did not speak about bad performers yet - the projects who do not make the required $1. It's not possible to follow this system without hitting some duds.
Count on the majority, not just 'some'.
> You spend a reasonable amount of time trying to bring it up,
What's a reasonably amount of time here? A day ? There goes at $50 / hour one year of your income, assuming this is not a dud!
Again, I've been trying to do this, yes, using adsense, that old and so 2006 method of making money on small sites.
But I've yet to find something that works better, in spite of trying several different ad networks. And other monetization schemes are a lot more labour intensive.
This is a great idea in theory, but trust me it is very hard to execute in practice.
It's all so very easy to say that you can quickly make a buck a day on the internet. "Sure, just throw together some videos of puppies and put some adsense on there" but that's not the reality of the net today.
People and companies are heavily competing on every freaking keyword that anybody might be interested in. That doesn't mean there isn't opportunities, but it's a much longer haul than just brainstorming an idea and creating a simple web site.
Note that in that list there are several sites that have millions of pageviews per month (a success by most standards), and in spite of that the monetization simply sucks.
If you were to spread those millions of pageviews across many smaller sites the maintenance headache would be a multiple of what it is right now and you'd still not make more than roughly $1000 / month.
If I lost all the $1 per day sites from the list (or lower) there would be only 5 sites left.
I remember Noah Everett talked about transitioning from AdSense to other options in his Mixergy interview. This from the transcript:
"Andrew: When did you have that big leap, from making just a few hundred or a few thousand dollars to actually making substantial money? Was there a month that you actually took that big leap?
Interviewee: Yeah, so when we moved away from Google AdSense to other ad partners, because I just stuck the AdSense code on there just to be generating something. I really didn't know anything about ads, or CPM or CTR, or whatever. I generally knew what it was, but when we started getting into higher quality advertisers, that's when the saw the revenue it creates." [1]
I don't know anything about monetizing by ads but I took this to mean that there are other, more profitable places to sell ads than AdSense, presumably based on some volume of clearly targeted, well characterized traffic.
So Jaques, if you have millions of pageviews per month, could you transition from AdSense to whatever it is Noah Everett is referring to? If not, why not?
I'll give it a shot, and I'll report on what that did.
The thing that has held me back to date is the number of ad networks that are used to serve up malware, or that redirect the traffic or serve unauthorized pop-ups that's something that I'm fairly sure would never happen with google.
edit: Ok, I'm going to do this a bit more structurally, if you have an advertising network you want benchmarked please add it to this thread:
If you've got a million views a month page for a keywordyou should be able to sell an indvidual ad for big money.
I run maintain a blog for a friend for whom one page ranks highly for a particular keyword gaining her about 100 thousand pv's a month. We sold an ad on that page for about £150 a month. Yes they over pay. But with a million page views you could easily make more.
They're not for any individual keyword, they're for an enormous range.
For one single keyword it would be worth selling ads direct, selling inventory for a large range of keywords direct is a major headache. That sounds like real work ;)
Yes, if you're going to try to get into adsense or adwords at this point in time you are really behind the curve. The game has moved on - offer something people want. Use your hobby or pick something you can research and offer good info.
For example, I suddenly need to know a lot about tax because with my sudden increase in income I don't know what to do. I would easily pay $50 for a tax-for-dummies who make above $10k a month book. It's a small niche, but it is valuable.
Or healthcare. For sick people, this topic is very important. If there is something that offers me good value for this, I will pay for it.
I am asthmatic, for example. There are very few software out there to help asthmatics.
Don't do the adworse nonsense of years ago. Do tiny projects that help people or solve peoples problems and it will be easy to make your dollar.
The reason I said maintenance is important is because the game is 'moving on' all the time. So, whatever you make today that will make you your $1/day will not continue to do so for a long time. You'll be in a new ratrace, but one of your own making. The one where you will have to replace old stuff with new stuff fast enough to make up for the churn.
The $50 tax-for-dummies book sounds like a great plan, but it would take a man-year or more to write that book before you'd pay $50 for it.
It had better not be a small niche then!
How could software help asthmatics ?
The 'adworse nonsense' is still the easiest way to monetize 'tiny' things.
The game is moving, but since your target is so low at $1, you can let your projects not be cutting edge, so long they are meeting their target.
You need to design your projects right and since you know you don't have time to waste, you need to design in an ever-green manner. Don't do things that will flame for a month and burn out - maintainance every 6 months should be the aim.
For asthmatics for example, we need to track lung capacity (there is something you get given that gives you this info when you blow in), and we need to keep track of the spray so it does not finish. Additionally, there are certain excercise one should do to improve lung capacity (like running). If I made such a simple tracker as a start (daily vs capacity), I could start selling this quickly.
I could then use the same tracker as a weight tracker. Or study tracker. Stuff like that. So the new projects are just offshoots of the original project.
I'm not going to build this because I looked up asthma search count a while back and didn't like what I saw. There is another chronic disease with far more searches and a lot more competing software. I'll be building for that soon, and though I won't explicitely say the name anyone who is interesting in pursuing the niche should feel free to.
But following on your own theory, if it is trivial to clone the concept on to something related then you'd have to do both anyway. After all, changing the concept and marketing it for two or more different diseases is exactly what you are advocating, and doing it only for a single disease would be the opposite!
Yeah, but I'm not going to waste my time on an area with no market, even if it just a little time. I start off with the high market thing, if it works I can modify to enter the smaller markets, but I test on the most likely first.
@maxklein Would love some feedback on a specific case too. The tax-for-dummies book idea has value, but it doesn't fit into the "optimize for time" strategy you advocate.
For instance, while working in tax law for a number of years, I created an annotated Google Custom Search Engine for my own research purposes.
As evidence that it's an under-served niche, the website where it's published was cited by a UCalifornia Law Library and a number of other related websites as a useful resource for tax research purposes.
Besides adsense, how would you generate income for this?
I don't really know how ads work, so I've never actually used them. A tax search engine seems to me like an ideal place for affiliate selling of books on tax, and ebooks that other people are selling.
You have the terms people are searching for, just match a book to the term and offer to sell to them. Something like that, but I have no idea about the market.
Use as in optimised for them and actually made an effort to learn how to make things work with adsense. What I did on the video site was embed the code google gave and that's it. That does not mean I know anything about adsense.
I would imagine that he's selling information, i.e. they type in a credit card number or click a PayPal link on his website, and he sends them a PDF or .doc containing some information that is relevant to them.
Personally from experience the hard work is in the research of finding a micro niche, once you have that nailed down then you quickly understand what topics are likely to be winners and which are to be duds. An understanding of SEO is critical though.
In terms of someone setting up, the barrier to entry may seem minimal but theres nothing like getting out there and giving it a go;
Google Product Search + Market Samurai + Hosting&Domain + X Site Pro + Adwords Account + SEO = Done.
I couldn't agree more. When I started out I was budgeting the whole thing based on being able to make $0.50 ECPM, that seemed to be reasonable since I can't seem to be able to buy it under a dollar.
This still gives me the feeling that I'm being screwed royally somewhere.
'Made For Adsense', sites that add no value other than to get google traffic in order to sell the clicks back to google.
Google is heavily cracking down on these nowadays, so it's less of a problem than it used to be, but the sheer number of RSS feed regurgitators made searching for something very hard for a while (end of 2008).
MFA is a predatory strategy, it just takes without giving back.
Remember all those wikipedia clones with 6 adense ads per page? That's MFA, but there are lots of other examples.
And, unfortunately, MFA sites will bring in more money if they solve fewer problems. e.g., you want your content to be good enough that it brings in traffic, but not so good that it solves problems (leaving visitors not needing to click your ads).
The concept of "ideas" and inspiration has proved effective for me on a couple of sites. The ideas and inspiration help people get a vision of what they could do, but they'll still need to click ads to execute that (e.g., give them ideas for bathroom tiling, but leave them to click on to tiler's website to get quotes).
Do you have evidence that Google is cracking down on those?
Because I frequently get both Wikipedia clones and various Usenet "archives" ranking very high in my search results.
Since they are always the same sites, they should be be easy to remove from the index.
I've seen a whole pile of them simply drop off the radar, I'm sure there are still plenty left but there seems to be a concerted effort by google to control this.
The first real crackdown was somewhere in 2007, since then the situation definitely has improved.
I think if you try to create 400 projects, most will make 0/day and a couple will make 10/day. Then you optimize those. Slowly you end up with a small number of projects generating a half decent amount money.
This is actually a great way to prevent yourself from choosing a local maximum in the product space. You climb a bunch of hills a little bit.
Over diversification is dangerous too. Jack of all apps, master of none? I like the idea, but the problem with this product space search is that is dead slow. You might want to search like this for a bit and see what takes off, then put more energy into the ones that are doing well.
You are right about the dangers of diversification. You would have to prune down projects as you go or else risk not doing anything well.
However, if the projects are designed to be all up front effort and no ongoing time costs, you can just leave them to languish. I have had things take off in a minor way, long after abandoning them.
I do something roughly like this on the side, but trending more towards MFA stuff (not that ninja videos with ads isn't the same). Rather than $1/day, I look to cover the base cost of the domains as a starting point (4c/day at least). Some sites absolutely struggle because they're half-arsed with poor content, no pagerank and few backlinks while others rank really well for reasonable 2-3 word keyphrases.
Of the sites, 5-10 have some traction, took a few hours to set up (total) and make $3-4k/mo, passively.
It's definitely possible and can ease pressure enough to give you time to work on more serious side-project pursuits because your living costs are already taken care of.
I either register domains based on keyword research and bulk searches to see what's still available, or I try to grab expired domains at auction (via drop.com.au). Vast majority of my domains are .com.au - smaller audience obviously, but also less competition when it comes to SEO.
I register through TPP (wholesale account) and host them with CrystalTech. On a base ColdFusion plan ($11.90ish/mo reseller rate) I can host 26 domains and then split out the requests either via ColdFusion or Mod-Rewrite. Some sites are standalone, while a few others use a quick publishing engine I built that takes articles from the database and outputs them with nav, AdSense blocks, etc ready to go.
Given content and a domain pointed to the right nameservers, I can have a multipage site up and running in a few minutes.
I have tried having content written by someone cheaply ($6/300 words) but it's quite obviously MFA, the content isn't massively helpful to those arriving from Google and the sites are rightfully struggling because they're uninspiring.
Another example is a six-page site targeting 2-3 word keyphrases. Content was written by my partner after she had to look into the topic herself and realised there was a bit of a gap in the market. Took her an afternoon to write six pages of content a couple of years back. Took me a couple of hours to put together. Makes about $3-4k/yr from AdSense and I haven't really touched it since I put it together.
If I were to make any recommendations to people hopeful of trying this sort of thing, I'd say:
- have patience, domain age and so on will stop anything from raking in cash immediately
- if you have another side-project with decent pagerank, use that to help out the new project
- don't go for a single keyword as you'll struggle with competition; pick a keyphrase niche
- make sure you pick something that will have advertising in the space and where the clicks will pay (Google the phrase you're considering, and if no ads show, avoid that phrase)
- use Google's keyword research tool to find a niche with some traffic
- try to pick a space where you have some passion/interest and write decent, useful content yourself. If you do use a dodgy paid-writer, take what they've created and try to polish it a bit yourself. I think if you're just looking for a cash-cow, it'll show.
I looked at opening comments through Disqus to try and get some longtail content, but comments are just a waste of time and kill you on maintenance. You want something that will stay relevant and if it needs any maintenance, it's just an hour a month or so to tweak.
Making $1 400 times is exactly my business model. I've been building websites that hire excellent writers to write excellent content about specific keywords, targeted for SEO, and every article brings in about $1.50/day. Each article costs me about $10 to make (so I make back my investment in 7 months, purely passive). I write about 100-200 articles/month.
I wrote software and hired assistants to do everything, so my actual work is < 4h/week. The software I wrote can be seen just after the 3m' mark here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1merER1zVFg .
I find targeted keywords, use SEM to get my article into the top 4 results and sit back and wait for passive income. It's not as hard as you'd think.
To borrow Warren Buffet's term, the in-crowd are the winners of the Ovarian Lottery, and the normals (with me among them) are the losers.
"I’ve had it so good in this world, you know. The odds were fifty-to-one against me born in the United States in 1930. I won the lottery the day I emerged from the womb by being in the United States instead of in some other country where my chances would have been way different.
Imagine there are two identical twins in the womb, both equally bright and energetic. And the genie says to them, “One of you is going to be born in the United States, and one of you is going to be born in Bangladesh. And if you wind up in Bangladesh, you will pay no taxes. What percentage of your income would you bid to be the one this is born in the United States?” It says something about the fact that society has something to do with your fate and not just your innate qualities. The people who say, “I did it all myself,” and think of themselves as Horatio Alger – believe me, they’d bid more to be in the United States than in Bangladesh. That’s the Ovarian Lottery."
It seems like marketing would still be an issue though. Even to make $1/day, someone has to find your software. If you're not marketing through a blog or Twitter, that leaves advertising. So now in addition to writing good ads, you need to make sure each project is making more than you're spending on advertising, which is a lot of work on its own.
Actually, it's not. If you have to move 1000 copies of software in a month, then you need to market. If you want to move 1 copy a month, list it on download.com and you will move 1 copy. That's the beauty of the system - it minimises the need for marketing and instead ups the project count to make up for the loss there.
You are basically moving resources from one thing (marketing, promotion) into another (designing generic software, finding new ideas, writing software very fast). The second options are easy for software developers to do compared to marketing.
If you write software to move 1 copy per month then you'll be writing software to move 25 copies during the lifetime of that version. It'd be very hard to even support your users.
I wrote a script sometime ago, which sells about 4 copies a month for $25 each. The only way I marketed was by adding it to directories such as HotScripts. That will you give you some traffic if you're providing a solution in a field that's not highly competitive (a niche).
You could try that.
not sure if domain name is that important, for such tiny sites. Most of your traffic is going to be from search engines, so I guess you'll need to worry more about SEO than coming up with a memorable name (as people aren't going to remember it). From SEO point of view, keyword rich domain names are important, not sure how much though.
Sounds like a great strategy if one only cares about making money and doesn't care about working on any projects, startups, software for companies, ect.
If you take his definitions of in-crowd vs. normals to be true, the in-crowd has the prerogative to choose energizing startups and work on exciting projects without putting much thought into making money early-on. The normals have bills to pay, kids to send to school, and sick family members to take care. For us normals, money is always a large (though not the only) factor in making decisions that relate to our career, projects, and products.
I would love to leave everything and work on some of my ideas but too many people rely on me to have a stable income at this point for me to just abandon them midstream. This doesn't mean I'm doing nothing. I'm slowly changing my life around so I can get to where I want to be. But at every project I look into, I have to consider how much money I can potentially make and how soon would I see a cash flow. The normals aren't all dreaming of being the next MS/Google. Just like the in-crowd, we want to make good products that users would love. We just have a lot more baggage and need to make sure our dreams don't get in the way of our loved ones' care.
I guess I should have said sounds like a "strategy." It dislike the strategy because it's not why I program. I don't program a million things to make a million dollars. I program because it's a passion, and unless I misinterpreted the meaning of the post, this strategy is...heartless.
I take into account that "in-crowd" has it easy and "normal" doesn't. I could image myself writing a similar article; however, instead of the goal being "make 12,000 a month", the goal would have been "Find followers so that one can make a reputation which will allow one to find a well-liked job (could be continuing to make small apps)" And hell. I'd sure as hell point out that if one attempts to make money from those apps, then one can help subsidize his living costs and manage to raise enough money to send his or her kids to private school!
One of the reasons I write now is to grow my popularity, so that one day I will have enough reach to be able to build something big and grand and people will actually notice.
Why do you have to have reach in order to build something big and grand? Your reach has no bearing on the quality of your product! The idea is to build something so great that others will talk favorably about it regardless of what you say.
Except for projects that require a large userbase before it is useful (auctions, dating sites, etc). Then, a large following can be the jumpstart you need.
If you're not popular, only a few people will notice your product is good. Being popular helps your good work being noticed more publicly.
The only reason Hunch.com got so much popularity on launch is because it was a project by Flickr founder Caterina Fake. If you or I had made an exact site, it wouldn't have got even 1/10th the coverage. Being popular helps if you can repeat your past successes.
If you make a throwaway app every 2 days, that's 400 apps in a little over 2 years. That's far less time than it takes to go to college and get a bachelor's degree. When you're done, you've got enough income to live off of, and you can work on anything you damned well please.
I don't know that I necessarily agree with Max's premise, but I don't think timing is that big an issue (assuming everything else works out).
Assuming a 20 day work month and a 10 hour workday that will give you half an hour a month to work on each of your 400 projects. And assuming (optimistically) that you will spend 2 weeks doing each project it will take 15 years to get to 400.
And that's not counting overhead such as accounting, etc. for all of your projects.
I like the idea of the post, but maybe he took it a bit too far...
That's the point - you don't start a new project every 2 weeks. You start off with an idea easily adaptable to various scenarios. Then adapt each time, target new people, and observe if the variation makes you required $1 a day. When you have nichified a codebase that nothing more can be squeezed of it, you start on the next.
I think the idea is that each project gets an initial small period of launch work, and then after that they're mostly self-sustaining for their economic lifetime. "Optimize for time." In that case, half hour/month may be enough.
The 1$/day and 400/month figures are just for illustration. The idea is to crank on multiple simple things that share characteristics. As you optimize for time, you're also optimizing for "crank," getting better at cranking out simple things.
This advice feels wrong but it reminds of what Jason Fried said at this year's startup school, which I feel is better advice anyways. [I'm probably butchering it but one of the gists of it was] Just get started and practice making money.
Although I wouldn't see myself doing 400 "half baked" projects, I understand that it could be a solution for people who are in it for the money. That being said, I definitely agree with the fact that your social network and environment can have a big influence on your success. We don't all have the chance to live in Silicon Valley.
Ask a Ninja is so popular that he/they (I'm unclear) appeared alongside a bunch of stars in SF recently -- in honor of Conan O'Brien, whom I presume was there as well. Holy cow.
I actually don't agree with the in-crowd - normal philosophy. As long as someone works hard and gives good focus then the chances of someone being highly successful is pretty good. As I always say, 99% effort, 1% luck.
Did you set the "in crowd #" at 400 twitter followers because that's what you have? Because 400 is pretty low, I'd say the number should be closer to 15,000
15k followers is not in-crowd that's more like the exclusive country club crowd. Most seem to have 60 or 70 followers. The people who are just random programmers and not real marketers seem to have 400-600. But I obviously did not do any serious research on this.
"The normals lack any of those attributes. They may be 50 years old, or have gone to community college, or may have learned programming on their own, or may come from Bulgaria or some other distant country."
You can even use it in the service of the one big lovingly-handedcrafted adequately-supported non-sucking product that you're supposedly not capable of building/marketing/etc. For example, everybody and their dog has done "photo sharing website", and if you're coming to the Internet today with photo sharing site #85421 you're probably not going to get too far. However, you could probably do fairly well with the same tech and a focus on wedding photographers. (I happen to know that pond is well-fished, too, just an example.) And you could roll out new facets of your marketing/product creation strategy to target each niche you can identify, big and small.
For example: I very much doubt that I could make a software product about a subject as niche as owls of Asia while still adequately devoting time and resources to supporting/maintaining/improving it, but I'm pretty sure with an established product adding a bit about owls of Asia to the marketing mix is pretty much just a bolt-on-and-go sort of maneuver. (You might ask "Now is there anyone in the world who will actually pay money to do something associated with the owls of Asia?!" I have evidence in the affirmative.)
Edit to add: It seems Max and I independently chose owl-related niches as our practical examples, since he posted before me and I didn't see it. What are the odds, right?