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).
