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'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.
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.
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, [email protected] . 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
[+] [-] patio11|16 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] conesus|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mahmud|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sabat|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mattmaroon|16 years ago|reply
"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.)
[+] [-] zaidf|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Sukotto|16 years ago|reply
Either through improving the thing you're selling, or by finding better ways to sell it. Take, for example, [email protected] . 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.
[+] [-] maxklein|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] levesque|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanwaggoner|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] maxklein|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] alex_c|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kiba|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] icey|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ja27|16 years ago|reply
http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com
[+] [-] sabat|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aw3c2|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] axod|16 years ago|reply
"Could you run 10,000km?"
".. erm no"
"ok, how about can you run 1km?"
"sure!"
"Great! so all you need to do, is do that 10,000 times! easy eh!?"
I have trouble paying more than 1 or 2 projects real attention. And without attention, things die.
[+] [-] thibaut_barrere|16 years ago|reply
For most programmers, a project is something that has already a decent size, is complex to get out and test on the field.
If you think this way, a "side-project" can only be rare.
On the other hand: a friend of mine started exactly the way Max describes a long while back, and currently runs way more than 400 sites/projects.
He is also doing way more than 12k€ per month.
The thing is 95% of his projects wouldn't even catch the 'regular' (if there's such thing) programmer's interest :)
[+] [-] awolf|16 years ago|reply
I've got a few of these on my back-burner right now... $50-$100 /month, 0 effort.
[+] [-] brianobush|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YonghoShin|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sshumaker|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] albertni|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thibaut_barrere|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acon|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gridspy|16 years ago|reply
This is the way I get everything done.
[+] [-] Psyonic|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|16 years ago|reply
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.
These figures are for the month of January.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 ?).
[+] [-] il|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] maxklein|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] agbell|16 years ago|reply
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.
(edited)
[+] [-] brianobush|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prawn|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] enriketuned|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maneesh|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] VladimirGolovin|16 years ago|reply
"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."
[+] [-] cwalcott|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxklein|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DXL|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vijayr|16 years ago|reply
I guess there is definitely some money to be made, if the site is useful ("tool" based). Some examples:
http://selfmademinds.com/200811/mini-site-case-study-update/
http://www.calendarsquick.com/printables/index.html (don't know how much this site makes, I'd assume more than $1 per day)
[+] [-] joelhaus|16 years ago|reply
Imagine that a highly relevant name could significantly reduce your marketing investment and get you more traffic.
[+] [-] dbz|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chime|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] icey|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmax|16 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] galactus|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timtrueman|16 years ago|reply
http://www.justin.tv/clip/b897875d2e8cd907