I actually did this too... I create Datastreamer (http://www.datastreamer.io/) which (when I created it) was an RSS syndication platform as a service.
You gave us RSS feeds and then we would index them and send you the output without having to deal with the insanity of RSS feeds.
This was a decade ago though.
I've been running it since and now it's more of a massive search engine of content - nearly a petabyte at this point.
We have an Elasticsearch API which our customers query. We also have a streaming API if you just want to listen to the crawl data directly.
It's been a wild ride but here's my big takeaway - if your company is profitable it actually might be because you're sitting on something MASSIVE and don't realize it.
Datastreamer was the first company in the content indexing space and we were WAY ahead of everyone else.
I was more focused on enjoying life, traveling, backpacking, etc.
In retrospect when you're sitting on a rocket it might make sense to buy more gas and light up that bad boy.
I'm actually in the middle of a (mild) pivot of Datastreamer right now. We think it might have significant value for the coming 'code war' we're in right now with Russia.
With companies continually looking at social media as a way to manipulate democratic societies these governments need tools (and data) to figure out where they're being attacked and how their citizens are being manipulated.
A 4% signup rate actually signifies really well targeted emails. Not everyone who doesn't sign up is annoyed by the mail (or did even open or read it).
I think this is far from beeing spam, where you would see signup rates well below 1%.
Agreed, the first thing I thought was 'Where did he get a list of 30,000 email addresses?' Buying lists is technically illegal in the US. Sure, the chances of you being hauled in are slim to none, but it's still slimy as hell.
I have a motor control IC. I look for robot manufacturers and read their company websites for contact info. I call or email them to schedule a presentation. Some say OK. Some don’t . This is just basic cold calls.
Maybe someone can be so good, majority of leads end up buying the motor IC. But 4% of response is quite high in my experience.
Goes into good details about the tactics used to come up with an idea and then recruit the first few customers. After signing up $5k/month revenue it meant he needed to generate 5,000 leads per month for those customers. That is the hard bit, how did he do that on a side project? He says that the income was passive, so how did he generate 5,000 targeted leads passively? That is the magic, not the ability to recruit some customers.
Based on when this product was created, I can almost guarantee they are just manually scraping LinkedIn (plus a few other places - Facebook, twitter, Bloomberg, maybe even Pitchbook). There are custom Google search portals you can use to search LinkedIn via keyword that not everyone knows about. From there one can use a bunch of services that will provide you (mostly)valid emails at various companies.
I imagine he made a quick set of tutorials for his outsourced contractors and had his virtual assistant he found on oDesk do the hiring and setting up of those contractors.
This quote from the article is wild: "Customers have to train their team and the billing is variable so your cost per lead ranges from $.50 to $5" You can beat that number paying people $20/hr to do this stuff, let alone exploiting people out in the Philippines on I'm sure the not livable wages he's paying them(Aka the fallacy of low rent/cost of living in developing economies).
Sigh... you know we're at the end of the cycle when it's just a bunch of outsourcers with marketing backgrounds.
> As a millennial there are few things that rank as desirable as finding a recurring source of income that doesn’t take much work
That made me laugh! As someone much older I can honestly say that there are few things that rank as desirable as finding a recurring source of income that doesn’t take much work for me too.
I believe the author added the 'as a millennial' bit because everyone's feeds for the past couple of years have been bombarded by posts about 'digital nomads', the seemingly lucky few that are their own bosses and live out of a suitcase and a Macbook in exotic-seeming places like Slovakia, Argentina or Vietnam.
> That was made possible when I took a couple friends (who are salespeople) out for drinks to tell them what I was working on. Afterwards they both said they would try to think of people to refer me to.
Thomas deserves all the credit for building and selling his business, but the value of this point here is critical, in my mind. IMO key takeaways are (1) knowing lots of people helps a lot, and (2) asking for help/daring to talk about your project helps a lot.
> Most people in the tech industry are brainwashed by Silicon Valley group think. These people believe that every business must have a billion dollar opportunity.
If anything, I’d say that most people in the tech industry in Silicon Valley are brainwashed into thinking that entrepreneurship is the One True Path to salvation.
Much like whoever wrote this article. Who else would recommend that someone follow the path that “led to depression, social isolation, and the hardest time of my life” just because they got lucky in the end?
> Who else would recommend that someone follow the path that “led to depression, social isolation, and the hardest time of my life” just because they got lucky in the end?
One of my favorite Ewan McGregor quotes from watching Long Way Round recently was when he would say ”This is the part that really sucks right now and is just so hard it makes you wanna cry, but it’s the part we remember most fondly later”
He said that on multiple occasions. It maps well to stuff I recently learned in Thinking Fast and Slow about our experiencing self versus our remembering self.
It turns out we cherish sucky experiences tht end well more dearly than we do experiences that are great (or bad) throughout.
I created a successful side project back in 2014. It is still running and making 20 times more than I would get with a normal job.
But i was lucky. Lucky to be born in a rich country. Lucky because I was given a computer at the age of 5. Lucky because I had unlimited education opportunities. Lucky because I had a friend who gave me access to something I needed for my business. And many other lucks. I will never deny that fact.
But reading these stories makes me a bit angry, because it is just not that simple. It's always easy to translate a successful story into a guideline. But that guideline isn't worth anything when all those luck properties are different.
I witnessed "Play #3" firsthand. The first startup for which I worked (developing a peer-to-peer learning system that paired up students to learn off one another, whether in person or via video chat) had an uphill battle getting customers and investors because we had to convince them that the problem our product solved was actually a problem they had. Our product happened to chiefly operate by integrating with a different one (Khan Academy), so much of our time "in the wild" pitching to potential customers was spent giving KA free advertisement before we could even explain what our product did.
There were multiple other factors behind why we ultimately didn't succeed and ended up all going our separate ways (and I know I wasn't blameless there), but in hindsight I think this was the central factor. We barely had the resources - sapient or monetary - to sell our own product; trying to sell other people's products upon which ours depended was doomed to fail.
I still think we had an excellent and valuable product, and I stand by the code we wrote and the platform we built; we were just too far ahead of our time :) One of these days, when things like Khan Academy are a bit more mainstream in classrooms, I'd love to (with my old boss' permission, of course) try restarting that particular project and giving it another go.
This is great and educational. But I've noticed that many (most?) of the successful side projects were started by people who had some sales and marketing experience. Sales first, tech second (or third).
If you want other people to buy, rent, invest, etc., you have to be able to find the right people and communicate with them in a way that will lead them to become your customers/partners. Unfortunately, I doubt many of us with CompSci degrees and years/decades of experience have those sales and marketing skills.
So I guess there's a business just waiting (for someone who knows sales + tech)! Teach nerds how to market. I might be a customer.
The truth is, there is no 5-10 hour work week for 99% of people. Even if you make something like this person did, if you don't continue investing a lot of time into it, eventually competition will break you to pieces. Why? Because your competitor is hungry and working a lot more than 5-10 hours a week.
I know this, because I've built two side income businesses, sat back and collected money only to find competitors had taken me over. They weren't big by any means but the $3,000 a month I made off one and the $1,000 a month off another was quite nice. I could've quit my job and traveled, but instead I paid down my mortgage and banked/invested the rest. This left me with a lot of money (for me). I eventually sold both businesses when I saw the writing on the wall with various competitors and industry changes.
I did end up traveling for a while though. I did that with a remote job. Sure I had to work during the day, but that left plenty of time to explore whatever city I was in at night and do bigger adventures on the weekend.
I find it hilarious that he calls Abercrombie & Fitch the “high end clothing brand for middle schoolers”. A&F used to target “elite outdoorsmen” (not a joke — think a high end LL Bean), and they made some really good stuff. Some of that quality lasted until the 90s and early 00s after changing hands and shifting towards targeting youth casual wear, but their clothing line is almost all overpriced junk now. Such a sad loss.
If you don't mind me asking, I'd like some help laying out what my next steps should be on one of my side projects. I had an idea for a side project, ran it by a hand full of friends and associates, expecting to have a bunch of holes poked into it (they have done that to me many times in the past). This time they all think I have something.
Problem is I work full time, as a Linux systems engineer (30 years of Unix experience), with a side passion for C programming, web technologies, and have built a hand full of web apps that are getting a lot of use at work (btw I'm not under any contract prohibiting side projects, and have cleared it with my management).
Next problem: The project itself is relatively simple, has client-side pieces that will be open source, and over all I prototyped it in about a weekend's worth of work, but need probably a month or so to get it more polished and robust. The upshot is that it can be easily replicated by anyone in a similar space. There are similar products that try to solve the same problem, but in a rather backwards and less secure method, but I'm really not sure why other vendors haven't thought of this project first.
Third problem: I'm relatively new at modern advanced web apps, so things like taking payments, handling customers, integrating to a customer's on-premise or cloud based authentication (O365, Active Directory, etc) is something I'm not too familiar with (for my projects I just used ldap bind for authentication against a local AD server).
So for my next step, should I put a prototype / demo site online, and let people create demo accounts that last for a couple weeks? Then if there is sufficient interest, set up something like a Stripe account? Start off with local user account authentication, then later on add the ability for customers to set up users authenticating against their own AD domain or O365 account?
Or would I be better off finding a business partner that has been through all this already?
Stupid question, how could you possibly automate lead generation? For that matter, how do you do it manually? Search for potential customers and read up about their business?
You can, I replied to the main thread about my two side businesses without going into specifics. Both my businesses were lead generation. I won't give the industries a way, but here's the jist.
I had a system I built for a clients lead generation business. I asked if I could re-purpose the software and in exchange I'd provide the enhancements free as well as discounted development. He agreed. It was a basic system where a lead would come in for a geographical area, that area would have a vendor assigned, and an email would be dispatched. If you do the SEO and marketing right, the leads become pretty passive.
I improved the system in two ways:
1. My client generated monthly invoices. This was a problem since he had to chase people down for money. I setup a credit system where you purchased credits (leads) in advanced. I gave a 20% discount for purchasing 100 credits at a time. I also gave new customers their first 10 credits free. No obligation, no contract, not joking.
2. Email sucks. I integrated twilio and did direct call dispatching with numbers I controlled. I spammed the internet with these numbers. If a customer ever dropped off, I'd just find someone else. Rarely did I need to do that since the leads were so good.
This required a lot of work up front, but in areas where my marketing was dialed in already it just always generated income. This is the kind of stuff fluff articles like this never tell you, the actual specifics.
You could now take this basic model and apply to any industry that requires leads. Bonus if the industry is underserved, not huge, and filled with techno-peasants.
What about Reddit type ads ("Promoted posts"), in a relevant subreddit, with comments enabled? I've seen that on other advice lists, would like to know real-world experiences on that though.
Good article, thanks! The business seemed to have been built on oDesk workers but now that site it called Upwork. Are there any alternatives to upwork out there?
Virtual indeed refers to their presence. While to you, you know they are remote, for any outward facing function though, such as with customer interaction, ideally they'll seem like they are no further then the next office or department of your company.
That's exactly what it is. Freelancers working for relative pennies. Tim Ferriss started the bad habit of calling this 'automation' in the 4hr work week book.
There's a "favorite" link you should click instead, located just below the article's title on this very page — it'll add the article to your "favorites" list at: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=willart4food
[+] [-] burtonator|7 years ago|reply
You gave us RSS feeds and then we would index them and send you the output without having to deal with the insanity of RSS feeds.
This was a decade ago though.
I've been running it since and now it's more of a massive search engine of content - nearly a petabyte at this point.
We have an Elasticsearch API which our customers query. We also have a streaming API if you just want to listen to the crawl data directly.
It's been a wild ride but here's my big takeaway - if your company is profitable it actually might be because you're sitting on something MASSIVE and don't realize it.
Datastreamer was the first company in the content indexing space and we were WAY ahead of everyone else.
I was more focused on enjoying life, traveling, backpacking, etc.
In retrospect when you're sitting on a rocket it might make sense to buy more gas and light up that bad boy.
I'm actually in the middle of a (mild) pivot of Datastreamer right now. We think it might have significant value for the coming 'code war' we're in right now with Russia.
With companies continually looking at social media as a way to manipulate democratic societies these governments need tools (and data) to figure out where they're being attacked and how their citizens are being manipulated.
[+] [-] haihaibye|7 years ago|reply
>> By May of 2015 I had sent over 30,000 sales and marketing emails
.96 × 30,000 = You just annoyed ~28,800 people. It's only because this immense amount of time lost is borne by strangers that it's a viable business.
Let's not glorify spammers.
[+] [-] growt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matty22|7 years ago|reply
This guy built a side hustle nefariously.
[+] [-] juiyout|7 years ago|reply
Maybe someone can be so good, majority of leads end up buying the motor IC. But 4% of response is quite high in my experience.
[+] [-] andrewmcwatters|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klohto|7 years ago|reply
It's clear that the author meant he had experience with sending mail, not that he sent 30k mails about THIS product.
[+] [-] pmarreck|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zelmor|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] PhilWright|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kokokokoko|7 years ago|reply
I imagine he made a quick set of tutorials for his outsourced contractors and had his virtual assistant he found on oDesk do the hiring and setting up of those contractors.
This quote from the article is wild: "Customers have to train their team and the billing is variable so your cost per lead ranges from $.50 to $5" You can beat that number paying people $20/hr to do this stuff, let alone exploiting people out in the Philippines on I'm sure the not livable wages he's paying them(Aka the fallacy of low rent/cost of living in developing economies).
Sigh... you know we're at the end of the cycle when it's just a bunch of outsourcers with marketing backgrounds.
[+] [-] hudibras|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asimjalis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeeJay942|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mike2477|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] blakesterz|7 years ago|reply
That made me laugh! As someone much older I can honestly say that there are few things that rank as desirable as finding a recurring source of income that doesn’t take much work for me too.
[+] [-] Skunkleton|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fouc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] branchless|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wyldfire|7 years ago|reply
Thomas deserves all the credit for building and selling his business, but the value of this point here is critical, in my mind. IMO key takeaways are (1) knowing lots of people helps a lot, and (2) asking for help/daring to talk about your project helps a lot.
[+] [-] wilsonnb3|7 years ago|reply
If anything, I’d say that most people in the tech industry in Silicon Valley are brainwashed into thinking that entrepreneurship is the One True Path to salvation.
Much like whoever wrote this article. Who else would recommend that someone follow the path that “led to depression, social isolation, and the hardest time of my life” just because they got lucky in the end?
[+] [-] Swizec|7 years ago|reply
One of my favorite Ewan McGregor quotes from watching Long Way Round recently was when he would say ”This is the part that really sucks right now and is just so hard it makes you wanna cry, but it’s the part we remember most fondly later”
He said that on multiple occasions. It maps well to stuff I recently learned in Thinking Fast and Slow about our experiencing self versus our remembering self.
It turns out we cherish sucky experiences tht end well more dearly than we do experiences that are great (or bad) throughout.
[+] [-] code_duck|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] holoduke|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yellowapple|7 years ago|reply
There were multiple other factors behind why we ultimately didn't succeed and ended up all going our separate ways (and I know I wasn't blameless there), but in hindsight I think this was the central factor. We barely had the resources - sapient or monetary - to sell our own product; trying to sell other people's products upon which ours depended was doomed to fail.
I still think we had an excellent and valuable product, and I stand by the code we wrote and the platform we built; we were just too far ahead of our time :) One of these days, when things like Khan Academy are a bit more mainstream in classrooms, I'd love to (with my old boss' permission, of course) try restarting that particular project and giving it another go.
[+] [-] blunte|7 years ago|reply
If you want other people to buy, rent, invest, etc., you have to be able to find the right people and communicate with them in a way that will lead them to become your customers/partners. Unfortunately, I doubt many of us with CompSci degrees and years/decades of experience have those sales and marketing skills.
So I guess there's a business just waiting (for someone who knows sales + tech)! Teach nerds how to market. I might be a customer.
[+] [-] systematical|7 years ago|reply
I know this, because I've built two side income businesses, sat back and collected money only to find competitors had taken me over. They weren't big by any means but the $3,000 a month I made off one and the $1,000 a month off another was quite nice. I could've quit my job and traveled, but instead I paid down my mortgage and banked/invested the rest. This left me with a lot of money (for me). I eventually sold both businesses when I saw the writing on the wall with various competitors and industry changes.
I did end up traveling for a while though. I did that with a remote job. Sure I had to work during the day, but that left plenty of time to explore whatever city I was in at night and do bigger adventures on the weekend.
TLDR; 5-10 hour work week doesn't last.
[+] [-] madeuptempacct|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] csa|7 years ago|reply
I find it hilarious that he calls Abercrombie & Fitch the “high end clothing brand for middle schoolers”. A&F used to target “elite outdoorsmen” (not a joke — think a high end LL Bean), and they made some really good stuff. Some of that quality lasted until the 90s and early 00s after changing hands and shifting towards targeting youth casual wear, but their clothing line is almost all overpriced junk now. Such a sad loss.
[+] [-] derekp7|7 years ago|reply
Problem is I work full time, as a Linux systems engineer (30 years of Unix experience), with a side passion for C programming, web technologies, and have built a hand full of web apps that are getting a lot of use at work (btw I'm not under any contract prohibiting side projects, and have cleared it with my management).
Next problem: The project itself is relatively simple, has client-side pieces that will be open source, and over all I prototyped it in about a weekend's worth of work, but need probably a month or so to get it more polished and robust. The upshot is that it can be easily replicated by anyone in a similar space. There are similar products that try to solve the same problem, but in a rather backwards and less secure method, but I'm really not sure why other vendors haven't thought of this project first.
Third problem: I'm relatively new at modern advanced web apps, so things like taking payments, handling customers, integrating to a customer's on-premise or cloud based authentication (O365, Active Directory, etc) is something I'm not too familiar with (for my projects I just used ldap bind for authentication against a local AD server).
So for my next step, should I put a prototype / demo site online, and let people create demo accounts that last for a couple weeks? Then if there is sufficient interest, set up something like a Stripe account? Start off with local user account authentication, then later on add the ability for customers to set up users authenticating against their own AD domain or O365 account?
Or would I be better off finding a business partner that has been through all this already?
[+] [-] wyldfire|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] infinii|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csa|7 years ago|reply
2. Pay a VA to use the keyword list to locate businesses and/or people in search engines, FB, and LinkedIn, and record their contact info.
3. Sell this info.
The steps are easy. The execution is decidedly less so.
[+] [-] systematical|7 years ago|reply
I had a system I built for a clients lead generation business. I asked if I could re-purpose the software and in exchange I'd provide the enhancements free as well as discounted development. He agreed. It was a basic system where a lead would come in for a geographical area, that area would have a vendor assigned, and an email would be dispatched. If you do the SEO and marketing right, the leads become pretty passive.
I improved the system in two ways:
1. My client generated monthly invoices. This was a problem since he had to chase people down for money. I setup a credit system where you purchased credits (leads) in advanced. I gave a 20% discount for purchasing 100 credits at a time. I also gave new customers their first 10 credits free. No obligation, no contract, not joking.
2. Email sucks. I integrated twilio and did direct call dispatching with numbers I controlled. I spammed the internet with these numbers. If a customer ever dropped off, I'd just find someone else. Rarely did I need to do that since the leads were so good.
This required a lot of work up front, but in areas where my marketing was dialed in already it just always generated income. This is the kind of stuff fluff articles like this never tell you, the actual specifics.
You could now take this basic model and apply to any industry that requires leads. Bonus if the industry is underserved, not huge, and filled with techno-peasants.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] derekp7|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbigelow76|7 years ago|reply
- Email (spam) blast > Landing page data entry form
- Game or content paywall > submit personal info to bypass.
[+] [-] wtracy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] herova|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nowarninglabel|7 years ago|reply
Is it possible for anyone to share how they found people to hire/outsource building sales lists to?
[+] [-] illumin8|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bayesian_horse|7 years ago|reply
Maybe I am too pessimistic and jaded from studying statistics...
[+] [-] beezle|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RyanShook|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ForHackernews|7 years ago|reply
Am I correct in thinking this "virtual" assistant is not a bot, but just a human hired remotely?
[+] [-] molticrystal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willart4food|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akavel|7 years ago|reply