Am I being pretentious or unfair for wondering what on earth this blog or author is about?
I don't find this specific post terrible, but I'm the type who prefers the advice of people with a track record of success–or, at the very least, who have tried and humbly reflect on their failures. With details.
When the most I get from an About page is "I’ve been working and training to be the most skilled strategist of our era." and "I worked as an entrepreneur from 2004 to 2008.", meh ... pass.
> Am I being pretentious or unfair for wondering what on earth this blog or author is about?
Nah, that's a common enough reaction. Me, I dropped out of two high schools, was able to pick up an alternative high school diploma at age 16 or so anyways, got a near full ride scholarship to UMass Amherst at 17, left there at 19, have held down a variety of self-employed or owned gigs in contracting, project management, sales, marketing, logistics, and a whole variety of other things. Studied business at Boston University later, paid cash for everything. Lived, worked, or traveled through 40+ countries, been around Asia the last 15 months. My last work was in hospitality/tourism. I'll make at least $65,000 this year (just inked a $65,000 contract, but the cash isn't in the bank yet so no partying yet), maybe a lot more depending.
> I'm the type who prefers the advice of people with a track record of success–or, at the very least, who have tried and humbly reflect on their failures. With details.
That's totally fair. I've written hundreds of posts - did you go through any of them? I've written detailed guides on lots of stuff, lots of personal experiences.
This is actually a tricky thing about writing, you never know which piece you write will be the first one someone sees. You write a heavily assertive one, someone thinks you're a jerk. You write an introspective one, someone thinks you're narcissistic. You talk about what you've done, people think you're bragging. You don't talk about what you've done, people think you're full of hot air.
...occupational hazard with writing, I guess. I don't take it personally :)
Am I being pretentious or unfair for wondering what on earth this blog or author is about?
No. Perfectly reasonable question.
lionhearted may or may not have a "track record of success", but he does have a track record here on hn. For every x weird posts, he has a real gem, something that no one else has mentioned that really gets you thinking. Also, he is more likely that almost any other poster to "push the envelope", bring up something that runs counter to the group think often found here.
If he posts something I don't get in the first 3 sentences, I just hit the back button and decide to read him some other day. It's usually worth it.
Some people, in order to hit a few home runs, have to strike out every once in a while too.
If you're going to speak with authority, you want to establish some sort of credibility and the About page here fails to do that. I think the author has a great handle on aspirational "made-for-hackernews" linkbait but I'm not sure I want to read strategy advice from someone who has no obvious history of implementing strategy.
I was wondering the same thing. It's not to say I'm dismissive of Sebastian's thoughts -- this particular one actually kind of resonates with me -- but I do find that his posts lack perspective. Compared to Derek Sivers' posts, for example, Derek always presents his thoughts as lessons learned wrt CD Baby and ties them to some aspect of his business.
In other words, I'm not saying Sebastian's content is necessarily bad (some of it is quite good), but I would like to see him focus on improving his writing style a bit.
This is just one of those cheap, direction-less advice blogs that hopes to get a book deal. "My goals for the short term are to get back to doing productive freelancing work for good people while finishing up my first book."
May be it's just me but I tend to value "authority/expert/background" less and judge the actual delivered content by itself. Trusting content by its "background" is just intellectually lazy. Question authority. That's part of critical thinking I've learned long time ago.
Lionhearted (Sebastian) has delivered outstanding insights time and time again. Many thing he said has struck a chord with me. One of his best blogs was that it takes many ordinary writings to hit a gem piece. And he certainly practices that.
Yeah the lack of credentials is troubling.
Still, the anecdotes were interesting--the author's change in pay just by asking I found pretty entertaining.
Again though, it would be nice to actually know that the author is "successful". These anecdotes lose some credibility if hes living out of a one-bedroom basement apartment at the time of writing.
It doesn't matter. The guy reflects a mentality that I like.
I pretty much feel the same way he does about "needing" money. I can't say it made me successful, but it certainly makes me have some respect for myself.
"What's my name? Fuck you, that's my name. You know why, mister? Because you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight; I drove an $80,000 BMW. That's my name."
Sure, always consider the source. Then again, considering the content, I read: You don't make much money from ads on a blog, and you can often get more money out of a deal by asking for it. You don't have to be an SV baller to convince me of that.
On a related note, it's really interesting to see how people act when they know they can't motivate someone with money.
For example, I used to do client work, but stopped (because I hate it) a few years ago after I sold my design firm. On my blog's contact form I specifically say that I don't do any consulting work, but I still get emails at least once or twice per week from people who want to hire me for iPhone work. I always politely refuse, and thank them for the consideration. Sometimes they'll reply saying "we have a large budget" or something like that, and I'll reply again saying, thanks, but no thanks, it's not about the money. As soon as I say that magical phrase, they just don't know what to say or do because they're used to motivating designers/developers with money. It's actually an interesting sociological situation.
> I believe the reason you see sites without ads as superior on some level is because the absolute-highest-quality writers usually don’t have ads.
And then he goes on to list a bunch of tech entrepreneurial writers. Well I hate to break it to you, but those are not the definition of "the absolute-highest-quality writers". Sure they are very good writers, but their secret sauce is that they are great businessmen too, and so their ideas are valuable if they do any reasonably competent job of communicating them.
More importantly, these guys make their money (and a lot of it) elsewhere, so it would be a terrible idea to dilute their brand with cheap ads that were irrelevant to their net worth.
It might very well be true that the best writers don't have ads on their site, but my guess is because you can't really make a lot of money from ads unless your audience is massive, and frankly, the audience for very high-quality writing is disturbingly small. By and large people read for content more than quality—this thesis is supported by the fact that the OA considers entrepundits to be the "absolute best". The absolute best writers are probably people who do it professionally, and to do so professionally requires working for an organization that is extracting the true value out of great writing. That is, either a high-brow periodical, or a book publisher.
Yeah. In particular, Joel's blog is essentially a giant ad for everything Fog Creek makes. Not that that's a bad thing -- I tried Fogbugz because I found it through Joel, was willing to give it a try because I thought highly of his writing, and I'm a happy customer. Still, Joel monetizes his blog by indirectly selling software, not by being gauche and slapping adsense all over the place.
"But as soon as you need money – and people know – you’re hosed."
Sales-wise, this is where most companies fail. Their salespeople let buyers know they need money. And as soon as buyers sniff you out, they make you their bitch. If you're a salesperson - and everybody should be - you lose.
The trick is to work hard on your attitude until you're ready to walk away from every deal without blinking - even if you really need money. It's really counterintuitive - but winner's attitude works.
I never understood this. I always thought that you'd rather buy from someone who is likely to go out of their way to serve your needs than to buy from someone who simply doesn't care. I know that all other things being equal (I mean, assuming I think both companies can actually deliver, at a similar price point, and that one company isn't going to vanish while I still need them.) that's certainly how I feel, when I buy expensive things.
But then, I've pretty much miserably failed to sell any product (other than my time) that was worth, you know, real money per-customer, so this is likely one of those areas where I'm just weird, and another reason why using myself as a model for generalizing human behavior is a bad idea.
Personally, I focus on selling a whole lot of little things, mostly because I've utterly failed to sell big things, and I've met some success selling lots of little things. Obviously, $10/month is not going to make or break me... and if I spend a lot of time on any one sale, obviously, I'm not going to end up with an acceptable hourly rate, especially as I have some significant marginal costs that come out of that $10 before it can be spent on my salary. But I think it's important, to some extent, to still treat people like customers; yeah, the accountant won't even notice if that customer quits next month. But if more people quit than sign up? or if that customer quits and then loudly complains in public about my bad service?
The customer isn't always right, but dealing with customers you don't want as customers is a delicate art. I'm certain that if I took an insulting attitude towards the customers I didn't want, it'd end badly for me rather quickly. So it seems to me like this issue is... complex. You want to appear to care, but you don't want to appear desperate, and the line between those two, much like the line between confidence and arrogance, can be pretty blurry (at least to someone as socially unskilled as myself.)
The "don't need money" attitude sends out a "social-proof" signal that the stuff being sold is in high demand, which translated into it's of high quality and worth buying.
It's similar to the pricing signal of a high-priced product. The buyer takes all these signals into consideration when buying.
You can see this attitude in Apple. They sell their products at relatively high prices. You can always hear it from Steve Jobs: we're not gonna produce crap that sell cheap.
When you think you're desperate for money, you become cheap, and you will produce garbage.
I think it's also why 37signals has this mantra about always saying No to feature requests. They're not desperate for more customers; they'd rather make a top notch product instead.
I wrote three comments for this and didn't post any of them, so I obviously have something to say, if I can just get it out :)
I think Sebastian is actually answering a different question than he sets out to answer. What I think he's answering is "How do I be cool with what goes on my blog?"
If so, it was a pretty long and roundabout way of answering.
I usually like Sebastian's work, I just felt this one article had a lot of opinion and a lot of text but not a lot of depth or analysis. It was strangely unsatisfying and frustrating.
AdBlock-Plus has made ads virtually irrelevant for me. Sometimes I forget that people are even subjected to them.
Last year, while traveling through eastern Asia, I would occasionally drop by an internet cafe. I couldn't believe the amount of ads non-ABP users had to see. It still baffles me.
Getting content for free because advertisers are paying for it is pretty great, though, right? As Heinlein would say, there's no such thing as a free lunch...
You do know that there is a special place in hell for ABP users?
On a serious note, I've also pulled out my hair waiting for TechCrunch to load. My solution is to hit Esc as soon as the main content is loaded (or use RSS instead).
If you’re looking to grow in popularity as quickly as possible and the cash you could get from ads doesn’t matter, then yes, go without ads.
It's not one way or the other. You can fall in the middle. You can run ads on a site to only non logged in users or only on posts over a certain age. For a long established blog, just running ads on posts over a month old could still cover 50%+ of the pageviews. I use this "trick" myself and the CTRs are great because it's mostly people coming in from search engines who hit those ads rather than my "regulars" :-)
I like this. I wonder if there's a google-killer in targeting ads at the quality, or type, that suits you? It would build brands both ways, as the article says. Of course, it's not needed at the high-end of BMW et. al., because they already have full-time staff for this stuff; but there's a huge middle-ground between that and the weight loss ads. Now, how to make it convenient and low-cost enough, to bring those benefits to the next tier, who are presently non-consumers of this service, but would love it (like lionhearted here)?
aside: low-cost in this article happen to also be unpleasant; but they needn't coincide. Most disruptions are low-cost (e.g. PCs). They are indeed low-quality, but only with respect to users who already have something better (e.g. mainframes). Google text ads are very low-cost, but also pretty good, especially when related to what you're searching for anyway - this is the idea they copied from (and paid off) overture.com (was: goto.com, now yahoo owns them). I think this was a fantastic idea, even better than google's search, because it aligns everyone's interest, even as it optimizes profit (the auction part).
Re: "needing the money": I recently negotiated my highest ever deal (by a significant integer factor). I did it by pretending I didn't need the money. But I really, really did, so this was... stressful. At the last, I gave in; but I estimate I could have gotten an extra $50,000 or so. Oh well, I still did really well. I prefer the article's plan of not actually needing the money. Fortunately, that deal is very close to putting me in that position.
I believe the reason you see sites without ads as superior on some level is because the absolute-highest-quality writers usually don’t have ads.
Sites like Paul Graham’s, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s, Mark Cuban’s, and Steve Blank’s don’t have advertisements.
I've been subscribed to Cuban's feed for some time now and think he has some interesting things to say on occasion but I wouldn't call him a high quality writer. He's not in the same category as the others listed there.
Few things in the article ring a bell close to me.
1)One being the power to choose things without bothering about the money part is like a drug.
I still remember the time, when I would take design prjects for as cheap as $20 per hour (which for India's standard is not cheap) but I knew I had to build my name and it was a good enough price to pay for a while.
Then I realised that I could do more interesting and challenging personal projects than make sites with no budget and affection for design from the companies' end.
2) “You don’t need the money?” – well, 95%+ of people in the world would like more money. Maybe 99%+.
Well I would say it is 100%. Never come across someone who would say not to money. And no I am not talking moral issues, grey area, lack of time reasons. I am talking reasons where you did not take that money for the sake of not just taking that money.
That power of being able to refuse projects left and right and be very picky is what I cherish the most. I might rather just enjoy a quite night with my girlfriend than slog for some work I don't get a thrill out of.
Blogs are one of the worst monetizing categories of sites; a blog has to have a LOT of traffic (like 100k a month) to move the meter, and if you don't get that kind of traffic you're just hurting your credibility by running ads.
Sebastian's site doesn't even show up in quantcast, so Sebastian is probably turning up $2.35 a month in ad revenues, if that.
>a blog has to have a LOT of traffic (like 100k a month) to move the meter, and if you don't get that kind of traffic you're just hurting your credibility by running ads.
I get a quarter of that on my blog, but I'm pretty random and rarely blog. All my ads do is pay the hosting costs for itself and a couple of extra domains that are in perpetual [un]development and maybe if I'm lucky buy me a meal out once a year (at a pretty low class restaurant) - but do people really disrespect me for that?
Personally despite it being cheap I probably couldn't afford to run the blog without ads (for at least another year) and 250k visits p.a. suggests that at least a few thousand folks might be moderately distracted or find worth in my blog.
In your opinion should I stop the blog? (based on this very limited information alone).
Linda Evangelista is a bad example. She -had- to get out of bed to make money. If she was sick, out of town or otherwise engaged, she couldn't generate revenue. Everything was dependent upon her physically showing up somewhere to do something. Smart people figure out a way to stay in bed and still make the $10k.
Many SaaS/e-Book/App-People think, the money comes in even when they're sick. This might be true for a short period of time but as time changes the value of your work decreases. Let's say you stop working for 6month on your project — usually your sales will collapse.
People bashing freelancers/contractors usually ignore this fact. I for one prefer to get e.g. 10k$/month freelancing instead of 30k$ for an e-book that requires 6month work to write + promote.
[+] [-] callmeed|15 years ago|reply
I don't find this specific post terrible, but I'm the type who prefers the advice of people with a track record of success–or, at the very least, who have tried and humbly reflect on their failures. With details.
When the most I get from an About page is "I’ve been working and training to be the most skilled strategist of our era." and "I worked as an entrepreneur from 2004 to 2008.", meh ... pass.
[+] [-] lionhearted|15 years ago|reply
Nah, that's a common enough reaction. Me, I dropped out of two high schools, was able to pick up an alternative high school diploma at age 16 or so anyways, got a near full ride scholarship to UMass Amherst at 17, left there at 19, have held down a variety of self-employed or owned gigs in contracting, project management, sales, marketing, logistics, and a whole variety of other things. Studied business at Boston University later, paid cash for everything. Lived, worked, or traveled through 40+ countries, been around Asia the last 15 months. My last work was in hospitality/tourism. I'll make at least $65,000 this year (just inked a $65,000 contract, but the cash isn't in the bank yet so no partying yet), maybe a lot more depending.
> I'm the type who prefers the advice of people with a track record of success–or, at the very least, who have tried and humbly reflect on their failures. With details.
That's totally fair. I've written hundreds of posts - did you go through any of them? I've written detailed guides on lots of stuff, lots of personal experiences.
This is actually a tricky thing about writing, you never know which piece you write will be the first one someone sees. You write a heavily assertive one, someone thinks you're a jerk. You write an introspective one, someone thinks you're narcissistic. You talk about what you've done, people think you're bragging. You don't talk about what you've done, people think you're full of hot air.
...occupational hazard with writing, I guess. I don't take it personally :)
[+] [-] edw519|15 years ago|reply
No. Perfectly reasonable question.
lionhearted may or may not have a "track record of success", but he does have a track record here on hn. For every x weird posts, he has a real gem, something that no one else has mentioned that really gets you thinking. Also, he is more likely that almost any other poster to "push the envelope", bring up something that runs counter to the group think often found here.
If he posts something I don't get in the first 3 sentences, I just hit the back button and decide to read him some other day. It's usually worth it.
Some people, in order to hit a few home runs, have to strike out every once in a while too.
[+] [-] webwright|15 years ago|reply
If you're going to speak with authority, you want to establish some sort of credibility and the About page here fails to do that. I think the author has a great handle on aspirational "made-for-hackernews" linkbait but I'm not sure I want to read strategy advice from someone who has no obvious history of implementing strategy.
[+] [-] mirkules|15 years ago|reply
In other words, I'm not saying Sebastian's content is necessarily bad (some of it is quite good), but I would like to see him focus on improving his writing style a bit.
[+] [-] PonyGumbo|15 years ago|reply
It's apparently about "Strategy, Philosophy, Self-Discipline, Science. Victory."
[+] [-] oldstrangers|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ww520|15 years ago|reply
Lionhearted (Sebastian) has delivered outstanding insights time and time again. Many thing he said has struck a chord with me. One of his best blogs was that it takes many ordinary writings to hit a gem piece. And he certainly practices that.
[+] [-] camdykeman|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hasenj|15 years ago|reply
I pretty much feel the same way he does about "needing" money. I can't say it made me successful, but it certainly makes me have some respect for myself.
[+] [-] bitwize|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dave_sullivan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Keyframe|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] flyosity|15 years ago|reply
For example, I used to do client work, but stopped (because I hate it) a few years ago after I sold my design firm. On my blog's contact form I specifically say that I don't do any consulting work, but I still get emails at least once or twice per week from people who want to hire me for iPhone work. I always politely refuse, and thank them for the consideration. Sometimes they'll reply saying "we have a large budget" or something like that, and I'll reply again saying, thanks, but no thanks, it's not about the money. As soon as I say that magical phrase, they just don't know what to say or do because they're used to motivating designers/developers with money. It's actually an interesting sociological situation.
[+] [-] mahmud|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DenisM|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dasil003|15 years ago|reply
> I believe the reason you see sites without ads as superior on some level is because the absolute-highest-quality writers usually don’t have ads.
And then he goes on to list a bunch of tech entrepreneurial writers. Well I hate to break it to you, but those are not the definition of "the absolute-highest-quality writers". Sure they are very good writers, but their secret sauce is that they are great businessmen too, and so their ideas are valuable if they do any reasonably competent job of communicating them.
More importantly, these guys make their money (and a lot of it) elsewhere, so it would be a terrible idea to dilute their brand with cheap ads that were irrelevant to their net worth.
It might very well be true that the best writers don't have ads on their site, but my guess is because you can't really make a lot of money from ads unless your audience is massive, and frankly, the audience for very high-quality writing is disturbingly small. By and large people read for content more than quality—this thesis is supported by the fact that the OA considers entrepundits to be the "absolute best". The absolute best writers are probably people who do it professionally, and to do so professionally requires working for an organization that is extracting the true value out of great writing. That is, either a high-brow periodical, or a book publisher.
[+] [-] earl|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luckyisgood|15 years ago|reply
Sales-wise, this is where most companies fail. Their salespeople let buyers know they need money. And as soon as buyers sniff you out, they make you their bitch. If you're a salesperson - and everybody should be - you lose.
The trick is to work hard on your attitude until you're ready to walk away from every deal without blinking - even if you really need money. It's really counterintuitive - but winner's attitude works.
[+] [-] lsc|15 years ago|reply
But then, I've pretty much miserably failed to sell any product (other than my time) that was worth, you know, real money per-customer, so this is likely one of those areas where I'm just weird, and another reason why using myself as a model for generalizing human behavior is a bad idea.
Personally, I focus on selling a whole lot of little things, mostly because I've utterly failed to sell big things, and I've met some success selling lots of little things. Obviously, $10/month is not going to make or break me... and if I spend a lot of time on any one sale, obviously, I'm not going to end up with an acceptable hourly rate, especially as I have some significant marginal costs that come out of that $10 before it can be spent on my salary. But I think it's important, to some extent, to still treat people like customers; yeah, the accountant won't even notice if that customer quits next month. But if more people quit than sign up? or if that customer quits and then loudly complains in public about my bad service?
The customer isn't always right, but dealing with customers you don't want as customers is a delicate art. I'm certain that if I took an insulting attitude towards the customers I didn't want, it'd end badly for me rather quickly. So it seems to me like this issue is... complex. You want to appear to care, but you don't want to appear desperate, and the line between those two, much like the line between confidence and arrogance, can be pretty blurry (at least to someone as socially unskilled as myself.)
[+] [-] ww520|15 years ago|reply
It's similar to the pricing signal of a high-priced product. The buyer takes all these signals into consideration when buying.
[+] [-] hasenj|15 years ago|reply
When you think you're desperate for money, you become cheap, and you will produce garbage.
I think it's also why 37signals has this mantra about always saying No to feature requests. They're not desperate for more customers; they'd rather make a top notch product instead.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|15 years ago|reply
I think Sebastian is actually answering a different question than he sets out to answer. What I think he's answering is "How do I be cool with what goes on my blog?"
If so, it was a pretty long and roundabout way of answering.
I usually like Sebastian's work, I just felt this one article had a lot of opinion and a lot of text but not a lot of depth or analysis. It was strangely unsatisfying and frustrating.
[+] [-] ChaseB|15 years ago|reply
Last year, while traveling through eastern Asia, I would occasionally drop by an internet cafe. I couldn't believe the amount of ads non-ABP users had to see. It still baffles me.
[+] [-] MikeCapone|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tutorialzine|15 years ago|reply
On a serious note, I've also pulled out my hair waiting for TechCrunch to load. My solution is to hit Esc as soon as the main content is loaded (or use RSS instead).
[+] [-] petercooper|15 years ago|reply
It's not one way or the other. You can fall in the middle. You can run ads on a site to only non logged in users or only on posts over a certain age. For a long established blog, just running ads on posts over a month old could still cover 50%+ of the pageviews. I use this "trick" myself and the CTRs are great because it's mostly people coming in from search engines who hit those ads rather than my "regulars" :-)
[+] [-] 6ren|15 years ago|reply
aside: low-cost in this article happen to also be unpleasant; but they needn't coincide. Most disruptions are low-cost (e.g. PCs). They are indeed low-quality, but only with respect to users who already have something better (e.g. mainframes). Google text ads are very low-cost, but also pretty good, especially when related to what you're searching for anyway - this is the idea they copied from (and paid off) overture.com (was: goto.com, now yahoo owns them). I think this was a fantastic idea, even better than google's search, because it aligns everyone's interest, even as it optimizes profit (the auction part).
Re: "needing the money": I recently negotiated my highest ever deal (by a significant integer factor). I did it by pretending I didn't need the money. But I really, really did, so this was... stressful. At the last, I gave in; but I estimate I could have gotten an extra $50,000 or so. Oh well, I still did really well. I prefer the article's plan of not actually needing the money. Fortunately, that deal is very close to putting me in that position.
[+] [-] yannickmahe|15 years ago|reply
I think it's the opposite. It's rather because the lowest quality sites on the internet are filled with ads.
[+] [-] statictype|15 years ago|reply
Sites like Paul Graham’s, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s, Mark Cuban’s, and Steve Blank’s don’t have advertisements.
I've been subscribed to Cuban's feed for some time now and think he has some interesting things to say on occasion but I wouldn't call him a high quality writer. He's not in the same category as the others listed there.
[+] [-] tuhin|15 years ago|reply
1)One being the power to choose things without bothering about the money part is like a drug.
I still remember the time, when I would take design prjects for as cheap as $20 per hour (which for India's standard is not cheap) but I knew I had to build my name and it was a good enough price to pay for a while.
Then I realised that I could do more interesting and challenging personal projects than make sites with no budget and affection for design from the companies' end.
2) “You don’t need the money?” – well, 95%+ of people in the world would like more money. Maybe 99%+.
Well I would say it is 100%. Never come across someone who would say not to money. And no I am not talking moral issues, grey area, lack of time reasons. I am talking reasons where you did not take that money for the sake of not just taking that money.
That power of being able to refuse projects left and right and be very picky is what I cherish the most. I might rather just enjoy a quite night with my girlfriend than slog for some work I don't get a thrill out of.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|15 years ago|reply
Sebastian's site doesn't even show up in quantcast, so Sebastian is probably turning up $2.35 a month in ad revenues, if that.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|15 years ago|reply
I get a quarter of that on my blog, but I'm pretty random and rarely blog. All my ads do is pay the hosting costs for itself and a couple of extra domains that are in perpetual [un]development and maybe if I'm lucky buy me a meal out once a year (at a pretty low class restaurant) - but do people really disrespect me for that?
Personally despite it being cheap I probably couldn't afford to run the blog without ads (for at least another year) and 250k visits p.a. suggests that at least a few thousand folks might be moderately distracted or find worth in my blog.
In your opinion should I stop the blog? (based on this very limited information alone).
[+] [-] girlvinyl|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmoriz|15 years ago|reply
Many SaaS/e-Book/App-People think, the money comes in even when they're sick. This might be true for a short period of time but as time changes the value of your work decreases. Let's say you stop working for 6month on your project — usually your sales will collapse.
People bashing freelancers/contractors usually ignore this fact. I for one prefer to get e.g. 10k$/month freelancing instead of 30k$ for an e-book that requires 6month work to write + promote.
[+] [-] JoelMcCracken|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toephu|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] quan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] potatolicious|15 years ago|reply