It does require a bit of a mindset change. You have to stop thinking of yourself as a "skilled developer", for one, since development skill leads to success in software businesses like the ability to cook amazing waffles leads to successfully running a bed and breakfast.
A few years ago I was part of a small company, and one day we had a meeting to discuss our future (and yes, porn was one of the things we discussed, though we ended up not pursuing it). The question we asked was, "What was the goal of the company?" If the answer was "To make money", then was writing code the proper way to do it? Each of us, being coders, had come to think so.
I sometimes think that having a skill or a passion for some hands-on activity is a detriment because it leads you think you can and should be doing that as the path to success. The whole "do what you love and the money will follow" nonsense.
OTOH, if you believe you have no tangible skill, but think you can recognize or anticipate a market, then you don't bother trying to implement the solution yourself; you go hire people. (Of course pulling that off is a skill in itself, but it's a different sort from the "make things with your hands" realm where coding lives.)
From a business point of view it may make more sense to take a high-paying but soul-sucking Rails contract job and use the money to pay other developers to implement you MVP.
(BTW, the book The E-Myth covers some of this.)
Well put.
ref: http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About/...
Do you think your project will need new features regularly? Pick a project whose problem domain changes rarely, and get out of the features = value mindset because it is outrageously false.
Do you think you will have to be constantly selling? Don't pick something with high touch sales processes for a side project.
Do you think your project will require support regularly? Do something less critical, so you have less time pressure on support. Do something simpler. Give people self-help resources and push them. Automate as much of your support burden as reasonably possible. (e.g. "Hey Patrick I need a receipt" takes me about 10 seconds to answer. It used to take a few minutes, but I get asked it frequently enough to justify 30 minutes of dev to make it quick.)
Do you think you will need to play sysadmin frequently? Become a better engineer. (I have a couple articles about this.)
I am not the sharpest knife in the HN drawer by a long shot. Currently I'm travelling internationally doing some networking at a Silicon Valley startup and, on the weekdays, consulting in NYC. I profoundly hate flying right now. I also have two software businesses and, from their perspective, this state of affairs is exactly identical to me just sleeping in back at my house. It is rather unlikely the businesses will cause significant work for me.
Big data/machine learning of all the meta data associated on tube sites, repurposing content for tablets, recommendation engines, social layers that are delineated/firewalled from the mainstream social graph, hosting/live streaming services for adult content -- are all opportunity spaces that come to mind.
Many of these projects can be kept on "life-support" and still bring in a healthy profit if set up correctly.
Please don't down-vote because it's porn - it's a legal and legitimate space
How do you know this? I'm genuinely curious; is this reasonable speculation (but still speculation) or do you have some concrete evidence of this working for people?
What I've read lately about porn sites suggests that the days of easy money are gone, modulo a few outliers.
What has disappeared are the "gallery sites" that were easy to make - often by hand - or using basic CMS's like wordpress.
Most of the people who say it is over are the "old skool" industry folks who hate the Tube sites because they represent a level of technical expertise that they cannot match (but most HN'ers can)
What is happening is real technology is disrupting the space and those without skills are getting pushed out.
People are still paying for porn, and content sites need to find the distribution and new leads.
I know this because my partner has a lot of projects in this space. I also know many people - from owners of some of the biggest content houses here in SF thru to engineers who work on startups and supplement their income at night through this kinds of projects.
It's actually more common then you think, most people just don't want to put their names to it.
Adult seems to be a good next project for me. The only initial unknown I can think of would be where content would come from unless it's user-supplied. Any other links/info/thoughts?
Anyway... hope this helps - good luck!
Don't get into user-generated - too many legal and ethical issues.
He runs one of the slickest sites tube sites out there.
So from just a single user signing up for a $30/month subscription, you would make over $180/year.
My partner enjoys a healthy secondary income (way way above the monthly figure mentioned in the original question) from such activity.
If you do big-data analysis and/or curation of content you can probably sell this to other sites too as many in this space are cash rich and tech-ability poor.
Coding isn't everything either. You may be a fine developer, but you're forgetting about design, marketing, customer support, dealing with crisis when your project does good, dealing when depression when it doesn't…
Don't make a plan to get to $1000. Rather, build something cool, and when $1000 does or does not show up at the door, be thankful and learn from the experience. And try again. Iterate.
"I never thought I could own my own business, but it is just so easy" - happy customer
</satire>
The app store for web apps is twitter and facebook.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY
6 years into building web-apps and finally I am just now seeing a few bucks rolling in (still <$1000 month).
I wasted lots of time, primarily pursuing the wrong kinds of business models (free!!!) or putting effort into the wrong areas of a business, ultimately burning out because things weren't working.
But, even if you've picked a good product with a good market, for the un-initiated engineer there's this mysterious delta between being able to build something (anything!), and making that something successful. My recommendation (because its working for me), is to find a co-founder who is a business guy employed at a successful small software company. Painting with broad strokes here, but try to pick a sales or marketing guy over a biz dev guy, I think they are connected better with the product.
You've heard this advice before. Its true. Engineers think of the world as meritocratic. But good product != success. You need someone to help you get past this way of thinking.
And of course not everyone can retire at the same time as longs as we don't have a more advanced economy ;-)
Even if you don't make huge amounts of money (disclaimer: that's my blog post linked at the bottom of the answer), there's a huge gulf between those that spend their days thinking about possibilities, and those that get up and start their projects. If you're in the latter group, you stand a much greater chance :)
What is sad is that instead to create a spam engine, adsense powered, doing $1000/month is pretty straightforward.
and I mean it in the most sarcastic way.
1. Pick a tool you can build which will make money for people.
2. Build it for people who will pay.
3. Market to them.
4. Build it.
5. Ship it.
6. Market to them. (Over and over. It's not a one-time thing.)
I've done it, and I teach other people to do it. (But the thing is - once you reach $1000, you might as well go further since the first $100 is the hardest, once you get that, you have proof and you begin to have leverage for word of mouth and client success stories and yadda yadda yadda.)
You should hack off 2-6 and describe step 1 in 7 steps.
So few people even say that the first step exists, or that it should come first, that alone is worth stating. Then go look for resources for how-to.
1. Freckle
2. JavaScript Performance Rocks
3. Various JavaScript workshops
4. my entrepreneurship class (30x500)
And, by the end of June, we'll be launching our 2nd SaaS, Charm, which is much larger & took a longer time to develop (while I was fighting undiagnosed chronic fatigue syndrome), and we've already got people chomping at the bit to sign up and pay us for it. After that, we're creating self-study versions of our JS workshops.
If you're going to employ snarky skepticism, you might as well do your research first!
Yes.
(Serious question. I suck at asking questions that get me useful answers. I have some websites that have been around a while and make next to nothing in spite of having something of value to offer. I want to make $2000-$3000/mo. How on earth do I get there from here?)
The first thing to define is "quality traffic". Let's say the health condition is a painful nose wart. If only 14 people in the U.S. have this condition you're never going to get significant traffic. If the condition is indeed widespread you have to ask how people would search for it. Would they type "painful nose warts" or maybe something else like "nose bumps"? If you have been assuming people use the same keyword phrasing you do to describe the same thing you need to investigate what is the actual case. Google's keyword tool can help by showing what people are searching for. (I recommend comparing broad and exact match versions too.) Make a list of all possible phrasing. This can help you identify long tail keywords which there is little competition for, and sometimes strong keywords nobody targets well at all.
After you've confirmed that there is indeed significant traffic to be had for your topic, and you're armed with your keyword list the next step is to set up your site to be successful when aligned with those things. Probably the quickest and easiest thing to do is start a Wordpress blog, since there are many theme possibilities and it's already going to have many SEO basics built in. Next, go to Google and type in: SEO site: news.ycombinator.com. Take a day or two to read through many of the results. Pay extra attention to comments by patio11. Now, consider how you can follow as much of that advice as possible with your site. Be prepared to work and improve on this for days or weeks. The time consuming part of receiving free traffic from search engines really boils down to: creating quality content (keep your phrasing list in mind here!) on the topic, and receiving links to that content. If your content is good enough, links will start appearing naturally. This can take time, but it will happen. To help things along be proactive by reaching out to sites, communities, writers, organizations which have anything at all to do with your topic. Ask them directly for links back, or possibly if you can write a guest post on their site referencing your site. If you follow these steps correctly, over time you will see results.
Now that you've established traffic you need to monetize it. There are a couple ways to do that. If the traffic is significant enough, and depending on the topic, simply putting up ads may be enough. If there are complimentary products to aid in getting healthy, like a special measurement machine, see if you can position yourself to earn a commission whenever it's sold through your site as an affiliate (start contacting suppliers directly if you need to and pitch them).
The other way to monetize your traffic is by selling access to the information itself. You hold valuable information. You want to monetize it. And here I disagree with mechanical_fish. There is nothing wrong with asking people to pay for you taking the time to show them a way to improve their life. Doctors and drug companies don't work free. They are usually quite expensive, and they don't have all the answers as they are literally "practicing" medicine. Providing alternatives which may be more effective and likely less costly as well is certainly worth something.
The approach I would use when taking this route is freely offering about 80-90% of the solution and trying to monetize the remaining 10%. As you say you will probably face skepticism about any proposed solution, whether it's true or not. Talking openly and candidly about the first 90% is a way to address that skepticism. People can detect when you are probably being genuine, and they will respond to that. I would tell my story as genuinely and matter-of-factly as possible on my blog, and interact with readers. Next, I would offer one of two options which could be monetized. My favorite thing to do would be adding a premium membership forum to my site. I'd make it known that in this forum participants shared and progressed together, as well as having access to me. Even if you gave away 100% of your solution, coaching members along is still likely to be a needed and valuable product.
The other option is to package up the remaining 10% in an eBook format where you essentially re-tell your entire story, but with 100% of the information. Show your site visitors that you have taken time to put together a more in depth look at the topic, and you hope they will pay the modest < $5 cost to receive it.
Last, be sure to have a legal disclaimer stipulating that you're not a doctor, you're only telling your story, and people should consult their doctor before beginning any form of treatment for anything.
