MixergyNotes on Gurbaksh Chahal, founder of gWallet and self-made millionaire. | Hacker News Reader

MixergyNotes on Gurbaksh Chahal, founder of gWallet and self-made millionaire.

mixergynotes.com

18 pointsmixergyNOTES14 comments

I watched the Mixergy thing and read these notes, and have read other stuff about this guy. I was in Silicon Valley when he built and sold his startups. At the time, I did not understand what his startups did, and I still do not understand how ad startups like this work or make money. I especially don't know why they make $300M instead of $3M or even $3000. How does the product work? How is it sold? Who buys this service? Does it require heavy hitter sales people or are customers just entering their credit card number in to a web form? Do you just make up the prices as you go along?

Sadly, I believe my lack of understanding means that I'll probably never be successful as an entrepreneur. I'm still trapped in the "I must build a better iPhone to succeed as an entrpreneur" mindset. Obviously one can build an ad network instead. But I just. don't. get. it. Please advise.

If you're doing any sort of Internet startup, you should really try to develop an understanding of the online ad market, either to monetize your app or market it.

Ad networks are very simple- they connect advertisers with publishers and take a cut(usually 30-50%) of the advertiser's spend.

The reason BlueLithium was(and remains) so successful is that instead of targeting the entire network of publishers or simply segmenting them by channels/topics, they pioneered some rudimentary behavioral targeting to show ads to people who were more likely to click on them. This led to lower CPA/CPC for advertisers, which means they were willing to pay more for impressions. That led to BlueLithium being able to pay publishers more, resulting in rapid growth for the network.

Feel the same here. The only people making serious cash on the internet seem to be either selling ads or running scams.

gWallet raised $12.5 million, 2 months after launch

You mean after gWallet's second launch? I find it interesting that G never mentioned that gWallet initially launched as a coupon website (similiar to retailmenot.com), totally unrelated to virtual currency.

Mentioning a few of Gurbaksh's failures would have been enlightening.

$40 million at 18 is mindblowing.

The "hire developers to make it" approach is not for me personally, but there are important pure-entrepreneur lessons here that some of us inventor-entrepreneurs forget all too easily:

- “When you go to market, you don’t need the best thing, you just need something.”

- “Startups primarily exist to execute faster and more efficiently than bigger companies that have gotten lazy and bureaucratic.”

Is this site run by Andrew Warner as well?

Doesn't look like that is the case. Though I see the site adding value over existing material on Mixergy.

Its a bit annoying that there is no link to the actual mixergy interview (or if there is, I can't find it!).

The suspect thing I see about this is that it doesn't link back to Mixergy at all or even mention that it is summarizing another websites content.

Seems to step a little bit over fair use if it's an unauthorized site.

Andrew mentioned mixergyNotes in one of his interviews. He supports it and encourages others to find ways to use his content.

Ahh ok, that's fine then.

Flagged as spam.

The submitter, mixergyNOTES, has two submissions total, both pointing to mixergynotes.com; also, he has four comments (two of which were killed), all of which spam mixergynotes.com and are only tangentially related to the topic.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mixergyNOTES

Why spam? The site seems to provide value and I enjoyed reading the summary of mixergy interviews. I don't think self promotion, if relevant to HNers, should be marked as spam.

Wasn't trying to spam, it was just my first day posting on here and I was trying to understand it.

I got the jist of it now.

I appreciate your honesty though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com