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Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

Surely the other point is that "wanting to be rich" isn't a good start.

"wanting to be successful, create something useful and have fun" is a far better mindset to have.

Do something because you love it. Not because you believe it'll make you rich.

I don't really agree with the conclusion here particularly, maybe there are some people like that, but there's a sure fire way to be successful.

  * Create something that solves a problem
  * Get people to use it
  * Work out how to monetize it

Seems that the average software developer can do 1 and 2 pretty easily without stretching themselves. 3 may be a little more work, but once you have 1 and 2, it's not hard to try a few models and see what works.

I'm sure some software developers do fall into the trap of developing something that only solves their own problem, and no one elses, and maybe that's the 'procrastinating' bit.

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I don't think #1's easy at all. I think identifying real problems is actually incredibly hard. Sure it's easy to dream problems up ("you know, I think my pet needs a microblogging service...) But to identify real problems requires a reasonable amount of domain specific knowledge. For developers, their primary domain tends to be ... software development. And at least for me, there's something strangely unpleasant about work that's so meta/recursive. Not to mention, you might be up against open source, if you're trying to build a saleable product.

I mean if you've done your homework on #1, #2 should flow from it, minus bureaucracy/long sales cycles/etc. And so should #3. If you've really solved a real problem, people should see your value.

Yeah ok, not easy, but doable. Anyone here could start a "community for fish tank owners" and make a ton of money from it.

The problem can be fairly mundane and not even unique. You just have to do it well, be enthusiastic and put your all into it.

Also, it's fairly likely you may need to try out 100 ideas, maybe more, before you find one that is good.

It's way easier to try 100 ideas until one succeeds, than doing a comprehensive 'on paper' analysis of ideas and assessing the risk of each one, building the one you've chosen, launching it and finding that it falls flat.

I seriously shy away from "saleable product", so my thoughts are purely from a conventional ad supported website model.

> Anyone here could start a "community for fish tank owners" and make a ton of money from it.

I highly doubt that it would as easy as you make it seem.

Communities have critical mass and if you do not have a very good reason for people to switch or tap in to an existing userbase then you'll be surprised how hard this really is. I'm actually surprised that you think that 'doing it well and putting your all in to it' would be enough to make it work, that's suspiciously close to 'built it and they will come'.

It's fairly easy:

  * Create a website, get affiliate links setup for
    selling fishtanks etc
  * Create cool content people will stay around for
  * Setup mailing list to further monetize etc
  * Start spending money on adwords etc to get people to join
  * Start optimizing to make sure you make more money than
    you spend

That's only one way, but it's pretty sure to work if you stay on the ball.

Prove it by doing it and blog about it.

I don't buy it.

Those cards are dealt, that scheme might have worked 10 years ago but today it's a lot harder than that.

And make sure you log your time, so you can work out your hourly rate.

I've been making a living out of advertising income for 10 years. I think if anything it's easier now to make money out of advertising. Back in the day you didn't even have adsense/adwords etc.

It would be fun to do such an experiment, but I'm way too busy and way too lazy to be the one to do it :)

I've been earning money from advertising for a decade as well (actually, 12 years to be more precise) and the landscape has changed quite a bit.

Making money once you have your community set up is only part of the problem, getting a working community off the ground is the hard part.

When adsense/adwords did not exist CPMs were much higher than they are today and such a venture would have been easier to get to profitability then it is because of that. Some costs (notably bandwidth) have declined, but simply slapping a forum on a server and calling it a day is not going to cut it. It will take a good bit of time to get people to re-visit your niche community on a daily basis.

And there are already to many fish-tank forums that you'd be competing for a fairly small slice of the cake.

Create cool content people will stay around for

And that's the hard part. You might as well have said "Write a best-seller," though the barrier of entry is a bit lower.

It depends. You can make money simply finding people who want stuff, and pointing them at stuff.

Having content can just be an optional extra which brings repeat sales.

And how does one find the stuff people want?

s/best-seller/better money-making algorithm/

Just like every entrepreneur. And what, 90% of them fail? Yep, it sure is easy.

I seriously shy away from "saleable product", so my thoughts are purely from a conventional ad supported website model.

I think it's just the opposite; a product or service that you charge money for is way easier to make a living from than an ad-supported community. How big is the market for ad-supported communities for fish tank owners that are big enough that you could live off of them? A dozen or two? But how big is the market for companies that make a product or service that fish tank owners would buy? Probably thousands. Depending on your margins, you can make a living off of a handful of customers if you're selling them something (and you make money from the very first customer), but it'll take a large audience before you can make any money from ads. This also ignores the fact that ad-supported models have both users and customers, and they're not the same group, which can create all kinds of problems.

Identify a problem, create a solution, and ask people to pay for it.

My main experience and success has been with advertising, so that's what I know, and what I recommend as being easiest to start, easiest to scale.

I disagree with your argument.

>> "it'll take a large audience before you can make any money from ads"

It'll take a targeted audience before you can make money from ads. It's not about raw numbers, but about how well you match your users up to what they want.

You can make a living out of a website that gets 100 visitors a month, if those 100 visitors are extremely targeted visitors.

Okay, I'll bite. One of my webapps (http://todoneapp.com) has 100 active users a week. How do I monetize it?

The most obvious route would be:

  * Make it more of a reminder service for specific dates
  * Make it email/sms/etc you at pre determined times
  * Make those communications include handy adverts

For example, "I need to buy a present for a thomas who is 8 by Aug 8th at the latest"... on Aug 1st it emails you saying "Don't forget to buy a present! Here's some cool offers, here's a coupon to buy toys. Here's a great place to buy e-cards, etc etc"

I'd start by analyzing what sort of events/items your userbase are adding on your app, and working out how you can enhance their experience using advertising.

If it turned out that 90% of your userbase are adding the todo item "Find a good deal on car insurance", then obviously it'd pay to find some good car insurance affiliate programs... (Hyperbole example, I know, just to show a point).

But 100 users using a todo webapp aren't really that targeted.

By targeted I'm meaning more like "They have already expressed a desire to buy X" etc

The users are targeted, just not explicitly. An advertisement for David Allen's GTD book would target that audience.

I've been trying to crack #1 for several years now. I agree with you 100%--my primary domain is software development, and it's sort of overpopulated in terms of developers solving those problems.

You would think that through consulting and contracting, I would meet some people and get some additional domain insight. But most of my clients don't really know any more than I do about their target market (and they don't do very well... but at least I get paid).

I do have one or two real problems in the general domain of "computing professionals" that need solving. But the barrier is higher than just a software developer in a garage (or else someone would have already done it). Ideally I need a hardware hacker on the team. And, let's face it, that's pretty hard, and hardware costs $$. So I'm still looking for some non-computing domain that I could solve without custom hardware.

I have plenty of problems for you to solve. For a low, low fee of $12.99/mo. (plus sales tax as appropriate) you too can be the proud recipient of a collection of problems to solve!

    Surely the other point is that "wanting to be rich" 
    isn't a good start.
    
    "wanting to be successful, create something useful and 
    have fun" is a far better mindset to have.

I don't disagree with you, but it's a pretty easy mentality for us in the west to adopt.

The author is in India, where a very significant portion of the population sleeps on the street and even the ones a notch above them live in abject poverty compared to even our lowest classes[1].

I suspect "being rich" for an Indian means something quite different than for us, and might very well mean a middle-class existence in our terms.

[1] GDP per capita in India is $1,124 a year.

I don't think the author is from India. I have to admit I never heard of him before but "Max Klein" doesn't sound like an Indian name to me and his domain is maxkle.in which is clearly using the .in TLD so that his name can be the full domain name of his blog and not because it is a blog from India.

You are right, I just extrapolated from the TLD.

Max is British, I believe.

I like how this is a mantra that is repeated half a dozen times every two submissions.

People probably forget/ignore it half a dozen times every two submissions as well.

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