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Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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