How I launched a profitable minimally viable product in 3 hours

Ditto. Please, if you're exposing this much about the process and not trying to keep it a secret or anything, give us the play by play.

Yeah, the nuts and bolts of selling the product is the easy part. There are loads of services out there to sell digital goods including the one that the submitter used and my own service (shameless plug: link in my profile anyone is interested).

PayPal is still the cheapest and easiest way to collect the money, even considering fraud. (PayPal almost always sides with the buyer and with digital goods you have little recourse.)

It's the marketing that makes all the difference. We have customers that have made $50-60k in less than a week due to awesome marketing. And we have customers that pull in well over $100k/yr due to good marketing and good affiliates. We also have many that will never sell anywhere near that much in the product's lifetime, also due to marketing.

I am more surprised by how much people are trying to reinvent the wheel every day. I think there are enough tools and APIs out there to build small useful products in less than a week.

This has always been my impression. But when I've actually looked for resources on how to get those nuts & bolts set up, for someone who knows nothing about them, it's been non-obvious.

You wouldn't by any chance know of some resources related to getting over the initial hump of getting paid for software/services, would you?

The problem, for me at least, was that I didn't know what was the simplest way. I spent a long time learning some design skills, learning html/css, etc. Then I realized (not long ago) that I could effectively buy a 20$ site template, and it would take a hundredth of the time and look 100 times better. Then, even more recently, I learned that you can set up a WordPress site, with a great design, and pretty much any goodie you need (contact forms, email lists, etc.).

Now, none of these things are particularly hard. But for me, coming from a non-Web background, each of these steps took some learning. And you never know when you should be learning more.

So in that sense, every article I read that says exactly how to set up an MVP, including all the nuts & bolts of the various plugins / etc, is incredibly valuable.

That's probably another lesson I should add to the post: Never use 1and1 as your host.

I'm thinking Apache with KeepAlive turned on: it kills more blogs than cancer!