That simple ? 10K/month ?
Id love to hear how I can get one of those 10K/month businesses (outside of consulting/programmer-for-hire).
People keep making it sound like it super easy to just get such a business going. How about some examples ?
Id love to hear how I can get one of those 10K/month businesses (outside of consulting/programmer-for-hire).
People keep making it sound like it super easy to just get such a business going. How about some examples ?
Every person here at HN is talented enough to create a $10k/mo business. It may not be as easy as what the article suggests, but you can do it.
Also, I should note that I did it all on the side & the weekends. I have a full-time job as well.
They key (as someone who has done it) is to look for niche B2B opportunities. Find a need and fulfill it better or cheaper than existing players. Exploit newer/cheaper tech or SEO knowledge that the existing guys don't/can't get.
Think of it this way: you need 500 businesses to pay you $20/month to get to $10k/month. If you can get 1 signup a day, you're there in < 2 years.
One example: we run nextproof.com that lets wedding and portrait photographers sell prints online (think of it as a shopify for photographers). There are way bigger players in the market (pictage, smugmug, printroom, etc.) but we have ~2,000 users. Half of them are on a paid plan at between $9 and $99/month. The other half are on a free plan BUT we still make money on them through transaction fees. So, after 3 years, it's well over $10k/month.
Another option is premium content or tools targeted at these niche businesses. This could be in the form of WordPress themes/plugins, eBooks, DVDs, etc. We did an SEO DVD for photographers and sold 1,000 @ $79 each.
Most of the "ideas" I come up with are along these lines. I have tons of them.
It's the same with building a successful $10k/month business. Find a niche, solve a problem people are prepared to pay money to have solved, market your solution and deliver on your promises. But all that won't happen in a week will it? Because of this, most people will give up before they get to the top of the mountain (or before they have six-pack abs).
The above advice is meant to help those who are inclined to focus and work hard, but it's worth noting that it takes nothing away from the gourmands and loafers of the world: they (and I) will not have six-pack abs. Period. Those unwilling or unable to change their lifestyle would be best served by finding something else to do with their time.
The formula is simple but the implementation will always be up to the individual.
If you follow Amy's blogging on Unicorn Free you'll have a seen a recent post where she talks about how long it has taken her and Thomas to get Freckle to where they are now - about 2 years (http://unicornfree.com/2011/drawing-back-the-curtain/). Both Amy and Thomas hustle their tails off and yet it has taken them two years and a lot of hard work to get too where they are (not to mention the years before that leading up to it). The point is that there is very rarely an easy route, but there is absolutely a possible route if you're passionate and you hustle. You'll be lucky if you only fail a couple of times before you land on something that gains traction, but you can do it.
I was silly to choose the twitter market because (a) everyone wants the tools for free (b) It's the most competitive single tools software market EVERYONE and his uncle made a twitter client (just like me) (c) It is impossible to SEO because EVERYONE and his uncle made a twitter site.
Even so, with all of that going against me, I've still been able to reach 1.5k month and it's now starting to really pick up due to valuable lessons I've learned from other bootstrappers along the way. Like Amy Hoy (above with the $10k/month) who's obviously a little bit cleverer than me!
I should also mention that for 6 of those months I did "absolutely nothing" with Pluggio. Because I didn't believe in it. Because it wasn't doing well enough according to my Entreporn expectations.
Yes, I let it slide for 6 entire months. If I had spent that time working on it, it would be at least 5k now.
I'm sorry to roll out the cliché, but gaining time is more likely to make you happy and free. And a few slow grown bootstrapped 'dipshit companies' are much more realistic and likely to provide you with that time along with a boatload more autonomy. Instead it seems everyone is aiming to be the head of the next big thing and indebted to VC's in to the bargain. What do I know though, perhaps it's not all that bad...?
I do think that with a couple of $10,000 a month semi-automated apps in your pocket you've got a lot of choices. Especially if you are young. It can give you the free time to really work out what you want to get out of your life. With time to think you might find it's not what your doing and/or aspiring to right now.
For me if my startup ever starts to make 10K+ a month it'll simply mean trying to spend a little less time sat behind my keyboard. Spending more time outdoors travelling and experiencing the world instead of too much time indoors reading about it sounds like a good plan to me.
The original article seems to be arguing $10K is something like a "sweet spot" where lots of micro-entrepreneurs could comfortably stay. I would contend that if an entrepreneur is able to get to $10K/month with ease or with difficulty, they've probably got the resource to go to $20K, and then $40 look promising etc. That requires extreme hustle of course but so does staying at $10K.
IE, there's no "sweet spot" or stable spot. It is more like either failure or "lift-off".
I think he went overboard by imploring EVERYBODY to stop trying to build those types, and build a lifestyle business - but the criticism is valid.
We, the industry, is caught up with the $10M Series A round, and the major IPOs and acquisitions. When it's just as much of a major victory for a small company - one or two employees doing $10K - $100K/mo.
That's pretty major.
I think it is doable. Not for ALL types of technology - e.g. not Twitter, Google, or FB.
But certainly for many webapps.
Think of it like being the new 'professional', where professional is an accountant/lawyer/doctor. You no longer have to go to med. school for 7 years, but you have to invest time in learning about everything it takes to build and launch a successful webapp (which I would argue is just as grueling as med/law school).
The major difference is that it scales beautifully. If you can put the systems in place to earn $10K, you can relatively easily go to $100K/mo.
Most of $10K/months business that continue along that I know of are consulting. And a lot of consulting is essentially continuing your connections with a larger enterprise but from the outside.
I think there's a simple logic to this.
If anyone has duplicatable way of getting to a $10k/month from their labor, they also have a key to building a business; they could just recruit people, teach the recruits their methods and split the profits in any number of ways. Thus, they would almost certainly have a business that could expand to $10 million a year fairly quickly (if you have the kind of business where you could add servers or machine instead, so much the better).
Now reason that there are VCs is that the number of businesses which can bootstrap to $10 million/year are inherently a subset of businesses that can be financed to $10 million/year.
Now, we know that if A > B and B == C, then A > C. Thus the number of VC-financable opportunities to build a $10 million/year company are inherently larger than the number of easily duplicable schemes that could allow a single individual to make $10K/month.
That leaves the "totally unique" ways, that depend on each person's special qualities and can't duplicated. If you're working on the web, how many of those are there?
I'm totally happy with where I am in life today, and there are a bunch of happy places I could see myself in two years, lifestyle business or no. A word of caution: not everyone selling Obama cereal intends to be doing so forever.
It worked alright for me and my business partners and we spent the first year working part time on it.
Do these things really exist? How do you find them?
In other words, the consulting jobs exist but they are for "niche markets" - companies hire back their most senior workers on a consulting basis. Also those explicitly trained by SAP and the like at one time could get the bucks. I don't know if that's still true.
What I'm really saying: if you stop at $10K/month, you haven't actually built that function.