Six Figures in 6 days
tr.af
tr.af
I saw other people complaining online so I posted the updated resource file on my $5/mo shared hosting and put a link on a forum...it was picked up on some blogs but I didn’t realize it had become popular, then I woke up a couple of days later and I’d blown through 10s of gigs of bandwidth and had my hosting account frozen (conveniently the day I’d planned a long roadtrip to test a gps/photo sharing app I’d been working on).
Years later people were still asking if I could help them change their iTunes icons, or even getting mad at me that I hadn’t updated the file to work with newer versions!
https://osxdaily.com/2010/09/03/get-color-icons-back-in-the-...
Definitely - it is hard for many to grasp how productive a single engineer can be in putting together a project that looks quite polished and professional.
But also, some people are just mean.
Though, as MiroF points out, some people are just jerks.
Almost everyone is super hyped that someone finally likes their work enough that they actually want it, let alone actually want to pay for it. So they undervalue their work and sell it for peanuts. I sometimes see work priced so low that it barely covers the supplies. They might sell a few but don't want to raise their price as they get better. Get a few people doing this and it becomes hard for legitimate creatives to sell their work at higher realistic prices.
Then there's overseas creatives. Some can do phenomenal work but you just can't compete with their prices even if they're pricing realiatically for where they live.
I used to have a pretty successful business buying products at the monthly USPS lost mail auctions and reselling them online.
But a bunch of bloggers picked up on the opportunity and started hawking it as a get rich quick scheme. So people started showing up and way overpaying for things because there was so much competition. People were paying more for things like Macbooks than you could buy them new at Best Buy.
The first few times I saw it happen, I thought, well, this won't last, these fools will lose their shirts on all this and never come back. And I was right, people rarely came back a second time. But for months and months, new fools would show up and repeat the same exercise and never come back. After more than a year of that, we couldn't afford to keep going regularly. But for years kept checking back periodically and I saw no sign of prices going back to anything reasonable.
Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
Then the TV shows came out and that put an end to that for them. Bids were too high that it wasn't feasible anymore.
Maybe the problem is that we make things look so easy that no one realizes how difficult and/or time-consuming producing code is.
What's strange is that, since I switched to Android a couple years back, I no longer had the urge to change the icons or customizing the UI. There is something about the design that makes it feel "okay". You don't feel like you're fighting the phone or being left wanted for more.
I just picked up an iphone from family to check it out, and instantly feel the need to customize it. For all the UX experts, is there a theory/phenomenal for this that I can read more?
1. want every icon to be as tantalizing as those icons already are (and so desire to customize the "lesser" icons to achieve that); and
2. feel like something very precious has been lost whenever an icon is made less tantalizing.
I would hazard a guess that the "greyscale makes people less addicted to their phones" research is more true for iOS users than Android users. iOS just has a higher average level of visual addicting-ness in its design. (Which, to be clear, has nothing to do with differing levels of "polish" or anything like that; addicting-ness is its own thing. Some [good] design-aesthetics have it; other [also good] design-aesthetics don't.)
There's a threshold after which something is so good it's worth criticizing?
I just can't move on from the mini player, 18 years of play counts/last played, AppleScript, offline USB sync with an iPhone 4S, and of course your coloured icons. I even had to make my own RSRC edits with Themepark to show the icons correctly on Retina, based on your work. I'm not mad at you; I'm grateful for keeping the best music player (in my opinion) looking beautiful.
Any suggestions for other media management software is welcome, but I don't know if I'll ever be able to leave my beloved iTunes 10.6.3. More likely I'll run a 10.5 emulator just to keep it going through future decades.
Don't get me wrong, I do love my iPhone, but this isn't something most people (myself included) will have the patience to do.
I'm surprised you find that surprising because customisation isn't exactly a new phenomenon. I mean is it really any different to techies slapping stickers on their laptop? Or car enthusiasts modding their vehical? Or home owners decorating their house? Maybe you consider this different because it is software rather than physical stuff; but people do also change their ring tones and wallpaper images too, people customise their avatars on MMO games and profile pictures on social networks. Heck, I even have an alternative coloured border on HN. So while this particular workaround will undoubtedly be more work than most people are willing to take I do still get why some people might want to customise their home screen.
If adding a sticker to your laptop increased the boot time a fraction of a second some people would still do it, but many would it find it maddening!
"A delay of less than 100 milliseconds feels instant to a user, but a delay between 100 and 300 milliseconds is perceptible. A delay between 300 and 1,000 milliseconds makes the user feel like a machine is working, but if the delay is above 1,000 milliseconds, your user will likely start to mentally context-switch."
http://designingforperformance.com/performance-is-ux/#design...
You'd be surprised at the lengths of inconvenience some people will endure for the sake of aesthetics.
Never underestimate a persons vanity.
It's like the cost of eating lunch out three times in a big city.
Given the amount of work put into drawing icons, I'd say it's fair. I'm absolutely thrilled someone found a way to charge for something that is a personal project and not backed by some big corporate marketing buck.
Don't take this the wrong way. I'm happy for the designer to have been so successful. I'm merely pointing out that the price is relatively steep in comparison with other icon kits of the same craft. But good for him that he was so bold to go with the price and get rewarded for it!
An entire generation of developers is growing up being told that users like being told how to use their devices, and that options scare them.
If you're targeting a segment that likes options it's a different story.
Sure, if you approach the average person about an obscure topic like their privacy on the internet, they probably don't have strong opinions about it because that is outside of their wheelhouse, and they probably haven't given it much thought. If you couch privacy in terms that they are familiar with, such as drawing parallels to Supreme Court cases regarding surveillance and privacy, suddenly they care about whether or not they're being stalked online by corporations and governments.
For example, right to repair is something that most people don't think about. However, if you press the average person about whether they think they have the right to repair their own vehicle, suddenly everyone has strong opinions about it. People assume they have the right to use their hardware as they see fit, and aren't afraid of such options.
To be clear, I don't like the Apple approach. I think the options should still exist--but they need to be far removed from the UI without significant, non-discoverable steps.
Maybe the subset of people who spend time on software customization is small because software customization tends to be low priority and well hidden?
Stickers take a trivial amount of effort and don't impair performance. Car mods take time and money, but often make things functionally better. The icon app takes time and money to setup and the only functional change is for the worse. I think the icons are just enough different/worse than most other customizations that it's reasonable to be surprised at their popularity.
Another classic example: https://skins.webamp.org/
https://winworldpc.com/product/icon-do-it/1x
I remember it was not inexpensive ($19).
I know what the logos correspond to, Apple.
Can you find 3626 iPhone owners willing to spend $28 on an icon pack? Sure you can. In fact I bet you can find 3626 Android owners willing to part with $28 too.
The key to this success story is this:
> Then, MKBHD happened.
MKBHD could have picked up something much less refined and it would have been popular, a different designer dabbling with no prior mobile icon interest could have come up with something appealing to others as well.
Being there and getting an influencer is what made this story, and can be repeated by anyone. OP is conflating the rest of it with his own trials and tribulations.
I think MKBHD also has to worry about his reputation, if he promoted something less refined his viewers might get pissed off.
The key to a success of this type is luck. Sure, you can optimize for being on the path of success, but majority will still be missed.
What an odd mentality.
No, the key to success is skill, with effort (grit?) thrown in there as well. Luck can sometimes play a significant factor, all else being equal. But the idea that everyone is equally "good" at things, or put in the same effort, and that it's mere chance that success happens to someone is...pessimistic to say the least.
But your point is entirely correct.
But luck is a huge component in getting wealthy. Plenty of people with equal skills, equal expertise, and equal hard work never succeed because they don't get the magical conjunction of right time at the right place.
That being said, it doesn't mean that one shouldn't hone their skills and try to be successful. It's just that it's not likely that you will have such meteoric success no matter the skill or effort you put in.
Luck doesn't just play a significant factor, luck almost always plays the biggest factor. But being skillful and putting in effort is the only thing you can change and definitely does help too.
It is rare to find someone very lazy or completely talentless among the most successful, so it must be hard work and talent, right? No, because it's easy to find very hard-working and talented people who are not successful. In fact, according to research[0], the most successful are usually not the most talented, but those of mediocre talent and a lot of luck.
He succeeded because his time to market was shorter than anyone else's.
The key to finding those 3626 people willing to shell out $28 was the exposure, with MKBHD being the biggest contributor.
Whatever was the key to getting that exposure in the first place is irrelevant to my point.
And went on to say:
> The market will decide a huge part of what comes after sharing something, so continually increase your odds by building, publishing, then repeating.
All the people here decrying everything he had done up until this point and proclaiming any degree of success is attributable only to luck is amazing. It's not the same as stumbling on a winning lotto ticking on the street (unless you have spent years scouring the streets looking for winning lotto tickets).
It's one of those things that makes me want to scream at Hacker News regularly.
Even if you think it's about "luck", how are you modelling it?
MKBHD did a fair coin toss between all of his options?
Nah, doesn't seem realistic.
Some options are probably more likely than others.
Based on what? Oh well, the quality of the product, the buzz around it (which itself is probably based on the quality of the product, how it matches the zeitgeist's aesthetic (which means good understanding of trends, marketing, psychology, etc.)), the original reputation of the person creating the product, and so on.
Hacker News's take: it's just luck, it could have been any other icon set with the same probability.
Yeah, no.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-05-01-loot-boxes...
It's not a technical achievement(that took Apple 10 years to do), it's a design choice(that Apple made then and now). It can have multiple motivations that we can speculate on, would have been great to have someone from Apple to give us some perspective.
>iPhone owners are willing to spend $28 for a icon pack, a very nice one, but still an icon pack.
There are multiple games that make billions of $ by simply selling cosmetic items, this is very similar. It also has a a version in the physical world, people pay a premium for stuff with a special visual design and no functional advantage all the time. Handbags, clothes, cars, jewellery, movie merchandise(like Darth Vader helmets etc), houses, paint, books, computers - you name it, people actually pay for design.
That's the most poetic way of saying "it's not a bug, it's a feature"
That's subjective. Many people prefer iPhones. They may find the features of iPhone more desirable or some other aspect about it like the Apple ecosystem.
(For context, I'm writing this not as an Android fanboy, but as an 11-year iPhone user, though I've often had a secondary current gen Android for testing, etc, and have constantly evaluated switching and never found a compelling reason for doing so, despite some of those attractive line-items)
Let's talk about cameras specifically. Samsung has this "burst mode" feature which lets you take 100 or 200 shots in rapid succession. This was linked to a long press of the "take picture" button, so when I would use my wife's phone if I paused for a moment with my finger on the button it would fill up the memory card with hundreds of identical JPEG images that she would then have to sort through and delete individually.
Contrast this with Apple's "Live Photo" feature which takes a short 2 or 3 second video around the moment when you take your picture. You can still sort through each individual frame and pick the best one but it doesn't completely fill up the device's memory with hundreds of identical JPEGs. And it gives you this cool video of the moment for every picture.
Being first to market doesn't matter if the feature isn't actually usable.
I don’t deny I can do more with the android phone though.
Meanwhile android has 3 nice buttons at the bottom that are there always.
What's not to like?
My last Android (Nexus 5) stopped receiving updates just 2 years after I bought it, because of some ridiculous graphics driver bs.
My Galaxy S7 is 4 years old. It's still very fast (never had to reset it) and still gets security updates (last one in August) although no more OS updates.
If I played AAA games on my smartphone, I might want an upgrade, but I do my gaming on PCs. Otherwise newer models don't really have that much appeal, except for the better camera (although I am not impressed by the fake bokeh effect). However, even for the camera, it always feels like a compromise whenever I use it, in that I put up with lower quality in exchange for convenience.
Then I got my first iPhone almost three years ago, and I still have the same phone and I don’t feel a need to get a new one. After several major updates my phone still works perfectly (even better I would say). Battery is in 85% and still lasts a whole day. Do I miss some features? of course, but the same would be true if I switched to Android, I would miss Shortcuts, Airdrop and other small features, plus at present time I can’t think of a big feature I’m missing from Android.
If you want your phone to last forever, you need to take control of it yourself. Get a Lineage OS compatible phone and ditch the play store. Not only will it be faster, the battery life will quadruple.
Also there was a plethora of Android features to support local advertising that I considered very invasive of my privacy. One example was an ad campaign for a children's clothing store called "Charming Charlie" which would pop up on my phone whenever I walked past their store at the mall regardless of whether Bluetooth and Wifi were on or off.
Finally, I can actually talk to a live human when I'm having problems with my Apple phone.
In my opinion, most features that have come out in recent years for smart phones don't really matter to users. They are marketing checklists.
Is android still using really low resolution icons?
It's painful to use and look at, all of which was described in the video, and people paid $28 for it. Pretty insane.
Act Immediately
Get an influencer
All the rest of OP's journey doesn't really matter.
My newest venture this summer did 7 figures after I got motivated by watching Hamilton, this was also a week long period of sales, which came after a 2 week long period of idea and building hype. It definitely came down to doing something very trendy and having people know about it, and there is nothing organic in that process. I don't think the same venture could do that now already. It would have to be new trendy things.
I've hired people on fiverr and tapped development teams I've worked with before to deliver quickly.
"Had I not have already vetted that development team I wouldn't have been ready to capitalize so quickly. Had I not practiced making static websites. Had I not practiced tying SSL to domain names so that people take me seriously."
I'm not diminishing OP's skill, I am diminishing the message and pointing out which parts are repeatable. This is prosperity preaching (being rewarded for prior sacrifices because of those prior sacrifices) and wasting everyone's energy if they actually believe that and approach life this way. Unsubscribe to that logic and you still have execute quickly + make sure people know about it.
But don't those prior experiences grow your skill to a degree?
You are grasping at straws to support traf's view of the events.
Yes, doing something in the past helps you do something in the future. No, thats not the reason traf's work went viral.
Is there some "luck" in that? Of course. But that bit of luck does not happen in a vacuum.
Yes the OP lovingly crafted his skills over a period of several years, but let's face it, his skills are commodities and you too could have achieved his success if you took a shortcut to hire someone to produce an icon pack quickly and professionally and then partnered with an influencer to sell the productized version of it.
Probably 94% of the success here is due to the influencer's exposure. The moral of the story is become good friends with influencers in relevant industries and be ready to act quickly on new business ideas, and keep access to cash to invest in whatever is needed.
100% this, I sell audio plugins and every time I release a new product there is a huge uptick in sales, and not just from existing users.
But yep, if I didn't specify then it should be pretty clear I wasn't going to specify.
To their credit, sometimes it is still worth asking, like instead of me being seen as shilling in my first post, I could just be responding to someone and mention the product then.
Spot on analysis that I wasn't going to specify though.
just asking as someone curious about this type of thing
why go out of your way to spread negativity?
I see you are committed to being angry online so I won't stop you from following your passion, but I hope you see eventually that it is strange behavior.
It's funny because anyone who actually believed that would never have created those icons 7 years ago. They would have never published them and they would have never stuck their neck out to promote them.
In a way it seems like the best way to ensure that you never "get lucky" is to assume that it's all just luck in the first place.
Luck is absolutely, 100% a factor here, but you won't get lucky without putting the effort in first.
-- Roald Amundsen
Someone much wiser than me once said, “dedicated people can force luck to happen”, implying that it’s only a small part of the equation.
First mover advantage ties into this here, as does discussions on the free market, and other interesting economic theory.
> A successful business relies on having repeatable processes that generate profit
It can take luck to get the business off the ground though.
One supporting data point: back when the game 2048 went viral I happened to be on a break with nothing to do, so I coded up an AI for it in one night [1]. The next day it blew up on Twitter and elsewhere. There have since been many other, better AIs, but since mine was first and came out when the game was on everyone's mind, it was the only one that got so much attention.
I believe you summed up what he did to achieve his "luck."
He said he made $6k before the influencer came along. Seems pretty good for a start.
And because he has made strategic, low-risk efforts in the past, this opportunity actually became possible. The influencer never would have gotten a whiff of this otherwise.
To say "it is really just luck" is honestly just ridiculous. Our probability was 0%. His probability was significantly higher, due to the previous work and decisions he has made. That's not "just luck".
There is no such thing as a deterministic, risk-free business strategy. You can only make bets, try to maximise your odds, and repeat. That's what the author is doing. I knew nothing about him before today, but I can see his business ethos. He's doing a good job, and the market is validating that with their wallets.
Published in 2018, absolutely exploded in 2020 due to a single Twitch streamer. I'm pretty sure the devs of Among Us became millionaires virtually overnight. Influencers with large followings wield awesome power.
Wikipedias source for that, https://www.businessinsider.com/flappy-bird-origin-2014-2?r=...
JS to display text. Brilliant.
Though if you really go all in on no-JS (which I understand what OP isn't recommending), there are certain issues. Like if you have a "subscribe" button at the bottom of your page, using a non-AJAX POST request to submit the email will not get you to the bottom of the page by itself (which would come for free if using JS). So using JS can provide a better UX in these aspects.
EDIT: The blog in question: https://pythonautomationtutorial.com
> much more lightweight and loads and renders much faster
Were you hosting it on the same host you're currently using? The downside with server-side templating is that you can't use a cheap global CDN like GitHub Pages or Netlify, which will be faster than your own servers in pretty much every case. The few extra KBs of JS (compressed) is likely offset by the latency of physical distance.
But you won’t know it’s the “right place” until after the fact.
Genuinely, no. For those who have it, vision is such an integral part of...well, existence that intuitively grasping that people have completely different ways of perceiving it beyond the obvious is extremely difficult. This goes a bit beyond the "try to explain 'blue' to someone" troupe. I have difficulties explaining my own brand of vision difficulties (or hearing difficulties, for that matter) without basically explaining the optics of vision and going from there.
For instance, for folks with without some kind of color difficulties, being able to look at two colors (what most would perceive as) completely different colors and being able to say "those colors would look the same to color blind folks" is almost impossible without training or extra tools.
So no, it doesn't occur to someone without training to constant question their own perception, unfortunately. The most we can do is give web masters a shout when we notice and promote accessibility tools wherever we can
So I completely appreciate accessibility options. I've tweaked my iPhone settings to improve contrast wherever possible. What annoys me a lot is how many app designers think some form of gray-on-gray text is perfectly readable. No, no it's not. Black on white, white on black. Something with more contrast, please.
Having a thin stroke (the space font face) and small character size (18 px, which is a 12 pt equivalent) for your typeface typically means that you need to increase the contrast to compensate.
In other words, 7.5:1 is insufficient given the design choices. Even if it's "legal".
I tried again with uBlock enabled and refreshed the page which worked. So the bottom line is, refresh the page, and you should see the content.
- who pays $28 for icons you have to install yourself one by one?!
- most of these icons are protected by copyright/trademark laws, how is still legal?
For some reason, that was the line that stuck with me the most.
Now, the only real skill I have is in software development, but fortunately there are a lot of things to try in software development, so I can give that suggestion a try run.
Love the software stack. Is this the norm these days? Am I out of touch with web tech?
The most complete thing is a uhh.. parody text editor.. game. I've seen other indie projects recently that gave me all sorts of imposter syndrome and made me second guess the value in something so critical as a text editor made for laughs. I'm encouraged by a 28$ icon pack to wrap it up and put it out there, even if it's for 2$ and doesn't sell at all. Ride or die, right?
There is also a very good Veritasium Video about that:
https://www.slashgear.com/prada-phone-3-0-by-lg-review-08215...
Edit: That being said I'm on Twitter @k0ode if you want to follow along.
Well yes, but you usually either need (a) tens of thousands of pre-existing Twitter followers or (b) a huge amount of luck that some celebrity that you @ed retweets you.
Working as a freelancer / small business hustler etc., bursts of success like this are extraordinarily rare, and typically fall between long seasons of not making much at all.
The upside of the freelancing / side hustling life isn’t the money, it’s the freedom.
Start with practicing finding product market fit and getting better at timing things. If you can do those, the rest (exposure, wealth, connections, etc) fall into place. It’s that simple, but it definitely isn’t easy at all
(x={icon,...})
EDIT: This seems to be outside AppStore.
Not sure how I feel about the article. Kind of reads like those "I got stupid lucky this one time, so can you!" fluff pieces at best, and at worst is just further advertisement/marketing for the icon pack.
If you publish often, act immediately, be transparent, etc, etc. Luck is at the intersection of preparation and opportunity.
this reads 100% like most blog posts looking to promote their product. a bit of inspiration wrapped around 'try my product!', with a dash of bragging about their success.
Where exactly did you find a “try my product” in the post?
I thought jailbreaking was basically over by 2013
Why are you blown away? People pay 50 USD for a personalised phone cover. Is this different because it's software?
When the author said "charge more" that's correct when the initial price was $1. I wonder the conversion rate on this if it had been $7. Maybe at a quarter of the price there would have been five times or even ten times the sales. We don't know because no data was gathered. Clearly the conversions would have been higher at a notably lower price, but it's unclear where the crossover point for total profits would be. Alternately, some portion of those 4188 buyers would have purchased at $60 or even $80.
Something to remember here is while you can as a consultant make more money in 40 hours if you charge more per hour for your time rather than working extra hours or turning away excess work, the point the author made about leveraging digital distribution should prove it's not the same scenario. Once your development cost is sunk, distribution (outside of an app store) is nearly free. Selling fewer units at a higher price isn't necessarily any better than selling more units at a lower price. The total's the thing.
Consider that, for many, spending $28 on a meal is something they do without a second thought.
If they are willing to spend that on food, which is a need they have much more often, why wouldn't they spend it on frivolous one time purchases?
That's consumer culture in a nutshell.
So why not? If nothing else, it is historically significant.
It's not just that you're not allowed to make your home screen look the way you want it, it's that even if you decide for a certain ordering, moving the icons in the right order is tougher than a sliding puzzle.
It's all very automated now, the re-ordering of icon placements based on widget insertion, the folding and unfolding of "screens" based on the flow of icons to the next screen when widgets push an overflow.
You are describing how the broken way iOS handles icons works. Great. That was not my point. It's broken in the first place.
Do you know how many operating system developed in the past forty years don't allow users to position icons where they want?
There's just one: iOS.
I just don't understand the motivation behind this decision. It makes no sense.