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Comment by yesenadam | Hacker News Reader

I enjoyed this, I thought it mostly made good points, and it linked to other articles I will look at. Yet..

I started reading a blogger who teaches how to make a successful blog, sells courses about it, etc. I soon realized her blog is just about her making money from promising to help you make money from your blog. A frighteningly vacuous operation. It seems a modern cousin to the old ad in magazines promising to reveal the secret to wealth for $20. When you write to the given address you get a letter back saying "Do as I do." It's a pyramid operation.

Writing books about writing books seems similar. Selling the dream of high sales when you write on other topics, when their books are the same "making money from promising to help you make money" from your book seems a bit fishy, has a scammy element. It's more than a lil "Do as I do."

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It's a fine line but ....

I've just bought an e-book online which is essentially about promoting your content online (so broadly aligned with what you're talking about). The book was relatively expensive but I'd say definitely worth it - contents are really well thought out and comes with a lot of supporting material. It also seems to have been pretty successful for the author.

But the irony is that if this wasn't something that had been promoted successfully online then I'm not sure that the author would have had the credibility to be able to sell a product of this type. Why should I believe you if you're not doing it yourself?

I respect your opinion, and if you're the type of person who considers that a blanket conflict of interest than our book isn't for you.

I don't consider that good or bad, it just is. Similar to how some people prefer fish over meat and vice versa.

However, I will push back against the broad stroke generalization that you either teach people for free or charge money and be considered a scam.

Our advice is solid and battle-tested. There's Rob who wrote the Mom Test and Devin who wrote The Workshop Survival guide with Rob. And then there's our community with over a 100 up and coming authors who we're helping increase the probability of success through our process. The early results are already positive and it'll only improve as we keep trying to nail our process even more.

Is YC a scam because it isn't free?

If an author is like Tai Lopez you don't get word of mouth and burn through your lead pool. That means you're constantly trying to attract fresh leads, which is why these scams eventually tend to break.

What we're doing is teaching a process that minimizes some of the common mistakes authors make. Yes, we're charging money for that.

But if you look at our process, or heck, just read this article, you should be able to see that there's value worth paying for.

If you use nothing else but this article with these 4 common pitfalls to avoid, you'll do better vs. not having read it. And this was free.

So, I don't think your argument holds any water.

There's definitely a scam element when the thing that they're selling is a "How to make money doing X". Less so if X is recursive like this, or the original article here.

If there's a magic money fountain and someone is selling info on how to get it, rather than exploiting it for all it's worth, selling the info is the magic money fountain they've found. And the money is supposed to come from you.

Isn't it the case with anyone doing anything for the most part?

When Marques Brownlee tells me what motivated him to buy an iPhone it's always a gymnastic I need to play in my head on if I should even try to relate to a dude who buys/gets handed a couple devices or cars every week.

The article does read like that but he seems to have basically applied lean principles to writing books. And he says he's written 2 books that both make him $10k per month so it seems he's walking the walk.

You've hit the nail on the head. It's the same for some other industries like courses teaching you how to trade stocks. The way they make money is the course, not the trading.

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