If you are really serious about $10 (and not some other larger number), here are some tips:
* Pick a topic you know really well (programming, cooking, sea diving, whatever)
* Make an infographic (get started on the topic of your choice, some specific and useful practical tip, etc) - picking a template from free tier Canva will go a long way in producing a good looking graphical post (you can even do animations)
* Put this up under pay-what-you-want model on sites like Gumroad (so, minimum price free but users can pay if they wish) - see https://mathspp.gumroad.com/l/cheatsheet_list_comps_101 for an example
* Post a sample on sites like Twitter, Reddit, etc (just the nice looking graphic, add a link to Gumroad later in comments if the posts start getting attention)
* Make a video to show demos (if applicable)
* Be consistent! Give it your best shot for topics you are really confident about. Listen to feedback. Learn and Build in Public for better reach (see https://swyx.io/learn-in-public and https://chriscoyier.net/2012/09/23/working-in-public/)
If you want an example for someone making a living by doing things like this, check out Julia's https://wizardzines.com/
It doesn't take that many $100 purchases to be a respectable income source
>Hello! It looks like you're in India, where this zine might be expensive. If you need it, please use code <redacted> at checkout to get 70% off the regular price.
(Content creator here.)
But I don't work directly on any of the topics in the zines, I just like to understand things, or at least understand them enough that I can hang information on what I already know.
Regarding RoI, that depends on your needs. I left my job in 2014 due to various reasons. I tried and failed at many things for about 5 years. Then I tried selling ebooks and the second book clicked for me. Now I earn more than I need (with the caveat that I live alone in outskirts of a second tier city with an average monthly expense of just about $150).
There would be no money left over for other categories of spending like shelter or transportation.
See https://learnbyexample.github.io/curated_resources/linux_cli... for more learning resources on Bash scripting.
Buy Me a Coffee on the other hand has actually gotten me some money (~€50). People find some niche stuff I wrote, it helps them, they click on a prominent link at the bottom, leave a tip, and that's it. I intentionally mimic tips one might give offline: no attachments, no benefits, I don't spam your email months later.
But if I were to try this full time (I don't have the consistency for it), my difficulty would be much higher simply by not being in a country supported by Stripe. There's all sorts of cool new stuff in the area I've discovered over the years, but basically all of them only support payouts over Stripe while I'm pretty much limited to PayPal, so tough shit!
With nearly zero Twitter followers, posting to Twitter is a black hole. Even posting to reddit is posting to a black hole unless you get really lucky (lots of upvotes and engagement).
It's a chicken and egg problem. How do you get the word out when nobody listens to what you have to say?
https://datastation.multiprocess.io/blog/2022-06-11-year-in-...
How close is your approach to what they described, and did you actually make <$10?
That would make it a lot less enticing :)
If you don't have a following you don't have social clout. If you don't have social clout you are in that bottom tier where people don't see the need to engage with. I don't expect that high clout people like Jim Cramer or Elon Musk engage, but in general especially Twitter is a black hole. I had good experience with getting followers on LinkedIn and Medium, but that was mainly based on a lot of work that I had put in to engage with people and write content. At some point in time, I was in the top 5% business writers in the world. Yet, from a monetization perspective that was a flat 0. So given that experience, I might be the worst social marketer since I am not being able to earn 10 bucks on common social media.
Is your product worth paying for? Is it even worth someone’s time to look at it or download it for free?
Is it the type of thing that you yourself have paid for in the past? (E.g. if you’re making infographics about cooking, ask yourself, when’s the last time you gave someone money because of their cooking infographics). Would you pay for your own product?
If you can’t imagine a scenario where you would pay for your own product, then why would anyone else?
I think the main culprit is that Twitter specifically is an extremely saturated space and that content discovery is really hard for pretty much everyone who is not in the top 1%.
For example: https://twitter.com/willmcgugan/status/1533056162417070081
>Just read How DNS Works by @b0rk. I love how easily digestible this is. A 10 minute read and i feel I have a solid understanding of DNS! And I’ve been a web developer for more than a decade.
Apparently he tried doing a big rewrite a couple years ago to fix the UX and whatnot, but his income dropped to 1/3rd of what it was after the change. Probably people spent less time on the site. So he put it back how it was.
Heck, I had a couple blog posts that made HN front page and still I didn't think that people would actually pay me money for that content.
Then a couple months ago I realized I could take one of those posts about interview advice to software engineers and turn it into a more in depth video lecture. I was amazed to see people actually buying it (sold $7k worth of that course!)
In case it provides inspiration, I wrote about what it was like making the course here: https://twitter.com/ZainRzv/status/1525211786710077449
Folks will launch courses that net $1m a year, sure. But what you miss is the years beforehand building goodwill with their community by helping out, writing articles, attending conferences and giving talks, etc.
I do this myself with React at https://maxrozen.com, and most folks that end up buying my book found my site dozens of times first.
I built four SaaS products while working full time as a software dev, I have started companies, tried some side hussles, I am a smart chap but I was never blessed with opportunity and luck at the time I was putting in the effort. Then I burned out, and now I am just happy to be enjoying software for a living again. It would take a really captivating idea for me to start another software side gig, and only if a concrete opportunity arises. For now I am happy working on being prepared to sieze that opportunity by building cash, skills and a network, rather than actively working on one that doesn't yet exist.
I don't know much about business, but I think you need business chops to build a business.
It's definitely possible to grow it to a replacement salary (I know several full time YouTubers now) but it does require a certain amount of luck and a huge amount of effort. Not really different from any other endeavour...
I used to be able to (late 1990s/early 2000s) make a living on a mixture of niche websites, affiliate marketing, CPC arbitrage, and similar; but it just started drying up as more people gravitated to social media platforms, and unless you can skill up on social media marketing while getting lucky with their algorithms, you probably won't get far.
I decided to just move on because I never really liked the platforms and wanted stable employment for a while, but even now that I would be willing to risk the unpredictable income, it's nigh on impossible to get anything rolling. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Find a problem people have, ideally something they are paying to solve now (this includes hiring people to solve it).
- Write down/screenshot the places online/offline where you have seen people indicating that they have this problem and are paying to solve it.
- Make a solution that is different in some way that is important to some subset of people (e.g. "X, but it works with Linode" or "Y, but it's in Portuguese"). Sometimes, the people posting/asking about solutions to the problem will ask specific questions that tell you how to differentiate.
- Post your solution in the same places you saw people talking about the problem
This has worked for me in the past, hopefully this approach will help you. The key point here is obviously that you know where and who to sell to before you make anything, so you are more likely to be able to sell your offering once you make it.
The guiding principle is simple, but in practice it can be hard and complex.
Make something cheaper, its also a good starting point for a lot of "inventive" startups (Spacex is spacex, cause they are cheaper than others). However you don't have to be inventive, just do similar/same thing but cheaper.
Ok, I want to make compilers. People want them but don't want to pay for them ...
So if you release something competitive to TBB+MKL for AMD, then you're in business ;) But be warned, it's like millions LOC and 500MB of pure compiled binaries to get to that level of functionality.
a few hundreds of hours of programming without any validation whatsoever
My advice is to remember the situations where _you_ have spent $10 online and just analyze what was in place to help you spend that money.