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Comment by jsemrau | Hacker News Reader

I've been doing that for the last 12 months and tbh, it does not work unless you already had an audience before. Highly likely I am the worst social marketer on the planet. But in terms of RoI your advice doesn't work for 99% of the population.

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I have a couple of simple stuff on Gumroad, paying is optional, they get some downloads (like a couple of dozen) despite zero advertisement from my side, but not one person that downloaded them over the years entered anything but $0.

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!

Use Reddit. You don't need an existing audience for that. Make sure to follow the rules of the subreddit. Write a few tips/tutorial posts, help other learners, etc. Then you can try self promoting within the rules. And parallelly, you can build an audience on sites on Twitter. Read about marketing. Follow other creators. And so on. (Edit: You can self promote without existing audience with Show HN too, provided it fits the rules. Luck plays a huge role, but you won't get lucky if you don't try at all).

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).

How do you keep your expenses so low? That includes rent, utilities, and groceries?

GP indicated in another comment that they are in India. Anybody living on that amount of money in the US would have to be homeless and/or surviving off of government or charity assistance, I would think …

It would be difficult but not impossible to eat properly on $150/mo in the USA.

There would be no money left over for other categories of spending like shelter or transportation.

As mentioned in another comment, I'm from India. $150 translates to about Rs 12000. That's indeed enough to cover rent (the place is more than fit for 2 people), food, maid service, etc. This wouldn't work in a bigger city (which was one of the reasons I left one) and I could further cut down expenses if I moved to a smaller town. Internet is via mobile, cheap and connection issues are rare (in fact, it has been better than broadband I had earlier).

Thanks for your work. I've been using your repos to learn more about bash scripting.

You're welcome and thanks a lot for the feedback :)

See https://learnbyexample.github.io/curated_resources/linux_cli... for more learning resources on Bash scripting.

I agree. Marketing is hard.

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?

I went through this process last year taking a new project-specific Twitter account for zero to 300+ followers. It's hard but possible! Write good posts consistently, teach people something. Link all your channels together (blog posts should end with an embedded tweet announcing the blog post that people can like) and eventually your followers will grow.

https://datastation.multiprocess.io/blog/2022-06-11-year-in-...

I think asking some basic troubleshooting questions is helpful.

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?

Thank you for trying to troubleshoot this. I perform about 15 customer interviews per week and yes, people would pay for the product.

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%.

Interesting data point.

How close is your approach to what they described, and did you actually make <$10?

That would make it a lot less enticing :)

That's pretty much exactly the playbook that I am using.

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.

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