I made $1M in 67 days during Covid | Hacker News Reader

I made $1M in 67 days during Covid

marshallhaas.com

32 pointsthamer31 comments

A couple elements that I think misleadingly present this as an “easy” success:

1. He already has the email list (though the author called this out). The email list was likely very affluent — look at the other products offered in the same site.

2. He already had a polished presentation, with well tuned branding. Making the decisions about packaging, product page, ads, etc is much easier if you already know the target

3. He (likely) already had experience running ads on Instagram/Facebook/Google. This alone can represent a full career

4. He already had 3pl (third party logistics) set up to fulfill orders. Or he fulfilled them himself, manually.

5. There are likely other things that I’m missing

Obviously this is still quite fast progress, but the post undersells the amount of work that went into this. It’s easy to take for granted the pre-existing infrastructure he had built. “It takes years to be an overnight success”

Edit: My main goal is to say — don’t feel “bad” that he achieved so much so easily. It wasn’t really as fast or easy as it seems

Yes, this is: look at what I did with all my contacts, website, email list and available funds (he had to pay upfront)

The website for this product says that it’s made with 360 brass[1], which is typically about 3% lead. Holding a piece of 360 brass won’t hurt you, but I probably wouldn’t leave it in my pocket rubbing against my belongings for months on end (or using it to open beer bottles, as shown).

[1]: https://buypeel.com/products/brass-keychain-touch-tool

Ugh that’s bad - one shouldn’t need to be a materials scientist or health physicist to spend 10 minutes to ask what the composition of the product one’s selling is and if there are any concerns.

Cheap jewelry often has lead problems, sounds like this is basically the same and might be the subject of a lawsuit or recall if the lead content is that high. Sounds like a prop 65 lawsuit waiting to happen anyway.

I don't know whether or not lead in brass can actually be absorbed by the skin but it's interesting to note that key manufacturers were sued for a similar lead content in brass keys:

https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/major-manufacturers-a...

so one has to wonder if this keychain is even legal to sell in California?

Next post: how I lost $10M in 6 months defending against a class action lawsuit.

“ While most people were watching Netflix in their PJs, I was working more than I ever had before”

Honestly this is really offputting.

Honest question, why? That’s what most everyone I know ended up doing. Lots of gaming and/or content consumption.

I think poster is perceiving it as a dig — “I’m at work while the ops SLEEP”. I agree though, I think it’s just to dramatize the story, not meant as an insult.

It's either true and you don't need to write it or it's false and it's weird to write it.

Either way normal people don't react well when you remind them you're better than them for seemingly no reasons

But then again wantrepreneurs are statistically much more likely to be socio/psychopath which usually explain their complete lack of ability to read the room

It has real "While you were partying, I studied the Blade..." meme energy to it.

Because it’s arrogant and self aggrandising.

I was working full time with a brand new baby and a toddler and zero school or day care while this guy was playing with silly cnc toys and using a disease that isn’t really transmitted on surfaces to sell snake oil keychains, for comparison.

Agree with you.

It’s condescending and verging on martyrdom

Cool, maybe the comment wasn’t about you since you clearly had no free time.

It’s a comment about people literally doing something you didn’t do and you still got indignant. Chill the fuck out.

Aside from 3,500 face shields I also 3D printed a big bunch of basically those same "covid keys" and gave them away because that's how I roll.

It’s so unbelievable that somewhere.com went for $52M. It’s not that I don’t believe it, I just can’t fathom paying that for that.

https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1cufqvd/has...

“We find you amazing employees that cost 80% less than US equivalents” I guess there is a big market for that.

The domain was probably $10-15M of that.

How to make $1M Step 1 - be rich Step 2 - capitalize on mass death and hysteria by rebranding a shiny bottle opener as health and safety tool

> We emailed Peel’s customer list announcing the product and shared it on our socials.

> Peel was an existing brand with customers and an email list. We had a basis to launch to.

A new product for an existing brand with a ready-to-go mailing list. Good story from a design and production perspective but nothing exceptional for marketing.

Am I cheap if I am confused who would pay $40 for this?

Its shiny

Scared people.

You can sell them almost anything. A tactic heavily used in politics all around the world ;-)

And back then a lot of us were scared.

Scared but also misinformed, as Covid never spread by touch.

Well. Easier to say now than back in the days when being careful when touching anything was government guidelines almost everywhere.

That's true, although those government guidelines were not rooted in any evidence at the time. They were speculative.

Now for example, we know for a fact that monkeypox spreads through touch and physical contact, but still most people don't take action to safeguard against it.

While it's impressive to see someone achieve such rapid success, it raises questions about how much prior planning and context played into it. For instance, did the author already have an established network and email list, or was this truly a 'from scratch' success? It's important to acknowledge that behind every quick success story is a potentially lengthy history of preparation and market understanding. What do you think—are we seeing a genuine entrepreneurial triumph, or just the culmination of years of groundwork?

I bought a few of a similar product probably a few months later than the timeline covered here. Got mine from Etsy, and kind of assumed they were made in a home setup (obviously this is far from universally true with Etsy products). Living in an apartment complex, I got a lot more use out of them than family living in SFHs.

I'm certainly curious what sales looked like over a longer timeframe.

You capitalized on people's ignorance and misinformation. Covid doesn't spread by touch. It spreads by respiratory inhalation.

To be fair I don’t think this was known at first. He could have been fixing a perceived problem at the time. Post-facto we realize it was less important than many thought

While it wasn't known early on that it didn't spread by touch, it was known pretty early on that it spread through the air. Remember those people stuck on cruise ships at the beginning that all got COVID despite not leaving their cabins? It was entering each cabin through the air circulation system. They were sitting ducks.

To me, whether it's immoral or not depends on his attitude about it. People are misinformed, you have to go where the market is. If you're honest about it, that is, when asked, do you pretend your product solves a health problem or are you honest that it doesn't protect you from the perceived threat? If you're honest, "this won't protect you from covid", then you're just meeting a market demand. If you're lying, youre manufacturing a demand dishonestly. There are misinformed people in the world, and some stubbornly so, and if they're willing to give you their money even though you've made available information why they don't need to, I don't see a moral problem. Hopefully they learn not to touch the stove.

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