How I Made $350 In Two Days With Three Pages and Some Payment Code (2011) | Hacker News Reader

How I Made $350 In Two Days With Three Pages and Some Payment Code (2011)

danshipper.com

86 pointstpatke41 comments

This is misstated:

"You can find the post here. It didn’t have any upvotes (besides mine) for about 10 minutes. Then it slowly started to climb. And climb. By about 1 am it was at the top of the front page and the orders were pouring in! By 2 am I was scrambling to fill orders. I had a huge TextEdit file open with customer names, site URLs, and email addresses. I sent every email, and set up every survey by hand.

By 6 am I had completed processing every order and went to bed. I got up an hour later forwork at 7 am. In those few precious moments of sleep I had made another $40. By the end of the day on Monday I had made over $330 and the number kept climbing.

So now I’m sitting here writing this blog post with a bunch of orders to fill, features to build, and customers to help. My Stripe account also says that I’ve made $350 to date. All from three pages and some payment code."

You made $350 from 3 pages, a payment code, and 5 hours of manual labor from 1AM to 6AM. And the additional hours you spent creating the pages. So that is about $70/hr at best and closer $25/hr if you include the other time investment.

I only mention this because it is a common mistake people make when they see real money come in for the product of their work that they see it as paying $x for the product because they haven't included any value for their own time.

If you are not careful that mistake can have you working below minimum wage :-).

Hey guys great to see an old article of mine like this posted here. For the people who asked, the site is down because I sold it and the new owner neglected to take care of it :(

Read about the experience here: http://danshipper.com/110636263

Happy to answer questions about it if you have them.

To the people wondering whether the website is down: yes, Dan has sold the website: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3698539 (DomainPolish: From MVP To Exit In 6 Months)

Is this exit really a significant milestone? If I'm not wrong, he sold the site for $3,500 which really is not alot. That plus considering the fact that he probably got out at the right time considering the venture was not profitable for the new owner (a presumption based on the fact that the site is on longer online). Sales like these happen numerous times a day, usually theyre fly by night business ideas, spam adsense sites, or etc. Its nothing new, and posting stuff like this to hn does not make it any different, go to digitalpoint theres 15 year olds doing this stuff day in and out.

The guy who bought it also had a few other projects going on at the same time. I wish I still had it because it was a reliable money-maker for me. Just needed attention that he couldn't give it - especially because he couldn't code it himself.

Why don't you buy it back? He gets to recoup part of his failed investment and you get your project back. Dedicate 3-7 days to implement what you've learned since that time and set up a passive income source. Would make a hell of a follow-up blog post too.

It's a very significant milestone. He created value for customers from a basic idea and managed to sell the entire thing to some other guy.

It's a great little story to get you funding. Ignore the 3.5k (which isn't horrible imo) the entire story is worth way more from a career building POV. It's not your typical adsense pump and dump either this is miniature startup entrepreneurship. I'm not a VC guy but a story like this would get my "yeah invest in that dude" senses tingling.

Sorry, I come off sounding as a cynic from the start. But I have liked the quality and content of Dan's previous posts, and this is not anything personal. With that said - Really? I could find you hundreds of others doing this same exact thing and I wouldn't find that as a reason to qualify them to get my "yeah invest in that dude" senses tingling. I think I see this from a different viewpoint because from my years on hn it seems as most of the readers are blind to the other side of the startup world - the one where people focus on building products for 1) money or 2) flip. There's a whole ecosystem out there full of these small, medium, large, business that are bought and sold everyday.

What I found particularly interesting about this is just how minimum the minimum viable product was. I think it's easy to lose perspective on the MVP concept and forget that not everything has to be automated right off the bat. Instead of starting out with a web app that automated a process, he started out by offering a manual service, and then automated the job he had created for himself. Very smart.

This was covered a while back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839534

In other news a friend of mine actually earned 600$ in 1.5 hours by selling a static html5 website (he had a site in his portfolio the client asked him to make the same ) to a client on odesk.

"$350 In Two Days With Three Pages" sounds really awesome (and a bit linkbait-y), but how many hours did you actually work? Looks like you had to do a lot of manual labor.

I am also a bit skeptical about it otherwise, seeing as this is simply a proxy for another service.

I sometimes do "one off" stuff like this, and it usually takes about 2 days of solid work at the computer.

That said, it doesn't often work as well as Dan's did.

You have to take into account him manually creating surveys and getting reviews for his customers.

Seeing as this site is no longer functioning and the article is 1.5 years old, is there a site that does inexpensive focus groups to review websites?

I experimented with http://rifff.com/ a bit for crowdsourcing feedback. I got some great detailed feedback, but I think the site is more prone to X vs. Y questions, which are helpful as well.

Feedback Army was my best competitor: http://feedbackarmy.com/

I found http://criticue.com on HN a few weeks ago and I've received some very good feedback from it.

http://fivesecondtest.com/

http://www.usertesting.com/

http://usabilla.com/

http://www.testgang.com/

http://feedbackroulette.com/

http://www.loop11.com/

http://feedbackarmy.com/

http://www.usaura.com/

http://www.conceptfeedback.com/

http://www.pickfu.com/

http://ethn.io/

Is http://www.domainpolish.com/ down, or just me that can't access it?

Great story and good to see success - how scalable is it - from what I read, the early feedback praised you on the quality/depth of questions, which if you move to a more automated way of producing the surveys you'll lose?

I guess you could hire someone on mechanical turk to write tailored survey questions?

It's mechanical turk all the way down!

>Posted on August 3, 2011

haha he probably doesn't know yet that he is one the first page of HN and his website is down.

It's not down, he sold it.

yea pretty fun to wake up it. the site's not down because of traffic though. as others have alluded to I sold it a while ago.

would be nice to have a warning message there... unless all the work was done and no client waiting for results, and there is no will to carry on the site by the new owner

no news because maybe a competitor wiping it out? ;)

I love that you're not afraid to share both your failures and successes. The important thing I see is that you're out there testing different things, if one path leads to a dead-end, you figure out another path. I think you're on your way to success. Good luck!

Seems your site is taking a bit of a hit: http://isitup.org/www.domainpolish.com

What a great idea though, glad to see it's a success! Now you just need to automate it a bit further.

The article is 1.5 years old so it's possible that the website doesn't exist anymore (the domain is still actively registered though).

Oh wow, I didn't even notice how old it was. Guess it was more of a hit a run thing. A shame really, though it was a nice use of Mechanical Turk.

The site: http://web-beta.archive.org/web/20120525003840/http://domain...

Reading this guys bio humbles me. He's done more in the last 10 years as a student than I've done in the past 10 years professionally.

Well, his name is Shipper. Clearly an aptronym.

Same here. I feel old and terrible at life :D I also would love to have student hours again.

You can still get stuff done! Read: http://danshipper.com/the-choices-are-fake-and-the-truth-is-.... Feel free to email me at dan@danshipper.com if you have questions :)

Man, this somewhat distresses me. It is so incredibly easy to add basic automation... write down by hand, really? (Although I really like the custom thank you videos for your first customers - nice touch).

Great story though, I'm glad you cashed out, i guess i just feel that twinge of pain at the fact you could have kept it going for hardly more work, but i understand entirely where you're coming from - so props to you !

Making "How Do I" posts can only bring traffic to the site than any other benefit to others.

Really enjoyed this article. Back to the drawing board is great advice

Is there a mobile version of this type of service?

How do you know someone goes to an ivy school? Don't worry, they'll tell you.

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