I'm talking about very specific types of "pickaxes" that make me cynically feel like there is no "there there." Instead of selling a book on something, sell a book on selling books. Instead of executing on an idea, sell a app that lets people talk about ideas others can execute on. Instead of going out there and doing the hard work of customer development, build a tool whose sales pitch is that it will do customer development for you. I mean, it's really no different than when you see "How to get rich" books in the book store: the way to get rich is to sell books telling people how to get rich.

I get scratching itches and selling those tools you create in the process, but there's just something that seems off about these products that are clearly pitched by failed entrepreneurs to the HN crowd of struggling entrepreneurs and conceived as an after-thought from a failed "real" product. (As a counterexample, 37signals' books etc on building things, are byproducts of building real, successful products, not their main focus of effort in-and-of-themselves.) If you have some tool you built that provided real leverage when building another "real" product, by all means, you should sell that sucker since it's validated as providing real value. But if you had no luck launching a real product and are building some tool that potentially could have helped you if you went back in time, it sounds like you are copping out of the struggle of finding product-market fit and trying to pitch to people going through similar struggles that there is a "quick fix."

There's a grey area here but basically it's the pornographic definition to me for what constitutes ponzi-products: I know it when I see it. Some people are selling actual useful pickaxes, which is great, but others might be just selling fictional treasure maps and Gold Rush 2013 t-shirts.