How to make $800/mo from three lines of code | Hacker News Reader

How to make $800/mo from three lines of code

jmduke.com

68 pointsjmduke32 comments

That's a very programmer way of looking at it. People don't pay for highlighting, they are paying for more traffic from an ad. Ultimately, they are paying for all the other stuff on the website that gets people to show up, view ads and click on them. I guess the point is revenue != labor, but you should mention why this is possible in this case.

What you say the article is missing is the whole point of the post. This is not a programmer way of looking at it on the whole. In fact, I think the goal of this post is to change programmers "way of looking at it'". 'this is only three lines of code' is a programmer's viewpoint. But it is only a hook into the post to grab programmers and then the post goes on to shift to a practical, business viewpoint. (this post changes the programmer's view point who reads the post)

In terms of

'People don't pay for highlighting, they are paying for more traffic from an ad Ultimately, they are paying for all the other stuff on the website that gets people to show up, view ads and click on them.'

Uhhh dur. And the post even addresses this:

' There are a lot of lessons one can learn from this anecdote: the art of the graceful upsell, the underlying value of 37Signal's brand/traffic that lets them charge $200/month for a glorified <li> element. '

Note, "the underlying value of 37Signal's brand/traffic".

Yeah, it's roughly equivalent to a printer discussing in amazement how much people are willing to pay to have just a few mL of ink inserted into a magazine.

You can pay $1M for just two lines of delta:

      House address: 123 Main Street
    - Owner: Joe Previous
    + Owner: You

Actually, without significant traffic volume which means customers willing to pay for highlighted listing the three lines of code would not by themselves produce $800/month in value. This is like saying that a movie theater can make $1,000 more in 2 seconds by changing the popcorn price. It's all about having a large audience first, then small changes can have a significant impact.

Of course. That was the entire point of the article, to point out that you should not use technical difficulty as your primary data point for setting your selling price.

The author purposely picked out an example where the technical difficulty was trivial to illustrate that the value to the customer is NOT related to the technical difficulty of the feature.

The article author makes an important point. The value of your product or service to a customer often has little if anything to do with the prices and investments you made to create it.

Yes, it's not only 3 lines, you need the code that adds the class to the elements

But it's an interesting analysis of value through the chain.

Whoever payed for the highlight, funnily enough is going to end up spending more since it's going to hire earlier than the others (in principle, on average)

But they expect the $50 to pay for itself on the longer term

On the other hand, I feel like I instinctively ignore blocks with a different coloured background because they appear as being ads, so it may actually produce the desired effect (by reducing the number of applicants).

It's not just ads, but anything that visually sets itself apart from the rest of the content on the page. This includes sidebars next to articles and even headings at the top of the screen, if they look too different. It's called banner blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness I had to deal with it in a product where the current location was shown in a purple tab at the top of the screen. Users would consistently get lost because, even when looking for location cues, they never read the text.

Well yeah, 3 lines of front end CSS. But there's a bit more back end logic that goes into it. But I do like the concept of relatively small yet profitable changes.

It's a lot more than the 3 lines of code suggested. It's still very very small, only a few hours work, but it's not a 3 minute, 3 line change.

And in reality, that $50/month price may rise in order to keep the number of highlighted lines infrequent enough to still stand out.

Bit sensational though, it's not just those 3 lines. You'll also have to add the option to the sign up form, bit more overhead in testing, etc.

It's not just 3 lines is what I'm trying to say.

It's like wondering how much would it take to replace the three letters: "TIM" with letters "ROL" on a device?

$5,000-10,000+

Do the exercise and share the results.

The keyword is: "TIMEX"

You are missing the whole point. What they are selling is people's attention. And they have it. If I did the same thing even for free, I doubt I would get as much hits as they do. Once you have people's attention then you can try stuff like this. This is a pretty stupid post. Honestly. It lacks a point.

Did you read the entire post? It ends with:

> But the most important lesson -- and the most easily digestable -- never confuse technical difficulty for demonstrated value.

I did. And that is exactly why I say there is no point to the article.

But it is for the 'business concept', and not for changing code customers are paying. Code is already written, it is just a matter for switch-on and switch-off ... which is again max. 3 minutes job.

How many times companies sell same product? They are not rewriting the code, just sending you a copy - zero effort

3 lines?

What about the lines of code in order to control the feature? Code to charge customers who use the feature? Running analysis to test different shades of the color and how well they perform? What about time spent on the phone and sending emails answering questions from prospective and current customers?

I think you missed the point. The point is that although it's technically very easy to 'highlight some job postings on the list, that simple upsell can generate hundreds of dollars a month.

This was not intended to be a literal guide on how to make $800 in 3 lines of code.

How to make $800/mo from three lines of code

The title was just link bait then?

When browsing the ads on http://weworkremotely.com, I have to force myself to read the highlighted listings, otherwise my brain just ignores them.

I guess it's the product of years of ignoring the ads on Google.

I wonder if that makes you more conscious of them.

I'm thinking about a study cited in Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow[1] where the participants did better on a test when the questions where in a blurry font. I believe it was suggested that being forced to exert mental effort to read the questions forced their brain into "actual thinking mode" as opposed to "pattern recognition" mode.

ie. If we know it's probably not an ad, but it looks like an ad, is it a more effective bit of non-ad? (well, it is an ad, but it's an ad we want to see.)

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/...

The point of the article is that small technology changes can provide disporportionate value to the customer and your company (The best types of changes to make) and most commentors still feel it necessary to mention that its not really 3 lines of code.

Clearly, this is something that people pay money for, and that counts for something. I never would, though. It looks like a losing game to me. Surely there are more interesting, compelling, inspiring ways to reach out to people?

There are probably a few profound lesson for aspiring entrepreneurs and developers somewhere in this find, beyond it's profitability.

Google makes billions with highlighting text on a yellow background. Not sure how many lines of css it took them, however.

Step 1: Be as well known as 37signals

Step 2: 3 lines of code

Step 3: Profit

And if everyone starts paying to highlight their ads, then those that don't pay will stand out.

May I paraphrase patio11 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4477088 ) ...

If everyone want’s to highlight their add, then double your price. If everyone still want’s to highlight their add, then double your price again.

I don't understand why it is currently #1 on HN. In newspapers it surely doesn't cost them much more to put your ad in bold. Probably less than a cent. But hell yeah they will charge in the thousands if the newspaper happens to be WSJ weekend edition real estate section.

Obviously, you pay for the amount of eye-balls seeing that ad. Changing the color may result in thousands of people more seeing the ad. The cost is in the know-how to get these thousands of eye-balls to see your content. Not for the color.

Without a platform as hugely popular as 37-signals the programmer could change colors all day long on his 'localhost:3000' and that wouldn't be worth $800. That would be worth $0.0.

The premise of the article is completely false.

I thought the article was just trying to make a point about charging based on how much work it takes vs charging what people will pay.

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