The 30x500 philosophy the article mentions takes that to the extreme.

The workflow is basically:

    1. Find an audience ("wordpress consultants")
    2. Stalk their forums & chat rooms. Listen to complaints and problems.
    3. "Flip their pain" - figure out how you could trivially fix their problem. Nothing more. Don't jump straight to "web app" or even "softwarE" at this point. People in my class were working on shipping well built excel sheets, or books, or trainings.
    4. Build that thing in #3, and sell.  Normal email / blog marketing techniques apply here.  Get paying customers right away.