how two hours of work lets me sell $10,000 extra of Bingo Card Creator a year

What you really need to do is stop talking and start working.

Früher landeten alte Schränke und abgewohnte Dielen auf dem Müll. Designer machen aus solchen Resten nun Möbel mit Geschichte und setzen Handwerk gegen Massenfertigung

bignoggins 15 hours ago | link | parent | on: The 10k Bootstrap Challenge

I'm a big fan of bootstrapping, allow me to add my own data point. I was the typical bored-at-BigCo guy but was afraid to completely jump into startups full time (I have a family). I decided to bootstrap my startup (mobile app) at the beginning of 2010, while working full time for 6 months. 6 months after that I quit my job full time as the income from the startup surpassed my SV engineering salary (made 75K in 6 months). In 2011, I traveled the world for 7 months with my wife while making my 2nd app, and my income went up to 340K. This year, I'm pretty much working ~20 hrs a week and I'm on track to hit at least 600K (already did 300K YTD). No full time employees, no VCs, no board, minimal expenses (macbook + iphone), no hassle.

I have friends and relatives who have done YC, gone the whole fundraising route, etc. Some who are fairly successful, but I wouldn't trade places with them in a second. I'm not saying bootstrapping is better, but if you are like me (risk averse and lazy) then it is definitely a legitimate option.



bignoggins 10 hours ago | link

I haven't spent any money and barely any time on marketing. Development I did all the coding myself and eventually hired a graphic designer part time. The thing is I'm not usually on the Top 100 list (or even Top 300 for that matter), I just charge more for my apps (my price points are $3, $5, $8). That's the best kept secret of the app store. Sure the Top 100 apps make a ton of money, but there is a growing class of niche apps that can make just as much money by charging more and catering to a smaller niche audience.

My advice is to not create the next Angry Birds, but try and find a niche that is underserved and create a great app and charge as much as you can get away with. And get a great designer too, that's the best ROI I can think of.

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sayemm 9 hours ago | link

I think it's very smart, and not just for the risk-averse and lazy... starting small and earning your first stripes as an entrepreneur may prove to be a solid stepping stone to pursue bigger ventures in the future, I think. And now that you're financially independent, you won't have to worry about money holding you back. Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo founder), Ben Milne (Dwolla founder), Nat Turner (Invite Media founder), the list goes on... were all proven bootstrapped entrepreneurs before they worked on their first venture-backed startup.

Congrats on your success, do you recommend any good books or resources for bootstrapping/marketing apps?

I'm a big fan of Rob Walling's book/blog.

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bignoggins 9 hours ago | link

pretty much followed Rob's advice to the T

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sayemm 8 hours ago | link

good to know! thanks

Hannan 18 hours ago | link

Living in London was quite expensive for me. He estimates four months:

"All my expenses come from the £10k but I can only make money from products (e.g. no consulting). London is expensive, so this gives me about 4 months."

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CharlesPal 18 hours ago | link

Spending £2.5k/month to live in London? In your experience, how accurate does that sound?

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objclxt 18 hours ago | link

Sounds about right, the London Living Wage (a suggested but not mandatory minimum wage for living in London) works out at just under £400 per week, so maybe £5k to live on, the remaining £5k for other expenses, etc.

Bear in mind it's not £2.5k/month for living expenses: it's £2.5k per month for all expenses: including building the product, etc etc.

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beck5 17 hours ago | link

That is living an fairly decent life. You could scrape on £1k a month if you really wanted to.

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megablast 2 hours ago | link

This is what I do, rent and bills is around £800 a month, and can live quite well on another £300 to £400, and that includes going out.

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robfitz 35 minutes ago | link

I spent 5 years living like that at my first couple companies. These days, however, my life is no longer organised in a way where that's viable. So 2-2.5k it is. If I was in a real pinch, I could temporarily get to 1.5k, but I feel like 4 months is about the right period of time for this anyway.

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alinajaf 17 hours ago | link

That's about me, post-tax for the past two years I think. Would go a lot further if I were single, but we can afford to rent a decent-sized 2-bedroom flat in a nice area without having to pinch pennies.

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rythie 17 hours ago | link

It's fairly common to pay at least £1k/month for a one bedroom flat in central London.

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Ja, wo stecken sie denn? Computerexperten sind in Deutschland eine seltene Spezies. Auch Finanzkrise und Rezession haben an diesem Fachkräftemangel nichts geändert. So kommt es, dass selbst Quereinsteiger auf dem IT-Jobmarkt gute Chancen haben. Ein Überblick.
...
Doch ein vergleichsweise gutes Gehalt reicht vielen IT-Profis nicht aus. Immer mehr von ihnen tauschen die Sicherheit des Angestelltendaseins gegen die Ungebundenheit eines Freiberuflers ein. Pfisterer schätzt, dass es in Deutschland bis zu 80.000 Freelancer gibt. Ihre Zahl steige kontinuierlich, im Vergleich zu angestellten IT-Spezialisten jedoch nicht überproportional. "Die meisten Freelancer arbeiten freiberuflich, weil sie die Freiheiten schätzen, die sie als ihr eigener Chef haben - nicht, weil ihnen nichts anderes übrig bleibt", so Pfisterer. Das habe unter anderem die Internetblase 2002/2003 bewiesen: "Damals ist die Zahl der Arbeitslosen in der IT-Branche stark gestiegen, nicht aber die Zahl der Freiberufler. Das zeigt, dass Freelancing kein Krisenphänomen ist".
...
Auch wenn das für SAP-Berater Clemens im Moment keine Option ist, schließt er nicht aus, sich irgendwann selbständig zu machen. Damit hätte er auf dem Freelancer-Markt gute Chancen: "Ein Fünftel unserer Projektanfragen richten sich an SAP-Spezialisten", so Schödl. Doch auch Arbeitgeber umwerben den 37-Jährigen: Über Karrierenetzwerke wie Xing oder LinkedIn bekomme er im Schnitt zwei Stellenangebote pro Woche. "Für mich hat sich der Quereinstieg in jeder Hinsicht gelohnt."

Elegantly said. Too many put an emphasis on being the first to think of an idea. So much so that they never actually create anything, they just keep trying to think of an idea that doesn't yet exist. The most iconic companies in the world weren't the first, they were simply the best. MySpace beat Facebook to the punch, HP hit the market before Apple, PicPlz existed before Instagram.

It didn't matter.​ They succeeded because they did it right.

nirvana 3 hours ago | link

This article is silly. The idea that you can't make any money from an App if you aren't in the top of the charts is false.

One of my apps has only occasionally and then briefly, broken the top 200 in the US in its CATEGORY. (So nowhere near top 200 overall) and it still reliably pays out every single month. Further over its lifetime-- about 2 years at this point, the amount it pays every month has gone up, not down. The experiments we've done show that several things we could do would make it pay even more.

For instance, if we'd done a single bit of marketing that might have helped. The closest thing to "marketing" we do is to give promo codes to anyone who asks for one because they want to review the app. (nobody in the USA has yet reviewed the app.)

The idea that you need hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop an app is also kinda silly. A team of two developed our app over the course of a month. In the intervening 2 years, another month or two has been put into the app. At this point, the app has gone well more than a year without an update and it is still earning the same income- in fact, its income has gone up in the past several months.

There are somethings that you should do to have success though:

1. Have a good UI. The team of 2 was an engineer and a designer and we spent a lot of time on the design.

2. Make the app good. The star rating is a factor in the app doing well.

3. Make the app useful. Have something unique about it... but this doesn't have to be super unique. (our unique value is quite terrible. Paul Graham would throw me out of his office or a YC interview if I pitched him on it... its barely a differentiator, but its enough.)

4. Learn from your app and then do another one. Over time you can build a nice stable of apps and a nice income.

5. Update your app regularly. You experience a sales dip when the app is first updated, but after there are sufficient ratings on the new version the update seems to boost your sales. (or at least ours have, though we stopped updating it to focus on other things.)

6. Make your app sticky. About %80 of the people who buy our app never use it, and that's unfortunate. But the %20 who do, do for a long time and use it quite a bit. I think not every app is for everyone. But if your app is going to be useless after awhile, there's not much point (remember the vevuzula? lots of apps came out to make that sound. wonder how they're selling now?)

Hits come and go, and the big money may go to the hits. But viewing an App as a dividend that pays out every month, in my experience the returns are quite well worth it.

Some more points

-- Don't spend $100,000 on an app. Or even $10,000. IF you count our cost of living, our app cost us $3,400. We did spend a couple hundred on an outside designer that didn't work out, and about $500 on the app down the road after it was already making good money each month. That $3,400 we "spent" on it-- we get more than half of that back each month.

-- If you're a big business expecting to gross $1M a year from an app, then maybe it is a lottery. I dunno.

-- A high price is not a problem. We sold our app for $3 the first year, then $5 the second. No real change in income. We experiment with pricing a bit. You get a lot more downloads at $0.99. And you can have a big boost to your app by running a sale... but that also affects the amount of "juice" apple gives you.

-- Since we're not in the charts, our sales come because Apple is recommending our app to people. Think about that. The store does work, even if you'd never see us in the store by just browsing.

-- I think the idea of focusing on a few apps is a very good one. don't just throw crap out there and see if it sticks. That's the biggest problem with the store-- too much crap. But Apple is getting algorithmically better at figuring out whats crap and what isn't. Make your app good. Doesn't have to have all the features you could possibly want in the first version, an MVP is fine, but make it polished.

I think that the app store is a huge opportunity for people who would like to work for themselves but aren't in a position to raise funding to do a startup.

I think its a lot easier to get a good app discovered than an obscure website.

Alle reden über Urheberrechte und neue Bezahlmodelle im Internet. Wie läuft eigentlich das Musikgeschäft? Peter Tschmuck, Professor für Kulturwirtschaft, erklärt es.

What did I earn or learn with my actions so far?

I just started this experiment 14 days ago and I created two small spin offs of my OSS stuff, one was a QR encoder and the other was a Visitor Heatmap Plugin for WordPress. The QR thing didn’t get a lot of attention yet, but I didn’t do any marketing or sharing activities so far. Anyways, some guys bought it though :) Just 5 sells, and about 32$, but that’s better than nothing and in my opinion a good start for this long journey! The heatmap plugin for wordpress got a little more attention. It got approved on codecanyon a little earlier today and already made 4 sells. The people seem to be interested in it, what makes me very happy. I recognized that investing some extra time in good/appealing graphics for the market entry really makes a difference whether people will even have a look at it or not (pretty obvious, duh. But as a programmer you sometimes forget about that stuff). Nevertheless, we’ll see how it will perform the upcoming days :)
I tried adbrite for showing ads and I added the code for some time now. The webpage has about 500-700 visitors per day, but is pretty nice ranked on google. Since then I only earned about 25 pennies in 14 days and I’m a little suspicious of adbrite, because I know the amount of earnings at adbrite already was (a little) bigger but from one day to another it switched back to a lower amount. I do not want to display ads on my websites and then not even get paid correctly for it so I’m going to remove the ads and better place a link for one of my spin off products on it.

So here is a final summary of what I’ve earned so far since I started this experiment (14 days ago)
Advertisements: 0.21$
Spin-Offs on Codecanyon: 62$

That’s it, my first attempt to get passive income. See you next time! If you have any feedback, please let me know! :)

Btw if you wanna check out the WordPress Visitor Heatmap Plugin, here’s the URL:
WP Visitor Heatmap Plugin

Allerdings blickt die Wall Street nach anfänglicher Begeisterung inzwischen deutlich kritischer auf das 2004 von Mark Zuckerberg gegründete Netzwerk - nicht zuletzt wegen Zweifeln, ob das Turbo-Wachstum ewig weitergeht und ob es sich in entsprechenden Gewinnen niederschlägt. Verglichen mit dem Vorquartal ging der Umsatz im ersten Vierteljahr 2012 um sechs Prozent zurück. Die erzielten 1,06 Milliarden Dollar entsprechen aber einem Plus von 45 Prozent im Vergleich zum Vorjahreszeitraum. Der Nettogewinn sank auf Jahressicht um zwölf Prozent auf 205 Millionen Dollar.

Gerade auf Wachstumsmärkten wie Brasilien und Indien hat Facebook Analysten zufolge Schwierigkeiten, aus seinen Diensten Gewinn zu ziehen. "Sie haben die internationalen Märkte noch nicht geknackt, während andere wie Google im Ausland sehr erfolgreich sind", sagte Anupam Palit von GreenCrest Capital. Auch die saisonalen Schwankungen der Werbung scheint Google weniger zu spüren: Der Suchmaschinenbetreiber erhöhte seinen Umsatz im ersten Quartal auch im Vergleich zum Vierteljahr davor leicht.

Common Objections

“I’m not a tech person. I have no experience in this market.”
I was in the same spot, and I still don’t know how to write code. But I found successful people to learn from, emulated their models, and hired programmers and designers who could execute my ideas. If you can draw your idea on a piece of paper, you can successfully build an app.

“The app market has too much competition. I don’t stand a chance.”
This industry is just getting started– it’s less than four years old! What makes the app business unique is that the big players are on the same playing field as everyone else. They have the same questions and challenges as you and I will have.

“I don’t have the money.”
You don’t need a lot of money to start. It costs anywhere from $500 to $5,000 to develop simple apps. As soon as you launch your app (depending on your sales), you could see money hit your bank account within two months.

“It’s difficult… I don’t understand it… I’m not smart enough.”
Just like everything you’ve learned in life, you have to start somewhere. Fortunately, running an app business is far easier than almost every other type of business. Apple and Google handle all of the distribution, so you can spend your time creating apps and marketing them. And you don’t have to come up with new, innovative ideas. If you can improve on existing app ideas, you can make money.
...
Whenever you decide to look into emulating an app, ask yourself these six questions:

1. Why are people purchasing this?
2. Can I do something to emulate this idea and take it to another level?
3. What other ideas would this app’s demographic like?
4. How many other similar apps are in the market? (Visit TopAppCharts.com to find out.)
5. How successful and consistent have they been?
6. How does their marketing and pricing model work?

Rechner nach Maß, verkauft per Telefon oder übers Web - mit dieser Idee wurde Michael Dell zum Milliardär. Doch den Erfolg des Computerunternehmers macht in Wahrheit etwas anderes aus: Der Wille, seinen Konzern immer wieder auf neue Bedürfnisse der Kunden auszurichten.
...
Selbst wenn man also weiß, wofür der Kunde bezahlt, erfordert es einiges an Anstrengung, sich so zu organisieren, dass der Kunde im Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit bleibt.

wrong: build something and then figure out how much you can charge. right: choose your desired price, then figure out how to justify it.
— Amy Hoy (@amyhoy) March 5, 2012

If you're stuck at the starting line, you don't need more time or permission. You don’t need to wait for a boss’s okay or to be told to push the button; you just need to poke.

A Q&A with Seth Godin

Question: What does it mean to Poke the Box?

Seth Godin: Conformity used to be crucial--fitting in, not standing out. Compliance used to be the heart of every successful organization, every successful career. The reason? We all worked for the system, in the factory, doing what we were told. Now, though, compliance is no longer a competitive advantage.

Poke the Box is about the spark that brings things to life. We need to be nudged away from conformity and toward ingenuity, toward answering unknown questions for ourselves. Even if we fail, as I have done many times in my life, we learn what not to do by experience and doing the new.

This isn’t the same thing as taking a risk. In fact, the riskiest thing we can do right now is nothing.

I’ve had an extraordinary run, creating a dozen nationwide bestsellers, starting Internet companies and giving speeches around the world. The key thing I bring to the projects I take on is not more talent than most (I don’t) or even more hours than most (hardly). My contribution is a willingness to poke, to start, to lean into the project and to get it out the door.

Question: What will I learn from reading Poke the Box?

Seth Godin: Hopefully you will learn lots but do more. Start thinking about when you’ve taken initiative in a way that really meant something to you and your team, your family. When was the last time you did something for the first time? How did it feel?

There are no step-by-step how-to instructions in Poke the Box. Instead, you’ll find a series of layers, a foundation for taking a different approach to your work. Instead of learning to be more compliant, I want to push you to be the one who takes initiative.

Question: Why did you write this book?

Seth Godin: I’ve been fortunate enough to hear from almost a million people over the years, to talk with CEOs and bosses and customers around the world. And they all tell me precisely the same thing: it’s the motive force they demand, the person who will shake things up and move them forward.

Static is not an acceptable state. The status quo is no longer something we want at work or in politics or in any organization we care about.

The market is just waiting for people to step forward. I wrote the book for those people, the ones who’ve been hesitating to take the leap.

Question: Why did you start The Domino Project?

Seth Godin: The Domino Project is my latest attempt at "poking." It’s an independent publishing imprint founded by me and powered by Amazon. This is an opportunity to publish "idea manifestos" committed to readers, rather than being bookstore friendly. It’s named after the domino effect--where one powerful idea spreads down the line, pushing from person to person.

I have two audacious goals: I want to change the people who read (not enough do) and I want to change the way books are published (they’re too hard to find and spread). I honestly believe that a book can change a mind like nothing else, and that’s our focus. To help anyone to do work they’re proud of and to make a difference.

Question: Why Amazon?

Seth Godin: I partnered with Amazon so we could leverage what we both do best--Amazon is the leader in global distribution, multiple format production capabilities, and reaching people in the right way, and I want to spread powerful ideas to the people who want to read them.

For 15 years, Amazon has been building an audience and gaining our trust. Many surveys identify them as the most-trusted new brand in the world. Now that Amazon is interacting with more people more often, they have a chance to bring those customers new ideas in innovative ways. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to bring ideas worth spreading to a huge and eager audience.

Question: Who is Seth Godin?

Seth Godin: I’m an author, entrepreneur, and a person who starts things.

I'm a long time redditor, but wanted to keep my reddit life and my company life seperate, hence the throwaway.

I'll get right to it:

In October last year I was reading an article about a guy that started a cleaning company in his city and is now doing $150,000 per year.

I work full-time, but figured, shoot, if he can pull that off, why can't I?

I got to working in this order:

1) I drew up a quick marketing plan-literally one page in bullet form
2) Had a website built that featured some of the ideas that I thought was most appealing about his site.
3) Asked my home cleaner if she would take the jobs if I got any and she basically said "hells yeah" (I now have a total of 8 cleaners)
4) I brushed up on my adwords (I had already owned an Adwords guide and had dabbled in adwords before for another local company)
5) Started Twitter and Facebook page.

All of this took like 3 weeks.

I launched the site on November 3rd and had the first job on the first day.

By the end of November I made my first $1,000 profit, and now the site is doing $1,000 profit per week ($4,000 per month), which exceeds the take home pay from my full time job.

This post is two-fold. To say,

1) This is not brain surgery and 2) Don't overthink shit, sometimes just doing it is the only answer.

I'm just getting started with this and feel I could hit $10,000 per month profit in the next 4 or 5 months if things keep going like this.

ASK ME ANYTHING!

Also, I feel like I can duplicate this success in another venture: Lawncare. I plan to start a lawncare company (and by plan, I literally mean I'm going to get that bad boy jumping in the next two weeks) and I try to duplicate my success.

If you guys want to tag along for the ride I plan to document everything here and you can follow along. I'll make everything super transparent, including money I make the entire thing.

Tl/dr I started a cleaning company that replaced my take home salary from my full time job in 4 fucking months. Now I'm going to try again with a lawn care company and I'll make the entire process super transparent if you guys are interested.

Edit: I figured I would share the site: http://www.maidsinblack.com/

Edit: Here is where the lawn site follow along will take place: http://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/ (Thanks to tabasquito for setting this up).

Edit: It's amazing seeing folks come to the site from as far away as China, that's awesome!

Edit: Thanks to the redditor that emailed me through the site to verify that it was me! :-)

Ask away.
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patio11 10 hours ago | link

He's essentially figured out that cleaning is one of many services which would have lower barrier to entry if it were not regulated. He is, of course, right. I sincerely hope for his sake that he reinvests profits into bringing himself into compliance with e.g. employment taxes, workers comp, etc.

Gary Vaynerchuk said it perhaps best in his talk at the 2011 Big Omaha: “ideas are shit, execution’s the game”. Watch it2.
http://www.siliconprairienews.com/2011/07/big-omaha-video-series-gary-vaynerchuk-of-vaynermedia

"Android is on fire, and the pace of mobile innovation has never been greater," he wrote. "Over 850,000 devices are activated daily through a network of 55 manufacturers and more than 300 carriers."

At the end of February, I launched a side project, Loft Resumes, with a friend of mine, Emory Cash. Our tagline is “Style-Conscious Resumes for the Standout Job Seeker.” As you can tell from the Google Analytics screenshot below, from the time that we first tweeted about it on February 21st to mid-day March 31st, we’ve received over 81,000 visits (over 66,000 of them uniques,) and over 209,000 page views. We’re pleased. We’re even more pleased that it’s generated enough sales that we’re working like crazy every day to fulfill them.

[–]Realworld 118 Punkte 1 Tag zuvor

Early 60s. Retired age 47. Probably didn't work at paid employment more than 20 years total.

Already mentioned main themes; consider all expenditures over years total and find substitutes for as many as possible. Redditors make fun of hipsters but much of that culture has to do with substituting taste for cash. Retro is a fancy way of saying old quality bought cheap. Fixie bikes are pretentious and cheap, much cheaper than car loans. Home espresso machine instead of Starbucks. Home brew beer instead of bars. Learn to cook & bake instead of using restaurants.

Staying healthy and fit is important. Scratch-cooking food is cheaper than junk food. Moderate servings are cheaper than pigging out. Endurance running/swimming/biking is virtually free. A full night sleep is free. A healthy fit body lets you do whatever you choose to. Just as important, you will be moving up and you need to look the part. Many of my early mentors where upper-middle and upper class women who saw potential in me.

Appearance: as I said, you need to look the part. No hats, no tats. Clean clothes, hair, and apartment. You can dress hipster through your poverty years but then you need to switch up. Preppy works well. Polo shirts and deck shoes are cheap given their durability and they never go out of style.

I don't know if my path is universally applicable. I constantly look for new things to learn, new things to experiance, new things to do. Wherever I was employed I learned everything I could about my job, my coworkers jobs, competitors methods, market demand, profit margins. Above all I tried to figure out ways to make my job more efficient and increase quality/production. It passes time swiftly and it's satisfying. Didn't ask permission, just did it. Depending on boss, I was either fired or promoted. About 50/50 response. I could afford to lose a job so didn't matter. Even when they loved me I didn't stay more than 2-3 years. Too many new things to try.

I reached a level by late 20s where no one else had my particular weird combination of abilities. Life got more interesting and easier from then on.
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"Excellent, tomorrow call in sick make a list of 50 business close to you that you think that can benefit with your product and call them. Ask if you can speak to the manager and book an appoint to see them. Do not spend a cent on the business until you have a customer"....Didn't make much sense right? Then they explained, customers will go with business who they trust. Good old fashion customer service. You're selling yourself as the business not the business that you work for. No business is going to give you their trust if they feel your reckless, unskilled and false.
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[–]eatsnobananas 42 Punkte 1 Tag zuvor

My parent's recipe is something along the lines of ...

Work 100+ hours a week.

Make everything about money - including being a tight-ass.

Property, tax breaks and tax credits.

Finance Nothing. Finance Nothing. Finance Nothing.

Arrange it so that if you win, you win - if you lose, you still win some.

Be shrewd, calculating and get ready to cut that other guy's throat.

My advice? I'm biased since I'm inheriting this money, but relax and have fun. Stress levels leave them perpetually hovering over death.

I could join my dad in his work and be making low six-figures, but the level of evil involved in his work is somewhere between "Professional Puppy Kicker" and "Candy Snatcher".

I know it's not possible for most people, but I don't understand how I don't see more people don't do what I do - specialize so that you can work part-time for an incredibly high hourly wage. Seriously, I have the next six days off. It's awesome.

Permalink

Near the end of his life, Jobs was visited at home by Larry Page, who was about to resume control of Google, the company he had cofounded. Even though their companies were feuding, Jobs was willing to give some advice. “The main thing I stressed was focus,” he recalled. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up, he told Page. “It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.” Page followed the advice. In January 2012 he told employees to focus on just a few priorities, such as Android and Google+, and to make them “beautiful,” the way Jobs would have done.

Hi, I’m Amy!

Hi, I'm Amy Hoy. I'm a Product Crusader. I'm building my own product empire of web apps.

(Freckle, Charm), training, and educational products. I aim to help you do the same.

Why is there a narwhal impaling a unicorn on my blog heading? Simple: Unicorns are a fantasy -- but narwhals are the stunning reality. So in nature, so in life: You can't base a business on glitter and rainbows. Real businesses charge.

An article he wrote a year ago inspired me to focus less on building a “startup” and more on learning how to make money.
Experimentation is the key to learning and growing, it’s through the work and process itself that we figure out exactly what we need to build. The myth of the shower idea that led to millions in funding and overnight success is incredibly damaging to the entrepreneur community. I set out to simply sell my labor in a most basic way, while learning how to create publicity and optimize for conversions.

While I’m still experimenting with the publicity and conversion thing, I have made some money and learned a few things in only a weekend.

You know, that partial app you wrote five years ago and put on GitHub, the one you still get emails about, what's going to happen to that? Or the web site about dancing turtles you created that makes five dollars a month from AdSense.

patio11 3 hours ago | link

In addition to making all the necessary steps to deal without a technical cofounder (problem: can't iterate without code, solution: crash course in Python programming then), Tracy also really, really works angles that many technical founders wouldn't consider. I did a wee bit of work with her at 500 Startups -- my favorite example of several is that she produced an actual, honest to God, on-dead-tree photo book of her paying customers' wares. It was extraordinarily compelling, both as a product (I have recent experience with wedding product photo books, mostly produced on 1000x the budget of that), as a sales channel for her company, and clearly the hackiest use of paper I've ever seen in a software company.

...
Focus on revenue.

If you’re a solo founder (and in my case, first-time and non-technical as well), fundraising is going to be 10x (perhaps 100x) harder. It’s easy to hear stories of seemingly silly startups raising 500k seed rounds with just an idea and think that fundraising isn’t that hard — that all you need is an idea and a shoddy MVP — and the cash will be magically falling into your hands.

Chances are: you’re not lucky, you’re not going to raise money, and fundraising is going to a bitch of a process and severely depressing. It’s hard to pitch your company to angels and VCs and get “meh” in return — not to mention, if you’re a solo founder and you’re fundraising, you have no time to work on product, and your progress is going to stagnate while you’re trying to raise money.

Find a product where you can work hard and bring in revenue. It’s much more rewarding. I’ve heard good things about Amy Hoy’s 30×500 class, which sounds like a good hand-holding class for anyone wanting to jump into a revenue-building project.

It’s also surprising how easy it can be sometimes to convince a stranger to pay for your product. Revenue first is key when you don’t have a cofounder. I remember when I first added paid accounts to WeddingInviteLove, and being completely baffled when ~10% of my existing customers upgraded — and my conversion rate has stayed at 10% ever since.

ehrgeizige, leidenschaftliche, dynamische, spontane, motivierte, Mitarbeiter, Freelancer, und, Praktikanten, sowie, Entwickler, für, C#, iOS, Android, und, Verkäufer, im, lokalen, Markt, und, Handel

Ambitious startup ideas usually operate in large markets where there are often lots of customers and lots of money flowing. If you start out trying to create or disrupt such a market you often end up stumbling on an initial beachhead where you can attack the greater landmass.

Product Launch Checklist ✶

A very decent list of "things to do" to help a launch go better. However, It's worth pointing out that none of those things (save, perhaps, the SSL certificate) should stop you from launching your product, at least in the sense of allowing people to sign up, use the service, and pay you money.

Me: “What’s your favorite Pixar movie?”
Matt: *SIGH*
Me: “Haha! Why the sigh?”
Matt: “This is such a tough question, because they are all good. And yet at the same time, it can be hard to watch one that you’ve worked on, because you spend so many hours on it. You know all the little choices you made, and all the shortcuts that were taken. And you remember the riskier things you could have tried but ended up not, because you couldn’t risk the schedule. And so when you are watching the movie, you can see all the flaws, and it isn’t until you see the faces of your friends and family that you start to forget them.”

Question: What is the distinction between Do the Work and War of Art, the book where you first introduced Resistance? Does Do the Work take it a step further?

Steven Pressfield: Do the Work is structured to take the reader from A to Z. If the reader has a project they want to start or complete, such as a new business they want to open or a book they want to write, Do the Work is designed to take them from starting to shipping to hitting all the predictable resistance points along the way. I know you’re familiar with these moments; The beginning, the middle, and all the moments in between just before you ship and then just after you ship. Do the Work guides you from the start of the project and takes you all the way through.

It’s about getting off your behind and starting something. And Seth Godin writes about this, that once you start, you have to finish; you don’t get off the hook half way through. I recently got an email from a guy who said, "Help. I’m stuck." He was in a class and he had to write a screenplay and he was a quarter of the way through. Normally I would cheer him on, but just for fun, I gave him a little program to do; I put on my instructor voice and said, “Do this, do that, do this, do that.” It worked because right away he got over a couple speed bumps and took it all the way to the finish line. He loved it! I’d always been too shy to do that before, but I tried the assertive tone of voice and it really worked--he responded really well to it. So I thought, let me try that tone of voice in Do the Work.

Question: What did you tell him to do?

Steven Pressfield: One of the first things I told him to do was to banish the self-censor. I could tell he was frozen, worrying, "Is this going to be good? Is this going to be perfect? So I told him, "Take the next five days and write for two hours everyday. I don’t care what else is in your life--banish it. When you write for those two hours, start on minute one and don’t think for one second all the way through until minute 120. Just write, don’t self censor. Don’t do anything." That really seemed to get him moving and gave him permission to not be paralyzed with seeking perfection.

Ishita: You almost have to be ruthless with yourself when you’re confronting your censor. What do you think is the difference between our natural limitations and Resistance? How can we tell Resistance from our own stuff coming up?

Steve: First let me say one thing. My rule of thumb is: When in doubt, it’s Resistance. When you think it might be something else, it’s not, it’s Resistance. When I went through my 20s and early 30s, I had about a seven-year period where I wandered into the wilderness, I ran away from everything in my life, believing the voices in my head and not recognizing them as Resistance. I went through a long, long period of getting in my own way in a really bad way, hurting other people along the way. The worst stuff you can imagine. It was only after that, when I came to this rule of thumb that "When in doubt, it is Resistance." The answer is that you have to overcome it.

Ishita: So that was a time when you weren’t "doing the work?"

Steve: Absolutely, I wasn’t doing it at all.

Ishita: I relate to that. I’ll give you an example unrelated to creative work, but where Resistance rears its ugly head in a big way. Sometimes I’ll lace up my gym shoes, make the ten minute walk to the gym, and turn right back around and go home. And all the while I’m thinking, "What am I doing?!" I then wonder if there’s something before taking the action that comes into play, something that comes just prior to taking action.

Steve: I can just picture you now, Ishita.

Ishita: I don’t know if I should have told you that but there we have it!

Steve: I understand that. It’s almost like you have to say, "Put your ass where your heart wants to be" and just put your body there and do it. For me it seems like a head of steam has to build up inside before you’re actually able to take that plunge. That the pain of not doing it is worse then the pain of walking home from the gym, for example.

Ishita: You get so sick of not doing it that you force yourself to ultimately do it. It seems like we fight so hard against Resistance, it’s a never-ending battle. As soon as you’re done overcoming one obstacle, here comes another.

Steve: Absolutely, I mean, it never gets any easier. And it almost gets to a spiritual level, where it’s just part of the human condition. Simply put, there are dark forces in religions and views of the world that stop us from ascending to higher levels and stops the higher level from communicating with us. The ancient rabbis and monks and Zen masters recognized that as just a part of life. In America, we’re in this "Go, go, go" power positive thinking society, that we think there’s no such thing as evil or that we can overcome it by the proper social program or going to the right school, etc. But George Lucas was right: The dark force is there. And we have to fight it in ourselves everyday. It’s always there, just like gravity, and it’s always keeping us from being able to fly. Resistance is the same.

Ishita: I think about people who’ve made "it" at the top of their game. They’re putting stuff out into the world but it’s clear that Resistance still comes up. I’m learning that no matter what, there are always challenges and that no one really has it "made."

Steve: I don’t think anyone has it made at all. In fact, I love stories when an artist or a writer tells the various hells they went through who we now look at and think, "Wow, they must have been at the top of their game!" And then you realize that no, they were going through a divorce or lawsuits were filed against them, or their kids were sick or whatever. Yet they still did it. That’s just the way it is. It’s what separates the men from the boys, so to speak. There’s a famous story of Picasso after he had finished about 24 paintings for his next show. He invited his agent or his manager to his studio to look at the paintings and as Picasso was looking at them with his manager, he started to hate them. He grabbed a painting knife and started slashing the paintings. The manager absolutely freaked out and said, "NO, NO, NO!" but Picasso kept slashing until they were all ruined. Then he went back to the drawing board.

Ishita: That’s crazy--I had never heard that story! It shows just how powerful Resistance can really be. Switching gears to doing the work, how do you choose what’s next for you? How do you recognize a new challenge and mix it up for yourself?

Steve: I think you’re always starting from scratch when you come to a new project, Ishita. I always want to do something that number one I love--that just seizes me, rather than try to second-guess the marketplace. I also want to do something that’s new and that will make me stretch. At the same time I don’t want to go too far because I think that you can lose readers and your audience, so you go a half step at a time. You have to do something where you say, "I don’t know if I can pull this off." And in fact that you really think, "I don’t think I can pull this off." You want that feeling. So you’ll have to use new muscles and try something different. Fail, fail, fail, succeed, fail, fail, fail, succeed; That’s kind of the way it goes. I’m definitely a believer that you have to be as fearless as you can be. Usually the projects that work out best for me are the ones that I think to myself no one in the world is going to be interested in this except me. I’m starting a new one now, which I’m not going to tell you about, but I have that exact feeling, that I must be crazy to do this because no one will care about it but me. But I’m interested in it and so I’m doing it.

Ishita: The filmmaker Mira Nair said, "The more specific you get with your story, the more universal it becomes." So the more you do what you want and what lights your fire, the more people will resonate with it. That you delve so deeply into the story that interests you and you think, "Why would anyone else be interested in this?" but it’s exactly that reason that people will be interested in it.

Steve: I think that’s exactly true, Ishita. Like when you wrote me that email describing the MBA program you were a part of and how great it was, but also how challenging it was and that you cried every night. Then you wrote back and said, "Perhaps don’t publish that part?" and I thought it was actually the most charming and most involving part of our conversation about it because when I read that, I literally lit up and I said to myself, "Ah, I can just see it..." So you’re right. That’s a specific detail that really makes something universal because we all feel, "Yeah, I was crying every night too" at some point in time in our lives.

Ishita: As creators we collaborate and work on teams, but being alone is the nature of the job of being an artist or writer. How do you hold yourself accountable when it’s just you, solo--with no boss or "job" to hold yourself to? For example, how did you finally write your novel while you were living in your car with just your typewriter and no one else to motivate you?

Steve: That’s a great question. I just ran away from it for so long and in so many different avenues that proved to be dead ends, that I just ran out of places to run to. So the pain of not doing it was worse than the pain of doing it. I never really thought about it from an accountable point of view because I just had to do it, there was no question. I thought, "If I were to crap out now, I’d just have to hang myself." So for me at least, I don’t need anybody else’s opinion to make me go forward. I just know that I’ll be so unhappy inside myself if I don’t. And vice versa. I know I’ll feel good at the end of the day when I do put in the work and do what I need to d[…]

Daniel H. Pink is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Drive and A Whole New Mind, which together have been translated into 31 languages. Read his guest review of Seth Godin's Poke the Box:

Let me begin with a professional and personal disclosure: If Seth Godin weren’t a friend of mine, I would probably hate his guts.

He makes those of us in the word-slinging, meme-spreading trade look like a bunch of ne’er-do-well slackers. He is so preposterously creative and so endlessly productive--a new blog post every day, a new book every year, dozens of efforts to raise money for charity, Squidoo, the Domino Project, and more--that I once suspected "Seth Godin" was really a cover name for an army of elves toiling in a work camp near the Hudson River.

But after reading this remarkable book, I’ve discovered Seth’s secret: He’s willing to poke the box. To start. To initiate. To begin. That’s all.

Indeed, the message of this book is so profoundly simple and so simply profound, I can encapsulate it in a single word.

Go.

Don’t cogitate. Don’t ruminate. Don’t plan on getting started or wait for permission to begin.

Go.

Of course, that’s a little scary. Starting is a risk. Things might not work out. You could flop. But one theme of this book--and it’s a theme that you should write on a rock, imprint on your brain, and inject into your bloodstream--is that we ought to be much more concerned about mediocrity than failure. "If you can’t fail," Seth writes, "it doesn’t count."

Like the man who produced it, Poke the Box is inspired and inspiring. I’ll place it on my shelf alongside two other extraordinary books: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. If you enjoyed those two, you’ll love this one. It will simultaneously stir your heart and kick your butt.

Which brings us to a final question: When should you get started on that project, that business, that work of art only you can deliver to the world?

Seth has the answer to that, too: "Soon is not as good as now."

In other words, go. --Daniel H. Pink
-------------------
A Q&A with Seth Godin

Question: What does it mean to Poke the Box?

Seth Godin: Conformity used to be crucial--fitting in, not standing out. Compliance used to be the heart of every successful organization, every successful career. The reason? We all worked for the system, in the factory, doing what we were told. Now, though, compliance is no longer a competitive advantage.

Poke the Box is about the spark that brings things to life. We need to be nudged away from conformity and toward ingenuity, toward answering unknown questions for ourselves. Even if we fail, as I have done many times in my life, we learn what not to do by experience and doing the new.

This isn’t the same thing as taking a risk. In fact, the riskiest thing we can do right now is nothing.

I’ve had an extraordinary run, creating a dozen nationwide bestsellers, starting Internet companies and giving speeches around the world. The key thing I bring to the projects I take on is not more talent than most (I don’t) or even more hours than most (hardly). My contribution is a willingness to poke, to start, to lean into the project and to get it out the door.

Question: What will I learn from reading Poke the Box?

Seth Godin: Hopefully you will learn lots but do more. Start thinking about when you’ve taken initiative in a way that really meant something to you and your team, your family. When was the last time you did something for the first time? How did it feel?

There are no step-by-step how-to instructions in Poke the Box. Instead, you’ll find a series of layers, a foundation for taking a different approach to your work. Instead of learning to be more compliant, I want to push you to be the one who takes initiative.

Question: Why did you write this book?

Seth Godin: I’ve been fortunate enough to hear from almost a million people over the years, to talk with CEOs and bosses and customers around the world. And they all tell me precisely the same thing: it’s the motive force they demand, the person who will shake things up and move them forward.

Static is not an acceptable state. The status quo is no longer something we want at work or in politics or in any organization we care about.

The market is just waiting for people to step forward. I wrote the book for those people, the ones who’ve been hesitating to take the leap.

Question: Why did you start The Domino Project?

Seth Godin: The Domino Project is my latest attempt at "poking." It’s an independent publishing imprint founded by me and powered by Amazon. This is an opportunity to publish "idea manifestos" committed to readers, rather than being bookstore friendly. It’s named after the domino effect--where one powerful idea spreads down the line, pushing from person to person.

I have two audacious goals: I want to change the people who read (not enough do) and I want to change the way books are published (they’re too hard to find and spread). I honestly believe that a book can change a mind like nothing else, and that’s our focus. To help anyone to do work they’re proud of and to make a difference.

Question: Why Amazon?

Seth Godin: I partnered with Amazon so we could leverage what we both do best--Amazon is the leader in global distribution, multiple format production capabilities, and reaching people in the right way, and I want to spread powerful ideas to the people who want to read them.

For 15 years, Amazon has been building an audience and gaining our trust. Many surveys identify them as the most-trusted new brand in the world. Now that Amazon is interacting with more people more often, they have a chance to bring those customers new ideas in innovative ways. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to bring ideas worth spreading to a huge and eager audience.

Question: Who is Seth Godin?

Seth Godin: I’m an author, entrepreneur, and a person who starts things.
Review
“Seth Godin may be the ultimate entrepreneur for the information age.” --Business Week

“It’s easy to see why people pay to hear what he has to say.” --Time Magazine

One word reviews for Poke the Box

“Embarkable.” --Annie Duke, world poker champion, author and talk show host

“Rut-reversing.” --Sarah Jones, playwright

“Essential.” --Jill Greenberg, photographer, manipulator.org
See all Editorial Reviews

I like most of Seth Godin's ideas, including this one, but to what end is the purpose of this 100 page book that, I believe, would have been suited for a short article or blog post.?

We are all weird, is self-evident in a day when we can choose between a couple of hundred pasta sauces in the supermarket. If you want to buy and learn how to play the ukulele, you will be sure to find like minded people online. The market is no longer of limited choice dictated by others.

Today, you can do, buy, sell, and associate with anyone you want, as long as it is legal, and it's as easy as ever to find it. That pretty much sums it up.

Seth Godin is still an amazing person to listen to and take advice from. I think Seth Godin's book, " Poke the Box" deserves 5 stars.

Preston-Werner’s bet has paid off. GitHub is now profitable. Users can sign up for free and start contributing, but they pay money if they want to privately host code there — starting at $7 per month. GitHub also sells an enterprise product that lets companies run your own version of GitHub behind the corporate firewall. That starts at $5,000 per year, but can cost hundreds of thousands annually for companies with hundreds of coders.
...
When Scott Chabon wrote a book about GitHub, the first fork appeared within a month. It was a German translation of his book. Now, three years later, it’s been translated into 10 languages, with another 10 translations in the works. Half of the traffic to the book’s website comes from China. “Tons of people in China are learning Git because they can read [the book] in Chinese on my website, because somebody provided that,” he says

Sources

Technical Underpinnings
net@night Interview
Personal Email

Stats

16.3 million bookmarks
52 million tags
9.4 million urls
989 GB archived content
A little under 1 hour cumulative downtime since July 8th, 2010.

Platform

MySQL
PHP
Perl
Ubuntu
APC
Sphinx
Cron jobs
S3

Hardware

Machine 1: 64 GB, runs a database master, stores user archives and runs search
Machine 2: 32 GB, runs the failover master, crawls various outside feeds, does background tasks
Machine 3: 16 GB, web server and database slave

Architecture

A copy of the database is kept on all three machines.
The website runs on the 16GB machine. The database fits entirely in RAM and page load times have improved by a factor of 10 or more.
Master-master architecture with an additional read slave. All writes are pointed at one DB, these include bookmark, user, and tag tables.
The second master runs:
Aggregate calculations like global link counts and per-user statistics.
Nightly DB backups using mysqldump. The backup is stored to S3 in a compressed format.
Perl scripts run background tasks:
Downloading outside feeds, caching pages for users with the archive feature enabled, handling incoming email, generating tag clouds, and running backups.
Perl was chosen because of an existing skill set and the large support library available in CPAN.
Features like most popular bookmarks are generated by a cron job that is generally run each night, but are turned off when the load becomes too high.
PHP is used to generate HTML pages:
No templating engine is used. No frameworks are used.
APC is used to cache PHP files.
No other caching is used.
Sphinx is used for the search engine and for global tag pages.

Lessons Learned
Have a mantra. Pinboard has the goals of: being fast, reliable, and terse. They think these are the qualities that will earn and keep customers. When a problem comes up, like massive growth, they always prioritize so that these system qualities are maintained. For example, their first priority is preventing data loss, which dictated changing their server architecture. So the site seems conceptually confusing during a period of growth that's OK...if the site is quickly and reliably saving links.
Start as a paid site from the beginning. The advantage of being a paid site is you don't get the rush of new users, so you can stay small. When the demise of Delicious was announced, if they would have been a free site they would have been down immediately, but being a paid site helps smooth out the growth.
Charge based on the number of users. Pinboard has a unique pricing scheme that is designed to scale better than services with free accounts. The price is based on the current number of users. As the number of users goes up the price goes up. People are paying for the resources are using. This is similar, but enticingly different than the Amazon or Google App Engine payment model. This is a one time fee. For an extra $25/year all your bookmarks can be cached and searched.
Use boring and faded technologies. These help ensure the site will never lose data and be very fast.
A rule of thumb: if you are excited to play around with something, it probably doesn't belong in production.
Make switching as simple as possible. Pinboard removes adoption objections by automatically importing and exporting to Delicious and by supporting the Delicious API.
Staying small is much more fun. When you can offer personal customer support and interact directly with users you'll have a much better time.
Compare machine costs based on dollars per GB of RAM or storage. Pinboard originally ran on Slicehost and Linode, but they moved to a different service when the cost expressed in dollars per GB of RAM or storage was far higher, without any offsetting benefits.
Turn off features under load. Turn off search, for example, if you need performance elsewhere.
A medium to large site is the most expensive. Small sites are relatively cheap to run, but at some point during the growth curve the marginal cost of each new user increases. It costs more because data has to be split across multiple machines and those machines must be bought and managed. There's a scaling cost. Once you get into millions of users it gets cheaper again. Those first steps from where you go to a tiny site to a medium or medium large site are painful and expensive.
Call the shots on your own product. Depending on who you believe, Delicious was harmed by the continual layoffs at Yahoo, but the real problem was the Delicious team were not the decisions makers. New features were prioritized over reliability, stability, and innovation. It doesn't matter how hard or long you work when your fate is in the hands of others.
Small doesn't always work. A storm of new users added over seven million bookmarks, more than were collected over the entire lifetime of the service, and traffic to the site was over a hundred times normal. As a result normal background tasks like search, archiving, and polling outside feeds were suspended. An elastic strategy to handle spike loads like these isn't all bad.
Look at outlier page load times, not median page load times to judge the quality of your service. It's not acceptable if a page can take multiple seconds to load even is most of the page load times are acceptable.
Punt on features to build quickly. Pinboard was built quickly partly because social and discovery features were deferred by saying "go somewhere else for that." Other sites will let you share links with friends and discover new and interesting content, but no other site acts like a personal archive and that's Pinboard's niche.
Segregate services by machine. When a web server shares a machine with other services the web server can take a hit. Another example is once each day the search indexer would wrestle with MySQL over memory while it did a full index rebuild.

Related Articles

What The “Great Delicious Exodus” Looked Like For Pin-Sized Competitor Pinboard by Erick Schonfeld. The service wasn’t handling a huge number of requests to begin with—a few hundred per minute at peak—but that number increased about tenfold to over 2,500 requests per minute.
Quick thoughts on Pinboard by Matt Haughey
Back To Basics: Ditch Delicious, Use Pinboard by Michael Arrington
Why Pinboard.in Is My Favorite Bookmarking Service by Ben Gross
del.icio.us, Thank You : Pinboard, Welcome by Stephen O'Grady

"Was wird sich in den nächsten fünf bis zehn Jahren nicht ändern?"

Um solch große Innovationsprojekte anzustoßen, stellte Jeff Bezos mit seinen Kollegen bei Amazon immer wieder folgende Frage in den Mittelpunkt: "Was wird sich in den nächsten fünf bis zehn Jahren nicht ändern?" Die meisten Unternehmen machen es umgekehrt: Sie verwenden viel Zeit auf die berechtigte Frage, was sich voraussichtlich in den nächsten fünf bis zehn Jahren überhaupt ändern wird. Die gegenteilige Frage wird häufig vernachlässigt. Doch wer sie beantwortet, gewinnt unweigerlich ein tieferes Verständnis der Kundenbedürfnisse und der Unternehmensumwelt.

Der Text ist ein bearbeiteter Auszug aus dem Buch "Management - Von den Besten lernen".

My advice is to train yourself to recognize and note the small (but important) reactions that you have when you’re working with your own apps. Dismiss your professional knowledge about the effort it will take and consider the experience alone. Only when you’re willing and able to do what’s necessary to perfect a feature will you be accomplishing your best work. Your exit criteria should be when you’re delighted to use your own app or feature and surprised that you were able to pull it off.

You’ve identified a deep pain at a large company. You land a contract to build them the solution. (Maybe you worked there or a co-founder or investor has some juice). The contract says you retain the IP and are allowed to sell a product like this to other companies. (Often they’ll agree if it means a steep hourly discount or cheaper maintenance costs.) You build the product, then you have your banner customer and go get others. In the worst cast, you can’t sell to others, but at least you made money.
You think you have a great idea. You hit your network and the road, calling twenty people at large companies, all of whom are in your potential market. You can’t get to all the decision-markers, but you can find people who are influencers (here’s how) and who can accurately say whether your product would be desirable, and at what price. After interviewing everyone, you tailor your product accordingly, and when you’re ready for beta you have twenty people literally waiting to u

As I wrote earlier, a lot of ideas are cool but they seldom provide value to anyone (and hence seldom make money). “Value” is not some abstract concept I am throwing around. Your product/service is valuable if a lot of people will become sad if it didn’t exist or if you take it away from them. Your idea has no value if nobody cares whether it exists or not. For example, you decide to open a cafeteria chain with iPad menus in college campuses. It is a cool idea, for sure. It may even get you on TechCrunch. But, frankly, would your target market bother if such an idea didn’t exist or if you open up one cafeteria and decide to shut it down? The campus crowd has other alternatives for cafeteria and that is why they won’t cringe when you shut it down. They would not bother with your cafeteria. An iPad menu isn’t a strong enough value to anyone.

Like I said on Twitter earlier today, the people who REALLY taught me "How To" do anything worthwhile, didn't write a big ol' list of instructions, didn't hold my hand, they just led by example.
The great British advertising man, Dave Trott once did that for me, back in the day...
THIS is what REAL leadership means. THIS is what REAL inspiration means.
And you'd better get used to it. Because in the world we now live in, there are no more jobs. There are no more bosses. There are only clients and customers from now on.
The employees who don't get that, are dead in the water. And so are the "bosses" who still like to be treated as "bosses". Good riddance to them all.
So... go read Dave Trott's stuff. Find out who he is. Go learn from a MASTER. Do it. Rock on.

J) Love it. You can only make money doing what you love. If you work a nine to five job that you hate then you’re on a leash and you’ll only make enough to get by and you won’t behappy. If you love something, you’ll get the knowledge, you’ll get the contacts, you’ll build the site with the features nobody else has, you’ll scare the competition, you’ll wow the customers.

I didn’t enjoy writing finance articles. I’d write a finance article for some random finance site and then repost this on jamesaltucher.com. I had zero traffic.

Then I decided to write articles I enjoyed. To get back to my true roots where I loved writing and reading. I also lwanted to really explore all of my failures, my miseries, my pain. In public. I love being honest and intimate with people. I love building community. I love emailing with readers. That was about a little over a year ago I decided to make the shift where I was just going to open the kimono at jamesaltucher.com and say everything I wanted t

Are you leaving behind an easily found trail of accomplishment? Few people are interested in your resume any more. Plenty are interested in what you've done. The second thing you'll need to do is regularly note what you produce in...

A year into my first startup, my first major product epiphany was to never, never, ever try to build a product you couldn’t be a user for. That may be obvious, but I still read people discussing strategies for building products that they don’t use. There is no better user study, no more accurate persona than asking yourself what is good. There are probably product people out there that can do it, but, no offense, it’s probably not you, and it’s certainly not me.

The reality is that rich, successful people negotiate. (This is one important way in which they get — and stay — rich.) It is an all-day-every-day thing in much of the business world, which is where most rich people get their money.

Schmitz kam so zu Geld, investierte, spekulierte. Für die Technik aber waren stets andere zuständig – Matthias O. beispielsweise, aber auch in der Hacker-Community anerkannte Sicherheitsexperten. Es habe »mehr als nur Kim Schmitz« gegeben, bestätigt einer der damaligen Mitarbeiter. Ein Zugpferd sei Schmitz gewesen, der vor allem das Spiel mit der Öffentlichkeit beherrschte, sagt er: »Ein Bericht in der Wirtschaftswoche brachte uns keinen neuen Kunden, nach einem Bericht in der Bild-Zeitung rannte man uns die Türen ein.«

If you're a tech company or a marketer, your goal is to be the first thing people do when they start their day. If you're an artist, a leader or someone seeking to make a difference, the first thing you do should be to lay tracks to accomplish your goals, not to hear how others have reacted/responded/insisted to what happened yesterday.

“The biggest failure you can have in life is not trying at all.” ~ Emil Motycka

Closed mouths don’t get fed

I’ve written before about the importance of networking and moving from wallflower to evangelist. Kobayashi was adamant about the importance of this. “Closed mouths don’t get fed,” he would say. “If you want something, you have to either ask for it or walk up and take it.”

We can’t expect good fortune to fall into our lap. It’s our responsibility to create the circumstances for it and then capture that good fortune. The meek may inherit the earth, but they’ll be getting it from Kobayashi.

Be a badass

“There’s only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that’s being so good at what you do that they can’t ignore you.” – Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

My friend Chris DeVore makes a comparison I love: pirate ships as organizational models. Pirate ships combine an “us against the world” mentality with a hunt for treasure. This crucible of chaos and ambition somehow allows unstructured groups of mercenaries to complete complex tasks without killing

"Real artists ship"
- Steve Jobs

Hugh MacLeod is an artist, cartoonist, and Web 2.0 pundit whose blog, gapingvoid.com, has two million unique monthly visitors. His first book, Ignore Everybody, was an Amazon Top Ten Business Book of the Year and a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of Linchpin:

This is by far Seth’s most passionate book. He’s pulling fewer punches. He’s out for blood. He’s out to make a difference. And that glorious, heartfelt passion is obvious on every page, even if it is in Seth’s usual quiet, lucid, understated manner.

A linchpin, as Seth describes it, is somebody in an organization who is indispensable, who cannot be replaced—her role is just far too unique and valuable. And then he goes on to say, well, seriously folks, you need to be one of these people, you really do. To not be one is economic and career suicide.

No surprises there—that’s exactly what one would expect Seth to say. But here’s where it gets interesting.

In his best-known book, Purple Cow,

If you want to do, do it fearlessly, do it on the side, wake up early and do it, stay up late and do it, but DO IT. And the right exit will come. For Bukowski, it’s when a publisher offered him $100 a month (just $100 a month) for life if he quit his job and would just write and the publisher would have first dibs on anything he wrote. That publisher became very rich.

The second answer, which is almost my default answer on anything is: do the Daily Pratice. If you stay physically healthy, surround yourself more and more with positive people and do not engage with the crappy people, continually come up with new ideas (the way Bukowski would write every day no matter what), and spiritually cultivate a sense of surrender and gratitude and honesty, then the answers will come at the right time.

Be Remarkable

When I talk about assets, cash is the least interesting of all of these. Instead, I'm talking about more intangible assets like skills, reputation, relationships, attention & fame. I'm of the strong opinion that the most reliable path towards startup success is to focus relentlessly on acquiring interesting assets and then execute on the startups that naturally fall out of them.
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Without great software design SO would not have been able to retain users at the rate they did. Joel Spolsky & Jeff Atwood had both been thinking very deeply about the structure and organization of social software for a very long time and avoided a number of obvious mistakes in the fundamental foundations of the software. Here's a blog post from Joel in 2003, thinking about these issues: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ar... and the Stack Overflow podcasts are a secret mine of excellent social experience design insight: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/ca...

Neither Joel or J...

Goal reached! My regular income still seems to grow. My lastly introduced in my “Make Money on Android” eBook method seems to be working very well (not only for me – check lastly published success story and comments). As you will see in the numbers I have no reason to complain. My current income generated online lets me to live in my country quite comfortably. Lastly most of my work time has been spent on Android Development. Preparing updates and some new software in preparation. Moreover I have found great way of increasing my productivity. Read this post further for more details.
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Thanks! I’m new to your blog–do you have a post explaining your dev environment? If not, can you say a few words?
Reply

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KreCi
November 28, 2011 at 2:37 pm

Sure. It is Eclipse + Android SDK. Testing on emulator, HTC Sensation (XE) and now on Archos 80 G9 tablet.
Reply

YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE.
This is a curious rule and it took me a long time to learn because in fact at the beginning of my practice I felt the opposite. Professionalism required that you didn’t particularly like the people that you worked for or at least maintained an arms length relationship to them, which meant that I never had lunch with a client or saw them socially. Then some years ago I realised that the opposite was true. I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection. I am talking about a client and you sharing some common ground. That in fact your view of life is someway congruent with the client, otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle.

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CONCLUSION – GET PHILOSOPHICAL, DON’T TAKE CRAP, GET WHAT YOU WANT

Start living a principaled life and things get easier and more enjoyable.

The rabbit hole goes pretty deep – I keep learning and re-learning and re-re-learning this stuff.

I do think artists deserve to be treated better, but that means demanding to be treated better.

If you take only one thing from this piece, it’s to lay down a set of principals about what your time, your art, and your life are worth, and to explain them in advance. In the process, educate people about how best to work with you, and immediately call someone out when they start disrespecting your principals and your life.

We’re on the planet for a brief blink of an eye, a single warm teardrop on the cold oceans of eternity. It’s too short to share that time with people who won’t respect yours, and yet eternally long when shared with people doing beautiful and creative things. Godspeed.

Startup buds! Listen up...We're starting to get some flak for going a bit over zealous on the minimum viable product strategy. Robert Scoble just ripped into us for approaching him with too many poorly-constructed concepts that are not ready for the light of the day. Dismiss his criticism at your own peril. I think he was right.

Reid Hoffman's Rule #6 is "Launch early enough that you are embarrassed by your first product release." He's also right.

Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.

And it’s that process that is the magic.
—
Steve Jobs (via Daring Fireball)

In my eyes, if you start some project and you bet the house on it you gain tremendous respect, no matter what the end result. Failure isn't an option, simply because failure is inevitable.

Thomas Suarez is in the 6th grade at a middle school in the South Bay. And while most of his peers are probably fussing over new soccer kleets or watching the Disney channel, he’s creating iOS apps and giving TED Talks.

Suarez, whose not even old enough to have a Facebook account, has been fascinated by computers and technology since before kindergarten. He’s established his own company, CarrotCorp and has made two iOS apps that are currently in the App Store: Earth Fortune, which displays different colors of Earth depending on what your fortune is and his most successful- Bustin Jieber, a Whac-a-Mole for Justin Bieber.

Complete guide to creating premium WordPress themes: how to gain a solid user-base, what to include, and most importantly what to leave out.