31–40 of 261 posts
Thomas deserves all the credit for building and selling his business, but the value of this point here is critical, in my mind. IMO key takeaways are (1) knowing lots of people helps a lot, and (2) asking for help/daring to talk about your project helps a lot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a millennial myself, I would like the need for income taken off the table so that I can find a recurring source of meaningful work.
This is such a modern problem too. No matter what anyone feels about it having to farm crops to eat was definitely meaningful work a hundred years ago. Even if you were being exploited in a factory suicide was common but mostly from abuse and injury rather than the vacuousness of the job. Its wholly contemporary to invent bullshit jobs and imagine complexity to keep people at desks en masse, leaving them with such a…
You gave us RSS feeds and then we would index them and send you the output without having to deal with the insanity of RSS feeds.
This was a decade ago though.
I've been running it since and now it's more of a massive search engine of content - nearly a petabyte at this point.
We have an Elasticsearch API which our customers query. We also have a streaming API if you just want to listen to the crawl data directly.
It's been a wild ride but here's my big takeaway - if your company is profitable it actually might be because you're sitting on something MASSIVE and don't realize it.
Datastreamer was the first company in the content indexing space and we were WAY ahead of everyone else.
I was more focused on enjoying life, traveling, backpacking, etc.
In retrospect when you're sitting on a rocket it might make sense to buy more gas and light up that bad boy.
I'm actually in the middle of a (mild) pivot of Datastreamer right now. We think it might have significant value for the coming 'code war' we're in right now with Russia.
With companies continually looking at social media as a way to manipulate democratic societies these governments need tools (and data) to figure out where they're being attacked and how their citizens are being manipulated.
I created a successful side project back in 2014. It is still running and making 20 times more than I would get with a normal job. But i was lucky. Lucky to be born in a rich country. Lucky because I was given a computer at the age of 5. Lucky because I had unlimited education opportunities. Lucky because I had a friend who gave me access to something I needed for my business. And many other lucks. I will never deny…
In hindsight, all these stories seem to have a clear thread running through them which can be replicated by anyone with reasonable intelligence, drive, and time. In practice that particular thread likely required all kinds of environmental details to occur - details the entrepreneur might not have noticed at the time, might have forgotten about later, or might be discounting as unimportant.
However, at the end of the day, you are taking a risk, it's a gamble. What stops most people is the fear of failure. This fear isn't necessarily unwarranted. As the author points out, he has a previous failed startup. Most people don't have the drive to work hundreds of hours after work and possibly invest their own hard earned cash in a project they suspect deep down might not actually pan out. I know I find it difficult.
Still, I don't dislike these stories. It's good if it inspires people to take (calculated) risks, and it is possible to learn from failures. Though I would also say that yeah, there's probably some self-selection going on. The people out there with 2 or 3 failed attempts at monetizing side-projects probably don't feel super eager to write a blog post and tell us all how we can improve our lives by following in their footsteps.
Goes into good details about the tactics used to come up with an idea and then recruit the first few customers. After signing up $5k/month revenue it meant he needed to generate 5,000 leads per month for those customers. That is the hard bit, how did he do that on a side project? He says that the income was passive, so how did he generate 5,000 targeted leads passively? That is the magic, not the ability to recruit s…
I imagine he made a quick set of tutorials for his outsourced contractors and had his virtual assistant he found on oDesk do the hiring and setting up of those contractors.
This quote from the article is wild: "Customers have to train their team and the billing is variable so your cost per lead ranges from $.50 to $5" You can beat that number paying people $20/hr to do this stuff, let alone exploiting people out in the Philippines on I'm sure the not livable wages he's paying them(Aka the fallacy of low rent/cost of living in developing economies).
Sigh... you know we're at the end of the cycle when it's just a bunch of outsourcers with marketing backgrounds.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Who else would recommend that someone follow the path that “led to depression, social isolation, and the hardest time of my life” just because they got lucky in the end? One of my favorite Ewan McGregor quotes from watching Long Way Round recently was when he would say ”This is the part that really sucks right now and is just so hard it makes you wanna cry, but it’s the part we remember most fondly later” He said t…
What about sucky experiences that don't end well?
I witnessed "Play #3" firsthand. The first startup for which I worked (developing a peer-to-peer learning system that paired up students to learn off one another, whether in person or via video chat) had an uphill battle getting customers and investors because we had to convince them that the problem our product solved was actually a problem they had. Our product happened to chiefly operate by integrating with a diff…
I created a successful side project back in 2014. It is still running and making 20 times more than I would get with a normal job. But i was lucky. Lucky to be born in a rich country. Lucky because I was given a computer at the age of 5. Lucky because I had unlimited education opportunities. Lucky because I had a friend who gave me access to something I needed for my business. And many other lucks. I will never deny…
I worked for a mom + pop Amazon seller (manufacture + ship from China to America, stick packaging on it, send it in to Fulfillment by Amazon, collect a check) He's probably worth $50m as one of the top 250 sellers. Probably ~20 SKUs. Tons of competitors trying to bring him down but his product has so many reviews that it is just a money printer. He was smart to be at the right place at the right time. He undercut the…
Stupid question, how could you possibly automate lead generation? For that matter, how do you do it manually? Search for potential customers and read up about their business?
- Email (spam) blast > Landing page data entry form
- Game or content paywall > submit personal info to bypass.