> I already spend over $300/mo on SaaS tools to run the community
Would be interesting to know the details.
Congrats on your project!
I launched a paid community in one month
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Re: I launched a paid community in one month
#52When first visiting bloggingfordevs site, it looks, to me, like an infomercial. I'm not immediately convinced I need to give you my email address in order to gain some personal value. That's not to say it wouldn't possibly be a great experience if I did so - it's just that, from my initial impressions, it doesn't seem particularly unique and valuable. But hey, if it's working and growing, congrats!
Hey there! Thanks for your feedback, that's really interesting because most people have told me they like the conversational style of my writing. No worries if you're not into it, just curious what felt "infomercially" to you. Is it that the email form is kind of immediate? I changed that recently before launching on product hunt -- it used to just be a paragraph and two input fields. Thanks for checking it out in an…
I can't speak for kerabatsos, but when I see something like "How my paid community made $5K in it's first week", I tend to automatically add "... and YOU CAN TOO, with my special patented secret methods!"
Writing like that is bait, because it will generate money from marks without even verifying whether the claim is true. If I take the bait, then I'm a sucker, and I'd rather keep my money and not be a sucker. To turn phrases in that way is sensationalism, and while I'm sure it works for you, I believe it trades short term cash for long term trust. When the next sucker finds that he can't reproduce your results, there's a good chance he'll feel shafted.
Re: I launched a paid community in one month
#53Just in case others missed it, the lion's share of the revenue was not recurring — it was lifetime purchases ($3,420 @ $180 each). The recurring revenue for the first month was about $2k.
I'm also not clear on the "in one month" aspect of this, since the author stresses that most purchasers were people that were on her 4,000-person newsletter list. Presumably that was built up over a much longer time period?
Still, congrats to @mlent for launching this, adding value for so many people, and taking the time to share her experience!
Re: I launched a paid community in one month
#54I have noticed that the way to make money on the internet is to provide services to people wanting to make money on the internet.
Re: I launched a paid community in one month
#55Congrats, it looks like you effectively monetised your network. I have met some people who wanted to do this, did have something to offer yet failed quite spectacularly to the point of becoming homeless and destitute. I guess it all depends on who you know. A lot of people (like me) are simply unwilling to pay more than something is worth in terms of time invested. But it proves that if you are popular amongst the right kind of crowd that is able and willing to spend, it is possible to do it.
Re: I launched a paid community in one month
#56About 20 years ago I was coming across a website called something like filthyrichguy.com (I can't remember the exact name). This site described how rich the guy owning this site was and how you could become rich too. How? By just buying his book, of course. I was mesmerized by this site and it's audacious design for a solid hour or two. I searched around the web for more information and ended up in this circle jerk o…
I think I can give you my perspective here, since I am part of Monica's community. I started blogging late this summer and quickly found how hard it is to write and be read. As an engineer I of course started researching how to increase my readership and I ended up down the infinite sewer hole of content marketing and "how to game search engines" aka SEO. (If you want to understand why the web looks like this and why…
> I of course started researching how to increase my readership
Do you mind if I ask why you want to increase your readership?
What is your goal as a dev who also blogs?
I ask because I've spent a decade building my blog and social media following (which I have to say, is pretty decent at this point), but there has never really been a "goal" or "purpose", and I'm really only thinking aobut ways to monetize it well now, after many thousands of hours of work.
Re: I launched a paid community in one month
#57I think community and habit is really what we pay for in education, we just dont realise it.
If the Paid packaging of the product had been course + community, we wouldn’t have seen the negative messages here.
Re: I launched a paid community in one month
#58About 20 years ago I was coming across a website called something like filthyrichguy.com (I can't remember the exact name). This site described how rich the guy owning this site was and how you could become rich too. How? By just buying his book, of course. I was mesmerized by this site and it's audacious design for a solid hour or two. I searched around the web for more information and ended up in this circle jerk o…
I think I can give you my perspective here, since I am part of Monica's community. I started blogging late this summer and quickly found how hard it is to write and be read. As an engineer I of course started researching how to increase my readership and I ended up down the infinite sewer hole of content marketing and "how to game search engines" aka SEO. (If you want to understand why the web looks like this and why…
For anyone joining the community for a recurring fee, at what point does it make sense for the members to just make a free offsite?
Re: I launched a paid community in one month
#59About 20 years ago I was coming across a website called something like filthyrichguy.com (I can't remember the exact name). This site described how rich the guy owning this site was and how you could become rich too. How? By just buying his book, of course. I was mesmerized by this site and it's audacious design for a solid hour or two. I searched around the web for more information and ended up in this circle jerk o…
This remind me that Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy said that if Nietzsche was really an egoist, he would not be preaching it.
Wow, you win HN for today.
Re: I launched a paid community in one month
#60About 20 years ago I was coming across a website called something like filthyrichguy.com (I can't remember the exact name). This site described how rich the guy owning this site was and how you could become rich too. How? By just buying his book, of course. I was mesmerized by this site and it's audacious design for a solid hour or two. I searched around the web for more information and ended up in this circle jerk o…
> About 20 years ago I was coming across a website called something like filthyrichguy.com (I can't remember the exact name). Possibly the Rich Jerk. I don't know how much money they had, but they certainly lived up to at least half the name. (Edit: It occurred to me that there were probably loads of these things; I always just assumed, maybe wrongly, TRJ was the original/worst/best.)
Maybe I should start a community of bloggers telling each other how to better compete with each other. But what to call it?
The Something Jerk?
Maybe...Circle?