How I Went From An Idea To Paying Customers In 3 Days

"If anything tells me HN has gone down the pan, it's that this post didn't take off there. This is gold!"

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.

1. Problems too trivial to expend energy and time solving once and for all. (It's easier to pay the small cost each time you encounter the problem). Not marketable.

2. Problems you can solve, but everyone else already have partial or 'good enough' solutions for. Competitive, no innovation.

3. Problems you think you can solve, but you really can't. Doomed.

4. Problems you know you can't solve on your own, or with the resources available to you. Expensive.

5. Problems outside of your area of expertise.

6. Problems you have, but really aren't problems to anyone else.

You know those websites, where this wonderfully crafted copy leads you on and on and on about selling you something special and magical without ever really revealing what it is. Typically, at the end of the nothing-sale will be a heavily-priced video or ebook that supposedly contains a very deep insight which is so precious that its actual properties can't even be hinted at before giving the author some money right now.

This article does the same thing, but on a meta level. What we get to experience here is not the nothing-sale itself, but the marketing of the capability to make that sale. It does contain just enough hints and bits to keep you reading, just enough truisms to have you nodding along every once in a while, but at the end very little is actually being reported.

I actually admire this, but know that I can't (or maybe don't want to) replicate it on my own. I do admit that features and specifics matter a great deal to me, both when I sell something and when I consume. It's not difficult to recognize that I do have these unrealistic expectations over the need for substance which result in me being a terrible sales person.

So, hat off to people who get to make tons of cash off of this ability, more power to them and all. But in a very real sense they do exist right at the edge between online scam and shopping channel. "Sell as close to nothing as you can get away with" is indeed an interesting optimization problem, and probably an act of performance art.