How to Build a Million-Dollar Business

Just pitch until you sell to 1 person. That person will tell their friends and create 1 more customer, and so on. Now you can just sit back and wait while the millions roll in. The rest, as they say, is maaaaagggggiiiiic.

In other words, to build a Million dollar business, first you need to... build a million dollar business.

Here's a list of investing newsletters that cost more than $25/month.

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/newsletters/newsletters.asp?...

There's even one that is $100 month and I've seen others that are even more.

The difference between these and "high-quality magazines" is that these are extremely targeted to a specific audience with a minimum of advertising.

I think Trizle makes more sense if you read it in context with everything else on there; my total apologies for the ambiguity.

Some points:

1. The typical $1M business has about 5 full-time employees working on it (~$200K in revenue per employee); so while building a business that generates that much by yourself is possible, it's out of the norm. I should've definitely mentioned that.

2. You probably don't want to throw X market dollars at something without understanding your conversion rates first. First, get your average conversion rates (you can do that through statistical inference) from a random sample of your target market, determine if the model is profitable, then gradually expand your reach.

3. The "$25 bi-weekly newsletter" is just one product example; you can replace it with whatever product you're selling, and then use the model to determine your conversion rates to get an idea of how many pitches it'll take with your current model. For instance, selling a $200 product would take 10x less pitches than a $20 product (in terms of revs) to make X.

4. The free market creates incentives to provide as much value to your customers as possible; it's a broken system when you let get-rich-quick folks exploit others and get rich; mechanisms drive society, and that's why the Trizle articles tend to emphasize that providing immense customer value as the sole way to building a solid company for the long-term in a free-market economy.

There are no get-rich-quick-schemes, and any model that tells you that you can consistently earn greater returns than Warren Buffett's annual ROE of 20% is likely suspect. Solid, long-term companies, are built over years/decades.

------

BTW, I love Ycombinator's board (pleasantly surprise someones posted the article here); I come back daily to read the stuff you guys/gals post on here. I come from a technical background (EE degree, using Rails daily), so it's always a fun read every time.