41–50 of 173 posts
Frankly, this stuff was really shady and sketchtastic. I guess I suggest finding a pastor-type and talking about right behaviors. How come you never tried to make something people wanted?
When you're making tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in your 20s, why would you want to do something different?
Like many, I was tempted into these same areas - driven by success stories and my own technical knowledge which fooled me into thinking it would be "easy". What I found is there's lot of money to be made in... telling people how to make money! Those guys like Shoemaker who have an almost cult following end up making an empire on those in the "pyramid" below them. Not to say this is shady, just that the real "riches"…
To be honest, HN is full of this stuff too - Double your freelancing - Guys who create a not-very-well-known startup and then start pushing guides on how to be successful - Email marketing, write 3 tutorials on topic X to build your list and then spam your ebook. Don't get me wrong, things are better targeted and less shady. It just feels like people spend more time selling their systems than they do using them. It l…
Agreed, and some of it (as you mention) is quite ingeniously marketed as well, e.g. pushing a load of free content that occasionally suggests using a certain SaaS app as part of the success strategy.
It just feels like people spend more time selling their systems than they do using them. It looks like 'snake oil'.
I'm not sure that it's always snake oil exactly, more that it's simply easier for these people to make their money training others, especially compared to making money with the systems they're pushing.
Like many, I was tempted into these same areas - driven by success stories and my own technical knowledge which fooled me into thinking it would be "easy". What I found is there's lot of money to be made in... telling people how to make money! Those guys like Shoemaker who have an almost cult following end up making an empire on those in the "pyramid" below them. Not to say this is shady, just that the real "riches"…
This always disturbs me that only a handful people make it big such as Shoemaker while the rest of the population sample barely make ends meet. I don't know if this has anything to do with some obscure physical law like these phenomenons that best described by a normal/Gaussian distribution or just explained by the probability theory (read: sheer luck) and the success ratio of this magnitude in these "games" or life…
Like many, I was tempted into these same areas - driven by success stories and my own technical knowledge which fooled me into thinking it would be "easy". What I found is there's lot of money to be made in... telling people how to make money! Those guys like Shoemaker who have an almost cult following end up making an empire on those in the "pyramid" below them. Not to say this is shady, just that the real "riches"…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair I did point out that blowing the money was an obvious mistake on my part. Those numbers don't include expenses either. Actually most of the money was lost to testing new ideas.
I found it odd that even after some success, you had to borrow money and look for credit limit increases. Or did you have the money and it was just that CC was the method of payment?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I'm somewhat surprised that anyone would have spent 10 years flailing in this arena and not learned that. "I’ve always had some type of entrepreneur trapped inside me. [...] I decided I’ll start a blog and make money via AdSense ads." This is not the thought process of someone with the competence to know how to learn effectively. It sounds like someone who just wants to be a cog in a money wheel, both learning as li…
Yep. This guy takes "get rich quick" to the next level. In that same time period he could have founded real startups with real products. Instead, he got 10 years of putting his blood, sweat, and tears into bullshit money making schemes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found it odd that even after some success, you had to borrow money and look for credit limit increases. Or did you have the money and it was just that CC was the method of payment?
Affiliate networks usually payout on net-30 max, or net-7 minimum. Google and other ad networks take payments on net-3 or less. So you have to float money for ads while you wait to get paid.
Turned out to be a humblebrag with no new insights into the affiliate networks. I think it basically states that the train has left and you are 10 years late.