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How I’m Making Five-Figures A Month Off Bootstrapped Products

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Re: How I’m Making Five-Figures A Month Off Bootstrapped Products

#111

Post by coliveira »

patio11 wrote: post #49
31reasons wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"most software developers didn't choose their profession out of a burning desire to become a marketer." I agree, if you choose to be a pure software programmer type then of course you can be just that. You can work in a core team or do research in academia. But if you have an entrepreneur itch you have to learn marketing and sales. In fact its pretty fun once you begin to realize that marketing also has lot of intell…

Also being a dev who can market is an unfair advantage over substantially all devs and substantially all marketers. It is seriously unreal. An example near and dear to my heart: consider an engineer, a marketer, and one of us weird chimeras all studying a graph of feature adoption among the userbase. The engineer things "Hmm, only 20% of the customers use X. That's unfortunate. Maybe they don't need it." The marketer…

Agreed that this may be news for lots of programmers, but I think you're overstating their advantage. I once took a serious marketing course in a business school, and the idea of A/B testing is very old. Any professional marketer knows about it, and is currently being done by people that don't know anything about coding (by asking programmers to code it for them).

Re: How I’m Making Five-Figures A Month Off Bootstrapped Products

#112

Post by ryanwaggoner »

mingmecca wrote: post #110
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing is mostly about deception and half-truths, and promoting a product effectively means maximizing the positives and minimizing/omitting the negatives. It's extremely telling that you consider this to be an accurate description of marketing.

Please explain.

Programmer: "Programmers think that X is Y because X is Y."

Re: How I’m Making Five-Figures A Month Off Bootstrapped Products

#113

Post by jaggederest »

bdunn wrote: post #24
pault wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you market to someone that is immediately skeptical of any long form sales letter promising five figure a month income?

For every 1 person who fits that profile, there are 10 that don't :-) I meticulously track the results I'm getting, and have tested a variant that ISN'T a long form sales letter. Guess which won out?

Also you're clearly eliminating the skeptics, which is a good way to screen those with actual buying potential aka suckers ;)

Re: How I’m Making Five-Figures A Month Off Bootstrapped Products

#114

Post by varjag »

ahoyhere wrote: post #93
patio11 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is upside down when college-educated white and Asian males making $60k+ a year ($40 an hour programmers) are "the weak", isn't it? I just have to put that out there. Vis-a-vis businesses it can actually make sense, because any business which is e.g. hiring an intermediate Ruby developer for $40 an hour is exploiting him, but "Five figures a month is unachievably high! There are no reliable ways of earning t…

If you know where I can hire decent Rails developers for $100 an hour or less, please let me know! That's not the kind of rate I see. Just a couple weeks ago a talented 15-year-old in Belarus told me his rate was $100/hr. And when I said "Sorry, you don't have the experience to justify that rate for me," he told me his last client paid just a little less.

This is not a typical rate in Belarus. A competent Java developer would net you €25 or so.

Re: How I’m Making Five-Figures A Month Off Bootstrapped Products

#115

Post by righyeah »

zenocon wrote: post #89
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this outlook really sad. I paid $39 for Brennan's ebook (thanks to a $10 off coupon) and I didn't know him from Adam when I bought it. Literally don't think I had ever heard of him, but someone on HN recommended it. I read the whole thing in one sitting and the very next day, sent out two project proposals at a 50% bump in my normal hourly rates. One guy balked, one guy just said ok without comment. That simpl…

Why not just raise your rate regardless of some book -- isn't that really the take away message? I've also been consulting as an independent for 7 years now. I have not raised my rate, but nor have I lowered it (ever). I have turned down plenty jobs, and some have walked away because they did not want to pay the rate, but I have been doing this 40+ hours / week for 7 years now. I do feel like it is time to raise my r…

You've also nailed it with your first sentence.

The answer to your question of whether the book is necessary is in the blog post (I think marketers call this a "sales letter"?). It is in bold. It describes a person who wants to pay money in order to improve their life.

Now, as to anyone claiming to have paid money and had their life improve, we may know that paying money was not necessary and not at cause for any change in their life. That was something they did on their own. But the blogger is OK with that. In fact he sees it as a key to his enterprise. He says the product (web app, etc.) does not necessarily matter. You simply need to find people who want to pay money to improve their life.

The ethical question is do you care if 99% of them may fail to improve it by simply paying money? That's not your fault of course. But it makes you wonder what exactly you are selling. Maybe you are just a sink for a known type of source --> The type of person looking to spend money on information to "improve their life", despite the availability of the same information without cost; and despite the fact that the key to improving their life may have nothing to do with impulsively buying an ebook.

Not everyone will answer that ethical question the same way. If they did we would not be having a discussion about this.

Any Rails developer can skip the ebook and just raise their rates for new clients. What's the worst that can happen? The only way to know what the market will bear is to test it. Alternatively they could stop coding and sell ebooks to other developers with the knowledge that "some people are looking to spend money to improve their lives and it really doesn't matter what that something is". It doesn't have to be a application you spent large blocks of time developing. An ebook on how easy it is to make money (by finding people ready to spend money to improve their lives) that you wrote in a single day may be just fine.

Re: How I’m Making Five-Figures A Month Off Bootstrapped Products

#117

Post by reinhardt »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #95
zenocon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just raise your rate regardless of some book -- isn't that really the take away message? I've also been consulting as an independent for 7 years now. I have not raised my rate, but nor have I lowered it (ever). I have turned down plenty jobs, and some have walked away because they did not want to pay the rate, but I have been doing this 40+ hours / week for 7 years now. I do feel like it is time to raise my r…

1. I could have raised my rate at any time, but I didn't until I read the book. If you haven't raised your rates for seven years , I'm guessing that you've thrown away six figures of lost income. I say this based on an assumption founded on the observation that something like 98% of freelance developers are undercharging for no reason at all. I was. You are. Even just taking inflation into account, you should be char…

We are having this discussion because this particular book happened to make it to the HN front page. Everything you write would be equally valid justifications to buy every self-help or get-rich-quick book out there. In fact, that's one of the standard marketing tricks such ebooks employ: comparing the modest price of the ebook with the potential (typically best case) reward. There must be a name for this common fallacy but can't think of it off the top of my head.

Re: How I’m Making Five-Figures A Month Off Bootstrapped Products

#118

Post by bravoyankee »

AVTizzle wrote: post #106
larrys wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I challenge you it's for discussion. Also to point out that others might be thinking the things that I think (at least some people) but not raise the issue. And you could loose business from them. They might look at your planscope page and note that there aren't bios on anyone. That may be important to them. Now if you're a 1 person company there could be a strategic reason for doing that ("better to be thought a…

"If I challenge you it's for discussion... you've learned in a short period of time and the ability to take advantage of people's generally trusting nature. Nothing wrong with that. " Larry - reading this along with your other snips at patio and bdunn, I feel compelled to point out that you're coming off as slightly crazy. No offense. If that was challenging it was for the sake of discussion.

I think Larry was being facetious, especially considering the context of the comment.

Re: How I’m Making Five-Figures A Month Off Bootstrapped Products

#119

Post by bravoyankee »

bdunn wrote: post #100
larrys wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I challenge you it's for discussion. Also to point out that others might be thinking the things that I think (at least some people) but not raise the issue. And you could loose business from them. They might look at your planscope page and note that there aren't bios on anyone. That may be important to them. Now if you're a 1 person company there could be a strategic reason for doing that ("better to be thought a…

I'm just confused about why you think I'm running a smoke-and-mirrors shop. I have a ton of testimonials from people thanking me for helping them raise their rates. If you email me, I'll send them to you. I take a lot of offense that you think I have "the proper degree of BS mixed together with things I've learned in a short period of time" and that I'm "taking advantage of people." I am delivering value in exchange…

You and Patrick have done an exemplary job of leveraging the herd mentality, but some of us are getting tired of the pitch. How many times are you going to try and milk this cow?

Re: How I’m Making Five-Figures A Month Off Bootstrapped Products

#120

Post by reinhardt »

bdunn wrote: post #36
johnrob wrote: post #34

The depressing truth about the software business is that most of the success stories take the form "and then I started spending all my time on marketing, and my business took off!". I say depressing because most software developers didn't choose their profession out of a burning desire to become a marketer.

That's sort of like saying "the depressing truth about relationships is that you need to go out and meet people to get involved in one." I take a lot of pride in promoting my products. Marketing is just storytelling, and when your story aligns with the needs of someone else, a transaction occurs. Honestly, if you want to just write code all day (and there's nothing wrong with that) don't create a product - work for s…

> That's sort of like saying "the depressing truth about relationships is that you need to go out and meet people to get involved in one."

This was supposed to be snarky but it's actually a great analogy. There are many people who would love to be able to skip all the go out-meet-impress-pickup courting rituals and get right into a relationship, just like there are many devs who would love for their product to sell itself on its own merits. Usually doesn't work very well in either case but that's not to dismiss this particular wishful thinking.

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