I think the odds of creating 400 money-making projects without one of them becoming a real success are very low.
How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter
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Re: How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter
#22I think if you try to create 400 projects, most will make 0/day and a couple will make 10/day. Then you optimize those. Slowly you end up with a small number of projects generating a half decent amount money.
This is actually a great way to prevent yourself from choosing a local maximum in the product space. You climb a bunch of hills a little bit.
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Re: How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's the first option. Which is focusing on one thing and making it better and making more money from it.
I'm confused then, because it seems from your post that you say the first option is difficult unless you're a US-based MIT-educated elite startup founder Twitter-chasing wunderkid with VC money coming out your ears and good writing ability. At the risk of stating the obvious, I am not a US-based MIT-educated elite startup founder Twitter-chasing wunderkid with VC money coming out my ears. Nor do I think any of these…
I'm not saying it is impossible to write and sell good software and keep improving it. I'm saying that a lot of people have tried it and do not have the neccessary advice and reach to make the software successful.
Look at all the Review my startup posts. I have only ever seen a handful actually become successful. Most just seem to fade off.
I'm not saying you NEED to be from that group to do it successfully. But it is difficult. What you did, has not been replicable by most of the other people here.
Re: How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter
#24I think the odds of creating 400 money-making projects without one of them becoming a real success are very low.
One of the projects was putting thirty ninja videos on a website. When that project becomes a real success I'll buy you dinner.
Re: How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter
#25Sounds like a great strategy if one only cares about making money and doesn't care about working on any projects, startups, software for companies, ect.
If you take his definitions of in-crowd vs. normals to be true, the in-crowd has the prerogative to choose energizing startups and work on exciting projects without putting much thought into making money early-on. The normals have bills to pay, kids to send to school, and sick family members to take care. For us normals, money is always a large (though not the only) factor in making decisions that relate to our career, projects, and products.
I would love to leave everything and work on some of my ideas but too many people rely on me to have a stable income at this point for me to just abandon them midstream. This doesn't mean I'm doing nothing. I'm slowly changing my life around so I can get to where I want to be. But at every project I look into, I have to consider how much money I can potentially make and how soon would I see a cash flow. The normals aren't all dreaming of being the next MS/Google. Just like the in-crowd, we want to make good products that users would love. We just have a lot more baggage and need to make sure our dreams don't get in the way of our loved ones' care.
Re: How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter
#26I think the odds of creating 400 money-making projects without one of them becoming a real success are very low.
One of the projects was putting thirty ninja videos on a website. When that project becomes a real success I'll buy you dinner.
Ask a ninja is ridiculously popular and probably started with a bunch of videos.
Re: How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter
#27Assuming a 20 day work month and a 10 hour workday that will give you half an hour a month to work on each of your 400 projects. And assuming (optimistically) that you will spend 2 weeks doing each project it will take 15 years to get to 400. And that's not counting overhead such as accounting, etc. for all of your projects. I like the idea of the post, but maybe he took it a bit too far...
I think the idea is that each project gets an initial small period of launch work, and then after that they're mostly self-sustaining for their economic lifetime. "Optimize for time." In that case, half hour/month may be enough.
The 1$/day and 400/month figures are just for illustration. The idea is to crank on multiple simple things that share characteristics. As you optimize for time, you're also optimizing for "crank," getting better at cranking out simple things.
Re: How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter
#28How on earth are you supposed to create and maintain 400 "projects" at once?
Re: How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter
#29Sounds like a great strategy if one only cares about making money and doesn't care about working on any projects, startups, software for companies, ect.
If you take his definitions of in-crowd vs. normals to be true, the in-crowd has the prerogative to choose energizing startups and work on exciting projects without putting much thought into making money early-on. The normals have bills to pay, kids to send to school, and sick family members to take care. For us normals, money is always a large (though not the only) factor in making decisions that relate to our caree…
I guess I should have said sounds like a "strategy." It dislike the strategy because it's not why I program. I don't program a million things to make a million dollars. I program because it's a passion, and unless I misinterpreted the meaning of the post, this strategy is...heartless.
I take into account that "in-crowd" has it easy and "normal" doesn't. I could image myself writing a similar article; however, instead of the goal being "make 12,000 a month", the goal would have been "Find followers so that one can make a reputation which will allow one to find a well-liked job (could be continuing to make small apps)" And hell. I'd sure as hell point out that if one attempts to make money from those apps, then one can help subsidize his living costs and manage to raise enough money to send his or her kids to private school!
Re: How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter
#30This is a sure-fire way to create a lot of spam and hack products. The creative element of fostering a project and putting real intellectual effort is gone, for sake of trying to turn a measly profit. There is nothing artistic or genuine about what he is doing here. There is no soul in these products.
Of all the products and software I use, there is soul in every single one of them. Safari, Tweetie/Twitter, Hacker News, iTunes, Adium, Fireworks, TextMate, Sequel Pro, zsh, Firefox, and all of the websites I read. They each have something to be proud of. If you are making software and services that you cannot be proud of and are only there to make you money, then you have chosen a path that is less meaningful and will not bring you the kind of happiness and security that I think most software creators are looking for in building software.
Feeding your family is one thing, but creating and harboring what is effectively spam is not the only way to do it. Labors of love are perfectly capable of making you money, and with the right amount of luck, and much more preparation, you can find yourself rolling in the same dough as these bottom of the barrel money makers that this writer is scheming.
As they say, don't eat your soul to fill your belly.