There are two types of people in software. There are the people I will refer to as the in-crowd, and another group I will refer to as the normals.
The in-crowd live in the U.S, they attended MIT or Berkeley, they write well, have interesting blogs and are followed by 400 or more people on twitter. They are young, usually about 20-35. The normals lack any of those attributes. They may be 50 years old, or have gone to community college, or may have learned programming on their own, or may come from Bulgaria or some other distant country. Both groups typically will dream of starting up and making it big. Both groups want to create some excellent piece of software, improve it over time, have it make a lot of money and then exit as rich people. The reality is this: The in-crowd are going have it so much easier. The normals will have a really tough battle getting people to notice what they did. The normals will have a really hard time getting the right people to guide them in the right direction on their product. The normals are going to have large trouble finding anyone willing to invest in their idea. I’m also a normal, and I’m not going to tell normals how to solve those problems. I don’t know how. What I’m going to tell you right now is another approach to making money that can make you rich, even if you belong to the crowd of normal people. The core strategy is this: optimise for time. Answer this question – with the skills you have, can you make some product that makes you $1 a day? That’s $30 a month. I once made a video hosting website and put 30 ninja videos on it. Adsense money was about $1 a day. I wrote a desktop software once, and priced it at $29.90. I sold one copy a month, which was terrible. That’s $1 a day. It’s really easy as a programmer to do something that makes $1 a day. Now comes the trick: If you make 400 things making $1 a day, you will be making $12.000 a month. This is the mental repositioning that needs to be made to follow this strategy. It’s not about how to make a lot of money with a project, it becomes a matter of how to optimise your time and selected projects so that you can make 400 of them within the shortest possible period. When you start, you have no idea. Just pick something you like. Woodwork, hentai, mobile phones, anything. Now sit back and think for a few days – what type of software could I write that would be quite quick to make and could bring me $1 a day? Once you find one that works, think of ways to modify and expand it. Bring in new ideas. The start goes slow but after a couple of months, your mental realignment will happen, you will start seeing time optimisation techniques you never though of before. Additionally, the quick feedback from the projects allows you quickly iterate and converge towards the path of maximum profitability. And though you should aim for 400 projects, by the time you reach 150 projects or so, you will already far exceed $12.000. This method is the polar opposite of writing a good and polished software product. Don’t try to combine the strategies. This technique is not for everyone. It’s for people who have been stuck for a long time trying to break through and have no other path to follow. Those people that have tried hard, but no matter what they do, nobody seems to want to follow them on twitter. —–Follow me on twitter, I’m interesting.
This is great advice. Thanks for sharing!
Great post. And… I just followed you on Twitter.
But now you have an interesting blog and 500+ Twitter followers, so you can’t be a normal. You’re a paradox.
Hentai!
@Ryan 2 months ago I had 50 followers or so and was following 100 people. I’ll be very happy if I leave the ranks of the normalos and enter the elite – I’d be all like : so long suckers
So you are basically saying go for the quick buck and do not build a great experience for your clients. Just let them pay for some piece of crap you are not going to support because you have moved on to project number 402?
What a utter bullshit….that is the first part of the post.. Don’t really like this elitist way of dividing people on the privileged ones living in Silicon Valley and the rest.Common..we live in the internet era.it doesn’t matter where we live. If you are smart and determined to succeed , it doesn’t matter where you are. Some people say: On the internet nobody knows you are a dog…OK OK.. the second part..good. That’s exactly how I built my business , you do 100 projects and one of them surely has to take off unless you are a complete idiot.
I was trying something similar for a while.Could I just point out that this will require you to be supporting 400 separate projects by yourself per day. Which on an 8 hour working day would give you approximately 1 minute to spend on each project per day to keep it ticking over – tax returns, responding to emails, keeping servers online…My advice: keep experimenting but give up as quickly as possible on the stuff that just doesn’t work.
Hey Max, this is good advice re: money and business, but this stuff about Twitter is illogical. Going to Stanford is no advantage at all; it saddles you with student loan debt and puts you on a track towards becoming a cog in some giant Silicon Valley machine. Many, many VC-style tech entrepreneurs fail, give up, and end up cogs. If you’re following real business principles and somebody else is hoping for a big IPO payout, your way is the easy way.Also, your “don’t combine the strategies” advice, I don’t buy that either. Jason Cohen’s Smart Bear company combined the strategies and was a huge success. Nimblebit.com combines the strategies in a different way and succeeds with it also.The grass is always greener on the other side. I think you were just annoyed that these other people are getting more fame for failing than you are for succeeding. I don’t blame you for being annoyed about that, but there’s no actual logical connection between the two topics of your post.
You’re missing the point. The “in-crowd” people who are stars on Twitter are stars because they are passionate about the craft of software, and write about that passion. As it happens, being visibly passionate is also good business, because people believe you can deliver a quality product when they see you care about your craft. But it’s first and foremost about loving what they do and being curious about how to do it better.People with money on the brain generally aren’t as interesting, hence the lower follow rate. There are exceptions, of course; Michael Arrington and the whole SEO crowd draw a lot of eyeballs.Oh and by the way, I don’t know where you’re getting the Berkely/MIT thing. I have over 500 followers and I only did a tiny bit of community college. I don’t think any of the popular coders I know went to MIT or Berkeley. Maybe don’t read so much Paul Graham, his is a somewhat skewed view of the industry.
Great and insightful article!I like your idea and how you put it bluntly and simple!This technique is well established not-so-known strategy to increase your income! For example, to make money from blogging you don’t own/maintain only one blog, but several ones on your topics of interest.Regards,Alex
This is very Tim Ferris-esque. Sure there are ways of creating a million things that bring in $1 a day, but upkeep on all of those things, even to attain $1 a day, could be difficult eventually.
Ahh.. another member of the “good-enough-revolution” exposes himself! I love you guys!! Please, post more stories like this. You see, I know the masses are too stupid and lazy to read all the way down here, so they’ll never know that I’m calling it total crap. As a result, they’ll spend all their time writing insignificant, crappy little apps while people like me, who really ARE the “in crowd”, get wealthier, month after month, year after year.Shhh.. Don’t tell Evan, or Michael, or any of those stuffed shirts, but we collectively and systematically pander to their monstrous egos in every public venue so that everyone else *thinks* they are the “in crowd”. Of course, we do all this so that we’ll be overlooked. No sense in generating unnecessary competition, right?We probably never completed college, are over 40 and self-educated in software development, which is as it should be. Really, who needs to learn how to write a compiler until you need to write a compiler?We craft fantastic, cutting-edge, revenue generating solutions because it’s our passion, and our customers pay us whatever we ask, year upon year, eschewing free solutions because they know we’ll be around and we won’t screw them over to make the NEXT buck.We’re people who don’t learn languages because they are popular or make us appear “elite”, like Ruby or Python. We’re the people that architect robust, well written apps that scale, while producing easily readable, maintainable, object-oriented code, the kind of which you’ll never find in open source.Your efforts here are *greatly* appreciated, Sir. Sadly, however, you didn’t include a “donate” link, so I can’t send you a buck.Perhaps that will be in your next app… err.. post.:-)
Wow, very good advise. I lke this idea.Jesswww.internet-anonymity.se.tc
The idea is beautifully described in Nassim Taleb’s bestseller: The Black Swan. I think it’s called “maximizing the exposure”, yet success is not only about time optimization and rabbit-like multiplication of your projects, since in that case many people who are now making $100/month would be making $100.000, but they are not, and only few of them ever will.
AGAIN…another reason this country is going to the horse manure. This, from a guy who outsource to the likes of Rentacoder. Putz.
great vice indeed , but I guess it’s not that easy to find something you can really earn small amount of money per from per day and iterate without maintenance.
Spot on. I had the same attitude in college. I didn’t study CS and when I had an idea for an app, CS people wouldn’t take me seriously. So I taught myself to code. My first 20 some apps made $0 / day. Then I caught a break and coded something that makes $50 / day. Then it was $3,000 / day and then it was $30,000 / day.
I should point out that, if this is one of your 400 projects, you should add ads, because I’d have clicked them after reading your post.
I would say 99% effort 1% luck.. You would still need luck to be really successful.
thanks for the advice. I think I will put my website to use, to make some money for me, and probably it multiplies..
interesting, never thought of it that way.. will sure to try it out.. once i find the time of course =D
You know regardless of your skeptics, and though I might have put the message in a different way, at the core of what I took away from this post may be game-changing for me. So I thank you for that.
you are your own nobody wants to die for you
It’s a type of bootstrapping. It takes a lot of time to get the 400 projects going, and lots of time spent managing, but it will eventually be worth it. One might take off or someone else might come along and like your idea enough to buy it from you.
This is the worst advice I’ve heard on business in a long time married to the most indignant rant I’ve heard in even longer.I taught myself programming, I lived in Denmark, but I did dream about making it big. Then I put my mind and my efforts to it and got involved in projects I believed in and made it happen.Are you just mentally masturbating about the fantasy 400 projects that make $1/day or have you actually done this? Considering the fact that you’re posting this “oh woe is me” wail, I think you probably haven’t.The vast majority of successful web entrepreneurs that I’ve met became that way because they focused their efforts on one or a very few things and then gave it their very best. They didn’t just throw random shit against the wall 400 times in the hope that each of them would give them a dollar a day back. Eeks.
Chinese call it “death by a thousand cuts.” It’s great if you are extremelymotivated and/or creative. One CONTROVERSIAL example is Sri Chinmoy.Set weightlifting record while in his seventies. Thousands of stories and songs. No, I don’t belleve the religion. warning: controversial.It could be he is a cheat or shading the truth or just really manages timewell.But the law of success. Most of Microzzzoft, USAtodazzz – let us laughagain at the over-simpllification; the statistics and da** or **mn liesand USAtodazzz is highly profitable. If anything, the college education;discipline and work and open source may have made me worse.the cellphone bill is likely wrong. random generator sends numbers.eventually you will pay SOMETHING for it is ‘death by thousand cuts.’-official source – but too lazy to post the Chinese classic. bills havebeen proven (depending upon time source) to be NON-deterministic.Banks may be off by trillions on derivatives and mark to ‘what accountingsystem.’
Congratulations, front page of Reddit. Great tips.
You know, money isn’t everything. Some of us code because we love doing it. Some of us even love our jobs. And I write myblog because I like doing it. Any money it makes is gravy
So you want me to become a programming whore? Programming is my love. I don’t know. Doing what you say is almost against my core belief system.
Just go on welfare. Fuck it. what are you going to do, save the world? Homeless is where it’s at. I’m on 3 months of food stamps so far and things are great.
I don’t know where I would find time for 400 projects. Also, have you become rich following what you are preaching in the post?
God. Bless. You.
I think as programmers, we all have the IQ to realize that he is not actually asking every visitor to this web page to each make 400 apps each year.The core points are these:1. Once you find one that works, think of ways to modify and expand it. **Bring in new ideas.**Is it just me or does anyone else recognize the word “innovation” spelled differently?2.And though you should aim for 400 projects, by the time you reach 150 projects or so, you will already far exceed $12.000.Hmm. The title of this post should be:Why people make so Google Gadgets, Facebook Apps and iPhone Apps.(Oh btw, No flame wars intended. This thing can be talked out
)
I don’t agree with you but this is an interesting POV
long time since I read something interesting, nice read
basically you’re trying to massively hide latency, similar to how a GPU operates compared to a CPU.in a nutshell the true answer lies in proper time management.
Nailed it! I tried the sell big software application to big banks/investment companyes and big fail. Now my mentallity is like yours, the apple app store and a storey I read on a popular desk top app. So, I’m working on something big for people to use on the cheap! … maybe not exactly $1 day!
how to become X even if nobody is following you on Y.bla bla bla blafollow me on Y, I’m loser
This is a strategy used by many beginning writers. Write every day and submit everything you write. It’s worked well for many, e.g., see Robert Silverberg’s Other Spaces, Other Times: A Life Spent in the Future. There’s no reason it wouldn’t work for programming, given that one has some latent talent. Practice, practice, practice.
Thanks 0nly that’s what we needed to hear. Because you haven’t had any nibbles by even your 20th project doesn’t mean something’s wrong with you. Just keep at it, firing away, and keep to the “time it takes to 1 dollar/day profitability” frame of reference.
I agree with another commenter here; this is similar to what Tim Ferris’ calls muses in his book 4HWW. The author is talking about $1/day “products” – one of the examples is a video page with adsense on it. What is there to support? He’s not talking about commercial products people are buying – he’s talking about a website that gets some traffic.People should not get all agitated over the 400 number .. the idea is the same; produce a product that gives you $50 / day, then another, then another.
Don’t listen to the haters, Max, this idea is great.What are some techniques for generating tiny amounts of recurring passive revenue? Check out my discussion here, I would appreciate your thoughts:http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/9373/what-are-small-projects-that-gen…
It’s a nice numbers game. But seriously, 400 Projects? To handle this amount is hard work. Besides 12000 a month is a big number. I think 3000 would make it also. Need only 100 Projects. But the basic approach is nice.
Yes! This is exactly what I’ve been thinking for a while. Not quite 400 projects and hopefully not as low as $1 a day, but the plan is to iterate, small projects, small ideas, some may make nothing, some may make a $1, some may make $30. The point is… you have a portfolio of ideas / products that generate a consistent income (of any value) … each fairly simple and maybe not bringing in a lot – but overall the collective income is great.I recently had an idea which I pitched to a few friends. They said it was a good idea, but one of them said ‘you’ll never make a lot of money from it’. I said (since i’m full time employment) – if it made me $100 a month – I’d be happy. They all laughed at the thought of making such a small amount of money, but then I pointed out that if it made $1 it would be one dollar I didn’t have and who knows, it may infact make $1000 or more. The reality is, I won’t know until I try – and that should be the attitude with all ideas, the worst case is you end up with many products which each bring in small amounts.The net result though is that I will make money. Money I didn’t have before. Period.
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great post thanks, follow me on twitter everyone i follow back http://twitter.com/gr8p
If you guys do not get the point of this post, you do not deserve to be rich in the first place.