That's a marketing headline. A little clickbait-y. That's fine you're a marketing hustler after all. Let's break down your numbers:
$99.75 in expenses (not counting time spent getting sales or building website)
5 total sales resulting in $450 of sales
108 hours of work done by you. We don't know how much time it took your brother to create the podcasts. Let's assume he didn't do the 6 podcasts perfectly in the first go.
30 days of total case study.
$350 in "profit"
Divide your profit by the hours you worked on it. $350/108 = $3.24 per hour.
Now let's consider setting up the website was a one time cost so moving forward your operating expense is $30/month to host the website and the podcasts[edit]
Let's take the hours your took to get the sales and divide those by the number of sales you got. 90/5 that comes to 18 hours per sale. Your average sale value was $450/5 = $90. Let's say your put a bare minimum hourly rate for your time of $10/hour that's $180 spent getting a $90 sale.
Now unless you get more visibility and are super savvy in promoting your podcast your ROI just doesn't pan out.
Let's see what your $1000 budget gets you in 3 months. Might be a good post to regenerate interest in your podcast. :)
I wonder what Bill Gates' pay per hour was for Microsoft's first month? ;)
I totally am on board with back-of-the-envelope math, evaluating ROI, market size, etc. But come on. This was month #1, a good chunk of which was doing one-time tasks (figuring out what the hell the site would actually be, setting up the template, etc.)
If you want to fault him for something, fault him for the lack of market analysis to see if this idea really has some legs, besides citing someone else "making millions of a similar idea". E.g., a red flag was one decent sized advertiser telling him their ROI on podcast ads are not worth it.
Actually a good chunk of work was actually research, marketing and sales since he didn't start on the website creation till the very end. He picked a template and modified it so that's not a lot of work either. In the end he got lucky with getting the first sale. As shown by him he was not able to replicate his initial sale. In fact now that I read it again all his sales were lucky shots. None of which he could reliably replicate as a sales strategy.
Bill Gates also lived with his parents and worked out from their garage. If this article was targeted at rich kids that want to make money on the side and don't have to worry about paying rent and buying food then sure don't worry that you are going to end up losing money in Month #1. and Month #2 and Month #6.
Yes this is clickbait to get him traffic. This is Viperchill, very skilled writer and smart guy who unfortunately makes a living from "get rich by teaching others how to get rich" schemes. There's a grain of truth in everything he says but it's all greatly exaggerated in order to wow the less educated and later sell them something for a profit.
Just type Viperchill into google and watch the suggestions.
It's a sad day to see him polluting HN with his "work".
As the audience here is way smarter than his average followers I hope people with see through his schemes and do not promote him.
I liked his blog post and thought it was interesting. I didn't see anything obviously bad in it, I just saw an SEO-type telling a story and promoting themselves through it.
I don't know what he has done in the past but I think you are being harsh.
I actually am very interested to know if SpokenGrowth grows. I think it's a great idea. Will it become successful depends on a very specific combination of skill set and determination and persistence and having the financial means to persist.[edit] Saying "if I can do it anybody can" is not actually fair since even though you used a pen name you did bring your considerable marketing experience to promoting the idea and site.
But you see there lies the big dilemma. Great ideas are dime a dozen. The question is how big is the market for the idea and how do you reach that market and finally how do you monetize that market that results in a decent ROI. It doesn't have to be mind blowing ROI but something that generates passive income is good too.
What i took away from the 15 minutes I spent reading was this: If you're not afraid to reach out to prospective customers and you know how to make a sales pitch, you can sell any half-baked product.
Whether it could actually be a successful business or not is an entirely different matter and would take much longer to find out.
The question is: could you take the $100 to a wholesale distributor, buy a bunch of cheap things, and then go and sell them at a market stall for more than $400. My guess is yes, especially if you have 16 days of selling to make your $400. That operation would scale about as well, possibly better, than the one described in the blog post. This idea ignores the pay for labour, but so does the blog post.
I tried buying goods wholesale and selling at a market stall :) Failed dismally and lost money :( Need to have the right personality. The guys who were natural extroverts and spoke with a booming voice got most of the sales. It's the same in this blog post. He's a marketing guy and very tactful. He's good with people. Most other people who tried his "business" idea probably wouldn't get a single sale. So for the average person, it's even worse than what you suggest.
Did you fail at the buying end or the selling end? (i.e. did you have to pay a higher price compared to these people, or were you unable to sell at a high price compared to these people?)
Yeah I think the difference is that in college you can keep your hands clean. But REAL business involves a lot of hustling, stuff that can only been seen and learned in the real world.
Turning $100 into $500 is easy. You can do that by selling lemonade for a week on the beach. The hard part is to do it in a way that scales more than linearly.
"I hope your biggest takeaway is not that I made any money or that you like the concept, but that my results are held up by a massive pillar of failure."
This part stood out for me.
There are so many moments in a new venture like this, where you're just feeling your way forward, and it feels like nothing is working. But you keep chipping and one day the rock cracks.
This would actually be great; I'm reasonably sure I can read faster than a podcaster can speak, and I can certainly skim faster than I can listen for key phrases with a podcast on 2x speed.
That is certainly more labour intensive. I transcribed a couple of lectures from youtube (ok they were mathematical) and it is quite time consuming and I made a lot of mistakes too.
If the recordings are high quality and enjoyable to listen to I'd subscribe to that podcast. Most web content does not have an audio transcription beyond screen readers.
One thing I don't understand: why was this person contacting prospects using a deliberately fake name? Did his name carry so much clout that customers would reply 'shut up and take my money', therefore invalidating the "challenge"?
I also wonder if this person procured authorization from the parties involved before publishing their e-mail responses on the Web, especially given the fact that it's rather easy to identify some of these (unwittingly?) "challenge participants"...
I built a search engine for lectures (https://www.findlectures.com) to counter the "lots of noise" problem (not podcasts or audiobooks, but it's the same idea).
It never occurred to me there were so many ways to approach the problem, so this post gave me some things to think about :)
First of all, congratulations on your success and experience.
Second of all, correct me if I am wrong, but you do not seem to be factoring in your time (16 working days) or any kind of opportunity cost required to produce the content?
I understand. But to many businesses – especially online businesses – time is the most significant expense. It is the elephant in the room here. You are not "profitable" (not even "ramen profitable") until you've factored in this expense.
I am not sure how many hours he worked a day, but if he did the full 8 hours, then for me I see this as costing just $100 plus cough $10k in sacrificed salary!
Taking that into consideration it would have been more prudent to outsource a lot of the things and cut it back. I would be more interested in what you can launch in 16 hours (a single weekend).
Making 5 sales and $450 is not a "profitable business", it's just some cash. With all due respect to your work, the title is just a clickbait. It's to early to conclude you'be built a profitable business.
That's a bit snarky no? considering you don't put in labor costs and time costs it's a bit ingenuous to say you built a profitable business. At a "profit" of $22 a day you could not pay your rent and food. Your customer acquisition cost at this stage is much higher than what the customer pays you.
I agree. But here's what I think would have gotten your point of "take action" across much better. At the end be honest about ROI and projections.
This is a cold calling marketing campaign you had to do to get your sales. If at the end you had actionable advice on improving conversion rate of cold calling campaigns with numbers to back it up(not anecdotal evidence) that would be very useful.
My suggestion is to track SpokenGrowth.com over a period of 3 months now that you've handed it off to someone who might not have your marketing skills. Do another post 3 months later that either proves you can make a viable business if you "just take action" or shows how hard it can be and maybe do a lessons learnt post.
I'm all for hustling to market your product or your skills. Good luck on SpokenGrowth.com
As a self-funding concern they don't work that way for long. If you have seed capital or another line of income, sure.
If the point is that you put 16 days of sweat equity in to make $22 a day and trending upward of passive income every day after, that would be impressive. Summarizing that you turned $100 into $450 over the course of sixteen days just sounds like a self-funding hobby. This is not the sort of thing that multiplies your cash 4.5 times every few weeks regardless of input amount. This only scales with more contact and a lot of selling.
What really impressed me were the insights into this space. Getting the initial contact by offering free help up front is an interesting angle. Figuring out that most bloggers aren't interested in really expanding their audiences in a condensed version was a surprise. I'd readily have read through a full article on either of those. The numbers summarized up front almost turned me off the rest of the article altogether.
The techniques of hosting and publishing web content and setting up email are a couple decades old hat to me. Email marketing isn't especially interesting anymore either. The concepts for the business are interesting. The insights into the customers for the final concept are even more interesting. The small amount of money made on the initial experiment proves no angel investors were bled dry to start it rolling, but leading with that just didn't do it any favors with me.
$99.75 in expenses (not counting time spent getting sales or building website)
5 total sales resulting in $450 of sales
108 hours of work done by you. We don't know how much time it took your brother to create the podcasts. Let's assume he didn't do the 6 podcasts perfectly in the first go.
30 days of total case study.
$350 in "profit"
Divide your profit by the hours you worked on it. $350/108 = $3.24 per hour.
Now let's consider setting up the website was a one time cost so moving forward your operating expense is $30/month to host the website and the podcasts[edit]
Let's take the hours your took to get the sales and divide those by the number of sales you got. 90/5 that comes to 18 hours per sale. Your average sale value was $450/5 = $90. Let's say your put a bare minimum hourly rate for your time of $10/hour that's $180 spent getting a $90 sale.
Now unless you get more visibility and are super savvy in promoting your podcast your ROI just doesn't pan out.
Let's see what your $1000 budget gets you in 3 months. Might be a good post to regenerate interest in your podcast. :)