[palakchokshi]

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. :)

[dharmon]

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.

[palakchokshi]

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.

[martokus]

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.

Disclaimer: I've outed him in the past.

[i_am_andy]

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.

[carapace]

Hey friend, good point. There's a unique and rare opportunity I'd like to talk to you about involving a bridge in Brooklyn...

In all seriousness, this fellow is a fancy bottom feeder. It's not that there's no value in his products (and ad copy, which is what that "blog post" actually was..) its that he is not SCORE! (https://www.score.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCORE_Association)

He's not "bad" compared to a Ponzi scheme, but he's obviously venal compared to the Service Corps of Retired Executives.

[viperchill]

Oh man, if every business owner settled on what they made in the first month capitalism likely wouldn't even exist.

"Now unless you get more visibility"

What online business doesn't aim to grow going forward? I certainly wouldn't rely on the first month results for the rest of my life.

I have too weird an accent to get incredible podcast downloads, but the $1,000 goes to a reader of my site, not me.

Appreciate the feedback :)

[palakchokshi]

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.