[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.