[ahoyhere]

It's not hard at all. Here's what you need to do:

1. Pick a tool you can build which will make money for people.

2. Build it for people who will pay.

3. Market to them.

4. Build it.

5. Ship it.

6. Market to them. (Over and over. It's not a one-time thing.)

I've done it, and I teach other people to do it. (But the thing is - once you reach $1000, you might as well go further since the first $100 is the hardest, once you get that, you have proof and you begin to have leverage for word of mouth and client success stories and yadda yadda yadda.)

[rhizome]

Easy to describe is not the same as easy to do.

You should hack off 2-6 and describe step 1 in 7 steps.

[ahoyhere]

This is Hacker News, not "Write A Business Book For Me For Free Then Hold My Hand" News. There's a lot out there on how to do each one of those steps, in books mostly and some of the better software-biz blogs. The fact that I didn't write a 30,000-word essay doesn't make what I'm saying any less true.

So few people even say that the first step exists, or that it should come first, that alone is worth stating. Then go look for resources for how-to.

[chc]

I'm not asking you to do it, but honestly, I really haven't ever found any of these places that contain much more info about step 1 than was contained in your rough outline (but I have found lots of places that contain roughly the same amount of actionable info in longer form).

If a piece of writing does go further, it typically just advises the reader to do something like "Talk to people and find out," which is frustratingly circular. Talking to people is something most of us do every day without any profit, and "find out" just restates the problem.

It may be that this has been written about well somewhere, but I have never seen it. I figure it must be one of those things where you just have to figure it out for yourself, and for those who have figured it out, these vague platitudes look like actionable advice because they're able to mentally fill in the blanks.

[ahoyhere]

There are plenty of books on market research, customer development, and internet marketing (real books and serious ebooks/classes) that go much deeper into the topic. Have you been reading those, or just blog posts?

Blog posts are by nature superficial, and more importantly, if you're reading blog posts by people in the tech world about marketing, you're probably picking the wrong teachers to learn from.

As a biz book nerd, who reads probably 30 biz books a year (for the last 12 years), I've never found one or even two resources that are end-to-end adequate. What I've learned, I've pieced together from hundreds of sources, including some meant for enterprise (and adapted for my needs), like _Pricing with Confidence_, and taking vague hand-wavy inspiration (_Purple Cow_) and looking for specific, real-world actions to make it concrete.

That's why I created my "30x500" course: to be a super-concise, super-specific crash course for nerd types (like me) who want to create their first product and want to do it with as little risk of failure as possible. I teach systems. I'm not gonna really pitch it here, cuz it's neither the time nor the place, but to say that I know what you're talking about -- and the stuff IS out there.

It either takes digging and work to piece it together into a strategy, or a willingness to shell out for something accelerated. My course is not the only one where you can learn how to do market research -- but you're going to be hard pressed to find it in one book, or two books, or 10 books, because the strategies and techniques to reduce risk are very valuable. And they take a LOT of work to create… I've spent hundreds of hours on building my course, doing research, tweaking the teaching methods & order, the metaphors, the workbooks, the homework, the supporting materials.

You'll rarely find that level of energy and diligence put into a business book, unless it's a byproduct of "workshopping" (like the GTD system was a workshop long before it was a book). Teaching workshops is vastly more profitable, and in a lot of ways more emotionally rewarding, than selling a book. So as blog posts are to books, books are to live classes & workshops. There's no equivalent reward for selling a $20 - $30 book with that kind of information in it... unless you can turn around and sell something more expensive, and leverage fame, like David Allen did.

That aside, there are courses & workshops where you can learn a lot more about step #1 -- other than mine! I've found these two to be excellent at the "figuring out what to sell" side of things: Presell Formula by Clay Collins, and Product Launch Formula by Jeff Walker.

Laugh if you must, yep it's internet marketer slumming, but they're really good at what they do. A person who wants to succeed won't sneer at any source of workable knowledge.

[SonicSoul]

Can you list some of your favorite books?

[mootothemax]

If it's that easy, why haven't you done it 10 or 100 times by now?

[ahoyhere]

Here are the products I've planned & designed, which sell well:

1. Freckle

2. JavaScript Performance Rocks

3. Various JavaScript workshops

4. my entrepreneurship class (30x500)

And, by the end of June, we'll be launching our 2nd SaaS, Charm, which is much larger & took a longer time to develop (while I was fighting undiagnosed chronic fatigue syndrome), and we've already got people chomping at the bit to sign up and pay us for it. After that, we're creating self-study versions of our JS workshops.

If you're going to employ snarky skepticism, you might as well do your research first!

[mootothemax]

1. SaaS 2. Books 3. Workshops 4. Classes

Great, I'm strong believer in diversification. But you haven't launched 4 successful SaaS, and whilst I wish you luck with Charm, it's a bit cheeky to suggest success before success has been achieved!

[ahoyhere]

We have big companies just chomping at the bit to pay us - their words, "when can we pay you?" and our beta testers are ecstatic. We have 2000 people on our advance notice list. I think it's safe to say that it is going to go very well for us indeed.

(That's not to say we won't have technical or growing pains. I'm sure we will. That's part of the reason we haven't launched yet -- that, and my chronic fatigue making me useless for weeks on end without warning.)

[raarky]

you missed out the steps: ??? and Profit!