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by soylentnewsorg 1700 days ago
I think the common thing here is not giving up w/o immediate success. That is a very good idea sometimes. Homer Simpson built a goofy car, people were exposed to it and he got negative feedback, and he rightly abandoned it. Some projects are a bad idea, you don't know they are, and once you find out they are, you absolutely should not keep wasting resources due to the sunk cost of wishful thinking.

His common issue is he expected to invest time to make money. You need to invest money to make money. This is why I sometimes laugh at a guy who can't get a good job, has no savings, is borrowing cash from friends to pay the rent and maxing out credit cards for food. Sometimes that guy's solution to being poor is "I'm going to start my own business." When you build on a foundation of nothing, your house collapses.

He ran an ad campaign - it clearly worked. He needed to run it more, and bigger, and yes, eat the cost of it from personal savings. In a business, you first spend money, then you make money. There are no freebies just because you have an idea. Stories of that happening are like self-learning guitar because you plan on being a rockstar.

The reason people don't want to pay for a new project from a new person? Because there's high risk of it being dead within a year - like all of this guy's projects. It's the same reason I don't start watching any new shows till they've had a few seasons out. Don't want to invest hours into the plot just to have it cancelled and left w/o closure in after two seasons.

It's also a reason no one joined things like google plus or used any of their other now dead projects. They proudly declare they try many things to see what sticks and kill the rest. Well, I'm not willing to give my time for free to their unpaid focus group.

So what he needed to do was save up, spend those savings on letting people know about his product, take the risk of loosing that cash, and give the product away at first. Then when the paid product comes, there is a huge user base he paid for, and people see the risk of it being killed as minimized.