Never give up and never surrender. The difference between failure and profitability can be as small as changing a few paragraphs on your sales page (it was in my case).
Reduce your costs, and experiment as much as possible.
The worst that can happen is you end up getting a day job.
as someone who's living off of the tiny business income, there are plenty of opportunities to be found on the internets. some of these opportunities have a shorter shelf life than others, and that's okay; you can still make a killing before moving on to the next wave.
you probably won't start ranking as easily as you could have 10 or 20 years ago, and there is lots of competition these days — that's true.
Getting profitable is easy. It's the getting big bit which is hard.
The fact is, it's often easier especially online, to solve the hard problem (get big) first. Once you've done that getting profitable is a walk in the park.
Since it doesn't sound like they have strong domain expertise in any area, I'm going to recommend eCommerce. If you can create a fad (e.g. fidget spinners, Razor scooters, ICO, etc.) and quickly capitalize on it that's going to be the quickest way to make $10mm+.
It's a heavily luck-based plan, but if there was a no-luck 3-year plan to making $10mm+ we would all be doing that instead of whatever we're doing now.
Here are 3 ways I've identified highly profitable ideas:
a) Having a problem that needs solving. It's OK if it's a focused need, so long as you're not addressing a market which is too small. The world of people who research online is big enough. The world of Web 2.0 developers is not.
b) Careful listening to user feedback. Often users of one of my products have given me an inkling of the need for another. This will happen if (1) the original product works well, (2) the new product appeals to a similar audience, (3) you make it easy for people to give you feedback, and read it religiously and with empathy.
c) Being in-the-know about breaking trends. Make sure you regularly read (or at least skim) some high quality international publications. I read The Economist cover-to-cover every week, along with BusinessWeek. Worth every minute.
For me, each of these methods has been the catalyst for creating at least one successful online business.
Here's my recipe:
1) own the product or the rights to the product - stay away from commodities
2) sell something with low inventory costs and low shipping costs. Digital goods are the best.
3) sell something in the price point above $50 but below $500.
4) get good at seo and adwords
5) try and get featured in blogs and magazines
6) ???
7) profit!
- do a portal on class action lawsuits. almost everyone is applicable to win some class action (e.g. eat french fries from Mcdonalds 10 yrs ago? you won a class action. have an ipod in 2004, you won a class action, etc). High keyword spending there. No portals are good.
- buy up popular domain names with the words misspelled (e.g. www.eatingdsorders.com, etc) - then do appropriate content (scrape sites) and google ads. Put together a portfolio of these names for cheap and sell to Demand Media
- Write e-books. "100 Ways to Lose Weight". "40 stocks that can Double this year". Use simple google ads to sell them. Write 10 books / mo to make decent living and one might be a breakout. Traditional publishing dead. Get your friends to write e-books. You'll market, they write, split 50-50.
- Therapists charge over $150-200 /hr. Charge $10 / hr and offer to do therapy over skype.
This is maybe a bit pretentious, but I wanted to tell that long ago. Something coming here on a regular basis is how hard it is to get momentum, to keep the motivation and going ahead when you are tired etc.
I found that the best solution is to sell. It does not mean that you need to sell a lot, even if it is just $50 a month. Do it. Offer a paid option of your webapp and sell.
The days you will be down, the serendipity will be there and you will get an email from your payment processing gateway: "$50 for you". And this is the best thing you can get, it means:
"Me, the customer, trust you, you have a good product and I am ready to pay for it. You are good."
When you are offering both "totally free" and "paid options" the effect on the moral of getting a sale is higher than the inverse of your conversion rate. It is like drug, you want more of it, you start to make crosses on your year calendar on the wall, you feel good.
Go sell and enjoy accumulating these little red crosses.
And you, what is keeping you rolling? Do you think that in your case you cannot sell right from the start?
This. It's easy to hustle, and hustle, and work hard, and hustle.. when you've found that product-market fit, or you've found that profitable niche, or you've found that market opportunity. Otherwise, the chances of you succeeding is nil. It's like you're playing World of Warcraft, or Diablo II and can't find that loophole to farm new items. Once you've found that secret, you can then hustle.
Selling digital goods that don't require continuous maintenance or services, if you can make it work.
Things like Tailwind CSS, game assets, courses, books etc. The caveat is that it's not easy to produce something great, but if you're good at what you do and if you have built a large followerbase on social media it can work I think. Like games, movies, music etc. it's a hit-driven business though, so Paretos' law applies to it (90 % of overall revenue will be generated by 10 % of the products).
The goal is often to hit "ramen profitablity" as soon as possible.
If you're doing enterprise, get that one customer who's paying you enough to sustain yourself, and make them very happy.
For consumer facing, find something you can build 10x better that people are already willing to pay for. Then beeline towards building and selling it. If they aren't buying it, it's not valuable enough.
There are exceptions like reddit, but you can't really bootstrap those. Anything with network effects needs a very long runway.
reply