I run a bakery, so I found members of the media I wanted to get along with, got to know them, and gave them free samples of my products. Many of them are now customers and friends.
I imagine a similar process would work for online-only businesses.
I already do this to an extent! It is indeed part of the added value for the business, but when I first started coding it up a lot of it was because I missed coding and was looking for an excuse to write more.
Well, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you all and tell you I run a bakery. I know you guys were expecting a tech company.
I wasn't actually planning on revealing this, but you guys seem to really want to know and the community has been good to me. And maybe you can give me more advice.
I actually have a degree in CS and I love to code, but I tried for a while and never managed to make money on my own with my tech skills before Patrick. I figured (correctly, I think) that my problem was not with my hacking abilities but with my business skills - I had absolutely no good sense of what people would give me money for.
In my mind, I saw myself stumbling around on a seemingly infinite plane while I was trying to follow a hill-climbing algorithm to maximize the amount of money I was making. So I imagined something like a random-restart approach might work: let's jump somewhere totally different and try climbing any hills we find there. Plus, I knew that people were willing to give money for baked goods, so I figured that simplified the business component to an extent.
It turns out I was right - I did find a hill to climb and I've gotten a lot better at business in general.
The dilemma now is I really enjoy coding and actually think I have the skills to run a softare business (which could ultimately be more lucrative), but have a growing food business on my hands. I'm certainly not complaining - really, anything that brings me more money to buy stuff like a dryer makes me happy - but sometimes I feel out of place.
Now that I've hired a manager for the bakery, I have a bit more control of my time and I've recently been able to take on a bit of consulting work, which has turned out well, and I'm pumping the money into growing the bakery.
I think that's the optimal strategy I can follow for now. What do you guys think? I look forward to hearing your thoughts on my relatively twisted path.
Generally, being a social person (which does not come easily to me at all) is very helpful. If you have a lot of friends, it's very likely one of them will be able to help you market or sell in some way or another. I relied heavily on friends and friends of friends. I still do.
More specifically, figuring out who are major journalists or trend-influencers (potential customers who can convince their friends to become customers) within your target market and then befriending them is very useful.
I am not a student. I am young, not married, and do not have kids. I live in a developing country in Asia and am frugal: I could buy a dryer, but I hang my clothes to dry instead.
I live in a developing country, share an apartment, and am relatively frugal. I do however spend money on things that save me significant amounts of time.
I feel silly answering this because there are much more qualified people here to give advice, but I'll answer because you asked and because it's also useful for me to reflect. I hadn't really done it.
In random order:
Employees watch what you do very carefully. Their behavior is strongly influenced by yours.
Having several conservative ways to make small amounts of money if necessary is good.
Emotional stability is an important skill. The ability to dampen both optimism and anxiety is something that comes with experience, I think. Multiple backup plans help with the latter.
It is relatively easy to siphon off pieces of business when the market is large. Profitable competition tells me that I can probably find buyers, so long as I can think of a twist.
Being a generally friendly, helpful person, even to people who you think have nothing to offer you in return, is good for business. I'm a much friendlier person now than I was when I started. I've also found being friendly and helpful just makes me happy.
You're right. But Patrick indicated to me that he was happy for me and that he would understand if I couldn't go on. I'll be totally honest, I should've kept in better sync with him and I felt terrible that my 2nd project fell behind schedule, but I really found myself totally engulfed in putting out fires in my personal business. Nothing went according to plan. I didn't abandon his project though, I finished it and got it to him a little late. I was just looking at it again today and I saw some problems I hadn't noticed before, so I sent him a patch.
It's really only now that I'm starting to get back a bit of time where I can do things like write this. I sent him an email telling him about this thread, but I'd bet he's asleep now.
I'm not expecting $400 for life, I'm more interested in trading time for money. How much time? Theoretically that should depend on how good I am.
Some of the opportunities people (such as patio11) have posted are what I'm interested in. I will be following up on some of those.
On the other hand, I also find some of the longer-term infrastructure-building advice (e.g. SEO, e-book stuff) useful, provided it's got a high probability of generating some cash within a month or two.
I like this route. I can write well and I'm well-educated, so I feel like I have information that MUST be valuable. I just don't know how to identify / sell it. I know it's probably hard to give specifics without knowing what I want to sell, but can you give me any advice on how long generating such a product might take (how long it took you in the beginning, perhaps?) and how you might pick such a product?
Any ideas how quickly I could make the money off of something like elance (or how quickly you could, since we don't know our relative coding speeds)? Likewise for Mechanical Turk?