The author touched briefly on one thing that's worth noting, but it might have got buried in the article so it bears repeating:
If you build something cool, people will find you and give you consulting work
That's a strategy that has worked for me several times over the years. I mentioned a silly unmonetizable Travel Blogging site elsewhere in this discussion, but if you look at the paying client work that resulted from that site's existence, you could argue that it's been one of my most successful products.
In addition to cool, I might suggest building something public which comes close to meeting business needs for people. With those provisos: yeah, it works great. Having a reputation in whatever your circle of competence is gets you more leads and lets you be pickier about who you work with, what you work on, and how much you charge.
But sometimes it's easier and faster to build something
cool than to try to build a useful business product.
I'm facing that dilemma now. Should I focus on the product I want to build and possibly fail months later with nothing to show for the effort and no budget left to live on (I'm still recovering from the last one)?
Or should I build several smaller demo projects as portfolio pieces I can shop to get client work to fund the part-time development of my eventual product? Especially considering that my walled-off enterprise projects are inaccessible and built with tools other than the open source ones I'd prefer to be working with.
As a heavy Wordpress user, I have a lot of love for the folks who create both free and premium themes. They solve huge business problems for me. (Substantially all of the publicly visible content of my next product is getting served up by Wordpress with a WooThemes template, because I'd rather spend a week talking to early adopters rather than a week handwriting copy and markup in Rails.)
They're even better for folks who don't have good designers available or who don't have the technical chops to make adjustments to their sites themselves.
As a business model, it is pretty good if you can get traction, too -- the content scarcely ever rots, per-customer value is high (relative to, say, B2C software), and you stand a decent chance of getting repeat business if you continue expanding your product line. I wouldn't want to get into it myself (no design skills and I think I'd be about four years behind the curve even if I could design my way out of a paper bag), but it is clearly successful for some folks.
Great story particularly because he seems like an average (but talented, obviously) guy in a cubicle farm with a wife and kids and mortgage, not yet-another Stanford golden-child.
At the moment, I'm passionate about rock climbing, travel, surfing and computer programming. If it weren't for that 4th one, I'd be screwed.
I currently run maybe the 3rd most popular Travel Blogging site out there. It's had a good 5 years of passion poured in now, off and on, and if I were to slap ads on it today I'd pull in a buck thirtyfive a day.
I also run a little service that processes the draconian logfiles that Amazon provides for its webservices and spits out pretty analytics. It's a subject that no human being could ever be passionate about and it pays my rent.
Sometimes it's better to monetize something boring that people are willing to pay for.
Assuming your travel blogging site is the one listed in your profile. If that's the case, you should be making way more than a $1.35 a day (~2K uniques per Compete and nearly sub 100K Alexa). I'm sure you don't want to plaster your site with ads, but if you reached out to smaller brand advertisers, I'm sure you could get some decent non-obtrusive, CPM deals. You could also use something like Skimlinks/Viglink to affiliatize traffic (although I think CPM is the way to go).
Not always directly, no. You could, for example, route your passion for rock climbing into selling rock climbing equipment, or producing rock climbing training videos, or publishing a travel guide about the best rock climbing destinations.
Those specific examples may or may not work for you, but even if rock climbing itself isn't a profitable activity, there's surely some way to build business related to rock climbing.
Climbing shops squeak by selling ice axes to non-climbers who mount them on their walls. Climbing guides survive by taking beginners up mountains and hosting birthday parties at the crag. Guidebook authors are lucky if they recoup their printing costs.
Climbers (and outdoor folks in general) just don't like to pay for stuff. I rode enough outdoor-enthusiast dot-coms into the ground back in the 90's to know to stay clear of that space.
I see where you're going with this though, and I'll grant that you can certainly find a way to squeeze out a niche in even a space this dirtbaggishly stingy. But if you're going to put in the effort, I'd recommend doing it in a vertical full of people used to paying lots of money to make their technically trivial problems go away.
There are plenty of those verticals waiting to be tapped, and chances are they're not your passion.
I just picked up indoor rock climbing about 6 months ago and would disagree. Many climbers at the gym I frequent are in their early thirties or older and already have a steady income from a white collar job.
While it isn't a particularly expensive sport like hockey or golf, I'd say it isn't cheap either. Day passes at the gym are $16, and it is packed. And it's growing too! There's lots of newbies starting the sport, especially parents bringing their kids, or school groups.
This could vary widely from location to location though.
Regardless, climbers have a noble history of not paying for things.
Gyms are a good example of this. They make the lion's share of their money off of Birthday Parties. Monthly dues won't even keep the lights on.
Other lifestyle sports have the same issues. There's a reason why most Surf Shops don't sell surfboards. They sell boardshorts to people who want to look like surfers. The actual participants don't spend much on their sports.
I think it really depends on the gym. In my area, I would estimate that around 90% of visitors are regulars (that is, have an ID card/monthly pass).
The ones I've been to have a range of climbs: from a small section available to beginners, to routes and bouldering that require a much higher level of technique and endurance.
From personal experience, I've already spent an embarrassing amount on courses, memberships, and equipment.
That's actually my point, and the reason that gyms struggle. 90% of the people you see only pay them money once a month, and even then they complain if it's more than $50/month.
Daypasses cost $16 and end up generating a lot more revenue. Birthday parties cost $10/head, happen 16-30 times a month, and bring in enough to keep them afloat.
That's why you end up with tons of toproping areas, easy routes, and pretty looking features: to bring in the one-time visitors.
A good training area doesn't need to look pretty. In fact, the more it looks a lot like an inclined piece of plywood, the better. History shows, however, that training-focused gyms fail every time, whereas beginner & birthday party "social" gyms can sometimes squeak by.
It's certainly not an industry you go into to make money.
Let me know when you get into traditional climbing, all the gear that it comes with, and start flying to different crags, then it will surely start adding up :P
I share those exact 4 passions (surfing a bit less so, but have been getting more into it when time and weather permits, with climbing at #1 spot by far) and while I can totally see what you mean, I'm not sure I'd personally want to "monetize" climbing.
I climb to get away from computers, to spend an afternoon (or a few days) with friends away from technology and have by my escape. Just like artists who choose not to sell their art, I'm afraid trying to make money from it will ruin it. I have met guides who I've taken lessons from before who absolutely loved guiding and would not have traded it for the world. Obviously, other peoples' opinions will differ.
(Where are you geographically btw?
edit: just checked your info and I think I've asked you this before. Last time I did, you were in Thailand or the UK, not quite sure if I remember)
Indeed. Every adsense test I've done on the site has pulled in about a dollar a day. More fun, it's always been $1/day even as the site grew to 10x and 50x the original traffic. It seems our growth was inversely matching people's decline in tendency to click on ads.
Have you considered trying affiliate sales? Pick something that you like, mention it with an affiliate link. Blogs with some kind of focus seem to do pretty well with this approach.
Yes. For a while we tried Amazon links to Lonely Planet guidebooks and Affiliate links to hostels. That made maybe ten dollars after 6 months, and dropped the site into Google's "Hotel Affiliate Site" black hole for the next year. Bad move.
The problem with monetizing the Travel side of a site like this is that there are dozens of big money sites devoted to doing exactly that. Blogabond's whole appeal is that we don't surround your blog with banner ads and we don't try to help you book flights and rental cars.
So yeah, we could do that sort of stuff and maybe make a few dollars, but it would just turn us into another TripAdvisor instead of a cool place to host your blog.
Oh, I see how you're set up now. I thought you were the sole blogger, not a blog host. That makes a little more sense as those sorts of sites do seem to be tougher to monetize without doing things like offering premium features to your bloggers (and even then, you need a pretty huge author base to make it worthwhile).
One lesson I got from this is to follow trends. In this case, Wordpress and commercial themes. It's taken me years to see that most small businesses make money this way, rather than forging entirely new paths or inventing new technologies.. Find something that's already becoming popular, do it a bit better, profit..
Inspiring. I wonder what other Open Source ecosystems have opportunities for selling premium add-ons. As a sysadmin, DBA, and sometimes programmer I already love what I do, but I'm starting to realize the limits of the money I can make working for somebody else.
I like to imagine the flow of wealth I can get into more capable hands than my own. I've seen incredible designs and tech with only a few days work. These folks need more $$ and models to move their creations to others in need. I think part of the attractor for a startup is enabling better conditions for people with impressive skills that prefer a job, autonomy, but don't wanna deal with the business side.
IMHO there is a growing niche of creating websites on WP (or any other extensible CMS) as a way to cheaply test your ideas rather than invest the upfront cost of building a site from scratch.
Providing a service of building websites quickly & cheaply using something like WordPress can be valuable and lucrative even in the corporate world. I recently proposed this to my company for a new project and got the green light (after getting quotes of above $15K from other shops for a custom job). It was however difficult to find WP hackers easily and ended up building the site myself (in a fraction of the time and cost).
As a developer and a publisher who has used Wordpress for many projects, I have to say: good for him. He's doing it almost as it should be. Uses solid CSS frameworks, and sort-of good publishing platform(WP) and provides good support(According to his site).
For todays projects, I tend to use small microframeworks using Python, but WP is still my 0-60 in 5 seconds platform.
As a press75 customer I have to say I've had a very positive experience. They're selling a high quality product and support seems to be good even though I haven't had to call on it myself.
Great story - really chimes with what i did two months ago...I left my well paid corporate job to do something that i really enjoyed...solving real world problems for real world clients who really need them solving (not just pleasing the boss). So i set up PageDo (http://pagedo.com).
Interesting how he integrated the price for all his WP themes into his brand -- everything is 75 bucks, hence press75.com. That seems great for now, but does it make it difficult to raise prices in the future?
According to http://www.thesevenfive.com/about/ that's not the case. In fact, your statement is backwards. His price is a reflection of his brand, not the other way i.e. his brand is "75"... thus changing his price won't matter much in the future, as his brand won't change.
It hasn't stopped The Carphone Warehouse from remaining one of the largest cellphone companies in the UK :-) Many companies have products that have migrated away from the original brand definition.
That's it, HN is dead to me. "How I Monetized My Passion" is self-parody. When you can't tell the difference between parody and the real thing you're a goner.
If you build something cool, people will find you and give you consulting work
That's a strategy that has worked for me several times over the years. I mentioned a silly unmonetizable Travel Blogging site elsewhere in this discussion, but if you look at the paying client work that resulted from that site's existence, you could argue that it's been one of my most successful products.