Thank you! I was just about to use Google to find the link and then realized I'm on Hacker News and if there were comments already on the article, someone beat me to it.
+1 for you, and another +1 for catching legacy media up to speed ;)
he calls himself a serial entrepreneur even though he's still on his first business and his second is going to be T-shirts (notoriously bad business sector)? I forsee bad things in the future.
He's been successful, which I'm pretty sure gives him the right. Whether he'll do it again, is yet to be seen. I bet people would have said selling coins would be a notoriously bad idea/sector,etc. but he did well. I foresee good things in his future.
I was also thinking this falls under the luck category also. ~8 years ago I got into selling Transformers on ebay. Classic G1 toys were going for a lot and I was making a nice margin. And then Hasbro and Takara started re-releasing the toys. My bad luck.
He's been successful one time in a row. I admit that that's a better success rate than I currently have to my credit, but it did make for a rather lame ending to an otherwise good story.
HAHA... I thought that too until I finally understood what he meant.
Remember, he started off with just Marine coins, then... "In the past five years, Morin has expanded his coin business beyond the Marines to include other service branches, weddings, sports teams, and corporations such as Starbucks, Delta Air Lines and United Parcel Service. He hired a Web designer to jazz up the online site. He changed his company name from Marine Corps Coins to Coins for Anything and has expanded into trophies, pins and lanyards (the neck straps to which security badges or credentials are attached)."
So you say, "he expanded", but he views these expansions as additional businesses and treated them as such "... estimate that Morin's companies earn a net profit of around $1 million; he didn't deny that estimate. He is rolling most of that profit back into his enterprises. A competitor offered to buy the coin company for $4 million a couple of years back."
Furthermore, I wouldn't downplay the t-shirt business everyone. I would have said the same thing about the coin business until I read this. Only difference is I know a bit more about the t-shirt business and the money is there.
In his first business he noticed a profitable demand and filled it. Now he has the advantage of capital to try other ventures, as well as real world business experience. He may do well. I love stories like this.
Wow, he may end up in the dictionary next to the word 'capitalist'. I love that he has positive cash flow. I know websites and Internets are all the rage but he may be actually making more profit than Facebook, and certainly more than Twitter.
You say that like it's as simple as making the decision. Why would they hold off on making money? I think it's because they don't know how to monetize it. I'm curious to see what they come up with.
Because money often interferes with growth, and in any case if your first priority is growth it's best to focus on that rather than bring in secondary or tertiary concerns.
According to a Mashable article in March '09: "The latest numbers from Nielsen Online indicate that Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month."
I'm not sure how much you can interfere with that kind of growth. My point is that people seem to talk easily about monetizing all those users, but nobody seems to be able to give specifics on how to do it.
Even if users don't mind the ads, it can take a depressing amount of time to integrate ads into a site [1]. Assuming you don't just use adsense, each advertiser often has their own way of doing things and will have one-off requirements for how their ads should behave on your site. That's engineering time that could be used to fuel growth by developing features and working on scaling.
[1] I'm speaking from personal experience. For about six months, I worked on nothing but integrating various advertisers' products into justin.tv. Video ad providers are particularly difficult to work with, since it's still quite a young market.
Ads may be their obvious route, but I wonder how much of a turn-off that will be for users. I'm totally rooting for Twitter to be successful, I just wanted to highlight the contrast between this small $5M business actually making money vs. "hot" web companies that may be faddish, and have yet to prove a model to make money, yet get all the press plus $100M investment.
I think it's great that Twitter is focused on only one thing: being the first social network to reach 1Bn users.
I mean, honestly, who gives a shit whether Twitter is making money now or not? Twitter doesn't, their users don't, and their investors don't.
Who else matters in this equation?
The only reason people talk about it is because other people say "Yes, Twitter is big, but how will they make money?" People said the same thing about Google and (some) still say the same thing about Facebook.
Twitter probably won't be the first to 1B users, at 45M plus 1 new user/second currently that will probably be linkedin. Also, pumping huge amounts of cash into things that don't actually have the corresponding cash value is how bubbles form and burst. (reply to jfarmer above)
EDIT: whoever downvoted me shouldn't have. Regardless of your feelings about Twitter, my statement about economic bubbles is correct.
You say bubble, other people say sound investment. If Twitter crumbles because they overreach there will be a thousand startups ready to pick up the pieces.
My problem is not with Twitter per se; as I said I hope they are successful. My concern is that we don't celebrate companies like this where the guy actually makes money enough; instead we focus on things which are more speculative in nature. Sure, facebook and twitter may turn out to reap huge profits in the future, but valuing them at around 1B before they've made more in profit than this little $5M company has done is the same pattern of ignoring cash to actual value that led to the Great Depression, the dot com bust, and this latest housing bust/financial crisis. How many funded web companies still don't make $1M yearly in profit?
P.S. Legacy media: When we cite folks on the Internet, we include links. I should not have to use Google to complete your articles for you.