How I Made $4000 Selling A Product I Didn't Have
Published in 2013, this chronicle by @adii details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $4000.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 54 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 71 comments
TL;DR - Putting up a marketing site and asking for money up front sets customers expectations for what is to be delivered. But startups change significantly in the early stages, so it's very difficult to meet customer expectations.
I'd like to hear more about what people said in the customer interviews. Here's my experience as a consumer...
After flipping through the library, I signed up immediately. The cost/value was very high.
After putting in my credit card details, I was put in a queue, which was a little frustrating as I was expecting instant access, but I got over it quickly and didn't mind waiting. I think this was fine.
The big problem came when the library disappeared from the site and the business went in a very different direction. I had pledged $30/month for something specific (the videos from high-profile entrepreneurs), so it was disappointing to see that it wasn't going to happen. It even entered my mind that it was only ever a carrot to get my credit card details and that there was never an intent to make the videos. So, some confidence lost there. Also, still having my credit card on the hook for something else that I hadn't yet learned about was a bit disconcerting.
Adii is a friend and I was still curious about what it would be, so I stuck with it. It's highly likely if I didn't know the founder, I would have cancelled immediately.
I struggle to consistently participate in communities, so I will be cancelling my membership. The video library was more my thing, consumption without engagement. And that's what I pledged my $30/month for.
The comments here have covered all the shady/illegal aspects of the post, but the most dangerous part (and you may not experience it in person outside of major tech areas): people get really excited about manipulating and abusing others for their own gain (especially small numbers of technically competent people abusing large numbers of "normals").
People are just anonymous hits online, right? Drive up the hits. How? Just manipulate people. Oh, we got money? Chest bumps and high fives all around. We did it!
When you start thinking about "right" or "wrong" when doing work like this, your world falls apart, so you don't think that way. You run the hustle. You run the borderline-illegal practices all in the name of growth. When you're successful it'll all be forgiven by rich people who want to leech of your success anyway.
If we keep telling ourselves it's bad/wrong/illegal, all the people willing to do this shady work will end up ruling the world while we still sit on our poor sanctimonious asses.
Interesting - he gave a talk on this at Microconf Europe which was this last weekend, and a very good conference with lots of cool and interesting people. There was (I thought) something of a feeling in the room of "hrm, maybe this is a bit over the line?" although everyone was appreciative of the fact that it was a much stronger validation of the idea than just handing over an email address. Watching Adii talk, I certainly got the impression he was not 100% happy with the approach himself, and wrestled with it some.
OTOH, I can understand the risk avversion: if they've given you a CC number (they were not, however, charged), they're a Real Customer and your product is far more likely to have legs than just getting an email address, which is in turn better than not even having a pre-launch page and just hoping people want whatever it is you've slaved away building for months. Spending a lot of money to build something only to find no one wants it, or wants a fairly different version sucks big time!
Launching early is certainly a good thing. Launching a product that is only a proof of concept so people can really see what you're trying to do is also a good idea. But taking people's money under the banner "WE'RE A COMMUNITY OF ENTREPRENEURS THAT HELP EACH OTHER." when no such community exists seems borderline dishonest.
When 5.5% of your initial customers feel scammed and are are upset about being deceived it may be an "acceptable loss" from a business perspective, but I certainly don't think that's a "great result". 5.5% is a lot. For comparison, an eBay vendor with that many unhappy customers wouldn't last long.
Bootstrapping communities is notoriously difficult, and I'm well aware that the use of "community building hacks" are more the norm rather than exception, but I'm still not going to applaud this behavior.
If you use deception to found a company, you'll find reasons to continue using it while running the company, and you'll eventually lose the company because of it.
There are ways to measure buying signals. Please research them. Here, I'll do you a solid, and Google "how to measure buying signals"
Oh, look: http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/can-you-get-roi-from-simple-words-on-twitter/
While it's not my intention to hold this up as the authority on buying signals, what you will pick up on is that nothing on this page talks about the number of subscribers on an email list. Subscriber counts are, at best a weak buying signal. It measures interest, not willingness to purchase.