Item — HN Reader

Hmm, sorry if my article seems to come across that way? I feel like many of the points I'm making are very much: you aren't going to get rich quick.

You need to practice to get good at something for a long time. You need to take the long game approach to building an audience (Basecamp took awhile to build up its audience which eventually propelled its product which still took awhile and never became a 'unicorn'). Going to where your customers are is a grind. You just keep talking though and eventually you find a ton of value from those conversations. Inkling (YC W06!) was a long grind. Never turned into a unicorn. Never got rich. But... all the hard work eventually led to us figuring out how to make a living from it. Same with Cityposh from YC S11. That was a total bust. But eventually, after a ton of pain and even had to take a break and do the Obama campaign tech team, figured out some value that turned into Draft (http://draftin.com) which tada also hasn't made me rich. But it makes some decent revenue for a thing that runs on its own and took one person to build and maintain.

A lot of grinding and figuring this stuff out and doing stuff I mention in this article kept getting me further and further and further. And now all this stuff led to me taking over Highrise (http://highrisehq.com). I'm not rich like some f u money acquisition, skyrocketing, startup success story, but through all this long hard work for a decade I've been able to largely wake up and work on whatever I deemed important, and explore lots of weird ideas, write, not travel so I could hang out at home with my family (my consultant days sucked) and 19 month old daughter.

I think anyone can repeat this too. There's usually always a way to make some money from something we think we're passionate about. It's probably not plan A, B, C, D, or E. But eventually we can figure out an angle. But you're right, it's not quick. The stuff in this article took me a long time. But it was worth it. And I'm happy to help anyone I can figure this out. What can I do? @natekontny on Twitter and nate.kontny on Gmail. Please let me know how I can help.

2 comments

Ok, sorry, you are right. The article didn't show a recipe to get rich quickly. It was more about a "hot to get rich in due time" recipe.

Perhaps I'm just being overly sensitive and cranky.. I guess HN is different things to different people. I know most of us are doing this to make money. I certainly am. But when the discussion turns to purely make-money things that don't have a clear technology angle, I get antsy. (Yes, they obviously have parallels in the teach business, but still.)

No problem at all! I understand too. This stuff has a way of making us cranky. Probably because the success part of getting people to use something isn't as formulaic as building something. I quit my career in chemical engineering because I wanted that structure of the computer. The mess of how chemicals react drove me nuts. And then I just find myself in the mess of human psychology and "chemistry" :) Oh well.

For what it's worth, even with this non-tech, hand wavey stuff, I try and share as much tactic and followable strategy as I can. That point in here about asking "Can I buy you a virtual cup of coffee" that worked so well. Everyone I've emailed with that subject line has opened that email and taken me up on it. Got some great meetings.

But still at the end, there's no guarantee those meetings will create any immediate wealth. But like I said earlier, from so much of life I feel like most of us who have the capability to get on a computer and read this stuff on this message board, eventually we can figure out an angle to making money from the stuff we want to.

It's not maybe exactly your dream but I keep finding ways to make it work. For example, maybe your software product just doesn't turn out to be the SaaS app you get 1000 people paying $100 a month for. But with enough giving up, trying some new variation, testing again, we find what does sell. Maybe it's selling licenses as one off installs for big banks, or doing consulting in the same domain. If you love the domain of your product, there's so much room for the actual original product idea to suck, but find something tangential that you still love to work on.

And those books I mention in the article about Blue Ocean Strategy and Something Really New are mind opening on how to design a product. Draft was all about analyzing tasks we have as writers and removing steps. It wasn't overnight, but was a key way I thought about the product design that led to some great usage.

Quick questions on the DraftIn site:

1) Under features you mention the ability to send content to a panel of reviewers.

How does that work? Are they your staff or is that crowdsourcing from other members?

2) What's the length-limit for content your reviewers will proofread?

Great product idea by the way!

Thanks! It's outsourced. I actually use another YC company, Mobileworks, to source the editors.

As for time limit I just charge for 15 minutes or 45 minutes. You get what you get in that bucket. Some folks can get a bunch of help depending on the length and density of their writing. It all really depends on the situation. Some stuff that comes in for 15 minutes is like 4000 words of deep philosophical treatise, hard to proof read much of that in 15 min, but we do our best! :)