Category Archives: Mindhack

How I Built a $600 / mo Product In One Day

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I’ve been working on a few big projects recently, and became frustrated with the inertia built into launching anything big. Sometimes it seems like things will never be ready; like there’s just too much to do.

So I decided to take a break, and really challenge myself.

The Challenge: Building a $500 / mo Product in A Day

For some reason, I’m most motivated by absurd goals. Could I really find a market, pick a niche, and build a product in a single day? And what about marketing?

I decided that a single day wouldn’t afford any time for marketing, and so decided to just focus my efforts on finding a simple market inefficiency. That is, finding a pain point from within the web.

Deciding to Build Something Small

I decided to build some sort of plugin for an Open Source web project. I’ve noticed a real inefficiency here. All the good programmers are out there building the next Twitter, not making life easier for the businesses using Open Source software.

But which Open Source web software? To find out, I pulled up Google Trends, and searched for my potential targets:

As you can see, WordPress turns out to be the great big old winner. It simply gets searched for more often than my other two potential targets combined. And it’s growing like crazy.

A perfect market to search for inefficiencies.

Total Time Spent Finding Market: 2 hours


Narrowing It Down: Finding Unserved Pain Points

The most obvious market for WordPress is within Commercial themes. However, this market is pretty damn competitive, with multiple companies already established making 7 figure incomes. I decided building a complete theme and finding a place to market it in a single day was too obvious a path.

Seems WordPress plugins may be an interesting niche.

So instead, I focused on secondary needs. What is the purpose of WordPress, and what’s a user’s greatest pain point that isn’t being served?

In my case, I decided it was figuring out what the hell to write about. Having run a company, I know that it can be a pain to write content about widgets every day. I mean, how much can a person say about widget x?

Problem Definition: Making it easier to come up with ideas about what to write about.


Having the Aha! Moment

So again, I began researching. How do writers aggregate data relevant to their topic?

The answer was by monitoring RSS feeds, twitter, news sites, etc.

So my product would put that very front end right into WordPress. Grabbing RSS feeds, and putting them directly into the WordPress backend.

This is going to be our product.

Product Definition: RSS feed aggregator integrated into WordPress with the ability to put excerpts into post automatically

Total Time Defining Product: About 30 minutes

Leveraging Existing Technology

So we’ve defined our product roughly. The question now becomes:

What existing technology can I leverage to solve this problem?

It turns out, there’s an incredible library for manipulating RSS feeds in PHP called SimplePie. It’s dead simple to use, and it’s got great examples. I build upon one of the examples and get my RSS feeds working in under an hour.


Plugging into WordPress

I don’t want to say WordPress is poorly documented, because it isn’t. However, it is pretty dry to read technical writing. That being said, my next job was to bring my nice SimplePie based RSS reader right on into the WordPress backend.

To do so, I needed to create a plugin skeleton for WordPress, and add a plugin for TinyMCE. These two meant I had to go back and forth between the WordPress and TinyMCE documentation to figure out how the two fit together.

But once it was all plugged in, I had a working prototype another hour and a half into my actual work.

Total time to build the actual product: 2 1/2 hours


Finding a Marketplace

This was the real opportunity for efficiency. As part of my experiment, I didn’t want to spend a dime on building a market or processing sales. As the day wore on, I decided this could make a great example for someone with absolutely no monetary resources.

So I began researching markets to publish my Commercial WordPress Plugin to.

There was my old favorite, the Envato Marketplace, but they charge a ridiculous commission structure. Something like 50% if you decide you want to retain control to your own product.

That’s just a little too high, even for me.

So I kept looking, and found this great site, wpplugins.com. Turns out they only want a 10% commission to add your software to their marketplace.

However, they insist upon all plugins being released under the GPL, and so I needed to go back and make sure all my code had the GPL inserted into it. However, I signed up for an account, created a zip file, and began writing the documentation for my plugin.

All told, creating some screenshots, writing up a description and cleaning up code probably took more time than writing the actual software.

Total Time Finding Marketplace, Writing Copy: 3 hours

Success! The product has been built and sent out in under a day!


Finally, Watching the Money Roll In

With the marketplace I chose, there was a delay in waiting for my plugin to be approved. However, from the very first day I had sales.

I chose a very low cost for my product, because I believe people don’t have a problem paying for something if it’s less work than pirating it.

That being said, my product is being sold at $14.95 per copy. If you’re interested, you can see a video of it in action below:

You can check out the final product, Content Avalanche here.

Action Cures Fear

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Fear of Failure.

It’s what keeps entrepreneurs up at night, worried about their massive investments in capital and time.

Do I have the right idea? Have I developed it enough? Will it work?

Take Action Now

When I developed my first business, I spent three months developing an actionable plan that looked good enough on paper. Then I spent another three months implementing the site to perfection before I was ready to put it out to the world. Somehow those three months kept dragging on.

Finally, I just launched, even though it was a mess.

Your Well Thought Out Plan Sucks

In my business plan, I had specific targets to meet, for traffic goals and for promotions to get things done. However, it wasn’t nearly enough. I overestimated my effectiveness, and underestimated the complexity of the task at hand.

My lack of progress disturbed me, and I immediately questioned whether or not I was on the right track. I decided quickly that my idea was bad, and started thinking about the next one.

You’ll Need Much More Work than Anticipated

For my second online business, I committed to complete domination of my chosen niche.

This plan meant attacking from many fronts at once. For example, if you want to have a successful blog, the following is the standard work flow:

  • Create ideas for possible subjects
  • Develop ideas completely
  • Write article
  • Submit to social networks

And that seems like enough. But it isn’t. You must dominate, you must be better than at least 95% of everyone else.

So that means doing more:

  • Using Analytics
  • Split Testing Layouts
  • Developing Relationships with Publishers
  • Investing in Intelligence
  • Publishing elsewhere
  • Developing a Brand
  • Becoming a (micro) Celebrity

Understand, the people of the top 95% of any field get a disproportionate number of the results. Being just slightly better than the competition means a landslide more money and eyeballs.

The only way to get better is to work more and work smarter.

You Will Fail at Least 66% of the Time, Even at Your Peak

That’s a hard statistic to deal with, but it’s true. At least 66% of what you’re doing will be ineffective and ignored. It’s hard to be detached and say that one of your grand ideas didn’t work. It’s even harder to come back after your ego’s been beat up.

Something I’ve found helpful to maintain a positive mindset is to assume a negative result in every endeavor. I learned the technique from Winning Through Intimidation.

Basically, the majority of projects you attempt will fail. So have many more projects at one than you anticipate needing. Then be prepared for failure, to keep a positive perspective. When you win, you will be pleasantly surprised.

Use More Action to Build More Momentum

A question most every entrepreneur asks themselves is:

“Why am I putting so much work in to get so little out?”

Action builds momentum. You move first, and then you measure the results later. You can only refine after you’ve made mistakes. So start making mistakes in piles. Eventually, you’ll have a success, mostly by accident. Take that and build upon it.

Your capacity to produce will increase as you push harder. You will become more specialized and more adept, but it does require an initial leap of faith.

Take the plunge and get to work.