The Mixergy Guide to Building a Recurring Revenue Business From Scratch

http://hackthesystem.com/blog/the-mixergy-guide-to-building-a-recurring-revenue-business-from-scratch/

by peeplaja • 14 years ago

124 51 14 years ago

maneesh5• 14 years ago

Maybe the most powerful post I've ever read on recurring revenue businesses --- This post is a guest post on my site, and I took extensive notes for myself! Learned an amazing amount---nice!

vitalique2• 14 years ago

maneesh, thank you and especially Michael for a post that has solid content but jumps right into the instapaper since reading it at your website is unreasonably hard. social sharing buttons really get in the way.

maneesh5• 14 years ago

why are the social buttons getting in your way? I don't see any problem with a full size Chrome browser on a mac---are you on mobile or something?

josscrowcroft• 14 years ago

Wow. Amazing!

Would love to see a section about what to do with your time once your business is covering all your expenses ("filling the void" type stuff)

charleshaanel2• 14 years ago

It's easy. Here's what I did (after 20 months off)

1. Visited Russian owned Wineries in Mexican wine country (yep they have them - they are amazing) 2. Learned how to Horseback ride 3. Volunteered at an orphanage in Latin America (changed my view on business for ever) 4. Moved to Budapest for a while (amazing opera, kick ass clubs, amazing white wine, great caviar) 5. Went clubbing in Stockholm (Midsommar ftw) 6. Went clubbing in Marbella, visited amazing parts of Southern spain, loved it so much settled there (check out a kick ass co-working spot here: http://www.nidomalaga.com) 7. Went clubbing in London - was supposed to go to falconry school but blacked out - LOL just kidding.... noticed a trend here?

Read a gazillion books, caught up on TV, started writing a book, etc. Actually now I'm back on my 3rd start up 'cause I want to get into movie production - self financed. It costs at least $50 million to produce a good movie and another $50 million to market it so I need a to get to work ;)

I thought about posting some screenshots but meh, too much work.

People discounting the whole 4HWW lifestyle - it's real. But who has time to convince other people of something you know to be true...

wj• 14 years ago

As someone with a movie production site I'm curious about your movie production start up. I find a lot of parallels between start ups and production companies.

356365• 14 years ago

"People discounting the whole 4HWW lifestyle - it's real. But who has time to convince other people of something you know to be true..."

Apparently, you.

zupreme• 14 years ago

I wish there was a "Sticky" function on HN. Every SaaS startup founder needs to read this.

Seriously. Bookmark it. Instapaper it. Evernote clip it. However you save it, save it and read it.

maneesh5• 14 years ago

It's pretty epic, isn't it?

dholowiski• 14 years ago

Instapaper!

AndrewWarner2• 14 years ago

Why? What'd you find useful?

knes• 14 years ago

Please give more information on why we would need to bookmark it and co. After a first skim, it looks like the normal e-marketing garbage ebook of people explaining what works for them in their specific niche 3 years ago...

joonix• 14 years ago

Are you kidding me?

nachteilig• 14 years ago

The creating fame section of this was pretty interesting, although it still seems easier written than done

breckenedge• 14 years ago

OK side note: Anyone else use Adblock to remove that ugly fixed #getSocial div with the Twitter, Facebook, etc buttons? I do this all of the time to websites, wonder if others do too.

vitalique2• 14 years ago

You are not alone. I adblock, stylish and tampermonkey the hell out of the great deal of websites I frequent.

OwlHuntr• 14 years ago

With some work I got it into a more readable state: http://cl.ly/KZxs. After the first barrage of buzz words and hype I found it really hard to keep reading at all.

meritt• 14 years ago

I did $('.getsocial').hide(); but yeah.

BryanB55• 14 years ago

It seems a lot of these examples are from 'internet marketing businesses' or people selling info products on "how to make money online" or "how to create an email auto responder".

I've been following the internet marketing niche on and off for a while now so maybe thats why I have certain alarms going off in my head when I see words like:

"What’s your biggest fear and frustration?" - Seriously, that is taught in every internet marketing eBook ever made.

And emails with really long pitches that try to be overly friendly and act like we are best friends and mention things like "Tomorrow I’ll be sending you the “Internet Business Toolkit!” and "since we’ve found each other, I’ll be hooking you up with all sorts of cool stuff"

Maybe it works, but to me it just seems so cheesy after seeing the same email format and same tactics from thousands of other wannabe "internet marketing gurus".

k-mcgrady2• 14 years ago

When I see emails like that the first thing that I think is 'spam'. It works though. I know a few people who do internet marketing and make around £15-25k per month. The majority of the work they do is through emails just like you described.

handzhiev2• 14 years ago

But don't forget that for the few people you know there are another few thousands who use the same tactics and don't manage to make a dime.

356365• 14 years ago

I don't know anyone who actually makes that much in profit.

Most info products leverage information asymmetry. They aren't really "products" in my mind, much closer to scams than anything else. They find ignorant people, string them along, and then sell them information that is either worthless or available for free with the vague promise of "making money online", whatever that means. In some cases the information actually has negative value because it's so wrong.

Some people DO get large checks at the end of the month running this kind of scam, but those same people also spend thousands per month on paid advertising trying to shovel people into their lead capture system. Adwords, CPM buys on shady networks, whatever works.

I don't know of, and have never seen any evidence that you can, actually make £15-25k per month in profit. They usually leave that part out. If you are selling some worthless ebook for $10, you can push plenty of them through Adwords alone, but it's not going to be free, and worthless info products don't scale well once you deplete the initial pool of ignorance. You'd be much better off with fiction, actually.

The whole of "Internet Marketing" is people pretending like they are making bank, but they have little net worth and they put in insanely long hours to walk away with very little profit. Most of that "4hr work week garbage" is the same thing.

maneesh5• 14 years ago

The trick is to not use the same tactics as wannabe "internet marketing gurus."

You can fit the strategies that Michael is speaking of into a number of other businesses. In fact, I'm always surprised the lack of email strategy by tech companies.

When a user comes to your site, there are methods of introducing him to your product that isn't a hard-sell "You need this product--sign up now." You need to introduce them to your product before you make a sale.

So you can offer a giveaway that entices a user join a newsletter. Then you send interesting emails---emails that a reader appreciates being sent. The kind they actually read till the end, and think it was a good decision to read. This builds trust.

But the next step? You introduce them your product, show them why they will get a benefit from it, and then offer them the product---and because they trust you, and understand where it comes from, the user will be likely to buy it.

I'm working on something similar with RescueTime---introducing users to the product with a more story-telling angle.

will_lam• 14 years ago

Interesting, do you mean you're working with the RescueTime on a consulting basis to craft their email drip strategy?

lucaspiller• 14 years ago

OT: RescueTime looks interesting, I wouldn't mind giving it a go, but the two week trial seems a bit short to be able to properly see whether it is working. I wouldn't mind paying for a few months at only $6, but payment is done manually, so I don't have that option.

anselm_eickhoff• 14 years ago

You said what I thought much more eloquently. I found the business models and example emails really spammy if not even scammy.

If what you offer is so vague that you have to do those silly engagement tricks, maybe it doesn't have real value.

handzhiev2• 14 years ago

I don't like this kind of posts. There isn't much wisdom inside. Instead there is the usual kind-of inspiring talk that is not bad, but is not actionable and doesn't contain much details.

It's not "ultimate guide" at all, it's a collection of nearly random and not at all that insightful things that in general would work if you need to execute them well. And the execution is what will make or break your business, not just "knowing" the stuff.

AndrewWarner2• 14 years ago

What would make it the 'ultimate guide' for you?

I didn't know they were going to publish this, but I'm impressed that they connected different ideas in my interviews and I'm curious about other ways to do that.

thaumaturgy3• 14 years ago

Do you mind if I turn this around and ask you some leading questions?

Do you think that 7500 words can constitute an "Ultimate Guide" on anything, let alone a subject as broad and deep as, "Building a Recurring Revenue Business from Scratch"? Do the points featured in the blog post seem to flow naturally from one to the next? If you were to ignore the title of the post and what it claims to be about, what would you think it was about after reading it?

Does it read like an essay, or like an outline?

What kind of recurring revenue businesses will this guide help to build?

I had started to write an objection to this post hours ago after following the link to Maneesh's "first passive business" and doing a little more background research. About halfway through I canceled the comment, deciding that it probably wasn't constructive and probably wasn't worth my time (or a reader's).

(Side note: I was going to go to mixergy.com to try to also make the argument that the usual content from Mixergy is far better than this, but found that I couldn't actually load the site without first signing up with an email address. I look forward to the future messages delivered to my account, no@piss-off.com. I also realize that my argument would have been wrong.)

If Maneesh has been building fame and fortune online by using SEO tools to come up with subjects that $.01/word writers at http://thecontentauthority.com/ will blog about for him (it's "high quality" and "not spam", of course) and then post around the web for him so that he can make passive AdSense revenue from people directed to the ghost-written posts by Google, well ... awesome, I guess. I honestly kind of wish I could give up programming and do something like that; I certainly can't argue with his quality of life or how he's chosen to spend the money he's made exploiting a company that provides both ads and search results.

And if he's now coming up with ways to leverage his skills into enormously popular posts like, "How I quadrupled my productivity by hiring a hiring a woman to slap me", or, "How to learn a language in 90 days", or, "How to Earn $12,840 from a Single Guest Post", then that's awesome too, I guess.

And if he then writes a post that compiles a bunch of tips on building a social-media-newsletter-marketing-recurring-revenue business, then awesome, too. But, I find myself agreeing with handzhiev's sentiment that it's vague and incomplete and not polished, and I also find myself feeling like I should soon expect to see a follow-up post, "How I made $32,768 by having someone else write a guest post on my site and submit it everywhere", followed by the even more popular, "The ultimate guide to getting rich online".

The Mixergy Guide to Building a Recurring Revenue Business From Scratch

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