righyeah

Upon further reflection, I retract all my prior statements. I concede defeat. You win the "debate". Alas I cannot downvote my original comment back to "1". I will need help. Any takers? What were those upvoters thinking anyway? Surely we need more ebook marketing of this variety on the HN frontpage.

To be fair, what I am commenting on goes well beyond this specific blog. The type of practice I've described gets much, much worse than what is on this blog. But is essentially the same thing, only to a different degree.

It's ironic that the web has opened up the door to vast amounts of free information and at the same time led to many people believing they can and should sell any information they manage to acquire. Will some people pay? Yes, some people will. Buy my ebook and I'll explain how.

If the niche products are doing so well, then why the need to sell consulting? I mean if you have a product that is truly revolutionizing the time management space, one would think that business would constinue to grow and require a lot of energy to maintain.

It seems like this niche is a given number of programmers with poor time management skills surfing the web (what a coincidence :). Giving them a quick fix impulse buy is the niche. You will not catch enough fish to last a lifetime but some not-so-smart fish will get caught in the net, consistently.

And we can apply this same idea to selling admission to a talk or sellling an ebook. The point is to sell a perceived quick fix to people who are foolish enough to believe in such things.

No one would question this works as a "business". People _will_ pay. I would not doubt someone could make 30K in one month.

What's being questioned is whether you want to sell to an audience of people who you know will, with very rare exception, never have that success. This is because they believe in quick fixes. And of those rare cases where a buyer does succeed, can you really take credit for their success?

"none of [his] products are about how to build products. They're about how to do better consulting..."

The question is: What is being consulting on?

Is it substantive?

Building products seems substantive. Especially building products that can produce sufficient income over the long term. But if it's not on bulding products like this then what is it? Is it about how not to have to build products that make sizeable but not sufficient income and instead to sell advice to people in that position? How clever.

If every developer were to become a "consultant", then who is left doing the grunt work of actually building products? Who is left to discover these websites, while they can produce decent bursts of monthly income, are not enough to sustain someone over a long period?

You've also nailed it with your first sentence.

The answer to your question of whether the book is necessary is in the blog post (I think marketers call this a "sales letter"?). It is in bold. It describes a person who wants to pay money in order to improve their life.

Now, as to anyone claiming to have paid money and had their life improve, we may know that paying money was not necessary and not at cause for any change in their life. That was something they did on their own. But the blogger is OK with that. In fact he sees it as a key to his enterprise. He says the product (web app, etc.) does not necessarily matter. You simply need to find people who want to pay money to improve their life.

The ethical question is do you care if 99% of them may fail to improve it by simply paying money? That's not your fault of course. But it makes you wonder what exactly you are selling. Maybe you are just a sink for a known type of source --> The type of person looking to spend money on information to "improve their life", despite the availability of the same information without cost; and despite the fact that the key to improving their life may have nothing to do with impulsively buying an ebook.

Not everyone will answer that ethical question the same way. If they did we would not be having a discussion about this.

Any Rails developer can skip the ebook and just raise their rates for new clients. What's the worst that can happen? The only way to know what the market will bear is to test it. Alternatively they could stop coding and sell ebooks to other developers with the knowledge that "some people are looking to spend money to improve their lives and it really doesn't matter what that something is". It doesn't have to be a application you spent large blocks of time developing. An ebook on how easy it is to make money (by finding people ready to spend money to improve their lives) that you wrote in a single day may be just fine.

"It's like condemning all..."

No, it is not like that. I'm not sure why you would see it that way. It is condemning a very specific practice. This practice is much like multi-level marketing.

You might think of it as a sort of recursion. To use your example, it would be like selling a book on how to sell a book on how to learn to program. You might do very well with this sort of business but it does not require that anyone ever learns how to program. That is, the book does not need to be effective in accomplishing anything more than selling itself. As long as you understand this, it's fine. But somewhere down the line, someone may actually want to learn to program (not just sell ebooks). If this still isn't clear I am happy to give another example.

Do some Google searches for "how to become wealthy without...", "work from home..." or some similarly popular too-good-to-be-true idea, or even just "internet marketing". You will find eventually examples of people, who have (surprise) done very well for themselves, by selling advice on how to sell advice on how to {become wealthy, work from home, etc.}, using the internet (email, web). These "advice on how to sell advice" schemes are perhaps the most lucrative forms of advice that can be sold via the internet. And also the most hollow. A best selling ebook might simply be a ebook on how to sell ebooks (on how to sell ebooks)! Keep recursing.

Or just cut to the chase and search "multi-level marketing".

True. There is nothing wrong with git. It is great software.

But like a good song, if the radio stations overplay it, they can ruin the enjoyment of it for some listeners.

I think maybe we (nerds) all have the urge to be fanboys. We all have some software that we really like. Yet there are many examples of people who resist the urge to be a fanboy. Alas, the ones who give in to it are the ones who post their follies on the web and announce it to the world. The ones who don't are silent.

"No ordinary FTP client can do that."

Use ncftp or lftp. Problem solved.

But there never was a problem. Those ftp client have been around since the mid-1990's. He created a "problem" in order to play with a favorite software: git. This is typical behavior. git is clearly among the softwares, systems (Linux?) and devices (iPhone?) that have "fanboys".

So we can be sure we'll be hearing more about git. More fabricated "problems" to solve. Fanboys are blinded to all of history and all else besides their chosen infatuation.

Meanwhile, no matter how wonderful git is, I still have to install multiple versioning systems (cvs, svn, hg and git, at the bare minimum), because programmers can't agree on just one. Now _that_ is a problem.

You've nailed it with your first paragraph.

That is the scheme. It's old. It still works. The web, like TV, is absolutely perfect for this scheme. The audience that includes people who would pay for this sort of advice is the one that watches TV at odd hours, and they are now increasingly surfing the web.

It is the rough equivalent of the infommercial.

While it may be theoretically possible, no one is going to make five figures per month except the person selling advice on how to make five figures per month.

I don't know how these sellers sleep at night. Certainly they can do well. But they are _deliberately_ preying on the weak. If that's the type of "business" you want to run, go for it.

But it has always been pure sleaze and will continue to be so for the forseeable future.