Tim Ferriss is very good at downplaying the effort and costs that go into businesses. Good for inspiring people to try, bad for actually being transparent.
In this example, the (claimed) $200 production cost and $2.10 DVD cost are probably nothing relative to this large marketing cost:
> piece through trade magazines
The marketing costs and effort are conveniently omitted.
The info is generally available. It is just old school and somewhat of a lost art.
There’s lists of publications by trade. You could buy ad space on multiple publications or individually. The model was $n per square inch of space.
The trick was finding the lists. General business magazines used to have advertisements for companies that ran/owned the lists. So it was somewhat accessible to the general public.
Cost was similar to how ad words are calculated. So the more niche you’d go the better chance you had of manageable costs (unless your niche was super expensive for some reason).
Effort is relative. Once you knew how the marketing channels worked everything else was fairly straightforward. The ads that worked were just left on autopilot. There weren’t redesigns or none of the shit that’s done today. Ads were left alone. Tracking was even rather simple. You’d have a special code, phone number, or mailbox that tied the ad to the order. Simple stuff.
You can replicate all of these today and still make a tidy sum. But you won’t do it behind a computer. Gotta go out into the wild and talk with people about all kinds.
> The marketing costs and effort are conveniently omitted.
I agree with you, but also somewhat disagree on the overall takeaway. Yes, of course you have to put more effort into it than just spending $200 NRE and $2.10 unit cost. The quiet part that really needs to be said out loud (way more than marketing costs and effort) is: find a niche with really great unit economics. When you've got a product with 10% margin, you have to manage all of those marketing costs very very carefully. When you've got a product with a raw 5000% margin, it matters way way less whether your CAC is even triple the raw manufacturing cost of the product.
Back then marketing was easier - just throw something up on eBay. But there are some 'hidden' costs not discussed.
I have a friend who did something similar back around the same time frame and he did pretty well. His niche was doing video tutorials on how to use new camera equipment. He needed to buy/own camera and video equipment. Luckily he already had it from is other endeavor as a photographer. He needed to have the skillset to the make and edit the video. Again, he had that from being a photographer. He ended up selling quite a lot of DVDs.
So the moral is to find a niche that leverages a lot of what you already have/know.
In this example, the (claimed) $200 production cost and $2.10 DVD cost are probably nothing relative to this large marketing cost:
> piece through trade magazines
The marketing costs and effort are conveniently omitted.