There was one company I saw that had a one click integration as part of their onboarding flow, just forgot to grab the example. It's very clever, and a great way to expose the product to multiple people within your organization (think Slack integration).
Hmm, good question. Hard to say really, but it is not a trivial amount of time. The launch itself was literally at least 20 hours. I did get 4 hours of sleep ;) But to promote the whole thing it probably took several days. Yeah that sounds about right.
For me it is more than just about the money - I do okay as a consultant. There's just a somewhat of a special feeling when you create something - a product - and sell it. It's just not the same as providing a service. I hope that makes sense.
Thanks for the write-up! Im curious, how did you promote ph launch? Did you have a mailing list to let everyone know? Where did the support come from or was it just through luck?
No list. As I said in the post, I had very little audience. Most of the success is due to me randomly messaging my Twitter contacts and asking for their support. I messaged ahead of time (maybe a few hours before?) just so it wasn't out of the blue. Everyone agreed. Some were already customers (I made some sales before the launch) so they left honest reviews of the product.
I think the other part of this being successful was the giveaway tweet, plus all the friends who just wanted to support me. I am really thankful they did!
My affiliate marketing background also tells me that if something is profitable, chances are you can scale it. So this is my goal - figure out ways to scale this thing. It's too fun to just drop now.
Thanks for your feedback - have entrepreneurship as a industry field in the database. So for example companies sponsoring BetaList or Starterstory are covered in my list.
Do you know good newsletters/websites I should cover with my report?
A ton of games use psychological tricks to get people to spend. Look at hearthstone from Blizzard. You have to keep buying cards until you get lucky... and you never do. The randomized fashion makes it so you never stop spending even though you are one card away from your ideal deck. It has all the elements of gambling minus the real life rewards. There definitely needs to be some sort of regulation — perhaps punishing the randomized reward mechanics.
I did the same in WoW :) Bought up all the versions of a certain item in AH and sold at extreme markup over time. As more came up on AH I’d just buy them all up and continue. This lasted for quite some time and I diversified into other items. Let’s just say I could afford anything in that game :)
In my case it was the egg needed for making a gingerbread cookie on Christmass. There was only one low level area that would drop them 100%. So I farmed it en-masse, no one else did.
