I'm Daniel. I made $404,473 selling an ebook and a video course on the internet. AMA 👇

@jondotjames tl;dr: Don't focus on one project. Do many at the same time. Long answer: That there are two very distinct types of "work": - One where the payoff follows a normal distribution (doctor, programmer, plumber, etc). - The other where the payoff follows a Pareto distribution (musician, author, startup founder, YouTuber, etc). If you want to work in the Pareto world, you can’t treat work the same as a normal job. Unlike a normal job, you can’t rely on focus and hard work to increase your odds of success, because the Pareto world is extremely competitive, random, and highly unpredictable. To make a living with the Pareto world, you must behave like a venture capitalist, a book publisher, or a film studio. You must have a portfolio of enough things such that you can expect a few payoffs to happen regularly. You can't just focus one one product and hope it works. You have to build a portfolio of small safe-to-fail bets.

@cristian_cisa1 Thank you! And I agree that marketing is the biggest challenge. I attribute almost all my revenue to having an audience on Twitter. I had about 11,000 Twitter followers when I released my first product (the ebook on AWS) on December 2019. That product made about $40,000 in sales in 2 weeks, and over $125,000 lifetime. I've seen many successful info product creators who had no social media audience and simply used SEO, paid ads, content marketing, their personal network, and other techniques. Unfortunately I don't have much experience with those, but it's a viable option for the right product.

@sanjrng 1. When I made my first $1,000 a few hours after I released my first product, I knew this was a viable income stream for me. I had no idea what the full upside was, but I had a strong gut feel that this was something I could continue doing for a living. 2. Nothing major. I made few promotion efforts that were too ambitious, that I shouldn't have attempted. For example, once I promised to review everyone's Twitter account if they bought my Twitter course, but I received so many requests at once that I didn't manage to keep up. 3. I don't think it's necessary because I didn't do any of that. But I'm sure it depends a lot on the product.

@youreka I like to practice 'intensity over consistency'. (which imo, is much more in harmony with our nature.) So, I don't context switch frequently. I go all-in on something for a short while (a few days; maybe a couple of weeks) and then I rest. Then, the next thing I pick up can be something very different from the last. When people ask my about what my typical day looks like I never have a good answer because I don't have a typical day :)

@kyleighsmith I'm not a fan of creating habits. I mainly look for intrinsic motivation, and then the good habits follow automatically. Maybe creating good habits is useful for things like keeping my tax paperwork organized, and so on, but for creative endeavors, I never had a problem with bad habits. If I want something badly enough, the good habits emerge on their own. Maybe one "habit" that's been helpful to me is to keep plenty of idle time. It's hard to recognize good opportunities when all your time is tied up in busywork.

@levinunnink 1. I don't anymore. I did a lot of investing in 2010-2019 (and made some good money from the tech bull market), but now I find investing extremely boring. In an effort to simplify my life, I closed all investment positions over the last year or so. There's already a lot of randomness in my life, and I don't want to also be worrying about the stock market. It's been a long time since I looked at the Stocks app, and it's very liberating! 2. Userbase is still there, but it's only like 2% of my income. It's only doing about $400 MRR, which is way below what I hoped. It's certainly a failed bet from a financial perspective, but that's easier said in hindsight :)

@dvassallo Thanks, Daniel! One more question if you have time: Can you elaborate on why you're "bad for the economy"?

@levinunnink Haha, it's a bit of an inside joke on my Twitter, because many people claim that I've inspired them to quit their high-paying tech jobs to work for themselves on something that better matches their preferred lifestyle. Origin: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/st...

@timoteo_ladmann I'm not a fan of FIRE, mainly because of its distinct bimodal approach towards life: the deferring phase, and then the living phase. First of all, I believe that the discovery of our true preferences is a life-long exercise, and the most reliable way to reveal our preferences is to live them. Almost everyone I know who retired after a grueling career went into retirement unprepared, and their life went downhill fast. The 'Always Be Compounding' attitude during the deferring phase gets in the way of exercising the muscle that leads to discovering what we truly like and dislike. The other issue is about the hidden risk behind the magic $xM number. I don't think it's easy to convince our subconscious that any number is sufficient (beyond cases of extreme wealth), and our subconscious is likely right to smell a hidden risk – especially when expecting a long retirement. The 'safe 4% withdrawal rule' hasn't been proven safe, and it can never be proven. I'd imagine myself waking up every morning worrying about the stock market and an endless number of things beyond my control to verify that my assumptions are still valid. When it comes to matters of survival, the lizard part of our brain has a tendency to keep us up at night. For me, active income is the ultimate robustifier and peace of mind enabler. Every day I make $100 from something I did recently confirms to me that I'm still relevant to society. And if my active income declines one day, it forces me to adapt while I'm still exercising my income-generating skills. It's much easier to adapt in this state, rather than 10 years into retirement when I realize I'll need to top up my savings. There are certainly a few inspiring things from the FIRE movement, such as the questioning of our expectations, awareness of the hedonic treadmill, and thinking hard about what really matters. I think there's lots to gain from reading Mr Money Mustache, et al. However, I'm quite convinced that the better life strategy is one of incremental lifestyle enhancement, where we're simultaneously adding enough optionality for the future, and also arranging our life in the present to best match our preferences. More specifically, my approach is to save the minimum possible so that I can weather any storm, then spend the excess in the present. I buy insurance for catastrophic risk, and save some money for what I can't insure against. Beyond that, I spend all the excess now. And sometimes, 'spending' simply means working less (leaving money on the table).

@eastonhunter Thank you! This is the happiest I've ever been.

@hugh_dawkins Almost all my sales came organically from my Twitter account, simply by announcing them. For example, this single tweet directly made over $12,000 in the first 24 hours: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/st... ... Then I kept the momentum up by mentioning my product occasionally. After a month or two, almost all sales start coming from word of mouth (people recommending my products on their workplace's slack, private discords, on podcasts, etc). For new products, I'm also able to email my existing customers, which helps a bit as well. I have an email list of 19,000 customers now. But I still think Twitter is my best way to reach people.

@richardfliu You have to find a way to make people know about you. Most people will be buying your product because it's you behind it. *You* are part of the product. Now, how do you make people know about you? It's all about going where people already hang out, and helping them. Build a name for yourself in communities where there's already thousands of people online every day. Answer everything you can for free. Then, once you start feeling you can't keep up with the questions, it's time to consider packaging everything you know into an info product. This approach solves two problems: What to make the info product about, and who to promote it to. Of course, I'm sure there are many other ways, but this is the one that worked for me (and for many others).

@mike_seekwell A lot. I attribute almost all my income to it. Let's say that if you offered me $500K to shut it down, I wouldn't take it.

@mike_seekwell @dvassallo Heaps of Twitter followers. Some are afraid to rely on social media with the changing algorithms and much rather have a emailing list under their control. Any views?

@vijaykrishna_ravichandran I would highly recommend building an audience, but it's not the only way to do it. What's important is that you have a strategy: How will you get people to the top of the funnel? Is it going to be via paid ads, search engine results, content marketing, podcast mentions, word of mouth, etc. How can you get, say, 250 people to see your product page every day? What you choose depends a lot on your product, strengths, budget, spare time, etc.

@v1jay Thank you Vijay! — I have no objections around 'trading time for money', as long as: 1) it's somewhat leveraged (high hourly rate); 2) I have control over how much time I dedicate to it (and I can stop when I want); 3) It's something I enjoy doing. I think the woodworking business has the potential to be that. In an ideal world, I'll dedicate maybe a couple of hours a day to it, make a decent side-income ($3K+/mo), keep practicing my woodworking craft, and leverage my audience (so I don't have to compete with thousands of makers on etsy). I'm also curious to get first-hand experience with a physical product business. Maybe this eventually evolves to something else... who knows? It's just a small bet :)

@begovatovd1 Thank you! My friend @searchbound just tweeted a list of people who are doing business 'my way', by building a small portfolio of projects aligned to their personal interests: https://twitter.com/searchbound/...

@annglish Thank you. My most successful product is a 1.5 hour video course on building a Twitter audience. It made $240K in sales since Apr 2020: https://dvassallo.gumroad.com/l/... My second product by revenue is a short technical ebook about AWS. It made $135K in sales since Dec 2019, which I split 50/50 with a co-author: https://dvassallo.gumroad.com/l/... I also have a small membership info product which has about $2.5K MRR and $32K in total sales, where I publish my detailed financial results every month and interact with members who are interested in the behind the scenes of my business: https://dvassallo.gumroad.com/l/... The platform I leverage is my Twitter account :)

@vdemedes I think it's good to have a separate personal email list from a product-specific one. You can be more aggressive with product updates on the product-specific list since you know people signed up for that. On the personal email list you have to be more careful to make sure you're giving something to your audience with every email, and not just promoting your products.

@alexis_llontop Thank you! I made my first info product (the ebook about AWS) with a co-author, so we split the work (and earnings) 50/50. The other info products have been just myself. For my SaaS product, I hired a part-time employee for a while, mostly because I was extremely impatient to get it done :)

@daria_kalinovskaya I only had some success from reddit ads, and it was only temporary. I made $17K from an $11K spent on reddit ads when promoting my AWS book. I briefly tried other ad platforms but had no luck and I gave up quickly. I think there's more potential in ads if I had the time to experiment, but so far I've preferred spending my energy elsewhere.

@nickvitucci That's the only concrete thing on the roadmap. I hope to start selling those next week or the week after. Longer time, I' thinking of creating another course, focused on 'fending for yourself'. Still very nebulous, but I think I have a good content plan. We'll see :)