As I wrote in part 1, I really thought the best way to make money on the Internet (maybe the only way, if you couldn’t directly accept credit cards) was to build web pages. It’s obvious now that people make money online doing everything they make money offline, just more efficiently. That includes everything from selling your junk to taking naked pictures of yourself, except the Internet opened up markets to people whose junk wasn’t locally appealing, or who otherwise should not be naked.
But there are definitely ways to make money that didn’t exist ten years ago, from professional bloggers (advertising or reader-supported writing) to professional eBayer (who relies on the generosity of those who will pay $10 to ship a $5 thing which should really be $3 to ship and actually cost $1). The existence of Google Ads alone turns any somewhat-narrowly-targeted personal site into a potential source of money: beer money, if not server/hosting money, and possibly rent money. I’ve had some ideas for these niche blogs, and it always destroys me to find the same topics covered in a hundred blogs already better written than mine will ever be. But I don’t know: it’s possible that I’ll be first in on something clever, and Google Ads will be more than spare change one day. I own the top Google result for "fix n mix frosty". That’s gotta be worth something.
I do have some other personal projects that I’m going to dedicate some time to, if only to tie up the loose ends and get them prepared for deep-freeze. I spend too much time thinking about the domains I still own, the blog software I’ve got half-done, the books I’ve got half-read, the open source software I want to play with, the development platforms I’m kind of interested in, and the personal / professional self-improvement I sometimes find time for, but frequently don’t.
I don’t know if I’ll ever own another business. I did this one sort of half-seriously, and another one (a partnership) quite formally. Very different experiences, but I think I prefer the formal method. It enforces a lot of discipline and deliberation about the reason for your actions, and that can be valuable. There’s this other idea, that those with ideas move extremely quickly, throw something out on a server, and start a billion-dollar company on their lunch break, but there are so many more people who think they’re going to do that, and never do, because there’s no external pressure to formalize any of it.
Thanks, by the way, for letting me monopolize the weblog all week with this. My least favorite thing about entrepreneurism is that there’s this pressure to keep everything so goddamn secret. You convince yourself that your ideas, your methods, your contacts, and your price list are the only things that make you different and special, even when your non-entrepreneurial half knows better. Letting it all out has been a huge relief, so again, thanks.
