Unicorn Free

I'm pretty sure the pricing was somehow related to libsyn's pricing: http://www.libsyn.com/plans-pricing/

Also, while I 100% agree on lowering costs, I think the idea of lowering pricing is foolish. I don't think cutting price in half is going to more than double sales. In fact, with as small as his sales likely are, it's very likely that he could stand to double the lower end plans. Something more like $25/$50/$100 might be more appropriate.

Podcast hosting is a very small niche. It's not wordpress hosting where there are millions of potential sites. You're talking about potentially thousands of customers total in the marketplace. Now, even at 10% of 1,000 potential customers you're talking about 100 potential customers. At $9 a month that's $900 a month, which is not a lot frankly. At $25 a month you're at $2,500 a month which still isn't great but it's somewhat interesting and something you can at least reinvest in customer acquisition.

At even the top end plan $100/month is going to need 100 customers to get to $10,000 which is probably salary replacement level after taxes for one developer, depending on where they live. Realistically, if the average customer pays $20, that means you need 500 customers to get to the same outcome.

If the company gets 10 sales a month and has 0 churn it is going to take approximately 4+ years to get to 500 customers. Figuring on a reasonable churn rate, it's more like 5 or more years at $20/month to get to $10,000 a month.

Now, if…

Devops actually makes things a little easier I think. With Ansible, setting up a server on AWS feels a little like maintaining a vimrc file. Get a starter playbook from someone and run that to setup a server on AWS. Then you modify as needed as you go through your days as a developer. The great thing about Ansible playbooks is that it codifies the setup. You have a "recipe" that you can modify and run as needed. For me, this is much better than the days where I would set up a VPS "firing from the hip." If you had me setup 10 different servers, I would have set them up 10 different ways.

I think for development knowledge in general, it might be good to look at the following people...

http://www.kalzumeus.com/ (patio11 here)

http://brennandunn.com/

http://unicornfree.com/

Take a read through. For these guys, it's all about products. In the end, that's all that matters. Maybe try for a change of perspective where you look at your skills in terms of products.

In Amazon, there are probably projects where they lock developers in dark basements to learn arcane crafts so specialized that these engineers forget how to spell their name. These engineers would probably struggle just the same as you if the need for these specialties were to disappear. Faced with the need to "retool" - would they be able to do it? Some might, some might not.

There is (and probably will be for quite some time) still a lot of need for people doing the sort of "LAMP" development that you cut your…

I'm 9 months in to my startup (consultancy/product combo for enterprise), probably 2 weeks from having the first signed deal. I quit my day job June 2012. Then I wasted 6 months spinning my wheels.

What got me back on track? patio11 (http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/) and Amy Hoy (http://unicornfree.com/). The way they think about these things is a much better match for how I think about the world than say Eric Ries (that said, great book, and anyone involved in building a gragh db has my whole-hearted admiration.)

Key things for me are:

-holy shit, you can charge $x0,000/week (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4805091)? What am I doing wrong? What can I do to charge that much? No seriously, what can I do to charge that much? Thinking about that pretty solid for about a month changed the way I view things (both consultancy and product).

- if you're doing it right, you're customers will tell you "shut up and take my money" (http://unicornfree.com/2012/shut-up-and-take-my-money-or-how-to-pitch-so-people-will-listen). I started off with an idea and was looking for a customer. That wasn't fun. Starting with a customer and solving their problems is much nicer.

Also: I'm reliably told that you don't need to quit your day job if your smart about it. That said, doing this full time is pretty sweet.

There is definitely a third option.

You don't need to have an idea, or even investment to start a company now a days.

Maybe your definition of company is much larger, but there are people who has successfully launched a SaaS company with a) no idea of what they were building and b) no money to build it themselves initially and c) no development skills to build it themselves.

I am not affiliated at all, nor am i member of this group/company but I suggest you go check out http://thefoundation.com -- get the free case study about Sam.

It's loaded with great information.. But the TLDR is simple: Dane Maxwell has a "system" he teaches entrepreneurs. It's a way to source a market for an idea, then actually find paying customers who are willing to wait for the product, then you turn around and use that capital as inital investment for developers. it's a system that has been replicated, and it's quite inspiring.

There are also people like Amy Hoy http://unicornfree.com who actually hits many of the same types of "philosophies" when it comes to building a SaaS company.

"There are too many bad companies out there" -- then don't give them your money.

HackerNews community really looks down upon things like petty insults (and I believe you just called the founder of Y Combinator [creator of this site] dumb).

I and many people like me make large (six-figure annual) passive* income streams from selling information products online. My flagship product is a book/video bundle to teach web development with Ruby on Rails, and sells for $159 (http://railstutorial.org/). Many people who use it go on to get new jobs paying them 50%–200% more money, which makes the product an easy sell to the right market.

*Of course, it's not perfectly passive, but it's pretty darn close: ~2 hrs per week (for customer service) plus ~3 months full-time every 15–18 months (to make a new edition).

There are lots of opportunities to make product businesses like mine. It's not a startup in the traditional sense; I think of it as a medium risk, medium reward business. It can also free you up to take bigger risks, such as starting a full-blown startup, which is what I'm doing now. In particular, I'm working on a publishing platform to allow technical authors to make profitable information-product businesses. (I love meta.)

I recommend reading Amy Hoy's blog [Unicornfree](http://unicornfree.com/) for ideas and suggestions, and maybe take her 30x500 course some time. You may find yourself surprised that it's not snake oil or Ponzi schemes—you can earn an honest, healthy living while still having a huge amount of time and freedom.

Anyone can tell people to do what makes them happy or leave their dissatisfying job. These exhortations have become platitudes. If you want to help people find fulfillment, you need to move beyond the low hanging fruit of personal development advice. You need to do work. You need to talk to people and find out why they stay in their jobs. Then you need to address those concerns.

The exhortation to "do what makes you happy" has been around for a long time, yet there are still people in dissatisfying jobs. Is offering another formulation of the same message going to make a difference? If your audience doesn't respond to your message, you work on your message, you don't just repeat it with subtle variations.

If you want to see someone who is doing work in this field and saying something new, read http://www.unicornfree.com/ or http://www.paulgraham.com/. There is simply no comparison between the kind of practical, "actionable" advice Amy Hoy and Paul Graham are offering and the platitudes presented in this post.

Specifically, read http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html which almost exactly echoes what I just said (despite reading it only after making this post): "We've got it down to four words: 'Do what you love.' But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated."