"There is nothing Gus does that any of us couldn’t do as well — nothing."

Making good jerky is a skill honed with years of practice. I think Gus deserves more credit than this.

I don't think he meant literally "make good jerky and sell it on the web..." He is pointing out someone who is doing well, serving a small niche. This shows that small success is within the reach of most, and that you don't have to have a idea for the next Google to succeed.

Unless you really have to have that private jet.

Exactly. Born and raised in Texas (still here), I've tasted PLENTY of bad jerky in my time, and we're a state that loves meat.

What Cringely doesn't recognize (regarding the "furor" around Parrot Secrets) is that in the Fresh Jerky case, there is no attempt to deceive-- they actually make fresh jerky. No faking involved.

Something doesn't make sense. $2 million in sales with just 178 monthly visitors?

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/freshjerky.com/?metric=uv

Well, Compete is probably really inaccurate, but still. I'd bet good money $2 million isn't coming through that web site.

According to Google, there's exactly one link on the entire web to FreshJerky.com. All these happy customers would be linking and talking about it, if it were true.

It's not like journalists actually verify claims like this. If the guy says he has $2 million in sales, that's what gets written.

The site itself includes a link at the bottom to their own extremetracking.com stats page, driven by the page insert:

http://extremetracking.com/open;unique?login=freshjer

It reports 440 visitors for the April period Compete reports 178. (As Compete notes, "Small Sample - Datapoints are estimates".)

Eyeballing it as about 400 unique visitors a month, so maybe 4800/year (with some double-counting), $2 million / 440 = ~$420/visitor, which still seems like a lot. Perhaps they do a lot of de facto wholesaling -- previous month visitors and word-of-mouth customers now buy in bulk each month, for resale, without necessarily going through the web page. And maybe they had a nice jerky business under another name even before opening 'freshjerky.com'.

I'm willing to wager that the 2 millskie is gross sales not net profit. Still, pretty impressive. People love their beef jerky and are willing to pay hefty prices for it. I bet his margins are Apple-esque.

"So how is the company doing? Just fine, thanks, though most of the sales are online, about $2 million per year."

Or after Bob Cringely writes about you, $3 million per year.

Yup, we can all get rich by choosing some product or service that we know nothing about and selling it on a web site. Consumers would much rather fill out forms and wait weeks for shipping than endure the fun and convenience of the mall, because hey, it's on the internet! This completely novel idea shall be named.. i-shopping.

I found this to be pretty interesting: Gus, The Beef Jerky King http://chrisblogs.typepad.com/chris_has_stepped_out/2007/09/...

I think the point of the article is that too many startups are wasting time and money trying to create a market for their worldchanging revolutionary new product, as opposed to entering an existing niche market and dominating in it.

I think it's worth noting that Fresh Jerky does what it does with a relatively poorly designed website (half of which is in Flash) and only PayPal for ecommerce.

I doubt Gus does much a/b testing on his site ...

Ugh and he's using PayPal. Get a merchant account and save some money on fees, Gus!

It's like real estate. It's all in the domain name and freshjerky.com is very attractive and sought after.

Sorry but that's nothing but an excuse, "I could do great things, too, if I had a great domain name..."

Unless, I guess, you really think linkedin.com is a better domain name than business.com

Sure. On the other hand, all the text on his site is all flash.

So, if you wanted to compete you could probably win the SEO fight. What's stopping you?