- Double your freelancing
- Guys who create a not-very-well-known startup and then start pushing guides on how to be successful
- Email marketing, write 3 tutorials on topic X to build your list and then spam your ebook.
Don't get me wrong, things are better targeted and less shady. It just feels like people spend more time selling their systems than they do using them. It looks like 'snake oil'.
Agreed, and some of it (as you mention) is quite ingeniously marketed as well, e.g. pushing a load of free content that occasionally suggests using a certain SaaS app as part of the success strategy.
It just feels like people spend more time selling their systems than they do using them. It looks like 'snake oil'.
I'm not sure that it's always snake oil exactly, more that it's simply easier for these people to make their money training others, especially compared to making money with the systems they're pushing.
The final stage is selling miners to other mining companies.
I've actually had to tell some freelancers I use to RAISE their rates, because they were too busy and frazzled. The kind of advice in Brennan's book is something a lot of freelancers need.
The third is probably Patrick Mckenzie. He advice helped me create an email course that is very popular on my site. It's not spam if you write good stuff and people ask for it.
Everyone on my list explicitly signs up to get an email course, and I get tons of excited emails from happy users.
That stuff is popular on Hacker News because a big percent of the audience here genuinely needs help with those problems.
(I agree that the second one can be an issue, if they actually lack expertise. On the other hand, lots of startups are good even though I've never heard of them. It all depends at what level you're giving advice. If you're giving advice about a solo business, you don't need to have founded Facebook)
I don't know if this has anything to do with some obscure physical law like these phenomenons that best described by a normal/Gaussian distribution or just explained by the probability theory (read: sheer luck) and the success ratio of this magnitude in these "games" or life in general is very slim and thus people should not get that excited to imitate them or feel down and dejected if they don't.
Certainly, wealth and power distribution on Earth is one of these life mysteries that kept and will keep puzzling humans for a long time to come.
What I found is there's lot of money to be made in... telling people how to make money! Those guys like Shoemaker who have an almost cult following end up making an empire on those in the "pyramid" below them.
Not to say this is shady, just that the real "riches" are in charging people to tell then how ... not in actually practicing what you preach.