Check Out This One Weird Trick for Entrepreneurial Success

Alright, I did it.
I finally created a blog post title so tongue-in-cheek that it came back around the other side of the screen, like in PacMan, and is actually kind of true. Hear me out.
What I want to do here is offer one simple tactic — seriously, just one, and it is simple — to help you as a moonlighter, freelancer, or prospective business owner.
(Brief editorial aside. Thanks for your patience with the lack of content here. My wife and I had our first baby a month ago, and he came several weeks early, so it’s been a bit of an adventure. But everybody is happy, healthy, tired, and working our way toward whatever normal life looks like from here forward.)
Info Product Marketing is A Desolate Space Wasteland
I don’t know if I’ve said this explicitly on the blog yet or not, but I have a hypothesis that info products aren’t really a viable standalone business.
They seem tantalizingly viable to side hustlers, but sustained success remains eternally out of reach. You’ve just got to grind until, well… forever. In that sense, they’re ironically identical to the very job they claim to replace with “money while you sleep.”
Because of this, info products and their beast masters have a marketing lifecycle that resembles a star:
- They wink powerfully into existence with a fusion explosion of creativity and enthusiasm.
- During a stable period of hope, they burn their own fuel sustainably for a time.
- They burn through their reserves and bloat out into red giants, in an impressive display that actually represents their death throes.
- They leave behind a sad, dark husk that drifts unnoticed through the universe.
Due the sheer expanded volume of (3), this is the stage during which you’re most likely to encounter them. This is the stage for the grinder’s grinder, going on an absolute blitz of guest blog posts, podcast appearances, and short-lived presences on community sites like DZone, dev.to, etc.
What you’ll encounter in this situation is someone on a veritable bender of “don’t miss out on this opportunity to learn the 12 secrets to earning a promotion from C++ Software Engineer III to C++ Software Engineer IV!”
If you give it a little thought, you’ll realize something.
They’re not actually solving any kind of problem that you have, or that anyone has, for that matter. Instead, they’re just balling up whatever they’ve happened to do in the last few years, and desperately hawking it for $899 the steep, can-you-believe-it discount price of $199, ZOMG!!!!!