Thread by @GergelyOrosz

“Quit your job to make money online” is gaining momentum. But most stories are of people selling you their own courses.

The reality is you need to build a profitable business to make a living if you quit. Right now there are more cheap B2C marketing channels with social media.

https://twitter.com/carnage4life/status/1492450774642692097

We’ll see an explosion of profitable online small businesses built on top of cheap social media as a distribution channel. There’s an opening for this strategy for the next years.

But it’s not easy & the majority will not succeed (unit economics & attention economy economics).

The economics for “tech creators” (those quitting a sw eng job) is tough.

To make $300K/yr (a sr eng comp at a big tech in US) you need ~ 3,000 customers/year if you sell something for $100/year. That’s ~30,000 leads at a 10% conversion, and 3M impressions at a 1% conversion.

Now the 3,000 customers per year might not seem that much.

But spending $100/year on content/education something most people will only do for very few things per year and re-evaluate it every year.

Succeeding here is similar to succeeding as a bootstrapped, profitable startup.

Also, remember the 3M impressions? Suppose you could somehow target only software engineers to see whatever you’re selling. 1% of them is vaguely interested and clicks (30K) and 10% buy.

The problem? There’s “only” ~26M software engineers, globally.