Their business model isn't creating software - it's selling "get rich fast schemes" and other information for high margins. You are the target of their sales channel. You can just see it in the financial Brennan posts: 12% comes from selling software, 88% comes from selling to you -- and he earned most from selling a $1199! course on how to build your own multi-million dollar consultancy. It should ring bells as it's a very common theme in most other markets (where you have a lot of people selling "how to get rich quick" - - and the only people that get rich by these schemes are the people that are selling them).
My company is making money with Brennan's Consultancy Class and it paid for itself literally within a week. Brennan's advice has significantly impacted my company's revenue in 2012, and will continue to do so in 2013.
I am sure there will be people that make money on the advice that's given. And I am sure most of the advice is valid. The question is: is it really worth $1000? Maybe you could have saved that $1000 and done these optimizations yourself (they seem pretty straightforward and you can find thousands of articles about retainer fees and fixed bids if you just search Google). I.e. maybe he is not selling anything extraordinary or "secret", it's just common sense packaged at a ridiculous price?
Here's some simple math for you. It would have taken my business partner (he took the course, not me) more than 10 hours to find all of the advice Brennan shared. He can bill out 10 hours to a client for $1000. Therefore is it worth it to pay someone to gather all this advice and package it in a way that allows him to apply it? Absolutely.
It took me a long time to realize many businesses are looking to exchange money for time. They have more money than they do time. It's a hard notion to understand when you don't have more money than time. I suspect you can't truly know it until you reach the point of being able to make that decision yourself.
If people think they will get $1000 of value out of it then they will buy it. If you don't think you can get that value then there is no reason you should buy.
A colleague of mine was a finance major and said in one of his higher level finance classes on the first day the professor asked, "Who wants to make a million dollars?". Of course, everyone raised their hands and he responded, "ok, go write a book."
Which is 100% the opposite of what most of us get told in most areas, at least in tech, because book writing will net most people only a few thousand bucks, and often takes several months.
But self-publishing? Owning everything? There seems to be more upside potential there (and yes, it's harder up front, because you have to market yourself too).
I find it funny that you call out these products. These are products that actually create value for their customers and they make their creators a decent amount of money. Yet you call them "get rich quick schemes". If anything this site (HN) is all about get rich quick schemes. How many startups actually make it to a point where they sell and make their owners very rich? Very, very, very few. It's almost like winning the lottery. Yet HN is always full of the "next social app" that's "valued" (in fake money of course) at a billion dollars that does nothing special. If anything, startups are the real "get rich quick" schemes, but HN eats them up.
That's a pretty serious accusation. Do you have any evidence to back that up?
If you actually ready any of the things we wrote, I think you're going to find it really hard to find any suggestion that "getting rich" is easy, fast, or common.
A kinder - but not, I think, less accurate - phrase might be, "selling pickaxes to gold miners".
To my eyes, this "accusation" is more like stating the plain facts of the matter. There's often more reliable money in selling people advice or tools, that they use to do something, than there is in actually doing that thing. When people are trying to sell you advice, or tools, or what have you, it's worth bearing in mind that their interests are not automatically aligned with yours.
This is general-purpose advice, given apropos of very little.
I can't figure out how you think that's "kinder" instead of "a compliment." What's so noble about gold mining, exactly? Or with a long-term impact?
If I help 10 students build $100k/yr+ businesses, that's a $1 m/year impact I've made… which will continue to improve their lives, have an impact on their families and their communities and naturally themselves, and anyone they tutor, too. And the first of my students are reaching that goalpost, 2-3 years later.
Freckle, too, is designed to help my customers earn more & build a better business. And I have over a thousand paying customers there.
How's that less valuable or less honorable than creating some kind of social startup I hope to sell for a couple million dollars? (Or investing in somebody who does?)
There aren't a lot of gold miners who have created lasting wealth, or lasting impact.
