This is misstated:<p><i>"You can find the post here. It didn’t have any upvotes (besides mine) for about 10 minutes. Then it slowly started to climb. And climb. By about 1 am it was at the top of the front page and the orders were pouring in! By 2 am I was scrambling to fill orders. I had a huge TextEdit file open with customer names, site URLs, and email addresses. I sent every email, and set up every survey by hand.<p>By 6 am I had completed processing every order and went to bed. I got up an hour later forwork at 7 am. In those few precious moments of sleep I had made another $40. By the end of the day on Monday I had made over $330 and the number kept climbing.<p>So now I’m sitting here writing this blog post with a bunch of orders to fill, features to build, and customers to help. My Stripe account also says that I’ve made $350 to date. All from three pages and some payment code."</i><p>You made $350 from 3 pages, a payment code, and 5 hours of manual labor from 1AM to 6AM. And the additional hours you spent creating the pages. So that is about $70/hr at best and closer $25/hr if you include the other time investment.<p>I only mention this because it is a common mistake people make when they see real money come in for the product of their work that they see it as paying $x for the product because they haven't included any value for their own time.<p>If you are not careful that mistake can have you working below minimum wage :-).
Hey guys great to see an old article of mine like this posted here. For the people who asked, the site is down because I sold it and the new owner neglected to take care of it :(<p>Read about the experience here: <a href="http://danshipper.com/110636263" rel="nofollow">http://danshipper.com/110636263</a><p>Happy to answer questions about it if you have them.
To the people wondering whether the website is down: yes, Dan has sold the website: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3698539" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3698539</a> (DomainPolish: From MVP To Exit In 6 Months)
What I found particularly interesting about this is just how <i>minimum</i> the minimum viable product was. I think it's easy to lose perspective on the MVP concept and forget that not everything has to be automated right off the bat. Instead of starting out with a web app that automated a process, he started out by offering a manual service, and then automated the job he had created for himself. Very smart.
In other news a friend of mine actually earned 600$ in 1.5 hours by selling a static html5 website (he had a site in his portfolio the client asked him to make the same ) to a client on odesk.
"$350 In Two Days With Three Pages" sounds really awesome (and a bit linkbait-y), but how many hours did you actually work? Looks like you had to do a lot of manual labor.<p>I am also a bit skeptical about it otherwise, seeing as this is simply a proxy for another service.
Great story and good to see success - how scalable is it - from what I read, the early feedback praised you on the quality/depth of questions, which if you move to a more automated way of producing the surveys you'll lose?
I love that you're not afraid to share both your failures and successes. The important thing I see is that you're out there testing different things, if one path leads to a dead-end, you figure out another path. I think you're on your way to success. Good luck!
Seems your site is taking a bit of a hit: <a href="http://isitup.org/www.domainpolish.com" rel="nofollow">http://isitup.org/www.domainpolish.com</a><p>What a great idea though, glad to see it's a success! Now you just need to automate it a bit further.
The site: <a href="http://web-beta.archive.org/web/20120525003840/http://domainpolish.com/" rel="nofollow">http://web-beta.archive.org/web/20120525003840/http://domain...</a>
Man, this somewhat distresses me. It is so incredibly easy to add basic automation... write down by hand, really? (Although I really like the custom thank you videos for your first customers - nice touch).<p>Great story though, I'm glad you cashed out, i guess i just feel that twinge of pain at the fact you could have kept it going for hardly more work, but i understand entirely where you're coming from - so props to you !