Bill Bernbach is an advertising legend. If you don’t know him, you might know his work. But one thing is for sure, you’ll recognize his style.

Not only was he devoted to simplicity, he was also known for his offbeat themes.

Brilliant!

Logic and over-analysis can immobilize and sterilize an idea. It’s like love — the more you analyze it, the faster it disappears.

You can read more about Bill Bernbach here.

A common subject on Hacker News and other entrepreneur communities is how to find business ideas. There’s the usual:

• Scratch your own itch
• Ask people what they want
• Copy

Scratching your own itch is the most fun, but being too passionate about something might blind you from real business opportunities. Asking people is good but more often than not, they can’t tell you what they want. You don’t want to build what people want, you want to build what they need. If Henry Ford asked people what they wanted, I’d be sitting on a (faster) horse today. Copying is good, but you don’t want to copy something that is not successful.

What I want to show you, is a quick technique to find markets where people are looking for something and willing to pay for it. It’s not 100% accurate but it’s a good start, costs nothing and takes only 5 minutes to do.

1. Find What People Are Looking For

Go to Google Search-based keyword tool and browse the categories on the left. You’ll see how much traffic, competition and how much people are bidding for those keywords. What we’re looking for is medium-to-high traffic, low competition and bid. But not $0 bid, if nobody is willing to pay for ads for that keyword, it often means nobody is willing to pay for the products in that market.

Here I found something interesting, “flv converter”, with very high traffic, low competition and bid.

2. Look at The Competition

Next thing you want to look at is who is buying ads for those keywords and what are the top results:

You can see there’s lots of results, that means big SEO competition, but only two ads. If there’s money in that market you could buy ads to get on top before building up your Page Rank. You can also contact owners of the sites in the top results to see if they are interested in promoting your product or service.

This is also a good place to look to see what the competition is doing. Maybe they are missing something. Maybe you’ll see some forum posts about people complaining about their problem.

3. Where’s The Money?

Now the big question is: will people pay. If bid is low and there’s no competition that could mean two things: people searching for those keywords are not looking to buy stuff or that this is an unexploited niche.

Microsoft AdLabs built a tool to guess if people searching for specific keywords have commercial intention.

This tells you that people searching for “flv converter” have a 50% chance of being in buy-mode.

It’s also a great tool to refine your niche, eg.: “flv converter mac” has 0.54 probability, “flv converter windows” has 0.62 and of course “buy flv converter” has 0.97, but no traffic.

Don’t base your whole business on this, but this is a good indicator to start from and better then wild guesses or slanted surveys.

Greatness is not this […] god-like feature that only the special amongst us will ever taste. It exist in all of us. It’s really simple: This is what I believe and I’m willing to die for it. […] You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, but if we get on the treadmill together, there’s two things, you’re getting off first or I’m gonna die, it’s really that simple.

I’ve never seen myself as particularly talented. Where I excel, is ridiculous, sickening work ethic. While the other guys are sleeping, I’m working. While the other guys are eating, I’m working.

Being realistic is the most common road to mediocrity.

(Via Mass Control)

Here’s how to show the number of feed subscribers on your blog without going through FeedBurner or any other service, all in javascript.

First, most feed fetcher bots pass the number of subscribers in the User-Agent header, you can get this in you web server log:

209.85.238.248 - - [23/Jun/2010:11:36:45 -0700] "GET /blog.atom HTTP/1.1" 304 169 "-" "Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 540 subscribers; feed-id=8309483740725605993)"

Here’s a dirty script that will parse the Apache log file and extract the number of subscribers and add them up:

# Path to your Apache log
LOG_PATH = "logs/macournoyer.com/http/access.log"

cmd = "grep subscribers #{LOG_PATH} | " +
      %q{sed -rn 's/^.*GET (\/.*) HTTP.*"-" "([A-Z].*) .*; ([0-9].*[0-9]) subscribers.*$/\2\1--\3/ p'}
      # outputs BotName/URL--<# of subscribers>

counts = Hash.new(0)

`#{cmd}`.each_line do |line|
  ip, count = line.split("--")
  counts[ip] = count.to_i if count.to_i > counts[ip]
end

puts counts.values.inject(0) { |sum, i| sum += i }

Next, create a Cron job to run this each day and save it to a file accessible online:

0 0 * * * ruby feedcount.rb > PATH_TO_YOUR_SITE_ROOT/feedcount.txt

Finally, you want to update the info on your site using jQuery:

$("#feedcount").load("/feedcount.txt");

Boom!

I got lots of great feedback from my post on the importance of setting Goals. But, I forgot to mention something very important:

You got to have a purpose.

(A goal) is the progressive realization of a worthy objective.

- George Dans

You can’t set a goal to make money for the sake of making money, that won’t work. You’ll lose motivation or, if you achieve it, won’t bring anything to your life.

George Dans is a motivational speaker. Although it might look and sound cheesy, take a moment to listen to this, and let me know what you think:

(video via SiteFling)

Making money online has been one of my goals for quite some time. Not just for the sake of making money. I think convincing someone to give your their hard-earned dollars is a rewarding and valuable experience. I don’t think that’s a good way to get rich. But a way to create a passive income? Perhaps!

I’d like to share with you a few things that helped me go from $0 online income to selling an ebook, SaaS subscriptions and my startup in less than a year.

To Make Money, Spend Money

What I’ve found is that it’s very hard for open-source hackers to switch from the everything-should-be-free world to the make-money world. While you can do both, you got to understand making money first.

How could you expect anyone to pay for your product if you don’t do it yourself.

Your first step is to start paying for stuff. No kidding. How could you expect anyone to pay for your products if you don’t do it yourself. Get your credit card and start paying for those software, specially the ones made by Indie devs. Actually, if you want to make a SaaS, pay for a few ones, if you want to write an ebook, buy a couple ones.

This will be hard at first. It’s a new mindset, specially if you’re a strong believer in open-source and are not used to pay for software. But it’s the best way to dive into this world and understand what it means and what’s required to sell through the tubes.

Build Trust

Now, after buying a few pieces of code you might have noticed how hard it is to get your credit card out of your wallet and enter the numbers in a text field in your browser, on each key stroke you’re asking yourself:

“What domain am I on? Is the page secure, OK https, I’m safe, but that just means the connection is secure. Who’s that company anyway? What’s the worst that could happen? Shit, maybe I’m getting screwed. What should I do? All right…”. Close your eyes and press buy.

It is extremely hard to make someone enter their credit card number in the browser. B2B might be a little different, because they are not spending their money. But a user like you and me will think twice or more before giving you anything, even a few pennies.

The way to ease this process is to build trust. Trust in the seller, trust in the product and trust in the buying process. How to build trust is a subject on its own, but it could be summarized in: be open, do what you say and be humble. Also, if you have some online reputation because of OSS or something else already, you got yourself a great trust boost.

Don’t Under-Sell Yourself

Lets not lie to ourselves, we’re in this to make money! So please don’t charge a few cents for the software you’ve put your heart into. Most of the time you should charge more than you think. There’s a few reasons for that:

1. It sends the message that this is a quality product (ding! ding! trust++).
2. It shows that you’re not just trying to make money, but that you’re actually serious about it (ding! ding! trust++).
3. It acts as a filter for customers you don’t want. You want to stay small, so less people means: less support emails, less everything, but still a decent amount of money.
4. Helps turn your customers into evangelists. Since they are paying a good amount of money for it, they’ll use it and find how great it is and talk about it.

Niche Markets is Where it’s At!

If you’re thinking of building yet another bug tracker, project management, todo, chat (!) software, it will be be hard! Very hard! If you want to take the easy path, find an unexploited niche. There’s a few ways to do this once you have an idea:

1. Do a Google search and look for the results, but mostly at the ads on the side. If there’s none, good chance you just found an unexploited niche.
2. Use Google Keyword Tool to find what’s the price of the keywords you want to use, if it drives a lot of traffic, how popular it is.
3. Build a beta signup page and collect emails to see if there’s interest.

Build a Kick Ass Product or Service

This is almost too obvious to mention. If you don’t believe you can make the best product ever created for the problem you’re solving, give up right now! If you’re not sure, have a look at what’s on the market and tell me you can’t do better.

I’m sure everyone reading this blog could kick the crap out of some niche products right now!

A couple years ago I saw this somewhere:

Knowing where you’re going greatly increase your chances of getting there.

I don’t remember where, but it did struck a chord with me and I love trying those kinds of things. So I wrote my personal goals for the current year and a few more to come.

Now, three years later, almost everything I wanted to do, I accomplished and sometimes surpassed in ways I couldn’t even imagine.

Items in bold are the ones I completed. Note that I was updating the list all the time to fit my interests and new objectives, but I never took out something because it was too ambitious, quite the opposite.

2007 Goals

• Make money with a website
• Have a site with more than 500 daily visits (refactormycode.com)
• Participate in a conference

2008 Goals

• Be known in the programming world (Thin)
• Present at a conference
• Work from home
• Work with passionate people (Standout Jobs)

2009 Goals

• Build my own programming language (tinyrb + Min)
• Practice a sport at least once a week (running)
• Make money online (createyourproglang.com)
• Speak at an international conference (RailsConf, MeshU)
• Train each week
• Learn 3 songs on the guitar
• Start my own business
• Work from home 5 days a week
• Work for myself only

2010 Goals

• Have another child
• Make > $100K/yr
• Snowboard when I feel like it
• Weight 175 lbs
• Learn 10 songs on the guitar
• Heli-ski in Blackcomb
• Use my own programming language for real things
• Try kite-surf
• Write a real book

I hope this inspires you or someone to do it. Lots of successful people have been doing it for years, because it works! If you haven’t done so yet. Go write your goals for this year and the next one and so on.

Do it!

I’m brainstorming using Mind Maps these days and loving it.

A couple notes:

• You have an idea, start with it in the middle, branch and explore.
• Use a pen & paper, software breaks the flow.
• Don’t try to make sense, the goal is to get in the flow.
• Works very well for taking notes quickly.
• Once it gets to complex, start a new page with the last idea.
• Writing helps you remember.

My mind is exploding with ideas. Try it!

For those that don’t know, I’ve written an ebook a couple months ago and decided to sell it online, as an experiment. It did pretty well. My expectations were very low and it was the first time I tried selling something online, so it ended up being a big success for me.

How did it do?

Gotta say, I’m very surprised with the results. I launched it on September 9th. So far I’ve sold 168 copies for a total of $6558.36. I’m still selling a few copies each month, mostly from the nice traffic I get for free from Google.

You want to sell your own thing too?

A lot of people asked me how I did it. So here it is:

1. Created a quick landing page to test the market with a form to subscribe to a newsletter
2. Launched a 2 day ad campaign on AdWords to drive traffic to my landing page (spent $100)
3. Checked stats to see if there was interest (3 signups for the newsletter, 56 visits, 5% CR)
4. Wrote the book in textile, converted it to HTML, then PDF
5. Asked for reviewers on Twitter
6. Reviewed, polished, reviewed, polished
7. Reviewed and polished some more
8. Redesigned the whole thing in Adobe InDesign (there must be a better way, I hope! This was painful)
9. Improved the landing page according to stuff I read regarding sales letters and landing pages
10. Got an account on e-junkie, using a coupon code, got 120 days for free
11. Plugged e-junkie to my Paypal account
12. Announced it on Twitter

A few tips if you plan on selling something similar:

• Don’t sell just an ebook, package it with something else
• Test your market first
• Focus on a niche

If you have any questions, I’d be glad to answer them in the comments.

Help Me Promote My Book And Get 50% on Each Sale

As an experiment, I’ve moved from E-junkie to ClickBank to try some affiliate marketing. Simply put, affiliate marketing is: you send people to my site, they buy, you get a percentage of that sale (50% in my case). Pretty simple and works well for some products I’ve read, so hey, why not try it.

If you’d like to help me promote Create Your Own Programming Language, see the special affiliates page I’ve created will all the info you need to get started.

Here’s the cover letter I sent for applying to my previous job.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
I = []; fit = [:your, :offer, ' http://www.standoutjobs.com/jobs.php?id=1409']
just = checkout = %w(macournoyer cv)
its = you = me = 1_000_000_000 #$
class Array
  def can i, help = :you; true end 
  def me love = ruby
    $my = self; love='creating world'.class.new 'stuff'
  end
  def see _for = :yourself
    `open http://#{$my.join '.com/'}/`
  end
  alias :am :to_a 
  alias :in? :include?
end

I.fill(0).each { |criterion| } && I.am.uniq! and :passionate

its.upto(you) do |i| fit.in? :StandoutJobs
   just.send :me, :an => 'email' 
end; %w(e ll).see if I.can :help => you

=begin
[... snip ...]

Marc-André Cournoyer
http://macournoyer.com

Run this ruby script to get my résumé
=end

I see lots of people complaining job offers all look the same. But how about your CV / cover letter?