Here’s an excellent response to a video by Andrew Wagner, who made a killing selling online greeting cards:

My mother pays something like $50 a year for online greeting cards. Do the quick extrapolation on how many mothers there are in America, how many of them use the Internet, and how many you can reasonably convert. Yeah, $40 million for a market leader doesn’t seem that unreasonable now does it.

You will not get invited to give conferences at The Future Of Web 3.0 2012 if you make greeting cards. Nobody will ask you for your insights on scaling, principally because at your scale it will be a boring engineering problem with well-understood solutions. You’ll just put smiles on a few mothers’ faces and, oh, well, there might be a little bit of money involved.

I think I’ve mentioned this a few times, but to say it one more time: grown women have money, too, and nobody in tech wants it. Instead of building stuff they want and charging money for it (money they have and spend), we want to push CPM levels to about a quarter (trending towards dimes!) while making social networks for the same people who are already members of six.

There’s a huge lesson there: you don’t have to make something shiny. Just make something that people will use.

There are a lot of parallels between writing well, speaking well, and good web design.

Take the following, for instance, from Dale Carnegie’s the Quick and Effective Way to Effective Speaking:

Some years ago I wrote a series of articles for the American Magazine, and I had the opportunity of talking with John Siddall, who was then in charge of the Interesting People Department.

“People are selfish,” he said. “They are interested chiefly in themselves. They are not very much concerned about whether the government should own the railroads; but they do want to know how to get ahead, how to draw more salary, how to keep healthy. If I were editor of this magazine,” he went on, “I would tell them how to take care of their teeth, how to take baths, how to keep cool in summer, how to get a position, how to handle employees, how to buy homes, how to remember, how to avoid grammatical errors, and so on. People are always interested in human interest stories, so I would have some rich man tell how he made a million in real estate. I would get prominent bankers and presidents of various corporations to tell the stories of how they battled their ways up from the ranks to power and wealth.

Shortly after that, Siddall was made editor. The magazine then had a small circulation. Siddall did just what he said he would do. The response? It was overwhelming. The circulation figures climbed up to two hundred thousand, three, four, half a million.  Here was something the public wanted. Soon a million people a month were buying it, then a million and a half, finally two million. It did not stop there, but continued to grow for many years. Siddall appealed to the self interests of his readers.

Want to make something that people want? Make something that appeals to their self interests.

From a speech by Francisco in Atlas Shrugged via HackerNews:

To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss–the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery–that you must offer them values, not wounds–that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade–with reason, not force, as their final arbiter–it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability–and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money.

Personally, I liked Hank Rearden the best :). I really which I had time to reread the book. The audiobook appears to be 52 hours long… maybe not a bad idea.

“Mind if I take a photo of you guys?” I asked these two aspiring entrepreneurs.

“Sure, go ahead, but photos don’t put steak on our kids’ tables.”

“And this does?”

One of them looked at me and said with a grin “You’d be surprised.”

Lesson learned: Find a niche and go for it.