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Comment by rexreed | Hacker News Reader

That was also my first thought. Kudos to the OP in that you managed to build a product people wanted and paid something for. For creating something you could sell. And then went ahead and sold it. And made a profit. That's better than most wantpreneurs.

But you didn't do better than minimum wage. You could have just done a bunch of TaskRabbit or Odesk or Elance gigs and for the same 26 hours ended up much farther ahead.

What does that mean? Perhaps not much because it's comparing apples and oranges (contract / service work vs. product sales). Or perhaps it does mean that you need to understand the value of income (not just revenue) with relation to time cost. That might actually be the biggest lesson here: yes, you can build something you can sell. And perhaps you learned how hard sales is, but how possible making a profit is. But most importantly, you learned that not all businesses are worth it. And this one most certainly is not worth it.

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You guys are right in that the total profit was probably nil for the weekend (but that doesn't sound cool). However, you're not considering this is a subscription service. The idea is that the work put in initially returns revenue every month indefinitely. If the work this month returned $1K, then the same amount of work next month should return $2K, etc.

That's how most monthly services work. It takes a lot of work up front to make a product successful. You will almost always in fact be working for almost nothing when you start a company like this. That's why people raise money. But that initial work returns exponential value in the long term.

So yes, if you want to attack something you can attack the $1K in profit, go for it. But you're missing the point. The point is that making money takes work, and if you put in the work, you can make money doing anything. Like selling Jerky. Imagine if you actually have a good idea.

First off I think doing Startup Weekends is awesome (I believe the author would approve of that descriptor), just focusing on turning a profit during them I do not see as a worthwhile focus(with exceptions of course), and it seemed to be the author's focus.

As per your point of recurring income. No, I am not taking into account recurring income, because the author does not make it clear what the '267 subscriptions sold' constitute.

For instance he says: And when I say “what Noah did” I mean exactly what Noah did. Beef Jerky Subscription Service. Period. I “iterated” on the idea exactly zero. Just ‘stole it’ and executed like crazy for two days, along with the seven other people on my team.

However Noah http://www.appsumo.com/sumo-jerky/ required a 3 month minimum subscription with that 3 month period paid up front.

Now in the author's post they mention they sold 3 month subscriptions however the $5340 divides by 20 as exactly the number of subscriptions sold.

So did the author count the 3 month subscription as 3 subscriptions?

Did the author count it as 1 and not count $40 of the revenue?

Did the author do something else, there is not enough information for me at least to determine how the recurring income would be handled next month. So while you can estimate it would double, I do not feel safe making that estimate.

You're still missing the point. It was an exercise, or a "challenge" as the author states. The point of the post is that sales are hard, and awkward, but very possible if you focus on it. If you can sell jerky, you can sell anything. That's the point. Forget the jerky business, it's just an example of what happened to prove what people can do when they put the work in.

Wow guys - cut them some slack. Making profit at a Startup Weekend is a gargantuan accomplishment, considering that most teams only get to the point of having a powerpoint demo / half finished prototype. Sure they didn't actually make that much compared to a real job in an established workplace, but this is still an awesome achievement.

I could pay $1 dollar to my team to subscribe to their service and call it "profit". But I do agree that most teams spin their wheels without actually executing much.

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