Cognition

Growing up in the Gen-X / Gen-Y, post-TV world of my youth has obvious advantages. But it lacks some of the nuance of yesteryear – like a framed copy of your first dollar.

Making money on the internet, at least at a small scale, is exactly the opposite of making money in the real world. Trying something is so cheap, you should just keep trying things until something works. Unfortunately, just because it works a little bit – doesn’t mean it’ll work much more than that.

I started writing software when I was seven years old. Most of the years I clung to the idea that, someday, I would write a piece of software that people would pay money to OWN. When I began working, first as a coder and then later as a software architect, I still held out dreams of building the next Google – a gigantic, brilliant piece of engineering that would make me the richest man in the world.

And then I discovered Toyota.

This was also just about the time I was going broke, chasing one of these big, complicated visions.

To take my mind off things, I decided to start copying Jesse Andrews (the godfather of UserScripts.org). Build simple, clean, simple, tiny, simple… really SIMPLE pieces of software that do only one thing.

But I took a little twist on Jesse’s way of doing it – I would only work on things that I could code, test, and ship – in one sitting.

And we called it “Tiny Apps“. And it was good.

But not that good. A great little app, thrown together in a few hours and tossed out into the surf of the Intarwebs, is a bit of a sitting duck. People started shooting them – by which, I mean ripping our ideas off EXACTLY – and then getting tons of press.

US: Whoissocial.com. Four days later: usernamecheck.com

US: Gastracker.cognition.ca. Several months later: A whole bunch of them.

My original tiny app, a grid-computer-powered price-watching service, remains the only Tiny App to make much money. Okay, any money. Really. Freddy Mangum and I worked on developing this concept further, and prototyped a few variants – GoogAzon, which adds Amazon and eBay search results to google pages; and “The Kraken“, which was a tongue-in-cheek response to the “Pirates of the Amazon” extension that came out late last year.

The Kraken was notable enough to get us some substantial press (and a fair number of downloads, too) – but it’s never made a cent.

Here’s how I’ve made money on teh internet:

• Google Adsense. But only a little. ($46 in three years, roughly).
• Amazon Affiliate revenue – both embedded in software, and in blog posts. (Some many bunches of dollars).
• eBay Affiliate revenue – About $3.

Now, if you’ve bothered to read all the way down here, this is where I’m going to give away a little secret. And by secret, I don’t mean something really clever that I dreamed up on my own – I mean a strange and lucky coincidence that happened to lead to something cool.

As of right now, I make more money from my blog, than from anything else.

Seriously.

Actually, to be fair – I make more money off of a single post on my blog.

This post.

Which brings me back to Seth Godin, and Jesse Andrews. Just build cool stuff, solve your own problems – and share.

Oh, and get an Amazon Affiliate account.