How to Get Good at Making Money

Hear them haters talk

but there ain't nothin you can tell em

just made a million..

got another million on my schedule.

-Wiz Khalifa, Black and Yellow

I just finished reading a really, REALLY good article from Jason Fried, CEO of 37Signals. His article on Inc.com titled How to Get Good at Making Money follows his innocent and curious exploration of sales and enterprise during his childhood. Here's some of my favorite quotes:

...people are happy to pay for things that work well. Never be afraid to put a price on something. If you pour your heart into something and make it great, sell it. For real money. Even if there are free options, even if the market is flooded with free. People will pay for things they love.

.. charging for something makes you want to make it better... after all, paying for something is one of the most intimate things that can occur between two people. One person is offering something for sale, and the other person is spending hard-earned cash to buy it. Both have worked hard to be able to offer the other something he or she wants. That's trust-and, dare I say, intimacy. For customers, paying for something sets a high expectation.

When you put a price on something, you get really honest feedback from customers. When entrepreneurs ask me how to get customers to tell us what they really think, I respond with two words: charge them. They'll tell you what they think, demand excellence, and take the product seriously in a way they never would if they were just using it for free.

This article was very insightful and endearing to me as it helped crystallize some "forgotten" lessons from my childhood. As a youngster, I loved making money and was always knocking on doors to shovel people's walk or rake their leaves. The feeling of money in my pocket was great - especially because it signified that I had earned something.

Later on, I had moved into trading cards - first with Pokemon and later on with Star Wars, as the franchise reboot happened when I was in fifth grade. I liked the competition of playing the games (yes there were games to be played) and acquired a large enough collection to let people borrow the minimum required deck size to play and would teach them.

I remember going to Scout summer camp and teaching other boys in my troop (we had about 100 enrolled any given time) and other kids from out of state at the commons area. I picked them because everyone in my neighborhood was already playing Star Wars and the likelihood that they would be interested in buying from me was low. Plus, when you are camping somewhere in Idaho or Wyoming, scout camp provides very little non-scout-related entertainment, thus there was little to do but play card games.

As kids learned the game, I started selling them at a premium since there wasn't any trading card shops immediately available. I could also upsell "foil cards" that were strategic game-makers at multiples of the price of a pack of 10 cards (each pack contained at least one *surprise* foil card).

My parents would marvel at the fact that I would come home with more money after camp than they gave me.

I echo Jason's insight that you have to sell the things that you love yourself - because otherwise nothing gets sold. Even then, you aren't even having a sales conversation as it is traditionally known.

Here are entrepreneurial lessons from my childhood that still show up today:

1. Go where the ground is fertile. - I knew I couldn't sell in my neighborhood because everyone was doing it and there was a card shop nearby so there was little that I could offer them. I had to go someplace where people would be open to a new kind of card game and could easily catch the fever. Scout camp was great because card games were a great way to pass the time when you decided to skip out of your merit badge classes.

2. Enroll, entertain, teach. - I think it's important to find way to get people's attention for just long enough and then you have to do everything possible to make sure that they enjoyed their time with you. You've got to give them the dopamine charge - the "happy-feel-good" experience that leaves them wanting more. When you get permission to have more of their time - that's the perfect opportunity a great opportunity to introduce some of the dry "learning" that is necessary for them to be pleasantly hooked on what you are up to. It's important to love what you are selling because your natural passion is what people are playing off of when you are teaching them about your product.

3. Let the value proposition present itself. - After playing the game a few times, I would typically offer a "premade" deck for sale - mentioning it would take more time and money to construct themselves. By allowing them to participate for free, they could easily see the benefit of having their own deck to curate - rather than some fixed deck that I constructed.

4. Let the users interact. - After I had sold about 8 decks of cards, I organized tournaments with a "heavily stacked" deck as the prize for the winner. This would usually draw small crowd of curious boys who would watch, ask questions and then would want to purchase a deck from me. Because I removed myself from the equation and let kids from different troops battle it out, the players would have their friends show up and I could easily offer the same access to the fun to those who showed up - this saved me a lot of time and effort by letting my customers do most of the work for me.

All in all, I agree with Jason Fried that the skills we build can start at anytime but that we are always practicing them. This has certainly been the case for me. I think that our childhood lessons should be taken at face value simply because they capture the essence of doing business and human interaction. As adults we have a nasty habit of over-complicating things - which can be detrimental when you are leading an early-stage startup with limited resources to use in the quest to find product-market fit.

Thanks Jason for the article. I recommend that you all go check it out and see what shows up for you.