How I made $3,300 on a short niche philosophy book
Published in 2020, this chronicle by @exolymph details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $3,300.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE 97 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 51 comments
as a warning to HN users unfamiliar with the author, this article should probably be taken with a grain of salt -- the guy is known to be somewhat of a jester within that very same niche philosophical community he talks about. think of him as the tai lopez of french theory internet enthusiasts
he's built a reputation basically making memes & posting hot takes on twitter for retweets, and harnessed a sort of following among people who mostly get their knowledge of philosophy through memes and fb groups. the article probably reflects more of a marketing lesson than anything else
you can judge that based on his very content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmdWfFrevzI ↗; he gives a very generalized account of the eternal return (one of the central concepts in D&G's, klossowski's and nietzsche's philosophy) which probably wouldn't get a passing grade in an undergrad philosophy course
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51900848-based-deleuze ↗ for anyone interested. The reviews don't seem great, for what it's worth.
And from a guy who tweets
and gives courses on "how to be an intellectual".
1. https://twitter.com/jmrphy/status/1176703990056267777?lang=en ↗
Very cool, congrats. I've published a couple of books on Amazon with similar levels of success (https://www.amazon.com/Product-Management-Interview-Manager-Process/dp/1075470986 ↗ is the most recent), and the one thing I'd strongly recommend to you is to try Amazon advertising. It's very simple to set up and has been profitable the whole way. Nothing earth-moving; in the last month I've spent about $30 in ads and that's yielded about $80 in profit (before the cost of ads). The sales from ads also help keep your book higher in search, which can generate organic sales.
Congrats again!
Self-publishing is a very underrated way of exchanging knowledge for money with high ROI. I'm approaching $200K in 6 months from 2 self-published info products: one is a short ebook on AWS (160 hours to produce), and the other is a video presentation about building an audience (16 hours to produce).
https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1268622381964095488 ↗
AKA: How I made slightly under $50/hr for about 2 months of work.
I don't want to take anything away from the author (I've written zero books), but it's not an indication to me of an extraordinary outcome relative to the time, effort, and expertise required.