I've been a successful duo-founder (my wife is my business partner) for 3.5 years now. We started in affiliate marketing and have slowly added agency services and now software (we founded a newer company for that with a few business partners).
I've been working for myself full-time ever since we started and income is great. The last two years have been well in to the six figures and growth is excellent, allowing us to live comfortably here in San Diego with a great house. However, there are a few pitfalls to the marketing business...
Primarily, we found that affiliate marketing, while high-margin in theory, is so extremely competitive and dirty that your entire livelihood hangs by a thread. Google can slap your site, search algorithm changes can sandbox you and unscrupulous affiliates can and will copy your entire site wholesale and use it to compete directly with you. Google, the affiliate networks they use and ISP's will do absolutely nothing (one of the reasons for my ire with all of them as far as SEO/PPC goes) which made us resort to retaining legal counsel to slam people as soon as it crops up.
Our entire growth on the affiliate side has been Facebook and Mobile where our margins are often 300-400% as opposed to the slimmer 60-100% margins on AdWords. However, being in such a competitive and bleeding-edge field has meant that our agency clients get the benefit of that experience. We can often muscle a new client into highly a competitive segment and get them profiting quickly; we live the mindset of "if it doesn't make money, don't do it".
We ended up making our newer software company with a few co-founders because our overall growth there is better, margins are great, security is better and we have assets. You can't easily sell an affiliate web site, but you can build a software company that is very appealing to sell.
It has been a hell of an experience and I'm considering writing a series about it once we release our new app. Hopefully can bring the benefit of our blood/sweat/tears-and-such to the rest of HN :)
I've been working for myself full-time ever since we started and income is great. The last two years have been well in to the six figures and growth is excellent, allowing us to live comfortably here in San Diego with a great house. However, there are a few pitfalls to the marketing business...
Primarily, we found that affiliate marketing, while high-margin in theory, is so extremely competitive and dirty that your entire livelihood hangs by a thread. Google can slap your site, search algorithm changes can sandbox you and unscrupulous affiliates can and will copy your entire site wholesale and use it to compete directly with you. Google, the affiliate networks they use and ISP's will do absolutely nothing (one of the reasons for my ire with all of them as far as SEO/PPC goes) which made us resort to retaining legal counsel to slam people as soon as it crops up.
Our entire growth on the affiliate side has been Facebook and Mobile where our margins are often 300-400% as opposed to the slimmer 60-100% margins on AdWords. However, being in such a competitive and bleeding-edge field has meant that our agency clients get the benefit of that experience. We can often muscle a new client into highly a competitive segment and get them profiting quickly; we live the mindset of "if it doesn't make money, don't do it".
We ended up making our newer software company with a few co-founders because our overall growth there is better, margins are great, security is better and we have assets. You can't easily sell an affiliate web site, but you can build a software company that is very appealing to sell.
It has been a hell of an experience and I'm considering writing a series about it once we release our new app. Hopefully can bring the benefit of our blood/sweat/tears-and-such to the rest of HN :)