I get similar emails throughout the day and while it might be healthy for me to get the continuous stream of positive reward, sometimes it is demotivating to me. I start the day by waking up in the afternoon and checking my email, and I've already generated my wealth for the day without doing anything.
This is significantly less demotivating than working your ass off for a year with the promise of a promotion and a raise, only to be told that you won't be getting a promotion or raise at the end of the year.
This happened to me today and I totally understand why people want to go the startup route. Ever hour invested into your startup is an hour that gets you closer to where you want to be.
Ever hour invested into your startup is an hour that gets you closer to where you want to be.
This is not the case. You can burn through time, money, health, and other consumables chasing bad ideas and, if you're not measuring obsessively, not even know you're doing it until the company suddenly fails on you. (This is even more possible if you're not "in the loop" : many startups with actual employees which flamed out had highly motivated bright people who were hitting their performance targets, in the service of a business which just didn't work. That fact is, ahem, not always clearly communicated to all employees.)
That said: owning the effing company at least means that, if you're getting screwed out of something-to-keep for each hour you work, you should at least know whose fault it was. I really recommend it if working for The Man starts to feel exploitative. (Heads you win, tails you find out why The Man was offering you the terms he was offering.)
A couple of "route finder" reviews posts on an old personal blog of mine suddenly did well on Google and, as was the trend, I had Adsense on my site. Just from those few posts, I earned between $2000-$5000 most months of that year (with one stray month just shy of $10000) and did little "real" work that year. In 2009, Google penalized the blog because I got greedy and started running "text link ads" on the front page (dumb idea). Traffic crashed and the income stream disappeared.
I eventually got the penalty lifted but by then a lot of people had figured out that ranking highly for the names of the top route finders was a goldmine and now my posts are on page 2 rather than in the top 5 results and make rather little.
Interesting while it lasted but the work I'm doing now to produce an income feels more rewarding than checking Adsense 20 times a day ;-)
Online driving route apps like Rand McNally, etc. Thinking about it, these sites must have been hurt a lot by the features in Google Maps in recent years..
