If that phrasing sounds a little weird, let me explain. Over these last three days, I’ve been watching Dharmesh Shah’s really great presentation on what he knows about startups, in which he talks, amongst other topics, about the attention economy vs. the wallet economy. If you haven’t already, you should really check it out!

The attention economy is based on eyeballs, on non-paying visitors to your site or users of your app that, through some magical reasoning, will translate into clicks on advertising, eventually leading to income to you the entrepreneur. I call that magical because no one I know of actually clicks on adverts.

The wallet economy is based on eyeballs with little hands reaching out of it that hold cash with which they pay you. I serve product A, it costs $20, you pay, I just gained $20 (minus cost of goods sold). The feedback is instantaneous and you don’t have to wait for X000 customers to land on your site and 0.000X% of them clicking on adverts.

This is pretty much the way the world has always worked, with the exception of newspapers and, arguably, the internet is one big newspaper (seriously lacking in editors).

It’s very easy to go the attention route, because it’s very easy to build soft-/webware in the first place. When you start a business in the real world, you make real investments, usually with the help of external funding like banks, that want to see a real return on their money. When you start a “digital” startup, you need a PC, you need to know some code, you need to spend $20 on a domain and $10-50 per month on hosting. The pressure isn’t there to really push for every dollar of income, because you aren’t feeling the banks et al. pushing down on your back. As a matter of fact, you can just set up a service, and go pursue another career, waiting for it to magically attract enough eyeballs to make you millions.

It’s nice, in theory, but it’s not what entrepreneurship is about. Entrepreneurship is like the film “There will be blood.” Life is tough, you have to fight for every drop of oil, people hate you and you will probably end up killing (=divorcing) a member of your family in the process.

And that kind of work deserves the instant gratification that cash for your product provides.

The end. Have a nice weekend, y’all!

Vincent

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