Two years: How to change from a pauper to a 1 million dollar developer?

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"Editor's note" James Altucher, an investor, programmer and entrepreneur, recently interviewed Braintree founder Bryan and presented us with a story of a pauper who turned into a 1 million dollar developer.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article to analyze why this year is your resignation year. It's not an ambitious verbal manifesto like "You have to be an entrepreneur," but because it's full of crap, you feel more and more obliged to resign. Now a lot of people ask, what's next? What am I supposed to do? How do I quit and make 1 million bucks?

What we're saying here is that not everyone is Zuckerberg or Larry, not everyone can drop out of school and invent the iphone, not everyone can build Google Glass. It's cool to make 1 million bucks right now, and it's cool that you can be your own boss and then use financial freedom to achieve greater success.

Braintree is a supplier of online payment gateways with the force of a mobile platform, called PayPal's new rival. I recently called his founder, Bryan. You may not have heard the name, but you must have heard it. Credit card transactions and mobile payment customer's name: Rovio/angry birds,uber,37signals,opentable,fab,github,airbnb,shopify, HotelTonight.

Here is the story of Braintree.

Bryan was Sears's manager in 2007, but he resigned to start his own business. "I really don't like the job," he says. Never thought about getting a fixed salary, I worked as a salesman before making a credit card process, where I contacted a lot of restaurants and retailers to turn them into business, and soon afterwards I felt I could do it myself rather than work for another company. "And two years later I finally made 1 million, and the lesson I learned in two years was the following 7 points."

1. Let the middleman out

After resigning, Bryan did not sell the stuff to the company he used to sell, about it directly on the credit card processor, and developed his own resale agreement, which was done when he left the previous company.

"Some people will ask me if I should start raising money when I'm still in office," he said. "Of course not, at least you leave the former company, you must be a bit tough at the beginning, because VC generally like a bit of character entrepreneurs."

2. Choose a business that most people won't try

Everyone is looking for "the next great thing", but this is the same as discovering rare gold mines on Mars. Bryan simply chose the business that many of the world's businessmen needed and saw the timing ——— the online store had become an irreversible trend. There's no need to stare at the latest things, just a little bit better than others. More flexible and smaller than large enterprises you also lack of bureaucracy; less resources than large enterprises but you can provide better services, more user interaction, over time users will tend to you.

3. Several users who must be fixed at first

This is the most important for an entrepreneur, people like to take shortcuts, such as VC investment, quit work, build products, and then suddenly have millions of of users, but the fact that there is a gap between the imagination.

Bryan eventually pulled 10 from the original corporate client, without 2100 dollars a month, but the previous 10 clients made it 6200 dollars in the first month, so he was adamant about quitting his job.

4. Make money while you sleep

"I don't want to run around the streets to make a little bit of money, but to keep the online business going," he said. At first I was advised to write a blog, but if you want to make it work, you have to put a great effort into it. Otherwise it would be useless, so I write blog is the credit card industry's true knowledge, there are unscrupulous businessmen to do, there are businessmen's intrigues ", I wrote my own writing on the popular social networking site exposure, Digg, Reddit, as well as stumbleupon, and sometimes the articles will become the most popular articles on these sites, my own site has brought a lot of traffic. But the reason for my reputation was that I became a source of real news about credit card processing software, and that people in this industry were paying more and more attention to me, and started asking me to convert payment services for them.

5. Blogging doesn't make money

Blogging is just a place to cultivate people's trust in you, but that's where the opportunity comes from. Because some of the text, Bryan's website received a lot of attention, although not to bring a dime income but brought millions of revenue opportunities. For example, when OpenTable saw what I wrote, I called and wanted me to offer them a software solution to store the credit card business, "I signed a 3-year contract to build a development team for them to deliver the solution, and then OpenTable became our big customer."

6. Dare to say "Yes"

At first it was a credit card processor and was called to do software development. Although no software development has been done before, but he promised not hesitate, immediately pulled the development team, made a contract work, creating revenue doubling. Then, business needs as if a gaping mouth, Airbnb, Uber come, VC came ...

7. This kind of customer service

Treat the customer as a person in real life is right, at the beginning we circled the most annoying things customers: automatic response, slow response, poor ability to solve problems. We firmly believe that when we are small companies, there is no qualification in customer service to do a mess, the old customer is your best new customers, the best way to keep old customers is the best customer service.

Two years later, Bryan earned 1 million dollars, and now the annual income is doubling, and they are too late to recruit. In 2011, Braintree, who received 34 million of a-round financing, now deals with more than 8 billion of credit card transactions each year.

So this story tells us: for some people, quitting is not a bad thing, but it is the fuse you find millions of wealth.

Via TC