I'm Robin. I started E-junkie.com to successfully gain my own financial freedom. AMA! 🔥
Robin Singh
14 replies
Since starting in 2004, E-junkie has processed 3,67,00,636 transactions amounting to $1.38 Billion for over 55,379 makers!
I am an Entrepreneur working for doing good, as I don't think there's anything better to do. I started my career as a hacker in 1998, and then founded Ejunkie in 2003, a service to remove technology barriers for artists, authors and developers wanting to sell their digital content directly to buyers. Later that year, I moved to Tucson, Arizona and continued to build Ejunkie.
After successfully exiting in 2011, I took some time off to figure out why I was doing anything, and then started working to help animals in February, 2013 first in Auroville, India and then Delhi. Realizing that the nature of welfare projects in India being such that they can't be scaled by scaling the infrastructure, I changed my strategy from just "doing" to involving & inspiring, and storytelling. To that end, in December 2014 along with two other co-founders I started Peepal Farm - a place for animals to heal, and be heard. I've been building it, running it, and living there since.
If knowing about any aspect of my journey so far helps you clear any doubts about yours, I'll be happy to share. Mostly I am here to you that if can do it, so can you AMA!
Replies
Joshua Dance@joshdance
Summer Bod 2020
What are opportunities you see in the market right now?
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@joshdance I am thinking of doing a simple paywall provider ... so makers can run their own patreon style page.
@shakks I wasn't looking for an idea. I was just looking to solve my own problem, so I guess I didn't have that dilemma. However once E-junkie was launched, and it's core featureset solved my original issue to automating downlods after a PayPal payment, I kept improving it based on what people wanted.
As for validating the idea, I talke to people I knew first, and I implemented the automation script (E-junkie wasn't born yet) for my musician friends. Then I put up the automation script for sale, as well as put up ads on freelance websites that I'd implement this for people who wanted to automate their digital delivery. Response to that was good. Then I graduated to turning that script into E-junkie, where people could implement it themselves, and started looking for websites selling downloads manually by searching for things like "I will email you the file" etc and contacting those people and giving free accounts. I also used adwords for related keywords to gauge the interest people had in solving the problem of automating digital delivery after sales.
Product Hunt
I'd love to know more about Peepal Farm. How do you help animals heal and be heard? How many animals fo you currently look after?
@ejsnowdon Right now, we have 61 animals ... which is 21 over what we had planned for. Out of this 15 are residents (7 cows & bulls, 3 dogs, 1 cat, 1 pig, 1 mule, 1 goat, 1 sheep). We help animals by running a rescue and clinic for injured stray animals. It's mostly cows, dogs, cats and mules, as rest of the animals people eat, so it's only rare circumstances that we get to rescue other animals.
I'd started working with animals in Feb of 2013, and I'd realized early on that although each one I am helping counts, there are millions that I am unable to help ... and to help them, the best way within my capabilities is to nudge people away from behaviors that cause animals (human & non-human) to suffer. So, we help animals be heard via two ways 1. Involve & Inspire, and 2. Storytelling. Both with the idea of helping people feel what they already know - that all animals too feel fear and pain just like we do.
For #1, we share our space with volunteers from all over the world. They live with us for a couple weeks, share meals and help with the daily work. Although every one has a different take home, spending time with companion animals like dogs (which most everyone connects with) and farm animals like cows, and Pablo the pig makes people realize that the distinction we make in both is arbitrary.
For #2, we do a lot of videos like
See these two -
@abadesi I'll have to give you a bit of a background to answer that. I'd gotten into hacking to get my hands on internet accounts, as I wanted to read all day. However one thing led to another, and 5 years later I found myself building websites, whereas my heart was in learning ... learning anything that pulled my attention. So my prime reason to pursue financial independence was so I could spend my time learning and tinkering at my leisure. After exiting, I spent the bulk of my day at Pima Country Library; that's when I got my real education :) And although that was the drive, then benefit I got from getting to this point was to be able to pause, and peel of the abstraction layers for once in my life and question the why of it all.
I'd never thought I'd make the kind of money I did with E-junkie, and before I started E-junkie, I was shooting for making $3000 a month without having to put in any hours using google adsense, so I'd kept my consumption habits and living standards in check :) It wasn't a lot of change so to speak, but just resisting the temptation to increase my expenses to match the gradually increasing income.
Soundrs
How did you knew that what you had in mind was useful for someone and how did you validate that it was true?
@ayoprez When I'd gone to Target for the first time and saw all the nifty little kitchen tools they had it occurred to me for the first time ... that in US, either you find a solution to all the problems ... and if you come across a problem that no one has solved, then you are on to something!
So when I solved my problem of mailing out the software file for each sale, there was no doubt in my mind that this is something that others can also use. I validated this first just talking to people I knew first, and implementing the automation script (E-junkie wasn't born yet) for my musician friends. Then I put up the automation script for sale, as well as put up ads on freelance websites that I'd implement this for people who wanted to automate their digital delivery. Response to that was good. Then I graduated to turning that script into E-junkie, where people could implement it themselves, and started looking for websites selling downloads manually by searching for things like "I will email you the file" etc and contacting those people and giving free accounts.
Also, using adwords for related keywords, let me gauge the interest people had in solving the problem of automating downloads after sales.
what is your point of validation?
@fashionistwomen do you mean to know how I validated the idea, or at what point I felt the idea was valid?
