Based on what Max has written, I think it'd be obvious why he doesn't want to say what he does - it would potentially ruin his business.
Max has made it very clear that what he's doing isn't particularly complicated, difficult or innovative. It seems clear to me that that the value he creates is in identifying and targeting specific underexploited niches. I imagine that he has spent a lot of time and money on identifying these niches. If my assumption is correct, it'd be commercial suicide to give away almost all of the value in his business to a baying mob of smart, fast entrepreneurs.
We like openness in this community, often for very good reasons, but I think we do tend to fetishise it. I think we often forget that secrecy is the norm in business and our penchant for publishing sensitive business data is seen as very odd by the majority of businesspeople. There are often compelling business reasons to keep certain things private and I think it's unfair to infer guilt from silence.
I think it's unfair to expect people to respect his desire to not have anyone probe into his business when he's braying DHH style about the money he's making on his business model and the trips he makes to Bangkok so that he can spend a month in a 5-star hotel, something myself and no one else I know personally has even done yet in their entire lives thus far.
So yeah, if he keeps poking his head out the hole like this, the axe is going to come down. At this point I'd be willing to bet there's at least a handful of people here who'd like to eat his lunch just for being so arrogant.
Why don't you just email me if you are so curious? My business model is easy to duplicate and posting something like this is not good for me, I would prefer it if you would just do this privately.
I respect your request to keep your business private. It's just that when you write post after post, comment after comment, which I enjoy often, about your startup experiences without actually touching upon what exactly it is you do, it gets rather irritating. It's like someone telling you stories about how some product has helped their lives dramatically with tips on how to use it, without actually telling you what the product is. After a while, it starts to raise questions.
I am going to make it public, I just was waiting till august, as that's how my startup plan is constructed. Now would be premature and have no benefit, but in august I would have a clear benefit.
Interesting. Releasing in August will give you three months till November 5th, which is just enough time to manufacture thousands of masks, distribute them across a large metropolitan city, and purchase tons of explosives to rig the underground subway headed for parliament. I feel there's more to your story.
Not yet: Max Klein, drop the Klein, replace with Payne (same character count). Max Payne was created by Finnish developers. Rearrange the letters of 'Finnish' and you get 'Fish Inn,' which is a dumbed down reference to the Hotel Redfish in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The main language spoken in Brazil is Portuguese, which rearranged yields 'toupee rugs,' which you plan to make out of the hair from the shaved head of your beautiful female prisoner, whom you've tortured to make fearless in hopes that she will one day return to aid in the execution of your plot. Now it's over.
3 months is way more than enough to manufacture thousands of masks. I think he could get millions of them done, especially if he gets help from the Vatican and the Frenchmasons. I think this could be an international plot.
It is a strange thing to say given that your products are already in the market. You sound very confident in your posts and you sound awfully scared in this comment of yours. Are you particularly scared of HNers?
I have a cash-cow side project that makes more money than many would expect. It'd also be trivially easy to duplicate and is simple enough that there'd be barely any value to HNers to hear the details. I'm confident talking crap about that field but wouldn't be overly keen to submit to HN questioning. Could well be that maxklein is in a similar position.
A crowd of mostly young or hungry entrepreneurial hackers who could clone his software and/or enter the same niche markets, perhaps taking only a few good sprints to do it, as well. I can definitely see why someone might be scared of this crowd.
You may not be able to think of such legit businesses, but they exist. I've signed NDA's at at least two.
Simple reason why you might not want to talk about it: you want to sell to customers on the sly while avoiding creating competition. The product is probably easy to duplicate and doesn't currently exist right now because no one thought of it.
In a few months, when I have entered the second stage of my business, I will start talking about my products. It's just a choice. I am not marketing to the startup or hacker crowd, just to the normal people.
I agree with the feeling. The posts are interesting reads, but early on there was discussion of social engineering that didn't smell right... There are a number of interesting domains registered to a maximus klein with the following contact:
Maximus Klein (maxim19055@yahoo.com)
81 City Road
London
United Kingdom,EC1Y 1BL
GB
Tel. +44.8452802710
close to the cubeofm registration .. a domain name with a "vitch" in the ending as well...
Our Max says this isn't him though...
I suppose it is cool for cubeofm domain registration to give the address for the Dog & Partridge Pubs then ehhh? As so many seem to be saying... it's suspicious smelling. Could be completely legit, but also could be like the KimKins lowcarbfriends thing and could use some investigation.. The items posted were straight from DNS registration public info...
Okay, for the curious, I will make you a deal. Anyone who emails me today or tomorrow, I will provide them with a link to the things I do, provided you will keep it to yourself. I will make a mass-email tommorow and send it to everyone. Then please don't ask me anymore till August, I am not yet ready for the publicity.
It's getting late now and I want to sleep, I don't want to stay awake and be nervously watching this question all night, so just email me if you have any questions for me.
I'd caution against it. If you have planned to wait until August, you should do so. Don't let yourself be goaded in to doing something you otherwise would not unless you perceive a clear benefit from it.
I'm as curious as everybody else here but I won't be mailing you because I think you should call the shots on this one.
I guess maxklein himself would be the right person to answer this. He can't be that hard to reach.
Which raises the question, why didn't you ask him directly? Or did you? Is this a show-move because you know what those apps are, and you want to "expose him" for making cheap spammy apps (note: I have no evidence whatsoever that maxklein makes spammy apps, but your post does seem to have some undertones of that)?
his blog posts are great. more over, particularly after a very xkcd-ish comic he made about starting out, i associated him with success stories like patio11 (whose recent mixergy interview really inspires me).
but i just can't seem to figure out what exactly he does (whereas patio11 is incredibly transparent).
there's nothing sinister about my curiosity. when i get inspired by someone else's success, i want to know as much about the context and details of that success as possible. otherwise it just becomes frustrating.
Yeah I made that comment before I read "My business model is easy to duplicate and posting something like this is not good for me." So, while such an interview might be of interest to people of HN, it doesn't sound like Max would agree to it in the first place.
Alternatively, perhaps exit applied Occam's Razor and concluded that maxklein is either a fiction or a fraud, and calling him out in public seems like an apt way to expose the lie?
This is what doesn't add up. If you want to make money, why would you post anything and risk killing the golden goose? If you want to share your wisdom or experience, why do so in a vague, watered down fashion? Why not just wait, and publish when you can back up your posts with hard facts?
When I started my blog, the explanation was in one of my first posts, but let me explain again - on the one hand I am doing something that makes me quick cash. On the other hand, I am building an audience with my blog. Then I use the quick cash to build more substantial products and use the audience I built with my blog to market my new products.
I'd love to know too, but can wait till August. I know how he feels, I had something that made anywhere between 3-10k a month through 2007-2008 and there's no way I would have shared it at the time because it was too fragile and easily "copied" (for the last year I've made nothing from it because people did catch on.) It was a collection of blog posts referencing online route finders in certain ways that meant I got a lot of traffic that clicked, in high numbers, on well paying ads to get to the original site. Totally accidental, but it eventually paid for my wedding and a car in all. I'm keen not to equate my sheer good luck with the hard work Max is doing however ;-)
Search for "aa route finder." One of my posts is now on page 2 (but used to be 2nd or 3rd) - the domain contains my HN username.
I used to post all sorts of trash on my old personal blog and was doing very short "reviews" of route finders as I discovered new ones. Once I noticed something crazy going on with my ad income, about six months on, I turned up the positioning (within policy) on those individual pages to see if I could maximise the income.
None of this has made more than $50 or so over the last year, alas. You'll notice there are now a lot of sites above mine doing similar things. There's a lot of money in things like that, but I only came across it by accident. It's not the sort of thing I'd go out of my way to engineer as it just feels cheap. That probably makes me an idiot :-)
(It's a great story, though, because a lot of people thought I was wasting my time personal blogging in the 2000-2005 area and it's amazing how random activities can pay off.)
As maxklein himself states on this page "My business model is easy to duplicate and posting something like this is not good for me If he wants his company and what it does secret that's his choice - and a perfectly valid one.
I disagree with this thread. It's quite unfair to push Max Klein that he will reveal his business niches. His specific business details are unrelated to the quality of his business, which are (still) valuable even without knowing the specifics. Would you like to share your specific niches with the HN-Crowd, full of highly productive programmers?? I cannot ignore the feeling that the purpose of questioning the authenticity of Max Klein and his blog posts is to expose his niches.
from what I understand it's just a bunch of small apps. His business model isn't to sell a single app 1,000 times, but to sell 100 apps, 10 times each.
as far as long term, he mentioned that he is using the blog for cred building, so that when he moves to stage 2 with a "real" product, he'll be able to get more coverage/buzz, and worst case scenario he'll have his own blog audience to spam.
it's like Arrington and tablets, on it's own noone cared about it, once Arrington started pushing the idea, suddenly everyone thought it was the second coming of jesus.
if this is being voted down because of the url, it wasn't put up as spam, it is a domain registered by "a" maximus klein that sells "OEM" or discounted software...
Max has made it very clear that what he's doing isn't particularly complicated, difficult or innovative. It seems clear to me that that the value he creates is in identifying and targeting specific underexploited niches. I imagine that he has spent a lot of time and money on identifying these niches. If my assumption is correct, it'd be commercial suicide to give away almost all of the value in his business to a baying mob of smart, fast entrepreneurs.
We like openness in this community, often for very good reasons, but I think we do tend to fetishise it. I think we often forget that secrecy is the norm in business and our penchant for publishing sensitive business data is seen as very odd by the majority of businesspeople. There are often compelling business reasons to keep certain things private and I think it's unfair to infer guilt from silence.