Hyperink, a Content Farm That Grows Books

When Kevin Gao quit his consulting job at McKinsey three years ago, he knew he wanted to start his own business. The trouble was, he was expert in only one thing: getting a job at McKinsey. Relatives and friends kept seeking his advice on landing a job in consulting. “I’m fundamentally a little bit lazy,” says Gao. “So I thought, why keep answering the same e-mails and phone calls if I can just really do it once?” Gao, now 27, wrote down his thoughts on interviews, case studies, résumés, and cover letters in a 90-page tract he called The Consulting Bible and began selling the e-book at $25 apiece. Last year, he says, the title made more than $100,000, and the book’s unexpected success got Gao thinking. “There are millions of people out there like me who have interesting knowledge about all these random topics,” he says. “But to market a book online there are a thousand steps that I had to figure out through trial and error.”

That line of thought led Gao to create Hyperink, a kind of middle-brow content mill that launched on Oct. 26. Similar outfits such as Associated Content and Demand Media — which went public earlier this year and now trades at a market capitalization of about $500 million—pay cheap freelancers to write a few hundred words on perennial questions, like how to tie a Windsor knot, then sell ads next to the articles. Critics say such companies spit lots of low-quality information onto the Web. Hyperink pitches itself as a way to achieve the same kind of massive scale for publishing expert advice. It’s raised $1.2 million from venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz and Lerer Ventures.