
Ask HN: What's the closest one can get to a personal Basic Income with software? - hsribei
If you want to live modestly, cover your basic needs in the smallest fraction of your time possible so you can work on other things, what is the best path to take?<p>What types of businesses are most suited to that? (Only thing that comes to mind is Bingo Card Creator.)<p>Where do I find other developers and entrepreneurs shooting for that goal without getting drowned in the spammy noise that the theme of (semi-)passive income brings with it?<p>I&#x27;m not just talking about bootstrapping. I&#x27;m talking about making specific decisions so that you can put in time in the beginning but with the clear goal that once you reach a certain monthly recurring revenue, the thing you optimize from there is the time you spend achieving that revenue, not its growth.<p>Note that the answer &quot;it&#x27;s impossible&quot; doesn&#x27;t count. In the spectrum between zero maintenance effort and being a full-time business owner there must be tons of opportunity. What&#x27;s the lowest amount of hours needed to make X amount of money? Or what&#x27;s the highest amount of money possible to sustain with Y weekly hours?<p>And where do I learn about how to do it and find people with the same goal to grow with?<p>Thanks!<p>P.S.: if you look for Garrett Dimon&#x27;s post on Recurring Revenue vs Disability Insurance, you will see how this is not about living the easy life, but having a little safety net when things go really wrong for a really long time. His quote:<p>&quot;No source of income beats creating something that makes money while you’re asleep. Or sick. Or in the hospital. Or busy caring for a loved one.&quot;
======
patio11
There are any number of software entrepreneurs (and, for that matter,
insurance agents) who widely vary the amount of time they spend on the
business and include many weeks where they look gainfully unemployed.

In terms of what to shoot for, a) recurring revenue (BCC didn't have it and
_believe me_ did that radically raise the savviness bar required on the
customer acquisition front), b) B2B where something is important enough to
need but not enough to require a long sales cycle or urgent support if the
thing hiccups, c) a well-understood marketing and sales model that you can
semi-automate.

The third thing is probably hardest to build, and as your time scale gets
longer, it is the most likely part to require your sustained attention to
improve. (I have no information how BCC is doing these days but I rather
suspect the original organic SEO strategy which served me well for 5+ years
will not continue operating unaltered for 20.)

In terms of where these folks hang out: business owners who have priorities in
their life other than the business are still business owners. I think the
great mistake in the "passive income" community is failure to treat running a
business like running a business; it becomes aspirational for lots of folks
who have neither the skills nor the inclination to run a business nor,
unfortunately, the desire to change either of those two things.

This makes "passive income" spaces into a whirlwind of depression and
hucksterism. Meanwhile, if you ask around the table at MicroConf, you'll find
some folks who had a really good year and worked really hard for it and you'll
find some folks who phoned it in while taking care of parents, getting
married, throwing themselves into a home-building project, starting a new
business, etc.

MicroConf, BaconBiz, and DCBKK are three conferences which all had folks who
were at many points along the spectrum here. All have online ambits to them,
too. (I suppose one could run a not-awful conference about software businesses
in maintenance mode but if you have one then flying out to a conference would
absorb a few weeks of maintenance mode and be probably a lot more boring than
going to MicroConf.)

~~~
hsribei
Wow, thanks a lot for taking the time to answer. This is better than getting
on the front page.

>a) recurring revenue (BCC didn't have it and _believe me_ did that radically
raise the savviness bar required on the customer acquisition front),

Didn't know the savviness gap was that big.

To be honest, I even considered emailing you to ask if doing bingo card
software localized to Brazil for instance was a good idea, since: 1) you've
trailblazed its SEO and conversion optimization tactics already 2) sold it, so
no conflict of interest 3) they haven't to my knowledge localized it 4) there
seems to be few competitors in Brazil, and 5) you seemed to have been able to
make a decent annual salary from it with ~3h/week if I'm not wrong.

I'm not nearly as savvy to tune something like it to the extent you did
though, and the Brazilian Portuguese market is much smaller than the whole
internet's English-speaking audience.

So B2B non-critical SaaS sounds like the best bet indeed.

>The third thing is probably hardest to build, and as your time scale gets
longer, it is the most likely part to require your sustained attention to
improve. (I have no information how BCC is doing these days but I rather
suspect the original organic SEO strategy which served me well for 5+ years
will not continue operating unaltered for 20.)

That makes a lot of sense. What I like about BCC is that the user-satisfying
part of the software itself is so simple and unchanging that you had the time
to devote yourself almost exclusively to optimizing traffic and conversion.

It's hard to think of a useful SaaS product that wouldn't require a good
amount of code maintenance, stack upgrades, new features requested by users,
etc. just to keep the repeat business of the current ones.

As a solo entrepreneur with little time available, splitting it between that
and constantly tuning marketing channels sounds challenging. But as you said,
a lot of it can be automated.

>In terms of where these folks hang out: business owners who have priorities
in their life other than the business are still business owners. I think the
great mistake in the "passive income" community is failure to treat running a
business like running a business; it becomes aspirational for lots of folks
who have neither the skills nor the inclination to run a business nor,
unfortunately, the desire to change either of those two things. This makes
"passive income" spaces into a whirlwind of depression and hucksterism.

Exactly. I was at my wits end googling around (I might be terrible at
googling, who knows) for a community that didn't come off like that. I went so
far as proposing one myself under the "4hww4devs" banner
([https://hsribei.github.io/log/4hww4devs/](https://hsribei.github.io/log/4hww4devs/)),
hoping the "devs" filter would bring in a more skilled and "business
owner"-mentality crowd.

Thankfully I found Indie Hackers, which has taught me a lot so far. And
through that post I was reached out to by Matthew Mallard, who started the
##passiveincome channel on Freenode a couple of months ago. I hope being on
Freenode achieves the same kind of selective pressure I was looking for.

>MicroConf, BaconBiz, and DCBKK are three conferences which all had folks who
were at many points along the spectrum here. All have online ambits to them,
too.

I will definitely acquaint myself as deeply as I can with those. Thank you a
lot for the pointers, and for the kindness in answering without prejudice.

~~~
patio11
_I even considered emailing you to ask if doing bingo card software localized
to Brazil for instance was a good idea_

I'll take the liberty of answering here: it's a terrible, terrible project
relative to your goals when you consider the the universe of projects you can
ship with the same skill set. Bingo Card Creator is fundamentally a CRUD app
which spits out PDFs; life-time value of a customer is ~$30. There are
_numerous_ applications which, for the same technical challenge, sell to
businesses for $50 ~ $200 per month and LTVs in the $1k ~ $10k range. Do one
of them instead.

~~~
hsribei
For the same technical challenge? None occurs to me, but I'll think harder
about that. Even if other options are more challenging, I guess I welcome the
excuse to dabble in Elm soon :) Thanks for the advice.

~~~
napoleond
Here's an example: [https://jsreport.net/](https://jsreport.net/)

It may seem like a complicated product, and I'm sure the guys behind it put in
a lot of work to polish it, but the guts of the product are 3-4 well-
established open-source libraries wrapped together with duct tape.

Here's a shameless plug to something I built, as another example:
[https://smsinbox.net](https://smsinbox.net)

patio11 was kind enough to give me some feedback about that when I was getting
started. I successfully charge businesses $75+ per month to use it, and
although I'm proud of the programming work involved to build it, it is not
substantially more complicated than BCC.

EDIT: I noticed your comment on Indie Hackers about not feeling as qualified
for B2B since you don't have a lot of experience working for companies. One
way to tackle this is to build a product that participates inside a bigger
ecosystem (Wordpress plugins are an example, or Shopify plugins or something
like [https://baremetrics.com/](https://baremetrics.com/) in the Stripe
ecosystem or my thing in the Twilio ecosystem). The awesome side effect of
this approach is that it often simplifies distribution, since there are
already communities established around those platforms.

~~~
hsribei
Curious: are you living off of smsinbox? What do you estimate is the average
weekly amount of hours you spend on it?

~~~
napoleond
_> are you living off of smsinbox?_

No, not even close :) But the customer base is growing slowly and steadily.

 _> What do you estimate is the average weekly amount of hours you spend on
it?_

Under 2, most weeks.

------
jasonkester
This sounds a lot like what I've done with my SaaS products.

I set out to build a business with the heuristic of "Maximize Jason's Vacation
Time". I like to climb rocks, surf and travel through interesting parts of the
world, and always found it hard to do that for, say, most of the year every
year when I had to work for other people.

So I built a product that brings in recurring revenue, generally sells itself,
and has a userbase of technical people who can usually solve their own issues
for themselves, and are generally fun to talk to when they need help. Even so,
I've also made a priority of automating everything that can be automated,
including common customer service things, so that as time goes on there are
fewer things that can interrupt my Days Off. (Days Off being defined as days
where the sun is out or the kids of off school and I don't need a rest day
from climbing or surfing, so hey, let's polish the product a bit).

And yes, as you describe, I've passed up opportunities that would grow
revenues faster at the cost of more of my time being taken up by the business.

The one downside is that it took longer this way. It was 4 years before my
product stuff could pay my rent, and another 2 before I could properly live
off of it, buy houses, raise kids, etc.

But now that it's there, it's kinda nice. I've gone as far as not bothering to
bring a laptop on the road anymore for trips less than a few weeks.

I have a blog (linked in my profile) with some possibly useful info, and it
seems I do a lot of my writing about this stuff here as well. Searching
comments for "jasonkester product" seems to pull a bunch of stuff up.

Good luck!

~~~
hsribei
Wow, it's so great to hear that there are people out there who are actually
doing this. Congratulations! That's exactly the kind of security I want to
have.

Good to know how long it took you. 6+ years requires grit, and although still
a bit limited by the RSI, I'm in a personal position where I can have that
kind of long-term commitment.

I loved the expat software website, by the way :) It reminds me of an amusing
conversation someone on Freenode (##passiveincome) sent me this link to:

myles.io/thoughts/passive-income-hacker-vs-startup-guy

------
hsribei
Glad to see @patio11 thinks the same way. Look at his answer to this:

Q: Why are you bothering with BCC when consulting is so much more lucrative?
(I can think of a few good reasons, but I'd like to hear what your reasons
are.)

A: I really enjoy being a product guy. BCC has a very desirable property in
that it mostly works in my sleep. Consulting is quite lucrative and
intellectually engaging, but it often disrupts my life in ways that BCC does
not: for example, flying off to $BIG_CITY_ACROSS_OCEAN for a few weeks is
wonderful once or twice a year but would get tiresome if I were doing it every
month. I very rarely get tired of BCC, and with the exception of a trivial
amount of support all of my work for it is at my absolute discretion to
schedule. I mean, my little brother is graduating college this spring and,
without even looking at the calendar, I can say "Sure, no problem, I'll be
there. Tell me the day sometime."

Money is also not a huge motivator for me. I like it, don't get me wrong, but
after I've got the rent and necessities covered (oh look, bingo) money
generally has to be the icing on the cake to motivate me to do something.
(Shh, no telling the consulting clients.)

Source:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018936](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018936)

~~~
patio11
Worth mentioning: my desires on what to optimize for have waxed and waned over
the years.

~~~
hsribei
If it's not too personal, I'd love to know how your, er, personal philosophy
has changed over the years.

Is it work that got more interesting, so you don't mind doing more of it, or
you found new uses for money you didn't think were important before, or
something else entirely?

(Feel free to ignore.)

~~~
patio11
A combination of things: I had a conversation with Joel Spolsky which
convinced me that people with the opportunity to contribute a lot to the world
have an obligation to do so. (He grounded this in a Talmudic understanding but
it largely comports with me as a Catholic, FWIW.) I've found myself vastly
more interested in doing work when work impacts meaningful problems that I
care about, like e.g. changing hiring in the tech industry or making
entrepreneurship a transformatively better experience worldwide. I have at
times had some not-so-happy health issues to deal with and when not dealing
with them my tolerance for a more traditional workweek is rather higher. As I
get increasingly far from my salaryman days, my raw distaste for things-that-
feel-like-work declines.

I wouldn't primarily credit attitudes about or desires for money with any of
this, though my personal burn rate is much higher now than it was in 2010. (I
got married, had two kids, and moved to Tokyo; this makes ~$10k spend like
~$2k used to.)

------
tedmiston
I think the short answer is: (1) work for yourself, not as an employee, (2)
find a niche market, (3) create a SaaS product for it, (4) outsource tasks
like support to other people instead of doing them yourself.

I just recommended this book the other day in a related thread [1], but _Start
Small, Stay Small: A Developer 's Guide to Launching a Startup_ by Rob Walling
really is a stellar reference on this topic. He is very big on the "grow big
enough to have a functional small business (buzzword: micropreneur) but don't
grow forever and obsessively". They also have a (paid) forum where you can
talk with likeminded devs turned founders.

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13981490](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13981490)

[2]: [http://www.startupbook.net/](http://www.startupbook.net/)

~~~
hsribei
Thanks for the pointers! I think (2) is the hardest, but I'll try some of the
things Amy Hoy publicly shared about her Sales Safari process (can't afford
30x500 yet).

------
ksherlock
You could also get a job that pays well, live within your means, and use the
extra money to buy dividend paying stocks and bonds or rental real estate (use
a property manager to keep it passive).

------
nkkollaw
Honestly, in my experience that would be consulting.

I've personally always failed building anything that people would like to use
enough to pay for it, and I've seen many people waste (or invest) about 10x
what they would put into consulting to make less than minimum wage (or even
0).

Yet, I'm still trying.

~~~
lsc
I would agree. I built something people liked enough to pay me for, and it
even gave me a basic income. But I was on call all the time and generally
working a lot for like 1/4 what you get working for other people around here,
and going home at six.

My experience was that I could slack off and work less than full time, but
doing so would damage the business and then I would have to put in a lot more
effort.

I mean, if I was better at business, it would have perhaps been different. As
it was, it was full time work for about what I earned when I was 17, and on
top of that, finding a job after working exclusively for my self was rather
harder than doing so after sporadic contracting gigs.

~~~
nkkollaw
Nice.

May I ask what your project is/was?

What difficulties did you encounter?

~~~
atsaloli
[http://prgmr.com/xen/](http://prgmr.com/xen/) Xen-based VPS

Look forward to hearing Luke's answer - as a fellow sysadmin eneterpreneur,
he's been a real inspiration (even though I'm in a different line - training).

~~~
nkkollaw
I don't hate it, but that's a really crowded and competitive market, uh?

:-)

~~~
lsc
This is something else I want to write about. Starting a really different
service is a lot harder to sell, and I knew going in that selling is what I am
worst at.

Also, when I started, most of the competition was using UML or OpenVZ. Xen was
unquestionably superior to those technologies for multi tenant systems, so one
could argue that this market wasn't as crowded in 2005

Of course, I was big into the idea of a commodity product. Like I said,
competing as a commodity requires less marketing skill. Instead of talking
someone into trying something new, you start with something they already are
using and then just point out the advantages of your implementation, which can
be as simple as the blog I posted in the other comment.

------
umen
Great source of bootstrapping information see the videos

[https://vimeo.com/user12790628](https://vimeo.com/user12790628)

------
urs2102
indiehackers.com is a great place to start looking at ideas. I've recommended
it on a couple of threads, but it's worth a look.

~~~
hsribei
Indeed! I take back what I said previously. There has been positive response
and even someone who's done before giving me hope it's possible:

[https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/post/-KgG2eMQ4Sv9wWUc4SKJ](https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/post/-KgG2eMQ4Sv9wWUc4SKJ)

