
Screw Passive Income, I Want Active Income - vi1rus
I keep reading threads in HN talking about passive income, small side gigs that make money while you sit.<p>I don&#x27;t want that. I want to escape my 9-5. Reach financial independence. I don&#x27;t care about expensive cars, houses with multiple rooms I won&#x27;t use.<p>I just want to work for myself and live my life.<p>How do I do that?<p>Skill set: Average Developer, understand marketing, SEO, exceptional Project Manager
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codegeek
Some options:

1\. Build a product (SAAS) in a niche domain. Charge between $50-$100/Month.
Get 75 customers.

2\. Buy an existing SAAS in a domain that you have interest in (experience a
bonus but not required). It should bring in profits of 5k/month (give or
take). If the business is rock solid and at least 3 years old with a
sustainable rate of revenue, then expect to pay 3X (3 years of profits) upto
5X (depends on many factors). You may even find gems for less than 3X
multiplier.

3\. Start a "Service" based freelance business but offer a specific skill. For
example, "I will help you host wordpress sites for $x/month and fully manage
it for you". Charge a flat monthly fee. Kinda like Step 1 but "service" based
instead of "product" based. The trick is that you don't deviate too much from
the scope otherise it will be difficult to do it as one man show and you will
end up going towards a "agency" type model.

4\. If you are really good at something and have the skills to create a good
tutorial, start something like
[https://www.laracasts.com](https://www.laracasts.com) and provide solid
content regularly to your subscribers. Charge a flat fee per month.

All these 4 things are extremely difficult to start with BUT very possible to
do. I have done #2 myself fyi and already grown it 6 times in 2 years.

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kevinrpope
Where did you research sites to buy? Places like flippa seem sketchy, though I
remember patio11 recommended feiinternational.com when he sold his business.

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taprun
I think you meant [http://feinternational.com](http://feinternational.com)
right?

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kevinrpope
Yes, that's right, thanks

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jordansmith
Honestly, I slowly moved away from being a developer. Anyone with an idea can
hire a developer to make their SaaS project, or whatever the idea is. The
money is in the marketing of the project.

I switched to affiliate marketing and making ecommerce stores. Less time
developing and more time just selling. Facebook Ads & Instagram are a godsend.

This is both active and passive income. Once things are rolling you can hire a
VA for super cheap to make sure things keep running smoothly. This lets you
take time off while keeping keeping the machine running. If you want to be
active you can push out new products, niches, and just scale what is already
working.

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_jdams
Hey man, I have a quick question. You may know the answer, you may not, it's a
shot in the dark but I'll try anyway.

I've been wanting to get into the affiliate marketing space for a while now. I
was curious if one way to approach is to setup a shopify-type store which
contains actual products I'm looking to sell, but the links to the products
actually go outbound to amazon affiliate link or something else, or is your
approach more blog-related, where you type text about something and then
include affiliate links within the body of the blog post? Have you tried both,
which is more effective?

The other thing I've researched and read a lot about is how to validate an
idea to see if there's interest. The way to do this is to setup a simple
2-page landing/splash page on Strikingly, Unbounce, Instapage, or any other
similar site, explaining what your product or website is about, with a direct
button to complete the purchase, but then you redirect the user to a "Sorry,
we are not yet ready", and see how many "convert" \- that is, users who are
immediately ready to pay for said product. Do you do any of this validation
for your affiliate marketing sites, or do you just open them and start selling
through your web store or blog posts (depending on answer from first
paragraph)?

Thanks so much for taking a moment to help me get started.

~~~
jordansmith
I don't do any amazon affiliate type stuff as the money isn't great so I can't
really help you there. There are things out there that can pull a feed from
amazon and display the stuff on your site.

I have done that type of validation before. Often I'll do that if I am testing
between multiple offers to see which works best. But usually with affiliate
marketing you don't need to do that since they aren't purchasing anything from
you, it just redirects to the advertisers site.

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chatmasta
Find an SaaS in a medium sized market where most competitors are one man shops
with low switching costs for customers. Replicate the best competitor, improve
on features, and undercut prices. Identify their advertising channels and
insert yourself into the mix.

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vi1rus
What's your definition of medium sized?

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chatmasta
A market with enough customers to get to $10k/month revenue within a year with
few competitors, preferably none of which are multi person companies.

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csallen
Check out my site: IndieHackers.com. There are some great examples there.
After conducting the interviews found there, I agree with people who emphasize
marketing over development. You need to work on something that solves a well-
defined and valuable problem for a segment of people, and you need to know
channels through which you can share it with these people.

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virken
Find a unmet or poorly met need that you are also passionate about. And then
make the best damn solution you can to address it.

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wwalser
Here is a good podcast on this subject:
[http://thestartupchat.com/ep126/](http://thestartupchat.com/ep126/)

A significant number of the self-funded startup people that I come across used
the stair-step approach that's described in the podcast.

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tedmiston
Become a founder building projects that scratch your own itch. The 37signals
(neè Basecamp) guys have written quite a bit about this.

Consulting is probably a faster way to financial independence than founding
is, but founding is more about lifestyle independence, which seems important
to you too.

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android521
What is the monthly take home income (after tax) you aim for to be comfortable
enough for your lifestyle

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vi1rus
$3.5K is enough to comfortably support me $7k-10k would be epic

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bbcbasic
We're working towards that by paying the mortgage of asap. Just boring old
living frugally while trying to maximise income. One twist is to rent our
place out and rent somewhere cheaper.

