

Earn money in your sleep - sirbrad
http://www.netmagazine.com/features/earn-money-your-sleep

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jasonkester
There's an interesting dynamic at play with things like this. When you first
build one of these "earn money in your sleep" SaaS products, it really doesn't
make you all that much money. After a few months of being launched and signing
customers, it's not at all uncommon to be bringing in something like
$50/month.

At that point, it's tough to keep motivated to tweak, market, A/B Test and
otherwise keep moving forward. Especially when you look at your consulting
rate, or make the dreaded calculation to see how much your effective hourly
rate has been for this f'ng side project.

But here's the thing. After a while, that $50/month starts looking more like
$500/month. Then $1,000/month. Then $2,000/month. Sure, that's still, what?
Two days worth of consulting revenue? Even then it's a bit hard to stay
particularly excited. Consulting will pretty much always blow the doors off of
what you can make on a side project.

But the thing with consulting is that as soon as you stop consulting, people
stop sending you money. Products don't work like that. Want to take a month
off and go backpacking through Honduras? Cool. Your product will pay you
$2,000 to do that. Want to take a leap and try to build that shoot-for-the-
moon startup idea you've always had kicking around? Go for it. Your product
will take care of the rent for you.

Even better, products that charge by the month have a way of making you _more_
money every month. Until attrition really kicks in, you're going to be signing
more customers than you lose. Even if you only sign a few per month, that's
revenue that just keeps piling on top of itself. So now, a couple years after
that trip to Honduras and that woefully failed startup, check it out: you're
bringing in $5,000 or even $10,000 every month on that silly little product.
You really don't need to work anymore if you don't want to. Wow!

So yeah, products are actually pretty cool. They just don't seem like it at
first. Stick with it though. It gets good.

~~~
patio11
_Even better, products that charge by the month have a way of making you more
money every month._

This bit of advice is probably in the top 3 of "Things I wish someone had told
me in 2006."

~~~
noahc
Do you think that if someone told you that you wouldn't have built BCC? What
I'm really asking is can you make everything reoccurring or are their certain
markets that won't tolerate it.

~~~
patio11
I believed very strongly in 2006 that teachers would never go for recurring
purchases. I also thought that there were only ~1,000 people in the entire
world that would ever buy bingo card creation software. Belief #2 is
demonstrably catastrophically inaccurate.

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vdm
I hate to seem cynical about this, it was an interesting article, but I can't
help noticing that all the product examples were for a market of other web
developers.

I doubt this is a sustainable market; surely, all web developers can't just
sell to each other. The market for web development products can only be
created and paid for by having a sustainable web product market for non web
developers.

patio11's Bingo Cards feels a lot more 'real' to me as a product business, and
I would be interested in hearing other examples done by small teams.

~~~
muhfuhkuh
"patio11's Bingo Cards feels a lot more 'real' to me as a product business"

Why? He's basically selling _only_ to teachers.

What's wrong with a web developer selling a product to a niche of other web
developers?

And, actually, if you're selling byproducts like rejected logos or vector
images or stock photos or Wordpress themes, wouldn't that actually be for more
than just web developers? We've bought vectors for our mobile app in
development and just because bloggers who are in the market for a custom theme
are technically "on the web" doesn't mean they're developers.

~~~
patio11
_Why? He's basically selling only to teachers._

Sixty/forty or thereabouts, actually. There's also Fortune 500 companies,
people planning a birthday party for grandma, a whole mess of ladies planning
baby showers (baby shower bingo is A Thing), assisted living communities,
churches, NGOs, and if I remember correctly every branch of the military.

I emphasize the teaching bit when talking about BCC because that's how I
_thought_ about it, that's generally how I _think_ about it, and it makes a
very good story, but it isn't 100% of the business

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flyosity
Just as a quick example for other people who are thinking about doing this, I
sell UI design & development tutorials at Design Then Code
(<http://designthencode.com/>) for 1) designers learning how to code, and 2)
coders learning how to design. I've been selling them since March and the
total money earned is now about 1/3rd the salary I earn at my full-time job.
Not enough to fully supplant it, but jumping my income up 33% has been pretty
awesome.

Waking up in the morning to check out how much money you made last night is an
incredible feeling. Or, getting an email while out at dinner that you just
sold a thing that paid for your dinner? It's tough to explain just how
satisfying it is. And anyone can do it. I write about the things that I _do_
every single day. All of us have special, deep knowledge about a subject that
other people might want to become more knowledgable about, it's just a matter
of putting that knowledge into a compelling package.

~~~
lupatus
Way cool! Any tips for success for folks who might want to set up a similar
business model on other topics?

~~~
flyosity
I think the best decision I made was finding a niche (UI development for iOS)
and sticking with it, trying to build up my knowledge so that I was a very
knowledgeable person in the field.

~~~
lupatus
How did you identify your niche (personal interest and hope it worked, or did
you evaluate it with metrics of some sort)?

Any recommendations for payment processing and goods delivery services?

~~~
flyosity
The niche worked out because it's what I'm most excited about :)

I use Quixly for payment processing, it's the service that Pictos icon set
uses because Drew, the creator of Pictos, wrote it himself. It's outstanding
and very cheap. I highly recommend it for selling digital goods online.

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sgdesign
Good read, but what the article only mentions at the end is that the first
step for all of these strategies is:

"Work really, really hard."

Writing a book, creating a whole icon set, or creating GitHub are all much
harder and more time-consuming than doing client work.

So I think the biggest barrier to earning money while you sleep is probably
the amount of work involved, not the lack of ideas.

~~~
uptown
The difference between the two is that work for a client can typically only be
sold once. Work like creating an icon set or writing a book can be sold
infinitely and require virtually no post-support. Additionally, those streams
of income can continue while you're working on more client work if that's your
thing.

~~~
sidmitra
Except you can also scale your consulting business by hiring or tying up with
other devs. This means you can still earn while others are working for you!

~~~
yeahsure
I recommend you to read this article: [http://blog.asmartbear.com/consulting-
company-accounting.htm...](http://blog.asmartbear.com/consulting-company-
accounting.html)

While I don't agree with everything he says, there's a large amount of truth
in that post.

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latitude
Oh, what a thoroughly misleading post.

One thing to keep in mind is that projects like Dribbble and Pictos would've
not nearly as successful if they were not launched by people with a lot of
existing exposure. Getting noticed and acquiring critical mass that would
self-propel project's marketing is a _really damn big_ issue.

Second thing to notice is that all listed examples are of an exceptionally
high quality. The title of the post sort of implies that you can just ruffle
through your recycle bin, pick something that doesn't completely suck, stick
it on a website and it will magically earn you $$$ in your sleep. It will not.
Regardless of how _by_ the byproduct is, it will still require a lot of
attention and effort to be brought into a marketable state.

Going back to Pictos as an example. It would've long disappeared from the
radar if Drew would've not been very busy promoting himself (and Pictos) on
Dribbble and in other places. He might not be working on the Pictos much, but
he certainly puts a lot of effort in keeping it afloat.

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techvibe
Earning money while sleeping is not that difficult. I (living in Europe) run a
site with many visitors from US and Japan. Most of the revenues are generated
during my sleep time. ;-)

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freshfey
When I read this article I thought immediately about keynotopia from a fellow
HN member. He created those keynote ui templates (which he used in his day
job) and sells them, bringing in between 5'000 - 10'000 $ revenue per month,
which is pretty huge. Those kind of examples just make it look easy and I'm
questioning my own projects when I see something like that. Nonetheless, good
article.

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elmindreda
This has its downsides as well:

<http://dresdencodak.com/2006/10/07/summer-dream-job/>

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bennesvig
Isn't that the difference between an entrepreneur and a freelancer?
Freelancers only get paid when they're working and entrepreneur's set up
businesses bigger than themselves where they can make money while they're not
working (sleeping).

~~~
_delirium
I see the main difference as whether you're making the decisions on what to
build/sell, versus doing it to a specification given by a client.

It somewhat correlates in tech, but in most industries entrepreneurs aren't
defined as making money while they sleep. For example, a very traditional kind
of entrepreneurial activity is to open a brick-and-mortar shop. A mom-and-pop
bakery doesn't make money when they aren't there, but is entrepreneurial (in
fact opening a bakery is basically the economics textbook example of
entrepreneurship).

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fezzl
Isn't that the defining characteristic of all SaaS and web product-based
companies?

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jQueryIsAwesome
I once created a cool website (Wordpress + jQuery) for a share in the adsense
revenue... and man, it is the best bussiness i have done so far!

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jasonadriaan
adii ftw!

