

How I created passive income in a week, by over-delivering value - robwilliams88
http://letsworkshop.com/blog/how-i-created-passive-income/

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Jemaclus
> I spend 3-5 hours every single day and come up with the best freelance jobs
> of the day from all over the web.

So it's not really passive income, is it?

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robwilliams88
It's passive in the sense that I can make more and my income is not tied to
the amount of hours I work.

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positivejam
Fair enough. A lot of people would probably define passive income differently,
but I see what you're getting at. I hope the entire comments section of this
post doesn't turn into only a debate about what qualifies as passive income
because I'm actually really interested in what you've done and would like to
see some good discussion about _that_.

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rndholesqpeg
"I spend 3-5 hours every single day and come up with the best freelance jobs
of the day from all over the web. I painstakingly hand-craft this list every
day."

This would seem to contradict the term 'passive'.

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_lex
Ok - it looks like commenters are unable to see why he calls this "passive
income".

It's because although the work is done by hand, he can eventually (in like a
month) hand it off to his own employee or contractor for them to do for a
fraction of the profits.

Starting it up himself allows him to formularize the entire business, build a
following and keep costs low in the beginning. He probably also plans to start
creating similar email lists for other verticals with high levels of
contractor work - so not just developers, but also designers, devops etc.

If you read between the lines, you can see where he's going with this; it can
absolutely be a passive income stream, and based on his traction, it may
replace his need to work.

Edit: To commenters below - Most successful businesses eventually hire someone
to run them w/o much intervention from the investors/founders. He can do the
same.

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RyanZAG
Handing off work to employees is not passive income, or every business owner
in the world would be "passive income". It's just a standard product business.

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_lex
CEOs are employees, and stocks are considered passive income. Granted, he
might still have to be on the "board", but he could get pretty close to
passive income.

To spell this out: Most successful businesses eventually hire someone to run
them w/o much intervention from the investors/founders. He can do the same.

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RyanZAG
The words you're looking for are "I'm making money with a product that has
fixed costs and variable income", not passive income. It's a pretty well known
model used by a number of companies such as Microsoft.

You're also selling 'mining picks', so I'd guess your product has a lot of
potential.

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isaacb
We try really hard to come up with ways to use technology to create value, but
there are heaps of opportunities like this one to curate a product by hand and
deliver value derived from your knowledge and experience, rather than some
clever hacking.

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wnevets
I dont think that word means what you think it means

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positivejam
Has anyone done something similar with a focus on _software_
freelancing/consulting opportunities?

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positivejam
Are you getting any feedback from your users on a lead by lead basis about the
quality of the leads? Like, the ability for them to rate the leads they
pursue? It would be interesting to see if getting such feedback could improve
the quality/efficiency of your lead-finding abilities.

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robwilliams88
That would be pretty awesome. Currently I'm using campaign monitor and no
other software.

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positivejam
If you pursued it, you might even be able to identify patterns common to high-
quality leads and use those patterns to automate your process some.

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svantana
Interesting, but doesn't it scale kind of badly? Imagine if thousands of devs
were using the service, then it would get really competitive to get any of
these leads, thus lowering the value of the leads for the devs.

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robwilliams88
Well I want to keep the list small - so I'll be raising the price
aggressively.

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scriptstar
When I click on the button to subscribe, it was rendering the same page
instead of allowing me to subscribe. Please fix and let me know.

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robwilliams88
Stupid chrome bug. It should be fixed now, and here's the direct link to
signup: [http://gum.co/letsworkshop](http://gum.co/letsworkshop)

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webhat
I'm currently getting a 404 on the link.

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robwilliams88
just fixed that, thanks for the heads up

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chaz
Cool. How did you find your first customers?

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robwilliams88
I had an email list of about 300 people, and I looked at twitter occasionally
for people saying "Looking for freelance work"

