I think this story basically demonstrates that once you focus on the money and simply do many projects that quickly bring money, you will be successful in making money. The biggest problems with most startups is that they focus too much on the product and too little on the money.
Even though having any source of income is great, building a predictable, sustainable source of income is key to eventual success. Currently, it looks like iStockPhoto is the only source of sustainable income. And now he is focusing on the Andriod app, which is great.
The lion's share of his "revenue" is what amounts to spec-work consulting ("flipping" web sites). Consulting is a great way to make money but it's a LOUSY way to build equity/recurring revenue.
I'm interested why you decided to sell the e-book site? It seems to me you could have put a small amount of effort in each month to keep the sales up to around the same amount - at least for a few months then sold it for a lot more!
Giving up website flipping seems a bad move - especially as you have now sold the e-book. Your only real source of income is iStockphoto.
I don't see how the e-book and website flipping can be replaced with Android apps given your location
Mainly I have sold it because tax law in Poland sucks and it was too much to maintain all sales and be ok with all legal things. Moreover it took much more than you can think to promote such website.
Website flipping is not free cash or quick easy cash. You build a site/service/app, promote it, rank it, get traffic and users and then sell it for cash. It's like working for someone else project.
I understand your question and often think the same thing myself. The most gain in flipping sites is in the middle - sites between $1500 and $4000 as these are fairly low investment and quick turnover, but the problem is in automating this. When you try to manage five medium sized sites, you can end up losing entire days :)
I'm working on a new project to manage outsourced web marketing and ultimately semi automate the process of building traffic and revenue to a site. Flipping is, at the moment, only sustainable if you know how many sites you can personally manage (or even how many people you can manage if others are managing the sites for you).
As I wrote in post I am not going to do it long term. It is just a temporary job for some quicker cash and I am working hard to build some steady passive income from other sources.
I find it pretty cool that you left your day job and do something that you really enjoy. (Not saying that a day job can't be something enjoyable thought). And yeah, it sure look impressive at first that you made 3x the income, however, it seems that you've went a little all-in with the stuff you already had.
Looking forward to see the next month with the android app! Question for you: Why android and not iphone?
Considering the recent success of the iPad and iPhone 4, that might not happen at all or be in the far future. On the other hand, the iPhone market might be more saturated for the kind of applications you want to make. Still, once you got the idea, the graphics and the general structure, porting apps either way isn't that hard, even if you have to rewrite the code, so investing in a used Mac Mini + iPod Touch might be worth it in the end.
Why do you think that Android would be more profitable? It seems to me that Google is terrible at marketing; the only people I've seen interested in Droid have been geeks like us.
Just wandering what the Amazon store thing is? (http://astore.amazon.com/krsbl-20).
Do you build a page, fill it with products and take a commission in sales?
Some of them are build in a few days and then maintained with a 2-3 hours per week per site. Some of them are build a lot longer but do not need maintenance at all but more promotion.
I would very much like to read a case study where you walk through your entire experience from initial idea to cash-in-hand... for each of the two types.
Congrats on your overall success. Keep it up dude!
