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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Earn money in your sleep
11–20 of 46 posts
Re: Earn money in your sleep
#12I 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.
Re: Earn money in your sleep
#13Good 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.
So, earn money in your sleep by working really hard and not sleeping for a long time. Kind of like it taking 10 years to become an overnight success.
Re: Earn money in your sleep
#14Just 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.
Re: Earn money in your sleep
#15Good 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.
So, earn money in your sleep by working really hard and not sleeping for a long time. Kind of like it taking 10 years to become an overnight success.
So true...I've been publishing apps on the iOS app store for the last 3 years and get an hour of sleep during development. But once the app is live and earning money, I can rest easy and sleep 8-9 hours a night. Over a span of 5 years, it basically averages out to about 5-6 hours of sleep a night, which seems normal.
Re: Earn money in your sleep
#16Good 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.
Not really. If your day job is designing icon sets, then pumping out one more on the side isn't really all that hard. Especially if your day job is designing a client site that happens to need a whole bunch of icons for a client who doesn't consider things like generated IP to be worth protecting.
There are lots of examples of this sort of thing that make it pretty straightforward to take something that you're doing anyway and spin it off as a product that brings in revenue. If fact, the product that pays my rent (S3stat) was exactly that: something we needed in house that turned out to be something other people would pay for.
So yeah, it's probably not anywhere near as much work as you expect. And like people are telling you elsewhere, once it's built, it stays built, and the money keeps rolling in.
Re: Earn money in your sleep
#17There'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.
Re: Earn money in your sleep
#18I 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 Car…
"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.
Re: Earn money in your sleep
#19I 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 Car…
"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 mo…
It's much easier for us techies to sell things to non-techies than it is for us to sell to techies. To a fellow techie, we have just created a simple django basic application. To a non-techie we have done magic.
Re: Earn money in your sleep
#20When 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.