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Earn money in your sleep

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Re: Earn money in your sleep

#31

Post by 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.

Re: Earn money in your sleep

#32

Post by ja27 »

jasonkester wrote: post #17

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.…

I help myself keep going when a project like that is slow to bring in revenue by measuring it in terms of what that can buy. My little $50 a month site is almost a new iPad a year and I don't spend any time on it.

Re: Earn money in your sleep

#33

Post by cb18 »

patio11 wrote: post #24
jasonkester wrote: post #17

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.…

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."

Other two?

Re: Earn money in your sleep

#34

Post by lupatus »

flyosity wrote: post #14

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…

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

Re: Earn money in your sleep

#37

Post by patio11 »

rmc wrote: post #30
patio11 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Have you considered changing it? Surely there's an A/B test you can do.

That's a week or two of work (BCC is kinda creeky) and a whole lot of future customer support headaches to do that test (+), and the future revenues of BCC are the least important thing for my business success. I'd much rather spend the time on e.g. marketing AR and trying to 10x it's current revenue, or just do a week of consulting.

+ Despite having a totally consistent policy on this for the last five years, I have customers who either a) can't read and understand that BCC is a one-off purchase or b) actually think that BCC is billing them monthly (for free trial accounts) and want to cancel them to stop the billings on their Googles.

Re: Earn money in your sleep

#38

Post by patio11 »

noahc wrote: post #29
patio11 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

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.

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.

Re: Earn money in your sleep

#39

Post by flyosity »

lupatus wrote: post #34
flyosity wrote: post #14

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…

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

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.

Re: Earn money in your sleep

#40

Post by nathanbarry »

flyosity wrote: post #14

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…

I have the same feeling with my iOS applications. The day my son was born (a day I didn't go near a computer) I made just over $1.5k on the app store (normal sales are a small fraction of that). The feeling you get from making that much money when you didn't even think about your products that day is pretty amazing.

I also happily check my sales every morning.

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