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Earn money in your sleep

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Re: Earn money in your sleep

#41

Post by lupatus »

flyosity wrote: post #39
lupatus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: Earn money in your sleep

#42

Post by euroclydon »

patio11 wrote: post #37
rmc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can go to the purchase page of CWC, a spiritual BCC clone, and see the lengths I've gone to impress just that point.

Re: Earn money in your sleep

#43

Post by flyosity »

lupatus wrote: post #41
flyosity wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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.

Re: Earn money in your sleep

#44

Post by stinkytaco »

jasonkester wrote: post #16
sgdesign wrote: post #6

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.

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…

Are you kidding? The last think I want to do after I do my day job is more of my day job. I think lots of people feel this way and that's why they find the article valuable, the realization that their extra time can be parlayed into future earning. But yeah, it will take time and work, sometime time and work some of us just can't bring ourselves to do, no matter the future value.

Re: Earn money in your sleep

#45

Post by jleader »

vdm wrote: post #12

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 Car…

Any company selling to a group of people has to understand the needs of their customers.

Many companies do this by hiring people called "marketers", who specialize in studying the needs of other groups of people.

An alternative is to create products for a group you belong to.

Hence, if a web developer (who is not also a marketer) is going to develop a product by themselves, it might make sense for them to create a product for other web developers.

Note that this doesn't mean all web developers will only make products for other web developers. Many web developers work for companies that have marketers to handle the "understand the needs of your customers" part. Other web developers have (or can teach themselves) sufficient marketing skills to develop products for people unlike themselves. Still others develop products for other groups they are members of (e.g. web developers creating products for people who share one of their hobbies).

I don't know why the original article didn't include these last 2 categories of developers, though.

Re: Earn money in your sleep

#46

Post by yeahsure »

sidmitra wrote: post #10
uptown wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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!

I recommend you to read this article: http://blog.asmartbear.com/consulting-company-accounting.htm...

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

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