What types of businesses are most suited to that? (Only thing that comes to mind is Bingo Card Creator.)
Where do I find other developers and entrepreneurs shooting for that goal without getting drowned in the spammy noise that the theme of (semi-)passive income brings with it?
I'm not just talking about bootstrapping. I'm talking about making specific decisions so that you can put in time in the beginning but with the clear goal that once you reach a certain monthly recurring revenue, the thing you optimize from there is the time you spend achieving that revenue, not its growth.
Note that the answer "it's impossible" doesn't count. In the spectrum between zero maintenance effort and being a full-time business owner there must be tons of opportunity. What's the lowest amount of hours needed to make X amount of money? Or what's the highest amount of money possible to sustain with Y weekly hours?
And where do I learn about how to do it and find people with the same goal to grow with?
Thanks!
P.S.: if you look for Garrett Dimon's post on Recurring Revenue vs Disability Insurance, you will see how this is not about living the easy life, but having a little safety net when things go really wrong for a really long time. His quote:
"No source of income beats creating something that makes money while you’re asleep. Or sick. Or in the hospital. Or busy caring for a loved one."
I've personally always failed building anything that people would like to use enough to pay for it, and I've seen many people waste (or invest) about 10x what they would put into consulting to make less than minimum wage (or even 0).
Yet, I'm still trying.
My experience was that I could slack off and work less than full time, but doing so would damage the business and then I would have to put in a lot more effort.
I mean, if I was better at business, it would have perhaps been different. As it was, it was full time work for about what I earned when I was 17, and on top of that, finding a job after working exclusively for my self was rather harder than doing so after sporadic contracting gigs.
May I ask what your project is/was?
What difficulties did you encounter?
In terms of what to shoot for, a) recurring revenue (BCC didn't have it and _believe me_ did that radically raise the savviness bar required on the customer acquisition front), b) B2B where something is important enough to need but not enough to require a long sales cycle or urgent support if the thing hiccups, c) a well-understood marketing and sales model that you can semi-automate.
The third thing is probably hardest to build, and as your time scale gets longer, it is the most likely part to require your sustained attention to improve. (I have no information how BCC is doing these days but I rather suspect the original organic SEO strategy which served me well for 5+ years will not continue operating unaltered for 20.)
In terms of where these folks hang out: business owners who have priorities in their life other than the business are still business owners. I think the great mistake in the "passive income" community is failure to treat running a business like running a business; it becomes aspirational for lots of folks who have neither the skills nor the inclination to run a business nor, unfortunately, the desire to change either of those two things.
This makes "passive income" spaces into a whirlwind of depression and hucksterism. Meanwhile, if you ask around the table at MicroConf, you'll find some folks who had a really good year and worked really hard for it and you'll find some folks who phoned it in while taking care of parents, getting married, throwing themselves into a home-building project, starting a new business, etc.
MicroConf, BaconBiz, and DCBKK are three conferences which all had folks who were at many points along the spectrum here. All have online ambits to them, too. (I suppose one could run a not-awful conference about software businesses in maintenance mode but if you have one then flying out to a conference would absorb a few weeks of maintenance mode and be probably a lot more boring than going to MicroConf.)
>a) recurring revenue (BCC didn't have it and _believe me_ did that radically raise the savviness bar required on the customer acquisition front),
Didn't know the savviness gap was that big.
To be honest, I even considered emailing you to ask if doing bingo card software localized to Brazil for instance was a good idea, since: 1) you've trailblazed its SEO and conversion optimization tactics already 2) sold it, so no conflict of interest 3) they haven't to my knowledge localized it 4) there seems to be few competitors in Brazil, and 5) you seemed to have been able to make a decent annual salary from it with ~3h/week if I'm not wrong.
I'm not nearly as savvy to tune something like it to the extent you did though, and the Brazilian Portuguese market is much smaller than the whole internet's English-speaking audience.
So B2B non-critical SaaS sounds like the best bet indeed.
>The third thing is probably hardest to build, and as your time scale gets longer, it is the most likely part to require your sustained attention to improve. (I have no information how BCC is doing these days but I rather suspect the original organic SEO strategy which served me well for 5+ years will not continue operating unaltered for 20.)
That makes a lot of sense. What I like about BCC is that the user-satisfying part of the software itself is so simple and unchanging that you had the time to devote yourself almost exclusively to optimizing traffic and conversion.
It's hard to think of a useful SaaS product that wouldn't require a good amount of code maintenance, stack upgrades, new features requested by users, etc. just to keep the repeat business of the current ones.
As a solo entrepreneur with little time available, splitting it between that and constantly tuning marketing channels sounds challenging. But as you said, a lot of it can be automated.
>In terms of where these folks hang out: business owners who have priorities in their life other than the business are still business owners. I think the great mistake in the "passive income" community is failure to treat running a business like running a business; it becomes aspirational for lots of folks who have neither the skills nor the inclination to run a business nor, unfortunately, the desire to change either of those two things. This makes "passive income" spaces into a whirlwind of depression and hucksterism.
Exactly. I was at my wits end googling around (I might be terrible at googling, who knows) for a community that didn't come off like that. I went so far as proposing one myself under the "4hww4devs" banner (https://hsribei.github.io/log/4hww4devs/), hoping the "devs" filter would bring in a more skilled and "business owner"-mentality crowd.
Thankfully I found Indie Hackers, which has taught me a lot so far. And through that post I was reached out to by Matthew Mallard, who started the ##passiveincome channel on Freenode a couple of months ago. I hope being on Freenode achieves the same kind of selective pressure I was looking for.
>MicroConf, BaconBiz, and DCBKK are three conferences which all had folks who were at many points along the spectrum here. All have online ambits to them, too.
I will definitely acquaint myself as deeply as I can with those. Thank you a lot for the pointers, and for the kindness in answering without prejudice.
I'll take the liberty of answering here: it's a terrible, terrible project relative to your goals when you consider the the universe of projects you can ship with the same skill set. Bingo Card Creator is fundamentally a CRUD app which spits out PDFs; life-time value of a customer is ~$30. There are numerous applications which, for the same technical challenge, sell to businesses for $50 ~ $200 per month and LTVs in the $1k ~ $10k range. Do one of them instead.
Q: Why are you bothering with BCC when consulting is so much more lucrative? (I can think of a few good reasons, but I'd like to hear what your reasons are.)
A: I really enjoy being a product guy. BCC has a very desirable property in that it mostly works in my sleep. Consulting is quite lucrative and intellectually engaging, but it often disrupts my life in ways that BCC does not: for example, flying off to $BIG_CITY_ACROSS_OCEAN for a few weeks is wonderful once or twice a year but would get tiresome if I were doing it every month. I very rarely get tired of BCC, and with the exception of a trivial amount of support all of my work for it is at my absolute discretion to schedule. I mean, my little brother is graduating college this spring and, without even looking at the calendar, I can say "Sure, no problem, I'll be there. Tell me the day sometime."
Money is also not a huge motivator for me. I like it, don't get me wrong, but after I've got the rent and necessities covered (oh look, bingo) money generally has to be the icing on the cake to motivate me to do something. (Shh, no telling the consulting clients.)
Is it work that got more interesting, so you don't mind doing more of it, or you found new uses for money you didn't think were important before, or something else entirely?
(Feel free to ignore.)
I set out to build a business with the heuristic of "Maximize Jason's Vacation Time". I like to climb rocks, surf and travel through interesting parts of the world, and always found it hard to do that for, say, most of the year every year when I had to work for other people.
So I built a product that brings in recurring revenue, generally sells itself, and has a userbase of technical people who can usually solve their own issues for themselves, and are generally fun to talk to when they need help. Even so, I've also made a priority of automating everything that can be automated, including common customer service things, so that as time goes on there are fewer things that can interrupt my Days Off. (Days Off being defined as days where the sun is out or the kids of off school and I don't need a rest day from climbing or surfing, so hey, let's polish the product a bit).
And yes, as you describe, I've passed up opportunities that would grow revenues faster at the cost of more of my time being taken up by the business.
The one downside is that it took longer this way. It was 4 years before my product stuff could pay my rent, and another 2 before I could properly live off of it, buy houses, raise kids, etc.
But now that it's there, it's kinda nice. I've gone as far as not bothering to bring a laptop on the road anymore for trips less than a few weeks.
I have a blog (linked in my profile) with some possibly useful info, and it seems I do a lot of my writing about this stuff here as well. Searching comments for "jasonkester product" seems to pull a bunch of stuff up.
Good luck!
Good to know how long it took you. 6+ years requires grit, and although still a bit limited by the RSI, I'm in a personal position where I can have that kind of long-term commitment.
I loved the expat software website, by the way :) It reminds me of an amusing conversation someone on Freenode (##passiveincome) sent me this link to:
myles.io/thoughts/passive-income-hacker-vs-startup-guy
I just recommended this book the other day in a related thread [1], but Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup by Rob Walling really is a stellar reference on this topic. He is very big on the "grow big enough to have a functional small business (buzzword: micropreneur) but don't grow forever and obsessively". They also have a (paid) forum where you can talk with likeminded devs turned founders.
https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/post/-KgG2eMQ4Sv9wWUc4SKJ
