Screw Passive Income, I Want Active Income I keep reading threads in HN talking about passive income, small side gigs that make money while you sit. I don't want that. I want to escape my 9-5. Reach financial independence. I don't care about expensive cars, houses with multiple rooms I won't use. I just want to work for myself and live my life. How do I do that? Skill set: Average Developer, understand marketing, SEO, exceptional Project Manager |
1. Build a product (SAAS) in a niche domain. Charge between $50-$100/Month. Get 75 customers.
2. Buy an existing SAAS in a domain that you have interest in (experience a bonus but not required). It should bring in profits of 5k/month (give or take). If the business is rock solid and at least 3 years old with a sustainable rate of revenue, then expect to pay 3X (3 years of profits) upto 5X (depends on many factors). You may even find gems for less than 3X multiplier.
3. Start a "Service" based freelance business but offer a specific skill. For example, "I will help you host wordpress sites for $x/month and fully manage it for you". Charge a flat monthly fee. Kinda like Step 1 but "service" based instead of "product" based. The trick is that you don't deviate too much from the scope otherise it will be difficult to do it as one man show and you will end up going towards a "agency" type model.
4. If you are really good at something and have the skills to create a good tutorial, start something like https://www.laracasts.com and provide solid content regularly to your subscribers. Charge a flat fee per month.
All these 4 things are extremely difficult to start with BUT very possible to do. I have done #2 myself fyi and already grown it 6 times in 2 years.
I switched to affiliate marketing and making ecommerce stores. Less time developing and more time just selling. Facebook Ads & Instagram are a godsend.
This is both active and passive income. Once things are rolling you can hire a VA for super cheap to make sure things keep running smoothly. This lets you take time off while keeping keeping the machine running. If you want to be active you can push out new products, niches, and just scale what is already working.
I've been wanting to get into the affiliate marketing space for a while now. I was curious if one way to approach is to setup a shopify-type store which contains actual products I'm looking to sell, but the links to the products actually go outbound to amazon affiliate link or something else, or is your approach more blog-related, where you type text about something and then include affiliate links within the body of the blog post? Have you tried both, which is more effective?
The other thing I've researched and read a lot about is how to validate an idea to see if there's interest. The way to do this is to setup a simple 2-page landing/splash page on Strikingly, Unbounce, Instapage, or any other similar site, explaining what your product or website is about, with a direct button to complete the purchase, but then you redirect the user to a "Sorry, we are not yet ready", and see how many "convert" - that is, users who are immediately ready to pay for said product. Do you do any of this validation for your affiliate marketing sites, or do you just open them and start selling through your web store or blog posts (depending on answer from first paragraph)?
Thanks so much for taking a moment to help me get started.
I have done that type of validation before. Often I'll do that if I am testing between multiple offers to see which works best. But usually with affiliate marketing you don't need to do that since they aren't purchasing anything from you, it just redirects to the advertisers site.
Did you create new products or simply better at marketing products that are readily available on Amzn etc?
What I sell isn't any better than anywhere else, it is just the marketing that gets people in.
A significant number of the self-funded startup people that I come across used the stair-step approach that's described in the podcast.
Consulting is probably a faster way to financial independence than founding is, but founding is more about lifestyle independence, which seems important to you too.