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Wow, thanks a lot for taking the time to answer. This is better than getting on the front page. >a) recurring revenue (BCC didn't have it and _believe me_ did
by hsribei 10y ago
Wow, thanks a lot for taking the time to answer. This is better than getting on the front page.
>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/ 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.
- patio11 10y agoI even considered emailing you to ask if doing bingo card software localized to Brazil for instance was a good idea 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.
- hsribei 10y agoFor the same technical challenge? None occurs to me, but I'll think harder about that. Even if other options are more challenging, I guess I welcome the excuse to dabble in Elm soon :) Thanks for the advice.
- napoleond 10y agoHere's an example: https://jsreport.net/ https://jsreport.net/ It may seem like a complicated product, and I'm sure the guys behind it put in a lot of work to polish it, but the guts of the product are 3-4 well-established open-source libraries wrapped together with duct tape. Here's a shameless plug to something I built, as another example: https://smsinbox.net https://smsinbox.net patio11 was kind enough to give me some feedback about that when I was getting started. I successfully charge businesses $75+ per month to use it, and although I'm proud of the programming work involved to build it, it is not substantially more complicated than BCC. EDIT: I noticed your comment on Indie Hackers about not feeling as qualified for B2B since you don't have a lot of experience working for companies. One way to tackle this is to build a product that participates inside a bigger ecosystem (Wordpress plugins are an example, or Shopify plugins or something like https://baremetrics.com/ https://baremetrics.com/ in the Stripe ecosystem or my thing in the Twilio ecosystem). The awesome side effect of this approach is that it often simplifies distribution, since there are already communities established around those platforms.
- 10y ago