4 ms·

My experience is that yes, it is possible to generate a passive income with side projects (by passive I mean <5h work per week). As someone who has built and s

My experience is that yes, it is possible to generate a passive income with side projects (by passive I mean <5h work per week). As someone who has built and sold a SaaS company however, I'd strongly recommend against starting off with one. They are almost never passive! If your main goal is to make some money on the side, I'd recommend you first try: - An info product (a course, ebook, video course etc) - Something in the ecommerce space (check out lasertweets.co by Josh Pigford for inspiration) It's a lot easier to make $1-10k/month with just a few hours work per week (and time invested upfront of course) doing something like this than it is with a SaaS. SaaS is just too time intensive with support, sales, product dev etc. Source: Have built a SaaS, an ecommerce project and am now working on my first info product.

louisswiss 8y ago
Am being seriously downvoted. Anyone care to explain why? I know the idea of software (and SaaS in particular) being a tricky passive side project is unpopular amongst the HN crowd, but unfortunately it's true.
- jftuga 8y ago
  > It's a lot easier to make $1-10k/month with just a few hours work per week. $10k/month with just a few hours per week is BS. $120k / year would be a lot more than many peoples salary.
  - justaguyhere 8y ago
    Other than a few western countries, $120K USD per year is a lot more than many people's multi year salary
  - coffee 8y ago
    You've missed the point, he said: > It's a lot easier to make $1-10k/month with just a few hours work per week (and time invested upfront of course) ...and time invested upfront of course There are many stories of folks who have done just this, it's not BS, they exist.
- soulchild37 8y ago
  I would take the downvotes as a good sign as that means less competition for us who are more pragmatic on creating profitable side projects (the downvoters are probably still cobbling together their SaaS for years with no audience in mind).
davidscolgan 8y ago
I agree with you. SaaS is in my opinion the hardest way to make money as a developer. Not only do you have to make working software, you also have to do every other thing a freelance business requires. The path I often see is: Developer builds an app in private with no monitization strategy or "we'll put on ads", releases to crickets/not very many users, and nothing then happens. The question is then asked "why won't anyone buy my software?" Answer: "because you made something nobody asked for." My recommendation is, instead of starting with a SaaS you come up with yourself and try to sell it to people, start with the audience. Learn about them and try to find a problem they'd pay money to solve. To make things automatically twice as easy, sell to businesses instead of individual non-business owners. You can sell a $500 a month service to a business that solves a business problem. My family values software at less than $1. If the problem you are solving is something the audience might also want to learn how to do, start a mailing list around the idea and teach them about the thing. Make info products, and services around helping them do the thing. Create a consulting service to manually do what your SaaS app might do automatically. Then build an app to automate the process. Audience -> Freelance/Consulting -> Info Products -> Software. Each of these steps are necessary for all the following steps anyway. Building a SaaS first is like jumping into senior year as a freshman - you _could_ learn everything all at the same time but that may take a lot of effort and frustration. This is one of my soapbox issues because I have spent so much of my side project time flailing around doing exactly the opposite of what I said above and never making a dime from it.
jackgolding 8y ago
I agree with this approach and have seen it mentioned a few times in indiehacker or solopreneur communities. Do you have any resources in particular you are following for this? 30x500 seems like one of the only courses for this but it has mixed reviews (source: google, HN)
- tmaly 8y ago
  I think you could buy the book or audio of Will It Fly by Pat Flynn and get most of the same process for a lot less. Nathan Barry wrote a book call Authority that talks specifically about making an ebook or info product.

louisswiss 8y ago

Am being seriously downvoted. Anyone care to explain why? I know the idea of software (and SaaS in particular) being a tricky passive side project is unpopular amongst the HN crowd, but unfortunately it's true.

jftuga 8y ago
> It's a lot easier to make $1-10k/month with just a few hours work per week. $10k/month with just a few hours per week is BS. $120k / year would be a lot more than many peoples salary.
- justaguyhere 8y ago
  Other than a few western countries, $120K USD per year is a lot more than many people's multi year salary
- coffee 8y ago
  You've missed the point, he said: > It's a lot easier to make $1-10k/month with just a few hours work per week (and time invested upfront of course) ...and time invested upfront of course There are many stories of folks who have done just this, it's not BS, they exist.
soulchild37 8y ago
I would take the downvotes as a good sign as that means less competition for us who are more pragmatic on creating profitable side projects (the downvoters are probably still cobbling together their SaaS for years with no audience in mind).

davidscolgan 8y ago

I agree with you. SaaS is in my opinion the hardest way to make money as a developer. Not only do you have to make working software, you also have to do every other thing a freelance business requires. The path I often see is: Developer builds an app in private with no monitization strategy or "we'll put on ads", releases to crickets/not very many users, and nothing then happens. The question is then asked "why won't anyone buy my software?" Answer: "because you made something nobody asked for." My recommendation is, instead of starting with a SaaS you come up with yourself and try to sell it to people, start with the audience. Learn about them and try to find a problem they'd pay money to solve. To make things automatically twice as easy, sell to businesses instead of individual non-business owners. You can sell a $500 a month service to a business that solves a business problem. My family values software at less than $1. If the problem you are solving is something the audience might also want to learn how to do, start a mailing list around the idea and teach them about the thing. Make info products, and services around helping them do the thing. Create a consulting service to manually do what your SaaS app might do automatically. Then build an app to automate the process. Audience -> Freelance/Consulting -> Info Products -> Software. Each of these steps are necessary for all the following steps anyway. Building a SaaS first is like jumping into senior year as a freshman - you _could_ learn everything all at the same time but that may take a lot of effort and frustration. This is one of my soapbox issues because I have spent so much of my side project time flailing around doing exactly the opposite of what I said above and never making a dime from it.

jackgolding 8y ago

I agree with this approach and have seen it mentioned a few times in indiehacker or solopreneur communities. Do you have any resources in particular you are following for this? 30x500 seems like one of the only courses for this but it has mixed reviews (source: google, HN)

tmaly 8y ago
I think you could buy the book or audio of Will It Fly by Pat Flynn and get most of the same process for a lot less. Nathan Barry wrote a book call Authority that talks specifically about making an ebook or info product.