5 ms·

Ask HN: Cash-flow muses

71 points by bkovitz 17y ago

Timothy "Four-Hour Work Week" Ferriss has a concept he calls a "cash-flow muse". That's a little business that generates some monthly cash without taking up too much of your time. I think the idea is that with a couple of these running, you're pretty much free to do as you please most of the time. Some desirable attributes of a cash-flow muse: - You own it. - The value proposition is simple enough to explain in one sentence. - High margin: 4x to 50x. - Easy to automate or outsource the selling, record-keeping, and whatever other businessy stuff is needed. - Low capital investment. - Takes no more than about 4 weeks to manufacture the product. Ferriss often casually mentioned that generating this sort of cash flow is easy to do. It might take a month of real work to set one up, and you'll likely have to market-test a few ideas before you find one that's solid enough to commit to, but once it's up, it should pay your living expenses. That sounds really good--when talked about abstractly. The main idea is really not that a cash-flow muse can free up your time, it's that cash-flow-muse opportunities are abundant and easy to find. I myself have little concrete idea of what sort of tiny product you could turn into a tiny business like this, and scarcely any idea how to begin searching for one. My question: Has anyone actually done one of these?

jsterce 17y ago
I fell into one of these with one of my hobbies--nature photography. A couple of years ago I setup JS Nature Photos (http://photos.jstechs.com http://photos.jstechs.com) basically how it is now as a branch of another site at the time. Soon traffic to JS Nature Photos dwarfed traffic to the main site. The other site was fizzling anyway. Practically all of the revenue from JS Nature Photos is from ads (people don't buy photos online). It brought in some pretty good money through the first half of 2008, till the economy tanked. I don't have time to do much with it with school, etc., posting a photo every week or two if I'm lucky, but it still pays the rent each month.
nico 17y ago
I don't agree much with the idea, seems like trying to take a shortcut instead of focusing on real hard work to achieve what you want. I think that "cash-flow muses" are kind of a myth. If there's something easy to do, it's probably easy for a lot of people, hence you'll have a lot of competition, and market price will be low. If you want to differentiate yourself, then you'll have to put time and work into it, and it'll stop being a cash-flow muse. Also, if you need many cash-flow muses, each taking up only a bit of your time, together they'll take up a lot of your time. Anyway, why do you want to free up your time anyway? If you'd like to focus on doing what you really want, then you should read this: http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html (a bit long but worth it).
- noodle 17y ago
  i disagree. why are they mutually exclusive? many times, doing hard work towards what you want to do in life doesn't quite pay the bills. for him, it was traveling around and doing interesting things. for you, it might be working on an interesting startup that won't even be ramen profitable for a while.
  - nico 17y ago
    I am not saying they are exclusive, I'm just saying that from my point of view, cash-flow muses are not worth it.
    - zackattack 17y ago
      First, let me say thanks for linking to that essay. Through the essay, though, pg implies that cash-flow muses could be a path to what you love through the two-job route.
- ryanwaggoner 17y ago
  I go back and forth between feeling this way, but I've taken the plunge and I have two of these "cash-flow muses" in progress. They've both had sales, and one is close to being profitable. Here's a couple of other thoughts: 1. Hackers often dramatically under-estimate the knowledge that they have...something that's easy for most of us is probably near impossible for 99.9% of the population, or at least they think it is. 2. For me, I don't view this as something that I'll dedicate any more time or energy to than is necessary to free my time. The whole point of a muse is passive income to allow you to pursue whatever you're really passionate about.
quizbiz 17y ago
The idea is to set yourself up in a way that allows you to generate passive income. I like this as in it seems particle and beneficial. I don't think you can agree with it or disagree with it. It's not morally wrong. For example, I am not a professional photographer but I have photos on iStockPhoto and ShutterStock. 33 cents per purchase ads up and I have paid for a nice amount of gear with the income generated from photo purchases. In another example, the google ads still point to my account on an old message board I started. It's 1 check per year at best but it's nice. If we all put our web designs, a widget of code, anything of that sort for download for free on a page with ads or for $1 on a purchase paid, you will be surprised at how it can add up over a long period of time. That's the idea. I plan to put some of my own webdesigns on an online gallery, people would pay and get a link to download the .zip. After it's set up, it would be another source passive income flow. A bit differently, at one point I experimented with answering questions for the text messaging service kgb_ whenever I would watch TV. By forcing myself to do this, I was able to get a nice check at the end of the month. 10 cents for 2 min of work isn't really worth it though. Making rules for techniques like these is silly. The idea is to make some extra spending money however you can... in my opinion.
mishmax 17y ago
I have one of these businesses. Took me 2 months to build the product (on the side, after my full-time job). A few more to market and see sales (it takes time to close sales and generate site traffic). It should generate 10-20k this year, hopefully more next. My advice is to focus on a niche market filled with people w/ money, willing to pay for stuff. And avoid any market/problem that your typical computer geek would be interested in or aware of (you want to relax on the beach, not code away 60hrs a week fearing some other startup will catch up and take the market away).
- bkovitz 17y ago
  Wow, a data point! Thanks. May I ask, broadly what kind of product and what kind of market?
  - mishmax 17y ago
    Sure, it's an online app for the medical market.
- fallentimes 17y ago
  Are you worried that because it didn't take long to create (and presumably has a small barrier to entry), that an influx of competitors will appear?
  - mishmax 17y ago
    Yeah just don't want unneeded attention. Hopefully in the future I'll have more non-technical competitive barriers.
  - patio11 17y ago
    I think people are overly concerned about competitors. At least two people now have read my blog and set up their own businesses. One of them practically Xeroxed my business, and his I-can't-believe-its-not-me is fairly decent. I always joke that since my sales have doubled since then all I need is to recruit two more people who understand copy/paste and then I can retire. (The numbers in the joke are way out of date.) Similarly, I was myself a new upstart competitor to the established market participants back in 2006, and I haven't killed them, either. (The idea is not to pick a market with no competitition -- that is a red flag there is no money to be made. Instead, pick a market where there is an addressable niche for whom the existing choices are painfully inadequate. Then, sell pain relief.)
patio11 17y ago
Has anyone actually done one of these? Yep, although I don't think I could comfortably describe it as a fun little sideline these days. See http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats and look at the historical sales data: back in early 2007 when it was selling high three figures a month I think it would have been a fairly decent example of this. Tim Ferriss would not be my first suggestion for who to look for for advice on how to accomplish this. I think he sells "You can avoid doing actual work!!!" when the real lesson is "You can do actual work very, very efficiently these days if you're prepared to spend significant amounts of time and mental effort laying the groundwork for it." Incidentally, the amount of time you spend on "manufacturing the product" is rounding error next to the amount of time you will spend on this project. 90% of the value happens outside your IDE.
- bkovitz 17y ago
  Wow. Thanks for the data point(s)! Your web site cum stats page has got to be the most useful information I have ever seen or heard of, for the small, hacker entrepreneur. Of particular interest to me is that the price for your program is $29.95. Being a software guy who never buys anything except necessities, books, and meals out, I have a hard time imagining myself in the place of a buyer. The reality, of course, is that for some people, $29.95 for the bingo-card creator is a good deal, and you found them.
  - patio11 17y ago
    At the risk of tooting my own horn, you can find my blog linked in my profile. I think it is probably more useful to you to hear what I've done to get those stats graphs than to see the graphs themselves, since many of the techniques will also apply to your business, where the sales numbers will not.
idlewords 17y ago
I run the Bedbug Registry (http://bedbugregistry.com http://bedbugregistry.com), which covers about half my living expenses. Every six months or so I put in a week's work on it; otherwise it's just a matter of site babysitting (irate landlords, requests to rescind a report), which takes no more than an hour a week. Getting the site to this point took about two years, so I would counsel patience and perserverance. It also helps to really care about the project, even if you don't spend much time on it. And it especially helps when your business partners are relentless insects who spread very efficiently and feast on the blood of people's sleeping children.
- coconutrandom 17y ago
  wow, I need partners like that! So far I've only gotten sloths who cannot even digest without sitting in the sun.
- bkovitz 17y ago
  Wow, thanks: another rich-information, insight-stimulating data point. I heard an NPR story about bedbugs being on the rise a year or so ago. It didn't occur to me that bedbugs presented an entrepreneurial opportunity.
  - 10ren 17y ago
    problem = opportunity
- sutro 17y ago
  And it especially helps when your business partners are relentless insects who spread very efficiently and feast on the blood of people's sleeping children. Which VC firm are you referring to?
- makmanalp 17y ago
  Where does the revenue come from? Just ads?
- Adrenalist 17y ago
  I love the idea of the cash-flow muse and I'm VERY intrigued by these types of stories. Can you give any more details? Exactly (or approximately) how many dollars is half your living expenses? How did you start the project and keep it going? What marketing tools do you use? How much time + money have you put into the project? Sorry if I'm prying, but I am genuinely interested in people that taken a simple idea and built something strong and profitable out of it.
matthew-wegner 17y ago
I created one of these. My company used to actively develop for a particular market. Today we no longer develop for this market, but it's a big market and the large players have affiliate programs. We utilize these affiliate programs--they provide XML feeds and the like, and our site's backend combines them together and figures out the overlap--to run our own site in the space. The market players are quite competitive, and feud over exclusive product distribution, so ironically I think we actually have the largest inventory of any single non-affiliate site. It took about two months of my time to do the original website, much of it spent on SEO optimization and traffic generation strategies. Today we earn ~$8k/month on the site with an upkeep of ~30 minutes/week. This worked primarily because of deep knowledge of the market (from back when we were developing this kind of software). I don't think an outsider would have been able to predict hit products far enough out to lay the proper groundwork for SEO/etc. When I was actively creating the site site you could search for "Product X" on launch day and we'd be #1 or #2. Note: I also launched the site on our company's domain name, taking advantage of our existing inbound links. SEO from scratch will take a year or more to really see predictable traffic levels. So, yeah, it's definitely possible to create a cash flow muse; I think I could build another one today in around the same amount of time. It would be hard to do from a totally cold start, though; I'm not sure you could say "you know what, I'm going to make money by creating a local real estate website", or whatever random topic, and actually make it happen. But if you had friends/family in the real estate business, or somehow had accrued expert knowledge in the area, you'd be off to a strong start. If you're smart about the area you pursue you should be alright...
- mlapeter 17y ago
  Funny you mention local real estate websites, that's actually been something I've been thinking of. I'm a real estate broker learning to program, and my "muse" hopeful is http://mysinglepropertywebsites.com/ http://mysinglepropertywebsites.com/, which is targeted towards real estate agents. Average age of agents is 54, and they have a lot of pain points. I'm still pretty weak on programming but deep on real estate industry knowledge, if you (or anyone else) is actually interested in that area email me: mlapeter at gmail.
  - 17y ago
zackattack 17y ago
I hesitate to dive into a startup for a number of reasons, one of which is that I have little knowledge of the markets. Where do people have problems? What are they? A more difficult question: What non-obvious "problems" become manifest once a solution is evident? (Perhaps, A key to victory in this consumer culture). Anyway, more directly on topic, here's a cash-flow muse I came up with recently: make a pasta-chute that lets you put in the pasta without burning yourself in the boiling water. Let me know if you wanna collaborate with me.
ja27 17y ago
I have a small one that looks like it'll bring in about enough to buy a new laptop this year. It's taking maybe 60 hours so the rate sucks but those are mostly otherwise wasted hours where I'm already watching TV or other crap. This is a direct result of doing Ed Dale's 30 Day Challenge last year. That's a free online course on internet marketing, especially on market testing, that often gets confused with a "make money fast" scheme. I went into it last year with what I thought was a decent product but soon realized that the online market (search hits) for it is tiny. Almost a year later and I still only get 20 hits a week on that one. In the last week of the challenge I stumbled upon a market niche that works and now generates up to a thousand hits for me a week. It's not a market looking to spend money so my conversion rate has sucked, but I'm slowly finding what sells to them. If I hadn't done this testing, I would have wasted some money and a lot of time trying to get the first idea off the ground. If you've got a product or service (or even just an idea for one), I'd recommend the 30 Day Challenge as a free/cheap way to get rolling.
jlees 17y ago
I'm glad to read that people have actually set up decent, wholesome businesses that fulfil the criteria of cash-flow muses. My reaction when reading the book and even now is just to think 'set up one of those dodgy affiliate sites, ebook sites or drop shipping resellers', none of these being something I ever want to do. The idea of spending a month making something and then the rest of your time reaping in the profits with low overhead is a great one. Not only does it give you the freedom to work on a startup (or whatever) without worrying about rent, but I'd warrant it gives you a fair bit of credibility too - and a possible exit, even; cf. the recent post about Mingle^2 which took 66.5 hours to build and which got sold to a competitor. Edit Actually, I kind of have a cash-flow muse of my own. I helped build up a gaming blog to the point where it pays significant money to writers, and am retained as a columnist there, contributing about 1 hour's worth of work every Saturday. Without going into too much of the gritty detail, if I doubled that to 8 hours of work a month, I'd about cover my rent. However, there's a catch; as my startup's become more exciting, I've had no time to play the game I blog about, and have stopped writing. I can imagine this working a wee bit better if I was writing a column a week for TechCrunch or something similarly in line with the 'day-job', though.
igrekel 17y ago
Unrelated to the question, I apologize but am I the only one who is annoyed by the usage of the word "muse" in this context? For me a muse has such a noble connotation about deep tought, meaning and inspiration that I feel it is cheapened by being associated with selling pills online and other near-scams. Not to say that a small, low maintenance business can't have value to the world.
wlievens 17y ago
I'm somewhat facing the same dilemma. I will be having a good amount of free time in a couple of months' time (4 weeks, at least, possibly more), so I really want to do one of these, even if it only ends up providing me with a couple hundred euro per month. I have one micro-b2b idea, but I'm not really convinced of its value. How do you generate more ideas of the sort? The impending time pressure isn't helping me either :-)

71 points by bkovitz 17y ago

jsterce 17y ago

I fell into one of these with one of my hobbies--nature photography. A couple of years ago I setup JS Nature Photos (http://photos.jstechs.com http://photos.jstechs.com) basically how it is now as a branch of another site at the time. Soon traffic to JS Nature Photos dwarfed traffic to the main site. The other site was fizzling anyway. Practically all of the revenue from JS Nature Photos is from ads (people don't buy photos online). It brought in some pretty good money through the first half of 2008, till the economy tanked. I don't have time to do much with it with school, etc., posting a photo every week or two if I'm lucky, but it still pays the rent each month.

nico 17y ago

I don't agree much with the idea, seems like trying to take a shortcut instead of focusing on real hard work to achieve what you want. I think that "cash-flow muses" are kind of a myth. If there's something easy to do, it's probably easy for a lot of people, hence you'll have a lot of competition, and market price will be low. If you want to differentiate yourself, then you'll have to put time and work into it, and it'll stop being a cash-flow muse. Also, if you need many cash-flow muses, each taking up only a bit of your time, together they'll take up a lot of your time. Anyway, why do you want to free up your time anyway? If you'd like to focus on doing what you really want, then you should read this: http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html (a bit long but worth it).

noodle 17y ago
i disagree. why are they mutually exclusive? many times, doing hard work towards what you want to do in life doesn't quite pay the bills. for him, it was traveling around and doing interesting things. for you, it might be working on an interesting startup that won't even be ramen profitable for a while.
- nico 17y ago
  I am not saying they are exclusive, I'm just saying that from my point of view, cash-flow muses are not worth it.
  - zackattack 17y ago
    First, let me say thanks for linking to that essay. Through the essay, though, pg implies that cash-flow muses could be a path to what you love through the two-job route.
ryanwaggoner 17y ago
I go back and forth between feeling this way, but I've taken the plunge and I have two of these "cash-flow muses" in progress. They've both had sales, and one is close to being profitable. Here's a couple of other thoughts: 1. Hackers often dramatically under-estimate the knowledge that they have...something that's easy for most of us is probably near impossible for 99.9% of the population, or at least they think it is. 2. For me, I don't view this as something that I'll dedicate any more time or energy to than is necessary to free my time. The whole point of a muse is passive income to allow you to pursue whatever you're really passionate about.

quizbiz 17y ago

The idea is to set yourself up in a way that allows you to generate passive income. I like this as in it seems particle and beneficial. I don't think you can agree with it or disagree with it. It's not morally wrong. For example, I am not a professional photographer but I have photos on iStockPhoto and ShutterStock. 33 cents per purchase ads up and I have paid for a nice amount of gear with the income generated from photo purchases. In another example, the google ads still point to my account on an old message board I started. It's 1 check per year at best but it's nice. If we all put our web designs, a widget of code, anything of that sort for download for free on a page with ads or for $1 on a purchase paid, you will be surprised at how it can add up over a long period of time. That's the idea. I plan to put some of my own webdesigns on an online gallery, people would pay and get a link to download the .zip. After it's set up, it would be another source passive income flow. A bit differently, at one point I experimented with answering questions for the text messaging service kgb_ whenever I would watch TV. By forcing myself to do this, I was able to get a nice check at the end of the month. 10 cents for 2 min of work isn't really worth it though. Making rules for techniques like these is silly. The idea is to make some extra spending money however you can... in my opinion.

mishmax 17y ago

I have one of these businesses. Took me 2 months to build the product (on the side, after my full-time job). A few more to market and see sales (it takes time to close sales and generate site traffic). It should generate 10-20k this year, hopefully more next. My advice is to focus on a niche market filled with people w/ money, willing to pay for stuff. And avoid any market/problem that your typical computer geek would be interested in or aware of (you want to relax on the beach, not code away 60hrs a week fearing some other startup will catch up and take the market away).

bkovitz 17y ago
Wow, a data point! Thanks. May I ask, broadly what kind of product and what kind of market?
- mishmax 17y ago
  Sure, it's an online app for the medical market.
fallentimes 17y ago
Are you worried that because it didn't take long to create (and presumably has a small barrier to entry), that an influx of competitors will appear?
- mishmax 17y ago
  Yeah just don't want unneeded attention. Hopefully in the future I'll have more non-technical competitive barriers.
- patio11 17y ago
  I think people are overly concerned about competitors. At least two people now have read my blog and set up their own businesses. One of them practically Xeroxed my business, and his I-can't-believe-its-not-me is fairly decent. I always joke that since my sales have doubled since then all I need is to recruit two more people who understand copy/paste and then I can retire. (The numbers in the joke are way out of date.) Similarly, I was myself a new upstart competitor to the established market participants back in 2006, and I haven't killed them, either. (The idea is not to pick a market with no competitition -- that is a red flag there is no money to be made. Instead, pick a market where there is an addressable niche for whom the existing choices are painfully inadequate. Then, sell pain relief.)

patio11 17y ago

Has anyone actually done one of these? Yep, although I don't think I could comfortably describe it as a fun little sideline these days. See http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats and look at the historical sales data: back in early 2007 when it was selling high three figures a month I think it would have been a fairly decent example of this. Tim Ferriss would not be my first suggestion for who to look for for advice on how to accomplish this. I think he sells "You can avoid doing actual work!!!" when the real lesson is "You can do actual work very, very efficiently these days if you're prepared to spend significant amounts of time and mental effort laying the groundwork for it." Incidentally, the amount of time you spend on "manufacturing the product" is rounding error next to the amount of time you will spend on this project. 90% of the value happens outside your IDE.

bkovitz 17y ago
Wow. Thanks for the data point(s)! Your web site cum stats page has got to be the most useful information I have ever seen or heard of, for the small, hacker entrepreneur. Of particular interest to me is that the price for your program is $29.95. Being a software guy who never buys anything except necessities, books, and meals out, I have a hard time imagining myself in the place of a buyer. The reality, of course, is that for some people, $29.95 for the bingo-card creator is a good deal, and you found them.
- patio11 17y ago
  At the risk of tooting my own horn, you can find my blog linked in my profile. I think it is probably more useful to you to hear what I've done to get those stats graphs than to see the graphs themselves, since many of the techniques will also apply to your business, where the sales numbers will not.

idlewords 17y ago

I run the Bedbug Registry (http://bedbugregistry.com http://bedbugregistry.com), which covers about half my living expenses. Every six months or so I put in a week's work on it; otherwise it's just a matter of site babysitting (irate landlords, requests to rescind a report), which takes no more than an hour a week. Getting the site to this point took about two years, so I would counsel patience and perserverance. It also helps to really care about the project, even if you don't spend much time on it. And it especially helps when your business partners are relentless insects who spread very efficiently and feast on the blood of people's sleeping children.

coconutrandom 17y ago
wow, I need partners like that! So far I've only gotten sloths who cannot even digest without sitting in the sun.
bkovitz 17y ago
Wow, thanks: another rich-information, insight-stimulating data point. I heard an NPR story about bedbugs being on the rise a year or so ago. It didn't occur to me that bedbugs presented an entrepreneurial opportunity.
- 10ren 17y ago
  problem = opportunity
sutro 17y ago
And it especially helps when your business partners are relentless insects who spread very efficiently and feast on the blood of people's sleeping children. Which VC firm are you referring to?
makmanalp 17y ago
Where does the revenue come from? Just ads?
Adrenalist 17y ago
I love the idea of the cash-flow muse and I'm VERY intrigued by these types of stories. Can you give any more details? Exactly (or approximately) how many dollars is half your living expenses? How did you start the project and keep it going? What marketing tools do you use? How much time + money have you put into the project? Sorry if I'm prying, but I am genuinely interested in people that taken a simple idea and built something strong and profitable out of it.

matthew-wegner 17y ago

I created one of these. My company used to actively develop for a particular market. Today we no longer develop for this market, but it's a big market and the large players have affiliate programs. We utilize these affiliate programs--they provide XML feeds and the like, and our site's backend combines them together and figures out the overlap--to run our own site in the space. The market players are quite competitive, and feud over exclusive product distribution, so ironically I think we actually have the largest inventory of any single non-affiliate site. It took about two months of my time to do the original website, much of it spent on SEO optimization and traffic generation strategies. Today we earn ~$8k/month on the site with an upkeep of ~30 minutes/week. This worked primarily because of deep knowledge of the market (from back when we were developing this kind of software). I don't think an outsider would have been able to predict hit products far enough out to lay the proper groundwork for SEO/etc. When I was actively creating the site site you could search for "Product X" on launch day and we'd be #1 or #2. Note: I also launched the site on our company's domain name, taking advantage of our existing inbound links. SEO from scratch will take a year or more to really see predictable traffic levels. So, yeah, it's definitely possible to create a cash flow muse; I think I could build another one today in around the same amount of time. It would be hard to do from a totally cold start, though; I'm not sure you could say "you know what, I'm going to make money by creating a local real estate website", or whatever random topic, and actually make it happen. But if you had friends/family in the real estate business, or somehow had accrued expert knowledge in the area, you'd be off to a strong start. If you're smart about the area you pursue you should be alright...

mlapeter 17y ago
Funny you mention local real estate websites, that's actually been something I've been thinking of. I'm a real estate broker learning to program, and my "muse" hopeful is http://mysinglepropertywebsites.com/ http://mysinglepropertywebsites.com/, which is targeted towards real estate agents. Average age of agents is 54, and they have a lot of pain points. I'm still pretty weak on programming but deep on real estate industry knowledge, if you (or anyone else) is actually interested in that area email me: mlapeter at gmail.
- 17y ago

zackattack 17y ago

I hesitate to dive into a startup for a number of reasons, one of which is that I have little knowledge of the markets. Where do people have problems? What are they? A more difficult question: What non-obvious "problems" become manifest once a solution is evident? (Perhaps, A key to victory in this consumer culture). Anyway, more directly on topic, here's a cash-flow muse I came up with recently: make a pasta-chute that lets you put in the pasta without burning yourself in the boiling water. Let me know if you wanna collaborate with me.

ja27 17y ago

I have a small one that looks like it'll bring in about enough to buy a new laptop this year. It's taking maybe 60 hours so the rate sucks but those are mostly otherwise wasted hours where I'm already watching TV or other crap. This is a direct result of doing Ed Dale's 30 Day Challenge last year. That's a free online course on internet marketing, especially on market testing, that often gets confused with a "make money fast" scheme. I went into it last year with what I thought was a decent product but soon realized that the online market (search hits) for it is tiny. Almost a year later and I still only get 20 hits a week on that one. In the last week of the challenge I stumbled upon a market niche that works and now generates up to a thousand hits for me a week. It's not a market looking to spend money so my conversion rate has sucked, but I'm slowly finding what sells to them. If I hadn't done this testing, I would have wasted some money and a lot of time trying to get the first idea off the ground. If you've got a product or service (or even just an idea for one), I'd recommend the 30 Day Challenge as a free/cheap way to get rolling.

jlees 17y ago

I'm glad to read that people have actually set up decent, wholesome businesses that fulfil the criteria of cash-flow muses. My reaction when reading the book and even now is just to think 'set up one of those dodgy affiliate sites, ebook sites or drop shipping resellers', none of these being something I ever want to do. The idea of spending a month making something and then the rest of your time reaping in the profits with low overhead is a great one. Not only does it give you the freedom to work on a startup (or whatever) without worrying about rent, but I'd warrant it gives you a fair bit of credibility too - and a possible exit, even; cf. the recent post about Mingle^2 which took 66.5 hours to build and which got sold to a competitor. Edit Actually, I kind of have a cash-flow muse of my own. I helped build up a gaming blog to the point where it pays significant money to writers, and am retained as a columnist there, contributing about 1 hour's worth of work every Saturday. Without going into too much of the gritty detail, if I doubled that to 8 hours of work a month, I'd about cover my rent. However, there's a catch; as my startup's become more exciting, I've had no time to play the game I blog about, and have stopped writing. I can imagine this working a wee bit better if I was writing a column a week for TechCrunch or something similarly in line with the 'day-job', though.

igrekel 17y ago

Unrelated to the question, I apologize but am I the only one who is annoyed by the usage of the word "muse" in this context? For me a muse has such a noble connotation about deep tought, meaning and inspiration that I feel it is cheapened by being associated with selling pills online and other near-scams. Not to say that a small, low maintenance business can't have value to the world.

wlievens 17y ago

I'm somewhat facing the same dilemma. I will be having a good amount of free time in a couple of months' time (4 weeks, at least, possibly more), so I really want to do one of these, even if it only ends up providing me with a couple hundred euro per month. I have one micro-b2b idea, but I'm not really convinced of its value. How do you generate more ideas of the sort? The impending time pressure isn't helping me either :-)