I happen to have done both, and am friends with a lot of people who have done both. Birds of a feather and all that. If you are good at writing / good at teac

I happen to have done both, and am friends with a lot of people who have done both. Birds of a feather and all that. If you are good at writing / good at teaching, it is much easier to ship a book or course than it is to ship almost any SaaS applications. SaaS apps have a suite of challenges which solving does not make you any MRR, such as maintenance, security, server administration, devops, deployment workflows, customer support (orders of magnitude more time than "Reset my password please" or "Send me another receipt"), etc etc. Typically, people use a launch-centric approach to promoting books and courses, which results in them getting a spike of sales around the launch window and then fairly little residual value. You can do better than this, but you have to be savvy about it. (Savvy, in this context, basically means "doing email marketing very well in an ongoing fashion.") I will happily show you actual graphs of sales over time, but the most common patterns among my friends are, for books/courses, a sales spike during the launch window and then it declines to an asymptote close to the Y axis. For SaaS, "the long slow SaaS ramp of death", where MRR grows by some amount every month, and it may well take you years until it is worth your time, depending on your ability to make sales. (The fastest solo-founded SaaS I'm aware of is Baremetrics, and they hit $20k MRR in 6 months. That's meteoric compared to almost every Internet buddy I've ever swapped numbers with -- more typically, you hit $10k in ~18 months of full-time work. I'm aware of at least five people who hit $30k with their first book, which generally requires a fraction of the effort to get out there and a fraction of a fraction of the post-launch time to support.) As to whether books/etc can be worth it for customers, the short answer is "Yes." There are plenty of get rich schemes on the Internet. You don't have to be one of them. Local examples of savvy value-producing authors include Nathan Barry (design and authorship), Brennan Dunn (business topics for freelancers), Sasha Greif (the Meteor book), and another dozen or so HNers at least. Your chances of producing something of value go radically up if you do not teach non-technical people how to make a software business (expected success rate of people who buy that book: < 1%, if that) but rather produce something which makes a professional in your field better at one specific additional thing that you know very well. For example, I'm a Ruby on Rails developer and have no decent integration tests. If you write the book on integration testing, there is at least a 50% chance that I will be at least somewhat successful at learning about and successfully executing on integration tests. The price of your book is denominated in minutes of my time -- attention is a scarce resource but money is not, so if you can trade me "I'll save you 12 hours of Googling and reading Free Information On The Internet (TM) and it will cost you $50", that's a great trade for me.