>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/), 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.