How many people are there making five figures ($10,000+) in profit a month with their SaaS product? Working by themselves, for only "20 minutes a day", with a full day of product development "every few weeks"?
$150/month product that saves businesses $4,000/mo (one less programmer). Hard part: Find 70 clients.
Working in industry, we demo products all the time. We pay outrageous amounts of money for an online time tracker which is basically an online spreadsheet. We have considered obtaining systems for managing accounting, supply, etc.
Focusing on our core business, policies, we never get tied up in 2-3 month/year adventures in uncomfortable territory. There is no innovation, just maintenance. We use a 20 year old 4GL language assisted by native Python/C.
I could crank out Android apps in niches, write web content and advertise, build a few cloud based web products (CAN IT EXPORT TO EXCEL!?!?!!!111), and easily live off of 15-20k a month with huge fluctuations (both directions). I choose the simple life of industry.
Not to mention, it is so hard to motivate yourself to go from start to end on a product. Most of that energy was used in my late teens.
Right now, I could be cranking out that turn based strategy Google Glass native app, because native apps with delays in turn taking are going to be the key to Glass (it gets hot!). Instead, I'll just build another fixed width extract with this day. It will run in 1/16th of the time of the original. People will not notice or care until it breaks again. Ad absurdum.
I suppose its worth mentioning, I know a few who pull in 4-6k a month solely on advertising/affiliates. Completely passive, they have months worth of posts automated to go out every 2nd or 4th week. I've pulled off 1-2k using the same method, but I always had a hard time finding microniches that were available for me to dominate. Writing about en pointe ballet, dremels, silver polishing, simms fishing gear etc. is not my ideal goal. It did make money though.
I hear this a lot, but are there numbers on how many people are managing it? I.e. if you exclude apps put out by large companies, how many people are earning $5k+/mo off Android apps? I don't even have a ballpark guess; is it 10 people? 10,000 people?
It has the potential to make $5-17/day. I'm guessing if I corrected/updated the code, it would jump in rank. If I could generate 13-15 apps that fit into this type of niche, I would easily reach $5k/month with lazy/horrible coding. If I just sat there for one-two full month(s) churning out one app a day, I would probably be able to reach that goal.
Life of the corporate drone. And yet... in exchange for forfeited dreams and ambitions you get a nearly assured nice retirement someday and little need to think or work hard.
If this was true then every startup would be a success. You need a lot more than that. Not to mention that finding a problem that costs a company $4k/mo and coming up with an elegant solution is a lot harder than it sounds.
Many first time founders think exactly like this. They're blindsided after the product is built and they realize the hard work has just begun.
I cannot name the online system we use, but I am willing to say that page load times average 15-30 seconds. The interface is riddled with bugs. There is no customer support for what I imagine is a $5k/mo meal ticket. They also hotlink all of their JavaScript.
Functionality is easier to sell than all of the other facets of the start up. CIO wants to know if the system will replace it. CEO wants to know how much money it will save. Higher level execs want to be able to export it to Excel and easily notify mid level execs when they are behind.
Once again, I kid you not. This expensive app is literally a spreadsheet with dynamic columns which allow administrators (dept heads) to assign values. The hierarchy is the system is sys admin, admins (officers), users, and temps.
Job scheduling, accounting/vouchers, log analyzers, time management, project management, supply systems, commissions systems. If you have seen them once, you can probably reproduce it 'with a twist'.
> Does Passive Income Hacker actually exist?
> Profits: $38,598 (up 66% from $23,230)
>
> Wage per Hour: Approximately $1,000, given that I worked
> for approximately 15 hours integrating the new design and
> spend approximately 20 minutes a week doing support.
The reality is that it's a little more than "20 minutes a week" if you tally up all of the labor over the lifetime of the product, but then again, most people don't include how much they've worked in the past when they're asked: "How much time do you spend working each week?"
In short, passive hackers who are bootstrapped and make a tidy some exist all over. I know several. However, it typically isn't treated as a "vacation" but rather having the flexibility to breathe and do things right.
There are a lot of us out there. Speaking for myself, I can say I don't talk much about it to other people and pretty much never around startup entrepreneurs. The article sums up the feeling I get on the receiving end...
That is to say, the quoted number happens occasionally, but it feels like all the time.
This is with a SaaS app designed from the outset to minimize support and maintenance, with profit also a high priority, provided it doesn't conflict with the first. It was in no way hard to do this. I often recommend that others give it a try.
What most of these Passive Income blogs and podcasts seem to be selling is really a process: whereupon you start with analyzing a market with google's search insight tools, build a simple utility for that market, purchase adwords for it, and then ab test it.
While a process like this might work some of the time, it still doesn't guarantee anything.
I love the idea of being a Passive Income Hacker, mostly because I love the idea of "financial freedom" to pursue interests independent of a stable job and stable income. But the two things that make me wary of it are: (1) isn't it still a lot of work up front? work that you could be putting into something with much bigger impact on society into? (2) I wonder how stable the income is over time without maintenance.
You just summed up every article written on PIH
Not to say this is sustainable but if there's a way to make money via arbitrage that nobody else has picked up on yet it can be very profitable. And potentially low-effort too.