At that point, it's tough to keep motivated to tweak, market, A/B Test and otherwise keep moving forward. Especially when you look at your consulting rate, or make the dreaded calculation to see how much your effective hourly rate has been for this f'ng side project.
But here's the thing. After a while, that $50/month starts looking more like $500/month. Then $1,000/month. Then $2,000/month. Sure, that's still, what? Two days worth of consulting revenue? Even then it's a bit hard to stay particularly excited. Consulting will pretty much always blow the doors off of what you can make on a side project.
But the thing with consulting is that as soon as you stop consulting, people stop sending you money. Products don't work like that. Want to take a month off and go backpacking through Honduras? Cool. Your product will pay you $2,000 to do that. Want to take a leap and try to build that shoot-for-the-moon startup idea you've always had kicking around? Go for it. Your product will take care of the rent for you.
Even better, products that charge by the month have a way of making you more money every month. Until attrition really kicks in, you're going to be signing more customers than you lose. Even if you only sign a few per month, that's revenue that just keeps piling on top of itself. So now, a couple years after that trip to Honduras and that woefully failed startup, check it out: you're bringing in $5,000 or even $10,000 every month on that silly little product. You really don't need to work anymore if you don't want to. Wow!
So yeah, products are actually pretty cool. They just don't seem like it at first. Stick with it though. It gets good.
This bit of advice is probably in the top 3 of "Things I wish someone had told me in 2006."
That's actually tougher than it sounds, since it means picking a market full of people who are smart enough to not need much hand holding, then building your thing to be self explanatory enough that even the dumbest of those people won't be sending you emails every week.
It also means building on top of the most boring technology stack you can find, to avoid any whisper of doubt that you might need to touch the server for any reason during the times you'd rather be focusing your attention elsewhere (such as when you're off the map in Honduras, a full day's dugout ride from electricity.)
I doubt this is a sustainable market; surely, all web developers can't just sell to each other. The market for web development products can only be created and paid for by having a sustainable web product market for non web developers.
patio11's Bingo Cards feels a lot more 'real' to me as a product business, and I would be interested in hearing other examples done by small teams.
Why? He's basically selling only to teachers.
What's wrong with a web developer selling a product to a niche of other web developers?
And, actually, if you're selling byproducts like rejected logos or vector images or stock photos or Wordpress themes, wouldn't that actually be for more than just web developers? We've bought vectors for our mobile app in development and just because bloggers who are in the market for a custom theme are technically "on the web" doesn't mean they're developers.
Sixty/forty or thereabouts, actually. There's also Fortune 500 companies, people planning a birthday party for grandma, a whole mess of ladies planning baby showers (baby shower bingo is A Thing), assisted living communities, churches, NGOs, and if I remember correctly every branch of the military.
I emphasize the teaching bit when talking about BCC because that's how I thought about it, that's generally how I think about it, and it makes a very good story, but it isn't 100% of the business
Many companies do this by hiring people called "marketers", who specialize in studying the needs of other groups of people.
An alternative is to create products for a group you belong to.
Hence, if a web developer (who is not also a marketer) is going to develop a product by themselves, it might make sense for them to create a product for other web developers.
Note that this doesn't mean all web developers will only make products for other web developers. Many web developers work for companies that have marketers to handle the "understand the needs of your customers" part. Other web developers have (or can teach themselves) sufficient marketing skills to develop products for people unlike themselves. Still others develop products for other groups they are members of (e.g. web developers creating products for people who share one of their hobbies).
I don't know why the original article didn't include these last 2 categories of developers, though.
This is an interesting idea to me. Why not?
The group of "all people" sell to each other and no one else. Literate people could certainly make a living selling only to other literate people. In theory, why couldn't web developers do the same if no other customers were available?
Waking up in the morning to check out how much money you made last night is an incredible feeling. Or, getting an email while out at dinner that you just sold a thing that paid for your dinner? It's tough to explain just how satisfying it is. And anyone can do it. I write about the things that I do every single day. All of us have special, deep knowledge about a subject that other people might want to become more knowledgable about, it's just a matter of putting that knowledge into a compelling package.
I also happily check my sales every morning.
"Work really, really hard."
Writing a book, creating a whole icon set, or creating GitHub are all much harder and more time-consuming than doing client work.
So I think the biggest barrier to earning money while you sleep is probably the amount of work involved, not the lack of ideas.
There are lots of examples of this sort of thing that make it pretty straightforward to take something that you're doing anyway and spin it off as a product that brings in revenue. If fact, the product that pays my rent (S3stat) was exactly that: something we needed in house that turned out to be something other people would pay for.
So yeah, it's probably not anywhere near as much work as you expect. And like people are telling you elsewhere, once it's built, it stays built, and the money keeps rolling in.
One thing to keep in mind is that projects like Dribbble and Pictos would've not nearly as successful if they were not launched by people with a lot of existing exposure. Getting noticed and acquiring critical mass that would self-propel project's marketing is a really damn big issue.
Second thing to notice is that all listed examples are of an exceptionally high quality. The title of the post sort of implies that you can just ruffle through your recycle bin, pick something that doesn't completely suck, stick it on a website and it will magically earn you $$$ in your sleep. It will not. Regardless of how by the byproduct is, it will still require a lot of attention and effort to be brought into a marketable state.
Going back to Pictos as an example. It would've long disappeared from the radar if Drew would've not been very busy promoting himself (and Pictos) on Dribbble and in other places. He might not be working on the Pictos much, but he certainly puts a lot of effort in keeping it afloat.
It somewhat correlates in tech, but in most industries entrepreneurs aren't defined as making money while they sleep. For example, a very traditional kind of entrepreneurial activity is to open a brick-and-mortar shop. A mom-and-pop bakery doesn't make money when they aren't there, but is entrepreneurial (in fact opening a bakery is basically the economics textbook example of entrepreneurship).
