Anyone actually aiming for a 4-Hour Work Week?
No source of income beats creating something that makes money while you’re asleep. Or sick. Or in the hospital. Or busy caring for a loved one.—Garrett Dimon
Everyone here is trying to turn profit from a side project. In many interviews they go on to become big businesses that keep growing.
Is anyone here doing projects with the specific goal of making money with the lowest maintenance possible and staying that way? As in, "strict" >=4hww as per Tim Ferriss' book?
Anyone having success at it?
Edit: I ask from a health perspective. As I explain in the comments, I'm recovering from severe RSI, and having a revenue source like Garrett Dimon's Sifter would have made a huge difference to me. This is not a quest for the "easy life".
This post explains the motivation better:
Cheers,
Helder
P.S.: I've started a git chat for developers trying to reach that goal. It's at https://gitter.im/4hww4devs/Lobby in case anyone's interested.
it's very possible to run* a functional business (and make plenty of cash) by spending < 4 hours /week working on it.
HOWEVER, actually building that business (ie, coding the tech, sourcing suppliers, getting initial traction, etc) usually takes 60-80 hours/week for at least a few weeks, or a few months, first.
source: have done this a few times.
Wow. I just read your retirement post. Condragulations! Finally found someone who thinks the same way and has pulled it off. Thank you for existing.
My impulse is to bury you with questions, but I'll do my homework and read up on everything you've already shared on the topic. Hope I can learn to get there as well.
There's a non-zero chance that I'll recover well enough to put the time necessary to get a project like this off the ground. Or I can take longer than a few months. The point is that even if I do manage to put 80h/week again, there's no guarantee how long I'll be able to keep that up for, so I'll make it absolutely top priority to put my time into getting that (semi-)passive income.
If it won't bother you, I'd like to know if I could ask you a few questions after I've gone through the backlog. Thanks again!
ha, thanks.
happy to answer some Qs, maybe post here so anybody who's interested can see too?
Sure thing!
I think Tim Ferriss has been on record as saying "nobody actually works a four hour work week".
I had actually done that at one point, but my business suffered as a result.
By that, doesn't he mean that you find other things to do? I always took the four hour work week as meaning you do only 4 hours of work that you absolutely need to meet your basic needs and pay your bills.
Naturally, people would find activities to do the rest of the time, be they money-making or not, and might as a result have bigger expenses now and then, but you'd keep the recurring spending lower than the recurring revenue from those 4 weekly hours.
Do you remember where you saw that quote? It would be great to see it in context.
Also, could you elaborate on what your experience trying to do that was like? Thank you.
I don't remember where I saw Tim talk about nobody actually working a 4h workweek, but google around and you'll find murmurs. Based on his lifestyle and output, he clearly doesn't practice a 4h work week lifestyle.
I don't buy into the philosophy of "lower your expenses to zero, then make just enough money to get by". That's fine if you're <25, but eventually, that gets way, way old. I think anyone smart can build internet properties to cover living expenses in a low cost of living area (e.g. Thailand, Philippines, etc.)
"Passive income" really means income from investments. And that takes millions of dollars to be effective as a lifestyle, considering the volatile and risky nature of markets.
But yeah, I recommend slashing expenses wherever possible if you're entrepreneuring. The lower your monthly nut, the longer your runway. Just be prepared to have to deal with some serious social and romantic consequences, but get creative.
Anyway, after I read 4HWW, I followed his instructions. I put up a bunch of landing pages and sent traffic via AdWords. I launched a business based on the landing page that got conversions, and that was my life for a couple years.
I see what you mean. In my case, though, I'm not climbing down from a higher income, I'm climbing up from none due to health reasons. I've just recently managed to get back to a few minutes a day of computer time after >2 years of excruciating RSI-related pain that kept me off work and ate away all my savings (back to living with my parents now, the worst of shames). It also ended a 5-year relationship and took me through other kinds of personal roughness. So the consequences are already here.
Although I can't begin to compare my situation to the one Garrett Dimon went through, I completely identify with his post on Recurring Revenue vs Disability Insurance, especially this:
So to me it's not really about having the "easy life", but knowing that I've got something out there that I made "holding the line" financially when bad shit happens and puts me on the bench. I have no idea if I'll ever be able to do 40+h/week on a computer again, least of all if for the decades I still have left of work to do. So I need a plan B, and 4h/week is just about all I can muster these days.
Anyway, thanks for the perspective and for sharing your experience. If you've managed to do that for a couple years, maybe I can do it for a few more :)
That must be difficult.
Have you thought about alternate input devices? i.e. voice input?
Maybe a youtube channel for devs about avoiding RSI?
I'm seeing gradual improvement with physical therapy and trigger point self-massage, so I still haven't given up on keyboard+mouse completely. Maybe it's denial. If the trend doesn't keep up I might have to take my chances with voice though.
You could probably build a passive income property about your experiences with this. Make videos, document everything, write blog posts, have a domain, etc.
Thanks for posting this, Helder. I enjoyed reading your 4hww4devs post, as well as Garrett Dimon's story. Although I do not have severe RSI (yet), I am very sensitive to the physical effects (more so than my peers) of coding full-time, including wrist/finger cramping and soreness, lower back pain, neck and jaw stiffness, etc. I would ultimately like to spend less time using the computer, and building a lifestyle business focused on passive income and automation seems like an excellent goal.
I'm currently building an info product that I hope will help us all protect ourselves from the injuries and ill effects of prolonged sitting and computer use. Over the years, I have made quite a few modifications to my work space, habits and lifestyle to counter the fact that I am spending so much time coding. For me, ergonomics, stretching, exercise, and mindfulness/body awareness have improved my quality of life tremendously, and I hope to share that knowledge with others through my products.
So far, I created a short, guided stretching video that focuses on back pain. Although it was recorded on my phone in my apartment, I think the content is solid, and I'm very excited to produce a production-quality video soon! I've included a link below, if you'd like to check it out. It's the earliest stages of my info product in the works, haha. I have actually been dog-fooding the video at my office: a handful of co-workers have been receiving a daily text message reminding them to take a 5-minute break, play the video, tune into their body and enjoy the stretching sequence. Let me know if you'd like to receive daily texts/emails reminding you to stretch, too!
I'm definitely excited to enjoy all the benefits of PI and a lifestyle business, but as I learn more about all the facets of bootstrapping, I've found that more than anything else I'm enjoying the process immensely. Learning new skills outside of coding and the curiosity it creates has been a huge driving factor for me to push further along, and having the support of the IH community has been incredible. Thanks to everyone here for all the inspiration and moral support :)
https://youtu.be/M64uN82yE84
Good work there! I would suggest adding trigger point release to your product, it's doing a lot of good for me.
Here is the RSI-relief protocol I've been following.
Great reply by Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) on Hacker News:
Ask HN: What's the closest one can get to a personal Basic Income with software?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999014
I struggled with RSI in the past, and at one point was depressed at the possibility that my coding career was over. It's gotten much better since then, mostly due to a few changes I made to my life (working out my arms regularly, quitting video games, no longer using my computer on the couch/bed, etc).
Anyway, in terms of running a low-maintenance business, I recommend podcasting. The vast majority of it is talking and sending emails, which can be dictated via speech-to-text. An email newsletter is similar: you can simply dictate what you're writing.
Indie Hackers itself doesn't take very long to run. I could probably cut things down to 8 hours/week if I wanted: 3 on the interviews and newsletter, 2 on the podcast, and 3 talking to sponsors. But I'd be neglecting putting a lot of time into growth, marketing, strategy, etc.
If you want to start a SaaS, that's trickier. You'll need to write a significant amount of code upfront, and at 4 hours/week that could take years. Furthermore, very few SaaS offerings stay relevant without code updates. And there's no great way to dictate code. Maybe find a niche that's light on product and high on sales (e.g. recruiting commissions), so you can spend less time at the keyboard and more time using your voice?
Thank you for sharing your experience with RSI. That "my career is over" feeling is a hard one to overcome. You stop taking hope for granted and start cultivating it every day. Glad you're better now.
I was indeed facing this question of whether to go into infoproducts or doing a small SaaS or even something as simple as Bingo Card Creator.
Podcasting is a good idea, one I hadn't considered.
The biggest issue for me though is figuring out the right niche/audience to target. It seems like the right business format kind of reveals itself once you know who exactly you'll be dealing with.
Amy Hoy recommends you pick an audience you're part of so it's easier to "get in their heads" cuz you're one of them.
But in my case, with limited insider experience on the needs of companies (haven't worked enough in them to find pain points) that implies B2C, which many people advise against.
The other option is to sell to people you don't know. A friend has done this marketing simple infoproducts like "how to make and sell chocolate candy" to poor people who use it to improve their income. He's an experienced SEO marketer and sources niches from keyword research.
So there's this fork in the road, with very different skills and public positioning for me to take (build reputation with my own name vs market semi-anonymously to SEO traffic).
Ideas?
Amy Hoy's advice is wise. Understanding your customers and their problems is crucial, and that's way easier to do when you're one of them. 👌
It's okay if you don't have much experience in companies. I don't either! I guarantee you still have problems with lucrative solutions, and there's often overlap between consumer needs and business needs. My two biggest tips here are:
Once you have a problem, the product and marketing are up to you. You have to be unique and compelling here. You can copy the problems solved by existing companies, but you don't want to copy their solutions, because nobody will have a reason to switch to an exact clone.
Personally, I'll probably always pick the Hacker News audience as my market, because I understand what they care about, I know how to get in front of them, and the payoff is huge (HN gets tons of traffic). What communities do you belong to? What people do you understand? If you have answers to these questions, it will make marketing a lot easier.
That's great advice to approach known problems (with your own solution) instead of looking for an "original" one.
I guess I'm kind of in the same boat as you and identify more with the Hacker News crowd. Though I don't read it, submit or comment much.
I guess people on Indie Hackers probably felt the same way. Lots in common with HN, but seeking something slightly different, or just a more focused subset of the people/topics covered there. Now I identify more strongly with IH, so thank you for creating it!
One angle I'm going for, at least in my writing, is to bridge the gap between the concepts of "passive income" (lazy, spammy, frowned upon) and "basic income" (socially progressive; arts-, entrepreneurship-, and community-enabling; Elon-approved).
I want to make it clear that PI is just the asymptotic quest for BI, with the same noble motivations and potential outcomes. In fact, I for one identify with the Effective Altruism movement, and want to make just enough for my living expenses, then donate whatever other income I get to GiveDirectly. So (almost-)basic income for me, basic income for others. If lots of people do this the world can become a very interesting place.
Maybe I can make an infoproduct targetting specifically the "earn-to-givers" who just want to learn how to make more money to donate.
I saw a person on Twitter saying they already had a job, were happy with it, made a good salary, but wanted to join Amy's 30x500.com course in order to have product revenue so they could give more.
That could be my niche. For now I think I've got a lot of research to do though before putting my chips on anything.
Thank you for provoking these thoughts. They hadn't occurred to me until I started answering you.
I plan to automate all the routine stuff so I can spend very little time on it per week, but I think I will still have plenty of business development to do.
There was a podcast episode from the 3 month vacation early on in the series that did a good coverage of why the 4 hours is really not enough time to make a masterpiece.