Don't box yourself to SAAS tools for passive income
I see a lot of questions on Indie Hackers and Twitter on how to generate passive income. And if you are an engineer or anyone remotely interested in the software world the first answer always seems to be:
- Build a SAAS tool that solves a problem
- Sell a monthly subscription for it
- Chill on a beach somewhere đď¸
This is a definitely a time tested approach to generate recurring revenue but its not the ONLY approach. Also SAAS software is not truly passive as it requires maintenance, updation etc.
I would say donât limit yourself to SAAS if generating passive income that grows and replaces your full time income is the end goal.
You have a lot of highly valuable skills as an engineer. And you can monetise those skills and generate revenue by doing things like creating video courses teaching the concepts in the technology that you are an expert in or writing tutorials on how to accomplish something like creating a website and hosting it on AWS S3 for free.
The possible topics on which you can create content is limitless and people are looking for good packaged out of the box solutions. So if you run a tutorial blog or video course series on a technology that you work on, there are high chances that people will find it useful.
The best part is that distribution is no longer your headache for things like YouTube videos and courses for content providers like Udemy and PluralSight.
I speak from experience here as I have been working with PluralSight for 3 years now and have 6 courses published with them. It generates a good chunk of money in royalties which is a significant side income for me. Best of all once the course is published I don't have to do a thing other than collect the cheque every month. Some of these providers like PluralSight also pay you upfront for creating a course so there are literally Zero sunk costs.
I have friends who have done something similar with YouTube video tutorials and have got an income stream from that.
All I would say is if generating passive income is your goal BE CREATIVE and think what skills / knowledge do you have today that others would pay for. SAAS is not the only answer, don't paint yourself in a corner :)
Here is the link to my PluralSight author profile:
https://app.pluralsight.com/profile/author/nitin-singh
Also if you love to code, like I do, you can always try things on the side. This is my latest project:
A search engine for Remote Only Engineering jobs
https://remoteonlyengineers.com
Let me know what you think and if you want a referral for PluralSight to become an author there, reach out to me and I will put the word to them.
Cheers
Yes, what you say about thinking beyond Saas resonates with me. Saas is really really hard, especially as a side gig - getting distribution right is a killer. Creating courses can be a great way of generating income not directly coupled to hours put in (just can't bring myself to call it passive :). I also think getting distribution right with education products is a little easier, in my experience at least.
The great thing about teaching first is that it helps build an audience that knows and trusts you. From here, you can find out if there are tools they need and start offering these alongside your courses. This is what I've done (https://www.degreetutors.com/), sort of a hybrid between education and Saas and it's working well so far.
So in essence my suggestion is to consider building a course business as a step towards backing into a subscription Saas business. Just my two cents.
That makes a lot of sense Sean.
There is immense value in building an audience that trusts you. Once you have that you can keep adding additional value and charging for it.
Everything gets easier with an audience.
Great advice and insight Nitin! I like the Remote only engineer concept. I wondered how you were able to source the job data, do you scrape other sites or pay for access to the API? Also, how do you differentiate from LinkedIn that recently added the "Remote Only" filter?
I have written a crawler that goes through various job boards and sites to index remote jobs. A very crude version of what google does.
LinkedIn is one of the sources of remote jobs and I donât compete with them directly. I will crawl LinkedIn as well soon.
I want remote only engineers to be a single place you can come to for searching remote jobs. Much like you google for things.
Eventually I will crawl the careers pages of top 50 Remote first companies as well. All in good time :)
One route I've seen some people have success with is to use their engineering / webdev skills to build useful web sites and use them to earn affiliate income.
This could be something relatively simple like combining data from a few different sources, visualising it nicely and rendering unique pages for them to be found on Google. Or it could be something that allows people to compare products or something like that.
An approach like this removes a few hassles:
Long term these can be relatively passive sources of income. And with new platforms that help you sell sites like these, one moderately successful one might fund your "proper" indiehacker play down the line.
Seems like you could make it more passive by hiring someone else to make the coursesâŚ
Thatâs a big no no. You can get help with certain aspects of it like editing or makings your PPT slides pretty but if you hand over the course creation you lose the quality and personal touch. Students come back to authors they trust. With any audience based system if trust is gone you wonât have any audience left.
âď¸ This...100%.
Itâs working okay for Egghead and Frontend Masters.
That's kind of a marketplace approach. It could work but now you have to reach and appeal to two different crowds: course creators and students.
This is what Pluralsight, Udemy, Skillshare and others are doing.
By producing courses yourself, you avoid the need to find course creators.
If you're also using a platform like Pluralsight or Udemy, you don't have to find the students either. It helps to market your courses, but you will automatically have some viewers coming from the platform.
If you're just looking for side income, that is passive and have limited time, just creating value with courses is definitely a good approach.
Many platforms also place restrictions on how you can create courses and prohibit outsourcing creation.