Passive income SaaS on the side
Hey all, I have a fairly comfortable job (data engineering team lead) that pays pretty well for the area that I live in. However, I've been wanting to create a SaaS project that will generate some passive income on the side (enough $ that it actually helps with the bills) without quitting my job or necessarily working towards creating a full on start up. Just something small enough that I can create and maintain entirely on my own in my free time.
I've done some searching and found people that seem to have done this and were fairly successful but I'm wondering if they are just unicorns who got extremely lucky and most people would be foolish to spend time attempting this. Should I give up on such an outlandish dream or is there actual potential in this idea?
A SaaS product I built as a portfolio piece ten years ago is now bringing in $1000/pm. I only started monetizing it at the start of 2020.
It was 100% free before that, and it grew every year. Slowly, but still grew. I spent a bit of time to add subscriptions and additional paid features that users were requesting.
It is in an extremely saturated market: Invoicing for small businesses.
It is quite passive. I do zero marketing as I rely on my sites rankings in Google for long-tail keywords such as "free invoicing app south africa"
I plan to take it full time with a rebuild I am working on that will add accounting features and overall make it a better product.
I also built a Curriculum Vitae creation website that never gained traction. Turns out jobless people don't have money to spend, at least not in a country with a severely high unemployment rate.
Build something that is tried and trusted, do a bit of SEO, and throw it out there. Repeat. Something will stick.
This 👆 make something trusted, make it simple and beautiful yet strong and do SEO.
You're not alone! I have a really great job as a software engineer but I still find myself itching to work on side projects to generate some extra income. I've built a couple of apps but nothing with traction so far. Probably the most challenging parts for me:
That said, I'm still trying. I think it's totally do-able!
can relate to both points. both unpredictable in how much energy they would consume at any given day. i suggest doing some planning when you have a quiet time and when you come from work you just follow your plan you made on weekend, do something even if it is moving or coloring a button. but every day. like coming home and putting food in pets plate and cleaning their pooper. not much thoughts involved but you know what you should do.
helped me to keep going consistently for 3 years.
hope it helps you too!
Thanks for the advice. I do a version of this for my day job but for some reason I haven't really applied it to my side project. Going to give it a go!
I am starting a SaaS business on the side (i am non technical) right now. I have a pretty successful e-commerce business. This niche is such a no-brainer, we have tried everything out there and we just can't get find the software we need. Let me know if you are interested in talking more! [email protected] I also have two kids (3 and 1 year old)
I was like you,I got bored from my full-time job so I started doing some freelancing in my spare time on Upwork. Was hard at the beginning as it took me 20 application to land my first contract but things was getting easier after that. 2 months after, I was making double of my full time job (not the same currency 💲)
I quit my full-time job to work full time on Upwork, was exciting and challenging, I got to work with many clients from different timezones/requirements/mentalities and I learned so much.
After 6 months,. I got bored and i felt it is time to stop working for other people. I decided to stop (or at least pause ) working on Upwork and pursue my own dream. That wasn't an overnight decision, I made plan B (enough money to cover being jobless for 1+ year, beside, it is always easy to find a job in my field, so the risk was miniscule)
So I am in my Way to become an indies hacker now, I set my self a goal of launching an MVP of my first product in 30 days (this is my first week working on fast-resume.com). Things are great now as I get to do what I truly want the way I want
Hope my story gives you some insights of what you should do next 🙂
Thanks for sharing your story! And good luck on your next journey.
Curious to see what comes out from Fast Resume! The site loaded forever tho haha. But I like the idea! I am doing a lot of hiring rn and what I found (and studies underlined it) is that simple CVs are doing better than complex graphics ones.
I feel like there is a market for a generate that builds really nice-looking CV with great typography and is easy to read.
And maybe beautifying the ones that LinkedIn does?
Appreciate your feedback, fast-resume.com for now is just count down to launch page with a simple subscription form to gather some audience. I deployed the app to a free heroku subscription (https://fast-resume.herokuapp.com/coming-soon) and redirected my domain temporarily to that url, heroku free plan isn't that great for performance since it's just for testing, beside the coming soon page it self isn't optimized (animation images can be compressed, .. etc).
Résumé builders is a crowded market, and my idea is to make that experience very fast (importing and parsing existing or linked in resume, auto translate resumes, analysis tools, ai and deep learning). Clearly 30 days is not lof of time to implement all of that. So my idea is to launch something fast, and grow it later on. Need that experience because it is something that i wanted to do long time ago 🙂.
I still didn't tackle the templating engine, but the idea is to prioritize that one since it's the heart of this idea, am ok to launch with one or two templates and a robust templating engine, since I can always hire some developers to just add / code more predefined templates using the template engine.
Many things to solve in a short period of time, so challenging and am having really great time learning so much every day.
@lahcen is there a certain way to use Upwork that makes it worth your time? If I look at it from the jobs search, so much of it is "We want a Sr Foo developer and will pay $7 -$14 dollars per hour" or "Build us Khan Academy for $2,000 fixed bid". What are your pro tips?
Hi Austin, there are a lot of job posts of the kind you described, but on the other hand there are clients who value your time and skills and pay you a very fair amount for it.
Speaking for myself, I started working on small, fixed price contracts to get positive review on a 100% JSS on my profile, that happened in less than a month after my landing my first contract because I ensured to make a really good job for my first clients, clients went back to me and I did more work for them (fixed contracts always). I was underpaid (fixed contracts of 80$, 200$, 40$, some bonuses some times..etc) but after few time I had like 6 happy clients and my profile looked my fancier with the feedbackas they gave me :)
Next, I stopped looking for fixed contracts and I wanted a long term, hourly contract. I updated my hourly rate to 30$/H ( was 15$/H initially) and I applied to hourly jobs, I was interviewed so often by the clients you described but I refused to work with a low rate, not long after I started on 25$/H contract.
So I worked for about 5 months, was accepting sometimes fixed contract in parallel and delegating the working to some friends that I know they have the skills to deliver high quality work. Every one was happy!
I know people working for rates >100$/H, so to answer your question wether it is worth it or not, it depends, if you can monetize your skills elsewhere with a better rate (knowing that upwork also takes a commission of 20%, 10%, 5% once you earn <0$, <500$, <10K$ respectively), than perhaps it doesn't. Otherwise it difenitely does and it pushes you to learn more, progress and adapt to various requirements.
for the Tips, I don't have anything exceptional that is not described on the internet, you can check my upwork profile if that helps
Thanks for the insightful response! That is a helpful roadmap of what to expect to establish a profile and then shift to better gigs.
Sharing my own experience here - avoid building a SaaS that requires mid/high-bandwidth interaction with customers, otherwise it'll be hard to detach and make it "passive".
This is good advice. Also make sure that what you are building is generally stable and can be built stable by you in your time frame.
Agreed, keep it simple and intuitive. Users should be able to pick it up and just start using it without needing to contact support.
SaaS and passive income don't usually go hand-in-hand, especially due to competition (which means you have to continually improve your product so customers choose you), but here's an alt tip:
Don't work on anything that doesn't have "powered by" baked-in virality.
You can offload so much of the necessary marketing to your users if you are a lot more picky about your product ideas.
The only way to know is to try! Many people start building while working full time. I would work a FT job 9-6pm, have dinner with the wife, grab a coffee and code from 8pm-2am. It’s extreme, but I enjoyed the time doing it.
Weekends are your friend. Stop planning and just start anyway you know how.
Dude, I'm your same boat lol. I just got promoted and I love my Job. But
I have entrepreneurship itch. I Read a book called is 10% entrepreneurship. So my goal of give 10% of my time or money to project.
Yes same here, I have the "entrepreneurship itch" (good way to put it) but I also fortunately have a job I really enjoy and provides great stability and also happiness. I think this is a valid goal, some might say you do have to go all in for something to work but In the past I managed to have a significant side income (for around 3 to 4 years of around ~1k to 1.5k) making themes on envato. That faded off as the marketplace changed and I stoped developing new themes but it was a good way to get started and now trying to build an actual app to sell directly
Good luck!
Don't give up! It's definitely possible! The best method I've seen for coming up with and validating Saas ideas is to start with google keyword research. See what issues/pain points people search in google that is typically solved by software. Then build your product and marketing strategy around solving that issue.
A good way to start getting ideas would be by seeing what search terms a website like capterra.com ranks for!
For example, according to Ahrefs, "church management software" gets 1,200 searches per month. (Fair warning that is a pretty competitive keyword to go after. The key would be to go after something that is low competition, even if it only gets a couple of hundred searches a month)
Then see if you can build a quick MVP that solves the problem of the searcher.
If you can, then the next thing you want to do is write content answering questions that people in that niche search in google and use that content to promote your product.
Over time if you are going after low enough competition keywords with extremely valuable content you'll start to show up whenever people search for those questions. And eventually, because you've provided value and relevant information, you'll even start to show up for the main "software" keyword you were going after. (or if you don't want to wait just use Google ads to promote your content) Then you'll start to organically start bringing in customers for your product.
The other option, after you built your product, would be to find out who already does a great job at answering /ranking for those questions your target customer has and ask them if they would be interested in setting up a private affiliate partnership!
I can't give out his niche, but a friend of mine (who's also a full-time developer), within a few months of taking this approach and started making anywhere from like $1,000 to $1,300 per month selling a pretty straightforward Saas product he had built in a few weeks!
I hope that helps and gives you some motivation!
btw highly recommend reading this article and applying it to developing and validating product ideas:
https://growandconvert.com/content-marketing/seo-content-conversions/
(I am in no way associated with the writers btw I just really love it haha)
Let me know if you have any questions!
For me, it's been about steady, consistent progress. I'm not talking about weeks and months, but years!
I started Gaggle Mail (https://www.indiehackers.com/product/gaggle-mail) in 2015, working on it during my daily commute, 1.5 hours - 4 times a week. I never worked many nights and weekends, that was always family time.
After plugging away each day and getting feedback from paying customers the project evolved into a rewarding business. It's still a side project, still working on it during my commute, but it's now doing close to $30k MRR.
I'm not an engineer, but make enough money from my day job that I wasn't interested in leaving for a side project or working hard enough to build a "true" startup with VC financing and a bunch of staff that would ruin the lifestyle I enjoy. I'm a bit older and wasn't interested in working that hard.
In 2012, I got an idea and built an MVP with my self-taught coding skills (didn't know what an MVP was back then). Once I got some interested free users, I paid an actual developer to build something a bit nicer and have been running it ever since. It'll be 10 years in July.
It won't make me rich, but earns enough to make mortgage payments in California. I've been solo with contracted developers or other professionals. Customer service takes about 2-3 hours a week. Marketing is where I should spend more time, but frankly, I don't like it so I don't do nearly enough.
Sometimes I feel like I'd do more if my day job was less demanding. Reality is, I like my lifestyle and a new kid means the late nights I put in initially aren't really what I want to do. I enjoy being part of the entrepreneurial and niche communities this project has afforded me. I like most of the customer service and seeing the aha moments when users realize they can do something they didn't think was possible.
My advice is do what you enjoy. That's what will last. If it pays some bills or affords a nicer vacation/retirement - that's a bonus. Intuitively, I worked backwards from the lifestyle I wanted. That's worked out pretty well.
I’m very suspicious of the dream of passive income. It’s a tempting one, but in every case I’ve seen the income starts shrinking if it becomes truly passive. The market keeps moving and competition only becomes fiercer.
You are right. But almost everything is possible. It's though and requires a lot of learning and experience to understand what and how you have to do it. Context matters.
It's definitely not an easy path. Worth it tho?
It's 100% possible. The biggest challenge for someone like yourself is getting your product in front of potential customers. You probably could build something people would buy. But how will they find out about it?
If I had a full time job I would copy a product that already exists in a space I know well with some basic tweaks and niche down. Then I'd start writing relevant SEO content. In about 6-9 months you might start ranking for the keywords.
While content is being created you can work on the project, build in public etc. If you're copying something that already exists, you don't have to worry about validating the idea.
Same here. I've been looking into the blockchain space. It's a lot of cool dev opportunities out there
Having worked for more than 5 years for this https://casinoallianz.com/echtgeld-casino/spinamba/, I can give you some advice, make a plan for 2-6 months and do a little research on the market and similar products. After that, you should start implementing it. Be sure to allocate resources for marketing - competition in the SaaS market is fierce, so you have to fight for customers. Some services, like sellSaaS (https://sell-saas.com/), help you reach potential customers. Marketplaces also solve this problem by charging a small commission for mediation. In any case, developing a solution will take time, and it will have to be updated and improved regularly, which will require constant resources.
Hi Jeff! I think there is a chance. I am starting a SaaS business on the side (i am a non-technical founder) right now. I have a pretty successful e-commerce business. This niche is such a no-brainer, we have tried everything out there and we just can't get find the software we need. Let me know if you are interested in talking more! [email protected]. I would love to chat more, if you aren't interested, that is all good!
I am a fan of buying lifetime deals from marketplaces like AppSumo and offering sub accounts at discounted monthly rates.
You have to spend disproportionate amount of time and effort to find unmet needs in the market to avoid crowded market space. Once you find the idea and get it to market, it is definitely possible to have a passive income. There are lot of problems that big companies do not want to solve because it is not big enough for them. That provides us opportunities to build products.
I don't think it's impossible, I just think that it must be quite rare. Because how are you going to bring customers to see the product? Unless you are one of the only players on the field and you happen to be on the first page of google for some of the related search terms, you will need to spend a lot of time on promotion. There is also customer support that needs time, and even assuming the product is finished, there is always maintenance.
I think all of those things are almost impossible to do part time. What seems more feasible to me is to work on a Saas for years, get it stable and with steady incoming organic traffic, and then stop working on it full time.
Even that should be hard, because organic traffic will slowly dry out without new content.
Hello your my first post to comment and I do see comments being added and thankfully Google algorithm recommended your post so here's my advice. Yeah so if this is considered SAAS I started
buying crypto miners that'll earn me passive income once I get my ROI from the devices, OH also I got engaged with these crypto projects mainly on their integration focus in IoT, LoRaWan, and low-voltage capabilities and that's where I also decided in starting a business in focusing in FIRST distributing these miners at local family and friends (Create or add to your will in how to retrieve or continue operation in earning passive income). The crypto projects are all communicative on discord mainly ranging from: Helium Network, Nodle cash app Three fold, MXC (which is my favorite) and Sentinel Network(This is my least favorite until they work out the kinks although their partnership with Helium Network will be game changing). They also offer nodes as a service which you can go to strong block. There's also other miners that's in the manufacturing stage although have the same potential as the previous mentioned crypto projects which are Cirus Foundation, Akash Network. If you have any questions about this I'll be surely willing to lend an opinion.
Remember: Focus on helping customers, rather than on tech and money.
It's easy to do math and imagine future profits. It's easy to build tech you're excited about that nobody needs.
I can totally relate that's why i started remotely work on https://theinternetslots.com/au/ check it out
Starting something on a side doesn't have to be expensive and time consuming, you don't need to re-invent the wheel. Why not look into already available SaaS scripts you can buy from sites like CodeCanyon and with license/Auth from the author make changes to it (Adapt) and make something unique :).
This is the correct community for such endeavors. 👍 start with a problem you can solve.
Zero to sold by @arvidkahl is a good read.
All the best. ☺
It’s definitely possible. But I would say don’t limit yourself to SAAS. You have a lot of highly valued skills as an engineer.
The path I initially took was creating video courses for platforms like PluralSight on the side. They pay you upfront for creating a course and once it’s done you get passive income from royalty for every time someone watches your course.
You can do this with YouTube, writing tutorials etc.
Be creative is what I would say. Don’t box yourself to SAAS tools.
As long as you are just looking for some side money, from my experience you definitely do this and it is not just the unicorns. I currently have side income from an app that I haven't touched in almost 8 years. You will definitely need to put some work in to get it started though.