If you want to live modestly, cover your basic needs in the smallest fraction of your time possible so you can work on other things, what is the best path to take?<p>What types of businesses are most suited to that? (Only thing that comes to mind is Bingo Card Creator.)<p>Where do I find other developers and entrepreneurs shooting for that goal without getting drowned in the spammy noise that the theme of (semi-)passive income brings with it?<p>I'm not just talking about bootstrapping. I'm talking about making specific decisions so that you can put in time in the beginning but with the clear goal that once you reach a certain monthly recurring revenue, the thing you optimize from there is the time you spend achieving that revenue, not its growth.<p>Note that the answer "it's impossible" doesn't count. In the spectrum between zero maintenance effort and being a full-time business owner there must be tons of opportunity. What's the lowest amount of hours needed to make X amount of money? Or what's the highest amount of money possible to sustain with Y weekly hours?<p>And where do I learn about how to do it and find people with the same goal to grow with?<p>Thanks!<p>P.S.: if you look for Garrett Dimon's post on Recurring Revenue vs Disability Insurance, you will see how this is not about living the easy life, but having a little safety net when things go really wrong for a really long time. His quote:<p>"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."
There are any number of software entrepreneurs (and, for that matter, insurance agents) who widely vary the amount of time they spend on the business and include many weeks where they look gainfully unemployed.<p>In terms of what to shoot for, a) recurring revenue (BCC didn't have it and _believe me_ did that radically raise the savviness bar required on the customer acquisition front), b) B2B where something is important enough to need but not enough to require a long sales cycle or urgent support if the thing hiccups, c) a well-understood marketing and sales model that you can semi-automate.<p>The third thing is probably hardest to build, and as your time scale gets longer, it is the most likely part to require your sustained attention to improve. (I have no information how BCC is doing these days but I rather suspect the original organic SEO strategy which served me well for 5+ years will not continue operating unaltered for 20.)<p>In terms of where these folks hang out: business owners who have priorities in their life other than the business are still business owners. I think the great mistake in the "passive income" community is failure to treat running a business like running a business; it becomes aspirational for lots of folks who have neither the skills nor the inclination to run a business nor, unfortunately, the desire to change either of those two things.<p>This makes "passive income" spaces into a whirlwind of depression and hucksterism. Meanwhile, if you ask around the table at MicroConf, you'll find some folks who had a really good year and worked really hard for it and you'll find some folks who phoned it in while taking care of parents, getting married, throwing themselves into a home-building project, starting a new business, etc.<p>MicroConf, BaconBiz, and DCBKK are three conferences which all had folks who were at many points along the spectrum here. All have online ambits to them, too. (I suppose one could run a not-awful conference about software businesses in maintenance mode but if you have one then flying out to a conference would absorb a few weeks of maintenance mode and be probably a lot more boring than going to MicroConf.)
This sounds a lot like what I've done with my SaaS products.<p>I set out to build a business with the heuristic of "Maximize Jason's Vacation Time". I like to climb rocks, surf and travel through interesting parts of the world, and always found it hard to do that for, say, most of the year every year when I had to work for other people.<p>So I built a product that brings in recurring revenue, generally sells itself, and has a userbase of technical people who can usually solve their own issues for themselves, and are generally fun to talk to when they need help. Even so, I've also made a priority of automating everything that can be automated, including common customer service things, so that as time goes on there are fewer things that can interrupt my Days Off. (Days Off being defined as days where the sun is out or the kids of off school and I don't need a rest day from climbing or surfing, so hey, let's polish the product a bit).<p>And yes, as you describe, I've passed up opportunities that would grow revenues faster at the cost of more of my time being taken up by the business.<p>The one downside is that it took longer this way. It was 4 years before my product stuff could pay my rent, and another 2 before I could properly live off of it, buy houses, raise kids, etc.<p>But now that it's there, it's kinda nice. I've gone as far as not bothering to bring a laptop on the road anymore for trips less than a few weeks.<p>I have a blog (linked in my profile) with some possibly useful info, and it seems I do a lot of my writing about this stuff here as well. Searching comments for "jasonkester product" seems to pull a bunch of stuff up.<p>Good luck!
Glad to see @patio11 thinks the same way. Look at his answer to this:<p>Q: Why are you bothering with BCC when consulting is so much more lucrative?
(I can think of a few good reasons, but I'd like to hear what your reasons are.)<p>A: I really enjoy being a product guy. BCC has a very desirable property in that it mostly works in my sleep. Consulting is quite lucrative and intellectually engaging, but it often disrupts my life in ways that BCC does not: for example, flying off to $BIG_CITY_ACROSS_OCEAN for a few weeks is wonderful once or twice a year but would get tiresome if I were doing it every month. I very rarely get tired of BCC, and with the exception of a trivial amount of support all of my work for it is at my absolute discretion to schedule. I mean, my little brother is graduating college this spring and, without even looking at the calendar, I can say "Sure, no problem, I'll be there. Tell me the day sometime."<p>Money is also not a huge motivator for me. I like it, don't get me wrong, but after I've got the rent and necessities covered (oh look, bingo) money generally has to be the icing on the cake to motivate me to do something. (Shh, no telling the consulting clients.)<p>Source: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018936" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018936</a>
I think the short answer is: (1) work for yourself, not as an employee, (2) find a niche market, (3) create a SaaS product for it, (4) outsource tasks like support to other people instead of doing them yourself.<p>I just recommended this book the other day in a related thread [1], but <i>Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup</i> by Rob Walling really is a stellar reference on this topic. He is very big on the "grow big enough to have a functional small business (buzzword: micropreneur) but don't grow forever and obsessively". They also have a (paid) forum where you can talk with likeminded devs turned founders.<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13981490" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13981490</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://www.startupbook.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.startupbook.net/</a>
You could also get a job that pays well, live within your means, and use the extra money to buy dividend paying stocks and bonds or rental real estate (use a property manager to keep it passive).
Honestly, in my experience that would be consulting.<p>I've personally always failed building anything that people would like to use enough to pay for it, and I've seen many people waste (or invest) about 10x what they would put into consulting to make less than minimum wage (or even 0).<p>Yet, I'm still trying.
Great source of bootstrapping information see the videos<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/user12790628" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/user12790628</a>