Earn money in your sleep

There's an interesting dynamic at play with things like this. When you first build one of these "earn money in your sleep" SaaS products, it really doesn't make you all that much money. After a few months of being launched and signing customers, it's not at all uncommon to be bringing in something like $50/month.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Even better, products that charge by the month have a way of making you <i>more</i> 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!<p>So yeah, products are actually pretty cool. They just don't seem like it at first. Stick with it though. It gets good.

I hate to seem cynical about this, it was an interesting article, but I can't help noticing that all the product examples were for a market of other web developers.<p>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.<p>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.

Just as a quick example for other people who are thinking about doing this, I sell UI design &#38; development tutorials at Design Then Code (<a href="http://designthencode.com/" rel="nofollow">http://designthencode.com/</a>) for 1) designers learning how to code, and 2) coders learning how to design. I've been selling them since March and the total money earned is now about 1/3rd the salary I earn at my full-time job. Not enough to fully supplant it, but jumping my income up 33% has been pretty awesome.<p>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 <i>do</i> 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.

Good read, but what the article only mentions at the end is that the first step for all of these strategies is:<p>"Work really, really hard."<p>Writing a book, creating a whole icon set, or creating GitHub are all much harder and more time-consuming than doing client work.<p>So I think the biggest barrier to earning money while you sleep is probably the amount of work involved, not the lack of ideas.

Oh, what a thoroughly misleading post.<p>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 <i>really damn big</i> issue.<p>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 <i>by</i> the byproduct is, it will still require a lot of attention and effort to be brought into a marketable state.<p>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.

Earning money while sleeping is not that difficult. I (living in Europe) run a site with many visitors from US and Japan. Most of the revenues are generated during my sleep time. ;-)

When I read this article I thought immediately about keynotopia from a fellow HN member. He created those keynote ui templates (which he used in his day job) and sells them, bringing in between 5'000 - 10'000 $ revenue per month, which is pretty huge. Those kind of examples just make it look easy and I'm questioning my own projects when I see something like that. Nonetheless, good article.

This has its downsides as well:<p><a href="http://dresdencodak.com/2006/10/07/summer-dream-job/" rel="nofollow">http://dresdencodak.com/2006/10/07/summer-dream-job/</a>

Isn't that the difference between an entrepreneur and a freelancer? Freelancers only get paid when they're working and entrepreneur's set up businesses bigger than themselves where they can make money while they're not working (sleeping).

Isn't that the defining characteristic of all SaaS and web product-based companies?

I once created a cool website (Wordpress + jQuery) for a share in the adsense revenue... and man, it is the best bussiness i have done so far!

adii ftw!