I've been trying to do this for a long time, but I have to admit something rather peculiar about my frustrating attempts to do so.<p>I started a company with my brother in 2010. It involves websites, and it takes up about 10-20 hours of our time per year. It costs us about $150/mo to run and earns us anywhere from $1000-$2400/mo (probably $1,600/mo average). It's earned around the same income for about 3 years, and before that it earned $400-$800/mo for most of time during the first 2 years.<p>We could continue working hard to increase the amount our business earns, perhaps until it reaches $8,000-$10,000/mo (very realistic, but would require about 2 man months or so each), but for some reason neither of us are ever excited to work on it. In his spare time, he's busy doing his stuff (completely unrelated work), and I'm busy working on the next big thing (creating an SaaS, or at least trying to determine one to work on). It's really stupid, because we have this boring thing that earns us huge returns on our time invested, and currently pays us nearly $1,000/mo each for doing basically nothing, but we somehow find every excuse to work on something more exciting with little monetary returns, or perhaps simply scratching our own itches.<p>I think the lesson you can take from this (which I clearly haven't learned) is that you shouldn't seek to "create a SaaS", necessarily. Instead, figure out the path of lease resistance to the dollars you want, and don't worry about the "passive" nature of it. You can automate things later, in theory. Worry first about finding easy money. It really is out there.<p>I know that money isn't everything, but it is pretty important. If you have passive income coming in, you can work on all the fun and world changing projects (or charity, etc.) you want, and all without worrying about going broke.